Australian Writers Part 5

'I say it because I feel it. I am aware that it is in very bad taste, but that doesn't make it the less true. Do you suppose people are never glad when their relations die? They are--very often; they can't help it; only they pretend they are not, because it seems so shocking. I don't pretend--at least, I need not pretend to you. The fault is not always--not all--on the side of the survivors, Hannah.

I don't think I am any worse than those who pretend a grief that they don't feel. I was never unkind to her--never in my life, that I can remember. I did not kill her; I would have kept her alive as long as I possibly could. I think--I hope--that if I could have saved her by the sacrifice of my own life, I should have done it without a single moment's hesitation.'

'I am sure you would,' said Hannah.

'But,' he continued, with that unwonted fire blazing in his eyes, 'since dead she is, I _am_ glad--I am, I am! I am glad as a man who has been kept in prison is to be let out. It is not my fault; I would be sorry if I could. Some day, Hannah--some day, when we have been dust for a few hundred years--perhaps for a few score only--people will wake up to see how stupid it is to drive a man to be glad when his wife is dead. They are finding out so many things; they will find that out too in time.'

Probably it will still appear to many that Delavel's admission was at least indelicate and inconsistent with his chivalrous nature. It is not here possible to convey an adequate impression of his fiery spirit, his long heart-hunger, and the magnitude of the loss which a wholly uncongenial marriage must ever mean to such a man. When the full story of his life and that of his quietly 'implacable' wife is read, his conduct seems natural and excusable. It is as much a part of himself as the tremulous tenderness with which he ministers to the comfort of the frail Constance Bethune, after finding and bringing her home, or as his fierce grief when she dies.

Another very human spectacle that ill.u.s.trates the author's method is the reunion of Betty and Rutherford Ochiltree--the frank selfishness of their mutual joy while the poor woman who had been an unconscious barrier between them lies dead under their roof. It is a somewhat painful episode, and precludes anything like high esteem for Rutherford, but it has the quality of intense actuality.

In like manner is Adam Drewe shorn of some of the merit of his devotion to the heroine of _Fidelis_ by being shown in successive attachments to other women during his long exile in Australia. The author recognises that, 'the laws of literary romance being so much at variance with the laws of Nature,' Adam is certain to suffer in the reader's good opinion for having 'continued to hunger for feminine sympathy as well as his daily dinner.' No doubt his stature as a hero lessens when it appears that though the absent Fidelia was ever in his thoughts, and a daily source of inspiration to him as a writer, he twice narrowly escaped marriage--first with a servant girl at his lodgings, and afterwards with the daughter of his landlady--and that at another period of his colonial life he became involved in a disreputable kind of Bohemianism. But he is not disgraced by these lapses to the extent that the author antic.i.p.ates; at all events, they make him more human than he could otherwise have been.

It is this power of infusing a robust humanity into her characters that makes the distinctive feature of Ada Cambridge's best novels. In each, whatever the quality of the plot, there are always two or three personages who talk and act as real men and women do--now rationally or in obedience to custom, now pa.s.sionately or with that perversity which, as the author once describes it, 'is like a natural law, independent of other laws, the only one that persistently defies our calculations.'

They are mostly big people with big appet.i.tes. The beauty of the women is the beauty of mind and of sound physical health.

Susy Delavel was tall, well grown, straight and graceful, with an intelligent, eager face, though 'her mouth was large, her nose not all it should have been, and her complexion showed the want of parasols and veils.' She was 'not handsome at all, but decidedly attractive.'

Sarah French, the girl in _Fidelis_ whose comeliness so nearly drew the hero from his old allegiance, has 'a strong and good, rather than a pretty, face,' with a 'large and substantial figure.' Adam Drewe concluded on first sight of her that she was a nice woman. Later on he finds her 'looking the very incarnation of home, with her cheerful healthy face, her strong busy hands, her neat hair, her neat dress....

She might have sat for a statue of Motherhood--of Charity with a babe at her ample breast, and others clinging to her supporting hand; Nature had so evidently intended her to play the part.'

Katherine Knowles has fine physical symmetry and a strong, frank face.

While lacking 'the airs and graces, the superficial brightness, of conventional girlhood,' she is 'singularly vivid in her more substantial way.'

Betty Ochiltree's beauty, too, is of the kind that wears well. She has a face 'frank and spirited, firm of mouth and chin, kind and sweet, as honest as the day,' surmounting an ample body, and she carries herself with dignity, 'as few Australian girls can do.' And how impressive and consistent with her character is the n.o.ble, placid figure of Elizabeth King, 'perfect in proportion, fine in texture, full of natural dignity and ease!'

The author is fond of showing the attractiveness of such women at the age of thirty, or even more. 'In real life,' she once observes, 'the supremely interesting woman is not a girl of eighteen, as she is in fiction. Every man worth calling a man knows that. A girl of that age ... knows as much about love as does a young animal in the spring, and not a bit more. And the human male of these days--so highly developed, so subtly compounded--has grown out of the stage when that much would satisfy him. I mean, of course, the human male who in real life answers to the hero in fiction--a man who must have left, not only his teens, but his twenties behind him.'

When one comes to the heroes, it is easy to recall half a dozen commanding figures who blunder in the most natural and amiable manner in their affairs; who think a good deal more of their immediate personal comforts than of religious or ethical abstractions; who like their own way and try to get it; who, in short, are mostly what the author wishes them to appear--'the men out of books that we meet every day.' Of little men, in the physical sense, there are only two of any importance, but even these are virile and masterful. A general aim of the stories would seem to be to show the s.e.xes what each chiefly admires in the other. It is first a sort of apotheosis of the _mens sana in corpore sano_, and after that an ill.u.s.tration of the independent attractions of sympathy, gentleness, culture, and high character.

Though in most cases the strongest attachments are formed between men and women arrived at an age to discriminate beyond mere physical charm, nevertheless physical charm is the most powerful, though not always acknowledged, motive of their choice. 'Because of this,' says the pathetic Hilda Donne in _A Marriage Ceremony_, touching her cheek, which is terribly disfigured by a birth-mark, 'I have never had _love_. Can you think what that means? You can't. Once I thought I was not going to be quite shut out--once; but I was mistaken. I have found out that it is for one's body that one is loved, and not for one's soul.'

Hilda unconsciously exaggerates, for it appears that Rutherford Hope, though at first affected with disgust by her disfigurement, and convinced that no healthy man could consort with 'so unnatural a woman,'

had come at last to regard her as a possible wife--before he was confronted with the sudden temptation to secure a fortune by wedding Betty Ochiltree, in compliance with the conditions of her millionaire uncle's will. Yet Hilda's comment is substantially sound. Even Rutherford, with all the sense of his mature years, and all the culture that enabled him to appreciate her poetic gift, would have had to argue himself into a marriage with her.

The ugliness of Adam Drewe, from which his mother turned in disgust at his birth, and which in youth drove him across the seas in an agony of sensitiveness from the woman he loved, was a less serious affliction than that of Hilda Donne; but we know that he continued to be keenly reminded of its disadvantages long after time had proved the sterling qualities of his manhood, lessened his deformity, and brought him fame and wealth.

Compared with the previous ill.u.s.tration, however, his case is at fault in failing to give a sufficient description of his deformity. But that he himself long thought it an insuperable bar to his happiness is clear.

When he fell in love with Fidelia Plunket, she was temporarily blind.

His affection for her was returned, and he knew it, but dreading the disillusionment that would ensue when her sight was restored, he fled to Australia and determined to abandon all thought of her as a wife. Urged to return, because 'when a woman _is_ a woman,' and really in love with a man, 'there's no camel she won't swallow for him,' Drewe replied that his camel was just the one camel that no woman had been known to swallow, or, at any rate, to digest. And he remained--for twenty years.

The plots of Ada Cambridge's novels are of the episodical order, and the author, despite her openly-expressed scorn for the unnaturalness of the average conventional novel, has not disdained employment of some of its time-honoured methods. Occasionally she is at pains to explain the feasibility of coincidences employed to secure dramatic interest. They are certainly never of an impossible kind, and no one would deny the truism that real life abounds in them. But has not a distinguished writer aptly pointed out that there are matters in which fiction cannot compete with life? As a rule, however, where a few such weaknesses exist, they do not count for much with the average reader when the princ.i.p.al scenes are as finely drawn as those in _A Marked Man_ or _Fidelis_, or _The Three Miss Kings_. The latter story in some details puts a greater strain upon the credulity than any of the other novels, yet so well conceived and absolutely natural are the characters of the three girls, and so humorously and pictorially presented the chief incidents in their development, that the dubious points of the plot become almost insignificant. The qualities of the novel as a whole are similar to those which obscure the artistic defects of _Geoffry Hamlyn_, and which for thirty-seven years have made it one of the most popular of Australian stories.

In the presentation of tragic or pathetic incidents lies Ada Cambridge's chief power, as far as her plots are concerned. In _A Marked Man_ it is accompanied by her highest achievements in portraying a variety of well-contrasted character. _Fidelis_, which opens at the Norfolk village of the earlier novel, and reintroduces the Delavels, contains fewer developed characters, as may also be said of _A Marriage Ceremony_. But the three novels are equal in the high standard of their emotional quality. No quotation of moderate size could do justice to any of the princ.i.p.al scenes of _A Marked Man_: the chivalrous sacrifice of Richard Delavel's youthful marriage; the inward repentance of it for twenty-two years; the revival of his love for Constance Bethune; his painful anxiety for her health, hungry enjoyment of her companions.h.i.+p, and anguish at her death; and his own death soon afterwards. In the more briefly detailed tragedy that brings into such striking relief the sprightly drama of _A Marriage Ceremony_, there is a scene giving a fair example of the author's style in touching pa.s.sages. When Hilda, deeply in love with Rutherford Hope, hears of his union with another woman, she takes the readiest means of effacing herself by suddenly marrying a shallow c.o.xcomb who seeks her for mercenary reasons, and going with him to Australia. Years afterwards she is so affected by the sudden reappearance of Rutherford, and by subsequent ill-treatment received from her jealous husband, that an exhausting illness follows, and to save herself from insanity she commits suicide. Meanwhile the long separation of Rutherford and Betty Ochiltree, which began on the day of their marriage, is coming to an end, and Hilda's death removes the final impediment. Together they pay a last visit to the dead woman:

Incapable of speech, he lifted a tress of hair--flowing free over the rigid arms, because it was really pretty, and thus had to be made the most of--and pressed it a moment to his bearded mouth. In that gesture he seemed to ask her forgiveness for having been a man like other men, as Nature made them.

'Kiss _her_,' Betty whispered, pus.h.i.+ng him a little. She, too, felt that it would be something, if not much, to put to the account that was so frightfully ill-balanced--a kiss from Rutherford before all was wholly over.

He stooped and laid his lips--scarcely laid them--on the waxen forehead. And he thought how he had nearly kissed her once, in the scented spring dusk, at her father's gate, and been repelled at the last moment by the thought of something that he could not see.... He turned back the sheet and straightened it, and n.o.body but hired undertakers had anything more to do with Hilda Donne. He put out the lamps, leaving her in the dark, which, as a living, nervous woman, she had always been afraid of; and he took Betty in his arms to comfort her a little, before he opened the door upon the light and life of their own transfigured world.

There is a characteristic vein of realism in the subsequent view of the lovers' self-absorption and short-lived sorrow, and the callousness of Donne.

No later than the same Sat.u.r.day afternoon [Hilda was buried in the morning], her Edward was cheering himself with his preparations for New Zealand, whither he was easily persuaded to set off at once as a means of distracting his mind from his domestic woes, and of retiring gracefully from a Civil Service that was otherwise certain to dismiss him; and there he shortly found a number of absorbing interests, including--as Rutherford had predicted--a rosy-cheeked second wife, who, as he wrote to Mrs. Ochiltree when announcing his engagement, was all that heart could wish, and had apparently been made on purpose for him.... No later than Sat.u.r.day afternoon--and early at that--Rutherford, having parted with the widower and seen him off the premises, ran upstairs to his wife's door, with a spring in his step and a light in his eyes that plainly showed his mourning to be over. Hilda was dead and gone, but Betty was alive in her splendid strength and beauty, and he was her husband and bridegroom, and his hour had come! The grave had closed over that broken heart, which had ached as long as it could feel, and ached most for him; but the world was still glorious for him and his love, and never so glorious as now. They began to bask in their happiness, as the house in the suns.h.i.+ne that flooded it, now that the blinds were drawn up.

The shadow of death, close and terrible as it was, could not dim it for them any more.

In all the novels there are memorable scenes of tenderness, among the best of which are those between Fidelia and Adam Drewe, first in their brief meetings as girl and youth--she with her weak eyes bandaged, but reading him through his voice and bashful deprecation; he yearning to remain with her, but forcing himself away--and then in long years after, when he returns to find her in widowhood and poverty, and to all seeming hopelessly blind.

The conception of the latter scene is quite the best to be found in the whole of Ada Cambridge's work, and has not been equalled in its kind by any other Australian writer. The simplicity and verbal reticence of this chapter of intense feeling gives also a good sample of the author's style of expression. Seldom ornate or much studied, it is ever a lucid and easy style. As a narrative specimen, the following, from the same novel, is conveniently quotable:

It was not much of an accident, but it was enough. The engine buried its fore-paws in the soft earth of the embankment, where engines were not meant to go, and then paused abruptly in the att.i.tude of a little dog hiding a bone in a flower-bed; the embankment sloped down instead of up, and the monster hung upon the edge of it, nose to the ground and hind-quarters in the air, looking as if a baby's touch would send it over. Several carriages, violently running upon it and being checked suddenly, stood on tip-toes, so to speak, and fell into each other's arms with a vehemence that completely overset them; one rolled right down the bank, head first, and the others tumbled upon its kicking wheels. It was all over in a moment; and the dazed pa.s.sengers, realising in a second moment that the end of the world was still an event in the future, picked themselves up as best they could. No one was killed, but some were badly shaken, and most of them screamed horribly. The sound of those screams, mingled with the clanking and cras.h.i.+ng of riven wood and metal, and the hissing of escaping steam, conveyed the idea of such an appalling catastrophe as would make history for the world.

Though not a satirist--she does not hate well enough to be that--Ada Cambridge has occasionally a neat and forcible way of describing character. Richard Delavel's first wife was 'a gentle and complaisant being, soft and smooth, apparently yielding to the touch, but dense, square, and solid as a well-dumped wool-bale.' When opposed in will or contradicted in her opinion, she smiled resignedly, and, if it appeared due to her dignity, sulked for a period. Yet generally she was 'the evenest-tempered woman that ever a well-meaning husband found it difficult to get on with.' A pattern of order and conscientiousness, 'governed by principles that were as correct as her manners and costume, and as firmly established as the everlasting hills,' she might have made an admirable wife for a clergyman, but was totally unsuited to Delavel, as he to her.

Still, she was very proud of the look of 'blood' in her Richard, and when he became wealthy, and she a fas.h.i.+onable hostess in Sydney society, nothing delighted her more than her opportunities of making the aristocratic connection known. Her own origin as the daughter of a farmer was quite forgotten. 'Annie might have been a Delavel from the beginning, in her own right, for all the recollection that remained to her of the real character of her bringing up.... Years and certain circ.u.mstances will often affect a woman's memory that way--a man somehow manages to keep a better grasp of facts.'

Yelverton, the lover of Elizabeth King, an English aristocrat spending some of his wealth in lessening the misery and vice of London, was 'not the orthodox philanthropist, the half-feminine, half-neuter specialist with a hobby, the foot-rule reformer, the prig with a mission to set the world right; his benevolence was simply the natural expression of a sense of sympathy and brotherhood between him and his fellows, and the spirit which produced that was not limited in any direction.'

His friend, Major Duff-Scott, 'an ex-officer of dragoons, and a late prominent public man of his colony (he was prominent still, but for his social and not his official qualifications), was a well-dressed and well-preserved old gentleman who, having sown a large and miscellaneous crop of wild oats in the course of a long career, had been rewarded with great wealth, and all the privileges of the highest respectability.'

ADAM LINDSAY GORDON.

The strongest note of Adam Lindsay Gordon's poetry is a personal one.

When he represents Australia best, he best represents his own striking character. Yet that character had clearly shown itself, as had also his lyric gift, before he saw Australia. He is the favourite poet of the country by a happy fortuity rather than by the merit of special native inspiration. Those tastes of the people which he has expressed in manner and degree so rare as to make a parallel difficult of conception were also his own dominant tastes. From early boyhood they had controlled his life, and in the end they wrecked it.

That any man living an adventurous and precarious life, often in rude a.s.sociations and without the stimulus of ambition or of intellectual society, should write poetry at all is a matter for some wonder. And when several of the compositions of such a writer are marked by rare vigour and melody, and some few are worthy to rank with the best of their kind produced in the century, it must be held that the gift of the author is genuine and spontaneous. It is impossible to believe that Gordon would have been less a poet had he never lived under the Southern Cross; that he would have cared less for horses and wild riding, for manliness and the exhilaration of danger. Had he become a country gentleman in England, or a soldier, like his father, should we not still have had 'The Rhyme of Joyous Garde,' 'The Romance of Britomarte,' 'By Flood and Field,' and 'How we beat the Favourite.' And do these not form the majority of his best poems? A man apt alike for the risks of the chase or the cavalry charge, with a delicate ear for the music of words, with natural promptings to write, would in any conditions have found time to celebrate the things which his daring and gallant spirit loved.

Had he not ridden as well as written the rides related by his 'Sick Stockrider,' he might have been foremost in that more glorious one so often present to his fiery fancy, and have wielded

'The splendid bare sword Flas.h.i.+ng blue, rising red from the blow!'

Gordon was a true soldier in sentiment all his life, as he was also a true Englishman, and it is the soldier and the Englishman in him far more than the Australian that the people of his adopted country, consciously or unconsciously, admire. It is yet difficult to consider his work as a writer apart from his personality. And it is natural that this should be so in the case of a man whose career was itself a romance, who led as strange a double life as ever poet lived, and who, through all, retained the marked essentials of a gentleman.

In his character as a sportsman and a rider there is an element of the ideal which largely helps to commend him to the majority of Australians.

Though his liking for horses and the turf became a destroying pa.s.sion, there was never anything sordid in it. He was not a gambler, for long after he had won recognition as the first steeplechase rider in a country of accomplished riders, he declined payment for his services on the race-track, accepting it only when compelled at last by poverty to do so; and the distaste with which he had always viewed the meaner a.s.sociations of the sport latterly became dislike and scorn. In the period of disappointment that preceded his death he refused a remunerative post on the sporting staff of a leading Melbourne journal because he wished to dissociate himself completely and finally from everything connected with the professionalism of sport.

As a Bush rider he became noted for the performance of feats which no one else would think of attempting. The Australians often speak and write of it as courage absence of fear--but it surely had a large admixture of pure recklessness. It is at least evident that danger had a certain irresistible fascination for him. 'Name a jump, and he was on fire to ride at it,' is the description given of this curious predilection which made his company in a riding party a somewhat exciting pleasure. The day in 1868 when he won three steeplechases at Melbourne is still remembered; and at Mount Gambier, in South Australia, a granite obelisk marks where once he leaped his horse over a fence surmounting the headland of a lake, and then across a chasm 'more than forty feet wide.' A single false step would have cast horse and rider into the lake two hundred feet below. Of the same wild character was his riding during boyhood in the hunting-fields of Gloucesters.h.i.+re. It would be natural to suspect some measure of vanity or bravado in all this, but no hint of either is given by any of his acquaintances; and the few who knew him well are emphatic in placing him, as a man and a sportsman, apart from and above the majority of those with whom the conditions of his life brought him into contact. 'Gordon,' says one of his intimate friends, 'was always a quiet, modest, pure-minded gentleman.... I never knew such a n.o.ble-hearted man, especially where women were concerned.'

The deep melancholy in many of Gordon's poems has been attributed to the influence of Australian scenery, and to the loneliness of the earlier years of his life in the colonies. This explanation, if not wholly erroneous, is at least much exaggerated. It ignores the most obvious elements of the poet's temperament. It takes no account of the history of wasted opportunities and regrets, of defeat and discontent, of self-wrought failure and remorse, that may plainly be read in 'To my Sister,' 'An Exile's Farewell,' 'Early Adieux,' 'Whispering in the Wattle Boughs,' 'Quare Fatigasti,' 'Wormwood and Nightshade,' and other poems. The writer, as he himself says, has no reserve in the criticism of his own career.

'Let those who will their failings mask, To mine I frankly own; But for their pardon I will ask Of none--save Heaven alone.'

Gordon's youth was wild and ungoverned. Before his twenty-first year his folly had lost him home, friends, love, and the one profession that might have steadied him, as well as afforded him distinction. He was the son of Captain Adam D. Gordon (an officer who had seen service in India) and the grandson of a wealthy Scotch merchant. Captain Gordon settled at Cheltenham in the later years of his life, and intended that his son should study for the army; but a mad wilfulness and pa.s.sion for outdoor sport had taken possession of the youth, and nothing could be done with him. He rode to hounds with all the daring that marked his horsemans.h.i.+p in later life; he rode in steeplechases, he frequented the company of pugilists at country fairs and public-houses, and joined in their contests; he was removed from two schools for unruly conduct, and a more serious escapade, though innocent of any bad intention, nearly caused his arrest by the police. At last it was agreed that he should emigrate to Australia. He was glad to go, but bitter at the thought of what his going implied. The knowledge that he suffered solely through his own fault did not make less disagreeable to him the censure of others, even that of the gallant father whom, in his wildest moments of rebellion, he never ceased to love and admire. The unhappiness attending this severance from the home that he felt he would never see again is told in a poem to his sister, written (August, 1853) a few days before he sailed.

'Across the trackless seas I go, No matter when or where; And few my future lot will know, And fewer still will care.

My hopes are gone, my time is spent, I little heed their loss, And if I cannot feel content, I cannot feel remorse.