Return to Coolami by Eleanor Dark Page A

pretty damn sure that his victim was a half wit. “
You won’t know
—”
    Did she think him that? Emotionally half-witted? And with the phrase he was aware of a sudden revelation. Was that what it was–this confounded love business–a sixth sense? It sounded all right. I see, I taste, I smell, I hear, I feel, I love. Plausible, quite. Which meant, seeing that your emotions came to you through your senses, that you were, lacking that sixth sense, an emotional half-wit—
    And if it meant that, it meant also that no emotion came to you complete. No music stirred you to the full range of its power; no beauty yielded you the completeness of its perfection. No flavour, no scent, no touch—
    He began to see things, dimly. Susan backing away a step or two from him last night before she realised what she was doing. Susan standing still looking so desperately miserable that he’d sworn under his breath with uncomprehending exasperation, and gone out on the balcony to sit on the stretcher-bed so tactfully and casually left there by Millicent, and smoke, and think, and rage—
    Well, he was seeing glimmers of what might be daylight now. He was getting very vaguely and uncertainly somewhere near her point of view. He remembered a fellow who’d come up with Ken, once to Coolami. Who’d gone round the place staring and appraising, who’d seen it all in the green bursting vigour of a goodseason, who’d watched the lorries loaded with wool-bales go out in file, as glamorous a sight as any treasure-laden fleet of Spanish galleons; who’d ridden with him over sprawling acres more securely his kingdom than the lands of many a crowned monarch. Who’d nodded reflectively at last and conceded: “Well, I suppose it pays all right—”
    Was it from some such blundering obtuseness in himself that Susan had backed away last night? Could you blame her if it was? If an instinct she couldn’t quite subdue withheld her from giving him something he hadn’t the necessary sense – the sixth sense – to appreciate?
    So that finally, of this obtuseness, this half-wittedness of his senses, she was driven to make an ignoble ally. When the time came, which was so close upon them, for the inevitable compromise, it would be these senses she would beguile – as one might beguile some shuffling moron – secure in the knowledge of his emotional deformity—
    And he wouldn’t know—
    He stood up so suddenly that he upset his forgotten mug of tea, and began mechanically to brush away with his handkerchief a few splashes on his sock and trouser-leg.
    The thought that her savage little gibe might be true appalled him. He wouldn’t know, because he hadn’t the sense to know with. Any more than he could know if he were blind, all the loveliness of Coolami, or hear if he were deaf that sudden far-away chorus of tolwongs from the valley—
    Drew asked:
    â€œWhat’s wrong? Jumper ant bite you?”
    Bret laughed:
    â€œNo –no thanks – nothing – I – I just thought I saw one on my leg —”
    â€œThere are some about. Painful, the sting, for a moment or two. Funny thing the way it starts to itch like hell about a week after you’ve been bitten —”
    â€œNo,” replied Bret absently, and his father-in-law said, “Hey?” glanced at him sharply and muttered, “Oh, well – better be getting on, perhaps —”
    He called to Millicent and Susan, and began to repack the hamper. Bret said suddenly:
    â€œIt looks like rain over there.”
    Drew scowled at the bank of dark clouds lying like a distant smoke-screen along the western sky. “That means we’ll have to put the hood up. Might as well do it now while Susan and Milly pack.”
    Bret, grappling with his side of the hood and side-curtains, was thinking that his discovery hadn’t helped him much. There was still a very