It was not an altogether successful party. The dinner had portentous suggestiveness; the Leidchardt'stonians were at first rather difficult. Sir Luke a little too conscious of his responsibilities towards the British Throne: Lady Tallant so brilliant as to be bewildering. But except as it concerns Lady Bridget and McKeith, the Tallant's first dinner-party at Government House is not of special importance in this story. Mrs Gildea, very well occupied with Dr Plumtree, only caught diagonal glimpses of her two friends a little lower down on the opposite side of the table, and, in occasional lulls of conversation, the musical ring of Lady Bridget's rapid chatter. Colin did not seem to be talking much, but every time Mrs Gildea glanced at him, he appeared absorbed in contemplation of the small pointed face and the farouche, golden-brown eyes turned up to him from under the top heavy mass of chestnut hair. Lady Bridget, at any rate, had a great deal to say for herself, and Mrs Gildea wondered what was going to come of it all.
Conversation became more general as champagne flowed and the courses proceeded.
Sir Luke, discreetly on the prowl for information, attacked Antipodean questions—the Blacks for instance. He had observed the small company of natives theatrically got up in the war-paint of former times, which, grouped round the dais on which he had been received at the State Landing, had furnished an effective bit of local colour to the pageant. Up to what degree of latitude might these semi-civilised, and he feared demoralised beings, be taken as a survival of the indigenous population of Leichardt's Land? Did wild and dangerous Blacks still exist up north and in the interior of the Colony?
'You'd better ask McKeith about that, your Excellency,' said the Premier. 'He knows more about the Blacks up north than any of us.'
The Governor enquired as to the amenability of the Australian native to missionary methods of civilisation, and one of the other Ministers broke in with a laugh.
'Bible in one hand and baccy in the other! No, Sir, the Exeter Hall and General Gordon principles aren't workable with our Blacks. Kindness doesn't do. The early pioneers soon found that out.'
Lady Bridget had stopped suddenly in her talk with Colin, and was listening, her eyes glowering at her companion.
'Why didn't kindness do?' she asked sharply.
'Yes; Mr McKeith, tell us why the early pioneers abandoned the gentle method,' said the Governor.
McKeith's face changed: it became dark and a dangerous fire blazed in his blue eyes.
'Because they found that the Blacks repaid kindness with ingratitude—treachery—foul murder—' He pulled himself up as though afraid of losing command of himself if he pursued the subject: his voice thrilled with some deep-seated feeling. Mrs Gildea, who understood the personal application, broke in across the table with an apposite remark about her own early experiences of the Blacks. Lady Bridget impatiently addressed McKeith.
'Go on. What do the Blacks do now to you people to make you treat them unkindly?'
'What do they do now—to us squatters you mean?' Colin had recovered himself. 'Why they begin by spearing our cattle and then they take to spearing ourselves.'
'Did they ever spear you?' she asked.
Colin smiled at her grimly.
'Well, you wouldn't have noticed, of course, that I've got just a touch of a limp—it's only if I'm not in my best form that it shows. I owe that to a spear through my thigh one night that the Blacks rushed my camp when I was asleep. And I'd given their gins rations that very morning.'
'And then?' Lady Bridget's voice was tense.
'Oh then—after they'd murdered a white man or two, the rest of us whites—there wasn't more than a handful of us at that time up on the Leura—banded together and drove them off into the back country. We had a dangerous job with those Blacks until King Mograbar was shot down.'
'King Mograbar! How cruelly unjust. It was his country you were STEALING.' She accentuated the last word with bitter scorn.
'Well! If you come to that, I suppose Captain Cook was stealing when he hoisted the British flag in Botany Bay,' said McKeith.
'And if he hadn't, what about the glorious British record, and the March of Civilisation?' put in Vereker Wells.
Bridget shot a scathing glance at the aide-de-camp.
'I don't admire your glorious British record, I think it's nothing but a record of robbery, murder, and cruelty, beginning with Ireland and ending with South Africa.'
'Oh! my dear!—I warn you,' said Lady Tallant, bending from her end of the table and addressing the Leichardt'stonians generally. 'Lady Bridget is a little Englander, a pro-Boer, a champion of the poor oppressed native. If she had been alive then she'd have wanted to hand India back to the Indians after the Mutiny, and now when she has made Cecil Rhodes Emperor of Rhodesia, she'll give over all the rest again to the Dutch.'
Bridget responded calmly to the indictment.
'Yes, I would—if Cecil Rhodes were to decline the Emperorship of all South Africa—which I should make his job.... But you'd better add on that I'm a Socialist too, Rosamond, because I've become one, as you know. I think the working man is in a shamefully unjust position, and that the capitalists are no better than slave-drivers.'
'Oh, not out here, my word!' exclaimed a Leichardt'stonian who happened to be one of the old squattocracy. 'The landowners and the capitalists are not slave-drivers, they are slave-driven. We've got to pay what the Trades' Union organisers tell us—or else go without stockmen or shearers. Fact is, our Labour War is only just beginning; and I can tell you, Sir, that before a year is out the so-called bloated capitalist and the sheep and cattle station owner will sing either pretty big or very small.'
'I don't think it will be very small—on MY station,' murmured McKeith. 'But it's quite true about the Labour War. They're organising, as they call it, already all along the Leura.'
The Governor asked to have the Labour situation explained from the squatters' point of view; and for a few minutes McKeith forgot to look at Lady Bridget. He was on his own ground and knew what he was talking about.
'It's this way,' he began. 'You see, though, I'm cattle—and I'm the furthest squatter out my way. But there are a few sheep stations down the river, and there isn't an unlimited supply of either cattle-hands or shearers, so we've got to look sharp about hiring them. Now, last year, we—of course I'm classing myself with the sheep-owners, for we all stand together—hired our shearers for seventeen shillings and sixpence a day. Then, up come the Union organisers, form a Union of the men and say to them: "You've got to pay ten shillings down to the Union and sign a contract that you won't shear under twenty shillings a day." The Organiser pockets the ten shillings, and makes three pounds a week and his expenses besides, so it pays HIM pretty well. Well then, the shearers go to the squatters. "All right," say they, "we'll shear your sheep, but it's going to be twenty shillings instead of seventeen and six." The squatters grumble, but they've got to have their sheep shorn, and they pay the twenty shillings. Next year, I'm told, the word is to go round that it's to be twenty-two and sixpence. Well sir, we're to see what's to happen then!'
The Labour talk lacked local picturesqueness. Sir Luke preferred the Blacks, and started the question of danger to white men in the out-districts. How far had officialdom penetrated into the back blocks? He understood that Mr McKeith had explored for the laying of a telegraph-line to the Big Bight. Could Mr McKeith give him any information about all that?
McKeith explained again. He had stopped a week, he said, at the last outpost of Leichardt's land civilisation. The telegraph master there lived in a hut made of sheets of corrugated zinc, raised on piles twenty feet high and fortified against the Blacks. The entrance to it was masked, spear-proof and had two men always on guard—there were four men at the post. McKeith told a gruesome story of an assault by the natives, and of rifles at work through gun-holes in the zinc tower.
Lady Bridget listened in silence. Now and then, she looked up at McKeith, and, though her eyes gave forth ominous red-brown sparks, they had in them something of the same unwilling fascination Joan Gildea had noticed in the eyes of Colin McKeith.
In the drawing room, before the men came in, Bridget talked to Joan Gildea. They hadn't yet had, as Biddy reminded her, a regular outpouring. The outpouring it should be stated, was always mostly on Bridget's side.
'When did you start Socialism?' Mrs Gildea asked. 'That's something new, isn't it?'
Biddy gave one of her slow smiles in which lips, eyes, brows, what could be seen of them under her towzle of hair—all seemed to light up together.
'Why, I've always been a Socialist—in theory, you know. I've ALWAYS rebelled against the established order of things.'
'But latterly,' said Joan, 'I haven't heard anything about your doings—not since you wrote from Castle Gaverick after—after Mr Willoughby Maule's marriage?'
The light died out of Bridget's face. 'Ah, I'll tell you—Do you know, Rosamond saw them—the Willoughby Maules before we all left. She met them at Shoolbred's—buying furniture. Rosamond said SHE was dragging after him looking—a bundle—and cross and ill; and that he seemed intensely bored. Poor Will!'
There was silence, Bridget's thoughts seemed far away.
'But about the Socialism?' prompted Mrs Gildea.
'Oh well, Aunt Eliza made up her mind suddenly to consult her new doctor—Aunt Eliza's chief excitement is changing her doctors, and she grows quite youthful in the process. They say that love and religion are the chief emotional interests of unattached women. I should add on doctors when a woman is growing old. Don't you think, Joan, that in that case, all three come invariably to the same thing?'
'Love, religion and doctors! As emotional interests, do they come to the same thing for elderly women?' repeated Mrs Gildea, as if she were propounding a syllogism. 'No, certainly not, when the elderly woman happens to be a hard-working journalist.'
'Oh, there you have the pull—I suggested the idea to Rosamond the other day and she gave a true Rosamondian answer. "They don't come at all to the same thing," she said, "because usually you have to pay your doctor and SOMETIMES your lover pays you." Rather smart, wasn't it?'
'Yes, but I think you'd better warn Lady Tallant that the Leichardt'stonian ladies are a bit Puritanical in their ideas of repartee.'
'Oh, Rosamond is clever enough to have found that out already for herself;' and the two glanced at Lady Tallant, who seemed to be playing up quite satisfactorily to the female representatives of the Ministerial circle.
'I suppose you made friends with some Socialists when you were in London?' went on Mrs Gildea.
'My dear, I would have made friends with Beelzebub just them, if he would have helped me to escape from myself.'
Bridget sighed and paused.
'But you ARE getting over it, Biddy—the disappointment about Mr Maule? You ARE growing not to care?'
'I don't want to grow not to care—though, of course, now I should prefer to care about someone or something that isn't Willoughby Maule, I feel inside me that my salvation lies in caring—in caring intensely.... But you wouldn't understand, Joan. You weren't built that way.'
'No,' assented Mrs Gildea doubtfully.
'But,' went on Biddy brightly, 'I think sometimes that if one could get to the pitch of feeling nothing matters, it would be a way of reaching the "letting go" stage which one MUST arrive at before one can even BEGIN to live in the Eternal.'
There seemed something a little comic in the notion of Bridget O'Hara living in the Eternal, and yet Mrs Gildea realised that there really was a certain stable quality underneath the flashing, ever changing temperamental sheath, which might perhaps form a base for the Verities to rest upon.
'Beelzebub didn't teach you that,' she said.
'No, quite the contrary. It all came out of my concentration studies and the Higher Thought Centre where I met some most original dears—Christian Scientists and Spiritualists—and then these Socialists—not a bit on the lines of the old Fabians and Bernard Shavians and the rest who used to believe only in Matter—specially landed property matter—and in parcelling that out among themselves. My friends are for parcelling out what they call the Divine Intelligence, which they say will bring them everything they need for the good of others and, incidentally, themselves. Of course none of them have a penny. But they do contrive to get what they want for other people—it was a soup kitchen this winter where they fed 11,000 starving poor. Only, when they begin, they never have the smallest idea of HOW it's going to be done.'
Lady Bridget was so absorbed in her subject matter that she did not notice the entrance of the men; but Mrs Gildea saw that Colin McKeith was making straight towards them. He halted behind Bridget's chair. Biddy went on in reply to a question from her friend.
'You see, they argue this way, "We don't know," they say, "the HOW of the simplest things in life, we don't know the HOW of our actual existence—how we move or think—not even the HOW of the most ordinary fact in science. We only know that there must be an Intelligence who does know and who has forces at command and the power to set them in motion."'
'And how do we know that?' asked Colin McKeith.
Bridget turned with a start and looked at him solemnly for a second or two.
'You paralyse me: you are too big. I can't speak to you when you are standing up. Please sit down.'
He went to fetch a chair. At the moment, Lady Tallant came up.
'Biddy, will you sing. Do for Heaven's sake make a sensation. Help me out! You know how!'
Lady Bridget had a funny inscrutable little smile and a gleam in her eyes which crinkled up when she was going to say or do something rather naughty.
'I'll do my best, Rosamond. But you don't think it would be a dangerous experiment, do you?'
Lady Tallant laughed, and told Captain Vereker Wells to take her to the piano.
'YOU know that Biddy does a lot of mischief when she sings,' said the Governor's wife, sitting down in Lady Bridget's vacant place beside Mrs Gildea. Colin McKeith, still on the outskirts with his chair, stood leaning upon it, watching the performer.
The piano was in such a position that Lady Bridget faced him.
A vain man might have fancied that she was singing at him, and that the by-play of her song—the sudden eye-brightenings, the little twists of her mouth, the head gestures, were for his particular benefit.
She was singing one of the Neapolitan folk-songs which one hears along the shores of the Mediterranean beyond Marseilles—a love song.
Most people know that particular love-song. Lady Bridget gave it with all the tricks and all the verve and whimsical audacity of a born Italian singer. Well, she was Italian—on one side at least, and had inherited the tricks and a certain quality of voice, irresistibly catching. And she looked captivating as she sang—the small pointed face within its frame of reddish-brown hair, the strange eyes, the expressive red lips, alive with coquetry. The men—even the old politicians, listened and stared, quite fascinated.
Some of the Leichardt's Town ladies—good, homely wives and mothers who, in their early married days of struggle, had toiled and cooked and sewed, with no time to imagine an aspect of the Eternal Feminine of which they had never had any experience, were perhaps a little shocked, perhaps a little regretful. One or two others, younger, with budding aspirations, but provincial in their ideals, were filled with wonder and vague envy.
A few of them had made the usual trip 'Home,' landing at Naples and journeying to London, via Monte Carlo and Paris, and these felt they had missed something in that journey which Lady Bridget was now revealing to them. Joan Gildea, whose profession it was to realise vividly such modes of life as came within her purview, felt herself once more in the blue lands girdling the Sea of Story—It all came back upon her—moonlight nights in Naples; on the Chiaja; looking down from her windows on sunny gardens on the Riviera, and the strolling minstrels in front of the hotel....
As for Colin McKeith who had never been in the Blue Land and knew little even of the British Isles except for London—chiefly around St Paul's School, Hammersmith—and the Scotch Manse where he had occasionally spent his holidays—even he was transported from the Government House drawing-room. Where? .... Not to the realm of visions such as he had seen in the smoke of his camp fire. Oh no. He had never dreamed of this kind of enchantment.
A fresh impulse seized the singer. She struck a few chords. A familiar lilt sounded. Her face and manner changed. She burst into the famous song of CARMEN. She WAS CARMEN. One could almost see the swaying form, the seductive flirt of fan. There could be no doubt that had the voice been more powerful, Lady Bridget might have done well on the operatic stage.
Yet it had a TIMBRE, a peculiar, devil-may-care passion which produced a very thrilling effect upon her audience. She got up when she had finished in a dead silence and was half-way across the room before the applause burst out. There was a little rush of men towards her.
'Beats Zelie de Lussan and runs Calve hard,' said the Premier who had made more than one trip to England and considered himself an authority in the matter.
Bridget skimmed through the groups of admirers, stopping to murmur something to Lady Tallant who had met her half way; then stopped with hands before her like a meek schoolgirl, in front of Mrs Gildea and Colin McKeith—he almost the only man who had made no movement towards her. Bridget sank into her former seat.
'The last time I sang that was at a Factory Girls' entertainment at Poplar,' she said... 'You should have seen them, Joan: they stood up and tried to sing in chorus and some of them came on to the platform and danced.... Mr McKeith you look at me as if I had been doing something desperately improper. Don't you like the music of CARMEN?'
Colin was staring at her dazedly.
'It seemed to me a kind of witchcraft,' he said.... 'I should think you might go on the stage and make a fortune like Melba.'
She laughed. 'Why my voice is a very poor thing. And besides, I could never depend upon it.'
'Everything just how you feel at the time, eh?' he said. 'You wouldn't care what you did if you had a mind to do it.'
'No,' she answered. 'I shouldn't care in the least what I did if I had a mind to do it.'
There was the faintest mimicry of his half Scotch, half Australian accent in her voice—a little husky, with now and then unsuspected modulations. She looked at him and the gleam in her eyes and her strange smile made him stare at her in a sort of fascination. Joan knew those tricks of hers and knew that they boded mischief. She got up at the moment saying that people were going and that she must bid Lady Tallant good-night.
Then the Premier's wife came up shyly; she wanted to thank Lady Bridget for her singing. It had been as good as the Opera—They sometimes had good opera companies in Leichardt's Town, etcetera, etcetera.
Lady Bridget made the prettiest curtsey, which bewildered the Premier's wife and gave her food for speculation as to the manners and customs of the British aristocracy. She had always understood you only curtsied to Royalty. But she took it as a great compliment and never said anything but kind words about Bridget ever after.
Colin McKeith escorted Mrs Gildea to her cab and as they waited in the vestibule, obtained from her a few more particulars of Lady Bridget O'Hara's parentage and conditions. But he said not a word implying that he had discovered her identity with the author of the typed letter.
'I'll come along to-morrow morning if I can manage it, and tell you about Alexandra City and the Gas-Bore,' he said carelessly as she shut the fly door. Joan wondered whether he had caught Lady Biddy's parting words in the drawing room.
'If Rosamond doesn't insist on my doing some stuffy exploration with her, I'll bring my sketches some time in the morning, Joan, and you can see whether any of them would do for the great god Gibbs.'
'And what are you going to do, Biddy? How long are you going to stay with the Tallants?'
'Until Rosamond gets tired of me—or I feel no further need of the moral support of the British Throne,' answered Lady Bridget lightly. 'I'm not sure whether I shall be able to stand Luke's Jingo attitude in regard to Labour and the Indigenous Population—all the Colonial problems in capitals, observe. He does take his position so strenuously; it's no good my reminding him that even the Queen is obliged to respect a Constitutional government.'
Bridget took a cigarette from a gold case with her initials in tiny precious stones across it, and handed the case to Mrs Gildea who shook her head.
'Still too old-fashioned to smoke! I should have thought you'd have been driven to it here to keep the mosquitoes at a distance....
'Do you like my case, Joan? Willoughby Maule gave it to me,' she asked.
'You didn't return it then?'
'Why should I have hurt his feelings? We weren't engaged.' A meditative pause and then suddenly, 'Evelyn Mary doesn't smoke. Nice girls don't!'
'Biddy, I shall be sorry for Evelyn Mary if the Maules are to live in London and you go back there again—which I suppose you will do.'
'You needn't suppose for certain that I shall go back.' She savoured her cigarette slowly. 'I can't go on with that old life, the sort of life one has to lead with Aunt Eliza and the Gavericks and their set. I can't go on pushing and striving and rushing here and there in order to be seen at the right houses and join the hunt after fleeing eligibles.'
She gave a bitter little laugh, and then her tone changed to that ripple of frivolity in which nevertheless Mrs Gildea discerned the under-beat of tragedy.
'Besides, even so, it's incongruous—impossible. I've come to the conclusion that the only things which make London—as I've known it—endurable are unlimited credit at a good dressmaker—Oh, and one of the beautiful new motor-cars. You don't mind travelling from Dan to Beersheba if you can do it in five minutes. But when you've got to catch omnibuses or take the Tube, dressed in garden-party finery—well it's all too disproportionate and tiresome.'
Mrs Gildea laughed. 'You must remember that I am out of all your fine social business—except when I go as a reporter or look on from the upper boxes.'
'It's abominable: it's stifling,' exclaimed Lady Biddy, 'it kills all the best part of one. You know I've tried time after time to strike out on my own individual self, but I've always been brought back again by my hopeless, hopeless lack of practical knowledge of how to earn a livelihood. The one gift I'd inherited wasn't good enough to be of any use—If my mother had only left me the whole of her voice, I'd have been an opera-singer. But I don't think I could have stood the drudgery—and I should have hated the publicity of it all.... Joan, how did you ever manage to make yourself independent?'
'By drudging,' said Mrs Gildea dryly. 'Besides, I was born differently. And I was brought up with practical people.'
'Mr McKeith, for instance. He told me about his having been what he called a "cattle new-chum" on your father's station.'
'He wasn't exactly a "new-chum." His father had owned a sheep-station up in the unsettled districts. There was a tragedy—the place was sold up when Colin was a boy. He wanted to learn how we did things further south—and besides, he was left without a penny—that's how he came to be with us.'
'Oh! ... anyway, he's practical. But it isn't that side of him that appeals to me. He believes in Missions—in a sort of way.'
Mrs Gildea laughed uneasily. 'So you have discovered the streak of idealism in Colin. But'—she veered off hastily, 'I didn't want to talk about Colin McKeith. What I want is to hear about your own state of mind.'
'My state of mind! That's chaotic. The fact is, I feel in a horrible sort of transition state.... It's just as if one were trying to wind a skein backwards—taking up one end and finding a confusion of knots; then, taking up another and after forcing a few of the knots, giving the thing up in despair. One knows the right end is there, but how to find it through all that hopeless, woolly tangle!'
'Still, you must have learned something about how to wind your skein while you've been working through your various enterprises,' said Mrs Gildea. She took up one of Bridget's sketches which were on the table and looked at it thoughtfully.
'This is quite charming, Biddy—if only it wasn't too fine for reproduction. The block would cost more than the thing is worth.'
Biddy made a MOUE. 'Oh, I know. Like me isn't it? Impracticable. But I COULD do you some illustrations. I drew Rosamond entertaining the Ministerial Circle last night and showed it to Vereker Wells while we were waiting for breakfast. He nearly died with laughing. I couldn't have dared to let Luke see it.'
'That I can believe. And I should be murdered by the Leichardt'stonians if I allowed it to be published. But if you'd come with me through the Blue Mountains and caricature yourself exploring the Jenolan Caves—like the "Lady of Quality" in the Dolomite Country I could do something with that.'
Mrs Gildea alluded to their first and only collaboration as author and artist.
'Yes, I might. We'll think about it. And if I did perhaps I could make money enough to keep me out here for a year or two travelling about.'
Joan Gildea looked up in a startled way from the drawing she had been studying, and asked with some eagerness:
'Biddy, do you really mean that you are thinking of stopping out here for a year or two?'
'I do. I want to shake myself free from the old clogs. I want to be honest with myself and with—with the people who ARE honest with themselves. I've always envied you, Joan. Your life is real at least. You can put your finger on vital pulse beats. I should like to do as you are doing, study and learn from a country that has no traditions, but is making itself. I want to breathe Nature unadulterated—if I could only reach the reality of her. Joan, I have the feeling that if one could go right up to the Bush—far away from the Government House atmosphere and Luke Tallant's red-tapism and the stupid imitation of our English social shams—well, I think one might touch a more vital set of heart-beats than the heart-beats of civilization.'
'You are off civilization, Biddy?'
'Yes I am, I've had a horrible time. I was quite reckless and spent far too much on clothes and things—but that's not what matters—it's the effect on one's inner self that matters. And now I'm going through the pangs of revulsion, and just wondering where I can find anything that's true and satisfying. I believe it may be a kind of birth into a new life—coming out here you know and all the rest.'
She stopped, her long golden brown eyes fixed Sphinx-like on Joan, who returned the gaze, but did not answer in words. Biddy went on: 'YOUR work is practical—not idealistic. I believe the truth of it all is that the idealists haven't built up on a practical basis. There's too much POSE. Joan, I do think it's only the pinch of starvation that knocks down the ridiculous POSE of people.'
'True enough. Your cranks don't get much beyond POSE.—They think they do, but they don't.'
'Even the ones who believe in themselves—and who are in their way truly sincere. Joan, do you know, there were moments at the meetings I went to of those people—Christian Scientists, and my Spiritual Socialists, and all those philo-factory-girls and tramps, and philo-beasts, and philo-blacks and the rest of it—Moments when a ghastly wonder would come over me whether, if we were all stranded on a desert island with a shortage of food and water, it wouldn't be a case of fighting for bare existence and of Nature red of tooth and claw.'
'True for you, Lady Bridget. I like the way that's put,' broke in a voice from the other side of the veranda railing.
Lady Bridget started and looked round, a sudden flush rushing upon the ivory paleness of her face. If she had not had her back turned to the garden; if she had not left the gate open behind her, and if the wind in the bamboos had not then made a noisy rustling, she would have seen the visitor or heard his steps on the gravel path. Or if she had not been so absorbed in her subject and her cigarette she might have noticed that Mrs Gildea had looked up quickly a minute before and given a mute signal to the intruder not to interrupt the conversation untowardly.
Lady Bridget recovered herself as Colin McKeith mounted the steps and made the two ladies a rather self-conscious salute.
'I suppose you know that's a quotation,' she said.
'Weren't you a bit out?' he answered, and repeated the phrase. 'Excuse my correcting you.'
Bridget shrugged.
'Thank you. But I always thought men of action weren't great readers. How did you do your reading?'
'Some day—if you care to hear—I'll tell you.'
She looked at him interestedly. 'Yes, I should care to hear.'
'Not now,' put in Mrs Gildea. 'You've come this morning to tell us about the Gas-Bore at Alexandra City, and, as it's got to go into my next letter, I shall take some notes. Do look for a comfortable chair, Colin, and you may smoke if you want to.'
'This is good enough,' and he settled himself after his own fashion at Lady Bridget's feet with his back against the veranda post and his long legs sprawling over the steps.
Lady Bridget leaned out of the depths of her deep canvas chair and offered him her cigarette case.
He eyed it in amused criticism—the dull gold of the case, and the initials in diamonds, sapphires and rubies set diagonally across it.
'YOUR writing?'
Again the faint pink rose in her paleness.
'No, it's the writing of the person who gave it to me.'
'Was it a man?' he asked bluntly.
Bridget looked at him with slight haughtiness.
'Really, Mr McKeith, I think you are—inquisitive.'
'Yes, I am. And I've Bush manners—not up to your form. Please excuse my impertinence.'
'I don't mind Bush manners. They're—rather refreshing sometimes.... But'—again extending and then half-withdrawing her offering hand. 'You'd despise my cigarettes?'
He made an eager movement.
'No I shouldn't. Choose me one, won't you—two—if I may have one to keep.'
'Why to keep?' She selected two of the dainty gold-tipped cigarettes, and he received them almost as if they had been sacred symbols. One he placed carefully, notwithstanding her laughing protest, in a letter-case which he carried in an inner pocket. She tilted her face forward for him to light the other cigarette at hers, and he did so, always with that suggestion of reverence which sat so oddly upon him. Mrs Gildea watching the pair was immensely struck by it.
He smoked in silence for a few moments, his eyes still apparently fascinated by the glittering initials on the case which now Bridget attached to her chatelaine chain. She threw away the end of her cigarette.
'Well, so you've become the Governor's unconstitutional adviser?' she said. 'Joan, do you know that Luke Tallant kept Mr McKeith talking and smoking in the loggia just below my bedroom for hours last night after every one had gone—I know, because I couldn't get to sleep.'
McKeith had all compunction, 'I'm downright sorry for that, Lady Bridget. I'd have gone away if I'd only guessed your room was up above.'
'Oh, it didn't matter. I'd lots to think about—my own shortcomings and Luke's responsibilities.'
'He takes them—hard,' hazarded McKeith.
'I hope you gave him good advice,' put in Mrs Gildea.
McKeith's lips twisted into a humorous smile.
'Well, I told Sir Luke that I didn't think he need bother himself just yet awhile over that northern tour of inspection he's talking about.'
'He wants to make a kind of royal progress, Joan, through the Back-Blocks,' said Lady Biddy.
'It'll mean a bit of stiff riding,' said McKeith, 'but I've offered to show him round the Upper Leura anyway, and to find him a quiet hack.'
'Rosamond flatly declines the Royal Progress,' said Bridget. 'I'm coming instead of her.'
'Can you ride?' he asked.
'CAN I ride—Can any O'Hara ride! You needn't find ME a quiet hack.'
'All right,' said McKeith. 'But I wouldn't make sure of that by putting you on a buckjumper. It's a bargain then, Lady Bridget.'
'A bargain—what?'
'You promise to pay me a visit when the Governor makes his trip north—when he carries out his notion of establishing military patrols and a Maxim gun or two to put down Trades-Unionism and native outrages in the Back-Blocks?'
Lady Bridget looked at him thoughtfully. He had pulled out his tobacco pouch and was filling a well-worn pipe. 'You won't mind my pipe, will you—as you're a smoker yourself. Mrs Gildea likes it best—And so do I.'
Lady Bridget sniffed his raw tobacco and made a tiny moue. 'Well, if you prefer that—No, of course I don't mind. I see,' she went on, 'that you favour the Maxim gun idea, Mr McKeith. I understand that you're one of the Oppressors; and you and I wouldn't agree on that point.'
Mr McKeith returned her look, all the hardness in his face softening to an expression of almost tender indulgence.
'We'd see about that. I might convert you—but in the Back-Blocks.'
'Or I might convert YOU.'
He shook his head, and then laughed in a shy, boyish way.
'There's no knowing what might happen—but in the Back-Blocks.'
Lady Bridget leaned forward. 'Tell me about them—Tell me about your life in the Bush and what makes you hate the Blacks.'
'What makes me hate the Blacks?' he repeated slowly and the soft look on his face changed now to one very dour and grim.
'You do hate them, don't you? Mr McKeith, the Premier told me something about you last night, which simply filled me with horror. If I believed it—or unless I knew that what you did had been in honourable warfare, I don't think I could bear to speak to you again. Now, I'm going to ask you if it's true.'
'If what is true? Lady Bridget, I'll tell you the truth if you ask me for it, about anything I've done. But—I warn you—ugly things happen—in the Back-Blocks.'
'The Premier said that you were the terror of the natives. He told me about a gun you have with a great many notches on the barrel of it, and he said that each notch represented a black-fellow that you had killed.'
'I never killed a black-fellow except in fair fight, or under lawful provocation. Many a time one of them has sneaked a spear at me from behind a gum tree; and I'd have been done for if I hadn't been keeping a sharp look-out.'
'But you were taking their land,' Lady Bridget exclaimed impetuously, 'you had come, an invader, into their territory. What right had you to do that? You were the aggressor. And you can't judge them by the moral laws of civilised humanity. They fought in the only way they understood.'
'Lady Bridget, there are moral laws, which all humanity—civilised or savage understands. I'm not saying that no white man in the Bush has ever violated these laws, I'm not saying that the Blacks hadn't something on their side. I'm only saying that in my experience—it was the black man and not the white man who was the aggressor. And when you ask me what made me hate the Blacks—well—it isn't a pretty story—but, if you like, I'll tell it to you some time.'
'Tell me now,' she exclaimed, 'Oh, Joan ... Won't your notes keep?'
Mrs Gildea had got up, a sheaf of pencils and a reporter's note book in her hand.
'Yes, for a few minutes. But I've just remembered something I've got to refer to in one of Mr Gibbs' letters. Don't mind me; I'll be back presently.'
McKeith seemed to take no heed of her departure; his eyes were fixed on Lady Bridget; there was in them a light of inward excitement.
'Please go on,' she said, 'I want so much to hear.'
He thought for a few moments, shook the ashes from his pipe and then plunged into his story.
'I've got to go back to when I was quite a youngster—taken from school—I went to St Paul's in the Hammersmith Road—just before I was seventeen. You see before that my father had scraped together his little bit of money and we'd been living in West Kensington waiting while he made out what we were all going to do. He wasn't any great shakes, my father, in the way of birth, and fortune. I daresay, you guessed that, Lady Bridget?'
She tossed her head back impatiently. 'Oh what DOES that matter! Go on, please.'
'He'd been a farmer, Glasgow way'—McKeith still pronounced it 'Glesca,' 'and my mother was a minister's daughter, as good a woman and as true a lady as ever breathed. But that's neither here nor there in what turned out a bad business. Well, we all emigrated out here, and, after a while, my old dad bought a station on the Lower Leura—taken in he was, of course, over the deal, and not realising that it was unsettled country in those days. So the whole family of us started up from the coast to it.... He drove my mother and my two sisters just grown up, and a woman servant—Marty—in a double buggy, and Jerry the bullock driver and me in the dray with him and taught me to drive bullocks. There were stock-boys, two of them riding along side.
'It took us three and a half weeks, to reach the station, averaging about thirty miles a day and camping out each night.
'I'd like you to camp out in the Bush sometime, Lady Bridget, right away from everything—it'ud be an experience that 'ud live with you all your life—My word! It's like nothing else—lying straight under the Southern Cross and watching its pointers, and, one by one, the stars coming up above the gum trees—and the queer wild smell of the gums and the loneliness of it all—not a sound until the birds begin at dawn but the HOP-HOP of the Wallabies, and the funny noises of opossums, and the crying of the curlews and native dogs—dingoes we call 'em.... Well, there! I won't bother you with all that—though, truly, I tell you, it's the nearest touch with the Infinite I'VE ever known.... Lord! I remember the first night I camped right in the Bush—me rolled in my blanket on one side of the fire, and Leura-Jim the black-boy on the other. And the wonder of it all coming over me as I lay broad awake thinking of the contrast between London and its teeming millions—and the awful solitude of the Bush.... I wonder if your blood would have run cold as mine did when the grass rustled under stealthy footsteps and me thinking it was the blacks sneaking us—and the relief of hearing three dismal howls and knowing it was dingoes and not blacks.'
'I'd have loved it' murmured Bridget tensely. 'Go on, please.'
'Well, I've got to come to the tragedy. It began this way through an act of kindness on our journey up. We were going through the bunya-bunya country not far from our station, when out of the Bush there came a black gin with two half-caste girls, she ran up and stopped the buggy and implored my mother's protection for her girls because the Blacks wanted to kill and eat them.'
'O ... oh!' Biddy made a shuddering exclamation.
'Didn't I say the Blacks hadn't everything on their side—I ought to explain though that in our district were large forests of a kind of pine—there's one in this garden,' and he pointed to a pyramidal fir tree with spreading branches of small pointed leaves spiked at the ends, and with a cone of nuts about the size of a big man's head, hanging from one of the branches.
'That's the bunya-bunya, and the nuts are splendid roasted in the ashes—if ever that one gets properly ripe—it has to be yellow, you know—I'll ask Joan Gildea to let me roast it for you. Only it wouldn't be the same thing at all as when it's done in a fire of gum logs, the nuts covered with red ashes, and then peeled and washed down with quartpot tea....'
'Quartpot tea! What a lot you'll have to show me if—if I ever come to your station in the Back-Blocks.'
'Different from your London Life, eh? ... Your balls and dinners and big shows and coaching meets in Hyde Park, and all the rest of the flummery! Different, too, from your kid-glove fox-hunts over grass fields and trimmed hedges and puddles of ditches—the sort of thing you've been accustomed to, Lady Bridget, when you've gone out from your castle for a sporting spree!'
'A sporting spree!' She laughed with a child's merriment, and he joined in the laugh, 'It's clear to me, Mr McKeith, that you've never hunted in Ireland. And how did you know, by the way, that I'd lived in a castle?'
'I was led to believe that a good many of your kind owned historic castles which your forefathers had won and defended with the sword,' he answered, a little embarrassed.
'That's true enough.... But if you could see Castle Gaverick! My old Aunt is always talking of restoring it, but she never will, and if my cousin Chris Gaverick ever does come into it, he'd rather spend his money in doing something else.... But never mind that.... I want to hear about the black gin and the half-caste girls, and if your mother saved them from the cannibals ... and why the blacks wanted to eat their own kind. Dog doesn't eat dog—at least, so they tell one.'
'It's this way. Our blacks weren't regular cannibals, but in the bunya season they'd all collect in the scrubs and feed on the nuts and nothing else for months. Then after a bit they'd get meat-hungry, and there not being many wild animals in Australia and only a few cattle in those outlying districts, they'd satisfy their cravings by killing and eating some of themselves—lubras—young girls—by preference, and, naturally, half-castes, as having no particular tribal status, for choice.'
'Half-castes!' She repeated, a little puzzled.
'These ones had Chinky blood in them—daughters of a Chinaman fossicker.... We're not partial to the Chinese in Australia—only we don't eat them, we expel them—methods just a bit dissimilar, but the principle the same, you see.... Anyway, of course we took on the gin and her girls, and for about a year didn't have any particular trouble at the station with the blacks—though there was a shepherd speared in one of the out-huts.... That was his fault, however, poor devil—the old story—but it don't matter. The trouble came to a head with a black boy, called Leura-Jimmy, that Jerry the bullock-driver brought up with him and left at the station where he went down to the township for store supplies—He took me with him—I told you I was learning bullock-driving....'
McKeith paused, and the dark look came upon his face.
'And Leura-Jimmy?' put in Bridget.
'Oh, he was a fine, big fellow—plausible, too, and could speak pidgin English—he was never weaned from his tribe, and he was a treacherous scoundrel at heart.... As a precautionary measure, my father forbade the blacks to come up to the head-station. But Jimmy fell in love with the eldest of the half-caste girls. She encouraged him at first, then took up with one of the stock-boys....
'It was the bunya season again, and the girls' old tribe, under their King Mograbar—a devil incarnate in a brute—I sent him to Hell afterwards with my own hand and never did a better deed'—McKeith's brown fists clenched and the fury in his eyes blazed so that he himself looked almost devilish for a moment. His face remained very grim and dour as he proceeded.
'Jimmy had got to know through the half-caste girl about our ways and doings, and he made a diabolic plot with King Mograbar to get the blacks into the house.... Every living soul was murdered ...surprised in their sleep ... My father ... my mother ... my sisters ... God! ... I can't speak of it....'
He got up abruptly, jerking his long legs, and went to the further end of the veranda, where he stood with set features and brows like a red bar, below which staring eyes were fixed vacantly upon the avenue of bunya trees in the long walk of the Botanical Gardens across the river. But they did not see those bunya trees. What they saw was a row of mutilated bodies, lying stark along the veranda of that head-station on the Leura.
Bridget was leaning forward in her squatter's chair, her fingers grasping the arms of it, her face very white and her eyes staring too, as though they also beheld the scene of horror.
Presently McKeith came back, pale too, but quite composed.
'I beg your pardon,' he said stiffly. 'Perhaps I should not have told you.'
'It's—horrible. But I'm glad to know. Thank you for telling me.'
He looked at her wistfully. There was silence for a moment or two.
'And you ... you ... where were you?' she stammered.
'Me! I was with the drays, you know. We got back about noon that day.... If we'd been twelve hours sooner! Well, I suppose I should have been murdered with the rest.... The blacks had gone off with their loot.... We ... we buried our dead.... And then we ran up our best horses and never drew rein for forty miles till we'd got to where a band of the Native Police were camped.... And then ... we took what vengeance we could.... It wasn't complete till a long time afterwards.'
He was standing behind Bridget's chair, his eyes still gazing beyond the river. He did not notice that she leaned back suddenly, and her hands fell nervelessly to her lap. He felt a touch on his arm. It was Mrs Gildea, who had come out to the veranda again. 'Colin,' she said, 'I want you to go and bring me my typewriter from the parlour. And then you've got to dictate "copy," about the Alexandra City Gas-Bore. Please go at once.'
He obeyed. Mrs Gildea bent over Lady Bridget.
'Biddy! ... You're not faint, are you?'
Lady Bridget roused herself and looked up at her friend rather wildly.... 'No.... What do you take me for? ... I said I wanted real things, Joan ... And I've got them.'
She laughed a little hysterically.
'All right! But we shall give you a taste of real Australia that isn't quite so gruesome. That some of the tragedy belongs to the pioneer days.... I could tell you things myself that my father has told me. ... But I won't.... Mind, Colin McKeith is no more of a hero than a dozen bush boys I knew when I first knew him. Yes, put it there, Colin, please.... And now, if Biddy doesn't mind, we'll proceed to business, which is my IMPERIALIST Letter. I suppose you haven't brought back any snapshots of Alexandra City and your wonderful Gas-Bore that Mr Gibbs could get worked up for his paper?'