T, not F,” said Harriet.
“Torestin,” he said, pronouncing it like Russian. “Must be a native word.”
“No,” said Harriet. “It means ‘To rest in’.” She didn’t even laugh at him. He became painfully silent.
Harriet didn’t mind very much. They had been on the move for four months, and she felt if she could but come to anchor somewhere in a corner of her own, she wouldn’t much care where it was, or whether it was called Torestin or Angels Roost or even Tres Bon.
It was, thank heaven, quite a clean little bungalow, with just commonplace furniture, nothing very preposterous. Before Harriet had even taken her hat off she removed four pictures from the wall, and the red plush tablecloth from the table. Somers had disconsolately opened the bags, so she fished out an Indian sarong of purplish shot colour, to try how it would look across the table. But the walls were red, of an awful deep bluey red, that looks so fearful with dark-oak fittings and furniture: or dark-stained jarrah, which amounts to the same thing; and Somers snapped, looking at the purple sarong — a lovely thing in itself:
“Not with red walls.”
“No, I suppose not,” said Harriet, disappointed. “We can easily colour-wash them white — or cream.”
“What, start colour-washing walls?”
“It would only take half a day.”
“That’s what we come to a new land for — to God’s Own Country — to start colour-washing walls in a beastly little suburban bungalow? That we’ve hired for three months and mayn’t live in three weeks!”
“Why not? You must have walls.”
“I suppose you must,” he said, going away to inspect the two little bedrooms, and the kitchen, and the outside. There was a scrap of garden at the back, with a path down the middle, and a fine Australian tree at the end, a tree with pale bark and no leaves, but big tufts of red, spikey flowers. He looked at the flowers in wonder. They were apparently some sort of bean flower, in sharp tufts, like great red spikes of stiff wisteria, curving upwards, not dangling. They looked handsome against the blue sky: but again, extraneous. More like scarlet cockatoos perched in the bare tree, than natural growing flowers. Queer burning red, and hard red flowers! They call it coral tree.
There was a little round summer-house also, with a flat roof and steps going up. Somers mounted, and found that from the lead-covered roof of the little round place he could look down the middle harbour, and even see the low gateway, the low headlands with the lighthouse, opening to the full Pacific. There was the way out to the open Pacific, the white surf breaking. A tramp steamer was just coming in, under her shaft of black smoke.
But near at hand nothing but bungalows — street after street. This was one of the old-fashioned bits of Sydney. A little further off the streets of proper brick houses clustered. But here on this hill the original streets of bungalow places remained almost untouched, still hinting at the temporary shacks run up in the wilderness.
Somers felt a little uneasy because he could look down into the whole range of his neighbours’ gardens and back premises. He tried not to look at them. But Harriet had come climbing after him to survey the world, and she began:
“Isn’t it lovely up here! Do you see the harbour? — and the way we came in! Look, look, I remember looking out of the porthole and seeing that lighthouse, just as we came in — and those little brown cliffs. Oh, but it’s a wonderful harbour. What it must have been when it was first discovered. And now all these little dog-kennelly houses, and everything. But this next garden is lovely; have you seen the — what are they, the lovely flowers?”
“Dahlias.”
“But did ever you see such dahlias! Are you sure they’re dahlias? They’re like pink chrysanthemums — and like roses — oh, lovely! But all these little dog-kennels — awful piggling suburban place — and sort of lousy. Is this all men can do with a new country? Look at those tin cans!”
“What do you expect them to do. Rome was not built in a day.”
“Oh, but they might make it nice. Look at all the little backs: like chicken houses with chicken runs. They call this making a new country, do they?”
“Well, how would you start making a new country yourself?” asked Somers, a little impatiently.
“I wouldn’t have towns — and corrugated iron — and millions of little fences — and empty tins.”
“No, you’d have old chateaus and Tudor manors.”
They went down, hearing a banging at the back door, and seeing a tradesman with a basket on his arm. And for the rest of the day they were kept busy going to the door to tell the inexhaustible tradespeople that they were now fixed up with grocer and butcher and baker and all the rest. Night came on, and Somers sat on his tub of a summer-house looking at the lights glittering thick in swarms in the various hollows down to the water, and the lighthouses flashing in the distance, and ship lights on the water, and the dark places thinly sprinkled with lights. It wasn’t like a town, it was like a whole country, with towns and bays and darknesses. And all lying mysteriously within the Australian underdark, that peculiar lost, weary aloofness of Australia. There was the vast town of Sydney. And it didn’t seem to be real, it seemed to be sprinkled on the surface of a darkness into which it never penetrated.
Somers sighed and shivered and went down to the house. It was chilly. Why had he come? Why, oh why? What was he looking for? Reflecting for a moment, he imagined he knew what he had come for. But he wished he had not come to Australia, for all that.
He was a man with an income of four hundred a year, and a writer of poems and essays. In Europe, he had made up his mind that everything was done for, played out, finished, and he must go to a new country. The newest country: young Australia. Now he had tried Western Australia, and had looked at Adelaide and Melbourne. And the vast, uninhabited land frightened him. It seemed so hoary and lost, so unapproachable. The sky was pure, crystal pure and blue, of a lovely pale blue colour: the air was wonderful, new and unbreathed: and there were great distances. But the bush, the grey, charred bush. It scared him. As a poet, he felt himself entitled to all kinds of emotions and sensations which an ordinary man would have repudiated. Therefore he let himself feel all sorts of things about the bush. It was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by bush fires: and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in silence. Waiting, waiting — the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting. And he could not penetrate into its secret. He couldn’t get at it. Nobody could get at it. What was it waiting for?
And then one night at the time of the full moon he walked alone into the bush. A huge electric moon, huge, and the tree-trunks like naked pale aborigines among the dark-soaked foliage, in the moonlight. And not a sign of life — not a vestige.
Yet something. Something big and aware and hidden! He walked on, had walked a mile or so into the bush, and had just come to a clump of tall, nude, dead trees, shining almost phosphorescent with the moon, when the terror of the bush overcame him. He had looked so long at the vivid moon, without thinking. And now, there was something among the trees, and his hair began to stir with terror, on his head. There was a presence. He looked at the weird, white, dead trees, and into the hollow distances of the bush. Nothing! Nothing at all. He turned to go home. And then immediately the hair on his scalp stirred and went icy cold with terror. What of? He knew quite well it was nothing. He knew quite
