Thus Laura went to Coventry.--Not that the social banishment she now
suffered was known by that name. To the majority of the girls Coventry
was just a word in the geography book, a place where ribbons were said
to be made, and where for a better-read few, some one had hung with
grooms and porters on a bridge; this detail, odd to say, making a
deeper impression on their young minds than the story of Lady Godiva,
which was looked upon merely as a naughty anecdote.
But, by whatever name it was known, Laura's ostracism was complete. She
had been sampled, tested, put on one side. And not the softest-hearted
could find an excuse for her behaviour.
It was but another instance of how misfortune dogs him who is down,
that Chinky should choose this very moment to bring further shame upon
her.
On one of the miserable days that were now the rule, when Laura would
have liked best to be a rabbit, hid deep in its burrow; as she was
going upstairs one afternoon, she met Jacob, the man-of-all-work,
coming down. He had a trunk on his shoulder. Throughout the day she had
been aware of a subdued excitement among the boarders; they had stood
about in groups, talking in low voices--talking about her, she
believed, from the glances that were thrown over shoulders at her as
she passed. She made herself as small as she could; but when tea-time
came, and then [P.192] supper, and Chinky had not appeared at either
meal, curiosity got the better of her, and she tried to pump one of the
younger girls.
Maria came up while she was speaking, and the child ran away; for the
little ones aped their elders in making Laura taboo.
"What, liar? You want to stuff us you don't know why she's gone?" said
Maria. "No, thank you, it's not good enough. You can't bamboozle us
this time."
"Sapphira up to her tricks again, is she?" threw in the inseparable
Kate, who had caught the last words. "No, by dad, we don't tell liars
what they know already.--So put that in your pipe and smoke it!"
Only bit by bit did Laura dig out their meaning: then, the horrible
truth lay bare. Chinky had been dismissed--privately because she was a
boarder--from the school. Her crime was: she had taken half-a-sovereign
from the purse of one of her room-mates. When taxed with the theft, she
wept that she had not taken it for herself, but to buy a ring for Laura
Rambotham; and, with this admission on her lips, she passed out of
their lives, leaving Laura, her confederate, behind.--Yes, confederate;
for, in the minds of most, liar and thief were synonymous.
Laura had not cared two straws for Chinky; she found what the latter
had done, "mean and disgusting", and said so, stormily; but of course
was not believed. Usually too proud to defend herself, she here
returned to the charge again and again; for the hint of connivance had
touched her on the raw. But she strove in vain to prove her innocence:
she could not get her enemies to grasp the abysmal difference between
merely making up a story about people, and laying hands on others'
property; if she could do the one, she was capable of the other; and
her companions remained convinced that, if she had not actually had her
fingers in some one's purse, she had, by a love of jewellery, incited
Chinky to the theft. And so, after a time, Laura gave up the attempt
and suffered in silence; and it WAS suffering; for her schoolfellows
were cruel with that intolerance, that unimaginative dullness, which
makes a woman's cruelty so hard to bear. Laura had to accustom herself
to hear every word she said doubted; to hear some one called to, before
her face, to attest her statements; to see her room-mates lock up their
purses under her very nose.
However, only three weeks had still to run till the Christmas holidays.
She drew twenty-one strokes on a sheet of paper, which she pinned to
the wall above her bed; and each morning she ran her pencil through a
fresh line. She was quite resolved to beg Mother not to send her back
to school: if she said she was not getting proper food, that would be
enough to put Mother up in arms.
The boxes were being fetched from the lumber-rooms and distributed
among their owners, when a letter arrived from Mother saying that the
two little boys had sandy blight, and that Laura would not be able to
come home under two or three weeks, for fear of infection. These weeks
she was to spend, in company with Pin, at a watering-place down the
Bay, where one of her aunts had a cottage.
The news was welcome to Laura: she had shrunk from the thought of
Mother's searching eye. And at the cottage there would be none of her
grown-up relatives to face; only an old housekeeper, who was looking
after a party of boys.
Hence, when speech day was over, instead of setting out on an
up-country railway journey, Laura, under the escort of Miss Snodgrass,
went on board one of the steamers that ploughed the Bay.
"I should say sea-air'll do you good--brighten you up a bit," said the
governess affably as they drove: she was in great good-humour at the
prospect of losing sight for a time of the fifty-five. "You seem to be
always in the dumps nowadays."
Laura dutifully waved her handkerchief from the deck of the SILVER
STAR; and the paddles began to churn. As Miss Snodgrass's back
retreated down the pier, and the breach between ship and land widened,
she settled herself on her seat with a feeling of immense relief. At
last--at last she was off. The morning had been a sore trial to her: in
all the noisy and effusive leave-taking, she was odd man out; no one
had been sorry to part from her; no one had extracted a promise that
she would write. Her sole valediction had been a minatory shaft from
Maria: if she valued her skin, to learn to stop telling crams before
she showed up there again. Now, she was free of them; she would not be
humiliated afresh, would not need to stand eye to eye with anyone who
knew of her disgrace, for weeks to come; perhaps never again, if Mother
agreed. Her heart grew momentarily lighter. And the farther they left
Melbourne behind them, the higher her spirits rose.
But then, too, was it possible, on this radiant December day, long to
remain in what Miss Snodgrass had called "the dumps"?--The sea was a
blue-green mirror, on the surface of which they swam. The sky was a
stretched sheet of blue, in which the sun hung a very ball of fire. But
the steamer cooled the air as it moved; and none of the white-clad
people who, under the stretched white awnings, thronged the deck, felt
oppressed by the great heat. In the middle of the deck, a brass band
played popular tunes.
At a pretty watering-place where they stopped, Laura rose and crossed
to the opposite railing. A number of passengers went ashore, pushing
and laughing, but almost as many more came on board, all dressed in
white, and with eager, animated faces. Then the boat stood to sea again
and sailed past high, grass-grown cliffs, from which a few old cannons,
pointing their noses at you, watched over the safety of the Bay--in the
event, say, of the Japanese or the Russians entering the Heads past the
pretty township, and the beflagged bathing-enclosures on the beach
below. They neared the tall, granite lighthouse at the point, with the
flagstaff at its side where incoming steamers were signalled; and as
soon as they had rounded this corner they were in view of the Heads
themselves. From the distant cliffs there ran out, on either side,
brown reefs, which made the inrushing water dance and foam, and the
entrance to the Bay narrow and dangerous: on one side, there projected
the portion of a wreck which had lain there as long as Laura had been
in the world. Then, having made a sharp turn to the left, the boat
crossed to the opposite coast, and steamed past barrack-like buildings
lying asleep in the fierce sunshine of the afternoon; and, in due
course, it stopped at Laura's destination.
Old Anne was waiting on the jetty, having hitched the horse to a post:
she had driven in, in the 'shandrydan', to meet Laura. For the cottage
was not on the front beach, with the hotels and boarding-houses, the
fenced-in baths and great gentle slope of yellow sand: it stood in the
bush, on the back beach, which gave to the open sea.
Laura took her seat beside the old woman in her linen sunbonnet, the
body of the vehicle being packed full of groceries and other stores;
and the drive began. Directly they were clear of the township the road
as good as ceased, became a mere sandy track, running through a scrub
of ti-trees.--And what sand! White, dry, sliding sand, through which
the horse shuffled and floundered, in which the wheels sank and stuck.
Had one of the many hillocks to be taken, the two on the box-seat
instinctively threw their weight forward; old Anne, who had a stripped
wattle-bough for a whip, urged and cajoled; and more than once she
handed Laura the reins and got down, to give the horse a pull. They had
always to be ducking their heads, too, to let the low ti-tree branches
sweep over their backs.
About a couple of miles out, the old woman alighted and slipped a rail;
and having passed the only other house within cooee, they drove through
a paddock, but at a walking-pace, because of the thousands of
rabbit-burrows that perforated the ground. Another slip-rail lowered,
they drew up at the foot of a steepish hill, beside a sandy little
vegetable garden, a shed and a pump. The house was perched on the top
of the hill, and directly they sighted it they also saw Pin flying
down, her sunbonnet on her neck.
"Laura, Laura! Oh, I AM glad you've come. What a time you've been!"
"Hullo, Pin.--Oh, I say, let me get out first."
"And pull up your bonnet, honey. D'you want to be after gettin'
sunstruck?"
Glad though Laura was to see her sister again, she did not manage to
infuse a very hearty tone into her greeting; for her first glimpse of
Pin had given her a disagreeable shock. It was astonishing, the change
the past half-year had worked in the child; and as the two climbed the
hill together, to the accompaniment of Pin's bubbly talk, Laura stole
look after look at her little sister, in the hope of growing used to
what she saw. Pin had never been pretty, but now she was "downright
hideous"--as Laura phrased it to herself. Eleven years of age, she had
at last begun to grow in earnest: her legs were as of old mere
spindleshanks, but nearly twice as long; and her fat little body,
perched above them, made one think of a shrivelled-up old man who has
run all to paunch. Her face, too, had increased in shapelessness, the
features being blurred in the fat mass; her blue eyes were more
slit-like than before; and, to cap everything, her fine skin had
absolutely no chance, so bespattered was it with freckles. And none of
your pretty little sun-kisses; but large, black, irregular freckles
that disfigured like moles. Laura felt quite distressed; it outraged
her feelings that anyone belonging to her should be so ugly; and as
Pin, in happy ignorance of her sister's reflections, chattered on,
Laura turned over in her mind what she ought to do. She would have to
tell Pin about herself--that was plain: she must break the news to her,
in case others should do it, and more cruelly. It was one consolation
to know that Pin was not sensitive about her looks; so long as you did
not tease her about her legs, there was no limit to what you might say
to her: the grieving was all for the onlooker. But not today: this was
the first day; and there were pleasanter things to think of. And so,
when they had had tea--with condensed milk in it, for the cow had gone
dry, and no milkman came out so far--when tea was over--and that was
all that could be undertaken in the way of refreshment after the
journey; washing your face and hands, for instance, was out of the
question; every drop of water had to be carried up the hill from the
pump, and old Anne purposely kept the ewers empty by day; if you WOULD
wash, you must wash in the sea--as soon, then, as tea was over, the two
sisters made for the beach.
The four-roomed, weatherboard cottage, to which at a later date a
lean-to had been added, faced the bush: from the verandah there was a
wide view of the surrounding country. Between the back of the house and
the beach rose a huge sand-hill, sparsely grown with rushes and coarse
grass. It took you some twenty minutes to toil over this, and boots and
stockings were useless impedimenta; for the sand was once more of that
loose and shifting kind in which you sank at times up to the knees,
falling back one step for every two you climbed. But then, sand was the
prevailing note of this free and easy life: it bestrewed verandah and
floors; you carried it in your clothes; the beds were full of it; it
even got into the food; and you were soon so accustomed to its presence
that you missed the grit of it under foot, or the prickling on your
skin, did old Anne happen to take a broom in her hand, or thoroughly
re-make the beds.--When, however, on your way to the beach you had
laboriously attained the summit of the great dune, the sight that met
you almost took your breath away: as far as the eye could reach, the
bluest of skies melting into the bluest of seas, which broke its
foam-flecked edge against the flat, brown reefs that fringed the shore.
Then, downhill--with a trip and a flounder that sent the sand
man-high--and at last you were on what Laura and Pin thought the most
wonderful beach in the world. What a variety of things was there!
Whitest, purest sand, hot to the touch as a zinc roof in summer; rocky
caves, and sandy caves hung with crumbly stalactites; at low tide, on
the reef, lakes and ponds and rivers deep enough to make it unnecessary
for you to go near the ever-angry surf at all; seaweeds that ran
through the gamut of colours: brown and green, pearl-pink and
coral-pink, to vivid scarlet and orange; shells, beginning with tiny
grannies and cowries, and ending with the monsters in which the
breakers had left their echo; the bones of cuttlefish, light as paper,
and shaped like javelins. And, what was best of all, this beach
belonged to them alone; they had not to share its treasures with
strangers; except the inhabitants of the cottage, never a soul set foot
upon it.
The chief business of the morning was to bathe. If the girls were alone
and the tide full, they threw off their clothes and ran into a sandy,
shallow pool, where the water never came above their waists, and where
it was safe to let the breakers dash over them. But if the tide were
low, the boys bathed, too, and then Pin and Laura tied themselves up in
old bathing-gowns that were too big for them, and all went in a body to
the "Half-Moon Hole". This pool, which was about twenty feet long and
ten to fifteen deep, lay far out on the reef, and, at high tide, was
hidden beneath surf and foam; at low water, on the other hand, it was
like a glass mirror reflecting the sky, and so clear that you could see
every weed that waved at the bottom. Having cast off your shoes, you
applied your soles gingerly to the prickles of the rock; then
plop!--and in you went. Pin often needed a shove from behind, for
nowhere, of course, could you get a footing; but Laura swam with the
best. Some of the boys would dive to the bottom and bring up weeds and
shells, but Laura and Pin kept on the surface of the water; for they
had the imaginative dread common to children who know the sea well--the
dread of what may lurk beneath the thick, black horrors of seaweed.
Then, after an hour or so in the water, home to dinner, hungry as
swagmen, though the bill of fare never varied: it was always rabbit for
dinner, crayfish for tea; for the butcher called only once a week, and
meat could not be kept an hour without getting flyblown. The rabbits
were skinned and in the stew-pot before they were cold; the crayfish
died an instant death: one that drove the blood to Laura's head, and
made Pin run away and cry, with her fingers to her ears; for she
believed the sizzling of the water, as the fish were dropped in, to be
the shriek of the creatures in their death-agony.
Except in bathing, the girls saw little of the boys. Both were afraid
of guns, so did not go out on the expeditions which supplied the
dinner-table; and old Anne would not allow them to join the crayfishing
excursions. For these took place by night, off the end of the reef,
with nets and torches; and it sometimes happened, if the surf were
heavy, that one of the fishers was washed off the rocks, and only
hauled up again with considerable difficulty.
Laura took her last peep at the outside world, every evening, in the
brief span of time between sunset and dark. Running up to the top of
one of the hills, and letting her eyes range over sky and sea, she
would drink in the scents that were waking to life after the burning
heat of the day: salt water, warmed sand and seaweeds, ti-scrub,
sour-grass, and the sturdy berry-bushes, high as her knee, through
which she had ploughed her way. That was one of the moments she liked
best, that, and lying in bed at night listening to the roar of the
surf, which went on and on like a cannonade, even though the hill lay
between. It made her flesh crawl, too, in delightful fashion, did she
picture to herself how alone she and Pin were, in their room: the boys
slept in the lean-to on the other side of the kitchen; old Anne at the
back. For miles round, no house broke the solitude of the bush; only a
thin wooden partition separated her from possible bushrangers, from the
vastness and desolation of the night, the eternal booming of the sea.
Such was the life into which Laura now threw herself heart and soul,
forgetting, in the sheer joy of living, her recent tribulation.
But even the purest pleasures WILL pall; and after a time, when the
bloom had worn off and the newness and her mind was more at leisure
again, she made some disagreeable discoveries which ruffled her
tranquillity.