Chapter 6

Nor is the kindred subject of lounging in midsummer forgotten. Anyone in an armchair under a broad Australian verandah, who fetched anything for himself, would, in the author's opinion, 'show himself a man of weak mind.' Niggers were all that a Southern gentleman wanted to complete his comfort when the sun was at baking-point. Mrs. Beecher Stowe's teachings undergo a playful deprecation. Did she know the exertion required for cutting up a pipe of tobacco in a hot north wind; or the amount of perspiration and anger superinduced by knocking the head off a bottle of Bass in January; or the physical prostration caused by breaking two lumps of hard white sugar in a pawnee before a thunderstorm? The Southern gentleman undertakes to affirm that she didn't.

In the conversation of Kingsley's colonists, the business of the squatter, his hopes, fears and struggles, find no place, and the idea of hard work is never obtruded for its own sake. The talk is the talk of a cultured class who live wholesome lives and have no cares. The twelve thousand miles that separate them from the centre of their intellectual life are obliterated. The men preserve their individual tastes, together with that comradeship and mutual considerateness which have their origin in the best traditions of college life. The same loyalty and chivalry are prominently reproduced in the characters of _Ravenshoe_ and _Silcote of Silcotes_. But in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ these qualities are perhaps more noticeable (at all events to a colonial reader) than in the later novels, because of the contrast they furnish to the essentially competitive life of modern Australia. Brentwood is 'excessively attached to mathematics, and has leisure to gratify his hobby'; Harding, 'an Oxford man,' is 'an inveterate writer of songs,' a pastime which only the annual business of shearing is permitted to interrupt; Buckley is intent on the education of his son, in which he is careful to provide for a knowledge of the Latin Grammar; while Doctor Mulhaus finds the new country an even better field than the old one for his researches as a naturalist and geologist. In telling his story, Kingsley seems, in short, to have treated pioneer squatting in Australia as the brighter aspects of English country life have been treated in fiction for generations past. He expends his best efforts in showing the picturesque surroundings and interior comfort of Australian homes. Neither their tables nor their bookshelves lack any of the best luxuries of the hour. The greyness and rawness of their environment are not touched upon. Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in _Geoffry Hamlyn_. He would have allowed the budding civilisation of the country to be swallowed up in sombre desolate forests, or appear as lonely specks on bleached and thirsty plains. Though he might intend the contrary, that, substantially, would be the final impression left on the mind of the reader. Australian scenery awed and depressed him. With all his powers of graphic expression, he could seldom write of it without exaggeration. It was the fascination of the grotesque rather than the picturesque that he felt. Kingsley, though scarcely so graceful and vivid a describer, had a keener and more constant sense of natural beauty. His vision was unclouded by the peculiar susceptibility of temperament which narrowed the view of his brilliant contemporary. He could not have indulged in rhetorical flourishes at the expense of accuracy, as in the familiar passage professing to give the Australian view of 'our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours.' A comparison of Marcus Clarke's too often quoted description with the sketches of landscape given in, say, the twentieth, twenty-eighth and thirty-sixth chapters of _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and at the beginning of the third volume of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ curiously illustrates how far the appreciation of Australian scenery depends upon the point of view of the observer.

Kingsley's descriptions, like all else that he wrote of the country, breathe an unmistakable personal enjoyment. They are the natural expression of a happy disposition, just as is the boyish fun with which he surrounds the love-making of his characters. 'Halbert kicked Jim's shins under the table, and whispered: "You've lost your money, old fellow!"' when Sam Buckley, flushed and happy, rejoined his friends in the sitting-room at Garoopna, after proposing to Alice in the garden. Jim Brentwood had peevishly bet his friend that the lovers would go on shilly-shallying half their lives; but Halbert, with keener vision, had foreseen the very hour of their betrothal, and made a bet of five pounds on the event. More comical still is the spectacle of Hamlyn ducking under the bedclothes to escape the boot that is about to be flung at him, for laughingly discrediting the story of which his bosom-friend Stockbridge has tragically unburdened himself concerning the evaporation of his love for Mary Hawker.

Whether in recording the actions and dialogue of his characters, or in describing scenery and the habits of the birds and animals which figure so often in his first novel, Kingsley always reflected some of his own happiness. It is not wit nor subtle humour, but a combination of pure mirth with the enthusiasm of warm friendship, that maintains one's interest in the simple life of the new Drumston. There is an abundance of farcical fun and playfulness which force laughter, and never approach an unkindness. The men avoid being smart at each other's expense; and if they cannot claim to be clever or heroic, they are at least good fellows, any one of whom might serve as a model of manliness.

Kingsley's knowledge of household pets was of the kind exhibited by persons who have spent some period of their lives in loneliness, with only the companionship of dumb creatures. He was an acute observer of their peculiarities, with the noting of which he combined a whimsical exaggeration. The account of the menagerie which Sam Buckley found at Garoopna on the occasion of his memorable first meeting with Alice Brentwood is almost unique in Australian literature.

Buckley's ride to rescue his sweetheart from the bushrangers is one of the most moving and dramatic incidents in the book, and a good specimen of Kingsley's graphic narrative style. A band of the outlaws who were the terror of pioneer colonists fifty years ago have risen in the district, and, after committing outrages at one station, are reported to be riding on to another twenty miles distant. At the latter, Captain Brentwood's home, Alice happens to be alone. When the terrible news comes to her young lover, he is at Baroona, which by the shortest road is ten miles from Brentwood's. What start have the bushrangers had, and will they arrive before him?

Sam's noble horse, Widderin, a horse with a pedigree a hundred years old, stood in the stable. The buying of that horse had been Sam's only extravagance, for which he had often reproached himself, and now this day he would see whether he would get his money's-worth out of that horse or no.

I followed him up to the stable, and found him putting the bridle on Widderin's beautiful little head. Neither of us spoke; only when I handed him the saddle, and helped him with the girths, he said, 'God bless you!'

I ran out and got down the slip-rails for him. As he rode by, he said, 'Good-bye, Uncle Jeff; perhaps you won't see me again'; and I cried out, 'Remember your God and your mother, Sam, and don't do anything foolish.' Then he was gone....

Looking across the plains the way he should go, I saw another horseman toiling far away, and recognised Doctor Mulhaus. Good Doctor! he had seen the danger in a moment, and by his ready wit had got a start of everyone else by ten minutes. The Doctor, on his handsome, long-bodied Arabian mare, was making good work of it across the plains, when he heard the rush of a horse's feet behind him, and turning, he saw tall Widderin bestridden by Sam, springing over the turf, gaining on him stride after stride. In a few minutes they were alongside of one another.

'Good lad!' cried the Doctor. 'On, forwards; catch her, and away to the woods with her! Bloodhound Desborough will be on their trail in half an hour. Save her, and we will have noble vengeance!'

Sam only waved his hand in good-bye, and sped on across the plain like a solitary ship at sea. The good horse, with elastic and easy motion, fled on his course like a bird, lifting his feet clearly and rapidly through the grass. The brisk south wind filled his wide nostrils as he turned his graceful neck from side to side, till, finding that work was meant, and not play, he began to hold his head straight before him, and rush steadily forward....

One stumble now, and it were better to lie down on the plain and die. He was in the hands of God, and he felt it. He said one short prayer, but that towards the end was interrupted by the wild current of his thoughts. Was there any hope? They, the devils, would have been drinking at the Mayfords', and perhaps would go slow; or would they ride fast and wild? After thinking a short time, he feared the latter. They had tasted blood, and knew that the country would be roused on them shortly....

Here are a brace of good pistols, and they with care shall give account, if need be, of two men. After that, nothing. It were better--so much better--not to live if one were only ten minutes too late.... Now he was in the forest again, and now as he rode quickly down the steep sandy road among the bracken, he heard the hoarse rush of the river in his ears, and knew the end was well-nigh come.... Now the house was in sight, and now he cried aloud some wild inarticulate sound of thankfulness and joy. All was as peaceful as ever, and Alice, unconscious, stood white-robed in the verandah, feeding her birds.

As he rode up he shouted to her and beckoned. She came running through the house, and met him breathless at the doorway.

'The bushrangers, Alice, my love!' he said. 'We must fly this instant; they are close to us now.'

She had been prepared for this. She knew her duty well, for her father had often told her what to do. No tears! no hysterics! She took Sam's hand without a word, and, placing her fairy foot upon his boot, vaulted up into the saddle before him.... They crossed the river, and dismounting, they led the tired horse up the steep slope of turf that surrounded a little castellated tor of bluestone....

'I do not see them anywhere, Alice,' said Sam presently. 'I see no one coming across the plains. They must be either very near us in the hollow of the river-valley, or else a long way off.'

'There they are!' said Alice. 'Surely there is a large party of horsemen on the plain, but they are seven or eight miles off.'

'Ay, ten,' said Sam. 'I am not sure that they are horsemen.' Then he said suddenly in a whisper, 'Lie down, my love, in God's name! Here they are, close to us!'

There burst on his ear a confused round of talking and laughing, and out of one of the rocky gullies leading towards the river came the men they had been flying from, in number about fourteen. They had crossed the river, for some unknown reason, and to the fear-struck hiders it seemed as though they were making straight towards their lair.

He had got Widderin's head in his breast, blindfolding him with his coat, for should he neigh now they were undone indeed! As the bushrangers approached, the horse began to get uneasy and paw the ground, putting Sam in such an agony of terror that the sweat rolled down his face. In the midst of this he felt a hand on his arm, and Alice's voice, which he scarcely recognised, said in a fierce whisper: 'Give me one of your pistols, sir!'

'Leave that to me!' he replied, in the same tone.

'As you please,' she said; 'but I must not fall alive into their hands. Never look your mother in the face again if I do.'

He gave one more glance around, and saw that the enemy would come within a hundred yards of their hiding-place. Then he held the horse faster than ever and shut his eyes.

Was it a minute only, or an hour, until they heard the sound of the voices dying away in the roar of the river, and, opening their eyes once more, looked into one another's faces? Faces they thought that they had never seen before--so each told the other afterwards--so wild, so haggard, and so strange.

If, as Professor Masson says, 'it is by his characters that a novelist is chiefly judged,' Henry Kingsley's future reputation will be found to depend almost solely on what he accomplished in _Geoffry Hamlyn_, _The Hillyars and the Burtons_ and _Ravenshoe_. In the first two of these there is an abundance of original observation and little conscious study of character. The vivid Australian scenes of the one, and the Chelsea life of the other, are transcripts of the author's own memories. His knowledge of the squatters he got by working for them and living with them; what he knew of police and convicts and bushrangers he learned in doing police duty; the life of the Burtons, as told in 'Jim Burton's Story,' was that which the author saw during his boyhood round his father's old rectory on Chelsea Embankment.

'He seemed to me,' says Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie, 'to have lived his own books, battled them out and forced them into their living shapes, to have felt them and been them all.' Hardly all--one feels bound to say. The remark is entirely true of nearly everything in _Geoffry Hamlyn_ and of three-fourths of _The Hillyars and the Burtons_, but to _Ravenshoe_ it applies in a more limited degree, and to some of the later novels scarcely ever. Either through carelessness (of which one often suspects him) or deficiency of judgment, Kingsley more than once allowed the exigencies of his plots to destroy all consistency in his characters.

Thus, Squire Silcote, the clever old ex-lawyer, is made to retire from the world and brood for many years, and on quite insufficient grounds, in the belief that his first wife had been unfaithful, and had tried to poison him. Nothing short of a condition of semi-insanity could explain his conduct. In other respects the character is finely conceived. Emma Burton, too, is a perfectly natural and charming person until she is employed to revive the old problem of how far a sense of duty can triumph over the power of love. Her devotion to her deformed brother is wrong, because it is unnecessary. But even if this were not the case, it would be irrational in a woman so eminently sensible and unromantic as she is shown to be in the first half of the story. Almost at the beginning of her voluntary service she is represented as realising 'the hideous fate to which she has condemned herself in her fanaticism.' It is quite impossible to make the reader believe that, loving Erne Hillyar as she did, she could for years persist in rejecting him, and that her brother would permit so much sacrifice on his account.

The beautiful, crazy Gerty Neville is another instance of perversion. Her silliness is exaggerated in order that she shall weary and disgust the _blasé_ aristocrat who has married her. Some of her chatter is more inconceivable than the 'coo-ee-ing' which Mr. Hornung's 'Bride from the Bush' employed to attract the attention of a colonial acquaintance of hers in Rotten Row.

But the distortion which the character of Emma Burton undergoes, and the caricature of Gerty Neville, are, after all, easily pardonable faults in a story rich in noble thought and sympathy, bright with pretty, audacious nonsense, and containing such real personages as Jim Burton and his father and mother, Erne Hillyar, and the Honourable Jack Dawson.

Even in _Silcote of Silcotes_ there are intermittent glimpses of finely-conceived character which almost outbalance the eccentricities of the Dark Squire and his sister, the fantastic meddler in foreign intrigue. Kingsley's skill lay chiefly in his portrayal of men, especially of young men, such as the dashing Charles Ravenshoe and his philosophic friend Marston (a study of the George Warrington type); Lord Welter, Lieutenant Hillyar, and Colonel Tom Silcote, reckless profligates, but likeable fellows all; Frank Maberly, the athletic curate; and Sam Buckley, the type of an Australian country gentleman. With old men he was less successful. Lord Saltire, the placid good-natured cynic of _Ravenshoe_, is, however, a clever exception. 'All old women are beautiful,' says Kingsley in one of his stories, and he never portrayed one that was not. His best are Miss Thornton and Lady Ascot. The younger women, excepting Mary Hawker and Adelaide Summers, are rather slightly drawn. Even Alice Brentwood is a somewhat indistinct personage compared with the Australian girls of Mrs. Campbell Praed and Ada Cambridge.

The superior position usually accorded to _Ravenshoe_ among Kingsley's novels is merited more by the soundness of its plot than by the naturalness of its characters. It was the author's first essay in pure romance, and, with Henry Kingsley, to build character from imagination was always largely, sometimes extravagantly, to idealise. He loved to people old country houses with walking mysteries, to unravel tangled genealogies, and discover secrets of youthful folly, to apportion property to rightful heirs, and endow his characters with a superhuman generosity. When Charles Ravenshoe is recovering from the long illness which terminates the full series of his misfortunes, he sends for Welter, the man who might be considered his arch-enemy, who not so long before that had seduced Charles's sister and stole his _fiancée_. Ravenshoe is represented as forgetting all his newly-suffered wrongs, and thinking only of Welter as his favourite schoolfellow and youthful companion. Anticipating doubts as to the feasibility of this, the author proceeds to discuss the point with the reader, as he does in many similar instances throughout the story. He appears to have a constant anxiety about the impression he is making, and his comments and confidences certainly become distasteful. But this foible goes only a small way to discount the sterling merits of the novel.

ADA CAMBRIDGE.

Towards the close of 1890 the Australian booksellers--a cautious, conservative class in their attitude towards new fiction, especially that produced by the adventurous female writer of these latter days--began to display so marked an interest in the work of Ada Cambridge, that one not acquainted with the circumstances of the case might have credited them with a friendly--possibly a patriotic--desire to give due place to a newly-risen native genius. And when, in the following year, another story from the same pen appeared, the popularity of the author was firmly established.

The neat red volumes were on every stall; the Mudie of Melbourne gave them a place of honour in his show-window, and the leading critical review said that the second story possessed a charm which ought to induce even the person who ignored fiction on principle to make an exception in its favour. It was the kind of gratifying recognition that the public always believes itself eager to offer the deserving young writer. Yet Ada Cambridge's literary work had extended over no less a period than fifteen years. Of course, much of this delay in securing recognition might have been avoided. Probably in England she could have won a substantial reputation in a third of the time, and with half the labour expended by her in contributing to the Australian press. But, as the wife of a country clergyman, she had other matters besides literature to occupy her attention, and was content to write when there happened to be leisure for it, and to see her work in a few of the leading colonial newspapers.

About half a dozen novels were issued in this way, besides occasional articles and poems. The publication of the longer stories in the _Australasian_, a high-class weekly journal, ought in itself to have made a name for the author, and possibly would have done so, were they not in most cases so obviously a local product, and therefore not to be seriously considered. It was a repetition of the experience of Rolf Boldrewood. In the end, as usual, it was the English public that first accepted her novels for what they were worth.

Ada Cambridge is a native of Norfolk, the lonely fens and quaint villages of which are a picturesque background of some of her best stories. In 1870, shortly after her marriage, she went with her husband, the Rev. George Frederick Cross, a clergyman of the Church of England, to Wangaratta, in Victoria. After residing successively in several other country towns of this colony, they settled in 1893 at Williamstown, a waterside suburb of Melbourne.

A novel entitled _Up the Murray_, dealing with life in the colonies, was published by Ada Cambridge (the author continues to issue her work under her maiden name) in the Melbourne press in 1875. Others of the same character followed at irregular intervals. Two were issued in book-form by a London firm of publishers, but did not attain to much more than a library circulation.

When the author again came before the English public, it was with a novel in which the purely Australian interest was rigidly subordinated to dramatic quality and a richly sympathetic study of character. _A Marked Man_ is the story of a younger son of an old English county family who, while sharing the pride and indomitable spirit of his ancestry, develops a hatred for conventional prejudices and religious cant, and, after making a final assertion of independence by marrying a farmer's daughter, emigrates to New South Wales to establish a name and fortune on his own account.

The first half of the action takes place in England, the remainder in the colonies. The natural beauties surrounding the home of the Delavels at Sydney are not less delicately and poetically described than the village life they have left behind in the mother country--the patriarchal rule of an old-fashioned, rather pompous house, over a people retaining the hereditary respect of vassals for their feudal lord; but the view given of Australian society is, in keeping with the relation to it of Richard Delavel and his household, of the slightest kind.

Delavel and the only daughter whom he has trained to be his second self, whose comradeship makes him almost forget the long-drawn thraldom of his early _mésalliance_, live in a world so much and so necessarily their own, that one is grateful for the good taste which excluded from it the bustle and commoner interests of colonial life. The novel met with general, and in several instances cordial, favour in England, and since then the author has yearly increased her reputation.