Goulburn slid behind. I felt all crumbly and full of pangs that poor old Pa and Ma were not coming too, but they both had been to Sydney often in days gone by. I was bubbling with glee inside like a bottle of honey-mead. If the stopper had not been firmly tied I’d have effervesced right out in one high jet.
There was nothing joyful in the landscape. It was naturally barren and scraggly and dry, and now dotted with dead beasts. Those alive were so pitifully frail that it was painful to behold them. Milch cows being beaten in and out of bails and dusty yards, in such condition, was surely a cruel purgatory for animals. But the coastal belt approached with everything green and soft, and ferns and shrubs and flowers not to be seen inland. I ran out on the platform at each stop to see all I could. Liverpool, and after that it all seemed town. Strathfield and the roar of the city like a flood. Surging, exciting. It gave me tremors all over. The racket of the trains passing each other shocked like blows. Sydney was all around me. I was swamped by new feelings.
I was to be the guest of people who were somebody, I was to see all the sights and meet heaps and heaps of people, and work at nothing but pleasure from morning till night for a month!
I stood beside Pa’s old Gladstone bag—my only luggage—and when most of the passengers had gone a large old lady came and claimed me with: “This is my little girl, I know. I am Mrs. Crasterton.” She gave me a friendly kiss and said, “This is my brother.”
A man much her own general cut but younger, greeted me with a chummy nod and a flabby handshake. Mrs. Crasterton was weirdly smart. She had “kept her figure” with corset and belts as strong as patent wire strainers. The brother had a short figure, enlarged by a corpulency. He was instantly ruled out as an object of romance. Knights of the imagination are straight and slim, preferably tall and beautiful. Married men, however, have a false importance through their wives that one has to recognise; and in most cases it is impossible to conceive what elderly people ever saw in each other to admire.
I put the brother in the married class. He took a sidelong squint at me like a judicial old cockatoo. His sister called him Gaddie, but he did not look it. He carried my port along the platform and put Mrs. Crasterton and me in a cab and muttered, “See you later.”
The first thing I noticed about Sydney streets was the rain rushing through them in muddy torrents and a tram with water spraying out of its rear to the derision of the bystanders. The bystanders took my eyes. There were so many. Except at a horse race or a funeral bystanders in the bush are scarce.
The noise and bustle were enchanting. A labyrinth of streets obscured my sense of direction. Such a lively change from the bush where there was an ache of quietude and every range and road was dulled by familiarity and where one could steer by the sun or stars when outside the usual run.
At Circular Quay, Mrs. Crasterton puffed and I sprang out of the cab where Gaddy, who had arrived on a tram, was awaiting us. Cabs are contraptions designed to defeat all but the sturdiest horses, and the Sydney cab-men were not half so respectable-looking as those of Goulburn, but the ferry boat to North Sydney was a scrumptious dream.
My, the comforts and joys of the city compared with the bush! At Miller’s Point, Gaddy dumped us in another cab, which he directed to Geebung Villa, Pannikin Point, and we went off full rip in the wind and rain without him. I craned my neck to see the magnificent rocks rising on one side of the street, covered with the loveliest ferns with little springs of water trickling amongst them. The bamboos waving over walls high above filled me with astonished delight—giants’ wands with fairies’ grace. Doves were mourning and sparrows were twittering everywhere. On the other side were Aladdin glimpses of the Harbor. All too soon we had arrived.
My hostess paid the cabman. He was not satisfied. “You ugly old buzzard, and two of you and luggage to boot; Had I knowed you were to be that mean, I’d have tipped yous both out in the mud.”
“Run inside, my dear,” said Mrs. Crasterton.
“You old skin flint, you’d bile down fleas for their hides.”
“Run away, you’ll be shocked,” repeated Mrs. Crasterton, but it seemed cowardly to leave her. The language did not worry me. I had been audience to bullockies in action, to amateurs getting sheep across a creek, and to veterans training sheep puppies. Besides, I have never cultivated the pose that to hear of the common actualities of life would outrage me out of health. It is the being compelled to subscribe to cant and inconsistencies about them that I find so enervating.
A maid took my portmanteau. Mrs. Crasterton told me to follow the maid while she followed me laying the blame of “the growing insolence of the lower classes” on the unhealthy growth of the Labor Party, which she averred would be the ruin of the new Commonwealth. The rain pattered greyly on the bamboos and hibiscus, which shaded the side verandah, the cabby’s voice came as a refrain as we entered the home of a dead statesman where I was to find culture and high congeniality.
Only once in a lifetime can anticipation hold such a quality of flattery towards a clique or a class as mine did at that moment.
“We are not having anyone in tonight,” said Mrs. Crasterton when she came to my room. “Show me your dresses, child.”
It was a trying moment. I showed the new dress that I was to wear in the evenings, and the other one for street wear. “I must give you some dresses,” she murmured.
Shame invaded me. “I would rather not,” I said shakily. “I could just stay with you. I don’t want to see smart people, and then it would not matter about my clothes.” My frugal wardrobe merely covered me and the demands of decency, and was in no sense decorative.
I was alone when there was a tap on the door, and there stood a beautiful young lady. “I am Edmée Actem,” said she, with a most gorgeous smile. “I’m a bush girl too, and staying here on purpose to meet you. I was born on a station up the country. I just love your book. It’s ripping. You’ve said all the things we all think, but did not know how to express.”
Edmée had big bluish grey eyes that she rolled most arrestingly, and her hair was in chestnut curls on her forehead. Her dress showed off her figure in a SOCIETY manner. She was tall “yet voluptuous”, just like the heroines in The Goulburn Evening Penny Post, and she could languish and cast appealing glances. She looked as if she had all kinds of lovers—quondam, hopeless, distracted and those who would even try to be clandestine, and propose to her in conservatories, or find her monogrammed handkerchief in the shrubberies. Life must begin for me too on meeting her, so lovely and romantic—the very girl of my dreams.
She said she was dressing after dinner. “But that is such a pretty dress, and oh, you are lovely!” burst from me.
She called it just an old rag that she kept for wet nights and when there was no company. Every man who met her must fall madly in love with her. She confirmed this as soon as I confessed apologetically that I had no evening dress. She said it did not matter in my case as I was only a little girl from the bush, but that she was so conspicuous for her fatal beauty that it was an effort to keep pace with it. She knew I would not misunderstand her, and it was a relief to speak from soul to soul without humbug.
I wished that I was so beautiful that men would love me to distraction, but she said I was not the type. I doted and gloated on her while she told me there and then in confidence some of the burdens of her fascination. Such luscious love affairs put my little experiences out of existence.
Right in Geebung Villa Edmée was having trouble. Derek was very troublesome, and would have been the boy of her dreams only that he was four years younger. Gaddy too was a silly old thing. I asked was that why he was called Gaddy, and she laughed and said he had been christened Gad. Derek was a spoiled darling only son, and Gaddy... Both lived at Geebung Villa.
I could hardly keep from laughing at the thought of Gad approaching such a beauty as Edmée. In a democracy where admirers abounded by the dozen a girl does not at first realise that a bachelor of any age can purchase a woman of any youth if he but have the wherewithal and determination. It takes time also for a girl to grasp that any old tramp of a man thinks that every woman is craving a man, even a thing like himself, which she wouldn’t wipe her boots upon; when all the time her despair is not that she is without men importuning her, but that among the flock there is not one that she could conside............