Chapter XIX The Mood of a Maid
‘Do you know what it is to seek oceans, and to find puddles, to long for whirlwinds, and have to do the best you can with the bellows? That’s my case.’
Bartie had gone up to Coolooli for the afternoon. Old Mr. Stevenson had taken a great fancy to the boy, and prophesied that he had the making of a fine squatter in him.
Stevenson had ridden in to the selection on his way from Wilgandra. It was not often he passed the neat new gate in these days without turning in. He always felt a pleasant glow of conscious virtue, as his eyes marked all the improvements that had so suddenly sprung up.
‘Me boy’s pleasing me,’ he would mutter. ‘It wasn’t much to ask.’
He told the surprised Cameron that it was his fad to leave none of his property unimproved, and that he was merely making the trial on this particular selection, to see what might be done with a small holding. Cameron was rather relieved than otherwise that he no longer owned the place; the money he had borrowed on it at different times was almost equal to the sum he had paid for it at first. With such a landlord it was a much less responsible thing to be merely a tenant, especially as Stevenson, since he had foreclosed, would accept no rent, professing that he was getting the place ready for some one who could not take possession for a year or two, and that it was a convenience to him for Cameron to stay on the place and keep it in order. The long-established character of the man as hard and close kept any suspicion from Cameron that he was being helped out of kindness.
The old man had come in this afternoon to carry Bartie up to Coolooli with him, to show him the new invention he was about to try for the destruction of rabbits. Bart rushed off to get his horse ready while Stevenson stayed talking of the war and his son to Mrs. Cameron. It was quite a surprise to her when she learned much later that the old man had five other sons. This one at the front was the only one he ever spoke about.
He liked talking to this practical, sensible mother of the family. He felt amazed that such a shiftless fellow as Cameron should own such a treasure, and he felt, as he looked at her, that the salvation of the family would have been assured after her arrival, even if he himself had not lent a hand. With Hermie his manner was unconsciously somewhat aggressive, and she shrank from the rugged-faced old man who looked at her so sharply from under his bushy eyebrows. He saw her one day as he passed her in the verandah, reading a book fresh from London. Mrs. Cameron saw to it that the poor girl had time now for such rest and recreation.
‘Can you make soap and candles?’ he said, stopping suddenly in front of her.
It was not likely such arts had been learned on Dunks’ selection.
‘No,’ said Hermie. ‘At least, we did try once with the fat to make soap, but it went wrong.’
‘How would you instruct your men to corn beef or make mutton hams?’
Hermie looked at him distressed.
‘I have never done any,’ she said.
‘Humph!’ he growled, and went to untie his horse, muttering, ‘A pretty wife, a pretty wife!’ to himself.
This particular afternoon Bart went off in high spirits, Challis watching him wistfully from the verandah.
Hermie was—oh, who knew where Hermie was? Wandering up and down among the roses perhaps, her eyes soft with tears—Challis had found her like that two or three times—or reading poetry in some quiet corner in the paddocks, or writing it in the secret solitude of her bedroom, or on Tramby’s back riding, riding with dreamy eyes down the road to the sunset. Wherever she was, she did not want Challis.
Mrs. Cameron was with her husband. Up and down the path they walked, his arm round her waist, her hand in his, talking, talking a little of the future, not at all of the quivering past, mostly of the tender all-sufficing present. Challis, who had had such sweet monopoly of her mother for so long, missed it exceedingly now, while readily acquiescing that the turn for the others had come. She looked from the verandah with yearning eyes. It seemed months instead of weeks since she had poured all her hopes and imaginings and longings and queer little fancies into that ever-ready ear.
Roly? Roly was killing his Boers down in the paddock, or wheeling heavy loads of earth to make kopjes in the bush. He would tell her to ‘clear out of the way of lyddite shells,’ if she sought him out.
Floss? Floss, who hated a needle, was sitting on the grass making, with incredible labour, a pincushion for the mother she had begun to love with an almost fierce affection. Challis would have liked to go and help her, but the child, if she pricked her fingers till they were empty of blood, would have no stitch set in it that was not her own. Furthermore, all the dreams on the Utopia were dispersed. Challis had never buttoned one of the little girl’s garments, never tied a sash, never brushed out a curl. The small woman had dressed herself independently ever since she was three, and indignantly scorned all help; she hated sashes—her straight light hair she raked herself. And though she accepted in an offhand fashion the toys Challis had chosen with such love and interest, she kept up an inexplicably warlike attitude towards her, and deprecated her on every possible occasion. Her hands—‘Pooh! Well, I would be ashamed to have hands that colour! S’pose you never take your gloves off?’ ‘Frightened to walk in the bush ’cause of snakes! Well, some girls are ninnies!’ ‘Never been-on a horse—’fraid to get on Tramby! Why, she—Floss—had galloped all over on Tramby without a saddle when she was only four!’
Challis, sensitively aware of her own want of courage to explore and grow familiar with these bush things, got into the habit of shrinking away when Floss came on the scene.
There seemed no niche left for her in this home she had looked forward to; that was what it was. The place, rightly hers, had filled up entirely during her long absence.
No one understood her, or tried to. They took it for granted that her genius and her life abroad had lifted her to a higher plane than the one on which they themselves lived. It might be very cultivated and beautiful up there, but they were not familiar with it, and therefore did not take any interest in it.
The girl tried hard to get on to their plane, and be interested in their things; but they knew she was trying hard, and it merely irritated them. Let her stay where she belonged.
It was so lonely, too—so very lonely. Used to the pleasant uproar and friendliness and excitement of cities, this little clearing in the great silent bush oppressed her intolerably after a week or two.
She had been a little ill before leaving Sydney. The doctors had said her nervous system was completely run down—a shocking thing in a child! They advised complete rest for several months, and expressed their opinion that the quiet bush life at Wilgandra and roughing it with children, who would take her out of herself, would be the best possible thing for her, and the triumphal career could be resumed later on.
So there were to be no concerts yet, no happy strivings to interpret Chopin’s varying moods to a breathless audience, to reach up with Mendelssohn to his pleasant sunlit heights, to go down with Wagner to strange depths that stirred her soul. She was to practise very little, to appear in public not at all. The papers expressed their regret at her illness, and said a kind thing or two. After that her name had no mention in them.
One paragraph she had read had touched her to the quick. Some interviewer who had been to see her in Sydney wrote in his paper, ‘Thank Heaven, she is not pretty! Her chances are hereby much greater.’
Poor little Fifteen! Her pillow was wet that night. She felt she had much rather he had said, ‘She has no genius, but she is very pretty.’ She longed for Hermie’s shining wavy hair, for the sweet blue of her eyes, the pink that pulsed about her cheeks. Who cared if you could interpret the waves and storms of Lizst’s rhapsodies, and let the keen little rifts of melody in between the thunder until the almost intolerable sweetness made the heart ache? Who cared that Leschetizky himself had taught you and had tears in his eyes once, when you had played to him the wind in the trees just as he himself heard it? What did all these things matter? Every one went home from your concerts and forgot all about you. Oh, surely it were better to be so exquisitely pretty that all who saw you loved you on the spot!
She looked at herself again and again in the glass that night. Until that wounding paragraph, she had never given one thought to her looks; the sensitive small face, the grey eyes drenched with this new tragedy, the fair straight hair falling over her shoulders—not pretty, not pretty, and all the world knew it now!
She drifted in from the verandah to the living-room, where the piano stood open as Hermie had left it, when, imagining Challis out of hearing an hour or two ago, she had sat down to it for a few minutes. But the cheap tinkling stuff that comprised poor Hermie’s repertoire—the jingling waltzes, the pretty-pretty compositions of Gustave Lange and Brindley Richards, ‘Edelweiss’ and ‘Longing,’ ‘Warblings at Eve,’ and such—they set her ear horribly on edge, though she would rather have died than have said so. It were less torture to hear Flossie thumping conscientiously away at ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland’ and ‘We’re a’ Noddin’.’
The very piano was a heartache; it was seven years since it had been tuned, and despite the careful dusting of Miss Browne, the silverfish led a gay existence in its interior, and ate all the softness and depth from the notes.
But this afternoon the girl, with that vague misery tugging at her heart, was driven to it; nothing else could ease her. She put her foot down on the soft pedal, to keep the discordant jangle away, and avoiding as much as she could the B that was flat, and the D that was dumb, and the F sharp that Roly had torn off bodily, she worked off the gloom that oppressed her with Beethoven and Bach.
Roly came in. He was arming himself for a new attack on Ladysmith; he had the kitchen poker and the stove-brush, the tin-opener, a knife from a broken plough, a genuine boomerang, the corkscrew, the gravy-strainer, and the carving-knife, disposed about his person, and he came into the living-room, his eye roving about in search of fresh implements of warfare. Nothing seemed to appeal to him, however, and he was going out again discontentedly when he noticed his new sister had dropped her hands from the keyboard, and was resting her forehead there instead.
He approached her with some awe.
‘Can you play with your head too?’ he asked; then he noticed there were tears running down her cheeks. ‘Don’t cry,’ he said; ‘I’ll run out and ask mother to let you off. Did she say you’d got to practise an hour? Oh, I’ll soon get her to let you off!’
Challis smiled faintly through her tears.
‘It’s all right,’ she said; ‘don’t disturb mother. No one told me to practise.’
‘Well, you are a muggins!’ said the uncouth bushikin. ‘Catch me setting myself a copy or a sum! Why don’t you go out and play?’
Challis let a new tear fall.
‘I don’t know how to play at anything,’ she said. ‘I never had any one to play with.’
Roly’s breast swelled with magnanimity.
‘Look here,’ he said, ‘you can be Cronje if you like. Here, you can have these two for your weapons.’ He handed her the stove-brush and the corkscrew. ‘Come on down here, I’ll soon show you how to do it.’
Challis shook her head.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m fifteen; it’s too late to learn now. I’ll just have to go on playing and playing at concerts. And who cares when you’re playing your very best, and have practised one composition six hours a day? Who cares?’ She looked at him miserably.
‘Look here, Chall,’ he said, a most brotherly, kindly tone in his voice, ‘it’s only because you play such fat-headed things, that’s why they don’t care. I can’t listen to them myself. Often when I’ve been digging my garden outside the window, and you’ve started to play, I’ve just had to go away. If you’d learn some nice-sounding pieces now, instead of things like Flossie’s scales, only worse! There’s Peter Small’s sister, down in W’gandra, you ought to hear her play; she can play “Soldiers of the Queen,” and “Sons of the Empire,” and “Absent-Minded Beggar,” and “Girl He Left Behind Him,” and all those things, and she jumps her hands about, and runs up and down, and crosses them just as much as you do. If you like, I’ll ask Peter to get her to lend you them; I’m friends with Peter just now.’
Challis smiled and dried her tears.
‘I mightn’t be able to play them, Roly,’ she said; ‘so I don’t think I’ll trouble you to ask.’
‘Oh,’ said Roly encouragingly, ‘you’d soon pick them up. You could watch her a few times, and notice how she does them. But I’ll have to be going now, Challis, if you don’t want me. I’ll be down in the bush at the back, if you want to come and have a try to play. Don’t let on to Brownie that I’ve collared this.’ He pointed to the gravy-strainer that adorned his breast. I’ll bring it back all right.’
Left alone once more, Challis wandered about the little house. Miss Browne’s door was half open, to let in the evening breeze. Miss Browne herself, her day’s work finished, was sitting at the table writing a multitude of letters with a happy flush on her cheeks.
Challis looked on wistfully.
‘Would you mind if I came in and sat with you?’ she said.
Miss Browne dropped her pen and jumped up to welcome her.
‘My dear, my love, why, you know you may; most pleased, most delighted, whenever you like—honoured, most delighted.’
Challis stepped into the little room.