Another ‘Ripping Yarn’ from the pen of N E Gledhill, kindly shared by his Great Nephew Allen Gledhill with thanks:
When East Meets West
(By N. E. Gledhill)
You wonder how he came to be there; but I’ll tell you. There are brave men in this world who will face anything but themselves. Rio, Danilova, Port Headland you’ll find them. It is the place, the people, the drink and the drugs that help them forget. And their look is unmistakable. I’ve seen once rich men who were paupers, men despairing with the hopelessness of civilization; men with a woman in their lives, and some the victims of drugs — and every one of them looked like a man with a foot in the grave.
Ottaway didn’t. His unkempt hair still looked as though it hadn’t long since known the regular brush and comb, and his stooped body and parched skin was a living example of abuse of magnificent manhood. The terrible scar, too, with its stitch marks like a fish bone, stretching from the left corner of his mouth to his ear, seemed somehow incongruous: for beneath the remnants of a once black serge, and the rim-burned panama, Ottaway looked like a man who might easily have gone through life without a scar.
And I’ll tell you where you could have found him. There is a spot on the West Australian coast about thirty miles below Perth, where the rocks and the wind are so sheltered that scarcely a surf rolls upon the shore. The train will take you there, then it goes no further. So by foot along the burning sandy stretches, winding from the sea’s edge into where the hills form a ragged belt of granite, past the desolated turtle factory, around the cliffs where, miles away, the island light house creeps into view blinking like a sleepy schoolboy, and where the wind hits like a wet knife; and on beneath the stars in the cooling sand to the crest of the sheerest hill standing straight above the sea like a victorious gladiator above his victim.
That’s where I found him. A cabbage patch to the left covered with dry gum leaves; a litter of chips to the right telling their tale of the axe; and he sleeping the heavy sleep of the drugged, stretched across the door of his sapling shack in a litter of unswept dirt and food scraps. As the match I struck burnt dimly in a diaphanous haze of smoke, I could see by him where he had fallen the cursed half filled pipe, and my nostrils twitched at the sweet scent of poppy juice that took me back to the Chinese Fan-tan dens of Ballarat.
Ballarat! That was where I first met Luke, the hardest two-fisted fighter the town knew.
A stretch of alluvial diggings honeycombing the gravel earth like wombat holes. A hundred iron shakers rocking crazily to the everlasting chorus of sifted stone, and a thousand dungareed and flanneled figures shoveling rhythmically or gazing into the pans, through the spirals of rising dust, like boys into Christmas puddings. A giant Italian on the claim adjacent to mine crosses his pegs and is working my dirt. Both of us are legally wrong, of course, both working below ten feet, but the Ballarat men didn’t cavil to civil law. According to the diggers code he had jumped my claim, and might if not right be on his side. Physical argument wouldn’t have worried me, but his advantage in avoirdupois gave me as much chance as a man in a stope slide.
I felt a hand against my chest that pushed me aside like a sheath of straw. It was Ottaway, from the next claim, and without a word his fist flashed like a piston rod to the Italian’s jaw and dropped him like falling timber. Ottaway licked his skinned knuckles then looked at me. “Come on over to my show, the colour you’ll get here isn’t worth fightin’ for — worked it meself two months before you came to the diggin’s. But his game wasn’t straight. There’s plenty stone and work where I am for two. Walk in and we’ll call partners.”
It hadn’t taken me a fortnight with little credit, less gold and thirteen hours a day at the end of a shovel to know I was on a duffer; so I gathered my traps and we shook on the deal. Together we worked the Big Reward, sun, heat and rain. Sometimes the dirt was good; then for months there was no sound of the welcome drag across the wire mesh. I often wondered whether it was actually the gold that Luke wanted or the job of finding it. When tray after tray showed no colour his whistle became louder and more erratic and his eyes would light with the thrill of hard work as he swung his
pick in the three-by-three hole. And he always won! For two years he literally dragged gold from that claim, and things looked bright.
Then Paddy Hannan rolled a stone for a pillow near the old Maritana Hill, and East, South, and North rushed for the West. And Luke left the claim to me and rushed with them. For twelve months I chased luck around Ballarat, and not a word from him. I thought he had shifted on anywhere that the stone called him, always singing, digging, fighting in his careless way. Then came a letter from Kalgoorlie saying he wanted me. I went because it said little, so I knew I was needed.
I found him with his head swathed in bandages, in the house of an Eastern woman. He had had an accident, it seems, and she had nursed him. So much he told me — but I guessed more. She was beautiful, this woman, dark and beautiful as a Kalgoorlie night, and with a vein of Malaysian blood in her. She seemed to glide into the room and stand for minutes watching Luke where he lay and he would never discuss her with me. And when a man won’t talk of a woman . . .
But there was another man it seemed. This man — curse him — was married, Joe Harper, we had both known him in Ballarat. He was fine to look at, so much I’ll say of him, and the Malaysian woman was beautiful. He walked by the fence one morning as she was pulling a few weeds from the garden, and his shadow crossed her face.
They met. She didn’t know he was married.
The weeks passed and Luke waited until they were together; then he went to them. He faced Harper and he told the woman. Two days later we were sitting at a corner table in Gazzard’s, Harper came up, knocked the glass out of Luke’s hand, and said: “We’re going to fight.” Luke never shifted in his seat but nodded vacantly: “I thought we would.” “No one need know but we three,” said Harper, “and we fight with naked fists. Tomorrow at this time back of the Chaffers.”
For a second I thought I saw the old fire light in Luke’s eyes, then he kicked away his chair and we followed Harper through the door. The next day we walked silently over the leases, down past the Ivanhoe, and across to the Chaffers dump. Harper was waiting for us alone. We followed him beyond the mines, along the woodline, and about a mile into the bush where a small clearing left a ten-foot square among the stunted saplings. Nobody spoke. Throwing off their coats and flannels they faced each other like David and Goliath, and solid as Luke was he was the David. Harper took a watch from his pocket.
“It’s five to twelve. When the Chaffers’ whistle blows mid-day we start”.
The man that wins has the woman—the other stays here”. Luke nodded. There was a silence in that bush as I stood and watched them, which made me hungry for a sound. Not a creek of running water, or a wind to stir the trees. Nothing but leaves and stone, and lazy clouds shrugging their shoulders as they brushed the tops of the taller gums.
Suddenly a terrible shriek swept down the sides of the out-crops, swamped the heavy air we were breathing, and raced off across the horizon. Then like machines in a collision, the two figures clashed heavily, locked like some writhing body that ground and crushed the spinifex beneath it, while the protectors on their boots flashed sparks from the ironstone. Not a sound but the sick thud of fists on human flesh and muttered curses. For a few seconds, the curtain of red dust hid them as they rolled among a thicket of saplings. Then with a scream like a wounded animal, I saw Ottaway’s left cheek spurt blood, as with head thrown back his fingers fastened around Harper’s neck and closed till the nails whitened.
Five minutes later we covered with bushes the sightless thing that grinned hideously at the skies, and I half carried Ottaway to the nearest doctor. His left cheek was terribly gashed from mouth to ear, and twenty-four hours later he was still unconscious. When he woke he wanted to go to the woman, but we told him it meant a fortnight’s bed for him. He was mad and wouldn’t hear of it. By the end of the week, like a drunken man, he left us and went to her house. She was gone. Gone out of the country, back to the stinking coolies and fever swamps where she belonged. Then he disappeared, and I thought he had followed her until a fortnight later I met him one sweltering morning. His face was covered with a dirty growth, and he huddled in an overcoat pinned around his ears. God, he was terrible. I tried to pass it over lightly.
“East is East,” I cited Kipling, “and West is West and never the twain shall meet.”
But he didn’t answer. His eyes were vacant, yet the pin-point pupils seemed to dance with the delight of a little girl harbouring a big secret. I followed him over to the leases, trying hard to reason with him, trying to make him talk about himself, or Ballarat or gold. But he walked with bowed head, only occasionally turning his eyes on me like a man who had seen the bottom of despair.
When we came to a hessian shack by the Horseshoe battery, I followed him inside and understood. A mattress was stretched on the floor in one corner, and the walls near it were like a stained spittoon. Luke flung himself on the mattress, face downward, and lay like a dead man. On a kerosene box by his side stood a sinister black pipe, with a huge bowl and a foot of rubber stem. I swiped the jar of brown pellets across the floor, nodded slowly, and pulled the door quietly after me.
East had met West with a vengeance.
It was three months later when, following a clue, I passed the turtle factory, skirted the cliffs by the sea where the wind hits like a wet knife, saw the blinking eyes of the lighthouse, and climbed the crest of the sheerest hill to the sapling shack.
His taut fingers clutched the rubber stem of a long pipe; his face was colourless, his skin cold and clammy and his lips and the tips of his ears were livid. The faded overcoat was still fastened about his neck, and a rim-burned panama lay in the corner. It looked as though East had conquered.
I left him until the effects of the drug should have worn off. When I returned two days later the shack was deserted; the pipe, the pellets, everything but the sickly stench that hung like an invisible veil and took me by the throat as I jerked open the warped door. I forget the date of the issue of the “Kalgoorlie Miner”, in which the paragraph appeared:
“. . .at the bottom of an abandoned shaft in an advanced stage of decomposition. From the remnants of a tattered overcoat and a panama hat found alongside, the remains are believed to be those of a white man.”
Moya Sharp
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