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It occurred to him suddenly that if he couldn't manage to love her she might manage some day to stop loving him. Wouldn't things be better then? A certain comradeship would be left, respect and a definite liking – good plain emotions which one could understand—

And then inwardly, helplessly, he began to laugh. Because after all what did you do to make a woman stop loving you? He'd behaved badly enough to her once or twice—

And he suddenly brought out an envelope and a pencil and scribbled:

“Don't you think you could manage to hate me?”

She looked at it,
at him, smiled uncertainly and wrote beneath:

“No.”

His pencil jerked wildly as the car came on to a bad patch of road. The words were hardly legible: “Why not?”

She scrawled quickly:

“I can't imagine.”

He grinned at this Susan-like dig, and managed laboriously:

“Would it be better if you did?”

She answered aloud, rather sharply:

“Don't be absurd!” and Millicent asked, turning her head:

“Did you speak to me, Susan?”

“No, Mother.”

The car lumbered into Kerrajellanbong and stopped austerely in front of a tiny shop with a notice which said, “Fruit, Confectionery, Soft Drinks.”

While Bret was buying ginger-beer, Drew was staring absently at his dashboard. The clock and the speedometer, the oil-gauge, the petrol indicator. Just there above his eyes the little windscreen-wiper which worked briskly, fussily, like a busy housewife. Here to his left hand a knob which moved intricate gears. Under his left foot something that bewitched the world into a streak of ribbon whirling past, and under his right something that made it secure and stationary again—

What a waste, he thought, awed, what a frightful sinful waste if she'd been smashed up on her first trip! All that complicated and beautiful mechanism, all that shining paint and nickel—! Not that it was so
shining now. He got out of the car and stood back, frowning, to examine it. He thought that he was angry, exasperated, but he found suddenly that he was smiling, and remembering Colin as he'd come home one day, bloodily victorious from some schoolboy scrap. The poor old bus looked just like that! She was transformed now, by her dilapidation, from an opulent new model of a costly car into something as intimately and personally concerned with his journeyings as the war-horse of any mediæval knight riding forth to forays and ambushments! Surprising, the character it gave her, the air of having travelled far and gallantly, and of being ready, standing there, powerful and solid and begrimed, for any amount more—

Any amount—

How far were they from Sydney now? A hundred miles or so? Well, it was a fair bit, but a fleabite compared with what lay ahead. What exactly, anyhow,
did
lie ahead? He realised, watching Bret come out of the store with his arms full of bottles and brown paper bags, that apart from a mental picture of its coast and boundary lines, of a vague impression of Mudgee somewhere west, and Orange somewhere west of that again, he knew very little indeed of his native state—

Something stirred in him restlessly. Old? Fifty-eight? Good Lord, no! The prime of life! But all the same, back there on the hill—

Queer how your life vanished, flickered past you, a succession of scenes like the lights that waver across your ceiling at night from passing trams or cars. And
you don't notice them any more than that, either; not when you're busy. Climbing towards something, watching it come nearer. Time doesn't count then, as time. It's just one of your weapons. But then when you've got what you were after, when you've won your victory, you're left standing – with your weapon still in your hand. And nothing to use it on—

Well, not exactly nothing. You go on working, of course, but the fight's over. And you're fifty-eight, so time has become, mysteriously, rather precious, rather terrible. You can't – you don't want to use it just – just
fiddling
with things. Like opening an egg with a battle-axe—

Time. Fifty-eight to sixty-eight. Ten years, say, of
active
life. Ten years when you're still not quite an old gentleman. God, how short, how horribly short, how sickeningly, mercilessly inadequate! Milly, what the devil have I been doing? Thirty-seven years we've been married, and I've spent them getting ready to settle down and live with you!

Funk! Yes, that's it, pure funk! Why? Reaction from that near-tragedy up there? Well, that would have been a sell, to go out like that with these ten years now ahead of you, these ten priceless years unlived! Would you care less about death if you'd always lived widely, colourfully, adventurously—?

And suddenly he remembered what it was he had noticed when there was nothing in front of him but space and tree-tops very far below – his little silver absurdity on the radiator still straining towards the final mystery, still pointing them victoriously forward. …

O
NLY
blue sky was to be seen ahead of them when they took the road again. It was still greasy, and they made slow enough progress for a time. Nobody minded. The sudden transition from mountain to plain country was intriguing, Millicent thought, watching green, wet paddocks where for the past few hours she'd been seeing the bush and the blue depth and distance of far-away gullies. She found too, that she was feeling a bit slack, tired, glad to relax into her well-upholstered corner of the seat and watch the landscape absently from eyes half focused, seeing it only as a strip of moving, slightly hypnotising
colour. She'd had a fright, she thought, a fright which had been psychological rather than physical, when they had hung for a second or two so near to death. Her feeling, she realised had been one of amazed incredulous protest. “Oh,
no!”
her whole being had cried. “Not yet! It can't be – I haven't
nearly
finished!” And her fear had been for something in the unguessable future which could not
– must
not thus be cheated of its day! She smiled ruefully to herself, thinking of her future. It was clear enough – had always been clear enough if one wanted (which one didn't) to think of it. But there must have been some hope, some feeling, some entirely irrational conviction at the back of her mind that some day before she died life would take on the flavour of adventure again! Rather alarming, the revelations one had now and then of unsuspected dwellers in oneself! No paltry dweller either! No vaguely fluttering hope, no half-baked impression, but a lusty and ravening desire lifting its voice in frantic protest against extinction unfulfilled! Well, poor dear, now that I know about you, what are your chances? Poor – very poor!

And yet after all,
what does one want, at fifty-seven, with extraneous adventures when one has just discovered inexhaustible unexplored territory in one's own mind?

Fascinating thought! But not, she admitted regretfully, of much practical use. You can't dig and delve for those intriguing buried things. They'd hide away deeper and more darkly. You can only surprise them as it were in flashes, by accident, as you might put your hand in the dark on a sleeping animal and not know which of you had the greater scare!

Well, one had still the children. But she sighed. Adventures meant dangers, of course, and it was one of the penalties of motherhood that you couldn't, however hard you tried, enjoy your children's dangers. Your instinct was to hustle them willy-nilly to the smooth, the safe, the easy, the everything which you so hated for yourself. And when you found you couldn't do that because one simply didn't interfere in other people's lives and you hadn't ever been able to think of your children except as people, individuals, you had to watch their adventures with a sinking of the heart, a sickness of dread and a shrinking of fear which no dangers of your own had ever roused in you.

And she had to confess to herself now that for years, ever since Colin came back from the war, her pity for him, her dread for him, had been draining something out of her as though she were bleeding incessantly from some tiny wound. There had been the makings of something so very good in Colin. He'd been like a lusty
young plant thrusting upward to its maturity, and shrivelled overnight by frost. Some plants will stand it, and others won't—

Bret had come through all right – as far as one knew. But then, as he had written illuminatingly once to her after their return, “I had the luck to be wounded.” How many men, she wondered now, owed their continued mental stability to a shattered limb or a sightless eye or a damaged lung? Something which had released them for a little from the incessant nervous strain of danger, discomfort, boredom. Something which had meant respite, turning the taut brain to new preoccupations – the walls of a ward in place of mud-bespattered dug-outs; cleanliness, silence, instead of dirt and nerve shattering noise; uniforms of nurses instead of endless khaki – the queer wonder of watching them, their movements, their voices so blessedly different—

Colin, and his “charmed life”! Colin who couldn't get hit! Colin, eighteen, who went too long without his respite—

Returned to her, after four years, sound in wind and limb! She remembered how meeting him at the troopship she'd actually grieved for other mothers walking beside sons on crutches, sons armless, eyeless; felt an almost awed gratitude for the straight and unharmed Colin at her side!

For you don't see them quickly, those other hidden injuries, those wounds which strike deeper than the body. You don't see at a glance a mind once gay and vital, distorted into an ugly contempt for life, an ugly disgust at itself, a still uglier fear—

Once when he was quite small, she remembered, he'd won an egg and spoon race at school. Red and
flustered, the others had wobbled, glanced round, hurried too much, clutched at their spoons with their hands, failed one way or another. She had watched Colin with surprise. He had moved with a machine-like steadiness and precision, his face slightly pink but immovable, his spoon rock-steady between his teeth. He had never lifted his eyes, turned his head, altered his pace. But she had seen with faint dismay after he reached the winning post, that he had stood for a second or two with shaking hands and brimming eyes, his small face queerly distorted—

Well, here it was again. There in front of him, stretched like the tape across the course, was the end of a different, an unspeakable contest. Beyond it he hadn't looked, hadn't thought. “
Get
there!” he'd said to himself, moving through it with machine-like efficiency. “
Get
there!
Get
there!” And then when he'd got there – what—?

Again the unbearable cessation of strain, the unendurable leisure to think. The cracking of a control too heavily weighted, too long sustained—

If she were built that way, thought Millicent, she should be thanking God that much as she loved her son and daughter she loved her son-in-law and her daughter-in-law hardly less! For just as she always thought with relief of Bret, she thought too with hope and confidence of Margery.

She began to think about her grandchildren. Richard would be three now; she hadn't seen him for eighteen months. And quite soon, now, there'd be the new one. Her suitcases bulged with clothes and playthings for them both, a bear for Richard and a set of ingenious toys which you fitted together into shapes of animals so deliciously ludicrous that even Tom had stopped to fiddle with them and roar with laughter at the absurdities he fashioned. And picture-books, and a clockwork train and a petrol-lorry. Not soldiers; she had looked at them for a moment, wondering. There had been a cannon too, and a machine-gun, very elaborate, with a kneeling soldier beside it— And she'd turned away with a sudden revulsion, thinking “If he must, he must – but not from me!”

It had been foolish,
perhaps, to buy so much. Margery would put some of them away, perhaps, for rainy days and Christmas. But the clothes she would be glad of – strong overalls, brown and blue, and little linen shirts and trousers, and a blue linen hat. And for the baby—

But here again a little prick of worry obtruded. While she was packing Susan had come in with her arms full of baby clothes, fine woollens, flannels furry soft and smooth, heavy silks. She'd said, “You might as well give these to Margery, Mother.” And put them down on the bed. What could one say? Nothing, without tearing that charming veil of perfection which they had all, by common consent, laid over the tragedy of her marriage to Bret. Nothing to do but murmur. “Thank you, dear, I expect she'd love them,” and pack them away beside the other little pile—

All the same, girls have queer feelings sometimes. It mightn't mean – Oh, well, what did it matter after all? They'd looked very happy once or twice to-day, grinning together like a pair of naughty children as they came up the hill to the rescue on a coal-lorry; carrying their soaked branches to put under the car wheels!

It wasn't any good remembering with too deep an apprehension sounds of stifled sobbing through a
closed door, the lines of a figure crouching over a picnic fire – lines that a sculptor might have striven for, the listless grief strangely and movingly mature, of youth—

No good remembering Bret's bent head against the blue valley, Bret's face closed, defensive, against the goad of a stinging tongue. All that was near its end – surely? Surely? This journey was an interlude – a little isthmus of time connecting a difficult and stormy past to a new life at Coolami.

Who wouldn't be happy at Coolami?

Who wouldn't find difficulties fading in that lovely place? And she reflected that, confronted by the joyous and uncaring fecundity of the earth, one would probably, sooner or later, begin to feel that until one had shed, somehow, one's unhealthful complexities, one was something less than any ripening ear of wheat!

Wheat. The mere thought of it made her feel homesick! She looked out with an impatience that was vaguely apologetic at a road climbing again into bushland. On the eastern slopes to the left there were huge orchards; apple-trees with buds just breaking misted away as far as you could see, a pinkish film against the dark earth. Pear-trees reared old trunks, blackly vigorous through the white foam of their blossoming. An elusive fragrance came from them borne up by the sun out of wet earth and leaves and petals.