Part 1
Petunia Again
SKETCHES
BY S. ELIZABETH JACKSON
A book is very like a kite, being made of paper and sent out at a venture.
_G. K. Chesterton._
ADELAIDE G. HASSELL & SON 1920
TO
MY GRANDFATHER
J.T.C.
_The little girl that was me_: “I’ve nothing to read in the train.”
_My grandfather_: “And you won’t need anything. There will be things to see and people to listen to.”
PREFACE.
“At Petunia” was received so kindly that I venture to offer these final sketches. The little township on the plains is now for me only a happy memory. Unlike their predecessors, most of the present sketches and essays have appeared before, either in _Orion_, _The Adelaide University Magazine_, _The Red Cross Record_, or _The Woman’s Record_, which I have to thank for allowing me to re-publish.
S.E.J.
Woodside, 10th November, 1920.
CONTENTS
Petunia Again
Page
Welcome 1
The Backblocks 3
The Aeroplane 5
From the Chinese 8
Adopting Emily 10
Twocott 13
A Country Writer 14
The Hypnotist 23
Tin Lizzie 24
The Show 26
The Haircut 28
Scipio 29
Bill Boundy 31
An Angry Man 33
Alcibiades 36
News 37
Amusing Daisy 39
Obiit 41
The Drought 41
The Works of Simple Simon, LL.D., D.Litt., Ph.D., M.B., B.S.
An Emendation 44
A Protest 46
A “Lancet” Article 48
An Application of Psychology to Medicine 50
Our National Bulletin 52
Nigger 60
Miscellaneous
The Queen City of the South 62
A Literature in the Making 68
Petunia Again
Welcome
Such a week as we have had in the country! You talk about the stopping of the cars giving people a welcome rest in the evenings. Well, we have no cars to stop, and only three trains a week, and still we can manage eleven social engagements in six days! Three of them were welcomes to soldiers. Seventy-eight went away from this district, and every time one returns (and that is very often now, thank God!) all the houses along the route from the railway station are decorated with flags. I expect that sometimes he wonders why people who take the trouble to decorate in his honour do not come out to wave. When he gets to the Institute he knows, because we are all there waiting to cheer and make speeches. Nothing about our boys has been finer than the courtesy with which they take our cheers and let us say “Thank you.” It relieves us, but oh, how it embarrasses them! They redden, but they smile, and are far from looking foolish when they “get up to reply.” The speeches aren’t always very easy to reply to, either, because what we call courage and duty-doing they think just a matter of course. Perhaps nothing more to the point has ever been said to them than this spontaneous outburst in one speech:—“By Jo, we are glad to see you.” It was worth all the rest about gallantry, and endurance, and honour, and so on. We thought all that, too, but just then what was delighting us was to see them. We had missed them, and now they were back and we would meet them in our daily lives again. And next morning their mothers would wake up happy because George and Clem were safe back, actually in the house in their own room at that moment!
Well, besides these official (and yet quite informal) welcomes there was also a large private party where another soldier, welcomed some time before, was to dance and talk with his friends, and there was also a Butterfly Fair, because now the war is over we simply must have a piano for the Sunday School Kindergarten. And there was the Red Cross meeting, and a Home Mission meeting, and the literary society, and choir practice, and a Band of Hope concert, and, of course, football on Saturday, for most of our players are coming back again now, though there are some we shall never see.
The Backblocks
Too many town people are prepared to talk as though “the outbacks” were anywhere beyond a 20-mile radius of the G.P.O. When you are really in the backblocks you turn the washing machine for your hostess, make complicated arrangements for keeping the ants out of the sugar, help “separate,” cut out some jumpers for the children on the newest town pattern, and take your afternoon ride on the poison-cart attending to bunny. Once or twice a week you go into the township for the mail. You bath frugally because all the water is caught off the roof or in the dam, and you empty the tub on to what garden there is, for none can be wasted.
I pity all healthy women who never have a chance to go sometimes where life, though not easy, is simple and self-contained and wholesome, where the work cannot be delegated to the baker or the small goods man or the dressmaker just because the weather is hot or you don’t feel up to the mark. Without this you cannot feel all the joy of being thoroughly essential to your family—nor its occasional terror. Only very fine women can live such a life properly, though. You have to find your happiness and your amusement in the life itself, not in some artificial amusement patched on for the moment. You have to find it in permanent and ultimate things, in love and work and effort and hope and helpfulness, not in “The Pictures” or a variety show.
I don’t pretend not to enjoy a variety show myself when I’m in town, and I don’t pretend that Petunia is in the backblocks, but it is in the country, and I am quite sure that country life is as enjoyable as a town one, though not every one feels it. Anyone can take a pill, but not all can make one, nor even pick out the ingredients from a lot of herbs and drugs presented to them.
I suppose that is the trouble with Joyce Wickhams. She has gone to work in town so that she can go to the Pav. and Henley Beach on band nights as often as she likes. I hope she will miss feeding the swill to the grunting, shoving, greedy pigs, miss the leisurely cows, miss the glow of health that you feel—without thinking about it—as you canter out for them. And Saturday’s tennis is never quite so nice in town as it is in the country, where you know everyone on the courts very well, are going to sing with most of them at the concert in March, and went with them to the working bee at the school last week. We shall miss Joyce. She was the best housemaid we’ve ever had in our dialogues, and the most popular waitress at tea meetings. Of course she will laugh a great deal at Charlie Chaplin, and the town entertainments will be very clever, but the fun that is made for you doesn’t make so much of your mind and heart laugh as the fun that you help make yourself.
The Aeroplane
The excitement continues. We’ve had rain and we’ve seen the aeroplane! In fact they came together. On Sunday it was given out in the churches that between 10 and 11 on Monday, Capt. Butler would fly over Petunia and drop Peace Loan literature. Farmers immediately decided that one morning off couldn’t make much difference to a bad season, and mothers and daughters exchanged glances in which the washing was postponed. When the school mistress had it announced in the Twocott chapel that there would be no lessons next morning, the children’s flushed faces were as good as cheers. Even the Hobbledehoy, who had seen the great sight in town, of course, was not so blasé as he pretended.
On Monday motors and traps and waggons poured into Petunia through driving wind and rain. Pedestrians with umbrellas struggled against the blast. I don’t quite know what we expected. Perhaps we thought the aeroplane would only be visible from the main street, or that it would land there, or that the literature would, and in any case, we all wanted to take our excitement in company. We lined up for shelter in the lee of shops and houses. Opinions differed. Some thought the Institute the best site, some the post-office, and some plumped for the vicinity of the Recreation Ground, as affording a clear view and a suitable place for an airman to descend (or drop out) after a spiral or a nose-dive.
The Postmaster suggested that the weather might be too ... but we shut him up for a croaker, and poddled about exchanging anticipations and chaffing young Jones, who was “look-out” to report the arrival to the expectant school. A stockman drifted in with a herd of yearlings, and we watched him zig-zag them resignedly past the groups of traps and people. Wet ruts gleamed in some fitful sunshine along the straight road stretching between green paddocks into the moist distance. There came an unexpected sound overhead, and the school children burst along the street with decorous hilarity. Something we had seen in pictures emerged from the grey and glided overhead, and into the distant grey again, “like a spoggy in the sky,” as young Allen poetically observed.
It was in sight for quite four minutes.
Half an hour later we were fairly certain that there were to be no nose-dives, no spirals, not even any literature. We snubbed the Postmaster, and closed in on the Institute, where the chairman of the district tried to focus our attention on the Peace Loan, and make us feel we had not come out for nothing. Then laughing people turned their collars up round their ears, climbed into buggies, and shook the reins. “Gid-dup.”
From the Chinese
A few people despise poetry; many more speak respectfully of it only because they think they ought to, not because they, personally, understand it or even appreciate it. Of course, it is quite easy to enjoy a poem without understanding its technique, its rhyme, rhythm, and so on, or without being able to say in what, apart from the form, it differs from prose. “Can’t you _feel_ it?” is often the sufficient answer, in the words of a certain professor of classics.
The following fragment from the Chinese makes us feel that it is poetry, though the translator cannot convey to us the poetic form of the original.
PO CHU-I STARTS ON A JOURNEY EARLY IN THE MORNING.
Washed by the rain, dust and grime are laid; Skirting the river, the road’s course is flat. The moon has risen on the last remnants of night; The traveller’s speed profits by the early cold. In the great silence I whisper a faint song; In the black darkness are bred sombre thoughts. On the lotus-banks hovers a dewy breeze; Through the rice furrows trickles a singing stream. At the noise of our bells a sleeping dog stirs; At the sight of our torches a roosting bird wakes. Dawn glimmers through the shapes of misty trees.... For ten miles, till day at last breaks.
“More than a thousand years have elapsed since that journey,” says the _Times_ reviewer, “and nobody knows the words of that ‘faint song,’ or the nature of those ‘sombre thoughts,’ but we are just as intimately acquainted with Po Chu-I as if he had enlarged by the page on his emotional complexities.... Chinese poetry aims to induce a mood rather than to state a thought.... Po Chu-I’s sorrows and joys and placid reveries hover in the mind after the book is closed, and that—and not the number of startling remarks made—is the test of a poem’s value.”
To-day or a thousand years ago, China or Australia, it is all the same. You and I have made journeys like that, and can share the poet’s mood. We have arisen early and crept about by lantern-light, we have let ourselves out on to a road that lies white under a cold moon, and have thrilled and hasted in the chill air. The first solemn joy gave place to gloom as the heralding darkness enveloped the world. And then we felt the dawn-breeze among the gum trees, and heard the creek rustle through the water-cress. A dog barked, a bird peeped, and the first pink cloud floated in the brightening sky. And then the world woke up, the magpies and the farmyards and the pumping engine, and we were glad that we were afoot and off, and a little proud about it.
And a thousand years ago an old, old Chinaman sang our mood for us, and lo! it was poetry. And because we have felt it all for ourselves, though we did not know how to tell about it, what he says plays on our minds like music, and we live the mood again.
Adopting Emily
“Seen that fine tabby in the woodhouse?” enquired Joshua.
“She’s got a beautiful white chest,” agreed Hob, “and that loose skin and soft fur like old M’Glusky.”
“And a pink nose,” said Daisy.
“And her eyes are amber. Do let’s adopt her,” said I.
“Yes, let’s,” chorused the others—all except Marjorie, who prefers mousetraps, and says that where one or two cats are gathered together, or something, there is always an awful noise. However, we determined to have that tabby.
Have you ever tried to adopt a duchess? A duchess in reduced circumstances? Then you don’t know what we have been through with Emily. (We call her Emily after Miss Fox-Seton, the “large, placid creature, kind rather than intelligent,” who became Marchioness in one of Mrs. Hodgson Burnett’s books.) Emily is a cat of character. She didn’t want to be adopted. She didn’t mind renting our woodheap, but preferred not to have to meet the family. She would keep herself to herself, thank you. She used to sit, serene and dignified, blinking in a sunbeam among the roots, lifting her white bosom and gently kneading the ground. If you offered her food she seemed to put up her lorgnettes at you, and it wasn’t any good leaving the saucer and going round the corner. When you came back Emily was gone, and the food wasn’t.
She certainly impressed us. We built up all sorts of legends around her. Her disdain for food and her calm refusal either to accept our advances, to withdraw from her place, or to be seen hurrying at any time, seemed so very aristocratic. And then how she kept up appearances! Marjorie scarcely took the same view as the rest of us, especially after Emily so haughtily snubbed the milk she had offered herself. She said she didn’t believe she was a duchess at all; more of a peroxide barmaid about Emily, if you asked her, a minx with a bust who put on airs. And a few nights later she said she wouldn’t have cats encouraged about the place. She said she believed Emily was the cause of that jazz party on the lawn in the moonlight.
Emily jazz! Never!
“Adopting Emily” became the favourite diversion of our leisure. In the end it was very mortifying, very mortifying indeed. We were all sitting on our heels round the woodheap coaxing Emily, and Emily as usual was barely tolerating our presence, too proud to withdraw, when Mr. Wickhams came across the paddocks to borrow another axe.
“Well, I’m blowed!” said he; “so this is where our old cat goes. She’s only been home for meals since the wife turned her out of the hat-box.”
Yes, what we took for dignity was sulks, and her aristocratic superiority to food was due, to put it bluntly, to a full stomach. Mr. Wickhams handsomely forgave us for trying to abduct his best mouser as he stretched a long arm into the wood and hauled her off by the scruff of the neck. Such an indignity for Emily.
Twocott
Driving out to Buxton on Wednesday afternoon, I picked up little Jennie Elliott walking home from Twocott.
“Do you go to school already?” I exclaimed.
“Oh, I’ve been going a long time—ever since Christmas. We got a nice teacher. She is always good to us—unless she can’t help it; and we are always good to her, unless _we_ can’t help it.” Dear understanding little mite. “All of us are in the second grade nearly.” “All of us” have now learnt to sing, and Jennie is always out early—unless she is kept in.
She held on tightly to the side of the dog-cart and looked about the country while she prattled out the gossip of the school from the point of view of a six-year-old, and I felt a swelling of gratitude to the wonderful teacher who keeps eight grades busy and happy and proud of themselves, and convinced that she is proud of them, too! “All of us” have a very nice time at Twocott, and are learning to be considerate and tolerant and self-controlled, as well as the more formal lessons, and all taught by a mere woman who understands the art of discipline without a stick.
A Country Writer
A writer in _The Times Literary Supplement_ complains of the dearth of good novels of country life. The modern author, he asserts, claps the story on to any county, irrespective of the spirit of the place. He takes a tourist’s trip to Cornwall or Yorkshire, and makes a book out of it, though his dialogue was never heard on land or sea, flowers bloom together whose seasons never met, and his pitiful town thinness of mind is visible alike in what he sees and in what he fails to see.
Against these degenerate moderns the letter sets Richard Doddridge Blackmore, and regrets that all his novels but one are neglected by an undiscriminating or too hasty generation.
Now it is the virtue of country libraries that, though only the feeblest of modern novels may find a way there, the best of the old linger on their shelves long after they have been ejected from more pretentious places. And so, while this letter was still fresh in my mind, in our Institute at Petunia, rubbing sides with volumes by Mrs. Gaskell and Miss Braddon, I came across “Cripps the Carrier,” whose title page proclaimed it to be “by the author of Lorna Doone.” I took it home, despite my doubt, as I eyed its yellow pages and heavy print, that I should pay with yawns for my virtuosity.
And then on the very first page I met Dobbin, “the best harse as ever looked through a bridle.”
“Every ‘talented’ man must think, whenever he walks beside a horse, of the superior talents of the horse ... the power of blowing (which no man hath in a comely and decorous form); and last, not least, the final blessing of terminating decorously in a tail.... Scarcely any man stops to think of the many cares that weigh upon the back of an honest horse. Dobbin knew all this, but was too much of a horse to dwell on it. He kept his tongue well under his bit, his eyes in sagacious blinkers, and sturdily up the hill he stepped, while Cripps, his master, trudged beside him.”
At the second page I was smiling outright, and knew that not a word of this book would I knowingly skip.
Such is the quality of the writing that not only do we learn to know Zacchary Cripps and his brother Tickus (christened after the third book of the “Pentachook,” as they called his sixth brother), his horse Dobbin, and Mary Hookham, “as he was a tarnin’ over in his mind,” together with Squire Oglander, Lawyer—or “Liar”—Sharp, as Zac addressed him, “wishing to put all things legal,” Miranda his wife, and Kit his son, as well as or better than we know our neighbours, but we are all the time falling in love with that sly rogue, that mellow scholar, that lover of a horse and a pretty girl, Richard Doddridge Blackmore. Here is a man who knows and loves and smiles over the rustic mind and life, as he knows and loves the trees, the hedges, the ruts, the sunlight, and the frosts, and all the ways of Nature. He is leisurely, and you must be leisurely with him. You must stop to see what he sees, and accompany all his friends on their goings out and comings in, smiling and enjoying with him. He cares more for the telling than for the story; he knows, like Louis Stevenson, that “to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.”
Oxford and Oxfordshire are the scenes of the story, and we hear more of town than gown, and more of Beckley than either. If the precise critic ask whether it be a novel of character or of place or of plot, the precise critic is a fool. There is the country, with its lanes and hedges and changing seasons, and there are the people who carried and delved and gossiped and wondered, sympathized with the trials of their “betters,” and did their duty by parish church and parish “public,” “same as Christians ought to.” And if you put it squarely to Squire (or Parson?) Blackmore: “Come, now, you don’t expect me to believe that Lawyer Sharp actually ... eh?” he will vouchsafe such a Philistine not so much as a wink in reply, though you may catch a quizzical twinkle at a generation too bald-minded to enjoy a hop field because the blossom must be held up on poles.
Blackmore, like Shakespeare, knows every turn of the bucolic’s slow, sturdy, tortuous mind; he loved his pauses, the dawning of perception, his easy missing of the point, his superstitions, and his common sense. Read this (it comes in that passage where the escaping Grace Oglander appeals to the Carrier to shelter her from pursuit in his van):
“But missy, poor missy,” Cripps stammered out, drawing on his heart for every word, “you was buried on the seventh day of January, in the year of our Lord 1838; three pickaxes was broken over digging your grave by reason of the frosty weather, and all of us come to your funeral! Do ’ee go back, miss, that’s a dear! The churchyard to Beckley is a comfortable place, and this here wood no place for a Christian.”
And he can paint the brisk homely maids as well as the gaping tongue-tied men.
“Now, sir, if you please. You must—you must,” cried Mary Hookham, his best maid, trotting in with her thumbs turned back from a right hot dish, and her lips up as if she were longing to kiss him, to let out her feelings.... “Sir, if you please, you must ate a bit.... ‘Take on,’ as my mother has often said, ‘take on as you must, if your heart is right, when the hand of the Lord is upon you; but never take off with your victuals.’... All of us has our own troubles,” said Mary, “but these here pickles is wonderful.”
In the affectionate malice of the misadventures into which is plunged Hardenow, that earnest, scholarly Tractarian, there is all the fun of a man who is teasing a beloved and misguided friend. The muscles he is so proud of shall be laughed at, into brambles he shall plunge, and lose his hat and tear his neckcloth into ribbons; in a pig-net shall he be caught, and his athletic legs having struck terror into the mind of Rabbit John, bound with thongs shall he be, and left in an empty pig-stye, the very parlour of pig-styes (“on the floor, where he had the best of it, for odour ever rises”), there to continue his fast for many hours. Pity him not overmuch; “his accustomed stomach but thinks it Friday come again!”
Aye, Blackmore knew man, and maid, and beast—even pig. Lying in this plight, Hardenow sees: