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Title: Boomerang (1932)
Author: Helen Simpson
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TO WINIFRED My dear, I would dedicate this book to you, if dedications any longer meant anything, and if I were not, with the rest of us in our hurry, shy and clumsy at making a gesture. I had better stand aside, I think, and let one of your Elizabethans do the trick for me as it should be done. Reginald Scot is speaking: "I do not present this unto you because it is meet for you; but for that you are meet for it (I meane) to judge upon it, to defend it. I hope you will read it, or at the least, lay it up in your study with your other books, among which, and this is sure, there is none dedicated to any with more good will. "Your sincere loving friend--" H. S. Queen Anne Street, London.
CONTENTS: Foreword Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17
Of the various incidents related in this book, some of the more improbable are true; for example, the impersonation of "Martina Fields" in a remote continent, and the visit of a woman to the Australian trenches on the Somme. I say this, not to forestall criticism of my invention, but as a pensive commentary on the difficulty imagination has to keep level when truth is allowed to set the pace.
The characters throughout are either imaginary or dead. In no case have real names been used, except that of the King of France who lost his throne in 1830; as for my Governor-General, like my Premier, Cardinal, and Lord Mayor, he is pure fantasy, having no original among the distinguished gentlemen who have held that office in reality.
The chapter headings throughout are taken from Sir Thomas Browne.
H. S.
But remembering the early civility they brought upon these countreys, and forgetting long passed mischiefs; we mercifully preserve their bones.
--Religio Medici.
Life can afford extravagance, books cannot; for this reason nobody will dream of believing in my two grandfathers. They are too true to be good--good fiction, at any rate; if I try to give some kind of picture of them, it is because they frame between them a vision of a golden age, which could only have existed in brand-new countries, among brand-new circumstances and laws. It was not a golden age for everybody, wives or servants for instance, but for these two it was; they were, to use a word which is almost dead, characters.
I am sorry to think what would happen to these two old gentlemen if they had the misfortune to live now; it would be something legal, that is certain, falling heavily to crush their magnificent egotism and eccentricity. Their wives, who in the 'seventies put up with them with the uncomprehending patience accorded by Insurance Companies to Acts of God, would nowadays divorce them. Servants would bring, and win, actions against them for assault. As for their families, these would scatter immediately after the first row or two, and go forth to earn their livings with all the horrid freedom that the post-war period accords. In an age of standardisation these old crusted, crusty gentlemen, mellow even in their rages as the Madeira which they sent for a roll round the Horn before bottling, would have the deuce of a time.
Doctors, to begin with, who in the last half century have swelled up into demi-gods, would be the first to interfere. They would view the couple, with their picturesquely flushed faces, their sudden wraths after meals, as mere examples of treacherous glands, and hardening arteries. (Character is a word which has died from the doctors' vocabulary too.) They would accept five-guinea fees to persuade the old gentlemen that what they needed was calm; and there would be a great recommending of suitable institutions--"quite in the country, you know, cooking not bad, and just supervision, nothing irksome." When the doctors had done, the lawyers would take their turn. Death duties, they would tell their victims, could best be avoided by making over the estate during lifetime to a reliable son. Relatives would then appear, with hints, backed by statistics, concerning vegetarian diet, and the undesirability of port by the pint twice a day. And at last, having shorn the bewildered unfortunates, for their own good, of home, money, wine and liberty, the twentieth century would turn the key on them with a sigh of genuine relief.
There was none of this in the colonies of last century, which was, for the tyrants, the very grandest imaginable time. There were doctors, true, and lawyers, but they were kept in their place, and the tyrants used them. Land was for the asking. Convicts were done with, to everybody's relief--the last batch reached Sydney in 1840; but there was labour to be had, labour which, like the doctors and lawyers, knew its place, and took its wage with a finger to the forelock. There were English immigrants who came after gold, and remained to use spade and shears. There were Chinese in numbers, who came, as they explained by an interpreter to astonished immigration officers, to earn prouder lacquered coffins in this rich new land than their own exhausted paddy-fields could yield them. (The price of the coffin once safe in a canvas bag, they broke their term of service and returned to China assured of respect.) To deal with the land and the labour, a great many laws were made, and printed, and forgotten on shelves; while on the land existed superbly a number of men and women who were laws to themselves; characters, obeyed as such, loved, feared, and occasionally murdered as such. And here we come upon those prime old personages, ripe and shocking and satisfying as good Stilton cheese, the despair of their families and neighbours, and worth the lot put together; Great-grandfather Boissy, and his son, Gustave-Félicité.
I may say at once that I never knew either.
All places, all Aires, make unto me one country; I have been ship wrackt, yet am not an enemy with the sea or winds.
--Religio Medici.
I
The first unbelievable thing about Grandfather Boissy is that he was born over a century and a quarter ago, in one of those little island colonies which the French and English were accustomed to snap up in passing during the eighteenth century. Great-grandfather, a ne'er-do-weel of family--Boissy de Mortemar was the full name--was sent there for his country's good in 1789, just before the French troubles began, and there remained and was forgotten, very conveniently for him, by his country's successive masters. It must not be thought that this exile, though imposed with a view to relieving a certain irritation which his presence set up in Parisian society, was attended with any humiliation such as the average deportee was obliged to endure. No; my great-grandfather, Auguste-Anne, went off to Santisimo Corazon in style, with a brevet of Lieutenant-Governor in his pocket, to be the representative of his king; my uncle has this brevet yet, with its seals, and its scrolly lawyer's writing, and the brave beginning "Il est ordonné," and at the bottom a fine flourishing signature, "Louis," the L of it three inches tall.
In Paris, Auguste-Anne had, I gather, been a nuisance. In Corazon, freed of relations, with no means ready-made of frittering money, and a climate which after a year or two either calmed or killed the individual submitted to it, he became a very respectable governor. He enjoyed being God, and had a fair conception of how the part should be played. He had a taste for splendour, as had the blacks he ruled. He encouraged their religion, which had withdrawn into the shadows as persecuted faiths will, so that witch doctors throve; even, they got up a procession or two after the fashion of those held at Church festivals, to the great scandal of the official priesthood. In ordinary times these latter would have protested to France, and there would have been a reprimand, and eventually a new Governor with a narrower mind; but by now the year was 1794, priests were disapproved in Paris, and it was felt, after the news of the massacre of Thermidor, that it would be tactless to invite the attention of Robespierre and his colleagues to a religious dispute in a distant island. The clergy did indeed send off some form of protest to the Pope, who replied absent-mindedly with an illuminated blessing, and an indulgence of thirty days for whosoever should recite, fasting, a prayer for the conversion of the heathen. After this their reverences gave it up, and retired with dignity from all competition in processions, wherein, as they had the wit to realize, they were hopelessly outclassed.
Meanwhile Auguste-Anne and his blacks went their scandalous and vivid way, working, but no more than was necessary, and breaking off into refreshing orgies of religion from time to time. The governor's religion, true, was that of Dr. Pangloss rather than of his baptism, but it included dancing and a certain show of physical prowess, and was perfectly understood by the governed. These, indeed, so far sympathised as to lend him occasionally their own mysterious drummers, though not the drums--sacred these, and strung with human hide; had they been borrowed and trifled with odd things might have happened. But the drummers had no objection to showing their skill, and condescended to rub knuckles on the garrison kettles, which thereupon spelt out the strangest aphrodisiac rhythms, unmilitary though commanding. Great-grandfather Boissy was probably the first European to tangle his feet in these rhythms, the germ of jazz, which fell upon barren ground, and bore no fruit for another century. It delights me to think of his two fiddlers and his solitary piper drawling out the artless melodies of old France--Bouton de Rose, Tendre Musette, Dans ce Bocage--with this primal wickedness thudding away underneath.
II
Such was his life on the island, while his impeccable relatives in Paris were scurrying this way and that like rats when a haystack burns. With two frontiers to defend, and a new philosophy to impose upon a sceptical hostile Europe, the Republic One and Indivisible had no thought to spare for Corazon. News came, blown in with stray ships, and was discussed, but without much interest. France was too far away. Then, somewhere about December 1794, came a warship flying the tricolour, from which landed two officers in full regalia with scarves of the three colours, to enquire of the governor why the devil the sacred three did not wave above the little mud fortress which guarded the port. They required an immediate lowering of the detested white flag, together with proofs of citizenship and loyalty from Auguste-Anne. The latter, who happily lacked the kind of principle which obliges a man to strike attitudes, had the flag down at once, and put up a makeshift affair of red, white and blue, made by the garrison's wives out of old petticoats. As for the proofs of citizenship and loyalty, these he provided until the officers were totally exhausted, and unable to deal with a girl or a glass more. He then had them conveyed aboard their vessel by polite negroes, with a note to say that he believed there were English ships in the offing; which hint, when they had recovered sufficiently to read it, they took, and made off under all sail.
When they had gone Auguste-Anne had the tricolour flag hauled down and stowed in a locker for future use. The island dreamed on under the white and gold as before.
A few months later an English sloop appeared, and remained in the harbour a week. At the end of this time another flag, red and white crosses on a blue ground, was stowed in the same locker, and another ship's company went off with aching heads to sea. It was the captain's hope to obtain at least a step in rank by reporting this new acquisition to the territory of George III, and he drew up an impressive report, dwelling on the dangerous nature of the exploit, and the stubborn resistance of the islanders. (More than one of the Governor's ladies had taken fright at his ginger whiskers, which were looked on by the unsophisticated creatures as lusus naturae.) But the Admiralty of those days was ancestor to the Admiralty of these. The king was having a fit when the tidings arrived, and so the report was initialled and docketed, and taken down into the bowels of the earth to be filed; that is to say, it was forgotten with all possible completeness, and the unlucky author remained a post-captain till death.
The years went on. Somewhere about the time when Napoleon was striking like forked lightning through Italy, a deputation waited on Auguste-Anne. He came from his bed to meet it in a peacock-coloured dressing-gown, and learned that it wished him to be king. Now that King Louis was dead, said the spokesman, nobody knew for certain whom the island belonged to. There were the Republicans, who sounded ferocious, and the English, who had run about after a little ball in full mid-day sun, and were regarded by the islanders as no better than lunatics. Remained Auguste-Anne; and the deputation, which included--privately glaring, but publicly all balm--the Bishop, and the most renowned of the witch-doctors, came to suggest that it was his duty to clear up the situation by accepting the crown. The whites harangued him, and drew examples from antiquity; the blacks wept and addressed him, not without a percentage of truth, as the father of their children. Seeing both parties so much in earnest, Auguste-Anne displayed no false modesty, but agreed then and there, all dressing-gowned as he was, to rule them. They thanked him without surprise and retired backwards to compose public demonstrations of rejoicing after their several manners. The blacks got up their inevitable procession, which was rained on, to the secret joy of the Bishop, whose Te Deum with augmented choir, and the now Royal piper playing the serpent, was a triumph of comfort and good producing.
Auguste-Anne was present, needless to say, while the canons and choirs felicitated God on having acquired him as vicegerent, sitting close to the altar and looking impressive in a blackguardly way. Later, when the Bishop, fired by the success of his performance, worked up to a coronation service, he submitted to the various ceremonies with dignity, and was respectful to such relics as the tibia of St. Athanasius and the ossa innominata of St. Stipendius, taken for the occasion from a magnificent charnel-house of solid silver. When it was over, the King, though tired, walked in procession under a canopy to a sort of natural grassy amphitheatre near the bay, and went through the whole thing again, according to the rather more ancient and much more disreputable rites of the blacks. The Bishop, though piqued, feigned not to notice this deliberate encouragement given to Paganism; remembering the result of his application to the Pope, and the distance of Corazon from any authority, he retired with a judicious migraine, and thus avoided taking any scandal. Happily, he recovered in time for the Palace dinner that evening, and did it full justice, which is more than can be said for the chief Witch-doctor, who lay on the shore all night in a sweat of blood, troubled by the resentful ghosts of sacrificed virgins.
III
When these civil and religious sprees were over, life went on as before; that is to say, the people supplied themselves at Nature's expense with food, and spent the rest of their time with women, or composing liquid symphonies upon a delectable ground-bass of rum. Such was the routine of blacks and whites alike, and Auguste-Anne was the last person to interfere with it. He left matters alone; it was his genius, the one thing he could do really well. Years had taught him that in an island such as Corazon, time and climate do all the ruling needed; glory, by which is usually meant wholesale killing, he left to the tornadoes which whirled through the gulf of Mexico every six or seven years. The anticipation of these disasters, and the rebuilding of life after they had occurred, were the island's artless substitutes for the thrills of civilised warfare, with this important difference, that the heads of the State and the poorest plodding conscript stood in exactly the same danger while the elements raged.
It was after one such tornado, which had blown in the Palace door as by a charge of gunpowder, flattening a couple of domestics, and cutting Auguste-Anne himself about the head with flying splinters, that the second deputation arrived. Auguste-Anne, piratical in bandages, received them and enquired their business; which was, put briefly, to get him married. They said that what with tornadoes and time they might lose him now any day. (Auguste-Anne started at this plain speaking, but the fact remained, he was forty-three and the climate was not tolerant to middle-age.) They knew, they said hastily, that so far there had been no diminishing of his remarkable physical powers, which had become a legend already, handed down in story from mothers to daughters when these attained suitable age; but all the same--
Then, as before, the whites harangued, and the blacks wept. "But where the devil," enquired Auguste-Anne, "am I to look for a wife in this bitch of an island?"
The deputation had an answer to this, having thought the whole situation out with care, amid the mourning and labour of a tornado's aftermath. It would not do, they agreed, to take a wife from the island. Women could not stand splendour; they had no heads for it. Lift up one island woman, and her first idea would be to trample the other island women, and these would rebel, and stir up their husbands, and there would be trouble in no time. (Witness that good-for-nothing daughter of old Tascher de Lapagerie, cocked up on a throne as Empress of the French, making her husband ridiculous with her extravagance and her bad taste in lovers.) Nor would it do, pursued the deputation, to return to France in search of a wife; nothing but parvenues now in France, none of the good old thin blood left, thin noses, thin notions; only a lot of dukes called after battles, and duchesses red-handed from the maternal wash-tub. America was out of the question, as was Canada, and the wilder republics of the south. The only place left where a personage like Auguste-Anne, last of a line of graceful existers, royalist and rich, might best look for a consort, was England. England swarmed with exiled ladies, poor but suitable, bending over embroidery, teaching deportment; even--these too--busied over wash-tubs. (But a wash-tub from which one has risen, and a wash-tub to which, after selling the last jewel, one descends, are two very different things.) The deputation's advice, then, was this: that Auguste-Anne should set sail in the next ship that touched at the little harbour, leaving his people to tidy up the island against his return; that he should take his time in England, look about him, choose, unhurried, some young creature who might enjoy the thought of processions and progeny, and bring her back to reign. Finances, they explained, would hardly run to a second crown; but there was always the Virgin's, which she only wore on feast-days, and could well spare the loan of now and then.
In fact, they had the whole plan neatly cut and dried.
As usual, Auguste-Anne did not keep them waiting, but assented at once, and dismissed them to such rejoicings as the devastation and threatening famine of the land allowed.
Saltimbancoes, Quacksalvers, and Charlatans...whose cries cannot conceal their mischief. For their impostures arc full of cruelty, and worse than any other, deluding not only unto pecuniary defraudations, but the irreparable deceit of death.
--Vulgar Errors.
I
Next month, in an opportune trading vessel, he set off to woo.
How he proposed to go about the business on landing at Bristol is unknown, for he was perfectly innocent of the English tongue, save for a few expletives, and had no introductions or passport except his brevet of governor and his still handsome though florid person. Probably this latter would have been the more useful of the two in a country where George the Prince Regent set fashions, but as things fell out he had no need to put it to the test, or to submit himself to the tilted eyebrows of dowagers, with fledglings in charge, ranged round a ballroom in Bath.
For while still in Bristol he met a young female by pure accident; ran her down, as a matter of fact, just as he was driving out for the first time in the immense chariot which had been specially built for him. The girl was small, and fair, and of no pretensions. Her nose was snub, not the aristocratic feature he had come to seek, but it had for the hawk--but purplish--beaked Auguste-Anne the violent attraction exercised by opposites.
She was hardly hurt at all, and had fainted more from a sense of propriety than anything else; and when she came to in the vast hotel bedroom to which she had been carried, and perceived herself to be wearing a gentleman's silk nightshirt, she was in half a mind to go off again. The nightshirt, however, had no immoral significance. The chambermaid had robed her in it at the bidding, but not in the presence, of Auguste-Anne. Still, he had come once to the door to see that his protégée was safely bestowed; and the sight of her lying there with her pale hair fanning out over the pillow caused him first a pang and then an exaltation. He swore at himself, a loud inconsequent French oath, but the exaltation persisted; then with a stamp of the foot, and a--"Why not? Sacred name of names!"--descended the stairs and ordered his horses to be put up again. He had decided with a truly royal impulsiveness to seek no further.
It must be remembered that he had had twenty years of sun and dark-favoured women, and this girl was fair, and the month an English November. It had rained since the day he arrived. The best inn was panelled throughout with oak, which absorbed any daylight left over from the narrow streets and high buildings. The best inn offered him twice a day mounds of half-raw meat in lieu of meals. There was an entire absence of any person who could converse in the only civil language. He had enquired if Bristol were a considerable city, and got the truthful reply that it was one of the greatest in England. He had enquired if any other part of England were less subject to rain, and was told no. He had enquired if there were anyone in the whole town who spoke French, and was briefly informed that there was a war on. He went to the carriage makers, and found them ignoramuses, unable to understand how the quarterings on the panels of the chariot should go. They had never heard of his illustrious family, and in their easy British way thought that anything ought to do for a Frenchy, and only one of these Markees at that. They were used to Markees, coming round with such pitiful fine bows to solicit the lowest paid jobs, and had got in the way of despising them. Even that anomaly, a Markee with quantities of money, ought, they considered, to put up with such heraldry as they chose to give him. Auguste-Anne nearly burst a blood vessel before he could get his mullets and leopards and blackamoors' heads in the right places.
All this may explain, at least partly, why Auguste-Anne, having set out upon an errand of State, with money in his pockets and the title of queen to offer, should have contented himself--more than that; should have set his heart upon, clung to, and refused to relinquish the first presentable young thing that happened to fall in his way.
II
Literally, to fall in his way; but as I said, she had hardly a touch from the hoofs. She came to, and blushed at the nightdress alone; then rang for the maid, and demanded to know where she was, and to be taken instantly home to her mother. Auguste-Anne, informed through the housemaid of this request, said with a wave of the hand when he had got the sense of it:
"Bring this mother to her."
And brought the mother was, in the identical chariot which had downed her daughter, and put her pale head in the way of a crown. She was a respectable middle-aged person in a clean cap, who let rooms to the grass-widows of sea-captains, and who somewhere in the Dark Ages had become the genuine, or turf-widow, of a sea-captain herself. It is impossible to guess at what she thought, and what the neighbours thought, when a large gilt chariot, its panels covered with blackamoors' heads, its horses glittering like successful generals, drew up with a prodigious jingling and stamping at her modest door. She was at once told of her daughter's accident, but having been brought up in a more practical and less ladylike way, neglected to swoon. Instead, she got into the vehicle, with a glance which made swift calculation of its cost, reflecting that this upset might turn out to be a bit of luck for the girl after all.
When she saw Auguste-Anne, however, she had something of a shock. Both England and France had grown out of the taste for brocades and bright colours. In civil life young gentlemen's choice for coats had dwindled down to a few sombre greens, black, mulberry, and a brown or two, though they might array themselves rather more picturesquely for any kind of slaughter. But Auguste-Anne, again remember, had not seen Europe for twenty years, and had lived among a people to whom strong colour was as natural and wholesome as strong wine. He wore now, in the year 1804, in Bristol, in November, a coat of bright yellow face-cloth, with a kind of laced stock, and crimson knee-breeches buckled with gold. Add to this a sword and a rather elaborate wig, curled so as to afford him an extra two inches of height; and the excellent mother's diffidence, her first astonished cry--"Love-a-duck, play actors!"--is easily explained.
Auguste-Anne led the fluttered lady to a chair, and by means of his interpreter, an able-bodied seaman who had been discovered in the tap, made known his project. His meaning was at first obscured unintentionally by the seaman, whose knowledge of the language of Racine had been acquired as a prisoner in the hulks of Toulon. At this intermediary's first statement of his principal's requirements the outraged mother rose from her chair, seeming to fluff out to twice her size, like an angry cat.
"Never!" declared the mother. "Tell him never, the wicked rascal, and you should think shame yourself to repeat such words, you nasty wretch, you!"
To which the seaman replied without heat:
"Stow your gab, I never said 'e didn't mean to sleep with 'er honest, did I?"
"Marriage?" said the mother incredulously, staring at Auguste-Anne, who recognised the word and bowed, saying in his own tongue:
"I have the honour, madame, as this person says, to demand mademoiselle your daughter's hand in marriage."
"Well!" said the mother, at this repetition of the word, and looked once more up and down the flaunting figure of her daughter's suitor.
"If," pursued Auguste-Anne smoothly, "as is natural, you should wish to peruse my credentials, I have them here--"
And he took from his bosom the parchment displaying King Louis' brevet, unrolled and let it hang, ribbon and seals and all, before the uncomprehending eyes of the mother.
"What's all this?" the latter enquired of the seaman.
"Licence," replied that worthy readily, "writ out in Greek by 'is Nibs the Archbishop o' Canterbury. Didn't I tell yer he wants to (an intolerable word) the girl honest?"
Stupefied, the mother sat surveying the mysterious parchment, while her thoughts played with a dream of riding about to the end of her days behind four horses, and of having done for ever with lodgers. After a brief period, during which it must be confessed that these and similar considerations received due attention while the possible happiness of her daughter went without more than perfunctory enquiry, she signified her willingness to ratify the arrangement.
But certain safeguards had to be thought of first. If there was one thing which a life among the grass-widows of seafarers had taught her, it was the importance of always having a sum of money down, and as far as possible payment in advance. Written pledges to pay she scorned; she had in her younger, more guileless days acquired quite a collection of these, which it gave her very little satisfaction to recall. She sat with folded hands, the primmest creature, while her mind flickered up and down columns of imaginary figures--price of chariot, gold hilt to sword, menservants in livery, diamond pin; and she had arrived at this conclusion, that the mysterious suitor, whatever he might be worth a year, was good as he stood for five hundred guineas. She therefore named this sum in gold as the price of her consent, adding the stipulation that the marriage should be performed by a clergyman of the church of England.
Somehow or other the seaman managed to get this proposition into a form assimilable by Auguste-Anne, with the unimportant difference that the sum demanded, in the usual way, was increased by passing through the middleman's hands. The seaman's eye had summed up the eccentric being more truly than the mother's could do, so long accustomed to the narrow horizons of lodgers. He had seen nabobs, had the seaman, and if this was not one, though a toad-eating Frenchy, blast his bowels, and so on, with a wealth of physiological detail. He demanded, accordingly, one thousand guineas; and when the Frenchy without turning a hair agreed, and told a servant to hand the purse, could have cursed himself blue for not asking double.
It must have been a curious scene, the three of them round the table in that foggy panelled room. There was the pinched respectable visage of the widow, who sat, telling over the coins with genteelly mittened hands; the tarry-tailed seaman striving to catch her eye with a wink, a plea not to give him away; finally the pantomime presence of Auguste-Anne Boissy de Mortemar, in his canary coat and wig twenty years out of date.
The tally completed--and it may be said at once that the mother never did give the seaman away; but to his blasphemous surprise, all that came to his pocket out of the surplus was two guineas, and those of a suspiciously light weight--the tally completed, it was suggested that Miss should be sent for, and informed of her good fortune. The sailor accordingly, not without protest, was banished; and the mother accepted a glass of wine from her son-to-be, while they waited for the girl to appear.
She came at last, looking timid and frail against the dark panelling, and ran towards her mother at once. There was a quick dialogue, unintelligible to Auguste-Anne, which may have run as follows:
"Oh, mother, whatever's been happening? Have you come to take me away?"
"Sit down, Bella, don't look so agitated. Not feverish, are you? Well, then, sit down."
"But who is that man? What does he want here?"
"That's not a man, child, that's a rich gentleman. Bob to him, do; look how he's bending himself nigh-on double--"
"Oh, the brute, that's him that was in the coach!"
"Well, what of it? He'll make you amends. He's a gentleman every inch--" here the purse in her pocket gave an approving clink--"and I don't want no better for my daughter. Ah, you'll be calling on your poor old mother, my dear, in your own carriage before long."
At this point the girl, turning one horrified glance on the hawk-face which, while it had not forgotten dignity so far as to smirk, was at any rate attempting an agreeable grimace, burst into tears, and subsided to a chair weeping. Over her bent head mother and suitor exchanged comprehending glances, and with a further bow, and a word or two of solace, Auguste-Anne left his heart's choice to a parent's care.
The argument was not soon over. Miss Bella had read quite a number of the fashionable horrid books in which mysterious strangers carried off damsels to castles hung with pictures whose hands dripped blood, whose lofty corridors resounded by night with female screams. To her otherwise untutored mind this dark personage was just such a being, and she had no fancy for screaming in corridors however lofty. She preferred, being a nice, ordinary, unadventurous girl, and a milliner's apprentice, to remain at home making bonnets for the gentry of Bristol, and told her mother so, as firmly as she could for tears. But she was no match for that lady, or for that lady's strict sense of honour, which having accepted payment, insisted upon delivering the goods. Finally to tears she opposed tears, louder, saltier, more abandoned. The daughter weakened, was assailed more closely, and at last yielded; on which the mother, her victory won, pocketed her handkerchief after a brisk final blast, and sent a servant to tell the foreign gentleman that the young lady would see him now.
Though the interview which followed from an English point of view could hardly have been reckoned a success, being in fact nothing but a series of silences linked by sobs, Auguste-Anne was not disturbed by it. Marriages, in his pre-revolution world, were entirely affairs between parents. Red eyes at the betrothal were to him only decent, a proof of sensibility, nothing out of the way. He looked his acquisition up and down, discreetly, not to cause her embarrassment, and putting his gleanings with the more particular information afforded by the housemaid who had undressed her, sat down content, and in good appetite, to the supper he had ordered.
III
The marriage, which took place soon, by licence, must have been an absurd and pathetic ceremony. Bella would have let it go over without fuss, swallowing Auguste-Anne like a pill, in private. Auguste-Anne himself, to whom a marriage service conducted by heretics was about as binding as a thread of cotton, would likewise have preferred to keep it quiet, and have the show on their return to Corazon in a climate better adapted to display.
But the mother was inexorable. Not content with the certainty of ease, she was determined that all Bristol should know of her divorce from the obloquy of furnished rooms, and of her daughter's elevation to a gilded coach. She had visions of lawn sleeves blessing the couple. Was there not, only a dozen miles off, the Bishop of Bath and Wells, and was a Bishop any too good for a man who could hand out a thousand guineas without a blink, like so much copper? A thousand pounds in thy courts is but a day, thought the widow, transposing the psalmist to the tune of Auguste-Anne's pockets, while she urged making a semi-royal spread of it, and asking the Mayor. She even went so far as to broach the idea of the Bishop to her rector, but that humble priest was so aghast at the idea of asking the Bishop to drive a dozen miles, and don his lawn sleeves to join a milliner's apprentice and a person who looked like a pirate, was in fact so sincerely shocked at the notion of requiring the Bishop to do anything but exist, that she gave way, and relinquished her dear ambition. With the Bishop departed hope of the Mayor, and with hope of the Mayor the whole official character of the thing, so that in no time it had come down to a pullulation of captain's wives and millinery companions, and the glory had quite departed. It was the Rector himself who undertook to marry them in the end, and the service at any rate was fully choral.
It must have been a grand sight--though some of the milliners tittered--to see the ruler of Corazon in really full fig, heels, wig, colour, everything slightly higher than ordinary. Even his nose seemed to have a more pronounced cant upwards at the bridge; but this may have been due to the amused contempt with which the whole ceremony filled him, comparing it with what his own witch-doctors and canons could do in the same line. A puffy post-captain on leave borrowed for the occasion from an ex-lodger gave the bride away, so that her mother, who could be perfectly the lady when occasion called or opportunity offered, might ply the smelling salts and be genteelly overcome. One unfortunate though picturesque circumstance was the intrusion of the seaman whose exaggeration had obtained for the widow five hundred pounds over her due, and who had been so smoothly bilked of his rightful commission. This unbidden wedding-guest, having waited till the ceremony was well under way, began, in a voice that in its time had competed with tempests, to deliver his version of the bargain which had resulted in the present ceremony.
He made a most unbecoming uproar, and his neighbours and the vergers, though scandalised, were too much filled with respect for the Lord's house, and also perhaps too completely scared by his appearance, to make effective protest. They remonstrated in whispers, which availed against his bawling about as well as a lady's fan against a hurricane; they looked with disapproval, or else feigned to ignore. The rumpus increased with their efforts until the bridal couple, who had got to the exchange of vows, could hardly hear themselves speak; at which point it occurred to the groom that the noise, which he, accustomed to oddities in religion, had at first supposed to be an integral part of the Church of England service, was in fact an interpolation. Accordingly, not being troubled by any scruples as to the sanctity of the place, he put the ring back in his pocket, and leaving the bride to the clergyman's mercies, advanced towards the disturber drawing his sword; seeing which the disturber fled, vaulting pews, and escaped with a thwack on his backside, which split his breeches and showed a semi-circle of white, as though that part of his anatomy grinned. Having purged the sacred edifice of din, the groom returned at the stately pace to which his heels compelled him, and concluded the business of getting married with the utmost decorum.
IV
A ship for the West Indies sailed that night on the tide, and they went aboard her from the church. There was a good deal of the kind of British merriment which seeks to veil with jocosity the deadly possibilities of every marriage. There was a good deal of assorted liquor of the very best quality; rum for the sailors, and champagne for the puffy post-captain, and for the ladies a little mild punch with ratafia biscuits. After justice had been done to these, and all the refined jokes had been made--the vulgar ones are inexhaustible, but were confined to the forecastle--the captain, being anxious for his tide, cleared away the guests with nautical finality. There were tears, and on the part of the post-captain, dragged from his liquor untimely, a protest or two; but he was prevailed on, and departed at last, weeping, between a couple of seamen. The widow was, as was right, the last to go. She was in fact anxious to be quit of her daughter, whose behaviour during the fortnight of the betrothal had shown a complete lack of gratitude to fate; but the girl clung, down in the dark and narrow cabin, and it was only decent to remain, and pat her shoulder and prophesy, and take every means to console and reassure. Thus the widow, though glad to leave, was last along the gangway. She had, as has been said, a strong sense of right, and never failed to pay the tribute of a gesture to virtue. Accordingly, she remained on the wharf in a fine mizzling rain until the ship was warped out and began to slide down-channel. Then, full of elation, charged with the enviable task of selling the gilt chariot and keeping what she could get for it, happy in the consciousness of a thousand gold guineas safe hidden behind the chimney, she made her way up and down the curling streets of Bristol, home.
Her conviction that she need never more let lodgings, and that she would ride behind four horses was proved true, for two mornings later she was found by her new servant lying before the fireplace, from which some bricks had been removed. She had been dead since midnight, and there was an ugly knife, of the kind that seamen carry, standing up out of her breast.
V
Corazon, not having been warned of their majesties' arrival, which in any case was far sooner than anyone expected, had no flags out as the ship crept in on a light dawn wind to Seven Wounds Bay. The flagstaff was bare--it may be told here, unofficially, that the military had gone off duty the day after their ruler's departure, and the flags of three political systems had shared the same sea-chest for months. The wreckage of wattle and daub houses was still to be seen everywhere, and the master's eye, looking towards the summit of the cathedral tower, observed that the gilded Virgin who formed the wind-vane no longer caught the sun. His telescope sought her, for she was one of the chief landmarks, and it was customary to take a bearing by her at a certain point in the narrow entry to the port. But she had gone, leaving only her pedestal.
This was the first news that greeted Auguste-Anne when he came on deck in the most gorgeous dressing-gown of all his repertoire. He was not much upset by it; he was seldom ruffled by any event which did not intimately affect his own comfort, and the Virgin, though celebrated and useful to mariners, had never really captured his attention, save when he cursed her for predicting the devastating nor'-west wind. He stood still, watching the morning light grow pink over the town, and for some few uncounted minutes was completely happy; that is to say, he did not know himself to be so. He breathed, and existed, and ignored time, like a god, until a touch on his arm brought him out of the clouds to realise that he had been experiencing a number of outmoded emotions such, for example, as love of home. It was his wife at his elbow.
"Augustus," she began, "my love--"
She persisted in this form of address, which humbled her husband but which he could not prevail on her to drop. She could not pronounce properly the "Monsieur" which to his mind was all that was permissible to a wife, and his couple of surnames prevented her from employing the Bristol idiom "Mister--" followed by the initial letter of the name. Mr. B. de M. would have been altogether too complex.
"Augustus," said she, therefore, "my love, is this really the place?"
He signified that it was. She looked about as the ship drew nearer to the ravaged waterfront with an air of being dutifully willing to be pleased with what she saw: but in her heart she was obliged to confess that it was indeed very different from Bristol. For one thing, there was, although it was barely dawn, more light: and this light, streaming up from behind the mountains, was increasing every instant so that her English eyes could hardly bear it; but they were not so blind but that they could observe the general dilapidation of the town, like a tattered patchwork quilt tossed over a couple of hills. It was not ashamed of its raggedness, did not tuck the broken-down streets away out of sight as was the custom in England. There were gaping roofs everywhere, even a very palatial building had a temporary wig of thatch, and a list to eastwards. A qualm overcame her. "Is that," said she pointing, "our residence?"
Auguste-Anne, casting a careless eye in the direction her finger showed, nodded with no diminution of his calm.
"But," she insisted, "that building is all askew!" Auguste-Anne nodded once more, and vouchsafed a short explanation.
"We have a gale, it does so, pouf! The next gale--pouf--blows it straight again. What matter?"
And he resumed his contemplation of the approaching port.
His wife would have wept, but at the end of a six weeks' voyage in her husband's company she knew better than to weep. Nevertheless she inwardly thought both the residence and its prevailing angle shocking, and had a momentary daughterly pang of resentment against her mother. The pictures that inspired lady had drawn! The visions of splendour she had known how to call up, out of an imagination nourished upon seafarers' tales! As the dutiful but disillusioned wife went below to finish her packing, she had privacy to indulge in a tear or two. But she was married now, and in her inmost heart of a milliner's apprentice and lodging-keeper's daughter, she knew that while without a husband a woman was dross, for a woman armed by marriage against the world there was sometimes hope. And she resumed her packing resigned.
By the time she came on deck again the news of their arrival had swept through the town, in the manner so surprising to those unused to the ways of blacks. The mud fort was dotted with gay uniforms, and as she looked the squat gun poking out from its casement gave a kind of loud bark, and recoiled for an instant out of sight. Down every street, out of every door, window, and other practicable aperture people were swarming, calling to each other, waving bits of bright stuff, assembling on the front to watch the ship berth, and receive her gig when it should come ashore. Auguste-Anne, perceiving these preparations, and mindful of the politeness of princes, turned to go below and array himself. But first he looked at his wife.
She was dressed in her wedding-dress of silk. It was the finest she had, it would have stood alone had it been set on the floor, but it was grey. Her bonnet, self-made, was also grey, though stuffed with pink roses. She looked, no doubt, very charming, and would have made a picture against a background of tender English green; here the background gave her no chance. It was daubed in like a very modern picture, in the strongest primary colours, blue and yellow and blinding white, and against it Madame la Marquise would not do.
"What is this dress?" he asked abruptly in French. "Why do you wear the costume of a nun?"
She swallowed once--after all, it was her wedding finery--before she answered in English:
"It is my best dress, Augustus."
"Have you nothing more suitable? Grey! Come, you see for yourself--"
His hand indicated the startling shore and the harbour now filling with small boats, red-sailed. She understood what he meant, but this was an eventuality she had not foreseen. She had nothing but what, in England, was suitable and in good taste, little pink dresses, white dresses, one grand flounced dress with sprigs; nothing that would accord in the least with this glare. Auguste-Anne shrugged, saying drily:
"We must remedy that," and went below to do his subjects' expectation justice.
Bella remained, looking down with fascinated eyes at the swimmers and rowing boats that now by dozens surrounded the ship. They kept up a continuous yelling, and those in the boats splashed madly with their paddles. This, had she but known, was not occasioned by the wildness of their enthusiasm, but from the need to terrify sharks, which frequented the harbour in schools. She gazed, then averted her eyes with all possible speed. The swimmers were unclad.
"Oh!" thought the unhappy Bella, wondering whether or no she should swoon, "Never, never did I think such things could be!"
And it is possible that in this comprehensive wail she included certain practices of her husband, Auguste-Anne Boissy de Mortemar.
"Well, meddarm," said the captain's voice behind her, "you don't see this sort o' thing much in Bristol."
"No, indeed," she agreed with feeling, and blushing.
No indeed, people did not cast away all restraint, all clothing in Bristol. People did not yell, nor live in pink houses all blown to one side. There were matrons in the boats, grinning and publicly feeding naked babies, while what clothes they wore seemed to serve no decent purpose. No, things were very different in Bristol.
The captain took a few walnuts from his pockets and tossed them down among the swimmers, who dived as they saw them coining, and then caught them accurately between their teeth; caught and cracked with one motion, and ate with one more.
"Look at that," said the captain, "monkeys ain't in it with these coves."
And he laughed heartily, searching his pockets for more nuts.
"I think they are terrible," said Bella, faintly, averting her eyes.
"Well," said the captain, considering, "I don't know. They have human sacrifices, by what I've heard, but not for eating, more in the way of fun. And they get up to a lot of mischief, with spells and such-like. They go mad a lot, too. But I don't know that they're so terrible, taking them all round."
At this point, just as Bella had decided that she could bear no more, Auguste-Anne, dressed for the occasion, came majestically on deck, and the welcomers began to arrive.
VI
First, the Bishop, rowed by six unclad negroes, his processional umbrella fringed with gold held over him by a priest. He was a bishop of the old school, rounded and jolly, who always found plenty of words in season to say to brides; and he had been devoting the past months to getting up a ceremony of uncommon splendour for the coronation, and to thinking out in private, with chuckles, something appropriate for a christening. It was with a conscience at ease and a mind alert with benevolent curiosity that he permitted himself to be hoisted by his negroes up the ship's ladder, into the presence of the island's lord and master. Auguste-Anne, who enjoyed the Bishop and played up to him, sank to one silken knee for his blessing; Bella, completely awed by this tribute, sank to both of hers; and the Bishop let off a good long Latin benediction over their heads, which, owing to the incurable fruitiness of his voice, sounded more like an excerpt from Petronius Arbiter. Then they rose, the bride keeping an eye on her spouse for cues of behaviour, like a parvenu watching a duke's manipulation of forks, and there was an outburst of foreign chatter. She was able to catch a word here and there of it, and understood that Auguste-Anne was introducing her. She had been coached, and should have known what to do when the Bishop thrust out his exquisite little rosy hand towards her; she did know what to do, she remembered perfectly, but at the popishness of it all the Bristol blood in her revolted, and she did not kiss the hand, but shook it; timidly, civilly, and with a curtsy as she had been taught at school.
Auguste-Anne glowered, while the Bishop appeared surprised. Another outburst of rapid French permitted her to guess that she was being apologised for as a heretic. Strangely enough, the Bishop did not seem in the least put out, but taking her hand kindly in his own two, like scented cushions, made her a little speech, from which she gathered that he promised himself great pleasure in taking on his shoulders the responsibility of her instruction in the Faith. She had not French enough to repudiate this, nor strength to withstand any longer her husband's sombre eye; and so she blushed, and looked appealing, and could not help being the prettiest creature the Bishop had ever seen. He said, measuring every word:
"You have a treasure, monsieur. We have lost our Blessed Lady (figuratively, you understand), and we will make of Madame a little golden saint to replace her."
And he chuckled again, and motioned the pair to a share of his umbrella, which already was totally inadequate for one; and they all three stood in state to survey the arrival, in a dug-out canoe hung with skulls, of the chief witch-doctor, his reverence Hele Tombai. This personage needed no help from his rowers to ascend the ship's side; he was up and over it in one bound, bowing and grinning, and finally whirling dizzily on his heels, while in the canoe his assistants waved a mysterious shape on the end of a thong, which gave out sounds like an angry bull. Auguste-Anne said to this power, when he finished his introductory dance, in the pidgin French of the island:
"This woman queen alonga me, you bloody well love her, name of a sacred name of a sacred pig, Tombai!"
Sacred pig was not at all an inappropriate term for the witch-doctor. His calling and station excused a good deal in him; but then the same might have been said, for that matter, both of the Bishop and of Auguste-Anne. This latter, while the Bishop feigned an aside to his chaplain, continued and closed his harangue with the simple words:
"She bring luck all same Yellow Mary" (the black's name for the lost Virgin). "You make tella your people, species of sacred goose, Tombai!"
Sacred goose was not bad either, as a piece of description. The witch-doctor was always cackling warnings, and the hurricanes which came along punctually every few years always bore him out as a prophet of disaster. His reputation rested on these hurricanes. It was supposed that a man whom the deities forewarned of their intentions in one important respect would hardly keep him in the dark about such minor matters as lost goats and sore eyes. But he was not, or perhaps the deities themselves were not, quite so strong on good-luck prophecies, and Auguste-Anne thought it as well in his exordium to offer an immediate and suitable substitute for Yellow Mary departed. This image was the only fragment of the island's official faith that the blacks were able to take to at all. They had been used to revere and say prayers to her, standing there so high, telling the winds which way to blow, bidding with her outstretched sceptre. Mistress of the Winds was their secret sacred name for her, and she came in for a good deal of devotion, mingled, as the blacks love to do, with fear. Auguste-Anne was aware of this, and seized his opportunity to set Bella in her place; she was as unbelievably white and gold, and every hair of her head was most evidently as good for the strongest kind of white magic as the gilded Lady brought from Seville two centuries ago.
The witch-doctor gave Bella an all-over glance as the Bishop had done, but no sentiment, whether of delight, covetousness, or contempt, was betrayed in the glaucous mirrors of his eyes. (They were greyish and opaque, the colour of oysters, but by no means blind.) He looked, then gave a final caper and twirl, and leaped over the ship's side again into his waiting, roaring canoe.
When he was out of reasonable earshot the Bishop began, in a tone of some concern:
"Excellence, my dear friend; I perceive that you appreciate fully the situation which the loss of Our Lady brings upon us. May I congratulate you upon your quick-wittedness in setting up--" he bowed--"an equivalent? The facts are these--"
"Facts?" repeated Auguste-Anne, drily. He knew the turn of the Bishop's mind, which could make a good story out of a mule consuming an over-ripe orange. The everyday glowed in rainbow hues when he set tongue to it. In the pulpit he could lend to Christianity the strangeness, the interest of an Eastern fairy-tale. Therefore Auguste-Anne repeated, without malice, the single word:
"Facts?"
"Aha!" said the Bishop with good-humour, "you do not trust me; well you are right, perhaps. We will let the abbé tell my story."
Thus encouraged the chaplain began.
VII
"Excellence, after the last tornado--you were gone soon after, and may not have observed it--Our Lady was discovered to be growing very stiff in her bearings, by no means so active or so accurate with regard to the wind. She was oiled, every care was paid her by steeplejacks, but with no effect. She creaked. She groaned like a soul in purgatory. Finally, she stuck."
"Stuck, abbé?"
"Stuck, Excellence; at south-east by east. Whether she had been bent by the excessive force of the wind is not known. This was one evening. Next day at dawn she was gone."
"Alas!" said the Bishop with a comfortable sigh.
"Hum!" mused Auguste-Anne, his eyes upon the swarming boats with their freight of monkey-like humans. "Your steeplejacks, were they black men?"
"Certainly," replied the abbé, "they were black men, Excellence. They are accustomed to hurry up and down tall trees in search of fruits and I don't know what else. Certainly our climbers were blacks."
"And have you seen them since?"
"Yes, Excellence, oh indeed, yes. Poor fellows, they were much distressed when coming in the morning they found her gone."
"She had not fallen?"
"There was no sound; no trace. Our Lady weighed some hundredweights, you know. She could hardly have fallen unnoticed. His Lordship, to begin with, must have heard the noise in the palace, which is so very close by--"
"Hum!" said Auguste-Anne again. He had himself been present at parties in the said palace when the sky might have fallen without any one of the guests being in a condition to observe it. He took a few steps this way and that upon the deck, eyed by all; then faced-about abruptly to declare:
"Your steeplejacks have got her."
"Excellence!" exclaimed the Bishop and his chaplain together. "What atrocity, our Blessed Lady in such hands!"
"Permit me. They have taken her away to worship. She will be treated with every respect."
"They will set skulls full of rum before her," moaned the chaplain.
"Force her to witness obscenities," added the Bishop, with a regretful sigh.
"Gentlemen," said Auguste-Anne, "you exaggerate. Our Lady can take care of herself; besides, she has influence--" He pointed upwards; then, seized by a sickening thought: "she was not of real gold?"
"Lead, gilded," replied the chaplain tearfully.
The Bishop and the ruler exchanged a glance which seemed to say "that would have been sacrilege indeed." The Bishop, taking a scented handkerchief from under the lace of his cotta--for the crowd of boats was growing thicker every moment, and the odour of their human freight mounting higher--said to the chaplain in his comfortable voice:
"Remind me, abbé, to curse the miscreants to-morrow morning before my Mass. They must not go unscathed." Then, turning to Bella, to whom the whole scene was a mystery, and who stood looking more adorable than ever in her bewilderment--she was one of those women whose faces an expression of intelligence kills:
"Madame," said the Bishop, bowing as well as his rotundity would allow, "here at last is your state barge coming, with, let us hope, a somewhat less perilous ladder. Will you honour my arm by taking it towards the descent?"
She slipped her white fingers under the Bishop's elbow, and found them caught close to the Bishop's side by muscles of unexpected strength. Together they took the ten steps to the ship's bulwark, Auguste-Anne following contemptuously with the chaplain. The state vessel indeed was there, hung with brocades that looked as though they had been dyed in wine, gilded, carved, its rowers dressed in liveries copied from those which had served poor King Louis upon his ornamental waters. A kind of boatswain with a whip stood in her prow, flailing off the encroaching negro eyes. Another official fixed the steps and came half-way up them to take his new mistress's hand. The Bishop gently urged her. She came to stand upon the broad top stop, lifted up above the boats, for the first time in full view. The crowd yelled, seeing her, and timidly she put a hand to her breast, while the other hand still stretched out and down. She did not know it, but she stood for ten seconds in the very attitude of the lost Virgin, and the quick eyes of the blacks perceived it at once. The yell came down to a duller crooning noise, with a rhythm to it, so that the Bishop, who knew that prayers sound the same in all languages, gave a start. Then she stepped down into the gilt cabin of the barge, and was lost to the worshippers' sight.
What an experience for Bella! The whole old story of Cinderella was being lived by her over again. There she sat, amid hangings of silk, with a Bishop, who for grandeur could have played His Inertia of Bath and Wells off the stage, bending to her lightest whisper; and a husband whom thousands feared; and a whole dark people smitten with wonder at her pale beauty. Her thoughts are not to be known; but it would surprise me to learn that there was nothing in them of regret, no hankering for the bonnets, the sameness, the dear respectability of Bristol, as she set foot that morning in the island's preposterous only town.
VIII
Almost immediately after her arrival things began to happen in Corazon. This in itself was unprecedented; things, caprices of the elements, often happened to the island, but it was against nature for the ordinary lotus-life of the islanders to engender events. Auguste-Anne, having reigned twenty years over docility, found actual problems presenting themselves to his lazy and despotic eye. The blacks, to begin with, were restless. He supposed that they had installed some new gods--they were always getting tired of the old ones, and inventing conquerors for them--and that their irritating drumming in the hills would soon die down. Possibly it was the cathedral statue, he thought, idly listening to the thuds through his netted windows, and they were offering her the kind of treats which in their innocence they supposed a virgin must enjoy. But there was no telling. The witch-doctor, questioned as closely and subtly as the simplicities of pidgin-French would admit, was bland, and civilly ignorant.
No, he knew of no trouble. All were busy, all were contented. There had been no reshuffling of gods.
Then perhaps Tombai could tell them what had become of Yellow Mary? Tombai shrugged so that his necklaces of teeth rattled ominously. Behind the glaucous eyes Auguste-Anne, long attuned to him, perceived a sullenness.
Yellow Mary, answered the witch-doctor, was very holy no doubt, very strong for magic?
It was a question. Auguste-Anne answered, feeling his way through the dark of Tombai's mind, that she was indeed strong. Had she not for two centuries beckoned the winds to the island?
"Ha!" replied Tombai, in a grunt so expressionless that Auguste-Anne knew it concealed something. But what? Was the witch-doctor afraid, or plotting, or shielding the thieves who had stolen Yellow Mary from her tower? Auguste-Anne could not resolve the problem, and in the end had to let his chancellor go. It never occurred to him that the poor ageing man was trying to keep his temper and his face, and pretend that all was well while in his spiritual dominions heresy raged with the fury of the recent hurricane.
But this was the truth, as appeared from the terrified confession of one of the house-servants one evening after his fingers had been held for a minute or two over a live candle. (This was such a very short way to the truth that local morality did not frown on it.) He could speak easy French, having been in the Governor's service many years, and the story came out comprehensibly enough to make Auguste-Anne swear, and take turns about the room.
The blacks were, said Boule de Neige, dissatisfied with Tombai. They thought him a true, but a disagreeable prophet, always faithful to disaster. He predicted cyclones, cyclones came, and there was endless rebuilding and work, to say nothing of personal danger. It seemed as though he had authority only over storms, for his other prophecies about children and crops and live stock were not notably accurate. There had been murmurings for some time. It had occurred to a good many people that they might do well to unfrock Tombai of his magic masks and necklaces, but they found themselves up against the usual difficulty of finding someone to put in his place. Half the population had watched and adored Yellow Mary for years, as presumably half the population of England in Newton's day had seen apples fall, but only one among them all conceived the notion of electing her in Tombai's stead.
Once the idea was grasped, it was acclaimed. Yellow Mary, as everyone with eyes in his head could see, was beckoner to all winds, not the dreaded nor'-wester alone. Her sceptre held magic to make the airs gallop which way she pleased; and it seemed to them that any person who could contrive, with the utmost respect, of course, to keep her sceptre towards the calmer quarters, might put a stop to tornadoes and their laborious consequences for ever.
So the steeplejacks one night ran up the spire and with reverence tried the experiment of roping the figure to one of their desired directions. They did it after much prayer, and with terror at their hearts, realising that the audacious experiment might well provoke a chastening tempest. But nothing happened save a few groans from the straining statue; then they realised with ecstasy that she was theirs, and that if only they could get her down safe from her height they might snap their fingers at old Tombai, and set up as popes for themselves. A nice stroke of irony directing the Bishop's choice, they found themselves summoned to deal with the immobility which themselves had caused. They used this daylight opportunity to reconnoitre, to slacken certain screws, to attach certain pulleys; and by the following morning there was no more trace of the Virgin than if she had had a second assumption, and been drawn up to heaven, points of the compass and all.
Since then, Tombai's offerings had been falling off, and the new worship had been sending the people into unequalled frenzies. Even the old man's drummers had deserted, and sat thumping day and night in the distant grotto where Yellow Mary stood, pointing with her sceptre always south-east by east. And except for a few women, always apt to lag behind where new ideas were concerned, nobody came any more to ask magic advice of Tombai.
Thus Boule de Neige, sucking from time to time his roasted finger.
"Do you know this grotto?" the Bishop asked.
(He was present, and none the worst for two bottles of claret.) Boule de Neige fell to gibbering, from which they gathered that he did know, but that it was as much as his life was worth to tell.
"She must be rescued," the Bishop avowed. "Our Lady in the hands of infidels, never! A new crusade--"
And he began to describe, with delicate gestures, the joys of suffering, of marching, of fighting amid blood and sweat as Our Lady's knights.
"As to that, I don't know," said Auguste-Anne slowly, impervious to eloquence, "I don't know, monseigneur, that we need go to all this trouble. I have done some campaigning, when I was younger, in this scrub of ours; they have only to sink the figure in a swamp, or bury her, and we may hunt till our tails turn blue. No, my advice--with deference, monseigneur--is to leave them in possession."
"It is sacrilege," said the Bishop firmly, for he would have enjoyed organising a crusade, and might even have accompanied it in a hammock between porters on the first day's march as far as the foothills.
"It is infernally bad policy," retorted Auguste-Anne. "(You may go, Boule de Neige.) If we lend importance to this theft, we set these black fellows thinking, 'Ha, we have stolen the goddess of the whites, their power lies in her, we have stolen their power, ha, he!' Then trouble begins," said Auguste-Anne slowly, "that's all that comes of crusades."
The Bishop gave the faintest shrug, and as he imagined turned the subject.
"When is it your wish that Madame should be crowned?"
"You can take a hint, Monseigneur," answered Auguste-Anne, with his saturnine smile. "That is, of course, the answer to these thieving monkeys. Madame is the new goddess in person, and I wish this made clear to the people. She must be dressed like the statue; the sceptre and crown should be easy, and with a few yards of cloth of gold--"
"You refer to her robes for the coronation?"
"What else? Then, seeing her enthroned, messieurs the blacks say among themselves, 'Ha, these whites are more foxy than we thought, they have still the power, the true Yellow Mary comes down from the sky to them, they are still our masters, ha, he!'"
"Excellence," replied the Bishop after a moment's smiling thought, "as a Christian I must approve your detestation of force."
"Ay, do," said Auguste-Anne with his sneer. "Force would have had us all barbecued long ago. Force recoils. Inaction--there's the policy for this island; ruse, laissez-faire. I remind you that the blacks are to the whites in a proportion of a thousand to one, all a great deal better equipped than we are with muscle, force potential. But I do not believe there is a sou's worth of intelligence to set up a rattle in the ten thousand empty cocoanuts they call their brains; and so we shall continue, if we use our wits, to rule."
"You are right, no doubt, my dear Lord," the lazy Bishop answered. Then, with a fat chuckle, lifting his glass, "To our new little golden saint!"
Auguste-Anne glowered, but drank.
IX
The coronation ceremony drew near. Bella, poor little creature, was rapidly losing the stiffness, as of Bristol board, which at first had kept her backbone poker-wise. She had, in the space of a month on the island, become much suppled in her ideas; whether the climate, or the lack of example, or the Bishop's persuasions were responsible, is not known. She still jibbed at being baptised, but the Bishop--who, if he had ridden, would have had good hands for a horse--had got her to the point of tolerating the coronation ceremony, and their catechism hour had turned into a kind of rehearsal for this. The abbé, shyly laughing, they installed as bishop, and Bella would approach his chair with a silver coaster on her small head, genuflect, put her hands between his, and come in pat with her amens. (This word, with its strong Church of England flavour, was the only one of the responses her conscience would permit her to make: the others, a sub-deacon was to voice at her shoulder.)
The Bishop, that connoisseur of ceremony, stood aside during this go and come with the cool eye of a theatrical producer nicely calculating the adjustment of his means--Bella--to his end--the maintenance of white rule. He was jolly, but he was also a strategist, and it cost him little on the whole to let the abbé press the creamy fingers, smooth now after nearly three months neglect of the needle; for on his pupil's right behaviour depended, to put it very bluntly, the Bishop's own skin, with which the blacks would not hesitate to rig their drums in case of a successful revolt. Women, he may have meditated, are all very well, but a skin is essential to the full enjoyment of them. So he held off, and criticised, and was kind in the most fatherly way till her timidity almost vanished, and she stepping about in her absurd coaster-crown as to the manner born. Then the Bishop gave the hint, and Auguste-Anne gave notice, by means of trumpeters in the market square, that there would be a coronation, oyez, oyez, and a procession after it on the following Monday, and that there would be a general amnesty for all prisoners (thus enabling their guards to swell the ranks of the uniformed and add dignity to the affair). The new queen, added the trumpeters, would be proclaimed by the name of Golden Mary.
When this was announced, in French and the native tongue, there was something like a commotion in the market-place; all the dark eyes rolled up to look at the cathedral spire, as if they expected to see the new queen perched on it; and then down scowling. Evidently they did not in the least know what to make of this announcement, although, having seen Bella on the day of arrival, it did not take anyone quite by surprise. Auguste-Anne had kept her pretty close since then and except the palace servants few had set eyes on her. She was flesh and blood, so much they were sure of, but whether this gave her an advantage over her gilded rival remained to be seen. They dispersed chattering, and somehow or other the news came almost as soon as the trumpeters had done with it to the two usurping witch-doctors as these sat outside their grotto, making a very good meal off recent offerings. The message did not come by word of mouth, and since they were alone when it reached them they could give their real opinions play. Said the first steeplejack-pontiff, with a laugh:
"How can this other Mary be the true one? How can a woman be a goddess?"
"Our black women," answered pontiff the second seriously, "are beasts and witless, but even they prophesy now and then, after there has been singing. This white woman is strong magic, we know, for even the greatest, even Sword-Face (Auguste-Anne) himself bends before her, and kisses her hand like a slave."
"It will be a nice thing for us, if She can't hold her own. Back all the rats will go to Tombai, and this"--a gesture included the broken meat and maize and sugar--"will come to an end."
The other, still laughing, rebuked him.
"How is Her"--a nod--"praying-stick set?"
"In the way of the good wind," answered pontiff the second. The first wetted his finger and held it up.
"Do the same, brother. Which side do you feel it blow cold?"
"The side of the good wind," repeated the second, relieved.
They wasted no more words, but nodded at each other in a satisfied kind of way, and buried the superfluous victuals with the carelessness of men who know for certain whence their next meal is coming.
The fact was that a pleasant and persistent trade-wind had blown from exactly that quarter for a month, as was its habit at this time of year. But they had never had leisure to note the habits of winds; it was a branch of blessing which they had been content, in the old days, to leave to Tombai. They presumed that they owed this month of constancy to Yellow Mary's firmly wedged sceptre and, in the confidence engendered by the belief, made a plan--a plan that was more in the nature of a challenge. They brooded and shaped it for days and delivered it full-blown to Auguste-Anne on the very morning of the procession.
It will be remembered that the island's Excellence was himself a patron and encourager of the black rites. He found them interestingly archaic, though far from effete, and had submitted indulgently to certain of the ceremonies which were appropriate to his dignity and his sex. But his stupefaction, his rage at the calm proposition of these two jumped-up witch-doctors, none of Tombai's disciples, but a pair of heretics in imitation necklaces, was unchancy to behold. What they proposed with such calm was nothing less than a trial of strength between the two Marys, with the suggestion--half a threat--that there were a few ceremonies of their own which Golden Mary had better attend, after the Bishop's affair at the cathedral. Their tone, though glazed with the official whine, was confident to insolence.
Sword-Face had a moment's unreasoning impulse to string up the two blackmailers in front of his palace and chance a row; then his own words concerning force recurred to him, and he mastered himself. He did not reply to the challenge, nor even go so far as to indicate the door; he merely laughed, once, and resumed perusal of the papers on his table. The pontiffs, disconcerted, made some attempt at argument, and stood shuffling. He ignored them more completely than if they had been flies. The first, who believed most firmly and therefore was most sure of himself, lifted a hand and said to the disdainful master in ugly bastard French:
"We know who will rule the island, and it is not you, mossié."
On that they departed, the second of them more than a little cast down, for Sword-Face seen close was really alarming; but the other consoled him.
X
The coronation went off well enough while it kept to the cathedral. The canons sang loud, and the Bishop was dignified, and the abbé was devout as though he had never sat dressed as the Bishop in a red shawl to bless Bella with the coaster on her head. But the anxious time came afterwards. She was to have walked, crowned, from the cathedral to the palace, no very great way, and the procession was taking its final orders in the canons' robing-room when it occurred to somebody--the organ having stopped and the bells not begun--that outside the cathedral things were suspiciously silent. The abbé went to look out, and came back with both pink cheeks faded.
"Not a soul," said he, whispering in the Bishop's ear; "the market-place is bare as my hand; and one can hear drums."
"Hum!" said the Bishop, and communicated the news to Auguste-Anne. That authority considered, then answered with the half of a grin:
"We had better take our chance of a procession while we can get it. March!"
And march they did, under a canopy heavily fringed, across the burning white dust of the market-place. Bella in her heavy golden dress had to press upon her husband's arm; the ceremony had lasted a good while, and she was carrying a child. However, she had vanity to keep her up, that stronger supporter than a husband's arm, and she did not know enough to be frightened. She walked then with dignity, the milliner's apprentice, thinking with scorn how once she had nearly fainted from awe trying on the bonnet of a mere Viscountess. And here she was with a crown on her head--the Virgin's loan--and a train yards long, sweeping back to her own palace. She thought now with gratitude of her mother's strength of mind, and vowed to write the longest letter to that lady, of whose fulfilled destiny she was not yet aware. The guns down at the port were going, and the bells by this time rollicking in the cathedral spire, so that the drums, which were distant, had their warning covered over, stifled, entirely silenced. But their rhythm went on in the calculating heads of the Bishop and Auguste-Anne.
The moment they, with the new queen and such white officials as were necessary, had entered the doors of the palace, their attitude of joyful composure was abandoned with their swords, baldrics, and other excrescences of State. It was a council of war that, without warning, Bella saw come into being before her eyes. A dozen men about a table; shutters carefully closed; a map; voices in which sounded both haste and dismay.
"Incredible!" one pasty-faced gentleman was repeating. "A rising, but it is irrational. It lacks common-sense. Why rise?"
"Because," answered another, "it is the property of scum to do so. We must skim them off, skim them off as they come--" and he made the gesture of a cook with her ladle. Auguste-Anne replied impatiently:
"They rise because they want to be masters; because for once they have an idea rattling in their skulls, and it is driving them mad. They have our fetish, as they think."
"The proclamation was a mistake," said the Bishop, shaking his head, "they have not been taken in by our goddess."
"Madame Marie is endangered by it," another put in, "they have only to try a silver bullet--"
Auguste-Anne hushed him with a scowl. Madame Marie was in the room, glowing but forgotten. He went up to her with his grand manner of the husband-consort, and offered his hand, saying:
"You should rest, Madame, you are fatigued. These gentlemen will excuse you."
But she had learned a little French by now, and the sentence about the silver bullet had not escaped her.
"Augustus," said she, clinging suddenly to his formally-arched hand, "is it me, trouble through me? Is there danger?"
"None," said he, with his formal smile. "Will you come?"
"But what is happening with the blacks?"
"That, Madame, is what we would give something to know."
And with this for sole satisfaction, her train looped into a bundle on her arm, she was obliged to depart, and submit herself to her servant women, who to-day--these too--were sullen and silent.
Below, the conclave went on. Where to defend? There had been no such threat as this for fifty, sixty years. Defence had sunk to mere decoration, as the plates of steel of the man-at-arms dwindled at last to epaulettes of gold braid. The fort's cannon had not been asked for generations to take charges of ball. The walls of the palace had grown thick with mosses, and the climbing plants of the tropics made living ladders over them. They could still be defended by an adequate force, adequately supplied, but what force was there? Perhaps three hundred able-bodied white men in the town; and the walls, conceived and built in more spacious days, enclosed a park, and wandered for a couple of miles before they met again at the iron gates. There were no muskets, save the fifty down at the fort; the butts of these were shiny with the slapping of hands during a half century of presenting arms, but as weapons they would need, to be effective, to be held by the barrel end. The stocks of powder were low, and the last lot, purchased from the English warship, of doubtful quality. The ten gentlemen, made aware of these facts, turned as underlings will upon a leader at a loss; and Auguste-Anne had to defend, as a deliberate policy, his past years of aimless pure idleness. He made, however, no long protest.
"If there were nothing but discontent in this," said he, "if it were only a question of who is to wear the regalia, that might be settled. I have no wish to lie uneasy at night for the sake of being called Excellency by day. But there is a bitterness in this brew of trouble that--with deference to monseigneur the Bishop--only religion can give. Oppression will not wake our indolent islanders to frenzy; it is this deuced godliness that is too strong wine for them. Their heads cannot stand religion as European heads can; they take it seriously. I was wrong, I confess, to start with them a competition in saints."
"True enough," admitted the Bishop, whose lackadaisical airs were now overcast by the shrewdness of his native Normandy, "but if religion stirs up danger, gentlemen--which is part of her task in this world--she is also the provider of refuge; and it is my suggestion that the cathedral, which possesses narrow windows and towers admirably loopholed, should shelter God's flock while the present storm threatens."
There was a murmur of agreement. Then the literal gentleman who saw no common-sense in a negro rising took up the last words.
"A storm?" said he, sniffing the air, "I believe his lordship is right. What says the barometer?"
"I spoke figuratively, sir," said the Bishop, impatiently.
"Oh, did you?" replied the unabashed gentleman. "Well, I think you've hit the truth, for all that."
And going to the shutters, he threw them open and stood breathing deeply of the leaden air. A broken spider's web hanging loose from one of the slats did not even tremble. The sea, far down below, was steel. Colour, movement, and sound had gone together out of the atmosphere; yet the stillness was dangerous with movement withheld, violence to come.
"Feels like a hurricane," said another gentleman, coming to stand beside the first in the window.
At that they were all down on him. The last disaster was not six months old. Hurricanes took time to gather. No, no, he was altogether wrong. He subsided, and the conclave went on with its business; but the first obstinate gentleman remained, shaking his head, and looking out to sea in the direction which usually vented the first gush of storm wind; that is to say the nor'-west.
XI
He could not know the interest that point of the compass was exciting among those who were gathered in the hills to cause the whites uneasiness, and would only have damned them heartily had he been aware. But the fact was that alarmed by the portents, which they could recognise very surely without the aid of barometers, the blacks had interrupted their drumming and other preparations to beseech the steeple-jacks, and to pray that Yellow Mary should show herself. Both pontiffs were averse to letting the goddess be seen, though since all the world had looked at her for years, beckoning on top of her pinnacle, there might seem nothing very sacrilegious in it. But they had to pay the penalty of those elected to power by the people, and give the people what the people chose, loudly, to demand. Everyone knew they were not genuine papaloi, real priests who got knowledge by years of silence and starvation. Everyone knew that they had once been mere climbers, and that the goddess had come into their hands by trickery and thieving. This did not mean that the goddess was less potent, but only that her devotees would not stand the priesthood putting on airs. The goddess was mighty, the steeplejacks were nothing; anyone might take their place, anyone could keep a goddess prisoner in a grotto. This having been made clear to the two, they gave way.
Yellow Mary, her sceptre still pointing south by east, was rolled forward, somewhere about 4.30 in the afternoon, out of her sacred darkness, and down went a great many thousand black heads in adoration. The priests had tricked her out in decorations copied from those worn by Tombai, a scarf of crimson stuff, necklaces, shining beads. She glittered through these, indifferent, with her weathered smile unchanged and the sceptre rigid. There was silence, and much bowing. Then the chief of the drummers rose, tiptoeing, and went to his tall drum which stood beside the impromptu altar. He struck out a solemn tune which they all knew, and by and by the thousands were singing their hymn of the Mother-Goddess:--
She who nourishes,
She who keeps with safety,
She who is not afraid,
Help us, Lady!
Over and over they sang it, the petition to be fed, and delivered from fear, and kept out of mischief. They droned it until the words lost significance, and the drumming and stamping rose above and drowned them. A bull died by the knife while they sang, and some goats; the blood of these creatures, drained into a long trough-shaped wooden bowl, was sacramentally drunk. Women began to writhe, and froth at the mouth; they prophesied before they fell. Men raged at each other in mimic fights, brandishing weapons which had been anointed with brains. The bull-roarers whirled. Amid the fury, Yellow Mary smiled, and a darkness gathered, unnoticed, in the direction opposed to her sceptre.
XII
When night had fallen, with the abrupt finality of a theatre curtain, the white pilgrimage to the cathedral began, unimaginably different from the morning procession. There was no light; they were afraid that the blacks, from their vantage-point in the hills, would spy the lanterns and learn of the panic. So muskets and blankets, and children, food, pet monkeys and birds, powder, skins of wine and water--all were brought by men and women, shoving and struggling like ants in the complete darkness. It took three hours, from six till nine, to get the cathedral munitioned, though the Bishop and clergy, who could work unobserved, had been busy in the crypt since early noon. All told, there was little confusion. The building was huge, and hugely strong. It had been set up in earlier days, and those first essentials of all good building, time and unlimited slave labour, had gone to make it. The windows of the aisles were, as the Bishop had said, narrow and high. The east and west windows, wherein flaunted a Last Judgment and a terrifying Crucifixion, were more attackable; but the builders--Spaniards, always on guard against possible treachery--had provided galleries with loopholes which commanded them. Altogether the cathedral made a passable fortress, thought Auguste-Anne, looking about with the casual eye of the amateur soldier.
Nor were the ghostly forces at the Bishop's command neglected. Before the high altar, where the red lamp burned, the woman and older priests were engaged upon a litany, preparing, much as their enemies had done, for death and battle by a passionate appeal to the Woman.
"Tower of ebony," sang the leaders,
"Tower of ivory,
House of gold--"
"Pray for us!" implored the chorus.
And the Bishop had caused to be rigged, with pulleys, strong lamps just inside the Judgment window, in particular near that corner on the left of the central figure which was thronged with devils, convincingly imagined. These lamps were not to be lit until the besiegers were actually at the doors; for--
"If I cannot save my windows," said the Bishop, "at least they shall earn us a minute's grace through fear."
Apart from the crowd that worked, and planned, and prayed, sat the cause of half the bother, little Bella the milliner's apprentice, upright on the Bishop's throne. She still wore her gold gown, and felt heavy in it, fatigued and perplexed. She could not be busy, women's hands were unneeded among the barrels and great sacks of provisions; and as for prayer, the English liturgy did not seem to her memory to be designed for such emergencies as this. There was something green and peaceable about most of the prayers she could recollect; they were recited orderly, and without much emphasis or meaning, as though they apologised in a well-bred way for taking up God's attention. But these prayers--the people were opening their mouths wide, and clamouring:
"Queen of Patriarchs,
Queen of prophets,
Queen of apostles
Pray for us!"
It was as though they said:
"We've tried flattery. Now we'll try what old association can do. We are in great need, Lady, and shameless. You must listen; surely one of these titles will catch your ear--"
And on they went, tirelessly, while Bella, even in her fright and her languor a little contemptuous, sat up, and said a prim prayer or two decently, within her own mind.
XIII
A watcher had been posted in the tower. He sat there in the dark, among the bells, keeping an eye on the far camp-fires. By daylight the whole town could be seen from this vantage point, which was its apex, and by daylight the watcher might have enjoyed his task. There would have been ten thousand lives to spy on, and the masts of ships pricking up over the horizon a good ten minutes before they could be seen in the port below.
But to-night the town and the very air seemed dead. No lights, no footsteps, and the rats were disquieting. They rushed about, continually squealing, and there were more of them every minute. They came scampering over his legs, racing past him up the bell-ropes and even on to the bells. The rafters were clotted with them; they fought, squealing, for places. The watcher had never heard anything like it before, and he did not care for it. He struck a light, thinking to frighten them, and only frightened himself; for the flame was reflected in ten thousand beads of eyes, and showed him, besides, the brown ordinary rats outnumbered and outfought by lean buccaneers from the waterside. Brown corpses were being devoured. He stared, neglecting his scrap of tow, which gasped once and went out. Swearing and sweating, he lit it again. It was bad to see the brutes, but worse to hear them capering and scampering in a black world which contained no other sounds. To distract his mind from the problem they offered--waterside rats? waterside rats in the tower?--he turned to his spyhole again.
Downhill the lights were moving, torches he judged, and still a couple of miles away. There was a regular path of them, a winding line coming down through the bush, quick and regular as if their bearers marched to a drum-beat. The attack! And thank God for it, thought the watcher, kicking his way through the still increasing tide of rats, and making for the rope knotted and looped by which he had come. Rats were on it, and he heard, as he kicked again, one or two of them thud down on the belfry's stone floor. As he lowered himself hand over hand, they swarmed over and past him. The musty stink of them was in his nose, and twice he felt teeth in his forearm.
"Eh, well, man, what is it?" asked the Bishop, whom he found in the crypt, burying--not without a certain impatience and perfunctoriness--the reverend fibulae and pelvices, to put them out of the way of sacrilege. "The attack, you say; from which direction? Torches and drums? Excellence," to Auguste-Anne, from whose pocket hung the seals of his Lieutenant's brevet, all that he had troubled to salve, "as we feared, the priests are with them. That means madness."
"We'll keep them out while we can," responded Auguste-Anne, "and when they overpower us, I have a bullet here for myself and another for my wife. I have no fancy to be barbecued, nor, I imagine, have you. Your cloth forbids the carrying of arms. Permit me--"
The offered weapon was accepted and stowed somewhere within the Bishop's draperies, and a final question tossed to the watcher:
"Nothing else of importance?"
The watcher signified No. He was ashamed, amid these preparations and courtesies and impending mighty happenings, to mention anything so sordid as a gathering of rats. Even when he was sent up once more to observe he did not protest. Rats, thought the watcher, though dirty brutes, were but animals after all; while the blacks, lit up by their priests, would be devils. There was a chance, up in the steeple, of a not too courageous man being forgotten. Without more ado he climbed his stair and his rope again.
Steadily yet restlessly, on came the torches. They were nearer now, at the first outskirts of the town. He saw points of light dive into the narrow channels of the streets, and show only as a glare between the houses. There was noise, yelling, with a rhythm of drums behind it. The glare advanced, turning this and that corner, until it burst into a thousand flares in the open space before the palace. He could almost distinguish faces now, and could see individual movements. A man in a necklace whirled an object, made some gesture or other. Instantly the swarms were on to the palace's broken walls, poised, and over. He thought of the rats; and indeed the blacks looked very like them, crowding, trampling each other to be first over. In no time the thatch blazed, but the stream of black bodies assailing the walls did not cease, and the noise, which had been a continuous excited yelling, turned, he thought, to something uglier still. They had been cheated; they were searching. He saw the torches run in groups this way and that, quartering the gardens. Other groups pushed forward along the streets to other houses. Soon the whole of the white quarter was throwing up flames towards the sky, and from nearly all the streets of the town rose the glare of hidden lights and the clamour of voices.
Below, in the cathedral, the men were at their posts, the women recited prayers, and Bella, swaying a little sideways, had fallen asleep on the Bishop's crimson-hung throne. Auguste-Anne cast one faintly contemptuous glance at his goddess, lovely as ever despite her crown askew, and refrained from waking her. Time enough for that and the pistol-shot. He sat down on the altar steps, and pulling his ivory box out of a pocket, began throwing dice, right hand against left, until the business of the evening should begin.
Noise and the lights drew nearer. From all the five streets which led to it the blacks poured upwards into the little square. The Bishop gave his orders for the cressets to be hoisted, and the demon rout began to live before the besiegers' eyes, dancing to the capricious measure of the flames. From this, the west window, the yelling menace shrank away, but at the others it was loud. A stone, twenty stones came crashing through glass, and set children screaming. There were detonations; an acrid smell of burnt powder crept about the nave like devil's incense. The men, recharging their pieces, waited grimly for the beginning of the end, the thump of a tree trunk against the weak northern door.
Above in his tower, forgotten, the watcher sat with a candle off the altar burning by his side, watching the rats. He knew now what was wrong with them. They were mad with fear. But he had been a sailor, and had seen enough of them to know that rats cared little enough for men's disturbances. Noise did not scare them much, and as for fire, there was no sign of that yet. The one thing that drove them to panic like this was fear of being trapped in a hulk and given no chance--against what? Against water, the rush of invading water.
God! thought the watcher, white-faced; and the sweat began to shine on his lip and forehead. His spy-hole looked northwest; another duplicate opening faced down towards the waterfront and harbour. He ran to it, treading living bodies underfoot, and keeping his balance with difficulty, stared down.
XIV
All the water of the bay was running out of the harbour. No ebb--and the tides in those parts are strong--had ever drawn it away at such a pace. Some of the fishing boats, moored together as was the blacks' custom in a cluster, broke from the single buoy that held them and went bobbing and circling out to sea. By the quayside down sank the water, drawing with it shingle and weed, further, and always more quickly, until the whole floor of the harbour was laid bare, a new landscape shining in the moon; hills, forests of weed, and a narrow valley, the channel for navigation, through which Yellow Mary had been used to give pilots their course. Upon this new territory, soft with slime, such boats as had not dragged anchor settled down, listing sideways. The watcher heard behind him the strangest mad scuffling and crying among the rats; then the moon, hanging low in the sky with no cloud near it, went suddenly out.
He shut his eyes. From the square outside there floated up to his loophole a wail, thin and pitiful, with no fight left in it, no frenzy, only terror. All the prayers he knew went out of his head. He could only stand with shut eyelids counting the seconds while the monstrous roaring wave advanced. It took its time. He counted a slow seventy before he heard the roar burst in a sound that nearly broke his ear-drums, and set the belfry shaking under his feet. All other sound was engulfed in that one. The watcher sat huddled in the dark, waiting without hope for the water to pour in upon him through the loopholes set two hundred feet above ground.
But none came. The roaring retreated. He stood up and peered and saw the moon upon the horizon, calmly on guard again. Her light showed the retreating water foaming backward, cascading down the hill, and bearing black specks that were the remains of roofs and boats and bodies. Houses were beaten flat, trees sailed in the current like straws, but the cathedral stood safe. He turned, and struck his light again, to see the rats fighting their way towards the bell ropes and his ladder, to get down; there was no panic now, and the fighting was only the usual clan-battle between black and brown.
"There'll be feeding for them in what's left of the town," thought the watcher with disgust, "the filthy beasts!" But they were a comfort to him, for all that. As they had known of the danger, so now they knew that it was over. He kicked his way among them, and slowly--for his hands were still wet, and his whole body weak as if with fever--came down to earth.
The cathedral hummed, rhythmic as a huge engine, with prayer. The Bishop, kneeling before the altar, hands upheld and the pistol-butt showing in his sash, was giving out the litany of the Blessed Virgin. Beside him Auguste-Anne knelt on one knee, one hand inside his deep pocket busy still with his dice-box. Under the Bishop's canopy stood Bella, awake now, and very upright. She would not kneel, for that was Popish, nor could she sit, for that was hardly respectful to the God who had just preserved her. She stood, therefore, one hand at her heart, in the very pose and likeness of Yellow Mary; and to the watcher's eye it seemed as if the whole congregation, Bishop and all, were saying their prayers to her.
"Tower of ivory--"
"Pray for us!"
"House of gold--"
"Pray for us!"
These were the very phrases; no others could have described her so well, standing there in the faint light, with her hands and face of ivory and her dress and hair of gold. Auguste-Anne, kneeling inattentively at the Bishop's side, triumphed in his mind over the blacks and their childish competition in goddesses.
"And by Christ's bones, mine won!" thought His Excellency. "We'll have them licking her feet to-morrow--what's left of the poor devils."
It was not many. They reckoned something like eight thousand dead in that disaster, the first submerging of Corazon.
Thus it is observed, that men sometimes, upon the hour of their departure, doe speak and reason above themselves.
--Religio Medici.
I
It is a pity to have to confess that life missed a dramatic opportunity here. It would have been so easy to allow this upheaval to coincide with my grandfather's birth, to let him make his first appearance on earth scandalously in a church, like that most inapropos child of Pope Joan; but occasionally life, which has so many other opportunities at command, disdains these theatrical strokes. My grandfather arrived six months later, in the normal way, and was christened Gustave-Félicité-George. This last name, such an abrupt resolution of the previous harmonies, was due to an outburst of Englishness on the part of his mother, who thought Gustave bad and Félicité worse, and was determined that her boy should have something solid in the way of a name. Auguste-Anne, who was not difficult on minor points, gave way readily enough, and continued to refer to his son by his title of Morhange. "Is M. de Morhange at liberty?" he would enquire. A servant would go to see, and on returning would answer gravely:
"M. de Morhange is having his binder adjusted. He will be at his Excellency's disposal in a few minutes." Bella, however, for the rest of her life never spoke of the boy except as George, nor could she acquire habits of ceremony with him. She loved him passionately in the most middle-class way, and when she died two years later of fever, though her delirium called and thirsted for him, she had the strength, in her lucid moments, to forbid him to be brought within range of the infection.
She died crying his name, and thrusting his imaginary presence away with her hands.
II
It would be possible to make a complete and not uninteresting book about Bella. Not many women in the course of their lives pass from milliner's apprentice to queen, with an interlude of goddess by the way. Emma Hamilton, of the same period, had something the same story, but the course of her fortune followed more everyday lines; men took her beauty, like a box of bricks, and built memorials with it to their own infatuation. Bella had beauty too--must have had, though there is no record of it, no portrait; but she had backbone, which Emma Hamilton never possessed, from the days when she wandered about Hove, her stockings mended with pins, to her zenith in the Queen of Naples' drawing-room. Bella was frightened of her husband, and stood up to him; awed by the Bishop, who still could get nothing out of her more Popish than the word Amen; and she had heard a tidal wave grind ships to powder within fifty yards of her with no audible or visible yielding to terror. It is strange to think that the mainspring of all this good behaviour was not courage, nor religion, nor duty, but simply an honest, healthy British contempt for foreigners and their ways. God bless this great-grandmother! I think--I hope--that I have a lot of her in me.
III
Things went on unchanged after her death. The boy grew, his father read Corneille to him, the Bishop conducted him here and there among the classics, as an able courier shows a traveller the sights of Rome; not too many stupendousnesses in one day, and ample intervals left for refreshment. He grew fair like his mother, beaky and lean like his father, and seemed to have no troubles in the world, and no ambitions beyond those of his years; to extend his body, and do better at sports than his fellows.
But greatness, as everyone knows, is thrust upon an unlucky few. In the year 1816 a ship came into the harbour, rebuilt by this time, and untroubled for a full ten years by storms. The ship was a French one, flying the old white flag, and named the Bon Souvenir, the Happy Memory; enough to show that she was an emissary of the Good Old Days, which somehow or another seemed to have come back to France. Her commander confirmed this impression; he came to inform Auguste-Anne of the accession, thanks to the goodness of God, Prince Metternich, and the higher powers generally, of Louis XVIII, brother to the late sainted king. As luck would have it, all the flags of the various political systems had been engulfed in the island's disaster, and the easiest to replace being the white, this was now flying over the fort and the palace. It did not need the brevet, signed by the lamented saint, to convince the commander of M. de Mortemar's persistent loyalty. He acknowledged it with tears of emotion, and begged the favour of doing so gallant a loyalist any service in his power. Auguste-Anne considered for a whole morning upon his verandah shaded by wistaria, and at length sent for M. de Morhange.
"My dear son," said Auguste-Anne when the boy presented himself, "there is once more a King Louis; and this being so, I propose, with your approval, to render him this island. God forbid that a Mortemar should strive with a Bourbon for a few square miles which may at any moment sink into the sea. You know the deathless motto, which our cousins Rohan stole from us centuries ago and changed--Crown he wears not, honour shares not, Mortemar cares not. There have been in Europe of late years, and still persist there, too many adventurers aping kings; a name such as ours does not enlist in such a shabby company. Better King's lieutenant, and hold our heads high, than a petty cringing equality. And so I have decided--always with your approval, monsieur--to send you to France in our good friend's charge to give His Majesty an account of our stewardship. If King Louis should offer you a place about the court, you may accept, that is only polite; but you are not to solicit any such thing, like a footman that renders a service for hire. This, I believe--with a recommendation against taking a mistress from your own class--is all the advice I have to give you. The first is a matter of dignity; as to the second, it is not to your interest to encourage lightness in a society which you hope may provide you with a wife."
With this inconsiderable amount of mental ballast the child--then aged twelve--set sail with Saint Louis XVI's brevet in his pocket for credentials, and the abbé and two or three old steady servants in attendance.
It may be said at once that he never set foot in Corazon again, never again saw his father, or trod, hand in hand with the Bishop, the maze of Latin prosody. For the next tidal wave was final. Earthquakes under the sea set it in motion, deep tremors affecting in their first onset only the bones of a few wrecks. But the subsidence meant the sudden shifting of a great mass of water, which tilted up in a wave five hundred feet high, and travelled solemnly, like a mountain walking, half-way across the Mexican Gulf before it struck land, curled, and broke. A few look-outs in the masts of distant vessels saw the slow-rolling horror go across their horizon; but there were no witnesses of the submerging of Corazon, and no survivors. Ships setting their course for the island months later found only water gently wrinkling and sank their lead many fathoms before they could discover where had been the town.
IV
Which event left Gustave-Félicité-George an orphan and dependent upon that very chancy factor, the gratitude of a Bourbon, for the means of continuing his existence. It may be wondered how he managed to survive; for Bourbon memories, though tenacious of such matters as court etiquette, old injuries, and a contempt for the third and fourth estates, were not otherwise reliable. Besides, there were many young men, of as good family, with better claims to gratitude than this latest sprig of the Mortemars, who could only proffer the submission and loyalty of an island, now, by a caprice of the earth's surface, entirely unpeopled. The Bourbons, however, could be capricious too; and the head of the family chose to exercise the family right in favour of this boy who asked nothing, to the annoyance of the other worthy young persons who had been assiduous, and were for the most part left kicking their heels. Gustave-Félicité became page of honour to the old king, whose brother, Charles X, when he succeeded found him similar employment. The family estates in Artois had been sequestrated; and so, although most of the pious and scandalized relatives who had hustled his father out of the country were conveniently dead and he was heir, it would have meant much money and long waiting to oust the tough Napoleonic general who was in possession. Gustave-Félicité had in his bones some of the indolent quality of the island which had bred him, where enough was enough and no man with ample leisure cared to waste any of his time looking forward. "Mortemar cares not." The motto lent authority for his disdain, the court gave him a sufficient background. He had not grown up like the other youths of his day, amid thrones toppling to the gutter and dominations rising out of it. A kingdom, to him, was something established and sure, in which people went about their business, and if now and then they loosed off guns, did it only in the sovereign's honour, and with the best intentions. (He had been told the story of the witch-doctor's rebellion often enough, but always at the end came in that convulsion of nature in support of the monarchic principle.) He witnessed, therefore, without any dismay the various experiments in government made by the witty and foolish old king. He saw the press being muzzled, the priests creeping back into their old places of power behind the throne, and being unaware that the citizens' attitude towards presses and priests had changed since 1790, thought his majesty well advised. Ministers came and went rather rapidly between 1825 and 1830; a certain restlessness invaded the court. Gustave-Félicité was touched by it; in a spasm of energy he volunteered for the expedition to Algiers, and at once got some inkling of the way democratic principles had invaded even the services. For the generals and admirals concerned in this venture actually consulted, before drawing up their plan of campaign, a little captain, of no importance, whose sole recommendation was that he knew the ground to be fought over, besides depths, and channels, and possible landings. His advice, though mauled about a good deal in the interests of discipline by his superiors in rank, was taken on the whole, with the result that the expedition met with quick and complete success. The force was limited, and even young gentlemen of the King's Household, in uniforms like the most elegant and gleaming strait-jackets, had to do their share of fighting. Gustave-Félicité did not resent this. He had something of the practical turn of mind of his grandmother, the lodging-house keeper in Bristol, to whom any situation, even disagreeable, was something to be grasped and looked at all round, and if possible used to advantage. He galloped, and went thirsty, and did his general's unintelligent errands with complete good temper, until the town of Algiers ceased to struggle, and the triumphant despatches began to speed home. He was one of the envoys chosen to bring the news to Paris, and astounded his general almost to apoplexy by respectfully applying for permission to remain with the troops in occupation.
The fact was, Gustave-Félicité liked all those things which set the general and most of the rank and file panting for home; he liked the heat and the glare and odd odours, and best of all he liked the blacks. He had, as a child, been used to all these things, and in his heart of hearts had missed them while he trotted obediently about vast chilly palaces, and laughed with the gaiety which springs cold from the mind. These Algerians were more solemn than his own native blacks; their religion stalked perpetually by them, instead of being resorted to only when they felt in a good mood; a wifely religion. Still, he liked them well enough to stay with them, if the general would allow it.
But the general had, after the manner of generals, his own ideas on the subject. "Lieutenant of Chasseurs the Marquis Boissy de Mortemar," wrote the general, cursing the flies and dripping sweat, "will make his report to the Minister of War according to orders." Then, with a growl to his aide-de-camp, "All this zeal makes me tired. Bah! I hate a careerist!"
The aide-de-camp might have rejoined that he hoped this lack of charity did not begin at home; but being a careerist himself--as was every man in the army with the exception of the unfortunate conscripts--refrained, and agreed with a nod. Thus Gustave-Félicité was despatched with the story of Hussein Dey's capitulation, and had the novel experience of sending it on twenty-four hours ahead of himself by means of the new telegraph station at Toulon. He arrived in Paris in time to put on his most superb uniform and attend the Te Deum in Notre Dame. That was on July 11th, a time of year when the temperature was trying pretty highly the ambition of careerists left behind in Algiers. But they could say, as they unhooked their stiff collars and cast down their bearskins--the expedition was fought throughout in parade uniform--"Our troubles are over." Gustave-Félicité, riding home through Paris streets after the King's carriage, seeing the lowering faces, hearing no cheers but only a threatening murmur, said to himself, "Our troubles begin."
What had happened to these Parisians, who so short a time back could get drunk on glory? They let the old King go by without a cheer; the flags on public buildings only showed how bare and unenthusiastic were private windows. The fact was, glory at second-hand no longer touched them. If old Charles X, that puppet of Jesuits, that muzzier of journalists, were to get all the credit, then down with glory, and spit on it! Napoleon--passe encore. He used to ride out and direct his own battles, and risk his own life. But an old Bourbon, with a face like the handsomest imaginable sheep, and the kind of wit that goes clean over people's heads--why should he take the cheering? Ah, that, no! said the Paris populace, swapping stories of the kind of thing Jesuits did, and being flicked to the point of madness by a popular press fighting for its life.
V
The tidal wave of revolution gathered during that fortnight, and sucked back in its withdrawal all the surface prosperity and gaiety and charm of Paris, until an ugly city showed, as sinister as that under-sea landscape which the watcher in the cathedral tower of Corazon had seen for a short time exposed to the moon. On the twenty-sixth of July the Ordonnances appeared, pat on the prophecies of the press. It was as though the poor king moved at the bidding of a malevolent hypnotist. Whatever enormity the journalists suggested he might do, that, after hesitation and fumbling, he at last triumphantly did. Their malicious wills goaded him ceaselessly; he was unaware of them, there was a crowd of defenders between them and him; yet somehow their commands reached him, somehow he always obeyed. The Ordonnances were the fine flower of their spite and his stupidity; a rigid censorship, a dissolution, and the disfranchising of a whole class of his own supporters. Trouble was bound to come, and it came. On the twenty-eighth there were barricades building in Paris streets, and a marshal, Marmont, who had once notoriously played the traitor, was given the task of restoring order. Delegates from the people approached him.
"Marshal, the Ordonnances must go."
"Gentlemen, I deplore the Ordonnances; but"--a shrug--"I am a soldier."
An answer equivalent to saying:
"Gentlemen, go ahead with your barricades."
The citizens translated it so, and proceeded tranquilly all night with their preparations, Marmont having withdrawn his troops to barracks after their day's work. The barracks, unluckily, were found to be ill-provided with necessaries, and the martial spirit of the soldiery was considerably lowered by the very circumstances which had been calculated to maintain it--tight uniforms, heavy shakos. To fight thus encumbered, and light of belly--is it any wonder that the following day saw traffic rather than bloodshed round the barricades? Cartridges were swapped for bread and wine with the barricade holders, comfortable in shirt sleeves. There were desertions; two whole regiments, the fifth and fifty-third of the line, went over to the mob. And always the heat increased.
July 29th saw events still more alarming, regiments bowling each other over, like a disaster among ninepins. The Swiss were fired upon in the Louvre by a few sharpshooters. Small blame to them if they remembered August 10th, 1789, when a previous company was massacred to a man in that very place. Attacked by a handful, and that memory, they ran. They ran in a mob towards the Tuileries, carrying panic with them. The picked gendarmes by the Arc de Triomphe were caught up in their rout; the gendarmes in turn swept away two battalions of the guard camped in the Tuileries gardens; and the end of it all was, a general riding like a madman to St. Cloud, stumbling into the King's presence blind with dust, standing painfully at attention and making a report in brief phrases, cut short by tears.
The old king had dignity. He did not interrupt, but when the general--Coetlosquet was his name, a Breton--at last hung his head, he asked with resignation:
"All's lost, then?"
"Not all, sire; but Paris."
VI
After that, excitements of all kinds. Marching and countermarching of citizens, pistol in one hand, the other arm about a female patriot's waist. Two hundred loyalists burned to death in the barracks of the rue de Babylone. Poets scribbling in rooms through whose windows spent bullets came flying. M. Hector Berlioz singing and conducting the "Marseillaise" from the balcony above a mercer's shop:
"First verse: silence complete. Second verse: same effect. This was rot to my mind--I, who had scored the national hymn for 'every man with a voice, and bowels, and blood in his veins.' I could stand it no longer, and when after the fourth verse they still were mute:
"'Sing!' I bawled at them, 'God damn you, can't you sing?'"
At that five thousand voices tore the refrain away from M. Berlioz, with an effect so exactly like a clap of thunder that, stunned by it, he fell backwards in the accommodating mercer's bedroom.
No doubt of it, the Three Days were glorious for the young. Not too much danger, just enough to spice the adventure of living; magnificent weather, when it was no hardship to sleep in the open upon some looted sofa at the summit of a barricade; the songs of Béranger to sing, and posterity to astonish. It was well to be M. Berlioz, aged twenty-seven and an artist, or the Marquis Boissy de Mortemar, aged twenty-five and with a range of becoming uniforms to choose from. As a careerist, however, this latter young gentleman was proving a failure. How easy to have approached Louis-Philippe with offers of sympathy! How easy to have gone to old Lafayette, that stormy petrel, with offers of service in the National Guard, now re-forming! How easy to put the country's good and one's own advancement together, and emerge as a patriot, conscience at rest! M. de Mortemar, however, did none of these things. He galloped about a good deal, true, but on the losing side, bearing messages of delay, unreasoning withdrawal, or equally inopportune defiance. This by day; at night he would stand by the green-clothed table while the old king, with voluntary tranquillity, enjoyed his habitual rubber of whist. Nothing of Paris, sweaty, loud, and merry, intruded upon that quiet room at St. Cloud. It was decorous, the wide windows admitted no sound nor ruffle of wind, only the scent of lime-trees in bloom; the old king with a firm thin hand added his tricks, laughed kindly, and pushed counters across the green baize to his victorious opponents. Not one sentinel more than ordinary, nor one less, guarded him during the three momentous days, and what apprehension or whispering there may have been confined itself to rooms outside the King's hearing.
Wilful blindness, or the disciplined calm of the gamester? Charles X had two essentials of a gentleman: he always picked up a challenge, and he was a good loser.
On July 31st, 1830, he lost with a shrug to Louis-Philippe, who came out of the Three Days as First Citizen of France, a title which immediately ranged him among the unconsidered personages of drama; First Citizen, First Murderer, and so on, necessary rôles but not star ones. However, there he was, wearing the crown which his father had helped to vote down into the guillotine basket, and out of France went Charles X, with no reproaches and no lament, save one ironic word. The young Duchess of Berry, flaunting in a riding habit, pointing with her crop to the provinces north and west which she would raise to save him, was gently snubbed:
"Dear child, you've been reading Walter Scott. Pray let us slip out of history with dignity--"
And his berlin rolled on along the Calais road.
VII
Gustave-Félicité, orphaned by a tidal wave, beggared by a revolution, now found himself exiled in perpetuity, and penalized here and there as well under various articles and sections of the Code Napoléon. His property was confiscated, there were penalties of the gravest kind attached to his presence in France, "or any of her dependencies"; an ironic reward for one of the victors of Algiers. But since he had never possessed the confiscated property, and was young enough not to find exile a burden, he went cheerfully into the northern mists, and served Charles X with affection until the King died at Holyrood six years later. Not till then did questions of occupation and domicile come within the scope of his plans for continuing to exist. But if he was penniless and proscribed, he was also free. The world was his oyster, and if he could no longer depend on family influence or royal patronage to provide the Chablis to go with it, he had energy and youth, together with curiosity. An atlas picked up and opened at random showed a clean and distant territory called Australia, half of it well within a comfortable Tropic. (The Scottish mists and draughts had been his severest test of loyalty.) He pulled a string or two, all that was left in the way of influence, and there fluttered down into his pocket a grant of five thousand acres in New South Wales. With this, and the famous original brevet of Auguste-Anne, the one rich with past pride, the other with hopes for the future, he set sail.
"At least there'll be blacks in Australia," thought Gustave-Félicité-George.
VIII
Somewhere about the same year, 1837, Grandfather Geraldine took ship for the same destination. I can give no biography of him, except to say that he had all the scoundrelly qualities of the best type of Irishman. He set out with the notion that Australia would provide none of the luxuries of life at all, and equipped himself accordingly with a wife, a wooden house numbered in parts, a great many hogsheads of claret, and several tons of Irish earth, which served during the voyage as ballast, and afterwards as a foundation for the wooden house and a protection against snakes.
He set up the wooden house facing Sydney Harbour on the pleasant heights which overlook Rushcutter's Bay. Perhaps in that year people still were cutting rushes there, or purses for a change when any plutocrat was mad enough to take a stroll by its shores. It was rustic, with the arid yet exotic charm of Australian scenes before they become professional beauty-spots. The wooden house, too, was rustic, and must have looked paltry among the stone palaces which other pioneers had built with the help of convict labour, and which were staffed with a nice assortment of forgers, poachers, and even duellists who had been assigned as servants. It rotted away fairly soon, however, having been contrived in a country which knew nothing of white ant, and was replaced, inevitably, by stone. This, the second house, was still there ten years ago. There were broad arrow marks chipped into many of the blocks, and as a child I remember one with initials, perhaps those of a convict who laid it: Y. R. What Christian name begins with Y? Or was it only meant as a tribute, from a subject distant and obscure, to little Queen Victoria; and the chisel slipped? I used to finger that inscription often as a child, with some idea that any writing on stone signified treasure if only one had the clue. Now I shall never know, for the house is pulled down.
But to go back ninety years, there is no need to describe the existence of Grandfather Geraldine in his new surroundings. The shock that decided him to leave Ireland had evidently spent its impetus, for he was respected, despite a temper. A copy of Burke's "Irish Landed Gentry" which he kept on his desk was apt to fall open of itself at "Geraldine: Fitzgerald Michael, Esq., of Corpus, Co. Sligo"; his father. Apparently nobody minded this touch; the distinction between "currency," the Australian born, and sterling, the English immigrant, was of importance, and made all the difference to a man's credit. Grandfather Geraldine had other eccentricities, but they were confined to his home, and did not affect the public estimate of him as a solid citizen to be esteemed. He threw out of the window, for instance, any dish which happened to displease his palate. He danced in all solemnity upon such of his wife's bonnets as did not, in his opinion, suit her. He insisted that their cook--a baby-farmer with the best of characters--should attempt to compound a dish of the locusts which trilled all summer in the pepper-trees by the stone house. These oddities were accepted by everyone as the kind of caprices to which overfed middle-aged gentlemen were liable. I cannot discover that anyone ever tried to protest, or that he was thought, as a paterfamilias, to be anything out of the way.
But for all this, he remains to me rather a shadowy figure. His children, my mother and uncles, never spoke of him. He loomed like the God of Israel; they could never manage to view him as a man, who suffered from indigestion, and might now and then be over-reached in business. Grandfather Boissy is different. He, too, loomed; but much more in the manner of Satan in the old Miracle plays, terrifying but rather comic, and carrying most of the sympathy since his was the losing side. Moreover, there is this difference. Grandfather Geraldine was a country man--Corpus, Co. Sligo, was extremely remote, a few hundred bare acres of tussocky grass, useless except for snipe shooting; while Grandfather Boissy was a man of the town, and of the creamiest life of that most pulsating town in the world, Paris. Yet it was he who went inland, over the ranges, to a new settlement so small that when he arrived it possessed no other traveller's accommodation than a thriving gaol. And he went with no capital, no knowledge of what one did with land when there were no peasants to hire and work it; no acquaintance, save a very nodding one, with the English language; no clothes save those suitable to the Place Vendôme or Princes Street. He went, in short, unbelievably ill-equipped, and ought soon to have gone to the bad and died without reputable posterity. That he did not is a tribute to his character; and it is also the reason why I choose to follow his fortune. Character makes happenings wherever it goes.
Man is the whole world, and teeth of God,--woman but the rib and crooked piece of man.
--Religio Medici.
I
Gustave-Félicité had, unlike most sons, been made aware of the circumstances of his father's courtship and marriage; not through Auguste-Anne's personal confidences, for he was not a personage who spoke freely to his juniors, but by way of the servants who had accompanied the wooing expedition, and later, grown dependable and grey, were sent off with the young master to France. They considered it, rightly, a romantic story, and told it often; which leaves a doubt whether the son's impetuous marriage may not have been due to vague emulation of his father's exploit. Possibly; but possibly too it was a family trait, a laziness, an unwillingness to spend much time securing women, those necessary accompaniments of a man's life. The Mortemars as a family were careless of quality. To carry the metaphor of the accompaniment further, they cared very little what was being vamped in the bass, so long as they had the tune to themselves. Their marriages appeared romantic, because they were surrounded by lucky or dramatic circumstance, but looked at closely they seemed as humdrum as their neighbours; and if they did not break asunder, that was due to laziness too. They took no trouble over women at all, win or lose, and the result was that their wives married them angrily for money or pique, and stayed with them, simmering down gradually through neglect to a passionate gratitude for not being interfered with, which served as well as love.
II
Witness the ridiculous wedding of Gustave-Félicité, which took place five weeks after he landed at Port Jackson. His bride disliked him. She could understand hardly two words in ten of what he said. She hid, in a hopeless kind of way, under her bed on the morning appointed for the wedding, and was discovered by a startled mother bent on verifying the housemaid's statement that she had swept beneath it. And there was a last minute attempt to get her younger sister to take her place.
This astounding incident occurred apropos of the wedding bonnets. That of the bride was, of course, white. She was dark, and looked sallow in white. The bridesmaid's bonnet was pink, and the bridesmaid, being fair, looked over-ripe in it. To swap headgear was unthinkable, but the bride's despair suggested an expedient.
"You have it, Harrie," said she piteously, "and the dress too."
"What next?" enquired her sister ironically.
"The Frenchman!" was the astounding reply. "Oh, do have him, do! At any rate we'd both get the bonnets we want--"
However, sanity and their mother with a dose of sal volatile prevailed. The sal volatile brought home as nothing else could have done the fact that Laura, the bride, was now grown up. Throughout her nonage the remedy for wilfulness had been castor-oil, sal volatile being reserved in a kind of tabernacle for maturer ills such as headaches and languor. With the first sip of it she felt herself inescapably a woman, and turned, sighing, to tie the strings of the white bonnet under her chin.
They were married by a hearty priest, whose address on the Marriage Feast of Cana was notable for its jolly translation of the Evangelist's material into a living and topical West of Ireland wedding fray.
"And the Mother of Jesus saith to him, they have no wine. (Some dirty fella drank more than his share, I suppose.) Ah, the Blessed Mother of God couldn't say that in this country! There's too much of it altogether at weddings here, more's the shame. No, what our Blessed Lady'd say here, she'd say, 'They have no wine, Son, and they're best off without it, so don't you go standing treat now.'"
But there was wine all the same, or rather spirits, blended together in certain nauseating but soul-stirring drinks which the ingenuity of exiles had invented. (The cocktail, for example, makes an interestingly early appearance in Australia, somewhere about 1853.) It was a grand party, for Laura's father was in government service, and "sterling" of the most ringing kind. There were officers there in stiffly frogged uniforms--War Offices being all the world over the same, and disdaining climate as an unsoldierly factor in designing military dress. There were a judge or two, and some young men from Government House; there was even a bishop. (How that fact would have delighted young Mortemar's grandmother, the lodging-house keeper!) A pleasant visiting bishop in partibus it was, of some apocryphal see such as Nineveh or Beth-Shemesh. He was present at the ceremony, but it is not known what he thought of the Reverend Aloysius Healy's address.
The festivities lasted some time, since there was no tide to hurry them, such as had bustled Auguste-Anne aboard the lugger with his bride. The inevitable post-captains and their potations were here allowed full scope, and--with the possible exception of the Bishop--no man departed altogether sober, not even the bridegroom. Still, he could carry liquor, and made a gallant enough show handing his bride in to the vehicle which was to convey them to Parramatta for the honeymoon. The bride herself, sustained only by sal volatile and a sandwich, found the whole performance impossible to credit; and as the triumphant feeling of being a cynosure wore off, she perceived with chill and mounting horror that she was in for it now, and with a perfect stranger.
Their three weeks' courtship had not taught her much. The actual proposal was on her in a flash and over before she knew where she was. It was the simplest story--a dance at Government House, and Gustave-Félicité in his dress uniform of lieutenant of chasseurs, a little out-of-date, a little tarnished, but straight out of a fairy-tale, with a great hanging sabretache and glittering boots. He looked, among the sober reds and blacks and blues, much as his father had looked in the inn at Bristol, something rich and strange, from an older and forgotten world. He had not worn it since the Te Deum in Notre Dame, and perhaps this thought saddened him; at any rate it was a Byronic figure that stood by the mantelpiece drawing the eyes of Laura Willis and her compeers in figured muslin. His attitude was a challenge which they took up in turn. They eyed him, fluttering. They lisped at him in the French which was fashionable at conversaziones, to which he smiled bewildered recognition. Then Laura had the presence of mind to feel slightly faint in the middle of a dance--nothing much, but the kind of ladylike indisposition which it is every man's first instinct to treat with air. On his arm, leaning with a dependence that was flattering, for she was taller than he, they went out into the reviving moonlight. She had the advantage of her faintness, and a full knowledge of what Sydney moons could do. But the splendour that evening was something out of the way; every object--the fringed leaves of pepper trees, the long elegant leaves of gum, the spars of distant ships--had a clear edge to it, and yet the light was kind. Laura's still and strapping beauty needed, in the ordinary way, no help; she too was black and white, foolish clothes could not spoil the lines of her body. But seen thus under the moon, she looked a goddess, and against all the cherished principles of Gustave-Félicité his braided arm went round her in a compelling grasp.
Goddess! That was one of the words, and one of the attitudes that enraged him. Women were inferiors; that a man should defer to them, save of course in trifles, or that he should seek companionship from them, was a ludicrous state of affairs, and one into which no sane man would let himself be drawn. One must desire them, one need never elect them to equality. They should not share the other, the true male hungers, for knowledge or glory or gain. Why, then, this braided arm with its convincing pressure?
It must be remembered that Gustave-Félicité had just endured a four months' voyage, out of sight, most of the time, of land or women. Remember, too, his exile; it rankled, though he laughed at it. This gesture represented a hidden spurt of determination to sigh no more for France, to bind himself body and soul to another country so that his children should care nothing, even if he himself should never get the French iron out of his soul.
"Marriage? Eternal plat du jour? After all, why not? One cannot live always a la carte," thought Gustave-Félicité as he kissed her.
They went back to the lighted rooms with decorum, but engaged, and when Laura saw the other girls' envious faces she did not repent it. When she went to bed that night she was still quite satisfied, being in a state of glamour, and beholding marriage as a triumphal procession through life, with rivals envying and making way, with a perpetual or at any rate frequent moon, and a young man in blue and gold always at her elbow but never too ardent.
Next morning came the shock. She rose late, and was lying in an oldish dressing-gown on the verandah, eating bananas in the sun, when she heard hoofs, and the click of the gate-latch. She sprang up, gave one brief sufficient look, and fled inside to collapse upon her bed, and laugh, laugh like the kookooburra that haunted the garden.
What she had seen was her admirer coming in state to demand her hand. No uniform for such an errand; instead, a costume which had been the last word in 1830 Paris, executed by an Edinburgh tailor apparently in the spirit of mockery. There was a vogue during the Romantic period for tartan, a vogue which still persists in French provinces, and lingers in the blouses and other trappings of children too young to protest. M. de Mortemar wore trousers of tartan. He wore, in the pale but deadly Australian sun, a coat of green velvet. His white cravat would have made a veil for a first Communicant; there must have been two yards of it at least, the very finest net, puffed up like a well-made meringue under his chin. On top of the whole array was a tall hat of the shape which Englishmen have decided to regard as comic, though its angles and curves are not noticeably more absurd than the angles and curves of their own stove-pipes. The horse from which M. the Marquis dismounted was a hired horse, a tired horse, a horse whose spirit flies and spurs had long since broken. It did not approach with any such proud gait as an ex-lieutenant of chasseurs might expect from his steed; it lounged along the street, stretching its ewe neck to snatch illicit grass, aware of the fact, and presuming on it, that the costume of a suitor does not include spurs. There was hardly need for a hand on the bridle to induce it to cease progress at the appointed gate; it drew up of its own accord, having reached the limits of endurance, and slumbered with bent baker-knees, ignoring the flies that crowded on its quarters.
And this, it occurred to Laura as she lay laughing on her bed, was the man she would have to live with, cat and sleep with, for the term of her natural life. The laughter abruptly ceased. It did not come to her mind that she might refuse Gustave-Félicité; the reputation of a jilt was not a desirable one, nor was it profitable to be considered a flirt. Flirts had a good time, but they did not get husbands; and in after-years no one would believe in the good time, while a husband, dead or alive, was a sure tribute to feminine prowess. She perceived that there could be no drawing back, and rising, began to look to her weapons. Off went the old wrapper, and on, after some striving and assistance from housemaids, went the new poplin. Hair-irons made their appearance, sizzling, from the kitchen range. At last, prinked and with never a crumple, she could go hatless down the steps to the garden, and stray among the flowers with as etherealan air as if bananas had never existed.
There had been voices in the study as she passed--or rather one voice, as is usually the way when two languages meet; one must take up the burden of speech, leaving to the other the nods and becks and wreathed smiles of comprehension. The voice in this case was that of Gustave-Félicité, who in the absence of any heavy male relative to do it for him, was extolling himself as a possible match. This disconcerted Mr. Willis, accustomed as he was to diffident wooers. There had been proposals before, which had run somewhat on the following lines:
"You wished to speak to me, Mr. So and So?"
"Yes, sir. The fact is--"
Pause. Attempt to assist by Mr. Willis.
"It is not business that brings you, I imagine? You would have come to my office."
"No, not business exactly. Well--I don't know--in a way. I don't suppose you'll listen to me, though."
Mr. Willis, from a listener's attitude:
"You have my full attention, on the contrary, Mr. So and So." Pause.
"Well--of course you'll say it's confounded impertinence and all that. I know it is. I know I'm not much. I had a bad year last year, what with the drought, and then Firefly not getting placed for the Cup. And it's not the place it was since we had the fire in December--"
Mr. Willis, intensifying the listening attitude to an alarming degree:
"Mr. So and So, I am pretty well aware of your prospects. Should you wish to borrow, I am not in favour of any young man starting in life with a weight round his neck."
The suitor, crimson, but seeing an opening:
"That's just what I'm after." With a burst of eloquence. "It's Laura!"
But this was not by any means the interview of which Gustave-Félicité took charge, tartan trousers, preposterous hat and all. To an astounded father he retailed at length his own desirability as a son-in-law. He traced back his ancestry, discoursed to his auditor's entire bewilderment of the marriages which had resulted in distinguished quarterings, described his own physical condition with frankness, his prospects with optimism, and at last, pausing to draw breath, couched the hat upon his thigh in a satisfied manner and awaited his answer.
All this in French, slowed down out of consideration for barbarian ignorance. Mr. Willis was intimidated. He put, in English, one or two of the orthodox questions, in which a disapproval of foreigners was veiled by concern for the future happiness of his daughter. But the answers were satisfactory, and he knew in his heart that it was no good. He was a timid man by nature. His daughter frightened him, for she was larger than he, and could be mulish. He was unaware of her feelings, but he presumed, from what this flamboyant young man had implied, that she too was set on the match. He could not know that behind her serenity her thoughts were running this way and that, like wild birds beating about a room into which they had flown.
"He felt nice last night. He--he smelt nice," Laura's thoughts were confessing as she ranged the garden. "He looked so handsome in his uniform. But he looks funny this morning. We've nothing to talk about. I don't want to be married to anyone, but everyone laughs at old maids. Here he comes! Those trousers--oh, what can I do?"
He was coming, certainly, in a brisk and satisfied way, with her father hovering behind; coming to look for her. She turned, for no reason, the loveliest pink, and stood still, waiting. She could not even pretend to be engaged with the flowers. There was nothing in that part of the garden but a loquat tree, whose fruit, too stony to be worth the eating, lay untidily on the ground. Gustave-Félicité approached and bowed with his heels together, never attempting to touch her hand. Mr. Willis made introductory, explanatory noises behind him.
"Er, Mr. de Mortemar, my dear. He has been asking me a very important question. I informed him that you alone knew the right answer to it--ahem!"
Neither of them heeded him. Laura saw that she need expect no help from that quarter. She was not aware of her father as a person easily bluffed, timid and shy. She saw him invested with the paterfamilial panoply, as something between an uncle and an ogre, and supposed that his consent meant her doom. Her father, finding her tongue-tied, was aware of relief. This young man, thought Mr. Willis, would take her away, right away, and replace her, after a suitable interval, by grandchildren, who would make the house feel young. He had never succeeded in liking his daughter after she had passed the age of seven, though he could never admit it and always agreed with people who said how proud he must be of her. He was proud, as an ordinary suburban citizen might be who had been presented by some potentate with a puma; but he was also embarrassed. He observed with gratitude how the young man's presence daunted her already; not a giggle was to be heard. He excused himself. Gustave-Félicité trumped his bow with a bow far more sophisticated in which the tall hat played its part, and forgot him with most civil ease.
"Avez-vous," said Laura, stammering, really nervous, and finding his presence more disturbing and moonlightish than she had expected, "jamais goûté un--loquat?"
Gustave-Félicité had, strangely enough, in that now nonexistent island of his birth, tasted loquats, and retained no opinion of them. He replied:
"Oui. C'est exécrable."
Conversation dropped. Laura tried again, with one hand indicating the sleepy and shimmering harbour below:
"Aimez-vous--" a comprehensive gesture--"la Nature?"
Gustave-Félicité was a disciple of the gloomier romantics, such who believed that Nature liked to have her laugh at man. Accordingly he replied:
"Non."
There was nothing left to say. They stood silent, always with the feeling of tension, of attraction, growing stronger. At last he said softly, in English:
"We marry soon, I think."
A statement, not a question. Any other man saying that to her would have been met with a flash, and a detonation:
"You think? Hadn't you better think again? Your thoughts will be getting you into trouble one of these days--"
But to Gustave-Félicité she answered, with the strangest mixture of reluctance and fascinated curiosity:
"If you want to."
She expected an outburst of proper gratitude, a declaration of unclouded happiness. What came was, if anything, a declaration of independence. He put his heels together once more, bowed; said in tones of no particular transport:
"That is very satisfactory. Mademoiselle, au revoir."
And with that clapped the hat on his head, and strode off, a fantastic figure seen against the background of the garden, with his waist like a wooden soldier, and his legs encased in swearing stripes.
The remaining interviews followed the same pattern. The suitor punctiliously came, and bowed, and ate, if food were offered, but made no attempt to endear himself. Why should he? After marriage would be time enough, when, besides, there were more facilities. Laura, who had always supposed the period of engagement to be the happiest of a girl's life--plenty of clothes and attention to look forward to, and lovemaking kept by decorum well within bounds, as most women prefer it--was disillusioned. And finally when all the guests and Father Aloysius were gathered together to tie her for life to this polite but laughable stranger, it was all she could do not to yield to the inevitable last-minute temptation and rush from the church screaming "No, no, no!" She surmounted it however, biting her lip. The presents would have to be returned, and such a display would spoil her chances of getting anyone else. With the ice-cold logic that sometimes assails women at a crisis she realised that marrying Gustave-Félicité would also spoil, with completeness, her chances of getting anyone else. Then another consideration came; standing by his side, in bridal white, she envisaged herself in weeds, and was consoled.
III
The party came next, and after the party, Parramatta, which was to the 1830's what the Blue Mountains are to the 1930's, the only place suitable for honeymoons. There were good reasons for this, though the name, which in blackfellow's language means only "Eels sit down," lacks romantic promise. Even as early as 1822 a prize poem addressed to Sydney Harbour has the lines:
"Whence she, coy wild rose on her virgin couch
Fled loath from Parramatta's am'rous touch."
And though I believe the coy wild rose in question typifies the bush retreating before civilisation the last phrase gives some notion of what might be expected in Parramatta.
Still, it served a purpose; it was unfrequented, save by other honeymooners, and such criminals as had qualified for a term in the female gaol; and there were many well-to-do villas there which friends, with a chuckle, lent. But there was nothing whatever to mitigate in any way the deadly aloneness that was de rigueur for couples. One could boat, but not in parties; one could look at the view, but arm in arm. The house-keeping, which might have provided the luckless brides with distraction, was taken off their hands by the careful orders of the aforesaid friends. As for the husbands, their lot was yet more unhappy; they could not even smoke, save in a room set apart, and wearing a specially embroidered cap; besides, their brides as a rule thought it womanly and charming to dislike the smell. In short, the full misery of honeymoons has never yet been told, and can now only be lightly touched on. Enough to say that Laura and Gustave-Félicité emerged from this seclusion at last, and returned to society's bosom with an impulsiveness and gaiety which told cynical observers just what their boredom had been. Their feelings about each other and the deathly fortnight may be crystallized in two sentences.
His:
"She is well-made and has--thank God, in this climate--dry hands."
Hers:
"None of the people who write novels about love can ever have been married."
But neither of these sentences found their way into the listening air.
IV
A month later they set off up-country, to spy out the land with which his grant endowed him. They took the road through Penrith, over the Nepean by ferry, and on to Emu Plains and the first gorges of the Blue Mountains. A wild road led them through trees that were tall pillars of charcoal with sprouting green crests, branded by bush fires but not killed; it proceeded by leaps and bounds, sometimes over steps and ledges of rock, called jumpers, sometimes through the dry beds of what in winter were mountain streams. The peculiarity of the road was its invariable, and almost conscious, choice of the greater evil; if a valley offered, this curmudgeon of a road chose rather to climb one of the neighbouring hills, and this not in zig-zag, but by direct perpendicular ascent. It crossed rivers for no evident purpose, as if to throw travellers off the scent, providing neither bridge nor ford, but only a ramshackle arrangement of tree-trunks padded with dead turf, which tilted, sagged, or fell utterly apart according to the weight of the vehicle which ventured upon them. Beside the road at frequent intervals lay the bones of oxen, stragglers or failures who had died under the yoke in the journey to Sydney from over the ranges. This road, with its too-steep gradient, its narrow ledges precipice-bounded, its unreasoning disregard for topography, was the conception of a former government surveyor, one Major Mitchell, a cross-grained personage whose delight it was to invite obvious suggestions from his subordinates, and then give orders for the opposite to be done. The perpendicular ascents were selected to annoy; the dangerous ledge-crawls rebuked all spirits less fiery than his own. His tantrums came expensive to the trade from inland to the coast.
Main road! The Frenchman, accustomed to the grand military roads of his own country, or the winding and unstrategic but smooth thoroughfares of England, found this track over which his barouche crawled and lurched a nightmare. It was no easier to ride, for the surface was pitted with holes, rocks of razor-like sharpness lay hidden under the dust. At one point, called Soldier's Pitch, was an incline cobbled with loose stones, whose foot was cluttered and almost impassable with heaps of wood; whole trees had been hooked on to drays at the top of the slope, lest, in spite of locked wheels, these should rush down and overrun their teams of bullocks. Nowhere was there an open prospect. The ranges folded in and behind each other as if they could go on till doomsday. And always the same grey leaves, the same mocking rustle that was never water, the same loneliness.
There were bushrangers about, convicts escaped from the chain gangs mostly, ugly customers; so that travellers, even the bullock teams, joined forces till they were through the passes. Gustave-Félicité, whose notions of what constituted danger and wild country were derived from his experiences in Algiers, mocked at these precautions. "One must go with an army corps," said he, thinking of the fleeting Arab bandits, "or alone." He provided himself with pistols, two menservants and a black guide called Jimmy, supposing, after the manner of fervid nationalists, himself to be a match for any three men of any other race. He had not reckoned with Major Mitchell and his opinionated road.
For just at the foot of Soldier's Pitch, that supreme practical joke of the whole engineering feat, things went wrong. The device of the tree-trunk was tried once too often. Half way down one of the chains that held it parted; the other took full strain a moment, then snapped with a sound like a shot. The coachman, in a last attempt to save the barouche, pulled the horses over across the track. A wheel heaved up on to a hidden stone, adding another three degrees or so to the vehicle's list of forty-five. It went over, laden as it was, like a brick wall falling, the pole snapped, gashing one horse badly; and bonnet boxes, crates of fowls, bottles, a ham, somersaulted down the incline from the barouche's laden roof.
No one was hurt. Laura, seeing the hill from the top, had decided to go down on foot. Gustave-Félicité, out of civility, had descended to give her his arm, though of the two she was more sensibly shod and better enabled to cope with rolling stones. The only casualty was the coachman, cut about the head, and he had the satisfaction of hearing himself damned with great heartiness in a foreign tongue.
"Oaf!" stormed his employer, "your head, you say! Who cares for your head, species of sacred unnamable camel that you are?"
To which the coachman made suitable reply, while Jimmy the black fellow, disengaging his big toe from the stirrup, kicked the already plunging horses with dispassionate comment:
"Budgeree* pfeller you, do no more work to-day."
[* lucky.]
But the fact was that there was not much more of the day left, and they were five miles still from the public-house that was to harbour them for the night. It was a question, argued out between the men in a symposium complicated by the admixture of two foreign tongues, whether to walk on in a body to the inn, or whether someone should stay by the wreck of the barouche; for if there were no bushrangers there were dingoes, starved brutes to whom the stores of food would be tempting. Things were settled at last by the determination to leave Jimmy on guard with a pistol. He protested that this particular track of country was the chosen haunt of devils, awful ones who walked with their feet turned heels first. He demanded, besides the pistol, such other aids to valour as the coachman's Wellington boots and a white pfeller's hat. These were refused, and a compromise was arranged which included a pannikin of rum and seemed to content him. The horses were disentangled, the stores piled, and the barouche righted; and the last seen of Jimmy was his face grinning above the light of a smoky fire while his fingers held strips of ham above the flames, and his toes manoeuvred the pistol.
It took no longer than fifteen minutes after that for the sun to die. It slipped down the sky with a rush, the ranges lifted above it like huge extinguishers, and there was darkness of a most satisfying blue, through which the silent party tramped, leading their horses, with only the barouche lantern to guide their steps. It was a stony and difficult five miles, with nothing much to be expected at the end. The inns were, for the most part, drink-shops only, for all they marked the stages of the road, and travellers had presumably other needs besides the drowning of care. They were, in their squalor, their insolent mishandling of food, their contempt for all custom which demanded service, an unholy revelation to Gustave-Félicité, used to the civility and infrequent drunkenness of France. Even Laura, though accustomed from earliest youth to the sight of men and women the worse for drink--the Willis's had a coachman who, when he took the family to the theatre, had orders to drive himself on to the police station, thus ensuring that he should be sober to get them home--even Laura had found the up-country publics a little too much for her. Apart from noise, there was dirt, and flat nightmarish bugs on the spotty sheets, and the foulest odours everywhere. She walked her five miles gallantly but hopelessly. There were no sounds in the bush. The wind had dropped with the sun, there was not even a rustling of grey leaves, and it suddenly came upon the Frenchman that to talk of this country as new was madness. It was not new; it was old, and worn-out, and dying. There was no generosity left in its earth. The blue-gums were sapless, the scent of the colourless bush flowers was concentrated as though by fire in an alembic, the very soil a mere sprinkling of sand upon lava. It was a country like an old courtesan, done with man, and cynical.
These reflections were, however, without effect upon that singular pioneer. His patrimony elsewhere had eluded him, sinking under the sea, or falling into other tenacious hands; these few thousand unseen acres, therefore, he was determined to possess. The sneering country woke a kind of gallant devil in him, that would not take an insult even from the ground beneath his feet. There was nothing but defiance in the look he threw upwards from time to time, through the branches to unfamiliar stars.
Lights began to show, the track widened to a clearing treacherous with stumps, and surrounded by a phalanx of ghostly trees, ring-barked, bled white. The inn known as "Blind Mick's" was before them, straggling like a small village with its out-houses and sheds. They pressed forward with relief, even while their memories of previous shelters warned them to expect little, and knocked on the door that, strangely enough, was closed. No answering movement could be heard in the house, though there were lights, one of which flitted to another room while they waited, and there was extinguished. They tried the door; it would not yield. One of the men was ready with the only too likely explanation that the household was in the after-throes of a "blind." He had not been on this road before--none of them had, except Jimmy--but pubs were and would be pubs the continent over. He proposed to get in somehow, through a window, and rouse the publican to a sense of duty; but as they stood in perplexity before this silent yet living house, steps came to the door, and the bolt shot back.
A man, the landlord presumably, stood before them with a lamp in his left hand. He was not drunk, to all appearances. He had shaved perfectly clean very recently, for his cheeks and jaws were shiny. He stood there confronting them, and seemed to be summing them up; but neither by gesture nor glance did he invite them in. There was nothing odd or ugly about him, nothing notable at all. He just stood there, and allowed the silence to continue.
It was Gustave-Félicité who broke it.
"We have an accident," said he briefly, "five miles back. My wife has walked and is tired. You will please accommodate us."
Still the man said nothing, but looked at Laura, and at the men in turn.
"This is an inn, I think?" Gustave-Félicité persisted. "It is your duty to receive travellers. It is the law."
On that the man gave a sudden sharp yelp of laughter, and an exaggerated bow. He did not let them pass him, but went before them down the entry, calling "Frank! Hey, here!"
A further man appeared at a door; his hands were covered with lather, and one held a kitchen knife like a weapon; he had the strangest look of angry apprehension.
"Frank," said the first man, "hustle up with that beauty treatment o' yours. Here's company come."
Frank's expression changed to a daze, and his eyes rested with incredulity on Laura.
"What's the sense, looking like that?" enquired the first man sharply, "this is an inn, ain't it? Aren't going to get us into trouble with the law, are you? Turning custom away--"
And on that, disregarding Frank, he opened the door of a room. Laura entered, her husband after her. Their host lit a candle, showing a bed, on whose counterpane dusty marks seemed to tell of a former occupant who had lain upon it in his boots. This was the more noticeable since the rest of the room was not merely cleanly, but almost prim. There was a toilet mirror dressed in some coarse stuff, on which the flies, which fouled clean curtains in a week, had not yet begun to make impression. There was a decent print of some historical carnage, and a text above the bed, while on the floor a rag rug, newly washed, held pride of place. It was so much more homely and kindly than the other inns along the road, that Laura could not reconcile it with the host's mocking and reluctant welcome, nor with the tumbled bed. She said, feeling her way:
"I thought it was--didn't they tell us that it was a blind man who kept this house?"
"That's right," the host agreed with a grin, "he's blind right enough."
Laura thought of the double significance of that word, and pursued her enquiries no further. She sat down thankfully, and opened her little toilet bag to cope with the dust of the road. The host brought water, but when asked for a clean counterpane looked nonplussed; he moved off, however, and she could hear him rummaging in cupboards. She changed her stockings, settled her dress, and was giving some attention to her hair, when a shouting arose, sudden as a dogfight, every word audible through the unpapered wooden partitions. It was the man called Frank, resenting some intrusion.
"Get out! Wot yer poking yer nose in 'ere for?"
The voice of the coachman, Andy:
"Where the 'ell am I to go? I want 'ay for my 'osses."
"You want yer face bloody well knocked in--"
The voice of the host, steely and quiet:
"Shut yer head, Frank. You"--to Andy--"keep where you belong."
"I got to see my 'osses gets their feed."
"That's right." A pause. "That's my business. I'll look to it, all in good time. My house, ain't it?" Pause. "Ain't it?"
"Yes, boss, I reckon so."
"That's more like. Frank, I want some candles; and where the hell's the sheets kept?"
"'Ow should I know?" With a laugh: "what's the idea? Not going to wake 'em, are yer?"
"Shut your mouth."
That was all. A minute later the host came in, after knocking, with a clean sheet to replace the soiled counterpane. The eternal up-country meal of ham and eggs would, he told them, be ready in ten minutes.
He was as good as his word. The meal came in, smoking, and the two menservants, standing awkwardly by, were bidden to sit down to it with their employers. Frank, too, made his appearance smelling of hot grease, and carrying a damper, unrisen flour cooked in ashes which served throughout the inland country as bread. It was, despite the inevitable nature of the food, an unusual meal. For instance, in such places it was not usual for the host to sit at table, nor for him to be sober, as this man was; cold-sober, and with a sobering eye that rested often and meaningly upon the sullen Frank. Then the parlour, like the bedroom, was clean, and had ribbon bows on the curtain-loops, such as a woman might have tied; but there was no sign of any woman. The lamp in the table's centre, trimmed and bright, lighted no laughter, and little conversation. The two servants were awkward, Laura was tired, Gustave-Félicité was preoccupied with the problem of mending his carriage, Frank went in awe, it seemed, of his employer, and looked to him between each mouthful. Only that personage was at his ease, and though not talkative, saw after their wants and kept order. He listened to the story of the disaster to the pole, questioned minutely as to the exact site of the accident, and promised to "have a look at it" for them in the morning. At the meal's end, when Laura stood to go, he picked up the lamp to escort her; the light, shining direct on his face from below, showed her something--but what was unusual, what was strange, in the sight of a chin shaved? Only it seemed as though a thick beard had been cut away, for the chin and lips were white, while the rest, even the eyelids, had the tan of years. It gave him an unhealthy look, as a sick dog goes white round the muzzle; and perhaps it was the contrast of this look with his brown and steady hand, the continued contrasts all through the house that set Laura's mind quivering, and made her sleep uneasy. She lay long awake after the house was quiet, save for snores; then dropped off, and started up out of an unremembered dream with a phrase in her mind.
At home, in Sydney, Laura was accustomed to be served by Catholics, men and women from Ireland. Teresa Mary McCarthy was the cook, James Kinehane was the groom. From a child she had listened to their talk, knew the ins and outs of their meaning, and the light of that knowledge threw fear into the remembered phrase. It was Frank's--"Not going to wake 'em, are you?" delivered with an ugly laugh. "To wake--" to dress up a corpse in state and hold a funeral feast, drinking round the coffin.
It frightened her so that she put out a hand to her husband and shook him by the shoulder. He was instantly alert; but when he asked "Yes? I am listening," she could find nothing to say of the play that her anxious mind had made upon some everyday words, and the feel of the house. She did ask, however, had he his pistols? One, yes; it was on the table loaded. Was he sure? Yes, yes, of what importance was it, the pistol? She said nothing more, but slipped out of bed and groped her way to the table, where, sure enough, the pistol lay. She brought it gingerly back to the bed, and thrust it under her husband's pillow, barrel turned upwards, but ready to his hand, or to hers. Gustave-Félicité laughed, and said something about these not being the kind of arms he preferred to take into bed with him. She hung awhile on her elbow, listening; there was snoring still, but no movement. She lay down, her heart thudding. Nothing stirred in the house. Slowly the heart slackened, her whole body seemed to grow heavy. She slept again, and soundly, till morning.
As a rule, in such wayside houses it was impossible to sleep after six. Drink or no drink the night before, someone had to milk the cows, who otherwise came roaring in misery to the slip-rails; an unwilling boy of twelve it was as a rule, booted out of bed with all the savagery that a six o'clock head can engender. Other travellers, stockmen and teamsters, eager to get half their mileage done before the heat of the day, had to be fed with chops and tea at dawn, and set off amid musket-cracks from their whips, and shouts to the bullock-leaders: "Git up, Bawly! Git on, you bastards!" But this house reposed like a gentleman's villa till the sun was up. Gustave-Félicité, fumbling under his pillow, found the pistol-butt with his fingers, and laughed; then his watch, and swore. It was the half-hour after seven, and he had meant to be up, and off to the wrecked barouche by that time. He got up stealthily, not to rouse his wife, put on half his clothes, and went to look for water to wash in. He had seen enough of the colony to know that water lived, not in pumps as at home, or as in Africa, in wells; but in square tanks of iron that caught all moisture from the roof. He went out through the back-door, which was open, into the level sunlight. Involuntarily his head went up, his shoulders widened to get a full draught of the air, fresh yet warm as new milk; his eyes ranged idly about the clearing which last night had seemed, with its dead trees, so sinister, and now looked a pleasant haven.
The horses, who had been turned into the back paddock the night before, came to the fence to greet him; and a parliament of cockatoos, observing him, took no notice, but continued their council, bowing gravely to each other, and gobbling with the utmost respect for decorum. Sinister! The place was full of promise. There were green flats behind the whitewashed house, and an attempt at a garden had been made outside the back door, where among the flowers pushed up sturdier growths--potatoes, and that dire English hybrid, neither fruit nor honest vegetable, detested rhubarb. He forgot, as he drank in the sunlight, his vision of the night before. The country was no longer a courtesan, sterile and weary, but an honest farmer's wife in a sunbonnet, her apron full of food.
"Ah, my dear," thought Gustave-Félicité, bending his arms to clench the muscles of his shoulders, "we shall get on together well enough, you and I."
The sentimental moment of idleness passed. The stillness of the house roused him to energy. Where were the men? The horses should have been watered, breakfast should have been prepared and eaten by now. Fresh from his sluice in a bucket he went authoritatively into the house, calling, knocking on doors.
"Hey, what the devil? Is there nobody to take orders in this place?"
Apparently not; no one answered. He thrust his way into the parlour, where his own two men had slept. Each clutched a bottle; other bottles, dead marines, were by their sides. He kicked the snorers, who opened glazed eyes, and rolled helplessly. What was all this? How had they got at the drink, with that sober-eyed man holding the keys? And where was the sober-eyed man?
This time he went back to the doors at which he had first knocked, kitchen he supposed, and the other some kind of doss-place. The kitchen was empty. The other room--
He stepped back involuntarily, and threw up a hand as a cloud of flies rose with a loud singing hiss from something on the floor; dried blood, a great pool of it, that seemed to have run out from under a cupboard that stood in one corner. He pulled open the cupboard door. A man and woman stood in it, very stiff. Their throats had been cut, and their bodies, bundled instantly into this hiding place still warm, had stiffened, propped upright by the closed door. The woman's face was comely, and she was tidy, save for the gap in her neck. The man's eyes were open, but opaque. Blind Mick, the tavern owner, with his wife, who had put bows to the curtains and tended the garden, looked out incuriously at their white-faced guest. By the side of the cupboard a text hung: "I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes. Ps. 101."
Gustave-Félicité crossed himself, banged the door to, and ran in blind haste for his pistol. He had to rouse Laura to get at it; she looked up sleepily, with a question. He snapped an order to stay quiet, and went through the house and outbuildings, pistol in hand. But the murderers, their hosts of the night before, had gone. (It is odd to have to relate that Laura, amid this panic search, turned over and went to sleep again. She had got her terror over, as is the manner of women, well before the event.)
V
These bushrangers, a pair of no particular distinction in a brotherhood which includes such spectacular figures as Thunderbolt and the Kellys, enjoyed no very long lease of dangerous life. Six months later they came before Mr. Justice Strutt at Bathurst, and Gustave-Félicité was one of the witnesses. The leader, that smooth and sober man, gave cool details in the dock. It seemed that the double murder had been done not more than twenty minutes before the traveller's arrival, and the bushrangers, taken unawares with their hands in stained soapsuds, had been afraid to tackle an armed party. They bluffed, then in the earliest dawn cleared out with their loot, having slept some hours on the bed in that room with the cupboard.
--for omitting those improperations and termes of scurrility betwixt us, which only difference our affections and not our cause, there is between us one common name and appellation, one faith.
--Vulgar Errors.
I
THe land, when after these vicissitudes they arrived at it, proved to be a fertile tract inland from Bathurst. There was, in summer, a river flowing through it, the Wollondoola, so called by the blacks, with their gift for smooth and water-sounding names; and the rich treeless flats promised to the eye of the ex-lieutenant of chasseurs a living as a grazier.
The place once surveyed, and being found to include no habitation of any kind, save the gunyas of brushwood tossed up by a black tribe on the river's eastern bank, Gustave-Félicité turned his attention to the construction of a dwelling. And here again his curious unimaginativeness comes in. He was used to countries in which people had for generations lived, where certain natural features--a harbour, or a well, or a rock easily defended--made the nucleus, and went on being used for centuries. In the most deserted tracts of Africa great chiselled columns would be seen lying broken in the sand; in France, no hill or ford that had not its traces of use, the bones of houses scattered here and there. In Australia was nothing of the kind. The blacks' shelters of bark fell to pieces in six months, which was just as long as they were needed before the tribe moved on to fresh hunting-grounds. It had not occurred to the Frenchman that he would have to build his house in a wilderness, out of such materials as the wilderness could provide. It may have seemed excess of caution on the part of Grandfather Geraldine to transport from the old world an entire house, together with soil to build it on; but it shows a truer grasp of the situation than the airy nothing and the name of which Gustave-Félicité's local habitation was composed. He had the name pat; the name which had given his father a chance, and a crown, and a good swift death in full career. It sounded oddly, Corazon, three gentle Spanish syllables, among the tags of blackfellow's talk and names of Scottish villages, as Burrumbuttock, Inverlochty, Pilnagullagai and Fyvie, which served other landowners to identify their holdings.
Remember that in his life he had never set hand to a tool; a wrist for sword-play he possessed, but such dartings and twists do not lend themselves to the service of utility. Blind muscle is the wilderness's primal need, where there is the stubborn passive resistance of wood and earth to overcome. In such circumstances the mind takes, for once, its rightful place as the body's follower, and must be idle while the body strives. Gustave-Félicité had no knowledge whatever of how to cope with such primitive masses of material; intimacy with spades and axes he did not propose to acquire. He returned to Bathurst--Laura had been left there, in the charge of the bank manager's wife--with the polish undimmed on his nails, and applied to the governor of the prison for a chain-gang. The governor responded that convicts, being detained at Her Majesty's pleasure, could only be employed upon her lawful occasions: road-making, bridge-building, or the construction of even stronger and more forbidding gaols for their own accommodation. But the governor was secretly in a quandary; for various reasons--bushrangers, floods, or sheer officialdom--he was short of money.
It may be wondered what uses money could be put to in that wilderness; the answer is that whereas in older countries towns were built about an altar, in Australia they were built about a bar. Paddy or Johnny or Alf--the pub-keeper never possessed or needed a surname--was the most powerful of all the citizens, not excluding governor and graziers, for their underlings reposed in the hollow of his hand. It is curious to see how entirely this new-found country was in the grip of liquor; globe-trotters, denizens, all the memoirs of the early times speak of rum as of a personal devil. Let me quote the letter of one Australian house-wife of this period.
"I perhaps praise the tidy appearance and good cookery of a friend's servant: 'Ah, yes, she is an excellent cook, but we can so seldom keep her sober.' I have known a female servant drink camphorated spirits of wine, and suspect the same individual of consuming a pint of hartshorn which mysteriously disappeared from my room; its evident strength being no doubt too tempting. Eau de Cologne and lavender water, I know, they drink whenever they are left about. The universality of this vice is most dreadful to contemplate, far worse to witness and endure--"
Now the governor's plight becomes apparent. No pay, no rum; no rum, no warders, but only a residue of discontented men formidably armed. Warders were not selected for their moral qualities; they were chosen on physical strength, and if brutality went with it so much the better for discipline. The governor was a nervous man, and Gustave-Félicité had brought with him, with the usual French mistrust of paper currency, a good provision of solid sovereigns. The governor hung back a week or two, hoping for the lawful gold to arrive; his expectation was disappointed, and Her Majesty's dignity was put by for the time with a good grace. He even took the trouble, did the governor, to con the dossiers of some of his prisoners, with the result that an architect, tuberculous and serving a lifer for having throttled his own sister, was discovered in one of the cells. This wreck was removed from solitary confinement and sent, coughing blood, off under escort with a note hoping that Mr. Boissy--nobody could get hold of "de Mortemar"--might find him useful.
II
Gustave-Félicité gave the wreck pencils and a protractor, and a quire of the bank's foolscap, and watched with his ever-curious eye how the cheeks blazed, while the shaking hands slowed to calmness as they handled once more the tools of their trade.
"French, aren't you?" enquired the wreck in tones of equality. "I used to know France once. Made the grand tour once--wouldn't think it to look at me, would you?" A laugh, followed by a coughing fit; then, with a touch of malice, spying the home-sickness, "French, eh? I know the kind of thing--"
And from under the pencil flowed, in steady lines that balanced, curved and met in just proportion, the outline of a house; no château with turrets, but a long low manor. Gustave-Félicité, very silent, watched the pencil. It drew steadily the courtyard, the wall of the potager, a dove-cote; hesitated, as though not altogether trusting memory; then put in, with care, a gable and a preposterous round window, the oeil-de-boeuf, set a trifle askew in the gable's top. The astonished Laura, looking up over her sewing, saw that her redoubtable husband's face was perfectly white. As she looked a harsh voice came out of the white mask.
"What house is this you make?"
And the wreck, with his head on one side, approving his own picture, answered:
"Some French place. In Northern France it was--I forget the name."
There is no reason to suppose that the drawing was intended to represent the ancient home of the Mortemars, or that the tuberculous stranger had ever set eyes on it; the long arm can hardly be expected to stretch so far. But it called the mind of the exile back to his own country with cruel swiftness; that dove-cot, those poplars, and most of all the irrelevant round window, all were France, never to be seen again, never to be forgotten.
The wreck went on sketching. His hands, calloused with pick and shovel, moved daintily among the pencils and the coloured inks. He was drawing again, and talking:
"Y'see, they haven't got the right idea here yet. What is the right idea in architecture? Why, to build for the climate, whatever it may be. That's why I don't--didn't--take to the Palladian for England. Columns, stucco--they want sun, don't you agree? No, brick for England; there's nothing like a Thames Valley fog to mellow brick. Those little russet towns--Maidenhead, eh? And Bray--"
The attentive Laura, looking over her sewing, was obliged to endure another mystification; for the shattered creature had, unawares, turned his own weapon upon himself. He had raised, in his starved mind, already drunk with the relief from routine, a ghost which was never permitted to walk, the ghost of his own free youth, sculling and laughing with a girl at Bray. (That was before the sister with her tongue had put an end to his game, and he with a handkerchief twisted and knotted had put an end to hers.) England! The mists that he would never feel upon his forehead again; the grey skies, under which a man might go wide-eyed, and not as here, peering against the excess of light
"The willows and the hazel-copses green
Shall now no more be seen--"
No more, no more! He had the consumptive's unkillable faith in his own power to recover, a faith which could bear up against confinement, loneliness, the distress and pain of illness; but it could not hold fast against that ghost. No more, sounded the voice in his heart; and no more, thought the free man, staring down at the foolscap sheet covered with lines and squares that spelt home for him. Laura, incredulous, saw tears in both men's eyes.
It was the jingle of the escort's accoutrement that roused them all three. Time was up, the routine was upon them. At the first sound of that heavy stamping tread the convict shivered and shrank back, from Mr. James Spading talking with a client, to Number 10573 returning under escort to a cell four and a half feet by seven; the Marquis Boissy de Mortemar, lord of Morhange, Voeuvre and Geudecourt in Artois dwindled down to plain Mr. Boissy, who had, somehow or other, to get a house built for himself, and earn his living by the base peasant expedient of fattening beasts for sale. Laura resumed her mental comfort, which had been momentarily disturbed, and the queer little incident sank into time leaving hardly a ripple.
10573 was given a drawing-board in his cell, and some more pencils, and told to get on with his designing. He was at the height of his last flicker of strength, and became dictatorial, complaining that there was not light enough in his cell to draw by. The governor, to oblige his dear acquaintance Gustave-Félicité, but with misgivings, moved him to one more spacious, with a window which permitted light to enter: a concession which implied part remission of the solitary confinement penalty. A dying man cooped alone in darkness! Well, but it was the penalty for those convicts who made themselves nuisances, and 10573 had been hysterical and troublesome all his life, had committed a murder for which he appeared to suffer no particular remorse, and owned a tongue that could lash up his fellows to madness in no time. Hence the misgivings.
But they were unneeded. 10573 became, with the change of air, and the drawing materials, and the renewed sense of importance, the professional man on a job. He drew with unremitting care for two days at his plan to scale, making from time to time such notes as this:
"Memo.
"In view of the cedar forests not far distant, all doors should certainly be of this wood, which takes an elegant French polish, besides possessing an agreeable odour."
"Query: the rock known as blue metal used in the construction of roads--capable of being split so as to afford flagstones for the domestic premises?"
These notes are written almost undecipherably, as though--as was the case--they were scribbled against time. But the plan of the house, which still exists, is drawn with precision, and perfectly to scale. It has, however, a brownish smear across it through which the drawing shows, and which is the only trace left of the blood which poured from the artist's mouth in his final paroxysm. This came upon him just after he had written with pride his name, "James Sparling, Archt.," and underneath, ironically, his number as one of Her Majesty's guests. The warder arriving with supper on the third evening found the wreck sprawled across his drawing-board, untidily dying, and had the sense to rescue the plan at once before sending for the chaplain. Thus the blood had no time to dry or soak in, and did not ruin the drawing irrevocably. It had been washed with care by the time Gustave-Félicité received it, and still could serve his purpose.
The house that grew out of it, and stands now after nearly a century, is a kindly monument to the brain and hand which so soon after their achievement rotted away to nothing in prison quicklime. It is a rather gracious house, light and livable, admirably proportioned; yet when I turned up, out of curiosity, the report of Sparling's trial, I found him blown this way and that by gusts of weak rage, resentment over trifles, and a kind of dark furtive cruelty. But then, that was real life, always a foreign country to the artist, while the house was a dream in which he was at home.
III
I cannot imagine what put into Grandfather Boissy's head the idea of getting Chinamen as shepherds. In no account of the celestial empire is there any record, to my remembrance, of Mongols understanding the management of sheep. Where did he get them from? How did he train them? The fact remains that five years after the building of the house it was the centre of a village of shanties in which about twenty Chinamen had their unfastidious being. There were gardeners and cooks among them, but for the most part they cared, mated, delivered, dipped and shore sheep. Most of them could not speak English. Gustave-Félicité to the end of his days, though he mastered that tongue, would fly off into French whenever his own feelings demanded it, regardless of whether or not he were understood. And it is difficult to indicate the minutiae of the care of sheep by gestures. I suppose that he drove them along, as in six months of marriage he tamed his wife, and later, dragooned his family, by sheer force of character. Napoleon spoke indifferent French, the historians say.
These orientals, with occasional gins from the blacks' camp, did all the work of the place during the first few years, and gave the whole settlement an exotic air. Their manners were exquisite. They had their own religious feasts, but invariably remembered the Christian ones, letting off polite fireworks at Christmas and Easter and corning to the house on these occasions in their best rig, with little gifts such as the children adored. There were paper flowers, joss-sticks, rice-paper paintings of ingenious tortures, and boxes filled alluringly with what looked like green gelatine. For a long time the purpose of these last remained a mystery, until one day an enterprising child rubbed one of the sheets with a damp finger. Instantly the finger was covered with a beautiful rose-coloured dye, which transferred to the cheeks in round patches gave a doll-like appearance most objectionable to Papa. The innocent cosmetic was immediately banned, and it was conveyed somehow or other to the donors that henceforth gifts would be censored. The civil Chinese accepted the master's fiat, and when the next festival came round it brought only the usual fireworks, with a quantity of nicely written paper prayers.
IV
Looking back on what my elders can tell me of that time, the whole life of the house seems to revolve about the servants. Papa and Mamma were aloof and terrible; the servants were accessible, human, and as far as dependence went in much the same boat with the children. It was natural for the two down-trodden sections of Corazon society to league with each other. They had their wars; but the moment a parental raid threatened these were forgotten and no alliance could well have been more strong. They lied zestfully in each other's defence, accepted blame which even parental omniscience sometimes distributed wrongly, knew and kept each other's secrets. Ten children, pretty much the same number of house-servants; on the other side, Papa and Mamma, who for a minority kept their prestige up with a vigour which is very respectable. They had, of course, the tradition of infallibility and all-wisdom to help them; they had religious precept, the social usage of the time, and a whole Commandment of God himself to back them up. They were compassed about with awe. They invented ceremonies and restrictions. For example, it was forbidden that any child should speak to Papa before being spoken to. This, like the prison governor's treatment of his troublesome prisoner, may seem inhuman, but must be considered in its true light as a measure of self-defence. To be at the beck and call of ten children; to be liable to questioning, petitions and other disturbances from morning till night--it was too much to expect of an autocrat born. The result, at meals, of this ukase would be as follows:
Gustave-Félicité was invariably helped first. He did not carve, nor talk; in fact he took no share in the life of the table save to eat, and religiously drink one bottle of excellent claret. As a result, he was always the first to finish, and while waiting for the next course, as he was obliged in decency to do, looked to his children to provide him with entertainment. He would sit at the table's head, a heavy figure in the velvet coat which he was never to forsake, looking like an ageing pagan god; and from time to time, fixing one unhappy child with his small bright eyes, would issue the command:
"Say something!"
What detail of a child's day can be brought with any confidence to grown-up notice? The only topics which rushed to the victim's mind were sins. He would start, swallow water to gain time, look pitiably for help to his compeers, ranked about him or standing impassive by the serving table; finally in his misery giggle or cry.
After that the procedure never varied. Gustave-Félicité would rise, so gradually as to give the effect of one of Memnon's colossi standing up from his seat of stone; with his dinner napkin, which he manipulated as accurately as a teamster his whip, he would flick the unfortunate from the room, semi-fed and disgraced, and sit down once more, until the next stage wait produced boredom and the same command:
"Say something!"
With the same result. Occasionally a meal would end with no less than six empty chairs, while the remaining children, subduing the nausea which rice-pudding invariably caused, sat finishing the ultimate grains on their plates with mouse-like stealth.
It is difficult to choose among the fantastic events with which the memories of my relatives are strewn; an embarrassment of riches, mere decoration, and useless to propel the story on, but irresistible. There was that child, for instance, now a stately aunt, who once stole her dreaded father's razor to ease the corns of a vagrant who had won her heart with his performance on the ocarina; a cone-shaped instrument this last, made--can my memory be accurate?--of china, with a willow-pattern. It was played held sideways to the mouth like a flute, and the whole hand covered with vents, shifting up and down to produce the strangest mooing ghosts of airs.
There was the incident of Ben Tatton, a disreputable, who finally rose to the position of butler. After a year at this eminence he decided to leave, an event which cast only the faintest of shadows before--a single remark, made to my aunt Sophie, his particular friend among the children.
"If they miss a key," said Ben Tatton aside to her on the eve of departure, "I know nothing about it."
Next day he left, after an affecting scene with his employer. "Master, you've treated me well."
"Ben, I know it." Then as if excusing a weakness, "But you are a deuced good fellow."
Such sweet sorrow was this parting. Not till the cellar key was missed, the stout cellar door broken open, and the bins found to contain deflowered bottles filled with water to the number of seven dozen, was the measure of Ben's resourcefulness revealed. He was pursued, but had too good a start; the family lost sight of him. Only my Aunt Sophie, flattered by the confidence with which he had always treated her, kept his memory green. Eleven years later came a letter:
MISS SOPHEY,
My husband died Tuesday sent his best respects and last wishes for you miss to see him in his coffin. Funeral Thursday, but will keep him to your convenience.
Yours respeckfully,
MRS. B. TATTON.
How did Aunt Sophie, usually a meek and by no means obstinate aunt, succeed in wringing permission from her father to say farewell in person to Ben? Somehow she accomplished it, and set off to the town, not very far distant, where he waited. It was November weather, sultry; but the funeral was faithfully put off until, just as the undertaker and the other occupants of the house were at the end of their patience, she arrived to gratify the corpse's last wish.
Cooks were always Irish, and, owing to the extremes of temperature offered by the Wollondoola plains, nearly always angry. Only one, Mary Considine, sticks like a dart in memory because of the interesting way in which her intellect followed the phases of the moon, and the freakish nature of her final exploit. She was missed from the kitchen one morning. The mistress waited, waited; at last, relinquishing hope of an interview, she turned away across the courtyard--paved, after all, with small squares of black and white local stone--to stand astonished in mid-traverse, stricken motionless by the view of Mary Considine's crimson head protruding from the dog's kennel, wearing an expression of contented malice. The dialogue was brief.
"Mary Considine! Be good enough to come here at once!" (With a fine irony.) "And why, may I ask, have you got into that kennel?"
"Ma'am," triumphantly, "to sphite the dog!"
There is no end to these stories. Perhaps, since I have chosen to follow Gustave-Félicité's life, I had better stick to the incidents in which he figures. They will show the life at Corazon better than any detailed description of the days, which were, after all, much like each other, and melted into years with a treacherous swiftness. The years themselves were remembered by the prices the wool-clip fetched, or by drought, or the discoveries of gold, as at Bathurst in 1851. (Every station lost personnel during this rush, and the Ballarat rush that followed.) The details of sheep-breeding and rearing are in themselves of no very great interest, and I believe that Gustave-Félicité in his heart hated his trade, though his shrewdness and the pressure of "needs must" kept him at it, and brought success. He continued till the end of his life to present a finished study in contradictions; a man with a wife and ten children, yet lonely; a man self-condemned to live in the wilds, yet who refused to truckle to the wilds, wearing always his velvet coat and plaid trousers, going to bush funerals in full evening dress, hungering for France, yet forbidding all mention of it, and bringing up his children to a language and an allegiance he despised. Sometimes the home-sickness slipped through. His house, for instance, thanks to the accurate eye of the defunct murderer and late Grand Tourist, was such as you may see any day of the year in the northern provinces of France; and somewhere about 1860, luck threw in his way an escapee from New Caledonia, who in his youth had learned something of how to grow wine. It was a chance not to be missed. Within a year or two after the arrival of Poquareau, the escapee, the barren sunny slopes behind the house carried vines; and in a year more the vines bore grapes, over which Poquareau watched day and night with a rook-rifle, rarely sleeping, dreading to sniff the reek of the flying foxes, to whom no grapes are inaccessible and none therefore sour. The vintage thus guarded was finally gathered, and Gustave-Félicité may have felt a pang seeing the great baskets filled with purple clusters coming home. He had, however, no press; the carpenter had concocted some inadequate affair, it leaked, it responded with reluctance only to great physical force; there was nothing for it, if the grapes were not to be altogether wasted, but Poquareau's feet. These--after a fully supervised cleansing with Brown Windsor, on which the scandalized Laura insisted--finally took up their solitary jig in a gigantic tub; and it was hard on the children, who petitioned with tears to be allowed to assist, some even going so far as to scour their feet for the purpose, to be kept at bay by the terrifying escapee, who flailed them off with unintelligible abuse and a borrowed stock-whip, his feet keeping up their rigadoon the while.
When Gustave-Félicité tasted the first must from his own vines he dismissed an illusion; something was wrong, soil or climate, that could never be righted. Poquareau's feet had done their work well enough; the whole fault lay with Australia in that it was not France. He shrugged; and after an appropriate period in the seclusion of wood the wine was bottled, and drunk without relish by the family on winter evenings, mulled, with sugar and spice. It was also offered, enthusiastically, to strangers. Gustave-Félicité himself, after that first sip at the must, the potential vintage, never touched it, but continued to drink the Madeira or claret that had come rolling out round the Horn.
This was failure. Now I shall show him triumphant in two emergencies, and have done.
V
Emergency number one concerned him through one of his few friendships. There lived at Borrigo, not far away as Australian distances go, some twenty miles, a Corsican family. (Persons whose habit it has been to think of Australia solely in terms of English convict stock must revise their imaginings. Within a thirty-mile radius of Corazon were, in addition to these Corsicans, stations owned by Germans, Dutch, and Scottish Highlanders.)
No one knew the cause of Count Rotti's emigration; but fortunately Corsica is one of those countries, like Ireland, to whose inhabitants exile comes naturally. He was, however, very evidently a personage of distinction, and though he had not the same entire contempt for public opinion in the matter of clothes as Gustave-Félicité, was still something out of the way to meet in the remote bush. He wore a cut-away bottle-green coat by day, with a stiff stock under his chin, and legs arrayed, whether he rode or walked, in long white trousers strapped under the foot. Compare this with the attire of the currency cavaliers escorting a governor of the period--"handsome-looking men in loose tunics and blouses, broad belts, tweed pantaloons strapped inside the legs with wide leathern stripes, cabbage-tree hats tied under the throat, bare necks, and with beards and ringlets in hirsute profusion." He and Gustave-Félicité recognised in each other something of the same metal, and got on as well as two men may who meet only very rarely to converse in a tongue not their own. Both were Catholics, too, and took an interest in the Church as something which had followed them from their own continent unchanged, like an old servant whose turns of phrase go on down the generations, and who will never leave the family. They both subscribed towards church expenses pretty liberally, and had their money's worth, driving in on Sundays and festivals to the town in waggonettes overflowing with children, and spending the whole day on a spiritual spree; confessions, then Mass, succeeded by lunch at the public-house and three hours' torpor; then Benediction under the full glare of the four o'clock sun, with the candles on the altar keeling over slowly in the heat. The Rotti boys and the Boissys served the priest at all these ceremonies, in red cassocks and cottas starched till they cracked like icicles. The girls sang, with more or less success, innocent and tuneful little masses by obscure Italians, in which the Gloria and the Sanctus were always very loud, and the Creed wandered into as many moods as articles. The ladies took turns at the harmonium. There was an imposing marble tablet with cherubs mourning the memory of Count Rotti's father on the south wall. One way and another the church depended on these two families for years. Then--I suppose there must have been some trouble, perhaps a display of English statesmanship; at any rate there descended on Wollondoola a plague of Irish, not biddable and humble, though quarrelsome Irish, such as the servants were, but a set of powerful blue-jowled fellows--gombeen men, the retainers called them; not gentry, but mighty intent on soon being reckoned as such. They came as settlers, publicans, storekeepers; their relations crowded to them and hung on; all were pious; and they had unnumbered children apiece, just as well able to genuflect and shift the missal from Epistle side to Gospel as the children of the Corazon and Borrigo grandees. With astuteness they seized upon their common faith to inflict themselves socially upon the grandees, who were civil, as charity required, but no more; on which Con Toohey, who had bought out the previous licensee of the White Horse, where on Sundays both families were wont to dine, one day took the offensive in a manner difficult to disregard.
It was the custom of both gentlemen, the Count and the Marquis, to settle by cheque after Benediction for their Sunday hospitality enjoyed at the hotel. The cheque is an Australian habit, and does not necessarily imply social standing as in England, or Rothschild millions, as in France. Still the total of their payments through the year was not negligible. The two families mustered between them seventeen children, and this number to be fed, with four grown-ups--the servants brought cold meat and tea, which they were supposed to consume in the waggonettes--amounted to something over a couple of pounds a Sunday. What was the astonishment of the two noblemen to find Con Toohey repulsing their money, oozing friendliness over his bar counter on the evening of one Easter Day.
"Ah now, what's this?" said Mr. Toohey, sweeping the cheques away with a grand gesture. "There's no call to be paying down yer good money for the few fleabites of food yerselves and yer relations take--" Hills of hard, hot mutton, avalanching blancmanges, potatoes massed like boulders: these were the fleabites. "No, no. I take it unkind. What's a dinner and toothful of drink between Catholics?"
There was no way to prevent Mr. Toohey conferring this obligation. If they pressed him with their cheques he was at liberty to strike an attitude and tear these up. For once it might pass, but both gentlemen were pretty shrewd, and suspected that next Sunday would be the same, and the Sunday after that, until the Tooheys had accumulated a debt of benevolence which would have, somehow, to be wiped off socially. Gloomily and stiffly they wrung Mr. Toohey's damp hand, and went out to their wives, who instantly pounced upon the manoeuvre's significance, and were aghast.
"Never!" Laura declared. "That terrible blowsy woman--those children with their terrible accent!" She nursed the English of her own offspring as though it had been some sensitive plant. "Gustave, it can't be."
Mrs. Rotti said the same. Religion was all very well, and no doubt the Tooheys were excellent people, but manners and breeding, not piety and excellence, were the qualifications for a drawing-room. She suggested that next Sunday's food should be taken in the form of a bush-picnic after Mass; this would allow time for the matter to be thought over, and a plan of action concerted. She also suggested--having been in her time a great lady, to whom the resentment of inferiors was quite unimportant--that there was no need to continue to frequent the White Horse at all.
"Are there not in the town," asked she, "other places?"
There were; but they were kept, as the gentlemen knew, by Thomas Bannigan, cousin to the blowsy Mrs. Toohey, and by Lawrence Conor, brother-in-law to the intolerable Con. The mot d'ordre would have been passed. At these hostelries, which were, besides, of inferior standing and patronized by the lowest orders, the same tactics would be tried, the same benefits heaped. There seemed, both parties mused, driving home in the twilight, no alternatives other than the distasteful ones of battle or capitulation.
VI
No doubt about it, the assailants had planned well. They had that first law of the Church to help them, the obligation of attendance at Sunday Mass. A similar assault undertaken by Anglicans would have been met by the assailed parties abstaining for a while from the comforts of religion; but the unhappy Boissys and Rottis could not, under pain of mortal sin, so abstain. They had no choice between affronting the Tooheys and doing violence to their own niceness, and to affront the Tooheys meant slapping the face of the whole town, which was filled with their relatives as a nest with hornets. There was doubt and difficulty whichever way the afflicted families looked.
I have no wish to present this incident as a problem in snobbishness. It is not how I see it, and I do not believe that the fear of what other people would think, which is the snob's terror, entered into this business at all. The situation goes a little deeper, and the clue to it is Laura's exclamation concerning the children's voices. In the middle of wild country, with no railway as yet, and Sydney a five days' journey by coach, these people had made of their houses little oases of civilization. They had certain refinements in their way of living, come by with difficulty and preciously maintained; ways of speech, of eating, small civilities alien to this raw unsettled place. It was not easy to keep up a standard of manners in surroundings which made existence of any kind something of a struggle; and it needed no great prescience to foretell what the result of an incursion of Tooheys would be. Something of the bloom of that refinement, which, rightly or wrongly, these families prized, must rub off in intercourse with people of other standards. This was what the grown-ups of both families felt without being able to put it into acceptable words. The problem, thus lifted about the petty, becomes material for a full-dress argument; whether, for instance, refinement is worth preserving, or desirable at all in the wilderness; whether its effect upon character is such that it is worth defending at the risk of losing goodwill; finally, whether kind hearts and coronets can ever meet without the latter tumbling. There is something more than snobbery here.
VII
A respite, however, reached the grandees before next Sunday. The priest, riding home late at night through newly cleared ground, pitched over his horse's shoulder as it pecked at a stump, and was found with his neck broken. The grandees had been fond of the priest, but it is possible that their grief had some tinge of relief in it. Father Morgan from Bathurst left his own flock, and came out to bury his brother in Christ; the whole community stood by the grave. Gustave-Félicité attended in evening dress with medals, a cynosure, and to the irreverent a mock. (He in turn despised their attire, which, beyond a crape weeper or two, showed no sense of the occasion. "In grey--like kangaroos," was his description of these free-and-easy mourners.) A vast feast followed, offered by the White Horse, whose women-folk had been slaving at it since dawn. The Count and the Marquis could not in decency refuse to attend, but their appetites for once might very suitably have been described in terms of fleabites and toothfuls, and they departed early, earnestly conferring until the track forked, leading to their several homes. Before they quitted each other it was agreed that a letter should be written to the Bishop at Sydney.
They were good at intrigues, the one by nationality, the other by upbringing. Corsicans have little else to do, while there was never a Bourbon court without its mining and countermining, its scurryings up and down back-stairs. It was very evident to both what the Tooheys' next move would be. Maynooth was educating their kinsmen fast and competently, hardly an Irish family that could not boast its priest; and these enthusiastic and patriotic young men were coming out in biennial batches, agog to missionize. No doubt about it, the clan Toohey had one of their number somewhere among the shiploads, a weapon ready to their hand. They would ask him of an unsuspecting Bishop, and there would be junketings to meet "me cousin, Father Moriarty," and the hospitality debt would go on mounting skyward. So the only thing for it was a letter to his Lordship, regretting very sincerely the passing of bluff North-Country Father Fielding, and asking, very tactfully, for the appointment of someone as like him as possible. The Bishop had stayed, during his last visitation, at Corazon; he read French, and had complimented Laura upon the good taste and comfort of her house. He would understand and all would be well.
Off went the letter, and up the hearts of the magnificos. They endured with no misgivings a three weeks' silence, which seemed to them to imply that the Bishop was making his selection with care. During these weeks there was no Mass, and they had no occasion to drive into the town; they were not, therefore, aware that the coach which carried their mail also bore Con Toohey, his best clothes stowed in a carpet-bag of brightest Axminster, to Sydney. Their first warning of the march that had been stolen upon them was a prim note, wherein a small cross preceded the apostrophe, thus:--
"+Dear Sir,"
It said that his lordship was more than sorry to learn of the loss the parish had sustained, and more than glad that the late priest's services had been so truly appreciated. It added that such men were rare, and difficult indeed to replace, but that his Lordship, who was at present overlaid with work, would do his best to provide a successor "in every way acceptable." This was all very well as far as it went, but there was a sting in the tail of the letter; nothing much; nothing more than the neat signature, "Your obedient servant in J.C., Michael Joseph Quin."
It was ominous, that Irish name; it put the grandees in a stew. But the suspense did not last. One week more, and a plump figure in black was descending from a shaggy yet rawboned horse at the Corazon gate. (Mr. Boissy, that eccentric, possessed a gate, the only one in a land of sliprails.) One look at the plump figure was enough; its upper lip was the length of a shoe-horn, its chin and eyes were a West of Ireland blue, and when it spoke the genteel a's and i's of Maynooth lifted up and down in a West of Ireland sing-song. The Reverend James Sheehy was flesh and blood proof of the triumph of the Tooheys over grandeur and disdain.
Not that the young man himself was offensively assured. He was at the other extreme of servility and compliment, not always well-judged; as in his remark upon the eldest aunt, who cherished an interesting pallor, and the belief that she was not long for this world--"Madam Boissy, your darter's a very powerful young woman." But this humility and willingness to please were in themselves bad omens for his behaviour when he should find himself fast in the grip of his kinsmen. (For kin he was to the Tooheys, it came out with naive pride in the first ten minutes of conversation; and the Michael Joseph Quin of the Bishop's letter was, as might have been expected, a relative too.) Seeing him so young, and so entirely ignorant of the part he was to play, Gustave-Félicité dropped a hint or two; as that he and his family were very quiet people with no great taste for company, and no great leisure to be visited.
"We are here in the wilds. All must be occupied. I myself"--a gesture of the hand that defied the priest's eye to comment upon its lack of callouses--"I myself see to the well-being of all."
They kept the little priest at Corazon that night, and passed him on to Borrigo next morning. Borrigo, taking its tone from the note of introduction which he bore, showed itself as calm and retiring as its neighbour. (Borrigo, that gave its name to the most famous of the colony's picnic race-meetings; a house whose hospitality never ceased!) It was no easy matter to key down this household, all practical jokers of repute, to whom a fledgling priest such as the Reverend James Sheehy was a gift from heaven; but it was somehow contrived, the boys bore themselves meekly, the girls forsook their rendezvous above the stables where euchre and illicit reading were indulged; and the little priest jogged away on his unkempt horse with a very warm feeling of admiration at his heart for two truly Christian families. Next Sunday, having done what they could, the grandees set off in their waggonettes for Mass.
When the sermon began, after the reading of the First Gospel, it could be plainly seen that the poor man's mind was in a twitter of indecision, divided between what he had been told and what he had seen for himself. The text itself was an appeal:
"'When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and stars which Thou hast ordained; what is man, that Thou art mindful of him?' Words taken from the eighth psalm of David. My dear brethren in Jesus Christ--"
The Tooheys, Learys, Considines and Conors sat impassively listening to their nominee's exhortation, which came to this: that in a grand new country such as Australia where every man had his chance, where nature filled the air with sweet scents and gold was for the picking up, the little strifes of men were out of harmony with God's glorious plan. Everywhere under the canopy of heaven it was the duty of Christians to be neighbourly; but if they were not, what did it matter, anyway? "When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers--" When the Reverend James finally wound up his contradictions and turned to the altar again for the Creed there were a stern eye or two among his clan. James had got his head turned. James must be screwed round again, and up to the mark, and kept there. At the end of Mass, when the congregation streamed out, awaited by itching dogs and twitching horses, there was a short colloquy:
"It is good-day, Father, and au revoir. We meet again at Benediction?"
Voice of Con Toohey, intervening: "Before then, before then, Mr. Boissy. No later than dinner-time you'll be enconterin' his reverence once more. Sure, you're not forgettin' the word I said a week or two agone? Ten children--what's ten? If you'd a family as long as'd stretch a furlong, the Horse would be able for ye, aha! The Horse'd beat ye to it!"
"I regret--to-day we make a picnic to One-Tree Hill. Father Sheehy, my felicitations. Mr. Toohey"--a bow--"all my regrets."
"A picnic, is it?" sourly from Mr. Toohey. "Cold meat, and warm butter, and the bulldog ants over all. This is no day to be draggin' women and children up hills--"
And indeed the heat was stunning. The whole landscape had paled under it; trees, grass, sky were colourless; only the dancing distances were blue. But the grandees would not enter into argument concerning their plans. Into the waggonettes, rigged up with fringed awnings of holland, they piled their gasping families; the flies rose with the first lift of the horses' quarters, and followed, a restless escort; dogs took up position in the shade of the vehicles for their four-mile run; and off went the grandees, leaving bitterness behind them.
There were no more invitations after that day. Next Sunday's sermon kept clear of social controversy, and moved on safer ground among the inter-relationships of the Trinity. There were greetings as usual afterwards, and wary civilities, but it did appear that the clan had taken the hint, and that tension would cease. Two Sundays later the grandees lunched at the White Horse in the ordinary way, and cheques were accepted as usual.
VIII
It was a treacherous lull. The first intimation that a tempest was preparing reached Gustave-Félicité in the form of a letter, informing him that a meeting of parishioners had decided that the present church was too small to house the congregation--this was true--and that a resolution had been passed, and the hat sent round. In short, the clan Toohey proposed to rebuild the church, and one A. MacRory was prepared to contract for it. The letter regretted that Mr. Boissy had been unable to attend the meeting, and thought that he would be glad to know the decision to which "the majority of the parishioners" had come.
Rebuild! Gustave-Félicité had seen the first stones of the present chapel laid. It was an honest little building of stone, roofed with mellow shingles, cool inside and plain, with narrow windows and an altar of cedar, uncarved. The only splendours were the vestments, and the Rotti tablet on the south wall, whose blazon was painted in bright heraldic colours, gules and or. It might have been the private chapel of some devout family; it had dignity, and freedom from the more theatrical appeals to devotion, simpering statuary and the like. Now, all this was to be changed, unless something were very speedily done.
A boy rode over with a letter to Borrigo, encountering upon the way a Borrigo lad bound for Corazon on a similar errand. Though both notes reflected an equal horror, the alarm and despondency of Count Rotti had better cause; for the parishioners in their letter to him had gone into greater detail, informing him that the south wall was the one which must come down to make room; they would thank him, therefore, to remove the tablet to his father's memory and pay for the removal together with storage pending re-erection, since every penny of church money "would be required for other expenses."
"Touch not a cat but (without) a glove," runs the motto of some canny Scottish family. For "cat" read "Corsican," and this motto might well have served as warning to the Irish who chose, in this petty but infuriating manner, to avenge the insult of a drawing-room closed to them. "You won't have our wives in your house? Then take your father out of our church," said the Irish in effect. And "Sacrilege! Insolence!" exclaimed the grandees, hastening into their boots, ordering saddle-horses and spurs to ride in and reckon with the interlopers.
There was a stormy meeting in the little priest's parlour, he, poor man, sitting terrified with his hands in his sleeves while the powers thundered above him. A. MacRory was there, and showed his contract. An underling from the Bank affirmed that the sum of four hundred pounds stood to the priest's credit earmarked "Church Rebuilding Fund." No halfpenny of this sum, it was pointed out, had been subscribed by the grandees.
"We had no opportunity--" began Mr. Boissy, but was swept aside by the more impetuous Corsican.
"Opportunity, no! Nor the wish, nor the will. I do not give to a project so hasty, so trumped-up!"
It was pointed out that this was no sudden emergency. Sunday after Sunday families for whom there was no room had to kneel among the headstones.
"What do I care? Let them come in time."
It was pointed out that those persons who had put their hands in their pockets were the ones best qualified to speak; that the south was the only wall that could come down without disturbing graves; and that the resolution had been quite lawfully passed by a majority and endorsed by the priest.
"I write to the Bishop!" declared the Corsican, unyielding.
The Bishop, they replied, had already been informed of the project to enlarge the church, and had expressed his unqualified approbation of their zeal.
In short, there was no doubt as to which side had the better of the argument. The grandees had nothing to urge, no reasonable objections to raise. Their pride was pricked, but this was no adequate reason for refusing to countenance a reform long overdue. The fact that the reform was being undertaken for a sub-motive of spite did nothing to make it less necessary. How cope with the Tooheys, how make clear to the Bishop that a church augmented to annoy was a church not worth having?
The grandees stamped out. The Tooheys smiled. The little priest, uncomfortably voicing a scruple or two, was talked down, and A. MacRory told to get on with the job. A letter was concocted before the meeting broke up, a kind of Parthian arrow, to inform the Count that the work of demolition would begin in three days' time, by which date the tablet must be removed or the contractor could not be answerable for damage. Mass during the weeks while the church was under repair would be held in the Social Room of the White Horse Hotel "by kind arrangement with Connellan Toohey, Esq."
This challenge reached Borrigo next day, and for six hours the Count was unapproachable even by his dogs. Towards evening, however, he calmed down, and spent a cheerful hour or two furbishing up firearms. He slept soundly, and early next morning set out, a mounted armoury, for Corazon, where the two gentlemen talked purposefully together, grimly laughing from time to time. Of the gist of their talk the family at Corazon gathered nothing. A very small child was flipped from the dining room for asking if the Count meant to fight bushrangers with all those pistols, but there were no other questions. The looks of both gentlemen were altogether too grim for enquiry, and next day, which was Sunday, the family drove into Wollondoola, poising feet without comment on squarish obstacles which they knew to be gun-cases, and other parcels, purpose and contents unknown.
Neither Count nor Marquis returned with the waggonettes after Benediction. They offered no explanation, it was not their way, but their dependants were given to understand that business matters of some urgency required their continued presence in the town. The families, depleted by the absence of sons at school, but making double the usual noise by reason of the absence of both senior parents, went home unsuspecting that history was about to be made.
IX
Morning broke, the red morning of the Antipodes, which warns rather than delights the shepherd, and means a cloudless day. The employees of A. MacRory took their time. They could have worked in fair comfort from five to eight, and again from five to eight at night, but such a division of the day occurred to none of these workers, who brought their notions of labour from that side of the world which is right way up.
They elected, therefore, as though they had been working in their native County Limerick, to assemble their tools and set about their preparations at eight o'clock. The task of demolition was to begin at the roof. Ladders were sloped and wedged. But the first man going up with a pick, gave a start and exclaimed upon the name of God. The barrel of a rifle was against his legs, sticking out from one of the narrow loop-hole-like windows on the south wall, and a voice was uttering defiance in imperfect English.
"You will go away from here," said the voice. "It is an outrage. You have no right--" Then, with sudden vivid colloquialism, "Skip, bastard, skip!"
The man obeyed, sliding down the ladder, never touching the rungs with his feet. The man on the second ladder, receiving a similar command, disobeyed, scornfully laughing. There was a crack, a light puff of smoke; the scornful one clapped one hand under his armpit, and scuttled down, cursing. Both windows remained silent, tenanted by motionless gun-barrels; and the foreman of A. MacRory, examining his subordinate's hand, through whose palm a small-calibre bullet had torn its way, put the situation clearly in the fewest possible number of words.
"Boys," said the foreman, "by Cripes, this is no building contract, but a bloody siege we've signed on for!"
It was. They tried the door; it was barred and barricaded, and threats came through the keyhole. They scanned the eastern and other windows, but always through a neat hole in the glass a gun-barrel followed them. The priest came, exhorting the defenders to remember the sanctity which they were profaning with wickedness and pride. The defenders replied that since the Blessed Sacrament and the altar relics had been removed, and as moreover any blood spilt would be shed outside, they were untroubled by conscience. The police magistrate came and reasoned. The Mayor--a Considine--threatened the reading of the Riot Act and an appeal to force. A crowd of all denominations gathered, enthralled with this unhoped-for drama, and picnicked about the building. The defenders, presumably, picnicked within, for those parcels on which their children had been too well drilled to comment contained food, a sufficient store to last for weeks. No importunities, no reasoning, availed. Night found the tablet still in place, and the church inviolate.
X
Thus the strange boomerang-curve of Gustave Félicité's fate brought him back to the point which he had last passed through unknowing. He was three months on the way towards conscious life when the blacks of Corazon rose; but something of that siege must have reached him through the quick blood of Bella, his mother, and he had heard the story, of course, many a time from the survivors. Still I should be surprised if, while he waited at his loophole in a suspense half-comic, half-serious, any thought of the parallel came to his mind. He was a person who saw clearly only one idea at a time. This was his strength; he did not fritter it, as nowadays is the fashion, upon half a dozen loyalties. He did not perceive anything artistically shapely about the course of his life. Yellow Mary's cathedral, now under the sea, was one place, and St. Joseph's, Wollondoola, quite another. He saw himself as Count Rotti's second, avenging an insult in a way that barbarians could comprehend, and had no qualms beyond an occasional speculation as to when the wine would give out.
XI
But just as the besiegers in the cathedral had been saved by outside disaster, so--such is the curious rhythm which some men's fortunes keep--the defenders of St. Joseph's were saved from the overwhelming which must sooner or later have come by a happening which they did not provoke and could not have foreseen. The sun had gone down, and the greater part of the crowd departed to their homes. A couple of pickets remained, with instructions to watch for any sneaking out, in which case they were to go easy, and clip the gentlemen over the head with all due care; for the town was good-humoured still in spite of the bullet through the bricklayer's hand.
The pickets therefore were dozing, wrapped in blueys against the dew, when through the peace of the night came the racket of a galloping horse. Dust, the eternal red dust of Antipodean roads, muffled it somewhat, but the hoof-beats were urgent. They stopped at the churchyard rail, and a voice shouted:
"Master! Mister Boissy, for God's sake are you there?"
The pickets leapt up, but the new arrival shouldered them aside and lowering his mouth to the keyhole of the church door bawled again through it:
"Mister. Boissy, for God's sake!"
The answer came swiftly, suspiciously:
"Who is there? What trick is this?"
"It's George, sir. Come out, for God's sake, and get a horse and ride. Billy Durgan's at Corazon!"
"God Almighty!" from the startled pickets. "D'ye hear that now? Durgan, is it? How does it come ye're alive to squeal on him?"
"Durgan!" A pause of horror within the church. "You cowardly ape, you escape, you leave my wife and children--"
The mounting rage in Gustave-Félicité's voice died at the answer.
"Sir, you've got all the guns. I got in late from the boundary, and found them there. It was the best I could do. There's not so much as a kid's toy pistol left in the house!"
"Get on into the town!" Thus the pickets to each other, excitedly. "You, Andy, run on, knock up Bannigan, he's got horses. Does the Police know? I'll go that way myself--"
There was a thudding and a crashing, as of furniture being shifted, the grinding of a huge key in the church door; Gustave-Félicité and the Count came out at a run. The former, shifting his rifle to his left hand, leapt on the sweating horse and was away down the road. No one questioned or stayed him. The Count, George, and the pickets, taking to their heels, ran doggedly, blindly, townwards, towards the police station, horses, help.
To his other contradictions, Gustave-Félicité added the power to think while acting. His father's imperiousness and impulsiveness were modified in him by his grandmother's practicality, that characteristic so hardly acquired among the deceits and shifts of sea-captains' wives. Thus while he galloped, mechanically keeping to the road, his mind was busy in the coolest way with strategies. It had been so thirty years ago, galloping at his general's command on the heights above Algiers, combining gallantry with common-sense, and avoiding the humiliation of ambushes which had befallen certain of his more dashing corn-peers. He mentally disposed his forces as the gaunt trees went by, starting with an appreciation of the character of Billy Durgan, as far as this could be gleaned from previous exploits. He was not one of your bushrangers of character, a Robin Hood of the New World. He had none of the imaginative courage of the Kellys. No robbing of gold-coaches, no tackling of armed escorts for Billy. He never attempted these grand coups of bushranging, realizing, perhaps, that he had no head for them. His forays were a sinister mixture of petty thieving and brutality. There was one story in particular of a servant shot dead for refusing to give up a copper signet-ring. He preyed as a rule upon outlying stations; this was the first time he had come near to civilization as represented by the township of Wollondoola, and Gustave-Félicité drew the conclusion that he and his gang were growing, not more enterprising, but more hungry; as wolves will draw near to villages in winter. Durgan and his gang--there were two satellites only, one a black man--had probably had a hard day's riding; their bolt-hole was supposed to be somewhere in the Coonamar ranges, forty miles off. There was food and a cellar at Corazon. They would make a night of it, probably, Billy and his lieutenant, leaving the black on guard. They would sit swilling the Margaux--no, the cognac; Margaux had not sting enough for bush palates; would drink themselves sick and silly, with Laura and the children and servants tied up as like as not, all in the same room to prevent accidents; Billy keeping a drunken eye on them, with his gun on the table in front of him. Gustave-Félicité felt a violent spurt of anger, and dug his heels into the horse's heaving sides. Then the anger subsided, was thrust away to make room for calculation.
They would sit in the dining-room, that was pretty sure; it was nearest the approach to the cellar. Harry the black, with a rifle, would be stationed outside on the verandah, commanding the main way to the house, whence he could hear in the night silence the sound of pursuers' hoofs. Would they give him a bottle for company? No; Durgan had crude sense enough to know that a black with a bottle inside him was about as much use as a black with a bullet through him. He would have his drink next day when they got home with the loot.
Gustave-Félicité checked his sobbing horse at the white skeleton of a gate that barred the track to Corazon. The house was a mile and a half away yet. It was a question whether or no the sound of dust-muffled hoofs had reached that attentive ear on the verandah. He turned his face to discover the direction of the faint, hot breeze. It blew from the north-west, out of the central desert; he was to leeward of the watcher. So far, good. He hitched the horse to a young tree, climbed the fence, and began a detour which should bring him to the back of the house. His watch, consulted by moonlight, gave the hour as eleven. They had been in possession of Corazon four hours. Midnight was probably the moment of departure; they would be half-way to Coonamar by break of day. He began to walk at a good pace, keeping as far as he could in shadow. The blackfellow's sight was good for a mile or more at night.
He walked quickly, trying over plans of attack. Kill the black fellow first; but at sound of the shot, what might drunken Durgan do? Blaze off at random, perhaps into the crowd of children and servants. No, no shooting; useless. Bare hands, then. But how approach unheard a creature with wild-cat senses, alert for danger? How about entering the house by the kitchen way, through the courtyard? The dogs, damn them, would give tongue. Well, and why not?
Gustave-Félicité went forward more lightly; he had found his plan.
XII
He reached the vine-planted slope behind the house, and slipped in and out among the shadows of the deserted men's quarters. He was careful to step lightly, and at first no sound greeted him. Then, surprisingly, wafted round from the drawing-room, came the thin gaiety of a schottische, played on the piano. He knew that the performer was his wife; she alone of the family could compass the difficulties of that particular dance, and she had a pretty facility, a kind of bird-like quality in her music that was unmistakable. He thought for a moment, hearing that accustomed tune, that George had lied, that the whole alarm had been a ruse; but almost at once the piano began to spell out a different story. The rhythm faltered, died away in a jangle of false notes, then was taken up again at speed, as a horse breaks into a canter, touched with the spur. The noisy dance went through, jerkily, to its end; ceased; was succeeded by something else, a polka or mazurka, played with the same inequality of touch and time. Gustave-Félicité, clenching his hand, could very well picture what was going on. Billy Durgan, in an armchair with a bottle near him, was giving orders:
"Come on, step lively, missus. Not often me and my mate gets the chance of a musical evenin'. Excuse our shirtsleeves. Go on, put a bit of life in it, d'ye hear?"
But again the anger died down, to be out of calculation's way. They were in the drawing-room, whose long windows opened on to the verandah's western side. The watcher would be near those windows. He remembered the piano's fascination for occasional blacks of the neighbouring tribe that came begging to the house. It was an even chance that the watcher would be at that end of the verandah, looking in at the mysterious box that laughed and sang when a woman's fingers tickled it.
Gustave-Félicité slipped out of his shadow and presented himself to the view of old Nigger, the yard dog. Nigger, who had been moaning to the tune, broke off his lament, and began a cheerful greeting, bouncing up and down on his forepaws. His bark set other dogs off; in twenty seconds there was a small uproar, drowning the sound of the piano entirely. Gustave-Félicité, having made his calculation, acted instantly in the assumption that it was correct. He ran to the east side of the verandah, and saw, as he had expected, the watcher drop noiselessly down off the western side, going by the shortest route to investigate the cause of the din. Gustave-Félicité crept to the window, from which light was streaming.
Laura was at the piano. Her wide shoulders--she had grown heavy in the twenty years since Sydney--shook with sobs, while her hands scuttercd ceaselessly up and down the keys, jerking out those dances cheerful to the soul of Billy Durgan. The girls, white-faced, sat together on the sofa, the eldest with the youngest's head on her lap. The servants, two men with their hands tied, and three women, huddled where they could on the floor. Billy himself in an armchair beat time with the butt of his pistol on the table, at which sat his mate, methodically stowing spoons and forks away in a wallet.
Gustave-Félicité took this in at a glance, and it may be said that his first sentiment was not of indignation, but purest thankfulness that none of his household was in the line of fire. Billy Durgan's head was neatly outlined against the famous brevet of Auguste-Anne de Mortemar, which hung, framed and glazed, upon the wall, and the great seal showed like a gout of blood, just below his chin.
Instantly upon the shot there were screams; the piano stopped at a discord, and there was a thin jingle of silver falling as the second bushranger plunged for his gun. Another shot, and the second bushranger doubled up with a ludicrous expression of surprise and lay quiet. Laura, turning from the piano, gave one look at her husband, then caught up the eight-year-old youngest and ran with her from the room, holding a corner of her shawl between the child's eyes and the blood on the floor. Gustave-Félicité, remembering the watcher, wasted no time in words, but loaded his gun again and went cautiously on to the verandah. A sound from the back of the house told him what he needed to know; Harry the Black, having heard the shots, was showing discretion, making off for the ranges on his ready-saddled horse.
But against the sound of these hoofs another beat, stronger, more confused, was coming up against the wind. It grew to a commotion, with shouting, and three times the crack of a gun. Gustave-Félicité, peering out across the moonlit paddocks, saw a troop of horsemen halted; while he watched they moved, and came leathering towards him, leaving behind them a dark blot on the silvery grass and a riderless horse galloping madly away from it.
Con Toohey's was the first voice of the rescuing party to make itself heard.
We got 'um, Mr. Boissy, we got the blackfella. Now where's that dirty rogue, Billy?"
"Dead," said Gustave-Félicité, grimly cairn; then, changing tone, "But what's this? You're hurt--"
"Ah, what's a taste of shot in the shoulder? So ye got Billy, did ye, all on yer lone? There's men had statues put up to 'em for less. Well, well," as they stepped through the window, and came in sight of the bodies, "here's two of the devil's own, surely. Let none of us be plaguin' Almighty God for the souls of the likes of them."
XIII
Such was the entry of Con Toohey into that drawing-room which twelve hours before had seemed remote as Paradise and as angrily guarded. His shoulder was bound up, and he was constrained, with civilities and honour, to lie upon the sofa, while the other men disposed the dead decently, and the servants, too overwrought to sleep, handed round "Poquareau," laced with cognac, upon trays. Together in the friendliest manner Count Rotti and his persecutors sipped and spoke, as though A. MacRory and the siege had belonged to some other world. The matter of the tablet was not touched upon, but that night completed the moral victory of the defenders. It was left undisturbed, and remains to this day, a dignified reminder of times more spacious, amid St. Josephs in red, St. Anthonys in brown, and Stations of the Cross with all sacred personages arrayed like the tiger-lilies of the field. The only traces of the siege were, until twenty years ago, certain small squares of plain glass at the bottom of each window, which replaced those broken to let the gun-barrels through. Now all the windows are like story-books; and the most glaring of all, a St. Patrick in emerald green trampling snakes, is dedicated by his sorrowing descendants to the memory of Connellan Toohey, Esq.
Whether a Lion be also afraid of a Cock, were very easie in some places to make triall.
--Vulgar Errors.
I
Time, what with children, and churches, and wool-clips, was passing on. Gold-rushes came and went. The Chinese labourers had purchased their ornamental coffins and returned to await, with the tranquillity of the just, that moment when they might put on the incorruption of lacquer. The six girls of the family departed in pairs to the sanctuary of a renowned convent school, where they came in for a certain amount of teasing owing to the tiny coronets with which their spoons and forks were engraved. One of the elders was discovered to have a vocation for the religious life--and in justice to the nuns it must be said that such fancies, which all girls pass through, were discouraged most purposefully by them; this aunt, however, had a soul made to the Dominican measure, and I cannot think of her in any garb other than the white habit.
Her parents attempted to distract her. There were dances, jaunts to Sydney even, and a spate of new dresses. The aunt, who was adorably pretty, smiled, and laced herself as tightly as her neighbours, and danced to whatever tune her relations chose to pipe. But there came a day when, borrowing the fare from a brother-in-law, she ran away to Christ. Her father made no sign, but regretted her, for she was almost the best-looking of the brood.
A wedding or two thinned the family down about this time. Young neighbouring squires, young visiting soldiers were eternally about the place, scorned by my father and uncles for languishing, envied for their whiskers and dress, and the assurance of their baritones as they sang duets. The Boissy boys, who had occurred in a crop towards the end of the family, were learning at King's School the casual manners and intolerance of regulation which marks the Australian born to this day, even while he wears, as they did, a uniform designed by the Duke of Wellington. They spoke--poor Laura!--in the lagging slipshod fashion which reassured their contemporaries, and guaranteed them against assault; an English accent was apt, in that school, to be driven out with pitchforks, never to return. They could ride; they knew how to tackle a bush-fire, how to do rudimentary cooking, how to muster sheep. These were things they cared for, and learnt automatically with intent to use, while the classics dropped off them with the dust of school. All four regarded reading of any kind as a toil which should be left to such cranks as enjoyed it; and beyond mathematics and football, they saw school as a meaningless tyranny with no end or purpose, which poisoned certain springs of the human mind for ever. They possessed, too, the suspicious Australian temperament, which always looks a gift horse in the mouth on principle. Nothing showed in them of either of the two western countries whence they drew their blood. They had neither English ruddiness, nor French swiftness, English tolerance nor French curiosity. They were lanky, and long-faced, and sallow, and sullen, with gleams of attractiveness and no dearth of brains. They quarrelled a good deal, between themselves, but were linked close as steel. Art was folly to them, and land a passion. The eldest, my father, Jacques-Marie, was just nineteen in the year when Bismarck juggled with the Ems telegram, and France under the spell of Empire challenged Germany to war.
II
That was a bad time for Gustave-Félicité. He had no faith in any of the Napoleons, least of all in that impassive yet theatrical adventurer, third of the name. To fight the Prussians was all very well; they were ancient enemies, and a trifle swollen-headed by reason of their victories over the Austrians and Danes; the French bayonets would lance that pride for them. But--and here came the torment--how would these bayonets be led? Who were these Marshals, MacMahon, Bazaine? And had their pinchbeck Emperor any of the eagle's luck sticking to him?
It is strange how underneath his Republicanism, Royalism, Imperialism, a Frenchman's loyalty is always to France. Here was this elderly man, forty years absent from his country, which had treated him, to say the least of it, cavalierly, stealing his property, stigmatising his name. He owed France nothing, not even the hospitality of her soil at birth, but the thought of that soil being trodden down in battle by men of another blood set his whole soul on fire. For years now he had had no communication with any of his relations; friends had died or were forgotten; deliberately he had kept aloof, not even seeing a French book, or following in the "Revue des Deux Mondes" the trend of thought. All he knew was what his Australian papers told him, and these, while they paid the war the compliment of headlines as a European event, took no great interest in the upshot. Why should they? Both countries were buyers of wool; war or no war, they would continue to buy wool. But whether the guns sounded and the regiments swayed this side or that of the imaginary line known as a frontier was to Australians a matter of indifference altogether.
"Take the strain!" is the command given before the tug-of-war actually starts. Gustave-Félicité took it with all his pride, bracing himself against the soil of his new allegiance. He became more silent, possibly more withdrawn; but noticeably he aged. It must have been pitiful to watch him during those months, while the war dwindled down from headlines to paragraphs, and soon fell away out of the news altogether. In the ironic heat of an early New South Wales summer his imagination endured the horrors of frozen cities and armies, the earth so bound with cold that it could not be opened even to make graves. From July to September he lived in thought the nightmare of suffering and betrayal, constant withdrawal checked by bloody gallant stands that make the story of the first months of the Franco-German war.
Probably he tortured himself more cruelly than there was any need for. Life seems to have gone on throughout France, save where the armies were actually operating, without any yielding to despair. Indeed the curious thing, reading the letters of the time, is to see how to the end the French were buoyed up by rumour and hope. Their minds had acquired the habit of victory, and they parted with it hardly. There were their little soldiers, the same little fellows who had trotted over all the roads of Europe, and into all the kings' palaces not so long ago, just as numerous, and wearing trousers of the authentic red; how should they not be victorious? Something would happen; France could not lose. French people talked and wrote like this while the Prussians drew round Paris.
III
Gustave-Félicité was feared by all his family, but by the sons most. They felt for him that curious antagonism which thrusts between the generations when the father's resentment at being displaced meets the young man's consciousness that the world moves on. The old prohibitions had gone as the family grew up, but the habit of awe remained; I do not believe that any one of the boys ever deliberately addressed his father unless he were spoken to first, and as the days crawled on between battle and battle these casual daily exchanges became more rare.
It was a shock then for Jack, riding home late in the cool of the night of December 1st, to discover, when he came in after putting up the horse, his father seated in his room. The old man sat with his eyes on the door waiting for his son, and to the startled boy it seemed as if those eyes belonged to a person he did not know. They were fixed, and heavily shadowed, and the expression did not change to welcome him. Nor did his father move. He said at once, speaking deliberately, in French:
"My son, we have something of importance to decide."
Jack answered, in his loosely-articulated English:
"Why, what's up, Papa?"
His father frowned, but for once did not reprove slang. He had other things to say.
"We are falling back. The river will hold these fellows, not for long. Still, it may give us time to get the men together. Men, more men! That is our affair. The good God must send a leader."
Jack, honestly bewildered, vaguely pictured a raid by blacks. But there were none within a hundred miles. What was this river?
"The army of the Loire," said Gustave-Félicité, answering his thought, "that this personage, this Gambetta, is forming. I know nothing of him; a revolutionary, by all accounts. But if he can lead, tant pis, he must be followed. France has had to lean on many a queer stick in her time."
Now Jack had his drift, but was none the less mystified. Who cared? What the hell interest was it, anyway? lie said, however:
"That's right. Look, hadn't you better be getting off to bed? It's pretty late."
His father put the interruption aside with one square white hand, and said, quite sanely, but fixing him with those unusual eyes:
"You are nineteen years of age. You can use a rifle. Is it necessary for me to indicate further your duty?"
Jack stared. When he had the meaning, he laughed. It was really very funny, this notion of going off to the other side of the world to put on a pair of red pants and bolster up a set of fool Frenchmen. Why, they were on the run, had been on the run from the start. You could lay out a regiment of them with a bag of pepper. He jumped as the old man spoke, a remembered ridiculous phrase that had taken on meaning:
"Say something!"
As in the old days when these words coming in the midst of a mouthful of pudding were the signal for an entire blankness of mind, so now. What was there to say? He couldn't tell the old man what he really thought of the Frenchies. Besides--besides, it was all too senseless. What, go off now; just when he's got rid of school, and that headmaster with hair like moss and sermons filled with cricketing metaphors about Christ always playing for his side; just when he was coming into his physical strength, and felt fit enough to push a bullock over; to go off and stop a dozen bullets from a German needle-gun! And what for? What on God's earth for?
His father was speaking.
"You can be ready by to-morrow's train. There is no need to pack, you may buy in Sydney what is necessary for the voyage. There will be time before the ship sails."
Here was a definite proposition, and Jack had to stand up to it, whether his father were, as he half thought, off his head or not.
"You mean you really want me to push off to France and fight?"
"I want?" A shrug. "Does it not seem to you a matter of duty?"
Jack came out plump with his scandalized refusal.
"No. It doesn't look one bit like that to me."
His father did not move, and his voice was oddly patient.
"You do not perhaps appreciate the position. Many do not, these newspapers are useless to give strategy. But I assure you the situation is most desperate."
"I know that. I dare say it is. But--God's truth, father, it's only France!"
With those three words all sense of proportion and justice fled from Gustave-Félicité. He ceased to remember that he had brought up his children as Australians, that he had never spoken to them of his own country, that all their interests, their whole life was in the soil that had adopted them. All these things, and the speaker's own relationship to him, he forgot. He struck with all his strength at the grinning brown face, knocking it backwards for a moment, and extinguishing the grin. Then his hands were caught and held in his son's; immediately, feeling the young man's greater strength and disdaining to pit his sixty-year-old muscles against it, he became quiet.
"Hold on, father; don't do that again," said Jack's voice angrily. Gustave-Félicité answered, biting out the words with a calm so contemptuous that the young man let him go:
"All my excuses, sir. I was in the wrong. One does not soil one's hands with a coward. You are right to remind me."
"But, Christ--listen here, father." A half turn down the room. "Listen, why the hell should I go? I'm not funking it. Put me down in front of a couple of Squareheads in the front paddock here, and I'll thrash 'em both to-morrow if they need it. I'll fight anyone if there's a reason. I don't see the sense of this idea of yours, that's all. I was born out here, I've got to live out here, haven't I? Where's the sense?"
"I do not argue with you. This is a matter of sentiment and proper feeling, not for argument."
"I don't want to argue, I want to make you see--"
"That is enough."
But at the door the old man paused and turned.
"One more chance. I cannot believe that one of my name would shelter himself. It is my last word. Will you fight?"
"No," said Jack, unhesitating. "I won't. France is nothing to me and this war's a mess and I'm bloody well not going to be bluffed into it."
He stood slouched against the chest of drawers as he spoke, and the words came out with that ugly unfinished drawl from which his mother had guarded him all his childhood. He seemed to the old soldier, whose eye for a man had been trained in quicker, more vivid countries, the very picture of degenerate youth. Gustave-Félicité looked him up and down, once, then said with the same calm:
"You are free to choose. I am master in this house. You must leave it."
"All right. Glad to. Better hump a bluey on my own than sweat my soul out running away from Germans."
But his father had got beyond the state of mind when taunts had power.
"You will go to-night. From to-night you do not come here again, nor speak to your mother and sisters. Understand; it is finished for you here."
"Right."
"You may take half an hour to pack your clothes."
"No, thanks."
And just as he was, in old breeches and a shirt, hatless, coatless, disdaining even to pick up his watch and the silver which while he talked he had emptied from his pockets to the dressing-table, Jacques-Marie swaggered out past his father.
Gustave-Félicité did not gaze after his son, nor take any further steps to make sure that he had left the place; so far he trusted the boy's pride. But in the morning, when at breakfast his wife commented:
"No Jack! That boy grows wilder every day. Regularity at meals is one of the truest marks of a gentleman Gustave-Félicité interposed:
"Jack will not return."
"Gustave! Not--"
"He is not dead. But he lacks other marks of the gentleman besides promptness. He will not return here. I forbid communication."
"But, Gustave, where's he gone?"
"I do not know."
IV
He had, in fact, and most naturally, gone to Borrigo and told the whole story there. Count Rotti was dead, but the eldest boy, Bert (Umberto), after conferring with Ben (Bentivoglio, the next in age), and deciding privately that old Boissy must be going mad, offered him a job about the place--"just till your old dad comes round," they said. Jack laughed, knowing better.
"He won't come round," said Jack.
But his presence at Borrigo, working out on the run, was a scandal, and news of it spread, together with garbled versions of the cause of his flight. His father had turned him out of the house for saying the French couldn't fight. He had been horse-whipped by his father for giving two Germans a job splitting rails. No, it was some kind of immorality, really too terrible. The rumours grew, and became more absurd as they spread wider, until old Madam Rotti was of opinion that this nonsense had gone on long enough. Besides, one of her girls showed signs of being interested in the unlucky Jack, was grown indeed quite fatuous, and of course there could be no question of anything if Jack were really, as the rumours said, cut out of his father's will. Old friends or no, that was a disaster not to be borne, and which should not occur for want of a little energy directed in the right quarter to prevent it.
Madam Rotti had out her landau, with her coachman in livery, and donning a hat with a fly-veil very similar to those worn by her horses, set off across the fifteen miles of bush track that lay between Borrigo and Corazon. She drove, regarding the ragged gum-trees, the endless grey border of post and rail fence, with an eye that lacked its usual bird's quickness. She was busy with the future. Of course, it was difficult to marry the girls out here in the bush; one had to find Catholics, and while these abounded, unfortunately they were all of the Toohey and Bannigan class, quite insufferable in the house except to cook and hand food. Trips to Sydney were costly. No, on the whole it was better to put all one's tact into playing peacemaker to the Boissys; to patch up the quarrel if possible, and see that Jack was given an interest in the station on his twenty-first birthday. The other boys did not matter, they would be several years yet coming along to marriageableness; one could put in a word there when the time came. If the quarrel were over money, she would have her work cut out, she told herself; the French, thought Madam Rotti, fanning herself, were always so mercenary, even the best-born of them. Now, in Corsica, money mattered nothing. Nobody had any. It took its proper place. Of course, one must be practical, but that was quite another thing.
So, musing, manipulating her ridiculous parasol to protect the fringes of her shawl, which already showed signs, after only two months' wear, of fading, Madam Rotti was driven along, through the ford at Gullagalong, past a boundary rider's deserted shanty. She remembered how Mr. Boissy, summoned post-haste to this spot to soothe the last moments of an employee who had brewed and swallowed a decoction of fly-papers, had addressed the writhing suicide without sympathy, thus:
"You are a bad man! You 'ave attempted to take your life."
A stare, and a turn on the heel. "I will 'ave you appre'ended."
Dear me, if he had genuine cause for quarrel with Jack! He was implacable. There would be nothing for it but that trip to Sydney.
Resolutely, when the landau drew up at the steps of Corazon, Madam Rotti dismounted. Her eye, withdrawn from inward contemplation and restored to its powers of observing, had leisure to note that the verandah, which ran round three sides of the house, was altogether deserted. Unusual, this; for as a rule the long chairs were tenanted, sewing and books littered the clean cedar boards where the feminine part of the family, immune from mosquitoes, carried on a perpetual out-of-door parliament, or talkery. Madam Rotti, a trifle worried lest they should all be out on some expedition and she have wasted her time, gave the bell a second savage tweak, and entered the hall through the open front door, calling, as she thumped forward on the stick she did not need:
"Madam! Louise, Sophie! Is anyone here?"
She was a woman who conducted her own life sans ceremony; and accordingly, as no answer came either to her tweak or her calling, she turned the handle of the first door on the right, which she knew led to the drawing-room.
"As well sit down, at any rate," thought Madam Rotti, "and he comfortable, even if they have all been struck deaf."
The room was pleasant, and deserted. Its bell, which she rang in a kind of supplementary summons, tinkled pitifully in the distant kitchen, and in vain. Madam Rotti, who had acquired a good working philosophy during her quarter-century of exile, seated herself at a frame whereon was stretched a chair seat in petit-point, from which one or other of the Muses looked out with starting eyes, and began to stitch. The clock under glass on the mantelpiece struck once; half-past twelve, and Madam Rotti had breakfasted at eight or a little before. She stitched on, resolving at one or thereabouts to raid the larder.
She was saved, however, from this breach of behaviour by the sound of wheels and hoofs; many wheels, many hoofs, coming up the drive. She went on to the verandah, parasol up, and beheld a cortège; the waggonette, a sulky or two, a couple of men on horses, approaching at a pace by no means brisk. She could see that in the waggonette Mrs. Boissy was holding a handkerchief to her eyes, while the girls appeared to be passing a bottle of smelling salts from hand to hand. A chill feeling overcame her. Could the old gentleman--so her upright seventy years regarded his heavy sixty-five--have gone off in a fit? He was nowhere to be seen. Yet the demeanour of the girls, which had, despite the smelling salts, some twinge of gaiety, seemed to give this conjecture the lie.
The waggonette drew up. Mrs. Boissy descended, cumbersomely, and looking up, saw her neighbour. The heavy silk skirt surged up the steps, and Laura, five foot eight, fell upon the shoulder of her neighbour, a slender five foot two, with the cry:
"My kindest friend, how did you know? How could you guess that I should need someone?"
And the large Laura wept anew. This was all that twenty-three years of marriage had done for her. The girl who attempted to pass off her bridegroom with the bribe of a bonnet, the moody girl of whom her father was afraid, could never have thought of needing a shoulder to weep on. But she had been thoroughly tamed and talked into womanliness, with the result that she could be overcome now at a few moments' notice, and had arrived at such expertness in sensibility that tears and voluntary unconsciousness were both at her command. Marriage had made of her no more than the shadow of a woman, having been for so long obliged to admire, believe, and do things which failed to interest her; a shadow cast by her husband's stronger personality. And now--"
"But, my dear," said Madam Rotti, patting her shoulder with the hand that still held the parasol, "I have heard nothing, I assure you. I know nothing. No, no, my pet"--as Laura attempted speech--"one of the girls shall tell me. Louise, you!"
"Papa's gone," said the youngest girl, thus exhorted, wide-eyed.
"Gone? Where gone?"
"Sydney, by the morning train. We've all spent the night in town to say good-bye. Servants and all."
An elder sister pushed this evidence aside, and communicated the true cause with some gusto, aided by a sniff at the salts.
"Papa's going back to France," said she, "to fight the Germans. Only think, he's taken his guns."
"At his age!" wailed Laura, gaining voice. She was in an armchair by now, being fanned. "The cold will kill him. And he's so venturesome, so impulsive. He'll never come back--"
"And Jack?" asked Madam Rotti, still with her eye to the main chance.
"Jack's cut off. There's to be a manager put in, some stranger."
"Ah!" said Madam Rotti, swiftly reversing her tactics, and compressing her plan to a single sentence--So! This means more for the younger sons, we must wait. "Your poor Jack is safe with us--or elsewhere. He is a fine worker. Such do not starve. Now, my dear friend, if I may suggest, you shall lie down, and take a little tea, and I will bathe your eyes."
"I don't want tea," responded Laura, sobbing, but moving as bidden towards the door. "I couldn't face a cup of tea." Pause.
"Perhaps a glass of Madeira
"Quickly, girls, a glass of Madeira for your mother. Where are the keys? Hurry."
A girl adroitly detached the bunch from her mother's chatelaine with an ease that betrayed long and subtle practice, and vanished into the dining-room. Her mother's voice followed her:
"Nor the good wine, darling. Papa would not wish that. The bottle that was opened for Sophie's cold--"
Then, with a burst of grief that was genuine, for it was a realization of how badly the years of marriage had cheated her, and how little of herself was left to carry on:
"But what does it all matter? He'll never come back."
V
Nor did he.
While he was on the sea, wasting time in the doldrums, more time at the mercy of strong contrary winds, things were happening in France that rendered all his impatience, together with his whole impulsive departure, tragically void. The Orleans' campaign, after a few clashes that cost men and settled nothing, failed for lack of generalship. There was Faidherbe, of course; but he was a mere junior amid that body for which the appropriate collective noun would have been a jealousy of marshals. Bourbaki ran his troops into a trap at Pontarlier, and shot himself--not dead; as ever, his conception and execution did not keep step, and the gesture ended with a flesh wound. Gambetta with his umbrella and haut-de-forme--what did he know of battles? Enough to muster and equip the troops somehow, to feed them, to get them into the field in numbers which at the beginning of January exceeded those of the invaders by some fifty thousand men; but, tragically, not enough to manoeuvre them. Or so the marshals said, marching the levies he raised for them here and there in the snow, never combining--what, one army in the field support another? The wrong marshal might get the credit--never seeing the four hundred miles of front as a whole. The German armies swung always forward, little by little, like the movement of a scythe. Francs-tireurs harried them, civilians passively resisted, a terribly severe winter season came upon them in their trenches; they moved inevitably on, bringing up by train from Germany the food they could not plunder, never short of shells, never for one moment in doubt of victory. The great battle of St. Quentin was the last effort of France to avert disaster; it failed, and she lay with the spine of her defences broken. On January 28th, as Gustave-Félicité was dawdling in his four-master round the seething Cape, armistice was signed.
VI
His ship arrived at Bordeaux at the beginning of March. The war was over, humiliating terms of peace were being added up into a treaty; two hundred millions in gold, and an army of occupation to be supported until they were paid. German troops were everywhere. France, like a woman in hysteria, was drumming her heels on the ground and shrieking that it was everyone else's fault. It was just the bad short period of disorder which preceded stern effort, the sort of thing to be expected of a country unaccustomed to defeat; but it shocked Gustave-Félicité, and that which disturbed him most of all was the fact that he was too late. It was the politicians' moment, now that the soldiers had failed, and politics had changed since 1830. Then there were still great names serving the state, Polignac, de Broglie, his own distant cousin, the Duc de Mortemar. Now a horde of nonentities, without money to preserve them from corruption, or tradition to keep them loyal, were negotiating on behalf of France, complacently making jobs and names for themselves out of her downfall.
He went to the Ministry of War to offer his services; repeated letters procured him an interview with an indifferent young man in varnished boots, who heard him with politeness, and at the end of the recital pointed out that there was no longer a war in progress. Gustave-Félicité questioned, uncomprehending:
"Is it your opinion that the country will swallow this peace that is preparing?"
"Why not, monsieur? The country is tired of war."
"But not of dishonour?"
The young man made a helpless gesture.
"I repeat, monsieur; is the country prepared to tolerate submission to these upstarts? Prepared to be bled? Will there be no resistance made?"
"Not, at any rate," delicately replied the young man, "by the Ministry of War. We have been beaten, unfortunately, in the field. We must make what terms we can. And if I may give my advice, M. le Marquis, it would be to suggest that fire-eating is definitely a harmful attitude at this moment, when every endeavour should be made to conciliate."
Gustave-Félicité, very white, took up his hat and gloves.
"I demand to see the Minister in person. He cannot be aware of the sentiments of his representative."
"On the contrary. The sentiments are officially recommended in a minute signed by him."
"Good God! A man of your age, tamely resigning himself and his country to servitude!"
The young man smiled.
"The word glory has been much trumpeted during the past six months; months, monsieur, during which you were on the other side of the world. We have seen where it leads."
"Am I to understand that my offer of service is refused?"
"The Minister regrets that it would be contrary to the understanding with the Prussian Government to enrol volunteers, however distinguished, during the present armistice."
And he bowed, eyeing his varnished boots with approval as he did so. The old man said, fury overcoming him:
"A War Office run by civilians! I no longer am astonished at the débâcle--"
"Monsieur," said the young man, very pale, "I fought at Gravelotte. Modern war is something more than an affair of sabres and gold braid. Permit me to close this interview."
Gustave-Félicité went out with no further word, bewildered and angry, into the street. How Paris had changed in those forty years since the revolution of July! Difficult, in this city of wide boulevards, to imagine such another revolution; no tangling of troops in narrow streets, no bottle-necked alleys to delay them. It had become a town defended by amenities against attack from within, for the new broad ways made easier traffic and afforded magnificent vistas, and the citizens, after a little natural grumbling, were proud of the Napoleonic achievement. Only a few revolutionaries and a few antiquaries mourned.
VII
Sitting in the unaltered gardens of the Tuileries to watch his countrymen pass by, he was astonished at their levity. The citizens talked of stocks and shares, of the weather, of women. German uniforms shouldered along the paths unchallenged, hardly noticed. The children stared with admiration after the handsome figure of a German officer of lancers, strolling with youthful assurance through this conquered garden. Two young men seated themselves on Gustave-Félicité's bench. He listened, still with his eyes on the officer, who had halted beside a pretty nursemaid. "These war taxes," said one, "I shall not pay, I for one."
"They'll make you, my friend," said the other. "Thank God, I have no money, no nice little business to be bled. I am not a voter; I escape the privilege of contributing."
"I do not say that I enjoy defeat," went on the first, "but looked at without prejudice, there may be money in it for the individual. One can pay too dear for glory."
"Ah, and for brioches too!" said the other, laughing. "Confess, the siege filled your pockets nicely!"
"Naturally, food becomes dearer. People expect that. It does not do, if one is in trade, to cheat expectation."
"No matter who else one cheats!"
"Perfectly. Glory! You can't dine off it; at least, not at my restaurant."
Gustave-Félicité got up from the seat, and in his somewhat ludicrous clothes--he had held for forty years to the fashions in vogue when he quitted France--addressed the two young men. They did not rise, but sat looking up at him, their legs sprawled out, hands in pockets, now and then winking. "Gentlemen," said Gustave-Félicité, "the tone of your talk surprises me. Do you in your hearts find that"--he indicated the lancer--"palatable?"
The two young men, having decided that this old personage must be one of those comic aristos so familiar in farces, grinned up at him, and the first, the restaurant-keeper, answered:
"His money is as good as another's."
"Money! Money," Gustave-Félicité repeated, "is that all you consider?"
"Look, monsieur," interposed the second young man, "we are young, both of us. Were we consulted about the war? No. Who will have to pay for this war? We shall. Not the generals. Not the politicians in top-hats. We, the workers, the young men, we have to pay for it. We have nothing to say to the old men. They made the war; we fought it. Who has the best right to talk?"
"The old men--"
"You, monsieur, and others like you; no offence, no blame to you. You get something out of war, and don't risk your skin; ribbons and dignities, win or lose. But it's all at our expense; we get nothing, not so much as a thank you. When they give medals for cooking soup, or telling the truth, maybe we'll get a look in."
"Do you say your leaders are cowards?"
"I say," said the young man, sneering, "that since they never go into danger, there's no way of telling whether they are cowards or not."
"Thank you, gentlemen," said Gustave-Félicité, removing his hat, "I am glad to have your opinion of your elders. I hope to prove to you that it is unjustified."
And with that he walked away in the German officer's direction. The lieutenant was speaking to the nursemaid, while the boy in her charge fingered his sabre. The two young men, giggling and nudging each other, saw the elderly madman approach, and speak to the officer, who looked haughtily at the broad stooped figure so oddly dressed, and gave a short answer which they could not overhear. The old man then spoke to the nursemaid, and quite gently took the little boy's hands. They heard what he said to the child.
"Little boy, you must not touch that sword. It has your countrymen's blood on it."
The officer's face was difficult to read. His bearing was insolent, but he was a man of breeding; and while he knew the old man's insult to be deliberate, he had self-control not to resent it. One could not pick a quarrel with an opinionated grandfather of this description, said his expression; it was more honourable to ignore the challenge than to accept it. He therefore said nothing, but bowed stiffly, pretending not to understand, and said in German:
"It is quite safe, the child will not cut himself."
And with a final lazy glance in the direction of the nursemaid, now, in terror, hurrying away, he turned to resume his stroll. But a hand at his elbow checked him.
"Do you speak French, lieutenant?"
The officer studied the white face and burning eyes, and shook his head.
"You do not? Fortunately, there is a language which every man understands."
And on that Gustave-Félicité struck the officer full on the mouth, as not so long ago he had struck his own son. The lieutenant swore, and carried his hand to his sword-hilt, sucking in the blood from his cut lip. A gendarme was approaching, the two young men had left their seat, and, forgetting their laughter, were running up in anticipation of some kind of immediate massacre. The lieutenant in ten seconds had hold of himself once more, and stanching the blood with his spotless glove said to his assailant in good French:
"Perhaps monsieur will favour me with his card?"
Gustave-Félicité took out his pocket-book and handed the rectangle of pasteboard without the formality of a bow. The officer, accepting it, wrinkled his brows.
"Corazon?" said he, "Wollondoola?" He pronounced it oddly. "Is this sufficient for my friends to find you, monsieur?" Gustave-Félicité took it again, and drawing a line through the address, scribbled the name of his hotel.
"Albrecht von Zeuss," said the officer, clicking his heels, "of the 21st Uhlans. My friends will not fail you."
"If they will be so good as to call in the morning, between nine and twelve, my friends will receive them."
"Au revoir, monsieur."
"Au revoir, lieutenant."
VIII
But as he walked away, Gustave-Félicité was wondering what the devil he should do. It was not the prospect of the fight that worried him, but the question of fighting en règie. Friends were necessary. A man could no more arrange his own duel with propriety than he could arrange his own marriage. And where were friends to be found? His mind ranged over the names of officers, brothers in arms of the campaign of Algiers, and of relatives not too distant who might be expected to help in an affair of honour. But how to trace them? So helpless and forlorn was he in this vast new Paris that he even considered approaching again the young man in varnished boots, that unsoldierly ex-soldier; but a memory of his execrable principles, his acceptance of defeat at the bidding of a War Office minute, drove that possibility away. "Corazon, Wollondoola," said his card, with truth. He belonged there now, although he could never think of it as home. This Paris, changed beyond recognition, this France defeated and humbled, meant home to him, though they treated him as a stranger. It was as if the lost heir should turn up at his inherited castle, after forty years in the wilds, to find the windows broken, and the caretaker dead, and nobody in the village who remembered.
It was time to eat. He turned into the nearest restaurant, a tidy, tiny place called "Au Bonheur de Vivre." It was empty, save for two young soldiers, privates in baggy red breeches, eating soup. They looked at him, but without displaying the amusement to which he was growing accustomed; and when they spoke, though it was only some triviality, some murmur from the corridors of the Opéra, the voices were of his own class. He finished his cutlet--how he would have loved to set this cook's ingenuity to work upon the prime meat that was the Australian staple!--and was served with a slice of Brie cheese, oozing fatness, cool on its platter of reeds. With the coffee that followed came decision. He got up and spoke to the two soldiers. They rose immediately, slightly bowed, and heard his first sentences with grave consideration.
"Gentlemen," said Gustave-Félicité, "you both wear uniform. Will you allow me to ask your help in a matter of honour?"
They asked him, very civilly, to be seated. They did not, like the young men upon the bench in the Tuileries, instantly conclude from his clothes that he was mad. Possibly each had a father or great-uncle just like him at home. They took cards from some inner pocket of their blue ill-fitting capotes and presented themselves; Bretons both, and gentlemen, one a cadet of a famous house.
They heard his further request in silence; at the end nodded to each other and agreed. They were on leave from their unit; the thing could be managed. They would wait next morning at his hotel for the German officer's friends. He, as the affronted person, would have choice of weapons. In case it should be pistols, would M. le Marquis care to employ the afternoon in a little practice shooting? After a long voyage the eye was apt to get a trifle out. They were at leisure, and could escort him.
To have the comfort of their society he agreed, and in a kind of saloon devoted to such displays astonished them both by his quickness with the weapon. They put him early to bed with cheerful good-byes, and promises to attend in the morning; he thanked them, and lay long awake, not from any fear of the issue of the quarrel, but plagued with memories, half-dreams. The scenes that came unbidden before his closed eyes were not French; one and all they were pictures of Australia, colourless plains, trees grey as lichen, unbelievable clouds of white birds with yellow crests halting in the front paddock on some pilgrimage north. His children moved in none of the scenes. It was the country always, brown or springing, or else tragic with forty miles of bush going up in flame. Thirty years of it! The place was in his bones. He longed for its warmth, and the great distances held in by eternally unfolding ranges. Yet he would not have given his blood, nor a snap of his fingers to defend it. Strange loyalty! that took no account of benefits received, but would give life for a thankless syllable, six letters of the alphabet; the name of France.
IX
His instructions had been explicit; neither apology, nor compromise. The two Bretons understood him, and did not trouble him with the proposal of the lieutenant's seconds that the matter should close upon a written recognition that the blow had been dealt "as the result of a malentendu due to a difference in language." The lieutenant's seconds, one very spick-and-span captain, one subaltern who remained voiceless throughout the interview, seemed uncomfortable about the whole affair, whether from a consideration of the disparity in age between the principals, or by reason of the moderation which their own War Office required them to show while the terms of peace were negotiating. They, with their excellent tailoring, valeting, burnishing, and physique, contrasted oddly with the Frenchmen, whose regulation coats and boots gave their figures a uniform and unsoldierly clumsiness.
The conversation lasted ten minutes, at the end of which time the lancers clicked and bent, and departed to their horses which stamped outside, attended by orderlies. The Frenchmen went upstairs, to knock on their principal's door.
Gustave-Félicité was breakfasting. Ah, the good rolls of Paris, the bad but seductive coffee of Paris! He had forgotten his Australian longings of the night before, and was back in France in spirit as in body, with his rolls before him, the din of a familiar street outside the window, and the prospect of putting in a blow for his country before twenty-four hours were over. He waved the young men to chairs, rang for more coffee, and listened, while he contentedly spread his butter, to what they came to tell him.
It was soon told. Foils, at eight-thirty next morning, in the Bois de Boulogne. Gustave-Félicité nodded, and complimented them on their talent for negotiation. But they were a trifle crestfallen, having hoped for pistols. Foils were quite another thing, a young man's weapon; with foils it was not only a question of eye, but of quick movement and supple muscles. They looked at their principal's heavy shoulders, the deliberate way he sipped his coffee from a spoon, and had doubts, which their unfailing gravity and courtesy covered. However, they had accepted responsibility, and were in no way inclined to shirk it. They took their duties seriously; and on the fresh coffee arriving the elder of the two, with apologies but firmness, tested its strength, and added more hot milk to the cup. Coffee, he explained, was very well as a stimulant--after an affair; before, no. Might he implore M. le Marquis to forgo its solace for the rest of the day? Its effect upon the nerves was--his fluttering hands exemplified most strikingly its effect upon the nerves.
Gustave-Félicité smiled and agreed. Unsmiling, they mapped out his day. Before lunch, a little work with the foils; afterwards, tranquillity, but not alone; a café, a club, somewhere with movement; early to bed. He agreed to it all, and thought with sudden anger of the lanky uncommunicative Jack; men of this type, precise, courageous and civil, should have been his sons.
X
Next morning was misty still at half-past eight, but beyond lending a certain reluctance to the thought of standing in shirt sleeves this was of no importance. It was not like a duel with pistols, when a thirty-foot veil of mist was enough to balk any man's aim. Perhaps, after all, thought the seconds, while before starting out they plied their man with tea--an English beverage reputed to cheer without unduly exciting--perhaps it was as well the Germans had selected foils. A bullet was a chancier thing than a prick with the point, did more damage and was less governable. The lieutenant, if he were any sort of a swordsman, would have no difficulty in satisfying honour without going to extremes.
From this it may be seen that they had no great confidence in their principal's powers, as these had been displayed the previous morning in a regimental salle d'armes. He had the wrist still, and the brain to conceive an attack; half, but only half, the necessary qualities for this form of fighting. The maitre had praised, and touched only when opportunities were too patent to be ignored; but to the young men afterwards, dropping his voice, he had remarked:
"Your grandfather needs a new mainspring, but the case is all right." (Le coffre est solide.)
The case was indeed in good condition. Gustave-Félicité had slept a reasonable time, untroubled by dreams of wide spaces, and with that queer unimaginativeness which pursued him through life, and drove him to oddities that he could not perceive were odd, he was not in the least apprehensive of the issue of his morning's quarrel. Deep in him was the thought, native to all nationalities, that by mere virtue of his Frenchness he was a match for any two foreigners. Besides, he had the supporting consciousness of making a gesture.
He looked about him as the carriage drove briskly along the new boulevards, not as his relatives had looked from tumbrils in '93, with avidity and despair, but with genuine interest and some disapproval; no tremors, no sudden stabbing thought--"It may be for the last time." The young men were impressed, and began to conceive fresh hopes, built on this steadiness. The talk was argumentative--they approved the Napoleonic town-planning--and almost gay. Then one young man turned with an exclamation, and tapped the coachman's back. They had arrived.
It was a patch of ground sheltered from questions by a grove of trees; far from paths, and in a kind of hollow, but level enough to serve the purpose of a piste. The Germans were there already, marching up and down, their cloaks caught close about them; the lieutenant, his seconds, and a bearded man, the doctor. Bows were exchanged; then followed a departure from formality. The captain came up to the little group of Frenchmen, and addressing himself to Gustave-Félicité in person, repeating his offer in terms which went to the farthest bounds of conciliation. Lieutenant von Zeuss was still willing to regard the blow as having been delivered under a misapprehension; an expression of regret would be accepted, if it were understood that the insult had been a personal one, and not directed at the uniform he had the honour to wear.
"Since you address your request to me, sir," Gustave-Félicité answered, "I will speak plainly. My quarrel is not with the lieutenant; he is a gentleman, I have no doubt, and knows how to conduct himself. But the uniform he wears is a challenge and an insult to every Frenchman. Make this clear to him. I have nothing further to say."
And he began to unbutton his coat.
The captain, wearing an expression for which any southerner would have used his shoulders, a shrug translated into terms of features, went back to his countrymen to report the result of his mission. The lieutenant received the statement with a brusque nod, and began likewise to strip. He was an elegant young man, with a girlish waist, who moved in his field-boots as easily as if they had been dancing pumps. The cases of foils were opened, the blades measured. Each combatant selected his weapon, and the officer began at once to make his whistle through the air in a series of cavalry slashes. Gustave-Félicité bent his double between his hands to prove the temper, tested the point against his palm. The seconds, after treading the ground to discover any inequalities, placed their men. Light favoured neither, there was no sun to be considered, nothing to wait for.
They stood facing each other, an unlikely pair of fighters. The lieutenant had the spring and slenderness of the foil in his hand, and his face, marred by the look of insolence to which it had been trained, seemed very young. Gustave-Félicité in his shirt-sleeves looked older, his shoulders more rounded, than when the tight stock and coat held him upright. Feet together, heads turned sideways, they went through the salute, the lieutenant with a flourish, his opponent with a minimum of display, much as he was wont to make the sign of the Cross; the sketch of a symbolic movement. They lowered the hilts from their lips. The German captain, standing a few paces off, dropped his sabre with the abrupt command: "En garde!"
On those words, in a flash, the characters of the opposed two changed. The top-heavy old man went forward with no single warning tap of the blade in a lunge from which the younger's guard alone could not protect him; he had to leap back in no very academic manner, and even then his forearm was touching his chest as he turned the point aside. He gave another foot, seeking room; another lunge came as he backed, catching him off his balance, so that the riposte came late and was easily taken. The attack was furious and incessant, but the young man kept his head and his temper, watched grimly, and without false pride continued to give ground.
In a series of forward lunges, and brief automaton-like withdrawals, they traversed some fifteen feet of grass. The fighting had lasted three minutes already, at a pace which had allowed no respite to lungs or muscles. Both were breathless; Gustave-Félicité, unknown to himself, groaned as he drove his point forward. The lieutenant was seeing opportunities now, as the thrusts grew wilder, leaving the heart uncovered; but he had hold of himself still, and until he could wound an arm or a shoulder, deal some scratch that would end the affair decently and without danger, he would not strike.
Four minutes, and still the attack persisted. They were nearly at the end of the piste, and a few yards further on the ground sloped downwards sharply to a kind of ditch. The lieutenant, his eyes fast to his opponent's blade, did not know how near he was to this drop; but the seconds saw, and Gustave-Félicité saw. Another two yards, and that steady left foot, retiring, would slip; the balance would be lost for a second, long enough to kill. Sobbing and straining he forced his body and mind to endurance, to the repeated agony of lunge and recovery. The blades slithered and flicked; back drew that left foot, six inches at a time, towards disaster. Again, again; nearer. Ah God, what--
The seconds saw the old man recover from his lunge; stand for an instant, then turn in his opponent's direction with a kind of slow helpless motion, and fall upon the point still held on guard. It pierced his throat. Immediately doctor and seconds came running; they propped him up, and the doctor with infinite precaution drew out the point. A little gush of blood followed, not the jet that a cut artery releases; there was no other movement, and the open eyes were already blind. The doctor fingered a wrist, laid his ear to the heart, and spoke a few grave German words to the lieutenant who knelt in the dew, his opponent's head lying back upon his knee, while the blood thickly and slowly soaked his elegant breeches. The arrogance was gone from his face, leaving only a boyish trouble as he looked up at the two Frenchmen, translating the doctor's speech:
"The doctor says, a rupture of the heart, and not my sword. God be thanked, gentlemen, not my sword!"
--the swiftest animal conjoined with that heavy body, implying that common moral, Festina lente; and that celerity should alwaies be contempered with cunctation.
--Vulgar Errors.
I
The Wollondoola Penny Post, that organ which supplied the district for a radius of twenty miles with its food for thought, came out with a couple of columns, black-edged and crossed at the corners, on the occasion of Gustave-Félicité's death. "Our respected fellow townsman," the editor's eulogy ended, "whose well-known family homestead is thus plunged into mourning, was ever to the fore in charitable schemes, and with his late co-religionist Count Rotti was largely instrumental in preserving intact the old historic R.C. chapel, at one time threatened by vandals with demolition. His services to the town were only equalled by the bonhomie, to use a word culled from his native language, of his demeanour to those who had the good fortune to be numbered among his friends. Both will be missed in this good town, which prides itself that worthy citizens of no matter which nationality or faith will always find the welcome here to which their merits entitle them. The dastardly deed robs a widow and seven unmarried children of their protector and main support."
Thus the editor, a non-Catholic for once, who could not resist the dig at the Tooheys about the chapel, or the opportunity, now that Gustave-Félicité was safely dead, of hinting at intimacy with the remote grandee. Actually, they had never exchanged ten words, and the sole communication from Corazon which had reached the editorial office was a protest against the wording of an advertisement in the Personal and Lost and Found column. "I, the undersigned, hereby offer 2/- reward for the name of the scabby thief who stole my prize pansies," ran the advertisement, evidently sent in at white-heat instantly after the unhappy event; and Mr Boissy, scandalized, had emerged from his thunderclouds to shake a threat or two at the editor, and to require from him a promise that in future the blue pencil would be more ruthlessly employed. Assurance had been given and there the matter ended. It is doubtful if the despot even knew the editor by sight.
Still, to some extent the editor was justified. His final sentence, the stock one with which every obituary notice was concluded, happened in this case to be nothing more nor less than the truth. Gustave-Félicité, ridiculously clad, inexpert in all that the colony regarded as the arts of life; a man who never drank whisky, rarely spoke, and took no pains with his inferiors, had in fact been his wife and family's main support, ruling his own domain with the sure hand of a Napoleon. All had depended upon that sombre and terrifying figure. Laura, as his departure discovered, had now no existence of her own; confronted with the ordering of a meal without her husband's taste as the standard, she was helpless as a newly-married chit of seventeen. The girls, who, what with the nuns at school and their father at home, had been like so many springs running underground, suddenly leapt into the open and became fountains, cascades, any free and merry simile that suggests itself.
Having taken their formal plunge into mourning they came out radiant six months later, leaving Laura still submerged in crape, and set about marrying in earnest. No need to cock their caps now at Catholics only. (Gustave-Félicité had been adamant on the mixed marriage question.) The vista of suitors widened, choice was free and might range, unfettered by considerations of faith or money, over the whole field of delightful detrimentals. The remaining Boissy girls, to the number of three, became in the course of one week of picnic races the most enchanting and accomplished flirts for a hundred miles round. Laura remonstrated, but her grip was flabby, a mittened grip incapable of holding the three huntresses back from their prey. Eighteen months after his death they were all married, with pomp and by bishops, to ne'er-do-weels. Their eldest brother gave them away, dressed up in ceremonial clothes, and feeling a fool.
It was the reappearance of Jacques-Marie, after a family row of vast dimensions that had surged up round him, and even eddied to the threshold of the law courts. For his father's will, drawn up by that eminent firm Geraldine and Fitzgerald of Sydney the day before he sailed for France, had been quite explicit. It divided the property, by this time worth a considerable sum, between Laura and nine of her children, with various safeguards in the way of trustees to preserve the female inheritors from being robbed in any but a legal manner; Jacques-Marie, the testator explained, having forfeited his share by conduct unbecoming a person of his antecedents. "I leave him nothing but my name, and this, if he has any respect for my wishes, he will change." That was in the original draft of the will, and the eminent firm had a day's work to get it into legal form, stripped of commas and pruned down to impersonality. They did it, though, and excluded him duly so that no claim could lie, while retaining with some skill the sting in the sentence's tail.
"Regrettable! Regrettable!" said Mr. Geraldine, Grandfather Geraldine who threw ill-conceived dishes out of windows, and had an air of being quite willing to do the same to disrespectful sons. "Not one penny--those were your father's words to me; or rather I believe he employed the French expression, sou. Not one sou. I am merely his agent in this matter; I am obliged to see that the provisions of his will are carried out. I may be--I am--deeply grieved that any young man should be left in this position after twenty years of luxury; but I can do nothing. That will"--he tapped the table proudly--"is unassailable in any court."
"I wasn't going to fight it," Jack mumbled, "I didn't come here for that."
"Very wise," said Mr. Geraldine, nodding brusquely, "I could not have advised you in conscience to do any such thing."
But for all that he was a little disappointed; he had a certain human curiosity to know what the offence had been. Gustav-eFélicité had given no details. Laura had never been told. The whole business was a mystery, probably rich with naughtiness, very tempting and thought-provoking.
"May I then," continued Mr. Geraldine, "enquire what it is that you have come for?"
"I came to say I'm not going to change my name," blurted Jack, and stood up. "And I won't get out of the country either. I've done nothing I'm ashamed of. The old man had this bee in his bonnet--"
"Yes?" said Mr. Geraldine, almost eagerly, for it looked as though the true story were coming at last; but instantly sank back into sternness. "Are you insinuating that your father at the time of making his will was not compos mentis?"
Jack looked at him stubbornly.
"I'm not saying anything against my father. His money's his own, he can do what he likes with it. I'm only saying he didn't see things straight."
"Didn't see with your eyes, I suppose, is what you mean to infer."
"No, that's right. I don't go round looking for trouble. He did. And he found it, too."
"Your father has been dead a bare three months, Mr. Boissy. It should not be necessary for me to remind you of that."
"All right, all right, I know he's dead, and I'm sorry in a way. They'll muck up Corazon, the way that manager's running it."
The manager was Mr. Geraldine's nominee, and a relation; a young man with half a line to himself in the "Irish Landed Gentry"; not a very illuminating half-line, merely the statement, to which everyone living and dead is entitled, that he had been born in a certain year. Still it was something; it set him up above the usual currency ruck; and the fact that he was related to the Geraldines removed him still further from criticism.
"What is this?" enquired Mr. Geraldine, purpling and shouting suddenly. "Are you aware, sir, that the administration of the estate is in my hands? The responsibility of advising your mother, poor lady, in her troubles? I'll thank you to bring your accusations to a point, and then--and then, Mr. Boissy, we shall see if the law of slander holds."
Jacques-Marie gazed uncomprehending on this turkey-cock rage, and answered, in his up-country sing-song:
"The manager's a new chum. He can't be expected to know. He gave a fancy price for those last two rams, and one of the chaps was telling me he reckons they're in for a go of scab if they don't look out. I'm not saying anything against him. I've never seen him. I suppose he's got to learn."
"You had better be careful," said Mr. Geraldine, unappeased. "My time's of value. If you have nothing to say beyond irreverent comments on your father, and vilification of a man unknown to you, we had better put an end to this interview."
"All right," Jacques-Marie agreed, moving towards the door, "I only wanted to say I'll see you and the old man and the family in hell before I change my name."
He said it without emphasis or theatricality, in a conversational tone; and followed it up with the question:
"How's your daughter Sheila? She all right?"
This was a blow in the dark to her father. How had this idle and most probably immoral cub contrived ever to approach within a hundred yards of her? With something of a pang he remembered those infernal picnic races, where chaperonage was notoriously ineffectual, and where the cub had been much in evidence, winning some cup or other on some undistinguished animal. He remembered to have observed his daughter wearing a new brooch. It was a trumpery thing, and it had not occurred to him to ask where she had got it, but now in a flash he knew. It was in the form of a whip, with the thong looped up in a kind of bow, and it had made its first appearance after her return, otherwise demure, from Borrigo. He drew breath to answer the young man.
"My daughter is in excellent health--"
"Good," replied the young man, without noticing the tone. "You might tell her I'll be looking in."
This was too much.
"I shall tell her nothing of the kind. But I'll tell you something else, my friend. My house is not open, and my daughter does not associate with anyone whom--upon whom a stigma rests."
"I told you," said the young man, astonished and sullen, "I'd done nothing--"
"I have your father's word to the contrary. Am I to suppose that your father, a just man if ever there was one, would have cut you out of his will unless he had been made aware of something to your discredit?"
"Oh, hell," responded the youth wearily, "think what you bloody well like."
And with that left the room before further lightnings could scorch him.
II
But it was a young man in a rage, for all the weariness, who turned down Hunter Street from the offices of Geraldine and Fitzgerald. He had not said all, or indeed anything that he had intended to say; the fact was that Mr. Geraldine had infuriated him from the start by treating him as though he were a criminal, and as though he had come to cadge, so that he had begun with defiance and wound up with insult. What hurt most was the infernal clause about changing his name. By a nice irony, the same quality in Gustave-Félicité that made him cling to France, the country to which he owed nothing, kept his son's teeth clenched in this matter of the name he bore, which he mispronounced and at whose traditions he mocked, but which for all that was part of himself.
It was an April morning; early autumn. The pleasant chill in the air cooled his temper a little, but certain facts remained in the back of his mind; as for instance that he owned exactly fifteen pounds in the world, and--a catastrophe on top of this--that he was in love. Not with the Rotti girl, who still languished, despite a good practical scolding from her mother on the terms of the will being made public; it never occurred to him to look at her, whom he had known from long frocks to short, and down to long again. But that vision from Sydney who had driven over with the Rouncevells from Walee, had the kind of figure and face that nineteen can hang a passion on. The thought of her watching the race had made him bucket an astonished filly along to victory at long odds, to the fury of Bert Rotti, the owner, who had laid heavily against his entry, while the only begetter of the performance sat in a tent with her back turned calmly having tea.
It was the pretty custom of those country races to give jewellery as prizes, one masculine and one feminine trinket for distribution, and there were always eyes alert to see where these last would fall. As in Spain the matador's supreme compliment is a casket containing the ears of his most recent bull, a privilege scrambled and even paid for by ladies, so at Borrigo picnic meeting these brooches and bracelets were eyed and coveted. Young men declared their intentions by means of them. They saved endless embarrassment by their tender implications to those who could never have got up courage enough to say the actual words. The cowards and the undecided gave them to sisters. They were straws showing which way inclinations blew.
And Shiela Geraldine had accepted the ridiculous gold whip in the form of a brooch which the amazing and unpopular win of Prophetess (out of Crystal by Jeremiah) had earned for that animal's rider. Shiela Geraldine, with her blue eyes and black lashes, was something to dream about at nights, and to hide, to hide deep away down in his mind, not to have her named or touched or fingered lightly, even in thought. He was not aware that by being thus in love he was breaking a tradition, the safe Mortemar practice of marrying in one swoop and then disregarding. The thing had hold of him, as after-events showed, pulling him into trouble and out again, this way and that about the world for long before he got hold of her; and even after they came together she continued to matter to him in a fashion at which his father and grandfather both would have stared.
Meanwhile he was not yet twenty, a youth disinherited, with nothing to offer life in exchange for a living; with his heart set on a girl, and an insolent injunction to the goddess's father warm upon his lips. The solitary prospect which contained a gleam of satisfaction was that of seeing the Sydney Cup run that afternoon. He was to meet Bert in the bar of the principal hotel and they were driving to Randwick together, independent of the Rotti family, which, with daughters and admirers and female friends, already overflowed a couple of brakes. He had a pretty good idea that in addition to seeing the Sydney Cup he might get a glimpse of Shiela; even, might have the joy of putting on money for her, another Australian opportunity for gallantry, and, from the feminine point of view, gold-digging. A chorus from a forgotten comic opera, Floradora, gives the strategy very exactly:--
"It's tact, tact,
Take it for a fact.
The race is run--you cannot see
The horse that you have backed.
Then you say (esspressivo), 'What have you done?
I said to back the horse that won!'
You can do a lot of betting--if you've tact!"
This, however, was not the subject of Jacques-Marie Boissy's meditation as he walked down Hunter Street. He was exceedingly simple. He took social events, and most other events as they came, without prying below the surface towards uncomfortable generalities. Races, for him, partook of the order of nature, and were divided by the seasons into spring and autumn handicaps, as the farmer's year was divided into spring and autumn sowing by the same forces. That they provided the chance of girls and young men meeting was something to be grateful for, but secondary. The horse, despite fashion's attempt to steal the ground from under its feet, was still, in Australia, supreme.
III
He found Bert without difficulty in the bar of the "Southern Cross." He was not easy to miss in any gathering; for though an Australian upbringing had conferred upon him the untidy slurred speech, subduing all personality in the voice, it had not been able to vanquish his Southern partiality for flamboyancy in clothes and bearing. His costume as a race-horse owner was exciting the derision and secret envy of all other frequenters of the bar, and his bearing matched it. No one in the world could stand drinks with such superb freedom as Bert; no one spat with such accuracy into the ornamental copper spittoons, or was so ready as Bert for a row. He had the unselfconsciousness of his father's people, which the British-born can so rarely achieve, and the retiring Jack was a trifle ashamed of greeting him in his glory. He was, however, instantly hauled into the picture, dealt a noggin of champagne and advised to look more cheerful.
"What's up with you, Jacko, my lad?" demanded the ebullient Bert from his throne upon the bar counter, where he had made for himself a kind of shrine composed of empty champagne bottles and pot-plants. "Let your face snap back into the well-known smile. You're going to win to-day. So 'm I. We're all going to win to-day on Mermaid. Come on, drink up, diggers! Mermaid! And may the sharks never get at her tail!"
The rest of the attendance clamorously drank, save for one man, who to judge from his appearance had breakfasted on whisky. He was in the slow, obstinate, and quarrelsome stage of drink, when a word will rouse what two chuckers-out and a bag over the head may hardly subdue. It should be pointed out in passing that Bert and his boon companions were not in the least drunk. It was eleven o'clock only, and they had scarcely got going. But the whiskified man was definitely drunk, and said as much, with pride.
"I been in this bar," said the man, "since it's opened. I got more drink in me than any two of you chaps, so I got a right to speak. That's to say, if there's any justice. But is there? That's what I ask."
"Out with it, old cock," said Bert, while his circle paused and turned, grinning, "What's the world done to you?"
"Skiting about winning," continued the whiskified man, fixing him with an uncertain eye, "Talking about sharks like you were God Almighty. How do you know what's going to win? Just because you got a fancy tie--"
"Well, what's your tip?" said the good-natured Bert. "Come on, we're all pals here. Let's have the stable secret, and here's your very good health."
"Not much," said the whiskified man, with a cunning shake of the head. "Not me. I may be shickered, but when you talk about sharks, who might you be meaning? That's what I sh'd like to know. That's what I want cleared up."
"Have a drink," said Bert, perceiving that the argument would never get further. He held out a glass. "It's my shout." But the whiskified man had risen, not without complications apparently caused by a bulging floor, and at the second attempt dashed the outstretched glass from his hand.
"My name's Sharkey," said he. "Now what you got to say? I pay for my drink, and I got a right to talk. You got no right to say I'm after any bloody mare. It's a lie, see? I'm going to take that fancy tie off you--"
And with a lurch, which surprisingly enough happened to be in the right direction, he pushed a heavy fist at the chin of Bert, who, taken unawares, fell crashing backwards amid a cascade of bottles into the limbo behind the bar counter. 'They were used to crashes in the bar of the "Southern Cross," and had evolved a special technique to deal with them. In less than a minute two brawny men in singlets and cauliflower ears had appeared, and with a vast impartiality removed what appeared to be the storm-centre of the row. On this occasion the storm-centre comprised a group of two--the whiskified man, blindly fighting, and Mr. Jacques-Marie Boissy, who was doing what he could to restrain him. It was unfair, but the men in singlets were not accustomed to waste time discriminating; it was their job to purge the bar, and they did it with such an enthusiastic display of force that both combatants landed sprawling on the kerb. The man so inopportunely named Sharkey lay fulminating in the gutter, then settled down, first removing from his nose, which even in his condition was offended by it, a piece of deliquescent fish. Mr. Jacques-Marie Boissy, to whom this incident came as the climax of a vile morning, rose cursing, and fumbling at his collar, which had burst from its stud. He was perfectly guiltless in the matter, as in that other for which Mr. Geraldine had lectured him; but life, in awarding stripes or stars, pays no attention whatever to whether or no these have been earned. It is not surprising, therefore, that the double ff of this ignominy was not by any means the climax of his day's crescendo. As he stood, red-faced, hair on end, dusty, and with. his collar gaping wide, a vehicle rolled down George Street, past him, crammed with toilettes and driven by George Blakiston, wearing his hat at the angle which is the Blakiston hallmark, and would sufficiently identify one of the family encountered by chance among Eskimos. By George's side sat--Ah, no! prayed Jacques-Marie suddenly to our Lady Help of Christians, don't let it be her! But it was Shiela Geraldine after all. She had not seen him, was looking the other way towards a shop-window. But there was that professional funny man, George, jogging her elbow, calling her to look at the spectacle of Jacques-Marie Boissy standing in the street by the side of an evident drunkard, and bearing signs of having been chucked out, at eleven o'clock in the morning, from the none-too-particular bar of the "Southern Cross" hotel.
The boy turned away, one hand holding the ends of his collar together. Whether she saw him or not he did not want to know, but trust George Blakiston to make a good story of it. God damn the world!
At this point, out came Bert with various companions to the rescue. They seized and dusted him, condoling. One rushed into a nearby hosier's and bought him a stud. They picked up the man named Sharkey, and deposited him in a handcart for the moment deserted by its custodian, full of malodorous refuse from the streets. They overwhelmed, by sheer numbers and good-will, the determination of Jack not to go to the races, not to tidy himself, not to live; and the end of it was that in five minutes they were most of them seated in or on a couple of dogcarts, and making good time out towards the course.
IV
Jack, with all the sensitiveness of nineteen years, would have preferred to mix with the plebs in the paddock or the Leger, to take no risk of being seen by the girl who had observed him dishevelled on the kerb; but with Bert and his companions in charge there was no hope of this. All were members, all wore enamel badges and had entrée to the stand, and Jack was helplessly swept in on the wave of their exuberance.
It was the first time he had seen the Cup run, and the thought of it, and the gaiety of the crowd, drove his miseries and injustices out of his head for a time. He could not be natural, for all that. He imagined that people were looking at him, wondering what he was doing there with the black band on his sleeve, pointing him out to each other as the Boissy boy that had come a cropper over his father's will. In fact, nobody knew him, or cared in the least about him. The laughing girls had better marks for their teasing than a lanky youth with dust-coloured hair, wearing an everyday grey suit--"like a Kangaroo."
The first race he would not bet on. He knew none of the horses, and the weights and jockeys' names told him little. Bert, of course, with an immensely knowing air, had given him a tip, and offered him a good-sized note to bet with. (No one but Bert could have done that without offence.) Jack refused it. He would bet with his own money, he said; only the one plunge, on the Cup. He went strolling away, hands in pockets, and ten minutes afterwards moodily heard the roar that justified Bert's omniscience. His selection had got home by a neck at a longish price. It was, friendship apart, a bitter consideration that Bert, who had money to burn, had probably made another couple of hundred pounds during those few ticks of the clock.
"Mr. Boissy!" said a voice behind him.
He swung about awkwardly, snatched off his hat, and stood with it in his hands. Shiela Geraldine was there with, as he instantly and blackly noted, George Blakiston at her elbow. She held out a hand, though; he dropped his hat, and took it, flushing. Had she not seen? Or didn't she care? Unaware, George answered both questions.
"Hullo, Jack, my lad! Starting early, weren't you? Who was your pal on the pavement?"
Shiela Geraldine struck in, without a smile for this badinage: "Mr. Jack, will you take me along to get something to eat? I'm hungry, and it's rather cold."
"But," interposed the astounded George, "you just said you wouldn't touch anything."
"Not anything," said Shiela, with one glance from under her perched ridiculous bonnet, "only some things."
And she slipped a hand through the crape-bound arm. George took it well, with his family grin, and a cock of the hat and the words:
"Jack, my lad, you've got all the luck to-day."
He sauntered off. Jack, in a state of exultation which overwhelmed even his shyness, even his sense of hopeless unworthiness, saw, holding the lace at her neck, the trumpery loop of the Borrigo brooch. He stopped, stammered:
"You're wearing it--"
Shiela Geraldine did not ask what he meant. She merely nodded in the most matter-of-fact way, and answered briskly:
"Of course I am. It's a most useful little brooch. Now, shall we ask the Rouncevells to give us something to eat?"
She was only eighteen, but grown-up to a degree that the simple Jack would probably never attain. She was pretty and delicate as a hyacinth, and he moved beside her coltishly. They made not an ill-looking pair, and she introduced him with confidence.
But the bad luck of it! Mrs. Rouncevell was a neighbour, in the Australian manner, forty miles off, of Corazon. She knew all about the trouble, that is to say, she had heard the various versions of his disgrace and accepted the most interesting, the one about knocking his old father down over some kitchen drab or other. She knew that the family had broken with him, but family ties were themselves thicker than water, and to be respected. Now here was this young fellow, with a bit of crape on his arm, true, but quite narrow, turning up at the races, and tagging after Shiela Geraldine while his mother and sisters remained in decent inky seclusion in the country.
She was uncivil to him, therefore; gently and deliberately rude. She said, with a glance at his arm:
"And how's your dear mother? But I suppose you can hardly give me any information. Poor Laura, how much she has had to bear!"
And again, a little later:
"We had been hoping to have your sister Louise with us for Race Week, but naturally it was impossible, in the circumstances. We quite understood. It wouldn't have done at all, so soon after--"
Strangely enough, so strong was the delirium of Shiela's presence, that these shafts actually went harmlessly by him. He who had, half an hour before, been alert to observe any look or tone that was an insult, was quite unaware that in Mrs. Rouncevell's phrases there was anything to resent. He just had no time for her. Shiela was accepting food from him, sending him on little errands--she felt the incivility quickly enough, and had him out of range in an instant--and his whole self was concerned with her, what she said and ate and looked and wore. His devotion was as conspicuous as to older eyes it was a trifle absurd. He was unaware of eccentricity. Her kindness had lifted him to an unselfconsciousness equal in its way to Bert's; he was intent, and remote; passionately alive, yet sensitive to one touch only. Perhaps never again in his life did he give himself to the emotion of pure happiness as for that one hour on that day.
It could not last. Mrs. Geraldine, magnificent and most dragonly, was bearing down, carrying Shiela away. The girl nodded and left him with a smiling:
"We'll meet again, Mr. Jack."
But even the dazzled Jack could read her mother's aspect, for which the word threatening was hardly adequate; mournfully he drifted out among the crowds again, put his money on Mermaid, and without elation saw her win. He had a glimpse of / Bert, triumphantly slapping backs right and left; another thousand or so the race had put in Bert's pocket. He gathered his own winnings, a respectable sum, sixty pounds, and told himself not to be a mug, not to have any more bets. Hang onto the sixty! It's a start; it's a start, he kept telling himself, building castles with it, buying a colt with it cheap and winning the Melbourne Cup, spending it all on a brooch, something really worthy of her, for Shiela. It was while he was having this last dream that he suddenly saw her again. She was on the arm of a young man who by his demeanour and general faultlessness could only have been one of the A.D.C.'s from Government House; one of those functionaries which a later flippant journal always referred to as "gent-helps." There was Shiela on the gent-help's arm, her mother near by, beaming approval, and quite evidently on guard to fend off interrupters of this very desirable stroll. But the dauntless Shiela found a smile for Jack, and with a tiny pressure on his arm brought her companion's long stiff steps to a halt. She introduced the two, formally, with a pretty beckoning gesture.
"Mr. Boissy, Captain Ponsonby mustn't go far from his duty. Will you do something for me?"
"Shiela," said Mrs. Geraldine, "we are keeping His Excellency waiting."
"Oh, we mustn't do that," answered her daughter, with a charming alacrity, "so I'll only say two words. Will you back Neck and Crop for me?"
She held out a little purse to Jack, who at first backed away from it.
"Neck and Crop!" said he, "but he's no good. He hasn't a chance--"
"Well, I don't know," she answered, demurely, "I believe he has."
And she touched, as if by accident, the gold hunting-crop that held the lace at her neck.
"Really, really!" said Mrs. Geraldine impatiently, giving her parasol an angry twirl, "Shiela, you are not to bet. How can you be so unladylike? And on your way to His Excellency's box, too!"
She swept her daughter away, with a great rustle; but the little netted purse remained in Jack Boissy's hands, and Shiela's lips, as she turned to look at him over her shoulder, formed unmistakably the words;
"Neck and Crop!"
Transported but anxious, he looked into the purse. It held five sovereigns. Did she mean him to bet with it all? Then he Must win for her. Jacques-Marie went seriously about the business. He found Bert, and required his advice as to the next race.
"Jacko, my lad," said Bert, pontifically waving a cigar, "you've come to the right man. Tomahawk's the horse; can't lose. Mathematically impossible for Tomahawk to lose. Money on, but the books have to defend themselves. It's a certainty, and I'm backing it."
This seemed to imply that enough had been said; but still Jack Boissy was not sure. Money on; risk five pounds perhaps to win three; nothing spectacular in that. He quitted Bert's prosperous aura, and went to the paddock to look the horses over.
There some eight or nine of them were being led about, temperamental as opera singers, and showing it in their various ways. Some held their noses in the air haughtily as duchesses; others swallowed the ground with fierceness and rage as of old in that conversation between Job and the Almighty. Others again danced and sidled as though, in the manner recommended by ancient books on horse-coping, their pranks had been stimulated by the administration of a live eel. Tomahawk, the favourite, was one of these latter; a nervous big horse, already, to Jack's shrewd eye, starting to sweat under his shiny coat, but the only one that looked like a winner. Eureka did not, nor Sweet Alice; nor did the unfortunate Neck and Crop, a hatrack of a brute all bones, with a narrow obstinate head. None of the contents of the netted purse should be laid for one instant on him, Jack determined, and gave his attention to the others as they went by.
Number 7 set him staring. It presented a south-east view of two immense hindquarters, such as may be seen without inconvenience by anyone guiding a plough; these sagged sideways after the true bush fashion, but now and again a great muscle in them leapt up to dislodge a colony of flies. Those hindquarters caught Jack's eye, that eye for a horse which is born, and comes expensive to acquire. He looked at his programme. "Pickaxe, br. gelding, age 5 years, jockey McNair." The owner was Oswald Walker, who had a station on the Riverina, entered a horse for sport now and then in a profitless, larky kind of way, and ran straight.
"Old Ozzy's moke," said Bert Rotti's voice in Jack's ear. "Dug him up somewhere, part payment for a bad debt; now he's running him for a bet. That's the yarn. Have you cast your eye over Tomahawk?"
The huge horse, Ozzy's moke, had moved a step or two, presenting himself from another angle. Jack's glance went up and down his drowsing great limbs, and the more he looked the better he liked him. True, his feet were ungainly, but the bone above was big in proportion, and the hocks were let down like a greyhound's. His shoulders started back like a couple of hillsides. Quality showed in the skin, fine as a mouse's, and in the ears, drooping now but narrow and sharp. As Jack looked and reckoned up the horse, the jockey, McNair, approached, and got up; a longish, thin man, tall for a jockey, looking half asleep even in the saddle, where he balanced with the typical up-country slouch. He wore no spurs, and carried no whip. "Pickaxe, jockey McNair." It was the first appearance in print of a partnership still legendary on the Australian Turf.
Jack waited to see the horses in motion as they went down to the start. Eight of them broke from a walk with swishing tails, and fashionable curvettings. Pickaxe's rider, driving unarmed heels into his mount's ribs, roused him from lethargy and set off at a canter at the tail of the procession. One look at that reaching lazy stride, and Jack had turned, and was making for the Ring.
V
"Pickaxe to win."
"Hundreds," said the bookmaker's clerk, scribbling out the ticket. His principal took up his professional chant in a voice like a brazen cracked gong.
"--four to two, Tomahawk. I'll take, I'll take four to two Tomahawk. Three to one Sweet Alice, twelve to one Holy Michael, a hundred to one the field. One hundred to one the field!" Then with a deep gasp, da capo: "Four to two Tomahawk--"
Jack sauntered to the rail, his six foot two looking easily over most shoulders, and critically watched his horse. Voices about him commented:
"Tomahawk's all right, I tell yer. That's O'Leary up on. 'im."
"I wouldn't give a bad 'arf dollar for his chance. Not without the rest of the field comes down with the gripes 'arf way."
"Wot yer know abart it? 'Ad it from the stable?"
"Stable's not backin' 'im, I know that much."
"Go on! That's a bloody lie. Wot'll yer bet?"
"I'm not betting."
"Wot yer come to the races for, then? 'Ealth?"
But this enquiry went unanswered, perhaps unheard in the yell which followed the drop of the flag.
The start--it was a long race, over two miles--was about a furlong down from the Ring. They came past the stand for the first time with a bay, Sweet Alice, making the pace, Tomahawk after her, and the rest of the field in a jumble of dust and colour and moving limbs behind. For a while they kept this formation; then, on the far side of the course Jack saw the mare die away, to leave the favourite and Eureka fighting for lead. Tomahawk had the best of it; by the time they had passed the three-quarter post, he was out in front, with a couple of lengths in hand. He was a good horse, no doubt of that, and his rider was clever; he had started fifth from the rails, now he was on them, and riding all he knew for a lead that should defeat all challenge. Experts about Jack were of opinion that there was only one horse in the race. It seemed like it, even to him.
But when next they came by, it became evident that the race was nothing like over. Pickaxe, going easily, came shouldering out of the ruck into second place, and stayed there. The experts commented, surprised:
"Cripes, look at that! He'll never 'old it."
But he did hold it; not only held it, but drew away from the rest of the field, and worried O'Leary, well out in front, with the rhythm of his ponderous gallop. O'Leary had ridden, as his orders were, to give Tomahawk a lead at the start, and go on to win. Tomahawk was a good horse, but he had his temper; he resented being bustled by other horses, and he resented being chased. O'Leary, who knew him, knew too that he was doing his best; but he gave him a couple of belts for luck, and urged him for the extra ounce that was not in him. The horse spurted gamely, but he could not hold the pace; and still his jockey could hear that unshakable gallop coming up on his quarter.
They were three furlongs, no more from home. Tomahawk kept his two lengths lead, but his stride was shortening, and O'Leary knew it. Two lengths, and three furlongs to go. It should have been enough to win, with a horse of that quality. But the gallop behind was unnerving. Who the hell could that challenger be?
The Irishman turned his head swiftly for an instant, the slightest movement, the briefest shifting of balance, but enough to throw out the stride of a tiring horse. Tomahawk changed feet, and swerved out from the rails.
That left a gap. Instantly, as it showed, Pickaxe with a sideways lurch and dive was into it, his jockey sitting quiet and low. Jack's heart quickened, recognising the spurt and swerve of the stock horse meeting the charge of a scrub bull; and the crowd, of which some knew riding when they saw it, others thought they had witnessed a foul, and the greater part had money on Tomahawk, let out a sudden roar between a boo and a cheer. Two furlongs to go; and Pickaxe's head was level with the favourite's girth, and Pickaxe's rider held the vital position by the rails.
O'Leary's wooden little mouth opened to a blasphemy or two; his horsemanship had to accept the bitter knowledge that only a horse fresher than his own could have compassed that swerve. But he was up to all the tricks, and had one or two still in his red and gold sleeve. He tried to pull Tomahawk across so as to drive the brown into the rails. Pickaxe, however, had been used in his wilds to the trick of shouldering bullocks out of a spinning herd, and his ponderous shoulders dealt the favourite a buffet that for the second time broke his stride. As Tomahawk faltered, Pickaxe drew level on the inside. With that the Celt's hysterical rage, the fury that will cut off its own nose any day gladly to spite its face, came on O'Leary. He had orders to win, and the horse to do it, the race in his pocket but for this slab-sided bastard on the brown--
Jack saw the whip come up, and strike inwards, once, twice, across the brown's eyes. Pickaxe threw up his head, swerved blindly into the rails and crashed through them, falling like the side of a house, in a cloud of dust and splintered wood.
The yell that followed was an ugly thing to listen to. Half the crowd had money on Tomahawk one way or other, and every member of it knew the penalty for what O'Leary had done; disqualification, and the horse unplaced. O'Leary knew it too. He rode his finish grimly, turning with a lift of his long lip to note which of the other runners he had presented with a race. At the head of the following bunch, blown, blundering, but game, came the hatrack. "Neck and Crop wins!" Beyond the runners and the rails he could see Pickaxe already on his feet again, standing quietly, nosing his rider, who was not yet moving. Said O'Leary, pulling in his horse, to Neck and Crop's chocolate, pink cap, grinning self-consciously at the thought of himself and his mount in such distinguished company:
"The books won't go broke this race, any bloody way!"
No, the books would not. They had smiles under their binoculars as they watched the numbers go up. Five, two, eleven; Neck and Crop winner, Fargo and Thistledown second and third; outsiders all, at prices ranging from 30 to 100 to 1. Half the money on the course had been on Tomahawk, unplaced, the rest divided between Sweet Alice and a horse who had got kicked at the start and finished last, Holy Michael. No, the books would not go broke this time.
Jack Boissy, feeling a little sick, turned away from the rail. He approached the nearest bookmaker, gazing about in that idleness after a race which is the paradise of his tribe, and means an unpopular win.
"What price were you giving Neck and Crop?"
The bookie, called down thus abruptly from an Elysium of non-payment, looked at the questioner without benevolence, and answered sharply:
"Got yer ticket, haven't yer? Price is on the ticket." Jack laughed without amusement.
"I didn't back him. I was only asking."
Benevolence returned.
"'undred to one you could 'ave 'ad," said the bookie with a smack of the lips. "That's what I was offerin', and no takers. No takers," he repeated dreamily.
"Starting price?" Jack persisted.
The bookmaker nodded; then, confidentially leaning forward:
"But you don't want to go followin' that 'orse. I'm not after your dibs," said the bookmaker ineffably, "or anyone's. That 'orse's out of place on a race-track. They ought to keep 'im in the kitchen to air the baby's belly-bands on."
Jack laughed unwillingly, and wandered back towards the stand, turning things over in his mind. He owed Shiela Geraldine five hundred pounds, that was the short and long of it; and he had in hand just seventy-five pounds with which to meet the debt. Borrow? Bert was the only man he knew well enough with cash to spare; just the one person it was impossible to ask. Bert would hand over the money without looking, without counting, and never ask for it again. For that very reason, no.
There was only one thing for it, to tell Shiela the truth. He winced from that cut at his vanity. Go up to her among the Excellencies, with that whiskered Captain standing by, and say straight out, "I've lost you five hundred pounds." He couldn't do it. In one of the too-fleeting moments of intuition that come to boys in love, he realized what it was that would hurt her; not the loss of the money, but the throwing aside, so carelessly, of the sentiment; that pretty gesture, touching the brooch at her neck, the little play on words which both of them understood, and no one else. He could stand the racket, find the money, steal it if need be, and pay her; what he couldn't face was the thought of telling her he'd let the meaning of her words go by, to show off his own knowledge of horseflesh.
He shouldered his way through the crowd towards the gate. People stared at the gloomy young eccentric leaving before the last race, but he saw no one he knew. Hands in pockets, he tramped back along the road to Sydney with the sort of desolation in his soul that only the very young can know.
VI
Nine o'clock that night found him sitting in a bar down by the Quay, his problem still unsolved. There was a dance on board one of the warships lying off Garden Island, and the music came in gusts, capriciously, in between the churning of paddle-wheels, and the bumping of swing doors. The bar was full of men, cheerful on the whole, for it had been, the 3.45 apart, a punter's day. Their faces and eternally lifting elbows were reflected in enormous mirrors with which the Dago proprietor had sought to turn his customers' thoughts to food. There were, painted on the mirrors, shellfish in most appetising variety, piles of oysters, lobsters cooked to a grenadier red, crabs, winkles; all these leavened with an occasional fantasy in the way of foaming bottles, or, in a remote corner, a seductive tangle of little octopuses. But the Dago's dream had come to nothing, though the best fish in the world came into the nearby market daily, and his wife had skill in the preparation of bouillabaisse. These Australians would not take food seriously; it interfered, they seemed to think, with the business of drinking; they would not even sit to consume it, nor attempt in their cups the least variety. Angelo, after a single year's experiment, had sighed, and sold his chairs and tables, his stock of wines. He dispensed whisky now, to men who preferred to mop it up standing, and his wife was losing her hand at a fish stew. Only in one corner of his bar two small tables remained of his first joyous conception, and over these a St. Francis in plaster presided, high up on a bracket; while the most superb of all the lobsters, a kind of crustacean drum-major, beckoned below with one curved claw.
In this corner, with what was contemptuously termed a soft drink before him, sat Jacques-Marie Boissy, sullenly and soberly thinking, while about him the voices got rowdier, and someone had started an electric piano going. One brave spirit attempted to lift Mrs. Angelo over the counter to dance with him, an ambitious feat, for she was a solid though shapely fourteen stone. The attempt but not the deed confounded him. Mrs. Angelo slid down from the counter angrily wiping her skirt, and at his next drink gave the temerarious one short measure. Without warning a personage in tight check clothes, who had slipped stealthily in through the bumping doors, ascended one of the chairs, and began to preach.
"Brothers," he implored, "will you 'earken to my message? It concerns each and every one of you here to-night--"
They spared a moment from the consumption of whisky to stare at the figure on the chair, which bore all the outward and visible signs of being a bookie. His face was the authentic royal shade, his clothes were clamorous, a horseshoe secured his tie, and across his stomach was slung a wallet.
"Gents," this figure went on, "you all know me. What, don't know me? I bet I've took money off yer many a time. Alf Hogan's my name, and I been a sinner like yerselves, layin' the odds on four-footed snares, and spendin' my children's money in 'ails of gilded sin--"
A clamour arose, and a movement started whose purpose seemed to be to demolish Mr. Hogan; but he dominated the racket with his voice, trained in that loud school, the ring, and checked the movement with an upraised hand which had all the authority of his previous calling.
"'ark to me, I say. I'm not 'ere to reproach. I don't bear no whip nor yet scourge. I'm 'ere to-night, brothers all, to make restitution!"
The onslaught was arrested. The human contents of the bar gaped at this magical vision of a bookie gone off his rocker. They pressed round, but not inimically. Mr. Hogan put both hands in his wallet, as though to pull out and scatter a shower of notes and gold.
"But first, brothers, 'ow about a song of Zion?"
The response was unfavourable. Mr. Hogan sighed, and proceeded with rising fervour:
"Only a sinner, brothers. Only old Alf Hogan. But 'e comes to lay odds on the Love-race. Christ's the favourite, brothers, Satan's nowhere. One, there's only one in it for the Salvation Stakes. 'Ere's my tip, brothers, straight from the owner's mouth! Put your shirts on Jesus Christ! Look, I got my book ready; the last book Alf Hogan'll ever make!"
A Bible appeared from the wallet, and was brandished aloft. An exasperated and threatening chorus arose.
"What's that you say?" Mr. Hogan appeared to lend an ear, "You don't get me right, brothers. I'm not offer'n you money. I'm givin' you something better'n money. I'm offerin' golden crowns and mansions in your Father's house more glorious than what you'll see round Rose Bay. You can't lose on Christ--"
A shower of tracts rose from the wallet and fluttered down; some impatient hand up-ended Mr. Hogan's chair, and the appeal was lost in a yell and a wooden sound as Mr. Hogan himself, willing hands like a battering-ram, opened the held by many swing doors with his head. When the tumult and the shouting had died, Jack Boissy perceived, seated opposite to him, his whiskified acquaintance of the "Southern Cross" bar. He was neither more nor less drunk than in the morning; he appeared to be able to balance on the tight-rope of whisky with nicety, avoiding total unconsciousness on the one hand, and entire sobriety on the other, in the most enviable way. His glaucous eye fell upon Jack, and gleamed.
"I see you," he stated, "you're the beggar that was backin' Mermaid. I been to the races too."
And he touched, with a knowing look, the bulging breast pocket of his coat. Jack had nothing to say to him.
"Ah, you don' believe me," mourned the whiskified man. "Not good enough for you. I don' go round in a fancy tie. But I got my rights like anyone else, and wot I say is, my money's as good as any beggar's. Better! If I 'ad a tie like that, I'd know where to stick it--"
With this defiance he slapped down the contents of the pocket. Jack saw old envelopes, newspaper clippings, and among them notes, notes, notes; fifty pound notes, twenties, at least three hundreds. There must have been close on a thousand pounds doubled up there on the table, soaking up sops, and speckled with crumbs of tobacco. A desperate thought went through his mind, and he looked swiftly towards the door, to see if the way were clear. But men blocked it, dozens of them in clotted groups. No good; and anyway--he came back with sudden attention to what his acquaintance was saying.
"Think a lot of yerself, don't yer? But can't hold licker. Tha's wha's matter with you young coves. Chucked out for bein' disorderly--tk, tk!" The whiskified man clucked his scandal at this behaviour; then, without modulation, from the minor to a brisker key: "'ow about a hand o' euchre?"
Jack Boissy, after a short calculation into which entered his own debt, his acquaintance's degree of drink, and the approximate sum of the notes on the table, answered with a lazy:
"Don't mind if I do."
"Tha's right," said the man, approvingly. "Not too proud to play a 'and with old Ted Sharkey. Come on, it's my shout, what's yours?"
"Soda," said Jack, briefly.
"A bloody blue-ribboner," commented old Ted, dolefully. "Tk, tk. You think I'm an easy mark, tha's wot it is," he went on with an unexpected gleam of shrewdness in his glazed eyes, "you think you c'n take me down while I'm drunk. You got ter learn."
On that ominous note he gathered his riches carefully and thrust them into seclusion; then, after a perilous tacking voyage to the bar he returned with a bottle and a new pack, which he stripped and shuffled with surprising deftness.
They cut for deal, sitting facing each other. Jack's back was to the room; above and behind Ted Sharkey's head the mirror eaned, its lobster's claw upraised in pathetic parody of St. Francis' benediction. Brother lobster took up and obscured the whole of that corner of the mirror; but in the other half Jacques-Marie saw very clearly, just opposite his own eyes, impossible to avoid, Ted Sharkey's forearm and the hand holding five cards, whose identities were reflected, framed in a trail of painted seaweed. He caught his breath.
"Tha's the soda," came his adversary's voice; and as he brought his eyes downwards, with a start: "makes yer feel that way. Never no peace with soda; always belchin'. Un'ealthy bloody stuff."
"I'm all right," said Jacques-Marie, taking hold of himself, and settling down squarely in his chair. He gave one steady glance into the mirror at the reflected card-faces, and said:
"Pass."
Euchre is a game not entirely dependent on any one element; luck, skill and bluff hold about equal places; but an opponent who sees the opposing hand can call any bluff, and, while his knowledge cannot affect the fall of the cards, it lends a sureness to his finesses and confidence to his general play. Nine games give the rubber. They marked with two of the stripped cards apiece, uncovering one of the pips for each win. There was a side-bet of a sovereign on each game; on the rubber, twenty. Jack held average cards but made the most of them. Impudently he ordered up the right bower into a hand which he saw to be otherwise destitute, took it with the joker, made the last trick and flicked his marking cards to show the ninth pip.
"Double or quits!" said old Ted, detaching a careless twenty from his jumble of notes, and stowing two others in safety under the whisky bottle, "you needn't think you got me broke. What you want's some good 'olesome spirit. No wonder you got 'iccupses--"
The new game began, and went its way. The two supplementary twenties were shoved over, another cut, another deal, while about them voices roared with an aimless but growing potency, and the automatic piano roused from time to time uncertain shufflings and thuds. There was no single breath, now, of the violins out by Garden Island; eternally the swing-doors clumped, there were jungle-sounds of laughter, and an occasional amused but protesting bellow as some of the weaker vessels were overcome by that sudden and copious sickness which lies ambushed for drinkers.
In their corner, under the patronage of St. Francis and his little brother of the sea, Jacques-Marie Boissy de Mortemar of no fixed abode and Edward Sharkey, late of Bungaroo, continued their tourney. There was now a little ridge of red along Jack's cheekbones. He had won his five hundred with fifteen to spare, and still the boozed old fool hung on, and wouldn't take his licking, but perpetually re-started the game, and lost, and boasted, and took another deal. The etiquette which hedges the winner prevented Jack from rising and escaping with his spoils. He had to give the man his chance of revenge if he wanted it. At last came a respite.
Old Ted's whisky had began to run low. He still used the bottle as paperweight for the notes he betted with, and still, by some strange provision of nature, he retained enough command of his wits to know a right from a left bower, and play with judgment, even with skill. But the whisky, cheated of its empire over his intelligence, was getting its own back on his limbs. His hands were unwieldy; they fumbled the cards, and spilt from the glass, and finally knocked the whisky bottle clean over. Old Ted gave a curse, and attempted to stand up. But the treacherous legs had, half an hour before, and without warning, changed masters, so that they now owned whisky for their lord, and not old Ted. He swore at them with the tongue that many a time had lifted a bullock-team out of trouble. Vainly he wrestled with them in spirit. His legs, for the moment, had had enough of old Ted, and they sagged beneath him, while he looked astonished and hurt at their disloyalty, and lamented his bad luck, puddling the lost dram on the floor with one rebellious foot.
"'Sall wrong," whimpered old Ted, "I cam get on 'thout my licker. I gotta right to my licker while I c'n pay for it. You think you got me beat. Tha's where you're wrong. I c'n take on two of yer. I c'n take on ten. But I gotta 'ave my licker. I tell you, 'swife and children to me. Poor old Ted's in'cent kids--all tricklin' away--"
He broke down and wept at the thought which this pretty image of the bottled family roused in his mind, lying across the table on top of the cards, and feebly scratching his head with one hand that happened to be under it.
It was just too much for Jack. His code differed from his grandfather's in many respects, but there may have been times, in Paris before his exile, when Auguste-Anne had torn up I.O.U.s scrawled by a card-player in his cups. Jack Boissy had learned up-country that drunks were fair game only for the pub-keeper; during that period of bliss known as knocking down the cheque, their fellows might not swindle, and must defend them while consciousness lasted. Yet here was Jack Boissy cheating a poor devil out of five hundred and fifteen pounds by the dirty trick of a mirror and the dirtier one of keeping sober. Even for his own vanity's sake he could not do it.
He stood up suddenly, with an ease that mocked the struggles of old Ted, and distracted that unfortunate from his grief for the imaginary family quite lost.
"Here," said Jack, and threw down the bundle of notes. "Next time, don't play with a looking-glass behind you."
He went towards the door without another word, or another glance at his adversary. But when his hand was actually on the slatted wood, he turned. Old Ted was slewed round on the table, looking owlishly up at the lobster in the glass, who held a minatory claw as if exhorting him to take warning; the wad of money lay on the table, and as Jack looked a hand slid over it, a skilled predatory hand, that, making no sound and courting no attention, magicked the notes away for ever from old Ted. Jack hesitated; then slapped the door open with the flat of his hand and went out. It was not part of the code to start a rough-house with professional toughs in defence of a boozer who was not a friend.
And so the money which might have bought Shiela Geraldine some lovely trifle for her neck, and established Jacques-Marie Boissy in her favour, and saved his family a year's anxiety, gave a professional pickpocket a month's high living, and then dribbled back to its original donors, the bookmakers. All this was nothing to Jack. He was on the high seas before the pickpocket had got through half his windfall, and Shiela Geraldine had a letter to cry over when the lights were out. He told the truth, and hurt them both vilely; but as things turned out no harm was done, and their final happiness was built upon a surer foundation than the discomfiture of Edward Sharkey, late of Bungaroo.
--where the Devil, like an insolent champion, beholds with pride the spoyles and Trophies of his victory in Adam.
Religio Medici.
I
The ship on which Jack Boissy left Australia was a small rusty steamer that had seen most of the world, and changed owners often. She had played nearly all the rôles in a ship's repertoire: cargo, passenger in the pilgrim traffic, troop-ship, and even--involuntarily, and owing to her pilot being drunk at the time--lightship, wedged on a Java sand bank. She had carried some curious merchandise in her day, from guns to "years of labour," the New Hebridean synonym for Kanaka slaves. And now she was tramping back again round the Horn, perhaps to Europe, perhaps no farther than Montevideo, with a cargo, presumably, since she lay low in the water, and three passengers: Mr. Jacques-Marie Boissy, a dead-beat Englishman with lungs called Dawlish, and an unknown quantity, an ageless, square, expressionless man whose name was Rudd.
Jacques-Marie had paid forty of his sixty pounds for the passage to South America. There was no special reason why he should go there except that no other boat was leaving Sydney Harbour that week; and he wanted, for all his boast to Grandfather Geraldine, to get clear of the country. He had some notion, not ill-founded, that it was impossible to lose yourself in Australia. There were too few people, and they all knew each other's business, or thought they did; and he had made a fool of himself, and lost the chance of Sheila. He was better out of the way of the whole crowd, he thought, and South America was a place where they ran cattle and sheep, and there were mines; a place not too different from Australia, that yet promised a chance.
He paid his forty pounds, and celebrated his twentieth birthday at sea, in the cabin of the s.s. Alberta (named for the Prince Consort, which has its ironic aspect when some of her rôles are considered) and in the company of Messrs. Rudd and Dawlish, his fellow-passengers. He got on with them well enough, though Dawlish wrote poetry, and caused acute discomfort by reciting it aloud on starry nights when he was tanked up. Rudd was another proposition. He had little to say, which was in his favour, but he kept to himself, which was less good. And he had a way of looking, a stare with the hint of a smile behind it, that made Jack feel disagreeably immature when it fixed him. There was no clue to his origin, either in voice or clothes, or predilections. He was just Mr. Rudd with a poker face, no Christian name, no yarns to swap, and an unfailing appetite.
He puzzled Jack Boissy, who let him alone. But the Englishman he exasperated. Dawlish, nervously excitable, dancing marionette-like on the invisible strings of his disease, was for ever talking at him, and baiting him, and getting no change. After a fortnight at sea, meals became monologues, exhibitions of offensiveness, with Dawlish scampering and waving red rags of temper, Rudd eating and answering only with that stare. This would be the kind of thing:
"My Christ, what do they make this soup of? Slop-rags?" A pause; then, to Rudd, "It don't seem to turn your stomach." Rudd would tilt his plate, and finish his soup. "Used to it, I dare say. They make soup out of offal where you come from, don't they? Silence gives consent. I thought so. Use offal a lot where you come from, don't they? Export it, eh? Funny to pay its carriage at passenger rates. Doesn't that look funny to you, Boissy? They send tripes First Saloon where Rudd comes from. Extravagant beggars, aren't they, over there? Oh, hell, have you both swallowed your tongues?"
And Jack Boissy would mumble a "Chuck it!" and Mr. Rudd would send his glance about the table imperturbably and help himself languidly to bread, with which to wipe up and eat the last dregs of the offending soup.
There were no books on board, except a copy of Sailing Regulations, a Common Prayer belonging to the captain and used only for burials at sea, and the unreadable volumes of poetry from which Dawlish was always spouting. There was nothing to do, except sit on deck of a morning with a rifle and pot sea-birds when these were encountered. The captain was a personage without sociability. The mates were unapproachable, the one on account of extreme religion which caused any conversation with him to end in a burst of Old Testament metaphors, the other by reason of his post of dog's-body which left him no leisure at all. There was no distraction for the restless mind of Dawlish save this eternal questioning of his enigma. He was sick, and knew it, and hated his sickness. Mr. Rudd's inalterable appetite and health were a perpetual challenge and sore.
"I'm going to find out about that fellow Rudd," he told Jack time and again, but beyond questioning the captain, who informed him that his nose was too long, and prodding with barbed comments at meals, he never seemed to get any further. This aimless sparring and irritation persisted through the three weeks while they were out of sight of land.
Then, one evening, the night before they were due to arrive in Valparaiso Harbour, there was a change in the attitude of both men. Dawlish was as malicious, but less angry. He taunted with the satisfied spitefulness of the cat with a mouse safe between her paws. And the impassivity of Rudd was like a curtain drawn over secret activity. Tired as he was Jack Boissy observed it, and growled in his heart that he'd be glad to be quit of this ship and the endless silly scrapping that went on. Scrapping in a more definite sense interested him; he had that afternoon taken on a forecastle hand, a Swede of about his own weight, who had knocked him sideways after a very respectable amount of give and take. He bore the Swede no even while a split lip made eating a delicate business. He could make the best of physical discomfort. It was the infernal atmosphere that Dawlish and his suspicions created which he hated, and was aware of, as an animal or a child knows when things are not right in the house. To come in to it after a grand afternoon of sun, and a half-hour's set-to in the cool, made him sick. He glowered, and ate in a hurry, eager to be outside again, away from them, while Dawlish flicked at the impassive enemy.
"Going ashore to-morrow, Mr. Rudd? You ought to. They say this is a dead-and-alive town; wants waking up. Don't do the senoritas out of a treat; they like a change sometimes. You'd be as good as a funeral to 'em."
And again:
"Well, I'm going ashore. I'll tell the news. They'll send a brass band to meet you, I shouldn't wonder. And a brief note from the President asking you as a favour to sleep with his wife. Well, we can't complain. We've had three weeks of your society, and I'm sure we're both better men for it. If you should decide to stay on shore and not rejoin the ship we'd keep our tears to ourselves."
Then to Jack, in a droll recitative:
"--While he lies like a soldier taking his rest,
With the Dago girls around him."
Jack answered, his temper coming to the surface:
"Chuck it, Dawlish! Have you got to be funny?"
"Oh, no," Dawlish assured him, "I don't get paid for it. It amuses me, that's all, to try and get a rise out of Mr. Rudd. Mr. Ruddy Rudd. What a name, what a hell of a soubriquet! Wouldn't think he was one of these romantic coves, would you? Not with a name like that. Not to look at either. Doesn't make you think of treasure, does it? Makes me think of tripes--look out, blast you, what d'you think you're doing?"
For the large man had put out a hand across the narrow table and taken firm hold of Dawlish's wrist, which he twisted in a knowledgeable way so as to cause sharp discomfort. The Englishman rose, on his first astonished yelp of pain, and Mr. Rudd rose too, looming, to say with no change of expression:
"You'd better sit quiet. I'm going to have it off you."
"Have what? Boissy, give a shout, get someone, the beggar's gone mad--"
"Sit still," returned Mr. Rudd, coming round the table-end. Dawlish gave a loud scream:
"Help! There's murder--"
At that Mr. Rudd drew back his free arm, and a short jab with all his side muscles behind it caught Dawlish on the jaw. His head went sideways with a click of the teeth and lolled. Jack Boissy started forward.
"Keep your distance," said this unfamiliar Mr. Rudd grimly. "He's got something of mine, and I want it back. He's not hurt to speak of. You keep out of this."
Jack halted, and stood, in two minds whether to go and leave the pair to settle their own difference; then the pitiful senseless face made its appeal, not vainly. He dropped his hands, and watched, with some notion of seeing fair play. Mr. Rudd made no objection. He was going through the other man's pockets with the same slow method that he went through his meals, missing nothing, taking everything in order. A little pile of objects grew on the table, whose plates and cutlery had been pushed aside; a few coins, a small edition of "Don Juan"; a mother-of-pearl penknife, a pious medal. Papers were many and scrupulously searched. Drafts for sonnets, half-scribbled letters, one or two unpleasant drawings, dubious advertisements clipped from new apers; none of these satisfied Mr. Rudd, whose methodical hands unfolded and put away every morsel of paper with equal care.
It became evident at last that there was nothing in the pockets. Rudd stood away from the unconscious figure; released from his hold it toppled over sideways to the floor with a horrible abandon that turned Jack Boissy white, and even seemed to disturb the searcher a little. He knelt, and put a thumb to Dawlish's eyelid, rolling it up; then, with a quick forward movement, brought his ear down to the open mouth. For a moment he remained thus, quite motionless, and Jack too was still. A tinkle came from the knives and spoons that lay heaped together as the ship rolled down and up in a trough of a wave. Mr. Rudd's voice said briefly:
"Give me was the vinegar."
There was a cruet on the table. Jack picked out the vinegar bottle, and came towards the group on the floor. Rudd took it from him, lifted the head of the tumbled Dawlish, and poured half the contents into his open mouth. There was no attempt at a cough or a swallow. The liquid trickled from the corners of the lips, and ran out in a little stream as, abruptly, he laid the head down. Rudd rose from his knees, and in his methodical way restored the bottle to its place in the cruet. He said nothing, and betrayed no concern; only said, as if musing:
"Now, what the hell can the little swine have done with it?" Jack, aged twenty, could not take it so calmly. He stammered: "But he's dead, isn't he? Dawlish?"
"Oh, he's dead," Mr. Rudd agreed, as though this were but one more aggravation of his offences. "Well, I'll have to look through his stuff."
And he made for the door. But Jack Boissy was before him, feeling sick and horribly puzzled, unsure of himself yet knowing that something must be done.
"No, you don't," said Jacques-Marie. "You're staying here till somebody comes."
Mr. Rudd regarded him with that juvenating stare, saying nothing.
"I'm sending for the captain," went on Jacques-Marie; his hand and till reached he comes sideways for the steward's bell; "and you're sitting here till he comes."
"What's the idea?" enquired Mr. Rudd, with a suspicion of mockery.
"That's what I'm trying to get at. Looks to me like murder."
"You think so, do you?" Mr. Rudd laughed, without amenity. "Well, send for your captain."
And he seated himself in the chair from which Dawlish's body had fallen.
The steward came with his tray, bustling in as if this were the usual nightly summons to clear the table. He saw the doubled-up figure by Rudd's feet, and halted, not much put about, for it was known that Dawlish drank, and the face was turned from him. It was Rudd, and not Jacques-Marie, who gave the order:
"Ask the captain to come here as soon as convenient."
Jack, angry at the fellow's calm, cut across this deliberate speech with:
"Tell him there's a man been killed."
The steward cast one glance at the body, and one at the unchanging face of Mr. Rudd; hesitated, and fled. Rudd crossed his legs, and leaning over the table, cut himself a slice from the Dutch cheese, which he ate slowly and with enjoyment, while Jack Boissy, cast for the sympathetic part but with no idea how to make the most of it, and feeling inexplicably a fool, stood by the door with his hands hanging at his sides.
It was a full five minutes until the captain came, minutes which Mr. Rudd passed at his ease, eating, and after the slice was finished, preparing with loving care a cigar. It was Jack who was nervous; Jack who had to keep a hand on himself to stick to his programme, not to do a bolt and leave Rudd and the captain to settle the whole ominous business between them. The coward in him, that most plausible denizen of every soul, was putting the facts in a very common-sense way.
"You didn't like Dawlish," said the coward, like a reasonable uncle, "now did you? He asked for trouble. He's been at Rudd the whole voyage. You can't blame Rudd. Besides, it was an accident, you know that. Rudd didn't mean to lay him out, he was only after something that had been stolen. You keep out of this. It's none of your business, anyway. Let Rudd settle it. He did it, it's his look-out."
But to this adviser something in his blood was answering, obstinately and unreasoning:
"Murder! That's what it was, and I saw it happen, and I've got to see it through."
But when at last the captain came, it was Mr. Rudd with a gesture of his cigar, who took the floor.
"Been a little accident here, captain," said he, almost affably. "Poor Dawlish. I've done what I could, but the poor chap's gone."
Jack clamoured, his voice sounding very high: "It was murder, Captain Jensen. He was murdered sitting in that chair--"
"Now, now," said Rudd soothingly, as to a child; then to the captain, bending to finger the leaden wrist, "Don't listen to him, captain. He don't know what he's talking about."
"I know murder when I see it."
"That's all right," Mr. Rudd soothed, "you've seen a hell of a lot, we know. What you want to do now is shut your mouth."
"He's done for," said the captain, heavily rising, and gazed at Rudd as though waiting his cue. These two large and middle-aged men might have been alone in the cabin for all the notice they took of Jack, with his flushed cheek-bones and the Australian lethargy gone. His nonentity enraged him. He caught the captain's arm roughly.
"You're the law on this ship, aren't you? Here's a man killed sitting at your table. What are you going to do about it?"
"He's going to forget it, if you give him the chance," said Mr. Rudd. "These things will happen, captain. A couple of youngsters skylarking. There won't be any questions if we all keep our traps shut."
"Are you saying," Jack Boissy choked, "I did it?"
"I'm saying it was an accident," returned Mr. Rudd steadily, "and Captain Jensen's taking my word for it. You won't find trouble if you don't go looking for it."
"He did it!" Jack's voice insisted, raging, but dwindling. "Took a swing at Dawlish, and broke his neck, not ten minutes ago, and I'm witness to it in any court you like--"
It was their silence that made him pause, and which gave him suddenly the ugly knowledge that they were in league. Only for an instant, yet he had in that instant a vast acreage of time in which to survey his own position if they were in league, and to hear the coward's voice sounding its warning. But he went on, defying them:
"You can't shut my mouth. I'll give information when I get ashore to-morrow. You needn't think you'll get away with it. What sort of ship is this, anyway? Who's the owner? He'll have something to say."
At that, for the first time in their acquaintance, Rudd laughed. "I'm the owner," said he.
The two large men stood looking at Jack Boissy, and despite their stillness, he had a very vivid sense of danger. He carried no weapon, there was no room for fists. He was near the door and he sprang for it, keeping an eye on the two quiet figures. They made no attempt to stop him. They merely watched, exchanging a smile.
And there was Jack Boissy in the narrow lobby, bolting down it like a rabbit, tearing open the door, running his hardest down the gently pitching deck towards his cabin, which lay aft. He reached it and stood, while the consciousness of his own youngness and folly and futility flowed over him. No one was following. No one had threatened him. What the hell was he doing, running away?
He dropped on to his bunk, and sat with his hands dangling between his knees, trying to think things out. A man was dead. Rudd had killed him. Rudd owned the ship and the captain, and the whole caboodle. It was Rudd's word against his, if he made trouble.
At that, in a kind of panic, he was up, looking about the tiny room for means of safety, something to barricade or wedge the door; a weapon. But there was nothing movable, except his own trunk, and nothing that resembled a weapon but his stock-whip with its twelve-foot thong; the cabin space was about ten foot by seven. It occurred to him that Dawlish might have possessed some kind of gun; then he remembered that Rudd would probably be coming to search his cabin. He had spoken of looking for his lost valuable--what could it be? Papers, evidently--among the dead man's things. All the same, Jack shifted his trunk from the door and undid the bolt, and listened. There were three cabins in the deck-house aft; Dawlish's, his own, and an airless cubby-hole used by the steward for his stores. Rudd slept forrard with the officers, a fact which had had no significance till now.
There was no sound, save the creaking and straining of the ship as she pitched forward through the long gentle waves perpetually rolling to meet her. Jacques-Marie stepped into the alley-way, and taking the lamp from its gimbal went towards the dead man's door.
It was unlocked; there were no such refinements as keys on the ramshackle Alberta. He looked in upon sluttish untidiness, and wrinkled his nose at the sourish stuffy smell, perceiving at once that there were only two places for exploration, a portmanteau under the bunk and the usual locker. Both gaped, displaying dirty wrinkled shirts and handkerchiefs, some of these latter splotched with blood. He hated to put his hands among the things, but the devil was driving, and pulling out the portmanteau he started to fossick. His fingers touched leather more than once, but leather of the wrong shape to hold firearms; there was a good pair of field-glasses, and an oval case that might have held a daguerreotype, and apart from clothes that was all. The locker was as unhelpful. He had a notion that Dawlish might have kept his gun under his pillow, and searched there; nothing. It was impossible that a weakling of that sort should take himself to foreign parts without any means of protection. He began to look wildly, in silly places, on the floor, under the bunk, beneath the mattress--
There at last his fingers closed on something. He pulled out a pocket book, or rather a wallet, stuffed and bulging with papers. No use to him! And he was about to thrust it back into its hiding place when the idea came that these were what Dawlish, in his spiteful folly, had stolen from Rudd. He could imagine pretty well when it had happened; just at the time when the boxing was going on, when the whole ship's company, Rudd included, were gathered to enjoy the cool and watch the sport. Dawlish could have gone unseen then to the officer's quarters, and played whatever silly trick he liked, the dirty little bastard! Jack felt a sudden rage against him, for monkeying with a man like Rudd, and getting the perfectly innocent Jack into the hell of a mess, where he didn't know what to do, or how he stood. Anyway, if the wallet belonged to Rudd it had better go back to him. As for Dawlish, where could you find a bloodier fool than the man who pokes his nose into danger with no means of taking care of himself? Tongue like a woman's and muscles to match, and not even a gun! Looked at all round, there was excuse and to spare for Rudd.
He put the wallet in his pocket, took up the lamp again, and went out, not troubling to try to clear up the mess he had made. One bell struck, and was echoed forrard. Half-past eight, and no sign of the avenging Rudd, and no unusual sound; the hiss of parting sea along the plates, and in the fo'c'sle an asthmatic concertina wailing out music-hall tunes at the pace of a hymn. These he heard in the alley-way as he stood replacing the lamp, the noises of every night; nothing sinister, no departure from routine on account of the sudden and violent death of a man. He went back into his own cabin, this time not bolting the door.
Nothing was happening as it should. Events ought to have come fast after that murderous blow; instead, there reigned a tranquillity as of Sunday afternoons in Wollondoola, and he, who had had nothing to do with the incident, was the only one disturbed. He could not see his way. To sit barricaded in his cabin till the ship reached port was a tame solution. To go back and confront Rudd and the captain after his dramatic exit, fleeing like the wicked where no man pursued--that, too, seemed an anticlimax. Bewildered, he began to doubt if that scene at the table had ever happened at all.
But the wallet was there, heavy in his pocket, and it might be as well, he decided, to find out whom it belonged to. It had a lock, but was unfastened; it was clumsy and shapeless with papers. He pulled out one thick one at random, unfolded and held it up to the light under which he stood.
It was a map; and a map, that was the strange part of it, that he knew like the palm of his hand. Looking down at that familiar map he had another moment's doubt of the reality of his immediate world. There was the scroll held by cherubs in the top right-hand corner, showing the inscription in French which announced that the map had been personally surveyed and calculated upon the meridian of Paris by one Delavigne, engineer and geographer to the King. There was the pair of dolphins gracefully spouting, and the rounded ship tacking into the principal bay. The date was the same, 1786; and the whole represented, again according to the scroll, the very loyal isle of Santisimo Corazon, part of the dominions of Louis XVI, that most Christian King.
Jack Boissy had seen this map every day of his life, since he was of an age to notice anything. It hung framed in the hall, attractive to small boys on account of the dolphins and the spitting competitions that contemplation of them always provoked. His father, grimly silent about France, would talk of the island; had, on occasion, taken down the map, and traced the heights with a finger, and told the story of the siege in the cathedral. Jack could have found his way about that island blindfolded. It had, in addition to its dramatic history, the charm of treasure lost, and the romance of glories not destroyed but waiting discovery. It had been one of his daydreams, going back to win that waiting treasure. And now here was the map in Rudd's wallet.
Not quite the same, though. As he looked, he perceived that here and there, neatly scribbled in ink upon the fine surface of the paper, were figures, numbers. There was a map of the town inset in the bottom corner, and here the groups of figures were numerous. The site of the governor's palace was 27; some of the streets leading upwards bore two or three numbers which decreased as they climbed; the Bishop's residence was 19-20, the Cathedral Tower only 14, the nave of the cathedral back again at 20, and the eastern end, beneath which lay the crypt, was numbered "approx. 23." He supposed it indifferently to be some surveyor's trick, and let it pass, while his mind played about with the coincidence of Rudd possessing such a map--if it were Rudd's. He put it down, and tried another paper from the wallet; it was in Spanish, or some such tongue, but there was Rudd's name sticking out unmistakably, like a pink British face among a crowd of Dagoes, and Jack had a moment to grin, discovering that his Christian name was apparently Noah. Otherwise the paper told him nothing. He pried further into the wallet; then stiffened, listening, not turning his head. Solid and leisurely footsteps were approaching down the deck, and voices making no attempt at concealment; voices at their everyday pitch, and steps anything but stealthy. They were coming to try to bribe or bluff him; they had guns, most probably, by now. The door? No use, with the ventilator holes above it just the size for a gun-barrel. He must bluff too; and leaving the door wide, he sat down and began to unlace his boots.
The steps and voices neared. A hand wrestled unskilfully with the latch of the alley-way door. It was Rudd and Jensen with the steward, and they passed by his open cabin without so much as a glance at the youth whose word had power, in ordinary circumstances, to send at least one of them to death or Dartmoor. There he was, keyed up, waiting to be cajoled, and the principal miscreants ignored him completely. True, the steward, following last, thrust his head in sideways to say casually:
"I 'aven't forgot your water, sir, but I got somethin' on 'and jest now."
And passed on, following his superiors into Dawlish's cabin, leaving Jacques-Marie Boissy playing half-heartedly with his laces, crestfallen, like a child whose "watch me!" has been greeted with the grown-up damper--"Not now, dear, I'm busy."
But there were one or two things in his ancestry that would not permit him to take the hint, and sit quiet. There was his father's tendency to obey impulse, his grandfather's gift for the grandiose and spectacular. Neither of these could ever resist the temptation to make an ace if their hands held one, even though strategy counselled letting it go. Jacques-Marie rapidly clicked the bootlaces back into their eyelets, felt for the wallet in his pocket, and made for Dawlish's door. Standing there, at the unready slouch that had so infuriated his father, he said in that father's very voice, holding out the wallet:
"You're looking for this, I believe."
Rudd and the captain regarded him. They were not searching. They were just standing about, while the steward sat on his haunches and crammed clothing into the portmanteau. Jack Boissy, with his gesture, had made no sensation. Rudd took the wallet; it was the captain who turned, and most surprisingly rated him:
"Where'd you get that?" demanded the captain. "You been in here looking round, hey? Don't you know dis cabin's got to be sealed up? All his things got to be packed up and sealed? I got to see dis young man's relatives gets his things. How'm I to do it if dere's outsiders nosing round, and picking up what dey fancy?"
"It's Mr. Rudd's wallet," answered the astounded Jack, sullen at this scolding from an accomplice after the fact of murder. "How d'you know that? You been looking in it, hey?"
"I looked to see whose it was."
Jack's presence of mind, shaken by the attack, deserted him. He could not think of a lie, and would not admit that he had taken it from the cabin in which he had, there was no denying it, no business to be. But Rudd saved him the trouble of an answer. He had been exploring the wallet, and now said without emphasis:
"I see you kept the map. Better hand it over."
Silently Jack produced the folded paper from his pocket. Mr. Rudd said, with his stare:
"Did you take a look at it?"
Jack nodded indifferently, and to show that he thought nothing of it added:
"It's all-same one we've got at home. My old grand-dad governed the show."
This time he made his sensation. He could feel, although no movement or glance out of the ordinary did they let slip, that both were watching him, and that he had given them a shock.
"Oh, he did?" said Mr. Rudd at last. "Then you know all about it. What was his name?"
"Mortemar."
"That's not your name, is it?"
Rudd's tone was offensive, and the boy grew angry. "If you think I'm a liar, why don't you say so?"
Mr. Rudd took no offence, but pondered, while the captain lit the stump of a cigar which he took from his trouser pocket. Then he said abruptly to the steward, still busy on the floor:
"Clear out."
The steward departed with a promptness that revealed the kind of discipline Mr. Rudd kept. Mr. Jacques-Marie Boissy, out of bravado, remained. He neither liked the situation nor knew what to make of it, but he was not going to run from these two men again; and he slouched against the door-post, the picture of indolence, while his mind added up his chances of leaving the cabin alive. Mr. Rudd seated himself on Dawlish's bunk, looking at his watch as he did so. It was close on nine.
"Look here, young Boissy," began Mr. Rudd, "or Mortemar, or whatever your name is; you think I'm out after you on account of what happened"--he jerked a thumb--"forrard. Don't you?"
Jack Boissy held his tongue.
"You think you've got the bend on me. You think I've got to find a way to keep you quiet. What I ask is, why the hell should I?" He paused.
"Authorities, that's what you said. Report to the authorities. I'd like to see you. How much money've you got? Not fifty goblins to rattle together. Yes, I'd certainly like to see you talk to the Dago police. They'd have you in the calaboose for giving false information, and there you'd rot. I've got the police greased; they know whom to listen to. I'm not going to the trouble of knocking you on the head. I don't need to. So you don't need to take exercise keeping out of my way."
He grinned, an unpleasant expression which recalled to Jack the shame of that panic flight from the saloon. He would have liked to take a jab at Rudd's head as he sat there on the bunk where Dawlish had lain coughing during so many nights. He answered, though, as casually as he could:
"That's all right. You don't want to be scared of me." Mr. Rudd took this insolence in good part.
"Now you're talking sense. I like a chap that knows when he's beaten. Then he can start again, see? Listen to me. You're going ashore to-morrow, aren't you?"
Jack nodded.
"Got a job waiting?" He held up a hand. "Now, now, let me finish. What were you thinking of trying for?"
"Job up-country," said Jack, briefly, resentful of this catechism, and suspicious lest Rudd should try to put a spoke in his wheel. He could not rid himself of the notion that all this talk of greasing the police was bluff. He was too young to realize the truth when he heard it. So he jerked out his noncommittal answer and waited.
"Any relations in S.A.?" Rudd went on. "Any pull? What's taking you there?"
"My business," Jack answered, mumbling but insolent.
"Speak the lingo?" Rudd persisted.
Jack was silent.
"I'll tell you what'll happen to you," said Rudd, crossing one leg over the other knee, and rocking easily back and forth. "You got no money to speak of, and no job waiting, and you can't talk Spanish no more than I can preach a sermon. You'll never get up-country. The first woman you go with'll take your money off you, and you'll get a job on the waterside shifting hides at forty cents a day. Why, Christ help you, haven't you seen it yourself in Sydney? Pommies coming out to make their fortunes. Ah; and how far do they get? Darlinghurst gaol if they're lucky, and the harbour if they're not. I tell you, I seen a thing or two fished out by the water police--"
"What are you getting at?" said Jack, interrupting, more bewildered than ever. "It's not your look-out what happens to me."
"I'm making you an offer," answered Mr. Rudd slowly, nursing his knee. "I've taken a fancy to you, young Boissy."
"I'll hold my tongue all right," contemptuously Jack took him up. "I've told you so once."
Mr. Rudd stared.
"Still harping on that, are you? Forget it, you'd better, the way we're going to. I'm asking you, do you want to come in on a good thing?"
"Depends. What do you call a good thing?"
For answer Mr. Rudd tapped the folded map which he still held.
"Just a little prospecting. Getting our hands on what's nobody's money. What 'ud you say to a little salvage work in Corazon?"
He pronounced it Spanish-fashion, the z softened to th; Jack took a second to understand him, then, amazed, blurted out: "But it's half a mile under water!"
"Nothing like," said Mr. Rudd complacently. "And there's stuff there. Well, what d'you say?"
The thing that surprised Jack almost more than this suggestion was Captain Jensen's face. It looked, first astounded, then and its eyes ranged from Rudd to the boy as if thunderous; they thought the former had gone suddenly mad. Jack half-shared the captain's opinion. He saw no reason, except treachery, why the offer should be made. Rudd was biding his time. Rudd wanted to get him into remote waters, and finish him in a manner which would lead to no enquiries. But he had baited the hook well, better than he could have known. Rudd was speaking, deliberately, in his reasonable style, giving out the most unconvincing stuff.
"You see, in a manner of talking, you got a right to a look-in on this, Grandfather, you said; governor, eh? There must he a lot there that's yours, by rights. You're the long-lost heir, so to speak. Looks to me like you had a kind of a legal right to go and look for it; if you've got any papers, that is; proofs of identity they call them in France. No? Well, never mind. They're easy to come by. We can make it look good to these Dagoes, anyway."
That barometer, the captain's face, changed during the course of these words from stormy to fair; changed slowly, and lifted at last almost to a grin of appreciation. Jack saw, but could make nothing of the whole business. For the second time he failed to realize that the artist Rudd was playing that supreme card of all liars, that joker, the truth. He was all astray, vaguely aware that somehow or other his manhood was on trial, ashamed to take what seemed the prudent course, suspicious of a trap, and tempted. Said Rudd, again in an uneventful voice:
"Well, it's you to call. I'm giving you the chance. Get off to-morrow if you want to sweat your tripes out for Dagoes; I won't interfere. I'm only saying it's a pity. You'll starve, or you'll live on women; that's the way they all do there. You'll save your skin, maybe, or maybe you won't. Anyway, there's dirtier things than murder. Well, take your choice. I'm not interfering."
"You needn't go on talking," Jack Boissy heard himself saying, above the clamour of his protesting and bustling thoughts "I'm on."
Rudd nodded, as though he had foreseen it all along, and offered the hand which an hour before had knocked Dawlish's life out. Jack took it, and the captain's after it. There was a moment's silence; then Rudd, rising and kicking the portmanteau, said:
"We've got to get this stuff put away. Where's the steward?"
II
Later that night Jack woke, disturbed by the cessation of the creaking and plashing which accompany a ship's motion. He sat up and stared out of his port; the stars kept their places. There were footsteps on deck, voices, and at the end of a very few minutes a considerable splash, which was the body of Arnold Dawlish being committed to the deep. He had full sea honours, a flag sewn round him--a yellow quarantine flag it was, the only spare in the signals locker--and the service read over him with almost professional unction by the mate, from the captain's Book of Common Prayer. After the splash came clangs from the engine-room, and those stars framed in the square of Jack's porthole began once more their swaying stately dance.
III
The Alberta trailed slowly up South America's eastern coast, depositing and accepting the oddest variety of cargoes; phosphates, coal, forty grand pianos, and finally a collection of animals for the Zoo at Rio. The Alberta, honest tramp, would carry anything consigners cared to pay freight on, asking no questions. She was, however, conspicuously virtuous during the whole of this trip; the busy Customs Officers found nothing in her holds--perhaps to their disappointment--which called for comment or for palm-oil. She might always have been a worthy god-child of Albert the Good.
She quitted Rio, however, riding high in the water, and turned her blunt nose north, and then nor'-west; and it was during these ten days' steaming that Rudd returned for the first time to the business of the bargain between him and his passenger. He said one night, cutting a cigar after supper:
"Now, Boissy, see here. We've got to get going. Have you got any papers to prove who you are? Letters, ticket of leave--"
Jack angrily rejected this last jocosity. And no, he hadn't any letters.
"Think," commanded Mr. Rudd. "Mean to say you've got nothing, not a single bit of paper with your name on?"
Jack had nothing; except--he laughed shortly--an old prayer-book with his name written in full in his father's hand. Mr. Rudd was interested. Jack was sent off, a trifle shamefaced, to his cabin to fetch the book. It was a small pious toy, bound in blue morocco, and entitled in gold--"Key of Heaven." On the fly-leaf was written in French--Gustave-Félicité mistrusted his own English--"For my eldest son, Jacques-Marie Boissy de Mortemar, on the occasion of his first Communion." The date followed, and then a flourish which underlined and enriched his signature.
"So you're a Roman," said Mr. Rudd, running the leaves past his thumb. "That's a hell of a funny church to belong to. I've seen a lot of these priests, one way and another. They had a shot at converting me once." He turned his palm, to show a round white scar. "There's their mark."
"You're a liar," said Jack instantly. "There's nothing of that sort goes on now."
"All right," returned Rudd placably, but with his hint of a smile. "I'll hang on to this, anyway." The "Key of Heaven" went into his pocket. "Now see here."
And Mr. Rudd began to outline a plan.
It appeared that treasure-hunting was not the simple sport it was made out to be. You had to get permission to dive. Whom from? Well, that was the point. These swallowed-up islands--two others went down with Corazon--by rights belonged to France. But France had, some time in the 'forties, traded the remaining islands of that group, which grew nothing, and were pestilential to whites, with the mainland Republic of San Miguel for a mining concession. The Republic, which somehow or other had become possessed of a gunboat, gave itself airs, referred to these islands as colonial possessions, and indefatigably patrolled their waters at a wheezy five knots, keeping up a clog-in-the-manger guard over the sunken territories as well as those which remained above water. The Republican stalwarts themselves never attempted anything in the way of salvage, any more than they attempted to work their mainland tin-mines. They contented themselves with taking money off enthusiastic foreigners, trusting to their climate and their gunboat--Espada de San Miguel, the Sword of Michael--to do the rest. It would cost, said Mr. Rudd, forty or fifty pounds to grease the right palms in Arcangel, the port and prime town; and you might just as well chuck fifty pounds into the sea.
"They give you a document," said Mr. Rudd sourly, "all over ribbons and seals. They're liberal with sealing wax, Dagoes are. All right. Off you go and start diving. Along comes this gun-boat bogaring* round. 'What's all this?' says the brass-bound Admiral commanding, 'Señores, the flag of San Miguel waves over these waters.' You bring out your document, and the Admiral plaits up a few of the ribbons so he can read it. Then he says, 'Caballeros, this was granted by the President before last. All his concessions are null and void.' That means another fifty or more, and the first lot goes down the drain."
[* Spanish; to sail round for the purpose of surveying.]
This revenue-producing scheme Mr. Rudd was prepared to double-cross. He proposed to make straight for the island and get to work, while the gunboat took up, in Arcangel harbour, those duties laid down for the Miguelan navy during the Feast of the Assumption; letting off fireworks, sustaining a Christmas-tree outburst of bunting, and contributing a contingent in full uniform to the religious processions. Law and order, said Rudd, were all very well in places where they'd got the idea. But San Miguel had no notion at all of either. The only language San Miguel understood was poker and prayers.
"They swindled me before," said Mr. Rudd, "trying to go honest. Now they've got to look out. I'm going to start operations, and not a cent goes into their greasy pockets, without I get the worth of it. They don't know I'm here, and I'm not what you might call confiding in them. I tell you all this straight, so you'll know what you're in for. It's not legal, but what the hell good's the law?"
Jack Boissy would have been the absolute fool he was not, if lie had not immediately perceived in the aroma of this proposition an ancient and fish-like smell.
But what was he to do? He had remained on this furtive little ship when he might have gone free of her, and he was committed to whatever her commander and his associates proposed. He had already swallowed murder; it was a little late to jib at piracy. He accepted Mr. Rudd's explanation, therefore, with a casual-seeming nod and asked no further questions--not even what Rudd intended to do with the prayer-book, that improbable content of his pocket.
This acquiescence and apparent gullibility, together with his silence and continual slight sullenness, presented a problem for Messrs. Rudd and Jensen, who disputed over it of nights in the captain's state-room, certain papers on the lamp-lit table between them. It was a question whether it were any use going on with these papers, which involved a certain amount of judicious transposing of words, together with some actual forgery. The captain would not have it that anyone could be such a fool. He felt, in fact, exactly as Jack did to Rudd's proposition, that there must be something dirty and dangerous behind it all. Rudd, however, going on with his deliberate work at the papers, said:
"You don't want to worry, Jensen. You don't know these young cornstalks. They know it all, and they'll tell you so. They've never been outside their own five-by-ten country, but nobody can show them anything. Why, a kid of six running the Liverpool streets knows more. It's out to learn, anyway. So don't go fancying Mr. Bloody-Marie Boissy's watching anything. His level's picking ticks off sheep."
The breathless July days went past, and they slid over the Equator in the night, without any of that Neptune mummery so picturesque to passengers of liners. The officers and crew of the Alberta had been from one hemisphere to the other too often to care about playing the goat in honour of an imaginary line. It was on the morning of August the first that the engine slowed down, and the ship lay quiet on water that looked not so blue as deep water should. The reading at midday gave their position--not quite a satisfactory one. Alberta coughed and snuffled, and crawled a mile or so westwards, while in the bows a man was busy with the lead. The water changed colour; it was blue no longer. It had the exquisite hue, emerald without the emerald's shrillness, of sea seen from a cliff; and as the linesman called depths that grew less and less, colour drained from the water until it was the clouded green of a peeled grape. Then at last the pant of the engines ceased, and the huge rusty anchor was let go that had sat all the voyage cocked on the Alberta's blunt bows like a fly on some plebeian nose. Corazon was under her keel.
IV
The slow wave that had drowned forty thousand breathing men and women, and the locust trees centuries old, smashing them out of existence and all likeness to imaginable things, had fallen with less power upon Corazon's stone. Under the restless water Five Wounds Bay kept its half-moon shape, though the fort with its guns had crumbled. But then the fort had been built only for show; it was part of the governor's trappings, like his prodigious cocked hat. The palace, too, had been rent asunder by that terrific impact of the wave, and dissolved to a little dust that muddied the water for a while. A diver walking along the sea-floor of crisp ridged sand would have passed unknowing over that fraction of the world's space where Gustave-Félicité had been born, and his mother mimicked her own crowning. No trace remained of the wall over which the blacks had swarmed in revolt; and as for the blacks' own hovels, their wattle and daub had been smashed back instantly into the element from which they came. There were fish playing and weeds yielding lazily to the water's sway over the market-place, so coloured once with country fruits, and fowls tied in bunches, and the gay scraps of stuff round black women's heads.
But the Church, after her usual custom, had built to withstand catastrophe. There still stuck up out of the sand a square of masonry, all that remained of the cathedral tower. It had been grim, but in sixty years had suffered a sea change. Weed climbed and covered it like ivy; sea-plants that were half fish grew over it, star-shaped jellies whose fringes waved in the drifts of current that served this water landscape for wind. In the old days on feasts the loop-holes had displayed flags, tawdry even with sun on them against the stone; but in its new existence the tower was like a monument to all the vanities, no inch of it that was not glowing or fluttering, while fishes, red and silver, silver and brown, sailed in fairy fleets through the only loop-hole left.
At the tower's foot, under tons of sand, a few boards and a few bones lay hidden, with some crusted iron hinges still keeping the curves of their foliated sprays. That was where the sacristy had been: and strangely enough, among the ruined things that the sand buried, one jewel was lying intact, a monstrance. The diver's foot, stumbling, might have found it. It could have returned, just as it was, to stand at the top of a flight of altar candles, with the harlequin sunlight of cathedrals slanting down to it, and incense drifting up. There it lay, perfect even to the round of thick crystal that protected the Host, the sands over it carved to other shapes with each year's storms, itself unchanging, witnessing in darkness the glory and furies of God.
V
It became evident from the way in which the crew set about matters that diving was an accepted part of the ship's repertoire. There were pearl banks north of Australia, forbidden, of course, and protected, which might have explained the Alberta's demure presence in Sydney Harbour at the moment when Jack Boissy was wanting a ship; demureness as of a cat purring beneath an empty bird-cage. And the safe in the captain's room was sizeable, and of the very latest model. Yes, undoubtedly diving was nothing out of the crew's way. Jack hung about watching while they got out the dresses and apparatus; weighted boots, copper helmet like the head of some insect hugely magnified. There were grapnels too. All this stuff, it was evident to his inland and ignorant Cornstalk eye, was up-to-date and good. The eye, too, was less ignorant than might have been supposed, for his day-dreams had turned, as is its way with boys, to a practical interest in diving methods and outfits. Jack knew something of what Siebe and other great firms had been doing, and this looked like the very latest for under-water. It all fitted in admirably with the captain's safe, and made Mr. Rudd somehow more remote and inexplicable than ever, with his tales that took nobody in, his impassive and ceaseless lying, his methodical conduct of a fantastic expedition. For Jack's mind could not rid itself of its earlier conception of pirates, that they should drink and make shift, with everything huggermugger, and a ship's company for ever on the verge of mutiny.
Another matter puzzled him too. He had kept quiet about it, but he remembered pretty accurately the depths in fathoms which were what the figures on the map stood for; and the cathedral and palace, places where treasure might supposedly be, were both of them more than twenty fathoms down. Where the Alberta lay, the depths could not have been more than five fathoms. The bottom was visible when no breeze ruffled the waves, populous with fish, and blotched with dark masses of weed and rock. He put his problem to the heads of the expedition as they sat over their midday meal on deck.
"Taken a look at that map of yours lately?"
Rudd and the captain turned their eyes on him.
"Because it looks to me as if you'd got yourselves bushed."
"How's that?" from Rudd. "This is the place, all right. We've about struck it plumb."
"Depends what you're after," said Jack with his drawl. "God's truth, what you think? Pickin' flowers?" angrily broke in Jensen.
"After?" Rudd replied, with a glance at the captain. "Well, the church stuff, say."
"So you said. You won't find it up on top of the Dos du Loup."
"On top of the ridge? Who says we're on the ridge?"
"You're nowhere near the town, anyway. I've been listening to the depths. This is the top of the range behind the town; there's never been any people here--"
It was the very spot where Yellow Mary had been hidden in her cavern, and whence the heretic army had set out, some thousands of singing women and men, to threaten, and burn, and die in a cataclysm.
"--so I don't see, myself, what you expect to find. The place to look for church stuff's the cathedral, I should have thought; and that's miles south."
"You think so, do you?" said Mr. Rudd equably. "Well, maybe you're right."
He would not argue any more; apparently he agreed; but after dinner the Alberta did not at once up anchor and away to the south. Jack found his suggestion entirely disregarded. He knew himself to be right, and what seemed sheer obstinate refusal even to investigate his point made him savage.
He stayed down in the waist of the ship with the crew, even took his meal there, only to be hailed by the infernal Rudd from the rail above:
"Boissy, something of yours. Catch!"
And the "Key of Heaven" was tossed down to him, among grinning sailors.
"Read it careful," continued Mr. Rudd, "and if there's a prayer for fine weather in it you can put it up in your spare time. We'll let you have a couple of candles out of store."
But although the sky was cloudless--August is one of the few peaceful months the Gulf of Mexico enjoys--there was no descent upon Corazon next day. Instead, a blasphemous crew tugged one of the life-boats about all the afternoon here and there over the water's surface that struck back the sun's heat as a mirror does, with as little apparent purpose as the zigzagging of a water-beetle. Mr. Rudd sat in the stern in a gigantic Panama hat, and checked off the linesman's depths on his chart. After five hours of it he returned to the Alberta in a temper as sour as the crew's, and in possession of a jumble of figures of which it seemed he could make nothing. There was a conference that night over the table in the captain's room.
"I don't care what you say," said the captain, "de position's all right. De position what dis old--gives." And he nodded contemptuously at the name of Delavigne, engineer-geographer Royal. "We're plumb over de place now, where it was. Who's to say dere's been nothing happened since? Sea floor in dese parts is always up to tricks."
"Another 'quake," said Rudd, pondering. "Might be. Anyway I'll send down Reilly for a look-see to-morrow. We can't afford time to go lousing about any more with the lead."
"Dat young chap Boissy's bustin' himself to go down," said the captain shrewdly, after a pause. "We let him, eh? One day."
"No reason why not," indifferently Rudd agreed. "If he's game."
"And pull him up a bit quick?" persisted Jensen. "He don't look all so strong as dat. Quick up out of t'irty fathoms--"
"Ah, shake your intellects, Jen. What have we got him on board for? Why didn't I give him my boot in the seat of his pants at Rio? We want him for the calaboose in Arcangel, don't we? All right, then."
The captain frowned.
"You're one of those," Rudd went on easily, "that always wants to be doing something. Get things done for you, that's my motto. Sit tight, and let the fools do the running about. There's no need for a man that knows the ropes ever to stir a finger."
"Maybe," returned the captain, "but dat young feller with his long face, and his look like he own de ship, it makes me spit blood havin' him round."
"You got to put up with it," Rudd told him bluntly; then, grinning, "besides, who owns the ship if he don't? Got a right, hasn't he, to look that way?"
"I don't like it," the captain answered obstinately, scowling. "I got a notion maybe you're being too bloody clever."
Rudd waved him to silence with his cigar, and laughed without sound.
"These Dagoes don't care," said he, "they'll get their money, won't they? And a foreigner to put in quod. That'll keep 'em busy awhile."
"Suppose they remember the cut of your jib?" went on the captain.
"Five years ago," Rudd reminded him. "Why, bless your bowels, there's a new pack of officials by now. They kill 'em off every year or two. If I can't bluff them, with two funnels when they're looking for one, and a clean face where they're looking for a beard, I'll deserve shooting. Your feet are cold, that's your trouble."
"And you're too cocky," said the captain. "You got de priests after you dis time, and dat's bad in any country."
"What, d'you think the gunboat's cruising round with a crew of bishops? Stand yourself a drink, Jensen. Don't you know I'm always right?"
That was the end of the talk. Next day, envied by Jack, a diver went down into the gently wrinkling water and roved about on the bottom for an hour. While he was under, there was a scare on the bridge. Somebody noticed smoke, then smokestacks, appearing over the horizon, and in another twenty minutes Rudd, with his glasses steadied on the rail, could make out the lines of a man-of-war. He did not summon the diver, nor make any other sort of bustle, but kept the glasses fixed a while longer; and at last with a sort of sigh, turned away.
"A Yank. Carry on."
She came near, a spruce-looking vessel, lured by the sight of a ship immobile in these unfrequented waters. In a little while the signal flickered across to them:
"U.S.S. McClintock-are-you-in-need-of-assistance?"
"Answer 'em civil. It's not their waters, but it pays," Rudd directed; and the dog's-body spelt back a message:
"Alberta-Rio-to-New-Orleans-engaged-salvage-operations-no-need-ass istance-but-would-appreciate-newspapers."
U.S.S. McClintock twinkled a good-bye, and veered off, throwing over a good-sized bundle wrapped in waterproof which slowly drifted towards them and proved to contain old magazines, liberally seasoned with tracts. Having worked off this joke, McClintock raced away full tilt, like a boy that has rung a door-bell for fun, and soon was lost, going west.
That unsuspicious passing of the man-of-war was another thing that stung Jack's mind to activity. Wasn't the U.S.A. boss in these waters as in her own? Wasn't there some doctrine or other giving her a right to shove her oar in wherever she found anything that looked fishy? Wasn't this treasure-spot known and protected, like the pearl banks north of Queensland? Rudd said you had to have a licence to dive there. Why hadn't anyone asked for that licence? Was it legal to dive, or wasn't it? If it was, and the warship's indifference made it look that way, where was the point of Rudd's yarn?
In the morning he had something else to think about. Somewhere about four Alberta began to get up steam; by eight the anchor was once more in the bows, and two hours later they were moving, prowling at two knots, while a grapnel and line, swung well out on a derrick not to foul the screw, trailed over the sea-bottom. Backwards and forwards they crept all day, crossing and re-crossing the ridge that in M. Delavigne's map was called the Dos du Loup. Not one of the journeys was more than a mile long. At the end of each the grapnel was hauled up and examined, with no apparent result. At night they anchored again, but kept up steam, and in the morning the same performance was repeated, nosing back and forth like a dog quartering the ground for a fallen bird. Rudd would not explain. He only stared, making Jack feel young and angry, then took up his glasses again to look westwards. He was forever eyeing that horizon. He remained placid while the ship, under the beat of the sun, seemed to throb and quiver like a live creature; and Jack, rifle on knees, keeping a look-out for sharks, felt tempted half-a-dozen times a morning to ruffle his calm with a shot.
VI
It must have been somewhere about five o'clock that the grapnel, when for the twentieth time they hauled it in, came heavy. The mate shouted the news; and in an instant Rudd had dropped his glasses and quitted his chair to stare down over the ship's side. Something was coming up through the water, scaring a shoal of striped blue-and-silver fish. It was not the usual mess of weed which had fooled them before. It was a thick wire hawser, crusted with shell, rich with the coloured soft growths of the sea, which, gay under water, died in the air to mere clots of jelly. The hawser was got aboard, and half a dozen of the crew hauled at it; but the weight was too great, and the crust of razor-edged shells made it impossible to handle. Time was wasted while they rigged a winch; and when finally one end was lugged up, it proved to be fast to nothing but a small anchor. Mr. Rudd, however, merely nodded at this, and called a halt in the most cold-blooded way for food, while Jack, tormented with curiosity but damned if he would question, kept up his pose of indifference and scorn.
After an hour's rest the toil at the winch was resumed. Yard by yard the hawser was drawn in. There must have been nearly a hundred fathoms of it coiled before another shout sent Mr. Rudd to look down over the ship's side. He stared, nodding, at the dark mass coming up foot by foot through water coloured like a muscatel. It was a solid brass-bound sea chest, studded with shells, ragged with weed, and the devil of a weight to haul on board. The captain, perpetually gloomy, opined that if they didn't go mighty easy they'd have the bottom dropping out of her after all this time under water. Rudd, his temper snapping at last within sight of success, told the captain that if it did he could bloody well go down after it.
But the chest held, bottom and all, and by nightfall it was on deck, intact, with the sea-creatures on it dying, melting away into water again. There was a consultation, and orders for rollers. Trundled on these, they got the massive thing forrard to the captain's quarters. It lay in the sleeping cabin, taking up all the space between his bunk and table, oozing salt water, and beginning to smell. The hands that had manoeuvred it pattered off cheerfully to get their share in the issue of whisky which Rudd had ordered; and there were left to gaze at it that personage himself, Captain Jensen, and Mr. Jacques-Marie Boissy, who was awaiting an explanation.
He was deceived. Mr. Rudd, having lit a cigar, surveyed him coldly with the question:
"And what d' you think you're doing here?"
Jack was startled, but did not change his position, lounging against the side of the door.
"Having a look."
"Get out," said Rudd, briefly, brutally, "you're not wanted." Then, as the astonished boy did not move: "Who owns this ship?"
Jack moved, but forward; Rudd's jaw took an ugly line. Jack produced a cigar from his own pocket, and actually filched the box of matches from under Rudd's left hand.
"Anyhow," said he, "you might give us a light."
And he got his cigar going before he strolled to the door and out. Rudd grinned, looking after him.
"There's times I like that kid," said he. "He's seen me kill a man, too."
"Well, we got it," the captain grunted, dismissing Jack, and indicating the chest with a kick. "What's next?"
"Steam up," Rudd answered, "we don't want to hang about here. That Yankee ship may have got talking."
"She was going to Arcangel, likely," the captain nodded, "dey send a boat or two for dat fool fiesta. God done up in fireworks. An' dey call it a religion--"
"Give the orders now," said Rudd coolly, "and let religion alone. You're no judge of it."
Outside on the deck, well out of range of the captain's port-holes, very quiet and furious, Jack Boissy leaned against the rail and watched little waves break in light against the ship's side. He had all kinds of wild thoughts, notably the idea of bailing up both men with the rifle they had contemptuously lent him for sharks. He was aware at last that the whole Corazon tale was a lie. This chest was what they had been after, that had been planted so carefully in shallow water nowhere near the lost town. But why, and why for the twentieth time, had they dragged him into the show, only to kick him out at this last minute, and allow him no share?
He looked up from the waves to the stars, and his eyes intercepted, just above horizon level, moving lights in the west; a ship, head on, coming towards them. He watched idly while the lights drew near. Nobody else seemed to have observed them. He supposed from the noise forrard that the whisky ration after a hard day was taking up general attention. As for him, if the blazing boat came on and rammed them amidships he'd rather jump to the sharks than give Rudd and Jensen warning. He watched, and the green light went out as the oncoming vessel altered her course. By the look of it she was now a mile away, no more. Lazily he watched her draw closer, and guessed at her length and lines through the darkness.
Then a light stabbed his eyes. He put up his hands against it, backing, but it held him and the whole of the Alberta's decks and superstructure in its glare. Noise stopped in the fo'c's'le, and Rudd and Jensen came tumbling out of the captain's cabin. Another, smaller light, began to wink at them.
"Now who the hell," mused Mr. Rudd, "has been teaching these monkeys to work a searchlight?"
The smaller light continued to wink threats in Spanish.
"Vengo a bordo," it said without apology, and added a brief sentence containing the word "interrogation." The captain swore. Rudd shrugged. Still nobody took the least notice of Mr. Jacques-Marie Boissy.
"Bluff 'em," said Rudd, "if we can. They're too close to miss, even with a Dago on the sights." And then at last, to Jack: "Stand by. You're in on this."
"Not me," said Jack Boissy, turning away. "Not much, Mr. Noah Rudd. I'm telling what I know."
"And that's a hell of a lot," Rudd mocked. "You talk the lingo, don't you? Oh, you'll have plenty news for them."
The Espada had lowered a boat, which now came beating its way with short brisk tugs of the oars down the path of light her searchlight made for it. Eight sailors rowed and there were three figures in the stern sheets. A voice commented, astounded, as they drew near:
"They're bringing a woman aboard!"
A yell of laughter greeted this, with three cheers for the don's kindly thought; but the captain, peering, drew back from the rail suddenly.
"I tole you," said he to Rudd in the flat tones of righteous despair, "I tole you what'd happen once you get de priests after you."
"Ah, shut your mouth," said Rudd. "They can't know who we are. What've you done with that stuff in the cabin?"
But his voice had an edge to it, and was hurried, as though the beats of his heart were running faster.
"What dey bring de black crow aboard for?" the captain demanded.
Rudd jerked his chin.
"They have priests in on everything. Can't unbutton their pants without there's a priest handy and some holy water. What did you do with the stuff?"
"What could I do with it?" bitterly the captain enquired, "half a ton it weighs. I locked de door, dat's all I could do."
"Go and unlock it," said Rudd, his eyes fixed on the approaching boat.
"You're mad! I got to ask dem in my chart-room, don't I? Dey see t'rough de door--"
"Pull the curtain across," Rudd commanded, "don't I tell you we've got to bluff? If that door's locked, they'll ask for it opened, bet your life. And talking of open, get out some drinks."
The boat was alongside now. A rope ladder was dropped, and up came the three from the stern-sheets, one gold-and-white personage with medals and a beard, another with more white and rather less gold, and a bunchy figure, bald-headed, in black skirts. Four of the sailors followed them up, and remained on guard at the top of the ladder, handling their rifles with careless ease. The captain, red-faced, achieved some kind of a salute to greet his guests, and a stumbling word or two in Spanish concerning the honour done to his ship. The senior personage acknowledged this with a bow, and turned to give perfectly audible instructions to his subordinate.
"You, teniente," said the personage, "will remain here in view of the Espada while I accompany the señor captain. Do not let the look-out lose sight of you, even for a moment. Were he to do so, that might be very unfortunate."
The lieutenant saluted in a breezy fashion with his drawn sword, and the little procession of Jensen, Rudd, admiral and priest moved forward to the chart-room. It went by Jack Boissy, standing back against the rail, and Rudd as he passed hooked his arm into the boy's. Jack made no response at all. Hands in pockets he stood glowering while Rudd presented him--so much he knew from hearing his full name rolled out, and cursed himself for ever letting Rudd see it, written on the fly-leaf of the "Key of Heaven." He was used to the "Marie" arousing mirth; in Australia he had kept it dark, as a shame. These Dagoes, however, heard it with courtesy, and the priest asked:
"Is the señor a Christian?"
A Catholic he meant, and so Rudd translated. Jack answered the priest direct:
"Yes, father."
"Very good, my son," returned the priest in admirable English. "You have been, perhaps, to a Jesuit school? But we delay his Excellency--"
And with an inclination of the head he beckoned Jack to accompany him. Rudd fell in behind the pair; and as he turned in the searchlight's flare Jack had time to see that Rudd was somehow horribly disconcerted. Devilment suggested, with some plausibility, that what Rudd disliked was having a second interpreter about. He had counted on Jack being dumb without him, on turning Jack's answers and statements any way he pleased; using Jack, in fact, as a ventriloquist's puppet, to say, unknowing, what Rudd wanted said. Jack suddenly perceived it, read it all in just one glance Rudd let fall on Don Cristobal, the priest, and after that he would not have been out of the fun for worlds.
They entered the chart-room, on whose table stood drinks and glasses. The door into the cabin beyond was open, and a red curtain bulged and blew casually in the draught. Through the chart-room windows on the port side the stream of the searchlight poured, white and fierce as from a moon on fire. The visitors sat, and accepted, but did not touch, a glass of brandy apiece. The priest took up that position recommended by the founder of his Order as being best for recollection, knees together, hands tucked into his none too wide black sleeves, bird-like dark eyes lowered. The admiral addressed Captain Jensen: "Señor; I should tell you that the object of this visit is first of all to inspect your papers."
They were produced without delay, openly, from the safe. "Secondly, to enquire what you are doing here in Miguelan waters."
The captain hesitated. Rudd, with a glance at Jack which did not escape the hidden eyes of the priest, but talking in his usual unemphatic style, began an explanation in Spanish.
The fact was--no sense in trying to conceal it--they had come up from Sydney on an idea suggested by his young friend; some notion of salvaging and exploring in the lost town of Corazon. Young Mr. Boissy was directly descended from the last governor of the island. He had plenty of money, his father--hacendado opulentisimo--being lately dead. It was a very natural thing to turn his thoughts to this sunken patrimony of his family. The ship's papers would show her chartered in his name.
"Ah, yes," said the personage, with civil acquiescence. The swinging lamp discovered his white uniform to be stained, his gold tarnished. His face had the typical clay-colour of the New World Spaniard, his hands were untended. His manners and language, however, were those of courts, grave and delicate.
"I am of course familiar with the señor's name," said he, with an inelination towards Jack, "it has its part in history. Distinguished, indeed! It would be of interest to hear his story. Does the señor speak Castilian?"
He addressed Jack, who looked blank. The priest translated before Rudd could answer.
"Not a word," said Jack; then to the priest: "I don't know what all that patter was about. My name's Mortemar all right. My father was born on the island."
"You were not aware, perhaps, that this group of islands, together with all rights in them, are now the property of the Miguelan Republic?"
"He told me so," Jack admitted, with a jerk of the head towards Rudd.
"You're not drinking," Rudd reproached the strangers, with a geniality in which Jack's ear could detect no strain. "Is there something else I could get you? Coffee?"
Both shook their heads and took up their glasses with polite readiness; but still they did not drink.
"He told you so," the priest repeated. His attention remained as it were withdrawn, but his words were direct to Jack. "Does that gentleman, then, know these waters? He has been here before, perhaps?"
"Not me," said Rudd bluffly. "Pearl-diving's my line. South seas."
"Will you be kind enough to tell us--" the priest began, addressing jack. Rudd caught him up.
"I'll answer any questions. Mr. Boissy's not so well up on the business side."
"He is, however, in charge of the expedition?" put in the priest smoothly.
"Yes, he is. That's right," from Jensen.
"His money, his idea. A pilgrimage, eh? To the soil of his fathers?"
"That's so," Rudd answered squarely, and met Jack Boissy's eye without a flicker. "Yes, it's his show; ship and all. It was an old map gave him the idea."
"I see," said the priest, dropping his eyes; and translated the whole interchange to lisping Castilian for the officer's benefit. It took a minute or two. When the priest had done both were silent, looking at the ill-assorted trio of treasure-hunters; Jensen, red and meaty; Rudd, any age, imperturbable; Jack Boissy, the stripling, obviously bewildered, nominally their commander. Jack himself was seeing his own position with extreme clearness. He was, as usual, in the thick of trouble which was none of his making; drawn into it--astute Mr. Rudd--and snared by the truth. For they were over Corazon, and it was illegal to dive over Corazon, exactly as he had said; only, they were diving for a different treasure. Here was the incident of Dawlish's death over again. Rudd had done the killing; but if Jack had lifted his voice ashore, there would have been some convincing false oaths and Jack in the calaboose. Rudd had planned this diving raid; but there were all the papers neatly forged, to attest that the villain of the piece was jack; was the lanky, sulky, penniless boy of twenty, standing with his hands in his pockets, and wondering if the truth he could tell had one chance in fifty of being believed.
For to deny that the venture was his in face of those forged charters; would that look like truth, or sheer silly panic? To say that his name was Mortemar, but that he had come to South America to work with his hands; to say that his port of disembarking was Rio, but he had not got off there--why not? Because these two hard-bitten gentry, Jensen and Rudd, had offered to share their gains with him. One of them a murderer, and he knew it, but had stayed within his reach. For what reason? Hoping to get a chance at the treasure. But you gave them no money, you say; what inducement had they to give you a chance of it? They're desperadoes, you say; one a murderer. What use could you be to them?
That was how the truth would sound; in just that way would it be badgered about, and turned inside out and endways. No good telling it. His shoulders hunched upwards in his father's shrug, and he shut his mouth, contemplating savagely the hell of a mess he was in, the habit of hells of a mess that pursued him through life.
The priest was speaking. He had put his untouched glass of brandy back on the table, and was asking in the low voice recommended by the founder of his Order--"ail loud tones should be reserved for the praises and petitioning of God"--what success they had had with their diving.
"Nothing much, so far," Rudd answered calmly. "We've got the best tackle, too. But tackle's not everything."
"No," the priest agreed. "So you find nothing?"
His eyes were still downcast, solely concerned with the floor, and the floor, as it happened, presented at that moment the interesting study of a palimpsest. Recent events were recorded on it on top of events less recent. There were bare patches on the carpet, holes, cigar ash and the crumbs and litter of the day; nothing very remarkable to the casual eye. But the priest's eye, which was anything but casual, perceived, half on the carpet and half on the boards, a squarish wet stain as if some large wet box had been up-ended. Salt water dries slowly. At the edge of the carpet, trodden in, was a fragment of transparent gelatinous stuff; deep-sea weed. The priest, keeping his lids still low, perused the interesting story of the floor while the clay-coloured admiral spoke.
"We accept your word, señores, that you have found nothing; that is to say, as private individuals we accept it. As functionaries, however, it is our duty to search. The individual apologises for the functionary."
"No objection," Rudd stated with a wide gesture that included the open state-room door, "everything's open and above-board."
The priest had discovered something else. About six feet away from the square wet patch was another; and on the edge of the door post was a new tear in the paint, a rusty tear as if some heavy jagged scrap of old iron had caught in going through. He tried to peer beyond the door, but the restlessly swinging curtain baffled his eyes. Still, he had seen a good deal. There was one thing more to look for, and he transferred his gaze to Mr. Rudd's hand, extended in blamelessness, inviting search. Just for a second this hand, carelessly thrown wide, exposed its lit palm to the priest's lifted eyes. Don Cristobal looked, and closed them once more, settling down into his chair with a contented cat-like motion, and nodding once or twice.
"It is police-work," the admiral was saying, "an unpleasant duty. Moreover, we miss the fiesta--"
"Ah," said Rudd, bluffly interested, "I've heard of that. I'd like to see that. Girls dressed up as saints, don't they have? and all the soldiers out in their spit and polish."
"And all the prisoners, too," deliberately said the priest in English, "walk in procession. Have you heard of that also, Mr. Rudd?"
"Prisoners?" Rudd repeated as if puzzled; and slowly smiled. "That's a funny notion."
"Yes, it is funny," the priest agreed. He went on tranquilly, while the admiral watched Rudd's face, and Jensen's eyes flickered. "They burn the prisoners' hands on the afternoon of that day with a hot iron, quite round, like a red ring. Gaol marriage, they call it. It leaves a mark." He spoke, never lifting his eyes. Mr. Rudd's left hand, palm down now on the table, did not so much as twitch. Jack, standing well back out of the lamplight, saw that Jensen's florid face was almost grey; but he poured himself another drink carelessly enough. Through the porthole the white ray of the searchlight was held steadily, pinning Alberta to her place in the waters, silhouetting the figure of the lieutenant with the sword, whose disappearance, even for a moment, would have such very unfortunate consequences.
"You are interested in our little country," went on the priest humbly; "it is not very civilised, no. Very far away. Miguelans do not leave their country. But the Church--the Church travels the world over."
There was a little silence, broken by Mr. Rudd. He rose, and said with his intimidating smile:
"I don't want to hustle you, gentlemen, but if you're going to make a search, hadn't we better be getting on?"
"No hurry," said the admiral, in Spanish, gazing out of the porthole at that waiting silhouette and the bayonets beside it.
"No hurry," said the priest, very gentle. "We have been waiting five years this pleasure, Mr. Rudd."
Now it was out; and for all the priest's gentleness, the air of the state-room seemed to thicken and grow cold when he said that, as if a breath had come out of some dungeon, whose door was opening to admit silent figures in hoods.
"I tole you," broke from Jensen, almost weeping, "I tole you what to look for wid de bloody Church on your track!"
"Where is the treasure of San Ildefonso, Mr. Rudd?" asked the priest, as he might have enquired for a lost umbrella, "that treasure you dropped so cleverly in the shallows when the Espada pursued you, five years ago?"
Rudd did not answer. He sat with his head forward on his chest, outwardly motionless, inwardly questing. Jack knew from his own old fear how the mind was darting this way and that. A weapon? A way out? Any chance if I go overboard? Not a hope, with that light. God blast these priests with their spy service! This means a wall and a bullet--
"You don't answer, Mr. Rudd?" the priest insisted. Then, rising suddenly, thrust the red curtain of the state-room aside with his left hand, and stood looking in.
Ten things happened in as many following seconds. Rudd's motionless fist darted forward among the bottles, seized one, and standing, brought it down on the priest's head as he stooped in the doorway. The admiral shouted in Spanish, and there was a clatter as his sword came rasping out of its sheath. Jack Boissy fell on Rudd from behind, catching him below the knees in a football tackle. They crashed down together, and Jack felt the jagged neck of the bottle tear daggerwise down his scalp. The priest, blood blinding him, moaned and blinked. Outside the white figure of the lieutenant leapt away out of the searchlight's eye. Almost immediately there was a thud, a whine and the Alberta shook as a shell burst on her, amidships. The admiral might be aboard, but the Sword of St. Michael was taking no chances; more admirals could be made any day with a strip of gold braid.
"Sink her quick, and let's be in time for the fiesta," said the gun's crew of the Espada, making pretty practice, until someone in authority recalled to them the fact that Father Cristobal was on board; then they spat, from no lack of reverence, but to get the taste of cordite out of their mouths, and desisted. Towards morning they took the remains of the Alberta in tow, after transferring their captives and the recovered chest, and set off westwards at the best speed of wheezy engines, not to be late for the feast of La Benigna, that kind lady, the Virgin of the Assumption.
VII
The Assumption was San Miguel's day out. It represented the very peak of the year in Arcangel, which, however, as became a Catholic country, was well provided with holidays of obligation. This feast was nothing so stern. It was a holiday of choice, of abundance, of good weather; a festival, carnival, spree, of the very first rank. It may seem a little surprising that Miguelans should not have chosen Michaelmas, the day of their country's patron, for rejoicing; but that spare armoured figure somehow did not lend itself to sprees. It is always easier for Southerners to make a fuss over a woman, and the Virgin Triumphant, dressed in her best and presumably in a mood to appreciate fireworks, took very naturally the chief of their homage.
Jack Boissy had never, in a life of twenty years spent among people who dreaded to differ from their fellows, believed that there could exist such fantasy, such colour as these Miguelans spread out unthinking before the feet of Her Benignity, Mother of God. No family, for that one day, kept its gaiety, its riches, or its songs to itself. The street which straggled down from the cathedral, much as the main street of Corazon must have done, dripped with colour. Damask, wine-coloured, that had been brought two centuries ago from Spain, hung from one window; a superb carpet from another; the vista showed lengths of yellow satin, flags and scraps of ribbon, banners with pious ejaculations embroidered down their length. Some of the sills were banked with flowers, cool pads on which girls leaned their elbows, and with which, after the procession had passed, they did battle; the poorer people displayed paper roses, and fought with staves of sugar cane. This was a feast of all the joys, fighting included.
There were doings in the cathedral, of course, from earliest morning. People were in and out, ant-like, getting the business of the day over, the necessary Mass heard, and then hurrying home to their best clothes. High Mass was grand, with the clergy in gold and silver, and the Archbishop putting his jewelled mitre off and on, while above them a full choir raged in Latin. But High Mass was only a preliminary to the glorious hour of the Paseo, which translated may stand for Our Lady's stroll.
They went in a body to escort her, gold priests, silver deacons, and the Archbishop under an umbrella of brocade. They put on, amid singing, her ceremonial out-of-doors dress, and mounted her in a silver chair, carried by men dressed and masked in scarlet. Then out she went, smiling, through the great west door on to the steps above the plaza, and the fun began.
First came the dance of the Kings of the Earth, doing homage. These were ten feet high, enormous crowned masks capering and bowing to the rhythm of drums. They fought with each other for her favour with lath swords gilded, and it was curious to hear the yells of defiance or pain proceeding from carved mouths, smiling, and shaped like wooden O's. When the kings had finished, there was an interlude of music; it ended in a blare of brass instruments, and through the ranks of nodding crowns leaped Satan, in armour with a dragon's head, challenging St. Michael. Another fight, real enough, this one; both were bleeding before the saint had his victory, and snatched off the dragon-head to lay at the Virgin's feet.
The women were next to do their share. Forty of them, in brilliant shawls, with white mantillas draped over their combs, curtseyed to Our Lady, and began a dance, in which hands and heels did all the gesturing; their heads, and bodies from the waist, remained motionless, to keep the mantillas in prescribed and decent folds. These were the virtuous women, renowned as such through the town; the others, who might have made a better show of dancing, watched critically, not without envy, while the righteous, getting some fun out of their virtue for once, tapped and postured under the Archbishop's eye.
When they had done, it was time for a meal and the siesta. La Benigna, who for this one day shared every action of the citizens, was offered some incense and a few candles, and carried to a cool shrine outside the episcopal palace to rest through the three hours' heat.
At half-past four, all the Kings of the Earth, among whom might have been identified David the Singer, Alexander the Great, and King Og of Bashan, the land of bulls, formed up in a friendly procession with Satan and the Saint, and followed by the ladies--separated, though, from the men by a blue banner eight foot by six--made their way to the shrine and bore off their patroness to the chief diversion of the day, a bull-fight. The Archbishop blessed her from his balcony and let her go, like an indulgent father glad to see his favourite daughter have a little gaiety; and relieved of his presence, which imposed a certain formality upon the crowd, the population of Arcangel set off happily with their Madonna to show her a slice of life before she went back to the year's labour of pleading lost causes before her Son.
The bull-ring was brilliant with striped awnings; and when the crowd had seethed into it two men who held the cushion monopoly began to hurl their wares, covered in red and yellow leather, to all parts of the circle, shouting and snapping up with agility the copper coins that fell beside them into the sand. The president's box was hung with green and white, and at the very front of it sat La Benigna in her silver chair, visible to the whole multitude, smiling approval under her high silver crown.
There was no long wait. At the half-hour after five the president dropped his handkerchief, and the double gates under his box swung back to let in the fighters' assistants, dressed in a dozen colours, but all with white stockings. They marched gravely, keeping step. Last, as was the custom, should have come the matador, dressed in yellow, and walking alone; but here the peculiar temperament and custom of the Miguelans were revealed. True, there was a figure in yellow, with gold fringes dripping off his shoulders, and a sword borne in front of him by an underling; but he, it could clearly be seen, was secured by chains to the soldiers who walked beside him, and his bearing was anything but gallant. He stumbled forward, jerked up now and then by the chains, to be greeted with a sudden ominous yell, the sound which anticipates blood, and the name of "corredor"--runner. "Courage, the runner! Show sport, man! Hat off to Our Lady--not he, he's a heretic. Good; he'll fight, then. Pick up your feet, corredor!"
But the corredor did take off his hat and throw it down, revealing a familiar face, very white, but not pitiable. He was game. The gesture with the hat was a defiance. And when they handed him, with mock ceremony, his sword made of a frail sliver of wood, he snapped it in two, and stood square, with folded arms, to face the gate at the other end, now opening to let in his enemy.
The bull rushed immediately into the arena, and halted, pawing. He was not like the little bulls of Andalusia, upon which all the resources of civilization are bent to keep them wild. This was a big beast from the pampas, savage with his few days of captivity, whom the people hailed delightedly by the title of "majador," the kneader, thus affording some clue to the expected issue of the fight.
It began much in the usual way, men on foot with lances goading the beast, men on horseback planting darts about his shoulders. They did this very prettily, so that the darts, which had paper streamers, stood in a semi-circle out from his shoulders like a high laced collar, and they manoeuvred their horses neatly so as to afford a good target for his horns. All the time they were protecting the man in the matador's dress, for it would have spoiled sport to have the bull get near him too soon. Horses gave the bull no trouble; one he tossed clean off its feet with one of his horns under its belly, and a scythe-like motion of his head ripped it as it fell. The riders scuttled off each time rapidly, and climbed footholes in the wall, monkey-like, out of the ring, until there remained to face the tiring bull only two men on foot, and the motionless "runner." These, who carried darts of a special kind, gave pleasure by their daring. They combined an attack, approaching the bull from the side; when he turned on one the other planted his dart; about turn, and in a flash the second dart was driven in, both on his rump. There was applause as the men ran, kissing their hands, towards safety, and a frenzy of noise as the darts began to splutter and crack; their butts were fireworks, that had been deftly lit the instant before they were planted.
Now the ring held only the bull and the last man, the "runner" in yellow, with the traditional red cloth for sole defence. Yells from the packed circles bade him dodge, or show a turn of speed, as the bull came at him, head down, goaded to madness. He stood paralysed until he was almost between its horns; then with a ludicrous sideways bop seemed to come to his senses, and began to run, to run wildly, zig-zagging like a hare, never looking round, but making for the footholes in the ring's twelve-foot wall. He found one such place, gasping, and clambered. A laughing picador standing at the top shoved him off and down with the butt-end of his lance, so that he fell just at the fore-feet of the bull. The brute did not trouble to lower its horns for an enemy already off his balance, scrambling on all fours in the sand. It bellowed, and began to trample. He screamed, but the audience was shouting praise of the bull, calling on it by name--"Give it to him, majador! Flatten him out, majador!"--singing, clapping; nobody heard or cared. The bull left him breath only for that one screech. In sixty seconds it had kneaded him out of all human likeness and all human energy, and the execution for sacrilege had gone its spectacular Miguelan way. La Benigna, throned in the president's box, smiled approval. The diversions in her honour, including four more bulls despatched, and fifteen prisoners burned in the hand, continued until nightfall.
VIII
Having thus finished off Mr. Rudd, the Miguelans bore no malice. They commandeered the Alberta, with some notion of starting a merchant navy, and imprisoned her captain and crew in a casual kind of way, so that these were perpetually to be met with, drifting about the town on parole. But, with a great parade of honesty, they handed over to jack Boissy the entire safe from the captain's cabin, gay with ribbons and sealing wax, which showed that its privacy had been respected. This they did, partly on the strength of the forged ship's papers, which represented him most clearly to be the owner, and partly on account of the "Key of Heaven," discovered, during the search which followed the cannonade, in one of his pockets. He had, moreover, gone to the rescue of Father Cristobal during the mêlée on the ship and got his head split open with a fragment of the identical sacrilegious bottle that had downed the priest. The Miguelans were not a vindictive people, and they had had their fun, an execution such as had not come their way for a hundred years or more; they, and the Church, were content. The treasure had been recovered--and a magnificent one it was; the jewelled copes had suffered, sodden embroideries had let slip their sewn pearls; but all the wealth was there--and after that object-lesson in the bullring on August 15th further larceny was unlikely. Sacrilege of the kind Mr. Rudd had successfully committed was in any case rare; guarded by the prestige of the sanctity, the Church kept its treasures in rickety cupboards with no thought of danger. Rudd, a person without reverence, had walked in one night to the church of San Ildefonso, whose doors were never closed, and walked out again laden. It was the simplest imaginable robbery, conducted by the light of the sanctuary lamp.
He had allies, of course, on the tramp ship then in Arcangel harbour, and was able to flee that same night. Pursued by the Espada, and veiled in a haze of dirty smoke, they had let the treasure go overboard into the shallows of Corazon. The Espada overtook, searched, and found nothing. Her commander brought Mr. Rudd back to Arcangel, where he was accused of spitting while a religious procession went by, and burnt in the hand to see if he would talk. But it was a fortune at stake. He held his tongue, and money passed, and after a while they let him go. The Church, however, wide-flung, always before him wherever he went, succeeded in keeping an eye on Mr. Rudd, a malevolent eye. He would have been astonished and made nervous to learn of the letters that had passed concerning him between men with shaved chins and white dog-collars, men with shovel hats and chins rather darker, bearded men in shirts with great black beads clinking as they walked. The Church, trustee and vicegerent of Christ, took her duties seriously, and freely used the powers bestowed by her charter to trace and watch and finish Mr. Rudd, Christ's thief. And so he ended, an unpleasant pulp, under the reddened hoofs of the first Assumption Day bull.
It was made clear to Jack Boissy that however innocent, and however historically connected he might be, there must be no question of any further diving over the lost town. The fact was, that the Miguelans, having without great effort arrived at possession of a complete modern diving outfit, were minded to try for the reputed treasure themselves. They were polite to Jack, they were sympathetic almost to tears; but as a Minister of Marine explained to him--patent leather boots, and a miniature zoo of decorations hanging at his collar; the Fleece, the Elephant, and a Miguelan honour, the Serpent--it was unbecoming that the Republic's colonial possessions should be regarded in the light of a lottery. Jacques-Marie thought secretly of the Australian gold rushes, and the general British impression that the Antipodes was a Tom Tiddler's ground, and could not see the Minister's point. But he had sense enough to acquiesce. They had the ship and the stuff; and as for him, the safe contained, one way and another, a respectable though illicit fortune. He went home round the Horn, arriving in Australia in time to give away his sisters to their chosen ne'er-do-weels, and to see a six-year-old horse, The Quack, win the Melbourne Cup of 1872 in three minutes thirty-nine seconds.
There is surely a nearer apprehension of anything that delights us in our dreames than in our waked senses.
--Religio Medici.
I
He married Shiela, of course. He was no longer penniless, and people had forgotten, and there had been other scandals since--notably that exploit of the Malachis, a resourceful couple whose burgled but heavily insured silver was revealed by untimely floods in their herbaceous border jack came back to Australia, and was just the eldest Boissy boy again, one of that family so highly respected, whose second daughter, Marie Madeleine, bad acquired an Honourable in the course of Race Week; an aide-de-camp, this, quite without money, and almost without intelligence to come in out of the rain, but a social asset of the highest.
A year had passed since Gustave-Félicité's death; it seemed no time, and all time. Jack could hardly imagine the same world and period containing the Miguelans, with their lazy unashamed enjoyment of the things of the sun--colour, cruelty, lust--and the Australians, a cold-blooded race under the tropic's burning-glass, self-conscious, distrustful of beauty, gamblers and the world's most unsatisfactory lovers. He had learnt a bit, had Jack, in that year. That eighth part of his being, Auguste-Anne's legacy, which King's School and the custom of the country had sealed up; that capacity for the enjoyment of splendour, passion and gaiety, the passing of twelve months had done something to set free. At any rate he found himself stating his case to Shiela Geraldine without stumbling or bathos; even, he waited his moment, catching her after a dance, standing in one of the wide windows of the Lamberts' house, and looking out on harbour water, and the ferrying lights. The Jack of eighteen seventy-one would have blurted out something shamefaced, a clumsy phrase like--"I suppose you know I'm gone on you." The Jack who had sailed over broken palaces and seen men die spoke stumbling, it is true, into Shiela Geraldine's hair, but he got out something rather better than that in the way of a declaration; must have, or my mother, the most incurable romantic, with the Irish heart that wavers to the spoken word, would never have sworn her freedom away.
I know very little of her. She died when I was born, and old photographs tell only half the truth of locks, showing as they do line without colour. She had peat-black hair, the kind that turns brown rather than blue in sunlight, and the very brightest blue eyes that ever were known. She was always reading, and neglected her clothes, and was shiftless and charming. When she spoke her voice had a tilt to it; not a brogue exactly, but an unexpected way of placing the emphasis, so that the words, nothing much in themselves, took the listener by surprise and started him laughing.
All this I learned from grandmother Boissy, Laura the impulsive, tamed by children but with a spark in her still. She had loved Shiela during the three years that she was her daughter, and had treasured all kinds of little things belonging to her, as if she knew that such a marriage and such friendship were too good to last. I have read pathetic letters that passed between them before I was born. Both had some kind of presentiment of trouble. The younger woman's gaiety hides it better, but it comes out clear in a letter from Laura such as this:
"Do not trouble yourself with too much stitching"--Shiela as a needlewoman! She could girth a horse well enough, but she once complained that a thimble made her finger feel blind--"For my own part, I could not endure the sight of the Layette before my children arrived! I could not tell why. You are not feeling well, that is not to be wondered at. But cheer up, and have confidence in the protection of La Sainte Vierge, and all will go smoothly, please God. Now, would you wear one of 'Our Lady's belts'? It is truly miraculous, their efficacy in accouchements. If you have faith and would like one, I could get it for you, I think. I have known most wonderful results from wearing them. Marie-Céleste would not be without hers for the world, I know."
And Marie-Céleste had already had five, so this was a valuable tribute. I do not know if the belt was ever procured; probably not, for Shiela was apt to be a little impatient of small pieties, such as had come to be the breath of Laura's life. At any rate, it gets no further mention in the letters, which come to an abrupt end in January '75, the month I was born.
II
There is nothing much to be said or remembered of the average child's life. It was fun at the time to run wild, to ride the pony, Pickaxe, to invent and exploit uncouth means of gambling in company with Ern and Bert, die stable-boys. But none of this comes to much in the telling. Australian children know it all--the panic flight at the sight of visitors' dust down by One Tree Gate, and games played in the thin shade of gum trees that hardly can temper the sun's heat. There were alarms with snakes and bull-dog ants at picnics, and the occasional distant magnificent frenzy of bush fires. I remember the heat of the wind blowing off the lit ranges--Wollondoola itself was almost treeless, so there was no great danger--and how one of these flare-ups arriving on top of a morning's religious instruction from Laura gave me a succession of nightmares about hell, which recur even now, night after night, when there has been any shock or trouble. As for games, these were elementary, and played alone, after the trouble with Ern and the spinning jenny.
This last had nothing to do with cotton. It was a round of cardboard divided into slices, cakewise; each slice differently coloured, and scrawled in pencil with the name of a racehorse. The pointer, a thin sliver of wood, swung on a nail driven through the centre of the circle. You laid your bet in matches, and the holder of the bank gave the sliver a flick with his thumb, as in playing marbles; it spun, and rested, and you had won or lost. It was an artless way of gambling, at least as far as I was concerned, though I now believe that the flick of Em's thumb was nicely graduated, and could bring the sliver to rest pretty well where it liked; you could not lose much at it, matches, my sole currency, being about a farthing the box and stolen from the store-cupboard at that. And I learnt a good deal more from it and Ern about life than five years of a convent school ever taught me. But the show was given away by a pious and scandalized cook, and my education closed.
Laura had the scolding of Ern, and did it badly, having dwindled into quite a gentle old lady by 1887. She was well primed by a supporting aunt, and had all the prestige that silver hair, and a very awful arm-chair like a red plush throne, could give; and for the first two minutes she did succeed, no doubt of that, in aweing Ern. The actual question of leading me astray could not really be disputed by Ern, unless he had said, which was the truth, that I was far more of a gambler than he. He was sacked, and another boy, expert at euchre, was engaged in his stead. My education continued.
It was after the row with Ern's successor, and the discovery of a pack of cards in my bed, that I was sent to school. And here the memories become a little different in quality. I had been leading the life of an ordinary bush small boy. My accomplishments were a boy's. I could ride, handle a rifle or take a hand at cards, garden a little, plait leather thongs, and at a pinch kill a hen. If I did not actually wear trousers, I had a trousered attitude to life; did not much mind cruelty, and had no patience with anything that seemed finicking and pretence. I had Shiela's fingers, blind and stumbling at needlework, deft at other kinds of making, the carpentering and knotting and rigging that come into nearly all solitary children's games. I had made my First Communion, savage and shy in a tight white dress and a veil which idiot custom compelled me to wear all day--at Christmas too, blistering weather. I wore it, scowling amid the congratulations, and had satisfaction only in feeling the starch at neck and armpits of my dress yield to sweat. They told me, all the relatives with their presents of little lace-edged holy pictures, and medals of the Immaculate Conception, and rosaries in carved nutshells, that I should remember that day all my life; so I have, but not as they intended. The big fact--and a big fact it was to me; Laura had grounded me well--was obscured, and turned out of miracle into boredom by the little scraps of piety that dangled all over it. I did not question the main idea; I wanted to be quiet, not shown off both before and after like a horse with its mane and tail done up with ribbons in the Agricultural Show. But even First Communion was nothing to school.
School was a constant infuriating decking and doing up with ribbons. School was a-jingle with rosaries and medals on top, while scapulars and Sacred Heart badges had it all their own way among the underclothing. There were little pits of prayer here, there and everywhere during the day, into which you were constantly falling. The Angelus was all very well, that I was used to three times a day; but there were prayers before the start of each class, prayers encompassed all meals and recreation, and as we ran at our mild games past the nun in charge we could hear the big rosary clicking in her pocket. French nuns too, they were, with French notions of what it was desirable for girls to learn, and of what it was entirely out of the question that girls should ever even suspect. They had the curious mixture of shrewdness and childishness that is not rare in people who go very little into the world, but are on their mettle when they do. They kept open eyes so far as we were concerned, every look and word were known, and they had no quixotry about trusting to our honour. School was shy of the trousered attitude, deplored and did not know what to make of it. School was the apotheosis of the skirt, that hampering, hiding, cumbrous yet draughty article of dress. They shook their coifed heads over me in genuine distress, those poor nuns; they scorched their fingers snatching me from the burning; they really did with all their hearts sorrow over my crudeness and intolerance of grace. I never thought to quote to them a remark of the chaplain, Father Macarthy, who, meeting me unexpectedly one day in the garden, put a large red finger under my chin and said:
"So there ye are. Well, ye're not what I'd call a good gerrl, Clotilde Boissy; not a good gerrl at all. But I'll say this at any rate: ye don't have scruples. Ye can thank God for that, and so can I."
"And so can I"--that tells a tale. He was a big red-faced priest, the sort of man that in Limerick, where he was born, might be after the hounds as often as he could borrow a horse; and there he was in Sydney, listening to the peccadilloes of a hundred and forty-two women a week.
"I have been uncharitable in thought three times since last confession, father. I was distracted during my preparation for Holy Communion. Twice this week I was deceitful; I didn't wear the chemise we have for the bath, I wet it and hung it over the side so that Mother Angela thought I'd used it, but I hadn't. That was acting a lie, wasn't it, father?"
Oh, poor Father Macarthy! For I believe, with all the supervision, and the filling up of odd moments with prayer, and the really hard work of teaching and learning, that this was about the best any of us, nuns or girls, could do in the way of sins. And this was what he had to listen to every Friday and Saturday, a hundred and forty-two times over, with nothing to spice it but a little occasional gluttony on feast days, and the privilege of wearing the most exquisite vestments I have ever seen at morning Mass and Sunday benediction. His vocation had clapped him into skirts as mercilessly as the nuns clapped me; but if ever there was a trousered individual it was the Reverend Hugh Macarthy, and the school must have been to him something very like Purgatory.
I too missed my trousers. There were beauties here and there; the chapel itself, for instance, whose carved stalls had come with the exiled nuns from France, and the ceremonies, which, for all our colourless voices piping Pergolesi, had their own age-old dignity, and kept the stateliness and terror of a Passion Play. Then the school was built upon a point of the harbour, wild in those days with scrub; it faced west across a five-mile stretch of water to the northern shore, and the sides, repeated in that five-mile mirror, were something that even memory can hardly make more splendid. There were nights when the horizon went green, and from it sprang narrow scarlet clouds that seemed to leap up and cover the whole sky like a flight of flamingoes. There were golden sunsets that dreamed and stayed. And there were nights, real nights with a moon; but our dormitories, all of them, faced away from that too searching, too awakening beauty.
III
Once a week, for an hour, I got back to the cheerful Ernishness of the years before school. Among those invaluable lessons of the hay-loft had been the handling of such musical instruments as the bush afforded; ocarina, penny whistle, mouth-organ, I fingered and made friends with them all. Most of these were Bert's property, and I was scolded for using them, still damp and warm from Bert's breath. They were impounded, hidden, found again, and surreptitiously blown. It was not pure obstinacy; I really enjoyed finding my way about the things; discovering how the penny whistle leaps an anguished octave when you blow hard, and the mouth organ yields quite different notes to the indrawn or outgoing breath.
Somehow this interest of mine must have soaked its way through my father's preoccupation. (He was managing Corazon at the time for Laura, and was back in favour.) He bought a real flute for me. I took it back for my second term at school, ecstatic but dumb; a flute's fingering does not jump to the eye, and until you have the trick of the embouchure it is difficult to make it emit any sound at all. The nuns were dubious, but allowed me to keep it. Somehow Father Macarthy got wind--for in the convent every tiny incident was an event, and news of it spread about rather more rapidly than the news of a decisive battle could do outside--and by the greatest luck in the world, had a protégé who could teach; a protégé down and out, but skilled, and answered for by the Reverend Hugh.
But for this, I cannot think that I should have been allowed the use of the instrument, faintly pagan as the sound of it was; much less actual lessons in the parlour, under the very noses of the last three Popes. But there it was; dead against all probability, and once a week, on Wednesday, I learned from Mr. Potts.
I rank him, looking back, with Ern as an instructor. He could play, no doubt of that, but when I had got past my awe at his artistry I found him a man and brother, the kind of person I had been used to. His moustache protruded, his hair was a ginger cockscomb, and his eyes eternally started and glared in what seemed defiance; he always looked as though he were planning a quarrel. His clothes were pitifully shabby, and he drank. Of this last I was perfectly well aware, as any bush child would be; a breath such as Mr. Potts' was something so customary that it never occurred to me to remark on it. Fortunately; for the nuns would have been in agonies, and have tackled Mr. Potts, or, worse, tried to wean him from his failing, and in any case the lessons would have gone by the board. I supposed that they knew, for they were quickly on to the sins that came within their scope; but they never spotted the first thing about Mr. Potts' weakness, and left us in peace to coo and toot through our Wednesday hour.
As I said, he could play. He talked of some great orchestra in England, and then, with no modulation to soften the transition, of Samoa. I asked no questions. I had seen men sacked for soaking in my time. But I liked hearing of the islands, and used to ask questions enough about them. This was the sort of talk to which the three Popes listened with uplifted forefingers:
"No, no, miss, it's the double-tonguing for the scale--tootle--tootle--tootle--too! Easy like."
"I hate E flat. My little finger's too short for the G sharp key."
"Well now, let me see. So it is. Well, that's very awkward. It's the same way with some of the island girls."
"Did you teach any of them the flute, Mr. Potts?"
"Not the flute, exactly, no. But I was speakin' of the fingers. Would you believe it, some of them up in Tonga, they cut off a joint to please their idols. Did you ever hear such a thing?"
"What for?"
"Well, now, that's a mystery. They bite 'em off, same as we do terriers' tails. Tutuanima, they call it. It's just one of their notions; don't do no good that I can see. But of course you'd hardly call them civilized up there. No. Now, take this slow movement of the Kuhlau duet--"
"What other funny things do they do, Mr. Potts?"
"Do? Why, there's no tricks they're not up to. They dance very funny; sticking themselves out--" Mr. Potts would sketch a step, and the Popes, their eyes irrevocably fixed on him by the lithographer, must have quailed--"and then stamping, and clapping. That's the war dance. There's others"--the Popes had a bad moment, but Mr. Potts recollected in time--"well, I don't remember what you might call the details of them. Now, try that E flat scale just once more, single-tonguing if it comes easier. That's the way, that's more like. Now I come in on the half-beat."
He said, too, that he had known Father Damien in the islands. I was agog, for we had had a sermon from a visiting priest about this latter-day saint. How would such a man look, and walk? I could not make any picture but one that I knew to be absurd, of a personage in a halo. Questions, however, seemed rather to bother Mr. Potts, and I believe that he had invented the acquaintance as a kind of pass-key into presbyteries.
"What did he look like? Well now, that's not at all easy to say. An ordinary kind of"--hesitation; what was the word? Man, saint, gentleman? No, not this last--"an ordinary-looking customer. Strong, though; my word! Had to be, to have stood it."
"What are lepers like, Mr. Potts?"
This I asked with shrinking. The sound of the lepers' bell, and the stories of their squints in church, had taken my imagination, and got into my dreams. I saw them silver-faced, featureless, and their limbs dropping off like lizards' tails. But Mr. Potts, with a description which might have given another child the horrors, eased me and my night's rest.
"Well, of course, they look very strange. People don't like to see them about, it's not to be wondered at. It's the people haven't got it seem to mind more than they do themselves. I've seen leper girls dancing before now, laughing as well as they were able, with what's it these white flowers are called in their hair."
"Are they all white?"
"Well, no, it's more the brown people, savages, that take it. Of course they're very uncleanly, very careless in their ways; more so than the whites."
"But their faces--aren't their faces all silvery, like goldfish go sometimes?"
"No; no, I wouldn't say that. Their faces get knobbly, as you might say, and reddish. Not like sores; more as if the faces were growing."
The things that can give comfort! I did not mind these knobs in the least; they delivered me from the silvery blanknesses that used to stalk through my sleep, and wake me sweating. And my respect for Father Damien dwindled, partly from the thought that anyone so everyday as Mr. Potts had known him, and partly because the disease he gave his life to tend had become so much less dreadful to the imagination. I thought--for everyone has their visions of becoming a saint--that I would not mind volunteering for duty at Molokai myself.
Meanwhile in between these slices of gossip, breaths from warm pastures to the chill uplands of school, I did succeed somehow in learning the flute. I even played a capriccio, fingers and lips trembling, eyes and mind blank with terror, at the concert attended by the Archbishop, who afterwards said to Reverend Mother that he doubted its being a suitable instrument for girls, and suggested as an alternative the harp. I suppose he did not like to see drops of moisture fall from the open end, and I could hardly halt in the mad scramble of the capriccio to tell him that it was not spit, as he must have thought, but only what Mr. Potts called "the condensing of the atmosphere." (Mr. Potts had given much thought to this matter, which he considered gave the lie to the true elegance of the flute; but warm breath against a cold metal tube will turn to water and escape. There is nothing to be done.)
I learnt, besides, a good deal from the nuns. Only two of the class mistresses spoke English, and these came respectively from Cork and Ballinadoon. The others were any nationality you please, from the gentle crippled portress, a German, to the Reverend Mother herself, who was French. We got sidelights on the history of our Empire which we resented at the time, or discounted; battles took on different aspects, even Waterloo itself, which, though it was reluctantly admitted to have been lost by the French, was as certainly not won by the English. And there were two gaudy breath-taking half-hours in the week labelled, dully enough, Church History. The Popes, it seemed, were always benevolent, humble, servants of the servants of God; if they battled to extend their dominions it was that the rule of God might be extended. Certain proud and princely English legends were destroyed by the Spanish nuns who taught this subject; Queen Elizabeth dwindled, and Drake sank back into the pirate he was. As for the French Revolution, no good could be expected to come of it, since it began by persecuting the Church, and Napoleon, who imprisoned the Holy Father, came irrevocably to a bad end. Once I mentioned Voltaire, whose innocent rhyme about the snake that bit Jean Fréron I had somehow picked up at home among the fragments of French that perpetually were bandied about. A hush fell, and I was told never to mention again the name of religion's enemy. Since at least half the authors of France tended, whether deliberately or no, to weaken faith or undermine morals our acquaintance with them was the merest nodding one. As for English literature, its pre-Reformation poets were, unhappily, improper, while after that unlucky event the writers, though less gross, grew more wrong-headed. I think that but for the books at home I should have grown up with the notion that poetry in England began with Crashaw and ended with Francis Thompson. (Shakespeare, very luckily, was hors contours, no more to be criticised than the Bible, though they must have realized that in places he was almost as lewd.)
They passed, somehow, these five years. I can typify their odd mixture of dignity, discipline, and absurdity by a picture.
Imagine a long and shining corridor, chequered with strong light that dances, reflected from the water; the walls a faint lavender-blue, hung with prints from Raphael. Down this corridor come two nuns, lay sisters, in black with blue stockings, which their skirts are kilted to show. They advance with the oddest motion, rather as if they were mounted on wheels, long striding steps. But their feet are grotesque, swathed and huddled in bandages to look twice their own size. Coming close, you can see that there is beeswax thick on the cloths, and that they skate and slide up and down for the sole purpose of polishing the floor. Their eyes are downcast, their hands busy with knitting or prayers. From the waist up they might have stepped out of Raphael, from the knees down out of a pantomime, as they slide in and out of the squares of eddying sunlight, and dip to Reverend Mother as she passes.
IV
Five years; and how much of the trousered attitude was left by that time? Only what Mr. Potts and the holidays between them could keep alive; and this had to submit, not only to the pious trampling of the nuns, but to those physical storms and commotions that blow up along the horizons of the half-grown girl, generally with as little warning as hurricanes among the Antilles. Hard to go striding carelessly about snapping your fingers at life, impatient of uncertainty, when from day to day you cannot count on your body's fitness; when its dreadful yet rhythmic caprices sway body and mind together, and compel a certain amount of care, a necessary minimum of fuss. Hard to keep your head above the billows of skirts closing in. Hard to justify your own conviction of the trousered attitude being the best, against the voice of your period, your relatives, and your education. Hardest of all to withstand a grandmother determined in the tenderest yet most unarguable way to give a motherless girl a good time.
For this is what Laura did. Bless her, she was seventy, and she had seen nothing whatever of the world for something like forty years, save when she entertained a visiting Bishop and his chaplains at Corazon. There was Aunt Marie-Céleste with her flock of girls, ready, as she said, to chaperone me, and give me every chance, but Laura would have none of it. Like the nuns, she was shrewd when she had real occasion to put her mind to worldly matters, and she may have had some idea that Marie-Céleste's generosity would not extend to sharing out any young men who hopped on to the twigs limed for them by her brood. She put all remonstrance gently aside. We were to go to Sydney and stay at the "Farmers and Graziers" in style. (This hotel, which had been the "Southern Cross's" respectable rival, had swung down the scale in twenty years to a raffishness beyond compare. Laura would not believe this when told, and her plans revolved round the "Farmers and Graziers" like spokes about a hub.) When Jack, to daunt her, drew a long face about money, she turned on him with the announcement that she had been saving up for this day for eighteen years, and flourished the astonishing secret total of her number two account with the Bank of Commerce. Really she had saved, in ways which troubled nobody, in economies that nobody observed, close on a thousand pounds, which she proposed, with an equanimity which seemed mad, to blow in a couple of months' high living. One and all, from every point of view, the relations went at her; it would give me extravagant ideas, it would cause jealousy, it would create a false impression in Sydney, it could not be kept up. Laura tackled them all with the first touch of spirit she had shown for years, and routed them, muttering, and tapping their heads. For they could not reconcile this extravagant project with the carefulness she had exercised all her married life, and which was mockingly known as "marsimony" among them. Laura was as intent upon knocking down her cheque as any shearer to whom a pub meant Paradise. The parish priest, called in at last in despair, could not move her. He had pointed out how much good she could do with the money, and Laura whipped round on him with:
"Who says I'm not doing good with it? I am not proposing, father, to introduce Clotilde into bar-rooms and billiard saloons. I am giving her the chance to make friends with young people of her own station in life."
The priest coughed and suggested, as an alternative to barrooms, the poor.
"I don't need to tell you, father," replied Laura grimly, "who it was in Holy Writ had that identical notion."
His Reverence, thus directly compared to Judas, could hardly keep up his attitude of protest. He gave in, as my father did, as Marie-Céleste and Marie-Josephine and Felicitas-Anne and the rest of the aunts did. I was to have my time in Sydney, and I might think myself lucky, they said, and they hoped I was properly grateful and nice to Grand'mère, taking all this trouble for my sake.
Not one of them suspected how entirely I was on their side. The thought of Sydney appalled me; dances where all would be strangers, elaborate clothes, terrifying dinner-parties, perhaps, where one would have to talk! It is the measure of my despair that I, who had fled from the convent, when the hour of release struck, like a possum from a burning tree, should have thought very seriously of fleeing back there as a postulant to escape the threatened horrors of society. I put that aside though, touched by Laura's fluttering happiness in her plan; it would have been cheating a child of its party not to go with her. I soothed, and pretended to share her impatience, smiling all the time a little wryly at the back of my mind, and feeling at least fifty years older than she was. I believe youth condescends to age in this way more often than age ever dreams.
Together we set off for Sydney with an ark-sized trunk apiece and empty dress-baskets to be filled with the latest that town could offer, and arrived three weeks before the autumn race meeting, 1894.
V
Just as I thought, it was nightmare. The new elegant clothes were boned as pertinaciously as garfish; my hair would not take the fashionable shape, nor would my hips. I had a big waist. Do what the dressmakers would, and pay what Laura might, I had no chic. It may be thought that, with a mind in trousers, I should have had no hankering after chic. True, I despised it; but so addled is the female mind, I envied it when I saw it in others; passionately wanted to look as well as they did, and was ashamed to take their trouble. For then as now, every woman who might write her name at Government House gave a good half of her time to clothes, their fitting, their making, their wearing. It is a pastime no more undignified than the hunt for first editions; it calls for as exact a knowledge and a skill which is not wholly of the purse. For the book-collector has only to acquire a rarity to be envied, but the expert in dress has to present her capture for public criticism, and in a sense be judged by it. She must bring her face and figure somehow into the scheme of the artist twelve thousand miles off who made and has forgotten his creation; she must read what his mind was, and do her half share in the work of art. Success is thankless, failure humiliating. The well-dressed woman is poised on the swaying fashion as on a tight-rope, with derision awaiting her if she makes a false step. Women have made careers, lost friends, committed adultery or murder to the dictation of their clothes; besides keeping ships afloat, and looms busy, and trappers alert, and thimbles on ten million fingers. No sane person can dismiss as trivial the science of dress.
But I was a savage, with a twenty-eight-inch waist and no conversation, amid the eighteen-inches and the rippling prattle of Sydney's young things. No aide-de-camp would look at me, still less any spruce and jolly flag-lieutenant. I hated them all impartially, dreaded the thought of marriage which lay behind this dressing up, these parties; feared to be noticed above all things, and resented not being noticed, perhaps, even more. There were scenes--not with Laura, but with some of the cousins, who all wore the right things, and tried to be kind. What could they do with a sulky-browed girl who, invited to play tennis, disappeared half-way through the afternoon and was found huddled in some remote bedroom with a book? The cousin who did thus discover me, Georgette, was the one I detested most. Her tact was unfailing, she never looked hot or cold or anything but the exact temperature for comfort, she had a nice mind and perfect clothes. She greeted me with good cheer:
"Here you are! How lucky I found you. They've all been looking everywhere. Do come down and make up a four with Commander Royce and Uncle Arthur."
"They'll get on all right without me."
"Oh, but Clo, they won't--"
"Well, anyhow they're playing singles now, because I saw them."
"Yes, but--aren't you feeling quite well?"
I was not, as it happened, but I could not stomach sympathy from Georgette. So I answered gruffly:
"I'm all right, thanks."
"But we want you to join in things. We like having you with us.
"Oh, don't talk bunkum, Georgette. Let me alone." That got past even her manners.
"Well, I must say! Of course we're cousins, and all that, and mother says we've got to be nice to you; but you don't make it easy, really, do you? It's nothing to me if you choose to creep up here with some old book or other. It looks rather peculiar, that's all. Everyone's noticed."
"Let them."
"That's all very well, and it's mother's house of course, not mine, but I do think it's rather silly and--and insulting to walk right away from all her guests and creep up here--"
"Oh Lord! Well, all right, I'll creep home."
But this was not what she wanted.
"You can't go away like that without rhyme or reason. We'll have to make some excuse for you."
"I'll leave a note on the pin-cushion."
With gravity, very much the elder woman of the world, Georgette stood and began to reprove me.
"Mother's sorry for you, we all are--"
"Why?"
"Well, having no mother and everything. But I do think--"
"I didn't ask to be patronized, and I can't play tennis, and those people don't want me. If I can't stay in peace I'm going home."
I got off the bed and beat down my crumpled linen skirts to some semblance of neatness. My hair was astray, I skewered it up with pins, and dragged on my hat, not looking in the mirror.
"But your racket's down on the court! And your shoes!"
I told her what to do with them, employing one of the stable-boy's phrases. She stared, and as the impropriety sank in, turned, for the first and only time in my acquaintance with her, a dull ugly scarlet. She went without one word out of the room.
After this there was a letter to Laura from the aunt:
"DEAREST MAMA,--
"I am sorry to be obliged to write on rather a delicate matter. As you know, I always thought it rather an ill-judged step to bring Clotilde into quite such prominence, and to spoil her with the kind of good time and expensive clothes none of her cousins, none of my girls certainly, could ever afford. I am not criticising your kindness in any way, or making comparisons, but I don't think you quite realize that Clotilde is not the sort of girl to make the best use of such advantages. She makes no attempt to meet one half-way, and indeed sometimes is actually rude when spoken to. She made use of an expression to Georgette which I shall not repeat, but which it would pain you to know any girl of eighteen could bring herself to use.
"I have no wish to make mischief or to stand in the child's way, but in view of what has happened you must not be surprised that I do not ask her to the house as before. I have to think of my own girls, as I am sure you will quite see.
"Roby writes from Colombo--says they are having perfect weather for their trip. Such luck, isn't it?
"With love, dearest Mama, your affectionate daughter,
"JOSEPHINe."
Laura was puzzled by this letter; she showed it to me, and asked what I had said to Georgette. I mumbled, and told her not to worry, I was sick of Aunt Josephine anyway. Laura with her odd mixture of shrewdness and guilelessness took the letter away, thought it over, and came to the conclusion that Josephine was jealous for her own daughters. She assumed that I had been too much of a success. (In the same way nobody had been able to persuade her that the "Farmers and Graziers" was not a perfectly proper place to stay. It swarmed with professional ladies, it was rowdy at night, there were drunks in the lounge; but anything out of the way she accepted as mere modernity, and supposed that in other hotels, the people were just as noisy and highly-scented.) So, in spite of that past incident of Ern and his dismissal, she assumed that there were still a good many words I had not heard, and facts of which I was not aware, and that possibly I had repeated some ordure in ignorance. Josephine, she concluded mildly, was making a fuss about nothing, protecting her girls from unfair competition, and did not blame her. She knew that of all ticklish jobs getting daughters off your hands was the most uneasy. She therefore answered the letter with a civil note, her smooth sentences gliding over thin ice with some skill.
"MY DEAREST CHILD,--
"I have received your letter, which I believe to have been written in haste--was it not? And I am able to see your point of view most clearly. In a large family it is sometimes difficult for all the members to be the best of friends, so many different characters and interests must clash now and then, and dull indeed should we be did they not. I quite understand your anxiety for your girls, but they are so pretty and well brought up--a sugarplum for you, dead--that I believe you need have no fears, and that they will all before long be happy wives.
"Clo goes to stay to-morrow with the Alloways, I believe it will do her good to be quiet for a little after so much gaiety. My fond love to Frederick and the children.
"Your ever affectionate,
"MAMA."
And that, she supposed, was the end of the incident.
Families, however--this she ought certainly to have known--possess a system of intercommunication whose speed might be envied by those savages who spread rumour tediously by means of drum-taps and smoke. It took about twenty-four hours to get round the half-dozen households that I had been rude to Georgette, and in what exact way I had been rude. Upper lips were drawn down, there were grave conclaves among the elders and giggling among the young, and the family fiery cross was handed round.
The declaration of war was made on my return to Sydney after a week at the Alloways', during which I had been perfectly happy. They had a pleasant informal house at Port Hacking, with half a mile of rock frontage on which oysters grew, and several boats all leaky at the seams. There were two boys not yet old enough to be shy themselves or to make me self-conscious. I borrowed one of their jerseys and an old tweed skirt of their mother's--my new town wardrobe included nothing wearable in less than a grandstand--and had a happy time alternately fishing for mullet and baling the boat with jam tins. I caught a skate, an immense flat fish whose unwieldy struggles, like the flapping of a sail in a gale, nearly had the whole boatload of us over. I got a fish hook in my thumb, whose point had to be pushed through and out before the barb could be filed off to release me, and earned genuine respect from the boys for making no fuss. Nobody changed at night into furbelows. Nobody was out for blood, trying to marry or to escape marriage. It was a perfect week.
I came back from it calmed, and swearing to do my best for Gran, to lace in my stays till they gored my sides, to smirk with agreeable folly, to do my clothes justice. Short of marrying a young man if one were actually caught--this would have alarmed and disconcerted me as much as hauling up the skate--I was determined to make Gran's autumn a success.
But the resolution, excellent as it was, got no chance. I came back to our rooms at the "Farmers and Graziers"--whose manager and staff valued Gran and her aureole of respectability in a most pathetic manner, and plied her with attention from morning till night--to find her with a trifle of a flush on her cheek bones and a flutter in her manner. Even I, blindly self-intent as was natural at my age, saw that something had happened. I could only ask if she felt all right, and when she replied that nothing was wrong with her health I was reduced to watching her silently, and catching now and again her restless eye. Before I went to bed I could see her mustering her courage to ask me something, but when the question came out it was only in this form:
"And what are your plans for to-morrow, dear child?"
I ran through my little list, tea here, dinner there, the morning devoted to trying-on, that ritual where the priestess approaches the victim on her knees before she bares the blade.
"A new dress?" repeated Gran, her nervousness now very evident. "And what dress is that?"
"The bridesmaid's dress for Cora's wedding. All the six of us are to go to David Jones' to-morrow so that they can get us looking alike."
"Yes," said Gran, poor darling, "the dress--well, I don't believe you need bother about it at all. You don't want it."
But still I could not get what she was trying to tell me.
"No, I don't want it one bit, and it'll be no use afterwards. Brown lace--who ever heard of wearing brown lace? But Cora'll be in a rage if I don't turn up with the others--"
"The fact is, my dear child," said Gran with sudden courage, "I have decided that it will be as well if you do not act as your cousin's bridesmaid." Then, in a great hurry, "You may have a new dress for the wedding, of course, and we must go together to choose something really suitable for a present. It will not do to seem piqued--"
Just the one word too much. "Piqued" told me the whole story; that Cora, or perhaps Cora's mother, Marie-Céleste, had objected to me as bridesmaid; had said plainly that I was not wanted. I must say that for the first moment I felt a little sick. It is one thing to quarrel with a relative in private, another to receive a public snub. I said nothing, but felt my face going scarlet, as if Cora's fat little hand had boxed my cheeks. What angered me was the snub from Cora, a little bitch if ever there was one, who had secured her guileless lieutenant R.N. by letting him go as far as he would and then coming over coy. I understood her manoeuvres thoroughly, and should have felt unwashed if I had lent myself to any of them. Yet there she was, bending down from the driven snow of her official pedestal to administer this flick to me, and worse, to Gran. I said, raging:
"I won't go to her stinking wedding at all."
And began to walk up and down. I could see that this was only the beginning of the trouble, and that I should accumulate snubs if we stayed. I swung round at the end of my march and begged Gran to let us go home.
"I'm not cut out for this sort of thing, darling, really. Let's clear out and leave them all and save the rest of the money and buy a racehorse with it."
But Gran was on her elderly dignity. She did not give in at the first shots exchanged. One did not show a wound. There was much that had to be ignored in life. Next morning she told me to put on my smartest hat and out we went then and there to Grant's in Hunter Street and spent thirty-five pounds on some magnificent silver candlesticks. No need to give the address where they were to be sent. The shopman said, smiling:
"I suppose these'll be for your granddaughter, Mrs. Boissy? That's right, we've been sending along a lot of stuff out to Double Bay. Nothing to touch these, though, yet, in the way of plate. There's a nice string of pearls her dad's giving her. I could show you if you liked."
And he did, and Gran admired, and I kept with difficulty from making the sort of remarks I wanted to make; and then one of the partners came out, and shook hands with Gran, and had a joke or two about weddings and expressed a polite hope concerning me.
"I don't doubt," said the partner cheerfully, with a meaning glance, "you'll be coming in again before long, Mrs. Boissy. These granddaughters--they keep us on the move. Keep our stock on the move, too. That's right."
And everybody laughed in a friendly manner before we made our exit. Gran was silent on the way home; but an hour later at lunch she observed, out of the blue:
"Did you hear what the man said? He said there had been nothing in the way of silver to touch our present."
"Wasted on Cora," I muttered.
"No, dearest child, I won't have you speak like that. Our Lord never remembered an injury. He always forgave."
"Yes, and look how He annoyed everyone."
Gran was shocked, and asked if I would like the nuns to hear me talking in such a way. All the same, she had given that present in no Christian spirit, and I knew it, and let her lecture me, secure in the knowledge.
Such was the first exchange in the duel. On the whole we gave as good as we got; the present cancelled the snub. But other attacks left less opening for riposte. Talk, for instance, is elusive as it is dangerous; you cannot catch talk on your blade. And talk there was, started by the relations, though these would have denied the fact if it had been put to them bluntly. They did not want a quarrel with Gran, who for aught they knew might have another thousand pounds or so up her sleeve. They therefore embroiled me in the most delicate way with outsiders, while seeming to defend. I began to be left out of things.
I have often wondered what exactly they said, deprived by my known savagery of temperament from the only really deadly charge, immorality, which then as now had reference to one commandment only. I was farouche with men, and civilization had not in the 'nineties--in Australia, at any rate--sufficiently advanced to make this characteristic the basis of another charge, more devastating still. Indeed, it is odd to reflect upon the peccadilloes that could, tongued about in those days, pretty well ruin a girl's life, and instructive to compare these with present-day tolerance. Though men still may not cheat at cards, it is difficult to think of any taste which a woman may not indulge and still keep her acquaintances.
But to return to the family, and their insufferable championship. It was Aunt Marie-Céleste, flushed with the triumph of having an eldest daughter on her honeymoon, who plagued us most. She would call at the "Farmers and Graziers" and sweep me off for a shopping expedition. My protests were disregarded with a magnificent generosity, draped over pin-pricks.
"Now, my dear Clo, I won't have this. You must be seen about, my dear child. This sensitiveness is ridiculous."
"I'm not sensitive."
"Just as well," responded Aunt Marie-Céleste, lightly but grimly. Then with the swiftest transition possible: "Put on your hat and come out and we'll spend some money. That's the best tonic of all when you've got plenty. Tell her she must come, Grand'mère."
Gran knew I was being baited, but it was difficult to interfere. The head and oldest member of a family, especially if her purse is her own, lives in the position of one walking armed through a jungle. True, if one tiger comes too near it may be dropped with a bullet; but will not its mate and its cubs, instantly and vengefully, take up the trail? Gran, who had by her adoption of me fired one warning shot, as it were, into the air, held her fire now; but her tigers were alert, though only the monkeys, looking down on it all and chattering as they swung by their tails, gave any notion that attacks were being meditated or made.
Then something happened which set all the wild beasts leaping out of ambush.
VI
At that time in Sydney, as now in the United States, there was among the idler women a taste for culture, which found its expression in attending lectures. Lectures, then as now, were easier and more sociable than books. The work was done when one had put on good clothes and clean kid gloves, and ordered the tea; one could then sit, in comfortable chairs and for not too long a time, and let the lecturer do the thinking. Culture seeped in and out of expensively hung ears several times a month. Hostesses amiably rivalled each other in oyster sandwiches and the latest from England in the way of frocks, magazines, accents. The only trouble was that there was a tiresome lack of genuine lions. The hostesses could make a sow's ear serve the purpose of a silk purse nine times out of ten; visiting actors were a great stand-by; still, no genuine resounding Name ever seemed to be found on the P. & O. or Orient lists. There was one exception, a professor of really world-wide eminence for whom they all lay in wait; but on an impulse he got off the ship at Adelaide and went into the desert, mounted on a camel, to study what was left of the blacks, and was next heard of at Broome in Western Australia, where there were no hostesses of any kind. All this must explain the furore caused by the sudden actual presence among us in Sydney of no less a personage than Martina Fields.
She had come out, it appeared, by Messageries, which was the reason for her appearing full-blown without notice. She was really a celebrity. Her plays were on every drawing-room table; her books, strong but never shocking, had afforded relief to hard-pressed conversationalists at every dinner for months. She was a lecturer of renown, photographed regally but badly, was friendly and yet--how strange, with the immense publicity of her life!--a little shy. Finally, and this was what had protected her from seekers for a while, she was travelling under her own name of Gloria Jebb. Everyone cultured had been aware that "Martina Fields" was no more than a pen name, such as it has always been the fashion for literary women to take; none of them, not the best-informed, knew what it replaced, and even had they scanned--as sometimes, in hope of a Count, they did--the passenger list of the Messageries Maritimes, Gloria Jebb would have told them nothing.
How the truth about her came out nobody ever knew. Certainly one of my aunts was the first to hear it, at the Library when she asked for Martina Fields' latest, and the assistant, with starting eyes, informed her that Miss Fields herself had been in that morning.
"Martina Fields here!" returned the aunt, incredulously, and a perfect stranger at her elbow, who had overheard, broke into the Australian lower class ejaculation of disbelief, "Go on!"
But the assistant was sure. The lady had let drop something about her last book--"Oh, it's got here already! Borkman's have been quick!" And the Sketch just out from home had a photograph of her that was the spit; and so on. To clinch the whole matter, she had taken out a subscription, and written down her name and address. There it was, Gloria Jebb, Hotel Australia, in the identical large cavorting hand that sprawled "Martina Fields" in gold across the bindings of that celebrity's books.
"Well!" said the aunt, impressed.
"Cripes!" commented the commoner at her elbow, and they parted, their minds having communed in one instant's emotion of pleasurable shock.
In about forty-eight hours every hostess, educational society, girls' school, and university was laying siege to Miss Fields at the Hotel Australia. People introduced themselves as she sat at meals, having tipped the head waiter largely to discover her table. People wrote; some sent telegrams; and Mr. Dudden, Sydney's sole concert agent and impresario, wiped the eyes of all the hostesses by securing Miss Fields for a series of lectures at the new Victoria Hall. In vain did that distinguished lady protest that she was resting, vegetating, trying to lie a little fallow for the good of her next year's book. Mr. Dudden was not going to be put off by such excuses as these.
"It's temperament," said Mr. Dudden, knowingly, to cronies in the Australia's winter garden, "they're all alike. Artistic temperament, that's the trouble; they all think they've got to have it, or if they haven't got it by nature they put up a bluff. I've seen Melba in tears, believe me or not. Shouting her head off and all for what, do you think? Port instead of sherry in her egg-flip. You've got to manage 'em."
"That's right," agreed the cronies, "it's on you again, George. You don't land a winner every day."
But he had landed one this time. Martina Fields, dressed in a kind of large classic manner in robes that trailed and folded and lacked utterly all the Gothic gimcrackery of bones and lace that afflicted her audiences, drew crowds ever larger to the Victoria Hall. She read remarkably well; her excerpts from her own plays were the most popular of the performances, magnificent stuff in the Elizabethan idiom with the drive of her personality behind it. She hypnotised, or rather, she stunned Sydney. It was the mixture of thunderbolt and Newfoundland puppy that fetched us all, the blend of Olympus and the nursery. And like the rest of Sydney I too was stunned, hypnotised, and fetched.
I suppose she knew the symptoms; one of her novels told the story of a girl's unhappy headlong falling in love with an older woman, that woman's mismanagement of the situation and its tragic end. As for me, I did not know in the least. I went to each lecture with the impatience of a tryst. Once I sent a little bunch of flowers--boronia it was, with the lemony smell that is not sickly, like the sweeter scents. At last, as was inevitable, I met her in somebody's drawing room, and the trouble really began.
She was kind and handsome; no trumpet-tones, but a classical façade in private. She asked me if I read much. Longing to show off, but surrounded by the cultured and so not daring to boast, I said no. An officious relation volunteered the fact that I lived in the bush. Miss Fields nodded sympathetically. She believed in silence, she said, and the healing solitude of wide plains. "Something great will come out of that loneliness some day."
She looked at me as she spoke, and smiled. It meant nothing; but ambitions I had never dreamed of came rolling up in my throat and stifled all speech. The interview drifted away, over a bridge of oyster sandwiches, to a discussion on cooking which left me cold. I went out into the garden by myself, to turn over in my memory the talk with the goddess, and to blush till I struck my own cheek at the thought that my contribution had been the one word, and that mumbled: "No."
When I came in she had gone. She never stayed long at parties, or talked literature when she was at them; was announced by her own name, and hardly differed, save for her skilled voice and a pair of most compelling eyes, from the mere thoughtful rabble. I overheard an aunt discussing her with the hostess.
"My dear Ada, that's all very well. But what's her age? Thirty-five? With her looks, that's too young to be staying about in hotels all over the world by herself."
"My dear," protested Mrs. Clibbon, "she has to earn her living, poor thing. Like an actress."
"Not quite. One doesn't expect much of actresses. But Miss Fields--you heard the bishop yourself--Miss Fields is a moral force. A moral force in the Australia's winter garden!"
"Just the place it's needed, one would think," replied Mrs. Clibbon, who was shrewd.
That talk, however, was going on in every drawing-room. I, who went about very little, heard it twice myself. The Hotel Australia as headquarters was a tactical mistake. It had not quite the raffishness of the "Farmers and Graziers," or of the now deliquescent "Southern Cross," but it was, in its dingy way, gay. Odds and ends frequented it; layers of odds, ends of fortunes. It was the last place, one would imagine, in which a Moral Force would feel at home.
No doubt some of the gossip found its way round to Miss Fields who kept her ears open always, and her eye unwinkingly fixed on the main chance. She was celebrated, the talkers admitted; she was an artist of rare quality, at once flamboyant and discreet; and she appeared to be moneyed. But was she, was she respectable? In those days, for such intimate entertainments as hers--she read in all the richer drawing-rooms--entertainments to which schoolgirls were taken in flocks, respectability really was necessary. Opera singers and actresses, kept to their stages, were not socially sought. Martina Fields was sought; and how awful for the leaders to discover that their search had been, all unknowing, for one of the socially lost!
Miss Fields, with her sensitive actress's knowledge of the feel of a "house," changed quarters, and displayed considerable art in her choice. She moved from the palms and capacious copper spittoons of the Hotel Australia to a boarding-house kept by the esteemed widow of a judge, on a hill looking down towards the blue of Elizabeth Bay, and known to all Sydney as "47." This address, in both senses of the word, saved her. Mrs. Lambert's flair for character was known all over Sydney. She was slightly psychic, with a vague greenish eye contradicted by a business-like pug nose, and she tested the auras of her guests before admitting them on equal terms to her home. In this, she had the help of her Guide, a personage of accurate business instincts who always gave her warnings when the auras were not of the right hue. Her chief aim at "47," she said, was a sympathetic atmosphere.
"My guests are all so good about it. They say to me, 'Mrs. Lambert, how do you do it? 47 is always such an oasis of peace.' And I always say, 'It's not my doing, y