This was his mother’s country. She had been born and raised here, and she had told him about it, many a time, like a fable. And this was what it was like! How could she feel she actually belonged to it? Nobody could belong to it.
Himself, he belonged to Bedford, England. And Bedford College. But his mind turned away from this in repugnance. Suddenly he turned desirously to the unreality of this remote place.
Jack was waiting for Mr. George, the lawyer to whom his letter of introduction was addressed. Mr. George had shaken hands with him on deck: a stout and breezy gentleman, who had been carried away again on the gusts of his own breeze, among the steamer crowd, and had forgotten his young charge. Jack patiently waited. Adult and responsible people with stout waistcoats had a habit, he knew, of being needed elsewhere.
Mr. George! And all his mother’s humorous stories about him! This notable character of the Western lonely colony, this rumbustical old gentleman who had a “terrific memory,” who was “full of quotations” and who “never forgot a face” — Jack waited the more calmly, sure of being recognised again by him — was to be seen in the distance with his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat armholes, passively surveying the scene with a quiet, shrewd eye, before hailing another acquaintance and delivering another sally. He had a “tongue like a razor” and frightened the women to death. Seeing him there on the wharf, elderly, stout and decidedly old-fashioned, Jack had a little difficulty in reconciling him with the hearty colonial hero of his mother’s stories.
How he had missed a seat on the bench, for example. He was to become a judge. But while acting on probation, or whatever it is called, a man came up before him charged with wife-beating, and serious maltreatment of his better half. A verdict of “not guilty” was returned. “Two years hard labour,” said Mr. George, who didn’t like the looks of the fellow. There was a protest. “Verdict stands!” said Mr. George. “Two years hard labour. Give it him for not beating her and breaking her head. He should have done. He should have done. ‘Twas fairly proved!”
So Mr. George had remained a lawyer, instead of becoming a judge. A stout, shabby, provincial-looking old man with baggy trousers that seemed as if they were slipping down. Jack had still to get used to that sort of trousers. One of his mother’s heroes!
But the whole scene was still outside the boy’s vague, almost trancelike state. The commotion of unloading went on — people stood in groups, the lumpers were already at work with the winches, bringing bales and boxes from the hold. The Jewish gentleman standing just there had a red nose. He swung his cane uneasily. He must be well-off, to judge by his links and watch-chain. But then why did his trousers hang so low and baggy, and why was his waistcoat of yellow cloth — that cloth cost a guinea a yard, Jack knew it from his horsey acquaintances — so dirty and frayed?
Western Australia in the year 1882. Jack had read all about it in the official report on the steamer. The colony had three years before celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Many people still remembered the fiasco of the first attempt at the Swan River Settlement. Captain Stirling brought the first boatload of prospective settlers. The Government promised not to defile the land with convicts. But the promise was broken. The convicts had come: and that stone prison-building must have been the convict station. He knew from his mother’s stories. But he also knew that the convicts were now gone again. The “Establishment” had been closed down already for ten years or more.
A land must have its ups and downs. And the first thing the old world had to ship to the new world was its sins, and the first shipments were of sinners. That was what his mother said. Jack felt a certain sympathy. He felt a sympathy with the empty “Establishment” and the departed convicts. He himself was mysteriously a “sinner.” He felt he was born such: just as he was born with his deceptive handsome look of innocence. He was a sinner, a Cain. Not that he was aware of having committed anything that seemed to himself particularly sinful. No, he was not aware of having “sinned.” He was not aware that he ever would “sin.”
But that wasn’t the point. Curiously enough, that wasn’t the point. The men who commit sins and who know they commit sins usually get on quite well with the world. Jack knew he would never get on well with the world. He was a sinner. He knew that as far as the world went, he was a sinner, born condemned. Perhaps it had come to him from his mother’s careless, rich, uncanny Australian blood. Perhaps it was a recoil from his father’s military-gentleman nature. His father was an officer in Her Majesty’s Army. An officer in Her Majesty’s Army. For some reason, there was always a touch of the fantastic and ridiculous, to Jack, in being an officer in Her Majesty’s Army. Quite a high and responsible officer, usually stationed in command in one or other of Her Britannic Majesty’s Colonies.
Why did Jack find his father slightly fantastic? Why was that gentleman in uniform who appeared occasionally, very resplendent and somehow very “good,” why was he always unreal and fantastic to the little boy left at home in England? Why was he even more fantastic when he wore a black coat and genteel grey trousers? He was handsome and pleasant, and indisputably “good.” Then why, oh, why should he have appeared fantastic to his own little boy, who was so much like him in appearance?
“The spitten image!” one of his nurses had said. And Jack never forgave it. He thought it meant a spat-upon image, or an image in spit. This he resented and repudiated absolutely, though it remained vague.
“Oh, you little sinner!” said the same nurse, half caressingly. And this the boy had accepted as his natural appellation. He was a little sinner. As he grew older, he was a young sinner. Now, as he approached manhood, he was a sinner without modification.
Not, we repeat, that he was ever able to understand wherein his sinfulness lay. He knew his father was a “good man.” — ”The colonel, your father, is such a good man, so you must be a good little boy and grow up like him.” — ”There is no better example of an English gentleman than your father, the general. All you have to do is to grow up like him.”
Jack knew from the start that he wouldn’t. And therein lay the sin, presumably. Or the root of the sin.
He did not dislike his father. The general was kind and simple and amiable. How could anyone dislike him? But to the boy he was always just a little fantastic, like the policeman in a Punch-and-Judy show.
Jack loved his mother with a love that could not but be intermittent, for sometimes she stayed in England and “lived” with him, and more often she left him and went off with his father to Jamaica or some such place — or to India or Khartoum, names that were in his blood — leaving the boy in the charge of a paternal Aunt. He didn’t think much of the Aunt.
But he liked the warm, flushed, rather muddled delight of his mother. She was a handsome, ripe Australian woman with warm colouring and soft flesh, absolutely kindly in a humorous, off-hand fashion, warm with a jolly sensuousness, and good in a wicked sort of way. She sat in the sun and laughed and refused to quarrel, refused also to weep. When she had to leave her little boy a spasm would contract her face and make her look ugly, so the child was glad if she went quickly. But she was in love with her husband, who was still more in love with her, so off she went laughing sensuously across seven seas, quarrelling with nobody, pitching her camp in true colonial fashion wherever she found herself, yet always with a touch of sensuous luxury, Persian rugs and silk cushions and dresses of rich material. She was the despair of the true English wives, for you couldn’t disapprove of her, she was the dearest thing imaginable, and yet she introduced a pleasant, semi-luxurious sense of — of what? Why, almost of sin. Not positive sin. She was really the dearest thing imaginable. But the feeling that there was no fence between sin and virtue. As if sin were, so to speak, the unreclaimed bush, and goodness were only the claims that the settlers had managed to fence in. And there was so much more bush than settlement. And the one was as good as the other, save that they served different ends. And that you always had the wild and endless bush all round your little claim, and coming
and going was always through the wild and innocent, but non-moral bush. Which non-moral bush had a devil in it. Oh, yes! But a wild and comprehensible devil, like bush-rangers who did brutal and lawless things. Whereas the tame devil of the settlement, drunkenness and greediness and foolish pride, he was more scaring.
“My dear, there’s tame innocence and wild innocence, and tame devils and wild devils, and tame morality and wild morality. Let’s camp in the bush and be good.” That was her attitude, always. “Let’s camp in the bush and be good.” She was an Australian from a wild Australian homestead. And she was like a wild sweet animal. Always the sense of space and lack of restrictions, and it didn’t matter what you did, so long as you were good inside yourself.
Her husband was in love with her, completely. To him it mattered very much what you did. So perhaps her easy indifference to English rail-fences satisfied in him the iconoclast that lies at the bottom of all men.
She was not well-bred. There was a certain “cottage” geniality about her. But also a sense of great, unfenced spaces, that put the ordinary ladylikeness rather at a loss. A real colonial, from the newest, wildest, remotest colony.
She loved her little boy. But also she loved her husband, and she loved the army life. She preferred, really, to be with her husband. And you can’t trail a child about. And she lived in all the world, and she couldn’t bear to be poked in a village in England. Not for long. And she was used to having men about her. Mostly men. Jolly men.
So her heart smarted for her little boy. But she had to leave him. And he loved her, but did not dream of depending on her. He knew it as a tiny child. He would never have to depend on anybody. His father would pay money for him. But his father was rather jealous of him. Jealous even of his beauty as a tiny child, in spite of the fact that the child was the “spitten” image of the father: dark blue eyes, curly hair, peach-bloom skin. Only the child had the easy way of accommodating himself to life and circumstances, like his mother, and a certain readiness to laugh, even when he was by himself. The easy laugh that made his nurse say “You little sinner!”
He knew he was a little sinner. It rather amused him.
Jack’s mind jolted awake as he made a grab at his hat, nearly knocking it off, realizing that he was being introduced to two men: or that two men were being introduced to him. They shook hands very casually, giggling at the same time to one another in a suppressed manner. Jack blushed furiously, embarrassed, not knowing what they were laughing at.
Just beside him, the Jewish gentleman was effusively greeting another Jewish gentleman. In fact, they were kissing: which made Jack curl with disgust. But he couldn’t move away, because there were bales behind him, people on two sides, and a big dog was dancing and barking in front of him, at something which it saw away below through a crack in the wharf timbers. The dog seemed to be a mixture of wolf and greyhound. Queer specimen! Later, he knew it was called a kangaroo dog.
“Mr. A. Bell and Mr. Swallow. Mr. Jack Grant from England.” This was Mr. George introducing him to the two men, and going on without any change, with a queer puffing of the lips: “Prh! Bah! Wolf and Hider! Wolf and Hider!”
This left Jack completely mystified. And why were Mr. Bell and Mr. Swallow laughing so convulsedly? Was it the dog?
“You remember his father, Bell, out here in ‘59. — Captain Grant. Married Surgeon-Captain Reid’s youngest daughter, from Woolamooloo Station.”
The gentleman said: “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” which was a phrase that embarrassed Jack because he didn’t know what to answer. Should one say, “Thank you!” — or “The pleasure is mine!” or “So am I to make yours!” He mumbled: “How do you do!”
However, it didn’t matter, for the two men kept the laugh between themselves, while Mr. George took on a colonial distrait look, then blew out his cheeks and ejaculated: “Mercy and truth have met together: righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” This was said in a matter-of-fact way. Jack knew it was a quotation from the Psalms, but not what it was aimed at. The two men were laughing more openly at the joke.
Was the joke against himself? Was it his own righteousness that was funny? He blushed furiously once more.
II
But Mr. George ignored the boy’s evident embarrassment, and strolled off with one of the gentlemen — whether Bell or Swallow, Jack did not know — towards the train.
The remaining gentleman — either Bell or Swallow — clapped the uncomfortable youth comfortably on the shoulder. “New chum, eh? — Not in the know? I’ll tell you.” — They set off after the other two.
“By gad, ‘s a funny thing! You’ve got to laugh if old George is about, though he never moves a muscle. Dry as a ship’s biscuit. D’y’see the Jews kissing? They’ve been at law for two years, those two blossoms. One’s name is Wolf and the other’s Hider, and Mr. George is Wolf’s attorney. Never able to do anything, because you couldn’t get Hider into the open. — See the joke? Hider! Sneak Hider! Hider under the rafters! Hider hidden! And the Wolf couldn’t unearth him. Though George showed up Wolf for what he is: a mean, grasping, contentious mongrel of a man. Now they meet to kiss. See them? The suit ended in a mush. But that dog there hunting a rat right under their feet — wasn’t that beautiful? Old George couldn’t miss it. — ’Mercy and truth have met together,’ ha! hal However he finds his text for everything, beats me — ”
Jack laughed, and walked in a daze beside his new acquaintance. He felt he had fallen overhead into Australia, instead of arriving naturally.
The wood-eating little engine was gasping in front of a little train of open carriages. Jack remarked on her tender piled high with chunks of wood.
“Yes, we stoke ‘er with timber. We carry all we can. And if we’re going a long way, to York, when she’s burned up all she can carry she stops in the bush and we all get down, passengers and all, to chop a new supply. See the axe there? She carries half a dozen on a long trip.”
The three men, all wearing old-fashioned whiskers, pulled out tobacco pouches the moment they were seated, and started their pipes. They were all stout, and their clothes were slack, and they behaved with such absolute unconcern that it made Jack self-conscious.
He sat rather stiffly, remembering the things his mother had told him. Her father, Surgeon-Captain Reid, had arrived at the Swan River on a man-of-war, on his very first voyage. He had landed with Captain Fremantle from H. M. S. “Challenger,” when that officer took formal possession of the country in the name of His Majesty King George IV. He had seen the first transport, the “Parmelia,” prevented by heavy gales from landing her goods and passengers on the mainland, disembark all on Garden Island, where the men of the “Challenger” were busy clearing ground and erecting temporary houses. That was in midwinter, June 1827: and Jack’s grandfather! Now it was midwinter, June 1882: and mere Jack.
Midwinter! A pure blue sky and a warm, crystal air. The brush outside green, rather dull green, the sandy country dry. It was like English June, English midsummer. Why call it midwinter? Except for a certain dull look of the bushes.
They were passing the convict station. The “Establishment” had not lasted long; from about 1850 to 1870. Not like New South Wales, which had a purely convict origin. Western Australia was more respectable.
He remembered his mother always praised the convicts, said they had been a blessing to the colony. Western Australia had been too big and barren a mouthful for the first pioneers to chew, even though they were gentlemen of pluck and education and bit off their claims bravely. Came the rush that followed occupation, a rush of estimable and highly respectable British workmen. But even these were unprepared for the hardships that awaited them in Western Australia. The country was too much for them.
It needed the convicts to make a real impression: the convicts with their law, and discipline, and all their governmental outfit: and their forced labour. Soldiers, doctors, lawyers, spiritual pastors and earthly masters . . . and the convicts condemned to obey. This was the beg
inning of the colony.
Thought speaks! Mr. Swallow, identified as the gentleman with the long, lean ruddy face and large nose and vague brown eye, leaned forward and jerked his pipe stem towards the open window.
“See that beautiful road running through the sand, sir? That road extends to Perth and over the Causeway and away up country, branching in all directions, like the arteries of the human body. Built by the sappers and miners with convict labour, sir. Yes with convict labour. Also the bridge over which we are crossing.”
Jack looked out at the road, but was much more enchanted by the full, soft river of heavenly blue water, on whose surface he looked eagerly for the black swans. He didn’t see any.
“Oh yes! Oh yes! You’ll find ‘em wild in their native state a little way up,” said Mr. Swallow.
Beyond the river were sheets of sand again, white sand, stretching around on every side.
“It must have been here that the Carpenter wept — ” Jack said in his unexpected young voice that was still slightly hoarse, as he poked his face out of the window.
The three gentlemen were silent in passive consternation, till Mr. George swelled his cheeks and continued:
“Like anything to see such quantities of sand.” Then he snorted and blew his nose.
Mr. Bell at once recognized the Westralian joke, which had been handed on to Jack by his mother.
“Hit it, my son!” he cried, clapping his hands on his knees. “In the first five minutes. Useless! Useless! A gentleman of discernment, that’s what you are. Just the sort we want in this colony — a gentleman of discernment. A gentleman without it planted us here, fifty years ago in the blank, blank sand. What’s the consequence? Clogged, cloyed, cramped, sand — smothered, that’s what we are.”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 384
