Chapter 10
His frequently expressed anxiety about the impression they were making upon the reader was not always an affectation. There is a real solicitude in the confidences concerning William Ravenshoe upon his sudden promotion from the stable to the drawing-room of Ravenshoe Manor. 'I hope you like this fellow, William,' he says in one place, and then there is a naïve enumeration of some of the ex-groom's social deficiencies. This, at best, is a useless interruption of the story, but it helps, with other signs, to show Kingsley's constant interest in his characters.
Nearly everything in his descriptions of Australian squatting pursuits is intended to have a definite and notable bearing upon them. Thus, the view we get of the drafting-yard at Garoopna, with Sam Buckley in torn shirt, dust-covered, and wielding a deft pole on the noses of the terrified cattle, is not presented as a piece of station-life so much as a picturesque means of leading Alice Brentwood into an involuntary display of her affection for Sam when he is struck down before her eyes.
Again, the description of the kangaroo-hunt, given in the same novel, is remembered chiefly on account of the picture of Sam and Alice in the frank enjoyment of their first love as they loiter in the tracks of the sportsmen, and, relinquishing the chase with happy indifference, go home and sit together under the verandah.
Kingsley avoided the fault, common to his successors, of exaggerating the interest which readers are supposed to take in the general aspects of life in a new country. He had a keen sense of the value of picturesque environment, but wisely contrived that nothing should withdraw attention from the progress of his drama. He was ever on the watch for opportunities to sketch in lightly and humorously small traits of character, and to emphasise salient ones. 'She had an imperial sort of way of manoeuvring a frying-pan,' he says, in allusion to the cheerful adaptability of the high-bred Agnes Buckley, that fine model of English womanhood, during her first rough experiences in Australia. When Hamlyn comes to Baroona from the neighbouring station to spend Christmas with his old friends, he finds the same lady 'picking raisins in the character of a duchess.' Considered apart from the story, these Dickensian touches might seem merely humorous exaggeration, but to those who have traced the development of Mrs. Buckley's character, how happy and pregnant they are!
_Robbery under Arms_ not only contains Boldrewood's most dramatic plot, but his most skilful and sympathetic treatment of character. It is a distinct exception to the rest of his work. In the later stories the characters are brightly sketched, but with so casual a touch that they leave no permanent impression with the reader. The best excite no more than a passing admiration, whereas Kingsley's win lasting admiration and love. There can be no surer test of art and truth: it furnishes the one indubitable proof of clear vision, sympathy, and correct expression. Where the weakness of some of Boldrewood's characters is not due to deficiency of interest in them on the part of the author, it is the result of an attempt to copy life with an accuracy which sacrifices picturesqueness.
The attempt to preserve absolute truth in every detail of the life-story of John Redgrave, the hero of _The Squatter's Dream_, seems distinctly a case in point. In no other novel is there so complete a description of Australian squatting life--its varying success and failure, its solid comforts and wholesome happiness in times of prosperity. Redgrave is one of the most elaborately drawn of all the author's characters; there is the fullest sense of probability in every incident; the entire story is plainly a direct transcript of life; nothing at first seems wanting. But when the book is laid aside, the reader realises that he has scarcely been once moved by it. He has felt a transient pity for the hero's misfortunes, and a mild satisfaction at his modified ultimate success--nothing more.
The main defect here appears to consist in the central motive of Redgrave's struggles being limited to purely personal ambition. His aim is no higher than that of a speculator in a hurry to be rich, and when he fails, he gets little more than the sympathy which is commonly given to the man who plays for a high stake and loses. His love for Maud Stangrove, which might have been made a controlling and ennobling influence, ranks only as an incident. It comes after the main impression of his character has been given. Beyond doubt he represents a real type; no error has been made in this respect; his failure to win higher favour with us arises from his too close approximation to the common clay. There is absent just that small element of the ideal with which even the sternest of the apostles of realism in letters have found it impracticable to dispense.
An illustration of how little Boldrewood was inclined to idealise either his characters or their surroundings is afforded by the account of Redgrave's first visit to the home of the Stangroves, his neighbours on the Warroo. On the journey he passed a Bush inn of the period where drunkenness was the normal condition of everyone, from the owner to the stable-boy. The shanty itself, an ugly slab building roofed with corrugated iron, 'stood as if dropped on the edge of the bare sandy plain.' It faced the dusty track which did duty as a highroad; at the back of the slovenly yard was the river, chiefly used as a receptacle for rubbish and broken bottles. A half-score of gaunt, savage-looking pigs lay in the verandah or stirred the dust and bones in the immediate vicinity of the front-entrance. 'What, in the name of wonder,' inquired Jack of himself as he rode away, 'can a man do who lives in such a fragment of Hades _but_ drink?'
The home of the Stangroves, though less depressing, bears painful evidence of its isolation. The settler's wife little resembles Agnes Buckley--she is too typically colonial for that. 'She was young, but a certain worn look told of the early trials of matronhood. Her face bore silent witness to the toils of housekeeping with indifferent servants or none at all; to the want of average female society; to a little loneliness and a great deal of monotony.'
The visitor meets another member of the household, Stangrove's unmarried sister, a beautiful and spirited young woman whose impatience with her colourless life is outwardly subdued to ironical resignation. 'Another eventful day for Mr. Redgrave,' she remarks on his return after a day's riding over the station with her brother; 'yesterday the sheep were lost--to-day the sheep are found; so passes our life on the Warroo.'
The best argument against Boldrewood's usual treatment of character is furnished by the great bushranger chief who is the central figure in _Robbery under Arms_. The author here submits for the first and only time to that fundamental law of fiction which demands a certain judicious exaggeration in the characters of a story depending for its interest mainly on the charm of circumstance. Starlight is at once the most real and least possible personage to be found in any of Boldrewood's novels. He becomes real because his character and actions are conceived in harmony with the romance and pathos of the story. Though it is obvious enough that there never could have existed a bushranger with quite so much of the _bel air_, or with a private code of honour so admirable, the exaggeration is far from obtrusive. He is of a stature suited to the deeds he performs, and, both he and his exploits being often closely associated with historical facts, a strong sense of reality is maintained.
Starlight seems to be a compound of several characters. He has Turpin's ubiquity, Claude Duval's _sang-froid_, the personal attractiveness of Gardiner (leader of a gang which made a business of robbing gold-escorts in New South Wales about forty years ago), and the humorous daredevilry of the 'Captain Thunderbolt' who obtained notoriety in the same colony a few years later.
Boldrewood seems to have shrewdly agreed with the dictum of Turpin, that it is necessary for a highwayman, at all events a captain of highwaymen, to be a gentleman. But Starlight, unlike Turpin, does not become vain with success, and is far from being enamoured with his profession. Indeed, he is quite with the orthodox view of it. He is a bushranger, apparently, because he no longer hopes or desires to resume his rank in certain aristocratic circles from which, by occasional hints, we are informed that he has fallen. He indulges in no lugubrious moralisings--he is far too agreeable a person for that--but exhibits just the required touch of romance by letting you know that in his past there is a sadness which a career of excitement and danger is necessary to enable him to forget. Having been won over as a sympathiser and admirer, the reader is ready to believe that at worst the dashing outlaw could never have been a very bad fellow. Certainly the author has carefully kept him from participation in the grosser acts of lawlessness of which his revengeful old partner Ben Marston, the more typical bushranger, is guilty. Cattle-stealing and highway robbery as supervised by Starlight are allowable, and even meritorious, in so far as they afford him opportunities to practise some facetious deception on the police. Such raids are not crimes, but comedies.
There is excellent fun in his posing as 'Charles Carisforth, Esq., of Sturton, Yorkshire, and Banda, Waroona and Ebor Downs, N.S.W.,' while awaiting the arrival at Adelaide of the 1,100 head of stolen cattle, or as the 'Hon. Frank Haughton,' one of 'the three honourables' on the Turon gold-field. The rash daring and cleverness of these disguises furnish a combination of amusement and dramatic interest not approached in anything else that Boldrewood has written. Starlight's presence at dinner with the gold-fields commissioner and police magistrate at Turon, when 'in walked Inspector Goring,' the officer who had been so long and patiently seeking him elsewhere, and his appearance at Bella Barnes' wedding, after a reward of a thousand pounds has been offered for his capture, are scenes which remain vivid in the memory long after the more commonplace adventures of the lords of Terrible Hollow have lost their distinctness or been forgotten.
Next to his humour and courage, the qualities which most endear this picturesque marauder to the reader are the happy fierceness with which he commands the respect of his retainers, and his politeness and gallantry to women. When a robbery is to be effected, the plans are laid with sound generalship, but there is no unnecessary violence or loss of good manners. His conduct at the plundering of the gold-escort is fully equal to the traditional suavity of Claude Duval. 'Now, then, all aboard!' he calls out to the passengers when the contents of the coach have been removed. 'Get in, gentlemen; our business matters are concluded for the night. Better luck next time! William, you had better drive on. Send back from the next stage, and you will find the mail-bags under that tree. They shall not be injured more than can be helped.'
The bushranger of real life, as known to the pioneer colonist, would have bagged his booty with much fewer words. That Starlight should have 'treated all women as if they were duchesses,' and have made it a point of honour to keep his pledged word with them, in however slight a matter, seems only natural. Not even the women-folk of his enemy are allowed to want a protector. When Moran and his gang of ruffians take possession of Darjallook station during the absence of the male members of the household, Starlight and the Marstons ride twenty miles across country and rescue the ladies before the worst has been done. Starlight bows to them 'as if he was just coming into a ball-room,' and, retiring, raises Miss Falkland's hand to his lips like a knight of old.
These passages are only a few of the many which might be cited to show how far the author, fired with the spirit and romance of the story, gave freedom to his imagination in shaping the proportions of his leading character. Starlight, though he is not, and cannot be, a portrait of any single colonial outlaw of real life, is sufficiently natural to consistently represent in both his conduct and adventures much that was typical of Australian bushranging forty years ago and later.
Some of his characteristics, and at least one of the concluding episodes of the story, were suggested by the career of a New South Wales horse-stealer who became known as 'Captain Moonlight.' So much is certain. Boldrewood has himself narrated to a contributor of the Australian _Review of Reviews_ his recollections of Moonlight and his end: 'Among other horses he stole was a mare called Locket, with a white patch on her neck. We had all seen her. This was the horse that brought about his downfall, and he was actually killed on the Queensland border in the way I have described in _Robbery under Arms_. Before that, Moonlight had had some encounters with Sergeant Wallings (Goring); and this day, when Wallings rode straight at him, he said: "Keep back, if you're wise, Wallings. I don't want your blood on my head; but if you must----" But Wallings rode at him at a gallop. Two of the troopers fired point-blank at Moonlight, and both shots told. He never moved, but just lifted his rifle. Wallings threw up his arms, and fell off his horse a dying man. As Moonlight was sinking, the leader of the troopers said: "Now you may as well tell us what your name is." But he shook his head, and died with the secret.' He was 'a gentlemanly fellow,' probably one of that unhappy class of young Englishmen of good birth and no character who are exiled to the colonies for their sins, and there often acquire new vices or sink into obscurity.
When Archibald Forbes was in New Zealand a few years ago, he met a peer's son who was earning his 'tucker' as a station-cook. A Chinaman, aspiring to better things, had vacated the billet in his favour! It is interesting to note the use Boldrewood makes in his novel of the suggestion afforded by the bushranger's concealment of his identity. When Starlight is overcome in his last attempt at escape, the curiosity long felt concerning his past life seems for the third time in the story about to be gratified. But the reader is once more and finally disappointed. The bushranger has given his last messages, and is dying with some of the indifference to existence which has characterised him throughout the story.
'I say, Morringer, do you remember the last pigeon-match you and I shot in, at Hurlingham?'
'Why, good God!' says Sir Ferdinand, bending down, and looking into his face. 'It can't be! Yes; by Jove! it is----'
He spoke some name I couldn't catch, but Starlight put a finger on his lips, and whispered:
'You won't tell, will you? Say you won't.'
The other nodded.
He smiled just like his old self.
'Poor Aileen!' he said, quite faint. His head fell back. Starlight was dead!
Boldrewood's characters, as he has said himself, are constructed from many models. And the Marstons are, it seems, the only personages he has drawn solely from life. Gardiner, with whom some readers have identified Starlight, was, it is recorded, 'a man of prepossessing appearance and plausible address, who had many friends even among the settlers never suspected of sympathy with criminals, while many of the fair sex regarded him as a veritable hero.'
That the romantic life of this noted criminal furnished Boldrewood with some material there cannot be any doubt, but the fictitious bushranger is far from being in any respect a mere copy of the real one. In Starlight's relations with women, for instance, there is nothing but what is manly and honourable, whereas one of Gardiner's exploits was the seduction of a settler's wife, a beautiful woman whom he induced to elope with him to a remote district in Queensland. And, further, none of the sensational incidents connected with his capture--his escape under a legal technicality from the death-penalty suffered by some of his associates, his imprisonment for twelve years and subsequent exile--are made use of in the novel.
The narrative method adopted in _Robbery under Arms_ has so much contributed to the success of the story as to be worthy of some comparison with the ordinary style of the author. The limitations imposed by the choice of a narrator with no pretensions to education or sentiment, and writing in the first person, proved in this case salutary rather than disadvantageous. They repressed Boldrewood's usual tendency to excessive detail, and kept his attention closely fixed on the drama of the story.
The occasional deficiency of local colour and loss of effect in the grouping of the characters is more than compensated for by the racy piquancy of Dick Marston's vernacular, and the aspect, unrivalled in Australian literature, which his account affords of bushranging life from the bushranger's own point of view. In the truth with which this view is presented lies the strength and lasting merit of what might otherwise have been little better than a commonplace series of sensational episodes.
Starlight and the Marstons, as we see them, are reckless and dangerous criminals, but they are not exactly the 'bloodthirsty cowards' and 'murderers' known to the press and police of the period. The little they can plead in excuse for their lives is plainly stated, while no complaint is urged against their fate, or attempt made to obscure its obvious lesson. Grim old Ben Marston's career illustrates one of the results of the stupidly cruel system of transporting persons from England to the colonies for petty offences which in these days are punished by a slight fine, and his sons are types of a class who were far from being as irreclaimable as their offences made them appear. 'Men like us,' Dick Marston is once made to say, 'are only half-and-half bad, like a good many more in this world. They are partly tempted into doing wrong by opportunity, and kept back by circumstances from getting into the straight track afterwards.'
The examples given in the story of the aptness of this remark are often very touching. The poor Marston boys are indeed only half bad. Their better natures, seconded by the influence of a good mother and sister, are continually urging them to reformation, but for this there is no opportunity. The decision of their fate by the turn of a coin when the first great temptation comes is symbolical of the trifling causes to which the ruin of so many young Bushmen in the early days of squatting was traceable.
The personal observation strongly marked in all Boldrewood's novels has in _Robbery under Arms_ its fullest, as well as most skilful, expression. As a squatter, the author had seen the practices of the cattle-thief, and learned his language. He had observed the extent to which idleness and a love of horseflesh combined to fill the gaols of the country, and in later years this knowledge was confirmed in the course of his long experience as a magistrate. The judgment with which he presents the case of the young Marstons as types of a class is excelled only by the literary skill employed upon the character of their chief.
But there was no need to make Dick Marston so often emphasise the comfort of living 'on the square,' and the folly of ever doing otherwise. The story bears a self-evident moral. Humour there is in plenty, but the pathos of tragedy is the dominant, as it is the appropriate, tone of the book. In no respect has greater accuracy been attained than in the reproduction of the Australian vernacular, that odd compound of English, Irish, Scotch, and American phrases and inflexions, with its slender admixture of original terms. Visitors to Australia have praised the purity of the English spoken there by the middle classes. Mr. Froude, as late as 1885, found that 'no provincialism had yet developed itself,' but he wrote chiefly of what he had heard in the towns. It is in the country that the colonial dialect--if speech so largely imitative can yet be called a dialect--is most heard.
Among other interesting features in Dick Marston's narrative is the curious half-impersonal view which the outlaws take of the efforts made by the Government to capture them, and their strong dislike, on the other hand, to the private persons who competed with the police for the large rewards offered. This detail is as true to life as the example of the sympathy and assistance accorded the bushrangers by settlers in the neighbourhood of their mountain retreat.
It was sympathy of this kind, combined with bribery, which so protected the Kelly gang as to involve the Government of Victoria in an outlay of about one hundred and fifteen thousand pounds before their destruction could be accomplished. Effective literary use will be made at some time in the future of the exploits of this last and most daring of all the bushranging gangs, but many years must elapse before the sordid aspects of their career shall have been forgotten, and only its romance be left. And nothing short of genius will be required to refine the rude proportions of Ned Kelly into something like the gentlemanly exterior of the dashing captain, the smooth gallant, the humorist, philosopher, and quick-change artist of _Robbery under Arms_.
In _The Miner's Right_, which ranks second in popularity among Boldrewood's novels, the personal narrative style is again adopted, but with little effect of the kind produced by Dick Marston's vivid directness in the earlier novel. Hereward Pole, the hero, is a cultured Englishman, sensitive and sentimental, who keeps an eye upon humanity at large, as well as upon the business of making a fortune which has brought him to the colonies. Half of his record, though a striking picture of the gold-fields, is not an inherent part of the story of his own career. Confined to their strictly just limits, the events which combine to prolong his separation from the sweetheart whom he has left in England could have been told in fifty pages. But this would not have been all the author wished. He was satisfied with a slender plot and a _dénouement_ which can be guessed almost from the outset as soon as he saw that they would carry the glowing scenes and episodes of diggings life with which his memory was so richly stocked. One cannot believe but that, in this case, his slender attention to the long-drawn thread of the story was the outcome of choice. Else where was the need for elaborateness in such details as the dispute over the Liberator claim at Yatala, the trial of Pole and the inquest on Challerson, with their rendering of witnesses' depositions in the manner of a newspaper report, the riot at Green Valley and Oxley, and the scene at the funeral of the agitator Radetsky? Yet, though these episodes are given at great length, and do not form any essential part of the story of Hereward Pole and Ruth Allerton--the vindication of a man's honour and the triumph of a woman's invincible devotion--they are told with so much intimate knowledge and strength of colouring as almost to supply the absence of a plot, and to make the story, apart from artistic considerations, a really fine piece of work.
It has a popularity in the English libraries which is itself a proof of the service done by the author to those who would know something of the careers of varying success and bitter failure, of hardship and romantic adventure, upon which so many of their kinsmen set out forty years ago. _Nevermore_ and _The Sphinx of Eaglehawk_ give other views of the gold-digging days, chiefly of their seamy side, but these stories offer nothing that equals in interest the splendid panorama of pioneer life revealed in _The Miner's Right_.