Illywhacker

The snake landed where his lap had been. It looked angry and nasty. I cared for nothing. I was beyond it. I picked up the snake without looking at it. I held it behind its neck and at the tail.

"You cannot make this a good little bunny," I told the silent men in the room, "no matter what you say to it, no matter what you feed it. You cannot buy it or tame it or make it nice."

I swung the snake by the tail towards Cocky Abbot Junior and the snake, beside itself with rage, struck out and got a fang into the farmer's scarf and when it was pulled away the scarf came with it, poison soaking into the warp and weft of top quality merino wool.

"Bow," I said to young Cocky Abbot.

Jack moaned. Oswald-Smith pushed his chair back a fraction, closer to the window.

"Bow", I bellowed, "to a true Australian snake."

Young Cocky Abbot tried to look threatening but lacked the conviction. He went down on his knife-point creases and did not have to be told to put his head on the ground.

"Now," I said, "you understand something."

My voice softened a little, and the farmer, having looked upwards carefully, retreated slowly into the wingback chair.

I then addressed the gathering with a friendliness that doubtless struck them as strange. "This snake", I explained, "has been in gaol. It is a mean bastard of an animal and it cannot be bought."

"What are you trying to say?" Young Cocky Abbot tried, without much luck, to combine sarcasm and servility in one intonation.

"I'm trying to say I'm an Australian," I said, "and we should have an Australian aeroplane."

Cocky Abbot Senior now shook his head. He stood. He knew when a man had lost his strength. It had all gone from me now. I stood there in the middle of the room, as if I'd pissed my pants and was ashamed of it.

"I came here to talk to Jack about making a quid," Cocky Abbot Senior said. "I didn't come here to listen to some ratbag and I didn't come here to see a circus with snakes. I would have put my money into this scheme of yours but you've done me a favour by showing me what a ratbag you are so early so I'm saved the horrible discovery later on when you've got your oily mits on the dough I worked so hard to make. I'm inclined to punch you in the nose, snake or no snake, but I think I'd rather ask Mr Oswald-Smith if he'd give us a lift in his auto to the Criterion Hotel."

He went to Jack McGrath and shook his hand. "I'll see you again, Jack," he said, "but my advice to you is to get this bugger out of your house before he does some real damage."

I stood alone with the snake. No one looked at me. They shook Jack's hand as they departed.

51

"Ah," I said, after five minutes of silence during which Jack had poured himself two large tumblers of Scotch. "I'm sorry."

Jack could only shake his head. There was no malice in him, no anger. He had big eyes like a Labrador. "Why? What came over you?"

I was a sleep-walker trying to explain my presence, barefoot, on a midnight street.

"You should have lit the flares down at Barwon Common," I said. "You shouldn't have sent me down to Colac and not have anywhere for me to land."

"You never told me, Badgery. I'm not a mind-reader."

"Anyone knows a plane can't land after dark."

"Well, I didn't know," he bellowed, and the whole household heard his voice and they felt frightened. "I didn't know," he yelled. Sergeant House heard him. Mrs Kentwell and Jonathon Oakes, playing cribbage in their parlour, heard him.

"Ah," I said, wondering if I might have a whisky and then deciding against it. I looked at Cocky Abbot Junior's fallen chair and Oswald-Smith's teacup. "Agents! I've had enough of being an agent."

"We're a young country. We've got to crawl before we can walk."

"If you start out crawling, you end up crawling."

Jack looked at me resentfully and poured more Scotch into his glass. "You were wrong about the snake," he said.

I shrugged. I was not worrying about right or wrong any more. I was only worrying that I had been a fool.

"You don't know anything about animals," my host said. "There isn't a creature alive who won't respond to kindness. You're not a kind man, Badgery, and it hurts me to say it."

Judged, I put my head in my hands.

"If there is one thing I know about," Jack went on, "it's animals. I had a tame kangaroo in Point's Point. I raised it on a bottle when its mother was killed. It used to follow me. You ask the wife, she'll tell you. It followed me everywhere and then some larrikins from Mansfield shot it, with a rifle."

"I dare say," I said, "but that is what they call an analogy."

"I don't know anything about analogies," Jack said impatiently, "but by Jove I know about animals."

"It's not the point."

"It is the point. It's the whole point. If kindness is not the point, what point is there?"