The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

by Henry Handel Richardson

  Had there been the day’s work only to contend with, she would not have complained. It was the nights that wore her down. The nights were cruel. On every one of them without exception, between half-past one and a quarter to two, there came a knocking like thunder at the front door. This was the coach arriving with the night mail: she had to open up the office, drag a heavy mail-bag in, haul another out. Not until this was over could there be any question of sleep for her.

  Almost at once it became a nervous obsession (she who had had such small patience with Richard’s night fancies!) that, did she even doze off, she might fail to hear the knocking—calculated though this was to wake the dead!—fail in her duty, lose her post, bring them all to ruin. Hence she made a point of sitting up till she could sit no longer, then of lying down fully dressed, watching the shadows thrown by the candle on walls and ceiling, listening to the children’s steady breathing, the wind that soughed round the corners of the house.

  Then when the coach had rumbled off, the sound of wheels and hoofs died away, and she might have slept, she could not. The effort of rising, of pulling the bags about and exchanging words with the driver, had too effectually roused her. Also, the glimpse caught through the open door of the black darkness and loneliness without alarmed her each time afresh. For the country was anything but safe. The notorious Kellys had recently been at work in the district, and not so very far from Gymgurra either; the township still rang with tales of their exploits. And after the Bank, the post office was the likeliest place to be stuck up, if not the likeliest; for the Bank Manager had a strong-room, and no doubt a revolver, too. . . .besides being a man. While she was only a defenceless woman, with no companions but two small children. If the bushrangers should appear one night, and order her to “bail up” while they rifled the office, she would be utterly at their mercy.

  The result of letting her mind dwell on such things was that she grew steadily more awake; and till dawn would lie listening to every sound. Never did the cheering fall of a human foot pass the house. Unlit, unpatrolled, the township slept the sleep of the dead. Only the dingoes snarled and howled; at first a long way off, and then, more shrilly, near at hand. Or the old volcano that stood in its lake some three miles away—it was said to be extinct, but really one didn’t know—would suddenly give vent to loud, unearthly rumblings; which sometimes became so violent that the jugs on the washstand danced and rattled. And then the children, who had learned to sleep through the bustle of the coach, would wake up, too, and be frightened; and she would have to light the candle again and talk to them, and give them drinks, and re-arrange their pillows.

  “It’s all right, chicks. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Mamma’s here.”

  This satisfied them: Mamma was there, hence all was well. . . .as though she were a kind of demigod, who controlled even the eruptions of volcanoes! With Lucie cuddled tight in her arms, all the fragrance of the child’s warm body mounting to her, she lay and thought of her children with a pity that left mere love far behind. They trusted her so blindly; and she, what could she do for them? Except for this imagined security, she had nothing to give. And, should anything happen to her, while they were still too young to fend for themselves—no! that simply did not bear thinking of. She had seen too much of the fates of motherless children in this country. Bandied from one home to another, tossed from pillar to post. . . .like so much unclaimed baggage. Rather than know hers exposed to such a destiny. . . .yes, there came moments when she could understand and condone the madness of the mother who, about to be torn away, refused to leave her little ones behind. For, to these small creatures, bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, links bound Mary that must, she felt, outlast life itself. Through them and her love for them, she caught her one real glimpse of immortality.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  But these were night thoughts. By day, when the children were their very human selves—high-spirited, quarrelsome, up to endless mischief—the question of Richard and Richard’s welfare again took first place in her mind.

  The improvement she had so hoped for him, in his pleasant, carefree surroundings, did not come to pass. She saw this, not so much from what the doctors wrote—they were painfully guarded—as from his own letters to her. Week by week these grew more incoherent; not words only, whole sentences were now being left out. They were written, too, in a large, unformed, childish hand, which bore no likeness to his fine, small writing; were smudged and ill-spelt. She felt them as shameful, and directly she had deciphered them hid them away: no eye but hers should see to what depths he had sunk.

  And the doctors kept up their non-committal attitude to the end: the end, that was, of the three months for which she had their fees laid by. Then, they were forced to come out of their shell; and, to her letter saying that she could no longer afford to leave her husband in their charge and asking for a frank opinion on his case, they wrote her what she had feared and foreseen: there was no hope of recovery for Richard. His mental deterioration, since coming under their notice, had been marked; signs of arterial degeneration were now to be observed as well. Did she seriously contemplate removing him, they could only advise his further restraint in one of the public institutions. They trusted, however, that she would reconsider her decision to remove him. On all points it would be to the patient’s advantage.

  In her distress, Mary crushed the letter to a ball in her hand. To re-read it, she had to stroke and smooth it flat again. For the step they were urging upon her meant the end of everything: meant certification; an asylum for the insane. (The children’s father a certified lunatic!) Yet, just because of the children. . . .This was an objection the doctors had raised, in telling her that Richard might last for years—in his present state—when she first proposed keeping him with her. They would be doubly against it now. And for days she went irresolute, torn between pity for Richard and fear for her children. In the end it was once more Bowes-Smith who got the better of her. He pointed out how little, for all her devotion, she could do to ameliorate her husband’s lot, compared with the skilled nursing he would receive from properly trained attendants. Besides, Richard was, he assured her, by now too far gone in inattention, really to miss her or to need her. There seemed nothing for it but gratefully to accept his offer, himself to take the affair in hand. Thanks to his influence, Richard had a chance of being lodged in one of the separate cottages at the asylum, apart from the crowd: he would be under a special warder, have a bedroom more or less to himself. And so, with a heavy heart Mary gave her consent; the various legal and medical formalities were set in motion; and, soon after, the news came that the change had been made and Richard installed in his new quarters. His books and clothing were being returned to her. (Prisoners—no, she meant patients—were not allowed any superfluous belongings. Nor, bitter thought! need she now rack her brains where the new suit was to come from, for which his late nurse had pressed, because of his growing habit of spilling his food. From now on, he would wear the garb of his kind.) But after this she heard no more: with the shutting of the gates behind him silence fell—a horrible, deathlike silence. Never again did one of his pitiful little letters reach her; and the authorities blankly ignored her requests for information. Finally, in response to a more vigorous demand than usual, she received a printed form stating that reports were issued quarterly, and hers would reach her in due course. Grimly she set her teeth and waited; meanwhile laying shilling to shilling for the journey to Melbourne which she could see lay before her.—But, when the time came, she had to part with a little brooch to which she had clung, because it had been one of Richard’s first gifts to her after marriage. Mr. Rucker, the clergyman, bought it of her for his wife.

  Her story was, of course, common property in Gymgurra by now; and it was just an example of people’s kindness, when the very next day Mrs. Rucker brought the brooch back and, with her own hands, pinned it on again, saying things that made it impossible to take offence. Yes, Mary never ce
ased to marvel at the way in which friends sprang up round her in her need, and put themselves out to help her. These Ruckers, for instance—they had no family of their own—were constantly taking the children off her hands. Hence, when the week’s leave of absence for which she had applied was granted, she could part from Cuffy and Lucie with an easy mind.

  And one cold spring night towards two o’clock, she put on her warmest travelling clothes and climbed into the coach for Colac. She had bespoken a seat. . . .and a good job, too! For an election had taken place in the district, and the coach was crammed with men, some coming from the polling, others on their way to a cattle market. She sat, the night through, jammed in among them, her arms pinned to her sides, half suffocated with smoke, and deafened by their talk. Not till daybreak was she joined by one of her own sex. Then, on stopping at a wayside public-house, they found a thinly clad, elderly woman waiting for the coach, a little bundle in her hand. But there was not room for a mouse in among them, let alone an old woman: one rude voice after another bawled the information. At which the poor thing began to cry, and so heartbrokenly that Mary was touched. Elbowing her way to the window, she leaned out and questioned the woman. At what she heard, and at the continued crude joking of her fellow-travellers, she lost her temper, and rounding on them cried: “Do you mean to say there isn’t one of you who’s man enough to give up his seat?” And as, though the laughter ceased, none offered, she said hotly: “Very well then, if you won’t, I will! I’m on my way, too, to see a sick person, but I’ll take my chance of getting a lift later in the day.—I’m glad I’m not a man. . . .that’s all!”

  “Now then, missis, keep your hair on.” And a lanky young fellow, with hands like ploughshares and a face confusion-red at his own good deed, gawkily detached himself and stepped out. “Here y’are, ma, in you get! I’ll toddle along on Shanks’ p’s.”

  The two women made the rest of the journey in company, Mary even treading underfoot the prejudice of a lifetime and going second-class in the train. (There was no Richard now, to cast up his eyes in horror.) The poor soul at her side told a sad story: one’s own troubles shrank as one heard it. She was bound for the Melbourne Hospital, where her son, her only child, lay dying: he had got “the water” on his chest, and the doctors had telegraphed she must come at once if she wanted to see him alive. Her husband had been killed at tree-felling only a few months back; and, her son gone, she would be alone in the world. Mary, feeling rich in comparison, shared with her her travelling-rug, her packet of sandwiches, her bottle of cold tea; and at Spencer Street station; having saved considerably on her fare, was able to put the poor mother in a wagonette and pay for her to be driven straight to the hospital. For she could see the bush-dweller’s alarm at the noise and bustle of the city.

  On parting, the woman kissed her hand. “God bless you, ma’am. . . .God bless and keep you, the kindest lady ever I met!—and may He restore your poor gentleman to his right mind! I shan’t never forget what you’ve done for me this day. And if ever there come a time when I c’ld do su’thing for you. . . .but there! not likely—only Bowman’s my name—Mrs. Bowman, at Sayer’s Thack, near Mortlake.”

  For Mary the Devines’ carriage and pair was in waiting. The old coachman smiled and touched his hat and said: “Very glad to see you again, ma’am!” tucked the black opossum-rug round her, and off they rolled, she lying back on the springy cushions. And all the time she was in Melbourne this conveyance stood freely at her disposal, Lady Devine being by now grown too comfortable even for “carriage exercise.” “By the time I’ve buttoned me boots, dearie, and put on me plumes, I’m dead beat. An’ there are the ’orses eatin’ their ’eads off in the stable. You can’t do Jake and me a greater kindness ’n to use ’em.”

  Without this mechanical aid: to expedite her hither and thither, to wait for her while she kept appointments, to carry her on anew, Mary could impossibly have got through what she did in the days that followed: looked back on, they resembled the whirligig horrors of a nightmare. She had come to Melbourne tired, sad, and anxious enough, in all conscience. But in the hard-faced, unscrupulous woman with which, at the end of the time, her glass presented her, she hardly recognised herself. Never in her life had she fought for anything as now for Richard’s freedom.

  The morning after her arrival, she drove out to the asylum. The way led through lovely Toorak, with its green lawns and white houses, up Richmond Hill, and down into the unattractive purlieus of Collingwood. The carriage came to a standstill on a stretch of waste land, a kind of vast, unfenced paddock, where hobbled horses grazed. It could go no farther, for, between them and the complex of houses, cottages, huts which formed the asylum, flowed the unbridged river. Rain had fallen during the night, and the reddish, muddy stream, which here turned and twisted like a serpent, ran so high that the weeping willows (Richard’s favourite Salix babylonica) which lined the bank, dragged their branches deep in the flood. The houses, overhung by the ragged, melancholy gums, looked shabby and neglected; one and all in need of a coat of paint. Mary’s heart fell.

  Seating herself in the ferry, she was conveyed across the water.

  She had not announced her visit. Her intention was to see for herself how Richard was lodged and cared for, at those times when the place was closed to the public. Had the authorities known beforehand that she was coming, they might have dressed and dolled him up for her. (Yes! she was fast turning into a thoroughly suspicious and distrustful woman.) For passport, she had armed herself with a letter to the head doctor from Sir Jake Devine.

  And well that she had. Great its virtue was not, but, without it, she would hardly have got over the threshold. And once inside the front door she had to fight her way forward, step by step: it needed all her native obstinacy, her newly acquired aggressiveness, not to allow herself to be bowed out by the several assistants and attendants who blocked her path. But having vowed to herself that she would see some one in authority, see him she did; though in the end they fobbed her off with a youngish fellow, to whom—he had cod’s eyes and a domineering manner—she took an instant and violent dislike.

  By this time, too, her blood was up; and the incivility of her reception seemed the last straw. A good log-fire burnt in the fireplace—the rest of the building struck her as very damp and chill—a comfortable armchair was suitably placed, but he did not invite her to approach the fire or to take a seat. He stood while he spoke. . . .and kept her standing. She had, he presumed, already been informed that this was not a visiting-day—and certainly not an hour for visitors. But as he understood that she had made a special journey from up-country, they had stretched a point. What did she want?

  “To know how my husband is.”

  His fish eyes bulged still more. Was that all? When the report would have been so shortly in her hands?

  “I preferred to come myself. I wish to speak to my husband.”

  “For that, ma’am, you will need to present yourself at the proper time.” (Then it was as she thought. They were not going to let her see Richard unprepared.)

  As, however, she made no movement to withdraw, but stood her ground with, for all her shabby dress and black gloves showing white at the finger-tips, the air of a duchess, and an answer for everything (danged if he knew how to treat such a bold, bouncing woman!), he crossed the room, took a ledger from a rack, and asked in tones of exasperation: “Well, what in thunder is it then?. . . .your husband’s name?”

  “Quite so. . . .exactly!” he cut her reply short. “If you think, madam, with the dozens of patients we have on our hands. . . .it is possible to remember. . . .the details and antecedents of each individual case. . . .” As he spoke he was running a fat finger down column after column. “Ha! here we have it.” Transporting the book to the central table, he laid it flat and faced her over it. “Here it is; and I regret to inform you that the report we should presently have sent you would have been of a highly unsatisfactory nature.�
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  “Why? Is he so much worse?” With difficulty her dry lips framed the words.

  “I refer not to his state of health—the disease is running a normal course—but to his conduct. Ever since being admitted to the asylum, your husband has proved to the last degree obstreperous and unruly.”

  “Well, that I cannot understand!” gave back Mary hotly. “Where he was—before he came here—they had only good to say of him.”

  “No doubt, no doubt! A patient worth his eight or ten guineas a week—”

  “Five, if you please! He received special terms. . . .as a medical man.”

  “All of which is beside the point. The fact remains that, to us, he is a constant source of trouble. We have been obliged more than once to place him in solitary confinement. His behaviour is such as to corrupt the other patients.”

  “Corrupt?”

  “Corrupt.”

  “Well, all I can say is. . . .there must be something very wrong in the way he’s treated. He would never willingly give trouble. By nature he’s one of the gentlest and politest of men.”

  “Perhaps you would like to hear his warder on the subject?” And going to the fireplace the young man rang a bell and instructed a servant: “Send 97B’s keeper here to me.”

  (97B?. . . .why B?. . . .why not A? Mary’s mind seized on the trivial detail and held fast to it, so as not to have to face the. . . .the degradation the numbering implied.)

  The warder entered touching his forelock: a coarse, strongly built fellow, with a low forehead and the under-jaw of a prize-fighter. Her heart seemed to shrivel at thought of Richard. . . .Richard!. . . .in the power of such a man.