many currents of our Australian life fastened on her mind--men
delicately nurtured in the old homes of the Old World, as well as the
luxurious ones of the New, and in the end going completely under, in the
rough, wild manner of the veriest waifs. This is misery of the kind
which weaves the most tragic thread in the web of existence. The slow
but inexorable deterioration of character makes oftentimes a strong
seizure on the startled spirit.
'Oh, it is all too cruel!' said the girl to herself. And then a curious
sense of undefined peril came over her--one of those quick unreasoning
apprehensions, often strong enough to give a sense of physical pain, to
which minds of over-reflective fibre are sometimes subject. It is as
though chains of consciousness, apart from the centre of thought, were
at work storing up half-understood impressions, piecing together
disconnected events, casual words and signs that have floated through
the brain without leaving traces strong enough for waking memory, till
the total is summed up in an expression of imminent or latent danger
which is suddenly flashed on the mind with bewildering vividness. And
yet the process by which this is conveyed is sealed from knowledge.
There is no orthodox channel of intercourse between these swift
intuitions and the workaday brain immersed in the details of daily life.
'Do you think it does a fellow any good to come a cropper in that way?'
was one of the reminiscences Stella found rising in her mind after the
vague little shock of dread had left her.
She went back into the drawing-room, and there was the little square
parcel still unopened. It was a brown morocco case which opened on
pressing a spring and disclosed a magnificent pearl brooch in the form
of a horse-shoe--row upon row of graduated pearls, with a very large one
in the centre, and large ones round it; the next a little smaller, and
so on to the last row, which were small exquisite pear-shaped pearls.
There was a little note in Ted's round, schoolboyish hand:
'DEAR STELLA,
'This is for your birthday in April. They are Shark Bay pearls, got by
the boat I have an interest in. You used to take little presents from
me before on your birthday. Once I brought you a little beggar of a
sparrow, with only a few feathers, and tried to get a kiss for it, but
you didn't see it. By Jove! you owe me an awful lot, you know. I hope
you will like the pearls. I got the jeweller--should there be two _l_'s
or three in that word?--to make them up in a horse-shoe for good luck.
Mind you, I know very well I'm not half good enough for you; but then
neither would any other fellow be. I wish to-morrow was the day I was
to see you in Melbourne. You must be a bit of a flirt, Stella. The
governor is always quite gone on you afresh after he sees you. He likes
a girl with plenty of go in her; and you always tell him some funny
story over which he keeps on chuckling. If you're not in when I call
to-morrow, I may tell you that I was awfully cut up I couldn't leave
Heronshaw on the 26th, so as to dine at home. I'm getting full-up of
races. I shan't go to one till I see you again. I am going quite into
the Bush for a thorough change.
'Good-bye, Stella,
'Always yours,
'ED. RITCHIE.'
Stella looked long at the pearls. They were so soft and lustrous, with
that glowing moist look as if damp with the sea under whose myriad waves
they took shape and grew within a creature that had the breath of life.
Is it this that gives them the wistful tenderness which marks them from
all other jewels? That, and perhaps the melancholy moanings of the sea
in which they were cradled.
'It is much too costly a gift--unless, indeed, this endless wooing is to
have an unfortunate close,' thought Stella with a smile. 'Well, it
should rob matrimony of some of its terror to marry the youth who at
nine or ten tried to bribe one to kiss him with a half-fledged
sparrowlet.'
From that day till she met him again she consciously from time to time
faced the possibility of this 'unfortunate close.'
*CHAPTER VI.*
Some of the letters which Stella wrote to her brother will best convey
the tenor of her life during the months that intervened before she left
for Melbourne and Lullaboolagana. They were the last she wrote from the
home of her infancy and girlhood--that serene and happy resting-place in
the chequered journey of life. They show her on one side gay, playful,
open to every impression, in love with life and beauty as ardently as a
Greek, finding food for mirth at the core of much which outwardly wears
a mask of solemn gravity. On the other side she exhibits a cold logical
faculty for drawing pitiless inferences from the laws of nature, from
those lives which had touched her own and had become bankrupt in all
life's promises of joy. Prone also to that severe disenchanted estimate
of human affairs, springing from the austere strand inevitably woven
into minds that have at one time been nourished on the sustained
enthusiasm of supernatural ideals--on the writings of saints and fathers
whose keynote is the lofty renunciation of those who look on the world
and its most coveted distinctions as the empty pageant of a passing
show:
'Fairacre, N. Adelaide, 15th January.
'You ask me to be sure and write when the thought arises: "How I should
like to tell Cuthbert about this!" "If I could only have a good long
talk with him now!" But consider, my friend, what a cold little viper a
pen is when you want really to talk face to face! When a word, a look,
suggests thoughts that had else hardly struggled into existence! And
then, apart from the chill which the frosty tip of a pen engenders in
one's most communicative moods, has not ink an immemorial right to be
dull? Still, I perceive a certain advantage in saying whatever I like,
feeling sure that in a day and a half you will gravely read it all.
Whereas in a _tete-a-tete_ one is open to contradiction--to
interruption--to be skipped like an elderly newspaper, yawned at like a
tedious play. One is afraid to skip a letter too cavalierly. There
might be something in it. For after all life has many surprises.
'As women generally sit by the hearth all their lives, like a cat that
has given up hunting, they should early learn how to purr and write
letters. Do you know the tradition among some of our aboriginal tribes,
that their Creator taught men how to spear kangaroos and women how to
dig roots? Now that you are on the pacific war-path of a spearer of
souls--what a vile simile! I am sorry, but that is the worst of
primitive races--they seldom afford good metaphors. I imagine that I
meant to say I must learn to dig with my pen--grow intimate with it,
make it loyal to me, so as to keep at bay that estrangement which often
creeps between people when they are apart. What a fierce jealousy stirs
me at the thought that time and absence might dare to nip with lean
fingers at our lifelong friendship!
'Shall I divide my letters between daily events and the natural sprouts
of my own understanding? Someone has said that matter of fact is the
comfortable resource of dull people. But when you come to fold it up in
pages, stamp it and send it five hundred miles or so, matter of fact
should have its whiskers trimmed, and its obesity buttoned up in a slim
jacket, like an organ-grinder's monkey. But if you do this when you are
so good and calm that you have no history, what remains?
'All this day the north-east wind has abused the privilege it has of
being intolerable. How I envy people who, unless they go out on foot,
hardly perceive that this _bise_ of Australia is running riot! You know
the habits of our climate at such times. The air dry and parching, with
ever-recurring puffs and gusts, warm as if they had escaped from
caldrons of red-hot sand, and that unceasing undertone, whether the wind
blows high or low, as of things being swirled along the earth. It is
the motion of countless little twigs, of skeleton leaves, of bits of
bark, of old frayed nonentities, of desert grit borne along in a whirl
of dead resurrection by a wind that surely has not its compeer on earth
for dragging things from near and far that have been long spent and
buried into the unmerciful light of day. You were spared another page or
two regarding the hot wind by Kirsty, who came half an hour ago to the
library-door, saying that poor old Honora wanted to see me.
'"She's the warse o' drink, and as hoarse as a corbie. There's nae use
in helping her at a'. It's mony a day sinsyne that she began thae evil
ways," said Kirsty, with those severe lines round her mouth growing
still severer. "Sall I say you're too busy, Miss Stella?" Needless to
say I was not. Poor Honora! She was more sunburnt and draggled than
ever, her clothes more weather-beaten, her hat more desperately broken.
Altogether she looked one of the most forlorn targets of the darts of
misfortune that could well be seen on the world's turbulent stage.
Still, with it all she maintained that inflexible air of being only one
more victim of the stratagems of fate.
'Oh, she was well, all things considered! Many a poor thing with a bad
husband and undutiful children would even now like to change places with
her. But things had gone against her again. Work was not easy to get,
and since she had set up housekeeping she had more worries. "Yis, Miss
Stella, wid the foive shillins' ye gave me whin I met ye three weeks
ago, and I had neither bed nor sup, nor anny other av the luxuries av
loife for two or three days. May the Blissid Virgin reward ye, and pray
for ye, now and at the hour av your death. Ye see, it was loike this,
me darlint."--Honora always grows more affectionate when she is going to
tell you a bit of her life.
'"I luked at the two half-crowns, and thought to meself, 'There's a dale
may be done wid so much capital. If 'twere one mane shillin' it
wouldn't help anybody to turn over a new leaf, so to speak.' So I spint
two an' a penny on a supply of groceries, and I bought a taypot and cup,
and an old tayspoon in a second-hand shop, kep' by an honest,
hardworking, straightforward, onfortinate woman as ever the sun shone
on, Widdy Ryan, in Brown Street. I tould her how I was resolved, wid the
help of God and a little capital, to be no longer a sthray vagabond,
loike a cat left in an impty house. And she, poor crather, knowing what
the hardships and mocks av this world are, let me have the few
crockeries as chape as dirt. Thin I hired one room from an old comrade,
Johanna O'Connor, a cook, who has come down from the north to take a
spell for a few months. Indade, Miss Stella, I was as proud as an
Impiror when I heard the chip crackling under the saucepan I got the
loan av from Johanna, for 'twould have made too big a hole in me funds
to buy a taykittle. And nixt day I just tuk it aisy, and wint for a
walk in Loight Square, and who should I meet but two av the Sisthers av
Saint Joseph, that used to give me a bed now and thin, but av late have
been moighty cool. 'Well, Honora,' sez Sisther Lucy, 'we haven't seen
ye at chapel at all av late. Where do ye go?' 'Indade, sisthers,' sez
I, 'I must go to thim as will help me. I've been thinking of giving up
religion altogether and turning Proteshtant.'" Do you not find this
interview worth all the "capital"?
'Kirsty is quite scandalized at my liking for the poor old soul I
suppose it is a sad vulgar taste, but I love to listen to these details.
I want to go and see them all: Widdy Ryan, with her secondhand shop, who
knows what the mocks of this world are; Johanna, who is taking her ease
in her own rinted cottage; and Honora boiling water for tea in a
saucepan.
'Dustiefoot is well, but, can you believe it? not quite so young as he
was. It seems that as soon as he is a year old a collie dog begins to
fall into sombre reveries on the flight of Time, on free will, and the
yoke of necessity. Or are there infinitely more important themes that
occupy the thoughts of a creature who has the felicity to be born with
four legs and an oblique tan spot above each eye? I whispered your name
to him this moment, and he wagged his tail thirteen times. Have angels
a more eloquent mode of expressing goodwill? Certainly man has not.
Still, I am not sorry that in our arduous ascent in the scale of nature
we lost our tails. Do you not know by instinct the people who would
jocularly catch us by them, as a token of good fellowship? Notably
those who pride themselves on being too sincere to take kindly to the
conventionalities of life, and on being the artificers of their own
manners. Now think over it, and see if Blank, and Dash, and Snap do not
appear to you in a more lurid light than ever. Do you not find a fresh
glow of dislike welling up as you reflect: "Yes, that is the stamp of
man who would infallibly pull one's tail"?'
*CHAPTER VII.*
'Fairacre, 13th January.
When a benevolent fairy bestows on me a cast-off island, or some
old-fashioned kingdom upon the mainland, I shall have a carriage as
capacious as a state barge, drawn by two iron-gray horses, tall and high
stepping, likewise a slim footman, and a fat elderly coachman. This is
the state with which I was encircled yesterday, when I drove out with
Mrs. Marwood in her brand-new equipage. And let me tell you, my dear,
that I found the change from our lowly pony carriage, and Leo's
diminutive trot, to these exalted prosperities very soothing. How
deferential shop-people and all that ilk are, when one goes about with
such a halo of wealth! But never suppose that I am going to revile
human nature on these grounds. No; when I reflected on the matter, I
was unmoved and dispassionate to an edifying degree. "After all," I
said, "money is a great power." Pray, are you dazzled with the
brilliant originality of this? But don't interrupt reflections, for
though doing so may add much to your joy, it is death to the homilist.
"Money is at the root of all civilization and art."
'At this point an aboriginal family bore in sight, who pointed the moral
in a striking way--father, mother, and two picaninnies were all
barefooted. In a word, a tattered Government blanket, a couple of
waddies, and the rakings of a dust-bin, by way of clothing, comprised
all their worldly possessions. Thrilled with the justice of my remarks,
I went on: "Society is held together by mutual wants. The unfortunate
devils who have not wherewithal to satisfy these must go to the wall.
How unavoidable, then, that money should confer distinction! It is true
that wealth draws out the flunkeyism of the average week-day mortal in a
pitiful way. But may not flunkeyism itself be termed the exaggerated
respect of poor natures for an absolute power?" etc. I do not know any
place in which one may make reflections so fairly and comfortably as in
a deep-seated, plush-lined carriage.
'Do you know how profoundly benevolent and incoherent Mrs. Marwood is in
her charities? She really is a perfect _point de raillement_ of
incongruities. You find her telling you how atrociously Worth charges
for a simple gray silk, and before she has finished marshalling her
figures she ejaculates, "But why should we worms of the earth take so
much thought wherewithal shall we be clothed? The sheep and caterpillar
wore that very clothing long before." My imagination is not nimble
enough to take in so varied an assortment of metaphors without bruising
its shins. First as to the phrase "a worm of the earth." I no sooner
hear it than I picture myself as a creeping thing, without hands or feet
or face, living in a carcase underground, without light or sun or air.
Before this gruesome picture is complete, enter a sheep with a waist, in
a fine homespun, and a caterpillar trailing a trained silk. You see,
they wore "that very clothing long before." 'Tis to no purpose for a
sober man to knock at the door of poesy, says Plato. So it is with me.
The flights that people take to read a lesson to man's pride confuse
rather than edify me.
'One of the visits Mrs. Marwood paid as we were on our way to her house
was to a family whose head she described as a "brand plucked from the
burning." Judge whether one who lounges about his house in the
afternoon with unlaced boots, a stubbly beard of a week's growth, and
smoking a short black pipe, seems a fit subject for such a description.
But then perhaps the appositeness of a "plucked brand" rests with the
eye that sees it. Certainly he might have been engaged in drowning his
youngest child in the tank, or dancing on the prostrate form of his
wife.
'You hope that I am going on with my collection of aboriginal myths and
customs? I hope the same. So it is evident that life is partly given
us that we may keep on hoping, and nothing come of it. "Why do I not
set to more seriously?" In the first place, I hate to "set to"; in the
second, I abhor "more." And if I could hang myself for aught, it would
be because there is such a word as "seriously," not only in the
dictionary, where one may endure anything, but also in people's mouths.
Have I expressed myself too strongly? Then I repent--but without any
thought of amendment. This, I believe, is the only thing that makes
repentance tolerable.'
*CHAPTER VIII.*
'Fairacre, 3rd February.
'Thank you for your kind inquiries after my chickens. They thrive apace.
Ten out of twelve of them seem to have gained a firm footing in the
world. One especially, a buffy white, nimble creature, is so trenchant
a warrior in the battle of life that we have named it Hector, not after
the family, but the classical hero. He picks crumbs out of his
brothers' mouths as if he were a Christian merchant; he hops on his
mother's back, and, stretching his neck, spoils twenty muscatel grapes
in half a minute. He snatches happy insects out of the sunshine, and,
with one slight arch of his neck, hurls them into an unshrived eternity.
The place where his tail ought to be is fast developing; a tiny yellow
comb is faintly visible. Alas! I see plainly that Time, who scatters
his poppy-seeds with a ruthless hand, is bent on his destruction. For
the day on which he becomes what Kirsty terms "a cockerel," his fate is
sealed. But, then, our own special doom awaits each of us; and Hector
has this advantage in being shelled a fowl: he never sinks into sallow
meditations as to his coming fate. The present hour, with its worms and
sunshine and sweet opportunities of theft, is enough for him. He
listens to all the speculations that can be addressed to him with
unmoved composure. Only this morning one held him in her hand, and said:
"Ah, little feathered atom, so lately shelled from one eternity into
another; fleeting pilgrim in a passing show; confined to a few roods of
earth, yet linked by subtle chains to the remotest star--nay, perchance,
to spirit itself! To know thee wholly, how largely must the boundaries
of human knowledge be widened. Time and space, and the solar
system--all are necessary to thy existence----"
'Hector listened with round rolling eyes, but at this point he made a
sudden dart at the speaker's mouth, as if it suddenly struck him that it
was alive, and possibly as good to eat as a beetle.
'Yesterday I made several visits to sick people. Two of them--Mrs.
Rupert and Mrs. Morland--have been slowly dying for nearly two years.
Do you remember hearing mother speak of them? One of consumption, the
other of some internal malady. Can one witness such long unavailing
struggles without pondering why human beings should endure so much, all
to no purpose? .... People speak about waiting for the end. But has not
the end of the body come when it is smitten with an incurable agonizing
malady?
'It would seem that when I enter on moralities, my dear, you and I are
undone, like salt in water. At any rate, you will not feel disposed to
grumble that, just at the moment I was dipping the inquisitive beak of
my pen in ink, to come without further phrase or disguise on the yolk at
the heart of euthanasia, who should call but Mr. Willie Stein. You know
how he makes these sudden appearances from the far north. The
thermometer is very high; the wind is from the east, and threatens to
veer to the north; there are crowds of undelightful things that ought to
be done the day before to-morrow; Duty, like an old hag that ought to be
burnt at the stake for sedition, peers in at you from time to time; and
then, to fill up the measure, in comes Mr. Willie! Here is an
aboriginal myth he told me: Once upon a time the pelicans went to fish
and found a great deal of barracoota, which they left in a gully while
they went for more. Up came some greedy thieving magpies and stole the
booty. The pelicans, in revenge, rolled them in the ashes, and that is
the reason why they are partly black. This belongs to the same class of
legend as that of the venomous snake who made the moon angry by killing
so many blacks, till at last she burnt its head as it slept in the grass
at night. So that is the reason why its head is black and its bite
harmless. You see, Australian myths have this in common with those of
classic Greece, that they also endeavour to give an account of the
origin of things.
'You ask about my translation of "Faust." I have not done so many lines
per day since you left. You see the second part is to our speech, with
its many one-syllable words, a perfect trap for the translator. I am
glad, however, you encouraged me to undertake this task, for in no other
way can one draw so near to the heart of a work in a foreign tongue.
But as for any literary value, of course the thing is naught. I could
make you die of laughing at subtilties, screwed words, and rhymes hacked
and raked all to no purpose. The performance is like nothing so much as
a barb-horse that hath his eyes blinded trying to race a soaring eagle.
But then I feel that I have climbed a little nearer to Goethe--and is
there anything in life more delightful than the tranquil friendship that
grows out of long and frequent intercourse with a great writer? One who
is not only among the most majestic sons of light, but a frontier savant
of life--who penetrated to the outposts of human nature, and
unflinchingly noted the vantage-ground of good and evil.
'Early next week I am going on one of my periodical visits to Dr. and
Mrs. Stein. They have staying with them, just now, an old friend, who
arrived from Germany a few days ago--a man who is as steeped in research
as a seaweed is in ozone. But is it? Well, if not, it ought to be.
'It is cruel of you to vaunt the praises of the Melbourne climate over
ours, when we are having such atrocious hot winds. Yesterday, some of
us did nothing but lie on the floor in Apostolic raiment, swallow ice,
and feebly murmur the old aboriginal incantation: "Sun, sun, burn your
wood--burn your internal substance and go down!"'
'Fairacre, 15th February.
'If I were a South Sea Islander, this is the day on which I would beat
my idol black and blue. I have completely fallen out with myself.
Dearest dear, do not put up your eyebrows in that unbelieving way. You
should have heard me speaking to myself a little while ago. "What sort
of a creature do you call yourself?" I said. "If the wind is from the
north-east, if a dress is a misfit, if people say the same things to
you, if they say nothing at all, you are like a bundle of
stinging-nettles--cross and disagreeable all over. What have you done to
your soul that it does not raise you above the petty malice of the
passing hour? Go away--go to someone who does not know you so well as I
do--no, I won't have you at any price.
'And, lo! my friend, here I am, with a pen and a scrubby little
ink-bottle, and a sheet of paper, and a shivering, homeless ego, thrust
from its accustomed throne. May I come to you? Do not ask me inside if
you are busy writing sermons. No, it wouldn't be safe. Just give me a
mat at the door and one of the old poets till you have finished. It
would be no use making a confidant of me. You could not feel for me.
If I said my pretty pink _crepe de chine_ has been spoilt in the
sleeves, you might try to look sympathetic, but you would really be
smiling inside. And yet greater failures have much greater
consolations. If you construct a wrong system of ethics you make your
claim surer to be ranked a philosopher; if you make it clear that the
majority of mankind must be damned, you may possibly be reckoned severe,
but are sure to be considered a sound Christian. But what comfort can be
drawn from having the wrong sort of sleeve? I defy you to find any; or
if you do, 'tis because you are not a woman.
'You. Is that the only reason why you have become "a house divided
against itself"? Well, some of your sex have ere now pretended to be
racked with toothache, when they were really suffering from heartache.