Thirty Years in Australia

Why does the Australian pastoralist provide free board and lodging for every loafer that comes for them, instead of kicking him out and telling him to go to work? Because he knows how easily and safely the loafer could avenge himself if sent empty away – and how well the loafer knows that he knows it. There is a tacit understanding between them. The wise blackmailer is easy in his demands – the regulation allowance and no more – and the blackmailed is glad to purchase valuable good-will at no greater cost. It is one of the oldest institutions of the country, which even we upon our hundred acres would not have dared to flout. Our wealthy but frugal neighbour did, as we were told, and reaped the consequences – which would not have mattered much if the undeserving poor had not stood in the path of the reaper. Thus, for weeks together, G. and his man never put up their horses at night until they had circled round and round the place, looking for little trails of dead sticks and straw carefully led into a fat paddock that was not ours, as a fuse to a mine. One Sunday night, on the way home from church, without looking for them – because they were all alight, though refusing to burn effectively without a wind – he found three.

This was in what we call the "fire year." That summer we had ten in almost ten consecutive days, each of which menaced the mass of old sun-dried woodwork in which we lived. Two horses stood ready to mount at the first signal, every homestead around being similarly prepared. We slept with blinds up and windows open, and anyone waking would at once jump up and go out and look into the night for the dreaded flare. No matter where it was, or when, the men were off to it with the speed of professional firemen; and if it was near, or the wind towards us, we women started to make bucketsful of tea to send out to them. Helpless with a new-born baby, I used to lie and smell the smoke and listen to the flap of the bags, and wonder what was happening, and nearly died from want of rest. One morning one of us unluckily remarked that "actually here was breakfast nearly over, and no fire!" Scarcely were the words uttered before the groom appeared with his "Fire, sir!" and the next instant both were galloping across the downs, to join other horsemen converging from all points of the compass upon the same spot. It was Saturday morning, and that battle lasted into Sunday, when we could have walked, we were told, ten miles in a straight line from our back door without going off burnt ground. One other morning, when I was well enough for a drive and wanted to do some shopping, and it seemed safe to leave home for an hour or two, G. took me to the township. We were hurrying through our business in the street when a man came up and said to G., "There's a fire over your way, sir." We had a pair of very fast horses, and we flew down those hills in record time. Reaching home, we found our good neighbours pouring water over the charred posts of the garden fence.

Of course, this was not all incendiarism. Even the aggrieved sundowner is not so bad as that. Under suitable conditions, nothing is easier than to start a blaze that flies out of your hand before you see the spark. A castaway bottle, a little ash knocked out of a pipe, will do it. My own eyes have proved to me from what a small cause a great conflagration may result. A cavalcade of vehicles from M – , while we were staying there, was on the road to church; it was a well-used, fenced Bush road, all dust and wild peppermint weed – a fire-break in itself, one would have thought. But I, in the second buggy, saw a flicker under the wheel of the first; it ran from one scrap of tinder to another and was away over the country before one could draw breath. "Like wildfire" is the best image for speed that I know. It used to pour over those grassy rises just as released water does, a spreading black stream with a scintillating yellow edge; not a menace to life as in forest country, but sickening to the heart of one who knows his home to windward of it, and knows the frailty of the most carefully-prepared "break." The buggies were stopped, the men in their Sunday coats out and after it on the instant, but there was no church that day for any male of the party except the parson. An examination of the spot where the fire started showed that the buggy wheel had passed over a wax match. The unwritten law of the Bush is that no matches must come into it, at these times, except the wooden ones guaranteed to strike on the box only.

The "fire year" – or the fire summer rather (1879-80) – is literally burnt into my memory. Now, when I smell Bush smoke I feel as I would at the sudden sight of blood in large quantities. All those old scenes come back, and the old terror of the nerves, which were strained so long that the effect upon me was something like what in pre-scientific days was called going into a decline. My strength refused to return after the birth of the child that arrived in the middle of the ordeal, so that at last I had to be sent away out of sight, sound, and smell of the place, to give me a chance to recover. But the worst was over before I went. We were sitting at tea one night – evening dinners, by the way, had early been given up – when there suddenly fell upon our ears the sound of rain pattering. We nearly jumped from our chairs; we looked at each other, beyond speech; and then I burst into a fit of hysterical tears – some of the happiest I ever shed.

In the evening a neighbour rode over – for the first time, as he remarked, without his sack on the saddle, and for the first time on any errand unconnected with its use. We had all been keeping guard of our homes for weeks that had seemed years, friends meeting only on the field of battle – as heroic a field of battle as those that our "contingenters" went to, and better than the playing-fields of Eton as a preparation for them; but we were free at last. And we could hardly realise it. All the evening we sat, almost in silence, inanely smirking at each other and listening to the rain. It was too sweet a sound to drown with talk.

The "old parsonage" was (allowing again for the enchantment that distance lends) a charming home; but it had that against it. I have been glad ever since to live where there is nothing more to do than turn the gas off at the meter when one goes to bed.

CHAPTER XII

THE SIXTH HOME

The charms of solitude at "The Old Parsonage" were outweighed by its disadvantages when I became that miserable creature, the confirmed invalid. The fire danger which made me nervous in summer was bad for health; the silence and loneliness of the winters, when nobody came, were worse. My husband, of course, was much away from home; the servants lived in their detached house; and so good and capable were they that for a time – after the elder babies began to go with Miss C. to school – I saved the expense of my dear little lady-help, who, however, came back to me later on. It was only with the greatest difficulty that I could get hold of my own children. Their devoted nurse and mine, already mentioned, watched us like a cat to keep us apart, lest their exuberance should fatigue me. The hour before tea (not afternoon tea, but the solid evening meal) was grudgingly conceded to us. Maria – she, like Dik, is dead, and I may give her the name now held in so much love and honour – would then bring them, beautifully brushed and garbed (she used to put clean socks and pinafores on them twice a day, although there was nobody but ourselves to see them), to my sofa side, and permit us to play together, provided we behaved ourselves. All the while she hovered in the doorway to see that I was not clambered over or roughly handled in any way, and long before time was up would advance to sweep them out, with her "Come now, I can see that mother is getting tired." She saw it before I did. They were as good as gold, thanks to her splendid training. Never were such model children – until the day that, as a broken-hearted bride, she parted from them, when they "played up" in a manner to drive the house distracted. When they had their little aches and pains, and I used to beg Maria to let them sleep in my room, she would not allow it. Many a time have I surreptitiously carried a fretful child to my bed, and settled down with it comfortably, as I thought, and then had it gently but firmly taken from me, despite my expostulations. I had, at anyrate, the comfort of knowing that no mother could tend them better than she did, and the theory of the household that I was not strong enough to stand anything had some foundation in fact. But my inactive life – although I still got through a large amount of sewing and novel-writing – and my many hours of brooding solitude, had their own bad effect upon my broken health. There came a day when I declared, with tears, that if I had to spend another winter in that place I should go melancholy mad.

So I did not spend another. G. also had had enough of it. And particularly he wanted to get back to the Melbourne diocese, from which he had been automatically expelled. But although he had been automatically expelled, his old diocese held him to be a legal stranger when he applied for re-admittance. It had a regulation, since abrogated, that no clergyman from outside could take a living until he had served unbeneficed for a year; and no exception was made in his peculiar case. However, we freely paid the price to get our way – exchanged our substantial parish, secure for life, had we so willed it, for a humble curacy, which might lead to anything or nothing – and on the 16th of November 1883 left the old parsonage for a home that was the greatest possible contrast to it – a grubby little terrace house in a low part of one of our premier cities – a house we had to take as the only one in our new parish that was then available. Our principal occupation and amusement during the short time that we lived there was hunting for another, which fortunately we had not found when the summons came to us again to move on.

But there was an interval between the uprooting in the Western District and the re-planting in this cramped spot – for the children and me. The elder ones were placed with some friends who kept a kindergarten at the seaside, and the baby and Maria accompanied me on a round of visits which lasted into January of the following year. This was perhaps the gayest period of my life, in spite of increasing invalidism. Socially it was the most brilliant era that Victoria has known in my time, and I was so placed that the best of everything came my way. The house that was my town head-quarters for many years then possessed its magnet of a daughter – now on the roll of the grandees of England, by her marriage an aunt to Royalty – and wherever she was, there was good company and plenty of it, for she had her pick and choice. And there for the time being was I also, for we were close friends, as we remain to this day, none of the usual arguments of the world against it having had any effect upon that faithful heart.

And this reminds me to make – as in these intimate disclosures I have an opportunity to do – a little explanation. When I wrote a novel called The Devastators, I knew that I was laying down a rule contradicted in my own circle by two glaring exceptions. This bright and beautiful woman is one of them; the other is a person still nearer to me. I had to apologise to both of them when that book came out. From their childhood they have been exposed to flatteries that should have spoiled them utterly; both have proved unspoilable. In the case of one of the pretty faces, it does not even care to look at itself in the glass; the mere ordinary vanity of the ordinary female is lacking. So that to this large extent my theory of the effect of physical charm upon its possessor is discredited. While I am glad to state the fact, I am sorry to remain of the opinion that such exceptions are exceptions, and that the rule is still the rule.

With the elder of the incorruptible pair – the younger was then a small child – I had great times in Melbourne, varying my social revels with a visit to the doctor twice or thrice a week. The distinguished globe-trotter was plentiful at that time. Lord and Lady Rosebery, amongst others, were touring the colonies and the houses of some of my friends. At one I spent three days with them. At another I had a still more interesting week-end with Archibald Forbes. He came nearest to the popular newspaper presentment of him, but I have little faith left in printed history when it deals with the inner lives of my illustrious contemporaries; from which it logically follows that I am a hopeless sceptic in respect of the printed history of the past. "It may have been thus," think I, when I con the so-called authentic records of my race in this or that particular, "but I wish I could have been there to see for myself."

It is not for me, a fellow-guest, to play reporter, but some incidents of those occasions when I could study England and Australia in conjunction upon the domestic stage may be mentioned without offence to taste or hospitality. For instance: – One fine afternoon the house-party, which included the Roseberys, went out to the tennis ground of the establishment. When we arrived there we found the beautiful grass court, kept like a bowling green, in the possession of a crowd of strangers, holiday trippers of the 'Arry and 'Arriet type; they had invaded the grounds from the railway near by, had found racquets and balls, and were in the middle of an exciting game. Did they scurry away, scared, on the appearance of the smart folks from the house? Did anybody order them off, or even request them to desist? Not a bit of it. They calmly continued their game, which took a long time, while we sat down meekly and waited. When they had quite done they trooped away without a word, and then Lord Rosebery wearily took up his racquet and started in. Typically Australian as this incident was, I cannot imagine it happening to those older great houses spoken of in a former chapter – houses of no particular size, as far as their material fabric is concerned, and with no liveried servants attached to them, but of a dignity secure of public respect, even in this disrespectful country.

Male house-servants, by the way, and men's valets, seem to me quite out of harmony with the domestic traditions of this land. With us they mark no caste, save that of wealth, and belong mainly to those who do not know what to do with them. I have sat at breakfast with a regiment of men in full-dress livery in waiting round the table – a degree of state that, to the best of my belief, an English duke dispenses with – and this in a house with no morning-room to go to when breakfast was over, but only the same gilded and satiny drawing-room used over-night; and where guests who had never done such a thing in their lives might find themselves put to sleep in the same room with strangers. A young titled Englishman, to whom this happened, cut his acquaintance with the place in consequence, although his entertainers never knew it. My "old families" are very chary of these exotic innovations, and, whatever one's aristocratic leanings, it does hurt one to think of an Australian man – synonym for simple and hardy manliness – submitting to be dressed and coddled by a trousered lady's-maid, and to think of another Australian man condescending to that sort of servitude. But no Australian man does condescend to it, I am sure; the Australian valet, as well as his liveried house-mates, is an imported article.

Against the lady's-maid in petticoats, who outnumbers him a hundred to one, I have nothing to say – quite the contrary. She is a "grateful and comforting" institution in this country, so far as I have known her, and three representatives of her class are on my list of friends. I like a lady's-maid myself at times, and my own Maria took up the rôle as one to the manner born when she and I were visiting "the quality" together. She packed and unpacked, and sewed tuckers, and laid out my evening clothes, and was as jealous of my dignity and her own, amongst strange servants, as if we had been grandees all our lives. I was envied the possession of her. "How do you come to have a woman like that?" said a person of wealth and consequence to me one day. "Why doesn't she go to the good houses? She would be snapped up anywhere. She could command any wages she liked to ask." "Well," said I, with a serene smile, "you offer her a better place. I will not stand in her way if she likes to take it." Maria's father was overseer of a great station, and she had never been in service until she came to me. I knew no bribe short of a husband and home of her own would entice her to leave me.

Charming associations surround the spot where I foregathered with the great war correspondent. There is a Mount – for it is not quite a mountain, while it is much more than a hill – situated forty-four miles from Melbourne and about seventeen hundred feet above it. In its natural state every inch was covered with forest trees and scrub, so that our mutual friend and host, who was one of the first to make a residential suburb of it, had to chop out a hole in the dense growth upon the steep hill-side to see where he was, when prospecting for a site on which to make a home. That home, when I began to frequent it, had become the show-place of the district. The pretty house made no pretensions to be more than a cottage, but the garden was notoriously one of the loveliest in the land. Its owner was a gardener born; he came up twice a week to his family from his business in town and his bachelor quarters at the Melbourne Club, and revelled in his darling pursuit through all his leisure hours. His head gardener was an importation from famous gardens at home; he had a salary of £200 a year, a house in the grounds, and two men under him; and all their work was exquisite. The garden dropped down and down, from the terrace that had been cut for the house to stand on, to an artificial lake at the bottom – velvet lawns and precious trees and shrubs, with a "fern gully" on one side of it, where you stepped down a glade dark with arching fronds, protecting thickets of innumerable rare varieties, from New Zealand and elsewhere, kept moist and cooled by a perennial cascade of crystal-clear mountain water, punctuated at intervals by pools with goldfish or water-flowers in them. In the spring that fairy tunnel was carpeted with lilies of the valley in myriads – the only place where I have seen them growing in this country, except in flower-pots. Up under the verandah roofs red bells of lapageria used to hang like a drapery, and the treasures of the unpretentious glass houses into which the sitting-rooms opened were beyond count. It was a fitting environment for one of the finest flower-painters of her day – known far beyond the limits of these realms, as, indeed, so is the place which reared her. Many a globe-trotter would recall it if he chanced to read these words. The Prince of Wales and his brother, when they were boys, stayed here; their noble chief took the opportunity to choose a wife for himself out of the house, a sister of the gifted lady who painted flowers so marvellously, and with whom Archibald Forbes fell – in a strictly platonic fashion, of course, for she was already married and he about to become so for the second time – so deeply in love. He raved about her in an English magazine article after he got home. He said she was … but there is the article (in a bound volume) to speak for itself.

It was winter when I went to this house to meet him. Beautiful as the place was in warmer seasons, abloom with flowers, when one sat under trees to read, and, looking up from one's book, looked down again upon the glimmering city and the sea fifty miles away, I think it was in winter that I liked it best. Oh, it was cold! Wrapped about with mountain mists or with whirling snow, it was like an Alpine chalet; but one came in out of this weather to great wood-fires with cushioned basket-chairs beside them – a fire to each room – and that was an effect that could not have been surpassed. It poured with rain on the night I speak of. I was staying at a neighbouring country-house, and joined the Saturday party coming up from town at a wayside station. A son of my host, who had been through the Russo-Turkish war with Archibald Forbes – one on one side, one on the other – was with them; and fine company they made, with their deadly reminiscences. They had met on the bloody field of Plevna, the most vivid incident of which, it appeared, was a banquet upon a looted German sausage (I think it was) when both were starving.

We passed, in dripping mackintoshes, across the little platform lonely in the scrub – there is a considerable station there now, and the Mount is populous with country-houses – to the covered waggonette awaiting us. Up the steep and miry Bush track, then like any other Bush track, the poor horses strained and struggled, slipped and fell. The men had to get out and do the climb on foot. It was pitchy dark, and the trees closed us round. But presently we turned in at a gate and passed through the perfect garden to the lighted house – the blazing bedroom fire to dress by, the glowing drawing-room hearth to gather around afterwards, the exhilarating dinner and evening talk. Mr Forbes had just come from New Zealand, and that country had enchanted him. He had roamed the earth – Switzerland, Norway, the Rockies, the Yosemite, all the famous beauty spots – but never, he declared, had he seen anything to match New Zealand scenery. A coach drive through the Otira Gorge had simply turned his head. The husband of the flower-painter had captained British troops in the Maori wars, and the house happened to possess a fine collection of New Zealand photographs, bound in several volumes. These I spent a long Sunday morning over, while Mr Forbes descanted upon the pages as I turned them. I made a promise to myself and him that not many years should pass before I saw the originals of those pictures, but – as a matter of course – I have not seen them yet. In my sadder moments I am convinced that I never shall. There was no church upon the mountain then – only a little school-house where, on alternate Sunday afternoons, an Anglican clergyman took a turn with his Presbyterian brother; on such occasions we ladies of the house brushed through the bracken-fern and woodland scrub to the humble tabernacle. My hostess played the harmonium; the potential Personage of the family led the singing. But on this wet and wintry Sunday we stayed at home. I had much friendly intercourse with our chief guest, and we corresponded afterwards. This was about four months before the gay time which included the Rosebery episode.

The diversions of that gay time soon palled upon me. I was glad to exchange my camp in town – lap of love as well as luxury though it was – for a home of my own, however 'umble. We collected ourselves in the little terrace house, which managed to hold us, a governess for the children included; and as soon as she had made us as comfortable as she could, Maria's ill-used young man came for her, and we lost a friend who could never be replaced. The 20th of February 1884 was her wedding-day, and no obsequies were ever celebrated with more pangs and tears.

Miss P., the new governess, was a treasure notwithstanding. A curate brother (he is a portly canon now), who wanted her for his housekeeper, reft her from me three months afterwards; and she is married, I hear, this long time, and I hope the man who has got her appreciates his luck. She had a handful with those children after Maria's influence was removed, but the way she managed them (in that confined space) made me envious of her moral vigour and the texture of her nerves.

When they were all disposed of for the night she and I used to take walks together. In my state of health, especially in the hot weather – and that was a particularly hot place – dressing and calling were too much for me; I waited until after dark, and then went out in about three garments, the most delightful costume that I ever wore in my life, and one to which I look back now with regret and longing unspeakable. Oh, why can we not relieve the inescapable fatigue of life in that way always, and not only for a few brief hours in thirty years! It was the heavenly fashion then to wear a long, light, loose paletot of China silk – the early dust-coat, before it had been spoiled. It buttoned at the throat and all down the front to the hem, which cleared the ground by about three inches. It had roomy pockets outside; the sleeves were roomy also; there was no need to wear a dress under it, nor anything whatever round the waist. I did not, and so walked with the sensations (as I should imagine them) of a disembodied spirit.