And there never was a more interesting time at the barracks than that which saw these country troops massed on the parade ground, waiting to be summoned to so new and strange a duty. Their colonel was a man notorious for plain speaking as for plain acting; the straight word and the swift blow (if necessary) were his, and a perfect scorn of consequences. In military affairs especially there was no mincing matters. Business was strictly business. So he told the men, who might at any time be called out to suppress civilian rioters, what they were to do in the terms that they were accustomed to. An orderly patience was to be maintained up to that point where the line had to be drawn; if that were passed, then, said he, simply, "Fire low and lay 'em out."
To "fire low" was, I believe, enjoined under the given circumstances by the regulations, and to "lay 'em out' is a colonial expressioncovering a wide field. His men understood him perfectly, and nobody within barrack walls had an idea of the potential sensationalism of his words. But somebody repeated them outside; the exasperated unionists got hold of them and found a plausible grievance in them, and they seem to have been immortalised by the tremendous rumpus that ensued. Here were poor innocent working men, and here was this bloodthirsty swash-buckler inciting their own brothers to slay them. Was the country going to allow such an outrage to pass? Not if they knew it. The colonel had to stand a sort of military trial for his offence before the avengers could be appeased. It came to nothing, but gave him as a scapegoat to the revilings of those with whom soldiers had become so unpopular. They hissed him in public places. They soothed the soreness of their other reverses by trying to make his life a burden to him. But it only hurt him through his wife, whose bright, good life it saddened deeply for a time. "Fire-low" or "Lay 'em out" took the place of his Christian name in the public mouth, and they keep it still, only that now the bitter nicknames have come to sound almost like terms of endearment.
For when the South African struggle came to widen our outlook in so many directions, there was such a unanimous call for him all over the country that it cannot be supposed that his one-time enemies did not join in it. He was not chosen to lead the First Contingent, and the crowds through which it passed from us loudly voiced their sympathy with him in the untowardcircumstance. I saw him go with the Second, and the cheers that followed him from the barracks to the ship were heart-stirring to listen to. It was thought that he was riding his own charger, which was safe on board, and his borrowed mount was almost denuded of its mane and tail by the enthusiasts who wanted a hair as a memento of him; he was nearly dragged from the saddle by the press of parting hand-shakers. It was the same when he came back, only more so. Every returned soldier was mobbed by his friends, but the frenzied "There he is!" and "That's him!" when the big colonel turned a corner into view, and the resultant roar of welcome, proclaimed the popular as well as the peculiar hero.
The military intervention in the struggle of the strike appeared decisive, but to deeper causes must be ascribed the modifications in the situation that remained after the dust of combat was cleared away. Labour Unions in this country were taught to "play the game" as soldiers would never have taught them. It was the civilians who manfully refused to knuckle under, who risked all for honour and the public good, to whom, more than to any other cause whatever, we owe a dozen years of industrial peace. And if that same wholesome spirit of true patriotism would arise again to put down a form of tyranny that has become quite as oppressive and ruinous as the Unionism of old....
But we shall see that too, some day.
My experiences of life in Australia, long in time, have been narrow in space. Of the thirty years of this chronicle, not six months were spent outside Victoria.
In earlier times I paid little visits to Albury, just over the border. We drove from Y—— in our first buggy, which was bought there, taking the babies to a house that was full of playmates for them, and where a couple more or less added nothing to the family cares. Looking out of my window one morning I realised why this was so. In a back-yard below, on a kitchen chair, sat the hostess's young widowed sister-in-law, who lived with her and was the mother of two; these two, my two, and the dozen or thereabouts of the family proper, sat or stood round her like a class in school, and from a huge basin on her lap she fed the lot, each in turn, a spoonful at a time, round and round, until the supplies were exhausted. The serious faces of the little ones as they opened their mouths wide one after the other showed they were not at games, but performing a duty they were accustomed to. When I went down to breakfast I was quietly informed that the children had had theirs and gone out to play. But I think myclearest memory of Albury is of the splendid Fallon vineyards and cellars, in which one morning a hospitable proprietor offered us tastes of his famous brands in innumerable little glasses, which politeness constrained me to "sample" at all costs. Taking but a sip of each, I reckoned that I must have swallowed a quantity fully equal to my daily allowance for a fortnight; and we drove home in the sun directly afterwards. I am proud to say that, although not a seasoned vessel, I passed the ordeal undisgraced even by a headache—my late host had confidently predicted it—otherwise I should not tell this tale.
Then I once went to Tasmania—for four hours. This was not very long ago, and I have ever since been awaiting opportunities to extend my acquaintance with that charming place—so green, so cool, so rich in the quality of its earth and all that springs from it, rightly entitled to its name of the "garden island" as far as my skimming eye could judge. Being out of health, I had taken one of those sudden longings for the sea which come over me at such times, an instinctive animal craving after the natural remedy for my complaint; and I had a friend in the captain of a smart steamer plying to Tasmanian ports. An invitation to a trip, as a privileged passenger, was too tempting to be refused. Thus I found myself one morning, tucked up in pillows and a 'possum rug in a long chair on the bridge, eating my breakfast of fried fish and coffee while I gazed at the Tasmanian shore, which we skirted between ports for several hours. We were near enough to discern the little farmhouses in the nooks of the hills, the little figures of milkers and carters, and housewives hanging the wash on the clothesline; and there was a beautiful coach-road running up and down and round the corners amongst the trees that I shall never be satisfied until I have driven over. I have spoken of it to those who have, and they tell me that imagination cannot conceive of it as more beautiful than it really is, given the right season and weather.
By-and-by we turned a corner ourselves and steered into a channel that presently opened out into a little inland bay, a little port, connected by a toy railway with Launceston. Its little town and wharves, where other ships were loading and unloading, occupied a section of the wooded hills enclosing it; elsewhere the green basin-rim was dotted with nestling homes, and their orchards and gardens. It was towards noon, and I was called to an early lunch, after which the captain appeared in mufti to take me for a walk. We were through the streets in a few minutes, and on a quiet road lined with great holly-hedges, a mighty tree of which, one blaze of scarlet, stood in a garden where the earliest spring flowers were sprouting from rich brown earth such as I had never seen on this side of the world. We followed the course of the bay as it narrowed in amongst the hills until it became a mere woodland brook burrowing under the bushes. The grass was lush and dewy, and the colour of the soil, where the path revealed it, as delightful to English eyes as the colour of flowers. It was too early for more than a sprinkling of these, but I filled my hands with ferns and other vernal treasures that told me what a Paradise the land would be in a few weeks if that was a fair sample of it. We "hustlers" of the mainland think it a fine place to visit in the hot weather, but far too dull and behind-the-times to live in; butto those who love Nature and a quiet home, and find their intellectual resources in themselves, what an ideal environment! "Here," said I to the captain, as we strolled back to the ship, "is where I should like to spend my last days—to rest when work is done." The idea obscured for a time the settled plan of my life, which is to get "Home" somehow before the final event. We sailed in the afternoon, and from the bridge I watched the fading of the green land as I had watched its unfolding, but feeling now that it was my friend for life. Now and then you look into a face which gives you the masonic sign of a natural affinity, absent in fifty faces that ought to be more dear; thus it was with Tasmania, which captured my heart at the first glance.
The furthest and the chiefest of my few jaunts abroad was to the mother-city of the mother-state—Sydney. And there is no place like Sydney. I am firm on that point, although I am a Victorian, in whom such an admission is rank heresy; and a son of mine who has spent several Long Vacs. there—in summer, when I would not go near it—is even more decidedly of the same mind. It was in the year following that of my illness in hospital, and while I was enjoying my fresh lease of life, that I took the journey after several false starts.
The captain—an intimate friend in private life—of an Orient liner telegraphed to me his arrival in port, the hour of his departure for Sydney, and the information that cabins had been reserved for me. Two of them, I found when I got on board. As I did not travel with a maid I took but one, which afforded twice the accommodation that I had paid for; even that I only occupied for a night. It was a stormy night, and at daybreak the captain andstewardess surveyed from the doorway a wretched object in the lower bunk, and it was ordered that I be brought upstairs to the commander's quarters. His cabin on deck had been my drawing-room the evening before; it now became my lodging altogether until we reached port. In the fresh air blowing through it, and after a light meal of champagne and biscuits, I recovered my equilibrium, and was able to thoroughly enjoy myself all day. Then the captain betook himself to the chart-room, where he had a bed that the weather did not allow him to use, and his servant wedged me in with pillows as I lay, still wearing the becoming and comfortable dressing-gown of semi-public life. I had promised not to undress, in view of his intention to fetch me up to the bridge when the little world below had done with us, that I might be gratified by the sight of a storm at sea under circumstances quite outside the common experience and never likely to occur again in mine. It was officially a "full" gale, and the newspapers of the next morning reported the velocity of the wind to have been up to eighty miles an hour. It was, moreover, the depth of winter and the dead of night. The turmoil of the sea was tremendous, but it did not upset me now; I was quite well and happy, swinging to the heavy roll and pitch of the ship in the soft but tight clasp of my wedging pillows, thankful that no feeling of sleepiness came to waste the time that was storing such romantic impressions. Presently the skipper called at the half-open door. He had oilskins and a woollen scarf, into which I was buttoned and tied; he dragged me out into the storm, and somehow we staggered and struggled over the swimming deck and up the stairs to the bridge and the chart-room, where I spent halfof the most wonderful night of my life, with him and the helmsman and the spirits of the Deep. The picture of that midnight sea could not fade from my memory in a thousand years. Looking down from our high platform in the air at the bulk of the vessel under us, big mail steamer that she was, the thought of her as man's work, effectually defying, as it seemed, the whole weight of the Universe, was more inspiring than words can say. Still more wonderful was the fortitude and vitality of two ships that passed us, fighting against the furious wind and not being hurtled along before it as we were. I was sure they were foundering, but not a bit of it—they were only going to be late at their destination.
We were early at ours, passing through Sydney Heads at daybreak before pilots expected us. When I went down to my cabin to dress I found my belongings stowed on the upper bunk and the rest of the room wet from the deluging seas that had swept us through the night. It was raw and grey now, but calm within the harbour, the loveliness of which did not reveal itself to me immediately. I was too rushed to get my hair done and my shore clothes on to have time to look for it. Here we have three hours of smooth water on which to make landing toilets; Sydney has but a few minutes. When I returned, cloaked and bonneted, to my late host, his successor was with him, awaiting me; and I was soon at breakfast on shore, making the acquaintance of what I believed to be the most charming city in the southern hemisphere. Well, at anyrate, it is incomparably charming to me. Of course, if I had gone there as a friendless woman, to struggle for a living in cheap lodgings, I might have pronounced it ordinary—even horrid, a term that I once actuallyheard applied to it by a mole-eyed person to whom it had never given a good time. Or if I had gone again, to get second impressions. Or if the weather—that arbitrary dispenser of joy and beauty—had not been as heavenly-sweet as it was for all the three weeks of my sojourn there. My letters from home reported rain, snow, dull skies, bad colds, a thorough winter of discontent; I was out every day in sunshine tempered with cool sea winds, an exhilarating freshness that made a bit of fur and an evening fire comfortable; and the wild flowers of spring were beginning to speckle the hills—cascades of something like white foam surrounded a rocky lunching camp on a memorable occasion—although it was only July.
I cannot recall one hour that does not bring pleasant thoughts to mind. Even at night I lay with the gleaming harbour under my eyes whenever I liked to open them to look, and I loved the strange experience of having my room flooded as with a search-light by the revolving beam of the great South Head Light. As an early riser I habitually wake at dawn, and then I watched the moving ships—a pastime I could never weary of—until called to my bath. They curved in and right up to the thresholds of our doors—that is one of the features of this harbour which few others can match. The masts seem to grow out of the streets, and you can step from the deck of a great liner to your cab as easily as from one room to the next.
At breakfast the programme for the day was submitted, and always it had been carefully compiled so as to comprise as much variety of pleasure as possible. I was taken on a cursory tour over the city the first day—round the Domain and through themain streets and beauty-places, to get that first good impression which has so much to do with the after ones. I was enchanted with Sydney—even with the narrow and twisted thoroughfares that are the mock of all good Melbournites; they give "bits" of architectural composition delightful to the uncommercial eye. In the evening we went to the theatre, and afterwards to Parliament House, where the debaters came between whiles to speak to us, and where I enjoyed a quite new and intensely interesting experience up to one o'clock in the morning. Next day I was at the Prorogation, and members entertained us with champagne in private rooms, and I was shown parliamentary life behind the scenes. I remember Lord Brassey was there, a visiting yachts-man, whom we did not then anticipate would be anything more to us. As the hero ofThe Voyage of the Sunbeam—then lying in Farm Cove, open to sightseers—I looked at him a great deal, and also at the author of that book, who at the ceremony sat just before me with her little daughters. She was having her last taste of travel and of life.
The afternoon of the same day brought quite a change of scene. That very nice man, the current American Consul, came to fetch us to a function that was after my own heart—the "send-off" of a popular American actress by the San Francisco mail. I cared nothing who the honoured person was; to assist at the departure of a ship was enough for me. In a carriage piled with flowers we drove to the quay, and there took tender for theZealandia, lying in Lavender Bay. Before the arrival of the heroine of the occasion I investigated the ship that was to carry her—wondering if the day would ever come when such an one would carry me. Then the crowdgathered until all one's wits were needed to avoid being crushed in alley-ways and corners. The distinguished traveller did not impair the effect by arriving too early; her company preceded her, also her humble husband, hugging her jewel-box to his breast as he hunted for the purser to take it from him and deposit it in the strong-room, and while still unrelieved of his responsibility naming to us and the general public the enormous sum that it was worth. When at last she came—such a small and ordinary-looking, every-day woman compared with the glittering stage vision of the previous night—she was nursing and guarding a strange bundle of her own, which, when opened in her cabin, disclosed a little native bear that she was taking home to make a pet of. The wallet that was to be its travelling house was lined with fur and had been carefully constructed for the purpose, and a consignment of the animal's natural foods was amongst her luggage. We crowded into her room, where more champagne flowed, not always into the right receptacles; bouquets were presented—they heaped her bed—and speeches made. Then visitors were rung off the ship, and sat round in their various small boats to cheer and wave handkerchiefs while theZealandiagot under way, and then chased the stately liner as long as they could keep up with her. Our golden-haired friend was kind enough to stand where we could see her, and was still hugging the fur bag with the little bear in it as we looked our last. When we regained the Consul's carriage he took us a drive round the Domain for the balance of the afternoon, that loveliest hour when Sydney glows pink in the setting sun and the whole scene is steeped in a dream-like haze that I never saw in any other place.I suppose the smoke and other breathings of the city, blending perhaps with exhalations of the sea, weave that wonderful veil. It is certain that the paintings of a sinking sun upon distant ranges in the country are never so beautiful as when there is a Bush fire about.
Next morning to Lane Cove—the first of the unforgetable series of excursions about that harbour which indeed the wildest boasts of its shore-dwellers could never do justice to. In the bright winter weather, which to all intents and purposes was spring—the mean temperature of Sydney, by the way, is two degrees above that of Nice, and roses are never out of flower the whole year round—I suppose I saw it at its best. We landed from the steamer on a bosky and solitary shore, and basked awhile on beach boulders encrusted with oysters, before climbing the steep paths to look at views. My son tells me that when he goes on these excursions with his young parties they take bread and butter and their pocket-knives with them, so that they can sit down to a meal of oysters at any place or time. There was another charming drive in the afternoon; in the evening theatre again, and a midnight visit to a great newspaper office, where I was initiated into the mysteries of newspaper production by all the modern processes, including that of photographing by electric light.
Next day to Coogee—an ocean shore, with great breakers thundering on it. Here lived a literary wife and painter husband in a little wooden house perched high upon the cliffs, where I think we lunched. A Saturday night party of authors, artists, and press-men—my host was a distinguished member of the latter clan—completed another dayin the most brilliant manner. Talk of good company! I smile when I compare that party with any Society party that I ever attended. But no comparison is possible.
It is one of my delightful memories of Sydney, that it had this intellectual kernel at its heart. I might not have found it in a lifetime had I entered the social life of the place by any other door, and so I hardly like to say that we have nothing of the kind in Melbourne, where my opportunities of search are limited. But friends of my own profession, who know the resources of both capitals, agree in the opinion that there really is nothing like it here. The number of representatives of letters and the arts, to whom mind and not money is the essential thing, may be as great, but there is no cohesion amongst them. They are lost in the general crowd. The little guild in Sydney was a compact and living body, and carried out its objects in uniting together with a sincerity rarely to be met with in the history of clubs. Subscriptions were not the first consideration—nor the second, nor the third; the question of its outward appearance was of the least importance. No gilding, no formality, no æsthetics—liberty and ease, any sort of a chair, a pipe and the right companionship—that was the idea; and it was good indeed to see the traditions of the intellectual life respected in that way.
I was its guest at a conversazione on the Wednesday following the Saturday supper-party. The intervening time was filled with fresh and bright sensations—more harbour trips, alternating with rambles about the old quarters of the town, the "Rocks," Argyle Cut, the Observatory, those blind streets and steep stairs from one tier to another,which struck me as so romantic and un-Australian; and the Arts Club's entertainment made the best possible contrast and relief to these. We did not dress too much. I was advised that my skirt must clear the ground, and for the rest a modest fichu and elbow sleeves seemed the most that good taste permitted. We set forth on foot in the cool darkness, comfortably untrammelled, and on arrival were received by our friends of the previous Saturday and many more, who piloted us through a series of little rooms, which were soon packed to the point where a dress-train would have rendered its wearer altogether immovable. We squeezed from place to place, a step at a time, ever meeting somebody or something to make us positively enjoy the heat and crush. Chairs and necessary tables, a piano, a blackboard, a raised platform or two, comprised the furniture of the homely suite; its ornaments were sketches pinned all over the walls, and the scientific and artistic things that covered the tables, outspread for the ladies' amusement. The mural decorations were fine. Phil May was a leading light of the society, and the grimy and bedaubed plaster laughed with his conceits at every turn. Amongst them was a portrait of the then Governor of New South Wales, Lord Carington, as an utterly disreputable vagabond. With no name to it, it was such a speaking likeness of him, as he would have been if he could have metamorphosed himself into such a character, that no one mistook the subject for an instant. It was a focus of mirth the evening through. I wonder what became of it? It might have been disrespectful, but it was a work of art, and I think he who had inspired it would have valued it as much as anybody. When, amongst other entertainments, this giftedartist—and his equally (I used to think more) gifted colleague, "Hop" of theBulletin, who, still remaining with us, has not shared his comrade's fame—drew "lightning sketches" on the blackboard with a lump of chalk, we saw pictures that it was indeed a wicked waste to destroy for ever a few seconds after they were made. Consummate artfulness as well as art was employed, for the strokes were so put in that we could not make head or tail of them until only the crowning one or two were needed; then suddenly the multitude roared as with one throat, and someone in the audience sat up in confused astonishment, while everybody else turned to look and laugh at him. The last touch of the chalk had given us his portrait to the life, with a shade of caricature more or less, but unmistakable. I have always looked back to those lightning sketches, so witty, so good-natured, so extremely clever, as the most refined form of entertainment that I ever enjoyed, and certainly the most generous. In other rooms were music, recitations, microscopes, and such things; and everywhere kindred spirits were intermingling and intercommuning. The ungarnished supper was carried on trays over our heads—coffee and sandwiches, and cakes and tarts from the pastry-cook's—and distributed to hands and mouths with much difficulty and various mishaps; and at last we broke up and broke away, and trotted home through the beautiful fresh night, still exhilarated with all the mental champagne we had imbibed, leaving our hosts, as we were secretly informed, to make a night of it on their own account over pipes and whisky.
There was yet another Saturday party—the party of them all. We started out to it in the sweetestweather to be found on earth, sunny and fresh, the living light of the sky the colour of nemophilas and the sea like liquid diamonds under it—poor similes both for the glory of that spring-like winter morning. On foot from Pott's Point to the Quay, by boat to Mosman's, up the ferny sandstone hills to breezy heights where I stood enraptured to look upon the Sound and the Heads and the Pacific outspread below, and down a crooked woodland path to a sequestered beach, we took our way: and if there had been nothing to get to at the end, the walk alone would have been a joy for ever. But on that lonely bit of shore, backed by the steep hills, fronted by the open gateway of the Heads, stood "the Camp"—the camp, if I may be allowed to remind the reader (with apologies, owed twice over, to the camp's proprietors), which I sketched in my novel,A Marked Man, written while the impressions of the place were fresh in my mind. The proprietors were two members of the Arts Club—men with homes and families in the city—who made this their private resting-place and holiday resort. They had gathered a choice assortment of their fellow-members on this occasion; they were "giving a party." But no woman had been allowed to take any hand in the affair; their wives were as much guests as I was; their cook was their old sailor caretaker, whose huge blocks of cold roast and boiled, hot potatoes and plum duff, bread and cake from his own camp oven, required no kickshaws to supplement them. It was a banquet for the gods, with that sauce of sea air to it. The permanent tent, combined sitting- and bedroom, was the drawing-room of groups of us in turn; we crowded on the covered-up truckle beds and the floor (of pine boards, well raised from the sand) forafternoon tea; at lunch we sat on planks under an awning, at long plank tables, like children at a school feast. It was a perfect "spree," but at the back of the merry trifling was that deep intellectual enjoyment of cultivated minds rubbing together which is so rare in social gatherings. We strolled in twos and threes along the lovely little beach, and sprawled under the bushes, and talked, talked; a few games had been provided, but there were no blanks to fill with them after lunch had crystallised us. The walk back to the boat was the best of all. The sun was setting as we climbed out of the glen of the camp, and, looking back from points of vantage as we rose, we saw the moon swim up over the North Head—black as ebony above the pale glitter of the water, while all other visible land was wrapped in that beautiful rosy haze which so glorified every feature of it. Then the great South Head Light began its revolutions, pouring over us and the darkening path at intervals of a minute. I do not know how far that long ray reaches, but I know that it is brilliant in the eyes of the homing traveller for hours before his steamer makes the Heads.
It was on the following morning that we took boat for Watson's Bay, and stood near the lighthouse to look down the sheer wall at the foot of which theDunbarwas wrecked, one only of her living freight surviving to tell the tale. It was awful to think of that event with the scene under one's eyes—the jagged cliff face going down and down, the thundering whirlpool raging at the bottom of it; and this was a sunny Sunday morning, and that was pitch-black night, so thick with rain and storm that a careful navigator accustomed to the port could notsee the beacon lit for him. But it was not, I think, the present light; it could not have been.
Those out-door excursions and intellectual entertainments—and I have not named the half of them—come first in my memories of this time; they are the pictures "on the line"; but around them were packed many social incidents of a less special but still interesting kind. We went to men-o'-war parties, which are always charming—the GermanBismarckin particular was splendidly hospitable—and the American Consul took pleasure in giving us dinner-theatre evenings. Between whiles we gave parties at home, and filled the interstices with drives. And so every day was a full holiday, and I was always well, and the sky was always blue and the sun shining. And so, when people ask me what I think of Sydney, I tell them that it is an earthly Paradise. Nothing will shake that conviction—until I go again.
I returned home overland, rather than descend to the status of an ordinary passenger on a steamboat to whose captain I was unknown, and I left my glass slipper on the Redfern platform. "Would you," implored a strange lady at my carriage window, as the express was about to start, "oh, would you mind taking charge of this little girl, who is travelling to Melbourne alone?" She handed up a child, and what could I do? I said I was not accustomed to taking charge of myself, that I had never made the journey before, and was not going as far as Melbourne; but she was sure it would be all right. What a night I had, with no sleeping berth available! And in the dark of the raw morning, when we were bundled out at Albury and into the hands of the Customs' officers, while looking after the child's luggage I lost my own, and did not recover it formonths afterwards. And then I landed at W——, chilled to the bone and exhausted with my fatigues, and had to wait many hours for the B—— branch train; and finally reached home to find winter again and all kinds of arrears of work awaiting me. I sat down to mend the stockings, and two days later there was snow upon the ground.
After all, that was the best part of it.
In 1893 our long country life came to an end. For years we had been hankering after a Melbourne parish, and at times, I must confess, had done a little canvassing for the vote and interest of the influential, under the well-founded impression that Providence helps those who help themselves; but it is very hard, when once "out of it," as the country-clergy describe their case, to get in, and we had come to consider our chances of metropolitan preferment as about equal to that of the camel which would pass through a needle's eye. Then suddenly it came to us, unsought.
There are three ways of reaching the goal, in our diocese. To be elected by the Board of Nominators is the regular way. When a parish falls vacant the Board meets to fill it from a prepared list of eligible candidates. The diocesan nominators have probably agreed upon their man; the equal number of parochial nominators have almost certainly done the same; the Bishop, acting as chairman, has the casting vote. There is generally a friendly discussion, in which one side or the other may allow itself to be over-ruled, but the result may be fairly calculated upon when the parish representatives are united and resolute, and not too unreasonable in their choice.Since they pay the piper, they naturally demand to call the tune, and considerations of justice no less than of peace make it inadvisable to force an unwelcome instrumentalist upon them. What the parishes want is the man they know—the man on the spot, that is—and let him be as young and smart as possible. Seniority and long service have no part in the merits of the case, so far as they are concerned. The old Bush parson who, in his favourite phrase, has borne the burden and heat of the day, and sees himself deprived of what he regards as his legitimate reward, is not the man for them; for the efficiency of a church in this country is in the last resort a matter of money, which is also—it cannot be denied, nor can it be helped—the matter of first concern to its official guardians. A good man is desirable, of course, but not if he is too old and out of date to draw the large and lively congregation necessary to the maintenance of a satisfactory income. This is the squalid way in which the voluntary system works, and I often wish the advocates of Disestablishment at home could live under it for a few years. On the other hand I know the defects of the arrangement I was brought up to. I remember a half-witted rector of my child's days, occupant of a family living, who used to run belated to the reading-desk dragging on his surplice over his hunting pinks and tops, or leave us to wait for him in vain while he carried his Saturday diversions too far afield to get home for Sunday; and another who left all to a poor curate while he lived on the income of his fat living in foreign parts; and still another—the son of a bishop, who had bestowed the plums of the see upon him ere he was grown up—whose long retinue of liveried servants was an object of interest to me at church, andwho, one of the last of the big pluralists, still alive in old age when I left England, was too high above his parishioners to be approached except through the humble curate. There are faults in both systems—in all. And as for the one I am speaking of, which leaves the old worker unpaid, and gives the prize to the beginner who has not earned it, I for my part do not see that any great wrong is done. That the world is for the young is Nature's own decree; if we, who are no longer of that fortunate company, cannot see it, we ought. We too have been young, we should remember, and have had our favoured day—that day when we had as good a chance of getting the better of our betters (if they were our betters) as those who supersede us now. But what I started to say was that the regular path of promotion to a Melbourne parish is to be elected by the Board of Nominators, and that that path was virtually closed to us—not because we were old, for we were not, but because we were so distant and little known.
The second way is to be appointed directly by the Bishop. But, with few exceptions, the Bishop can choose for himself only in the case of parishes too small to have their own nominators, or not bothering to have them, or not qualified to have them because their churches are still in debt. A church must not only be built, but paid for, before it can be consecrated, the act of consecration carrying with it full parochial rights. These lame ducks of parishes did not come into our account.
The third way is by exchange. This was our way.
G., being in town, fell in with the incumbent of the place which is now our home. He had occupied it for many years, without thought of leaving it; but his wife was convalescing from severe illness,and the doctor had advised that she be taken from the sea to a bracing inland climate. The climate we had to offer seemed the very thing—and I may say here that it proved so, even beyond expectations—and the suggestion of an exchange, coming in the nick of time as it did, was hailed as a special interposition of Providence. That was exactly what we thought it.
About a week after G.'s return, Canon S. came up to B—— to investigate. It rained hard, and he was a little dashed at first; he called the picturesque little house a "shanty," though not in our hearing. But when the weather cleared he brightened with it, and I think I may say that he never had another regret in connection with the place. The vestry was consulted, and the three parish nominators gave consent. A few days later the Bishop gave his. Then G. went to town, to be "passed," in his turn, by the vestry of the other parish, and a night or two afterwards, as I was going to bed, the telegraph boy brought me a message from him:—"All satisfactorily settled."
The invalid came up, and we established her, with a daughter, in the nicest lodgings we could find. She was a dreadful wreck, apparently past being mended by any climate, but the next time I saw her she beat all the records of persons of sixty-five for joyous energy and youthfulness. "I wake up in the morning," she said to me, "and wonder what it is that makes me feel so happy." It was the same with her husband, several years her senior. "I can walk twelve hilly miles, and take a service, and walk back again," he bragged, his figure and step and fine-featured old face alert and alive. "I am twenty years younger than when I came."
Certainly B—— deserves to be one of the sanatoriums of the world, and it is the fact that English doctors, who knew its virtues, sent several hopeless invalids to us, either to make miraculous recoveries or to prolong for years in tolerable comfort some life not worth a month's purchase at home. One of the latter cases I lovingly recall to mind—that of a gifted young fellow who, with mother and sisters, had rooms in our chief hotel year after year, although he came to us in apparently the last stage of consumption. He was a dear friend of mine, and a loss to the stock of intellect and genius in the world. "Don't you think I'd better stop this?" he once said to me as we were taking a Bush walk. "I am keeping my mother too long from her home and the rest of her family, and doing nothing to compensate her for what I cost." He meant that he had only to cease breathing that life-giving air to bring on the inevitable end, and that the sooner it came the better for those who were exiled for his sake. We discussed the matter quite fully, and in the quietest way, and I persuaded him that it was better to go on, on their account and his own, at least until the effort became too painful. He died amongst us at last, but none of them regretted those saved years which he unquestionably owed to the B—— climate. A consumptive friend of his came out to try the cure, and became so well that he thought himself proof against further danger, and went home again—to die. Another consumptive, whom winters on the Riviera and in the Engadine had failed to benefit, lived in B—— for, I think, five years, and from the day he came gained much ground and never lost any; he was an active townsman, hard put to it to find enough to do, andseemed to enjoy life as much as any of us. Unfortunately he had a delicate wife, a sufferer from acute asthma, for which a milder climate was required. The rare and vigorous climate of our hills was pronounced to be as bad for her as it was good for him. She grew worse and worse, and so they struck camp and went down to live by the sea—and there he died. Of course he might have died if he had stayed in B——. On the other hand, he might have been alive now.
But the best proof I can give of the healthiness of those parts is the case of three brothers, the elder of whom entertained me on my first visit into the remoter wilds of our first parish. Originally they were four brothers, sons of a highly-placed English clergyman, all four smitten with consumption, out in Australia to save their lives, if possible. One was too far gone and died before he could get a start; another, being at the time in apparently sound health, was killed in a buggy accident many years later; the remaining two are still enjoying life, as hale as the average old man of their age, and indeed more than that. The elder, on that memorable drive to his home amongst the Murray ranges, told me he had left England with but one lung. "I used to feel it when digging or climbing hills," said he, "but now it troubles me very little"—and that was thirty years ago. He had already been some time in the country.
They had good blood in their veins, but little or no money in their pockets, and they had to make their own way by the hardest of hard work—the sort of work that was done in those days, when men were men. Indeed, the history of their career is the most instructive thing that I can put into this casualchronicle, and I am glad I thought of it before too late.
The three brothers took up land, wild, uncleared land, together; each had his own piece, but neighboured the other two. With their own hands they felled trees and made fences, and built their huts and yards, dug and ploughed and milked and all the rest of it—these consumptive lads!—which seems to show that not only the right air, but strong exercise in it, is necessary for the complaint. They spent nothing in labour and next to nothing on food. They raised their own meat and vegetables, made their own candles—after awhile sold them as well—and their own soap; used wild honey for sugar, and indeed carried frugality to the finest point in every direction. As soon as they could marry they chose useful wives, who did not want servants, but would nurse the baby with one hand and scrub and wash and make butter with the other. When I paid the visit I speak of I found the children trotting about bare-footed, in linsey-woolsey (I forget how to spell that word) overalls, little sacks in shape, with two holes to put the legs through, in which they could make mud pies without spoiling anything. At dinner, after the mutton, there was a lovely apple pudding, as I thought; I remember my greedy chagrin at finding it was filled with quinces (so soon after the W—— quinces), to be eaten with wild honey instead of sugar. The jams were also made with wild honey, and the cakes and other sweets.
This was the way to get on in the world, and the fortunes of this household rose to the level of its deserts. Soon after I had made his acquaintance, the house-father took a trip home, leaving his admirable wife to keep things going in his absence.He came back with three young Jackaroos, sons of the good families associated with his own, enterprising lads with money and a desire for the life he had made successful; they paid him high premiums for instruction, and he set them on his farm work—which was far better, from his point of view, than paying professional labourers to do it. One of them felt aggrieved at being kept at milking and fencing within such narrow bounds, and ran away and was never heard of more—by me; the other two, and more who followed them, bought stations and took root in the country, which they have made their own.
So this plan of the relays of paying instead of paid labourers increased the resources of our friend, and he started upon fresh enterprises. He parted with his much-improved holding, settled his family in a town where the growing children could go as day scholars to one of the best public schools, and started for "out back" in Queensland. Land speculation here was a big thing, with big money hanging to it, in those days; and he was the right man for the golden chance he saw. He took up country, no longer by acres but by miles, did something to it to give it a claim to be a civilised "property," sold it, and went back further to repeat the process.
In a short time he was a very wealthy man. I believe the Boom and its consequences gave him a bad set-back, but he could afford it. His family, in a fine town house, have lived the life of the rich for many years. The other surviving brother was of a slower temperament. He still sits, as Dik would say, upon the same land that he first squatted on—probably in the same house (with additions to it).He dairy-farms, as so many of his neighbours now do, getting up with his sons in the middle of the night to milk and to drive the load of cans to the Butter Factory near by. He still works hard, and he has not made his fortune. A quiet, staunch, useful man in shire and church and all the relations of life, and "as good as they make 'em." Both are good, and their country would be the better of a few more of the same sort.
And to think that it was all due to the accident of climate! For one may be almost sure it was.
Walk some fresh spring or autumn morning up those hills, as I used to do—having always loved to kill two birds with one stone, and three birds if possible, I would at those seasons take my work there, so as to combine business with pleasure and with profit to my health—and you will feel that you are literally drinking the elixir of life. A week ago I went to call on an old friend come back from England, after some years' residence there—her husband had been one of those very Jackaroos of whom I have just been speaking—and she told me she had been for a trip up to B——, where she had once lived, while we were there. "I had forgotten," she said, "what that air was. It was a new revelation to me. There certainly can be nothing like it in the world"—and she had been travelling extensively. Yes, although I was ill there, and felt that nothing but the sea would cure me, I go back now at intervals, when the sea has temporarily failed in its effects, and I get the same surprise that she did, every time. I step out upon the little platform in the clear, cold night, at the end of my long journey from the muggy city, and that stuff that I draw into my expanding lungs makes a new creature of me in three breaths.
Well, those mornings in the hills ... let me try to describe one of them—in April, let us say.
It begins with a nipping-cold bath and a roaring fire to breakfast by. But while we pile the logs on the hearth we also set wide the two door-windows to the sun. The meal and little housekeepings disposed of, I look out over the tree-fern on the rockery to the sky which I can see above the bank of new-blown chrysanthemums that line the upper fence—look at the cat basking full-length on the threshold—and fetch my big hat. Half an hour later I am in another world.
It is ten o'clock, and the sun has been shining with all its might since eight, yet the dew is thick on the steep and rugged track and on the little strips of lawn between the rocks; my stout boots, made on purpose for this rough work, and the hems of my petticoats are drenched. No delicate wild flowers in these verdant spaces now. The grass tufts are sprinkled with dead leaves and wisps of bark with the colour bleached out of them. When those brittle shavings were freshly peeled their outsides were a rich chocolate tint and the insides a tender shade of lilac. They come from a large-leaved kind of gum-tree, and I have often carried bits home and laid them on my writing-table, merely to look at the colour, as if they were flowers; but they fade like flowers too.
11A.M.—I sit with pencil and paper on my knee. The sun has long since dried my skirts and is now burning my boots. I bask in the warmth and the matchless air, like the cat on the doorstep, and (having successfully dodged my dog) in the utmost solitude that can be imagined. Though the hidden town behind me is so near, I have only once,in scores of mornings, met a human being here—a local naturalist with a butterfly-net. Not even a bridle-track threads the thousand hills of which the one I sit on is as a single wave in a heaving sea—a sea flowing to the horizon. The distant ranges and the sky are of hues that neither language nor pigment could give an idea of. The ranges are covered with trees, the rounded, feathery tops only showing, with the effect of plush or the bloom of downy fruit; their turquoise tint has a shade of indigo in it, deepening in the folds to an intenser colour. The sky is living blue light, without an earthly stain.
Nearer—more within the limits of this world—wooded and rocky slopes, darkly green against those heavenly blues, fold over unseen valleys at my feet; nearer still, the gum saplings, with the sun shining through their leaves, the sharply-contrasting spears of Murray pine, the tossed heaps of granite rocks, mossed, lichened, fern-fringed in shady crevices, the wattle tree that makes a frame for the beautiful whole. It will be a golden frame later on; to-day its blossoms are represented by crinkled buds of the size of a pin's head. Spiders' webs shine between twigs and the green blades under them. The light flashes up and down the little threads continually; they are never still, though there is hardly a stir of air.
But never was solitude less lonely. There is only too much companionship for the purpose I have in view. The leaves talk, although there is hardly a stir of air—the little tongues glitter at the edges as they swing and turn; and another voice accompanies them, one that never ceases and cannot be ignored. It belongs to a waterfall ina hidden gorge near by. The stream, yellower than any Tiber with the washings of gold mines, tumbles several hundreds of feet over a jagged staircase of rock to the valley beneath, and makes a great commotion at that place; here it is merely a purring, crooning whisper all the time. Birds are scarce, but every now and then a handful of minute brown things, with a delicate little unobtrusive twitter, scatter themselves around me. A crow comes and sits as near as he dare, to complain of my intrusion; perhaps he does not mean to complain, but his comment upon my presence seems a perfect wail of woe. As for the ground-dwellers—lizards, spiders, ants—they are constant company, and the most distracting of all with their complicated manœuvres, which are full of cultivated intelligence when you come to look into them, There was a time when the presence and curiosity of so many little active creatures seemed a drawback to the otherwise perfect charm of the place, but now I do not mind them any more than they mind me. The trouble is that I cannot mind them less. More and more I neglect my own business to watch them at theirs, until I have to recognise that this study would have to be given up, even if winter were not near.
Winter ... that word reminds me of other scenes. There is an entry in my journal against June 6th, 1887:—"Five hours' heavy snow. Five inches on the ground." And another for the same month two years later:—"Woke up to find everything white with snow. Four inches officially reported. Broke trees and bushes." Our distant ranges used to wear white caps for weeks together,and white mantles on occasion, but oh, the joy of shovelling snow in one's own garden! It rarely stayed long enough to be shovelled, but once in a way it did, and the first of the occasions cited is unforgetable, because it was the first.
All the year round we sleep with windows open; here the upper sash was pulled down level with the lower, and stayed so night and day; and that window was at the foot of the bed. In wakeful hours I could watch the stars shining through the branches of the trees, and trace the shadow-patterns of the moon when it was her night out. Accustomed to rise early, I rarely fail to note the first glimmer of the dawn, and the first shaft of sunlight was levelled straight at my eyes, as by a marksman ambushed behind the looking-glass. As the sun rose I used to lie with eyes half shut to see the dazzle of rainbow colours that then filled them—as likewise to see, involuntarily, how the room was swept and dusted. There was a beautiful rosy-blossomed tree framed by that open square—I forget its right name, the "Tree of Heaven" was that given it by the vulgar tongue (I think it belongs to Queensland)—and it was my almanac the year round. Every morning a little bud grew bigger, a frond uncurled a little more; as the days passed the foliage spread and thickened, the leaves yellowed, browned, and fluttered away. And then the rain would drive in and make a mess on the dressing-table. Or a wind blew down upon the bed, causing regrets for the eider-down imprudently discarded overnight when we were full of the warmth of the drawing-room fire. Or—wonderful and soul-stirring experience—snow.
On that morning of June 6th, 1887, I felt the peculiar snow-cold, without knowing what it was, when I got out of bed to take in my early cup of tea. I had finished it, and was enjoying a few peaceful minutes before going to the bathroom, gazing upon the bare tree-twigs and their background of leaden sky, when suddenly I perceived the picture speckled with fine white particles, and understood that it was snowing. In the twinkling of an eye I was into dressing-gown and slippers, calling up the house to look at the sight. The governess was an Englishwoman, who had not seen snow since leaving her Kentish village, and never expected to see it in Australia. I went to her room first, colliding with a maid who was rushing thither on the same errand; then to the nursery, where I found three little night-gowned figures already at the window, flattening three little noses against the glass. The children were chattering and shouting with delight. The fine white particles had become substantial flakes by this time, and were dusting the roofs and bushes to an extent that promised snowballs presently; and the two small boys were wild at the prospect of fights in the street on their way to school. Australian boys of British parentage take as naturally to snowballing as to plum-pudding; you would think, to see them at it, that it was their regular winter amusement. The bath tap flowed unheeded, until the water overflowed on to the floor; the fowls invaded the sacred precincts of a beautifully-kept kitchen, and walked about there unmolested; the cat got on the table and drank the milk. It was washing-day, but no one thought of that. Thesnowstorm was the one absorbing interest to everybody, except the father of the family, who likes his bed and is not in the habit of exciting himself.
When the postman came it had been snowing—good solid snow—for more than an hour, and as he tramped up the twelve white steps to the front door his feet sank an inch and a half into the soft carpet that covered them. Shrubs and trees, creepers and bushes were thick with snow. Masses of the delicate foliage of the marguerite daisy and some young pepper trees sent us into raptures with their beauty, for there was no wind to shake them. So did some old fences smothered in green creepers, the long sprays and trails of which were as neatly covered as with hoar-frost. Each arching blade of pampas-grass bore heaped-up ridges of snow, and the feathery heads looked as if they had been dipped into cake-icing, as if nothing that was not sticky could have adhered so thickly to such unsubstantial things. Every laurel leaf held a sausage-roll of snow. The corrugated iron roofs were dazzlingly white and smooth—two or three inches of snow in every groove. The back-yard and orchard were a white plain, the latter diversified with weeds and suckers that never looked so beautiful before, the naked fruit-trees being loaded with the white powder on every branch and twig. Beyond the outer fence on one side there was a mass of furze bushes, covering a piece of waste land; all this was white, too, stretching away to the grey sky.
It was amusing to see the consternation of the fowls when they were let out. They had never seen snow before, and did not know what to make of it. They tried to walk through it, and they tried to eatit; they flew from point to point and back again, craning their necks from side to side, in search of the earth that had disappeared. They took refuge in the kitchen under dressers and tables, and, when driven thence, under the fowl-house walls, where they stood all day, each on a single leg, with feathers puffed up, the picture of patient misery. The cat had left her kittens in an outhouse before the snow began, and afterwards proposed to return to them. She daintily sounded the snow with her fore-paw, mewed piteously, and in the end went back to the kitchen and left the kittens to their fate. But she was, for a dumb animal, a singularly bad mother. The first time she had kittens she overlaid and suffocated them, and the second batch she carried from a warm bed in the middle of the night, and in a tempest of rain, while they were yet blind and helpless, and deposited them beside an overflowing water-tank, so that when they were found they were so drowned and chilled that it took a whole day's nursing to bring them round.
This was the state of things at half-past eight. It snowed, without stopping for a minute, until twelve, when the drift was six inches in some places, and in others a foot. All the heads of pampas-grass were broken off, borne down with the weight; and stout myrtle and box bushes, which had taken the snow solidly, were trailing to the ground with their stems splitting. We had one tree-fern that rose from the centre of a rockery, and spread itself over it like a handsome umbrella. It stood in front of the dining-room windows, and was an object of constant interest to the family, which always knew when it started a new frond and how it was getting on generally. At twelve o'clockferntree and rockery were one smooth white mound—the snow covered the whole thing completely; not so much as a green tip the size of a pin's head stuck out anywhere. Even the native gums had managed to catch and accumulate the soft flakes, so that they looked as if full of white blossoms; wattles were bent and loaded like the pepper-trees, while the great pines would not have disgraced a Canadian winter forest. Such a sight had not been seen in that town since it was planted in the mountains in the old gold days. We neglected all our work to gaze upon it. And then a little wind began to blow through the white stillness, and there were signs that the snow was going to turn to rain. Huge masses fell from roof eaves and boughs, falling with a soft but heavy thud upon the garden beds and paths, which had been so smooth and spotless. "Pure as untrodden snow"—that is a good phrase. How dazzlingly pure it is! I know it is silly to say these things to an English reader, but let him be an exile for seventeen years, as I had been, and see how a snow-storm will strike him then. It brought to my home-sick heart memories of the old days of youth, before one realised that there was such a place as Australia in the world; visions of flat fen marshes, all black, white, and grey, like a photograph—of frozen meres fringed with pollard willows, and dry reed-beds rattling in the wind—of old snowballings, old skatings, old walks with old sweethearts on the ringing roads, old talks by the winter firesides ... things unspeakable.
By half-past twelve the rain had come, the snow was going. It was already slushy about the doors, semi-transparent under eaves and branches. More and bigger lumps of it slid and fell, revealing thebroken limbs of the trees that had seemed so strong, but were not strong enough for the weight they had had to bear. The boys had come home with rosy faces and exulting mien, their collars limp as rags, their boots and stockings saturated, their coats plastered with melting snow. They had had as good a snowballing as England could have given them—one they will not forget as long as they live.
But the common winter day up there was, in fine weather, a thing beyond words. The nipping and eager temperature, the iced pools and frosted grass in the shadows, the dazzling sun in the open, the diamond glitter and transparency of the air through which one viewed the sapphire-blue ranges miles away, the ringing granite roads, that knew neither mud nor dust, the exhilaration, the invigoration, the pure joy of life....
And I left this sweet place hard-heartedly, without a pang. So did G. His dignity of Rural Dean was laid aside with no more regret than I felt for the old frocks that I gave away because they were not worth packing. We were Bush folks no more. He was going to be "town clergy," and no unimportant member of that much-envied band; and I was going to live with books and other stirring things—the "larger life," which somehow never proves quite deserving of its name. And we were going nearer to England than we had yet been. The day after I knew "all satisfactorily settled," I began sorting, clearing up, dismantling—a job I love only a few degrees less than the rebuilding of a new home out of chaos. "The nuisance of moving!" is a lamentation one hears often from those who have to do it; nobody ever heard it from me. It puzzles me how any housewife, interested in having her things nice,can fail to enjoy such an opportunity for putting new ideas in practice. I have thoroughly enjoyed it eight times, and should like nothing better than to move again to-morrow, provided it were to the right place—the place that I am so long getting to that I almost despair of seeing it again.
We were moving now too far to take all the furniture with us; in bulk it was not valuable enough to be worth the heavy railway charges. So I packed the special treasures and all else that I could, and, leaving G. to struggle with the sale and the final farewells, preceded him to Melbourne, that I might lay the foundations of the new home before he came to it.