Benton's Conviction by Geoff Page

Author:Geoff Page
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-09T06:43:30+00:00

18

Bearing it to the post office at ten the next morning Benton was aware now of a change in the distances. Ever since he’d come to the town, to the vicarage, there’d been the normal distances suited to newcomers. Having a property fifteen miles out was not enough; the Benton name out there was barely twenty years old anyway. Though the town itself had been there only sixty years, you had to be second generation at least to count. Anyone else was a parvenu, half-expected to move on anytime. There was that other distance too, given by the collar: his own congregation nodding politely, the other persuasions shifting their eyes at the final moment, knowing who he was but not yielding the point. Storekeepers, he noticed, were friendly enough; they had their own reasons.

But now in this gusty September morning there was distance of another kind: heads that turned away at twenty paces instead of the usual one; unseeing silences overtaking those who only a month ago would have given that time of day his position required. Once or twice only did he catch a rueful, secret smile from some fettler perhaps, or stationhand, never seen before.

Under the store verandas and in the windows the campaign for the 28th had already begun. Elder Smiths had a big VOTE YES right next to their THE EMPIRE NEEDS YOU and GOD BLESS DADDY posters. Benton had half expected the VOTE YES posters to be as ubiquitous as Captain Winters’ had been back in May, but this time they were plastered on veranda posts only and any spare surfaces that didn’t too clearly have an owner. The shopkeepers, Benton detected, were not so keen to declare themselves. A few fairly crude VOTE NOs were already being slapped up on top of their rivals (Bert Spenser’s work, no doubt). There was a VOTE NO too on the Hibernian wall but maybe the manager hadn’t seen it yet. It was only ten o’clock, after all.

If the townspeople hadn’t yet taken up their positions, they were at least, Benton realised, facing the inevitability of having to do so. There were possibly less than half a dozen activists on either side but they would be sufficient. The reluctantly abandoned simplicities of August ’14 were giving away to something else, not quite visible yet but due to appear by the 28th. Frizelle, he knew, would be pleased to get the telegram, and Benton in turn was relieved to have it forcing him beyond the half-measures more natural to him. Everything around him now was bearing down on the 28th—there was no chance at all of breaking back, nor, he was glad to discover, did he have any wish to do so.

The outsize, polished granite pillars of Geradgery Post Office always seemed to humble the mere brick behind them, an oddness Benton had often pondered. It was Mrs Giddins, finally, who had told him the town story of an architect’s mistake down in Sydney. The building seemed, he’d sometimes

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