They did not hear from Johann Ritter in Hahndorf until July, by then Elizabeth was four months pregnant. The money raised by selling her jewellery and the locket was diminishing. Stefan had found a part-time job with a clothing factory in Redfern, but it was a two-mile walk each way. He had no choice but to walk; the pay of four shillings per day was little enough without the expense of fares. It helped safeguard their dwindling resources, while waiting to hear from his family. There were times, as weeks went by, when she thought it might have been wiser to set out for Hahndorf and arrive unexpectedly, rather than wait for an invitation which took so long to come. But Stefan insisted this way was more tactful. He had written to his relatives with a full explanation. There would be a reply. His uncle was no doubt busy with the grapes, and was not a man who put pen to paper swiftly.
Despite this delay, and the growing anxiety over money, she was content. The first awful night was now a dim memory, and had she not felt so guilty about her parents, Elizabeth would have proclaimed herself happy. There were times, indeed, when she was deliriously so. After the first uncertainty, their lovemaking had taken her by surprise; the pleasure she experienced startled her. Her enjoyment of their bodies, her longing each night, the wild climaxes that came in waves were so impassioned they almost frightened her. She had no knowledge before this of her intense sexuality. At times she wondered uneasily, never having been able to discuss it with anyone, least of all her mother, whether it was a sin to so enjoy an act never spoken of in polite society.
When they could afford it they took a ferry across to the north side of the harbour. At Milson’s Point, the cable tram took travellers into the countryside of St Leonards, and although this was beyond their limited means, they once took the tram to Crows Nest, formerly a rural area, and now rapidly burgeoning into streets of workmen’s cottages. They picnicked on a grassy slope that overlooked the harbour then, quietly happy, walked hand in hand down the hill to the ferry.
They still lived in the room over the shoemaker’s shop and sometimes, on days when Stefan’s shift finished early, they walked to Hyde Park. Once, when they were alone there, he gathered her a posy of flowers, and they walked homeward with their arms around each other. In less than a city block, the tenderness they felt for each other became a quickening desire, and the moment they reached home they went to bed, barely able to contain themselves. That night their hunger for each other was insatiable, until they fell into an exhausted sleep.
But there were other days — days when the small room oppressed her, times when the walls seemed as if they were closing in to smother her. There was hardly, in her childhood home, one room as tiny as this one in which their lives were spent. There were days when she missed that house and her parents dreadfully, when she wanted to write to them again, or even catch a tram, alight where Oxford Street joined the corner of Centennial Park, and walk in there and greet them as if nothing had happened.
There was the first day when she was sick, when she had run shudderingly to the backyard privy, and heaved what little breakfast she had eaten into the rancid pit. And another day later, when the landlady told her what this meant.
‘But it can’t be,’ Elizabeth said, and the stout woman, who had become a friend, laughed.
‘It is, lovey. And no wonder, the way you two children enjoy yourselves at night.’
Stefan was filled with pride and joy. He kissed her, held her lovingly, and spoke of what was in both their thoughts. ‘Do you want to tell them?’ he asked.
‘I should. They have a right to know.’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you come with me?’
He shook his head. They both knew her father would never accept him, and a confrontation with him would be humiliating for Stefan, and disagreeable for them both.
‘He hates me. But you should write. Or visit, if you wish.’ His English, though fluent now, still had an accent, and in moments of stress could be markedly formal. She sensed a tension in him, and knew he did not want her to visit her parents, as if he still feared their influence.
She decided to think about it, and had still not made up her mind, when the long-awaited letter arrived.
Stefan had not expected forgiveness, but the cold hostility of the reply stunned him. You are, his uncle wrote in local Oeutsch, in pencil and in indignation, undankbarer. The smudged page, the gross misspellings accused and castigated him. If you still wish to come, you must pay the fare, the letter concluded, though your aunt is most unhappy that you have married a foreigner.
A foreigner, Stefan thought. What kind of place do they live in when an Australian girl like Elizabeth is a foreigner? And how can I tell her, after we have waited all this time and built our hopes so high, that after reading this letter I am not certain if we should go there.
‘What does it say?’ Elizabeth asked. She had been watching him while he read the letter, but his face remained impassive. Which made her wonder.
‘Here,’ he said, and offered it to her. She made a face at him. ‘Fool,’ she said fondly, ‘you know I can’t read German.’
‘This we must change.’ He smiled at her. ‘It is not right that Mrs Stefan Muller, soon to be the mother of Heinrich Muller, cannot read German.’ He was playing for time, trying to decide what to tell her, and for once deceived her.
‘Perhaps it won’t be Heinrich,’ she gave him back the crudely printed letter. It did not look promising to her, but then the man was a farmer, not a scholar. ‘Perhaps it will be Hilde. And anyway, in this country he shouldn’t be called Heinrich, he should be Henry. So there.’
She waited for him to tell her what the letter contained.
He knew they must go. It was their only chance. Each week, no matter how many hours he worked, they were falling slowly behind — each week a few shillings, slowly whittling away the pitifully small nest egg her locket and jewellery had brought them. In another six months or less it would all be gone. By then they would have a child. He would have no alternative but to go abjectly to William Patterson and ask for help. Or else subject Elizabeth to even deeper squalor and deprivation.
She watched his face. ‘Is he angry?’ she asked. ‘A little. He says I have been a dummkopf.’
‘Stefan, if he doesn’t want us there, we have an alternative.’ He knew it; he didn’t need to ask.
‘Soon I have to tell my parents about the baby. My father would help us. He’d almost insist on it.’
‘I know,’ Stefan said.
‘If he offered, would you accept his help?’
‘You know what it would do, don’t you?’
‘What would it do?’
‘Confirm his opinion, that I am a dirty fortune-hunting bloody foreigner.’
Elizabeth felt shock. She had not known her father had used those words, but could almost hear him saying it.
Stefan saw her distress and took her hand. He was aware that the rift with her father had caused her pain, and the last thing he wished to do was hurt her further. He loved this girl, loved her with his entire being, and wanted to be able to give her a proper place in the world. But that could not come from the charity of her father, surrounded, as it would be, by conditions. William Patterson’s help would be for one purpose only; to drive Stefan away and regain his daughter. He doubted if any kind of life was really possible for them here in this city, where every day must remind her of the ease and comfort of her former life.
No, it had to be far-off Hahndorf; that was the only place that offered them a chance. Uncle Johann’s surly hostility or not, there they would begin their real life. There was nowhere else.
He picked up the letter.
‘It says,’ he was determined not to lie more than necessary, ‘I am an ungrateful fool, and caused much concern. But it seems I have come to my senses, and married a nice girl. They will make us welcome.’
She smiled with relief, and he hugged her gently, grateful that she could not see the troubled uncertainty in his eyes.
Elizabeth thought
about it long and hard, and finally decided not to see her parents. Nor did she write to them, giving news of the expected birth, before leaving Sydney. She was now committed to this journey halfway across the continent; she had sensed something of Stefan’s feelings, his need to begin their real life together far away from the city and the scenes of her childhood. She was aware that if she saw her father and told him the news, he would do all he could to stop her leaving the east, and would certainly offer the kind of financial aid they would find difficult to refuse. For Stefan’s sake, for their only chance of a future together, that situation must not be allowed to arise.
In early August, Elizabeth Muller, by then nearly five months pregnant, travelled with her husband by third-class carriage to Albury. They sat up all night, and huddled together for warmth, as the train laboured its way through the wheat belt on the far side of the Dividing Range, and reached the border town on the Murray River the following day. There, passengers crossed the platform to climb aboard another train, this one on Victoria’s wider gauge rail system. They passed through the customs posts of both colonies. Neither Elizabeth nor Stefan had anything to declare.
When they reached Melbourne there was a mishap that had a disturbing affect on their perilously low savings. They missed, by less than an hour, their westbound train to Ballarat and the South Australian border. It meant an overnight stop in Melbourne. The miscalculation almost dealt a mortal blow to their slender budget and planned schedule. They settled on the cheapest lodgings they could find, in Little Lonsdale Street, and were kept awake most of the night by drunks and fights and a furious row across the pavement between the girls of rival brothels.
In the morning they paid out most of their remaining money on third-class tickets, and risked fourpence in the railway refreshment room to buy cups of tea and two buns. The buns were hard and stale, but they wolfed them ravenously and barely noticed.
They were excited and confident, without fear of the future, no matter what it might hold.
When they crossed over into South Australia, through another customs post and onto a new rail system, they did not have enough money to go much further. The clerk in the ticket office of the border town of Pinnaroo looked at the few shillings they were able to offer him, and shook his head.
‘Not enough for two tickets,’ he said. ‘Enough for one.’
‘Then my wife will go,’ Stefan said. ‘I’ll walk.’
‘No,’ Elizabeth said. ‘We’ll go as far as that money will take us, then we’ll both walk.’
Out of Yumali, on a long stretch of line halfway to Coomandock, the small train stopped to unload mail at a cattle station siding. The guard looked regretfully at Elizabeth and Stefan.
‘I’ve given you an extra fifty miles,’ he said. ‘If the Inspector gets on at the next town, I’ll cop it.’
They thanked him, and waved as the train left them on the tiny and empty siding. They were still nearly sixty miles from the Adelaide Hills and their destination. They had no money left, and had not eaten all that day. But their hearts were high with expectation, and they never, even for a moment, contemplated failure.
The earliest Adelaide Hills settlers lived in the Mount Lofty forests, but in 1830 there was a new wave of immigration. Silesian Germans, fleeing from the religious intolerance of King Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, took ship to the infant colony and founded a community on the eastern slopes of the Hills. They were Lutherans, peasant farmers, and the ship on which they travelled was commanded by a Danish seaman, Captain Dirk Hahn.
It was Hahn who realised, during the long voyage, that these people had no future unless they could find land to farm. It was he who helped them discover and lease an area several days’ travel from the port, and he even walked with them while they carried their meagre possessions to their new hillside home. In grateful tribute of this rare kindness to them, they named the place Hahndorf.
The first years were bitter. Crops were difficult to raise. They had no money to buy farm implements, and dug the soil with jagged scraps of wood. Their homes were shacks. The winters were cold, and many died. But they were zealots, these pilgrims; their faith helped them survive. For six days each week they worked themselves to exhaustion; on the seventh they held church services in an open field, where their Pastor thanked the Almighty for giving them a new home where they could worship Him and not the King of Prussia.
As the years passed many of the settlers began to flourish.
They built new homes, churches and Lutheran schools to educate the children, instil religion, and prevent them from forgetting the old ways.
By the time Johann Ritter left his ship to begin a new life here, Hahndorf had become an established township with wide streets of handsome stone houses. Ritter took lodgings and attended church with the dominant purpose of looking for a wife, finding among the congregation a girl from Westphalia named Anna, from whose family he borrowed sufficient money to purchase four acres of hillside land.
They planted vines and had four children, who attended the local village school where the lessons were in German. None was yet old enough to work when a letter came from his sister Cordula in Augsburg. She told him of their orphaned nephew Stefan, and his wish to find employment in the new World. She spoke in such glowing terms of Stefan, so invaluable to her husband in his shop, that Johann, who could never be called an impetuous man, spent the next year wondering why his sister wanted to be rid of this paragon. Finally, it occurred to him his sister’s eldest son was now of an age to replace Stefan, and after a further six months of deliberation, he wrote offering a third-class fare in return for work on the farm.
When Stefan failed to arrive, Johann and Anna merely assumed the boat had been delayed. Time was of little relevance to them. The weeks were divided by the sabbath, the seasons by the planting and harvesting of the grapes, the years by their own religious festivals. They were barely aware that three years had passed since their nephew had first expressed a youthful wish to join them.
The first letter they received after Stefan left the ship angered Johann greatly. He had never been a generous man, and the original outlay of the passage money had caused him considerable misgiving. To be told by this ungrateful upstart that he had fallen in love, and intended to remain in the city of Sydney, a den of iniquity so far away, infuriated him. Even the pledge to repay the cost of the voyage did not placate Johann; he had little trust in the empty promises of profligate relatives.
The second letter with news of his marriage divided the household deeply. Johann himself was slightly consoled, seeing an opportunity to recoup his investment. Anna was resentful. It was geschmacklos, boorish and tactless of him to marry an Ausldnderin, a foreigner, when there were many eligible German girls in their district. At least four women from church, all with daughters of marriageable age, had already made discreet enquiries about Stefan’s arrival.
The discord in the family resulted in the dispatch of the crude reproach, which Stefan had so carefully paraphrased to make it palatable for Elizabeth. The letter he had destroyed, but the tone of it, the anger, he remembered only too clearly, the more so the closer they came to Hahndorf, and the end of their arduous odyssey across half the continent.
From the rail siding they walked steadily across the open flat land near Coomandock. They passed a wheat field, and later an orchard, the apples reminding them of their hunger. In mid-afternoon, when Elizabeth was desperately weary, fortune smiled on them. A farmer in a dray stopped alongside.
‘Going to Long Flat, near Murray Bridge,’ he offered, and they gratefully climbed aboard. In a few minutes, despite the rutted road and the jolting of the dray, Elizabeth was asleep against a bale of hay. Stefan watched her with great affection.
Are we mad? he wondered. So few clothes, not a penny to our names, on the way to a place we have never seen, dependent upon people we do not know. But before he could answer his own question, he, too, had fallen asleep.
Before dark they reached the farmer’s small-h
olding, where he insisted they spend the night. He brought them cups of hot, sweet tea, and bread and cheese. The next morning, following his directions, they walked the remaining twenty miles to Hahndorf. They saw the spire of the church a long way off, then soon afterwards there were buildings and Stefan began to notice Bavarian architecture, and to see familiar German names on the road signs and outside the shops. Despite the chill of his uncle’s letter, this sense of familiarity cheered him. His spirits began to rise. A passing woman greeted them.
‘Gritss Gatt,’ she nodded. ‘Gritss Gatt,’ Stefan answered.
All at once it was difficult to believe he was twelve thousand miles away from Bavaria. He took Elizabeth’s hand. Despite his own excitement, he knew she was close to exhaustion. He led her to rest in the shade of the German Arms Hotel verandah. The proprietor emerged, exclaimed at her swollen stomach and the fatigue that showed on her face, and in German invited her to come inside. Stefan nodded his thanks, and translated for her. Elizabeth smiled her gratitude. It was a good omen, an act of kindness from their first encounter here.
‘Danke,’ she said, and asked Stefan, ‘is that correct?’
‘That’s correct,’ he said tenderly, and leaving her resting in the hotel, he went to ask how to find his relatives.
SEVEN
The baby kicked inside her, and she felt a moment of alarm. Inside the shed, Heinrich began to cry. She knew it was too hot for him in there; also the old woman, Grossmutter, would soon complain. Sure enough, as she turned the wheel of the churn to separate the milk, there rose a querulous voice from the direction of the rocking chair on the verandah.
Grossmutter was Aunt Anna’s mother, a formidable old lady forever attired in black, as if in mourning for her life and its approaching end, here in this foreign place. Grossmutter did not like Hahndorf. She had obeyed her husband when he chose to emigrate from Westphalia, but had remained mutely disapproving all the years of her long exile. She had seen her daughter marry Johann Ritter, who in her opinion was an unimaginative, tight-fisted hoffnungslos, and had watched him try to sweat a living out of this infertile land. When her husband died, she had come to live with them; no other choice was open to her.
A Bitter Harvest Page 7