Читать книгу Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang - Miles Franklin - Страница 19

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The Cook was her stand-by in the first strange days when she was left entirely to her own resources. Mr Labosseer had ordered that the patient was to be well fed and have plenty of sunlight, and not to be left to loneliness. The Cook was extolled as the best chef from Cooma to Gundagai, or cursed as a rotten, useless, stinkingly dirty, wasteful cow, depending upon the angle of observation, the Cook's form, or how unrelieved the monotony of camp existence. But he was a good man and a kind companion to Bernice. He fed her on custards and chops, and on trout that he ran out and tickled from Gyang Gyang Creek; and when she saw that his apparatus was an unwieldy camp-oven and several blackened saucepans and boilers supplemented by kerosene-tins and billies hung on pot-hooks above logs on a hearth devoid of even hobs, she hailed him as an artist of resource and courage.

Bernice was at present weak and defeated beyond her associates' realizing. Shrinking from the society she had known in Europe, hiding from that which offered in Australia, she yet needed some companionship, and the simple friendliness of the Cook was most salutary. He confided to her his own family affairs without being guilty of curiosity in hers and was a factor in her return to purpose. Finding that she was not "stuck-up", he called her down to the kitchen for morning and afternoon tea. In the manner of the aimless and stricken she would linger, cheered by his chat of things as they appeared to him and his kindly estimation of bosses and fellow workmen. Her gaze rested so vaguely on his appointments, even on the formidable tea-towels, that it was free from intrusion.

"There's one thing about her, she ain't stuck-up or a stickybeak," he observed to Beardy.

"No, an' she don't put on airs when you say things, like that ole girl at the pub, who wouldn't let anyone say anything about blowflies. Reckoned they made her sick."

One day Bernice came from writing a letter. She had to keep in touch with the world by assuring her father that she was all right. She was using a drawing pencil and an unlined writing-pad. The sun was high above the sallies and snow-gums, sending a white shaft down the chimney and another through a rent in its shoulder.

As a little thing of four or five Bernice had been wont to lie on her stomach and draw men and animals of action and character. When still in her teens, and sent abroad by public subscription because of her promise, she met other budding geniuses contemptuous of her ability to catch resemblance: merely photographic, they said. She had succumbed to the fashion of portraying things seen in terms of things imagined—many of them evidently in nightmares or licentious orgies. She had for a time been infected with "modern" ideas, which had at least shaken her out of mere convention and the frustrations of an inartistic and middle-class environment. But the human mind will have to be recharged before the story-teller can dispense with the story, the composer eliminate melody, the singer triumph without a voice, or the artist ignore resemblance to outlines recognizable by the laity.

As naturally as breathing she fell to limning the Cook with his cigarette on his lip and his black felt hat with the bleached, shredded band. As she progressed she found the atmosphere of Gyang Gyang leading her back to first principles. The jargon of Parisian ateliers would avail her naught on the snow leases. Of small advantage there to picture the Gyang Gyang Cook at an angle to win encomiums in Chelsea or Montmartre unless the gentleman should also be recognizable by himself as the person thus listed on Labosseer's payroll and by all his mates that rode the sheep pads from Burnt Hut Range to the Bimberies and Bringenbrong, and back again from Murderers' Cave to Dinnertime and Bullock Hill!

The Cook peeped over her shoulder. "I'm blamed if it ain't me as large as life!" he exclaimed. "Christ! it's better than a photo I had taken in Tumbarumba last Christmas. Cripes, I'd be obliged if I could have that to give my tart!"

It would have been easy and lazy to satisfy the Cook and his mates. A higher inspiration thrilled Bernice. She must picture the Cook to the approval and delight of Gyang Gyang and Goonara—all she had absorbed in Europe was meretricious should she fail so basically: but she must also produce work to challenge her peers and superiors all round the globe from Etaples to Woodstock, N.Y. To combine the adoration of the unsophisticated and the admiration of the cognoscenti is the problem of the gifted.

"You wait," said Bernice, uplifted by the Cook's delight. "I'll do you a really nice one for your young lady as a souvenir of all your kindness to me, but you must promise me you'll tell no one. I'll work while they're away in the day."