# Tussock Land/Chapter 18

XVIII
Now two years went past. Those two years were as important to King’s development as the brief periods of which I have regarded it as necessary to fully treat. In those two years every day did something towards the upbuilding or the demolition of the man’s individuality. Every evening marked the strengthening or the loosening of some strand in his character; every hour brought its minute contribution to his personality.
On the stage it is the great incidents that influence the persons of the dramatist; in life it is the little, unnoticed, forgotten incidents that mould a man. Life is a growth, neither a series of chapters nor a succession of “curtains.”
But to place on view all the causes that go to the making of a man is impossible, and, if possible, would be intolerable. Hence we must drop King Southern at his twenty-second year, predicate two years of life in Sydney, and take him up again upon the pin-point of observation at his twenty-fourth year.
In that interim King had become a law clerk in the office of a Sydney firm, and had settled into his work. It was the only way left open to him, and he had taken it with a bad grace. Yet he discovered that once in the swing of his office-work he did not find it intolerable. Rather, he became interested in his new life. One grows older—even in one’s ​twenties—one grows less fastidious, one adapts oneself. Life is a soothing thing even to youth.
Meanwhile he had learnt to take his art more sanely, more steadily. He had worked strenuously at his painting outside office-hours, and had achieved some success. He was recognised now as a brilliant student, whose work was always stimulating, and always hinted of the unexpected. Certain critics had recently observed that it was time that Mr Southern showed his ability to paint a big composition. Sketches and studies, however clever, they said, were not enough to form a test of Mr Southern’s undoubted ability. He was recognised now, despite his youth, as one of the leaders in the new Australian impressionistic school; but unless he was to remain a mere instance of precocity he must venture further. And—here is a revelation—though King felt the justice of those criticisms, he confessed to himself a curious disinclination to attempt the big landscape that would prove his powers. It was so easy when under the influence of a mighty impulse to produce a cleverly handled sketch; but the composition of a larger effort found him unresponsive.
He did not know the cause of this artistic lethargy. Yet there was one. It was the Australian climate reacting on King’s individuality.
New Zealand is a cold and rugged country, a temperate, windswept, sea-washed clime. Australia is a semi-tropical continent, flat and dry under a cloudless, brassy sky, or a more intolerable film of heat-haze. And Sydney, moist and hot, is a climate of enervation. To the Sydney-born, lean, pallid men and women, accustomed to the humid heat of the city—a heat that makes the starched collar limply wilt and disconsolately droop—there was nothing abnormal in the long steam bath of the summer. ​The Sydney-born took precautions, moderated his walk to a gentle saunter, crept along the shady side of the street, took frequent trips to the ozone of Manly, ran up for the week-end to the heights of the Blue Mountains, loafed when the heat-wave commanded it, and slouched easily through his summer.
But the dweller of a colder climate, coming from the heady invigoration of the ever-potent sea-breeze of Maoriland, pined under the pitiless dominion of the sun. He walked quickly, forced himself to work with the perspiration running from him, and strove valiantly, with a sense of loss of valuable time, against the enervation of the Australian summer. He tried to work at regular hours—he had so few to spare that he felt the necessity of making the most of every minute; he accepted no warning from the heat-wave.
The Australian will be an artistic people. Under the brilliance of that sky, under the germinating influence of that heat, he will reach heights of artistic expression impossible to his more sturdy cousin in Maoriland. The New Zealander dwells in a mountainous country; and it is not the Himalayas nor the Alps that produce the great poets, the masters of painting and of music. It is the sleepy, level, fat lands, the wide and monotonous plains, the smallnesses of a quiet countryside, or the sordid dreariness of the city that rear genius. Australia’s vast, sombre monotony will, by the cogent reason of contrast, inevitably produce a race of idealists who will find in their dreams an instinctive relief from their unstimulating environment. Man, set in that wide, level solitude, will appear larger, taller, more majestic than when dwarfed by the shadow of great mountains. From the contemplation of the uninviting flatness of Australia the Australian will shrink, ​to see in his fellows a majesty unknown to his environment. It needs only the sleepy shallows of the Avon, the quiet homeliness and pleasant content of Stratford’s thatched cottages, to produce a Shakespeare. The Shakespeare of Australia will come slouching down to the feverish life of Sydney from some drear, sun-baked, God-forgotten back-blocks township, made superbly articulate by the endless and enigmatical silence of the bush.
The New Zealand race, meantime, at ease in a paradise of majestic scenery, will rest content with that. No stimulus, save the great stimulus of patriotism, will call them from their lotus-land. They will have their heaven at hand: what need to stir? They will have found their Fortunate Isles: why further voyage? Like the dwellers in a tropical island, they will not feel the need of initiative; happily and luxuriously down the centuries they may contentedly drift.
But the future may have for them the clarion that will awake them from their dangerous content; and the name of that clarion is war. Some day the whole of the scattered archipelagoes of the Pacific will be under the sway of this island power, and in the need for expansion of trade and ideas, the stirring belief in a great destiny that will follow that great sway, there may come an Elizabethan age to this England of the South. But that lies in the great unknown, below the horizon of the years.
After two years in the moist and enervating heat of Sydney, King found himself subject to strange fits of sloth, careless of his work, distrustful of himself. He had overtaxed his strength by his two employments, and often on an eagerly anticipated Saturday afternoon, when he was to finish a picture of which he had been dreaming all the week, he was ​physically so tired that work before an easel was practically impossible. Yet he worked on almost fiercely. He knew he was losing time; almost he feared that he was losing touch with his art. And that was a possibility that kept him awake on many of those hot, still nights, when the city stirred uneasily in its tired sleep, and the mosquitoes kept up their persistent hum outside his mosquito-curtains with an iteration that seemed to the restless brain foolishly virulent, absurdly and insignificantly inexplicable.
He was still at the same lodgings, though only Miss Smith remained of the people whom he had found there. The Anæmic Niece and her aunt had gone back to their country township. Jennie Wave thought the move an ignominious retreat, and fumed under the irksome monotony of the life she had for such a brief time escaped. Her occasional letters to King seethed with petulant discontent. She had seen the doors of paradise open and shut, and stood straining at the bars, beating her hands against the great gate till they bled. What did life hold for such a soul? King replied gently and patiently, and gradually he came unwillingly to be the confidant of all her petulances and irresponsible angers. He soothed and sympathised, blindly doing his best to teach her something of resignation and patience, some acquiescence with life. It amused him to find himself in this rôle of comforter. He smiled grimly as he shut the envelopes, for he felt that he was a hypocrite to offer such advice. He tried to imagine himself in her position, and knew that such advice to a man who felt himself a failure in life would be mere idle words. And he knew that to Jennie Wave he was ever the conquering one; he had life in his hands, and could squeeze the orange dry. And now he had almost begun to doubt himself! But to her ​life had never opened the door. Then he did not smile; and gradually he came to look on Jennie Wave as a spoilt child given into his care, with whom he must be very patient, for whose life he had become in some vague way almost responsible.
There remained Barbara Smith of the indeterminate eyebrows. She had already made the discovery that she was in love with King. At first she had been thrilled with a great gladness that seemed to have in it a sense of something forbidden. But, wanton woman as she was, that thought but added to the keen pleasure with which all her body pulsed. It was wicked to so greatly dare, to so greatly desire. But Barbara was an abandoned woman; she let her heart rove with a reckless disdain. It seemed to her that the discovery of her love for King made her of more importance to the world; she felt already the experienced lover. She grew proud, and would not chatter to her workmates in the photographic establishment. She dreamed delicious impossible and—she recognised with a delighted shudder—passionate dreams. She wore a hint of pink in her blouse, and as she walked her step had almost an aggressive spring. In fact, Barbara was an abandoned woman for a fortnight.
Then reflection came, and she descended from her pedestal. He didn’t love her. Of that she was sure. She considered the matter from all sides in that sane, quiet way of hers, reasoned with herself, argued with her heart, and carefully put the great discovery back into her heart, whence she should never have taken it. She had been a little fool, and surely she was old enough to know better! He did not love her, would never love her. So she packed the stupendous secret within her heart, secure from observation. Sometimes, during the long hot ​nights, as she lay awake and heard King close his door when he came in, she took the secret out from her heart and peered fearfully at it with a delicious joy at her great daring. But after a little while she put it away again, wet with tears.
It was indeed her secret; but she had stolen it. That treasure was not for her. She felt that King had never contemplated the possibility of his being in love with her—which was quite wrong; for King had carefully considered that possibility.
Modern novels and modern plays tell us again and again of fatuous heroes ignorant of the heroine’s love, and un-feminine heroines who mistake the attentions of the grovelling hero for a bitter hatred; but modern life with its complex of emotions does not allow two intuitive and sensitive minds to be in the same environment without the consciousness of the possibilities of their reaction upon each other. No man who has a girl-friend is so deficient in mentality as to overlook the possibility of his being in love with her. No; the thought that this sane, simple, serious friendship that had grown up between Barbara and himself might be one aspect of love rose in the man’s mind, too. He did not put the suggestion away from him without examining it. Only the examination led to the conclusion that he liked Miss Barbara Smith, that he would miss her if they were separated, that she was a good friend who did not demand too much, and that he could contemplate the chance of their separation without any grave tremor. Why Barbara Smith fell in love with King demands further explanation; but the only hint of the causes I can give may be found in the fact that King was the first man whom she had had the opportunity of studying at close quarters. Possibly she found the exercise fascinating. Barbara Smith was a limpet ​woman; as long as she could cling, it did not matter much to what.
To Aroha, King wrote occasionally. Absence had severed the interests that once held them together, and often in those two years King found himself looking back on their meeting as a delicate and half-forgotten dream, almost as an occurrence in a previous life. He wondered with a tolerant smile at his previous inexperience. He wondered how he could have ever been so carried out of himself by the presence of a mere woman.
It was just after such a reflection that King met Gertrude Wonder.