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Hound of the Road

Hound of the Road

Mary Gilmore

Author of

"Mairi'd and other Verses," "The Passionate
Heart," etc.

Sydney

Angus & Robertson Ltd.
1922

Wholly set up and printed in Australia at THE HASSELL PRESS,
iO4Currie Street, Adelaide.

Registered by the Postmaster-General for transmission through the
post as a book.

Obtainable in Great Britain from the British Australasian Book-
store, 51 High Holborn, London, W.C. I, and all other bookseller*;
and (-wholesale only) from the Australian Book Company, 16
Farringdon Avenue, London, E.G. 4.

FOREWORD

When that restless pilgrim whose unwritten
story is partly suggested in the second half
of these pages came to my house I brought
him in and gave him meat and drink. But when
he had rested a while he rose and went his way
again leaving me with the fragments of the
uncompleted and with a deep wonder as to why
so many must follow a far star when a near one
shines in the heart and is spoken in the deep
moments of the inner self. That some of this
wonder will remain with those for whom this is
written is the hope of the writer.

MARY GILMORE.

At the Hotel Imperial, Goulburn,
and toward the end of 1921 .

3025788

CHAPTER I
THE FIRST LATCH

WHO set Saul among the prophets? ....
Outside my window is a woman
beating a child, and I cannot write
for the terrible sound of his weeping. But
I can say this : I would beat all women who
beat children, and, to close the circle, all men
who beat women.

The child weeps, and the woman with a
tongue like a door-knocker still clacks on.
Yesterday morning her husband called her
vile names; to-day the child called them back
to her, and she beats him, whereas she should
first have beaten the man. Why should a
man relieve his evil tongue in the ears of
innocent children? In the streets he would
be fined. But the home is a sacred place, and
even the Law must wait outside, flicking its
ass's ears on the pavement.

But the Law is not an ass. Dignity sits on
its brow in spite of asses appointed; and wis-
dom is in its mouth. I know brave men who are
judges. They sentence cowards; and when

HOUND OF THE ROAD

the occasion offers, lift up the weak, and set
the fallen on their feet. They spend their
days judging the worst of life, and yet, when
their work is over, they can meet good women
with innocent eyes, and children with smiles.
The Law is not always an ass, any more than
the whipped child is always unkissed. For
next door it is now cake for the beaten, and a
penny to spend.

Poor little boys! Poor foolish mothers!
And poor Humanity beaten of Mother Nature
who visits the sins of the fathers upon the
children even to the third and fourth
generation !

As to the prophets Let David harp.

The world has need of simples, of song
innocent as bird-song and sweet as water over
rock. Let the world sing, for an evil spirit
is tormenting Saul — Saul who should be just
and upright before the Lord. There is a
darkness over the face of the earth that only
the harping of harpers can break; the wise
harpers, the singing harpers, telling old stories
again with newer and more generous hearts.
Better laughter than tears; better tears than
blood; better love than a sword. Who spoke
of a sword? Is not the sword sheathed, and
peace upon the earth? Who spoke of a sword f

THE FIRST LATCH

Is fear still the master of earth, and justice but
a byword? Harp, David, and bring up from
the deep that which shall quiet the breast of

Saul There was a dove once on the

face of the waters; there was a Dove once
spake out of heaven; there was a Dove that
sought rest in the hearts of men. Where now
is that Dove? Who has built it an house?
Who of us hold out hands to call it home?

CHAPTER II
THE LIVING AND THE LOVED

LONG ago, in Sydney, there was a man
whom all men loved, for God gave him
that grace before all other things. And there
was a woman. I loved her, as indeed all who
knew her loved her.

She had not one perfect feature, this woman,
yet she was lovely, for in her face was some-
thing that rested the eyes of all who looked
upon her. Short-sighted, a wide mouth, a
not-much-of-a nose, an undistinguished chin:
that was her face, her features in catalogue.
Her glance dwelt, like a bird, now here, now
there. Was it her eyes that called? Surely
it was her ipouth ! Was it her mouth ? No !
it was the fleeting things that crossed her
cheek, that rested on her brow, that fled
through all the delicate texture of her sensitive
skin.

Now and then we find, as we travel the
road, that the face is the woman, the woman
is the face. But with her the face was but
the tabernacle of the winning. Her hair was

THE LIVING AND THE LOVED 7

gold; masses of it, sheaves and cascades of it.
And when she was dead, far away in Ireland a
woman-poet wrote of her, "Golden heart and
golden head."

She had character and temperament and
wit, and with all of these she had knowledge,
for she had lived. In early life she had played
the Irishwoman in the heart of her country's
events, and Parnell had turned to her for
sympathy and faithful trust long before the
world had crowned him with crucifixion.
Poetry moved with her fingers; her voice
made music in the kind Irish talk which
modulates like brooks rippling in tiny cascades
over rock sweetened by sand. And above all
she was true mate of the man whom all men
loved. But the man whom all men loved was
married. He had children because he was mar-
ried. He was married because once he had
youth. Oh, the young lives caught in a net!
Youth fades, and what is left? Life grows, and
asks for what is not. Thirst would drink, and
the brook is shallow. And, later, the soul that
would submerge in another finds but the
aridity of the arrested.

The woman I loved died, and in her dying
the man comforted her. Afterwards he too
died; alone. Yet he had kept his marriage

8

vow. When he suffered his own knew not
even that he ailed. But she, in her grave she

would have known To whom was he

contracted? To his true mate? Or to the
mother of his children?

The child is the symbol of the contract. We
are all one, false and true, ignorant and
learned, good and bad; and life is a small fish
that makes its way anywhere. "Give me the
best," says Life, "but, lest life fail, I take
anything." And for impatient Life, which
swallows the husk and misses the grain, "any-
thing" it oftenest is. And, after all, why not
"anything"? Is the right hand any better
than the left? No better, only more used; no
better, only given more authority; no better,
only more taught; no better, only more made
leader. The left-handed man is the equal of
the right-handed.

"Yet is there rock, and small sand." ....
But the rock is made of sand, and a man with-
out it is nothing, so that we say of the weak-
ling that he has no sand. Sand Sand

What is sand? The child of fire. And fire?
The child of heat. And heat? The child of
life. And life? God knows! But sand, it
would seem, is source of all dust risen to newer
shape ; dust that feeds the grass ; dust that is

THE LIVING AND THE LOVED 9

mud of ocean, and that is rock ; dust that God
raised up and breathed upon, making it woman
and lovable; making it man and loved. The
wind blew out all other dust but this ! This
stood, and the wind went weeping over it.

There is a city where the mountains pierce
the sky, and Rio watches the morning star. By
the shimmering blue of the water the houses
stand red and white ; the peach fills the streets
with its scent, the orange and the lemon give
dreams. Behind it the forest climbs to the Cor-
covada and the foot-hills ; and behind the foot-
hills rise the Sierras. God ! what a wonder set
in Thine eternal blue ! . . . . And they are sand ;
rock and root, peak and canyon, they are sand ;
sand that was dust; sand that will be dust.

God built Himself deserts of sand for
palaces. The sun burned and purified them.
The sea came and ground them in the soft
hands of its mighty strength to dust, and the
dust became mud. And out of the mud, out of
the ooze and the slime, came life individual.

Man looks on the blue of the Sierra in
wonder. He looks at the blue of a child's
eyes and wonders more. Whence came the
blue? From ancestors. Why? .... And
there is no answer save the sound of water
lap-lapping on sand. O Youth most beautiful,

10 HOUND OF THE ROAD

with whom is all the contract of life, art thou,
too, but dust? .... But oh, youth so beauti-
ful, with whom is all the contract of life, how
wise thou art; and how blind, how divinely
blind!

CHAPTER III
OF DEFINITION

THE ever-living tales that men tell are
always told among- men; the tales that
women tell are told to children. The
Decameron is not a woman's book, nor is it
a child's. And I wonder, when I see the old
men magpies clustered on a bough, if the
tales they tell are only for the old men among
them — or even if they have such tales at all !
And if they have none why have we them and
not they? Are tales one of the signs of evolu-
tion, or are they one of its sins?

A man once told me that he regarded high
heels as one of the sins of evolution. Yet he
regarded present civilization as the crown of
evolution. I replied that it was a somewhat
heavy drown, that crowns were unnatural, that,
since man only walked on the sole of his foot
when he stood upright, and since, as a baby,
he wore his toes and not his heels in crawling,
so high heels might even be natural and
primitive, and not really a sign of the civilized
in man ! He said the idea was too fanciful to
11

12

be admitted. Yet it is not all a fancy that
some people are plantigrade and demand low
heels, and some are digitigrade and, walking
on their toes, spurn the ordinary heel.

And thinking of that talk, I am wondering
if all that is written here is not too fanciful
to be admitted by this dry old world of facts
and figures, and things measurable in feet and
inches. For how shall one mind, from behind
the printed word, reach another? How tell
its thought to be understood? What im-
palpable hand reaches out from mind to mind?
How, telling its own story, does it know that of
the other?

Like footfalls in the dark, some unseen
presence within goes out with its lantern of
the mind, and another in the distance sees and
hails it, and there is pow-wow where neither
you nor I can reach. And yet it is you and
I all the time. Who talks? What talks?
Which of the beings that is you talks to me,
which that is I talks to you? What invisible
hands lift us nearer, what invisible palms push
us apart? The flowers of the garden stand
each in its place, and are visited in turn
by the bee. He rolls in the golden pollen of
one, and in the orange or the red of another,
and carries his load, pale, or bright, or dark,

OF DEFINITION 13

and leaves it, touching this and that as he
goes. And out of his coming and going seed
comes and life grows. Who or what is the bee
of man's mind? .... Invisible, eternal, pass-
ing through space as though it were not, not
held by doors, not stayed by keys, lip knows
it, ear hears it, yet eye never sees it; wider
than ocean, lighter than air, swifter than wind.
it conies higher than heaven and keener than
light! What is it? Life, love, vibration, aura,
essence .... God. O Wonder of Wonders,
spoken we know not how, how shall a man
who knows not himself make definition of
God!

CHAPTER IV
THE HOUSE OF MEMORY

LIFE has so many doors! A man may sit
in a chair and go through the world with
his eyes, through the air with his ears,
taste all things with his tongue, and know
the scent of a flower though there be no
flowers by his lonely window. All these
things he can do, himself a world within him-
self. But will he know things as others? Will
he be able to bring others into his own en-
circling world?

No man knows anything as another knows
it. The rose that is pink to me may be white
to you and orange to someone else. But we
will all call it pink, because, whatever the
word may mean to them, everyone else calls
it that. The label is tied on it. But there is
no guarantee that the words on the label will
denote the same thing to everyone! In a
world of strangeness we go. We touch a leaf
and find the familiar; we raise a stone and
find the known. But what of the multitude
of the unknown even in the things we

14

THE HOUSE OF MEMORY 15

touched? Our touch is but a point in a sur-
rounding horizon, just as we stand, ourselves,
a point in the circle of the heavenly horizon.
We make no question of our strange world,
because the familiar shuts the door; that door
which only the wise and the foolish seek to
open : for knowledge is endless, but not so
man's life. And who, then, would try to "stoup
the sea" of eternity with the cockle-shell of
three-score years and ten !

No one knows what another knows. All
that we have in common is an alphabet. But
the words which we make of it are not all
used alike. One says "shall" where he means
"will," and another "will" where he means
"shall." .... But one thing comforts: we
all know that "a" is "a". And because "a" is
our creation, it is "a" — till we change it.

From a point we begin in certainty. All
other things are relative, and the wider we go
the more we find the unsuspectedly relative.
And yet perhaps, after all, the more certain.
Certainty does not lie with proof, but with
being. Proof is only man's measure laid on
the knowable and the unknowable, even when
the unknowable lies in the visible stars. There
are the things perceived which are never
proven. Who made the Milky Way? and why?

16 HOUND OF THE ROAD

When you come down in the train from Killara
you see the lights of Sydney like a bandeau of
stars on the Harbour front. And when you
stand on the Fox Valley Road, at Warrawee,
they lie in the distance in a mist of light, a
Milky Way upon the earth, a dust of diamonds
on the ring of the horizon. And what do you
know about them? They are the stars of
man's creation; but, beyond that, what could
you know if you did not read of them, or go
to see them? And the stars? The stars are
worlds? .... How do you know? Might
they not be, as some have said, but thoughts
in the mind of the Eternal ! And can you
prove that they are not?

"A" means "a" .... So be it. Yet if it
were not that mind speaks to mind in a way
that science has still failed to find or to define,
we could not get past that first initial meaning
of "a" being "a". More meaning would be
impossible, and we should still be as the
animal.

Words are the door-knockers of the house
of the mind, the pebbles thrown up at the
windows to call and awaken those within.
Those within use words back again, yet both
speakers will have interchanged more than
words; more than voice has uttered itself and

THE HOUSE OF MEMORY 17

answered. Something has spoken which goes
where words cannot reach, using language as
a luggage-van, and words as portmanteaux of
meaning.

Why is man different from his fellow ani-
mals? Says the pianist, "I will stretch and
make flexible my fingers I" and he plays in the
whirlwind of ten thousand intricate and flexible
movements. But the worm is more flexible.
And the violinist plays on the stairway of the
strings, that ladder where sound like a living
thing flies up and down. His fingers flutter,
and he bows like the wind in storm. But a cat,
with a stroke of her paw or a leap in the air, is
quicker. And then man says, "I will stretch
my mind!" and he sees the stars and hears
worlds sing; the grass talks to him, a flower
gives him its scents and tells him its colours.
Does a flower do this for the animal? Is it be-
cause of these things that man is different? Yet
it might be that the animal, too, knows scents
and articulated sounds and colours, and that
man is different because he makes an artificial
thing called law, and having made it keeps it.
The animal dies for want of the artificial. Man
makes it and survives by it. If the created
would live he must also be the creator. We
live by the ephemeridae of our creation, law and

18 HOUND OF THE ROAD

fashion .... fashion that is sometimes custom,
and custom as often the chrysalis of law.

Man delves in the earth and makes homes
of mud. The peeweet makes his mud nest
with his bill, but the man with tools, which
are the product of his stretched-out mind.
Think of a chisel and all that it means ! Iron
and coal and the miner of each; furnace and
slag, forges and hammers .... armies and
armies of men, and all of them soldiers of
mind ! And after these endless armies come
the camp followers of market and trade. What
knows an animal of these things? What are
the tools of the tree? Housed in leaf, clothed
in blossom, fortified in walls of bark, what are
the tools of the tree? Strange cells working
like coral in all the tides of sun and moon, of
day and night, of spring and summer. Only
it is not the coral itself that works, but the
boneless points of jelly making "sea-bone"
from circulations of ocean. Have these cells
mind? If they have no minds why do they
work? What works in them?

.... A dog lay at my feet to-day and slept,
and in his sleep he dreamed. The writers who
give to the lesser creatures actual man-likeness
of quality do not appeal to me. I do not think

THE HOUSE OF MEMORY 19

the brute — and I use the word tenderly of
these fellow-creatures of man — I do not think
he writes on the tablet of the mind as man
does, though, without derogation to the
human, we can compare him to man in all the
fundamentals.

The dog Tweedie dreamed at my feet and,
whimpering, woke ; waking, he leaped up and
looked for the things of his dream. But even
as he looked the light went from his eyes, so
that as he turned to me expression faded, and,
with it, memory. Memory of what? Memory
of ideas. And perhaps that is why man is
different from an animal; he has memory of
memories, of ideas. That which is dreamed is
ideas, not facts visible and tangible. And no
dog, however human, remembers a dream.
Man's law, which he makes and keeps, is the
sign of his dream ; it is the moraine of his rivers
of memories, of his memories of memories.

A dog remembers his home and comes to
it with faithful longing and the affection of a
loving heart when he has been away. But he
remembers it not by its ideal in form but by
its scents, for he will find home in the dark.
And when he draws near to it after being
away and looks up as he noses the earth, or
the air, it is to seek for owning man, and not
for roof and chimney!.

20 HOUND OF THE ROAD

A dog knows movement and sound, scent
and direction. By direction he knows a door;
but its shape is nothing to him. No dog ever
looked upward to see a lintel or the ceiling;
he only looks at the top rail of a fence when
something is there and he wants to get over it.
As to colour, does a dog know colour? Is
colour the first step above initial fundamental
animal reason (for a dog does reason), just
as a sense of music is the mind's extension of
the use of the physical ear?

A dog does reason. All animals reason.
Even a guinea-pig does, or an ox drawn
within sight and sound of a slaughter-yard.
As to the dog, he reasoning says of a quarry,
"It is far, or near" ; of a scent, "It is quick, or
faint", as the case may be; and if far he hus-
bands his strength and goes slowly. Why?
Because in his mind he has done a sum, in
which the figures are the realities picked up by
his senses. If you knew dogs well, you could
tell how far or near the quarry was by the rate
of nosing and the speed of the feet.

The untamed thing dies out unknown, and
individually unstudied, while science is digging
up dead bones and piecing fragments together
to reconstruct the extinct. Almost within the
memory of living man three continents have

THE HOUSE OF MEMORY 21

been so emptied of the wild that protection
for historical, pictorial, and scientific purposes
has had to be ordained by law. We destroy
in mass what science must re-build from splin-
ters. The black man in Australia has forgot-
ten his lore ; his tradition is broken down ; and
now, measuring base coinage by such gold of
truth as we may have, we are glad of anything
we can get.

And as the primitive creatures, so the un-
stabled horse and the unkennelled dog will
go. The city forgets both, but the bush re-
members them. In the land of our childhood
they were our friends. Memory is kind and
keeps them. "There was a dog . . . . "
"There was a chap had a dog . . . . " "Down
the Castlereagh there was a feflow had a pup
. . . . " Dead, all dead ; the man who had
the pup and the man who remembered the
story.

Do you remember the horse that Wallace
Hogg had in Silverton? Years ago; years
ago ! But, in memory, the sleek skin shines,
and the kind eye brightens as he nuzzles up to
his owner or waits like a dog for his master's
coming. What wealth for remembrance flows
through our hands and we know it not! Yet
give God praise for ears, and for the tears that

22 HOUND OF THE ROAD

will rise for what the ears heard of these
friends of man. The idyll of the hawk is
written; the song of the nightingale rises from
the printed page, the Swiss loved one dog and
set him up in stone. But who has written
our dog? Kaleski?* Kaleski wrote dogs, not
the dog. It took a woman to write him; and
that woman was Barbara Baynton. She alone
wrote him as the man, next to his Maker,
knew him.

But it is not enough. We want more. Who
will give that more? The world forgets its
dumb friends; forgets even the tears for the
horses shot in the sands of Egypt and in the
gullies of Palestine. "I killed men without
compunction," said a soldier, "but I broke
down when it came to my horse. ..." The
soldier was wrong as regarded man ; but would
you not trust a man who so loved his horse?

I sit in a chair and go through that old twin-
door of memory and fancy which some open
but which so many keep shut. And I find to-
day that fancy is the gossamer with which
one scarfs the remembered, lest its poor old
bones should look bleak and bare in the harsh
light of modern comparisons. In the early
*"Barkers and Biters."

THE HOUSE OF MEMORY 23

years there was but fancy, the fancy of a child-
hood to which the pulling of a leaf meant

pain, and the death of an ant suffering

We have all come a long way since then. But
sometimes I wake in the night and hear the
song of the pine-tree at the end of the house,
and the sighing of the she-oaks by the creek.

How long ago? Let the years tell A

word will bring back the taste of she-oak nuts
boiled with sugar, the smell of the dam where
we went crayfishing on Yarrengerry, the odour
of dried hide and half-dry bones at a trap-
yard, the mud of the North Wagga Wagga
flats where, in drought, the cattle bogged and
struggled and died. And sometimes when one
strikes a piano the years fall away and in far
distance I hear Rosie Stinson singing; the
tender singing of one whose nature v«as ever
sweet and gentle. Then out of the dark the
lights of Kindra shine from the open door and
the friendly windows, and everyone is talking
all at once about Elvira Pike going to be mar-
ried To-day they tell me that two of

Elvira Pike's grandsons died on Gallipoli.
.... Pike and Beveridge, Devlin and
Barnes .... Meurant and Bennett and Beat-
tie and Stinson, how memory holds the names !
.... And one day at the Hotel Australia I saw

24 HOUND OF THE ROAD

Matt Sawyer come in, bigger than ever his
father was when we all went to the old Wagga
school, and Durie and Bonnynge wielded the
cane. While at Bondi, the other day, Bonnynge
threw forty years out of sight in an instantane-
ous recognition ! . . . . Ah, surely the compensa-
tion of age is the kindliness of remembrance.
The asperities go and the sweetness remains;
the smoke of combat dies, and, softened by
time, the heart looks back through a mist of
tears, in its own kindliness comforted.

CHAPTER V
THE WHISTLING MEN

I HEARD a man whistling in his room this
morning as if he loved every note of the
tune with his lips. In general men have for-
gotten how to whistle. They sing instead —
harshly, loudly, unmelodiously, gutturally — in
the bath. It advertises them as taking a bath,
and that is about all. Better if they whistled.
In the early days of this country all men
whistled. Some much, some little; all tune-
fully, and a few beautifully. »The throat that
is harshened by exposure, whose cords are
thickened by colds, can still whistle. Me, I
whistle at times, just to remind memory of
older days, and of those whose notes told of
home-coming over soft bush-tracks and broken
roads. But a woman is not supposed to
whistle. When I was a girl only the ungentle
did it. Then it crept up to the "genteel" and
certain of the professionals, and, among these
a whistling woman was not named with a
crowing hen and a walnut tree, but was called
"a siffleuse." Sometimes the siffleuse was a

25

26 HOUND OF THE ROAD

singer as well, as was that tall beauty of our
early American colony in Sydney, Mrs. Van
der Veer Green.

Now nobody whistles, not even tomboy
girls. As for that debased form of a beautiful
word, "genteel," once used for "gentle," or
gentille, it has gone with the frock coats, the
lavender waistcoats, and the grey trousers cut
tightly to the calf and strapped down over
the boots, which in the whistling days were
gentlefolk's wear for men. Mr. Lavender wore
them when he used to come on Sunday after-
noon with his wife to Springfield to my grand-
mother's for tea, and Mrs. Lavender wore
striped lavender silk. Mr. Lavender's waist-
coat was made of silk to match. Wilkinson
and Lavender were then only at their begin-
nings.

In the century just gone by men came home
whistling with the teams. The clear high
sound of *"The Wild Colonial Boy" was
mingled with Wer'cy's hymns; the "Come-all-
yans" followed Madame Carandini and talk of
Lola Montez. Among the many came an elect
few who spoke of Jenny Lind and of Patti ; of
the diggers who threw gold nuggets and bank-
notes on the stage at Sandhurst and Yackan-
*See "Old Bush Songs" collected by Banjo Paterson.

THE WHISTLING MEN 27

dandah, and of that Cameron who shod his
horse with gold; a publican, but a just and
generous man.

The whistling men drove their clinking
horse-teams down the old Bathurst road and
the old Goulburn road. They camped at Yass
(then "Yarr"), at Braidwood, and at Berrima.
Camden, the Razorback, Cowper's Hill at
Tarlo, Cobbity, the little scattered places built
before the gold rushes brought up towns
everywhere like crops of spring mushrooms,
all knew the teams, all heard the whistling
man, the rattle of the chains, the friendly "Gee
Up!" of the homecoming.

Stars and the whistling man, the warm smell
of home-hurrying horses, the faint whinney in
the dusk at the rails, the candlelight from the
half-opened door, the glow of the hearth fire,
and the sound of children's voices — can you
whistle them back, O Life? Only in memory.
The old Hay Market, with its sweet smell of
hay and corn and general produce, is gone,
and we have the Haymarket instead, with its
emporiums and its rattle and clatter of trams,
its picture-shows and its down-at-heel scaveng-
ings of city life. God made the country.
Man made the town for a dwelling place of

28 HOUND OF THE ROAD

evil, even though good is there too. It was
in the country that Abraham walked with the
shining three, and Jacob saw the hosts of
heaven in the road that lay near Haran.

And thinking of Abraham and Jacob, and
so of that Old Book which has meant so much
to our people, and to the history of the world,
we recall that there we read of singing, of
tabor and harp, of piping and of cymbals, but
there is no word of a whistling man. Yet
surely some earlier Pan played even in those
days, and, losing his pipes, softly whistled to
the skies, as he lay idle-thoughted in the shade,
pulling grass blades through his fingers !

It is little we read of the whistling man in
older England or in Scotland ; except when
swords whistled, and, in Scotland, the wicked
on Sunday. But we find him in Ireland,
where "he could whistle a bird off a bough, or
the heart out of a stone." The exile of Erin
was a sure man to find in the new lands; and
perhaps it is to him who took the dancer's
feet with him wherever he went that the- new
lands owe the whistling man of the early days.
Over the Rockies they went whistling, Daniel
Boone among them; over the Alleghanies,
Louis Trefle's father among them; and down
by the Andes and the coasts of Patagonia

29

where a rude red-headed Cameron gave his
name to a wide bay ; and over the Blue Moun-
tains, the Liverpool Range, the Cullarin, the
Gourock Have you a very old grand-
mother? Ask her. Have you a very old

grandfather? Ask him And, indeed,

when one thinks of it had Ned Kelly* whistled
more he might never have been hanged!

*A noted bushranger in Australia.

CHAPTER VI
THE BENT TWIG

WHEN from the incubation of years
of experience and thought a book
is written quickly and warm from the
heart, it is possible that, like the chicken
from the shell, it comes forth a little
surprised at the haste with which at last
it arrived at being, wondering somewhat at
its own newness, and dazzled, perhaps, by the
too brilliant light of the concrete and more
public world! One says "a book." But, after
all, that thing between covers is the self. Only
in a mirror does a man see his back, and the
"self" sees itself only in a book. In everything
else, in the acts and facts of daily life, it knows
but the isolated word, the single action, and
the individualized stress of personality. Books
are not all alike, of course, even as to the self.
Sometimes they mirror so small a part of the
reality that, after one look, they are found to
be so trifling that one does not look at them
again. But once in a while the soul speaks,
and not even the writer himself knows with

30

THE BENT TWIG 31

what self-revelation. For at times one finds
the depths come to the surface. The under-
world of life awakes like a bird which a passing
ray of light stirs in a dark forest. Then the
loves of the heart are spoken, the shallows are
broken through and submerged by that which
comes flowing forth.

But often, when one long silent writes a
book, the theorist, reading only what is writ-
ten, says, "This one did not write before be-
cause thought had not matured/' or "because
life had not touched him to emotion," or "be-
cause the hour had not struck." But, like the
clock in the tower, the hour of capacity strikes
many times, and passes without our being in
a position to take advantage of it. Thus, as
the waters of Australia, capacity flows out un-
conserved to that ocean which knows no in-
dividual boundaries within its mighty limits.
The storage-waters of art and science, of all
things that better life, are scarcely drawn upon
because the wells are not sunk, and the well-
buckets are set dredging in mud for a bare
existence. The pearls are lost that the pig
may feed; the cream of life is too often set to
do the work of the clay.

There was once a child who sang as soon
as it learned that words meant feeling. It

32 HOUND OF THE ROAD

sang, like a bird, in the fury of the creative
coming to expression, and, at the end of the
outburst, sank nerve-wearied through excess
of that spent force.

It sang because of an intensity of vitality
which demanded expression ; because of some-
thing that we call life stirring in its sleep, some
spirit-harp answering wind and sun. It sang
because life made it sing. And then the claims
of life came and drowned the young, the sing-
ing years. Many times the clock of capacity
struck ; but the striking had to go unheeded.

And there was a sculptor who was a
boundary rider. He cut sheep-shank bones
into rings, and into saddles and bridles ; sad-
dles small enough to fit the little finger, with
the tiny girth and every buckle and dee in its
place. But he never cut marble. The marble
was too far away. And who now on Man-
damah ever remembers Shannon the Boun-
dary-rider? .... There is, in a desk in Syd-
ney, a little saddle which is perhaps all that is
left of Shannon and a whole life's capacity.
The hour was struck every time that man took
out his knife and nicked a cut upon a bone ;
but circumstances shut the door of oppor-
tunity.

I knew a boy in Victoria. He could tell

THE BENT TWIG 33

you when the first tiger-orchid came out, miles
away from his home, and the kind of grass
that showed its most likely place of growth.
He discovered the first white boronia in his
district, and knew the cry and call of every
wandering bird. But he had no name for the
flowers, and no classification for the birds.
He had but dumb knowledge, depending on the
pointing of a finger or the production of a plant,
and but dumb thoughts, because none had
come to give him language. He had facts
without a name; his was genius without a
wing; he held life's jewels in his hands, un-
polished, denied their lustre.

The bush blossom called him ; the insect led
him. "He knows every spider in the bush !"
said the neighbours, interested in knowledge,
if not in the things that made knowledge. To
him a spider was creation; the created telling
the power of the Creator. To those about him
it was but a spider, a thing to be crushed
under foot, matter in the wrong place. "He is
mad on the colour of them," they said in their
crude way. What was a spider but a grey thing,
speckled black, or red or brown? But the
red and the black, the grey and the brown,
were a new world to this boy with his fine
sensitive senses and his strong native feeling.

34 HOUND OF THE ROAD

Darwin loved not nature better than he. As
with Agassiz, even the snake was not too
deadly for his friendly searching eyes and
hands.

A naturalist? .... At eighteen he was
shearing. At twenty-three he was dead on
the fields of France. In his death, the bush
which is going, along with its myriad tribes
and denizens, lost one who loved it; lost an
interpreter, who said nothing to the world be-
cause none brought him the opportunity of
learning the needed speech. He who would
have made the wild plant a friend and fellow-
housekeeper with man was like one who
would learn French yet had no books, and no
teacher. I grieve over that boy who never
had a chance, for the rose is only scented
where it blooms in the sun, and what is a
mind but a rose of God?

There was another boy, near Tocumwal, on
whom punishment fell constantly because of a
white wall and a bit of charcoal. A burnt
stick or a blue-bag drew out of him — as wind
out of warm air, as light from the sun — some-
thing that longed for utterance. It was the
Great God Himself, speaking out of a boy's
mind in a lightning that would not be held.
But the hand that should have balanced the

THE BENT TWIG 35

palette held a plough; and the sight that
should have measured form and steeped itself
in colour measured milk in a cow-yard.

I once met a girl in Paraguay who, in mud
from a river-bank, modelled lambs and cats
and pigs (and Kewpies before there were
Kewpies), choosing her colours as the clay
allowed. The native Paraguayans marvelled,
half afraid of the work so like yet so unlike
the living, for she added an individuality of the
bizarre to everything she did. "Milagro!"
they cried, as they looked at the work, and
Miracle! it was. But there was no one there
to tell the child that she had in her hand a
ladder which might reach from earth to
heaven !

And there was a man who knew the track
of the quail, and the haunt of the wild bee;
who felt the heart-beat of a horse, and realized

the ancestral fear of the dog Poverty

tied him, and only the dog and the horse read
his message. The Bush, that should have made
him, in its solitude ate him.

So, when I hear people talking of the
benevolence of poverty as a helper to genius,
and of how genius must "out," I ask, "Is
genius independent of bread? Hath not genius
appetite? Needs it not to eat?"

36 HOUND OF THE ROAD

A cask can be emptied in either of two ways.
One is by the slow process of drop by drop,
which benefits no one; the other is by the free
flow that quenches thirst, even the thirst of a
world eager to drink and to be sustained. And
genius that must "out" so often has only the
"out" of that slow drop which is as useless to
itself as to the world.

Even a plant must have time, a place and
food, to grow. And what is thought but a
plant of the mind? Poverty! .... Poverty!
.... Poverty! .... Ah! man the judge of
another, you do not put your corn in poor
ground if you want a full crop, nor turn the
herd on stony ground if you want milk! ....
Poverty ! . . . . Poverty is like frost ; it is a
good experience for the warm and the well-
fed, whether plant or man, but it kills the crop
of the poor. The oven has baked many a
woman's full song to hard crusts; the clearing
has sent many a sculpture to splinters; the
hand of the delicate touch has too often been
calloused by the grindstone of life. The baked
bread was eaten, and none knew of the song
lost in its baking, the trees fell, and none heard
the cry of the dream. "Genius will out?" When
I think of Genius and Poverty, I think of Hell
without a bottom !

THE BENT TWIG 37

Minds are many. There are crows as well
as nightingales. The cruelty is not in being
a crow, but in silencing the nightingale.
One may make brooms of roses instead of
millet. Such a broom may sweep ; it may even
sweep best. But to use the rose as a broom
destroys the rose; turns it from its true
destiny; in the end it becomes merely broom.
But no broom ever becomes a rose. There is
no real exchange in these things. There is
only the terrible loss of the subverted and the
destroyed, and the cruelty of waste unhallowed
by any compensating return of values.

CHAPTER VII
IN THE MIND OF A DREAMER

THE mind turns upon many things, and I
have often wondered if birds have a sense
of colour. They are themselves so beautiful,
even to the gloss of the crow and the soft grey
of the Cockatoo Parrot, that it seems as if they
should revel in colour. Yet I doubt if one of
them ever looked at or saw the sunset.

I used to feed a friend's birds — canaries and
a parrot. One morning I went out in a blue
house-gown, and for a moment they thought
I was a stranger. Was it the colour? or was
it the accident of some other cause?

It takes children some time to realize colour ;
or rather, not so much to realize it as to
react to it. Yet some colours are very early
perceived. Back almost behind memory I can
remember screaming at sight of my mother;
her arms held out to me made me scream with
greater fear. Others hushed me, and voices
explained that it was only a red coat and that
I was not to be afraid. I knew nothing of red.
What was red to me? I only saw the familiar
38

IN THE MIND OF A DREAMER 39

in something strange which made it strange
to me. The curious sense was nojt that of red,
as I know it now, but of something dark —
something that ate light. To-day I understand
it as having been something foreign, to which
the eye had not previously given lodgment, nor
the brain a name. I know now that I saw it
as things are seen by the blind newly come to
sight. .

One does not always realize that colour can
be just as much "a stranger" as a strange land,
or that acquaintance has to be made with it

just as with a human being What a

queer place the world must be for babies ! . . . .
Take even a dog right away from where he
belongs, drop him in surroundings hitherto un-
known, give him one shout of menace, and
then see how the unfamiliar adds to his sense
of the fearful !

I sat idly thinking and dreaming, and sud-
denly, with the vividness of an illuminating
realization such as only conies sometimes to
life, it struck me what a gift thought is ! Is it
any wonder man dreams of wings and of a-life-
to-come without pains and penalties when
within him moves this untrammelled and un-
suffering thing? However a face, or a heart,
or a tooth may ache, thought is free of pain.

40

And yet a man is only aware of his pain through
thought. Man dreams wings because thought
needs no wings, coming and going without
limitation. It wanders and rambles, and if a man
had to say where and to what end his thoughts
went for even one day, it would take him a
whole year — and then he would not have told
all. As well try to count the atoms of water
under a bridge as a day's thought! Quietly it
goes in some cases, but oftenest like a bird
flying from limb to limb of a tree. And just
here, in one of those flights, I would ask, How
does a bird fly straight to a limb or a fence?
He does not fall, he is not drawn down by the
earth, and he goes so much straighter than
you or I on our wonderful, lumbering, absurd
and beautiful human feet. Surely he jumps by
wing as a boy by feet, and measures dis-
tance as a carpenter measures a fillet or a
board. In his mind, he says the sum of it to
himself just as does a boy or a man; even
as the man behind the cannonade whose shells
fall unseen into the unseen beleaguered distant
city.

I have seen a galah measure distance, head
on one side, exactly like a tradesman, like a
woman considering when cutting out and
joining pieces in materials, like a boy at

IN THE MIND OF A DREAMER 41

"taws." When the galah had his full wings,
he measured at a glance; one look, and he
flew. But when his wing feathers were cut,
he carefully and slowly considered all the
factors — strength, balance, and distance; he
tested muscles, and collected himself in the
will to effort, just as you or I might. Shall I
— allowing for limitations — set this bird down
as an inferior? Shall I set him down as es-
sentially more different from me than the
newly-born babe which knows neither distance,
nor form, nor needs, and whose mind has not
yet begun to act?

I am friends with the ant. I have loved
him ever since like all children I let him run
over my hand, turning it side or back upwards
so that he could not run off. The tiny feet of
the ant : think of them ! And the little steps !
And the little young baby ant, tiniest of all.
.... When we were children it was a constant
wonder as to why they were not in families as
we were — brothers and sisters in groups, and
no two of one size. All the "grown ups," with
few exceptions, were of one size, and all the
smallest ones of another. There were no Ken-
wiggses among the ants! And it seemed so
strange.

42 HOUND OF THE ROAD

And as to the ant I have seen a dog

scent a half withered dead beast and run to
roll himself in the mouldering offal. There are
minds like that. But there are other minds
like the ant; the clean, seeking, wandering,
cleansing ant. Have you ever noticed that
what the ant touches it leaves stripped to the
shining bone? The venom of the snake is in
his jaw; but the ant leaves the skeleton clean,
and the poisonous jaw gleams white in the sun.
.... And there are minds just like that.
They cleanse the dark, unsoiled by the dark.

Perhaps we are all like ants. When we were
children, bush children, we used to take an ant
from one nest and put it on another to see the
fight. The world has its ants in other nests

to-day When we saw a "hindquarter"

carried off, we felt as the station butcher does
when he has his beast clean and high on the
station gallows. Perhaps the leader in a battle
feels the same wrhen he cuts off the arm of an
enemy. As the combatants fought we watched ;
and I recollect that the boys were more har-
dened than the girls ; they knew no pity. There
are always emotions under all the activities in
girls. Often in our eagerness we forgot to
keep guard and a green jumper came and

caught us in the rear The world has

green jumpers in its rear to-day.

IN THE MIND OF A DREAMER 43

I remember the smell of the sun on an ant's
nest, and the smell of the ants on a sunny
day. I remember it because it was a mixture
of perceptions ; the ant, the sun, the earth, and
all faint earth-smells. When the scent of the
gum leaves came, or of the myall blossoms, or
of the wattle, they seemed rich and full ....
foreign, impermanent, and not of the earth.
We knew the earth, kind and brown, with ants
all over it. The earth to us was a living thing,
full of life that moved. The air was a void,
and the sky a blue tradition. Our world, our
earth, stopped at the top of our heads. We
lived with the things that dwelt in tussocks,
climbed small stems, and made themselves tiny
holes in the earth. Sometimes the hole had a
trap-door

CHAPTER VIII
THE TRAP-DOOR SPIDER

SOMETIMES the hole had a trap-
door

I recollect a spider that had a hole in a bare
patch of ground. Small tussocks of native
grass grew scattered around it, eking out a
hardy existence in Riverina red earth which
cracked and crumbled, bone-dry in the heat.
But the spider's patch was bare of any shelter
except at that early hour when drowsy insects
rushed recklessly abroad for food, and at
evening when the tired wanderers and work-
men of this much circumscribed world came
home with inattentive minds. His shelter then,
his camouflage, was the shadow cast by the
grass on either side of his citadel in the
morning and evening sun.

Grey and black as only a stick in a very dry
country can become, he lay snug in his hole
till hunger called him out. Sometimes, to give
his legs exercise, he crossed the expanse of his
little plain ; a streak, an impression, that might
have been a whirling screw of sickle-shaped

44

THE TRAP-DOOR SPIDER 45

grass-seed in the wind, or the shadow of a
butterfly idling by. The open danger-space
passed (a No-Man's Land quite a foot wide),
he rested in the fortress of a tussock, while his
house stood open to the air, and, door well
back, lost some of its close summer heat.
Perhaps he laid plans and combed his zebra
hide in the shade; perhaps he merely rested
and cooled his head and heels. It might be

that he slept. Maybe he watched We

never knew ; for at the least touch, even at the
falling of a certain kind of glance on him, he
went like lightning back to his hole, and the
door closed. We never caught him, though we
stood on three sides at once, three eager
children holding back from closer search till
priority of discovery gave precedence to one.
Indeed we never even well saw him ; the grey
streak was too swift, the door too soon shut.
That door once shut only knowledge could find
it again ! And sticks down the hole never
reached him; at least not as far as we ever
knew !

Near where the trap-door spider dwelt, the
Willy Wag-tail used to swing, like a swaying
leaf, on a clod in the long dry furrow of an
adjacent wheat paddock which ran down to a

46 HOUND OF THE ROAD

shallow creek where water flowed only when
rain was heaviest. In spring the cockatoos
watched that field in its sprouting green, massed
in clusters on dry ring-barked trees which had
not yet been grubbed, and, at sight or sound
of a gun, flying to the shelter of the bush be-
hind the fences. In summer the magpies and the
Kookaburras used to follow the plough as the
furrow turned over like a lazily rolling dog.
.... And in the middle of it all was an old
boot, sun-bitten, brittle, and black. We feared
that boot. Spiders spun in it; "black spiders
with red on them !" Once we poked it with a
stick and ran

The story of the boot was that a man,
having no stick, had jumped on a snake's head
and the snake's fang had gone through. The
man died. A swagman, finding a good pair of
boots in an empty hut, put them on. He too
died. Then someone came and threw them out
into the paddock. Or so we believed.

The mark of Cain Well versed in

the Scriptures, we called that paddock Cain.
But we forgot about that when the straw was
in stacks arid the stubble covered everything
with its grey sunlight, and when, sliding end-
lessly down, we were buried in sweet smelling
straw! But then, there were men about, and

THE TRAP-DOOR SPIDER 47

horses stamping and champing; and who could
be afraid where there were men? In those days
it was all men; the only women we knew
were those of our own family, for these were
the days of the pioneers.

But the paddock and the boot We

never doubted, because we never asked. The
beginning of knowledge is a crooked little
mark, isn't it? And we never asked because
we never doubted. Children are like that. Our
attitude was that of primal men in unknown
forests. The world begins anew in every
child; earlier in some, later in some, but anew
in all children. The mystery, the horror, the
dread of the unknown, is no less and no more
because a thousand, ten thousand, a million
years have passed since the first man had felt
it. Nay, since even the first animal sweated
fear.

The familiar is like your skin; it covers all,
though unawarely to us. The strange brings

doubt, the unknown awakens disquiet

I have seen dogs tremble in the shadows like
children, and heard horses snort and shake
with a man's dread.

Fear knows neither class nor caste, neither
race nor kind. It speaks but one language ; its
whip fits every hand ; it makes brothers-in-kind

48 HOUND OF THE ROAD

of all things. The beast is not too low for
it, nor man too high. Yet faith will lift a
man above it, even when all else fails. It
lifts the brute, for the brute has faith in man,
the seen. Is man only just reaching out in an
effort for something beyond himself, some-
thing which will in time evolve in him new
powers? Is all evolution rooted in the
physical and bounded by it? Or is there
evolution upon evolution, boundless as the
stars and high as infinity? ....

CHAPTER IX
THE PAINTER'S MOTHER

THIS is a life-story, not of a leaf or an in-
sect, not of a man, but of a woman who
looked like The Picture of Whistler's Mother,
and who spoke with the voice of Raftery the
last of the Singers ; and of how a picture came
to the walls of our Art Gallery.

It began a long time ago, when a young girl,
who bore the burning name of Brennan, left
her home in Ireland to go to a far land.
There she married. Her husband was in the
Frontier Legion ; that body of law-giving, law-
defending pioneers who carried courage and
love of adventure to distant and remote places,
where old order, failing, was to be replaced by
new. In the replacing much breaking had to
be done on both sides. But the union of two
contrary things can only come by an initial
injury. Yet it is lucky if the breaking do not
leave scars of healing like the graft on an old
peach tree, and such as can never be forgotten.

Take Ireland. How the searing scars remain
and the old wounds ache! Did you read to-

49

50 HOUND OF THE ROAD

day's cables? No, never mind the date! Any

day of the year will do Scratch a Russian

and you find a Tartar. Scratch half the
modern pushing, progressing, pulsing, singing
world and you find a Celt; for Ireland — and
Scotland too — has a wide inheritance of homes
in all countries. And because of this, in unex-
pected places and in widely removed genera-
tions, a word of the Arran Isles or a hint of the
brogue will suddenly rise up to confront you
and tell of history long gone by. As Noah's
dove brought her olive-leaf to tell the story of
the earth's surface, so in pampa, in prairie, in
steppe; among the ice-fields of the polar
regions, the snowfield of Alps or Himalaya ; by
the deserts of the ancient world, or in the
Digger's hut of the new, a word picked up tells
of that flood of Celtic blood, which streamed in
widening currents across the world.

The song of Erin is found in the literature
of every land. Better to be a world singer
than a world conqueror. Richard, Lion-hearted
though he was, lives more sweetly, even in
history, because of Blondel; and the Bruce is
the more the Bruce because of the song of the
Douglas. Song? .... Yes, song indeed, for
what is a song but a word !

THE PAINTER'S MOTHER 51

"We are the music-makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams,

Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory "

Not Ireland, perhaps, but an O'Shaughnessy
singing.

And the little Irish girl, she carried her song
and her spirit with her to Africa. And there
she saw day after day the stringing herds
of Springbok go by, and up in the hills she
heard the lions roar and the cataract leap with
the thunder, while the chattering Hottentots
quaked in the kitchen. "Courage!" she said,
and they crept nearer for comfort. "Courage !"
she said, and they laughed in the release from
fear.

And children came to the little Irish girl,
she all alone the one white woman at that far
outpost, and her husband, gone out in the
early morning, came home at night to find her
ruling her house. Medicine she gave to the
sick, counsel she gave to the foolish; the pre-
sumptuous she rebuked as only the woman of
Ireland can. There is in such women that of

52 HOUND OF THE ROAD

the virginal which, holding itself pure, with no
more than a look compels purity.

As the children grew, she took them out and
showed them the mighty forest and the strange
tropical flowers, the black mass of the moun-
tains, and the rose and gold of the sunset.
With hands in hers they heard the winds sing
down the valleys, and the music of the waters
reaching out to the sea; tho crack of a rifle
woke the echoes, the snap of interlocking
horns spoke of the combat of the wild, the
trumpeting of the elephant rose and smote on
the stillness of dusk.

And then the years, turning, brought her to
New Zealand ; and, turning again, brought her
to Sydney. In Sydney I heard the story as
she told it. And I would that I could have
told it in her own words, for then it would
have lived for ever. For she had the eyes of a
painter and the heart of a singer of songs.

As for the picture: I find that story is not
for me to tell, for the painter* says the fierce
light that beats upon the published is not
for him, and that the telling must wait till he
is dead. As I am many years older than he
another will be the teller, and I shall not be
there to read it.
* Elioth Griiner.

THE PAINTER'S MOTHER 53

But what is told here is for the woman who
looked like the portrait of Whistler's Mother,
and who spoke in the tongue of Raftery the
last of the Singers.

CHAPTER X
CHIMNEYS OF HISTORY

I KNEW a woman once — why should I
hesitate to say it? — she was my father's
sister. When she died the minister who
stood last at her grave said, "I pray God that
I may have as white a soul as she at the Judg-
ment Day!" For this was a woman who put
self last, and duty and the needs of others first.
And the minister, he believed in the Judg-
ment, that man; in a lifting of dry bones,
new-clothed from the grave; of limbs rising
out of old battlefields coming to join long
mouldered, re-awakened bodies; perhaps even
of lost babies rising in shoals and crying to
find their mothers. And my own troubled
wonder when, as a child, I sat under the thun-
der of Free Kirk forty-minute sermons on hell
(and it was a long time to talk about that
place !) always used to be, How would the
babies know?

As for the minister, all ministers are chil-
dren, even those of the dour old Kirk; and
perhaps these most of all, for if they are not

54

CHIMNEYS OF HISTORY 55

they become too sophisticated and worldly-
wise, and forget the Key of Heaven. And
though a worldly minister may be a very
charming man, no matter what else he may do,
he is of no use unless he can bring you the
Keys of Belief! Without these he is but one
of the veering, surging crowd that fights and
struggles, knowing neither its beginnings nor
its endings.

As to the Judgment and its Day, I still re-
main a child, unable to lose the family in the
individual. There will always be, for me,
Father and Mother and the children. "The
children" are the family. They never grow
up. They are always holding hands, just little
things, and "the baby in arms." That is, for
us.

For others, the family flocks have to be
much more looked after by father and mother,
always with someone holding the next eldest
by the hand. They walk, these others, but
neither as orderly nor as surely as we, and the
parents have more anxiety as to whether they
are all there or not, or whether one may not
be left behind. There is never any danger as
we march along looking round upon wonders.
Nor for us! Maybe it is the catechism and the
doctrine of Election over again in a child's

56 HOUND OF THE ROAD

mind. Maybe it is the egotism of the indivi-
dual : "God bless me and my wife, John and
his wife," without the "Us four and no more,"
for, in my Judgment Day, all come home and
none are lost.

It has always been something of a medley
to me, that gathering of the world's clans;
something like a picnic, or going a journey:
and we went many journeys when I was a
child. Everything is at sixes and sevens,
yet sixes and sevens on a string that will put
all right at the end, for the vision of a child
is full of charity. I think, too, that there was
a feeling that, like picnics and journeys, there
would be something of weariness and dis-
illusion at the end; that the trump promised
more, and the flesh, however truly risen and
young, gave less than one expected. Bones
would still be bones, and ache after outings.

As to the trump, as one upon whose heart
the cry of a lost sheep came as a stab, I always
heard the babies louder than the trump. The
loneliness of the little struck harder than the
tears and the pains of the wicked. The mercy
of God was infinite and could cover the
wicked; but for loneliness there was no cover-
ing; it had to be borne without help and single-
handed. Think of the little feet run-

CHIMNEYS OF HISTORY 57

ning : such a crowded place : such endless faces
to be looked into before one found one's own
and the safety and comfort of sheltering arms !
I have always thought that the Catholic
Churches — Eastern or Western — have the best
of us there. They give the babies to that
woman of all women, the universal Mother,
Mary Immaculate, who, when the time comes,
will put all mournful little ones into the en-
circling arms of their own. There will be no
picking of strange ways through open graves
for these, no calling of Mother! Mother!
across wild distance, no anguish of the lost,
no trembling limbs and tear-stained darkened
eyes, there ! We Protestants leave too many
anxiously wandering and lonely for want of a
generously comforting idea, for want of the
symbol that through eyes and hands reaches
the heart and kindles the understanding. After
all, what are words but images, which memory
and intent hold in their separate niches? What
are ideas themselves but images, more imper-
manent than words, more deliberately and in-
tentionally kept in place? The image of re-
membrance is but the hand and the number
of the clock of memory, whether for the dead,
for the living, or for religion. And if you love
God and would do His works, you will dress

58 HOUND OF THE ROAD

the reminders of His will in the best that you
can give, whether the reminders be in words,
in Cathedrals, in music, or in statuary ; aye, or
in acts!

Religion has its vestments of the mind as
well as of the body ; its pinnacles and its spires
and its humble tabernacles; its meat for the
eye and its bones of the spirit. And the de-
light of the eye is itself worship, for the eye is
of God and worships without lips or hands.
We of the old Scottish Churches would do well
to remember that beauty which can live on as
beauty, generation after generation, is His true
minister, and learn a little from it. Is there
no lesson in the sunset drenching the high
densities of heaven with colours? In that the
stars shine and quiver like lamps before an,
altar, instead of being dull and leaden? Sup-
pose that a rose had never bloomed, that a
leaf had never ripened in the sun; that love,
the blossom of all beauty, had never lived !
Shall only the dumb' worship in beauty, and
man, "the soul and crown of things," deny it?

There is a bigotry that refuses the beautiful,
and, refusing, worships the ugly: that, deny-
ing charity a home in its thoughts, is, of itself,
but fit to be outcast of charity. To that
bigotry we should deny any place in our hearts.

CHIMNEYS OF HISTORY 59

.... When that charitable woman who
was my aunt died, there were many who felt
clods on the heart. The coffin is not the
only thing that makes hollow answer to
the earth at death ! A Highland woman with
a homely face in spite of her long pedigree, she
had a grace of the spirit and of bodily carriage
which made one forget her looks ; made one re-
member that the spirit is more than the body,
and manner more than riches.

"When your Aunt Belle danced with your
father," said one, "everyone in the room
stopped to look at them. She had a plain face,
but they made the handsomest couple in any
ballroom." And as he said it, recollection,
wistful -eyed and tender for things irrevocably
gone, gentled his face and spoke in his spirit,
so that one read there more than the words.
And here, too, was beauty; the beauty of re-
membrance and of long, long years of affec-
tion. It is something, after all, to be Highland,
and to have the Highland love and the High-
land fidelities.

I remember once when, after many years in
what was then "foreign country" over the
mountains — that is to say, where there were
none of the old Scottish or Irish people — two
of us went to visit our Argyle folk. "Ah,

60 HOUND OF THE ROAD

Johnny !" said our aunt, her voice full of feeling
and the thought of other days, "You are your
father over again!" Then, her hand touching
his coat, the sensitive skin sent instant message
to the responsive house of the brain, and
almost in the same breath she asked, " 'Tis the
fine cloth ! and what might it have cost, now ?"

There are two women whom remembrance
couples together in my mind. They are
Beatrix Esmond and this woman: women
who faced the world and whatever it might
give them, and died gallantly. They never
whimpered, and they never whined. Yet the
one was as selfish as the other was self-for-
getful. One took from life, and one gave; but
in her taking Beatrix Esmond gave something
that made dead bones live.

As for my aunt, when on past sixty, she was
still the woman with the open hand, and the
good will for a neighbour in trouble. A week
after I went to see her, a poor neighbour
falling ill, she rose in the dark and, morning
and evening, trudged through wet grass,
climbed fences, crossed a creek, followed the
thin path through the shaking bog to tend this
helpless one, milk her cows, see to the pigs and
poultry, feed and dress the children and send
them off to school. Ah ! "And shall not love-

CHIMNEYS OF HISTORY 61

liness be loved forever?" For what was this
but that immortal loveliness whose body of the
spirit shall never see corruption!

"Why don't you ride?" I asked her who was
once famous for her riding, for the days of her
nursing ran into weeks. " I ride!" she
exclaimed, "I haven't been on a horse for
twenty years !" And the road was not one for
driving, by reason of the long way round, and
the intervening farms, the gates, and the
fences. She could walk as quickly as she could
ride.

They called it "Argyle" in those days, and
the kindly Scottish folk called it Argyle to
the end, even though the stranger came who
knew no Gaelic, and changed both the heart
and the face of the place. Sometimes, indeed,
the stranger was their own child, restive of the
old, eager for the new

We read Gilbert Parker and dream of the
wonderful lives in the early settlement of the
French Canadian valleys, the simple kindliness
of heart, the unworldly ways, the gracious gift
of courtesies now fallen into disuse, the
patience, the heroism, and the pride of action.
The mists of years cover what was ugly, the
veil of distance beautifies that period of

62 HOUND OF THE ROAD

romance. It is all at our doors in this last
homogeneous settlement of Australia, perhaps
the last of its kind to be found in the world.
For here the gold of old romance from the still
olden and unchanged Highlands was poured
out in the new mould of this young land. In
those days, now far away, there was iron need
of adaptation to the strange, with all the heart-
longings for the old; in them was the
sternness of ancient pride, with the poverty
that knew no bygones; daring and adventure,
it all lay there. Nay ! it still lies there waiting
for the willing hand and the sympathetic heart
to lift and make it live again. The day will come
when, in folk talk, these scattered hearths will
all be re-built and the drying twig bud to leaf
anew, so that young hearts that we shall never
know will ache to think that they were not of
the old brave young years; young eyes will
glow and suddenly grow dim with a longing
of soul because of stories told round a simple
and neighbourly table. In the twilight the
spirit shall awaken and the day tell the story.
In the long fallen houses of the smoke-
blackened rafters the Bible lay on the shelf
above the fireplace, its pages peat-brown from
the reek, its leaves made soft and tender to the
touch with much handling in reverent read-

CHIMNEYS OF HISTORY 63

ings. In Gaelic, it kept the olden tongue alive
as song keeps tradition. Indeed it was the
song of their lives, almost as real as the songs
of the forefathers. To some it was more; and
in death it was with them.

By their firesides they chanted litanies of
genealogy : Donald son of " Hugh, son of
Donald Dhu, son of Alexander, son of John of
Fassifern, son of Lochiel. And one Lochiel was
the gentle Lochiel, and one was the great
Lochiel. And when I first saw that picture
with its "Come weal, come woe, I'll follow
thee," used as an advertisement for whiskey,
I thought it an impertinent intrusion into the
family history; all the forefathers rose up in
the blood in a fierce desire to tear it down.
An advertisement on that monument to the
gallant Colonel at Quatre Bras could not have
hurt more

In the chanting of genealogies the Tailor of
the Axe came out of the shades and was no
more remote from the fathers than their own
children. He grew as a giant with the years,
and there Ban rode and Fingal halloed. They
wept with the children of Glencoe mourning
over a ruined hearthstone. The cold of that
stone pierced the hearts of hundreds born on
the water-shed of the Wollondilly, who had

64 HOUND OF THE ROAD

never been nearer the Highlands than the
tossing of the caber at Crookwell, at Laggan,
at Taralga, at Goulburn.

For over a generation later you could tell a
Goulburn man by his speech, no matter where
you met him, the soft Highland speech, utter-
ing Australian talk, colour-woven with the

poetry of the Gaelic Ah, the Bonnie hills

of Scotland

In the years before Henley and Newbolt
and Rupert Brooke, no man said England
as the exile said Scotland, or the Highlands;
nor, to tell the full truth, as that blood-
brother of Erin spoke the holy names of
Ireland. From the Kyles of Bute to Stornaway
and far Caithness there dwelt the wistfulness
of deep-rooted love, and the cry of the exile
spoke it afar. The Stuart was still the Stuart;
the German Georges were but the children of
"the wee, wee German Lairdie."

Yet hear Henley, and what one voice deep
and true can do for a land!

What have I done for you,

England, my England?
What is there I would not do,

England, my own?
With your glorious eyes austere,
As the Lord were walking near,

CHIMNEYS OF HISTORY 65

Whispering terrible things and dear

As the Song on your bugles blown,

England —
Round the world on your bugles blown I

Ever the faith endures,

England, my England: —
'Take and break us: we are yours,

England, my own!
Life is good, and joy runs high
Between English earth and sky:
Death is death; but we shall die

To the Song on your bugles blown,

England —
To the stars on your bugles blown!'

Mother of Ships whose might,

England, my England,
Is the fierce old Sea's delight,

England, my own,
Chosen daughter of the Lord,
Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword,
There's the menace of the Word

In the Song on your bugles blown,

England —
Out of heaven on your bugles blown!

Something of the Celtic is there in that
which is not named as the Celtic; a Highland
note of love, of pride, of death, of duty, of the
sword, in a voice not Highland. And it could
not have been written for any one of the

66 HOUND OF THE ROAD

German Georges. But it was written in the
time of a woman-queen who boasted of her
descent from the Stuarts. And yet, as Mr. A. G.
Stephens said in The Bookfellow, over that
noble ode Kipling laid his brass ! . . . . But the
world has need of brass, and answers brass.

The bagpipes and the harp sang like the
wind in the trees ; but the brass comes like the
feet of trade echoing in sleeping streets, like
the steam that whistles ships to move and
wheels to turn. It speaks of the gorgeousness
of merchandise, and of commerce threading
the world with a keel and needling it with
wires. It is a music of ruthlessness, of coarse
appetites and strong odours, of glaring show
and vulgar noise. Yet by volume it gives
some sense of majesty and seems the very
voice of crude and all-dominating power. But,
to us who read and remember there comes,
holy as incense, tradition spoken in the utter-
ance of a long-loved word, and in the far
sound of singing lips; for romance lives
in a dream and speaks as a voice out
of heaven

Winds out of heaven, wind under the eaves;
wind in the wheat; wind in the grass, roll-over,
roll-over, roll-over; wind from the bush with
the sun hot on the trees, the bee in the blossom,

CHIMNEYS OF HISTORY 67

the wattle and honey-suckle throwing out
perfumes no other land knows; wind among
the barley stalks, the stubble and the rustling
corn; winds of history blowing down the

ages Are we not all Rab Tamson's

bairns. England, my England? But oh, for the
Highlands, the Highland hearts, and the High-
land eyes! Are we not all Rab Tamson's
bairns? Stand by me, Michael, whether you
be Michael Joseph Patrick, or plain Paddy;
you, too, belong; you, too, listen to the winds
howling through chimneys of history where
once stood home and byre! You, too, have
played pipes and written songs on wind; have
drunken spells and sung ; have slept and heard
the voices of the Ancient Ones. Not all the
glory belongs to Greece, not all the Gods to

Olympus

And when Rab Tamson blows the candle
out, we all sleep under the same blanket. Ah !
even these menacing ones. And there the
grass covers us, the wind blows over us.
Sometimes, even, one remembers us, keeping
our names in silence; keeping remembrance
holy by silence.

CHAPTER XI
PLOVERS IN THE WHEAT

LONG long ago a tall pine stood in the
midst of a field where wheat in the head
faced God and sang His praises in songs that
were tunes of the wind.

Beautiful were the songs. They made
sounds like the rubbings of a myriad tiny
hands, of young faces, and children's cheeks
just touching and passing; like soft fingers on
silk, and the fluttering of wind in the edges
of flags; like small spurts of flame in pine
wood, and little dust flung softly on many
windows ; like milk falling into a pail, and the
rustle of people moving at prayer; like the
sea rippling over the sand, and the rising of
birds from the water

Wind on the wheat ! . . . . The little breezes
took the songs and carried them far, planting
them in hearts that, remembering, thought of
God in remembering, and wept in nostalgias
wide as all life ; wider, it may be, than heaven,
for they may have gone right back even to Him
in Whom are all beginnings and the longing of
68

PLOVERS IN THE WHEAT 69

all endings. And when the wheat was gone
there was the army of the stubble; stubble
that smelt so sweet, yet was sharp and scythe-
like to the bare feet of a child; stubble that
still held sap and loved the earth with its
roots. The pine looked down on it all, and
on the plover's nest in the scarcely covered
furrow. There was a child there. She was
thin, and quick; she ran with fear, yet held
to her task with the courage of intent.
Imaginative, she saw all things alive; she
stepped over the ants, she lifted the wounded
grasshoppers. The earth belonged to the
defenceless things, to the things that were
houseless. She, not they, was interloper. God
made the world, and into that world, ready
peopled with its kind, came man, a trespasser.

Scarcely seven years old, she tingled to
every sound and scent, to the curve of the
shining stems of the stubble, the green deeps
of the pine, the darkness of its shadows on the
parched earth, the red of the clod, the slope
of a furrow. And because she was sensitive
fear held her even as beauty.

Thin to emaciation, her feet flew as a plover
swooped. "Hannah Lammond's child! Han-
nah Lammond's child!" .... The words came
like thunder in memory. And again the

HOUND OF THE ROAD

swooping plover passed, lower, and nearer.
She saw the Scottish reapers where they stood
and shouted; almost she saw the mother
climb. Should she turn back from the spur of
the plover for fear? Fear sprang in her bones,
her heart closed as in a vice. "Hannah Lam-
mond's child " and a whole world look-
ing on ! But here, she was but one alone in
the midst of an endless field, half-way passed,
half-way to go, and the last strokes of the
plover cutting the straw of her hat, and none
to cheer or to help.

Yet she went on; a bush child filled with
lore of old world stories, she faltered not a
word of her errand; but all night long in the
night that followed she heard the cutting
wing; all night long she cried on "Hannah
Lammond's child," with an agony that not all
the years could cover, not all the happenings
of life blot out. O God, take fear from child-
ren's hearts, and give them peace!

CHAPTER XII
BY THE DARK HUT

THEY say that when the death lights the
candles in a house, the bat flies low.
Then the pious pray wistfully for all souls in
pain, for all souls in dark places, for all in
uncharted ways.

Yet if the soul is loosed from the flesh, and
the flesh nothing Answer me this my un-
spoken question, and say, if you can, the thing
you would !

Have you spoken? / have not heard.

Have you spoken ? The grave is very deep.
I would not know if you had.

71

II

THE GATE OF THE ROAD

// thou shouldst never see my face again,
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought

by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let

thy voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For zvhat are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them

friend?

For so the ivhole round earth is every ivay
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.

Morte d' Arthur (Tennyson).

CHAPTER I
FURROW AND STAR

SHE was just a brown weather-beaten Irish-
woman whom fate had hit with a hard
stick ; but the brave wit and the quick wisdom
of her people were hers. And the piety of race
was hers, too. No mongrel race was ever pious,
for it has but the odd strands of many trends
in it, and never the grace of being able to dis-
entangle and follow any one of them faith-
fully. The mixture of peoples kills religion as
it kills race. The son may follow the father,
and the daughter the mother, but the grand-
child goes wandering

The garden fence round the house was
patched, and a bit of rope held the gate, but
the path was swept though the morning was
white in the frost. And as the door opened to
my knock, the smell of boiling potatoes came
out on the house-warm air to me. "It is not
the cold breakfast she gives them," I thought,
and smiled to myself in a mixture of recollec-
tion and feeling.

75

76 HOUND OF THE ROAD

"Good morning," I said, as she stood at the
door.

"Good morning," she answered, as she
smiled from kind, age-old eyes back at me.

And from some whimsy, born of something
of higher things in her look and of the early
hour of frost, "It was a fine morning star, this
morning!" I said, almost before I thought.

"And, glory be to God! a fine night before
the star," she replied, just as quickly.

It was the soul that spoke. And I, who had
never had much freedom to speak of such
things, found the tongue I thought I had lost,
and talked as I had never before done save to
one good old priest. He was a full man, that
one, every inch of him, and there was no way
that you could come at him that he would not
get you. And then, when you knew not which
way to turn, the spirit of the man would come
over you, so that you would see old things
in new ways and new things in old ways, for
he had all the hungers of a man, together with
the greater hunger that goes beyond them all.
Gainsay it who may, there is something in
the proud blood of race, and Ireland is not
called the Island of the Saints for nothing; for
though this man's favourite tongue was of
Spain, yet was Ireland his land, and her people

FURROW AND STAR 77

his. Long is he dead, long is the world the
poorer for his loss. God rest you, Father
Black, as you never rested in the fierce wild
days of early Silverton on the Barrier. And
indeed, in that place, and in that time, two
men stood out as faithful souls, even though
their paths were parallel and not one; and
memory still sets them together, the parish
priest, Father Black, and the Anglican rector,
Edward la Barte.

When I had refused the breakfast I was
asked to share (and with what a fine and free
hospitality), when I had paid for the bread I
had come to ask for, and had gotten a drop of
milk into the bargain, I turned for the road.

"God be good to you," said the woman, in
parting.

"And to you," I said, thinking, as I went,
how the goodness of God expresses itself in
many and strange ways, and how sometimes
the best blossom grows on what, at first sight,
looks most the thorn. Aye, and that goodness
is often about us only waiting to be picked up,
but not everyone has the hand to lift it, nor
the back that will stoop for it. Perhaps man's
eyes are so newly turned to heaven that he
forgets, in his newness, to look down and see
where the glory falls among the homely things

78 HOUND OF THE ROAD

of earth. It is the sun that blinds, and not the
sunlight on hill and furrow.

Talking of furrows, I am reminded again of
one that I once saw set out on the way to Bun-
gonia. It was black and red and silver, with a
fine threading of sand that came out at times
like a silken sheen, or as a patch all along its
length where the furrows lay flat on the slope :
St. Patrick's own colour on the head of Brian
Boru, and with something of the Polthogue
added. It was in a wee piece of fat land on
the edge of a creek; and the small that it
was, yet, with a little cot for shelter, it would
keep a peaceable man all the days of his life
and give him a good knowledge of spiders
at the end. And if you should ask why such a
man in such a place would be knowing about
spiders, I will tell you. For one thing a man
would have to get up early to work it; for an-
other, alone at the dawn with God, how could
he but wonder at the things he would see?
The loss of the world, to-day, is the won-
der which the living awakes in the living;
the recognition of things that no man's ac-
counting can account for. For who questions
at the things a man can make? Great as a
pavement is, it never lifted man's eyes ; and no

if

FURROW AND STAR 79

ball and socket shaped by hand, or turned in
a lathe, was ever like the small round thing
that is a baby's wrist, or the crooked leg of a
butterfly !

It was a small boy who taught me first
about spiders.

"Laddie," said I to the little fellow, barely
eight years of age, round among the Mosman
bushes at daylight, "what are you doing up at
this hour? Why aren't you tucked up in your
little warm bed waiting to be called before you
can wake?"

"There's different spiders, early," he said
quietly, and too busy to look up.

"Is that so?" I answered in surprise. And
something went through me like a blame to
think that I had been about all these years and
had never found out that. "My years !" I cried
in my heart, wistful for knowledge long lost
because undiscovered, and thinking how the
sheaves of this little fellow's harvest already
lay about him.

He had a jam-tin with a lid, and two holes
in the lid. "That's for air," he informed
me as he poked in and out among the branches
of a bush. "You get the green and yellow
spiders early, and the grey ones," he told me
in his baby talk. "You know," he went on,

80 HOUND OF THE ROAD

"the ones the hornets put in their mud nests."
"I'm like the hornet," he continued, "for I
get them. But I come before the hornet, when
they think he is asleep, and they do not hide."
He paused as he turned over a leaf. "They
don't know about me," he said. And he smiled
a wise little smile, like a man long versed in
the ways of life, and in the customs of man's
fellow-beings beyond that mysterious dividing
wall which is so near and yet so undiscover-
able.

I had been on my knees arranging my be-
longings as the little chap came up, and, in
hearing the wisdom of an old head on such
young shoulders, I forgot to rise, so that when
I did move it was with difficulty, my knees
having grown stiff. " 'Tis prayer," I said to
myself, as I eased them, for prayer is recog-
nition of wonders and of wisdom as well as
being the voice of petition. " 'Tis prayer," again
said I, "and God bless the prayer, and help
me to make it praise!" For I thought of all
the things at a man's hand and under his feet,
and of the closed eyes with which he goes
about and never sees them.

And that is how it was that, when I looked
at that small rich field by the turn of the road,
and the man with his two horses and plough

FURROW AND STAR 81

in the middle of it, I saw, in a flash as it were,
the misty dawns, and the grey evenings, and,
in the twilights, a small boy, child of a long
line of entomological ancestors, carrying out a
bias given, who knows how, a hundred years
before.

As for the man who owned the place, it was
a place to him and nothing more. But, for
me, I could have loved everything about it;
the rich loam, the smell of the turning furrow,
the upcast yams which the children eat, and
the wriggling worms for the furrow-following
birds. As I looked at the horses I seemed
to smell the warm sweat on their backs and
hear the chink of the chains, and to feel the
long forelock and the soft nose under my hand.
I could see the shine of the sun on the hard
hoofs, and the fringing hair glisten about
them; I could feel the swingle-bars which
shone grey in the light, and the ring and hook
at the end, hot to the touch. Morning would
come, and the horses would neigh for their
feed ; evening, and the harness would fall from
their backs, hames and collars and chains all in
a heap ; and as I picked them up to hang them
on their peg in the shed, Punch and Dobbin
would turn to the creek

Am I a wanderer? Ah! not in the heart, not

82 HOUND OF THE ROAD

in the heart! Only the feet have wandered.
Ever the heart comes home to the dream and
the thought and the wonderful things so com-
mon, so cheap, and so close to hand.

They say that nature takes on colour as
camouflage from enemies. Nature's chief
camouflage is shape and stillness. No wasp
ever took the green of a spider for the green
of the grass ! But rolled up like a ball, flat
on the earth instead of lifted in the air on
legs, the spider is partially hidden in stillness
and change of form. This is the intentional
camouflage of life individual, and not of nature
in the mass. It is the camouflage of intellect;
and a child adopts it, standing Indian-still in
the dusk, playing at Hidey-whoop!

Colour no doubt has its part. But colour is
the accident of survival, and is unintentional.
It is the child of chance; and chance is life's
blind epileptic son from whom come genius
and folly — one as chancey as the other.

As to spiders At daylight the world

that loves the dew comes out. A whole popu-
lation floods the earth, and creeps over it like
a river, or a sea, or tiny feet. It is so soft,
this dawn population, so soft and so small,
that it surelv is an innocent world : the snake

FURROW" AND STAR 83

and the fox, the dingo and the bat have gone
to their dens and their holes ; the hawk and the
eagle have not yet awakened. The podgy
black spider still dreams on in his blanket of
web under the dusty beam, for the fly that is
his breakfast and rising-bell is yet asleep.
With breakfast after the bell, who would rise
before it?

Wisdom? True ; but what is wisdom ? The
snail carries his house on his back; and the
spider finds his on a twig, in a curled leaf, or
under a log. I carry my swag like a snail, and
find shelter like a spider and the ant. The
man with the sweet-smelling land of loam fol-
lows the tail of a plough

.... Why does a man sweat for the things
he does not need? Ah! it is all a web, and
life is the spinner, with man for the thread.
There is nothing simple or single save death.
There only do we stand at the gate and enter
in alone.

As for me, what have I gathered, for all my
wandering but a storing of recollections? An
easy gathering, lifted as the wind lifts leaves
and scents! It is the man who sweats that
makes the magnifying glass and the telescope,
it is he that shivers who measures the stars.
Of us others, when I am dead what do I leave?

84 HOUND OF THE ROAD

I am dead; I am gone. Earth bears no mark
of me save a little ash where I, camp-fire,
have been for an hour; life has no place of
memory of me, not even of all that I felt in
wonder. But the man with the plough, ig-
norant, blind and unfeeling, he goes, and his
furrow is left on the earth ; the seed which he
planted grows and lives on, child of his hand,
seeding and re-seeding, and keeping the world
alive forever.

CHAPTER II
IN THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS

AS three of us, newly off the road, sat talk-
ing by the fire, the thought came of how
the original things of life are brought again to
use, however lost they may have seemed. In-
doors by a mixed fire we rested, the coal glow-
ing on the wood, the wood under the coal, as
sociably in the warmth talk ran upon inven-
tion and discover)^. Thought hovering from
mind to mind, and directed by what the eye
brought to the mind, one of us spoke of the
aniline dyes from coal, and another of its
medical drugs and trade essences, and of what
these things mean to life and nationhood.
That dead and buried world of the dinosaur
and the brontosaur was a place of strong es-
sences and odours. In it grew every herb and
tree, and every creeper that fathered the forests
and gardens of to-day. Life does not vary;
only the form which it takes.

The cooling of the earth caused crumples,
just as an opened oven door makes wrinkles on

85

86 HOUND OF THE ROAD

the top of a cake. And in the spongy earth-cake
of creation, in that crumpling, the great waters
rushed in upon new valleys and submerged
the tall trees and all that in them was. Fur-
ther crumpling and settling locked the walls
of the valleys together; it strained and drove
out the streaming waters, and, closing in, drain-
ing and drying, in the heat of the then world it
slowly cooked-in bone of fish and bird, sap and
essence of tree, gas and gum, just as is done
to-day in a charcoal-burner's pit. Only, in
that period, oceans untellable damped the pit
of Chaos and Nox, where to-day man sprinkles
with a bucket.

But what Eye, what fearful Hand watched
and tended, what mighty Charcoal-Burner laid
on the covering earth?

Chance ?

What made chance?

Like the essence and the scent which, child
of the green thing, returns through the labora-
tory and is misnamed and miscalled mechanical
and mineral, or of the earth earthy, so, after
the material years, comes back to the soul of
the world, and to the soul of wandering and
individual man, the voice of the spirit. The
bigotry of antagonism dies (for not all bigots

IN THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS 87

are of the Church and the creed), and the child
conies home to the re-awakened scents of for-
gotten Olivet and the sigh of winds in far
Gethsemane. The world cleanses itself of the
mud that covered it, and in the laboratories of
the spiritual the essences of faith break forth
once more.

In the black cloud of war men lost God, lost
belief, lost the moral sense. Only were left the
fear, the courage, and the animal fellowship of
the pagan and the beast. In the crumpling of
the world's understandings, of its standards
and covenants, the green forests of life and its
usages were broken down; the ooze and the
mud of evil ran over everything. In the val-
leys of the dead the graves were packed, and
the flesh rotted as the leaves of a tree. Yet
even there were the Eye and the Hand; even
there the Charcoal-Burner, heaping the earth
for the purging of the unclean, for the
sweetening and conserving of the good.

Last night in the Anglican Cathedral I heard
a man preach, not toleration, but understand-
ing. For though he used not these words, yet
in the end they held all his meaning, even
though, as an orthodox churchman defending
the future of an orthodox Church, he knew it
not.

88 HOUND OF THE ROAD

Sometimes it is as necessary for a Church
to use a laboratory as for the chemist of the
world. For what, after all, is a laboratory but
a place of understandings? A place where,
out of changed appearances, out of the accre-
tions of ages, that which was first of the living
sap is re-drawn again?

So it may be that the blood of the martyrs
comes forth to us once more in the purple
robes and the scarlet gowns of those who seek
truth; and that the bare feet of the Apostles
and the Communities of poverty of the Saints
walk with those who give up all for the
spirit. Abroad, to-day, drawing the inde-
structible from that which was submerged,
these, the forever young in their dream, surely
shall again give youth to its best, and the
world come back to its conscience.

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of

the Church " The first kindling fire

was the lightning that flashed, man knew not
whence, and went, man knew not whither.
Like thought intuitional, father and mother of
faith, it came, none knew how. Yet some-
where, somehow, just as spiritual revelation
flings itself through a soul, it flung itself upon
a tree, and fire which lit the world and drove

IN THE BLOOD OF THE MARTYRS 89

the world, comforted and warmed the world,
became a thing of purposed being. From the
burning tree man took a splinter. In like man-
ner, holder of but a splinter of spiritual know-
ledge, came the first seer and giver of a newer
and a greater light.

From man's first tree-splinter came the fiery
cross, even that of the Highlands, the hearth-
fire of the first family, and the home. Where
there are no fires, there are no homes. Where
there is no fire of the spirit, there are no altars.
The fire of spirit means sacrifice. The Brother-
hoods, the Fraternities, are sacrificial — who
knows with what suffering and through what
pain ! Yet in the blood of the martyrs is the
seed of the Church

But in what, and where, is the Church? You
will find something of it where a man beats
on a drum at a street corner and faith lives on
the charity of pence poured in ; you will find it
where the mild face of Wesley left its benedic-
tion ; in the strung hearts of a fierce congrega-
tion chanting the praises of the Lord in the
wild rhythm of the metrical psalms; in a thou-
sand little conventicles whose naming holds in
truth but One Name ; in places where tall can-
dles burn, and the incense offered is part of an
uttered Word; where High Churchmen, and

90 HOUND OF THE ROAD

Low, pray in simple trust. But perhaps most
of all, you will find it in the hearts and lives
of those in the Communities of Poverty, in
whose tender hands of service you may stoop
and kiss the Wounded Feet. And here truly is
the blood of the martyrs the seed of the
Church.

CHAPTER III
ROADS OF REMEMBRANCE

THERE are some people for whom a road
never lived. To them it is nothing but
a dull dead place of ruts, upon an equally
dull dead earth. "Bad for cars!" they say;
and that ends their chapter and their know-
ledge. People of that kind have no conception of
how deep a love a man can have for that which
is his only house and land, and what a full
book and a friend it can be. They see nothing
in such, no matter what they tell. All they
ever know of the mighty arteries of traffic flung
over the great world is "Tar" .... "Maca-
dam" "Bumps" "Jolts" ; and their one

connection with these wonderways of earth is
a rubber tyre — that and no more. Yet what
finer friend can a man have than that which,
like a brother, takes him home? And as to
books! .... Give a man a road, and he has
a library which neither comes to an end nor
grows cheap and common.

I know roads. History lies written in them
for those who can read. There is a road which,

91

92 HOUND OF THE ROAD

old and straight, runs on through the bush be-
side Bungonia. One end of it leads to Mel-
bourne, the other rests in Sydney. Men made
that road in the darker years of this land. It
heard the swing of the lash, and the sighs of
the broken. It was cemented with the blood
and tears of men. The page is black. Let us
leave it.

Yet this we might icll : This one was once
the great eastern highway of Australia, made
when Australia had but one capital, Sydney,
and only a settlement where the great city of
Melbourne now stands. The intention at that
time was that the central town in Argyle
should be where to-day we have the kindly
little village of Bungonia. But man was dis-
possessed of his power of command by the
want of a river. For neither city nor stock was
there water on the plan, and none on the earth
claimed by the plan ; so that unofficial maker
of towns, the common man, settled the fate
which created Goulburn. The surveyed line
went unofficially on, and the town grew miles
away by the Mulwarree and the Wollondilly.
And to it there came not only the foot traveller
and the cantering hack, but cart and dray,

waggon and team and the Iron Horse

at the end. Yesterday I saw an aeroplanist

ROADS OF REMEMBRANCE 93

rise from his landing by the river, and, Road-
man of the Air, sail over the city.

They name the aeroplane as they name the
old bullock waggons. But what a difference
in the meaning! In the one it is the maker,
or the make. In the other, fancy, recollection,
and romance wrote out their signatures. The
Prairie Flower: ah, Rosalie, who sings you
now? The Jolly Boy, and probably its owner
was a Presbyterian; The Red Rose: with the
paint burned to a faded brick colour; The
Luck, and the luck went out when the pleuro
struck the bullocks, Juanita, Geranium, Casa-
bianca : how many Casabiancas have I seen !
White Rose : up to the hub in mud, with a
rough corduroy and levering poles under the
wheels to get her out. And scattered among
these were Elisabeth, Jane, and Susan, Eliza,
and Mary Ellen — homely names, homely peo-
ple, homely days — now all gone from the road.

And the names of the bullocks There

was one team I knew in which there were
Knox and Calvin; Knox a big ball-faced red,
and Calvin, compact, dour and dark. Polers
these; with Wesley and Cranmer in the mid-
dle, and Roman and Peter in the lead. Some
reader, some humorist, that teamster, surely!
And another team was Nelson and Wellington,

94 HOUND OF THE ROAD

Napoleon and Blucher, Washington and Corn-
wallis. Only for brevity of language the last
two were usually "Wash" and "Corney."

"Come up, Path- finder! Gee, Black-feet!"
.... Did you ever read Fenimore Cooper
when you were a boy? Did you ever stand,
legs apart, eyes blazing, and feel like Jove as
you watched Jupiter and Orion stumble
slathering in a bog?

Great Parkes is dead, and no one will ever
call either the off-side or the near-side leader
after him again, for the teams of his day are
gone. It seems rather a pity. But in memory
one still hears the far-off "clock" of the bow-
yokes, the chink of the bar-chains, and the
steady, plodding steps of Parkes and Robert-
son, Hay and Buchanan — I forget the rest, ex-
cept to remember that, in moments of affec-
tion, Buchanan was Davy. Davy .... Davy
.... Yes, and the next two were Affleck and
(Jack) Want. These were the team when
empty, with the "spares" straggling along be-
hind at their own pace. The seven-span team
was named right through, but not all names
remain in recollection. Yet every bullock
knew his own call-up, and his own stand, so
that he would horn away another who an-
swered or came usurping, and would sulk all

ROADS OF REMEMBRANCE 95

day if yoked away from his own place and
mate.

Among the roads which so many feet have
travelled there was that which Louisa Law-
son trod, the road to Grenfell all among the
mullock heaps, where the diggers looked upon
the few good women among them as only a
little less than angels, and stood by the other
poor kind with their fists even if they talked
about them with their tongues. And fancy
sees, to this day, the heavy red-fringed silken
sash (seven pounds in weight the good ones,
especially if the fringe were of silver), the
"white moles," the top-boots, the cabbage-tree
hat, string under chin and nose, of the men
who faced the wilderness. And not only the
wilderness, but the unknown ; not only the un-
known, but the supernatural. For in those
days men wore amulets; said prayers and
feared God; saw ghosts and believed in
"haunts"; regarded witchcraft as fact, and
hoped the devil would not get them in the dark
of night. I well remember a man who
carried a hare's foot — it kept away evil; and
another who had a caul, so that, as he travelled
the land, the sea would not get him. Strange
things these to the eyes of a child ! And some

96 HOUND OF THE ROAD

wore this and some wore that on arms or
neck, feeling protection and comfort in the
touch of the charm. A motley world to look
back upon, my brothers, yet it is only half a
full man's life away!

The road that took the mother out brought
the son back; the boy in whose quick mind the
bitterness of the woman's shadowed life leapt
up and caught the sun, and sweetened in the
light. Now the mother has gone the long road,
and the son grown grey with the years is gone.
.... He, too, travelled strange roads.

There was another road, which ran to the
Bland. It went through black belar and rot-
ten earth. Wheels sank on an apparently
sound crust, which broke through as the spewy
earth oozed up. The world was a whirl of
mosquitoes in that year of eighteen hundred
and seventy; maddened horses lost their hair
as the result of bites, and bounded like India-
rubber monsters in agony, or crept, sniffing
and starting, up to any camp-fire for the relief
of its trailing smoke.

At the end of that road stood the old house
of Morangorell and the Macgregors of the
open hand. There came Carlo Marina in his
red Garibaldian shirt and long boots; short,
stocky, and brown as his own Italy. There the

ROADS OF REMEMBRANCE 97

last of the hereditary Counts of Chefourieux
came as tutor to the boys, loved the daughter
of the house, and went, a wanderer over the
earth, because her father frowned. For in
those days daughters were fathers' property,
and fathers suffered no interference with their
notions of authority.

Carlo Marina is no more, the Ffrenches are
gone, Chefourieux died in exile, and the his-
toric chateau, one of the oldest in France, fell
to strangers. The Macgregors, the Caldwells,
the Pawseys, the Rosses, the Burritts, the
Rutherfords, the Regans, the McCallums, and
so many others of that day, are scattered like
leaves in the sere. But the road remains, and
with it the bright brave record of history. And
on still nights one can see it wind away, and
hear upon it the soft sound of passing shadowy
feet; old memories, old affections, long re-
grets.

Again, long ago there was another road, one
that led to Lambing Flat. The mullock heaps
again stand clear, with the white sun shining
on grey box, and on grass blown in waves by
light wrinds. The sickle-shaped seeds bowl
along in every movement of air, gather into
fluffy balls full of space, catch on the root of a
tree, on a heap of earth, on a clod, and then

98 HOUND OF THE ROAD

scatter and gather again. Soon earth will hold

them by the barbed arrow-point, This

road, too, ran in and out among the dry mul-
lock heaps, and then it stopped at a humpy.
The humpy was of bark — all bark, wall, roof,
door, and chimney. The chimney-gutter was
of bark, and, when it rained, the water ran
cheerfully out at both ends.

Inside the hut the floor was so clean that you
felt you had never seen the like of it before.
Earth, just earth, thrown in from the short
handled spade or the diggers' shovel ; damped,
trodden down, worn smooth with much mop-
ping and the soft hustle of feet. A table set
in the middle of the hut had its legs of pointed
saplings driven into the floor. Its top was of
bark, inner side up, rough side down. The
bark fireplace was pugged all round a foot
thick, to give safety from fire and to provide
a ledge for a few tins and cooking utensils to
stand on. Whitewash covered everything. In
the midst of its snow-like field the fire burned,
and a billy hung black against the white, as it
boiled for the tea. Sweet and clean was the
hut, with about it the oddness, in that place,
of an air of home.

On one of the round blocks which served as
seats, a fat woman sat. Her hair was black

ROADS OF REMEMBRANCE 99

and glossy ; her deep-set, narrow eyes gleamed
and glinted like a sloe in a thicket into
which the sun had just pointed a finger of
light. Though she was ponderous there was
no awkwardness, and her step was light upon
the floor. She might have been a duchess
in movement, and her speech was that of one
who had been taught. At a time when every
woman of pride and dignity wore a tiny black
silk or alpaca apron, this woman wore the
wide white covering apron of service.

"Why do you wear it?" she was asked.

"Because in it I remember the days when
I was young and what I once belonged to,"
she answered.

It was the badge and the memorial of the
trained; for she had belonged in service to a
house where the men wore cockades and silk
stockings, and where no maid might be seen
(except when sent for) even by the employing
household.

The fat woman sat on her block like a bil-
lowing and overflowing pincushion, her black
dress in folds about her like the habit of a
religieuse; and the other woman, who was my
mother, sat on the only chair the place pos-
sessed.

"Take it yourself," she had said.

100 HOUND OF THE ROAD

"The block best suits my weight," answered
the other. "I only keep the chair because I
like to know that I have one."

The two women looked at an album on the
fat woman's knee.

"That," she said, as she turned over, and
putting her finger on the portrait of a slender
young man, "That is Sir Roger Tichborne.
I was his nurse. His mother gave me a silver
candlestick for my wedding, and that photo-
graph when I was leaving to come to Aus-
tralia." Perhaps she said "daguerreotype,"
for it is long since that day and memory is not
always clear.

The years passed, and the fat woman in her
black dress went with them. The hut went,
and the red-shirted diggers, who not so long
before had risen en masse and with pick and
shovel had driven out the too encroaching and
industrious Chinese, went too. Lambing-Flat
became Young. The road cut deeper and
deeper into the earth under the wheeling
years

Half a life-time later, a woman came to Syd-
ney. She came to our house.

"Will you help me to right a wrong?" she
said.

And then she told her story, and it was one

ROADS OF REMEMBRANCE 101

which took memory back to a fat woman with
an album on her knee, and to a child who heard

strange things and wondered "She showed

me," said the later woman, "an album, and, as I
looked through it, when I came to one por-
trait in it, I heard a voice at my shoulder say,
'That is Sir Roger Tichborne!' I turned, but
there was no one there, and I thought it must
have been fancy. But the voice came again,
and I knew then what was before me "

The woman who had owned the album was
perhaps the only person in Australia who could
have told at a glance whether Arthur Orton
was Tichborne or not ; the only one who could
have said whether the poor soul in Callan Park
for long long years was Tichborne or not. And
as I write these lines, here, beside the last
road I shall take, the memory quickens of how
in those far-off days she had said, when asked
why she had not offered evidence for the trial,
"I had come down in the world. I did not like
to go back. I did not want them to know.
Besides, it was so far." To-day, only those
who remember the irregular sailings, the long
hard voyages, and the slow team track through
the bush and over the mountains to Sydney,
can guess how far.

More there was, but memory did not suf-

102 HOUND OF THE ROAD

ficiently take it up at the time; so it slipped
away and is gone, except for a nod which she
gave unobtrusivly toward a sombre silent
man, and a lowered whisper which told a whole
story: "He is good to rne; but he cannot write
his own name, and I have to read everything
to him."

In Sydney the claim for Creswell was twice
opened up and inquired into. But the
Tichborne case was dead, and a settled heir
reigned by order of a verdict and the law
of usage. The older road was closed; a new
one could not be opened up. There was even

no right-of-way Not in our time at

least. But in that other world, whither all go,
and where all lie equal, there shall be neither
righting nor wronging, for there all things
hurtful shall have end; even, it may be, re-
membrance itself.

Yesterday I laid down the pen with which I
wrote, sitting under the westering sun, and
looked out over the hills. The wind swept cold
across to Bungendore, and an inner voice said,
"Snow at Taralga or Crookwell, surely!" A
picture of the mighty Horn with its everlast-
ing snows, and of the iron slopes of Tierra
del Fuego came to mind. And, as I looked

ROADS OF REMEMBRANCE 103

abroad over the great expanse of plain toward
where the Gourock and the Cullarin rise, bleak
and blue in distance, I thought of how
Drake had taken the round sea-road of the
world in the Golden Hind, had laid up at
Punta Arenas in the mouth of Magellan's
Strait, and had left his name in remembrance
there; "of Cortez and 'all his men silent upon
a peak in Darien'; of Nunez Balboa struck
dumb at sight of the Pacific endlessly laving
the world; of Columbus, the bold Genoese,
and his little convoy, cockle-shells floating like
thistle-down on unknown seas, and boldly
seeking adventure; of Vasco di Gama, the
lion-hearted; of De Quiros and Torres —
Spaniard, Italian, and Portuguese. Ah ! and of
all the bold brave men of Devon with their
root of the ancient Celtic in them, and, by it,
blood-brothers of the venturing Latin !

Men said, in the discovery of Australia, that
the world was conquered, for the last sea
was measured and named, the mountains
broken down, the deserts become roads. The
crusades of adventure were over; the earth,
they said, was a shaken out sock, and there
was nothing new. Discovery had the world
netted up in boundaries, and had set corner
posts to that which had been unlimited. It

104 HOUND OF THE ROAD

was all marked in little squares on the map,
and daylight and dark- were as one in the
candle man carried in his lantern.

And as I sat and thought, seeing the pampa
in the plain and the plain as pampa, a slender
ruffle of dust broke up in the distance. As it
rose and fell, coming nearer, a horseman rode
up.

" 'Day," he said.

" 'Day," said I.

"Hawker is dead," he said.

Am I ashamed to say that my eyes knew
tears? First, like Balboa; first, like Drake;
first, like Columbus! Into the unknown sea
of the air he had gone, and had sighted more
than Darien could show, or Alp, or Andean
height, or frozen Horn!

Hawker is dead, the man who knew no
fear; dead, not as a sluggard in bed, but as
a King: flaming out of the heights into which
he carried his light as a star.

The old world was a world of land and sea ;
but the sun sets not on the splendour of the
new!

Hawker is dead That lonely sailor in

Atlantean airs, no light below to guide, no
land on which to rest. As a dove on the
waters he flew. Now he is dead. Young did

ROADS OF REMEMBRANCE 105

he go from us ; youth was his part. Now he is
dead ; Hawker the bird-man, first among those
who went daring the ocean! The sky heard
his wings, and the waves looked up at his
flight. Over the sea fell his shadow, gigantic
and strange. "What bird is this?" cried
Ocean. And the winds answered, "It is the
Antipodean. It is Hawker, the Australian!"
And now he is dead.

Fold the wing over him and let him lie ; but,
Mother Australia! not in a stranger land.
Bring him again to his home, to his place in
the South; there to lie warm in his own re-
membering earth Bring him again to

her breast, Hawker, her son who is dead.
Young he did go from us ; youth was his part :
now he is dead.*

Note. — This was written before the lamented
death of that world-pioneer, Sir Ross Smith, of
whom it is doubly true.

*Died "on flight," 1921.

CHAPTER IV

ON THE WAY TO BUNGENDORE

WHEN the rain comes down in torrents
and the roads are very wet, when the
mud clings to the boot-heel and the water
soaks through the soles, then do I think
of quiet kitchens with wide fire-places and an
ingle-nook on either side with a big log fire
between. I have stood in many such while
the kettle steamed, and I steamed, while time
ticked on in a silence which was a benediction,
and a busy housewife rolled floury scones on
a floury board. And I have wondered why it
is that the thought of a comely woman (and
always such a woman is comely), skirt turned
up in housewifely care, bare arms, floured
hands rolling and kneading the white and sup-
ple dough, sets a man's heart longing back, or
yearning wistfully forward.

Dreams of a hand on a loaf, a heart to love ;
bread and cheese and kisses : are these all of
a man's life? its crown and its completion?
Love and compassion, strength and protection,
patience and sympathy: eternity bred in a

106

ON THE WAY TO BUNGENDORE i07

race, futurity born of a child: link upon link,
chain upon chain: family, nation, and race:
and then the grave! Is this all?

Yesterday it rained; sweet, soft, refreshing
rain. I had a good hat well rammed down on my
head, and boots newly soled by my old friend
the Goulburn shoemaker. "Sure of the lea-
ther, John," said I when I saw them, "rain
won't get through?"

"If you give them a rub now and then with
that there dubbin I'm giving you, I'll guarantee
you'll get no water till it comes through the
holes!" said he. And I was sure it was true,
for John never lied.

As the lain can;e down I turned my face up
to it; the multitudinous needles of the clouds
struck and became tiny drops, oh, so keen and
fresh ! And the drops joined and became
beads, beads that ran down and touched ten-
derly as the tips of baby fingers on the
toughened skin of a man's weather-beaten
face. There was no wind, only an inde-
scribable quickness of the air, a smell of rain
on dust, of warm grass newly sprinkled and
drenched, of eucalyptus drips from aromatic
trees, and, above it all, the grey smell of the
old grey fence along the road.

108 HOUND OF THE ROAD

By the time I got to the landmark of the
Bungendore Road, the post that saved poor
Johnny Gilbert the bushranger from being
shot by one of the Faithfulls, the track ran
in gutters, and the first smartness of adven-
ture was over. I was no longer a king or a
gladiator facing combat in pride of certain
victory.

As I stepped out, I thought with some heavi-
ness of heart of the long stretch to a timbered
patch. And even then shelter would be pre-
carious, for barbed- wire and title-deeds fence
oil' the road and the man who loves the road
from the trees that God gave him. Still hope
sprang, for the rain that sent me under the
trees might keep the man of might, or his
hired henchman, indoors.

The first timber was too far off, and the
next too sparse. But I plodded on with a wist-
ful thought of the sheltering roof of the old
roadside Gibson House, but also with a shud-
der at the thought of the squalor of the floors,
the broken and cobwebbed windows, and the
mixed company, crawling and travelling, one
might meet there. No! Godsend as it was to
so many of the sad arm)1- of the road, give me,
instead, the lee-side of a tree, and a few
boughs leaned up to make a gunyah.

ON THE WAY TO BUNGENDORE 109

When I had found a camping place and
boiled me a pot of tea — for in a little dip ran
a thin stream which the rain had hardly mud-
died— when I had fixed my friendly old swag
in the one dry spot, so that I could sit com-
fortably on it and read and smoke, I took
stock of the horizon, and decided that no in-
truding overlord of broad lands would come
to bother me that day. On all the other days
of the week, or of the year, indeed, he might
come, and I would not care, for I should be
away!

Rest is God's blessing to sinful man, and
who but the Road-Men really know it? "God
bless the man who first invented sleep," says
Sancho Panza. Aye, sleep, too, is good. But
a book to read, a pipe and a fire-stick handy,
a tree for back, and quiet to the horizon, is
more than sleep. It is that kind of rest which
restores even the weary soul.

I have loved many books, ever since, as a
small struggling wanderer among long words,
I had stumbled, impelled by I knew not what,
through The Vision of Mirza. The charm of
style and the love of words still holds me,
though many long miles had to be stepped and
many years pass before I knew, in detail, what
it was that held, and why.

110 HOUND OF THE ROAD

A word is a precious possession. To those
who know how to hold it to the mind's eye
and turn it to the light, long vistas lie in it,
and fields of space and colour. Artifice is
hidden in a word, and the man who puts it to
new meanings is yet another "Potter," shaping
great things to simple uses or simple
things to new and strange adventurings.
Sometimes, indeed, he is the maker of a shrine
to which later years bring grateful offerings.

In a word lies history, the long vision of
man's generations, the green savannahs of his
peace, the red fields of his strife. In a word
lies all that a man knows of wife and child,
except what he finds when his own lips kiss
or his own hand holds.

Wife! .... who said it? Father! .... Out
of the darkness, out of the world, ah, even
out of Eternity and the eternal, comes that
word! Over what seas of loneliness, what
strange stretches of imagination, what tremors
of hope and fear! "O, Absalom, my son,
my son." .... "While the child was yet
alive, I fasted and wept .... but now he

is dead " Are these words dead things,

or are they the ever-living voice of life ? How
many generations of men are gone, yet these
still remain to rend the human heart! "I

ON THE WAY TO BUNGENDORE 111

shall go to him, but he shall not return to
me." Oh, immortal hope ; eternal grief ! Shall
one man, one life, say all that this cry, uttered
on some day, in some hour, by all the fathers
of the world, has come to say: has said?
One man? Eternities of men. One genera-
tion? All generations. One people? . . . .

Eloi, Eloi, lamma sabachthani Even

there! Even there!

CHAPTER V.
IN THE STREET OF PETER AND PAUL.

now,1' said Renee de Gys, as he drew
Sword Straight from its loop, lifted it in
salute, and kissed the cross of the hilt with his
bearded lips, ' since we go to fight our last fight
I commend my soul to the Virgin."

On the eastern horizon lies the lightest
cloud, straight as a sword and clean; silver
it floats in the ether. As but now I watched
it in the translucence of unmarked heaven,
from some far sea of memory, unheralded as
that distant flake of wonder, came floating up
a seeming picture of the words of de Gys.
And with it rose another page, in which the
letters stand out as though alive; words at
whose coming the mind, as though in the un-
latching of long locked springs, widens in sud-
den stretch, and sees might, majesty, and
power, world-wide, age-long, one and indi-
visible.

"The Mother of all churches is very wise;
to her, East and West, saint and sinner, are
one: always her ministers wait, loins girded,
112

IN THE STREET OF PETER AND PAUL 113

for the call. Two nuns watched out the night
with Melie; and when sunrise dimmed the tall
candles about her curtained bed, Phu-nan
crept in on noiseless feet to announce that
Mother Church was prepared. Brown men,
converts of Mother Church, carried away the
husk of Melie; and the Jesuits said masses
for her soul in their cool chapel among the
odorous Malayan trees. Red frangipane and
redder hibiscus decked the white headstone,
whereon brown fingers carved the legend 'Me-
lie ; wife of Commandant Renee de Gys. Pray
for her/ Verily the Mother of all Churches,
who forgave that white untruth, is very
wise."*

Time has beaten upon her; and she
abides. Empires and kings have tried to stay
her, and it is they who are no more; their
kingdoms are dust, their very dynasties are
gone. Invention, imagination, convergences,
divergences, all the armies of historied years
and of moving chance, have flung on her the
debris and the dust of their passing; and still
she stands, yesterday, to-day, and forever the
same : the Mother of all Churches

The silver of the little sword-like cloud is
turned to rose: westward the sun is going
*The Seeds of Enchantment, by Gilbert Frankau.

114 HOUND OF THE ROAD

down the gates of heaven in chariots of fire.
In the south, towers and pinnacles, dove-white
and grey, are splashed with pink; gossamer
veils and tongues of flame fly upward to the
zenith; wonder upon wonder, passing every
moment. Yet, greatest wonder of all is the
invisible movement of change, imperceptibly
altering form and hue at every moment.

Faint is the thin blue mist on the range be-
yond Governor's Hill, faint on the Kookbun-
doons. Softly one tender, delicate reach of far
reflected light falls on the cross of the Cathe-
dral Passes the last pale gold that lin-
gered low on the edge of a cloud. Then in the
east, shining, serene, more beautiful than Vir-
gins, comes the full round of the moon. Like
a shield of silver-gold, she hangs above the
hills, space for her stair. How many times
has the world turned, since this wonder was
drawn, like another Eve, from the side of
earth, her Adam?

O Moon in the heavens ! how have the years
gone since first thou didst look down out of
thy peace upon the quiet of this new untrod-
den world ! Strange were the cries that pierced,
but did not break the rhythm of the
stillness; stranger still were its silences.

IN THE STREET OF PETER AND PAUL 115

.... Who shall sing the song of the moon,
the song of the Lady of Night? Sun, moon,

and1 stars Oh ! Man-child of Earth,

were all these made but for one life? The
limitless, scattered abroad from the hand of
the Maker just for an hour of thy sight?

In their little cities of quiet lie the dead;
and still for the sleepers there the same moon
sails on that lighted them from childhood;
that rose above the wild and saw it changed;
that saw the passing of the shadowy tribes.
And the mind is stirred to think that in this
land of hoof and fleece, of sheaf and stook,
there was a time almost within the memory
of living man, when to this, the hornless and
hoofless land, came for the first time the ox,
the horse, the sheep, and the first grain of
corn! Think of the clattering and clicking
hoofs of to-day, the illimitable stock roads, the
furrowed lands; and then of that marvel, of
the hour that heard the first bleat of a lamb !

We have uncovered the earth. Yet there
was a time when, on these naked hills of
Goulburn, of the Crookwell and Taralga, the
forest stood dense, and only bare feet trod
through it, feet that knew not even a moc-
casin. How mysterious these endless bare feet,
one after one, one after one, and the quick

116 HOUND OF THE ROAD

eye and the sudden hand ! Families, hunting
grounds, tribes! Now they are gone, and
gone with them the bush that was their world.

So small is an axe, so slender the hand of
man; yet the edge of the axe has eaten that
which once knew no breach save when a wind-
fire or the lightning struck and raged. This
land of Australia was a whole wide continent,
and in all its length and breadth there was not
even one saw or one auger, one brick, or one
shaped stone upon another. And yet the
world was very old. Babylon had fallen, and
Tadmor in the Wilderness. The silks of Tyre,
the ships of Sidon, had come and gone, and
had left their trail of romance and their elu-
sive hues and scents in men's memories.
Egypt, Greece, and Rome had written their
centuries with pride, Europe had swollen to
might, London had. held men's eyes. Indus-
try, invention, discovery, art: the world had
teemed and hummed: had broken and spilled
tools; yet, over the round of a hemisphere,
this land stood apart. Within the folded doors
of the virginal, she knew not the world. Then,
in a night, in a day, the world held her.

Almost within the reach of one life the un-
changing moon had looked down on the pri-
meval, filling its hollows with light and its bush

IN THE STREET OF PETER AND PAUL 117

with shadows; had heard the thudding flight
of the kangaroo, and the light step of the lit-
tle bandicoot. At the wane she had seen
dawn and heard the kookaburra wake and
fly. In waxing she had lightened the east,
and made radiant the darkening night. In
waxing and waning, she had heard the voice
of the first white child in this land, had seen
the first hearth-fire lit in the age-long hearth-
less.

Out of that first cry, and out of that first
fire, rose Sydney and Melbourne, Adelaide,
Brisbane, and Perth ; the long copper and steel
and iron lines that run to the north and south,
to the east and the west; the ships that sail,
the dead in France, the crosses of Gallipoli ; ah,
and even all the little roads of Goulburn which
I so much love. In sequence to that first voice
and that first love came love and hate, friend-
ship and war, bigotry and faith ; and compas-
sion, chief of the daughters of God.

. . . .Purple are the hills, purple the im-
minent west, rosy is the eastward arc in its
aurora. Silver is the gold moon, moving ves-
tal towards the zenith; Angelus is long since
rung, Benediction said ; quiet lies upon the
hills, night upon the city.

118 HOUND OF THE ROAD

"And God shall wipe away all tears from

their eyes " Strange that I should hear

that to-day of all days: this day of death re-
peated twenty times! Was it plague that
struck the City of the Wanderers, that ancient
by-way of many peoples? Was it a curse?
I do not know. I only know that men died,
that women and children wept and died; and
that those who were left went in and out and
about, and wet the lips of the dying, and com-
forted them with such words as they could.
And, in that band of helpers, there were those
who were glad when a crucifix meant words
long lost to memory, or hard for unaccus-
tomed lips to say.

The symbol is the word "The Word

was made Flesh and dwelt among us "

The Mother of all Churches is very wise. She
who gave words in many and visible forms is
very wise. When the stiffened tongue can no
longer speak, and the dulled ears no longer
hear, in her compassionate hand she holds the
cross before the glazing eyes: last sight, last
look of the dying. Ah ! When the closed
eyes see no more, lay it upon the lips, upon
the lids, that last tremendous Word; on the
heart, and in the folded hands. So shall re-
membrance live, and comfort follow even in
death.

IN THE STREET OF PETER AND PAUL 119

He died in other arms than mine,

the child of my heart ; and the words they read
over him sounded in my ears like thunder.
Yet in the end peace came, for verily the
Mother of all Churches is very wise, and I
dream of a day when that which was dead
shall live, and that which was dry run sap.

"What are these, that are arrayed in white
robes, and whence came they? These are
they which came out of great tribulation, and
have washed their robes, and made them white

in the blood of the Lamb They shall

hunger no more, neither thirst any more, nei-
ther shall the sun light on them, nor any heat.
And God shall wipe away all tears from their
eyes "

Oh, the bleak hill-side of the heart! Yet
even here, Beloved, shall that which was dead
bud again in the blossom of His eternal hope.

CHAPTER VI.
INTERLUDE OF THE HUT

"T T T HAT would you be doing with a
\ \ verse like that?" says he.

"I'd be leaving it," says I.

"You wouldn't alter it?" says he.

"How could you?" says I.

And so he left it as it was, for he was a wise
man who was able to feel reasons not always
given, and I could give no explanation why
I thought as I did, at least, not then, for the
knowledge had not yet come lettered-out to
me.

In literature, there are people who have a
mana for the smooth. They know only detail.
The great, the broad, and the deep escape
them, for they are preoccupied with ripples
and do not see the tempests and horizons of
ocean. Such people have no compelling com-
pound under-rhythms. Sometime they are
tuneless. When they write, they do it like a
man polishing bits of brass or the outside of a
horn. The shine is all on the surface of the
brass, and the horn is dumb.
120

121

Words are the bugles of thought, the horn
of feeling. Some put the mouthpiece to their
lips, and the echoes wind away, away, and
away, and come back again and sing in the
ear. Others blow a harsh note of strange
melody that haunts like an unspoken word
or the unexplained look from the eyes of a
soul. And some bring a note like one crying
from a far distance and over many barriers; a
mixed note, strange and constraining. After
these came the mass, the polishers of brass.

And when that old Road-fellow, who at
times makes me an Irishman through the
tongue (and by that same token, of the pen !)
as I am one through the Ancient Ones and
the heart: when that fellow asked me would
.1 be altering the boy's verse, I said "No!"
For who can blow another man's note, or sing
another man's song? Not I, for one; for the
song is of the soul, or it is no song at all.

But many a one goes through long dumb
years, because the burden of polish is laid
upon him who would sing and in his singing
find all his medium. "It is to be my polish,
not yours!" says the conventional old world.
And if an editor, or a critic, makes that world,
why there you are ! And, so, many never sing
at all, because of the blight of a kitchen stan-

122 HOUND OF THE ROAD

dard "Why didn't this one, or that one,

take to the road, and write in his early years?
Isn't the road always open?" they ask. It
isn't always that the road is seen for look-
ing at the stars. And if you put down the
song and the talk of the stars, how will you
get the singer on the road? You break the
wing in its early flight; and no broken and
fallen wing ever lifts as it did of old. By the
time it is strong again the fetters of time are
upon it, and the long battle and struggle of the
world

Interlude : When I am old I shall build
me a hermitage out in the wild. And there
will shine the sun, and fall the rain, and the
wind blow; and I shall be one with them.
And there will come the birds, and the bright-
eyed furry things, and the spider spin his
gossamer web, and in the dew of morning the
thrush wake me with his song. There will the
stars light me to rest; there, under the moon,
will the shadows lie black on the path, and the
silver of her beams shine on the trees and on
the grass.

1 shall make me a fire of wood, and in it
the leaves shall blaze woodland scents, the
twigs crackle in the frost, and the sparks fly up

INTERLUDE OF THE HUT 123

like the thoughts of a man. The embers will
glow like gold, and, falling apart, burn to a
clean white ash. The floor shall be of earth,
the tree give me a roof, the spring furnish my
drink. I will make me a broom of the brush
of the dogwood tree, tied round with a string
and a stick thrust through for a handle. And
the path to the door shall be clean, and the
yard shall be clean, and the floor of the hut.
There shall be a shelf for a plate and a nail
for the pannikin ; and above the fire I will put
a cross-bar of wood, and a chain and three
hooks. There will be a pot and an oven, and
the pot shall have three legs and the oven a
lid; and the camp-oven bread shall be sweeter
than honey, and the meat of the pot make a
man strong.

I shall build me a hermitage out in the wild,
and be friends with my world of the wild and
the free.

And when I am fain I will send out a word,
and one shall come from the east, and one from
the west; and out of the north shall another
come, and one from the south; the dusk shall
see one come, and the star another;
and none \vill be too early, and none too late.
We will look up at the stars and talk, and
watch the moon and talk, hearing the whis-

124 HOUND OF THE ROAD

pers of earth rise about us on the air, from
the leaves, from the growing grass and the
little flowers. The mountain will show us his
mass at moonlight, the silver of the morning
star shall be ours, and the light of dawn and
the stillness of its hour. And there shall each
one speak his soul in the fullness of peace.

I shall make me a hermitage out in the wild,
and be friends with my kind. The scent of
the bark of the roof and the walls shall be
about us, and the peg of the door shall hang
down by its string. For there will be no one
to fear either in the coming of friends or in
the going of strangers. Warm shall be the
hut in the winter, and cool in the summer;
and in spring I shall watch the first thrust of
the grass as it breaks through the soil — Green-
mantle coming up to spread his cloak upon the
earth. Green are his spears and his flag; his
army shall march to the east and the west;
the south and the north shall know him. The
tents of the grass shall cover the earth, green
for the growing and glad in the going. The
mushroom shall lift its pavilion out the dew,
the buttercup come in a budding of brown
and open its cup as a shield. Gold is the cup,
and gold are the plates of the shield, as, like
an army that stands in the grass, the flowrets

INTERLUDE OF THE HUT 125

sway like waves in the wind, and move like
a ripple of thought in the mind, multiple mo-
tion in one.

There in the grass will the orchid stand like
a tall sentinel, throat to the sun, the sundew
find her a place in the shade, and the box blos-
som call to the bee. And I shall be loosed
from the street and the kerb, and from the lock
on the door

I shall make me a hermitage out where the
voice of the innocent living shall strike on the
silences there. I shall make me a hermitage
out in the wild.

CHAPTER VII
AKAROON! AKAROON!

O BROTHERS of the Road, where are you
now? Once we were a fair brave com-
pany. Now, when memory stirs, it is as though
one entered a room where people sat and talked
old things above the newly dead. For of all
who set out together only so few (and the
dead) remain. For change inevitable and un-
conquerable took some, and forgetfulness
others. The years demanded their toll, and
the need of locking a door with a key, after
candles out and babes to bed, gathered in
most.

Sometimes I pass by warm and lighted win-
dows, a wayfarer in an outside world, and,
looking in where the light streams forth, I
wonder who sits by the fire, whose son puz-
zles out his sums at the table, whose little girl
helps mother gather up the tea-things. She
steps so lightly, that dear girl ; so innocent are
her eyes, so tender is her look. And one who
trod the roads with me gave her and her
sweetness to the world. Almost she seems
126

AKAROON! AKAROON! 127

mine as I look; almost my hand seems on the
curly head of the boy over whom she leans.

.... Mine, too; for I have loved all my
human kind, and the fellowship of the heart is
very wide.

One of that beloved olden company lives
and looks over the sea at Vaucluse; one sits,
grown grey with his University, in a Pro-
fessor's chair; another flung his banner to the
heavens and the Star of Australasia sings his
name. (Akaroon! Akaroon!* my land of the
Echoing Rock!) So they go on; so they set-
tled, one here, one there, and the roads know
them no more. And there are the others, they
who lie in the fields of France, and on the
slopes of Gallipoli; in Belgium, in Africa, in
the salt plains of the Patagonian and the Ar-
gentine Pampa; on the slopes of sea- washed
Waverley and in the quiet of one small peace-
ful acre in New Zealand. All friends; all
Brothers of the Road; all once fellow-
travellers on long strange ways, answering the
call of youth, shouting defiance to the warn-
ings of the fearful. Adventure called, and his
glow-worm light, now seen, and now unseen,
drew like a beacon in the distance. Hardship
fenced the way, loss lay at the end, but who

*An aboriginal name.

128 HOUND OF THE ROAD

cared? For only the onward march and the
surmounted mattered. If death lay in the dis-
tance, well, let be, for death ends everything,
even the worst, and the slowest death of all is
not to have lived. For the rest, with sun for
warmth and a tree for shade; with rain, sleet,
and hail for good ; with the heart for strength,
the hand for another, one after one took the
road; one after one they met and paused,
spoke, and the goodly company was formed.

And was that, too, but chance?

May be; but something in the night speaks,
and my heart awakes and cries, "Ah! was it
not something deeper; something more!"

CHAPTER VIII
ON THE TRACK TO BRAIDWOOD

AS up and down the land peregrine I go,
there are many who, because they hear
of me as a reader of books, come to me with
a line or two scrawled on paper to ask, "Is it
any good ?" hoping that promise may be found
in it. And, whatever the entanglement or
however poor the effort, I unravel the intent,
never minding the trouble, for jewels are often
found in unexpected places.

But the strangest thing of all was a woman's
pincushion, a hussif, and a worn glove, in an
empty hut on one of the old half-forgotten
tracks to Braidwood. On the pincushion was
fastened a piece of folded note-paper.

For a long time I stood and looked at the
little group of things, a group though scat-
tered, wondering if I had stumbled into a
house of the living instead of into the de-
serted, and whether I should not turn and tip-
toe out, seeing that I made neither tracks nor
noise in leaving. I seemed to feel a pre-
sence. Yet there was no one there. The ash

129

130 HOUND OF THE ROAD

in the fireplace was dead and matted under
past raindrops down the wide chimney; dust
lay on the table, and even on the bit of folded
paper; the door swung half-open, half-shut;
and where the wind had blown, it had brought
in a strickle or two of grass and a few dead
leaves.

Strange it seemed to me to see these things
there, in a man's hut; for a man's hut it was,
with its sapling bunk at one end and its rough
table under the window. The window was
bark with the usual boot-leather hinges grown
brittle with long disuse. The cross-piece and
hooks over the dead ashes were festooned in
cobweb, and cobweb reached right across the
back of the chimney. The shelf against the
wall was empty, not even a disused tin being
left. The only movable thing in the whole
place was a man's broken green-hide boot-
lace hanging on one of the two pegs in the
side wall ; that, and an old moth-eaten coat on
the corner peg at the foot of the bunk.

I slipped off my swag, for conjecture could
get nowhere, and, stepping up to the table, put
out my hand to take up the things there. But
it seemed again as if that unseen something
hovered, and I drew back, feeling as though
I had purposed an intrusion. I looked at the

ON THE TRACK TO BRAIDWOOD 131

articles so typical of a woman, and, turning,
left them where they lay. When I had cleared
out the ashes and lit a fire — for dusk was fall-
ing and a blaze was cheery in the quiet of that
strange place — I set the door wide, opened the
window, and, taking my billy, went out to look
for water. I came on it under a little brink
at the back of the hut. There had once been
a clear track to it, but it had been so long un-
used that the grass on either side almost met
over it. Yet the hollow of the path itself was
still firm and smooth. In the gully I found
a small rocky pool, out of which ran a thin
stream; and as I dipped to it young frogs
sprang in every direction. One small soft
thing leapt and smacked me on the cheek, and
then fell to the grass and the water. As I
turned to the hut, a star shone clear in my
face, very still, very bright. Above me the
whole sky seemed luminously translucent; but
under the trees it was shadowy dusk and
strange. The feeling of damp air rising from
dank earth shunned by all the warm things
of life lay upon it, and the chill of evening
struck upward into the fiesh.

When I came round the corner of the hut
the light of the fire shone out in long quiver-
ing rays, and the heart warmed in the sudden

132 HOUND OF THE ROAD

homeliness of flame. Friendly as the tongue
of a dog, of a dog all one's own in service and
affection, it spoke prophecy of future comfort
as it evoked from the unconscious storage of
memory reminders of past fellowship. For,
most of all things, is fire the friend of all way-
farers. There is a something in it that is not
entirely due to warmth and service. It is the
one anchored thing in the world of the moving
and the movable. A man does not walk with
it, he sits by it. And it is the sitting man who
dreams and remembers.

When I came inside the door, the first thing
I did was to look at the table. The things
were still there. No ghost had stolen in and
taken them, no hand had changed them from
their order. As the billy boiled, and I busied
myself with preparation for night, opening up
the dilly bags for the tea and sugar and the
bread and meat for supper, I glanced up at
the articles from time to time, thinking and
wondering what they meant in that empty and
desolate place. More empty and more deso-
late, indeed, the place seemed for their being
there.

Expectation lies in a man's heart, and he is
a fool who too soon breaks in upon it. So I
made tea, and then, lighting the candle-end I

ON THE TRACK TO BRAIDWOOD 133

am never without, I gently disengaged the
paper from its pin in the pincushion and came
back to the fire. I lit my pipe, put out the
careful candle, and unfolded the little slip. It
was written on in a woman's hand, and, as I
opened it out, something beside me seemed to
sigh. I looked round, but there was no one
there. Only the firelight flickered on the
floor.

Stories are written in the unwritten, and the
halting and unfinished fragment I held in my
hand I give as I found it, leaving everyone to
make his own explanation out of it, and read
his own meaning into it according to his capa-
city and liking. For interpretation of the ob-
scure lies with the intimate springs of self, and
not with the teller.

"He stood like life on the open stair,

Strength in his poise and pride in his air.

Ah, when it comes that I must die,

Let this great son of woman

Lend me the strength of his strong right-hand

As I go down to the nether strand;

Let him hold me the lamp of his own deep faith,

That in the dark I fear no scaith.

Long, long ago I saw him stand

Light on his head, in his eyes.

I was a woman, he was a man :

134 HOUND OF THE ROAD

Yet still, as ever since life began,

A woman's pride is the son she bore.

I ivas a woman, but he was more"

That was all; disjointed, unfinished, and
broken like that. Yet I swear to you that,
as I read it, I felt as if an invisible presence
stood by me, and one that could and would
have explained had explanation been possible.
I folded up the slip in the same creases as I
had found it in, and putting the pin through
the hole again set it back in its place. But I
could not thus put away thought. So after an
hour I went out and looked up at the stars,
marvelling at all the worlds they are, and of
how they look down on man who peered at and
about them, and who knew no more of them at
the end of a thousand years, or of ten thousand
years, than he did at the beginning. And I
thought of the millions of eyes that had been
lifted up, age after age, at these unchanging
stars, eyes as multitudinous as the sands of
earth's ocean, as the particles of the Milky
Way. And wonder grew in my heart as to
where they all were, and why they had existed
at all ! How could they come and then go out
like snuffed candles if there was nothing behind
them? Even a candle needs a maker; and how
much more man, who is the candle-maker !

ON THE TRACK TO BRAIDWOOD 135

As I go down to the nether strand ....
If a man go down to death, and all his life make
no cry upward, does he drown in death like an
animal? And does he who asks for light and
walks by light, go up to light? Is it like that in
death, which conies to all ? Do we, even in the
soul's last long cry, decide the end? A man
cuts off his body's life in suicide. Is it possible
that there is also suicide of the soul, as irre-
trievable, as blind, as foolishly wilful, and as
contrary to all law of continuity ?

Let him hold me the lamp of his own deep faith
That in the dark I fear no scaith ....

Let the stars make answer and the spirit of
man reply.

I came indoors and sat down again, and, as
the firelight leapt up and flickered, I saw that I
still had a piece of paper in my fingers. I
opened my hand and looked at it folded there.
It should have seemed quite strange, but some-
how I felt like one in a world where
there were no mysteries and nothing out of the
way. And as I looked, automatically I un-
folded the sheet and read what was written
there.

136 HOUND OF THE ROAD

"Friends! And the sky without a cloud.

Friends! And from the heart

Fallen the day's low care!

Hark! In the trees a thrush,

With only his voice to break on the hush

Of the sweet and the scented air —

Hush of the heart, hush of the soul,

With beauty itself for the part and the whole!

"Ah! As came the even,

Wistfully at even,

All in the sunset steven,

Wistfully turned we then;

Wistfully turned we home,

Facing the road of men,

Skirting a mottle of loam,

Skirting the planted field

Rich in its mellowing yield,

Riding up where orchard keeps

Clung about their rocky steeps,

And down by the river of sedges

Where clear the water dredges,

And on where upland and lowland lay

Gold at the end of a golden day!

" . . . . Sister, sister, sister mine,

Hold once more my hand!

Was that the sky I saw? Hush!

Comes once again the song of the thrush,

And the road winds on, and on, and on

ON THE TRACK TO BRAIDWOOD 137

.... Nay! it is gone!

And I am alone in the dark,

Like a lost boat out in the sea

With never a light nor a mark

To salvage me.

"Yet I remember!

What was it that I remember?

.... Was it the lonely grave

On the little round hill,

So quiet and still?

Ah! could I think of it, quiet and still,

Where no bolt falls and no winds rave,

Where only the young spring grasses wave,

And buttercups bend and hover

As, ever, the wind runs over and over!

Ah! was it yesterday? ....

Would that I might remember!

"Are the candles lit, sister, my sister?

Light them, then, and sit with me here.

This was her ribbon .... My dear! my dear!

And this zvas the rose whose scented breath

Lives in my heart and knows not death;

And this was the glove she zvore;

And this .... Put them away!

"Never for me her tenderness,

Never for me her love;

Never for me her eyes' caress,

Never for me, my dove!

138 HOUND OF THE ROAD

Something there was that held between —

What was it, O my sister?

Hands, as it were, that held unseen,

A voice that called ere love could speak,

Love too sad to follow and seek —

Ah! had I spoken!

.... Never a word and never a token

(Are the candles lit?)

But only the dark and the night

To sit in alone and remember it!"

What did it mean? Was it the lonely cry of
the soul to its own? Long, long I sat and
looked at that in my hand, and it seemed as
though I heard in it something that echoed
backward and ever backward there in my
heart. All night I sat thinking and dreaming,
remembering the living things that are never
dead. When I looked up it was day, the glove
and its companion things lay on the table, the
fire was out, and I had only my empty
hands. .

CHAPTER IX
BUNGONIA AND THE LOOK-DOWN

NOT always do we walk, we of the road.
Sometimes we ride. And in riding there
was once a day we took at the Look Down, that
mighty chasm where the gathering waters
of the Shoalhaven cut their way toward the es-
tuary and the sea. The drive is one of quiet
and delicate change; a winding road, where
the earth shows its variety in turpentines and
wild cherry, wattles and giant mallee, swamp
oak, white gum, white box, yellow box, iron
bark, even stringy bark, and Black-jack with
his spear. Only Black-jack is a grass and
not a tree, for all his name. On the way out,
like a picture in a quiet dream, Bungonia lies
against the hillside, a tiny hackle of houses
shining every day in the setting sun. The
stars come out on still nights and look down
upon it, fairy lanterns of distance that brighten
when the frost stiffens the grass and the twigs
crackle in the fire. "It is frosty to-night," say
the fathers, as the sparks snap and fly. "The
fairies are about," say the children, and wish

139

140 HOUND OF THE ROAD

on the sparks in their upward flight as their
elders do on falling stars.

Month by month the children see the moon
cut low on the horizon her newly-shaped
sickle of the sky, hang like a silver lamp in the
mid-heavens as she grows, and burn golden
over the hill as she rises at the full. And every
hour of their lives they know the little church
that stands above the cluster of dwellings, per-
haps the oldest Catholic church out of Sydney.

Life spins its \veb of daily tasks, and spills
its treasure of duties done about the neigh-
bourly hearth-stones, where peace looks out of
the windows and rests on the quiet door-steps.
Within-doors love works out its destiny; on
the hill-side the dead lie, sacredly held in the
secret places of the earth.

Once, in the years long gone, I went the
road with those I loved. Four of us; and a
child. Scarcely life whispered, it was all so
beautiful. No harsh sound, no jar broke on
the air to mar its sweetness. The way wound
in and out in light and shade. And only those
who know and fear impenetrable and unre-
sponding darkness can realize how beautiful
the light! Ferns filled the hollow, birds flit-
ted from bush to bush. The reed-warbler
stirred in the thick of the dip, the torn-tit in

BUNGONIA AND THE LOOK-DOWN 141

the stunted brush on its banks; the robin
showed the rose of his breast, and the wagtail
piped as he swung on a gate-post; a flock of
parrots rose up at our side and held with us
in parallel flight, a shawl of whirring colour,
making speed as they went to wheel across
our course. On a silver box a peeweet
clashed his wings as he called with plangent
cries to his mate, and his mate answered him,
crying and running through the grass. At a
turn of the road a grey cuckoo-shrike threaded
the air in flight, loping off in the distance from
tree to tree, and a strayed apostle-bird balanced
and ran, and flirted and ran again, one of the
twelve. As we paused to open the gates mag-
pies strutted and eyed us, bugling as they
came; and once a sage old kookaburra, look-
ing wisdom, sat watching us from the end of
a broken limb. Golden-green was the wattle,
Spring's offering to an earth which found it a
button-hole. One hill-side was thick with it,
one clearing a paradise of its loveliness. O
Life, "and shall not loveliness be loved for
ever?" For what have we in the world love-
lier than this green tree of our native land !

In a little clearing where the road turned off
and the metal became that friendly thing to
tired hoof and foot, a bush track, we saw open-

142 HOUND OF THE ROAD

air age in the field; an old man, healthy and
hale, occupying himself in burning off. Miles
of ring-barked timber stood stark and naked
on the farther side of the road; a whole forest
which had been laid waste that wool might
grow and cattle feed. The years pass, but the
trees come not again. In the ages to follow,
unless man plants to renew what he has de-
stroyed, there will come a day when, among
stunted shrubs and scant rose-gardens, people
will talk of the trees that once held this land
much as the owner of sheep may talk to-day of
the megatherium and the dinosaur, of things
gigantic when measured by those which took
their place. We watched the old man as we
passed. He had the narrow hips of the bush
that walks little ; and, as he stooped, the rider's
outward bend at the knee. The smoke of his
fires rose very light, very blue, in the crisp
air; the flame burned yellow in the sunlight,
and the smell of the consuming wood came as
the incense of the out-of-doors, the long-loved,
and, to us, of this dear land, the homely and
familiar.

And we? What were we that day? Chil-
dren : children who took life by the hands,
laughing at recollection as we found a dog-
leg fence, grey with weather and age, that

BUNGONIA AND THE LOOK-DOWN 143

zigzagged up a hill ; who called, each one first,
at sight of a brush fence and a mellow fallow ;
who counted the lengths of a chock-and-log
and the falling panels of an outward-pitched,
dingo-proof, stub fence which marked (so we
said) an ancient fold. And here, in this place,
romance looked up at us with faded eyes. For
in this spot a house had once stood, and some-
one, in the wild hour of the bush, had made
a home.

Here woman and child had lived, and a man
come at even. All day he had worked, this
pioneer man, his axe sounding from dim dis-
tance. The maul had rung on the wedges;
the crash of a tree, softened to a sigh in the
wide silence, had answered with its life the
rip of the cross-cut saw. In the house, silent
and alone, the woman had baked and swept;
had washed and made, had mended and
patched. Blinds to the window she had none,
for who but the trees could see? Besides, in
that far time of the pioneers, material was
scarce, and long-cared-for clothing was all that
one might ask. But the bed was white in a
valence and frill, and a patchwork of dimity
made a quilt for it. There was no sewing
machine then ; there was only the woman's
hand and a needle. Sometimes she had

144 HOUND OF THE ROAD

dreamed, that woman there, and the child not
yet had lain at peace because of her dream.

The wild briar grows where the hearth-stone
stood, and a thicket of fleur-de-lis shows its
flag at the edge of what was once a path. Per-
haps the woman who planted that had brought
with her, from her mother's garden, bachelor's
buttons and parsley seed, and a root of thyme ;

perhaps a slip of geranium "Water

them geraniums," wrote Henry Lawson, and
in so doing told the tragic patience, and the
longing pride and love of beauty of the woman
of the bush. Ah! in remembrance let us say
it again: "And shall not loveliness be loved
forever?" For here the loveliness was life
which trod its round and bore its burden and
then went out uncrowned and unknown. But
the garden — one such that I knew had mar-
joram, and a border of rosemary on one side
and lavender on the other. Pinks grew in that
garden, and an oleander burned in the midst.
In November the tall white lilies stood like an-
gels in the night to the child that knelt peer-
ing out in wonder, unable to sleep for the
scents, for the moonlight on the flowers, for
the flowers themselves, for beauty ineffable in
a white world of night. There the hundred-
leaved rose grew, and the scented verbena,

BUNGONIA AND THE LOOK-DOWN 145

the blue periwinkle and the rich. balm. And
there, too, time came with ruthless and unre-
pentant hand and swept the board, even as
here, in this place, on the way to the end of
the road that runs by Bungonia.

As we turned from this acre of the past the
eye caught the ridging of the grass. "Black
soil! .... Potatoes! . . . ." we said, in the
sudden release of knowledge awakened out of
the years. The hearth-stone itself was but one
ridge among others. Where was the house-
hold? Gone like a thought on the wind, no
man knows whither. Yet, it may be that in
some far land a man dreams great dreams and
does fine things because a woman of the dust
dreamed here.

.... The blue sky arches overhead, and
under it a battalion of soldier birds chase a
crow with cries like tiny bayonets of sound
piercing the air, diminished to points as the
distance grows. And as I lie here looking
back over the years, almost I ask, was it a
dream that we were all there together? Was
it a dream? .... Is life, itself, but a dream?
A fancy blown from the lips of chance, and
scattered, who knows how, on the unreasoning
winds of a cosmic void?

Ah, Love, if this were no more than a dream,
yet were it sweet.

CHAPTER X

OLD FENCES

« T Y OUND of the Road, my brother, fel-
low wayfarer even as I, what cheer?"

"The lone road and the heart to follow; the
steep rise and the will to climb ; the One-Tree
Hill and the eyes to see."

"The One-Tree Hill?"

"Aye, brother ; and beside the tree grow two
shrubs, one on either side. And of the two
one is dry and stunted, and one is living
green."

Cheerily we go, foot-slogging the way, tak-
ing what comes, yet always within call of the
vision beyond the hour and the slow feet. The
driven wheel sees less than we, for all its
speed. It reaches the end more quickly, but
the end is all that it has. It does not know the
way it goes, and all that it sees of the road is
a blur. Slow as we are, we see the heart of
Nature even in a decaying fence. For though
man made the fence, it is still of her empire.
She puts out her hand and marks it as
sun and rain turn it to grey, as lichen clings

116

OLD FENCES 147

to it and moss beards it. The red orange of
the fungoid spreads its stain, but it is her
mark. Decay sets in, but it is her law

In one panel of a fence, in one rail or post,
there is the painting of a man's life-time of
light and shade. Beautiful greys and grey-
greens, drabs and browns, such as no brush
has set to canvas. If ever, too old and broken
for the way, I have to come to be the thrall
of a house, I shall carry with me, even in
dreams of remembrance, the grey fences of the
road. Old and faithful, silent watchers that
guard what man gives them to guard, they
held the land for man when neither spark, nor
wheel, nor wire came to his aid. Beautiful as
hands, the crest of a thousand wavelets of
human effort in the sea of man's deeds and
possessions, who can see them and forget?

An old fence is a garden; a garden where
sun and time plant their flowers. An old rail is
as beautiful as any weathered boat. There
will be weathered boats to paint when there
will be no split-fences. Yet the split-fence dif-
ferentiates the new lands from the old. Would
that I were a painter! .... I look back
through the years and see the frail hands of
a child on a rail, marking its texture, "loving"
its feel, drinking in with the eager eyes, with

148 HOUND OF THE ROAD

the poor thin hands, everything it unfolded of
form, of light and colour. The child's heart
ached in its fullness of wonder and beauty,
seeing all things as the created living, and not
as the mechanical dead, or the lifeless that
had never lived.

.... Slowly the child died, for no one en-
tered into its world. God knew what He
knew when He gave Adam a mate. Death is
the solitary; in fellowship is life. From the
high tower of its own sensibility the child
looked out, but no little cloud of dust rose
even afar off on the road that edged the plain ;
no Sister Anne answered out of the silence.
But sometimes, in wonderful hours, the old
Road-fellow feels as though a presence burned
near, and the shadowy child walks, com-
panion-like, along the way Sometimes,

in wounded hours, he hears its tears.

CHAPTER XI
O FRIEND OF THE LIGHT

"Happy he, on the weary sea,

Who hath fled the tempest, and won the haven,

Happy whoso hath risen free

Above his striving "

"What else is wisdom? What of man's endeavour,
Of God's high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait,
To hold a hand uplifted over hate;
And shall not loveliness be loved for ever?"

Euripides (Gilbert Murray's translation).

WHEN the flesh wearies, as in its own
strength weary it sometimes must,
when the road is no more as it was for the
once quick foot and the adventuring heart,
then I shall turn back to my books and the
remembrance of a high look on the face of a
friend. And there I shall find a leadership of
thought, so risen in glory above the common-
place, that its light will shine upon that, too,
till it also is illuminated within and about,
and the soul sees that there is nothing com-
mon which God hath made. Even now,
as in the ante-room of the shadow I wait my

149

150 HOUND OF THE ROAD

sentence, I look up from suffering and loss and
thank God for Gilbert Murray; he who
has given to the Greek, reaching out pagan
hands to touch the still Invisible Hem, some-
thing no one not of the Old Church ever could
have given. And I find that of all beautiful
and wonderful passages written in human
philosophy none lifts the heart higher than
this : "To stand from fear set free : to breathe
and wait: to hold a hand uplifted over hate."
The whole conquest of life, even of death, is
in these words. In them small and selfish
things fall away; trust stands; false hope lies
slain in certainty. Not in the purchased, but
in the attained, man reaches up and lays his
hands upon the cross, pagan or Christian, and
looks up by faith sustained ! To the stoic this
great translator adds that indefinable some-
thing which only the son of his ancient Church
ever gives to the world; that sense, cleansed
of all hardness, of the ineffable beauty of the
spiritual. "What of man's endeavour, of God's
high grace, so lovely and so great? .... And
shall not loveliness be loved for ever?" The
wonder of these words never lessens, their
freshness never dies. And from this one's
mind turns to Tennyson, forever shorn for
want of what this church, had he been her

O FRIEND OF THE LIGHT 151

child, could have given him, and which he
most attains when he comes nearest to her.
For in Morte d'Arthur the beauty is not all of
the flesh, nor the passion wholly of the world :
"If thou shouldst never see my face again pray

for my soul " Ah ! and thinking of this,

do you remember that noble passage, the un-
forgettable lament in Mallory? For me, I
should like to have that with me even in the
grave.

" . . . . And the verdict?"

"Rest."

How shall I rest who have loved the road?
Can the wanderer who has watched the stars
sit among women and chatter embroideries, or
listen to the eloquence of contempt of the idle
for those less fortunate than themselves?

Everywhere, says Augustine, the greater joy
is ushered in by the greater pain. It may
be so; but the greater wisdom is not always
ushered in by the greater folly, as in Augus-
tine's own case! And not to everyone is it
given to stand, as he did with his mother at
the end of the day, and say, "She and I were
discoursing there together, alone very sweetly,
forgetting these things which are behind, and
reaching forth unto those things which are be-

152 HOUND OF THE ROAD

fore" .... If the long roads are all to lie be-
hind would I forget them? No more than
Augustine, even in his most longing upward
look, forgot the sins that lashed him to his
saintship.

.... Rest! .... Rest! .... And at the
end of rest, what? I have been so often under
the shadow that, if it comes suddenly nearer,
it comes as a thing long known. Perhaps it is
the shadow of a wing, and when it comes
very close, it may be that I shall see only the
edge of silver, and the everlasting light that
shines upon it. For, though you know me as
one, there be many brothers of the road, and
some of them are brothers to me. Of these,
one showed me the road of the Printing Press ;
one showed me the road that went down to
Jericho, and there I saw my fellow-man fallen
among thieves; and a third, he took me by
the road of Books. But the fourth, he walks
ahead. And when it is very dark, he waits,
and there is a lantern in his hand. Sometimes
as he goes he says, even as Augustine, "O
amare! O ire! O sibi perire! 0 ad Deum
pervenire!" Oh, and have I not said it too,
even as he?

"Oh to love! Oh, to go! Oh, to die to self!
Oh, through all things else to come to God!"

O FRIEND OF THE LIGHT 153

If, through the shadow, we come at last to
that, shall we who suffer repine, be fearful or
faint because of the hardship of the way? Ah!
in such case is not the way but a part of the
reward, a proving of the metal? And shall the
proud metal grieve?

We meet on the roads, all sorts of men ; and
we judge each other as we go. They judge
me, I judge them. We talk as we meet and
pass, and the Romany brings his store even
as night brings its stars. I found this when
once, on a long track, I fell in with Henry
Lawson. Afterwards I sent him a piece of
verse which somehow went astray, so that he
never received it

Sometimes in the wandering — but it is rare
— there comes one great as a ship. And his
head is filled with a well stowed cargo and
primed to the very verge of life's content. He
rides the waves of life in sanity and in
strength, purposeful, strong, and enduring.
Soemtimes such a one has a full sail of ima-
gination set on the masts of aspiration, and
all his being is threaded through with the sen-
sitiveness of intuition. Then indeed do leader-
less men find a leader, and the uncomforted
know comfort. For within such souls lie all
the fiery engines of strength, of passion, and

154 HOUND OF THE ROAD

of power. Yet their gift to the world is an
infinite patience of compassion, of mercy and
understanding. Rich in thought, yet quiet,
swift in response to a call, stable as a rock in
the hardest sea, the weak cling to them, the
beaten take courage from them, the suffering
tell their wounds. Only the small-minded are
afraid or scornful, as all such are of those who
are faithful and filled with power. For how
can the lesser, having neither faith nor power,
know in a friendly way these things in those
who have them? The touchstone of self is the
realization of others.

When old problems are renewed, or through
changing circumstances awake clamorous to
life again, the ancient mines of the forgotten
open their sealed mouths, and out of the
mullock-heaps of memory the gold wash
shines in the pan. So, out of Spain and a
book read in years long past, I see in a present
reminder, and with the strangeness of new
vision, the gold of a story missed in the heat
of the eager days.

The story is of a rich man who, in great
learning and much reading of books, had satis-
fied his heart, till, measuring his gain, he found
that the fuller he became of years and wisdom

O FRIEND OF THE LIGHT 155

the less he found the peace of God in the
things of the world and its knowledge. And
so he took the road, even as we, and coming
upon a beggar who lay broken and full of
sores upon the steps of a shrine, he said to
him, "Good-day, brother!"

And the beggar answered, "I never had a
bad day."

"But," said the traveller, looking pitifully
upon the man's sores, "may God send you bet-
ter fortune."

"I make no complaint of fortune!" replied
the other.

"How can that be," asked the man of learn-
ing, "seeing that you are covered with the
wounds of hunger, and broken by the hand
of disease?"

"God sends all things, even these," said the
poor man. "When the sun shone it warmed
me, and I rejoiced; and when the storm came,
I rejoiced in that too; for all things are of
His hand, even these sores. And shall I who
took the good repine for the evil?"

''Who then are you, who from the dust
speak high things?" asked the first man, for
he marvelled greatly at such patience and
piety under suffering.

"I am a king," the beggar said, speaking

156 HOUND OF THE ROAD

very softly, and as though he saw beyond the
visible the things of the invisible.

"And your kingdom?"

"Is in my dominion over my soul, and in
the conquest over the waywardness of my own
will. And in my kingdom there is peace and
none rebel."

"And," asked the other, "how did you make
this conquest, which so many strive to attain
and so few achieve?"

"I prayed to God and found it."

"When did you find it?"

"When I became His."

Then went the learned man on his way
strangely moved, to ask, as indeed he might,
why faith gave such power when knowledge
failed to hold. And I, often I followed after
that man in thought, and wondered if, as he
went, or as he returned to his home, in a sud-
den light of understanding did he too find voice
and cry, even as these others: "Oh, to love!
Oh, to go! Oh, to die to self! Oh, to pass
through all things else and come to God!"
And, also, of these two the question would
arise, Which of these is son of the bondmaid,
and which of the free woman? For one was
poorer than Lazarus, and one was richer than
Dives.

O FRIEND OF THE LIGHT 157

Of the multitude of other tellings that stir
thought and waken the heart to love and
faith, there is another brave story, let the
world put it aside as it may.

You will have read how Robert the Bruce,
when he was dying, made the Douglas swear
that he would carry his heart to the Holy
Land for burial, and of how "the good Sir
James" turned aside to fight to the death and
for his soul's sake against those enemies of
Christendom, the Moors in Granada. And you
will also have read how, when he met the
Saracens, he lifted up the casket containing
the king's heart, and, flinging it into the thick
of the fight, cried, "Press forward, brave heart,
as thou wast ever wont to do, and Douglas
will follow thee or die!" And die he did, de-
fending the honour of his lord.

Apocryphal ? Not all ; for loveliness, in spite
of the times is loved for ever; and what can
be national and characteristic is never wholly
apocryphal; nor is that which teaches no-
bility. For the things of the ideal live. The
dream is born of the spirit, the spirit was
before the flesh, and shall live after it. There-
fore for this will a man follow the Word, even
though his reason ask, "Is this true?" and
"Can such things be?" For, as Augustine

158 HOUND OF THE ROAD

says, the heart has a reason and a knowledge
of its own which go before the things of the
fixed hour and the moment of experience.
It is the mind that counts time, not the heart.
To the heart a day is as a thousand years and
a thousand years as a day, and it alone can
leap the barriers of change and see the immu-
table in the changing.

So, let the world criticize as it may, as long
as men dream great things, the heart of Bruce
will call on such to follow, and faithfulness
and daring lie in a word.

What else is Wisdom? What of Man's endeavour,
Or God's high grace, so lovely and so great?
To stand from fear set free, to breathe and wait;

To hold a hand uplifted over hate

And shall not loveliness be loved forever? ....

"What are these wounds in Thy hands?"
they asked of One who was wounded. And
sadly and sorrowfully the answer came, "These
are the wounds wherewith I was wounded in
the house of My friends." And do these words
not also draw? O amare! O ire! O sibi
perire! O ad Deum pervenire! Oh, unto these
wounds! unto these very wounds!

159

// thou shouldst never see my face again
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by

prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy

voice

Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what were men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of

prayer. . . .

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