Patrick White - Happy Valley

Like most places, eh? Yes, I suppose you’re right.

Men who work a lot in the open, especially men who work with sheep, have a habit of repeating things, even trivial things, several times, perhaps because conversation is scarce and it gives them a sense of company to have a phrase coming out of their mouths, even if the phrase is already stated. Clem Hagan was like this. He repeated a remark ponderously, sometimes with a different intonation just for variety’s sake. He stared out in front of him with an expression that might have been interesting if you didn’t know it was due to his having spent most of his life looking into the distance for sheep. Anyone who stares long enough into the distance is bound to be mistaken for a philosopher or mystic in the end. But Hagan was no philosopher, that is, he searched no farther than the immediate, sensual reality, and this translated into simpler terms meant a good steak with juice running out at the sides and blonde girls with comfortable busts.

He had the immense self-confidence of men who are successful in their sensuality. If you saw him walking, he walked slowly with his legs a little apart and his arms a little bent and the trousers tight across his behind. Or when he smiled there was a bit of gold in one of his front teeth that flashed, and they liked that. He only had to lean up against a bar and smile and they were ducking about behind the bottles, yes, Mr Hagan and no, Mr Hagan, and pouring out whisky when it should have been gin. Everything happened so easily. He tilted his hat over his eyes. He wore his hat perpetually on a tilt which made him look rather lazy, as if he had had too much, and you were just a moment too late, a pity, but there it was, and opening your mouth and breathing hard wouldn’t help matters at all.

Hagan sighed. He was getting cramp in his legs. His trousers were catching him in the crutch. And he wanted to make water too. There was no end to the yellow pasty road. In the back of the truck, if you could judge by the jangle, the incubator had come into permanent conjunction with the separating machine. There was the hell of row, and the country going on and on, it was how many miles, mean and sour, there was probably fluke in the sheep, and he did not know why he had come. She said her name was Bella, that red-haired one. She had a behind like a cart-horse, wicker-patterned, after sitting in that wicker chair drinking a gin and ginger beer. She said she got the wind awful bad, but she just loved ginger beer, and wasn’t it funny the way it got sticky on your fingers, she said. She liked ginger ale too, but didn’t it prickle up your nose. On the whole it was pretty dull. He had torn up her card and thrown it down the lavatory in the train. That was the worst of women, they were dull, talking about ginger beer, or when you began to tell them about yourself they shut up at once and began to hum and then came out with something about a paper pattern they’d got out of a magazine or who was taking them to the races Saturday week. You cut up rough with them sometimes, and you wouldn’t go with them any more, and then you went. Or sometimes you gave them a date, like that night about eleven girls waiting outside the King’s Cross picture show, and you went past in a tram and laughed to see them all there, looking at each other and waiting and people wondering what was the gala show. But it served women right, coming up to you in the street, served them bloody well right.

Hagan laughed.

Eh? said Chuffy Chambers.

All sorts of girls, said Hagan, spitting over the side again.

Lurching away, he’d have to get down or…

Here, you, he said. What’s your name?

Chambers.

What Chambers?

Chuffy Chambers.

What sort of a name do you call that? Anyway, stop this bus. I’ve got to get down and have a leak.

The truck gave a complicated emotional groan and stopped to let Hagan get down. Chuffy Chambers sat at the wheel. He had gone a little red because he had said his name was Chuffy Chambers, but he couldn’t help it, they called him that. He could not remember how it began, but it had always been like that, they said come here Chuffy, and he came. His real name was William.

If you could go up with the hawk you would see Happy Valley there in the hollow, the township I mean, still some way from the truck. The truck won’t get there till later on. But we have to go on a bit, only spatially, that is. For it is still pretty early, and not much activity trickling through the streets, not that there ever is in Happy Valley, except for the show or the races or polling day. So now there is very little doing, and we are looking down from above, and we are not particularly impressed by any beauty of design. Because somebody once built a house, I think it was probably old Quong, and someone else come along and built another, some little way off, just far enough to show that there was no love lost in the act. And it went on like that, just building here and there, without co-operation. There never was co-operation in Happy Valley, not even in the matter of living, or you might even say less in the matter of living. In Happy Valley the people existed in spite of each other.

To go one step farther, the country existed also in spite of the town. It was not aware of it. There was no connecting link. Just as Oliver Halliday noticed when he got back from Europe, the country slept, inwardly intent on some secret war of passion or trying to separate the threads of old passions spent. This made the town seem very ephemeral. In summer when the slopes were a scurfy yellow and the body of the earth was very hot, lying there stretched out, the town, with its cottages of red and brown weatherboard, reminded you of an ugly scab somewhere on the body of the earth. It was so ephemeral. Some day it would drop off, leaving a pink, clean place underneath.

But that day has not arrived yet. And as it is not even summer, the town does not look so much like a scab, though most of the snow has melted to slush and you can see the country round about, and the road to Kambala, and the road to Moorang, and the less official road out to Glen Marsh, which is the Furlows’ place. Up at the top of the hill, where the Belpers live, there is a bright red water-tank. It is a nice bit of unconscious colour. I say unconscious because nobody thought about that sort of thing, not even Mrs Belper, who in spite of breeding dogs had her Artistic Side. She even did pokerwork in her spare time. But mostly at Happy Valley you just lived. That was unconscious too, but more unavoidable. You ate and slept and dusted and cooked and hung out the washing on Monday morning.

It was Monday morning now, so there were several lots of washing hanging out in the backyards and beginning to look white against the dirty snow. Then the drizzle began to come, so you had to go out and gather your washing in. You shouted remarks on the weather over the fence, then billowed away. There wasn’t much else going on. A pounding noise came out of the blacksmith’s shop, and a smell of burning hoof. A pale little yellow sheep-dog bitch, with a collar several sizes too big, pointed a pink nose to the wind and trod delicately down the street.

I’m going up to Moriartys’, said Amy Quong.

At first Arthur said nothing at all. He never said much, but he knew that over the present case there was less to say than he usually said. He took up a bunch of liquorice straps and hung them on another nail.

I’ve said all this week I’m going to Moriartys’.

Arthur grunted and turned away.

Somebody’s got to go, she said.

Arthur dusted a flitch of bacon. The texture was a kind of smooth-rough. It was also pleasant to smell. The whole store was pleasant to smell if you had a taste for incongruities. That is the particular advantage of a general store. Arthur nervously dusted the bacon and said: