yelling sound in its breakers, the black cloud came up like a wall from
the sea, everywhere was dark. And the wind broke in volleys from the
sea, and the rain poured as if the cyclone were a great bucket of water
pouring itself endlessly down.
Richard and Harriet sat in the dark room at Coo-ee, with a big fire, and
darkness raging in waters around. It was like the end of the world. The
roaring snarl of the sea was of such volume, the volleying roar of the
wind so great as to create almost a sense of silence in the room. The
house was like a small cave under the water. Rain poured in waves over
the dark room, and with a heaviness of spume. Though the roof came down
so far and deep over the verandahs, yet the water swept in, and gurgled
under the doors and in at the windows. Tiles were ripped off the
verandah roof with a crash, and water splashed more heavily. For the
first day there was nothing to do but to sit by the fire, and
occasionally mop up the water at the seaward door. Through the long, low
windows you saw only a yellow-livid fume, and over all the boom you
heard the snarl of water.
They were quite cut off this day, alone, dark, in the devastation of
water. The rain had an iciness, too, which seemed to make a shell round
the house. The two beings, Harriet and Lovat, kept alone and silent in
the shell of a house as in a submarine. They were black inside as out.
Harriet particularly was full of a storm of black chagrin. She had
expected so much of Australia. It had been as if all her life she had
been waiting to come to Australia. To a new country, to a new, unspoiled
country. Oh, she hated the old world so much. London, Paris, Berlin,
Rome--they all seemed to her so old, so ponderous with ancient authority
and ancient dirt. Ponderous, ancient authority especially, oh, how she
hated it. Freed once, she wanted a new freedom, silvery and paradisical
in the atmosphere. A land with a new atmosphere, untainted by authority.
Silvery, untouched freedom.
And in the first months she had found this in Australia, in the silent,
silvery-blue days, and the unbreathed air, and strange, remote forms of
tree and creature. She had felt herself free, free, free, for the first
time in her life. In the silvery pure air of this undominated continent
she could swim like a fish that is just born, alone in a crystal ocean.
Woman that she was she exulted, she delighted. She had loved Coo-ee. And
she just could not understand that Richard was so tense, so resistant.
Then gradually, through the silver glisten of the new freedom came a
dull, sinister vibration. Sometimes from the interior came a wind that
seemed to her evil. Out of the silver paradisical freedom untamed, evil
winds could come, cold, like a stone hatchet murdering you. The freedom,
like everything else, had two sides to it. Sometimes a heavy,
reptile-hostility came off the sombre land, something gruesome and
infinitely repulsive. It frightened her as a reptile would frighten her
if it wound its cold folds around her. For the past month now Australia
had been giving her these horrors. It was as if the silvery freedom
suddenly turned, and showed the scaly back of a reptile, and the
horrible paws.
Out of all her bird-like elation at this new-found freedom, freedom for
her, the female, suddenly, without warning, dark revulsions struck her.
Struck her, it would seem, in her deepest female self, almost in her
womb. These revulsions sent her into a frenzy. She had sudden, mad
loathings of Australia. And these made her all the more frenzied because
of her former great, radiant hopes and her silvery realisations. What,
must it all be taken back from her, all this glisten of paradise, this
glisten of paradise, this silvery freedom like protoplasm of life? Was
it to be revoked?
There was Richard, that hell-bird, preaching, preaching at her: “Don’t
trust it. You can’t have this absolved sort of freedom. It’s an
illusion. You can’t have this freedom absolved from control. It can’t be
done. There is no stability. There will come a reaction and a
devastation. Inevitable. You must have deep control from within. You
must have a deep, dark weight of authority in your own soul. You must be
most carefully, sternly controlled from within. You must be under the
hand of the Lord. You can’t escape the dark hand of the Lord, not even
in free Australia. You’ll get the devils turning on you if you try too
much freedom. It can’t be done. Too much freedom means you absolve
yourself from the hand of the Lord, and once you’re really absolved you
fall a prey to devils, devils. You’ll see. All you white females raging
for further freedom. Wait, wait till you’ve got it and see how the
devils will bite you with unclean, reptile sort of mouths. Wait, you who
love Australia and its freedom. Only let me leave you to the freedom,
till it bites you with a sort of sewer-mouth, like all these rats. Only
let me abandon you to this freedom. Only let me--”
So he had preached at her, like a dog barking, barking senselessly. And
oh, how it had annoyed her.
Yet gradually, quite apart from him, it had begun to happen to her.
These hateful revulsions, when Australia had turned as it were _unclean_
to her, with an unclean sort of malevolence. And her revulsions had
possessed her. Then the death of Kangaroo. And now this blackness, this
slew of water, this noise of hellish elements.
To Richard it was like being caged in with a sick tiger, to be shut up
with Harriet in this watery cave of gloom. Like a sullen, sick tiger,
she could hardly get herself to move, the weight of her revulsion was so
deep upon her. She _loathed_ Australia, with wet, dark repulsion. She
was black, sick with chagrin. And she hated that barking white dog of a
Richard, with his yap-yap-yapping about control and authority and the
hand of the Lord. She had left Europe with her teeth set in hatred of
Europe’s ancient encumbrance of authority and of the withered, repulsive
weight of the Hand of the Lord, that old Jew, upon it. Undying hostility
to old Europe, undying hope of the new, free lands. Especially this far
Australia.
And now--and now--was the freedom all going to turn into dirty water?
All the uncontrolled gentleness and uncontaminated freedom of Australia,
was it going to turn and bite her like the ghastly bite of some
unclean-mouthed reptile, an iguana, a great newt? Had it already bitten
her?
She was sick with revulsion, she wanted to get out, away to America
which is not so sloppy and lovey, but hard and greedy and domineering,
perhaps, but not mushy-lovey.
These three days of dark wetness, slew, and wind finished her. On the
second morning there was an abatement, and Richard rushed to the post.
The boys, barefoot, bare legged in the icy water, were running to school
under mackintosh capes. Down came the rain in a wind suddenly like a
great hose-pipe, and Richard got home a running, streaming pillar of
water. Home into the dark room and the sulky tiger of Harriet.
The storm went on, black, all day, all night, and the next day the same,
inside the house as well as out. Harriet sulked the more, like a
frenzied sick tigress. The afternoon of the third day another abatement
into light rain, so Richard pulled on thick boots and went out to the
shore. His grass was a thin surface stream, and down the low cliffs, one
cascade stream. The sea was enormous: wave after wave in immediate
succession, raving yellow and crashing dull into the land. The
yeast-spume was piled in hills against the cliffs, among the big rocks,
and in swung the raving yellow water, in great dull blows under the
land, hoarsely surging out of the dim yellow blank of the sea. Harriet
looked at it for a few moments, shuddering and peering down like a sick
tigress in a flood. Then she turned tail and rushed indoors.
Richard tried to walk under the cliffs. But the whole shore was ruined,
changed: a whole mass of new rocks, a chaos of heaped boulders, a gurgle
of rushing, clayey water, and heaps of collapsed earth.
On the fourth day the wind had sunk, the rain was only thin, the dark
sky was breaking. Gradually the storm of the sky went down. But not the
sea. Its great yellow fore-fringe was a snarl of wave after wave,
unceasing. And the shore was a ruin. The beach seemed to have sunk or
been swept away, the shore was a catastrophe of rocks and boulders.
Richard scrambled along through the dank wetness to a bit of sand, where
seaweed was piled like bushes, and he could more or less walk. But soon
he came to a new obstacle. The creek, which formerly had sunk at the
edge of the beach in a long pool, and left the sloping sand all free and
beautiful, had now broken through, levelled the sand, and swept in a
kind of snarling river to the snarling waves, across the cut-out sand.
The fresh-water met the waves with a snarl, and sometimes pushed on into
the sea, sometimes was shoved back and heaped up with a rattle of angry
protest. Waters against waters.
The beach never recovered, during the Somers’ stay, the river never
subsided into the sand, the sandy foreshore never came back. It was a
rocky, boulder-heaped ruin with that stream for an impasse. Harriet
would not go down to the sea any more. The waves still raved very high,
they would not go back, and they lashed with a venomousness to the
cliffs, to cut a man off. Richard would wander cold and alone on this
inhospitable shore, looking for shells, out of the storm. And all the
time the waves would lash up, and he would scramble out. It seemed to
him female and vindictive. “Beastly water, beastly water, rolling up so
high. Beastly water, beastly water, rolling up so high, breaking all the
shells just where they lie”--he crooned to himself, crooning a kind of
war-croon, malevolent against the malevolence of this ocean.
Yet it was August, and spring was come, it was wattle-day in Sydney,
the city full of yellow bloom of mimosa. Richard and Harriet went up to
the United States Consul, to the shipping office: everything very easy.
But he could not bear to be in Sydney any more. He could hear Kangaroo
all the time.
It was August, and spring, and hot, hot sun in a blue sky. Only the sea
would not, or could not return to its old beauties. Richard preferred to
go inland. The wattle-trees and the camellia-trees were full in bloom in
the bungalow gardens, birds flew quickly about in the sun, the morning
was quick with spring, the afternoon already hot and drowsy with summer.
Harriet, in her soul, had now left Australia for America, so she could
look at this land with new, relieved eyes again. She never more
passionately identified herself with it as at first.
Richard hired a little two-wheeled trap, called in Australia a sulky,
with a little pony, to drive into the bush. Sometimes they had gone in a
motor-car, but they both much preferred the little, comfortable sulky.
There sat Harriet full and beaming, and the thin Richard beside her,
like any Australian couple in a shabby sulky behind a shabby pony,
trotting lazily under the gum-trees of the high-road and up the steep,
steep, jungle-dense climb of the mountain to the pass.
Nothing is lovelier than to drive into the Australian bush in spring, on
a clear day: and most days are clear and hot. Up the steep climb the
tree-ferns and the cabbage-palms stood dark and unlighted as ever, among
the great gums. But once at the top, away from the high-road and the
seaface, trotting on the yellow-brown sandy trail through the sunny,
thinly scattered trees of the untouched bush, it was heaven. They
splashed through a clear, clear stream, and walked up a bank into the
nowhere, the pony peacefully marching.
The bush was in bloom, the wattles were out. Wattle, or mimosa, is the
national flower of Australia. There are said to be thirty-two species.
Richard found only seven as they wandered along. The little, pale,
sulphur wattle with a reddish stem sends its lovely sprays so aerial out
of the sand of the trail, only a foot or two high, but such a delicate,
spring-like thing. The thorny wattle with its fuzzy pale balls tangles
on the banks. Then beautiful heath-plants with small bells, like white
heather, stand in tall, straight tufts, and above them the gold sprays
of the intensely gold bush mimosa, with here and there, on long, thin
stalks like hairs almost, beautiful blue flowers, with gold grains,
three-petalled, like reed-flowers, and blue, blue with a touch of
Australian darkness. Then comes a hollow, desolate bare place with empty
greyness and a few dead, charred gum-trees, where there has been a
bush-fire. At the side of this bare place great flowers, twelve feet
high, like sticky dark lilies in bulb-buds at the top of the shaft,
dark, blood-red. Then over another stream, and scattered bush once more,
and the last queer, gold red bushes of the bottle-brush tree, like
soft-bristly golden bottle-brushes standing stiffly up, and the queer
black-boys on one black leg with a tuft of dark-green spears, sending up
the high stick of a seed-stalk, much taller than a man. And here and
there the gold bushes of wattle with their narrow dark leaves.
Richard turned and they plunged into the wild grass and strange bushes,
following the stream. By the stream the mimosa was all gold, great gold
bushes full of spring fire rising over your head, and the scent of the
Australian spring, and the most ethereal of all golden bloom, the plumy,
many-balled wattle, and the utter loneliness, the manlessness, the
untouched blue sky overhead, the gaunt, lightless gum-trees rearing a
little way off, and sound of strange birds, vivid ones of strange,
brilliant birds that flit round. Save for that, and for some weird
frog-like sound, indescribable, the age-unbroken silence of the
Australian bush.
But it is wonderful, out of the sombreness of gum-trees, that seem the
same, hoary for ever, and that are said to begin to wither from the
centre the moment they are mature--out of the hollow bush of gum-trees
and silent heaths, all at once, in spring, the most delicate feathery
yellow of plumes and plumes and plumes and trees and bushes of wattle,
as if angels had flown right down out of the softest gold regions of
heaven to settle here, in the Australian bush. And the perfume in all
the air that might be heaven, and the unutterable stillness, save for
strange bright birds and flocks of parrots, and the motionlessness, save
for a stream and butterflies and some small brown bees. Yet a
stillness, and a manlessness, and an elation, the bush flowering at the
gates of heaven.
Somers and Harriet left the pony and clambered along the stream, past
trees of the grey, feathery leaved wattle, most sumptuous of all in soft
gold in the sky, and bushes of the grey-hard, queer-leaved wattle, on to
the thick green of strange trees narrowing into the water. The water
slithered rushing over steep rocks. The two scrambled down, and along
after the water, to an abrupt edge. There the water fell in a great roar
down a solid rock, and broke and rushed into a round, dark pool, dark,
still, fathomless, low down in a gruesome dark cup in the bush, with
rocks coming up to the trees. In this tarn the stream disappeared. There
was no outlet. Rock and bush shut it in. The river just dived into the
ground.
It was a dark, frightening place, famous for snakes. Richard hoped the
snakes were still sleeping. But there was a horror of them in the air,
rising from the tangled undergrowth, from under the fallen trees, the
gum-trees that crashed down into the great ferns, eaten out by white
ants.
In this place already the Christmas bells were blooming, like some great
heath with hanging, bright red bells tipped with white. Other more
single bell-flowers, a little bit like foxgloves, but stiff and sharp.
All the flowers stiff, sharp, like crystals of colour come opaque out of
the sombre, stiff, bristly bush plants.
Harriet had arm-fulls of bloom, gold plumage of many branches of
different wattles, and the white heather, the scarlet bells, with the
deep-blue reed-blobs. The sulky with all the bloom looked like a corner
of paradise. And as they trotted home through the bush evening was
coming, the gold sun slanting. But Richard kept jumping out from among
the flowers, to plunge into the brake for a new flower. And the little
pony looked round watching him impatiently and displeased. But it was a
gentle, tolerant, Australian little beast, with untold patience. Only
Harriet was frightened of the coming dusk.
So at length they were slipping down the steep slopes again, between the
dense, creeper-tangled jungle and tree ferns, dark, chilly. They passed
a family moving from nowhere to nowhere, two colts trotting beside the
wagon. And they came out at last at the bottom, to the lost, flickering
little township, at nightfall.
At home, with all the house full of blossom, but fluffy gold
wattle-bloom, they sat at tea in the pleasant room, the bright fire
burning, eating boiled eggs and toast. And they looked at one
another--and Richard uttered the unspoken thought:
“Do you wish you were staying?”
“I--I,” stammered Harriet, “if I had _three_ lives, I’d wish to stay.
It’s the loveliest thing I’ve _ever_ known.”
“I know,” he answered, laughing. “If one could live a hundred years. But
since one has only a short time--”
They were both silent. The flowers there in the room were like
angel-presences, something out of heaven. The bush! The wonderful
Australia.
Yet the day came to go: to give up the keys, and leave the lonely, bare
Coo-ee to the next comers. Even the sea had gone flowery again at last.
And everybody was so simple, so kindly, at the departure. Harriet felt
she would leave behind her forever something of herself, in that Coo-ee
home. And he knew that one of his souls would stand forever out on those
rocks beyond the jetty, towards Bulli, advanced into the sea, with the
dark magic of the tor standing just inland.
The journey to Sydney was so spring-warm and beautiful, in the fresh
morning. The bush now and then glowed gold, and there were almond and
apricot trees near the little wooden bungalows, and by the railway
unknown flowers, magenta and yellow and white, among the rocks. The
frail, wonderful Australian spring, coming out of all the gummy hardness
and sombreness of the bush.
Sydney, and the warm harbour. They crossed over once more in the blue
afternoon. Kangaroo dead. Sydney lying on its many-lobed blue harbour,
in the Australian spring. The many people, all seeming dissolved in the
blue air. Revolution--nothingnesses. Nothing could ever matter.
On the last morning Victoria and Jaz’s wife came to see the Somers off.
The ship sailed at ten. The sky was all sun, the boat reared her green
paint and red funnel to the sun. Down below in the dark shadow of the
wharf stood all those who were to be left behind, saying good-bye,
standing down in the shadow under the ship and the wharf, their faces
turned up to the passengers who hung over the rail. A whole crowd of
people down on the wharf, with white uplifted faces, and one little
group of quiet Chinese.
Everybody had bought streamers, rolls of coloured paper ribbon, and now
the passengers leaning over the rail of the lower and middle decks
tossed the unwinding rolls to their friends below. So this was the last
tie, this ribbon of coloured paper. Somers had a yellow and a red one:
Victoria held the end of the red streamer, Jaz’s wife the end of the
yellow. Harriet had blue and green streamers. And from the side of the
ship a whole glittering tangle of these colours connecting the departing
with the remaining, a criss-cross of brilliant colour that seemed to
glitter like a rainbow in the beams of the sun, as it rose higher,
shining in between the ship and the wharf shed, touching the faces of
the many people below.
The gangway was hoisted--the steamer gave long hoots. Only the
criss-crossing web of brilliant streamers went from the hands of the
departing to the hands of those who would be left behind. There was a
sort of silence: the calling seemed to die out. And already before the
cables were cast loose, the gulf seemed to come. Richard held fast to
the two streamers, and looked down at the faces of the two women, who
held the other ends of his paper threads. He felt a deep pang in his
heart, leaving Australia, that strange country that a man might love so
hopelessly. He felt another heart-string going to break like the
streamers, leaving Australia, leaving his own British connection. The
darkness that comes over the heart at the moment of departure darkens
the eyes too, and the last scene is remote, remote, detached inside a
darkness.
So now, when the cables were cast loose, and the ship slowly left the
side of the wharf and drew gradually towards the easier waters of the
harbour, there was a little gulf of water between the ship and the
wharf. The streamers lengthened out, they glittered and twinkled across
the space almost like music, so many-coloured. And then the engines were
going, and the crowd on the wooden quay began to follow slowly, slowly,
holding the frail streamers carefully, like the ends of a cloud,
following slowly down the quay as the ship melted from shadow to the sun
beyond.
One by one the streamers broke and fluttered loose and fell bright and
dead on the water. The slow crowd, slow as a funeral, was at the end,
the far end of the quay, holding the last streamers. But the ship
inexorably drifted out, and every coloured strip was broken: the crowd
stood alone at the end of the wharf, the side of the vessel was
fluttering with bright, broken ends.
So, it was time to take out handkerchiefs and wave across space. Few
people wept. Somers waved and waved his orange silk kerchief in the blue
air. Farewell! Farewell! Farewell Victoria and Jaz’s wife, farewell
Australia, farewell Britain and the great Empire. Farewell! Farewell!
The last streamers blowing away, like broken attachments, broken
heartstrings. The crowd on the wharf gone tiny in the sun, and melting
away as the ship turned.
Richard watched the Observatory go by: then the Circular Quay, with all
its ferry-wharves, and a Nippon steamer lying at her berth, and a
well-known, big buff and black P. and O. boat at the P. and O. wharf,
looking so like India. Then that was gone too, and the Governor’s
Palace, and the castellated Conservatorium of Music on its hill, where
Richard had first seen Jack--the Palace Gardens, and the blue inlet
where the Australian “Fleet” lay comfortably rusting. Then they drifted
across harbour, nearer to the wild-seeming slope, like bush, where the
Zoo is. And then they began to wait, to hang round.
There ahead was the open gate of the harbour, the low Heads with the
South Lighthouse, and the Pacific beyond, breaking white. On the left
was Manly, where Harriet had lost her yellow scarf. And then the tram
going to Narrabeen, where they had first seen Jaz. Behind was the great
lobed harbour, so blue, and Sydney rather inconspicuous on the south
hills, with its one or two sky-scrapers. And already, the blue water all
round, and a thing of the past.
It was midday before they got out of the Heads, out of the harbour into
the open sea. The sun was hot, the wind cold. There were not very many
passengers in the first class: and nobody who looked possible to the
Somers pair. Richard sat in the sun watching the dark coast of
Australia, so sombre, receding. Harriet watched the two seamen casting
rubbish overboard: such a funny assortment of rubbish. The iron sank in
the deep, dark water, the wood and straw and cardboard drearily
floated. The low Sydney Heads were not far off.
Lovat watched till he could see the dark of the mountain, far away,
behind Coo-ee. He was almost sure of the shape. He thought of the empty
house--the sunny grass in front--the sunny foreshore with its new
rocks--the township behind, the dark tor, the bush, the Australian
spring. The sea seemed dark and cold and inhospitable.
It was only four days to New Zealand, over a cold, dark, inhospitable
sea.
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
THE DUNEDIN PRESS LIMITED, EDINBURGH
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