During the forenoon Mrs. Crasterton, Mrs. Simms and the Editor of the previous evening were in telephonic communication. Then Mrs. Crasterton asked me how I would like to remain in Sydney and do the WOMAN’S LETTER on one of the big newspapers. The present writer under the alias4 of Lady Jane, was paid seven pounds a week, but of course I could only be offered half that as a beginning. Even so, it seemed an enormous amount of money to have each week. Little me who never had a penny, at any rate not five pounds spent on me in a whole year! It was a dazzling prospect5 until I picked it to pieces.
What would I have to write? I should have to lackey6 around to all the SOCIETY affairs and describe Lady Hobnob’s dresses and Sir James’s wonderful cellar—in short kow-tow to a lot of people who had not advanced my search for something better than ‘Possum Gully. Quite the contrary: they were disappointing results of the opportunities for which I was avid7. What was the present Lady Jane going to do? This was rather glozed over. She had been growing duller and duller. I would go around with her for a month to learn the ropes. But what would she do then? That was her problem, not mine, I was told. “But she would hate me for taking her position from her!”
“My dear, you’ll never be a success in society or the professions unless you are indifferent about hate or love. It’s a sign of your own worth sometimes if you are hated by the right people.”
That scared me off entirely8. How could I take another woman’s livelihood9 from her? I would rather share what I had with her. It was described as a tragedy that I, with my talents, should return to feeding the pigs and milking the cows, and white-washing hearths10 and shining pot-lids—a poverty-stricken grind in a petty domesticity which I hated. Mrs. Simms said that nevertheless she was glad that I did not attempt the journalistic job, which for women of any mental capacity was so devitalising—writing rot about recipes and ball-dresses and becoming a disheartened and frustrated11 hack12. I was so young yet, there was time for literary talent to develop. Writing was not, as some vocations13, dependent upon youth. And that was that.
The glorious escape from ‘Possum Gully, or what was to have been a glorious escape, had ended in nothing but a wish to return to ‘Possum Gully as an escape from the escape that was not glorious.
That was a painfully flat day. Mrs. Crasterton had made arrangements exclusive of me, as for the past week I had been on my own hook. Edmée had gone to a garden party. I arranged my belongings14 ready for flight. Life seemed to have run aground. The Harbor was divine in the full day sun, brilliant blue but with a breath of haze15 like a veil, and little grey cow tracks all across it like sashes on the tides. The small waves whispered of the tides on the rocks covered with oyster16 shells and draped in seaweed with a grand sedgy odour. The gulls17 rocked about like paper boats at play. Out beyond the Heads the swelling18 Pacific towered high as a plain. Behind was the city so full of people, but nowhere in it had I found anyone to whom I could tell my perplexities with any hope of being understood or really helped. They would criticise19 and advise, but Ma and Great-aunt Jane had already furnished me with that kind of friendship and assistance.
I sat on the sea wall and looked down at the jetty at Pannikin Point. We always came home to Geebung Villa20 that way when we had no luggage needing a cab. Gaddy got off the ferry boat in company with a tall man. Gaddy added to the friction21 in my thoughts, so I stayed on the terrace with the camellias and watched the shipping22. Presently he approached, calling me. When he appeared before me he flung out a leg and waltzed, an indulgence for aesthetic23 reasons improper24 to a corpulent man.
“Do you know who has put off his departure a whole day on purpose to see you—enough to give you swelled25 head, young woman. He heard about you on arrival, put in last night reading your book—guess who it is.”
“It couldn’t be Renfrew Haddington!”
“The very man! My idea of a real man and a literary josser combined—very rare, for I largely agree with old Wilting26 about local cacklers.”
Here was the really truly GREATEST AUSTRALIAN POET, but when a man had so many other distinctions it was easy to overlook this trifling27 indigenous28 dementia. He was known as one of the really influential29 journalists on the Australian press. He had represented the Melbourne Tribune in the Boer War. His despatches had been so sound that they had also been snapped up by London and American journals. His book on the war was considered a masterpiece alike by those who thought the war ignoble30 and by the swashbucklers. He had been lecturing in the United States and was on his way home.
Gad2 reminded me of all this, but I was not excited. I was subdued31 by campaign bruises32. EXPERIENCE was teaching me that people sought me for their own entertainment, not for mine, and that those supposed to be interesting were frequently less so than those reported to be otherwise.
I had to return to the house with Gad, feeling insignificant33 and crest-fallen, but I did not care. This was my last night in Sydney. Pa and Ma had not been to Sydney for more than ten years, and as far as I could see it might be all that before I could come again.
Mr. Haddington came across the lawn to meet me as I kept behind Gaddy. He was tall and broad and brown, and there was something restful and enfolding about him so that I ceased to be driven to act any role whatsoever34.
I drank of his understanding as I looked into his deep kind eyes, and gained assurance as he looked deeply back into mine. The world lit up with new possibilities. I was glad that Renfrew Haddington was alive and there holding me by the hand. I was refilled with the false hope of youth that happiness could come to me some day with shining face as a prince or knight35 and that a struggle to remain available for such an advent36 was worth while.
Manliness37 seemed to emanate38 from the man, with patience and strength as well as kindliness39. He had bumpy40 features and iron grey hair, and no superfluous41 flesh. The eyes looked searchingly from cavernous sockets42 with an illumination of spirit which he could impart. Most men are so elemental that I suffocate43 in my antiquity44 of spirit by comparison, but Mr. Haddington suddenly made me feel young and overcoming as if the awful things in life could be reformed. Here was a soul and mind in which one could take refuge.
I do not remember saying much to him, yet I felt that he knew a better self of me than consciously existed. He was departing on the Melbourne Express, and could not stay to dinner.
“Men will always seek you for your sympathy and understanding,” he said, as he held my hand in parting.
I was late down to dinner, and as I came in, Edmée was discussing the recent caller in her own style, and impressed upon me that I had been highly honoured. “What do you think of him?” she asked for the third time.
“I like him better than any human being I ever met,” I said, just like that.
“The doll awakes from petrifaction,” laughed Edmée. “We must get his son over from Melbourne. He must be as old as you.”
“I have never met Mrs. Haddington,” remarked Mrs. Crasterton.
“She’s a remarkably45 fine woman,” said Gaddy. “She needs to be to measure up to Haddington.”
I excused myself early. I wanted to write notes of good-bye to be posted on the morrow, but instead I sat recalling how Mr. Haddington had looked as he stood talking to Gad on the lawn in the light of the setting sun while I watched him from the drawing-room window curtains. I examined the inscription46 in the book he had given me. Magical that his hand had written there for me, the product of his own brain. If such a man was honoured because he wrote books, surely the attempt was not unvaliant for an ignorant girl. Surely none but piffling people thought that girls should not write. Renfrew Haddington would not think so. There must be numbers of similar men in the world. I had met few because I knew so few of all kinds, and humanity in the aggregate47 is so chock-a-block with culls48.
When the household retired49 I continued to sit by my window looking at the twinkling lights of the city, lovely, alluring50: they should have held something much nobler than I had met.
Why had Mr. Haddington stirred me so? I couldn’t be in love at first sight with a man old enough to be my father—that would be disgusting; but why should he be able to give a different meaning to life?
As many as a dozen old men have tried to probe if there was a real Harold Beecham to correspond to the hero in my book, and when I assure them that Harold Beecham was made out of imagination they still cling to their own notion. Many young men have told me that they are Harold Beecham or intend to be: girls ask is it true that Harold Beecham was drawn51 from their suitors because the suitors are claiming so to give themselves added weight and attraction. HAROLD BEECHAM! Pooh, he was the best I had been equipped to imagine at the time. Mr. Haddington had given me an idea of something much better furnished. Now I could see what Mr. Wilting and others meant when they said I bad been too inexperienced to attempt a love scene. Mr. Hardy52 at one end of the scale and Mr. Haddington at the other had been a revelation.
I fell all night from spoke53 to spoke of a mental wheel:
His son is as old as you are.
His wife is a mighty54 fine woman.
I am the merest of women and the most special cannot marry where they list.
The one man of our dreams would be sure to rush into marriage early.
Nothing matters.
So what does it matter after all?
Pa always says it will be all the same in a hundred years.
A hundred days, a hundred months are a long dull stretch when taken piecemeal55.
His wife is a remarkably fine woman.
This at any rate was something to be thankful for. If a man with the power to so impress me had been such a driveller as to yoke56 with a nincompoop or a “tart”, I should have felt disgraced.
The following night I fell from spoke to spoke of a different wheel—that of the gallant57 steam engine which tugged58 the mails and passengers from Sydney to Melbourne.
Despite an arid59 interior my last day in Sydney was a heavenly specimen60 of weather—blue and gold—the Harbor lovelier than a dream. Every garden in the roomy suburbs sprawling61 on the city’s ridges62 gave forth63 a wealth of roses and semi-tropic bloom. The thoroughfares were decorated with comely64 young people in white and gay colours. The city piles were outlined against the effulgent65 sunset ocean of liquid gold as I returned to Geebung Villa for the last time. The misty66 bays were a fairyland of twinkling lights as we crossed in the ferry and took a cab to Redfern.
Mrs. Crasterton was horrified67 that I should be travelling second class, but as in the matter of dresses she did not let it run to her pocket. “All those dreadful, coarse men,” she whispered, “Are you sure you will be safe with them? They look like working men.”
That’s what they were—station hands—and I felt as safe with them as with a gum tree. “We won’t be out of Sydney before they will be doing everything for me.”
She gave me a final hug and thanked me for my visit, which she said had brought so many old friends around her and so many new ones that she was quite rejuvenated68.
The men, who were shearers, disposed of my luggage and gave me my choice of a seat, just as I expected, and I leaned from the window to draw a breath from the luxuriant gardens of Strathfield, where the lights were putting out the starry69 evening.
The men talked of the drought and the terrible plight70 of the land immediately beyond the coastal71 belt, but the present hour was redeemed72 by moonlight. Moonlight is as lovely and as thrilling as a phantom73. The silver glory etherealises the grimmest landscape. Soon it transformed the drought and filled the wide night universe with mystery and enchantment74.
Scent75 of wattle drifted in from Liverpool onward76. The good engine roared and tugged, shaking the tiny houses of fettlers beside the line, on, and on, through the potency77 of the wide and silent but echoing night. Not a month since I had left the bush, but EXPERIENCE had made it a cycle.
Otherwise I was taking nothing back from the city but a blue sash and the books given to me by Mr. Stephens. I was clearly not a getter. Financially, I was as helpless as Pa. But my retreat was only a withdrawal78. I would come again. I must start again from the beginning. I must stick to myself henceforth. I must go beyond Sydney. Few of the people I had met in Sydney had anything more in them basically than those around ‘Possum Gully. The difference was in their having and doing, not in their being. There were greater worlds beyond Sydney. I should seek them. But henceforth I should not make holiday for others by exposing my intentions.
As the train pulled in to Bowral, Moss79 Vale and each little station I pondered on the people who at first predicted that my head would be turned by flattery and lionisation, and a little later had accused me of being abnormal or petrified80 because no one had been able to make any impression on me except through my affections.
Well, there wasn’t a woman among them who could hold a candle to Ma, not in housekeeping, in diction, in reading or in anything to which she addressed her talents. Ma could have kept a big institution shining and well-oiled in every wheel, and yet she was stuck in the bush in a situation in which her capabilities81 were as wasted as a cannon82 fired off to quell83 a mosquito—pure squanderation of the cannon and unnecessarily flattening84 to the skeet.
Thus I went from spoke to spoke till Goulburn, where I left the train and went to the Commercial for the remainder of the night.
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1
embarrassment
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| n.尴尬；使人为难的人(事物)；障碍；窘迫 | |
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gad
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| n.闲逛；v.闲逛 | |
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disporting
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| v.嬉戏，玩乐，自娱( disport的现在分词 ) | |
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alias
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| n.化名；别名；adv.又名 | |
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prospect
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| n.前景，前途；景色，视野 | |
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lackey
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| n.侍从；跟班 | |
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avid
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| adj.热心的；贪婪的；渴望的；劲头十足的 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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livelihood
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| n.生计，谋生之道 | |
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hearths
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| 壁炉前的地板，炉床，壁炉边( hearth的名词复数 ) | |
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frustrated
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| adj.挫败的，失意的，泄气的v.使不成功( frustrate的过去式和过去分词 )；挫败；使受挫折；令人沮丧 | |
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hack
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| n.劈，砍，出租马车；v.劈，砍，干咳 | |
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vocations
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| n.（认为特别适合自己的）职业( vocation的名词复数 )；使命；神召；（认为某种工作或生活方式特别适合自己的）信心 | |
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belongings
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| n.私人物品，私人财物 | |
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haze
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| n.霾，烟雾；懵懂，迷糊；vi.(over)变模糊 | |
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oyster
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| n.牡蛎；沉默寡言的人 | |
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gulls
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| n.鸥( gull的名词复数 )v.欺骗某人( gull的第三人称单数 ) | |
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swelling
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| n.肿胀 | |
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criticise
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| v.批评，评论；非难 | |
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villa
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| n.别墅，城郊小屋 | |
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friction
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| n.摩擦，摩擦力 | |
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shipping
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| n.船运（发货，运输，乘船） | |
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aesthetic
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| adj.美学的，审美的，有美感 | |
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improper
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| adj.不适当的，不合适的，不正确的，不合礼仪的 | |
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swelled
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| 增强( swell的过去式和过去分词 )； 肿胀； （使）凸出； 充满（激情） | |
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wilting
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| 萎蔫 | |
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trifling
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| adj.微不足道的；没什么价值的 | |
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indigenous
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| adj.土产的，土生土长的，本地的 | |
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influential
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| adj.有影响的，有权势的 | |
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ignoble
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| adj.不光彩的，卑鄙的；可耻的 | |
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subdued
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| adj. 屈服的，柔和的，减弱的 动词subdue的过去式和过去分词 | |
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bruises
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| n.瘀伤，伤痕，擦伤( bruise的名词复数 ) | |
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insignificant
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| adj.无关紧要的，可忽略的，无意义的 | |
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whatsoever
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| adv.（用于否定句中以加强语气）任何；pron.无论什么 | |
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knight
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| n.骑士，武士；爵士 | |
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advent
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| n.(重要事件等的)到来，来临 | |
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manliness
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| 刚毅 | |
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emanate
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| v.发自，来自，出自 | |
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kindliness
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| n.厚道，亲切，友好的行为 | |
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bumpy
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| adj.颠簸不平的，崎岖的 | |
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superfluous
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| adj.过多的，过剩的，多余的 | |
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42
sockets
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| n.套接字，使应用程序能够读写与收发通讯协定(protocol)与资料的程序( Socket的名词复数 )；孔( socket的名词复数 )；（电器上的）插口；托座；凹穴 | |
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43
suffocate
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| vt.使窒息，使缺氧，阻碍；vi.窒息，窒息而亡，阻碍发展 | |
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antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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remarkably
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| ad.不同寻常地，相当地 | |
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inscription
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| n.（尤指石块上的）刻印文字，铭文，碑文 | |
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47
aggregate
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| adj.总计的，集合的；n.总数；v.合计；集合 | |
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48
culls
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| n.挑选，剔除( cull的名词复数 )v.挑选，剔除( cull的第三人称单数 ) | |
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49
retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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50
alluring
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| adj.吸引人的，迷人的 | |
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51
drawn
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| v.拖，拉，拔出；adj.憔悴的，紧张的 | |
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52
hardy
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| adj.勇敢的，果断的，吃苦的；耐寒的 | |
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53
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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54
mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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55
piecemeal
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| adj.零碎的；n.片，块；adv.逐渐地；v.弄成碎块 | |
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56
yoke
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| n.轭；支配；v.给...上轭，连接，使成配偶 | |
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57
gallant
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| adj.英勇的，豪侠的；(向女人)献殷勤的 | |
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58
tugged
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| v.用力拉，使劲拉，猛扯( tug的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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arid
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| adj.干旱的；(土地)贫瘠的 | |
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specimen
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| n.样本，标本 | |
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sprawling
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| adj.蔓生的，不规则地伸展的v.伸开四肢坐[躺]( sprawl的现在分词 )；蔓延；杂乱无序地拓展；四肢伸展坐着（或躺着） | |
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62
ridges
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| n.脊( ridge的名词复数 )；山脊；脊状突起；大气层的)高压脊 | |
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63
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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64
comely
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| adj.漂亮的，合宜的 | |
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effulgent
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| adj.光辉的；灿烂的 | |
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66
misty
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| adj.雾蒙蒙的，有雾的 | |
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67
horrified
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| a.(表现出)恐惧的 | |
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68
rejuvenated
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| 更生的 | |
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69
starry
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| adj.星光照耀的, 闪亮的 | |
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70
plight
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| n.困境，境况，誓约，艰难；vt.宣誓，保证，约定 | |
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71
coastal
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| adj.海岸的，沿海的，沿岸的 | |
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72
redeemed
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| adj. 可赎回的，可救赎的 动词redeem的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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phantom
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| n.幻影，虚位，幽灵；adj.错觉的，幻影的，幽灵的 | |
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74
enchantment
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| n.迷惑，妖术，魅力 | |
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scent
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| n.气味，香味，香水，线索，嗅觉；v.嗅，发觉 | |
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onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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potency
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| n. 效力，潜能 | |
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78
withdrawal
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| n.取回，提款；撤退，撤军；收回，撤销 | |
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79
moss
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| n.苔，藓，地衣 | |
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80
petrified
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| adj.惊呆的；目瞪口呆的v.使吓呆，使惊呆；变僵硬；使石化(petrify的过去式和过去分词) | |
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81
capabilities
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| n.能力( capability的名词复数 )；可能；容量；[复数]潜在能力 | |
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82
cannon
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| n.大炮，火炮；飞机上的机关炮 | |
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83
quell
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| v.压制，平息，减轻 | |
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84
flattening
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| n. 修平 动词flatten的现在分词 | |
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