 CHAPTER 37 The Morning came, breakfast, next Harold's departure. I took my head and slipped the note into his hand as we parted. He rode slowly down the road. I sat on the step of the garden gate, buried my face in my hands, and reviewed the situation. I could see my life stretching out ahead of me, barren and monotonous as the thirsty track along which Harold was disappearing. Today it was washing, ironing tomorrow, next day baking, after that scrubbing, thus on and on. We would occasionally see a neighbour or a tea agent, a tramp or an Assyrian hawker. By hard slogging against flood, fire, drought, pest, stock diseases, and the sweating occasion by importation, we could manage to keep bread in our mouths. By training and education I was fitted for naught but what I was, or a general slaving, which was many degrees worse. I could take my choice. Life was too much for me. What was the end of it? What's its meaning? Same. Hope. Or use. In comparison to millions, I knew that I had received more than a fair share of the goods of life. But knowing another has leprosy makes our cancer none the easier to bear. My mother's voice sharpened across Rausme, Sabilla, you lazy unprincipled girl. To sit scheming there while you pour on mother is at the wash tub. You sit idling there, and then by and by you'll be groaning about this terrible life in which there's time for nothing but work. Now she fussed and bothered over the clothes was the marvel to me. My frame of mind was such that it seemed it would not signify if all our clothes went to the dogs, and the clothes of our neighbours, and the clothes of the whole world. And the world itself were the matter of that. Sabilla, you're a dirty careless washer. You've put Stanley's trousers in the boil and the colour is coming out of them. And your father's best white handkerchief should have been with the first lot, and here it is now. One mother got crosser as she grew weary with a fierce heat and arges toil. And as I am in my abstraction continued to make mistakes. But the last straw was the breaking of an old cup which I accidentally pushed off the table. I got it hot. Had I committed an act of premeditated villainy, I could not have received more lecturing. I deserved it. I was careless. Cups were scarce with us, and we could not afford more. But what I rail against is the grindingly uneventful narrowness of the life in which the unintentional breaking of a common cup is good for a long scolding. Ah, my mother, in my life of nineteen years I can look back and see a time when she was all gentleness and refinement. But the polish has been worn off by the years and years of scrubbing and scratching, and washing and patching, and poverty and husbandly neglect, and the bearing of burdens too heavy for delicate shoulders. But that we were more companionable, it would make many an oasis in the desert of our lives. Ah, that I could take an all-absorbing interest in patterns and recipes, bargains and orthodoxy. Oh, that you could understand my desire to feel the rolling billows of the ocean beneath. To hear the peeling of a great organ through dimly lit arches, or the sob and wail of a violin in a brilliant crowded hall, to be swept on by the human stream. Ah, though cruel fiend, ambition, desire. Soul of the leaping flame, heart of the scarlet fire, spirit that hath a name, only the name, desire. Two hot young hearts beating passionately in strong breast, the sweetest thing is motion. No, that part of me went beyond my mother's understanding. On the other hand there was a part of my mother, her brave cheerfulness, her trusting God, heroic struggle to keep the home together, which went soaring on beyond my understanding, leaving me a coward weakling groveling in the dust. With that hot dreary day never close, what advantage when it did? The next and the next and many weeks of others just the same were following hard after. The souls of lives were voiced in music. There are some that none but a great organ could express. There's the clash of a full orchestra, a few to which nought but the refined and exquisite sadness of a violin could do justice. Many might be likened unto common pianos, jangling in outer tune, and some to the feeble piping of a penny whistle, and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusted impot. Why do I write? For what does any one write? Shall I get a hearing? If so, what then? I have voiced the things around me, the small-minded thoughts, the sodden round of grinding tasks, a monotonous, purposeless, needless existence. But patience, O heart, surely I can make a purpose. For the present of my family I am the most suitable to wait about common public houses to look after my father when he is inebriated. It breaks my mother's heart to do it. It is dangerous for my brothers. Gertie is in such a position. But me it does not injure. I have the faculty for doing that sort of thing without coming to harm. And if it makes me more bitter and godless, well, what matter? Part 2 The next letter I received from Gertie contained, Suppose you were glad to see Harry. He did not tell me he was going, or I would have sent some things by him. I thought he would be able to tell me lots about you that I was dying to hear, but he never said a word, only that you were all well. He went travelling some weeks ago. I missed him at first because he used to be so kind to me, but now I don't. Because Mr. Creighton, whom Harry left to manage Five Bob, comes just as often as Harry used to, and it's lots funnier. He brings me something nice every time. Uncle J.J. teases me about him. Happy butterfly-natured Gertie. I envied her. Mr. Gertie's letter came also one from Granny, with further mention of Harold Beecham. We don't know what to make of Harold Beecham. He was always such a steady fellow, and hated to go away from home even for a short time. But now he has taken an idea to rush away to America, and is not coming home till he has gone over the world. He is not going to see anything. Because by cablegrams his aunt's got, he's in one place today, and hundreds of miles away tomorrow. It is some crazy as suddenly taken. I was asking Augusta if there was ever any lunacy in the family, and she says not that she knows of. It was a very unwise act to leave full management to Creighton and Benson in the face of such a drought. One warning in marvellous escape such as he has had, ought to be enough for a man with any sense. I told him he'd be poor again if he didn't take care. But he said he didn't mind if all his property was blown into atoms, as that it had done him more harm than good—whatever he means by talking that way. Insanity is the only reason I can see for his conduct. I thought he had an eye on Gertie, but I questioned her, and it appears he has never said anything to her. I wonder what was his motive for going to Possum Gully that time. Travel was indeed an unexpected development on the part of Harold Beecham. He had such a marked aversion to anything of that sort, and never went even to Sydney or Melbourne for more than a few days at a stretch—and that on business or at a time of stock shows. There were many conjectures read the motive of his visit to Possum Gully, but I held my peace. CHAPTER XXXVIII. OF MY BRILLIANT CAREER. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. CHAPTER XXXVIII. A Tale That Is Told and A Day That Is Done. There are others toiling and straining, neath burdens graver than mine. They are weary, yet uncomplaining. I know it, yet I repine. I know it, how time will ravage, how time will level, and yet, along with a longing savage, I regret with a fierce regret. AL Gordon, Possum Gully, 25th March, 1899. Christmas. Only distinguished from the 52 slow Sundays of the year by plum pudding, roast turkey, and a few bottles of homemade beer has been once more. New year ushered in with sweet-centred midsummer wattle and bloom of gum and box-tree has gone. February has followed, March is doing likewise, and my life is still the same. What the future holds, I know not. I am to-night so weary that I do not care. Time rules us all, and life indeed is not the thing we planned it out, if hope was dead, and then we women cannot choose our lot. Time is thorough in his work, and as that arch-cheat hope gradually becomes a phantom of the past, the neck will grow in nude to its yoke. Tonight is one of the times when the littleness, the abject littleness, of all things in life comes home to me. After all, what is there in vain ambition? King or slave, we all must die, and when death knocks at our door, will it matter whether our life has been great or small, fast or slow, so long as it has been true, true with the truth that will bring rest to the soul. But the toughest lives are brittle, and the bravest and the best, lightly fall, it matters little, now I only long for rest. To weary heart-srobbing, slowly and hopeless breast, the sweetest thing is rest. And my heart is weary—oh, how it aches tonight!—not with the ache of a young heart passionately crying out for battle, but with the slow dead ache of an old heart returning vanquished and defeated. Enough of pessimistic snarling and grumbling—enough, enough, now for a lilt of another theme. I am proud that I am an Australian, a daughter of the Southern Cross, a child of the mighty bush. I am thankful I am a peasant, a part of bone and muscle of my nation, and earn my bread by the sweat of my brow as man was meant to do. I rejoice I was not born a parasite, one of the bloodsuckers who lower on velvet and satin, crushed from the proceeds of human sweat and blood and souls. Ah, my son-burnt brothers, sons of toil and of Australia, I love and respect you well, for you are brave and good and true. I have seen not only those of you, with youth and hope and strong in your veins, but those with pathetic streaks of grey in your hair, large families to support, and with half a century sitting upon your work-laden shoulders. I have seen you struggle, uncomplainingly, against flood, fire, disease in stock, pests, drought, trade depression and sickness, and yet have time to extend your hands and hearts in true sympathy to a brother in misfortune, and spirits to laugh and joke and be cheerful. And for my sisters a great love and pity fills my heart, daughters of toil who scrub and wash and mend and cook, who address makers, paper hangers, milkmaids, gardeners and candle-makers all in one, and yet have time to be cheerful and tasty in your homes, and make the best of the few oasis to be found along the narrow, dusty track of your existence. But that I am more worthy to be one of you, more a typical Australian peasant, cheerful, honest, brave. I love you, I love you, bravely you jog along with a rope of class distinction drawn closer, closer, tighter, tighter around you. A few more generations and you will be enslaved as were the mojigs of Russia. I see it and know it, but I cannot help you. My ineffective life will be trod out in the same round of toil. I am only one of yourselves. I am only an unnecessary little bush-commoner. I am only a woman. The great sun is sinking in the west, grinning and winking knowingly as he goes, upon the starving stock and drought's mitten waste of land. Nearer he draws to the gum-tree-scrubby horizon, turns the clouds to orange, scarlet, silver flame, gold. Down, down he goes. The gorgeous garish splendour of sunset pageantry flames out, the long shadows eagerly cover all. The cookaburras laugh their merry mocking good-night, the clouds fade to turquoise green and grey, the stars peep shyly out, the soft call of the Mopokia rices in the gullies. With much love and good wishes to all. Good-night. Good-bye. Amen. End of Chapter 38 End of My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin