Tussock Land/Chapter 25

Of the two months that followed King’s recognition of his failure in his chosen work a discreet biographer would not usually speak. But as I am attempting to portray the manner of the man, it is necessary to indicate the extent of the flaw made in his individuality by his sudden failure of belief in himself. For King had―as will have already been abundantly clear―a weakness of fibre that, as long as his life went on evenly without stress, as long as he had not found himself out, did not disclose itself.

But with the avowal to himself of his complete failure as man and artist, the terrible consciousness of his weakness wrought strange disaster within that once arrogant personality. Life had found him out; he could not, even to himself, gloss over the weakness so startlingly obvious. And as it is the last stroke of the bushman’s axe that sends the sturdy forest giant crashing prostrate, so this sudden, trivial illumination of himself as a failure sent King headlong to destruction. With the utter abandonment of hope that followed there stretched before him nothing but a desolate blankness. Life held for him nothing more. He had finished his trial; he would never get a second chance. It was too late now to make another start. Besides, what could he essay? He could not begin again, for he had lost that which made ​aspiration possible—he had lost his belief in himself.

He was not bitter against life; but he blamed himself, utterly despaired of himself. What could there be ahead of a man who had only an ideal to buoy him up, and had seen that ideal suddenly and irretrievably snatched from his grasp? All his life had been a persistent striving towards that ideal, And his belief in his ability to reach that goal—his fervent assurance of his own worth—was the motor that had driven him on. And, after all, he was merely one of the utterly indistinguished! He laughed grimly at the humour of life that had dragged him so far and so carelessly flung him aside.

A stronger man would have accepted the verdict of life and set to work, doggedly, yet not hopelessly, to win a lesser yet still worthy verdict. Either he would refuse to believe that he was of no use to the world, or, recognising that his worth was indeed trivial, he would have gone bravely on to worthily fill the insignificant niche that Life, the humorist, had designed for him. That is the humiliating discovery life at thirty has for all of us. Perhaps, when we make that discovery, we have a sleepless night; but we shrug our shoulders—at thirty shoulders are easily shrugged—and our appetite does not fail us. Youthful ambitions are fine and delicately beautiful things, but there are more solid and enduring things than ideals—an income, for instance. So we go on earning our living and providing for our wives and children; and if sometimes, in a sentimental mood, we take out our youthful ambitions and turn them idly over in our memories, we do not weep over them. We light another cigar and contemplate its ash without bitterness. There is ash in every ​cigar; and one grows older. And so we relinquish the great and glowing hope that so long had lighted our lives, and hardly notice that something has faded, that the world has grown greyer. But with a clamorous family, with a growing business, with a more insistent world to consider, we come gratefully to the conclusion that ideals are inconvenient things to carry through middle age, and we shrug the facile shoulders of thirty and—light another cigar.

But King was not thirty. The loss of his conviction that he was a chosen spirit, this blank impasse into which life had led him, was as sudden a shock as the obliteration of the hope of immortality from a mortal’s heart.

And, despised as he believed himself to be, despising himself, King reached that ebb of despondency known as the Region of Don’t Care. Nothing mattered.

And Chance gave him the opportunity to prove triumphantly that nothing mattered.

Shunning the easy sympathy of his fellow-students, acknowledging no palliation of his palpable failure, he kept to himself, wrote no letters, saw no friends. It was impossible for him to write to inform his father of his failure; hence he was compelled to make to his mother no mention of the wreck that had come to him. He wrote to her, indeed; but he sent her no criticisms of his pictures. Of course she looked up the papers in the library, read them hotly indignant at their heartlessness—and said nothing to her son. She could not tell him that she knew; but he was surprised at an almost incoherent letter from her in which she told him again and again of her unutterable belief in her clever son. King felt the generous and sympathetic phrases burn into his wounds with a keen agony. He was almost tempted to write ​her the whole bitter truth. But he was not yet so weak.

He had met Gertrude only once, and her apparent happiness, veiled as it was by an unuttered sympathy for the critiques of his work, told him too plainly that she had promised herself to Roy.

Once or twice Barbara Smith ventured timorously to tempt him into talk upon his work, with the deliberate design of offering consolation; but the attempt was too obvious, her sympathy too near her lips, for him not to see through and avoid the kindly design. He was not going to have any women interfering, he said to himself hotly, and snubbed her.

So King went through his agony alone.

But crossing one day in the North Shore Ferry he noticed a dark-eyed girl whose pale, refined face, of a seraphic serenity, seemed vaguely familiar. His eyes sought her features at intervals during the crossing, his mind groping for a remembrance.

As she stepped upon the landing-stage at Circular Quay, however, she gave him a flash of her dark eyes. In her face he saw the faintest suspicion of a smile. Then King remembered. He had seen her on the ferry more than once before, had been attracted by those dark eyes, that strangely pure and refined, pallid face. He did not know whom she was. He did not care.

He overtook her in Pitt Street, and as he passed her, her eyes, turned aside, met his reflected in a panel mirror upon a shop front. Within that mirror their glances met in a faint smile. He did not care. He half paused and spoke to her. She seemed the least bit surprised, and flushed, but recovered herself with admirable self-control. Her self-poise conveyed a delicate flattery to him. She was astonished at his speaking to her, of course, but as he had done so she ​would not be discourteous to him. Surely he had some reason for such an action.

In a few minutes they were chatting. She knew him well by sight, had often wondered whom he was; really, they were already old friends. She said it with such a confident smile that King believed her. Her name, it appeared, was Effie.

He looked up the street and saw Gertrude and Roy approaching. Then King knew he had reached the Region of Don’t Care. Nothing mattered. He would show them! As they approached his attitude to Effie was one of long-standing familiarity. Effie did not resent it. He would show them!

That evening he met her by appointment. It appeared she was able to get out in the evenings. They took a tram to Rose Bay and went for a stroll. Within a quarter of an hour he was kissing Effie, and Effie showed merely a naive surprise. Her sole fear, frequently expressed, was that some one might see. King reassured her; she was easily reassured.

When he put her on board the North Shore boat that evening King turned to walk home with a strange resurgence of belief within him. This girl at least believed in him, took him for a man. She liked him; judging from the grace of her surrender to his kisses, she liked him very much. The serene, unworldly face was a strange contradiction to her passionate nature. She was a girl who never stepped from the realm of emotion. Life without passion was a grey, hateful thing to her. She dreamed intoxicating dreams and was loth to wake. Perhaps she was not a “lady”; occasionally he had caught a slovenliness of speech, a trivial hesitancy of grammar, that betrayed the superficiality of her education; but her mind was quick and stimulating, her outlook joyously natural. True, she was a pagan in the world ​of conventional morals. Love to her was an easy and impetuous thing. She did not know the necessity for restraint; if she loved, why hesitate to show her love? To love was the sweetest thing on earth—even sweeter than to be loved—and what was this life for if not to be loved and to love? Yes, King thought her a strangely fascinating character. She believed in him, took him without a question, accepted him with a naturalness, a lack of suspicion, that to King was a divine flattery. He went home rather surprised to find how much his estimation of himself had improved. He slept well, and in his dreams there was a girl. Curiously enough, she was Aroha, of whom he had not thought for many months.

He saw Effie very often. Almost every evening they met and went for walks, took the ferry boat to Mosman, Watson’s Bay, Manly, climbed on the electric tramcars and explored the new lines that ran recklessly into the heart of the bush and stopped in the wilderness of eucalyptus waiting for a lusty suburb to spring to life about their termini. And gradually Effie, whom he had received into his life merely as an entertaining stranger, took a less nebulous position in his environment. Once, by chance, he had met her in King Street. He was with some artist acquaintances, and he looked the other way. She had been very nice about that little rudeness; he had apologised. Now he sometimes took her to tea at the A. B. C. She always dressed with an almost obtrusive quietness; the pallid, beautiful, pathetic face making, with the severity of her costume, an almost startling contrast. She looked a seraph in a tailor-made dress. Once when he and Effie were having tea at the A. B. C. he noticed Roy and Gertrude sitting at the neighbour​ing table. He was very attentive to Effie that afternoon.

And slowly it came to him that Effie, who loved so swiftly and so facilely, was in love with him.

True, love was a simple and natural thing to her; she passed from one love to another with such a careless ease, and she surrendered to her dreams at the first hint of attack. For in her young life she had loved more than one. She told him she had been engaged three times. King said to himself, as men have said to themselves since all time, that her love for him was a richer, a deeper, a more sincere thing than had ever come to her before.

At times King found himself wondering whether he was not a cad. He was on the broad way. But he laughed—a little too boisterously. He did not care. The world had judged him once; he refused to let it judge him a second time. And he was very grateful for the warm, passionate love that Effie poured out on him. It rehabilitated him in his forgotten self-respect.

Effie did not deceive herself. She did not ask King to marry her. She did not want him to, though there were moments when she permitted an impossible future, rosy and respectable, to illumine her thoughts with its preposterous glow. But the present was very pleasant: why not let it go on—as long as it might? That was all the philosophy her twenty years of haphazard life had taught her.

Though King knew that to the world his life with her was an immoral one, to him there was little of immorality in it. He believed himself in love with Effie—as much in love as was possible to a failure such as he—and he thought Effie as much in love with him as her light heart allowed her to be. If there was vice in the life they led there was little ​that appeared to him vicious in it. The matter was entirely between Effie and himself, and both had their eyes wide open. There was a certain camaraderie between the two that gave their attachment a justification; they were good friends. They were playing a game, and knew it. As long as they played it fair to each other it was no concern of the world’s.

And his art? King let that go. He wanted a rest from art. Afterwards—well, he would see. Meantime Effie was waiting for him, Effie with her impetuous ways, her entrancing, childish assumption of mastery over him, her genuine delight in his company, her unexpected revelations of a soul to which the emotions were a perpetual feast. How a little kindness of his would bring the glad light into those beautiful eyes! How a gift of roses would send through all her body a thrill of gratitude! How spontaneously, how naturally, she would reward him for a trivial attention with her ready lips! It was so easy to please her; she asked so little to feed her love on. Fate had been very good to send into his life, when it was at its barrenest, such a joyous, spontaneous, vivid, pagan thing.

But in every game there are risks.

In those days he avoided Miss Barbara Smith. There was a swift sympathy in her eyes, indicated, too, by unobtrusive acts of kindness, from which he shrank. Effie did not think he needed sympathy: to her he was a god untrammelled. And after his fall from the pedestal on which he had so long reared himself, it was pleasant to come across, in the outer part of the temple, a worshipper who had herself raised a pedestal―smaller, perhaps, and not so firm―for him. Effie took him as he was, ignorant of his fall, incapable of appreciating his descent. But Miss ​Smith had known him in the days of his splendour: he hated her. She had probably presumed to judge him; perhaps now she pitied him. How he hated her!

But one day she caught him unawares. He had taken a book out to the verandah after dinner, but it was soon too dark to read. Miss Smith drew a chair near his and began the attack. He was too tired to stir.

“And what are you going to do now?” was her question.

“Do? Do nothing, I suppose, except try to knock out some sort of a living at law.”

“That’s right.” She nodded brightly. “I think you were just meant for the law. You’ll be famous some day.”

King was beginning to look ahead again. He felt within him that resurgence of hope that for ever marches in the train of despair. The tide cannot indefinitely ebb and ebb. And King was young, and a man.

After a pause Miss Barbara Smith began again, softly and hesitatingly.

“I think you have been very brave about-about your picture. You have not whined. I know I should not speak to you like this, but I―I’ve watched you so closely I feel I must just tell you what I think of it. Now, I know that if I had had such a disappointment I would just have gone to the bad. I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have considered whether I was hurting anybody else; I would have been done with everybody else; I would have forgotten everything but myself and the need I had to consider myself.”

King had a whimsical mental picture of Miss Barbara Smith in revolt, Miss Barbara Smith going ​to the bad. He wondered what her defiance of the world would amount to; he could rather imagine a rabbit defying a dog. And then the thought came that probably his revolt was as petty, as ineffectual as the simile he had called up to depict Miss Smith’s defiance of the universe.

She went on, with a growing hesitation. “But you―you have remembered that... there were those who might care, who would be hurt if you were not brave. I want...to thank you―for that.”

King turned his head quickly. There was a note of tears in her voice. Yet her face betrayed nothing.

“Barbara,” he said quietly, “it’s good of you to take all this interest in me. It is, really, but I don’t deserve it. I’m not the strong man you think me; I’ve just drifted, drifted, and I’m drifting still. I do not care―I do not care at all―for what anybody thinks or wishes. I’ve got past that. I’m not bitter, but I feel it does not matter much—anything. I’ve just gone on anyhow. I’ve made no effort. I’ve come down off my pedestal, and I’m not used to the level ground; I’ve been too long cramped up on that pedestal. So you mustn’t put a halo round my head; you mustn’t turn the limelight on me, you mustn’t.”

Miss Barbara Smith turned her face away and her hand sought furtively for her pocket-handkerchief. Her brimming eyes must not disclose the traitor heart. A great yearning filled her with a pain that was almost a keen sweetness. He had called her by her name, and it was the first time that a man had even uttered its sound. She felt that it had a richness, a sonorousness, new to her conception of it. Women did not know how to pronounce it. She felt rather proud of her name. She swayed slightly: the world was a rosy mist.

“There―there are lots of people who are watching ​you now,” she forced herself to go on. “Perhaps there are angels watching you at this moment, waiting anxiously to see how you will bear yourself. You know, I feel that we all go through our lives almost unnoticed—by men or angels―till the time of stress comes, and then we find ourselves in the middle of the stage, and the great audience is watching us, anxiously intent on the slightest gesture we make, waiting with an awful interest to catch from our smallest instinctive movement the clue to our worth. And upon that little gesture, seen with such vivid clearness by every eye in that great sea of invisible presences, upon that little trivial, unconscious gesture, that vague audience, set far away from us in the terrible blank darkness of the theatre, criticise and doom us.”

She broke off with an embarrassed laugh. “There, I’ve got on to a fancy of mine, the thought that somewhere out there in the dim blankness of the dark, somewhere in all that wide void of space, peopled by those vague, unimaginable presences, there are beings that are ever watching us, noting our least important gesture, hearing our slightest note of petulance, our lightest laugh, and remembering it, recording it for ever in their cosmic, indestructible, awful, passionless memories. It makes us more responsible to think that; it ought to make us more serious. Sometimes at night I look up and see a million aloof, passionless eyes keeping my petty hopes and trivial resolutions under their pitiless scrutiny. And somewhere in all that myriad gaze it seems to me there ought to be a vast and splendid pity, an overwhelming cosmic love. Only―of that cosmic love I am not quite sure. I cannot find it anywhere on earth. Darwin could not find it; and Nature does not seem to disclose it anywhere. So ​far Nature seems only callous, only cruel, and without a trace of pity. All this struggle, all this conflict in Nature seems to be an excuse for us. We aren’t much better than Nature; but after all, we have advanced a little along the road to pity and love. Nature has never heard of pity to the weaker, of love for the cast-off, of sympathy with the useless, of magnanimity to the vanquished in the struggle for existence. But we have improved on Nature; that seems to be our best excuse for existence. We have outgrown the limitations that Nature seems to find sufficient for the carrying on of her business; we venture to bring love and pity and sympathy―perhaps pity and sympathy are materialistically quite useless: possibly for the improvement of the race they are even harmless―and that seems to me to prove that we have some grandiose destiny ahead. Perhaps it is our stupendous task to tame and educate that hideously callous, strenuous, grim thing called Nature.”

King looked at her in surprise. This pitiable little person dared to think, to dream, to speculate, to devise theories of the universe! She knew Darwin. It called to his mind the image of an ant impeaching the motives of the cosmos.

But Miss Smith came swiftly back from her dreams. “So I’ve been watching you,” she concluded, “and I feel―I know that you’ll come out all right.”

A wave of pity went through the man. There was nothing ahead of this colourless girl who dared to speculate and dream. She was concerned in the affairs of creation, the splendid procession of evolution, the vast pageant of the future―and before her there lay only a little dreary, short path, leading nowhere. He had had his ideal; a momentous ​hope had coloured his life; he had fought for his ideal and had been heavily overcome. Yet he had waged his war not ingloriously. Defeat did not matter very much after all; he had known the splendour of the struggle. But this girl had no vision of success, had been splendidly stirred by no aspiration. And yet she had gone on, gone on. That was her curse—and her glory.

She spoke again. “You know, I was almost glad to hear that you had given up art. It seemed to make you more of a man, more human, more like us. And I want to tell you again how proud I—how proud we are of you, how proud!”

She rose quickly and went inside the house. She could not trust her voice any longer. She went to her room, and I think she cried a little. I know that at last she knelt beside her bed and asked for help to bear this great and splendid cross of her love for him without a word, without flinching.