“But it is; it must have been true all along, without my knowing it. I swear it is now.”
“It’ll dish you up!”
“I don’t think it. The Archdeacon will forgive me; he’s a man himself, the most sympathetic of men. Besides, I needn’t go back to him; there are other fields. But — you? Is it — isn’t it — true of you?”
The answer came with the last red beams of the dying day, in the first hush of the twilight forest —
“My word!”
And now all that remains of that romance is a genial rector in the Old Country, with a wife who is not the less popular for being considered just a little colonial by the county.
THE POET OF JUMPING SANDHILLS
OLIVE was not to know it from the outward character of her reception, which maintained the best traditions of bush hospitality, but there had been a fairly strong prejudice against her on the station. It was no fault of hers, but a vicarious reproach which a very little knowledge of the girl herself sufficed to remove. Yet the inauspicious fact remained that her brother had been there before her, not as a guest, but in a somewhat responsible position in which he had failed to give signal satisfaction. It was many years ago, in Olive’s childhood, but Philip Armitage had been writing bush stories ever since, with that station and its mighty paddocks for the unmistakable background of the often impudent picture. In the silly Old Country he was said to be taken quite seriously as a representative Australian writer. If so, as Mr. Pochin averred, “it was about time those colonies paddled their own canoe”; but he and his at any rate knew the fellow for what he had been as a beardless boy in their midst. It was like his nerve to write and tell them when his young sister was going out for her health, which he described as having broken down after the strain of working for her B. A. degree. Ladies with B. A. degrees, with or without brothers who put people into books, were not wanted on Meringul Station, N. S. W. But after such a letter some little attention was the geographical necessity of an irksome situation. And so it came that Olive Armitage penetrated to the Riverina, in response to a justifiably indefinite invitation, and in happy ignorance of the literary and scholastic shadow that she cast before her.
Indeed, she had never felt prouder of. her brother than on the journey, to her a triumphal progress through scenes that seemed almost as much his handiwork as that of “nature learning how to write.” All through Victoria there were his forests of “weird” gum-trees, amply justifying their inseparable epithet, and in the Murray region the train put up a perfect cloud of sulphur-crested cockatoos. These were not Philip’s favorite scenes or properties, but he had written about them more than once. It was when she reached the coaching stage, from Denliquin to Hay and from Hay to Jumping Sandhills, that Miss Armitage felt like one of her brother’s heroines. To be sure, no dandy bushranger stuck up the coach; but that “vermilion vehicle” duly “panted” on its leather springs, as described by Philip with somewhat cynical iteration. And the road-side shanties were all that he had painted them; the Jumping Sandhills did shimmer and change places, like living things, on the brazen and blue horizon; and there at last was one of Philip’s own dilapidated horsemen, a figure of tantalizing interest, because there also was a tiresomely smart young man, come to meet her in an equally smart buggy, and introducing himself unconstrainedly as Godfrey Pochin.
“I remember your brother perfectly,” said the young man, smiling at the long tails of the pair he drove. “I was one of his pupils. He taught us Latin grammar and sentences, and a lot of extraordinary rhymes about Latin genders. I remember some of them still, but I can’t say they come in extra handy in the back-blocks.”
Olive laughed quite heartily.
“Poor old boy, he had only just escaped from school himself,” she urged in Philip’s defence; “he was obliged to teach you something he knew!”
But she was greatly tickled, and Godfrey Pochin as pleasantly surprised as he had been by her merry interesting face and sparkling eyes. She was dark, too, and he had an idea that all the girls from Home were pink and yellow; the only difference between this one and a bush brunette was that Olive had not been sunburnt from the cradle, but had turned the very color of her own name without losing her sweet English purity of skin. Neither was she quite blinded by the reflected lustre of her brother’s notoriety. She could see the humor of some of Godfrey’s reminiscences, the new point of view of Philip’s stories. The point of view was not obtruded, so her loyal reserves were not called out in defence of the stories, nor her lips sealed on the subject of their local color.
“It’s all exactly as I pictured it,” she declared at the station itself: “this red-brick veranda, these white posts, those other little buildings — the wire fences and the crows — the corrugated roofs — there! That’s the very noise he says they make in the heat! There’s only one thing he seems to me wrong about, but he should really be forgiven much for that — because I haven’t met a single one of his characters!”
This was when they were all at tea. There was a slightly chilling pause.
“I don’t think you’ll meet them here,” said Mr. Pochin, gazing into his cup. He was himself the fair-bearded and blue-eyed squatter of half the tales, but Olive did not see it till she had spoken, because the beard had grown gray and was close-cropped. But now she realized that Philip had never done justice to her courteous and attentive host.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” the girl colored up as she explained. “I was thinking of the picturesque people in red shirts and spurs, not of what he’s pleased to call the parlor folk.”
“That’s good!” said Godfrey, encouraging her tentative smile with a broad grin. “That’s one of the sayings that evidently sank into Mr. Armitage.”
“I was thinking,” insisted Olive, “of his little army of lost angels in the shape of gentlemanly whim-drivers, boundary-riders, and bushrangers.”
“My whim-drivers and boundary-riders don’t answer to that description,” replied the squatter, laughing. “And as for bushrangers, Miss Armitage, the Kellys were the last authentic gang, and that was some years before your brother was out here.”
“But surely you have the stockman and the tramp who have seen better days?”
“I’ve no doubt we have, but they don’t always give it away for our benefit.”
And the blue eyes twinkled merrily with the hit, at which Godfrey and Olive laughed outright.
“What about old Stafford?” asked Fred, an elder son of fewer words; and Mrs. Pochin and the girls, who began to wish they had been with Godfrey to meet, the coach, remarked that they had just been thinking of old Stafford.
“To be sure!” cried Mr. Pochin. “He’s the nearest thing of the kind we’ve got to show. I was forgetting Stafford. He’s a poet.”
“A poet?” queried Olive, politely sceptical. It was a word of which she thought she knew the value, and she could not help looking amused.
“When he isn’t riding my boundaries or minding my sheep,” said Mr. Pochin, chuckling consumedly. “Quite a character, Stafford; you must see him for yourself, and tell us what your brother would have made of him.”
“We did see him, at the sandhills,” Godfrey informed Miss Armitage and the company— “waiting for his Bulletin as usual.”
He had no need to remind their visitor of the dilapidated horseman who had met the coach on his own account. Her single glimpse of him had appealed to Olive more than she cared to say in such civilized company, yet now her interest would have been greater if she had not seen him. That a poet! They all laughed at the serio-comic face that she made at the thought; for of course she was right, and those of them who had seen any of the lucubrations encouraged her dismay, while the laconic Fred found words to denounce the best of them as a barefaced imitation of Harvey Devlin. Poor Devlin most mercurial of bush ballad-mongers, but a true singer in his own compass, still enjoyed a posthumous popularity in the bush itself, if not such universal fame as his indigenous admirers imagined; but it so happened that
Olive Armitage, who thought she knew something about it, was a recent convert to their creed. She had bought the little selection of the real thing in Melbourne, and she wished to hear no more about the false. But here Godfrey had a word to say, and it was strangely in favor of the plagiarist and an early visit to his hut; in fact it so happened that Godfrey himself would have to be going out there next day, with some things the old man had been asking for that afternoon, and he seemed quite anxious to take Olive with him.
“You’ll really rather like the old chap, Miss Armitage,” said Godfrey. “He’s a bit mad, but perfectly harmless, and I believe myself that he’s only just missed being a genius. You should see all the extraordinary mad mottoes and things he’s got plastered about the place!”
Olive saw them. They were stuck all over a hut otherwise as familiar to her as though she had been brought up in such another. She looked at once for the wide log chimney, with the white ash of ages on the hearth, the billy-can in the ashes, the slush-lamp on the Robinson Crusoe table, the ration-bags dependent from the beams; and for none of these things did she look in vain. The only feature not on Philip’s list was the pencil jottings tacked like texts to the unbarked timbers, in place of the flyblown oddments from illustrated papers which had invariably garnished that author’s pet interior. The hut-keeper being out about his business, Olive lost no time in inspecting the scraps of dirty paper, to see what subjects the poor man was mad on; and Godfrey looked over her shoulder with a running chuckle.
“Poetry, of course!” said Godfrey.
And Olive read out below her breath:
“‘Hateful is the dark-blue sky, Vaulted o’er the dark-blue sea.
Death is the end of life; then why Should life all labor be?’
“Poor fellow!” was her only comment, with a side glance into the outer radiance.
“That isn’t Stafford’s!” exclaimed Godfrey, emphatically.
“No, indeed, it isn’t; and only one word wrong!”
Olive was looking about for books.
“I believe it’s a bit your brother once gave us for dictation. I seem to remember that about the sky.”
“Then he wasn’t here in vain,” said Olive, with a look of pleasure. It was a transitory look; the writing on the wall engrossed and troubled her. It was all of the same sort, remembered fragments of great verse, immortal images rescued practically intact from the ruins of ancient reading. The extracts ranged from a single line, as “In Tempe or the dales of Arcady,” or “One day when all days are one day to me,” to most of the second chorus in “Atalanta” and the opening couplets of “Locksley Hall.” Olive read them all, only muttering an occasional line aloud, and Godfrey danced attendance with his eyes seldom off her dark crisp hair and clear sunburnt skin. She was so absorbed that he could look his fill at her for the first time. She knew how to dress, he noted; her white linen frock was crisp like her hair, as though hot from the iron; and yet he had never seen anybody look so cool and trim in the heat, or striking picture more tellingly composed than that of Olive in the languorous gloom of the bushman’s hut, with a vertical sun still striking through stray holes in the roof, and breaking its lances on her snowy shoulders.
Godfrey was all the more disappointed and aggrieved when she turned to him in the end with glistening eyes.
“I must see something he’s written himself,” she whispered. “I can’t think it can be as bad as you all say. And I don’t believe in a man who remembers only the very best being such a slavish imitator of — Harvey Devlin!”
Godfrey rooted in a corner pink with copies of the Sydney Bulletin. In a few moments he unearthed a battered Shakepeare (who was not represented on the walls) and a quarto scribbling-book in debased American cloth.
“He keeps good company, you observe,” said Godfrey, turning over the blue-lined leaves without compunction. “No, he won’t mind, Miss Armitage. He’s often shown me them himself.”
“But that’s not quite the same thing as your showing them to me,” suggested Olive, whose eyebrows had already signified her qualms; but the protest went for nothing with the confident young man.
“Here’s a new one, by Jove!” cried he. “I say, this is rather good; he must have written this when he knocked down his last check, at the New Year.”
And there was no stopping him from reading every word of it aloud, with a marginal supply of his own remarks:
“‘There’s a hut in Riverina where a solitary hand May weaken on himself and all that’s his; There’s a pub in Riverina where they keep a smashing brand Of every sort o’ liquor short o’ fizz.
And I’ve been and blued another fifty-pounder at the pub —
You’re very sorry for me, I’ll be bound!
Rut when a man is fit up free with hut an’ horse an’ grub, What the blazes does he want with fifty pound? Why the dickens should he hoard his fifty quid?
Who would be a bit the better if he did? Though they slithered in a week When I couldn’t see or speak, Do you think I’m here to squeak?
Lord forbid!’”
So the thing began; but Godfrey had stopped to explain that this was obviously the hut, and Stafford himself the “solitary hand.” Olive seemed sorry to hear it; and quite contrary to expectation it was the reader who waxed enthusiastic as he proceeded, and the listener who grew lukewarm. In the next stanza it appeared that the reveller had been duly warned against the “pub in Riverina,” which Godfrey offered to show Miss Armitage any day she liked:
“‘The boss was in the homestead. When he give me good advice I took my oath, but took his check as well. And to me the moonlit shanty looked a pocket Paradise, Though the boss had just been calling it a Hell.’
“You’ll see which you think it,” said Godfrey, “and what you make of the publican and sinner who runs the sink! He’s hit him off to the life. Listen!” And he gabbled on to the titbit, only to give it with the greater unction:
“‘But the shanty-keeper smoked behind the bar.
Oh, his words were grave and few, And he never looked at you, And he just uncorked a new Gallon jar.’
“I can see him doing it!” cried Godfrey. “But I must say I’d no idea old Stafford could do anything as good as this — if it’s his own.”
Olive found herself keenly hoping it was not, and thinking of the snatches of Keats and Tennyson on the walls. So she was fortunate enough to miss a little of what followed:
“‘We fed, and then we started in the bar at nine o’clock; At twelve we made a move into the cool; The shanty-keeper he was just as steady as a rock, And me as paralytic as a fool.
I remember the veranda like a sinking vessel’s deck, And a brace of moons suspended in the sky — And nothing more till waking and inquiring for my check-”
“Mr. Pochin!” interrupted Olive at this ultimate point.
“Well? What’s wrong?”
“The whole thing. It’s terrible!”
“It’s jolly clever, if you ask me. I only want to know who really wrote it.”
“I didn’t mean that — not the verses as verses — but the complacent degradation of the thing itself!”
“I’m afraid that’s just where it’s so true to life,” he answered, tuning his tone to hers. “I wish it wasn’t, but it’s only too true of nearly all our hands.”
Olive took her eyes from the scraps of pencilled paper. He resented their drowned sparkle.
“True of this one?” she asked.
“Old Stafford? Rather! He’s like all the rest; he’ll slave for months and months, and then knock down a check for all his earnings at the nearest bar.”
“Then I don’t want to hear any more.”
And she took herself to the open door, where she could turn her back without discourtesy, as though in sudden admiration of the yellow shimmering salt-bush plains, with their blobs of gray-green fodder and their smudges of bottle-green scrub. The long streak of desolate sandhills was picked out by telegraph posts running right and left into infinity, like an e
ndless row of pins, against the loud blue sky so harped upon by her brother; and at her feet lay the shadow of the hut, sharp and dark as his standing simile of a sheet of new brown paper.
But at her elbow Godfrey was saying that she must just hear the end, and forcing her to realize the unmerited consolations of the debauchee’s return to the very threshold on which she stood.
“Yet the gates have not come open that I shut, I have seen no fences broken, and I’ve found no weak sheep bogged, And my little cat is purring in the hut!
There’s tea, too, for the billy-can, there’s water in the tanks, The ration bags hang heavy all around, And my good old bunk and blanket beat the bare veranda planks Of the shanty where I blued my fifty pound!
Here I stick until I’m worth fifty more, When I’ll take another check from the store; And with Riverina men All the betting is that then —
I shall knock it down again As before.’”
Olive was still standing in the doorway when a gaunt brown man rode up on his very counterpart in horse-flesh, and she could look upon yesterday’s tatterdemalion in the light of the verse he wrote and the poems he loved.
No; he was not the fine gentleman buried in the bush; it was hardly from social heights that he had fallen, of that she was quite certain, and knew not whether to be glad or sorry. But a starved lover of literature he was; the life-long passion beamed in his tanned and furrowed face, turning its oaken hue to a rich mahogany when Godfrey told him that Miss Armitage admired his taste. Olive filled out the statement with enthusiastic detail, and in a minute he and she were capping each other’s quotations while Godfrey remained mumchance on mere earth. Nor did all this sadden the battered creature, as it might have done if ever in the past he had been familiar with such as Olive; his joy in the moment was like a child’s; but he had a wild eye, with a tragic twinkle in it, that kept the author of his own lines ever before the girl.
Godfrey soon had enough of it. He must push on to the sandhills with the outgoing mail-bag; but he had to push on alone. Olive preferred to wait in the cool shelter of the hut. And there in another half-hour he found her somewhat hurriedly receiving a few sheets of MS., obviously torn from the old scribbling-book in the bushman’s hands, and giving in receipt some verbal undertaking that Godfrey failed to catch.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 528
