Life is not all as black as ink, even in an unliterary career. After Pa and Ma came to my help concerning Old Grayling, things took on a different aspect.
Henry went away for the winter to look after property in Queensland. I did not agree to be definitely engaged, but could not be hoity-toity seeing how I had implicated him in my misadventure. I was in hopes that he would tire of me before long. He was content to wait for three years. He said it would be safer if I looked around to see if I found anyone that I could like better than myself. If I did not he was sure that I would not find anyone whom I liked better than himself. “I don’t want you to buy a pig in a poke,” he said and laughed. It was nice of him to ease up on the Harold Beecham and Five-Bob Downs embarrassment.
As I would not break my training and accept a present, he got around the rules by leaving me a dashing filly to ride, called Popinjay. He also gave me a diary as a keepsake, in which I was to write a list of those I met and everything I thought, to read to him when next we met.
Tell him all I thought! Well, what do you think?
More and more English criticisms arrived and frightened me by their approbation. A Melbourne editor printed extracts from the whole tribe to controvert those who held that I should have been whipped for writing such a bad advertisement of Australians and shut up in a strict school until I outgrew my misguidedness. Ma kept the paper on the sitting-room table, where it could be seen. Some of the critics compared me to Emily Bront?. Zola and Dickens were other names used in comparison. The more high-flown a critic the more cordially he welcomed me as an audacious child who spoke unaffectedly from the heart.
Paradoxically, it was the people who knew my types by heart who reviled me as a liar and hypocrite. Dear old fellow-residents of Wallaby Range, I can see after these scarifying years the pathos of their disapproval, when for the first time they saw their own reality in print. No doubt they longed for something of the beauty of life, even as I, though in a less passionate and rebellious degree: or they may have imagined that in fiction they would be transmogrified into cavaliers like those in the stories in the Penny Post. It was too dismantling to find themselves in their own old beards and coats, and conversations about the crops and droughts and pudding recipes and little Tommies’ toe aches.
Nevertheless there was a new tide of complaints from those who blamed me for neglecting them. A curate lectured me as an ignoramus that I did not include him—an Oxford University graduate. I had missed my only chance to portray culture. Lordy, had I thought of doing him, he might have been punctured by my view of his stuffed magpie education and the Oxford impediment in his speech.
Other emissaries of the church came to denounce me to my face. Tales of those who tiraded behind my back were frequent—whether church wardens, local preachers, precentors, acolytes or other scribes and pharisees soon became a jumbled mass. We parted in a spirit of mutual unvanquishedness, They had every established institution on their side in one way or another, dependent upon whether they followed the Protestant or Roman Catholic recipe for endowing God with undesirable qualities, but I had Pa on my side and he assured me that TIME also was with me.
One gentle old Canon so impressed me that I thought him quite a gun. He was as thin as a lath which was appealing because the tickling Canon was balloony. This dear soul said when young himself, he had suffered torturing doubt and lonely seeking similar to mine. Patience and experience (how I hate patience, and there was Ma’s panacea—EXPERIENCE!) would garden my soul and show the futility of seeking peace in extraneous things. We must cleanse our hearts and look within for truth and salvation.
I abhorred the deadliness of peace, and was hankering for joy. The Salvation Army thumping tin cans and wearing ugly bonnets and roaring about being saved in such an unladylike way had too much of a corner on salvation to leave it any glamour.
One of the last to appear was the tickling Canon. Ma welcomed him and handed him the Melbourne paper, remarking that he might be interested to see what interest was taken in her daughter in England. Ma said she was surprised that he had been so dilatory—dilatory mind you, but Ma is no vassal—in coming to see Sybylla. No wonder the church was losing its influence when a young girl had to depend on the sympathy of other pastors than her own. She neatly mentioned the names of Father O’Toole and other educated odds and ends. I withdrew so as not to explode with pleased surprise. Fancy Ma!
The Canon was not at all haw-haw when I came in again. Softened by Ma’s support, I sat as demurely as a mopoke. He congratulated me. I thanked him. After a while he recovered slightly and said, “You can’t expect me to agree with you in toto.” (I could not find this in the dictionary, but it sounded like Trilby’s “altogether” in ideas.) Ma invited the Canon to lunch, but he had promised to return to the Ollivers’. Selah!
Other callers were tanned men all the way from the Cooper or the Paroo to bring me souvenirs or to shake the hand that had penned the book. Others wrote from Riverina and Out Back that they had met a man who had seen me. There were many whom I had never seen who gained notice by meeting me in places I had never been. Many others claimed relationship which did not exist. I was for ever hearing of cousins from Cape York to the Leeuwin—cousins in their own imagination. My real cousins, with a few exceptions, from Cape Otway to Charters Towers, maintained social superiority by deploring me as unworthy of the family progeniture. Inconsistently the people who had intended to turn their backs on me to illustrate my inferiority now reversed to attest their equality. The girls now said they did not mind how high I went, because I was not conceited and had never put on the slightest side. Pa, through EXPERIENCE, had predicted this.
The queerest characters thought they were my twin souls, and without having read my book. A far-flung tribulation of girls claimed me as their other self. People not near enough to feel caricatured loved my outburst because it was “just like ourselves”. They thanked me for my pluck and ability. I had given them all a lead in letting-go in egotism, and they found it a boon. My shr............