Читать книгу Katherine Mansfield, The Woman Behind The Books (Including Letters, Journals, Essays & Articles) - Katherine Mansfield - Страница 12

It was a passage of only eight days from Wellington — but eight of the roughest days that any sea provides — to Port Fairy, beyond Melbourne on the south coast of Victoria, where (on June 10th, 1854) Arthur Beauchamp married Mary Elizabeth Stanley. Her ancestors had belonged to the same trade as the Beauchamp family; her father was a silversmith in Lancashire. Though she was so young (only eighteen), she, too, was the stock of which pioneers are made, and she was ready to meet Australia with her young husband — was braced to the new adventure, uninhibited, set to it as one leans against the wind to hold a balance. Her body was flexible and sound, strengthened by the tense spirit, hemmed in to itself safely by a ring of belief she had cast about her — a religious belief she was never to lose. As another would say “grace before meat,” Elizabeth Stanley veered an instant before Australia, and only her family knew why she bent her head.

Her bridal journey was through one of the most lawless parts of the civilised world of the time. Australia and Tasmania were England’s penal stations then, had been for sixty-seven years past, and were to be for thirteen years more, until some 160,000 criminals — half victims of atrocious law, half true criminal types — had been poured over Victoria, Tasmania, and New South Wales. To these were added the adventurers — transients drawn together by the goldfields. Seasoned pioneers like the historic Captain Barry, who had been through California’s and Sydney’s first gold-rushes, found Victoria in those days “the roughest and wildest place in the world to do business in.” The shifting of whole towns over-night to new goldfields was effective enough evasion of civil authority.

Even in Melbourne, capital and port of Victoria, the Government was lax and feeble:

“Crimes of the most fearful character and degree abound on all sides”; (a resident of Melbourne had written, only the year before)”the roads swarm with bushrangers; the streets with burglars and desperadoes of every kind. In broad daylight, and in the most public streets, men have been knocked down, ill-used, and robbed; and shops have been invaded by armed ruffians who have ‘stuck up’ the inmates, and rifled the premises even situated in crowded thoroughfares. … Murders of the most frightful character have become so numerous that they are given only passing notice, and such is the inefficiency of the police that scarcely since the foundation of the colony has one perpetrator of premeditated murders been brought to justice. Police are cowed, or leagued with the actors in outrages. … We have all the evils of the Lynch law without its vigour or promptitude …”

To this city, Arthur Beauchamp, then twenty-six, was bringing his eighteen-year-old bride. It was mid-winter, and roads for those 100 miles were little more than ruts through the bush. Why he should have chosen to prospect in Castlemain (below Mt. Alexander), when the gold population was already draining down to Ballarat, no one can say. It was only one of his mistaken moves in a country not propitious to him. Later, in New Zealand, he was considered “sound” in judgment, and, in financial matters, keen and resourceful, though hot-headed. But in Australia, when flair for speculation counted for much, he seemed always to be attracted by the wrong pole. He was simply “unlucky,” as prospectors said.

The journey to Castlemain, some eighty miles by detour, took ten days. Roads were in a dreadful state, washed out, cut by horses and heavy carts dragging supplies. Hundreds were passing, going to the diggings or returning, many of the carts carrying women and infants. The down travellers shouted news of wealth and of murders. There were three murders that week in Bendigo, just beyond the Mount; one had been in a tent, surrounded by people who had heard a cry “Murder!” followed by a laugh (probably the murderer’s), but hearing laughter, they had thought it a joke. In the Black Forest — half-way from Melbourne to Castlemain — bushrangers were abroad — had stopped thirty drays, stripping them of goods and gold.

But the Beauchamps went on. The Forest itself as they passed through — wattle, groves of she-oaks and eucalyptus, was beautiful — unawakened, unfulfilled, without real identity — like all that Australian country, tricking decent Englishmen into a Mephistophelian bargain. A jackass laughed. Parrots screamed.”Why,” asked someone,”do all birds scream in Australia, and none ever sing?”

As they came within sight of the Mount, heaped masses of granite and quartz took strange forms, balanced in odd positions — great weights, quite round, that could be pushed with little effort off balance, to lurch and rattle down the mountain side.

Their first home, Castlemain, the mushroom town, was seething with indignation. The Governor of Victoria had imposed on prospectors a licence fee of 30£S. a month, with a penalty of £5 for the first negligence, and six months’ imprisonment for any thereafter. It made no difference that the prospector might have paid the fee, and that registration at headquarters proved it; if he did not have the card upon his person, sentence was imposed. This growing grievance had been intensified, in the year the Beauchamps were married, by the fright of Sir Charles Hotham, who — reaching Victoria and finding a depleted treasury and growing expense of the fields — had ordered the police to redouble their efforts to collect the fees. The police stationed at the goldfields were largely recruited from Tasmania; many were ex-convicts, risen through eminence in brutality to be gaol warders. The situation of the unsuccessful prospector was terrible.

The gold lay so irregularly that success was the sheerest luck. And the unlucky prospector (who had to buy food at extortionate prices) was simply unable to continue to pay for a licence. Before the year was over, Castlemain miners had defied all authority, and their riots in the face of martial law were only a forerunner of the famous “Eureka Stockade.” In Castlemain, in May of that year, 1855, was born the Beauchamps’ first son, Walter.

By the next year, when the second son, Cradock, was born and named after Arthur’s sea-faring younger brother who had lately joined them, Arthur Beauchamp had given up prospecting, for the time, and established a shop and auctioneering business in Melbourne. His young family lived at St. Kilda.

There were two St. Kildas, really. One was a fashionable suburb and resort across the Bay from Williamstown, accessible by a fleet of steam tugs on week days, and on Sundays, by a three-mile walk or ride by road from Melbourne. This St. Kilda, on the south side of the Yarra River, near Liardet’s Bay, was Melbourne’s Sunday resort. It was a mushroom town of wooden houses,”rented before the shingles were on the roof” (two rooms for £2 10S. a week), with squares of gay gardens, neatly tended. It was the fashion mart, seething with “shopkeepers, shopmen, diggers, ladies, diggers’ wives, horses, hackney carriages, shands, gigs;” and flaunting “such blaze of silk and satin, such bonnets, such feathers, flowers (artificial), such ribbons” — making fine the ladies and the wives of diggers come to fortune over night, that it seemed not all the shops in Melbourne could supply them.

But there was another St. Kilda— “Canvass Town,” near Emerald Hill, between Melbourne and the fashionable resort. Here the unlucky diggers lived as best they could with their families. It was intended as a temporary encampment. Government tents at 5£. a week afforded a covering for luggage and children. Round the 8,000 miserable inhabitants of “Canvass Town” was concentrated “all the dirt, misery, and squalor of the oldest and most poorly inhabited slums of great cities.” Every tent was trying to sell something; it was a sort of Caledonian Market offering the relics of prosperity — from a pianoforte, to a Greek book, or rusty frying pan.”Well-dressed and genteelly reared females, and young and tender infants, as well as grown up persons crouched in these miserable wigwams.”

Yet on any to-morrow, positions between those living in St. Kilda the smart, and St. Kilda “Canvass Town,” might be reversed. Here Cradock was born in June, 1856, and died in November of the following year.

By the time of the birth (November 15th, 1858) of Harold Beauchamp (who was to become the “Pa Man,” father of Katherine Mansfield), Arthur was prospecting, again — this time at Ararat, in the Victoria Pyrenees. Ararat was one of the forested spurs descending from the broken range at the foot of higher ridges. The ground was scarred as though the city of tents and rough huts had been under fire, leaving holes in the earth like gaping graves.

Luck went tremendously for or against the prospectors here. Some, like Arthur Beauchamp, with luck dead against them, changed and changed again, slaving away the whole of daylight — uselessly — when those at a short distance were discovering rich treasure. The formation was like that in the other mining districts of Victoria: beneath the surface soil lay a thick bed of gravel; then a bed of reddish earth containing gold; but not much time was spent on this, as immediately below lay a bed of blue clay likely to contain ore; below the clay was a stratum of slate with rich pockets (fissures in the slate in which gold had been deposited — sometimes in solid nuggets). But on certain claims masses of granite hidden in the clay beds blocked progress for days. To be comparatively, or intermittently, lucky was not enough. It was considered nothing to find an average of two ounces of gold a day. Diggers were seldom content with less than £60 to £70 a week; some made as much as £500 to £1,000.

But the luck of gold which passed over the father descended upon the son. It was to avoid his brothers, but settle on him. Born in a city of a day, he was to have many homes, enlarging and increasing as time passed. He was to have granted, finally, his deepest wish — prestige, but it was to come to him vicariously, and in the manner he expected least.

By this time, 1858, two more Beauchamp brothers had reached Australia — Frederick, who died almost immediately after arriving in Sydney, and Horatio, who started a business which flourished and descended to his grandsons. Henry Herron remained at Sydney until 1870 (“Elizabeth” was born in Kribilli); then he returned to England. But Arthur, who had no divining rod in this country, returned again to St. Kilda, and in Melbourne he began what was to be his life-occupation: combined auctioneering and a general store.

With his dramatic ability, and his tenacious memory, he was a born auctioneer. It was his custom to attract attention by preliminary recitations, and when he had assembled a crowd, to approach the subject of his wares by the road of witticism and pun, until he had warmed his audience before the sale, as some of his trade-rivals warmed it after by “shouting” drinks. Contemporaries remember his reciting Byron for a solid hour and a half. There was no end to the verses he had by heart, or to his ingenuity in adapting them to his use, or to his endurance in declaiming them.

He was well liked, being a magnetic, genial little man with keen blue eyes, and a gruff rounded voice that carried. When his goods were not in demand for themselves, he startled his audience into buying. Auctioneering — and shop-keeping, too — were nearly as precarious as prospecting, for on the goldfields the ordinary laws of supply and demand simply did not exist,”the value of the thing being what it will fetch.” To speculate successfully in stores required unusual foresight and quickness, for the market was in a bewildering state of fluctuation. This game was better adapted to the talents of Arthur Beauchamp than prospector’s “luck.”

Dealing generally with men who had easy gold in their hands, the store-man could do a tremendous business, if he had the wit to popularise some special article and get a “corner on it.” For a time, the height of fashion for Melbourne brides was a lorgnette; and “spy-glasses,” as they were called, sold for an exorbitant price until the demand exhausted the supply. Again, a rat plague raised the price of cats to 30s.; and boots sold for several guineas a pair, until a storekeeper imported a whole ship-load from England when the price dropped suddenly to 7s.

Stores were usually paid for over the counter with gold, a nugget greater in value than the goods, being “changed” into fine gold. The salesman, if he was canny, allowed his customers 55s. an ounce, and exchanged the gold at the Melbourne bank for 65.

Yet there were times when the auctioneering business was so crowded that turnover came only by “cutting trade” (selling at cost, or below); moreover, there was always danger from bushrangers; and purchased goods were not always paid for. Rarer and rarer became the trustful store-keeper who would “keep a bunch of mates going” till they “struck it.” If a man was lucky, he usually paid, but if ill-luck dogged him, it cast its shadow on the store-keeper. It took a fearless and resourceful man to collect his debts.

The Beauchamps’ fourth son, Arthur de Charmes, was born in St. Kilda in September, 1860. In the harbour was a fleet of anchored ships, whose crews had all deserted for the “diggings”; yet housing was insufficient for those left, and the city and suburbs were fearfully overcrowded; and “no man having even the appearance of respectability,” a contemporary wrote “can go abroad in the unlighted, unswept and filthy streets without the danger of being ‘bailed up’ by marauders.”

In 1861, announcing that “the climate of Melbourne was fatal to his very young children,” Arthur Beauchamp with his family, his brother Cradock, his fellow-prospector and friend, Mr. Hornby, and all their goods and chattels, embarked for Picton, New Zealand, on the brig Lalla Rookh, and left Australia for ever.