a congregation that grows grapes and tills the soil. Life passes with
such leisurely tranquillity, and the baser denominations of our kind
seem more unreal. I feel sure, too, that no one here tempts him to read
the "Kritik of Pure Reason."'
'Fairacre.
'I left Blumenthal yesterday, vowing to make a longer visit in the
spring. I carried away with me from the pastor an old ballad in early
German, called "Two King's Children," which I am translating into
English for your special benefit. This is the anniversary of Esther's
wedding-day. No one had the courage to say a word about it. After what
you said so admirably as to the necessity of sometimes showing a little
of the sympathy that one feels, I made an effort. But, heavens, how I
blundered! It was after sunset. I sat in the drawing-room bow-window
sewing, when Esther came and sat in a far corner already dusky with the
gathering twilight. She sat with folded hands, her face pale and set.
At last I crept up to her and touched her cheek with my hand; and
presently we were both crying. To make one weep bitterly who had before
been calm, is that shedding any of the balm of consolation? Don't you
think you had better dissuade rather than encourage me in such painful
bungling? It is better to recognise one's limitations. If people are
badly hurt, I can make them cry worse, but can never tell them it is all
for the best. I could tell them that no one understands the refinements
of hangmanship like Nature, and that life is a finished artist in
defeating the heart's insatiable yearning for happiness; but on the
whole I think I had better hold my tongue--likewise my pen. But not
till I tell you a little _conte a rire_ related to me by the pastor when
he drove me into Gawler for the two o'clock train. Two Sundays ago he
visited the little Lutheran Sunday-school at Detmold, and found the
teacher--a very stout, placid-natured man, who likes to arrange things
in a tranquil, unexciting way--with a class around him repeating the
Creed. The plan was that each child should say a clause, thus: "I
believe in ... the Holy Catholic Church;" next child, "the communion of
saints;" next, "the forgiveness of sins." Then there was a long pause,
till a small boy at the tail-end of the class piped out: "Please,
teacher, the girl who believes in the resurrection of the body has got
the mumps!"'
*CHAPTER XII.*
'Fairacre, 10th April.
'Alas! the young gentle autumn was a treacherous make-believe. For the
last week we have had an inordinate fit of hot weather--frequently the
sky overcast and lowering: it promises to rain, but the clouds turn to
vapour; the wind changes, but it is not cool. To-night, again, the
barometer has fallen; the moon and the stars are all hidden, the air is
intolerably sultry, and there is that further sign of change--unending
swarms of insect life. I write by my open window, and they come
floating in, hovering round the lamp, creeping on the table, getting in
the way of my pen--creatures on foot and on wing--thinglets that fly one
moment and fall down helplessly the next--morsels that crawl with
half-spread wings, and things that fly as if with legs. They terrify
me--these purposeless hordes that struggle into existence one moment and
the next are crushed by a footfall, the accidental turning of a leaf,
the scratch of an idle pen. Do they not throw some light on the
cataclysms of human history? Are they not linked closely to our race
and lot--part of an incomprehensible world in which, stronger than
righteousness or justice, or any figment of morality, reigns the impulse
of every single organic being to increase in numbers? Is it true that
some form of thought underlies the lowliest manifestations of life?
What instinct or purpose is subserved by those pretty little pearl-gray
moths, with silver dust on their wings, who dash into the flame of lamp
or candle, as if it were the source of life? Here is one of them which I
have twice saved from consuming itself. One wing is scorched and it is
very limp, as if rescuing it from burning were defeating its only
purpose, snatching it from the one possible joy of existence. The
thought possesses me that some higher intelligences than we know may
thus regard our lives. But have we more power to fashion and to mould
them than this helpless thinglet that was called into being by forces
over which it wields no control, and seeks nothingness by an impulse
equally beyond its influence?
'Last night the rain came down in torrents; towards morning there was a
thunderstorm, of which I heard nothing. But to-day the air and the sky
are clear and fresh, the Torrens is babbling, and the birds are singing
the blithest legends imaginable all over the Park Lands. The Major and
Mr. Ferrier are spending the day with us. Poor Mr. Ferrier is forever
telling us about the conversion of some aborigine. I often wish we
could keep an old black fellow on hand at Fairacre for him to convert
from time to time, and then perhaps he would spare us these endless
recitals. But my heart smites me for speaking like this of the zealous
ex-missionary, and I am sure mother likes to listen to him. Then he is
so entirely in earnest. Perhaps you would like to know his story of
to-day? It was about a half-caste boy who, after being at the Mandurang
Mission Station for a year, began to show signs of repentance and grace.
One day he stole some sugar. "Was that after he showed these signs?"
asked the Major. From some people the inquiry would sound ironical, but
not from the dear guileless Major, who is evidently quite unused to
theological phrases, and was merely trying hard to comprehend all he
heard.
'"Yes, sir," answered Mr. Ferrier; "it was some weeks after we had great
hopes of him. The old Adam is strong in all of us, but perhaps
especially so in our poor half-caste natives. Do you know, my dear sir,
that there was a canon law of the Church in the early ages which
rendered converts from heathenism ineligible for the priesthood to the
second and third generation? Well, I knew Thomas--we always gave our
people Christian names at their baptism--had taken the sugar; but I said
nothing to him. I felt the time had come when he must be allowed to
stand or fall. The boy was dear to my wife, and she wished me to take
him aside and remonstrate with him. But I said, 'He knows good from
evil now; we must see whether the root of the matter is in him.' We
read the Word of God, and had prayers in the evening as usual. My dear
wife offered the prayer; she wrestled with God mightily for the soul of
the half-caste boy. Ah, my dear friends, I wish you had known her--not
a thought for self. Her only thought was to win souls for the Saviour,
and many of these poor people were verily brought through her means to
the foot of the Cross. It was only nine months after this it pleased
God to take her from me."
'There was such pathos in the old man's voice, it gave one a lump in the
throat. The Major hastily drew out his handkerchief and pretended to
cough. But Dorothy at four and a half can make-believe much better than
the Major at fifty-seven.
'Mr. Ferrier went on to tell how, after the natives retired for the
night, he sat in the sitting-room writing out his monthly report,
leaving a blank where he was to write of Thomas, till he found whether
he would repent him of his theft. His wife sat with a book in her hand,
but he knew that she was crying, not reading. At last a tap came at the
open window, and a timid voice saying: "Missie, missie, me want to
gabber!" It was Thomas. The wife at once went out, and the boy talked
to her for some time. Presently she came in with "a light on her face,"
as Mr. Ferrier expressed it, and she said: "Paul, you need not leave a
blank for Thomas now. The Lord has given him to us as a prey snatched
from the snarer." "And though he had a passionate temper, and sometimes
gave way to it, yet from that day till the hour of his death I never had
reason to doubt that he was a chosen vessel of grace," said Mr. Ferrier
solemnly.
'No one could doubt the good man's sincerity. But I confess I never
hear him talk in this fashion without a great longing to know what
conception an Australian aborigine could really form of the profoundly
metaphysical dogmas of Christianity. They are so kneaded into our
literature, so imbedded in the marrow of our minds by inheritance and
instruction, we could not if we would really cast them from us at least
as phases of thought. But a savage who cannot count beyond three, and
goes out to murder some tribal foe because a kinsman has been killed by
the fall of a tree--what idea looms up in the twilight of his mind when
he is kept at a mission and taught the Creed and the Ten Commandments?
Here is an anecdote I fished from Mr. Ferrier, when I was trying to
glean aboriginal myths from him. An old man, badly wounded, came to the
mission one day. They nursed him and fed him, and he seemed so docile
and to accept all he was taught so readily, that they thought he was in
a short time ready for baptism. One thing puzzled them, however. Though
he bathed often, and had clean clothing on, a peculiar odour always hung
about him. A few days before he was to be baptized, it suddenly struck
Mr. Ferrier that this was caused by something with which he smeared his
hair. But this was not the case. It was the kidney-fat of an enemy
rolled up, and secured among his locks. He would allow no one to touch
or remove it, for it was a point of honour with him to keep this ghastly
memento until he had also murdered the brother of his victim. In the
meantime he was very anxious to be baptized.
'The rain has rather battered some of our chrysanthemum bushes. But
then there are such angelic multitudes--in all shades--white and
pale-cream, pink and rose; red are our special favourites among the
Japanese. This last shade has for me as irresistible a charm as the
pink ear of the maiden which in Tom's Turkish song robbed her lover of
his reason.'
*CHAPTER XIII.*
'Fairacre, 20th April.
'After listening to innumerable tales of conversion, after hearing of
aborigines who talked on their deathbeds like leaflet tracts, ever since
we first knew Mr. Ferrier, he has at last told me a charming little
myth. It bears no traces at all of being the production of natives
that, to use Dr. Stein's expression, had been "tampered with by the
missionaries." You might put everyone of them that ever laboured in
Australia in rows, and bribe them with the promise of a whole continent
of blacks, all ready to talk broken English and wear second-hand store
clothes on Sunday--and yet between them the worthy missionaries would
never produce anything with the peculiar cachet of an aboriginal myth.
But if I say much more you will vow that I am enamoured of the
subject--it is as a master passion on which people must notoriously be
mistrusted. It is such a short myth, dear, after all, that I am obliged
to add to it with a preface. Do you notice how Tom is training me to
dabble in bulls?
'The sun is a woman who courses over the sky all day, keeping up
enormous fires. But at last she uses up all the wood she has for that
day, and she goes down at night among the dead. They stand up in double
lines to let her pass, and do her reverence. She has a lover among
them, who gave her a great red kangaroo skin. Each morning, when she
rises, she throws this over her shoulders.
'Another thing I learned yesterday is that the good little man's special
blacks noticed the stars, and had names for some. The evening star they
called Kyirrie; the Milky Way Kockadooroo; and there is a cluster of
stars visible in the western sky, during the winter months, that they
knew by the name of Amathooroocooroo, which signifies "claw of
eagle-hawk." Please to reckon it henceforth among the classic
constellations.
'Then, floating in the Milky Way, is still to be seen the bottom of the
ark of Neppelle, who transported himself in it to heaven to escape the
waters with which another god flooded the earth to drown his unfaithful
wives. And did you ever hear that three of the stars in the Southern
Cross are two aboriginal Helens and their lover, who escaped with them
to that far retreat from the fury of the deserted husband? The
astronomical lore of our natives may not have been very scientific--but
at any rate they knew which sex was always causing mischief. But there,
dear--it is a sore subject--and I know many of you are now sincerely
repentant.
'Fairacre, 30th April.
'You would be very much shocked to hear of Mr. Stanhope's sudden death.
It took us all dreadfully by surprise. It is only seven days ago that
Allie and I met him and his mother at Sir Edward Ritchie's; and then, as
always, he looked the picture of health and strength, and overflowing
with merriment. We had great fun about Leo, who really is getting quite
past any whipping I can give him. In his wildest days he would sit at
the kitchen-table and eat sugar, but now he almost gets into the
pony-carriage instead of drawing it. Mr. Stanhope was particularly
diverted at the trick I told him Leo has acquired of stopping short when
he sees any very poor or disreputable-looking persons, making sure
mother is in the trap and wants to speak to them.
'"When you drive those glossy thoroughbreds that are being trained for
you, you will wonder how you could ever bear to sit behind Leo," he
said, and laughed when I pretended not to understand. Then he took out
a little pocket-calendar and said: "My mother and I are going to Cape
Town in November. Mind, the event must come off before then, for it is
a pact between Ritchie and myself that we should see each other go off
the hooks." The next day he was attacked with violent congestion of the
lungs. He was ill barely five days. He was buried this morning. I
write the words, but they seem to convey no meaning. I see him strong
and young, his eyes full of laughter, turning over the calendar filled
with engagements and appointments; but not a word of this one inevitable
assignation. Nothing left of all that eager, vivid personality save a
poor clod of earth hurriedly hidden out of sight! Good God! is not this
the bitterest insult that could be devised for the last scene of the
last act?
'There is a wonderful fund of unbelief in the heart regarding death.
Yes, we must all die; but individually it is as though immortality were
a birthright we are to inherit without tasting the bitterness of
dissolution. Is it very bitter? and in the hereafter, does it indeed
matter very much if we pass away with empty lamps? In that supreme
moment when the soul is sundered from the body, do we perceive that the
life which was all in all to us was but a dream grafted upon a dream--a
passing vision crowded with phantoms? ... And now the curtain is drawn.
We see no more. All beyond is so shadowy and faltering.
'How is it the thought of death does not haunt us more? The event is so
tremendous. I have often had the feeling after the death of one I knew,
that never again could I be lulled into such entire forgetfulness of
this one absolute certainty. But gradually the impression vanishes. We
are planted so deeply in the life that now is--we may be shaken and
horrified and apprehensive--but the world is like one of those
hydra-animals which may be turned inside out, and the exterior surface
will then digest and the stomach respire.'
'Fairacre, 7th May.
'Fanny Harrison has returned from her Melbourne visit, and has been
telling us tales about your overworking yourself--visiting sick people
day and night--reading to incurables and blind people by the
hour--making superhuman efforts to save larrikins from themselves.
Don't, dear darling; at any rate not so much. It gave me a shiver all
down the vertebrae when I thought, "What if Cuthbert should turn out one
of those clergymen who take life so seriously that they die of it like a
dose of arsenic?" Do not forget that it was a neglected cold when he
was so much engrossed with the sick and poor one hard winter that
brought on the lung complaint of which father died.
'I cannot get over a certain awkwardness of not knowing exactly what to
say when I first visit people who are very poor, and hopelessly ill. So
I mostly listen to them, and read a little only if they wish it. Poor
Thomson seems to like this, for the last time I visited him he aired his
grievances. People are very kind, he said, and lots of ladies always
visit him; but they do read so much to him. "No doubt 'tis very good of
them, but when a chap lies in bed month after month, never expectin' to
get up again in health, and often cussing himself for having been a fool
and partly to blame for his misfortune--why, then, a lump out o' the
Bible don't seem to hearten him up much. Now, there's Mrs. Cannister
and Mrs. Meadows, and her dorters--'tis my belief as they uses Bibles
not properly divided into chapters. In course there's a good deal of it
taken up with Jew names, and stories not meant for gineral use. But I
don't see why them ladies should pick out the melanchorliest psalmses
for me. Well, I mean them as is all about the horrors of death bein' on
me, and the waters goin' over me, and my eyes bein' consumed from
weeping, and bein' a worm and no man, and the arrers sticking fast in
me, and bein' in a pit, and in a dry thirsty land, and arskin' the Lord
why He cast me off for iver, and that I forgit to eat my bread, bein'
like a howl in the desert and a perlican in the wilderness, and a
sparrer atop o' the house without a mate, which is what niver happens,
as far as I know the varmin; and coals of juniper, and scattered at the
grave's mouth and lying in wait for my soul. Yes, Miss Stella, ye may
laugh, but it's true--the creepingest things. Yes, I remember what's
read to me pretty well, but then I've heerd it all over and over
agin--some days twicet over.
'"And then Mrs. Cannister--she sits there as you may be now, only more
frontin' me, so that she can fix her eyes onto me--and she reg'lar ivery
week says to me: 'Now, my good man'--if there's anything I hates it's
them words; if she said 'my wastin' away toad,' I'd like it
better--'now, my good man, do you not begin to feel that it's all well,
and all for the best in the hands of the Lord?' And if I'm tired I just
mostly gives a nod, so as she may stop jawing. But other times I says:
'I donno as to things being so very well. If my family was pervided
for, an' I didn't lie awake half the night coughin' and spittin', I
might be more sartin on the point. As to things bein' in the hands of
the Lord, I know well, if I'd have been stiddier and different-like in
many ways, I wouldn't be in the fix I'm in now.'
'"When I says anythin' like that, the old dame looks for a more
dismaller psalm the next time. It licks me, though, how people can go
on saying it's all in the hands of the Almighty, and He does everything
for the best. Now, Miss Stella, if you take it that me--and a good many
of the chaps I've knowed--was the handiwork of the Lord, I'd like to
know who has spiled more horns nor He before making a good spoon!"
'You may not think very highly of this man's theology, but I like him
for his honesty in admitting that he is to blame for what he calls the
"fix" he is in, and a straighter way of looking at things than people
generally allow themselves.'
Fairacre, 10th May.
'The Fortuniana and tea-roses, and the heliotrope and various other
sweet-smelling flowers, still flourish in our garden in golden
abundance. I brought a great posy to Frau Kettig this afternoon, with
various other things of a more material kind, but the flowers delighted
her most.
'Yes; I have just returned from seeing her. How angelically good and
uncomplaining she is all through her illness! She is more grateful for
being destitute than I am for all I possess. I assure you, dear, I
threw stones at myself nearly all the way home. I talked with the dear
old woman for a long time, and read her favourite hymn to her, "Ein
feste Burg ist unser Gott." Then she chanted the two first verses--her
thin, old, toil-marked hands devoutly clasped, her eyes half closed....
Through the little window at the foot of her bed I could see the sky,
clear blue and serene like a great heavenly web woven throughout of hope
and love.
'"Surely it must be so," I thought, looking at the frail old woman with
her load of eighty winters--with all her cruel bereavements and losses,
and now in her diseased old age, after moiling like a slave for
sixty-eight years, dependent on charity for her bread, yet lifting up
her trembling aged voice and hands in tearful love and gratitude to
God--the great Father in whose hands are a thousand worlds full of
treasures--who yet has bereft this sincere loving soul of all. If there
were not some tremendous force of love behind the "mocks of this world,"
could spirit achieve so signal a triumph over matter?
'"It is a fair summer day of the Lord, full of His sunshine, and yet
cool; and the flowers thou hast brought me, beloved child, take me back
to the sweet Thuringian woods," she said, with the simple directness
which makes the grand old German sound like one's mother-tongue. I
could not trust myself to speak. After a little she said, as if
suspecting that I was too sorry for her: "When one no longer hopes to
rise again, how good and dear it is to think on the day when all waiting
and weariness are forgotten in beholding the face of the beloved
Redeemer!"
'Here is Fatima at my elbow, rubbing herself against me and purring
benevolently, looking a little askance at Dustiefoot, who has indeed too
often tried to make a plaything of her tail. But he is fast asleep just
now, with his nose against my shoe. Fatima likes those lucid intervals
in which Dustiefoot slumbers and she can purr of "auld langsyne" without
interruption. Dear old tabby! tell me quick and tell me true, is your
ardent liking for fish a proof that in another world you will sail a
boat and cast a net into the sea? Certainly, though you love fish even
to felony, you cannot go a-fishing in the life that now is--which things
are a parable. I begin to see that this infatuated pen of mine will get
me into trouble if I do not stop.'
*CHAPTER XIV.*
'Fairacre, 17th May.
'We do not think mother is as strong as usual. But as neither the
seaside nor the hills suit her as well as Fairacre, we do not like to
venture on a change to either. She will, however, most probably
accompany Esther to Coonjooree for some months. Allie has gone for a
couple of weeks to the Emberlys; and I do most of mother's sick-visiting
for her. She consents to this more readily because I think she believes
it is good for me. But personally I cannot help feeling how much better
it would be to send Kirsty instead of me. She thoroughly believes that
under all circumstances people are better off than they deserve. If a
man has broken his leg, she is ready to say, "What a blessing it is not
his neck!" If a poor woman is confined of her tenth baby, Kirsty
reflects, "How much better than to have typhoid fever!" And when people
have typhoid fever, she says, "What a mercy it is from the Lord to have
medical attendance!" I confided to mother the other day how, in average
sick-visiting, I am haunted by the feeling that I can do no good, and
sit with a long face thinking how horrid it is to be in bed, and
wondering awkwardly what I am to say next. Then the flies put me out of
countenance. With the poorer people among us they are a veritable
plague--in their bedchambers, and upon their beds, and in their ovens,
and in their kneading-troughs. Mother answered very gently: "Charity, my
dear, is a kind of Bezer in the wilderness, a city of refuge, which we
must always keep open, because of the many accidents and misfortunes of
life. Our visitings and readings and half-hours spent by lonely
sick-beds, they may perhaps be compared to the 'Refuge, refuge,' written
in every double way on the parting of the ways, to aid those who,
without help or sympathy, might be in danger of perishing in the great
desert. Think, my dear, what it is to lie, for month after month, in a
poor little room, without ever hoping to be well again. Even to make
hours a little pleasanter, that would otherwise be dark and lonely, is
something. In such matters we must be content to live from hand to
mouth, without looking for great results."
'You know how mother's words, "delicate as honey born in air," at once
soothe and convince the heart.