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I

Next morning was frosty, even in Sydney, the sky fleckless with white sunshine and devoid of moisture that might go inland to break the drought and relieve the travail of the grim north-west. Dick awakened to the memory of sheep being tortured for commerce. He could see the light and dusty clip falling away from the combs, and the miserable little bodies, robbed of their last comfort in their warm coats, staggering out into the sirocco to perish of hunger and cold, the rapacious wind sifting the dust over them in natural burial.

Larry Healey, Freda's father, had been wont to declaim, as he ploughed in the dust nearly thirty years before, that it was an ignorant and inefficient people who were too improvident to store from the years of plenty. This was now voiced with increasing authority. The droughts were not as set as the six months of iron weather which every year gripped a great part of the continent of North America, and surplus fodder grew in Australia by the thousand square acres with old Nature herself sowing the seed and irrigating it. "But the books show," said the big syndicates, "that it is cheaper to let the sheep die and breed up again in a few years, than to spend perhaps more than their value in labour and fodder sustaining them in lean years." This course was pursued in the interests of dividends regardless of consequences to the face of the earth, and free of control excepting such as the trade unions could impose. The torture to frail dumb animals, in their failing strength left by crows with bloody vacant eyeballs for the last agony, did not show on the big land syndicates' ledgers--yet. It showed in the register of man's stupidity, which in cycles leaves thousands of himself mutilated on some field, no more considered commercially than the sheep and cattle fallen in the droughts.

It was glorious weather in Sydney, however pettifogging housewives might whine about the dust. The sun sparkled all day without a cloud. The waters of the Harbour reflected the deep blue of the skies. The spray rose and fell, rose and fell, as it does for ever, even on the calmest Pacific days, about the feet of the majestic gateway to the sea and all the other magnificent ramparts of rock which are the splendour of that coast.

"I hate to have struck a drought for my return," said Austra to Nat Horan next morning, when, fresh and efficient, she began practice. "It puts a shade on everything and will be bad for business."

"Oh, there's always a drought! I don't see why they don't build public silos or something--general fodder conservation like water conservation." Nat's roots were in the city, Mollye was of the squattocracy. The season had always been a vital issue to her and hers.

She welcomed her guests effusively when they arrived. Horan was in the background as far as the elders noted, but to Laleen he towered like the expensive flat building called the Rockefeller where Mollye was established.

"Business first, Blanche darling. You can go on the roof with a book, or perhaps you would prefer to stay here."

"I'll stay in this nice chair. It's not often I get a chance to have a little rest."

"No. I expect you are full of mother tricks and self-sacrifice. Laleen can get points for this opera she has to write, and Dick is to hear what we do with his songs."

Nat opened a manuscript score and played a little prelude, sweet and sibilant, and as original as seems possible to musical composition in this century. Mollye sat beside him and sang in half voice:

"The she-oaks sigh, and sigh, all down the slope, And life, my Own, sinks with the molten sun: The wild ducks circling, cry the day is done, And I'm alone, darkly withdrawn from hope. The she-oaks sigh, their mourning voices grey, Matching the aching dusk, where all is still, Save campwards sheep upon the middle hill Lament with me that you are far away. The she-oaks mourn, yet wait again the sun, The wild ducks nestle on the water's breast: For me alone there is nor peace nor rest, From gnawing void of parting here begun. My love has gone, has gone, the she-oaks sigh. The cold high stars refuse their peace.--Good-bye!"

Laleen was absorbed in the accompanist. Blanche noted details. Mollye was in a dead-black gown, and she had green jade pins in her hair, green slippers on black-stockinged feet. This was a sensation to Blanche, capped by discerning a green garter on the prima-donna's ample but shapely leg.

Dick's mind* was in the past on She-oak Ridge in the back paddock of his boyhood where that song (his first) had come to birth in a school exercise-book. Mollye was regal, glowing, all her heart calling out to him, but imagination, greater than reality, had engulfed him. He could more poignantly visualize Ignez Milford sitting against a little scrub oak writing a book about Nita, the girl who had broken the bonds of fate. In the way of make-believe, Ignez had probably created the creature she herself wished to be. Ignez! She had sat among the scrub oaks and written a book which after a generation was not forgotten! Freda, too, had been a little black-haired elf writing under her she-oak in imitation of Ignez. Blanche had been in it, too, but only to disrupt the literary society by suspicions as repugnant to Dick as those she would attribute to him and Mollye now.

[* See Cockatoos.]

It was all so long ago. He had forgotten Ignez and her imaginative inspiration to his adolescence, but her influence had been indelible. Wonderful Ignez, to have set out to write in the teeth of everyone, till routed by Blanche. Here, over twenty years later, Laleen had the same old struggle to break free. And yet Blanche was a self-sacrificing saint! A mother to them all. Poor old Blanche! Sweet little Laleen!

Blanche's eyes were popping as she inventoried the rugs and divans, the autographed photographs of the mighty. It was the most luxurious establishment she had entered on terms of such intimacy. Thus to be hob-nobbing with the celebrity of the hour put her on a ledge above any of her circle. She wove a romance for Mollye and Dick. She was to be in its reflected glory through her precious Dick. That American marriage, now dissolved, had never seemed actual. Mollye was an B.C., and Blanche's Protestantism was as staunch as her anti-labour politics, but neither the Mazeres nor Brennans had ever been so bigoted as many. When the Brennans declaimed against Protestants, they excepted the Mazeres, and vice versa. Close association between the families had illustrated that persons of both creeds could be equally desirable.

"Do you like it?" Mollye inquired. Dick was caught with absent gaze. "I'll sing it again."

"Please do."

"The she-oaks sigh..."

Dick was back again on the Ridge with Ignez, that girl so full of spiritual fire and tears, a prisoner in unknown wastes artistically, trying to beat her way unguided out of the scrubs of inexperience and uncongeniality. What haven had she reached? People wondered that her brilliant promise had never ripened. That, Dick understood. His own case had been parallel. Not till now was he to have time and peace. Freda, too, though successful in other fields, complained that there was no time nor peace to develop her deeps.

Mollye had succeeded in toto, though she had had to force her way from a similar environment. But her grandmother and mother before her had both sung beautifully at concerts and church bazaars--stepping-stones for Mollye. Ignez had had no one about her with a shred of her own talent, nor the culture to appraise it. And singing was a readily appreciated art, Mollye a better weight for crashing through the scrub. Once in the grief of parting Ignez had put her arms around Dick's neck and he had gripped her wildly in his innocent adolescent arms--an experience never duplicated in that she had seemed to wilt like some fine silken thing. Dick had attributed this to the delicacy of womanhood, but no later woman had ever felt like that. He had been surprised to find them of substance and hardness.

Thus Ignez had stayed in his memory as a wraith to dissolve in the grasp of ruthless reality. Out of her wraith-like memory she had bequeathed Freda--and Laleen. Laleen must have her chance while courage was unbroken and impossibility unknown.

Mollye let her great organ out a little. No wraith she, but a splendid hippopotamus to crash through anything. Dick's contacts with women, though respectable, told him she was scientifically girthed and braced. Give her another ten years or so, and she would be enormous. She wouldn't melt in his arms. By Jove, he wouldn't like to carry her far, and her great firm hands--she could lay a man out with a blow if she disapproved of him. Ignez's little hand had been so frail that she winced when hearty souls squeezed it too firmly. She had complained that her fingers were so stiff with rough work that it hurt her to play the piano. Mollye's hands had never been roughened by charing...By Jove, how did they find tenors to look anything but a midget beside her?

"Do you want me to sing it once again?" Mollye smiled with hearty good-nature based on thrilling health and strength, and flowering affections.

"I don't think it is good enough to be sung in public--the words, I mean. I could make a better job of it now."

He fell to reflection again. He might make a better attempt at craftsmanship, but the emotional spring from which it had spread as perfume from a flower--could he ever feel the same again! The red sun behind She-oak Ridge had filled him with exquisite melancholy, a melancholy that thrilled. He must go hack there and poke around. He could find his way in the dark to the pipeclay hole made by an uprooted gum-tree and sheltered by tussocks from which the kangaroo rats hopped forth. The gold of the wattle, the purple of the indigo and woodbine in spring. He recalled his grief when the wattles were stripped and left to die by wattle-bark invaders. The blood, in the form of exquisite edible gum, had hung in sheets. The button birds chimed overhead, with the soldier birds. Fields of blue orchids grew below. Shafts of sunlight fell on a sea of hop scrub all golden brown with bloom. The little koalas ran across the track with their babies on their backs. Geebung trees. Ground berries. Wild cherries. Sour currants. The scrub oaks with their carpets of dry needles, their quaint acorns full of seeds, their mournful sighing which had set him dreaming of romance and adventure, or fame, or of beltane tourneys long ago. The whole gamut of adolescent dreams had its keynote in that sighing. He had travelled far emotionally since then, but the world had never yielded what he had heard in the voice of the drab casuarinas in the back paddock at Oswald's Ridges. No releasing love adventure had been his, no excitement of unqualified success. Was there in experience anything more poignantly valuable than the memory of the soughing scrub?

The past re-emerged vividly real. Mollye at hand did not yet seem to exist, nor did Sydney and the sacked park and his family. Imagination as the matrix of all reality must be greater than its products.

He wrenched himself from She-oak Ridge to the domicile of one of the most famous living women. There she was, comely, superb, glowing with an affection that generously included the whole family. It was jolly lucky to be able to give good old Blanche such a pleasure, and Laleen looked like a choice flower in an appropriate vase in such appointments. She was like Sylvia come back from the past, and only a year or so older than his own daughter. (Emotions were a messy mixed grill if one rested in human affection, which was error, illusion.) He had let Elsa have her without protest. A decent man could not snatch a child from her mother when he had failed that mother.

How he had slaved, with failing strength like walking in quicksand, to pay alimony and educate the child! Well, he had investments ripening to cover her university career, and his wife had freed him from alimony by announcing that she would re-marry...He had a whole year to express himself in poetry companioned by his very own, who cared for him.

He thanked Mollye whole-heartedly as she turned towards him, radiant. He rose to meet her, a smile of happiness in his eyes. "Mollye, I thank God and you--and Mr Horan--for this."

She clasped his hands effusively. Blanche saw a blossom as big as a magnolia on the romance.

"Yes. Isn't it wonderful! Now do something on the heroic scale, and yet equally Australian, something that will make us live for that little hour we call for ever. Your work will last when mine will only be an echo."

"You forget the appliances of today."

"Ah well, for Australia then!" Mollye was an ardent patriot of decent complex. "Now, Nat, you play for Laleen, and I'll sing something for Blanche."

Neither Laleen nor Blanche was educated to their offerings, but to be entertained by such artists was delightful.

"Now we'll have a look at the Harbour from the roof, and lunch will be ready."

The Gardens were like a stage setting beneath them, and touched by the grim breath of drought even in this sheltered blood-sucking city. It was a blue day, the waters indescribably beautiful with lines like cattle tracks across them. The oceangoing ships lay intimately in the heart of the city. The little ferries ran back and forth. Tenders dodged about the grey navy. The majestic Heads guarded the opening with the white spray at their base. Beyond flashed the white caps where all the world ways went north. Laleen thrilled with a familiar dream which the last forty-eight hours had brought into the realm of possibility. Great ships and cities and fame and love floated in it--all the shimmering magic of youth's tomorrow, when today is ecstasy.

She was at a far corner of the roof with young Horan of the musical gifts, the social charm, the unexceptionable person. She was too self-conscious to look at him, but hoped he was looking at her.

"Not bad for a flapper," he was thinking condescendingly from his experience. Sister (only half-sister) of the poetaster, who was Madame's latest swan. He was thankful it wasn't the old girl (Blanche) that he had to look after. Madame had a prolific crop of friends with the biddy-biddies in their stockings or whiskers. Madame herself had sprung from the bushwhackers. They had as much inner understanding of the arts as a cow had of caviare, but were ready on the ground of entertainment to shell out for the expensive seats, and therefore to be propitiated. Solid people to fall back upon.

Mollye devoted herself to Blanche and made a rabid partisan. Dick was allowed to moon around. Mollye was used to poets and painters.

Dick gazed towards the Heads hardly conscious of the thread of his reverie. Was he thinking of his previous acquaintance with the Harbour as he had sailed away, with the sinking sun behind and the rising moon ahead, taking a mighty cargo of dreams? What had he brought home in their displacement? Any bigger or better dreams than those unshipped? Rather a realization of the priceless value of the old dreams. To reef himself from the syrtis of the past and catch the ever-present here and now must be his first, his fundamental demonstration.

II

Luncheon was an unqualified success. Madame did not pester Dick with dishes. Blanche wallowed in the appointments and the butler. She had never before been waited on by a private butler. Laleen revelled in the hour, the day, the company--in the very fact of being. It was cruel that such joy should end. She was like a child trying to fend off the sandman's hour, but when the end came there was the joyous anticipation of the next chapter.

"Won't it be joy to be singing something of Dick's?" said Mollye at leave-taking. "Now, don't let the idea of an opera out of your heads, either of you. You must keep them up to it, Blanche. Two geniuses--a considerable handful; but if anyone could manage it, I'm sure it's you, Blanche darling. I only wish I had you to look after me."

Nat smiled at Laleen. "You'd like some of the programmes with your brother's name on them, wouldn't you, and it has a bonzer picture of Madame."

"Oh, lovely! Has it a photograph of you, too?"

"That would be an anticlimax. Would you like one of me?" he inquired, his eyes dancing. He had been pretty boy in a London season, with no lack of ladies and flappers ready to be complaisant if complacency did not arrive, but Laleen was disarmingly fresh and ingenuous; besides, when did a man ever have enough adulation!

"I'd adore one," said Laleen; then blushed and added, "I'd like a photograph of Madame because she is singing Dick's poetry, and one of you because you made the music."

"Not just a little because of myself?" He inserted a seductive note in his voice, and there was a tantalizing lift in his brilliant eyes.

"Of course. I didn't mean to be rude. I beg your pardon."

"You couldn't be rude, though you might break a man's heart."

"Oh no, that would be terrible, I couldn't."

"You couldn't help it."

Long eyelashes drooped on daintily rounded cheeks. Not the first lady to whom he had said that. He could estimate the response to statements of that character as accurately as he could gauge the effect of certain compositions.

"I say, won't you come to my digs where I practise, and I'll play for you?"

"I should love that."

"We must make a definite appointment." He took out a gilt-edged diary, and among the dates pinked out with Madame, practice, swimming, Odette, Dolly, pupils and Tom, wrote Laleen. "I'm making it soon. What about..." Laleen's heart waited for "this afternoon", but he said, "Day after tomorrow, at four o'clock. I'll play anything you like, all for yourself."

Laleen's eyes expressed rapture.

"I'm at home on Sunday afternoon," said Mollye. "I'll have some of the poets and painters. It will be good for Laleen to meet everyone she can...I've put in a real photo for you, dearie, with the programme," Mollye whispered to Laleen, well paid by her delight. Mollye was dashed that Dick had not asked for a programme, but calculated that Laleen would display the photograph where he could not miss it.

She wanted to send them home in her car, but Dick decided to go to the Gardens. Blanche spoke of inspecting the progress of Farmer's new building. They walked across Macquarie Street, Dick longing for solitude, the enchanted Laleen eager for any mention of Horan.

"That Horan fellow is a real flirt by the style of him," remarked Blanche, as a check on Laleen, and then to weightier matters. "Only two pictures on the dining-room wall, and just one vase of flowers, and that dull kind of rugs with no pattern. Didn't you think the place looked rather bare, Dick?"

"I didn't notice particularly."

"Did you notice that quilt, Laleen? Satin on one side and silk on the other."

"It was the books took my eye. I wish I had them."

"The books we have now are too many for the cases, and a nuisance to drag out and dust. You don't read them as it is."

"Oh, those old things! I mean new books by clever people for clever people. Mollye had your poems beside her bed, Dick, and the loveliest reading-lamp I ever saw. Wouldn't it be heaven to curl up in bed, with a lamp like that, and read, and read!"

"I think reading in bed an untidy, slatternly habit. It would worry me. I believe Mollye likes Dick's poems best of all."

"My bits of doggerel may have a place in her collection. Mollye is a good practising Australian."

"Did you like the music to your words?"

"It is so difficult to translate. We can only work in one dimension or two. That is the torment of art."

"Yes, Dick, but also I can't write as quickly as I think. I nearly explode trying to keep up."

"You need self-discipline and composure."

"That is youth." Dick smiled indulgently. "The tumult of surplus vitality. Plenty time to be finicky when the pressure eases."

"What do you think was in that second course--the entree?"

"I didn't taste it."

"The spoons were real silver. They had B on them; they must have been Mollye's. Didn't she take that flat furnished?"

"I never thought about it, sis. You must ask her."

"I wonder if it's going to be the fashion to wear coloured shoes with black stockings?"

Good old Blanche! He was glad she was so entertained.

Laleen was desirous of bringing in Nat's name, but her elders were singularly indifferent.

"Mollye hasn't bobbed her hair, and she's up-to-date."

Blanche clung to the idea that long hair was still a glory in women. Laleen contended that it was now a frowsiness on the plane of the possum beards of bygone bushmen.

"I expect she keeps it as a useful 'property' in some of her roles. You had better go to the shops, sis. It's getting late."

"I don't like leaving you alone."

"I like to be alone."

"But I can't think it's good for you. Are you coming, Laleen?"

"I'm going to see the hothouses," said she, walking resolutely in their direction.

Blanche looked back on her way up the slope and could see Dick sitting in the sunlight, his face, with Captain Phillip's, turned towards the wide southern seas. She suspected Laleen of feinting about the hothouses. Outside the entrance she stood a few minutes, then returned, and sure enough Laleen was returning too. Moreover, Dick had risen to meet her. They rejoined each other eagerly. Oh yes! Blanche knew. There was no trusting people. They were all deceitful. Dick didn't really like this solitude. He only thought he did.

Blanche herself could not endure being alone for half an hour.

Here was a fleck on the dazzling visit to Mollye, but Blanche braced with the determination to prevent Laleen being a tax on Dick. She was only his half-sister and had never before seen him. She was so selfish and eager for notoriety, she did not consider Dick at all. It was a mercy he had come home to herself in time.

The prices of furnishing brocades that she did not require, and picture dresses that she could never wear, took her attention. Then she hurried home before the working crowds. She considered the peak-hour rush dangerous, and resented travellers' tales of those of New York and London being infinitely greater.

Laleen and Dick did not return for the evening meal. Dick found the grand Moreton Bay figs amid the beautiful rocks of the Outer Domain around Mrs Macquarie's Chair. The ocean-going steamers fascinated Laleen. She had never had anyone belonging to her so congenial and interesting as Dick. He had been all around the world and could speak German, and must know so much of life. Now that love had ceased to be foolish or repulsive, he could be questioned under the screen of art.

"In writing one has to know all about life and love. I used to think love foolish, but the poets don't; even you in your poems, Dick?"

"My dear, age cannot speak to youth. We can only love it This world no longer belongs to the old. It belongs to you, Laleen. What do you think of love?"

"I don't know what to think. You've been in love, I haven't."

"The kind of love you suggest is a delusion. One wakes from it as from dreams in the night. Sometimes we wish we could hold them. Other times we are relieved to find it was only a dream. You will probably have to go through with it."

"Isn't there any real and lasting love--not ever?"

"One kind of love is only a delusion of animal magnetism, a fata Morgana. Sometimes when its glow has dimmed, two people miraculously find themselves enjoying a sweet friendship and continue in companionship--they are blessed. Yet again...but it is endlessly controversial. Is there anyone who 'makes the ball so fine' for my little sister?"

"But, Dick, your marriage wasn't happy, was it?"

"No," he answered simply. "When the false glow faded I bored and disappointed my wife."

"I suppose she didn't care for poetry and other things you love."

"She didn't care for poetry...There were bigger reasons."

"Couldn't you tell me?"

"Yes. She would have liked a man more robust in--"

"You mean a sheik, or cave man, like in the movies?"

"I believe that was it, child. She needs to be rich. She is unhappy without a certain kind of social activity, which is purgatory to me. And when the war broke out--her parents were both German, and her sympathies were naturally with the Fatherland--she resented my being British, even though I was against the war altogether, and thought both sides equally mad. Most people did for a long time in the United States till they were worked up by propaganda for the Allies. It was very hard for Elsa in all ways."

"Poor Dicky! What a terrible tragedy for you."

"Not for me so much as for her. I have inner resources. But here I am free at last, home in my own country and family."

"What became of your little girl?"

"Her mother wanted her. She is growing up among all the rich opportunities of the United States; and her mother is shortly to marry again--a suitable and congenial union as far as I can hear. A commercial man who can afford to give his wife all the social activity to be had."

"Thank you for telling me all this. And you are not lonely?"

"How could I be with Blanche and Philippa to care for me, and my new little sister?" He took her hand, and they walked all around the broad path till glances suspecting them as lovers drove them apart.

"I have confided in you, but you still leave me on the outside."

"I haven't anything to confide yet. It was only that I was just thinking." And that Dick quite understood. It was beautiful under the great trees amid the rocks. If only there would be rain in those mighty stretches on which this activity fed! The Mazeres had the country--the bush in their blood. No matter how comfortable the city, they could not be easy while drought was devastating the inland.

"I thought you wanted to be alone, Dick," was Blanche's greeting when they returned to Nanda.

"Laleen and I had so much to say," he replied quite inconsistently.

Laleen went to her room and sat thinking by the open window in spite of the winter nip in the air. Philippa brought a parcel--a box of chocolates. The card read, "From Les." Laleen gave the box for family consumption. Bother Les!