WHICH RUSHES FOURTEEN THOUSAND MILES AWAY
“If I had guessed, if I had dreamed
Its weight was meant for me,
I should have built a lighter cross
To bear up Calvary.”
To the lad swinging monotonously on the gate, the straight grey road
that lay in front of his house seemed to run on to dull eternity. Far
away where the horizon cut it off from further sight the red, inflamed
eye of the sun was sinking down. A few spindly gum-trees showed black
against the fierce-coloured surrounding sky, and nearer some of the
black straggling colliery buildings lay athwart a cloud-patch of
bruised purple.
A bullock-dray crept into sight; the lad had seen it on the road when
it had looked like a toy procession; now it had come nearer and nearer,
and the big patient beasts blinked wearily at the swinging gate as they
passed.
“Hi!” called the boy to the drover. “You’re a nice one, two of your
fires are out.”
“No! are they?” said the man, drooping his whip and stepping closer to
the animals.
“That one, and that one,” said the boy.
The man pulled some handfuls of gum-leaves from a tree by the roadside
and felt in his pocket for his matches. A thin bar crossed each
bullock’s back, and suspended from it on either side was a small
iron pot, where a fire, generally of bark and pungent leaves, burnt
ceaselessly to keep off the mosquitoes.
“I’ve never seen them worse,” said the man with a groan; “I’ve come
five miles in a curtain of ’em—I suppose I’ve been so busy flicking
myself I didn’t notice.”
“You should see them in our house,” said the boy.
“You should ha’ seen them on the station,” said the man.
“Didn’t I?” said the boy. “Wasn’t I there for the letters this morning?
The train was an hour late again, and the men who were waiting for it
made a fire on the platform and stood in the smoke.”
“It’s the most God-forsaken hole on the face of the globe,” said the
man. “I’m cutting it—off on Monday; been here a month, and that’s four
weeks too much. Well—so-long.”
He cracked his long whip and the team lumbered wearily off on its
journey again.
“Clif,” called a tired voice from a side window, “are you there, Clif?
I wish you’d come and take baby for me.”
“I’m not there,” muttered Clif to himself, “I’m at the front. I
mightn’t have heard.” He slipped off the gate and glided away into
a stretch of scrubby bush adjacent. Then with a defiant look at the
windows of the house behind he stalked off to his own particular den,
or what his mother called his “sulking-place,” a hollow, hidden against
the bank where the colliery railway ran. He flung himself down and
kicked monotonously with his boot-heels on the pebbly ground. It was
one of the days that came so often to him, when he was in fierce revolt
with his surroundings, and wished himself or else all the rest of the
world dead and buried.
He was a thin boy, between twelve and thirteen; his hair had a crisp
wave in it that lent height to his forehead; his eyes were a deep blue,
sombre, even sullen at times in expression; his mouth accentuated the
sullenness.
Lying in his den he brooded again on his grievances, and the life
with which he was so sorely out of joint. What he seemed to resent
more than anything in the world was the number of children in their
house, and the noise they made, and the way they had to be looked
after. He was always being pressed into the service himself to rock a
cradle or push a perambulator, for between himself and the delicate
baby just short-coated were three other little boys, and his mother
had but one pair of hands. They could not afford a nurse; they could
not even afford a well-trained servant—only a rough Irish girl for
everything—for Dr. Wise, the father, was club doctor to the colliery,
and the salary a miserable one.
Sunnymeade this desolate place was called—in native language it had
been termed Moondi-Moondi, or Swamp Place, and surely of all misnomers
given by Australians in lieu of the curiously applicable aboriginal
names, Sunnymeade for such a place was worst.
Clif’s grievance to-day was caused by a rankling sense of injustice on
his mother’s part. She herself was one of the most absolutely unselfish
women in the world, and strove to make her children the same. But Clif
had a keen sense of the rights of property. That afternoon he had
finished a little boat, and with infinite labour had fitted it with a
mast and two sails. He took it proudly in to show his mother and gain
her praise.
She was rocking the fractious baby and keeping a watchful eye at the
same time on Richie and Alf, whose combined ages only made eight years.
“Yes, very pretty,” she said,—“mind the fender, Richie—very pretty
indeed—made it all by yourself, my son—you’re getting famously clever,
aren’t you?—you’ll be building us a new house soon.”
This was not the appreciation Clif wanted—it sounded humouring, as if
his mother were talking to Richie or Alf. He yearned for some one to
notice intelligently that there was a real rudder fastened on with a
bit of wire, and that the bow was shaped for cutting through the water.
Baby stopped crying a moment and sucked his fist ravenously—perhaps his
mother could attend now for a minute or two.
“If you notice,” he said shyly, “the rudder moves; I’ve tied a bit of
wire to it, and if you pull it, it will guide the boat just where you
want it to go.”
The mother glanced at it wearily.
“Beautiful,” she said. “I don’t know how you could think of it—Richie,
get off that chair, do you hear me—get down at once—Clif, lift him
down, and put his shoes on; he’s kicked them off.”
Clif fastened on the shoes and turned the chair upside down, so that it
could not be climbed on again. Whereupon Richie devoted fresh attention
to his eldest brother.
“Div Richie ze ickie boat,” he said coaxingly.
“I’m sure,” said Clif, and gathered it jealously to him.
Alf rushed up clamouring.
“I want to play with the boat,” he said.
“Here, cut—go and play,” Clif said, and lifted his boat for safety out
of reach.
The afternoon had been terribly hot, and the poor little fellows,
between sandflies and mosquitoes and heat, were cross and tired.
“Wants ze boat,” repeated Richie, his voice risen suddenly to crying
pitch, and his eyes weeping tears.
“Give us the boat,” cried Alf in chorus.
Clif retreated towards the door, glowering at the idea of sacrilege.
“Clif,” said his mother, between the baby’s fresh screams, “don’t be
selfish; lend the boat to your little brothers.”
Clif was quite pale.
[Illustration: “Wants ze boat,—give us the boat.”]
“I have been three days making it,” he said; “it is my very own.”
“Well,” she returned wearily, “it is sweeter to make things for other
people’s enjoyment than our own.”
But Clif was far too young and human to agree with this.
“It is mine,” he said obstinately, “my very own; I won’t let them have
it—let them play with their own toys.”
“Clif,” said the mother, and called him to her knee when she had lain
baby face downward for a little time—she put her arm round him and
looked at him with earnest, grieving eyes—“Clif, it breaks my heart
to see you growing like this—I cannot have it—give the boat to your
brothers for half-an-hour.”
Passion surged in the boy; a wave of red ran up into his very hair.
“You always say that—I never have my things to myself; when a thing’s
mine, it’s mine—it isn’t any one’s unless I say,” he burst out
excitedly. “I don’t take their things; they oughtn’t to take mine.”
“It’s very different,” Mrs. Wise said; “think how much older you are; a
selfish boy grows into a selfish man. Clif, give up the little boat at
once.”
Even in his anger, somewhere in his young complex nature there was
something that told the boy he was not being properly treated. If
he had been asked kindly to lend the toy, even if he had refused at
first, he felt he would have been glad to do so afterwards, if once it
were clearly established that the right of refusing or consenting lay
entirely with him. But this disposal of his property roused a fury in
his breast.
“Take it,” he said, and flung the toy he had worked at with eager
pleasure so roughly on the ground at his brothers’ feet that it broke
in two or three pieces—he had only saved himself by a strong effort
from flinging it at Alf’s round head.
“Clif!” cried his mother, something like despair in her voice—“Clif!”
But he had rushed away out of the room and house.
Mrs. Wise tucked the baby beneath her arm for a moment, and crossed to
the bookcase with a sigh. She reached three books down from the top
shelf—one a thin pamphlet, titled _On the Training and Education of
our Boys_; the second, _Human Buds, and our Responsibilities in the
Grafting of Them_; the third, _Children, their Souls and Minds_.
“Perhaps it is my fault,” she muttered. Then she went back to her
rocking-chair and buried herself in the books so deeply that she was
quite deaf to the fierce quarrel that took place between Alf and
Richie, and even hardly heard her infant’s cries.
She was a small, slight woman with a sallow-coloured skin stretched
tightly over her bones. Her eyes were dull blue, faded by the
tear-washings of many a year; her hair was light and colourless, pinned
away with absolute disregard for appearance. She wore the very gown she
should have shunned—a drab cotton wrapper.
Put carefully away in her work-box there was a large miniature
protected by glass and enclosed in a dainty case. It represented a very
sweet-faced girl, with blue, happy eyes; red, slightly pouting lips;
rounded pink cheeks; and sunshiny hair all curls and waves. This was
the same woman at eighteen, before she had run away from a luxurious
home and married the handsome young medical student, to whose suit her
parents would not listen.
She was never forgiven or even recognized again by her people. And
the rain of life came down too heavily for the poor butterfly nature.
For all these fourteen years Dr. Wise had never been anything but
direly poor; strive as he would he could make no way against the heavy
handicap his early, headstrong folly had given him. It was seven years
before he dare spare the time and money to complete his course and take
his degree, and the other seven had been spent in struggling for a
foothold in the profession and trying to keep a shelter over the poor
little wife and all the babies that had come.
The young wife had been at first bewildered by all the misfortunes,
and by the rapidly increasing family that she had to manage, totally
inexperienced as she was, almost single-handed.
Childish resentment followed, but only for a short time. This young
husband of hers, who had become grave, and old, and one-purposed,
before he was twenty-four, was doing all man could do: she could
blame nothing but their own wilfulness. Ill health and the dragging
years brought apathy to her; she went through the ceaseless duties
mechanically; she bathed and dressed her children, and mended their
clothes when she had time; she cooked and dusted; she ate and slept.
But after Richie’s birth she had an illness that kept her helpless and
a prisoner for six months. She lay in a private hospital in Sydney,
for Dr. Wise dare not risk home-nursing for her in such a household as
theirs was. He himself could only leave his practice to see her once
a fortnight, for, apart from lost time, it cost over a pound for the
railway-ticket; the children were brought to her twice only during all
that time, for the heavy nursing had entirely emptied the family purse.
And during those long quiet months a sense—almost a terror—of her
responsibilities was born in Mrs. Wise’s soul.
These five boys of hers—who would grow into men and help to make or
mar the world—what was she doing to help them grow as they should?
Sometimes she would wake in the night, a cold perspiration breaking out
all over her poor little face at the thought of difficult Clif grown
to manhood and going off, with swinging steps, down that hill whose
descent is so easy. She felt so weak, so helpless; five little girls
she perhaps might have managed; but five boys, with boys’ curious,
rough, untractable natures—she trembled at the thought of going back to
them.
When she rose from her bed at last, and the days of convalescence came,
she crept to a book-shop one day, and with her veil down, and a strange
trembling hesitancy in her speech, asked if they had any books about
training children. The man brought her _Kindergarten Studies_; _The
Youth’s Physical Manual_; _Recreation for the Young_; _The Care of the
Child in Sickness and in Health_.
But she turned the leaves feverishly, there was no help for her there.
“A book on the training of their—their _moral_ characters, is what I
want,” she said almost in a whisper, and after a long hunt the man
found three dusty paper-covered books: _Human Buds_; _Souls and Minds
of Children_; and _Training and Education of Boys_.
And these were the works she took back with her to Sunnymeade, to make
life a harder problem than ever for herself.
_Human Buds_ made a fine art of the training of children, and seemed
to take for granted absolute wisdom and patience on the mother’s part.
Mrs. Wise made her eyes red and her heart weary over the things in
it she had left undone that she ought to have done. “Never correct a
child while you are angry,” it said; “wait for calmness, and let mature
reflection guide you as to the best punishment best fitted for the
fault and for the offender.” In another place: “Beware how you crush
the frail wings of a child’s imagination; but beware also how you
foster the growth of them, for these Fancy Flights lead sometimes, in
later life, to a strangely perverted sense of Truth and Honour.”
In another: “These beautiful buds are your priceless gift; a life is
not too long to give to watching them unfold, and patiently plucking
off the leaves that spoil. Infinite patience, infinite wisdom, infinite
love; these are the absolutely necessary tools of the Mother-Gardener.
“Example is your greatest weapon; every child is a copyist, you are its
closest model. Strip yourself of your faults if you would not see them
strengthening with the strength of your child.”
Dr. Wise laughed at the books good-humouredly, and tried to soothe the
agitation they had caused the poor woman. Life was far too crowded with
work and care and trouble for him to study beautiful aphorisms, or make
an art of bringing up these children of his.
The lads had never known him to lie or break a promise, be ungentle
towards anything weak, or lack courage when occasion wanted it. But
they had seen him angry scores of times, had heard him swear, had even
experienced injustice from him in his swift and hurried arbitration of
their quarrels.
“Don’t worry your poor little head with things like these,” he said,
and tried to take the book from her. “See the little vagabonds have
lots of tubbing, knock them over if they’re impudent or tell lies, and
don’t let the big ones bully the little chaps. They’ll come up all
right.”
But she clung to the volumes and would not give them up, though she
said no more to him.
In her earnest desire to be “an example,” she made herself
absolutely—almost irritatingly unselfish. She worried the little lads
to death with talk and advice and admonitions. She fell into the error
of “nagging” at them where once she had shrugged her shoulders; she
made them learn “Noble Truths” by heart, a new one each week, to be
repeated every day. She punished them conscientiously for every fault,
both of omission and commission. A vicious feeling came to Clif every
time he saw the blue binding of _Human Buds, and our Responsibilities
in the Grafting of Them_. For he recognized how much it had to do with
all the worrying rules of the household.