The Fortunes of Richard Mahony

by Henry Handel Richardson

  “And is. . . .is he agreeable?” asked Mary, still unconvinced.

  Tilly half closed her right eye and protruded the tip of her tongue. “You could stake your last fiver on it, he is!”

  But now that portion of the entertainment devoted to art was at an end, and the serious business of the evening began. Card-tables had been set out—for loo, as for less hazardous games. In principle, Mahony objected to the high play that was the order of the day; but if you invited people to your house you could not ask them to screw their points down from crowns to halfpence. They would have thanked you kindly and have stayed at home. Here, at the loo-table places were eagerly snapped up, Henry Ocock and his stepmother being among the first to secure seats: both were keen, hard players, who invariably re-lined their well-filled pockets.

  It would not have been the thing for either Mahony or his wife to take a hand; several of the guests held aloof. John had buttonholed old Devine; Jinny and Agnes were still lost in domesticities. Dear little Agnes had grown so retiring of late, thought Mary; she quite avoided the society of gentlemen, in which she had formerly taken such pleasure. Richard and Archdeacon Long sat on the verandah, and in moving to and fro, Mary caught a fragment of their talk: they were at the debatable question of table-turning, and her mental comment was a motherly and amused: “That Richard, who is so clever, can interest himself in such nonsense!” Further on, Zara was giving Grindle an account of her voyage “home,” and ticking off the reasons that had led to her return. She sat across a hammock, and daintily exposed a very neat ankle. “It was much too sleepy and dull for me! No, I’ve quite decided to spend the rest of my days in the colony.”

  Mrs. Devine was still perched on her ottoman. She beamed at her hostess. “No, I dunno one card from another, dearie, and don’ want to. Oh, my dear, what a lovely party it ’as been, and ’ow well you’ve carried it h’off!”

  Mary nodded and smiled; but with an air of abstraction. The climax of her evening was fast approaching. Excusing herself, she slipped away and went to cast a last eye over her supper-tables, up and down which benches were ranged, borrowed from the Sunday School. To her surprise she found herself followed by Mrs. Devine.

  “Do let me ’elp you, my dear, do, now! I feel that stiff and silly sittin’ stuck up there with me ’ands before me. And jes’ send that young feller about ’is business.”

  So Purdy and his offers of assistance were returned with thanks to the card-room, and Mrs. Devine pinned up her black silk front. But not till she had freely vented her astonishment at the profusion of Mary’s good things. “’Ow do you git ’em to rise so?—No, I never did! Fit for Buckin’am Palace and Queen Victoria! And all by your little self, too.—My dear, I must give you a good ’ug!”

  Hence, when at twelve o’clock the company began to stream in, they found Mrs. Devine installed behind the barricade of cups, saucers and glasses; and she it was who dispensed tea and coffee and ladled out the claret-cup; thus leaving Mary free to keep an argus eye on her visitors’ plates. At his entry Richard had raised expostulating eyebrows; but his tongue of course was tied. And Mary made a lifelong friend.

  And now for the best part of an hour Mary’s sandwiches, sausage-rolls and meat-pies; her jam-rolls, pastries and lemon-sponges; her jellies, custards and creams; her blanc and jaunemanges and whipped syllabubs; her trifles, tipsy-cakes and charlotte-russes formed the theme of talk and objects of attention. And though the ladies picked with becoming daintiness, the gentlemen made up for their partners’ deficiencies; and there was none present who did not, in the shape of a hearty and well-turned compliment, add yet another laurel to Mary’s crown.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It had struck two before the party began to break up. The first move made, however, the guests left in batches, escorting one another to their respective house-doors. The Henry Ococks’ buggy had been in waiting for some time, and Mrs. Henry’s pretty head was drooping with fatigue before Henry, who was in the vein, could tear himself from the card-table. Mahony went to the front gate with them; then strolled with the Longs to the corner of the road.

  He was in no hurry to retrace his steps. The air was balmy, after that of the overcrowded rooms, and it was a fabulously beautiful night. The earth lay steeped in moonshine, as in the light of a silver sun. Trees and shrubs were patterned to their last leaf on the ground before them. What odd mental twist made mortals choose rather to huddle indoors, by puny candle-light, than to be abroad laving themselves in a splendour such as this?

  Leaning his arms on the top rail of a fence, he looked across the slope at the Flat, now hushed and still as the encampment of a sleeping army. Beyond, the bush shimmered palely grey—in his younger years he had been used, on a night like this when the moon sailed full and free, to take his gun and go opossuming. Those two old woody gods, Warrenheip and Buninyong, stood out more imposingly than by day; but the ranges seemed to have retreated. The light lay upon them like a visible burden, flattening their contours, filling up clefts and fissures with a milky haze.

  “Good evening, doctor!”

  Spoken in his very ear, the words made him jump. He had been lost in contemplation; and the address had a ghostly suddenness. But it was no ghost that stood beside him—nor indeed was it a night for those presences to be abroad whose element is the dark.

  Ill-pleased at the intrusion, he returned but a stiff nod: then, since he could not in decency greet and leave-take in a breath, feigned to go on for a minute with his study of the landscape. After which he said: “Well, I must be moving. Good night to you.”

  “So you’re off your sleep, too, are you?” As often happens, the impulse to speak was a joint one. The words collided.

  Instinctively Mahony shrank into himself; this familiar bracketing of his person with another’s was distasteful to him. Besides, the man who had sprung up at his elbow bore a reputation that was none of the best. The owner of a small chemist’s shop on the Flat, he contrived to give offence in sundry ways: he was irreligious—an infidel, his neighbours had it—and of a Sabbath would scour his premises or hoe potatoes rather than attend church or chapel. Though not a confirmed drunkard, he had been seen to stagger in the street, and be unable to answer when spoken to. Also, the woman with whom he lived was not generally believed to be his lawful wife. Hence the public fought shy of his nostrums; and it was a standing riddle how he managed to avoid putting up his shutters. More nefarious practices no doubt, said the relentless vox populi.—Seen near at hand, he was a tall, haggard-looking fellow of some forty years of age, the muscles on his neck standing out like those of a skinny old horse.

  Here, his gratuitous assumption of a common bond drew a cold: “Pray, what reason have you to think that?” from Mahony. And without waiting for a reply he again said good night and turned to go.

  The man accepted the rebuff with a meekness that was painful to see. “Thought, comin’ on you like this, you were a case like my own. No offence, I’m sure,” he said humbly. It was evident he was well used to getting the cold shoulder. Mahony stayed his steps. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “Aren’t you well? There’s a remedy to be found for most ills under the sun.”

  “Not for mine! The doctor isn’t born or the drug discovered that could cure me.”

  The tone of bragging bitterness grated anew. Himself given to the vice of overstatement, Mahony had small mercy on it in others. “Tut, tut!” he deprecated.

  There was a brief silence before the speaker went on more quietly: “You’re a young man, doctor, I’m an old one.” And he looked old as he spoke; Mahony saw that he had erred in putting him down as merely elderly. He was old and grey and down-at-heel—fifty, if a day—and his clothes hung loose on his bony frame. “You’ll excuse me if I say I know better’n you. When a man’s done, he’s done. And that’s me. Yes,”—he grew inflated again in reciting his woes—“I’m one o’ your hopeless cases, just as su
rely as if I was being eaten up by a cancer or a consumption. To mend me, you doctors ’ud need to start me afresh—from the mother-egg.”

  “You exaggerate, I’m sure.”

  “It’s that—knowin’ one’s played out, with by rights still a good third of one’s life to run—that’s what puts the sleep away. In the daylight it’s none so hard to keep the black thoughts under; themselves they’re not so daresome; and there’s one’s pipe, and the haver o’ the young fry. But night’s the time! Then they come tramplin’ along, a whole army of ’em, carryin’ banners with letters a dozen feet high, so’s you shan’t miss rememberin’ what you’d give your soul to forget. And so it’ll go on, et cetera and ad lib., till it pleases the old Joker who sits grinnin’ up aloft to put His heel down—as you or me would squash a bull-ant or a scorpion.”

  “You speak bitterly, Mr. Tangye. Does a night like this not bring you calmer, clearer thoughts?” and Mahony waved his arm in a large, loose gesture at the sky.

  His words passed unheeded. The man he addressed spun round and faced him, with a rusty laugh. “Hark at that!” he cried. “Just hark at it! Why, in all the years I’ve been in this God-forsaken place—long as I’ve been here—I’ve never yet heard my own name properly spoken. You’re the first, doctor. You shall have the medal.”

  “But, man alive, you surely don’t let that worry you? Why, I’ve the same thing to put up with every day of my life. I smile at it.” And Mahony believed what he said, forgetting, in the antagonism such spleen roused in him, the annoyance the false stressing of his own name could sometimes cause him.

  “So did I, once,” said Tangye, and wagged his head. “But the day came when it seemed the last straw; a bit o’ mean spite on the part o’ this hell of a country itself.”

  “You dislike the colony, it appears, intensely?”

  “You like it?” The counter question came tip for tap.

  “I can be fair to it, I hope, and appreciate its good sides.” As always, the mere hint of an injustice made Mahony passionately just.

  “Came ’ere of your own free will, did you? Weren’t crowded out at home? Or bamboozled by a pack o’ lying tales?” Tangye’s voice was husky with eagerness.

  “That I won’t say either. But it is entirely my own choice that I remain here.”

  “Well, I say to you, think twice of it! If you have the chance of gettin’ away, take it. It’s no place this, doctor, for the likes of you and me. Haven’t you never turned and asked yourself what the devil you were doin’ here? And that reminds me. . . .There was a line we used to have drummed into us at school—it’s often come back to me since. Coelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt. In our green days we gabbled that off by rote; then, it seemed just one more o’ the eel-sleek phrases the classics are full of. Now, I take off my hat to the man who wrote it. He knew what he was talkin’ about—by the Lord Harry, he did!”

  The Latin had come out tentatively, with an odd, unused intonation. Mahony’s retort: “How on earth do you know what suits me and what doesn’t?” died on his lips. He was surprised into silence. There had been nothing in the other’s speech to show that he was a man of any education—rather the reverse.

  Meanwhile Tangye went on: “I grant you it’s an antiquated point o’ view; but doesn’t that go to prove what I’ve been sayin’; that you and me are old-fashioned, too—out-o’-place here, out-o’-date? The modern sort, the sort that gets on in this country, is a prime hand at cuttin’ his coat to suit his cloth; for all that the stop-at-homes, like the writer o’ that line and other ancients, prate about the Ethiopian’s hide or the leopard and his spots. They didn’t buy their experience dear, like we did; didn’t guess that if a man don’t learn to fit himself in, when he gets set down in such a land as this, he’s a goner; any more’n they knew that most o’ those who hold out here—all of ’em at any rate who’ve climbed the ladder, nabbed the plunder—have found no more difficulty in changin’ their spots than they have their trousers. Yes, doctor, there’s only one breed that flourishes, and you don’t need me to tell you which it is. Here they lie”—and he nodded to right and left of him—“dreamin’ o’ their money-bags, and their dividends, and their profits, and how they’ll diddle and swindle one another afresh, soon as the sun gets up to-morrow. Harder ’n nails they are, and sharp as needles. You ask me why I do my walkin’ out in the night-time? It’s so’s to avoid the sight o’ their mean little eyes, and their greedy, graspin’ faces.”

  Mahony’s murmured disclaimer fell on deaf ears. Like one who had been bottled up for months, Tangye flowed on. “What a life! What a set! What a plate to end one’s days in! Remember, if you can, the yarns that were spun round it for our benefit, from twenty thousand safe miles away. It was the Land o’ Promise and Plenty, topful o’ gold, strewn over with nuggets that only waited for hands to pick ’em up.—Lies!—lies from beginnin’ to end! I say to you this is the hardest and cruellest country ever created, and a man like me’s no more good here than the muck—the parin’s and stale fishguts and other leavin’s—that knocks about a harbour and washes against the walls. I’ll tell you the only use I’ll have been here, doctor, when my end comes: I’ll dung some bit o’ land for ’em with my moulder and rot. That’s all. They’d do better with my sort if they knocked us on the head betimes, and boiled us down for our fat and marrow.”

  Not much in that line to be got from your carcase, my friend, thought Mahony, with an inward smile.

  But Tangye had paused merely to draw breath. “What I say is, instead o’ layin’ snares for us, it ought to be forbid by law to give men o’ my make ship room. At home in the old country we’d find our little nook, and jog along decently to the end of our days. But just the staid, respectable, orderly sort I belonged to’s neither needed nor wanted here. I fall to thinkin’ sometimes on the fates of the hundreds of honest, steady-goin’ lads, who at one time or another have chucked up their jobs over there—for this. The drink no doubt’s took most: they never knew before that one could sweat as you sweat here. And the rest? Well, just accident. . . .or the sun. . . .or dysentery. . . .or the bloody toil that goes by the name o’ work in these parts—you know the list, doctor, better’n me. They say the waste o’ life in a new country can’t be helped; doesn’t matter; has to be. But that’s cold comfort to the wasted. No! I say to you, there ought to be an Act of Parliament to prevent young fellows squanderin’ themselves, throwin’ away their lives as I did mine. For when we’re young, we’re not sane. Youth’s a fever o’ the brain. And I was young once, though you mightn’t believe it; I had straight joints, and no pouch under my chin, and my full share o’ windy hopes. Senseless truck these! To be spilled overboard bit by bit—like on a hundred-mile tramp a new-chum finishes by pitchin’ from his swag all the needless rubbish he’s started with. What’s wanted to get on here’s somethin’ quite else. Horny palms and costive bowels; more’n a dash o’ the sharper; and no sickly squeamishness about knockin’ out other men and steppin’ into their shoes. And I was only an ordinary young chap; not over-strong nor over-shrewd, but honest—honest, by God I was! That didn’t count. It even stood in my way. For I was too good for this and too mealy-mouthed for that; and while I stuck, considerin’ the fairness of a job, some one who didn’t care a damn whether it was fair or not, walked in over my head and took it from me. There isn’t anything I haven’t tried my luck at, and with everything it’s been the same. Nothin’s prospered; the money wouldn’t come—or stick if it did. And so here I am—all that’s left of me. It isn’t much; and by and by a few rank weeds ’ull spring from it, and old Joey there, who’s paid to grub round the graves, old Joey ’ull curse and say: a weedy fellow that, a rotten, weedy blackguard; and spit on his hands and hoe, till the weeds lie bleedin’ their juices—the last heirs of me. . . .the last issue of my loins!”

  “Pray, does it never occur to you, you fool, that flowers may spring from you?”

&nb
sp; He had listened to Tangye’s diatribe in a white heat of impatience. But when he spoke he struck an easy tone—nor was he in any hesitation how to reply: for that, he had played devil’s advocate all too often with himself in private. An unlovely country, yes, as Englishmen understood beauty; and yet not without a charm of its own. An arduous life, certainly, and one full of pitfalls for the weak or the unwary; yet he believed it was no more impossible to win through here, and with clean hands, than anywhere else. To generalise as his companion had done was absurd. Preposterous, too, the notion that those of their fellow-townsmen who had carried off the prizes owed their success to some superiority in bodily strength. . . .or sharp dealing. . . .or thickness of skin. With Mr. Tangye’s permission he would cite himself as an example. He was neither a very robust man, nor, he ventured to say, one of any marked ability in the other two directions. Yet he had managed to succeed without, in the process, sacrificing jot or tittle of his principles; and to-day he held a position that any member of his profession across the seas might envy him.

  “Yes, but till you got there!” cried Tangye. “Hasn’t every superfluous bit of you—every thought of interest that wasn’t essential to the daily grind—been pared off?”

  “If,” said Mahony stiffening, “if what you mean by that is, have I allowed my mind to grow narrow and sluggish, I can honestly answer no.”

  In his heart he denied the charge even more warmly; for, as he spoke, he saw the great cork-slabs on which hundreds of moths and butterflies made dazzling spots of colour; saw the sheets of pink blotting-paper between which his collection of native plants lay pressed; the glass case filled with geological specimens; his Bible, the margins of which round Genesis were black with his handwriting; a pile of books on the new marvel Spiritualism; Colenso’s Pentateuch; the big black volumes of the Arcana Coelestia; Locke on Miracles: he saw all these things and more. “No, I’m glad to say I have retained many interests outside my work.”