Читать книгу Gentlemen at Gyang Gyang - Miles Franklin - Страница 20

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"I don't need that. I'll never paint again," Bernice had said of a large ungainly package which her father had placed with her luggage.

"You wait, my dear," the little man had replied, "till you get up with Mr Labosseer in that wonderful air: everything will come right." Had not he himself, a weedy delicate youth, been taken by one of the Labosseers to the family base at Coolooluk and there restored to health?

The mailman had had to consider how to handle that package. Black Peter and Ced Spires and all the camp had been curious as to its contents and amused by its proportions. Bernice left the Cook whistling as he kneaded his brownie, and found herself with a buoyancy of soul that had been absent many moons as she hastened to the parcel. It had been compiled with judgment. Her father had sought the aid of an artist who knew Bernice's work and she was furnished to begin that very hour. She returned to the Cook and spent the afternoon in composing a bush interior.

Next morning she awakened with a feeling of something splendid in store.

The picture!

The men were clouting about at four thirty preparing for their unrelaxing day. She waited impatiently for their disappearance till she could begin work.

Work!

A miracle had happened. The creative urge had replaced that searing humiliation which had dried up the springs of inspiration. Here it was welling up again like water in a drought-blighted plain.

Glory! Glory!

She regarded her white toes with satisfaction in their shapeliness as she put them out on the weathered sheep-pen slats that boarded the veranda. A tiny sleek lizard ran past with action swift as a fish and rested upon the front door. It turned its dainty head and regarded her bird-like, a choice detail in decoration on the living grey of the mountain-ash which had stood the burning summer suns, the fierce rain and hail and snow for nearly thirty years without paint and without repair. Bernice noted its handsome grain, in one slab straight as ruled lines, in another the familiar water-waves. The small subjects of Australian hand-painted calendars, in bird and brush and flower were spread about her, embroidering the grand outline of blue ranges and wide rolling country with no other camp or homestead for miles in any direction.

The sun rose over Fossickers' Range at the nest of peaks in Half Moon Gap flinging aside the veils in the hollows and uncovering Gyang Gyang Creek writhing over its dark bed like a streak of gunmetal between the tussocks.

How to capture something of it, combining the big thing with its unique and matchless detail!

Existence was reilluminated. There was relish in the ordinary machinery of physical being.

As she awaited the men's departure she made a list of requisites and cogitated upon what combinations would produce the pastel-shades of the world of blackbutt and snow-gum. The gums were blue-grey with all the young leaves cut from galvanized iron. The blackbutts (or sallies) were of polished gunmetal streaked with apple- and cowslip-green where summer was bringing off the old bark.

There were those who maintained that this brilliant atmosphere could not be painted. That was typical of the unknown. The Australian atmosphere could not be painted, it was too brilliant; the life could not be convincingly told in fiction, it was too monotonous and lacking in that kind of action which the elementary reader calls plot. The need was for painters and novelists, as well as the ungifted, to break out of the established rut. A way must be found to suggest this different atmosphere both in picture and story—a fresh contribution must be made to technique. She set her shoulders to a surging inspiration which sprang up and away with her like a blood-horse newly saddled in spring.

She walked out in the dew-drenched tussocks under the gums standing like snow queens in perfumed bridal dress—never was such colossal yet honeyed loveliness for miles, and miles, and miles. She was out of herself with joyous excitement.

The long, long view of valley and mountain steadied her. There was something sublime in letting the sight roam to its full length, something restful and ease-giving in glances travelling in beauty till they evaporated in distance. She could never have enough of that free distance. She stood for a long time filling her soul with beauty, her attitude a prayer—a double prayer, of thanksgiving and of supplication to be worthy.

"This place is not real. It is surely only artistic fantasy. It can't be real. I must have fallen into a trance!" she exclaimed as the magpies began their morning soliloquies and the gyang gyangs flew past with genteelish screech in air that sparkled like soap bubbles. "I need two more arts—music and words—to give any fair idea of its difference." She was tormented by the gap that must ever lie between conception and achievement in art.

"This place isn't real, it's only a dream," she reiterated to the Cook when she went for breakfast.

"You'd think it was pretty real if you was out all day belting flies for your natural." He grinned indulgently.

"But that's what makes it unreal! A hundred thousand little jumbucks careering on the plains carrying wool for the dudes of Piccadilly, each with a clip in its ear to show its ownership and a travelling T on its little rump; and a dozen strong capable men suited to any hardship and emergency, brave gentlemen really, riding away each day at dawn like cavalry with a pair of shears instead of a sword in a scabbard, one ration of food and another of muck for killing flies on the saddle-bow. The suits of Bond Street and Saville Row and Unter den Linden, and the Bois de Bologne and Fifth Avenue on the hoof. It must be a dream!"

The Cook was a chum of the first water in those initial days. He never wearied of or laughed at her amateur questions about the life and landscape around her, and he never "stuffed" her, a form of humour rampant among bushmen towards pommies and townies.

Which is the more alluring, the art of the story-teller or that of the portraitist? What man so busy that he will not linger a moment for a story? Is there a man, whether potentate or pot-herd, immune to the allure of seeing himself or his acquaintances grow under the pencil?

The Cook looked at Bernice with a friendly grin. She responded with a smile of well-being. They were as happy as scout cubs with pop-guns. The Cook improvised an easel from the frame of a big deck-chair. A canvas was stretched and placed. A sheet of iron was removed from the chimney in the interests of lighting. The Cook set to work on his brownie; Bernice set to work on the Cook and his pots swinging in the shafts of sunlight falling like searchlights through various apertures, and on the tiny lizard like a signature in the corner, alert for prey and wary of the giants.

As her medium responded to her and her model enthused, purpose took form—to delight the folk of Gyang Gyang and bring to those of Piccadilly and elsewhere who wore finest wool a knowledge of this world where some of it summered. Here were ten or twelve men with facial outlines deeply marked by exposure, each with a quality unknown among the massaged English faces womanishly rubicund and unlined, each a separate challenge to an artist of character and originality. Here were horses, dogs, sheep, sky and mountains, plains and creeks, the shrubs that draped them, the birds that flew above them, the little lizard that kept her company, providing subjects such as but rarely found their way to the walls of the great galleries—a field to herself, and her very own. That ineradicable, irrational complex, love of one's birth land, took possession of her.

These men had suddenly become precious as the "properties" of attainment are to artists, surgeons, and others. When the Cook one day left her alone in camp while he sought the men with a telegram, she walked about evaluating the life lived at Gyang Gyang from November till April. Spartanly bare on the bedrock of essentials it rested. The beds were small with dark blankets, but clean as to linen, which the occupants could be seen laundering on Sunday mornings—emergencies permitting. Each man was furnished with shaving apparatus. Town suits and hats were preserved under Sydney Morning Heralds on the walls. Not a picture was on any wall, nor paint, nor paper, nor ornament. No easy chairs were to be seen. What use for easy chairs had men who went from bed to the saddle and back to bed again when night put an end to activity?

Here were gentlemen minus gentlemen's paraphernalia or ease, men whose daily routine approached that of soldiers on a lively campaign, who ate at a bare table of mountain-ash boards out of pannikins and tin plates. What a contrast to the prim little johnnies messing about Bloomsbury and Greenwich Village and Montmartre, who knew nothing of this community! Who did know of it in all the wide world outside of the few that lived in it, leaving no monument but the dog-proof fences running far across the rough plains, or the ringbarked timber on Whipstick, or Blanket or Herringbone Hills? Who knows this life sentinelled by the wild peaks of the Muniongs where is pastured from November to April some of the finest of the wool celebrated among experts from Germany to Japan, New York to France and Bradford?

Bernice was intoxicated with the idea of showing it all to Piccadilly, and Boul. Mich. and Washington Square—and Basil Vorotnikoff. A withering shaft of pain crumpled her, but it was of short duration today. There was something to replace it. Forsooth, she thanked Monsieur Basil. He it was who had driven her to Gyang Gyang. But for him she might have spent all her years in painting Parisian street-scenes or Sussex landscapes, or in picturing according to the modern schools a fifth-rate general or usurer or society matron.

"Oh, that my brain may have the power to conceive and my hand the cunning to execute," she prayed aloud where there were none to overhear but the black cockatoos, the grey and black-and-white magpies, the kookaburras and gyang gyangs, or those dogs whose day off it was.

She worked zestfully with but short breaks for meals, and ere the men could return from their magnum opus of cleansing sheep of maggots the Cook would hide hers in his own bunkroom, where he kept the reserves of cakes and potatoes, flour and soap. The torrential urge to create threatened to overwhelm her mere physical apparatus, so she was glad to lay down her brushes and walk abroad to let her emotions flow on a more manageable level. Glorious indeed it was to walk under the honeyed gums at sunset when the moths in a cloud of beauty circled round the wealth of blossom and the kookaburras laughed and laughed in full orchestra all around the horizon, and the night arose cool and crisp from the boulders and tussocks.

The hours of light were too few for Bernice, and when her Daddy, who never failed her, received her long list of requirements his heart lightened, though he had to postpone buying a light suit and new hat to meet the obligation. He asked no worrying questions and respected Bernice's desire for secrecy regarding her work and location. The materials gave evidence of all that he had hoped for in sending her to Mr Labosseer.

He had himself, when a clerk at an hotel and threatened with tuberculosis, been told by one of the Labosseers on a holiday in Sydney to pack up and come along and get well. He went and, fitting into station activities, had become a pet with the big super-capable Labosseer brothers. Though he was a weedy little townie they esteemed his tenacity and gratitude, his pluck beyond his strength, his courage in all circumstances. His unfailing good humour under the fire of chiacking to which he had been subjected had speedily endeared him to all. His delight in sun and air, running water, cattle and horses, in all the routine of outdoor existence, had been capital to him and a gift to his hosts. He had gone back to town a different being. True, he never rose higher than a book-keeper for a company, but when he married, Sylvester Labosseer had been at the wedding and later had been named as godfather to Bernice. Ernest Gaylord was the support beneath her. Such patient parents, wives, or mistresses are indispensable to genius, and rarely of the male sex. They are deeply rewarded when their mistletoes blossom with fruit and fame.