My Brilliant Career (34 page)

I got it hot. Had I committed an act of premeditated villainy I could not have received more lecturing. I deserved it—I was careless, cups were scarce with us, and we could not afford more; but what I rail against is the grindingly uneventful narrowness of the life in which the unintentional breaking of a common cup is good for a long scolding.

Ah, my mother! In my life of nineteen years I can look back and see a time when she was all gentleness and refinement, but the polish has been worn off it by years and years of scrubbing and scratching, and washing and patching, and poverty and husbandly neglect, and the bearing of burdens too heavy for delicate shoulders. Would that we were more companionable, it would make many an oasis in the desert of our lives. Oh that I could take an all-absorbing interest in patterns and recipes, bargains and orthodoxy! Oh that you could understand my desire to feel the rolling billows of the ocean beneath, to hear the pealing of a great organ through dimly lit arches, or the sob and wail of a violin in a brilliant crowded hall, to be swept on by the human stream.

Ah, thou cruel fiend—Ambition! Desire!

Soul of the leaping flame, Heart of the scarlet fire, Spirit that hath for name Only the name—Desire!

To hot young hearts beating passionately in strong breasts, the sweetest thing is motion.

No, that part of me went beyond my mother's understanding. On the other hand, there was a part of my mother—her
brave cheerfulness, her trust in God, her heroic struggle to keep the home together—which went soaring on beyond my understanding, leaving me a coward-weakling, grovelling in the dust.

Would that hot dreary day never close? What advantage when it did? The next and the next and many weeks of others just the same were following hard after.

If the souls of lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which naught but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling and out of tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin pot.

Why do I write? For what does anyone write? Shall I get a hearing? If so—what then?

I have voiced the things around me, the small-minded thoughts, the sodden round of grinding tasks—a monotonous, purposeless, needless existence. But patience, O heart, surely I can make a purpose! For the present, of my family I am the most suited to wait about common public-houses to look after my father when he is inebriated. It breaks my mother's heart to do it; it is dangerous for my brothers; imagine Gertie in such a position! But me it does not injure; I have the faculty for doing that sort of thing without coming to harm, and if it makes me more bitter and godless, well, what matter?

The next letter I received from Gertie contained:

Happy, butterfly-natured Gertie! I envied her. With Gertie's letter came also one from Grannie, with further mention of Harold Beecham.

Travel was indeed an unexpected development on the part of Harold Beecham. He had such a marked aversion to anything of that sort, and never went even to Sydney or Melbourne for more than a few days at a stretch, and that on business or at a time of stock shows.

There were many conjectures re the motive of his visit to Possum Gully, but I held my peace.

A. L. GORDON. Possum Gully, 25th March, 1899

Christmas, only distinguished from the fifty-two slow Sundays of the year by plum pudding, roast turkey, and a few bottles of homemade beer, has been once more; New Year, ushered in with sweet-scented midsummer wattle and bloom of gum and box tree has gone; February has followed, March is doing likewise, and my life is still the same.

What the future holds I know not, and am tonight so weary that I do not care.

Time rules us all. And life, indeed, is not the thing we planned it out, ere hope was dead; And then, we women cannot choose our lot.

Time is thorough in his work, and as that arch-cheat, Hope, gradually becomes a phantom of the past, the neck will grow inured to its yoke.

Tonight is one of the times when the littleness—the abject littleness—of all things in life comes home to me.

After all, what is there in vain ambition? King or slave, we all must die, and when death knocks at our door, will it matter
whether our life has been great or small, fast or slow, so long as it has been true—true with the truth that will bring rest to the soul?

But the toughest lives are brittle, and the bravest and the best lightly fall—it matters little; Now I only long for rest.

To weary hearts throbbing slowly in hopeless breasts the sweetest thing is rest.

And my heart is weary. Oh, how it aches tonight—not with the ache of a young heart passionately crying out for battle, but with the slow, dead ache of an old heart returning vanquished and defeated!

Enough of pessimistic snarling and grumbling! Enough! Enough! Now for a lilt of another theme:

I am proud that I am an Australian, a daughter of the Southern Cross, a child of the mighty bush. I am thankful I am a peasant, a part of the bone and muscle of my nation, and earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, as man was meant to do. I rejoice I was not born a parasite, one of the bloodsuckers who loll on velvet and satin, crushed from the proceeds of human sweat and blood and souls.

Ah, my sunburnt brothers!—sons of toil and of Australia! I love and respect you well, for you are brave and good and true. I have seen not only those of you with youth and hope strong in your veins, but those with pathetic streaks of gray in your hair, large families to support, and with half a century sitting upon your work-laden shoulders. I have seen you struggle uncomplainingly against flood, fire, disease in stock, pests, drought, trade depression, and sickness, and yet have time to extend your hands and hearts in true sympathy to a brother in misfortune, and spirits to laugh and joke and be cheerful.

And for my sisters a great love and pity fills my heart. Daughters of toil, who scrub and wash and mend and cook, who are dressmakers, paperhangers, milkmaids, gardeners, and candle-makers all in one, and yet have time to be cheerful and tasty in your homes, and make the best of the few oases to be found along the narrow, dusty track of your existence. Would that I were more worthy to be one of you—more a typical Australian peasant—cheerful, honest, brave!

I love you, I love you. Bravely you jog along with the rope of class distinction drawing closer, closer, tighter, tighter around you: a few more generations and you will be as enslaved as were ever the muzhiks of Russia. I see it and know it, but I cannot help you. My ineffective life will be trod out in the same round of toil—I am only one of yourselves, I am only an unnecessary, little, bush commoner, I am only a—woman!

The great sun is sinking in the west, grinning and winking knowingly as he goes, upon the starving stock and drought-smitten wastes of land. Nearer he draws to the gum-tree-scrubby horizon, turns the clouds to orange, scarlet, silver flame, gold! Down, down he goes. The gorgeous, garish splendor of sunset pageantry flames out; the long shadows eagerly cover all; the kookaburras laugh their merry, mocking good-night; the clouds fade to turquoise, green, and gray; the stars peep shyly out; the soft call of the mopoke arises in the gullies! With much love and good wishes to all—Good night! Good-bye!

AMEN.