place we don’t care for them, so if you like to have them you’re
welcome. And these are about the last of the passion fruit, seemingly.”
The persimmons were good big ones, of that lovely suave orange-red
colour which is perhaps their chief attraction, and they were just
beginning to go soft. Harriet of course was enchanted. William James
came in and sat down for a few minutes, wondering what had become of
Victoria. He looked round the room curiously. Harriet had, of course,
arranged it to her own liking, taken away all the pictures and
ornaments, hung a Tunis curtain behind the couch, stood two tall red
lacquer candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and altogether given the room
that air of pleasant distinction which a woman who knows how to do it
finds so easy, especially if she has a few shawls and cushion-covers and
bits of interesting brass or china. Harriet insisted on travelling with
a few such things. She was prepared to camp in a furnished bungalow or
cottage on any continent, but a few of her own things she must have
about her. Also she wore a dress of Bavarian peasant stuff, very thin
black woollen material, sprinkled all over with tiny pink roses with
green leaves. And on her feet she had heelless sandals of plaited strips
of leather, from Colombo. William James noticed every one of these
things. They had a glamour like magic for him.
“This is quite a pleasant room you have here,” he said in his Cornish
voice, with the alert, subtle, faintly smiling look of wonder on his
face.
“It isn’t bad,” said Harriet. “But a bit poky.”
“Poky you call it? Do you remember the little stone holes they have for
rooms in those old stone Cornish cottages?”
“Yes--but we had a lovely one. And the great thick granite walls and the
low ceilings.”
“Walls always letting the damp in, can’t keep it out, because all the
chinks and spaces are just stuffed with plain earth, and a bit of mortar
smeared over the outside like butter scraped on bread. Don’t I remember
it! I should think I do.”
“Cornwall had a great charm for me.”
“Well, I don’t know where you found it, I’m sure. But I suppose you’ve
got a way of your own with a place, let it be Cornwall or where it may,
to make it look well. It all depends where you’re born and where you
come from.”
“Perhaps,” said Harriet.
“I’ve never seen an Australian cottage looking like this, now. And yet
it isn’t the number of things you’ve put into it.”
“The number I’ve taken out,” laughed Harriet.
William James sat there with his quiet, slumberous-seeming body,
watching her: watching the quick radiance of her fair face, and the
charm of her bearing. There was something quick and sure and, as it
were, beyond the ordinary clay, about her, that exercised a spell over
him. She was his real Cornish idea of a lady: simple, living among
people as if one of themselves, and yet not one of themselves: a sort of
magic about her. He could almost see a glow in the air around her. And
he could see that for her he was just a nice fellow who lived in another
world and on another plane than herself, and that he could never come up
or she come down. She was the queen that slumbers somewhere in every
Cornish imagination, the queen ungrudged. And perhaps, in the true
Celtic imagination slumbers the glamorous king as well. The Celt needs
the mystic glow of real kingliness. Hence his loneliness in the
democratic world of industry, and his social perversity.
“I don’t suppose Rose could ever learn to do this with a room, could she
now?” he asked, making a slight gesture with his hand. He sat with his
clear, queer, light grey eyes fixed on Harriet’s face.
“I think so,” cried Harriet; then she met the watchful eyes. “In her own
way she could. Every woman has her own way, you know.”
“Yes, I do know,” he answered.
“And you see,” said Harriet, “we’re more or less lazy people who have no
regular work in the world. If we had, perhaps we should live in a
different way.”
William James shook his head.
“It’s what’s bred into you,” he said, “that comes out. Now if I was a
really rich man, I think I could learn to carry it off with the best of
them, out here. But when it comes to being the real thing, why, I know
it would be beyond me, so there you are.”
“But can one be sure?” she cried.
“I think I can. I can see the difference between common and uncommon. I
can do more than that. I can see the difference between gentlemen who
haven’t got the gift, and those that have. Take Lord Washburn, for
example. He’s a gentleman all right--he comes of an old family, they
tell me. But I doubt very much if he’s any better than I am.”
“Why should he be?” cried Harriet.
“What I mean is,” said William James, “he hasn’t got the gift, you
know.”
“The gift of what?” said Harriet, puzzled.
“How shall I put it? The gift that you’ve got, now: and that Mr Somers
has as well: and that people out here don’t have.”
“But that may only be manner,” said Harriet.
“No, it’s more than manner. It’s the gift of being superior, there now:
better than most folks. You understand me, I don’t mean swank and money.
That’ll never give it you. Neither is it _thinking_ yourself superior.
The people that are superior don’t think it, and don’t even seem to feel
it, in a way. And yet in a way they know it. But there aren’t many of
them out here. And what there are go away. This place is meant for all
one dead level sort of people.”
He spoke with curious sarcasm.
“But,” said Harriet, “you are Australian yourself now, aren’t you? Or
don’t you feel it?”
“Oh yes, I suppose I feel it,” he said, shifting uneasily on his seat.
“I _am_ Australian. And I’m Australian partly because I know that in
Australia there _won’t_ be anybody any better than me. There now.”
“But,” laughed Harriet, “aren’t you glad then?”
“Glad?” he said. “It’s not a matter for gladness. It’s a fact. But I’m
not one of the fools who think there’s nobody any better than me in the
world, I know there are.”
“How queer to hear you say so?”
“But this isn’t the place for them. Here in Australia we don’t want
them. We want the new-fashioned sort of people who are all dead-level as
good as one another. You’re going to Mullumbimby this week-end with Jack
and Victoria, aren’t you?”
“Yes. And I thought if we liked it we might stay down there for a
while--by the sea--away from the town.”
“You please yourselves, of course. Perhaps better there than here.
But--it’s no business of mine, you know that”--he shrugged his
shoulders. “But there’s something comes over me when I see Mr Somers
thinking he can live out here, and work with the Australians. I think
he’s wrong--I really do. They’ll drag him down to their level, and make
what use they can of him--and--well, in my opinion you’d both be sorry
for it.”
“How strange that you should say so, you who are one of them.”
“I am one of them, and I’m not. I’m not one of anybody. But I haven’t
got only just the two eyes in my head that can tell the kettle from the
teapot. I’ve got another set of eyes inside me somewhere that can tell
real differences, when there are any. And that’s what these people don’t
seem to have at all. They’ve only got the outside eyes.”
Harriet looked at him in wonder. And he looked at her--at her queer,
rather large, but thin-skinned, soft hands.
“You need a thick skin to live out here,” he said.
But still she sat with her hands folded, lost in meditation.
“But Lovat wants so much to do something in the world, with other men,”
she said at last. “It’s not _my_ urging, I assure you.”
“He’s making a mistake. He’s making a mistake to come out here, tell him
from me. They’ll take him at their own level, not at his.”
“But perhaps he wants to be taken at their level,” said Harriet, rather
bitterly, almost loving the short, thick man opposite for his quiet,
Cornish voice and his uncanny grey eyes, and his warning.
“If he does he makes the mistake of his life, tell him from me.” And
William James rose to his feet. “You’ll excuse me for stopping talking
like this, over things that’s no business of mine,” he added.
“It’s awfully good of you,” said Harriet.
“Well, it’s not often I interfere with people’s doings. But there was
just something about you and Mr Somers--”
“Awfully good of you.”
He had taken his little black felt hat. He had an almost Italian or
Spanish look about him--from one of the big towns, Barcelona or even
Palermo.
“I suppose I’ll have to be getting along,” he said.
She held out her hand to him to bid him good-bye. But he shook hands in
a loose, slack way, and was gone, leaving Harriet uneasy as if she had
received warning of a hidden danger.
She hastened to show Somers the persimmons when he came home, and to
tell of her visitor.
“And he’s queer, Lovat, he’s awfully queer--nice too. He told me we were
superior people, and that we made a mistake coming here, because they’d
bring us down to their level.”
“Not if we don’t let them.”
“He says we can’t help it.”
“Why did he come to tell you that, I wonder.”
They were going down to Mullumbimby in two days’ time--and they had
hardly seen anything of Jack and Victoria since the Sunday at Mosman’s
Bay. But Victoria called across the fence, rather hesitatingly:
“You’re going with us on Saturday, aren’t you, Mrs Somers?”
“Oh yes, we’re looking forward to it immensely--if it really suits you.”
“I’m so glad. I thought perhaps you didn’t want to go.”
That same evening Jack and Victoria came across for a few minutes.
“Look at the lovely _cacchi_,” said Harriet, giving the persimmons their
Italian name. “William James brought them me this morning.”
“William James brought them!” cried Victoria and Jack in a breath. “Why,
whatever have you done to him?”
“Nothing,” laughed Harriet. “I hope not, I’m sure.”
“You must have given him a glad eye,” said Jack. “Did he come in?”
“Yes, he came in and talked to me quite a long time. He said he would
see you to-morrow in town.”
“Wonders never cease! I tell you, you’ve done it on him. What did he
talk to you about, then?”
“Oh, Australia. He said he didn’t think we should really like it.”
“He did, did he! Wanted to warn you off, so to speak.”
“Perhaps,” laughed Harriet.
“The little mingo. He’s as deep as a five hundred feet boring, and I’ve
never got down to sweet water in him yet.”
“Don’t you trust him?” said Harriet.
“Trust him? Oh yes, he’d never pick my pocket.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“That’s the only way I have of trusting folks,” said Jack.
“Then you don’t trust them far,” mocked Harriet.
“Perhaps I don’t. And perhaps I’m wise of it.”
CHAP: V. COO-EE
They went to Mullumbimby by the two o’clock train from Sydney on the
Friday afternoon, Jack having managed to get a day off for the occasion.
He was a sort of partner in the motor-works place where he was employed,
so it was not so difficult. And work was slack.
Harriet and Victoria were both quite excited. The Somers had insisted on
packing one basket of food for the house, and Victoria had brought some
dainties as well. There were few people in the train, so they settled
themselves right at the front, in one of those long open second-class
coaches with many cane seats and a passage down the middle.
“This is really for the coal miners,” said Victoria. “You’ll see they’ll
get in when we get further down.”
She was rather wistful, after the vague coolness that had subsisted
between the two households. She was so happy that Somers and Harriet
were coming with her and Jack. They made her feel--she could hardly
describe it--but so safe, so happy and safe. Whereas often enough, in
spite of the stalwart Jack, she felt like some piece of fluff blown
about on the air, now that she was taken from her own home. With Somers
and Harriet she felt like a child that is with its parents, so lovely
and secure, without any need ever to look round. Jack was a man, and
everything a man should be, in her eyes. But he was also like a piece of
driftwood drifting on the strange unknown currents in an unexplored
nowhere, without any place to arrive at. Whereas, to Victoria, Harriet
seemed to be rooted right in the centre of everything, at last she could
come to perfect rest in her, like a bird in a tree that remains still
firm when the floods are washing everything else about.
If only Somers would let her rest in Harriet and him. But he seemed to
have a strange vindictiveness somewhere in his nature, that turned round
on her and terrified her worse than before. If he would only be fond of
her, that was what she wanted. If he would only be fond of her, and not
ever really leave her. Not love. When she thought of lovers, she thought
of something quite different. Something rather vulgar, rather common,
more or less naughty. Ah no, he wasn’t like that. And yet--since all men
are potential lovers to every woman--wouldn’t it be terrible if he asked
for love. Terrible--but wonderful. Not a bit like Jack--not a bit. Would
Harriet mind? Victoria looked at Harriet with her quick, bright, shy
brown eyes. Harriet looked so handsome and distant: she was a little
afraid of her. Not as she was afraid of Somers. Afraid as one woman is
of another fierce woman. Harriet was fierce, Victoria decided. Somers
was demonish, but could be gentle and kind.
It came on to rain, streaming down the carriage windows. Jack lit a
cigarette, and offered one to Harriet. She, though she knew Somers
disliked it intensely when she smoked, particularly in a public place
like this long, open railway carriage, accepted, and sat by the closed
window smoking.
The train ran for a long time through Sydney, or the endless outsides of
Sydney. The town took almost as much leaving as London does. But it was
different. Instead of solid rows of houses, solid streets like London,
it was mostly innumerable detached bungalows and cottages, spreading for
great distances, scattering over hills, low hills and shallow inclines.
And then waste marshy places, and old iron, and abortive corrugated iron
“works”--all like the Last Day of creation, instead of a new country.
Away to the left they saw the shallow waters of the big opening where
Botany Bay is: the sandy shores, the factory chimneys, the lonely places
where it is still Bush. And the weary half established straggling of
more suburb.
“Como,” said the station sign. And they ran on bridges over two arms of
water from the sea, and they saw what looked like a long lake with
wooded shores and bungalows: a bit like Lake Como, but oh, so unlike.
That curious sombreness of Australia, the sense of oldness, with the
forms all worn down low and blunt, squat. The squat-seeming earth. And
then they ran at last into real country rather rocky, dark old rocks,
and sombre bush with its different pale-stemmed dull-leaved gum-trees
standing graceful, and various healthy looking undergrowth, and great
spikey things like zuccas. As they turned south they saw tree-ferns
standing on one knobbly leg among the gums, and among the rocks
ordinary ferns and small bushes spreading in glades and up sharp
hill-slopes. It was virgin bush, and as if unvisited, lost, sombre, with
plenty of space, yet spreading grey for miles and miles, in a hollow
towards the west. Far in the west, the sky having suddenly cleared, they
saw the magical range of the Blue Mountains. And all this hoary space of
bush between. The strange, as it were, _invisible_ beauty of Australia,
which is undeniably there, but which seems to lurk just beyond the range
of our white vision. You feel you can’t _see_--as if your eyes hadn’t
the vision in them to correspond with the outside landscape. For the
landscape is so unimpressive, like a face with little or no features, a
dark face. It is so aboriginal, out of our ken, and it hangs back so
aloof. Somers always felt he looked at it through a cleft in the
atmosphere; as one looks at one of the ugly-faced, distorted aborigines
with his wonderful dark eyes that have such a incomprehensible ancient
shine in them, across gulfs of unbridged centuries. And yet, when you
don’t have the feeling of ugliness or monotony, in landscape or in
nigger, you get a sense of subtle, remote, _formless_ beauty more
poignant than anything ever experienced before.
“Your wonderful Australia!” said Harriet to Jack. “I can’t tell you how
it moves me. It feels as if no one had ever loved it. Do you know what I
mean? England and Germany and Italy and Egypt and India--they’ve all
been loved so passionately. But Australia feels as if it had never been
loved, and never come out into the open. As if man had never loved it,
and made it a happy country, a bride country--or a mother country.”
“I don’t suppose they ever have,” said Jack.
“But they will?” asked Harriet. “Surely they will. I feel that if I were
Australian, I should love the very earth of it--the very sand and
dryness of it--more than anything.”
“Where should we poor Australian wives be?” put in Victoria, leaning
forward her delicate, frail face--that reminded one of a flickering
butterfly in its wavering.
“Yes,” said Harriet meditatively, as if they had to be considered, but
were not as important as the other question.
“I’m afraid most Australians come to hate the Australian earth a good
bit before they’re done with it,” said Jack. “If you call the land a
bride, she’s the sort of bride not many of us are willing to tackle. She
drinks your sweat and your blood, and then as often as not lets you
down, does you in.”
“Of course,” said Harriet, “it will take time. And of course a _lot_ of
love. A lot of fierce love, too.”
“Let’s hope she gets it,” said Jack. “They treat the country more like a
woman they pick up on the streets than a bride, to my thinking.”
“I feel I could _love_ Australia,” declared Harriet.
“Do you feel you could love an Australian?” asked Jack, very much to the
point.
“Well,” said Harriet, arching her eyes at him, “that’s another matter.
From what I see of them I rather doubt it,” she laughed, teasing him.
“I should say you would. But it’s no good loving Australia if you can’t
love the Australian.”
“Yes, it is. If as you say Australia is like the poor prostitute, and
the Australian just bullies her to get what he can out of her and then
treats her like dirt.”
“It’s a good deal like that,” said Jack.
“And then you expect me to approve of you.”
“Oh, we’re not all alike, you know.”
“It always seems to me,” said Somers, “that somebody will have to water
Australia with their blood before it’s a real man’s country. The soil,
the very plants seem to be waiting for it.”
“You’ve got a lurid imagination, my dear man,” said Jack.
“Yes, he has,” said Harriet. “He’s always so extreme.”
The train jogged on, stopping at every little station. They were near
the coast, but for a long time the sea was not in sight. The land grew
steeper--dark, straight hills like cliffs, masked in sombre trees. And
then the first plume of colliery smoke among the trees on the hill-face.
But they were little collieries, for the most part, where the men just
walked into the face of the hill down a tunnel, and they hardly
disfigured the land at all. Then the train came out on the sea--lovely
bays with sand and grass and trees, sloping up towards the sudden hills
that were like a wall. There were bungalows dotted in most of the bays.
Then suddenly more collieries, and quite a large settlement of
bungalows. From the train they looked down on many many pale-grey zinc
roofs, sprinkled about like a great camp, close together, yet none
touching, and getting thinner towards the sea. The chimneys were faintly
smoking, there was a haze of smoke and a sense of home, home in the
wilds. A little way off, among the trees, plumes of white steam betrayed
more collieries.
A bunch of schoolboys clambered into the train with their satchels, at
home as schoolboys are. And several black colliers, with tin luncheon
boxes. Then the train ran for a mile and a half, to stop at another
little settlement. Sometimes they stopped at beautiful bays in a hollow
between hills, and no collieries, only a few bungalows. Harriet hoped
Mullumbimby was like that. She rather dreaded the settlements with the
many many iron roofs, and the wide, unmade roads of sandy earth running
between, down to the sea, or skirting swamp-like little creeks.
The train jogged on again--they were there. The place was half and half.
There were many tin roofs--but not so many. There were the wide, unmade
roads running so straight as it were to nowhere, with little bungalow
homes half-lost at the side. But they were pleasant little bungalow
homes. Then quite near, inland, rose a great black wall of mountain, or
cliff, or tor, a vast dark tree-covered tor that reminded Harriet of
Matlock, only much bigger. The town trailed down from the foot of this
mountain towards the railway, a huddle of grey and red-painted iron
roofs. Then over the railway, towards the sea, it began again in a
scattered, spasmodic fashion, rather forlorn bungalows and new “stores”
and fields with rail fences, and more bungalows above the fields, and
more still running down the creek shallows towards the hollow sea, which
lay beyond like a grey mound, the strangest sight Harriet had ever seen.
Next to the railway was a field, with men and youths playing football
for their lives. Across the road from the football field was a barber’s
shop, where a man on horseback was leaning chattering to the barber, a
young intelligent gentleman in eye-glasses. And on the broad grass of
the roadside grew the trees with the bright scarlet flowers perching
among the grey twigs.
Going towards the sea they were going away from the town that slid down
at the bush-covered foot of the dark tor. The sun was just sinking to
this great hill face, amid a curdle of grey-white clouds. The faintest
gold reflected in the more open eastern sky, in front. Strange and
forlorn, the wide sandy-rutted road with the broad grass margin and just
one or two bungalows. “Verdun” was the first, a wooden house painted
dark red. But some had quite wide grass round them, inside their fences,
like real lawns.
Victoria had to dart to the house-agent for the key. The other three
turned to the left, up another wide road cut in the almost nothingness,
past two straying bungalows perched on brick supports--then across a
piece of grassland as yet unoccupied, where small boys were kicking a
football--then round the corner of another new road, where water lay in
a great puddle so that they had to climb on to the grass beside the
fence of a big red-painted bungalow. Across the road was a big bungalow
built with imitation timbered walls and a red corrugated roof and red
huge water-tanks. The sea roared loudly, but was not in sight. Next
along the forlorn little road nestled a real bright red-tiled roof among
a high bushy hedge, and with a white gate.
“I do hope it’s that,” said Harriet to herself. She was so yearning to
find another home.
Jack stood waiting at the corner on the tall bit of grassy land above
the muddy, cut-out road. There came Victoria running in her eager way
across the open space up the slight incline. Evening was beginning to
fall.
“Got ’em?” called Jack.
“Yes. Mrs Wynne was just washing herself, so I had to wait a minute.”
Victoria came panting up.
“Is that it? “ said Harriet timidly at last, pointing to the bright red
roof.