ever was. He hung his washing on the line punctually every Monday morningâa pair of shorts, a shirt and a towel. A bath towelâfor he had perceived that tea towels are necessary only if you wash up, and washing up is necessary only if you cook, so he lived with sumptuous simplicity on bread and butter, cheese, raw eggs and vegetables, milk and fruit. He kept his knife in a sheath hanging from his belt, and cleaned it by pushing it into the ground, rinsing it at the tank tap, and drying it on his shorts. He brewed tea some six or seven times a day in a billy out of doors, and his stove remained cold except when he wanted to dry his boots.
Herbie is far from lazy. He has never minded doing a little work, and he continued to keep two acres under cultivation, milk his cow, feed his fowls and tend his vegetables. The rest of his land he left to be slowly swallowed up by lantana, and when he recalled how much of his life had been spent in brushing the stuff, he felt very peaceful and luxurious as he watched it creeping like a slow, green tide over his paddock, and knew he neednât do a thing about it. Sometimes his contentment was disturbed by a few guilty qualms, for there was a good deal of groundsel getting in too, and he had been brought up to hate groundsel like the devil. But he meant to get it out some day when he wasnât so busy. His training had never gone far below the surface of his mind, and underneath there were depths of conviction which told him the main business of life was to be happy.
He now began to be very happy indeed. It was noted that he lost his taut look, put on a bit of weight, and grew quite rosy. He was, if anything, more brisk, neat and methodical than ever as he went about his irreducible minimum of chores, for now there lay beyond them glorious, uninterrupted hours of looking.
If he specialised in anything, it was sunrises. He was unable to milk as early as his neighbours did, because sunrises cannot be taken in at a glance, or even in a series of glances; they emerge from darkness, and are not over until full daylight, and Herbie had to sit them out on his east verandah from beginning to end. Throughout the day clouds occupied a good deal of his time, and since staring upward causes a crick in the neck, he pursued this particular study lying flat on his back. Some peopleâAub Dawson was oneâtook a long while to get over the idea that there must be some purpose in Herbieâs odd behaviour. âWhatâs he do it
for
?â Aub would demand. âWhatâs he trying to get
out
of it?â But when such people asked Herbie what he got out of it, he only baffled them further with the simple word: âDunno.â This is his favourite word. It saves him endless trouble and discussion. Aub, who really could not bear to think of all that good, concentrated gazing going to waste, developed the theory that if a man spent most of the day staring at the sky, he must at least become a good weather-prophet. So he used to ask hopefully : âChange coming, Herbie? . . .â âRain blowing up? . . .â âMight get a thunderstorm, eh? . . .â But Herbie always answered, with his slow, amiable smile: âDunno.â And at last Aub fell back upon cynicism, and remarked that this, after all, proved him as good a weather-prophet as most. Similarly, when Herbie had been keeping his eyes fixed unwinkingly on a pineapple plant for a couple of hours, he had nothing to say about it afterwards. He just liked to stare, and his pleasure in staring was incommunicable.
He was on excellent terms with everyone, but he had only one real friend, and this was Tommy Hawkins, who was five years old. Tommy had a brother, Dave, a couple of years older than himself, and another, Keithie, who was three, so his mother sometimes thought it strange that he should so often abandon his games with them, and run off across the paddock to spend a few hours