Tussock Land; a Romance of New Zealand and the Commonwealth/Chapter 17
XVII
After this meeting King and the little photographic retoucher frequently met and talked. But a feeling of constraint rose between them as soon as the boy got better. It seemed to the woman that the man did not need her in his health. He seemed to shake her off, as one would shake off a weakness. She was little accustomed to notice from men, and she readily acquiesced in King’s lapse into indifference. In her heart she had secretly accounted as a wickedness the fact that she so took advantage of a man’s illness to force herself upon his recognition. She felt herself a wanton woman, and she brazenly rejoiced—in the secrecy of her heart—at her guile. She considered it as sharp practice on her part; but she did it, and was not ashamed. Nay, a glow came into her heart as she recalled the devious ways of her great cunning. That is the sort of shameless woman Miss Barbara Smith was.
And Miss Smith never disguised from herself the fact that she was a matter of utter indifference to the world. True, she felt a pleasurable importance when she got off the train at Penrith and marched at the head of a procession of sisters and brothers along the country lane to the farm. At those moments she felt that she comprehended Napoleon. At certain great epochs of his life he must have felt exactly like that.
But for the great world of men and women she knew she was a mere unregarded cypher. And she acquiesced in her position. Really she was of no importance to anybody except her family. There wasn’t one man in all the world. I’m afraid that some nights, after she had blown out the candle, Miss Smith cried from the mere sense of loneliness. The Anæmic Niece never cried. She would have scorned the weakness, and it would have made her head ache. In Miss Smith she took no further interest than to despise her utterly for her complacent attitude toward life. And Miss Smith took no notice of her save to deplore her lack of patience. And yet Miss Smith’s heart was a pitying one, keen to help and heal. But charity does not diffuse itself broadly like light; it has its affinities and its dislikes, and the two women’s personalities inspired in each a mutual misunderstanding and repugnance.
Now that King’s financial crisis was so near, his money dribbling, dribbling out, he felt the immediate need of an adviser, a confidant. He had written to his father, pointing out that it was impossible for him to continue his studies and meantime contrive to support himself by art. He suggested a loan.
His father’s answer did not lack clarity.
“I disapprove entirely,” he wrote in that neat, precise hand of his, “and have always disapproved of your absurd notion of making a living by painting. I shall not assist you to carry out that scheme any further. You have given it ample trial, and the result is not encouraging. If you give up the idea of becoming an artist and return to Dunedin I can arrange for a good legal firm here to receive you as a clerk, and on your passing your final law examinations I shall be willing to set you up in practice. Please understand that this offer is final. If you persist in your unfilial course, I have done with you. You must take the consequences of your foolishness.”
This was signed, with some absence of humour, “Your affec. father.”
By the same post came a long letter from his mother, imploring him to return home, and enclosing a postal order for £2, 10s. laboriously scraped by her from a somewhat keenly scrutinised and excessively audited household expenditure.
King tore his father’s letter up with a sense of finality.
His thoughts turned to Aroha. Here, he knew, was a friend whose advice would be helpful and sincere. He and she wrote regularly—too regularly, Aroha sometimes reflected, to be genuinely necessary—just the cheerful, non-committal, gossipy notes that pass between friends and keep a waning friendship in a state analogous to that of frozen mutton. It does not decay: it retains its freshness; and though perfectly wholesome and palatable, something of the juice has gone out of it.
Aroha would give him good advice, he felt; but, unfortunately, he knew the advice she would give. She thought little of his views of art, and would welcome his relinquishing such an unsatisfactory pursuit. He would not ask her. Besides, he felt he could not frankly consult her. Her opinion of him was still an asset of value in his thoughts of her, and he was not man enough to acknowledge defeat to her. He would prefer that she still conceived him as a conqueror.
But one evening, as he was sitting out on the balcony after a hard day’s work at the studio, he heard Miss Smith slip softly to a seat at the other end of the balcony. It was a still, star-lit night; the air had the fragrant coolness that was the first breath of the “southerly”; it seemed as if the great sweltering city took a deep breath of relief from the stifling heat of the day.
The gas lamp in the street made her face a pale blur in the darkness. He could see the utter weariness of her attitude as she sat back in the big chair with her hands in her lap, palms upwards, like a tired child. Perhaps she, too, had worked hard that day—and the heat had been terrible. Perhaps she, too, had had problems to solve that to her were as difficult as the balance of a picture.
He rose and went to her. She came back from her reverie almost with a physical effort.
“Why, you’ve brought me all the way from Penrith!” she said, with a faint laugh.
“Home?” said King.
“Yes, I always go there in my thoughts when—when I’ve got nothing better to do.”
She turned to him brightly. “But you’ve got something you want to tell me?” she guessed.
It always pleased her to be consulted. It made her affine to humanity, set a seal upon her importance to the world.
King told her.
“So,” she murmured, half to herself, “so the young ambition has met its first obstacle? Well, that’s good for the young ambition. And, I daresay, once you thought that there were no such things as obstacles—or, at least, that there would never be any obstacles for you? Well, you’ve just got to climb over them. How old are you?”
King could not resist her question. She treated him as if he were a child and she long had been a mother. But this evening there was a weariness in the boy’s brain that craved for the soothing touch of sympathy. In his uncertainty of spirit he shrank from the responsibility of his manhood. He told her his age—twenty-two years.
“And I’m thirty-three,” she said with an indrawn breath. King wondered if it was a sigh; he was not quite sure.
“Of course you’re not going to give up?” she said, to make sure. Her brain startled her by clamorously insisting that that was just what he was going to do. She looked on him as a spoilt boy, stirred by young ideals, fine ambitions, delicate instincts, but without that stability of character, that faculty for plodding, which was the foundation of all success in life. She did not know whether his character had depths or not. Conquest proved nothing; it was defeat that tested the fibres. She wanted to watch him when the tide ebbed. She had learnt that, to everyone in this life, no matter how gifted, how fortunate, there comes the hour when Fate says, “Life is too easy for this man, he goes too quickly, he attains too swiftly. The struggle will do him no good; he will pass through the engagement without a mark, without a consciousness that there was an engagement. He will not be able to value achievement, for he has not won success. Let us teach him to remember.”
And Fate puts a spoke in that man’s wheel. On every man that has risen above the ruck Fate has wreaked her incomprehensible, imperturbable spite; and it is the strong who survive that trial. The great men are those who, wounded in their most vital part, have yet gone on—not so easily, not so swiftly, not so cheerfully, not so splendidly, not so far. Yet they have struggled on, ever with that dragging spoke in their wheel. Or they have mutilated themselves and taken out the spoke—for the spoke is part of themselves; and the mutilated man, with the memory of that hurt still rankling in his heart, with that wound still tearing at his strength, the blood still oozing, oozing out, has still gone dauntlessly on. That is the great man—the only great man that life allows.
King’s reply was prompt. “Of course I’m not going to give up!”
His face lit up with her confidence in him. She was a stranger, and yet she believed in his future.
“But how are you going to do it?”
King’s face fell. He was at a pause; the obstacle loomed impassable before him.
“I might manage to hang on for a few months if I lived very cheaply—got into cheaper lodgings,” he ventured.
The suggestion stirred Miss Smith from her quietness. She had lived long in boarding-houses, and had come to acquiesce in the fluctuations of that life, the petty whirlpools and chance trivial currents that swept acquaintances from her, and drowned friend ships almost before they were grasped. She was not an attractive girl; she had not the personality to keep a friend to herself when she no longer came daily into that friend’s life. That was the deep significance that to her a mere change of lodgings sometimes had. She could not hold her friends once they got beyond her personal orbit. She acknowledged herself altogether a colourless personality; and after a month’s absence she could not blame the absent if time had blurred her image in their memories. So it was with a sense of clutching at a vanishing hand, swept from her reach by the current of chance, that she combated the idea of King going away. He must not go out of her life. She could do so much for him. It did not strike her till afterwards that she had been horribly selfish.
“That would only defer the inevitable,” she said almost vehemently.
King looked in surprise at her face. Her eyes were full of fire.
“No,” she went on, “there’s no chance of your making a living yet in Sydney by art. You’re only a student yet.”
He acquiesced unwillingly.
“Then you’ll have to do something else—not art.”
Already King had glanced, somewhat fearfully, at this possibility. It meant defeat, acknowledgment of failure. So he had shuddered and put the suggestion aside. And now this little mouse-coloured woman at his side suggested it as a probability. But to relinquish art? The idea was preposterous! He told her so.
“But you must get a living, and you needn’t altogether give up art. Make it your recreation. Couldn’t you get a billet as a clerk in a lawyer’s office?”
He humoured her absurd supposition. “Yes, there is an office here where I expect with my legal training I could get an appointment to a clerkship. I know the manager well. But, you know, I couldn’t ever do it. I’d have no time for painting.”
“Saturday afternoon and all Sunday, and the early mornings and the lunch-hours—oh, there’s lots of time to work in!”
“You talk because you’ve never tried,” said King, annoyed at her inexperience.
Miss Barbara Smith noted the anger in his voice. “I find I can do a lot of work in those fag-ends of the day,” she said quietly.
“Work? What work do you do?” he asked in faint scorn.
She shrank from his tone as if it were a blow. Did he have such a contempt for her as that? It was cruel of him to let her see how much he despised her.
“I write stories,” she said proudly.
“Printed stories?” His tone was one of utter surprise.
“Some of them are. Not in the Bulletin, though—I’m not clever enough for the Bulletin. But I don’t mind much. I think all the fun of writing stories comes in making them up. Once I’ve written a story I feel I’ve done everything that is necessary. I just put it away. But they pay you for them—sometimes; so I send them in. But I’ve got some dear little stories that are my own, that I’ll never let anyone else see. They’re mine: I made them—and oh, I couldn’t let any other eyes desecrate them! They’re just hidden away at the bottom of a box, and sometimes I take them out as if they were dolls and play with them; and sometimes I cry over them—they are so dear! And when I saw my first story in the Australasian it looked out at me from the type reproachfully—as if it were dead and laid out on the white paper, lifeless and cold and hard. I’m sure it was more human, more living, when it was in manuscript.”
King’s thoughts were away on his own career. The possibility of entering a lawyer’s office had already, beneath the quiet influence of this little woman, become a probability. He would have to give up his days to the drudgery of law, and he had solemnly forsworn that long ago! But there would be the early mornings—the time that in this hot climate he could best work in—and the end of the week. And all the time he would be supporting himself, living his own life and perfecting himself in his chosen art. It would be a fine answer to his father. But it would be a step downwards, a relinquishing of his hold on his ideal. No, he couldn’t do it!
“We’ve all got to compromise with life,” Miss Smith was saying, in her smooth, even tones. “We all have to live; and it seems to me that it really doesn’t matter how we pull along as long as the work is honest. But we needn’t cramp our lives within the limits of our work-hours. Often when I watch the clerks pouring out of the offices at five o’clock, I think of the day of resurrection. All that array has been all day in the grave, and at five o’clock the trump sounds, and they awake to life. It is grand to see the hope on their young faces! They’re men, all of them, not clerks; and the lives they are meant to live are manly lives. Life to them is a bigger, a more spacious thing, than office walls. Why, in your opinion I’m a photographic retoucher. But I know I’m not; I’m a soul! Do you think that when I go to heaven or hell and God asks me who I am I’ll say a photographic retoucher? No; I’m a soul, endowed with all a soul’s needs and desires. I retouch photographs in order to live. It seems a queer sort of universe, doesn’t it? where an individual would cease to be an individual if she didn’t keep on retouching photographs! Life has ordered me for a certain portion of my existence to retouch photographs; but that won’t prevent me from having my own life unseen, seeking my own ideals and dreaming my own dreams.”
She lapsed into a reverie. King felt vaguely annoyed at her detachment from his own concerns. He had come to her for advice, and apparently she had altogether forgotten him.
But she had not. She turned to him again.
“That work in a lawyer’s office would be so good for you,” she said. “You’ve never yet been in touch with life. A little cloudland is necessary to everybody; but you’ve got to come down and walk on solid earth for a bit, if you want to reach anything. You ought to feel what life is like, rub shoulders with the crowd.”
“But what have I to do with the crowd?”
“You’re one of the human crowd; you’re one of the workers, one of us.”
King paused. This girl was one of the workers, the hopeless, uncomplaining, mediocre workers, and she classed him—him, with his dreams and his talent—with the common crowd! She dared to put him in the ranks.
He was hurt with Miss Barbara Smith. And being yet young, he flashed out petulantly at her and left her.
Miss Barbara Smith smiled slowly and discriminatingly into the darkness.
“He’s such a boy!” she breathed. And there was a little envy in her voice. She could remember the time when she might have been as angry, might have as hastily hated the degradation of the crowd.