In the Wet Read Free Page A

would be occupied, but for the race week Bill Roberts set up seventeen extra beds in the verandahs, and the other place had as many. A travelling roundabout for the children turned up from Cloncurry and was erected in the main street; it had a great loudspeaker that blared canned dance tunes every night till one in the morning, and could be heard ten miles out in the bush. Two pedlars arrived in trucks that opened up as shops, and to crown everything the cinema truck arrivedon one of its infrequent visits, displaying films that I had seen ten years before in distant Godalming on the far side of the world. Miss Foster closed her school, and all the town went to the races.
    A race meeting at Landsborough has one or two features that distinguish it from Ascot. All the horses must be bred in the district and they come straight off the cattle stations, ungroomed of course, and sometimes covered in mud where they have been rolling. The jockeys are the stockmen from the stations decked out in brilliant racing colours, each riding a horse that he has picked out from the mob of two or three hundred in the horse paddock of his own station, and that he confidently believes will one day win the Melbourne Cup. The racecourse itself is in a natural clearing in the bush, the posts and rails are rough, untrimmed saplings cut a hundred yards away. The centre of the racecourse is the aerodrome and the ambulance aeroplane was there in case of accidents, and for a more mundane reason, because its crew were busily running a gambling wheel to pay for the aeroplane. There is no grand stand, but over the horse lines and the bar rough roofs of gum tree boughs with the leaves on them have been erected to provide a little shade. There is a stockyard for the Rodeo which comes on the last day of the meeting. There is a great deal of unrelieved sunshine, a great deal of beer, and a great deal of dust.
    I drove out to the races with Mrs. Roberts and her coloured maid, a girl of about seventeen called Coty. We were a little late in starting because they had served over sixty hot dinners cooked on an old fashioned kitchen range with the shade temperature in the yard outside at a hundred and five. It seemed only fair to stay and help them with the washing up, so it was after three o’clock when we got out to the racecourse. I knew a number of the managers and stockmen by that time, of course, and I spent the afternoonwith them pleasantly enough, drinking one beer to every three of theirs and putting my two shillings on the tote each race on their advice.
    Towards the last race, I met Stevie for the first time in my life. I was standing with a little group that included Jim Maclaren, manager of Beverley station, when I saw a very tattered old man zig-zagging towards me. He wore a dirty blue shirt without a collar, open to show his skinny chest, and dirty drill trousers held up by a ringer’s belt with a leather slot for the knife and a leather pocket for the tin box of matches. He had no hat; he was very tanned, with lean, not unpleasant features; he had worn out elastic sided riding boots upon his feet. He was unshaven and rather drunk; indeed, he looked as if he had been rather drunk for some considerable time.
    He came up to us and stood swaying a little, and said, “You’re the new parson.”
    “That’s right,” I said, and held out my hand to him. “My name’s Roger Hargreaves.”
    He took my hand and shook it, and went on shaking it; he wouldn’t let it go. “Roger Hargreaves,” he said seriously. There was a pause while he considered that information. “That’s your name.”
    “That’s right,” I said. “That’s my name.” I knew that everyone beside me was smiling a little, watching to see how the new parson reacted to this drunk old man.
    “Good on you,” he said at last, after another pause. “The Reverend Roger Hargreaves. That’s what they call you.”
    “That’s right,” I assured him. “That’s my name.”
    He stood