The Far Country Read Free Page A

“We could do a lot of things,” he said. “We could make that trip home.”
    In their hard early married life a trip home to England had been her great desire, always to be frustrated by their circumstances. She was English, the daughter of an admiral, brought up in all the comfort and security of a small country house before the first war, and sent to a good school. In 1917 she had joined the W.A.A.C.s with a commission as was proper for the daughter of a senior naval officer, and in 1918 she had shocked her parents by falling in love with an Australian, a lieutenant in the first A.I.F. Her family never understood Jack Dorman and did everything they could to dissuade her from marrying him, and succeeded in preventing her from doing so till she was twenty-one, in 1919; she married him on her birthday. He was a ranker officer, for one thing, which in those days damned him from the start; he had been an N.C.O. in Gallipoli and in France for nearly three years, and he had only recently been commissioned. He was an unpleasantly tough young man, addicted to a strange, un-English slang, and he never pulled up men for not saluting him because he didn’t believe in saluting, and said so. He used to have meals with private soldiers in cafés and in restaurants, and even drink with them; he had no idea of discipline at all. All he could do, with others like him, was to win battles.
    Thirty-two years had passed since those bad months of 1918, but Jane could still remember the unpleasantness as she had rebelled against her family. She was too young, too immature to be able to stand up and state her conviction that there was solid stuff in this young man, the substance for a happy and enduring marriage; she felt that very strongly, but she could never get it out in words. She could remember as if it were yesterday her father’s frigid politeness to this uncouth young officer that she had brought into the house, and his blistering contempt for him in their private talks, and her mother’s futile assurances that “Daddy knows best”. She had married Jack Dorman in February 1919 in Paddington a week before sailing with him to Australia, and her parents had come to the wedding, but only just. Nobody else came except one old school friend, and Aunt Ethel.
    Aunt Ethel was her father’s sister, Mrs. Trehearn, married to Geoffrey Trehearn, a Commissioner in the Indian Police, at that time stationed in Moulmein. Aunt Ethel had come home with her two children in 1916 to put them to school in England, and she wasstill in England waiting for a passage back to Burma. Aunt Ethel, alone of all Jane’s relations, had stood up for her and had told the family that she was making a wise choice, and she had cut little ice with her brother Tom; indeed, in some ways she had made matters worse. Admiral Sir Thomas Foxley had little regard for the sagacity of women, and to mention the woman’s vote to him in those far-off days was as a red rag to a bull.
    All these things passed through Jane Dorman’s mind as she sat sipping her tea in the kitchen of her homestead thirty-three years later. Seven thousand pounds to spend after paying tax, all earned in one year and earned honestly; more money than her father had ever dreamed of earning, or any of her family. Extraordinary to think of, and extraordinary that after their hard life the money should mean so little to them. Jack didn’t quite know what to do with it, so much was evident, and certainly she didn’t.
    “I don’t know about going home,” she said at last. “I don’t believe I’d know anybody there now except Aunt Ethel, and I don’t suppose I’d recognise
her
now. There was a letter from her in the post today, by the way. I’d like to see the old thing again before she dies, but she’s about the only one. She must be getting on for eighty now.”
    “Wouldn’t you like to go and see your old home?” he suggested. He knew how much her mind had turned to that small country house