“I don’t mean they care about us, but you must look decent.” Teresa leaned against the doorpost, studied the worn patterns of the oilcloth, tried to think of Jonathan Crow.
Kitty said in her husky tone: “Martha was with the same firm seven years! Imagine getting paid every week for seven years! She must have a lot of money.” She looked at her sister.
“Well, get a job,” said Teresa. Kitty, circulating in the kitchen, straightening things, excited, stopped near her sister and looked short-sightedly at her, very happy, wanting to hug her, wanting to tell her about the man she loved. Teresa, with a glance at her, hauled off and lounged into the passage. All the time she was thinking: “I must leave school, it will show whether I have any chance of success or not.” She heard the roughening wind outside and the water lapping; she was conscious of a stirring within and without; she turned round to her sister, and said: “ ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune.’”
Kitty’s face fell. She paused; she took two steps after her sister and said timidly: “When would I be able to get the money?”
“Now! I have it now,” Tess said roughly. “Now, you can have it now.”
She walked to the stairs, bolted up them three at a time and strode into her room. Kitty disturbed her when she wanted to think of what she must do tomorrow.
On Friday she had cashed her cheque at the bank, withdrawn five pounds although she had no plans made, and the money was all now in an open drawer, thrown carelessly in. She took two of the notes, without considering her own plans, and thrust them into Kitty’s hand, as Kitty came upstairs.
Kitty looked at the money, dazzled, and burst out in a flurry of thanks. As soon as Teresa could she escaped into her room to think about her tomorrow.
She saw herself, again and again, walking from the boat, up Macquarie Street, by the bowling green, down William Street, up towards Darlinghurst; and then George Wadling toiling down the same hill towards her, tugging at his little wagon full of kindling wood. His dirty face looked up at her and then down again without recognition. She saw his head on the window-sill. Dr Smith was standing beside her, large, obscurely unhappy himself, clumsy in his relations with people in some hopeless struggle she knew nothing of. Irritated by some quarrel with the headmaster, he had walked across with her and said: “I no longer sleep with my wife, I sleep on the back veranda.” He had said that, walking down the street. Walking across the gardens, he said: “I get my collars at Larbalestier’s.”—Such stupid, unworthy remarks that she was ashamed of him. This was the man who had told her about Glasgow, Paris, Jena; Héloïse and Abélard, a wonderful story in which Abélard taught Héloïse everything in the world; philosophy, languages, about Faust and Marguerite, an old German story in which an old man changed into a young man. The university welter-weight champion was already eaten by middle age; he was thirty-three.
Yet even thinking of Dr Smith, and Aunt Eliza, who had paid for her to continue school, she thought more of the mess of raffia wools and frames in her cupboard, of the darned holes in her stockings, of the chalk in the schoolroom air. She had been stuck in there too young, she was incapable of looking after them, she knew nothing of any kind, not even to teach madmen.
12
A Train for Narara, Fifty Miles North
Atrain for Narara, fifty miles north, left the Central Station in the morning, at nine-thirty-five. On one side of the large central hall is a dark pavilion lighted by clerestories. In it is an island of ticket-windows. Above this soared far up the sandstone canopy, with light criss-crossing as in a cathedral and pigeons flying about thirty feet above ground; and the shadows of people passing in the sunlit tram terminal. The hall is in shadow cut by the light of four entrances. Near the arch which leads to the train indicator for the northern lines, Teresa had been walking, much agitated, about twenty minutes, when she heard a voice from the ticket-windows and saw one of the clerks, a light-faced young man with reddish hair, leaning forward to look at her and beckoning to his friend. At this she picked up her little bag and walked rapidly to the Newcastle ticket-window, where she could get her ticket.
“What do they think? That I am going to commit suicide? It’s queer how you give yourself away, in any case.”
She walked out of the other door and to the platform gate with a busy air, and after a few minutes was admitted with the others to the waiting train. She had not been thinking about her plans, so much as seeing two scenes which ran themselves through her mind. At first, the playground, empty at this hour, quiet and fresh with the wind blowing across it from the uncut grass, the Public Gardens and the Domain; and then the teachers’ room, smelling, of coarse wall paint, hot face powder and sweet tea. They were scenes to which she would never return, bygone days; she thought of them both agonizedly, nevertheless.
As soon as she entered the railway carriage, the last link snapped, she forgot the school. She felt as strong and clairvoyant as one in a rage. Where were the others in this carriage going? Was there another here, perhaps that dark-haired man nearly opposite who was markedly observing her from the corner of his eye, who had found out that chains evaporate as soon as you try to throw them off? Chains do not exist, they are illusions.
Most of the people sat congealed in a sort of sullen despair, doing what they must, going where they must. If they only knew that it was only a matter of running away. She understood her own former timidity for the first time.
Outside it was very dark and a storm-wind howled round the train. When they saw the sky between cuttings, there were black bombs of rain bursting into the hills; the lakes and watercourses had an intense ghastly shine, a glittering, streaked and daubed silver skin, rolling out there like an earth-creature married to the sky, wind, and wet.
The people in the almost-dark carriage crouched more and more. The lights came on. They rattled over bridges where the swollen water gushed a few feet below; going through the hills the new water, like the rolling of many chains, was heard running off.
What was he thinking of, the dark-haired, thin-faced, middle-aged man who had been looking at her? Now he was sunk in himself, sorry for himself. She had never felt so well in her life. She could hear laughter, from the hills shouldering off their forests, from the rivers slipping away down, the cries of the bitter trees struggling against each other, rooted in one spot, killing the small things in their shade. Looking out over the numerous crests, rising now towards the range, she felt at once a horror of the rooted forest and its secular, aimless, but stern struggle, and a joy, a veritable jubilation in the road which had been cut through the wild, that goes down to water holes and skirts bluffs and rises to prospects, to the tops of the hills, where many ridges are only horny ripples in a withered beach long jilted by the sea.
She did not know where she was going; she was outward bound. This first train journey was only the first stride on a grand perilous journey. All the other people in the train seemed to her now buried in strange debris, not really alive as she was, as her excitement increased. Alone, she found the way out, which alone does not lead to blindness, years of remorse and hungry obscurity.
For the next stage of her trip, at any rate, after sleeping at her aunt’s house at Narara, a wooden cottage in an orchard, she would find the road to Harper’s Ferry. Up here, a few summers ago, when she was still a high-school girl, they had gone picnicking in the range with the Carlins, a family of three young people, and Tom Carlin had told her: “Harper’s Ferry is over that way”, his westward pointing arm in a careless wave taking in the valley, the foothills opposite, and beyond, the faint blue ridge of the Nepean range. She had often heard of it since, a beauty spot in wild country, a lone road taken by summer walking parties of university girls and young teachers, leading to a ford, or a ferry where a settler named Harper had once ferried people across.
She remembered the sunlit day. They had mounted the dripping wooden staircase by the rocks, out of the deep gully, a mere pothole in the hills. Deli
cate ferns and moss grew in the shade and the young eucalypts shot fifty and sixty feet into air to reach the sun at the top of the cliff. The air was wet with spray, in the heat the aromatic oils of the hardy plants intoxicated the air. Behind Tom Carlin and her, flirting and laughing, had been Jerry Carlin, the older boy, and her cousin Ellen. Tom was a tall, thin, attractive boy, with black hair, an engaging voice.
“What will you do when someone makes love to you?”
“I’ll wait and see. Perhaps I’ll be the one to make love.”
“Would you make love?”
“If I wanted to.”
“Make love to me?”
“You’re not the one.”
Later, when evening came, she had repulsed Tom again; she was ashamed of the silly scene of Ellen, a tall girl, sitting on the knee of Jerry, a middle-sized man, on the piano stool, while they both sang “The Last Rose of Summer”. This was Ellen, the starched cousin who had sung in the choir on Sundays and wanted to marry a modern young Minister of the Gospel. But she was even then twenty-seven and her morale smashed by an unlucky affair that lasted five years without marriage. She despised and disliked Ellen with her soul. She was her dead mother’s niece and in her father’s words had been “educated out of a husband”. Ellen had been not only to high school but to technical college and it was this, thought the family, which had frightened off the men. Ellen had a certain talent in sculpture. “Of what use is that to a housewife?” was the family saying. The whole venture had been absurd, and Ellen’s parents were regretting it, while Ellen, with bitter tongue and endless tantrums, took it out of them. The house with Ellen in it was only a shelter for a night, and she would turn from there into the mountains to see what she could see. If she had any plan at all, it was this then: to walk somehow, asking her way, to Harper’s Ferry, which was about sixty miles from Sydney and then walk back. When she got back, the first flurry would have died down and she would get a room somewhere, where no one would come to bother her; no one would take any further interest in her and she could begin as a typist and save up to get her degree and go abroad. Her ideas about going abroad had developed slightly in the past few weeks. She now wanted to go to the Sorbonne, like a friend of Mr Crow’s, another travelling scholar who was taking ship at the same time as Crow, a Mr Fountain. As to Harper’s Ferry, she had asked no more questions about it than about fees at the university. She had never looked at a map, and if there was an obscure reason for her choosing this spot of all spots, it was perhaps that she imagined it as a lonely, dark, dread, endlessly solitary, inhuman place and had heard that a murder had been committed near there. She had a vision of a dreary wild crossing, ancient trees; beyond that nothing, but it was her way.
Yet she loved that broad, soft Narara Valley which runs north and south for many miles. Narara Creek, a clear creek, runs at the foot of the eastern slope down to Brisbane Water. On the east, where her aunt lived among the small holdings and orchards too sheltered from the rising run, the unprofitable land rises roughly into small, round, spurred hills covered with new scrub. From the flat tops of the bluffs, which are reached by following a sharp spur, the rich and broad western side which gets all the day’s sun, in its entirety, is in sight, laid out in a cloth of dark orchards and light fields with the light brushmarks of pines and the black young forest of the pine nursery to the north. There are big-globed fruits fattened on the first rays and the fat midday light of the sun. The well-kept master houses to which they belong lie a little higher, all over the flanks of the western rise, which is spurred and starred and ends in a long upland, itself a spur.
So the hills conjoin, running towards the range. In this spur are steeps, gullies, and pockets, all blossom and young branch, with little houses, only their roofs visible, at the foot of a stiff green precipice hung with ferns, seedling pines, and many woods. In some of the gullies are small sawmills, logging sheds.
Coming through the bit of woodland which was her aunt’s but which they had not been able to clear, in its tall timber, she saw that the two-year-old orange-trees at the top of the orchard, in the bad soil, had scarcely grown, but the bean-rows on their frames grew tall.
Coming in the open gate, she thought: “Now I am coming home”, as one does in a place where one is sure of welcome. Her knock on the shut screen door and on the shut window was not heard. The door was not locked but she did not want to surprise them too much, so she went round the house to the front veranda, where she stood under the brick foundations, built very high. It was there with them she had graded the oranges and lemons, and packed them.
Passing the first window down she heard a woman’s naughty sob and recognized her cousin’s voice, Ellen’s. She returned and now entered the kitchen quietly, while a bundled female form came towards her in the passage from the front of the house blazing with noonday sun.
“Is anyone there? Aunt Terry?” she was calling when the woman appeared and Ellen’s mewing voice stopped.
“It’s Tess,” said Teresa softly.
Almost at once, her cousin appeared in the doorway, surprisingly tall, fair, pretty, in an old wrapper of faded pink which suited her delicate skin.
“Tess!” She rushed forward and squeezed her hands, bent and kissed her. “A surprise!”
“I’m not staying,” Teresa said. “I’m walking to Harper’s Ferry!”
“In this weather? Sun one moment, rain the next.”
Aunt Teresa, in an old print dress, had just come in from the orchard. As soon as they began to talk, the daughter went back to her room. Aunt Teresa made some fresh tea, keeping an old brown pot on the hob “for Uncle Ned” as she said. When they had their tea in front of them, in large breakfast cups, Aunt Terry whispered: “We’re doing very bad, and with ’er too. We’ve sacrificed everything for our girl and she’s no better here than she was in the city. It’s that affair that did it, she used to meet him in the Gardens every day for five years. One day I dressed her in a tussore silk suit I made myself and I went in with ’er to the Department and she asked him to let ’er have the truth, whether it was yes or no, and ‘e said no. Since then, she’s been another girl. Look at ’er now, and she ‘as no cause to be like that, she ‘as a chance, the man likes ’er.”
“What is it?”
“She’s invited to the Townshends’ for dinner, that big house on the opposite hill. She went there first when the Minister was ’ere. The boy likes ’er, and she won’t go. Sid Townshend is courting ’er and she’s too proud to go unless she’s sure, she’s afraid to seem to be ‘anging around.”
“She’s too sensitive.”
“I know it, but she’s getting worse and worse. She ought to take a step or two ’erself, she ought to show the young man some encouragement, this coldness, these ‘igh-and-mighty airs, she just shoos the young men off. She’s afraid she’ll be thought forward and laughed at. I understand the poor girl.”
There were soft sounds inside the closed door and Aunt Terry’s face lightened. “Perhaps she’s changed ’er mind, she may at least go to the Carlins’.” Ellen banged a drawer shut. The mother frowned and got up to pour water from the big black kettle into the small brown teapot.
“Your uncle will be in soon for ‘is tea,” she said, “and won’t ‘e be pleased to see ‘is Little Treasure! It was nice of you to come up for a few days, you know we love to see you. We wish our girlie knew ’er own mind as well as you do.”
Something fell in Ellen’s room. Aunt Teresa compressed her lips and made signs to Teresa. She rose to do some potatoes; after a while she came back to the table and, sitting down, explained about the Carlins again, asking Teresa to go and persuade Ellen to go to see Jerry.
“Jerry is perhaps the serious one, she’s been in and out of there for months, every day singing like a bird and with colour in ’er cheeks, like she used to when she was at Technical College. I don’t know whether we did right letting ’er go—nothing but unhappiness since—she became so ladylike there and she’s afraid now people won’t t
hink ’er a lady....”
“Oh, of course you were right.”
“Yes, she took two medals at the College and she was always the fastest typist in the Department, she was getting six pounds a week.” Aunt Terry was silent a moment, pressing her heavy, slightly-moustached lips.
“Your uncle and I have suffered a lot for ’er, but she is our own. It ‘appened that last night she sat with Jerry in the old car near the barn and because they teased them when she came in, and asked ’er when the wedding would be, now she won’t go, although she’s promised to be there tonight.”
Teresa found Ellen stupid, with her frigidity and coquetry; she said nothing about Ellen’s affair, but explained that she had come, not to stay for a week, that there was no school holiday, and that she had left school for ever, and was going to walk to Harper’s Ferry.
Aunt Terry said nothing and bustled to the stove to look at the stewing tea, then said:
“What did your father say? Whatever ‘e says is right.”
“Oh, I didn’t tell him, it isn’t his business.”
“What do you want to walk there for?”
“Just to see the world, as they say,” Teresa answered, quite at her ease.
“The weather—just look at the weather,” remonstrated her aunt.
“I love rain, I never catch cold,” said Teresa.
Presently in came her Uncle Edward, already faintly powdered by old age, though his long folded cheeks were tanned and sundried. He put his arms round Teresa and kissed her; a good old man, one of those who always have a smell of strong chaw tobacco, leather, and clean old clothes.
“My Little Treasure,” he said, grinning delightedly under his tobacco-stained moustache and settling himself in his chair at the scrubbed deal table. “My tea, Mother!” and he kept smiling at his young niece. “Those fresh young roses,” he said, kissing her cheeks with his whiskers. “And ‘ave you got a ‘oliday?”
“No,” said she.
For Love Alone Page 17
