Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
An authority on etiquette has said that the society one meets at a boarding-house is as select as that which one would meet on a raft after a shipwreck; and the boarding-house where King had his home was no exception to this rule. The group of individualities that gathered daily round the dinner-table interested King not at all. He felt that the mere fortuitous presence of other people in the same lodgings as himself was not a matter that affected him save for the necessity of occasionally saying “Good-morning” and sometimes passing the toast. He believed that he chose his friends; he was not old enough to know that all one can do on this earth is to make a choice from the poor selection of personalities that come within the average individual’s ken. He revolted from the thought that a mere chance meeting should force his hand. You see he walked still on stilts.
There was the landlady’s eldest daughter who poured out the tea. King had taken her into his consciousness only to the extent of asking her for two lumps and less milk, and to mentally remark that she was rather ugly. She had wide, unemotional eyes, and a nose of a hue that on chilly days protested too much. But one evening, a few months after his arrival, she had confided in him—with many tremors and a virginal shyness—that she who spoke painted too. She would never dare show her efforts to a real artist; but in the talk that followed it came clearly to King that this quite uninteresting woman had with the artist the same hopes, the same keen despairs, the same miracles of exaltation in the execution of her weak and smudgy sketches. Her soul yearned after its ideal; and in the blatant water-lilies and stiff bulrushes with which she so unnecessarily covered plush-framed mirrors there seemed to her some dim goal to strive for, some artistic instinct to appease. So blindly, yet with the same travail of soul, she worked towards her trivial ideal. Untrained, unfed, her ego had aspirations towards art; she wondered dazedly over the great pictures in the National Gallery, and took to her heart the worst and most accessible of them. They were the goal towards which she incessantly strove, and which was ever divinely inaccessible. So, in that blunted, clouded soul of hers, shut out from the brilliance that fell on the more favoured, she yearned and wondered and despaired, even as King did. And thenceforth the boy came into the presence of the plain, elderly girl with a vague understanding, and in his heart a dim pity.
Then there were the Tatlows—two old persons vaguely understood to be interested in the coal trade. The old man tended towards the didactic at breakfast; the old lady sniffed. King retreated behind his propped-up Daily Telegraph.
And there was the Anæmic Niece. King had so christened Miss Jennie Wave, the pale little girl with the face of pain and the great dark eyes. She was an invalid, and disappeared into her room for days. She was in the care of her aunt, Miss Lavinia Wave, a quiet, young old-maid who had not yet given up hope, and shyly and with many misgivings refused to go into bonnets. The niece was not yet twenty, and half her little life had been spent on a sick bed—on the rack of frayed nerves. She had been brought down from an up-country township in New South Wales to consult a celebrated Sydney nerve specialist. To King nerves meant schoolgirl hysteria, and he had the man’s contempt for the woman’s failing. To him it seemed monstrous—when he deigned to consider the matter of the Anæmic Niece at all—that the girl did not make some efforts to combat her weakness. He ended by dismissing both niece and aunt from his consciousness.
But one evening he spoke to the girl—they had been left alone in the drawing-room—and in a moment a torrent of confession was upon him. Sydney—so marvellous after the stagnation of her little back-blocks township—represented to her splendour, happiness, the proud, full stream of life. And here was a personality cramped in a broken body that yearned fiercely for all that life held, for all that for ever life withheld. She demanded enjoyment, passion, love. Her strenuous brain would over-leap the confines her ailing frame had fixed. It was a revolutionist in an invalid’s body. To her the Bulletin—crude, strenuous, acrid—was a bible. On that bitter food she had been nurtured, and in her burned the fierce,uncontrollable, passionate Australian spirit. She was discontent shut in upon itself. She saw, with a pitiable clearness that resolutely cast aside every illusion, herself denied her sex’s inalienable right, and she had not learnt—possibly would never learn—humility and patience. She snatched impatiently at the hands of Life, and found them closed against her puny fingers.
So, shut from the world her mind demanded, Jennie Wave built up a universe of her own from the printed word. She read everything, took with a voracious appetite the best and the worst that literature had to offer, and in this malleable world of her imagination was somewhat content. She loved with the fierce impetus of Gertrude Atherton’s heroines—those women of the red corpuscles!—she travailed with Tess, she lived with the breathless intensity of the Bulletin story heroines, stripped naked of all but sex.
All this came from the wrought-up brain of the weak girl in a torrent of confession. She had found a confidant, and recklessly gave her feelings vent. King shrank from the confession almost with horror, yet with a keen pity in his heart. To him, with his art, so much had been given; to her so much denied. Life was not fair. If ever his art were taken from him, if ever he lost confidence in himself to do the one thing he believed he had been sent into the world to accomplish, would he accept his fate with less tranquillity? He shrank from picturing the possibility.
Then there was Miss Barbara Smith. She was not young, possibly thirty-five, a pale-faced, little woman with indeterminate eyebrows and muddy hair which she dragged viciously back from a nice forehead. It was some weeks before King’s consciousness took notice of her at all, though every day she was in her place opposite him at table. She came into the room in the morning so quietly that King’s first sign of her presence was her mousey little whispered “Good-morning!” Then her eyes would droop upon the toast-rack and King would relapse into the cables. She was annoyingly precise, going out every morning with an exasperating punctuality to some office in the city. Later, King learnt that she was a retoucher at a photographic establishment in George Street. He decided that he liked her eyes; they were quiet, sensible eyes. Her glance was almost like the touch of a cool hand. So unlike the impatient, dark eyes in the drawn face of the Anæmic Niece.
One day, a few months after his arrival, King fell ill. Influenza held him in bed. That afternoon the news filtered through the house. As King restlessly tossed through the sweltering heat of the long day a knock came to his bedroom door. It was the elder Miss Wave with some books from the Anæmic Niece. She told him that her niece had one of her headaches. And the fevered boy seemed to suddenly comprehend something of the girl’s position.
That evening also appeared Mrs Tatlow, the old lady vaguely connected with the coal trade. She brought some jelly that she had made with her own hands, and she hoped that Mr Southern would pardon her the liberty (sniff) she had took in offering it to him. She had had the influenza herself last summer; she was that bad that she thought she was going to die (sniff) and there was nothing she could eat but jelly, and really you could buy the packets so easily nowadays it was no trouble at all to make it (sniff); not that she believed that it was really as nourishing as the jelly she used to make out of real calves’ feet (sniff); there was something really nutritious in that jelly; now, if Mr Southern would only try a little of this (sniff) and pardon the liberty she had took in bringing it up to him, she felt sure he would feel better, cooled-like (sniff); now she must go and attend to Mr Tatlow (sniff), he was always that particular about his supper, being old-like and got into habits and that-like, and he wasn’t so good at getting about now as he once was (sniff). Ah, well, they all got older and, thank God! they both could grow older together (a very sniffy sniff); there now, she heard him moving about below, and if he didn’t have his supper at half-past nine precise, he got that ill-tempered that there was no putting up with—
With a sniff concluding she went.
The next day she came again with more jelly, and that evening he heard the same timid knock at the door. In fact, so hesitant was it that he was not sure anyone had knocked, and only on its being repeated did he call “Come in!”
Miss Barbara Smith appeared.
“They tell me that you’ve got influenza,” she began hurriedly, as if repeating a lesson. She was evidently perturbed at her presumption.
“I thought I’d just come up and see how you were getting on,” she added, when she had recovered her breath. “A man’s never able to make himself comfortable when he’s ill. He never seems to grow into a room as a woman does into hers. Now a girl couldn’t sleep a night in a strange room without making its four bare walls reflect her personality; and a man might live a year in a room and never leave a mark to show that it was his.”
She was talking easily now. King was surprised to notice how bright her face was, how brilliant was the light in her neutral-tinted eyes. She was moving about the room, quietly putting his clothes in order, freshening the room with a woman’s touch.
“Yes, I’m afraid my room’s rather untidy,” admitted King. “It always is.”
“Not more untidy than most men’s,” she said.
King stared. “How many men’s bedrooms have you been inside?” he laughed.
She answered with a quiet seriousness. “Oh, men are always getting ill. They take to their beds so easily. I daresay it’s because we women are, as it were, always on the edge of ailing. We live accustomed to the thought of sickness. Illness, and the thought of illness, to us is almost a commonplace; but to a man illness is an extraordinary, a fearful thing. If a man feels the least bit unwell, he gets scared and slinks away to bed. There was Mr Graham who had this room before you; he used to have a girl’s photo on the dressing-table just where you’ve got that photo.”
She pointed to a little primitive portrait of Aroha.
“Only Mr Graham’s young lady was more good-looking—at least, more men’s good-looking—than yours. She was an actress, I think. Well, he used to be always getting colds and lying up, and when I came back from town I used often to run up and see how he was. He was usually pretty irritable, but then, you see, he was ill. At first, I thought it was perhaps because she did not come to see him, and once I asked him; but he laughed and said she wasn’t that sort. So I used to bring him up flowers for his room. I’ve got some in my room if you’d let me put them in here—they would brighten the room. Mr Graham used to put up with my fussing for the sake of the flowers, I think. Besides, I like men to talk to; and they don’t talk to me very much, you see. But when they’re ill I make them. It’s an unfair advantage to take, of course; but men are so much more sensible to talk to; they’re not so mean and petty. Of course they are coarse and horribly tactless; but when they’re ill the roughness is softened out of them and they’re quite bearable. I think if I ever married I’d like a husband who was always ill. Do let me get you those flowers—they’re country flowers, not the sick things you buy in the streets.”
“So you’re a country girl?” he said. He was feeling vaguely annoyed at the way in which Miss Smith regarded him. He was merely the occupant of a bedroom in which Miss Smith took an interest.
“Yes,” she said, as she arranged his pillows for him. “The farm at Penrith wouldn’t support us all, so I had to come to Sydney to make a living for myself.”
“And you’re in a photographer’s shop, aren’t you?” King was beginning to feel a faint interest in this little mousey woman with the patient eyes.
“Yes, I am a retoucher. It’s easy work, though sometimes it’s a bit dreary.”
“But retouching?” King wondered. “Isn’t it dreadfully monotonous work?”
“Isn’t all work monotonous?” she returned, with a touch of fire that in her seemed to King almost ludicrous.
“Not my work!” he preened.
“Oh, you paint!” she said indifferently. “I suppose you can afford to paint; but I wish—I wish—” She hesitated. “I wish you would go in for regular work, some real work. I am sure it would be better for you.”
King gasped. “But don’t you know that painting is my real work, my life work?” he managed to say at last. Miss Barbara Smith was evidently a “bod”— which is a suckling Philistine.
“Oh, if you can make a living that way, I daresay you’d be a fool not to,” she returned. “But it isn’t the living I’m considering; it’s the effect on you.”
Such views were not worth rebutting. It was only the work that ever mattered. Yet an uneasy memory rose in his mind of one other woman who had despised his work. But he put that memory resolutely from him.
“Those are your brothers and sisters that I sometimes see here on Saturday afternoons?” he said.
“Yes, I get my Saturdays off from one o’clock, and I usually take the train to Penrith and see them all at home. But it is such a treat for the kiddies to come to town that I often stay here and let them visit me. We go to the Zoo; the kiddies love it, but I hate it. Zoos smell so, don't they? and the animals are so dreadfully like human beings, caricatures of us in which all our wicked moods come out with such terrifying distinctness. I shudder every time I pass the monkey-cage, and there are some kangaroos that have got the silly faces of the portraits I have to retouch, and there’s a hyena that I fancy was once a larrikin, and some of the tigers have expressions like those on the faces of men that sidle up and speak to you if you’re out in the streets by yourself after dark. And I see all my friends and relations sometimes staring out at me from behind the bars; and once I fancied I caught a glimpse of myself—myself when I’m in my worst mood. I wonder if bishops ever go to zoos? I think zoos and museums—museums are places full of dead things—things that smell stuffy and ought to have been buried decently out of sight centuries ago—I think zoos and museums ought to be stopped. Or, perhaps, it would do if only children were admitted. We grown-ups think too much. We begin to shudder.”
King remembered those kiddies—sturdy little country children, whose presences radiated noise with the persistence of radium. He remembered once wondering how she could be so obviously glad to see such commonplace children. He had been irritated by the disparity between the effusiveness of her greeting and the unperturbed stolidity of the objects upon which she sprayed her superfluous kisses.
“And what holidays do you get?” he asked.
“Three days at Christmas, four at Easter, and then, of course, Queen’s birthday, and Prince of Wales’ birthday. I always go up to Penrith for my holidays, and we have picnics and black-berryings and drives in the big dray. I’m like one of the kiddies then!”
There was a flush of excitement on her face. King closed his eyes—he was a little feverish—and pictured her as a child. She would have been a demure, serious little thing, already a mother to the younger ones, already cheerfully shouldering her burden. Then he tried to conceive her daily work. The lack of interest in it, the eternal sameness of it, the stifling of every artistic stirring! It seemed to him that, as day after day she smoothed out the lines in the faces on the negatives, she had gradually smoothed out the lines in her soul. She had taken all the colour out of her life, all the meaning out of her universe. The world, as she saw it, was a drab, neutral-tinted thing—the colour of her eyebrows. And she was content, accepted this pallid pretence of life! He contrasted her humility and patience with the fierce rebellion that smouldered in the soul of the Anæmic Niece. He felt a vague contempt for the patient, little young-old woman with the indeterminate eyebrows.
He saw that her future would be but a drear continuous unrolling of her past. She would go on retouching, retouching. There was no hope of her ever marrying, and so escaping from the trivial iteration that life cheated her with as its meaning. Her prim face with its pure, pale complexion, her slim, unnoticeable figure, had in them no quality that would arrest a man’s attention. Men instinctively demand emphasis in a woman; the finer nuances are usually overlooked. That is why there are so many nice old maids. Miss Barbara Smith seemed deficient in sex. He could not imagine any man wanting to kiss her. Besides, she did not seem to consider the possibility of any change. She was manacled to patience, prisoned in content.
Then King contrasted her life with his. She might have had artistic tastes once; but life had smoothed them out of her soul long ago. It seemed to him that she had never grown up. And yet he was surprised to find himself considering her as not young. She was older than King, of course. But she had missed so much in life. The stream of emotion that seemed to colour all his life ran past her quiet personality unsuspected, unenvied.
And he was able, so he believed, to give utterance to every artistic striving within him. He was fully emotioned. The life that he had mapped out for himself provided at least that he would live. Life, as he saw it, meant only the chance of developing one’s individuality, of seizing and utilising to its utmost potentiality every factor that made for the growth of the ego, of giving utterance to every aspect of one’s personality, of throwing out antennae of inquiry into every corner of life, of increasing to its fullest capacity every striving that stirred within one. Experience, and the glorious, fully-equipped capacity to experience, made up life.
And this prim, undeveloped Miss Smith of the indeterminate eyebrows—a being as colourless as her name—had never lived, would never live. She would go on, day after monotonous day, retouching, retouching—fading inevitably with the years, until at last she passed almost imperceptibly, almost unperceiving, out of the state she called life. It seemed to King a shameful thing that Miss Smith should so passively accept what fate had offered her. His manhood stirred in him. He could never so submit; he would for ever struggle, for ever rebel.
And now the contempt that he had felt for this little woman of the mousey ways was tinged with the warm hue of pity. She had not his strength, his belief in himself, his special talent.
He turned on his pillow with words of confused sympathy crowding to his lips. She had left the room, had noiselessly closed the door.