Happy Valley Read Online Free PDF Page B

and dusted and cooked and hung out the washing on Monday morning.
    It was Monday morning now, so there were several lots of washing hanging out in the backyards and beginning tolook white against the dirty snow. Then the drizzle began to come, so you had to go out and gather your washing in. You shouted remarks on the weather over the fence, then billowed away. There wasn’t much else going on. A pounding noise came out of the blacksmith’s shop, and a smell of burning hoof. A pale little yellow sheep-dog bitch, with a collar several sizes too big, pointed a pink nose to the wind and trod delicately down the street.
    I’m going up to Moriartys’, said Amy Quong.
    At first Arthur said nothing at all. He never said much, but he knew that over the present case there was less to say than he usually said. He took up a bunch of liquorice straps and hung them on another nail.
    I’ve said all this week I’m going to Moriartys’.
    Arthur grunted and turned away.
    Somebody’s got to go, she said.
    Arthur dusted a flitch of bacon. The texture was a kind of smooth-rough. It was also pleasant to smell. The whole store was pleasant to smell if you had a taste for incongruities. That is the particular advantage of a general store. Arthur nervously dusted the bacon and said:
    Somebody’s got to go.
    He was small and brown and gentle. He had a soft, gentle voice. He didn’t like people, except Amy, who was his sister, and that is why he did not want to go to Moriartys’, because he did not like people, though he knew he ought to go. Amy would go to Moriartys’. She usually went. He looked at her slowly out of a pair of eyes that most people in town thought queer. There was a white rim near the edge of each iris. The iris was brown. So the general effectreminded you of marbles, the superior glass taws that you kept in a bag by themselves. The children were a bit afraid of Arthur Quong on account of his eyes. If they came into the shop they hoped they would encounter Amy, who was also small and gentle, but with a black bun at the back of her head and without the white rings in her eyes.
    Amy was also more European. They were only half Chinese. Their father, old Quong, had taken a poor Irish girl, who was the mother of Amy and Arthur, and of Walter Quong, but Amy and Arthur did not speak about Walter much. And now old Quong was dead, and the Irish woman he married, she died first, because she hadn’t much vitality. But old Quong lived a long time. He had come into the country with a bundle on his back, and sold things to the miners at Kambala, bootlaces and things, laughing a lot and being cheerful, and they liked him up at Kambala and showed him how to wash for gold. So old Quong sometimes washed for gold, but he continued to sell things to the miners, and then he put up a hut at Happy Valley. The miners used to get off the coach and talk to Quong on the way down. Now the hut was a weatherboard building with an upper story and General Store painted on the front. This happened about seven years before old Quong died.
    You shouldn’t’ve let her have that ribbon last week, said Amy.
    All right, said Arthur, you would have thought sulkily. All right, he said, we’ll leave it at that.
    But he wasn’t sulky. He just didn’t want to think of ribbons and things like that, or of what Mrs Moriarty owed. It was Amy who ran the store. Arthur thought ofbigger things. The hall where they had the picture show, that was one of Arthur’s ideas, and he speculated in land, and he had a racehorse in a stable out at the back. The horse was a neat bay colt that stood deep in straw all day and neighed if you went across the yard. Arthur Quong spent most of the day going across the yard. He squatted in the corner of the stable, or rubbed down the horse’s back with a slow and gentle purr to match the delicate progress of his hand. But he hissed when he finished off on the flank, he gave a sharp electrical flick, making a pattern on the horse’s