Читать книгу Thirty Years in Australia - Ada Cambridge - Страница 11

We had to wait in lodgings for a few weeks, during which time we made acquaintance with the place and people.

Our lodgings were very comfortable. Sitting-room and bedroom, with a door between, our other door opening upon a big plot of virgin bush, alive with magpies, whose exquisite carolling in the early hours of the day is the thing that I remember best. There is no bird-song in the world so fresh and cheery. I seldom hear it now, but when I do I am back again, in imagination, at breakfast near that open door, drinking in the sweetness of the lovely September mornings which were the morning of my life. Never had I known such air and sunshine, or such health to enjoy them; and never do I feel so much an Australian as when I go to the Bush again and am welcomed by that fluty note. The spirit of happy youth is in it, and of those "good old times" which we old colonists have so many reasons to regret to-day. No song of English nightingale could strike deeper to my heart.

Speaking of breakfast reminds me of the luxury we lived in, in respect of food. Never was such a land of plenty as this was then, when no one dreamed of butter and beef at what is their market rate this day. We had young appetites, in fine order after the sea-voyage, and the more we ate the better was our landlady pleased. It hurt her as a hostess and housewife to have any dish neglected. And she simply stuffed us with good things; the meal prepared for us two might have served half-a-dozen, and given bilious attacks to all. One mistake only did she make in the arrangement of her bill of fare—she gave us too many quinces; apparently they were a superfluity in her garden, as they have since been in nearly all of ours. At first they were a novel and welcome delicacy, but when we had had them at every meal for weeks—in jam, jelly, tart, pudding, and pie, with cream, with custard, with bread and butter, and inlaid in sandwich cake—we were so thoroughly sickened of them that neither of us have wanted to look at a quince since. We have given the fruit away in sacksful to our neighbours, season after season, all these thirty years, and not cooked one; just lately—tempted by a brilliant carbuncle-hued jelly presented to me by a gifted little cook in my family—I have suddenly re-acquired a taste for it (which G. says will never happen to him), and now for the first time we have no quinces in the garden. That is to say, we have quinces—as also pears and almonds and other fruits—but the thieving little town-boys that live around us steal everything before it is fit to pluck. And I may here add, in regard to this sad fact, that when we came to our town-house we found a notice-board up in the orchard-paddock at the back, offering a reward of £5 for the apprehension of "trespassers upon these premises." While it remained up, there was always a policeman outside the fence. It was the joy of our own school-boys to bamboozle him by scaling the fence at night or in some surreptitious manner, pretending to be trespassers, and only when they had given him all the trouble and satisfaction of apprehending them, revealing their identity as sons of the house. But I could not bear this board—such an anomaly in the colony, as I had known it; I thought it horrible in any case, but on a clergyman's land quite scandalous; and I did not rest until it was taken down. Now I understand the meaning of it. No sooner was it gone than the policeman disappeared for ever. And the thieving boys took, and keep, possession of the place—at any rate, of the fruit; and of the flowers when they fancy them, as occasionally they do. The fowls are locked up in their house at night, and could defend themselves with audible squawks in day-time. The back gate is also locked. But those young villains make their own gates; they breach the defences by simply tearing down a few palings, and pass through the hole. We mend it up, or hire a man to mend it—more than the £5 of the reward must have gone in this way—and next night they break it open again, or make another in an easier place. Then quite calmly, and boldly they come in and out, sit in the rifled and broken tree or on the top of the fence to munch their spoil and "cheek" the poor maid who goes out to expostulate; and, the once zealous policeman steadily holding aloof (he has been appealed to for succour a dozen times in vain), we have no redress, except when we take the law into our own hands, which is an unprofitable proceeding. One of my ex-schoolboys administers justice occasionally, in a fashion to bring irate parents, and threats of summonses for assault about his ears, but he cannot be in two places at once, and his long absences from this place are calculated upon. As for Bob, the current house-dog, a fox-terrier of some intelligence, he behaves like a perfect idiot in this case. He will bark furiously at the boys when ordered to do so, but will neither initiate the chase nor follow it up with effective action. My idea is that he takes them for permanent members of the establishment. Or "boys will be boys," he thinks. Or he has seen me bribe them to come and ask for fruit, instead of stealing it. Anyway the result is that we have no fruit for ourselves. Year after year we see our trees blossom and the young crop set and swell, knowing we shall gather no harvest beyond a few hard, half-grown pears, which can be stewed soft. If I want to make quince jelly, as now I do, I must buy the quinces.

But in the country there were no thieves—no locks and bars in use—no need for the policeman. The only raiders of the orchards were the birds, who had the right to tax us.

That town of W——, where we spent the first year of our Australian life, was a typical country-town of the better class, and at that period very lively and prosperous. The railway afterwards drained it of much of its local importance, which has only revived again in quite recent times—since the fat lands about it have become studded with dairy-farms and butter and tobacco factories, industries and population which have contrived to hold their own here and there against the crushing discouragements to which both are subjected. Within the last few months it has been made the seat of a bishopric.

We found a highly-civilised society. The police magistrate at the head of it—always a P.M. was at the head in those days, in the country-towns big enough to have one, and not only by virtue of his official standing, but by every right of personal character and culture, as a rule—was a (to me) surprisingly well bred as well as kindly gentleman; and his wife was as nice as he. They gave bright evening-parties, at which he played the flute with a delicate skill, and he read largely and liked to talk of what he read; also he was an exemplary husband and father. In the group of pleasant households his was one of the most serenely pleasant, and so we felt it deeply when one morning, a few months after our arrival, the news of his sudden death was brought to us. He had risen that morning apparently in his usual health, and was in his dressing-room, making his toilet and chatting with his wife through the open door between them—she with a baby a week or so old—when she heard him fall; he did not answer her call to know what was the matter, and when she went to see she found him dead upon the floor. The catastrophe left her with six little ones to provide for, and next to nothing to do it with. The good husband and father, taken without warning in his prime (of unsuspected heart disease), had begun to make provision for the rainy day, but not completed the task. However, with pupils and boarders and what not, she made a splendid fight of it. The baby son did not long survive his father, but the five daughters grew up to testify to her good mothering and to reward her for it. They are now good mothers in their turn, sharing her society between them.

Next to the P.M. in the social scale came the doctors. There were two, English gentlemen both. One had emigrated for adventure and the goldfields, and spent good years seeking his fortune by short cuts, but had been glad at last to return to his profession for a living. He was courting a girl of exactly half his age when we came upon the scene, and their wedding was the first smart function that we attended. The other doctor and his wife were new arrivals from home, like ourselves; they had landed but a month or two before us; and they were our special and best-beloved companions and friends. Alas! he too—one of the most delightful of men—died suddenly and dreadfully, shortly before the death of the P.M., also leaving six mere babies and a wife to whom he was perfectly devoted, as she to him. She came to stay with me after the funeral, and the almost simultaneous birth of my first child—the latter event hastened, it was thought, by the shock and grief that I had shared with her. She was the most uncommon woman I ever met, as she was one of the most adorable. Superficially, both in face and figure, with the exception of her beautiful hands, she was quite plain, and absolutely without trace of conscious fascination or coquetry—the only instance I have known of a woman of that sort being irresistible to every man she came across. The story of her engagement, as told me by her husband, was exactly appropriate to them both. He was leaving England for a foreign appointment, with but a few days to spare, when a friend or relative—a high church dignitary—wrote to beg a farewell visit, mentioning by way of special inducement that a charming girl was staying in the house. The doctor responded by falling in love with her on sight, in such a desperate and successful manner that she married him within those few spare days and accompanied him to his foreign appointment. Perfect love and bliss had been their portion ever since; it was an ideal union. They had the habit of driving up to our door, just as we were finishing dinner, and calling us, one or both, to come out with them. The country was new to us all, and we spent many of the evenings of our first summer exploring it together. We made common cause as new chums, although they were such citizens of the world as to feel at home anywhere. Even the little ones in the nursery could put us to shame in respect of their cosmopolitan experience. It filled me with envy to hear them chattering their pretty baby French to their Swiss nurse. The mother married again some years afterwards. And not a man of her acquaintance but felt and said—as my own husband did—that the not-too-well-off bachelor who saddled himself with the almost penniless widow and her six children did by that act the best day's work for himself that he had ever done or was likely to do. He, we have been told (for it is many a year since she drifted out of our reach), followed the example of his predecessor in marital behaviour—waiting on her hand and foot, writing her letters and packing her trunks to save her trouble, and generally worshipping the ground she walked on. That also is considered matter of course. But I wonder how it is with her now? She is living still, I hear. And she is considerably older than I am.