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I

The Major-General was rather a pompous little man; not so small when it came to weight, as he was naturally broad in the shoulder and beam and was acquiring a copious middle-aged spread. He swaggered up the mail-boat gangway followed by an obsequious steward, his honours obtrusive upon his labels for all tip- and tuft-hunters to read:

Maj.-Gen. Sir Oswald Mazere-Poole, K.C.M.G., M.P. Saloon Promenade Deck Cabin A.

He gave an order about his larger baggage. The steward acknowledged with a sharp salute. He too ha4 been in the army, and the Major-General was a prize. The Major-General returned the salute with satisfaction. Nothing to equal army discipline for straightening up young men!

"Anybody interesting this trip, steward?"

The steward halted in the doorway. "We have a prima-donna next cabin to you, sir."

"Who? Madame Melba?"

"No. That new one, Madame Austra, that there's a lot of fuss about now: makes pots of money: one of our own, sir, too."

"Good!"

"Theatrical troupe aboard too, sir. Seen the posters in San Francisco."

"That's good, too. Very good! Lunch directly we sail?"

"Yes, sir." With a second smart salute the steward went after other prey, leaving his passenger gratified as to the havoc a military K.C.M.G., etc., foot-free from his wife, might work among actresses and prima-donnas. Content with what the mirror said, he went and hung over the rail to watch the late passengers coming on with the final pantry stores.

The soldier had allowed himself half an hour from the hour of departure. The prima-donna and the actress were in a race to be last aboard. The Major-General observed them with lively interest.

A graceful figure swathed in veils, carrying bouquets and more bouquets, surrounded by many women and a few men, stood at the foot of the gang plank. She was languid and dreamy, with large dark eyes, and the technique of graciousness firmly clamped upon her. She might be any age under fifty or over twenty-nine, dependent upon her beauty specialist, thought the soldier. A man, even a member of the Australian squattocracy, had not undergone intimate contact with the hub of the universe without attaining to certain knowledge.

This must be the actress. "Not heavy enough in the brisket for the caterwauler," was his summing-up, redolent of early environment. This was confirmed by the arrival of an automobile which disgorged three women, one of splendid height, with pale-blue eyes and florid skin, who walked with swinging gait, taking all glances auspiciously without affectation. She was followed up the plank by maid and secretary, and stewards with parcels and parcels and parcels, and so many bouquets of such expensiveness that the previous arrival was obscured.

The Major-General grinned engagingly. There was something indelibly Australian about that grin, which contact with the world's soi-disant elect, or even the House of Commons, had not extirpated.

This was the Australian, if he knew anything. Her size and features and the hair protruding from beneath the fashionable skull-cap proclaimed one of the Brennans of Bool Bool, into which tribe Madame Austra had been born. This was inevitably Molly, descendant of Timothy and Maria of The Gap, one of the old pioneering families. Mollye--she now spelt it--had gone far since she had seen the light where the Wamgambril comes down singing the G Minor Ballade to join the peerless Yarrabongo and thence to old Mother of Waters and the Murray, far-flowing to the Bight. She now signed herself AUSTRA, like a royal personage, and the most critical musical journals conceded that she was the greatest living Brünnhilde, and one of the six great voices of the world. There was glory for you--from little old Australia so far away: and little old Bool Bool farther away up the country amid the Bogongs! The Major-General thrilled and was proud. He was glad of his ribbons on his breast and his alphabet after his name.

They were going home, away, away down there together. My, but it would be good to see and smell a bush fire again at night in the ranges, to dive in the cool clear swimming holes about Coolooluk and Bool Bool, and feel the breezes lilting down from Cootapatamba across old Monaro.

The orchestra was playing a haunting tune, the fair breeze fanned his cheek, an appetizing odour came from the galley, the summer sea undulated in a haze of heat, rocking a city of shipping.

"By Gad, if the old Brennans could see their great-grand-daughter Mollye and where she has reigned: or if the old Pooles and Mazeres could see me, how astonished they would be!"

The last rush aboard; the gang plank was clattering down. After the great ships between England and New York, it seemed an imposition to be crowding aboard a vessel of under eight thousand tons, whose main deck was hardly above the wharf used for full-grown liners, but she swung into the stream with maritime hardihood and out past Fisherman's Wharf, past Yerba Buena Island, away from the city so magnificently set on hills, past the fortified Government prison, away from Tamalpais guarding the skies, through the Golden Gates to the open endless deep, to meander for weeks adown the vast Pacific. Past Oceania. Past New Zealand. Still on across a final sea to reach that farthest land, beyond which there was no habitable globe, and whence all the lone waterways return again to the world. The tonnage of the R.M.S. Papeete illustrated that his homeland was a far countree of few people, an Ultima Thule indeed. That recognition had not been his for years after going north; at length perforce he had come to the European and American point of view.

II

None of the women celebrities had appeared at lunch. The Major-General expected something better from dinner. He entered with an appetite for eventualities as well as food. The Golden Gates were far abaft. A luscious, relaxed three or I our weeks lay ahead. Immaculate in white with the millinery on his left breast, he sat in state with the Captain in a saloon hilt half-filled with people and heavy with hothouse blooms.

"The ladies not appearing?"

"Having a little rest."

It developed into a rest cure. Judith Laurillard kept her cabin for days, and Austra was not going to allow her the more telling entrance. Instead of racing for it, they camped. Austra won. Her retirement was the less neurotic, the better to be endured. She took scalp and face treatment and wrote letters and read trashy novels and musical biographies to fill the time.

"Any millionaires aboard to float my Australian opera scheme?"

"They seem to be more like commercial travellers," said her secretary. "A doctor and a Major-General Sir Oswald Mazere-Poole seem to be the biggest panjandrums."

"I remember the Major-General as a goggle-eyed kid."

"Yes, madame. He hasn't changed."

"Don't you girls slip up on it. As soon as Judith appears and is well-set, then I come out."

"Yes, madame."

Judith Laurillard came out that very night seeking relief from her own thoughts. An affair with a splendid unspoiled youth had possessed her. Skilled in taking the psychological temperature, she had seen that youth would call to youth any day. Any pincushiony girl might lure him to the domestic yard and fatherhood. With rare art and fortitude she sought a tour of Australia, playing in the West en route. To her, Australia was utter exile which she sought as an effectual antidote. But she had been all-out, and fortitude could only temper her ordeal. Hour in, hour out she lay, slightly incapacitated by mal de mer, reliving hours drugged with amour, wearing and tormenting. For years now it had seemed that each lover must be the last flicker of sunlight, leaving existence a twilit desert where it would be toilsome to plant another garden to replace the passion flowers. No pulse to stir at her approach, no...

"Elsie," she said to her confidential maid, "you get me up tonight, even if I'm green with sea-sickness."

The ingénue had reported: "The awfullest, dull, fifth-rate crowd! I think we'll be homesick for even Americans before we are finished."

"I don't care if they're all Pullman porters. Anything will be better than any more of my own society."

She entered the dining saloon gracefully as a sylph, dark as night, and alone. Her gown, a fabulously expensive handful of filmy stuff, had gowpens of seed pearls on it, and ropes of pearls fit for a queen was most of the covering of her slender body above the table. Her perfectly arranged shingle was held with a fillet of pearls, and she carried a monster black feather fan set on mother-of-pearl sticks. She was pathetic and willowy and shrinking, with her great eyes and twisty sensitive mouth. She looked a cauldron of society emotions and the composite heroine of smart novels of Mayfair life. Everybody arose and did obeisance, and the Captain inquired profoundly about her health.

"I'm really the most frightful sailor alive," she murmured in her fluty, husky voice, and acknowledged the introductions. And that was all she said.

"Good old Judith!" murmured the ingénue at her side table. "She's always a wow wherever she appears."

"No one can touch her at the game," agreed the leading man. They did not know that at that moment Austra awaited her cue to illuminate the saloon. Every object was thrown into darkness as when the Aurora Australis plays its rose and green lightning around the night horizon. Majestic described her passage. The Captain rose to usher her to her seat of equal glory opposite Judith. Austra stretched out a large, capable, bejewelled hand like an empress.

"I prefer seclusion tonight. I still feel like a poisoned dingo and not fit company for normal people."

She moved transcendently on her way like a papal legate, all red gold and yellows to tone with skin and hair. A train of gold tissue that called for a page streamed behind her. Her flaming hair was reinforced by golden leaves dusted with diamonds. A diamond or two (dozen) in careless magnificence sparkled from other promontories of her person. She flirted a tiny bejewelled fan. Seemingly astonished to recognize the Major-General, though she had watched him critically through her port, and but for which she would not have known him from a pie melon, she exclaimed in those scientifically placed stentorian speaking notes of hers: "Why, I'm enraptured if it isn't our very own Major-General, little Ossy-Possy Poole that crept together on the floor with me! I'm proud of you. All these medals on your breast"--she tapped them with the miniature fan--"I feel as if I had won every one of them myself." She turned to the table. "We Australians are like that. There are still so few of us, and we're so isolated or provincial or something, we're one clan, and when one of us does something that the big world honours we each feel as if we had a share in it."

"By Gad, Mollye!" responded the soldier, embarrassed but glowing, gallantly rising to his full height and the top of the occasion, "the boot is on the other foot. If I could have a share in your triumphs!...You'll sing for us, I hope."

"I've been freezing and starving with homesickness for years, and years, and years, and years, and am just so dithering glad to be going back at last that I couldn't resist anything you'd ask me." Here she caught sight of Judith, apparently for the first time, and went around the table to do her honour. She obliterated Judith, though not of malice.

"Judith Laurillard! Excuse me not waiting for a formal introduction, but only a bandicoot would not recognize you from your posters. I admire you right out of sight, and in Australia I'll have a chance to know you at last."

The surpassed Judith was as nearly at a loss as so sophisticated a social machine could be. Austra rolled by like the midday sun.

"Good old Mollye!" said the highly elated Major-General, seeking to confirm and expand his limelight. "Her great-grandparents and mine were very close friends."

"What a woman! Beats all I ever had on this ship, and I've carried some stunners in my time."

"Marvellous! Such devastating animal magnetism! She has left me limp simply by passing by."

Limp and colourless Judith appeared by comparison. She was grace, she was subtlety, a voluptuary refined to the nth degree. She might be the grande cocotte idealized by postwar novelists, she might be a modern Thais, or an anaemic Cleopatra, or the Green Hat. Austra was Ceres, Brünnhilde, wholesome resplendent vitality--Boadicea. She was a first principle, Judith a deduction.

Austra dazzled like an arc light. Those facing her gazed openly. Others made excuses for looking behind them. Energy and hearty camaraderie radiated from her to the very stewards, who brazenly beamed in her face.

"When do we pick up the darling old Cross?" she boomed across to the Captain, sure as royalty of her words commanding attention.

"You might be able to pick it up tonight--from the bridge." Judith, deafened, retired early to sensitive seclusion.

She later wrote a postscript to an intimate letter to be posted at Papeete:

I'm shivering about my Australian tour. I fear the wrong plays have been chosen, though I am assured they swallow anything that has been boomed at home.

The people on board are friendly enough but aesthetically nonexistent, like the very worst provincials, only that this new-world democratic idea of each Dick and Sarah being better than any other Jim and Julia makes them more blatant. To discuss any of the advanced artistic or philosophic ideas with them would be trying to commune with arrested mental development.

Austra is on board--a mountain of a woman. I should judge her to be very popular in Australia. She can't appear without playing to the gallery about as softly as a fire engine in full blast. There is a total absence of subtlety and delicacy about her which suits her to her environment. Ah, well, we must all be what we are.

Ju.