# Tussock Land/Chapter 19

XIX
In novels it is the unalterable habit of the hero, unspotted of the world, ignorant of the ways of a woman, to meet a heroine who has never been loved. These two, for the purposes of the novelist, start heart-whole, fancy-free. But in life which of us begins, even a new acquaintance, from a cleared field? We always carry about with us, entangled in our personalities, old acquaintances, unsevered friendships, accretions and attachments of earlier years. Even in love there are always the memories of other friendships that might have been love. Only calf-love starts without a handicap from earlier emotions, and calf-love is usually banned as unworthy of serious consideration.
In a novel one man is marked out as the hero, one woman labelled the heroine. To the practised novel-reader it often seems absurd that the hero, so vividly characterised, does not immediately recognise the ticketed heroine. And the heroine displays culpable negligence in not at once separating the hero from the villain by means of their obvious labels. But in life it is difficult for us to discover our heroes and our heroines. None of us can foresee the last chapter in the novel of his life, when the hero and heroine stand together at the altar plain to see. In life there are always half a dozen possible heroes and as many ​heroines. Which are we to pair with which? That is one of the reasons why mothers were made.
Thus it was when King met Gertrude Wonder: neither had come from a cleared field. It was at a little supper at the “Australia” given by a coterie of Sydney artists to which he belonged. He had really gone because a certain girl, in whom he had become vaguely interested as she sat beside him at the night classes of his school, would probably be there. And Gertrude Wonder’s prime reason for attending the supper was to have a good time. She had a secondary reason, which was that Jim Hercus would be there. She was somewhat interested in Jim Hercus; he had proposed to her on the previous Friday, and she was still wondering why he did it. He was an artist. She knew herself a very beautiful girl—the fact, beside being patent, was shouted to the skies by every artist in Sydney—but that to her sane and shrewdly practical mind did not seem sufficient excuse. He had not a penny, and apparently had long ago discarded the idea that it would ever be necessary to obtain that penny. When he proposed, feeling vaguely that he should mark the occasion by some proof of his sincerity, he had offered to sell the piano upon which he strove with the accompaniments of the coon-songs of the day. But she had brought a great gratitude into his heart by obviating the necessity for such a sacrifice.
Gertrude Wonder was in the habit of receiving proposals. The Sydney youth proposes with facility, and Gertrude was a very beautiful girl. She was nineteen, of a surpassing richness of colour in a land of delicate, peach complexions. Her features in repose were too perfect to be pleasing, but her face was ever swept with a flood of varying expressions ​that took her from the category of a doll. Her copper-hued hair was a crown of glory. She also had a chin.
It was the chin that, up to the present, had saved her from capitulating to the ever recurring proposals. There was a way in which she shut her somewhat large mouth and elevated the chin that gave her an air of finality. Then the man usually discovered that he had been an unmitigated ass, and began to talk of his barren future. Sometimes he merely surreptitiously looked at his watch.
There had been a private secretary at Government House who contrived to snatch a moment between his official duties at a ball to plead for her firm and capable hand, and was kept so busy seeing to the supper arrangements afterwards that he had not time to look heart-broken. There had been middle-aged gentlemen of substantial property and superfluous flesh who wrote courteous notes, offering themselves with a quite pathetic miscalculation of their own personal value. There had been quiet, large-footed young men from the back-blocks, who smoked pipes of obtrusive aroma, and wriggled in silent heroism within creased and unaccustomed evening suits. And—since she had at wide intervals made a kind of principal soprano entrance into certain art-classes—there had been innumerable art-students. In fact, it had become a tradition in the school that, before a man’s opinion on tobacco, woman or art was worth consideration, he had to adduce the fact that he had been duly rejected by Gertrude Wonder.
It was a cheerful little supper, given by one of the group in reference to a hypothetical birthday alleged to belong to the principal guest, another art-student. The coterie of which King sometimes formed part was a happy and haphazard one. ​Money to this little band was an infrequent miracle, to be swiftly grasped and made use of. Hence when a windfall came to one of them, when one sold a picture or secured an patron, the occasion was seized and commemorated. There was an uncalculating camaraderie between the members of this careless group, not one of whom, except King, had a regular salary; and they spent their spare moments in unravelling a series of pencilled calculations as to the amount each owed the other. In consequence they had many of their pleasures in common; and when the lean years came they starved with a combined and united grace. There were glorious days in the country, when they made a boisterous incursion upon the bush, rioted in healthy savagedom, lived long pagan days in the open, bathed and ate and drank, and came back to the city brown and tired and happy. There were great dinners at the “Australia”—dinners in evening-dress and with pretty girls to make toasts to. There were memorable moonlight picnics to Balmoral and Watson’s Bay, where they wandered by the water and discussed the colour of moonlight, and settled for ever the meaning of art.
And in the lean years there were little teas round the corner of one of the arcades, at one insignificant café, where for sixpence you got a chop and bread and cheese, as many cups of tea as you liked, and a table napkin. It was the table napkin that differentiated the café from a wilderness of cafés. There the rule was for everybody to scrupulously pay for himself, and the man who exalted his financial soundness by asking for another chop was subsequently compelled to suggest coffee for all.
To this supper at the “Australia” Jim Hercus brought a bouquet of roses—an offering of despair ​upon the altar of Gertrude Wonder’s queenly frown. He felt that he was strewing flowers on a freshly-made grave. She accepted an uncompromising rose from the lavish bouquet, and Jim was partially exalted.
The girl in whom King was vaguely interested was not there, and chance placed him opposite Gertrude Wonder. Jim Hercus sat next her; she conversed with a sacrificial air. She felt herself immolated on the altar of good manners.
Between the glowing luxuriance of the flowers that decorated the table King saw her freshness and beauty shine like a rose. She consciously queened it that night. What a vivid miracle of beauty she was! In the pauses of his conversation with his companion his eyes were held by the splendid arrogance of her pose, the pride of her level glance. She was majesty and youth.
Once her glance met his boldly. In her eyes King seemed to divine a delicate, intimate appeal. He felt that he had known her many years. He found himself engaging her in talk, leaning eagerly forward toward that queen of the roses. A strange vivacity took possession of him, leading him blindly on. He talked brilliantly. He felt her presence, warm and human, opulent with youth and sex, enveloping him. He thrilled at his perilous nearness to her. He shuddered in a sudden terror of the future.
She noticed for the first time that the pale, big-eyed youth opposite her—he painted clever pictures, they said—was curiously attractive. As she drew her eyes away from his after that straight, level gaze she seemed to feel her personality slip away from her; almost she felt herself submissive in his arms. She drew her eyes away, angered and startled at herself. What had happened? What had she done? ​This was not the love of which Jim Hercus and the middle-aged gentlemen had spoken. She wondered....
After supper there was a pause. Gertrude gave Jim his final word: she left the bouquet of roses on the table and moved away forgetting. It was on the balcony overlooking Castlereagh Street that, half an hour later, King found her. The others were in the room, from the open window of which came the voices of the company in a subdued murmur. These two were alone on the balcony. King approached her.
There was some vague talk, mere surface froth of the deep currents that swayed them unseen, unacknowledged. Each was strangely elated. Overhead a great moon queened it in a faint blue sky, dimming the wide canopy of stars. The moonlight lay like a heavy flood upon the street; the world was dim and drowned in waves of dull silver. From their high balcony they could see Sydney beneath them glimmering—a city of spires and domes—silent beneath the lush warmth of the southern night.
Far down the narrow street someone was thrumming a mandoline, and an Australian voice, passionate and tremulant and rich, floated up to the balcony. And as they stood in that great silence of the evening it seemed to them that gradually the silence gathered voice, and upon them broke heavy waves of distant sound—the night throbbed and pulsed, restless, watching, expectant. Some vague thing seemed imminent; the night knew.
Romance hovered about them with insistent wings, very near. They were caught in the influence of that magical hour, swayed by the mood of the moon. By an insistent Nature, ever cunning to work her ends, ever on the watch to achieve her distant goals, these two were flung into each other’s arms.
​But they talked quietly, with a restraint upon them that was outwardly the same, yet in each proceeded from a different cause. The girl was held back by a new terror of herself, a horror of this novel thing that seemed to swamp her individuality, overwhelm her ego and sweep her—whither? It was the instinctive prudence of the woman, the unreasoned sagacity that had come from centuries of flight, passiveness, repression, retreat.
But the man recognised the reason of his exaltation. He was beginning to love this woman; and he was startled to find how swiftly he had gone, how impossible now it was to regain the friendly shore of the normal. This was no boyish passion, no ideal love among the hills, no miracle-meeting in the land of dream; it was love—love of the mature man for his mate, love that would take no refusal, that would persist to the end. It shook him like a physical thrill. He desired this woman for himself; he was jealous of the world that had kept her so long from him. He knew that she was immemorially meant for him. And he would take her, ruthlessly. It seemed to him that all his life had led to this; that this moment was the culmination of his existence, of the existence of the whole universe. For this meeting, this clash of two personalities, this startling recognition of two chance-driven souls, the whole cosmos had been laboriously created. Perhaps Nature pardoned the extravagance; for it is by such extravagances that subtle Nature wins her ends.
And the actual conversation of these two, if I were to write it, would be bald and possibly incomprehensible. They talked hesitatingly of themselves, made stupendous unforeseen and unknowing revelations of each personality to the other. In that hour of hap​hazard conversation upon the balcony of the “Australia,” when they seemed forgotten by their noisy friends inside, forgotten by all the world—save, possibly, Jim Hercus—and, therefore, prompted by an unexpressed sympathy, they drew nearer to each other—in that chance meeting it seemed to each that they had compassed centuries. There was no time when they had not known each other. They had existed side by side from the beginning of things.
The girl listened to his halting phrases greedily. She was dazed with an incomprehensible exaltation. She only knew that it was very sweet. She only knew that this man, picked from all the world and placed before her, was strangely interesting. When they were at last recalled from the balcony, and the party broke up, she went home in a glow, wondering.
And King walked proudly home through Hyde Park, confident, greatly ambitious, sure of his future, sure of himself, drunk with happiness and the great possibilities of happiness that swam before him as he strode. Here was the acme, the goal of his life. His talent, his genius, his self, he would pour out for the sake of this one woman. He had met his mate—the sole reason for his existence.
And never once on that long walk home did King’s thoughts light for a moment on a single memory of Aroha.