# Tussock Land/Chapter 24

XXIV
The swift Australian dusk was gathering as the steamer collected the picnic-party and turned homewards. There was a great quietness in the air, a great quietness in the hearts of the tired company. It had been a happy day, and more than one heart dreamed vague visions of the future as the steamer went silently past the darkening, sombre shores.
But Gertrude stood in the bow of the boat, excited and feverishly happy, with a reckless light in her eyes. She looked at Roy with a defiance that stirred all his desire for her. King was very quiet, sitting at her feet.
He had won this, at least, from life, and he was thankful and elate. But the reaction had come; his mind turned with a vague doubt to his pictures. The critics would have judged his work by now. What was the decision? Did the moonlight with its cynic gaze tell the truth, or was it all a mere morbid impression, the result of his continued depression and weariness? For on the following morning, when he had taken the covering from his great picture, the generous light of the early day had been kind to his work, and in a resurgence of hope he had told himself that the thing was “not half bad.” Which is as highly as an artist student with an eye for his reputation as a critic will ever venture to appreciate his own work. But with whose eyes—those of the moonlight or those of his confidence in himself—​would the critics see his work? He remembered the criticism of his master, the silence that had followed his uncovering of the picture, and at last the enigmatic “Um-y-airs” that might cover any phase of criticism from an awed admiration to a pitying surprise.
But behind all this questioning there lay a sense of glad triumph in his heart. The critics might damn his pictures; he would scarcely feel their dispraise. He had won a greater stake in life. He was more than an artist; he was a man―a man worthy of a wonderful woman’s love. He was exalted with the thought of his manhood; for he, out of all the world, had won the love of Gertrude. Love had given him the accolade. He looked at that ignorant, swaggering, blindly cheerful Roy with a pleasant contempt.
It happened—as accidents always happen ― so easily. Gertrude, with the new daring that was the outcome of her exalted mood, had climbed upon the railings at the bow and stood supporting herself by a steel wire stay. Roy, afraid of her losing her balance, cried out a sharp command to come down. She laughed tauntingly, with a delicious devilry in her sparkling eyes.
That look stirred Roy into action. “Then I’ll hold you!” he said, and made a step towards her to catch her hand. She shrank away laughing, with her eyes challenging his, and raised her hand to beat him off.
King called apprehensively, “Come down!”
“No!” she gasped, laughingly. “If anybody wants me to step down he’ll have to pull me down!”
She flashed her smile over the men beneath her. Roy and King started forward.
Roy was the nearer, the quicker. He swung himself up to her side and caught the girl by the wrist. ​In that rude grasp the girl felt a sudden, appalling weakness. He was too strong for her. It was mean of him to humiliate her so. She would not be dragged down by any man. She turned appealing eyes upon King; he would—he had the right....
But he had halted and was watching her. He made no move. He was afraid of the consequences of a struggle.
With an effort Gertrude wrenched her arm free from the detaining grasp. She lost her balance. Wildly she flung out her hand to clutch a rope. But it was only the halyard for a little flag at the bow, and broke as it felt her weight. She slipped over the side, with shut lips, into the gathering darkness.
Roy leapt upon the railings. A hand clutched his arm; he saw King’s white face beneath. He jumped.
And immediately after him King leapt. He had seen a glimpse of white beneath the swirling water as he jumped. He came to the surface quickly and swam heavily towards that vanishing patch of helpless white. Upon the water a vague afterglow seemed to linger. He remembered, with a strange confusion of mind, that Gertrude could swim with ease, and wondered vaguely why she was not now swimming toward him. He was not a good swimmer himself, but he felt serenely conscious of rescuing her. A faint shouting came from the launch; he had not imagined how far away it had got. He swam on and on—it seemed for an interminable distance, over a drear, dark waste of water stretching to the edges of the world. Suddenly a white face appeared, as if conjured by some enchantment up to the surface of this illimitable waste. A current swirled it toward him; he clutched at the figure and knew it was Gertrude. She was unconscious; all the animation ​had gone from her face. She hung limply upon him, weakly clutching him with unconscious arms. He felt strangely tired. He knew that he could not long support the weight of her body. Surely the people on the launch must have seen them? Why did they not come? It was growing very dark. He knew himself sinking slowly, slowly; yet he held that helpless figure fast. This was the end, then—to die ignominiously, haplessly, like a cast-off, useless thing. He had never imagined that death would come to him like that, so haphazardly, so unheroically. He had always thought that for him death would come with a stalking magnificence, a grim and terrible pomp. And here it was, with no ceremony, no concern—a mere prosaic, business-like sweeping aside of a life that stood in its way. It seemed pitiable, grotesquely undignified. Death, no longer a great and wonderful presence, came to him with a hardly-concealed smirk, in the guise of a matter-of-fact undertaker.
But he was dying with Gertrude. He had her close in his arms. Ah! death could not gainsay that! He had beaten death at the last. He had no bitterness now for death. It had all come right after all. Only there were his ambitions—his pictures. It seemed unfinished ... an anti-climax ...
He woke to fact—cruel, staring fact, within a moment. He was still on the launch, still with his hand on the rail, still about to leap. He had not moved. It had been all so easy to imagine; his mind had worked so swiftly, had pictured the sequence of events so vividly, that it was to him as if it had happened. But there was no salve for the bitterness of this awakening. He had not leapt. The artist-side of his brain had beguiled him with a pretty picture: the man in him had supinely shrunk ​from action. He had not leapt. He was a coward.
And it was too late to go to her rescue now. There was nothing for him to do. He had failed. He was a coward.
The launch had stopped and was turning. Someone had thrown out a life-belt. In the darkness nothing could be seen of Roy or Gertrude.
As Gertrude slipped from the bow she instinctively threw herself further out, in a swift dread of the launch’s propellor. As she came to the surface behind the boat she struggled to free herself from her skirt, whose clinging folds had already entangled her feet. She was not frightened, but wondered when the launch, which seemed so far off, would reach her. She felt herself able to keep afloat till it came—but it would have to come quickly. But it was a different thing swimming in the baths at Manly and struggling thus with a skirt cramping her movements. Besides, it was already very dark. She had more than once gone under. It seemed to her that a strange numbness, delightful and dreamy, was overcoming her. She wondered if she was drowning, and lazily decided that it did not greatly matter. Only it was mean of the people in the launch not to care. There was King—she had promised to marry King, she remembered; and instead, she was to drown. Why didn’t King come?
Suddenly she felt a hand grasp her. Instantly her brain cleared of that growing lethargy. She was saved. It was King who had leapt so promptly to her rescue. She felt a great gratitude to God and to King.
A voice said, “It’s all right now. I’ve got hold of you!”
It was Roy.
​“Put your arms on my shoulders; that’s right. Now don’t struggle, just lie quiet. If you clutch me I’ll strangle you, Gertrude, and we’ll both drown. The launch will be here soon. That’s right. Don’t worry; you can’t drown when I’m with you. But if you struggle I’ll strangle you! So keep quiet!”
It was a masterful voice; but its very sternness seemed to the girl very sweet. She was safe in Roy’s hands. He would most surely save her. And oh! what a splendid thing was strength! And it was a delicious thing to surrender, to lie passive within the shelter of his assured mastery of her. All her woman’s soul went out to this strong man, this man who dared and did. She had found her mate. Everything came suddenly clear. She had trifled with King, had played at love. But this was more than love; this was life. It was foolish to further struggle. Only by a complete surrender could she ever reach satisfaction for her woman’s heart. How she adored strength!
Her lips were very near his cheek. She kissed him.
The night had swiftly come. They were alone in the world, between a sea of water and a sea of darkness. He turned his head and looked into her eyes. The girl dropped her gaze before that compelling assurance of mastery. She submitted, she acknowledged her surrender. And there was no regret in her face. She clung to him the closer.
When the two were ignominiously pulled into the launch, dripping and nearly exhausted, the party on board experienced a great relief. A catastrophe had been averted. The shadow that had darkened their hearts suddenly disappeared. Everything was as before.
But in the glance that Gertrude gave King as she ​reached the deck there was a new aloofness, a faint criticism that seemed to set him suddenly and terribly far off.
When she had been “rigged up” in various hastily-collected garments and had appeared on deck again, laughing and defiantly unashamed of her grotesque appearance and her dank, straight ruddy hair, King did not approach her. By an unspoken consent Roy was left to look after the girl he had rescued. And she did not appear to want any other companion. At Redfern, where the party separated on their diverse ways home, Roy assumed the right to accompany Gertrude, and King hastily went off with another party and took the first opportunity to be by himself.
He went home, and, as he was very tired and it was late, to bed. He felt miserable, contemptuous of himself. As he lay awake, for he could not sleep, his mind went over again and again the events of the day. He felt his manhood shamed; he was a failure in life—a proven coward. And he had lost Gertrude—he had lost Gertrude.
Of that he was terribly sure. After his failure to go to her assistance, when she was in peril of her life, she could never respect him again. And he had still a spark of pride; he did not want a love that was merely an unreasoning pity. He ardently craved her respect. And he had for ever forfeited his right to respect. And why? He asked himself with a slow insistence the grave question—Why? It had been a mere trick of his brain—a brain unaccustomed to swift decision. His was the dreamer’s brain that imagines but cannot act. A lethargy of indecision held him ever hesitant before the sudden call of an emergency. He saw too far ahead to discern the immediate need for action. And yet, ​with all his explanations, he was no nearer the cause of his inability to leap to her rescue. Perhaps therein lay the reason: his mind was too self-conscious; the functions that an ordinary brain performed instinctively he had to consciously reason out. And did that make him the less a man? He feared so: he was sure that it was so. His was the dreamer’s brain that moves in a world unreal. It was with a grave reluctance that he stepped from it into the world of action. His was the delicate, self-wounding, piteous, self-manacled dreamer’s brain.
So in life he had failed, after all. He was not worthy of a woman’s love. He had not been able to make her his. What cursed flaw was in his nature that made him shrink from action? He had lost Gertrude. He knew that as well as if she had said so to him in biting, bitter words. The look in her eyes was enough. He had lost her.
He had no bitterness for the conqueror. Roy was a man, able and ready to prove his right. Roy was no waverer, no dallier. He knew his strength and used it ruthlessly. If in his might he swept another being from his path he wasted no time in compassion. It was the fortune of war, the invariable way of nature. Roy had won: the strong man must always win. He had no bitterness for Roy.
Again and again he said to himself through that hot night, “I have lost Gertrude!”
But at last—it was near the dawn—his brain cleared. There was his art. Life was not all failure: he had yet his work to do. He had his message for the world; until he had spoken it none could say that he had failed. After all, it was not for everyone to achieve happiness here; but, at least, ​there was work to be done. He wondered whether that was the sole meaning of life—the performance of work, and the uplifting of soul that came from the satisfaction of work worthily done. Happiness seemed to him a haphazard thing. The happiest people he knew were the stupidest. They, with their lowly-tuned nervous organisations, were cheerfully unable to perceive the many discords of life. The more highly-organised spirits paid a terrible penalty for their sensitiveness. The happy people of the world had no ear for unhappiness. They did not rashly lift themselves above their environment. It was the daring spirits that climbed unattempted peaks who suffered. They soared—and fell. And the fall was the more terrible because of the height to which they had aspired.
But work was a nobler ideal than happiness; and it was work that drew him ever. He had tried to snatch happiness on the way; but it was not for him. Perhaps it was this lack of happiness that was necessary for the completion of his work. Since that other path of flowers was not for him, he would trudge the dreary path of duty with a serious and untroubled purpose. And at that thought he slept a little.
But when the dawn came in he woke again. To escape the iteration of his thoughts he rose and dressed, and went downstairs. He could not stay indoors. He wildly imagined himself going to Mosman’s Bay and seeing if Gertrude was up. He would make a last appeal. But the grey light of the dawn serenely mocked him with the absurdity of such a mad freak. He had lost.
As he left his door the newspaper boy was delivering the morning papers. He took them and went out. He made his way briskly towards the ​Domain. He wanted to be in the open air, away from this wilderness of houses. As he went through the Domain the poor outcasts of the city, the “dossers,” were already slowly making their morning toilet. Tattered and disconsolate men, who had slept the night there wrapped in a few sheets of newspaper—which the Sydney “dosser” has found to be as warm as a blanket—were sleepily sitting up, putting their coats straight, tightening braces and buttoning gaping and dirty collars. One, an experienced “dosser,” was carefully rolling up the big sheets of brown paper upon which he had slept. They would come in handy the next evening. Others were still stretched motionless, grotesque and stiff. It seemed to King as if he were stepping over a great battlefield, and he thought that it was in truth a battlefield of life. For these were the slain in the conflict of life; these were the stricken, the useless, the cast-aside. They, with the unknown handicaps upon them of a poor physique, a shifty mind, a weak chin, an unhealthy thirst, a recklessness of temperament, a dislike to control, even an ideal too delicate or too aloof for the comprehension of those who reached lower ideals—they, with all these handicaps, were fore-doomed to defeat in the battle of life. They had fallen, and life had passed them by. Once each must have had his stirrings of splendid impulse, once must have loyally loved some woman.
He found a seat on one of the benches beneath the avenue of fig trees, and idly opened one of the papers in his hands. It was the Telegraph. Anything would be better than thought.
The first thing his eye met was a critical notice of the work at the Society of Artists. He scanned it eagerly. His name was mentioned early. It was ​a savage criticism, pitiless, contemptuous, bitter. The writer asserted that Mr Southern’s work was worse than valueless; it was an impertinence, a danger, a menace.
“Mere cleverness run amok,” “the bumptious superficiality of the art-student,” “weakness of composition not disguised by a botched technique,” “the banal masquerading as the bizarre”—these phrases seemed to his eyes printed in leaded type. He read on in terror. The moonlight had told the bare truth. He could not paint.
He opened the Herald mechanically. Perhaps that paper would approve. His name sprang from the column to his eyes. The Herald critic was not savage; the Herald would not demean itself by getting savage. But its faint scorn was almost worse than the fatal flippancy of the Telegraph. The critic began by apologising for dealing at such length with Mr Southern, but in the past he had betrayed distinct promise. He had put his fate to the test with a praiseworthy boldness by the huge canvases that he now submitted to the judgment of the critics. And in severe, heavy, sententious and sonorous phrases the critic—he was a youth and this was his first chance to display his turn for ponderous and oratorical phrase—went on to tell Mr Southern, politely and delicately, that he was no artist, that he should desert the palette for some easier and more self-respecting way of making a livelihood. The world could do without his pictures. There was more—references to technique put in to show the critic’s newly-acquired encyclopædic knowledge of his craft—but King had seen enough.
Yes, it was all true. King knew it was true. Here was the expression in plain type of all the doubts that had gathered like evil ghosts about him, ​the hesitations and despairs that had waylaid him and trapped him into depths of depression. His brother-artists would assent to that brutal verdict. It was all true.
A man, who had been lying like a slain soldier prone beneath a tree opposite him, slowly and drearily turned over, opened his amazed eyes, blinked lazily at the rising sun, groaned, and pulling his knees up suddenly sat up and looked around. Perhaps he had imagined for a moment after waking that his valet had knocked at the door, that he was being asked whether he was ready for his bath. But the reality aroused him. He noticed King upon the seat, saw the newspapers at his feet. He rose and slouched toward him, his tattered trousers flapping about his thin shins.
“Have you done with those papers, mate?” he asked.
“Yes,” said King, wearily.
The man gathered the scattered sheets and sat down to read. His toilet could wait. Here was the news of the day. Here was news of England; perhaps he would see the name of Taunton, sleepy Taunton in Somerset, where he had been born, where his mother was now wondering, wondering what life had done with her darling son. Taunton and the good broad Somerset dialect! Ah! if ever he saw that old town again, if ever he heard the generous flow of that dear speech.... He eagerly scanned the cables.
King noticed him with a new interest. He had called him unquestioningly “Mate!” That was what that failure thought him—his mate. And that “dosser” in the Domain was right in stretching out so frankly the hand of companionship. He and King were upon the same plane—both failures.
​It was characteristic of King that he accepted this mere newspaper judgment of his art. For it was but the expression of the fears that had so long mutely held him. The mere printed words had brought them to life. He knew that all his depressions, all his wearinesses, had been but the dim, inarticulate expression of his loss of belief in himself. That is what had happened. He had lost belief in himself. Once he could paint, he knew that. But that was when he believed in himself; it was his self-sureness only that had sustained him. His ideals were real to him; they had carried him on and on. He had hardly felt doubts or hesitations then. And now they were everywhere. He could not paint. His great―once he had thought God-given―talent had come to an end. He had forced it too far. It was a smaller talent than he had dreamed. He had not imagined that there were limits to any talent; and yet every gift that birth dowers a man with has its unvarying limit. Beyond its uttermost a man’s talent may not go. His goal is fixed for him.
And now he would never be an artist. There was no recovery for him. It was no use deceiving himself. It had all been a great mistake, a long and weary mistake. He would have to retrace his steps―how far? And after...?
He rose and turned to return. The loss of Gertrude did not seem to him now so great a thing. He would never paint, never reach that glowing fame that had always hung rosy and delicate in the far sky, never know the supreme joy of the master.
He went slowly through the Domain. Most of the loafers lay there yet undisturbed. They were the unimpassioned failures of life; to them the great glory of the dawn was nothing. Life, all its splendours, all its happinesses, all its banalities, all ​its despairs, rolled serenely over them, and they did not stir. They had long ago done with life; they had passed beyond caring. And he, too, was one of them. One had called him “Mate.”
What had life left for him now?
As he entered his lodgings he met Miss Barbara Smith leaving for her work in the city. She carried her lunch in a string hand-bag.
“You’re up early, Mr Southern,” she smiled at him. eagerly. “I’ve never seen you so early before. Really, you must be turning over a new leaf!”
“Are you off to your work?” he asked listlessly.
“Yes, off to work. Isn’t it a glorious morning?”
And she was gone.