Patrick White - Happy Valley

Oliver Halliday caught the point of his ski in a trough of snow and fell over in a heap, though it might have been a knot, it felt like a knot. He had that blue, constricted sensation of being winded. He felt that his face was a distinct, bright blue, then that his toes were hurting. He put his hand on the snow to raise himself up, sank in an inch or two, touched the ground. He was almost out of the snow. He would take off his skis and walk, if he could walk, if he wasn’t dead, but he felt he was dead, physically more than thirty-four. So he lay back on the cold snow, to consider the situation, and it was good and cold lying there, the way the ribs moved with his panting, in and out. His ribs moved in and out the day he won the quarter-mile, and the cup he received from the Governor dropped on the gravel drive as coming down, and somebody sniggered, he was very foolish bending to pick up the cup. He laughed. He was lying on his back in the present. His bag made a pillow under his neck. He was laughing up at a patch of sky that looked rather chaste and bewildered in the scud of cloud. Once he had written nature poems, on clouds and things. But he did not do that any more. He would get to his feet, and take off his skis, and after reaching the car he would drive on home to lunch, probably find cold mutton and pickles out of a bottle, it was a Monday, and Hilda said, you can’t expect anything hot on Monday, there’s always the wash. So the present was cold mutton and pickles, not nature poems about a cloud or mountains, he used to be keen on the idea of mountains, they recurred over and over again, generally blue, or else there was a mist, but that was before he had heard of Kambala. The way that man clung to the door, shivering on the mountaintop, perhaps standing there still, waiting for someone to come, and the whole winter nobody would come except a half-baked Chinese, creeping along the snow tunnel from one of the other houses.

But you needn’t think, of course. The Miracle of Thought, he had read somewhere, in a Sunday newspaper. God making a clockwork toy and feeling pleased with it, then scratching his head and seeing that it might work too well, so he put in an extra mechanism in a moment of compassion, you just pushed down a lever and the action was held up.

He walked along slowly. He would not think. There was the car now, with a thin powdering of snow on the roof. He began to whistle a tune, a Ständchen. Elisabeth Schumann sang it on the gramophone. It was thin and very cold and very sexless, but there were moments when it persisted it coming into your head, jamming down the lever, on cold, thin, sexless mornings walking over the snow.

The hawk continued to circle in wide, empty sweeps. It might have been anywhere, heading towards Kambala, over the roofs of Happy Valley, or aimless in the sky above the Moorang road.

I’d shoot that bird if I had a gun, Clem Hagan said.

He hadn’t a gun, so he knew he was perfectly safe. It was probably a damn side too far off. You couldn’t tell. But he hadn’t a gun and it was all right.

It’s a hawk, said Chuffy Chambers, hunched up stolidly at the wheel.

Go on! You’re telling me something new.

The mail truck churned its way from Moorang. The road was a sticky yellow-brown, for the little snow that had fallen on the lower slopes had thawed, and the country was visible now in its customary nakedness. The mail truck groaned and laboured on its way. On either side of the road there were stretches of grey winter grass, and trees that were grey in winter and summer too. A flock of ragged ewes scampered with a scattering of black dung into a hollow and out of sight. In the back of the truck the mail bags jostled. There were also some bags of corn, Hagan’s luggage, an incubator, and a separating machine. When the truck skidded the separating machine struck the incubator with a loud metallic ring.

That was a near one, said Hagan, holding the door.

Yes, agreed Chuffy Chambers, that was a near one right enough.

He settled over the wheel again. He was not conversationally ingenious. He liked to sit and spit, or smile at other people’s remarks, and when no remarks were made he merely sat. As Hagan was a stranger, to-day he sat. Every day he drove the lorry from Moorang to Happy Valley twice. His chief significance was as a link between two geographical and economic points, though he could also play the accordion and was consequently in demand when there were dances at Happy Valley at the School of Arts. Twice a year there was a dance at the School of Arts, in race week and during the agricultural show. Then Chuffy Chambers sat on the platform with the rest of the band, his yellow hair smoothed down, and the girls smiled at him as they danced past, and he felt extremely satisfied. There was no one could play the accordion so good as Chuffy Chambers, they said.

Hagan began to shiver. He turned up the collar of his overcoat, which was a greenish grey and fell to his ankles when he stood up. He had never felt so cold. Not even up in the north, he came from New England, had he ever felt so cold. It was a godforsaken part of the world. There was probably worm in the sheep. And perhaps he’d been a fool to come, only the money that Furlow offered was a rise on anything he’d had before. And what you couldn’t do with money! In Sydney, in at the Australia or the Metropole, you weren’t an overseer any more. This was what made you stop to consider money, all those faces in a ring round the bar. So he wrote to Furlow that he’d come. He was going to have a cottage to himself, and a cook, and there were also a couple of jackeroos. He would feel no end important as overseer to jackeroos. But the country, it made you sick, just to look at, not a blade of grass, though they said it was the country for sheep. Still, you always said that once you’d landed yourself in a mess just to make the best of things. He took out a tin of tobacco and started to roll a cigarette.

It’s cold, he said.

Yes, said Chuffy, it’s cold.

Anything doing out here? In Happy Valley, I mean.

Oh, I dunno. Now an’ again. There’s the races. There’s the pictures once a month in a ’all that belongs to Quongs’.

Chows, eh?

Yes. There’s Chows. Quongs is Chows that run the store. They got a good shop. You can get anything at Quongs’.

Hagan rolled his cigarette. You could never say much for a place that was run by Chows. Chows or dagoes. They always took away the profits from anyone else. He spat out over the side of the truck, to emphasize his dislike of Chows. His fingers were very red as he smoothed out the white cylinder that soon would become a cigarette. On the backs of his hands there was reddish hair that had crept out as an advance guard from the wrists.

What about girls? asked Hagan, licking the flap of the cigarette.

Yes, there’s girls, said Chuffy.

What sort of girls?

Same as most places I suppose. All sorts of girls.

Oh.

Chuffy Chambers did not like to talk about girls, because they were a sort of unrealized ambition with him, and even if they said, Chuffy, you play the accordion so good, they never said more than that. They laughed. They said he was loopy. Though he treated his mother well, he was a good boy, Chuffy, but — well, he wasn’t quite all there, and you couldn’t treat him altogether serious because of that, or go with him or anything like that. So Chuffy Chambers always squinted and felt embarrassed when anyone spoke about girls. He felt a hot sensation inside his shirt next to the holy medals and the sacred hearts. For Chuffy was religious, he was a Catholic. When Father Purcell came from Moorang to Happy Valley he went to Mrs Chambers’ for tea, and it made you feel good to have a priest in the house. It was a great consolation to be religious. The Protestants called him a Micky, but he didn’t mind. It gave him a kind of secret superiority over the other boys who went with girls, and when things got too bad he told himself he didn’t want to go with girls, it was bad, he touched the holy medals and told himself it was wrong.