The Getting of Wisdom

by Henry Handel Richardson

  Having drawn this sketch of her future, word by word from the weeping Laura, Evelyn fell into a fit of laughter which she could not stifle. ‘Well, Poppet,’ she said, when she could speak, ‘if that’s your idea of happiness for me, we’ll postpone it just as long as ever we can. I’m all there. For I mean to have a good time first—a jolly good time—before I tie myself up forever, world without end, amen.’

  ‘That’s just what I hate so—your good time, as you call it,’ retorted Laura, smarting under the laughter.

  ‘Everyone does, child. You’ll be after it yourself when you’re a little older.’

  ‘Me?—never!’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed you will.’

  ‘I won’t. I hate men and I always shall. And oh, I thought’— with an upward, sobbing breath—‘I thought you liked me best.’

  ‘Of course I like you, you silly child! But that’s altogether different. And I don’t like you any less because I enjoy having some fun with them, too.’

  ‘I don’t want your old leavings!’ said Laura savagely. It hurt, almost as much as having a tooth pulled out, did this knowledge that your friend’s affection was wholly yours only as long as no man was in question. And out of the sting, Laura added: ‘Wait till I’m grown up, and I’ll show them what I think of them— the pigs!’

  This time Evelyn had to hold her hand in front of her mouth. ‘No, no, I don’t mean to laugh at you. Come, be good now,’ she petted. ‘And you really must go to bed, Laura. It’s past twelve o’clock, and that infernal machine’ll be going off before you’ve had any sleep at all.’

  The ‘machine’ was Laura’s alarum, which ran down every night just now, at two o’clock. For, if one thing was sure, it was that affairs with Laura were in a sorry muddle. In this, the last and most momentous year of her school life, at the close of which, like a steep wall to be scaled, rose the university examination, she was behindhand with her work, occupied a mediocre place in her class. So steadfastly was her attention pitched on Evelyn that she could link it to nothing else: in the middle of an important task, her thoughts would stray to contemplate her friend, or wonder what she was doing; while, if Evelyn were out for the evening, Laura gave up her meagre pretence of study altogether, and moodily propped her head in her hand. This was why she had hit on the small hours for the necessary cramming; then, there were no distractions: the great house was as still as an empty church; and Evelyn lay safe and sound before her. So, punctually at two o’clock, Laura was startled, with a pounding heart, out of her first sleep; and lighting the gas, she sat up in bed and pored over her books. Evelyn was not disturbed by the light, or, at least, she did not complain; and it was certainly a famous time for committing things to memory: the subsequent hours of sleep seemed rather to etch the facts into your brain than to blur them.

  You cannot, however, rob Peter to pay Paul, with impunity, and, in the weeks that followed, despite her nightly industry, Laura made no headway.

  As the term tapered to an end, things went from bad to worse with her; and since, besides, the parting with Evelyn was at the door, she was often to be seen with red-rimmed eyelids, which she did not even try to conceal.

  ‘As if she’d lost her nearest relation!’ laughed her schoolfellows. And, did they meet her privately, on the stairs, or in a house corridor, they crossed their hands on their breasts and turned up their eyes, in tragedy fashion.

  Laura hardly saw them; for once in her life, ridicule could not have her. The nearer the time drew, the more completely did the coming loss of Evelyn push other considerations into the background. It was bitter to reflect that her present dear friendship was no better able to endure, than the thin pretences of friendship she had formerly played at. Evelyn and she would, no doubt, from time to time meet and take pleasure in each other again; but their homes lay hundreds of miles apart; and the intimacy of the schooldays were passing away, never to return. And no one could be held to blame for this. Evelyn’s mother and father thought, rightly enough, that it was time for their daughter to leave school—but that was all. They did not really miss her, or need her. No, it was just a stupid, crushing piece of ill-luck, which happened, one did not know why. The ready rebel in Laura came to life again; and she fought hard against the lesson, that there are events in life—bitter, grim and grotesque events—beneath which one can only bow one’s head. A further effect of the approaching separation was to bring home to her a sense of the fleetingness of things; she began to grasp that, everywhere and always, even when you revelled in them, things are perpetually rushing to a close; and the fact of them being things you loved, or enjoyed, did not, in the least, diminish the speed at which they escaped you.

  Of course, though, these were rather sensations than thoughts; and they did not hinder Laura from going on her knees to Evelyn, to implore her to remain. Day after day, Evelyn kindly and patiently explained why this could not be; and if she sometimes drew a sigh at the child’s persistence, it was too faint to be audible. Now, Laura knew that it was possible to kill animal pets by surfeiting them; and, towards the end, a suspicion dawned on her that you might perhaps damage feelings in the same way. It stood to reason: no matter how fond two people were of each other, the one who was about to emerge, like a butterfly from its sheath, could not be asked to regret her release; and, at moments—when Laura lay sobbing face downwards on her bed, or otherwise vented her pertinacious and disruly grief— at these moments, she scented, as it were, a dash of relief in Evelyn, at the prospect of deliverance.

  But such delicate hints on the part of the hidden self rarely have the power to gain a hearing; and, as the days dropped off one by one, like over-ripe fruit, Laura surrendered herself only the more blindly to her emotions. The consequence was M. P.’s prediction came true: in the test examinations, which took place at mid-winter, Laura, together with the dunces of her class, was ignominiously plucked. And still staggering under this blow, she had to kiss Evelyn goodbye, and to set her face for home.

  XXIV

  Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker.

  Nietzsche.

  Mother did not know or understand anything about ‘tests’; and Laura had no idea of enlightening her. She held her peace, and, throughout the holidays, hugged her disgraceful secret to her, untold. She had never before failed to pass an examination, having always lightly skimmed the surface of them on the wings of her parrot-like memory; hence, at home, no one suspected that anything was amiss with her. The knowledge weighed the more heavily on her own mind. And, as if her other troubles were not enough, she was now beset by nervous fears about the future. She saw chiefly rocks ahead. If she did not succeed in getting through the final examination, in summer, she would not be allowed to present herself for matriculation, and, did this happen, there would be the very devil to pay. All her schooling would, in Mother’s eyes, have been for naught. For Mother was one of those people who laid tremendous weight on prizes and examinations, as offering a tangible proof that your time had not been wasted or misspent. Besides this, she could not afford, in the event of a failure, to pay the school fees for another year. The money which, by hook and by crook, had been spared, and scraped together, and hoarded up, for the education of Laura, was now coming to an end; as it was, the next six months would mean a terrible pinching and screwing. The other children, too, were growing day by day more costly; their little minds and bodies clamoured for a larger share of attention. And Laura’s eyes were rudely opened to the struggle Mother had had to make both ends meet, while her first-born was laying up wisdom; for Mother spoke of it herself, spoke openly of her means and resources, relieved, perhaps, that the drain on her purse was about to come to an end, perhaps with some idea of rousing in Laura, a gratitude that had thus far been dormant.

  If the latter was her intention, she failed. Laura was much too fast entangled in her own troubles, to have leisure for such a costly feeling as gratitude; and Mother’s outspokenness only added a fresh weight to her pack. It seemed as if everybody and everything
were ranged against her; and guilty, careworn, lonely, she shrank into her shell. About school affairs, she again kept her lips shut, enduring, like a stubborn martyr, the epithets ‘close’ and ‘deceitful’, this reticence earned her. Her time was spent in writing endless, scrawly letters to Evelyn, which covered days; in sitting moodily at the top of the fir tree—which she climbed in defiance of her length of petticoat—glaring at sunsets, and brooding on dead delights; in taking long, solitary, evening walks, by choice on the heel of a thunderstorm, when the red earth was riddled by creeklets of running water; till Mother, haunted by a lively fear of encounters with ‘swags’ or Chinamen, put her foot down and forbade them.

  Sufferers are seldom sweet-tempered; and Laura formed no exception. Pin, her most frequent companion, had to bear the brunt of her acrimony: hence, the two were soon at war again. For Pin was tactless, and took small heed of her sister’s grumpy moods, save to cavil at them. Laura’s buttoned-upness, for instance, and her love of solitude, were perverse leanings to Pin’s mind; and she spoke out against them, with the assurance of one who has public opinion at his back. Laura retaliated by falling foul of little personal traits in Pin: a nervous habit she had of clearing her throat—her very walk. They quarrelled passionately, having branched as far apart as the endpoints of what is ultimately to be a triangle, between which the connecting line has not yet been drawn.

  Sometimes, they even came to blows.

  ‘I’ll fetch yer ma to yer—that I will!’ threatened Sarah, called by the noise of the scuffle. ‘Great girls like you—fightin’ like bandicoots! Y’ought to be downright ashamed o’ yerselves!’

  ‘I don’t know what’s come over you two, I’m sure!’ scolded Mother, when the combatants had been parted and brought before her in the kitchen, where she was rolling pastry. ‘You never used to go on like this. Pin, stop that noise! Do you want to deafen me?’

  ‘She hit me first,’ sobbed Pin. ‘It’s always Laura who begins.’

  ‘I’ll teach her to cheek me like that!’

  ‘Well, all I can say is,’ said Mother, exasperated, and pushed a lock of black hair off her perspiring forehead, with the back of her hand. ‘All I say is, big girls as you are, you deserve to have the nonsense whipped out of you. As for you, Laura, if this is the only return you can make me for all the money I’ve spent on you, then I wish from my heart, you’d never seen the inside of that Melbourne school!’

  ‘How pretty your eyes look, Mother, when your eyelashes get floury!’ said Laura, struck by the vivid contrast of black and white. She merely stated the fact, without intent to flatter, her anger being given to puffing out as suddenly as it kindled.

  ‘Oh, get along with you!’ said Mother, at the same time skil-fully lifting and turning a large, thin sheet of paste. ‘You can’t get round me like that!’

  ‘You used to have nice, ladylike manners,’ she reproached Laura on another occasion, when the latter, summoned to the drawing room to see a visitor, had, in Mother’s eyes, disgraced them both. ‘Now, you’ve no more idea how to behave than a country bumpkin. You sit there, like a stock or a stone, as if you didn’t know how to open your mouth!’ Mother was very cross.

  ‘I didn’t want to see that old frump anyhow!’ retorted Laura, who inclined to charge the inhabitants of the township with an extreme provinciality. ‘And what else was there to say, but yes or no? She asked me all things I didn’t know anything about. You don’t want me to tell stories, I suppose?’

  ‘Well, if a child of mine doesn’t know the difference between being polite and telling stories,’ said Mother, completely outraged, ‘then, all I can say is, it’s a…a great shame!’ she wound up lamely, after the fashion of hot-tempered people, who begin a sentence without being clear how they are going to end it. ‘You were a nice enough child, once. If only I’d never let you leave home!’

  This jeremiad was repeated by Mother and chorused by the rest till Laura grew incensed. She was roused to defend her present self, at the cost of her past perfections; and this gave rise to new dissension.

  So that, in spite of what she had to face at school, she was not altogether sorry when the time came to turn back on her unknowing, and hence, unsympathetic relations.

  She journeyed to Melbourne on one of those pleasant winter days when the sun shines from morning till night in a cloudless sky, and the chief mark of the season is the extraordinary greenness of the grass; returned a pale, determined, lanky girl, full of the grimmest resolutions.

  The first few days were like a bad dream. The absence of Evelyn came home to her in all its crushing significance. A gap yawned drearily where Evelyn had been—but then, she had been everywhere. There was now a kind of emptiness about the school—except for memories, which cropped up at each turn. Laura was in a strange room, with strange, indifferent girls; and, for a time, she felt as lonely as she had done in those unthinkable days, when she was still the poor little green ‘new chum’.

  Her companions were not wilfully unkind to her—her last extravagance had been foolish, not criminal—and two or three were even sorry for the woebegone figure she cut. But her idolatrous attachment to Evelyn had been the means of again drawing round her one of those magic circles, which held her schoolfellows at a distance. And the aroma of her eccentricity still hung about her. The members of her class were deep in study, too; little was now thought or spoken of, but the approaching examinations. And, her first grief over, Laura set her teeth and flung herself on her lessons like a dog on a bone, endeavouring to pack the conscientious work of twelve months into less than six.

  The days were feverish with energy. But, at night, the loneliness returned, and was only the more intense because, for some hours on end, she had been able to forget it.

  On one such night, when she lay wakeful, haunted by the prospect of failure, she turned over the leaves of her Bible—in which she had been memorising her weekly portion—and read, not as a school task, but for herself. By chance, she lighted on the fourteenth chapter of St John, and the familiar, honey-sweet words fell on her heart like caresses. Her tears flowed; both at the beauty of the language and out of pity for herself; and before she closed the Book, she knew that she had found a well of comfort that would never run dry.

  In spite of a certain flabbiness in its outward expression, deep down in Laura the supreme faith of childhood still dwelt intact: she believed, with her whole heart, in the existence of an all-knowing God, and just as implicitly in His perfect power to succour His human children, at will. But thus far on her way she had not greatly needed Him: at the most, she had had recourse to Him for forgiveness of sin. Now, however, the sudden withdrawal of a warm, human sympathy seemed to open up a new use for Him. An aching void was in her and about her; it was for Him to fill this void with the riches of His love. And she comforted herself for her previous lack of warmth by the reminder that His need also was chiefly of the heavy-laden and oppressed.

  In the spurt of intense religious fervour that now set in for her, it was to Christ she turned by preference, rather than to the remoter God the Father. For, of the latter, she carried a kind of Michel-Angelesque picture in her brain: that of an old, old man, with a flowing grey beard, who sat, Turk-fashion, one hand plucking at this beard, the other lying negligently across His knees, and with a disagreeable, haughty look in His eyes. Christ, on the other hand, was a young man, kindly of face, and full of tender invitation.

  To this younger, tenderer God, she proffered long and glowing prayers, which vied with one another in devoutness. Soon she felt herself led by Him, felt herself a favourite lying on His breast; and, as the days went by, her ardour so increased that she could no longer consume the smoke of her own fire: it overspread her daily life—to the embarrassment of her schoolfellows. Was it then impossible, they asked themselves, for Laura Rambotham to do anything in a decorous and ladylike way? Must she, at every step, put them out of countenance? It was not respectable to be so fervent. Religion, felt they, should be practised with modesty;
be worn like an indispensable, but private garment. Whereas she committed the gross error in taste of, as it were, parading it outside her other clothes.

  Laura, her thoughts turned heavenwards, did not look low enough to detect the distaste in her comrades’ eyes. The farther she spun herself into her intimacy with the Deity, the more indifferent she grew to the people and things of this world.

  Weeks passed. Her feelings, in the beginning a mere blissful certainty that God was Love and she was God’s, ceased to be wholly passive. Thus, her first satisfaction at her supposed election was soon ousted by self-righteousness, did she contemplate her unremitting devotion. And one night, when her own eloquence at prayer had brought the moisture to her eyes—one night the inspiration fell. Throughout these weeks, she had faithfully worshipped God, without asking as much as a pin’s-head from Him in return; she had given freely; all she had had been His. Now the time had surely come when she might claim to be rewarded. Now it was for Him to show that He had appreciated her homage. Oh, it was so easy a thing for Him to help her, if He would…if He only would!

  Pressing her fingers to her eyeballs till the starry blindness was effected that induces ecstasy, she prostrated herself before the mercy seat, not omitting, at this crisis, to conciliate the Almighty, by laying stress on her exceeding unworthiness.

  ‘Oh, dear Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me, miserable sinner! Oh, Christ, I ask Thy humble pardon! For I have been weak, Lord, and have forgotten to serve Thy Holy Name. My thoughts have erred and strayed like…like lost sheep. But I loved Thee, Jesus, all the time. My heart seemed full as…no, I didn’t mean to say that. But I was not ever thus, nor prayed that Thou shouldst lead me on. But now, dear Jesus, if Thou wilt only grant me my desire, I will never forget Thee, or be false to Thee, again. I will love Thee, and serve Thee, all the days of my life, till death…I mean, only let me pass my examinations, Lord, and there is nothing I will not do for Thee in return! Oh, dear Lord Jesus, Son of Mary, hear my prayer, and I will worship Thee and adore Thee, and never forget Thee, and that Thou hast died to save me! Grant me this my prayer, Lord, for Christ’s sake, Amen.’