Tourmaline Read Online Free Page B

the wall, and stand about and fan him, as that would be easier work than hewing a grave up on the hill there. He spoke as if only he appreciated the tremendous urgency of saving our patient for Tourmaline: but I think all of us felt this urgency, and a certain irritation with the others.
    So we stood by the bedside. A strange sight we must have been, fanning with bits of paper and cardboard and whatever else came to hand, earnest, and almost silent. The two women were there, and Rock and I, and Byrne, who seemed quite sober now and very grave. Jack Speed and Horse Carson came and went throughout the afternoon. Horse dipped into our subject’s trouser pockets for a name or some other clue, but there was nothing of that sort; only a pocket-knife, a handkerchief, a box of matches and a number of coins. ‘He wasn’t broke,’ said Horse; adding: ‘He’s wet his pants, poor bugger.’
    I remember the quiet of that afternoon, the forlorn crowing of Mary’s one rooster in the yard outside, the hiss of wind through stiff leaves, the occasional useless clank of the Springs’ windmill probing the almost dry bore. And above all the breathing of the man on the bed, who held on, who held so stubbornly on, defying the sun itself.
    At times Mary took his temperature. We declared at first that the old thermometer lied, when it said a hundred and seven; but Rock, who seemed to know something about these things, said he trusted it. In all the afternoon there was little change; a degree or two at the most. Our wrists ached with fanning, our legs with standing. After sunset, Mary said there was no point in retaining so many nurses. She and Tom would care for their new protégé, she seemed to suggest; and the rest of us, I think, rather resented this hint of possessiveness. He belonged to Tourmaline, after all.
    ‘I’ll stay too,’ Deborah said. And Mary nodded, looking pleased.
    Byrne said, rather awkwardly: ‘I’ll keep night watch.’
    ‘You, Byrnie,’ Mary said. ‘You’ll be dead drunk by ten o’clock.’
    He actually flushed, and muttered: ‘Not tonight.’
    ‘We’ll get chairs, Deborah,’ Mary said. So we knew then that we were dismissed.
    We went out into the street, where Rock soon left us. The sky was of that turquoise, verging on green, that comes between sunset and darkness, and had one star in it. The land was lumpy and obscure. Byrne had picked up his guitar from Tom’s counter. He sat down on the war memorial, strumming a little, moodily.
    I stood near him, looking down, observing the thick black hair, the gaunt hollow of his cheek as he bent over the guitar, the one satanic eyebrow that was in my line of vision. In that faint light he looked melancholy and even distinguished. One could not see the ruined skin. Some adolescent complaint had robbed him of whatever beauty he might have had, leaving his face pitted with craters, like a dead dark moon.
    He struck me as being intolerably sad. I said to him: ‘I think this boy will live, Byrnie. Rocky thinks so, and he seems to know.’
    He thumbed a chord or two, and said: ‘Good old Rocky,’ absently.
    ‘Tourmaline seems to have taken charge of him. When he wakes up he’s going to feel he’s not his own property any more.’
    ‘He mightn’t want to be his own property,’ Byrne said. ‘Why would he?’
    I was surprised, and said: ‘Only a weak-willed man——’
    ‘Ah, hell,’ he suddenly shouted, striking loud discords. ‘All right, I was meant to be someone’s dog.’ And he went on to play some ballad, very loud and twanging, with his face turned away. I had hurt him, somehow.
    So I said: ‘Good night, Byrnie,’ and left him, and went up the road towards my gaol. Towards my tower, silhouetted dark and square against the green western sky, and the black arms of my stricken tree, and the single soft wattle-ball of the evening star, which does not, alas, belong to me.
    But his voice followed me far, lamenting.
    ‘New Holland is a barren place,
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