obeyed.'
'Could you take your ship to sea without them?'
'Why, yes-just for a short run. Hobart would be a short trip, six or seven hours. We could take her there with just a dozen men, or even less. We wouldn't submerge if we were as short-handed as that, and we couldn't cruise for any length of time. But if we got her there, or even to New Zealand-say to Christchurch-without a full crew we could never be effective, operationally.' He paused. 'We'd be just refugees.'
They sat in silence for a time. 'One of the things that's been surprising me,' the grazier said, 'is that there have been so few refugees. So few people coming down from the north. From Cairns and Townsville, and from places like that.'
'Is that so?' the captain asked. 'It's just about impossible to get a bed in Melbourne-anywhere.'
'I know there have been some. But not the numbers that I should have expected.'
'That's the radio, I suppose,' Dwight said. 'These talks that the Prime Minister's been giving have been kind of steadying. The A.B.C.'s been doing a good job in telling people just the way things are. After all, there's not much comfort in leaving home and coming down here to live in a tent or in a car, and have the same thing happen to you a month or two later.'
'Maybe,' the grazier said. 'I've heard of people going back to Queensland after a few weeks of that. But I'm not sure that that's the whole story. I believe it is that nobody really thinks it's going to happen, not to them, until they start to feel ill. And by that time, well, it's less effort to stay at home and take it. You don't recover from this once it starts, do you?'
'I don't think that's true. I think you can recover, if you get out of the radioactive area into a hospital where you get proper treatment. They've got a lot of cases from the north in the Melbourne hospitals right now.'
'I didn't know that.'
'No. They don't say anything about that over the radio. After all, what's the use? They're only going to get it over again next September.'
'Nice outlook,' said the grazier. 'Will you have another whisky now?'
'Thank you, I believe I will.' He stood up and poured himself a drink. 'You know,' he said, 'now that I've got used to the idea, I think I'd rather have it this way. We've all got to die one day, some sooner and some later. The trouble always has been that you're never ready, because you don't know when it's coming. Well, now we do know, and there's nothing to be done about it. I kind of like that. I kind of like the thought that I'll be fit and well up till the end of August and then-home. I'd rather have it that way than go on as a sick man from when I'm seventy to when I'm ninety.'
'You're a regular naval officer,' the grazier said. 'You're probably more accustomed to this sort of thing than I would be.'
'Will you evacuate?' the captain asked. 'Go someplace else when it gets near? Tasmania?'
'Me? Leave this place?' the grazier said. 'No, I shan't go. When it comes, I'll have it here, on this verandah, in this chair, with a drink in my hand. Or else in my own bed. I wouldn't leave this place.'
'I'd say that's the way most folks think about it, now that they've got used to the idea.'
They sat on the verandah in the setting sun till Moira came to tell them that tea was ready. 'Drink up,' she said, 'and come in for the blotting paper, if you can still walk.'
Her father said, 'That's not the way to talk to our guest.'
'You don't know our guest as well as I do, Daddy. I tell you, you just can't get him past a pub. Any pub.'
'More likely he can't get you past one.' They went into the house.
There followed a very restful two days for Dwight Towers. He handed over a great bundle of mending to the two women, who took it away from him, sorted it, and busied themselves over it. In the hours of daylight he was occupied with Mr. Davidson upon the farm from dawn till dusk. He was initiated into the arts of crutching sheep and of shovelling silage up into a cart and distributing it in the paddocks; he spent long hours walking by the bullock on the sunlit pastures. The change did him good after his confined life in the submarine and in the mother ship; each night he went to bed early and slept heavily, and awoke refreshed for the next day.
On the last morning of his stay, after breakfast, Moira found him standing at the door of a small outside room beside the laundry, now used as a repository for luggage, ironing boards, gum boots, and junk of every description. He was standing at the open door smoking a cigarette, looking at the assortment of articles inside. She said, 'That's where we put things when we tidy up the house and say we'll send it to the jumble sale. Then we never do.'
He smiled. 'We've got one of those, only it's not so full as this. Maybe that's because we haven't lived there so long.' He stood looking in upon the mass with interest. 'Say, whose tricycle was that?'
'Mine,' she said.
'You must have been quite small when you rode around on that.'
She glanced at it. 'It does look small now, doesn't it? I should think I was four or five years old.'
'There's a Pogo stick!' He reached in and pulled it out; it squeaked rustily. 'It's years and years since I saw a Pogo stick. There was quite a craze for them at one time, back home.'
'They went out for a time, and then they came back into fashion,' she said. 'Quite a lot of kids about here have Pogo sticks now.'
'How old would you have been when you had that?'
She thought for a moment. 'It came after the tricycle, after the scooter, and before the bicycle. I should think I was about seven.'
He held it in his hands thoughtfully. 'I'd say that's about the right age for a Pogo stick. You can buy them in the shops here, now?'
'I should think so. The kids use them.'
He laid it down. 'It's years since I saw one of those in the United States. They go in fashions, as you say.' He glanced around. 'Who owned the stilts?'
'My brother had them first, and then I had them. I broke that one.'
'He was older than you, wasn't he?'
She nodded. 'Two years older-two and a half.'
'Is he in Australia now?'
'No. He's in England.'
He nodded; there was nothing useful to be said about that.
'Those stilts are quite high off the ground,' he remarked. 'I'd say you were older then.'
She nodded. 'I must have been ten or eleven.'
'Skis.' He measured the length of them with his eye, 'You must have been older still.'
'I didn't go skiing till I was about sixteen. But I used those up till just before the war. They were getting a bit small for me by then, though. That other pair were Donald's.'
He ran his eye around the jumbled contents of the little room.
'Say,' he said, 'there's a pair of water-skis!'
She nodded. 'We still use those-or we did up till the war.' She paused. 'We used to go for summer holidays at Barwon Heads. Mummy used to rent the same house every year…' She stood in silence for a moment, thinking of the sunny little house by the golf links, the warm sands, the cool air rushing past as she flew behind the motorboat in a flurry of warm spray. 'There's the wooden spade I used to build sand castles with when I was very little…'
He smiled at her. 'It's kind of fun, looking at other people's toys and trying to think what they must have looked like at that age. I can just imagine you at seven, jumping around on that Pogo stick.'
'And flying into a temper every other minute,' she said. She stood for a moment looking in at the door thoughtfully. 'I never would let Mummy give any of my toys away,' she said quietly. 'I said that I was going to keep them for my children to play with. Now there aren't going to be any.'
'Too bad,' he said. 'Still that's the way it is.' He pulled the door to and closed it on so many sentimental hopes. 'I think I'll have to get back to the ship this afternoon and see if she's sunk at her moorings. Do you know what time there'd be a train?'
'I don't, but we can ring the station and find out. You don't think you could stay another day?'
'I'd like to, honey, but I don't think I'd better. There'll be a pile of paper on my desk that needs attention.'
