AUSTRALIA
“Yesterday now is a part of forever
With glad days and sad days and bad days that never
Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight,
Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.”
The disappointment of Phyl and Dolly in Australia was very bitter.
They were actually in Sydney now, dwelling in furnished rooms,
while their mother looked about her and tried to put her plans into
execution. It was mere chance that made her choose Sydney rather than
any of the other cities; it lay at the end of the vessel’s journey for
one thing, and thus added an extra four or five days to the exquisite
voyage; for another she was a beauty lover, and had heard of the
harbour’s glories all her life; since all places now seemed equally
without advantage, financially, to her, she thought she might at least
bring her children up where Nature had been most royal.
But Phyl and Dolly were so saddened at the sight of the place, when,
once through the frowning Heads, they bore slowly down the far-famed
waters to the Quay, that they could never afterwards say honestly that
their first impressions of the harbour had filled them with rapturous
admiration.
All the voyage they had whispered, whispered together, hanging dreamily
over the vessel’s side in the tropics; cuddled up wrapped in a rug when
the freezing wind made the sailors say an iceberg must be at hand; shut
in the cabin when the storms drove the other passengers to the saloon
and privacy was impossible. Whispered, whispered, whispered, till a
fairy Australia was firmly builded in their heads.
And there was no one to tone down the colouring of their skies for
them, or to laughingly crop feet off their towering mountains, and set
their notions of gold fields and kindred things aright, for no one knew
of the strange building.
Those years of laughing ridicule, when the two were suddenly set down
in a large family, had flung them back entirely upon themselves, and
filled them with a shyness and reserve that lasted all their lives.
Of all the evils the sun looked down upon, the worst seemed to them
being laughed at; they would have endured tortures rather than have
allowed those big boys and girls to know anything of their ways; they
had a vague, shamed feeling that they _were_ rather ridiculous atoms,
but how to alter themselves they did not know. Life would have been
insupportable if they never “pretended,” and played nothing more
uneventful than “Chasings” and “Hide-and-seek” and “Hunt the Slipper.”
So they shrank together—even, in these matters, from their mother, who
had been so busy that last year or two she could not follow them up to
their absurd heights. In all the other joys and griefs of their lives
they went direct to her; but in the whispering and pretending there was
Phyl for Dolly and Dolly for Phyl, and the doors locked firmly on the
world.
There was no one therefore to correct the perspective when they drew
their plans of Australia.
When they steamed round Bradley’s Head, and Sydney spread itself before
their roughly-awakened senses, they both grew from that moment just a
little older and sadder, and more like children who see life only as it
is.
No chocolate-coloured beings, clad in bright, scanty garments, darted
down to a yellow beach and pushed off in strange boats to welcome their
ship; no kangaroos leapt back into the thick forests near the water’s
edge startled at their approach; no birds of brilliant plumage filled
the air with colour and music. On the hill-slopes around there fed no
million sheep, there waved no palms, there sprang no dazzling flowers.
Nowhere lay a field dug into holes, the greenness of its grass showing
up brilliantly the careless heaps of sparkling nuggets.
Merely a city stretched athwart the sky. Ordinary men and women,
just such as had been left behind in London, walked and stood and
bustled about the Quay. Every-day warehouses, dull and dingy, crowded
to left and right; above them, where the hills rose, thousands upon
thousands of shops and houses—alas! for the cherished wigwams—were
massed together, with church-spires and town-hall towers breaking
up their regular level just as they did in London and other English
towns. Afterwards, when the first keen edge of the disappointment
had worn off, they tried to excuse the harbour city for its manifold
shortcomings.
“Of course,” Phyl said, “since there are such a dreadful lot of people
here already they must have houses to live in; we ought to have thought
of that, Dolly.”
“And as such lots of ships come in, I s’pose they can’t help having
wharves and things,” Dolly said.
The presence of the Quay, with its bustling reminiscences of the London
docks in place of the yellow and white beaches thick with shells, she
was finding hardest of all to forgive.
“And I s’pose they had to have trams and trains,” sighed Phyl.
“But wouldn’t you think there’d be just one or two aboriginals left?”
said Dolly with saddened eyes.
Disillusion was Mrs. Conway’s portion also.
She also had had her secret imaginings. She had been certain that
everywhere there were places where a school had merely to be started to
prove at once a success. She felt sure that wealthy squatters were in
continual need of governesses for their children, and only too willing
and anxious to pay them a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds a year
for their services. She imagined her business training of the last two
years would easily fit her for one of the secretaryships that are such
rare and precious orchids in England, but as every new arrival knows—or
at all events imagines—grow on every bush in Australia. The awakening
was very rough and sharp.
A month slipped past; another one trod on its heels and tripped away
mockingly. The tiny account in the bank grew less and less, for small
girls must have enough to eat and a comfortable shelter for their
heads. No one took the faintest notice of the repeatedly advertised
statement that a well-educated lady offered her services as governess,
or amanuensis; unless, indeed, it was some one who smiled a little at
the faith and ignorance displayed by the well-educated lady in daring
to value her services at £120 a year.
Yet on less than that sum Mrs. Conway knew it would be impossible to
live. Indeed she could plainly see that, even if she succeeded in
obtaining such a salary, she would have to make repeated incursions
into that poor two hundred pounds, which was her one plank between the
waters of the whirlpool where so many struggled for a little time and
sank.
The prospect grew gloomier and gloomier; the little wrinkle of worry
that the voyage had smoothed away came back on the mother’s brow; Phyl
and Dolly read the Situations Vacant column in the newspaper every
morning over her shoulder, and with eyes as preternaturally grave as
hers. Even Weenie had a knowledge that the position was a serious one.
There came a temporary help from a shy, silent man who was boarding in
the same house. He belonged to a firm of big drapers in the city and
had taken an unobtrusive interest in the efforts of the young widow to
obtain employment.
“Of course you wouldn’t go into a shop,” he said to her one morning
with nervous abruptness.
“If you mean my pride wouldn’t let me, you are wrong,” said
Mrs. Conway; “I have entirely pocketed that. But it needs experience
and reference from former employers—no one would have me.”
He told her of a temporary vacancy that had occurred in his own
establishment; the lady who was head of one of the departments had
fallen ill, and had been sent away for three months. If Mrs. Conway
liked to come with him at once he would introduce her to the firm and
could indeed promise her the work; he himself would undertake to teach
her speedily the details of her position; what they chiefly wanted was
a well-dressed, tactful person to be present in the show-room always to
govern the young women who served, and in general to look after the
interests both of the firm and customers. The present head was drawing
a salary of five pounds a week, but he was afraid the firm would
not give more than three pounds to any one lacking experience—would
Mrs. Conway consider that sufficient?
Mrs. Conway replied by hastening away with a tight feeling in her
throat to put on her bonnet and gloves. She told him as they went along
the street how she had been offered twenty-six pounds a year the day
before at a registry office as governess for six children, and that
that was the only genuine offer she had had.
“But this is not all roses,” said the quiet man, “it is spirit-breaking
work at times.” He had at one time cherished hopes of entering one of
the liberal professions himself.
“I have three little girls,” said the widow, hastening along.
She held the post until the permanent head of the department was
restored to health; the children went daily to a cheap school near,
and they lived quietly and economically in furnished rooms for the
three months. Phyl and Dolly were grown up before they learned just
what spirit-breaking work it had been; the little mother was always so
bright and full of gaiety for them they had no idea at the time that it
was even unpleasant.
Then just when the old wearying search for work was starting again, the
silent man found a similar position, though at a smaller salary, in a
far-away country town.
Away they went with the boxes and bags that held everything they could
call their own in all this new strange continent.
They unpacked their possessions and prepared to settle down to life
under this fresh aspect. But in two months came a startling blow—the
country firm went bankrupt. Not one penny of her salary for those eight
weeks could the widow obtain, and in addition she was forced to sustain
all the travelling expenses which, it had been promised, would be
reimbursed to her.
“Write to Mr. Blair, mama,” said Phyl hopefully at this crisis; “he’ll
soon find you something to do.”
But even this help was now cut off; the silent man had written a letter
to the widow since she had been in this inland town and begged her to
return and marry him; he found it impossible to fill the blank her
absence caused.
Mrs. Conway sighed deeply as she wrote her gentle but decided refusal;
this good plain man’s advice had been of such service to her, and now
she could no longer ask it.
Then while still in the little town and looking almost hopelessly
towards the return to Sydney, the local house-agent, with whom she had
had some transactions, approached her.
He had a cottage to let in a small township not more than fifty miles
away; there was an excellent opening, he said, for a good private
school there; indeed, excepting a half-time public school there was no
other for miles around.
Mrs. Conway eagerly adopted the suggestion; teaching seemed delightful
work after these five months of “spirit-breaking,” and hitherto she
had been afraid to attempt a school because, in every instance she
had inquired about, a heavy sum had been necessary for the purchase.
But here was, as the agent said, a town with a population of five
thousand souls and not a single private school; and here was to let a
comfortable cottage with two acres of garden and five rooms for the
ridiculous rent of fifteen shillings a week.
Mrs. Conway signed the lease for a year—the agent professed himself
unable to let for a shorter period—and she spent some of her hoarded
“safety money” in the purchase of the necessary piano and furniture.
“I really think the sun is going to shine on us at last, little girls,”
she said.