# Tussock Land/Chapter 21

XXI
When King met Gertrude again she was very gentle, very patient, very winning. She seemed sorry for him; her eyes wished to console him. But her lips said no word of sympathy. She would not allow him to speak of love, to recall that night at Watson’s Bay. King tried once or twice to explain himself, but she possessed a keen intuition of the forbidden subject and promptly warded it off.
So at last King and she settled down on the quiet basis of friendship. The girl knew—and perhaps the friendship was the more delightful to her for the fact—that King’s passionate love smouldered close beneath the surface, perilously ready to break to flame. Gertrude knew herself able to damp that smoulder; for she had taken the discipline of herself into pitiless hands, and would have no further treachery within her heart. It was very nice to have a man at your feet—and to keep him there. In those days Gertrude tasted the deep joy of the tyrant.
And King, unable to divine her heart or to glean the meaning of her words—for, lover-like, her every little word, her every trivial gesture he freighted with a momentous meaning, her every attitude was a vast portent—lay in a delightful slavery, too happy sometimes to wish a term to his servitude, too grateful for the privilege of her splendid smile to feel impatience.
​And Gertrude was making discoveries in herself. She was gradually moulding herself into a new personality. The recognition of the existence of love as a thing that concerned herself, as a thing that was not merely confined to books and the stage, as a thing that audaciously entered into her own life, had transformed her from girl to woman. And yet she did not love King; she was too new to the idea of love to be sure. She felt that so much of life was to her yet an unexplored country; she had passed through so much of life, as it were, blindfold. Life held yet for her—so she was just beginning to divine—strange surprises, wider outlooks, stupendous revelations. She shrank from surrendering with a too swift eagerness to the first siege. She would try life first, taste and remember its savour. She was too young, too alert, too vivacious to close the door yet upon the world. For to her girl-mind marriage represented the closing of the door. She was too proud to surrender her personality yet to that of another—even to that of the loved one. Besides, in her heart, she was a little afraid.
Yet this she recognised—she was a different woman now. She had received her first lesson in life. Now she began to consider men from a new standpoint. They were all possible lovers. She entered into a new world. She saw love everywhere about her.
Hence it was that when Roy Underwood came down from the back-blocks for a holiday and was introduced to Gertrude he met with an approving glance from the girl’s enlightened eyes. Roy was strong, lithe, mighty, masterful. His breezy, sanguine manner, his open, keen-eyed, sunburnt face, his big stride, his six feet of muscular youth, his contempt for smart clothes, his powers with the ​cricket bat, his easy grace on horseback, his mastery of the pair of greys he habitually drove, prejudiced everybody with whom he came in contact into taking him for granted. He effused life; his laugh was incarnate youth. The son of a rich squatter, himself already the manager of a vast sheep-station in New South Wales, he had come to Sydney for a holiday, and city life, which he had forgotten for years, fascinated.
So when, the second time he met Gertrude, he asked her to come for a drive with him, she found herself rather unexpectedly consenting. The fact was that he did not give anyone the chance to refuse. His swift assurance that everybody must fall in with his arrangements was too palpable to admit of any but the most distinct individualities protesting.
And when the next time he called at Gertrude’s house and found her just going out, he was disappointed, but not disconsolate. He told her that her engagement would keep; meantime he was here with his dogcart, and she would not be foolish enough to miss the chance of a drive. Gertrude told him her appointment was a most important one. But she accepted the drive only as far as the ferry wharf, and crossed alone to the city to meet King. He drove off in utter astonishment at her unreasonableness. Gertrude met King, yet during the walk they took in the Gardens she could not help recurring once or twice to the drive she had refused, and ended with the fervent wish that Providence would in the future so arrange things that two such engagements would not clash.
It did not take Roy Underwood long to discover that Gertrude was more interested in King than consisted with a whole heart. He met King and ​was reassured. That pale-faced, thin fellow with the woman’s eyes the mate for such a splendid piece of womanhood as Gertrude! He dismissed the thought as absurd, and reasoned himself into a pleasant humour by contrasting his own fine physique, his capacity for doing things, his belief in himself, his unconquered desires, his healthy outlook on life with the hesitant spirit, the overweening ambitions of the artist-clerk who was neither artist nor clerk.
Roy felt the instinctive contempt of the strong man who has achieved his trivial ambitions to the unsuccessful one who has yet his star to reach. Roy had gone on step by step through life, moving along a securely-fenced road where every stage on his progress showed clear before him; it was beyond his comprehension that, with the plain highway of life open to all, there should yet be some who preferred to choose a path of their own—a path that would probably end in the mists of despair and disillusion, that might possibly lead to heights undreamed of even by the perverse wayfarer seeking them. Roy aimed prosaically at being rich, and probably experienced as fine an enthusiasm in his ambition as King felt in his. Already Roy Underwood was a prosperous young man; before he had done he would be the richest run-holder in New South Wales. And—the matter was now clear to him, had perhaps been clear to him the moment he saw Gertrude—he meant to take this girl back to his run as his wife. Mentally he swept King magnificently from his path. The artist-clerk irritated him by his appearance of unsuccess. Roy felt that for a man to be unsuccessful in his business—whether that business was painting pictures or growing sheep—was the one unpardonable sin.
​And King learned soon to take into account that new factor of Roy Underwood. He found that already Gertrude had accepted him as a fixed concomitant of her environment. She became more difficult, more incomprehensible. King had acquiesced in the belief that he understood her character, her clarity of soul, her sincerity of purpose; the absolute, almost brutal, naturalness of her frank personality had seemed to him to be her greatest and most compelling charm. She was clear, translucent to the divining eyes of the true lover. There was in her a directness, a knowledge of what she wanted, that was almost masculine. And it was the latent femininity in King’s being that was mated with her direct strength.
But now there was something inexplicable in the girl. Her soul had suddenly clouded; she drew herself away from his eyes. He felt that a door was being slowly shut upon him—a door through whose opening he had divined delightful intimacies beyond. Now she seemed to do the unexpected thing—and he was just beginning to understand her! This to King was almost an insult. He grew perplexed, annoyed.
The truth was, of course, that the girl’s soul was now to her also an inexplicable thing. She was beginning to love both men. There were moods in which she became impatient of King’s mere presence. He talked too much of his art, his ambitions; privately she was beginning to think that he achieved too little, aimed at too much. Then there were moments when Roy’s sturdy progression through life, his obstinate refusal to recognise obstacles, his serene optimism, seemed to her the mark of the dullard. She saw herself helpless in his pitiless hands and knew he had the power to wound her ​horribly by his lack of sympathy, of intuition. King she could sway with a glance: for Roy’s help she would have to piteously plead. And the woman in her had a little contempt for the man whose moods she could so easily play upon, and a terrible and growing fear of the man whose personality had no moods.
And this confused ebb and flow of her personalities gradually calmed to one clear thought. She felt the fascination of the mouse in the paws of the cat; it would solve every difficulty, cut this great tangle of perplexity for ever, if she threw herself in passive surrender into the arms of the strong, uncomprehending, brutal, pitiless man. Like all women—like all the world—it was strength that she finally, intimately worshipped. The need for the strength that is in the fibres of a man was as real to this strong woman as to the veriest kitten of an anæmic girl. The fineness of the fibre, in the ultimate analysis of the woman-soul, was nothing to her. She asked with all her being to be wrapped in the protection of a stern, pitiless, masterful masculinity. Already, though none of the three knew it, the die had been cast.
But one onlooker saw already the end of the strife. This was Miss Barbara Smith. A chance meeting with King and Gertrude walking together in the Gardens told her—the man, a prey to his nervous organisation, open to a hundred pin-pricks that to him would be wounds, too finely strung ever to do more than dream of ultimate happiness: the girl, in the supremacy of robust physical health, aglow with youth, sedate with an assured and stable personality. That girl would not for long be content with so slight a man; the two types did not mate. They might go the foolish length of marrying; but the ​end would come. She prayed it might come before marriage.
And that night Miss Barbara Smith learned something else. She began to see a little into her own unlined, placid soul. As she lay awake in bed she began to hate with a malice inexplicable that splendidly beautiful girl of the arrogant eyes. “That creature,” as she caught herself calling her, did not understand King, would never understand him. And Miss Smith, in the vindictiveness of her tiger-heart, audibly repeated to the night the term “creature.” She found a keen joy in the word. She had never guessed before how she could hate. She began to feel a little afraid of herself—at this quiet being that she had called herself that now flared out into such a passion of jealousy. What was she developing into? She thought with a thrill that a murderess must feel as she felt then towards that woman of the arrogant eyes who so despised and swayed her King. And the strange thing is that Miss Barbara Smith was not ashamed of her hatred. She felt a little pride in the possession of so much of the tiger in her soul.
And that girl would criticise, perhaps despise, the boy! How Barbara hated her!—the creature!
But she would not think of her any more. She turned her thoughts to King and let them linger there gratefully. How she loved him and his weaknesses! In her soul Barbara Smith jealously mothered him.