‘Laura, Laura! Oh, I am glad you’ve come. What a time you’ve been!’
‘Hullo, Pin. Oh, I say, let me get out first.’
‘And pull up your bonnet, honey. D’ye want to be after gettin’ sunstruck?’
Glad though Laura was to see her sister again, she did not manage to infuse a very hearty tone into her greeting; for her first glimpse of Pin had given her a disagreeable shock. It was astonishing, the change the past half-year had worked in the child, and, as the two climbed the hill together, to the accompaniment of Pin’s bubbly talk, Laura stole look after look at her little sister, in the hope of growing used to what she saw. Pin had never been pretty, but now she was ‘downright hideous’—as Laura phrased it to herself. Eleven years of age, she had at last begun to grow in earnest: her legs were, as of old, mere spindleshanks, but nearly twice as long; and her fat little body, perched above them, made one think of a shrivelled-up old man, who has run all to paunch. Her face, too, had increased in shapelessness, the features being blurred, in the fat mass; her blue eyes were more slit-like than before; and, to cap everything, her fine skin had absolutely no chance, so bespattered was it with freckles. And none of your pretty little sun-kisses; but large, black, irregular freckles, that disfigured like moles. Laura felt quite distressed; it outraged her feelings that anyone related to her should be so ugly; and, as Pin, in happy ignorance of her sister’s reflections, chattered on, Laura turned over in her mind what she ought to do. She would have to tell Pin about herself— that was plain: she must break the news to her, in case others should do it, and more cruelly. It was one consolation to know that Pin was not sensitive with regard to her looks; so long as you did not tease her about her legs, there was no limit to what you might say to her: the grieving was all for the onlooker. But not today: this was the first day; and there were pleasanter things to think of. And so, when they had had tea—with condensed milk in it, for the cow had gone dry, and no milkman came out so far; when tea was over—and that was all that could be undertaken in the way of refreshment after the journey; washing your face and hands, for instance, was out of the question; every drop of water had to be carried up the hill from the pump, and old Anne purposely kept the ewers empty by day; if you would wash, you must wash in the sea: as soon, then, as tea was over, the two sisters made for the beach.
The four-roomed, weatherboard cottage, to which, at a later date, a lean-to had been added, faced the bush: from the verandah, there was a wide view of the surrounding country. Between the back of the house and the beach rose a huge sand-hill, sparsely grown with rushes and coarse grass. It took you some twenty minutes to toil over this, and boots and stockings were useless impedimenta; for the sand was once more of that loose and shifting kind, in which you sank at times up to the knees, falling back one step for every two you climbed—but then, sand was the prevailing note of this free and easy life: it bestrewed verandah and floors; you carried it in your clothes; the beds were full of it; it even got into the food; and you were soon so accustomed to its presence that you missed the grit of it underfoot, or the prickling on your skin, did old Anne happen to take a broom in her hand, or thoroughly re-make the beds. When, however, on your way to the beach, you had laboriously attained the summit of the great dune, the sight that met you almost took your breath away: as far as eye could reach, the bluest of skies melting into the bluest of seas, which broke its foam-flecked edge against the flat, brown reefs that fringed the shore. Then, downhill—with a trip and a flounder that sent the sand man-high—and at last you were on what Laura and Pin thought the most wonderful beach in the world. What a variety of things was there! Whitest, purest sand, hot to the touch as a zinc roof in summer; rocky caves, and sandy caves, hung with crumbly stalactites; at low tide, on the reef, lakes, and ponds, and rivers, deep enough to make it unnecessary for you to go near the ever-angry surf, at all; seaweeds that ran through the gamut of colours: brown and green, pearl-pink and coral-pink, to vivid scarlet and orange; shells, beginning with tiny grannies and cowries, and ending with the monsters in which the breakers had left their echo; the bones of cuttlefish, light as paper, and shaped like javelins. And, what was best of all, this beach belonged to them alone; they had not to share its treasures with strangers; except the inhabitants of the cottage, never a soul set foot upon it.
The chief business of the morning was to bathe. If the girls were alone, and the tide full, they threw off their clothes and ran into a sandy, shallow pool, where the water never came above their waists, and where it was safe to let the breakers dash over them. But if the tide were low, the boys bathed, too, and then Pin and Laura tied themselves up in old bathing-gowns that were too big for them, and all went in a body to the ‘Half-moon Hole’. This pool, which was about twenty feet long and ten to fifteen deep, lay far out on the reef, and, at high tide, was hidden beneath surf and foam; at low water, on the other hand, it was like a glass mirror reflecting the sky, and so clear that you could see every weed that waved at the bottom. Having cast off your shoes, you applied your soles gingerly to the prickles of the rock; then plop!—and in you went. Pin often needed a shove from behind, for nowhere, of course, could you get a footing; but Laura swam with the best. Some of the boys would dive to the bottom, and bring up weeds and shells, but Laura and Pin kept on the surface of the water; for they had the imaginative dread common to children who know the sea well—the dread of what may lurk beneath the thick, black horrors of seaweed.
Then, after an hour or so in the water, home to dinner, hungry as swagmen, though the bill of fare never varied: it was always rabbit for dinner, crayfish for tea; for the butcher called only once a week, and meat could not be kept an hour, without getting flyblown. The rabbits were skinned and in the stew-pot before they were cold; the crayfish died an instant death: one that drove the blood to Laura’s head, and made Pin run away and cry, with her fingers to her ears; for she believed the sizzling of the water, as the fish were dropped in, to be the shriek of the creatures in their death-agony.
Except in bathing, the girls saw little of the boys. Both were afraid of guns, so did not go out on the expeditions which supplied the dinner table; and old Anne would not allow them to join the crayfishing excursions. For these took place by night, off the ends of the reef, with nets and torches; and it could sometimes happen, if the surf was heavy, that one of the fishers was washed off the rocks, and could only be hauled up again with considerable difficulty.
Laura took her last peep at the outside world every evening, in the brief span of time between sunset and dark. She would run up to the top of one of the hills, and, letting her eyes range over sky and sea, would drink in the scents that were waking to life after the burning heat of the day: salt water, warmed sand and seaweeds, tea-scrub, sour-grass, and the sturdy berry bushes, high as her knee, through which she had ploughed her way. That was one of the moments she liked best, that, and lying in bed at night, listening to the roar of the surf, which went on and on like a cannonade even though the hill lay between. It made her flesh crawl, too, in delightful fashion, did she picture to herself how alone she and Pin were, in their room: the boys slept in the lean-to on the other side of the kitchen; old Anne, at the back. For miles round, no house broke the solitude of the bush; only a thin wooden partition separated her from possible bushrangers, from the vastness and desolation of the night, the eternal booming of the sea.
Such was the life into which Laura now threw herself heart and soul, forgetting, in the sheer joy of living, her recent tribulation.
But even the purest pleasures will pall; and, after a time, when the bloom was wearing off the newness, and her mind was more at leisure again, she made some disagreeable discoveries, which ruffled her tranquility.
It was Pin, poor, fat, little well-meaning Pin, who did the mischief.
Pin was not only changed in looks; her character had changed, too; and in so marked a way that, before a week was out, the sisters were at loggerheads. Each day made it plainer to Laura that Pin was devel
oping a sturdy independence; she had ceased to look up to Laura as a prodigy of wisdom, and begun to hold opinions of her own. She was, indeed, even disposed to be critical of her sister; and criticism from this quarter was more than Laura could brook: it was just as if a slave usurped his master’s rights. At first speechless with surprise, she ended by losing her temper; the more, because Pin was prone to be mulish, and could not be got to budge, either by derision or by scorn, from her espoused views. They were those of the school at which, for the past half-year, she had been a day pupil, and seemed to her unassailable. Laura found them ridiculous, as she did much else about Pin at this time: her ugliness, her setting herself up as an authority: and she jeered unkindly, whenever Pin came out with them. A still more ludicrous thing was that, despite her plainness, Pin actually had an admirer. True, she did not say so outright; perhaps she was not even aware of it; but Laura gathered from her talk that a boy at her school, a boy some three years older than herself, had given her a silk handkerchief and liked to help her with her sums. And to Laura this was the most knock-down blow of all.
One day it came to an open quarrel between them. They were lying on the beach after bathing, trying to protect their bare and blistered legs from the sandflies. Laura, flat on her back, had spread a towel over hers; Pin sat Turk-fashion, with her legs beneath her, and fought the flies with her hands. Having vainly endeavoured to draw from the reticent Laura some of those school-tales, of which, in former holidays, she had been so prodigal, Pin was now chattering, to her heart’s content, about the small doings of home. Laura listened to her with the impatient toleration of one who has seen the world: she really could not be expected to interest herself in such trifles; and she laughed in her sleeve at Pin’s simpleness. When, however, her little sister began to enlarge anew on some wonderful orders Mother had lately had, she could not refrain from saying crossly: ‘You’ve told me that a dozen times already. And you needn’t bawl it out for everyone to hear!’
‘Oh, Laura, there isn’t anyone anywhere near us! And even if there were!—I thought you’d be so pleased. Mother’s going to give you an extra shilling pocket money, ’cause of it.’
‘Of course I’m pleased. Don’t be so silly, Pin.’
‘I’m not always silly, Laura!’ protested Pin. ‘And I don’t believe you are glad, a bit. Old Anne was, though. She said: “Bless her dear heart!” ’
‘Old Anne! Well, I just wonder what next! It’s none of her dashed business.’
‘Oh, Laura!’ began Pin, growing tearful, both at words and tone. ‘Why, Laura, you’re not ashamed of it, are you?—that mother does sewing?’—and Pin opened her lobelia-blue eyes to their widest, showing what very big eyes they would be, were they not always swollen with crying.
‘Of course I’m not!’ said Laura tartly. ‘But I’m blessed if I see what it’s got to do with old Anne.’
‘But she asked me…what Mother was working at—and if she’d got any new customers. She just loves Mother.’
‘Like her cheek!’ snapped Laura. ‘Poking her ugly old nose into what doesn’t concern her. You should just have said you didn’t know.’
‘But that would have been a story, Laura!’ cried Pin, horrified. ‘I did know—quite well.’
‘Goodness gracious, Pin, you——’
‘I’ve never told a story in my life!’ said Pin hotly. ‘And I’m not going to either, for you or anyone. I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself.’
‘Hold your silly tongue!’
‘I shan’t, Laura. And I think you’re very wicked. You’re not a bit like what you used to be. It’s all that going to school that’s done it—Mother always says it is.’
‘Oh, don’t be such a blooming ass!’ and Laura, stung to the quick, retaliated by taunting Pin with the change that had come to pass in her appearance. To her surprise, she found Pin grown inordinately touchy about her looks: at Laura’s brutal statement of the truth, she cried bitterly.
‘I’m not, no, I’m not! I haven’t got a full moon for a face! It’s no fatter than yours. Sarah said last time you were home how fat you were getting.’
‘I’m sure I’m not!’ said Laura, indignant in her turn.
‘Yes, you are,’ sobbed Pin. ‘But you only think other people are ugly, not yourself. I’ll tell Mother what you’ve said as soon as ever I get home. And I’ll tell her, too, you want to make me tell stories. And that I’m sure you’ve done something naughty at school, ’cause you won’t ever talk about it. And how you’re always saying bad words like blooming and gosh and golly—yes, I will!’
‘You were always a sneak and a telltale!’
‘And you were always a greedy, selfish, deceitful thing!’
‘You don’t know anything about me, you numbskull, you!’
‘I don’t want to! I know you’re a bad, wicked girl!’
After this exchange of home truths, they did not speak to each other for two days: Pin had a temper that smouldered and could not easily forgive. So she stayed at old Anne’s side, helping to bake scones and leather-jackets; or trotted after the boys, who had dropped into the way of saying: ‘Come on, little Pin!’ as they never said: ‘Come on, Laura!’—and Laura retired in lonely dudgeon to the beach.
She took the estrangement so much to heart that she eased her feelings by abusing Pin in thought; Pin was a pig-headed little ignoramus, as timid as ever of setting one foot before the other. And the rest of them would be the same—old stick-in-the-muds, unchanged by a hair, or if they had changed, then changed for the worse. Laura had somehow never foreseen the day on which she would find herself out of tune with her home circle; with unthinking assurance, she had expected that Pin, for instance, would always be eager to keep pace with her. Now, she saw that her little sister would probably never catch up to her again. Such progress as Pin might make—if she were not already glued firm to her silly notions—would be in quite another direction. For the quarrel had made one thing plain to Laura: with regard to her troubles, she need not look to Pin for sympathy: if Pin talked such gibberish at the hint of putting off an inquisitive old woman, what would she—and she not alone—what would they all say to the tissue of lies Laura had spun round Mr Shepherd, a holy man, a clergyman, and a personal friend of Mother’s, as well? She could not blink the fact that, did it come to their ears, they would call her, in earnest, what Pin had called her, in her temper—bad and wicked. Home was, alas! no longer the snug nest in which she was safe from the slings and shanghais of the world.
And then, there was another thing: did she stay at home, she would have to re-live herself into the thousand and one gimcrack concerns, which now, as set forth by Pin, so bored her: the colic Leppie had brought on by eating unripe almonds; the fact that another of Sarah’s teeth had dropped out, without extraneous aid. It was all very well for a week or two, but, at the idea of shutting herself wholly up with such mopokes, of cutting herself off from her present vital interests, Laura hastily reconsidered her decision to leave school. No: badly as she had suffered at her companions’ hands, much as she dreaded returning, it was at school she belonged. All her heart was there: in the doings of her equals, the things that really mattered—who would be promoted, who Prefect, whose seat changed in the dining hall. Besides, could anyone who had experienced the iron rule of Mr Strachey and Mrs Gurley, ever be content to go back and just form one of a family of children? She not, at any rate!
Thus she lay, all day long, her hands clasped under her neck, a small white speck on the great wave-lapped beach. She watched the surf break, watched the waves creep up and hide the reef, watched the gulls vanish in the sun-saturated blue overhead. Sometimes, she rose to her elbow to follow a ship just inside the horizon; and it pleased her to think that this great boat was sailing off, with a load of lucky mortals, to some unknown, fairer world, while she, a poor Cinderella, had to stop behind—even though she knew it was only the English mail going on to Sydney. Of Pin, she preferred not to think; nor could she dwell with equanimity on her la
te misfortunes at school, and the trials that awaited her on her reappearance there; and since she had to think of something, she fell into the habit of making up might-have-beens, of narrating to herself how things would have fallen out, had her fictions been fact, her ascetic hero the impetuous lover she had made of him. In other words, lying prostrate on the sand, Laura went on with her story.
When, towards the end of the third week, she and Pin were summoned to spend some days with Godmother, she had acquired such a gusto for this occupation, that she preferred to shirk reality, and let Pin pay the visit alone.
XX
Wie sollte ein Strom nicht endlich den Weg
zum Meere finden!
Nietzsche.
Sea, sun, and air did their healing work, as did also the long, idle days in the home garden; and Laura drank in health and vigour with every breath.
She had need of it all when, the golden holidays over, she returned to school; for the half-year that broke, was, in many ways, the most trying she had yet to face. True, her dupes’ first virulence had waned—they no longer lashed her openly with their tongues—but the quiet, covert insults that were now the rule, were every bit as hard to bear; and before a week had passed, Laura was telling herself that, had she been a Christian martyr, she would have preferred to be torn asunder, with one jerk, rather than submit to the thumbkin. Not an eye but looked askance at her; on every face was painted a reminder of her moral inferiority; and even newcomers among the boarders learnt, without always knowing what her crime had been, that Laura Rambotham was ‘not the thing’.
The Getting of Wisdom Page 18
