THE OFFER TO MARY
I
They worked for months at the mine, and still it turned out richly. Though they kept as quiet as possible, the fame spread. They had a bonanza. They were all three going to be rich, and Jack was going to be very rich. In the light of his luck, he was “the General” to everybody.
And in the midst of this flow of fortune, came another, rather comical windfall. Again the news was forwarded by Mr. George, along with a word of congratulation from that gentleman. The forwarded letter read:
“Dear Sir,
This come hopping to find you well as it leaves me at prisent thanks be to almity God. You dear uncle Passed Away peaceful on Satterday nite And though it be not my place to tell you of it i am Grateful to have the oppertunity to offer my umble Respecs before the lord and Perlice I take up my pen with pleashr to inform you that He passed without Pain and even Drafts as he aloud the umberrela to be put down and the Book read.
The 24 salm and i kep the ink and paper by to rite of his sudden dismiss but he lingered long years after the bote wint so was onable to Inform you before he desist the doctor rote a butiful certicket of death saying he did of sensible decay but I don no how he brote himself to rite it as the pore master was wite as driven snow and no blemish. And being his most umble and Dutiful servants we could not ave brout ourself to hever ave rote as he was sensible Pecos god knows the pore sole was not. be that as it may we burried him proud under the prisent arrangements of town councel the clerk who was prisent xpects the docters will he mad up the nite you was hear in the cimetary and pending your Return Holds It In Bond as Being rite for us we are Yor Respectable servants to Oblige Hand Commend
Emma and Amos Lewis.”
Jack and Tom roared with laughter over this epistle, that brought back so vividly the famous trip up North.
“Gloryanna, General, you’ve got your property at Coney Hatch all right,” said Tom.
There was a letter from Mr. George saying that the defunct John Grant was the son of Jack’s mother’s eldest sister, that he had been liable all his life to bouts of temporary insanity, but that in a period of sanity he had signed the will drawn up by Doctor Rackett, when the two boys called at the place several years before, and that the will had been approved. So that Jack, as legal heir and nearest male relative, could now come down and take possession of the farm.
“I don’t want that dismal place,” said Jack. “Let it go to the Crown. I’ve no need of it now.”
“Don’t be a silly cuckoo!” said Tom. “You saw it of a wet night with Ally Sloper in bed under a green cart umbrella. Go an’ look at it of a fine day. An’ then if you don’t want it, sell it or lease it, but don’t let the Crown rake it in.”
So in about a fortnight’s time Jack rather reluctantly left the mine, with its growing heaps of refuse, and departed from the mining settlement which had become a sort of voluntary prison for him, and went west to Perth. He was already a rich man and notorious in the colony. He rode with two pistols in his belt, and that unchanging aloof look on his face. But he carried himself with pride, rode a good horse, wore well-made riding breeches and a fine bandanna handkerchief loose round his neck, and looked, with a silver studded band round his broad felt hat, a mixture of gold miner, a gentleman settler, and a bandit chief. Perhaps he felt a mixture of them all.
Mr. George received him with a great welcome. And Jack was pleased to see the old man. But he refused absolutely to go to the club or to the Government House, or to meet any of the responsible people of the town.
“I don’t want to see them, Mr. George. I don’t want to see them.”
And poor Old George, his nose a bit out of joint, had to submit to leaving Jack alone.
Jack had his old room in Mr. George’s house. The Good Plain Cook was still going. And Aunt Matilda, rather older, stouter, with more lines in her face, came to tea with Mary and Miss Blessington. Mary had not married Mr. Blessington. But she had remained friends with the odd daughter, who was now a self-contained young woman, shy, thin, well-bred, and delicate. Mr. Blessington had not married again. In Aunt Matilda’s opinion, he was still waiting for Mary. And Mary had refused Tom’s rather doubtful offer. Tom was still nervous about Honeysuckle. So there they all were.
When Jack shook hands with Mary, he had a slight shock. He had forgotten her. She had gone out of his consciousness. But when she looked up at him with her dark, clear, waiting eyes, as if she had been watching and waiting for him afar off, his heart gave a queer dizzy lurch. He had forgotten her. They say the heart has a short memory. But now, as a dark hotness gathered in his heart, he realised that his blood had not forgotten her. He had only forgotten her with his head. His blood, with its strange submissiveness and its strange unawareness of time, had kept her just the same.
The blood has an eternal memory. It neither forgets nor moves on ahead. But it is quiescent and submits to the mind’s oversway.
He had a certain blood-connection with Mary. He had utterly forgotten it, in the stress and rage of other things. And now, the moment she lifted her eyes to him, and he saw her dusky, quiet, heavy permanent face, the dull heat started in his breast again, and he remembered how he had told her he would come for her again.
Since his twins were born and he had been so busy with the mine, and he had Monica, he had not given any thought to women. But the moment he saw Mary and met her eyes, the dark thought struck home in him again: I want Mary for my other woman. He didn’t want to displace Monica. Monica was Monica. But he wanted this other woman too.
Aunt Matilda dear-boyed him more than ever. But now he was not a dear boy, he didn’t feel a dear boy, and she was put out.
“Dear boy! and how does Monica stand that drying climate?”
“She is quite well again, Marm.”
“Poor child! Poor child! I hope you will bring her into a suitable home here in Perth, and have the children suitably brought up. It is so fortunate for you your mine is so successful. Now you can build a home here by the river, among us all, and be charming company for us, like your dear father.”
Mary was watching him with black eyes, and Miss Blessington with her wide, quick, round, dark-grey eyes. There was a frail beauty about that odd young woman; frail, highly-bred, sensitive, with an uncanny intelligence.
“No, Marm,” said Jack cheerfully. “I shall not come and live In Perth.”
“Dear boy, of course you will! You won’t forsake us and take your money and your family and your attractive self far away to England? No, don’t do that. It is just what your dear father did. Robbed us of one of our sweetest girls, and never came back.”
“No, I shan’t go to England either,” smiled Jack.
“Then what will you do?”
“Stay at the mine for the time being.”
“Oh, but the mine won’t last forever. And dear boy, don’t waste your talents and your charm mining, when it is no longer necessary! Oh, do come down to Perth, and bring your family. Mary is pining to see your twins: and dear Monica. Of course we all are.” Jack smiled to himself. He would no longer give in a hair’s breadth to any of these dreary world-people.
“A la bonne heure!” he said, using one of his mother’s well-worn tags. But then his mother could rattle bad colloquial French, and he couldn’t.
Mary asked him many questions about the mine and Monica, and Hilda Blessington listened with lowered head, only occasionally fixing him with queer searching eyes, like some odd creature not quite human. Jack was something of a hero. And he was pleased. He wanted to be a hero.
But he was no hero any more for Aunt Matilda. Now that the cherub look had gone forever, and the shy, blushing, blurting boy had turned into a hard-boned, healthy young man, with a half haughty aloofness and a little reckless smile that made you feel uncomfortable, she was driven to venting some venom on him.
“That is the worst of the colonies,” she said from her bluish powdered face. “Our most charming, cultured young men go out to the back of beyond, and they come home quite — quite—”
“Quite what, Marm?”
“Why I was going to say uncouth, but that’s perhaps a little strong.”
“I should say not at all,” he answered. He disliked the old lady, and enjoyed baiting her. Great stout old hen, she had played cock-o’-the-walk long enough.
“How many children have you got out there?” she suddenly asked, rudely.
“We have only the twins of my own,” he answered. “But of course there is Jane.”
“Jane! Jane! Which is Jane?”
“Jane is Easu’s child. Monica’s first.”
Everybody started. It was as if a bomb had been dropped in the room. Miss Blessington coloured to the roots of her fleecy brown hair. Mary studied her fingers, and Aunt Matilda sat in a Queen Victoria statue pose, outraged.
“What is she like?” asked Mary softly, looking up.
“Who, Jane? She’s a funny little urchin. I’m fond of her. I believe she’d always stand by me.”
Mary looked at him. It was a curious thing to say.
“Is that how you think of people — whether they would always stand by you or not?” she asked softly.
“I suppose it is,” he laughed. “Courage is the first quality in life, don’t you think? And fidelity the next.”
“Fidelity?” asked Mary.
“Oh, I don’t mean automatic fidelity. I mean faithful to the living spark,” he replied a little hastily.
“Don’t you try to be too much of a spark, young man,” snapped Aunt Matilda, arousing from her statuesque offence in order to let nothing pass by her.
“I promise you I won’t try,” he laughed.
Mary glanced at him quickly — then down at her fingers.
“I think fidelity is a great problem,” she said softly.
“Pray, why?” bounced Aunt Matilda. “You give your word, and you stick to it.”
“Oh, it’s not just simple word-faithfulness, Mrs. Watson,” said Jack. He had Mary in mind.
“Well, I suppose I have still to live and learn,” said Aunt Matilda.
“What’s that you have still to live and learn, Matilda?” said Mr. George, coming in again with papers.
“This young man is teaching me lessons about life. Courage is the first quality in life, if you please.”
“Well, why not?” said Old George amiably. “I like spunk myself.”
“Courage to do the right thing!” said Aunt Matilda.
“And who’s going to decide which is the right thing?” asked the old man, teasing her.
“There’s no question of it,” said Aunt Matilda.
“Well,” said the old lawyer, rubbing his head, “there often is, my dear woman, a very big question!”
“And fidelity is the second virtue,” said Mary, looking up at him with trustful eyes, enquiringly.
“A man’s no good unless he can keep faith,” said the old man.
“But what is it one must remain faithful to?” came the quiet cool voice of Hilda Blessington.
“Do you know what old Gran Ellis said?” asked Jack. “She said a man’s own true self is God in him. She was a queer old bird.”
“His true self,” said Aunt Matilda. “His true self! And I should say old Mrs. Ellis was a doubtful guide to young people, judging from her own family.”
“She made a great impression on me, Marm,” said Jack politely.
Mr. George had brought the papers referring to the new property. Jack read various documents, rather absently. Then the title deeds. Then he studied a fascinating little green-and-red map, “delineating and setting forth,” with “easements and encumbrances,” whatever they were. There was a bank-book showing a balance of four hundred pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, in the West Australian Bank. Jack told about his visit to Grant Farm, and the man under the umbrella. They all laughed.
“The poor fellow had a bad start,” said Mr. George. “But he was a good farmer and a good business man, in his right times. Oh, he knew who he was leaving the place to, when Rackett drew up that will.”
“Gran Ellis told me about him,” said Jack. “She told me about all the old people. She told me about my mother’s old sister. And she told me about the father of this crazy man as well, but—”
Mr. George was looking at him coldly and fiercely.
“The poor fellow’s father,” said the old man, “was an Englishman who thought himself a swell, but wasn’t too much of a high-born gentleman to abandon a decent girl and go round to the east side and marry another woman, and flaunt round in society with women he hadn’t married.”
Jack remembered. It was Mary’s father: seventh son of old Lord Haworth. What a mix-up! How bitter Old George sounded!
“It seems to have been a mighty mix-up out here, fifty years ago, sir,” he said mildly.
“It was a mix-up then — and is a mix-up now.”
“I suppose,” said Jack, “if the villain of a gentleman had never abandoned my Aunt — I can’t think of her as an Aunt — he’d never have gone to Sydney, and his children that he had there would never have been born.”
“I suppose not,” said Mr. George drily. But he started a little and involuntarily looked at Mary.
“Do you think it would have been better if they had never been born?” Jack asked pertinently.
“I don’t set up to judge,” said the old man.
“Does Mrs. Watson?”
“I certainly think it would be better,” said Mrs. Watson, “if that poor half-idiot cousin of yours had never been born.”
“I’ve got Gran Ellis on my mind,” said Jack. “She was funny, what she condemned and what she didn’t. I used to think she was an old terror. But I can understand her better now. She was a wise woman, seems to me.”
“Indeed!” said Aunt Matilda. “I never put her and wisdom together.”
“Yes, she was wise. I can see now. She knew that sins are as vital a part of life as virtues, and she stuck up for the sins that are necessary to life.”
“What’s the matter with you, Jack Grant, that you go and start moralising?” said Old George.
“Why sir, it must be that my own sinful state is dawning on my mind,” said Jack, “and I’m wondering whether to take Mrs. Watson’s advice and repent and weep, etc., etc. Or whether to follow old Gran Ellis’ lead, and put a sinful feather in my cap.”
“Well,” said Old George, smiling, “I don’t know. You talk about courage and fidelity. Sin usually means doing something rather cowardly, and breaking your faith in some direction.”
“Oh I don’t know, sir. Tom and Lennie are faithful to me. But that doesn’t mean they are not free. They are free to do just what they like, so long as they are faithful to the spark that is between us. As I am faithful to them. It seems to me, Sir, one is true to one’s word in business, in affairs. But in life one can only be true to the spark.”
“I’m afraid there’s something amiss with you, son, that’s set you off arguing and splitting hairs.”
“There is. Something is always amiss with most of us. Old Gran Ellis was a lesson to me, if I’d known. Something is always wrong with the lot of us. And I believe in thinking before I act.”
“Let us hope so,” said Mr. George. “But it sounds funny sort of thinking you do.”
“But,” said Hilda Blessington, with wide, haunted eyes, “what is the spark that one must be faithful to? How are we to be sure of it?”
“You just feel it. And then you act upon it. That’s courage. And then you always live up to the responsibility of your act. That’s faithfulness. You have to keep faith in all kinds of ways. I have to keep faith with Monica and the babies, and young Jane, and Lennie and Tom and dead Gran Ellis: and — and more — yes, more.”
He looked with clear hard eyes at Mary, and at the young girl. They were both watching him, puzzled and perturbed. The two old people in the background were silent but hostile.
“Do you know what I am faithful to?” he said, still to the two young women, but letting the elders hear. “I am faithful to my own inside, when something stirs in me. Gran Ellis said that was God in me. I know there’s a God outside of me. But he tells me to go my own way, and never be frightened of people and the world, only be frightened of Him. And if I felt I really wanted two wives, for example, I would have them and keep them both. If I really wanted them, it would mean it was the God outside of me bidding me, and it would be up to me to obey, world or no world.”
“You describe exactly the devil driving you,” said Aunt Matilda.
“Doesn’t he!” laughed Mr. George, who was oddly impressed. “I hope there isn’t a streak of madness in the family.”
“No, there’s not. The world is all so tame, it’s a bit imbecile, in my opinion. Really a dangerous idiot. If I do want two wives — or even three — I do. Why should I mind what the idiot says.”
“Sounds like you’d gone cracked, out there in that mining settlement,” said Mr. George.
“If I said I wanted two fortunes instead of one, you wouldn’t think it cracked,” said Jack, with a malicious smile.
“No, only greedy,” said Old George.
“Not if I could use them. And the same if I have real use for two wives — or even three—” said Jack, grinning, but with a queer bright intention, at Hilda Blessington. “Well, three wives would be three fortunes for my blood and spirit.”
“You are not allowed to say such things, even as a joke,” said Aunt Matilda, with ponderous disapproval. “It is no joke to me.”
“Surely I say them in dead earnest,” persisted Jack mischievously. He was aware of Mary and Hilda Blessington listening, and he wanted to throw a sort of lasso over them.
“You’ll merely find yourself in gaol for bigamy,” said Mr. George.
“Oh,” said Jack, “I wouldn’t risk that. It would really be a Scotch marriage. Monica is my legal wife. But what I pledged myself to, I’d stick to, as I stick to Monica, I’d stick to the others the same.”
“I won’t hear any more of this nonsense,” said Aunt Matilda, rising.
“Nonsense it is,” said Old George testily.
Jack laughed. Their being bothered amused him. He was a little surprised at himself breaking out in this way. But the sight of Mary, and the sense of a new, different responsibility, had struck it out of him. His nature was ethical, inclined to be emotionally mystical. Now, however, the sense of foolish complacency and empty assurance in Aunt Matilda, and in all the dead-certain people of this world struck out of him a hard, sharp, non-emotional opposition. He felt hard and mischievous, confronting them. Who were they, to judge and go on judging? Who was Aunt Matilda, to judge the dead fantastic soul of the fierce Gran? The Ellises, the Ellises, they all had some of Gran’s fierce pagan uneasiness about them, they were all a bit uncanny. That was why he loved them so.
And Mary! Mary had another slow, heavy, mute mystery that waited and waited forever, like a lode-stone. And should he therefore abandon her, abandon her to society and a sort of sterility? Not he. She was his. His, and no other man’s. She knew it herself. He knew it. Then he would fight them all. Even the good Old George. For the mystery that was his and Mary’s.
Let it be an end of popular goodness. Let there be another deeper, fiercer, untamed sort of goodness, like in the days of Abraham and Samson and Saul. If Jack was to be good he would be good with these great old men, the heroic fathers, not with the saints. The Christian goodness had gone bad, decayed almost into poison. It needed again the old heroic goodness of untamed men, with the wild great God who was forever too unknown to be a paragon.
Old George was a little afraid of Jack, uneasy about him. He thought him not normal. The boy had to be put in a category by himself, like a madman in a solitary cell. And at the same time, the old man was delighted. He was delighted with the young man’s physical presence. Bewildered by the careless, irrational things Jack would say, the old bachelor took off his spectacles and rubbed his tired eyes again and again, as if he were going blind, and as if he were losing his old dominant will.
He had been a dominant character in the colony so long. And now this young fellow was laughing at him and stealing away his power of resistance.
“Don’t make eyes at me, sir,” said Jack, laughing. “I know better than you what life means.”
“You do, do you? Oh you do?” said the old man. And he laughed too. Somehow it made him feel warm and easy. “A fine crazy affair it would be if it were left to you.” And he laughed loud at the absurdity.
II
Jack persuaded Mary to go with Mr. George and himself to look at Grant Farm. Mary and the old lawyer went in a buggy, Jack rode his own horse. And it seemed to him to be good to be out again in the bush and forest country. It was rainy season, and the smell of the earth was delicious in his nostrils.
He decided soon to leave the mine. It was running thin. He could leave it in charge of Tom. And then he must make some plans for himself. Perhaps he would come and live on the Grant Farm. It was not too far from Perth, or from Wandoo, it was in the hills, the climate was balmy and almost English, after the goldfields, and there were trees. He really rejoiced again, riding through strong, living trees.
Sometimes he would ride up beside Mary. She sat very still at Mr. George’s side, talking to him in her quick, secret-seeming way. Mary always looked as if the things she was saying were secrets.
And her upper lip with its down of fine dark hair, would lift and show her white teeth as she smiled with her mouth. She only smiled with her mouth: her eyes remained dark and glistening and unchanged. But she talked a great deal to Mr. George, almost like lovers, they were so confidential and so much in tune with one another. It was as if Mary was happy with an old man’s love, that was fatherly, warm, and sensuous, and wise and talkative, without being at all dangerous.
When Jack rode up, she seemed to snap the thread of her communication with Mr. George, her ready volubility failed, and she was a little nervous. Her eyes, her dark eyes, were afraid of the young man. Yet they would give him odd, bright, corner-wise looks, almost inviting. So different from the full, confident way she looked at Mr. George. So different from Monica’s queer yellow glare. Mary seemed almost to peep at him, while her dark face, like an animal’s muzzle with its slightly heavy mouth, remained quite expressionless.
It amused him. He remembered how he had kissed her, and he wondered if she remembered. It was impossible, of course, to ask her. And when she talked, it was always so seriously. That again amused Jack. She was so voluble, especially with Mr. George, on all kinds of deep and difficult subjects. She was quite excited, just now about authoritarianism. She was being drawn by the Roman Catholic Church.
“Oh,” she was saying, “I am an authoritarian. Don’t you think that the whole natural scheme is a scheme of authority, one rank having authority over another?”
Mr. George couldn’t quite see it. Yet it tickled his paternal male conceit of authority, so he didn’t contradict her. And Jack smiled to himself. “She runs too much to talk,” he thought. “She runs too much in her head.” She seemed, indeed, to have forgotten quite how he kissed her. It seemed that “questions of the day” quite absorbed her.
They came through the trees in the soft afternoon sunshine. Jack remembered the place well. He remembered the jamboree, and that girl who had called him Dearie! His first woman! And insignificant enough; but not bad. He thought kindly of her. She was a warm-hearted soul. But she didn’t belong to his life at all. He remembered too how he had kicked Tom. The faithful Tom! Mary would never marry Tom, that was a certainty. And it was equally certain, Tom would never break his heart.
Jack was thinking to himself that he would build a new house on this place, and ask Mary to live in the old house. That was a brilliant idea.
But as he drove up, he thought: “The first money you spend on this place, my boy, will be on a brand new five-barred white gate.”
Emma and Amos came out full of joy. They too were a faithful old pair. Jack handed Mary down. She wore a dark-blue dress and white silk gloves. It was so like her, to put on white silk gloves. But he liked the touch of them, as he handed her down. Her small, short, rather passive hands.
He and she walked round the place, and she was very much interested. A new place, a new farm, a new undertaking always excited her, as if it was she who was making the new move.
“Don’t you think that will be a good place for the new house,” he was saying to her. “Down there, near that jolly bunch of old trees. And the garden south of the trees. If you dig in that flat you’ll find water, sure to.”
She inspected the place most carefully, and uttered her mature judgments.
“You’ll have to help think it out,” he said. “Monica’s as different as an opossum. Would you like to build yourself a house here, and tend to things? I’ll build you one if you like. Or give you the old one.”
She looked at him with glowing eyes.
“Wouldn’t that be splendid!” she said. “Oh, wouldn’t that be splendid! If I had a house and a piece of land of my own! Oh yes!”
“Well I can easily give it you,” he said. “Just whatever you like.”
“Isn’t that lovely!” she exclaimed.
But he could tell she was thinking merely of the house and the bit of land, and herself a sort of Auntie to his and Monica’s children. She was fairly jumping into old-maidom, both feet first. Which was not what he intended. He didn’t want her as an Auntie for his children.
They went back to the house, and inspected there. She liked it. It was a stone one-storey house with a great kitchen and three other rooms, all rather low and homely. The dead cousin had wanted his house to be exactly like the houses of other respectable farmers. And he had not been prevented.
The place was a bit tumble-down, but clean. Emma was baking scones, and the sweet smell of scorched flour filled the house. Mary lit the lamp in the little parlour, and set it on the highly-polished but rather ricketty rosewood table, next the photograph album. The family Bible had been removed to the bedroom. But the old man had a photograph album, like any other respectable householder.
Mary drew up one of the green-rep chairs, and opened the book. Jack, looking over her shoulder, started a little as he saw the first photograph: an elderly lady in lace cap and voluminous silken skirts was seated reading a book, while negligently leaning with one hand on her chair was a gentleman, with long white trousers and old-fashioned coat and side-whiskers, obviously having his photograph taken.
This was the identical photograph which held place of honour in Jack’s mother’s album; being the photograph of her father and mother.
“See!” said Jack. “That’s my grandfather and grandmother. And he must have been the man who took Gran Ellis’ leg off. Goodness!”
Mary gazed at them closely.
“He looks a domineering man!” she said. “I hope you’re not like him.”
Jack didn’t feel at all like him. Mary turned over, and they beheld two young ladies of the Victorian period. Somebody had marked a cross, in ink, over the head of one of the young ladies. They must be his own Aunts, both of them many years older than his own mother, who was a late arrival.
“Do you think that was his mother?” said Mary, looking up at Jack, who stood at her side. “She was beautiful.”
Jack studied the photograph of the young woman. She looked like nobody’s mother on earth, with her hair curiously rolled and curled, and a great dress flouncing round her. And her beauty was so photographic and abstract, he merely gazed seeking for it.
But Mary, looking up at him, saw his silent face in the glow of the lamp, his rather grim mouth closed ironically under his moustache, his open nostrils, and the long, steady, self-contained look of his eyes under his lashes. He was not thinking of her at all, at the moment. But his calm, rather distant, unconsciously imperious face was something quite new and startling, and rather frightening to her. She became intensely aware of his thighs standing close against her, and her heart went faint. She was afraid of him.
In agitation, she was going to turn the leaf. But he put his work-hardened hand on the page, and turned back to the first photograph.
“Look!” he said. “He — —” pointing to his grandfather, “disowned her — —” turning to the Aunt marked with across, “ —— and she died an outcast, in misery, and her son burrowed here, half crazy. Yet their two faces are rather alike. Gran Ellis told me about them.” Mary studied them.
“They are both a bit like yours,” she said, “their faces.”
“Mine!” he exclaimed. “Oh no! I look like my father’s family.”
He could see no resemblance at all to himself in the handsome, hard-mouthed, large man, with the clean face and the fringe of fair whiskers, and the black cravat, and the overbearing look.
“Your eyes are set in the same way,” she said. “And your brows are the same. But your mouth is not so tight.”
“I don’t like what I heard of him, anyhow,” said Jack. “A puritanical surgeon! Turn over.”
She turned over and gave a low cry. There was a photograph of a young elegant with drooping black moustachios, and mutton-chop side whiskers, and large, languid, black eyes, leaning languidly and swinging a cane. Over the top was written, in a weird handwriting: The Honourable George Rath, blasted father of
This skull and cross-bones was repeated on the other margins of the photograph.
“Oh!” said Mary, covering her face with her hands.
Jack’s face was a study. Mary had evidently recognised the photograph of her father as a young man. Yet Jack could not help smiling at the skull and cross-bones, in connection with the Bulwer Lytton young elegant, and the man under the green umbrella.
“My God!” he thought to himself. “All that happens in a generation! From that sniffy young dude to that fellow here who made this farm, and Mary with her face in her hands!”
He could not help smiling to himself.
“Had you seen that photograph before?” he asked her.
She, unable to answer, kept her face in her hands.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “We’re all more or less that way. We’re none of us perfect.”
Still she did not answer. Then he went on, almost without thinking, as he studied the rather fetching young gentleman with the long black hair and bold black eyes, and the impudent, handsome, languid lips:
“You’re a bit like him, too. You’re a bit like him in the look of your eyes. I bet he wasn’t tall either. I bet he was rather small.”
Mary took her hands from her face and looked up fierce and angry.
“You have no feeling,” she said.
“I have,” he replied, smiling slightly. “But life seems to me too rummy to get piqued about it. Think of him leaving a son like the fellow I saw under the umbrella! Think of it! Such a dandy! And that his son! And then having you for a daughter when he was getting quite on in years. Do you remember him?”
“How can you talk to me like that?” she said.
“But why? It’s life. It’s how it was. Do you remember your father?”
“Of course I do.”
“Did he dye his whiskers?”
“I won’t answer you.”
“Well, don’t then. But this man under the umbrella here — you should have seen him — was your half-brother and my cousin. It makes us almost related.”
Mary left the room. In a few minutes Mr. George came in.
“What’s wrong with Mary?” he asked, suspiciously, angrily.
Jack shrugged his shoulders, and pointed to the photograph. The old man bent over and stared at it: and laughed. Then he took the photograph out of the book, and put it in his pocket.
“Well, I’m damned!” he said. “Signs himself skull and cross-bones! Think of that now!”
“Was the Honourable George a smallish-built man?” asked Jack.
“Eh!” The old man started. Then startled, he began to remember back. “Ay!” he said. “He was. He was smallish-built, and the biggest little dude you ever set eyes on. Something about his backside always reminded me of a woman. But all the women were wild about him. Ay, even when he was over fifty, Mary’s mother was wild in love with him. And he married her because she was going to be a big heiress. But she died a bit too soon, an’ he got nothing, nor Mary neither, because she was his daughter.” The old man made an ironic grimace. “He only died a few years back, in Sydney,” he added. “But I say, that poor lass is fair cut up about it. We’d always kept it from her. I feel bad about her.”
“She may as well get used to it,” said Jack, disliking the old man’s protective sentimentalism.
“Eh! Get used to it! Why? How can she get used to it?”
“She’s got to live her own life some time.”
“How d’y’ mean, live her own life? She’s never going to live that sort of a life, as long as I can see to it!” He was quite huffed.
“Are you going to leave her to be an old maid?” said Jack.
“Eh? Old maid? No! She’ll marry when she wants to.”
“You bet,” said Jack with a slow smile.
“She’s a child yet,” said Mr. George.
“An elderly child — poor Mary!”
“Poor Mary! Poor Mary! Why poor Mary? Why so?”
“Just poor Mary,” said Jack, slowly smiling.
“I don’t see it. Why is she poor? You’re growing into a real young devil, you are.” And the old man glanced into the young man’s eyes in mistrust, and fear, and also in admiration.
They went into the kitchen, the late tea was ready. It was evident that Mary was waiting for them to come in. She had recovered her composure, but was more serious than usual. Jack laughed at her, and teased her.
“Ah, Mary,” he said, “do you still believe in the Age of Innocence?”
“I still believe in good feeling,” she retorted.
“So do I. And when good feeling’s comical, I believe in laughing at it,” he replied.
“There’s something wrong with you,” she replied.
“Quoth Aunt Matilda,” he echoed.
“Aunt Matilda is very often right,” she said.
“Never, in my opinion. Aunt Matilda is a wrong number. She’s one of life’s false statements.”
“Hark at him!” laughed Old George.
As soon as the meal was over, he rose, saying he would see to his horse. Mary looked up at him as he put his hat on his head and took the lantern. She didn’t want him to go.
“How long will you be?” she asked.
“Why, not long,” he answered, with a slight smile. Nevertheless he was glad to be out and with his horse. Somehow those others made a false atmosphere, Mary and Old George. They made Jack’s soul feel sarcastic. He lingered about the stable in the dim light of the lantern, preparing himself a bed. There were only two bedrooms in the house. The old couple would sleep on the kitchen floor, or on the sofa. He preferred to sleep in the stable. He had grown so that he did not like to sleep inside their fixed, shut-in houses. He did not mind a mere hut, like his at the camp. But a shut-in house with fixed furniture made him feel sick. He was sick of the whole pretence of it.
And he knew he would never come to live on this farm. He didn’t want to. He didn’t like the atmosphere of the place. He felt stifled. He wanted to go North, or West, or North-West once more.
Suddenly he heard footsteps: Mary picking her way across.
“Is your horse all right?” she asked. “I was afraid something was wrong with him. And he is so beautiful. Or is it a mare?”
“No,” he said “it is a horse. I don’t care for a mare, for riding.”
“Why?”
“She has so many whims of her own, and wants so much attention paid to her. And then ten to one you can’t trust her. I prefer a horse to ride.”
She saw the rugs spread on the straw.
“Who is going to sleep here?” she asked.
“I”
“Why — but — —”
He cut short her expostulations.
“Oh, but do let me bring you sheets. Do let me make you a proper bed!” she cried.
But he only laughed at her.
“What’s a proper bed?” he said. “Is this an improper one, then?”
“It’s not a comfortable one,” she said with dignity.
“It is for me. I wasn’t going to ask you to sleep on it too, was I, now?”
She went out and stood looking at the Southern Cross.
“Weren’t you coming indoors again?” she asked.
“Don’t you think it’s nicer out here? Feels a bit tight in there. I say, Mary, I don’t think I shall ever come and live on this place.”
“Why not?” “I don’t like it.”
“Why not?”
“It feels a bit heavy — and a bit tight to me.”
“What shall you do then?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ll decide when I’m back at the camp. But I say, wouldn’t you like this place? I’ll give it you if you would. You’re next of kin really. If you’ll have it, I’ll give it you.”
Mary was silent for some time.
“And what do you think you’ll do if you don’t live here?” she asked. “Will you stay always on the goldfields?”
“Oh dear no! I shall probably go up to the Never-Never, and raise cattle. Where there aren’t so many people, and photo albums, and good old Georges and Aunt Matildas and all that.”
“You’ll be yourself, wherever you are.”
“Thank God for that, but it’s not quite true. I find I’m less myself down here, with all you people.”
Again she was silent for a time.
“Why?” she asked.
“Oh, that’s how it makes me feel, that’s all.”
“Are you more yourself on the goldfields?” she asked rather contemptuously.
“Oh yes.”
“When you are getting money, you mean?”
“No. But I’ve got so that Aunt Matilda-ism and Old-Georgism don’t agree with me. They make me feel sarcastic, they make me feel out of sorts all over.”
“And I suppose you mean Mary-ism too,” she said.
“Yes, a certain sort of Mary-ism does it to me as well. But there’s a Mary without the ism that I said I’d come back for. — Would you like this place?”
“Why?”
“To cultivate your Mary-ism. Or would you like to come to the North-West?”
“But why do you trouble about me?”
“I’ve come back for you. I said I’d come back for you. I am here.”
There was a moment of tense silence.
“You have married Monica, now,” said Mary in a low voice.
“Of course I have. But the leopard doesn’t change his spots when he goes into a cave with a she-leopard. I said I’d come back for you as well, and I’ve come.”
A dead silence.
“But what about Monica?” Mary asked, with a little curl of irony.
“Monica?” he said. “Yes, she’s my wife, I tell you. But she’s not my only wife. Why should she be? She will lose nothing.”
“Did she say so? Did you tell her?” Mary asked insidiously.
Slowly an anger suffused thick in his chest, and then seemed to break in a kind of explosion. And the curious tension of his desire for Mary snapped with the explosion of his anger.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t tell her. I had to ask you first. Monica is thick with her babies now. She won’t care where I am. That’s how women are. They are more creatures than men are. They’re not separated out of the earth: They’re like black ore. The metal’s in them, but it’s still part of the earth. They’re all part of the matrix, women are, with their children clinging to them.”
“And men are pure gold?” said Mary sarcastically.
“Yes, in streaks. Men are the pure metal, in streaks. Women never are. For my part, I don’t want them to be. They are the mother-rock. They are the matrix. Leave them at that. That’s why I want more than one wife.”
“But why?” she asked.
He realised that, in his clumsy fashion, he had taken the wrong tack. The one thing he should never have done, he had begun to do: explain and argue. Truly, Mary put up a permanent mental resistance. But he should have attacked elsewhere. He should have made love to her. Yet, since she had so much mental resistance, he had to make his position clear. — Now he realised he was angry and tangled.
“Shall we go in?” he said abruptly.
And she returned with him in silence back to the house. Mr. George was in the parlour, looking over some papers. Jack and Mary went in to him.
“I have been thinking, Sir,” said Jack, “that I shall never come and live on this place. I want to go up to the North-West and raise cattle. That’ll suit me better than wheat and dairy. So I offer this place to Mary. She can do as she likes with it. Really, I feel the property is naturally hers.”
Now Old George had secretly cherished this thought for many years, and it had riled him a little when Jack calmly stepped into the inheritance.
“Oh, you can’t be giving away a property like this,” he said.
“Why not? I have all the money I want. I give the place to Mary. I’d much rather give it to her than sell it. But if she won’t have it, I’ll ask you to sell it for me.”
“Why! Why!” said Old George fussily, stirring quite delighted in his chair, and looking from one to the other of the young people, unable to understand their faces. Mary looked sulky and unhappy, Jack looked sarcastic.
“I won’t take it, anyhow,” exclaimed Mary.
“Eh? Why not? If the young millionaire wants to throw it away — —” said the old man ironically.
“I won’t! I won’t take it!” she repeated abruptly.
“Why — what’s amiss?”
“Nothing! I won’t take it.”
“Got a proud stomach from your aristocratic ancestors, have you?” said Old George. “Well, you needn’t have; the place is your father’s son’s place, you needn’t be altogether so squeamish.”
“I wouldn’t take it if I was starving,” she asserted.
“You’re in no danger of starving, so don’t talk,” said the old man, testily. “It’s a nice little place. I should enjoy coming out here and spending a few months of the year myself. Should like nothing better.”
“But I won’t take it,” said Mary.
Jack went grinning off to his stable. He was angry, but it was the kind of anger that made him feel sarcastic.
Damn her! She was in love with him. She had a passion for him. What did she want? Did she want him to make love to her, and run away with her, and abandon Monica and Jane and the twin babies? — No doubt she would listen to such a proposition hard enough. But he was never going to make it her. He had married Monica, and he would stick to her. She was his first and chief wife, and whatever happened, she should remain it. He detested and despised divorce; a shifty business. But it was nonsense to pretend that Monica was the beginning and end of his marriage with woman. Woman was the matrix, the red earth, and he wanted his roots in this earth. More than one root, to keep him steady and complete. Mary instinctively belonged to him. Then why not belong to him completely? Why not? And why not make a marriage with her too? The legal marriage with Monica, his own marriage with Mary. It was a natural thing. The old heroes, the old fathers of red earth, like Abraham in the Bible, like David even, they took the wives they needed for their own completeness, without this nasty chop-and-change business of divorce. Then why should he not do the same?
He would have all the world against him. But what would it matter, if he were away in the Never-Never, where the world just faded out? Monica could have the chief house. But Mary should have another house, with garden and animals if she wanted them. And she should have her own children: his children. Why should she be only Auntie to Monica’s children? Mary, with her black, glistening eyes and her short, dark, secret body, she was asking far children. She was asking him for his children, really. He knew it, and secretly she knew it; and Aunt Matilda, and even Old George knew it, somewhere in themselves. And Old George was funny. He wouldn’t really have minded an affair between Jack and Mary, provided it had been kept dark. He would even have helped them to it, so long as they would let nothing be known.
But Jack was too wilful and headstrong, and too proud, for an intrigue. An intrigue meant a certain cringing before society, and this he would never do. If he took Mary, it was because he felt she instinctively belonged to him. Because, in spite of the show she kept up, her womb was asking for him. And he wanted her for himself. He wanted to have her and to answer her. And he would be judged by nobody.
He rose quickly, returning to the house. Mary and the old man were in the kitchen, getting their candles to go to bed.
“Mary,” said Jack, “come out and listen to the night-bird.”
She started slightly, glanced at him, then at Mr. George.
“Go with him a minute, if you want to,” said the old man.
Rather unwillingly she went out of the door with Jack. They crossed the yard in silence, towards the stable. She hesitated outside, in the thin moonlight.
“Come to the stable with me,” he said, his heart beating thick, and his voice strange and low.
“Oh Jack!” she cried, with a funny little lament; “you’re married to Monica! I can’t! You’re Monica’s.”
“Am I?” he said. “Monica’s mine, if you like, but why am I all hers? She’s certainly not all mine. She belongs chiefly to her babies just now. Why shouldn’t she? She’s their red earth. But I’m not going to shut my eyes. Neither am I going to play the mild Saint Joseph. I don’t feel that way. At the present moment I’m not Monica’s, any more than she is mine. So what’s the good of your telling me? I shall love her again, when she is free. Everything in season, even wives. Now I love you again, after having never thought of it for a long while. But it was always slumbering inside me, just as Monica is asleep inside me this minute. The sun goes, and the moon comes. A man isn’t made up of only one thread. What’s the good of keeping your virginity! It’s really mine. Come with me to the stable, and then afterwards come and live in the North-West, in one of my houses, and have your children there, and animals or whatever you want.”
“Oh God!” cried Mary. “You must really be mad. You don’t love me, you can’t, you must love Monica. Oh God, why do you torture me!”
“I don’t torture you. Come to the stable with me. I love you too.”
“But you love Monica.”
“I shall love Monica again; another time. Now I love you. I don’t change. But sometimes it’s one, then the other. Why not?”
“It can’t be! It can’t be!” cried Mary.
“Why not? Come into the stable with me, with me and the horses.”
“Oh don’t torture me! I hate my animal nature. You want to make a slave of me,” she cried blindly.
This struck him silent. Hate her animal nature? What did she mean? Did she mean the passion she had for him? And make a slave of her? How?
“How make a slave of you?” he asked. “What are you now? You are a sad thing as you are. I don’t want to leave you as you are. You are a slave now, to Aunt Matilda and all the conventions. Come with me into the stable.”
“Oh, you are cruel to me! You are wicked! I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“Why can’t you? You can. I am not wicked. To me it doesn’t matter what the world is. You really want me, and nothing but me. It’s only the outside of you that’s afraid. There is nothing to be afraid of, now we have enough money. You will come with me to the North-West, and be my other wife, and have my children, and I shall depend on you as a man has to depend on a woman.”
“How selfish you are! You are as selfish as my father, who betrayed your mother’s sister and left this skull-and-crossbones son,” she cried. “No, it’s dreadful, it’s horrible. In this horrible place, too, proposing such a thing to me. It shows you have no feelings.”
“I don’t care about feelings. They’re what people have because they feel they ought to have them. But I know my own real feelings. I don’t care about your feelings.”
“I know you don’t,” she said. “Good-night!” She turned abruptly and hurried away in the moonlight, escaping to the house.
Jack watched the empty night for some minutes. Then he turned away into the stable.
“That’s that!” he said, seeing his little plans come to nought.
He went into the stable and sat down on his bed, near the horses. How good it was to be with the horses! How good animals were, with no “feelings” and no ideas. They just straight felt what they’ felt, without lies and complications.
Well, so be it! He was surprised. He had not expected Mary to funk the issue, since the issue was clear. What else was the right thing to do? Why, nothing else!
It seemed to him so obvious. Mary obviously wanted him, even more, perhaps, than he wanted her. Because she was only a part thing, by herself. All women were only parts of some whole, when they were by themselves: let them be as clever as they might. They were creatures of earth, and fragments, all of them. All women were only fragments; fragments of matrix at that.
No, he was not wrong, he was right. If the others didn’t agree, they didn’t, that was all. He still was right. He still hated the nauseous one-couple-in-one-cottage domesticity. He hated domesticity altogether. He loathed the thought of being shut up with one woman and a bunch of kids in a house. Several women, several houses, several bunches of kids: it would then be like a perpetual travelling, a camp, not a home. He hated homes. He wanted a camp.
He wanted to pitch his camp in the wilderness: with the faithful Tom, and Lennie, and his own wives. Wives, not wife. And the horses, and the come-and-go, and the element of wildness. Not to be tamed. His men, men by themselves. And his women never to be tamed. And the wilderness still there. He wanted to go like Abraham under the wild sky, speaking to a fierce wild Lord, and having angels stand in his doorway.
Why not? Even if the whole world said No! Even then, why not?
As for being ridiculous, what was more ridiculous than men wheeling perambulators and living among a mass of furniture in a tight house?
Anyhow it was no good talking to Mary at the moment. She wasn’t a piece of the matrix of red earth. She was a piece of the upholstered world. Damn the upholstered world! He would go back to the goldfields, to Tom and Lennie and Monica, back to camp. Back to camp, away from the upholstery.
No, he wasn’t a man who had finished when he had got one wife.
And that damned Mary, by the mystery of fate, was linked to him.
And damn her, she preferred to break that link, and turn into an upholstered old maid. Of all the hells!
Then let her marry Blessington and a houseful of furniture. Or else marry Old George, and gas to him while he could hear. She loved gassing. Talk, talk, talk, Jack hated a talking woman. But Mary would rather sit gassing with Old George than be with him, Jack. Of all the surprising hells!
At least Tom wasn’t like that. And Monica wasn’t. But Monica was wrapped up in her babies, she seemed to swim in a sea of babies, and Jack had to let her be. And she too had a hankering after furniture. He knew she’d be after it, if he didn’t prevent her. Well, it was no good preventing people, even from stuffed plush furniture and knick-knacks. But he’d keep the brake on. He would do that.