My Brilliant Career (29 page)

Every night unfailingly when at home M'Swat sat in the bosom of his family and speculated as to how much richer he was than his neighbors, what old Reece lived on, and who had the best breed of sheep and who was the smartest at counting these animals, until the sordidness of it turned me dizzy, and I would steal out under the stars to try to cool my heated spirit.
This became a practice with me, and every night I would slip away out of hearing of the household to sing the songs I had heard at Caddagat, and in imagination to relive every day and hour there, till the thing became too much for me, and I was scarcely responsible for my actions. Often I knelt on the parched ground beneath the balmy summer sky to pray—wild passionate prayers that were never answered.

I was under the impression that my nightly ramble was not specially noticed by anyone, but I was mistaken. Mr. M'Swat, it appears, suspected me of having a lover, but was never able to catch me red-handed.

The possibility of a girl going out at night to gaze at the stars and dream was as improbable a thought for him as flying is to me, and having no soul above mud, had I attempted an explanation he would have considered me mad, and dangerous to have about the place.

Peter junior had a sweetheart, one Susie Duffy, who lived some miles on the other side of the Murrumbidgee. He was in the habit of courting her every Sunday and two or three nights during the week, and I often heard the clang of his stirrup irons and the clink of hobble chain when he returned late; but on one occasion I stayed out later than usual, and he passed me going home. I stood still and he did not see me, but his horse shied violently. I thought he would imagine I was a ghost, so called out: “It is I.”

“Well, I'll be hanged! What are ye doin' at this time ev night? Ain't yuz afraid of ghosts?”

“Oh dear no. I had a bad headache and couldn't sleep, so came out to try if a walk would cure it,” I explained.

We were a quarter of a mile or so from the house, so Peter slackened his speed that I might keep pace with him. His knowledge of etiquette did not extend as far as dismounting. There is a great difference between rudeness and ignorance. Peter was not rude; he was merely ignorant. For the same reason he let his mother feed the pigs, clean his boots, and chop wood, while he sat down and smoked and spat. It was not that he was unmanly, as that this was the only manliness he had known.

I was alone in the schoolroom next afternoon when Mr. M'Swat sidled in, and after stuttering and hawing a little,
delivered himself of: “I want to tell ye that I don't hold with a gu-r-r-r-1 going out of nights for to meet young men: if ye want to do any coortin' yuz can do it inside, if it's a decent young man. I have no objections to yer hangin' yer cap up to our Peter, only that ye have no prawperty—in yerself I like ye well enough, but we have other views for Peter. He's almost as good as made it sure with Susie Duffy, an' as ole Duffy will have a bit ev prawperty I want him to git her, an' wouldn't like ye to spoil the fun.”

Peter was “tall and freckled and sandy, face of a country lout,” and, like Middleton's rouse-about, “hadn't any opinions, hadn't any ideas,” but possessed sufficient instinct and common bushcraft with which, by hard slogging, to amass money. He was developing a mustache, and had a “gu-r-r-r-l”; he wore tight trousers and long spurs; he walked with a sidling swagger that was a cross between shyness and flashness, and took as much pride in his necktie as any man; he had a kind heart, honest principles, and would not hurt a fly; he worked away from morning till night, and contentedly did his duty like a bullock in the sphere in which God had placed him; he never had a bath while I knew him, and was a man according to his lights. He knew there was such a thing as the outside world, as I know there is such a thing as algebra; but it troubled him no more than algebra troubles me.

This was my estimation of Peter M'Swat, junior. I respected him right enough in his place, as I trust he respected me in mine, but though fate thought fit for the present to place us in the one groove, yet our lives were unmixable commodities as oil and water, which lay apart and would never meet until taken in hand by the omnipotent leveller—death.

Marriage with Peter M'Swat!

Consternation and disgust held me speechless, and yet I was half inclined to laugh at the preposterousness of the thing, when Peter's father continued, “I'm sorry if you've got smitten on Peter, but I know you'll be sensible. Ye see I have a lot of children, and when the place is divided among 'em it won't be much. I tell ye wot, old Duffy has a good bit of money and only two children, Susie and Mick. I could get you to meet Mick—he mayn't be so personable as our Peter,” he reflected, with evident
pride in his weedy firstborn, and he got no further, for I had been as a yeast bottle bubbling up, and now went off bang!

“Silence, you ignorant old creature! How dare you have the incomparable impertinence to mention my name in conjunction with that of your boor of a son. Though he were a millionaire I would think his touch contamination. You have fallen through for once if you imagine I go out at night to meet anyone—I merely go away to be free for a few minutes from the suffocating atmosphere of your odious home. You must not think that because you have grasped and slaved and got a little money that it makes a gentleman of you; and never you
dare
to again mention my name in regard to matrimony with anyone about here.” And with my head high and shoulders thrown back I marched to my room, where I wept till I was weak and ill.

This monotonous, sordid life was unhinging me, and there was no legitimate way of escape from it. I formed wild plans of running away, to do what I did not care so long as it brought a little action, anything but this torturing, maddening monotony; but my love for my little brothers and sisters held me back. I could not do anything that would put me forever beyond the pale of their society.

I was so reduced in spirit that had Harold Beecham appeared then with a matrimonial scheme to be fulfilled at once, I would have quickly erased the fine lines I had drawn and accepted his proposal; but he did not come, and I was unacquainted with his whereabouts or welfare. As I remembered him, how lovable and superior he seemed in comparison with the men I met nowadays: not that he was any better than these men in their place and according to their lights, but his lights—at least not his lights, for Harold Beecham was nothing of a philosopher, but the furniture of the drawing room which they illuminated—was more artistic. What a prince of gentlemanliness and winning gallantries he was in his quiet way!

This information concerning him was in a letter I received from my grandmother at Easter:

Teaching certainly had the effect upon me anticipated by Harold Beecham, but it was not the teaching but the place in which I taught which was doing the mischief—good, my mother termed it.

I was often sleepless for more than forty-eight hours at a stretch, and cried through the nights until my eyes had black rings round them, which washing failed to remove. The neighbors described me as “a sorrowful lookin' delicate creetur, that couldn't larf to save her life”—quite a different character from the girl who at Caddagat was continually chid for being a romp, a hoyden, a boisterous tomboy, a whirlwind, and for excessive laughter at anything and everything. I got into such a state of nervousness that I would jump at the opening of a door or an unexpected footfall.

When cooling down, after having so vigorously delivered Mr. M'Swat a piece of my mind, I felt that I owed him an apology. According to his lights (and that is the only fair way of judging our fellows) he had acted in a kind of fatherly way. I was a young girl under his charge, and he would have in a measure been
responsible had I come to harm through going out in the night. He had been good-natured, too, in offering to help things along by providing an eligible, and allowing us to “spoon” under his surveillance. That I was of temperament and aspirations that made his plans loathsome to me was no fault of his—only a heavy misfortune to myself. Yes; I had been in the wrong entirely.

With this idea in my head, sinking ankle-deep in the dust, and threading my way through the pigs and fowls which hung around the back door, I went in search of my master. Mrs. M'Swat was teaching Jimmy how to kill a sheep and dress it for use; while Lizer, who was nurse to the baby and spectator of the performance, was volubly and ungrammatically giving instructions in the art. Peter and some of the younger children were away felling stringybark trees for the sustenance of the sheep. The fall of their axes and the murmur of the Murrumbidgee echoed faintly from the sunset. They would be home presently and at tea; I reflected it would be “The old yeos looks terrible skinny, but the hoggets is fat yet. By crikey! They did go into the bushes. They chawed up stems and all—some as thick as a pencil.”

This information in that parlance had been given yesterday, the day before, would be given today, tomorrow, and the next day. It was the boss item on the conversational program until further orders.

I had a pretty good idea where to find Mr. M'Swat, as he had lately purchased a pair of stud rams, and was in the habit of admiring them for a couple of hours every evening. I went to where they usually grazed, and there, as I expected, found Mr. M'Swat, pipe in mouth, with glistening eyes, surveying his darlings.

“Mr. M'Swat, I have come to beg your pardon.”

“That's all right, me gu-r-r-r-1.1 didn't take no notice to anything ye might spit out in a rage.”

“But I was not in a rage. I meant every word I said, but I want to apologize for the rude way in which I said it as I had no right to speak so to my elders. And I want to tell you that you need not fear me running away with Peter, even supposing he should honor me with his affections, as I am engaged to another man.”

“By dad, I'll be hanged!” he exclaimed, with nothing but curiosity on his wrinkled, dried, tobacco-leaf-looking face. He expressed no resentment on account of my behavior to him. “Are ye to be married soon? Has he got any prawperty? Who is he? I suppose he's respectable. Ye're very young.”

“Yes; he is renowned for respectability, but I am not going to marry him till I am twenty-one. He is poor, but has good prospects. You must promise me not to tell anyone, as I wish it kept a secret, and only mention it to you so that you need not be disturbed about Peter.”

He assured me that he would keep the secret, and I knew I could rely on his word. He was greatly perturbed that my intended was poor.

“Never ye marry a man widout a bit er prawperty, me gu-r-r-r-1. Take my advice—the divil's in a poor match, no matter how good the man may be. Don't ye be in a hurry; ye're personable enough in yer way, and there's as good fish in the seas as ever come out of 'em. Yer very small; I admire a good lump of a woman meself—but don't ye lose heart. I've heerd some men say they like little girls, but, as I said, I like a good lump of a woman meself.”

“And you've got a good lump of a squaw,” I thought to myself.

Do not mistake me. I do not for an instant fancy myself above the M'Swats. Quite the reverse; they are much superior to me. Mr. M'Swat was upright and clean in his morals, and in his little sphere was as sensible and kind a man as one could wish for. Mrs. M'Swat was faithful to him, contented and good-natured, and bore uncomplainingly, year after year, that most cruelly agonizing of human duties—childbirth, and did more for her nation and her Maker than I will ever be noble enough to do.

But I could not help it that their life was warping my very soul. Nature fashions us all; we have no voice in the matter, and I could not change my organization to one which would find sufficient sustenance in the mental atmosphere of Barney's Gap.

It chanced at last, as June gave place to July and July to August, that I could bear it no longer. I would go away even if I had to walk, and what I would do I did not know or care, my one idea being to leave Barney's Gap far and far behind. One evening I got a lot of letters from my little brothers and sisters at home. I fretted over them a good deal, and put them under my pillow; and as I had not slept for nights, and was feeling weak and queer, I laid my head upon them to rest a little before going out to get the tea ready.

The next thing I knew was that Mrs. M'Swat was shaking me vigorously with one hand, holding a flaring candle in the other, and saying, “Lizer, shut the winder quick. She's been lyin' here in the draught till she's froze, and must have the nightmare, the way she's been singin' out that queer, an' I can't git her woke up. What ails ye, child? Are ye sick?”

I did not know what ailed me, but learnt subsequently that I laughed and cried very much, and pleaded hard with Grannie and some Harold to save me, and kept reiterating, “I cannot bear it, I cannot bear it,” and altogether behaved so strangely that Mr. M'Swat became so alarmed that he sent seventeen miles for the nearest doctor. He came next morning, felt my pulse, asked a few questions, and stated that I was suffering from nervous prostration.