Willis George Emerson - "The Smoky God"

Alice Turner Curtis - "Yankee Girl at Fort Sumter"

Ronald Reagan - "State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan"

Thomas Hardy - "Wessex Poems and Other Verses"

Such is Life

J >> Joseph Furphy >> Such is Life




Gravely impressed. For this recordless land--this land of our lawful
solicitude and imperative responsibility--is exempt from many a bane
of territorial rather than racial impress. She is committed to no usages
of petrified injustice; she is clogged by no fealty to shadowy idols,
enshrined by Ignorance, and upheld by misplaced homage alone; she is cursed
by no memories of fanaticism and persecution; she is innocent of hereditary
national jealousy, and free from the envy of sister states.

Then think how immeasurably higher are the possibilities of a Future
than the memories of any Past since history began. By comparison, the Past,
though glozed beyond all semblance of truth, is a clinging heritage
of canonised ignorance, brutality and baseness; a drag rather than a stimulus.
And as day by day, year by year, our own fluid Present congeals
into a fixed Past, we shall do well to take heed that, in time to come,
our own memory may not be justly held accursed. For though history
is a thing that never repeats itself--since no two historical propositions
are alike--one perennial truth holds good, namely, that every social hardship
or injustice may be traced back to the linked sins of aggression
and submission, remote or proximate in point of time. And I, for one,
will never believe the trail of the serpent to be so indelible
that barefaced incongruity must dog the footsteps of civilisation.

Dan O'Connell's ten-by-five paddock lay end-on to my route;
his hut being about midway down the line of fence. On striking the corner
of the paddock, I went through a gate, and was closing and securing it
behind Bunyip and Pup, when I became aware of a stout-built, blackbearded man
on a fat bay horse, approaching along the inside of the fence.

"Rory?" said I inquiringly.

"Well-to-be-shure! A ken har'ly crarit it, Tammas!" exclaimed the evergreen,
grasping my proffered hand, while his face became transformed with delight.

"You're so much changed," said I--"so manly and sunburnt, and bearded
like the patriarchs of old--that I did n't know you when I brought that wire.
But I wonder how you failed to recognise me, considering that
you heard my name."

"Och, man dear! A thought ye wur farmin' in Victoria," he replied.
"An' Collins is a purty common name, so it is; an' A did n't hear
yer Chris'n name at all at all. But ye'll stap wi' me the night,
an' we'll hev a graat cronia about oul' times."

"That's just what I was looking forward to, Rory. Which way
are you going now?"

"No matther, Tammas. A'll turn back wi' ye, an' we'll git home
a brave while afore sundown."

So we rode slowly side by side along the narrow clearing which extended
in endless perspective down the line of fence. After giving Rory a sketch
of the vicissitudes and disasters which had imparted an element of variety
to the thirteen preceding years of my life, I yielded myself to the lulling
influence of his own history during the same period. As you might expect,
he glanced lightly over all points of real interest, and dwelt interminably
on the statistics of the station--such as the percentage of lambs
for each year since the stock was put on; the happily decreasing loss
by dingoes; the average clip per head, and all manner of circumscribed
pastoral shop.

I reined our conversation round to the future prospects and possibilities
of the region wherein his lot was cast, and tried to steer it along that line.
But he merely took the country as he found it, and left things at that.
It had never occurred to him that a physical revolution was already
in progress; that the introduction of sheep meant the ultimate extirpation
of all trees and scrubs, except the inedible pine; and that the perpetual
trampling of those sharp little hoofs would in time caulk the spongy,
absorbent surface; so that these fluffy, scrub-clad expanses would become
a country of rich and spacious plains, variegated by lakes and forests,
and probably enjoying a fairly equable rainfall.

I have reason to remember that I quoted Sturt's account of the Old Man Plain
as a desert solitude of the most hopeless and forbidding character.
But, as I pointed out, settlement had crept over that inhospitable tract,
and the Old Man Plain had become a pastoral paradise, with a possible future
which no man could conjecture. Then I was going on to cite instances,
within my own knowledge and memory, of permanent lakes formed
in Northern Victoria, and a climate altered for the better, by mere settlement
of a soil antecedently dessicated and disintegrated by idle exposure
to the seasons. But I had brought round the subject of exploration;
and again Rory amazed me by the extent and accuracy of his information.

Glancing from Sturt to Eyre, he firmly, yet temperately, held that
the expedition carried out by this explorer along the shores of
the Great Australian Bight was the ablest achievement of its kind on record;
and he forthwith proceeded to substantiate his contention by a consecutive
account of the difficulties met and surmounted on that journey. Also
he expatiated with some severity on the slightness of public information
with respect to Eyre's exploit.

He listened with kindly toleration whilst I adverted to the excellent work
of more recent explorers, whose discoveries had made the Transcontinental
telegraph line a feasible undertaking. But his discursive mind ricochetted
off to the laying of the Transatlantic cable, in '65; and he dwelt on
that epoch-marking work with such minuteness of detail, and such confident
mastery of names, dates, and so forth, that I half-resented--not
his disconcerting fund of information, but his modest reticence on other
subjects of interest. It is a morally upsetting thing, for instance,
to discover that the unassuming Londoner, to whom you have been somewhat
loosely explaining the pedigrees of the British Peerage, has spent most
of his life as a clerk in the Heralds' College.

But I noticed a growing uneasiness in Rory's manner, despite his efforts
towards a free-and-easy cordiality. At last he said deprecatingly:

"We're about a mile aff the house now, Tammas. A must go roun' be a tank
thonder, an' that manes lavin' ye yer lone. Jist go sthraight on an'
ye'll come till the horse-paddock fence, wi' a wee gate in the corner, an'
the house furnent ye. An' ye might tell hurself A'll be home atoast sundown."

He shook up his horse, and dived through the scrub at an easy trot,
whilst I went on down the fence. Before I had gone three-quarters of a mile,
my attention was arrested by the peculiar apple-green hue of a tall,
healthy-looking pine, standing about a hundred and fifty yards from the fence.
Knowing that this abnormal deviation in colour, if not forthwith inquired into,
would harass me exceedingly in after years, I turned aside to inspect the tree.
It was worth the trouble. The pine had been dead for years, but every
leafless twig, right up to its spiry summit, was re-clothed by the dense
foliage of a giant woodbine, which embraced the trunk with three clean stems,
each as thick as your arm. No moralist worthy of the name could fail to find
a comprehensive allegory in the tree; but I had scarcely turned away from it
before my meditations were disturbed--

Ten or fifteen yards distant, under the cool shade of a large,
low growing wilga, I observed a man reclining at ease. A tall, athletic man,
apparently, with a billy and water-bag beside him, and nothing more
to wish for. When I caught sight of him, he was in the act of settling himself
more comfortably, and adjusting his wide-brimmed hat over his face.

My first impulse was to hail him with a friendly greeting, but a scruple
of punctilio made me pause. The clearing of Rory's horse-paddock was visible
here and there through gaps in the scrub; even the hut was in sight
from my own point of view; the sun was still a couple of hours above
the horizon; and the repose of the wilga shade was more to be desired
than the activity of the wood-heap. To everything there is a time
and a season; and the tactical moment for weary approach to a dwelling
is just when fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, and all the air
a solemn stillness holds. So, after a moment's hesitation, my instinctive
sense of bush etiquette caused me to tum stealthily away, and seek
the wicket gate which afforded ingress to Rory's horse-paddock.
But I want you to notice that this decision was preceded by a poise of option
between two alternatives. Now mark what followed, for, like Falstaff's story,
it is worth the marking.

[Each undertaking, great or small, of our lives has one controlling
alternative, and no more. To illustrate this from the play of Hamlet:
You will notice that, up to a certain point of time, the Prince governs
his own destiny--at least, as far as the Ghost's commission is concerned,
and this covers the whole drama. He is master and umpire of his circumstances,
so that when two or more lines of action, or a line of action and a line
of inaction, appear equally efficacious, he can select the one which appears
to be of least resistance. But subsequent to that point of time,
he is no longer the arbiter of his own situation, but rather the puppet
of circumstances. There are no more divergent roads; if he desires to leave
the one he has chosen, he must break blindly through a hedge
of moral antagonisms. His alternatives have become so lopsided
that practically there is only one course open. The initial exercise
of judgment was not merely an antecedent to later developments of the plot;
it was a Rubicon-crossing, which has committed the hero to a system
of interlaced contingencies; and the tendency of this system bears him away,
half-conscious of his own impotence, to where the rest is silence.
The turning-point is where Hamlet engages the Players to enact
the Murder of Gonzago.

A major-alternative may create and enclose all the secondary alternatives
of after life. A minor-alternative may exhaust itself in one minute,
or less, leaving its indelible, though imperceptible, scar on the experimenter,
and, through him, on the world in which he lives. The major-alternative
is the Shakespearian "tide in the affairs of men," often recognised,
though not formulated. In any case, each alternative brings into immediate
play a flash of Free-will, pure and simple, which instantly gives place--
as far as that particular section of life is concerned--to the dominion
of what we call Destiny. The two should never be confounded. "Who can control
his fate?" asks the ruined Othello. No one, indeed. But every one controls
his option, chooses his alternative. Othello himself had
independently evolved the decision which fixed his fate, recognising it
as such an alternative. Thus:--

Put out the light, and then--Put out the light?
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me;--but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is the Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have plucked thy rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again;
It needs must wither.

Also he perceives that it is a major-alternative which confronts him;
and he contrasts this with the supposititious minor-alternative
of extinguishing the lamp. But how often do we accept a major-alternative,
whilst innocently oblivious to its gravity!

In Macbeth, the alternatives are very obvious. The interest of the play
centres on the poise of incentive between action and non-action,
and the absolute free-will of election. But that election once made,
we see--and the hero himself acknowledges--a practical inevitableness
in all succeeding atrocities which mark his career as king.

Such momentous alternatives are simply the voluntary rough-hewing
of our own ends. Whether there's a Divinity that afterwards shapes them,
is a question which each inquirer may decide for himself. Say, however,
that this postulated Divinity consists of the Universal Mind, and that
the Universal Mind comprises the aggregate Human Intelligence,
co-operating with some Moral Centre beyond. And that the spontaneous sway
of this Influence is toward harmony--toward the smoothing of obstacles,
the healing of wounds. In the axiom that "Nature reverts to the norm,"
there is a recognition of this restorative tendency; and the religious aspect
of the same truth is expressed in the proverb that "God is Love."
For the grass will grow where Attila's horse has trod, while that objectionable
Hun himself is represented by a barrow-load of useful fertiliser.
But say that this always comes about by law of Cause (which is Human Free-will)
and Effect (which is Destiny)--never by sporadic intervention.
Yet a certain scar, tracing its origin to an antecedent alternative,
will remain as the signet of that limitation under which the Divinity works--
the limitation, namely, of Destiny, or the fixed issue of present effect
from foregone cause; such cause having been perpetually directed
and re-directed by recurring operation of individual Free-will, exercised,
independently, by those emanations from the Moral Centre which, by courtesy,
we call reasonable beings.

Vague? Yes. Well, put it in parable form. A young man has reached
an absolute poise of incentive. He tosses a shekel. "Head--I go and see life;
tail--I stay at home. Head it is." The alternative is accepted; whereupon
Destiny puts in her spoke, bringing such vicissitudes as are inevitable
on the initial option. In due time, another alternative presents itself,
and the poise of incentive recurs. The Prodigal spits on a chip,
and tosses it. "Wet--I crawl back home; dry--I see it out. Wet it is."
So he goes, to meet the ring, and the robe, and the fatted calf. His latter
alternative has taken him home; and a felicitous option on the old man's part
has given him a welcome. But the earlier alternative is following him up,
for the farm is gone! The old man himself cannot undo the effect
of the foregone choice.

Or put it in allegorical form. The misty expanse of Futurity is radiated
with divergent lines of rigid steel; and along one of these lines,
with diminishing carbon and sighing exhaust, you travel at schedule speed.
At each junction, you switch right or left, and on you go still, up or down
the way of your own choosing. But there is no stopping or turning back;
and until you have passed the current section there is no divergence,
except by voluntary catastrophe. Another junction flashes into sight,
and again your choice is made; negligently enough, perhaps, but still
with a view to what you consider the greatest good, present or prospective.
One line may lead through the Slough of Despond, and the other across
the Delectable Mountains, but you don't know whether the section
will prove rough or smooth, or whether it ends in a junction or a terminus,
till the cloven mists of the Future melt into a manifest Present.
We know what we are, but we know not what we shall be.

Often the shunting seems a mere trifle; but, in reality, the switch
is that wizard-wand which brings into evidence such corollaries of life
as felicity or misery, peace or tribulation, honour or ignominy, found on
the permanent way. For others, remember, as well as for ourselves. No one
except the anchorite lives to himself; and he is merely a person who evades
his responsibilities.

Here and there you find a curious complication of lines. From a junction
in front, there stretches out into the mist a single line and a double line;
and meantime, along a track converging toward your own, there spins
a bright little loco., in holiday trim, dazzling you with her radiant
head-lights, and commanding your admiration by her 'tractive power.
Quick! Choose! Single line to the next junction, or double line
to the terminus? A major-alternative, my boy! "Double line!" you say.
I thought so. Now you'll soon have a long train of empty I's to pull up
the gradients; and while you snort and bark under a heavy draught,
your disgusted consort will occasionally stimulate you with a "flying-kick";
and when this comes to pass, say Pompey told you so. To change the metaphor:
Instead of remaining a self-sufficient lord of creation, whose house
is thatched when his hat is on, you have become one of a Committee
of Ways and Means--a committee of two, with power to add to your number.
Dan O'Connell, for instance, had negotiated this alternative, and,
in the opinion of the barracks, had made his election in a remiss
and casual way.

And as with the individual, so with the community. Men, thinking and acting
in mass, do not (according to the accepted meaning of the phrase) follow
the line of least resistance. The myriad-headed monster adopts the alternative
which appears to promise such a line, but Its previsions are more often wrong
than right; and, in such cases, the irresistible momentum of the Destiny
called into being by Its short-sighted choice drives It helplessly along
a line of the greatest conceivable resistance. Is n't history a mere record
of blundering option, followed by iron servitude to the irremediable suffering
thereby entailed? Applied to the flying alternative, the "least resistance"
theory is gratuitously sound; beyond that, it is misleading. However,
all this must be taken as referring back to my own apparently insignificant
decision not to disturb the masterly inactivity of that sundowner
under the wilga. Mere afterthoughts, introduced here by reason
of their bearing on this simple chronicle.]

As a matter of fact, I approached Rory's neat, two-roomed hut speculating
as to why he had purposely left me to feel my own way. I soon formed
a good rough guess. A neatly-dressed child, in a vast, white sun-bonnet,
ran toward me as I came in sight, but presently paused, and returned
at the same pace. On reaching the door I was met by a stern-looking woman of
thirty-odd, to whom I introduced myself as an old friend of Mr. O'Halloran's.

"Deed he hes plenty o' frien's," replied the woman drily. "Are ye gunta
stap the night?"

"Well, Mr. O'Halloran was kind enough to proffer his hospitality,"
I replied, pulling the pack-saddle off Bunyip. "By the way, I'm to tell you
that he'll be home presently."

"Nat a fear but he'll be home at mail-time. An' a purty house he's got
fur till ax a sthranger intil."

"Now, Mrs. O'Halloran, it's the loveliest situation I've seen within
a hundred miles," I replied, as I set Cleopatra at liberty. "And the way
that the place is kept reflects the very highest credit upon yourself."
Moreover, both compliments were as true as they were frank.

"Dacent enough for them that's niver been used till betther. There's a dale
in how a body's rairt."

"True, Mrs. O'Halloran," I sighed. "I'm sure you must feel it. But,
my word! you can grow the right sort of children here! How old is
the little girl?" My custom is to ask a mother the age of her child,
and then express incredulity.

"Oul'er nor she's good. She was five on the thurteenth iv last month."

"No, but seriously, Mrs. O'Halloran?"

"A'm always sayrious about telling the thruth." And with this retort courteous
the impervious woman retired into her house, while I seated myself
on the bucket stool against the wall, and proceeded to fill my pipe.

"We got six goats--pure Angoras," remarked the little girl, approaching me
with instinctive courtesy. "We keep them for milkin'; an' Daddy shears them
ivery year."

"I noticed them coming along," I replied. "They're beautiful goats.
And I see you've got some horses too."

"Yis; three. We bought wan o' them chape, because he hed a sore back,
fram a shearer, an' it's nat hailed up yit. Daddy rides the other wans.
E-e-e! can't my Daddy ride! An' he ken grow melons, an' he ken put up shelves,
an' he knows iverything!"

"Yes; your Daddy's a good man. I knew him long, long ago, when there was
no you. What's your name, dear?"

"Mary."

"She's got no name," remarked the grim voice from the interior of the house.
And the mild, apologetic glance of the child in my face completed
a mental appraisement of Rory's family relations.

Half an hour passed pleasantly enough in this kind of conversation;
then Rory came in sight at the wicket gate where I had entered. Mary forgot
my existence in a moment, and raced toward him, opening a conversation
at the top of her voice while he was still a quarter of a mile distant.
When they met, he dismounted, and, placing her astride on the saddle,
continued his way with the expression of a man whose cup of happiness
is wastefully running over.

I had leisure to observe the child critically as she sat bareheaded
beside Rory at the tea-table, glancing from time to time at me for the tribute
of admiration due to each remark made by that nonpareil of men.

She was not only a strikingly beautiful child, but the stamp of child
that expands into a beautiful woman. In spite of her half-Anglican lineage
and Antipodean birth, there was something almost amusing in the strong
racial index of her pure Irish face. The black hair and eye-brows were there,
with eyes of indescribable blue; the full, shapely lips, and that delicate
contour of chin which specially marks the highest type of a race which is
not only non-Celtic but non-Aryan.

It is not the Celtic element that makes the Irish people a bundle
of inconsistencies--clannish, yet disjunctive; ardent, yet unstable;
faithful, yet perfidious; exceeding loveable for its own impulsive love,
yet a broken reed to lean upon. It is not the Celt who has made Irish history
an unexampled record of patience and insubordination, of devotion
and treachery. The Celt, though fiery, is shrewd, sensible, and practical.
It has been truly said that Western Britain is more Celtic than
Eastern Ireland. But the whole Anglo-Celtic mixture is a thing of yesterday.

Before the eagle of the Tenth Legion was planted on the shore of Cantium--
before the first Phoenician ship stowed tin at the Cassiterides--the Celt
had inhabited the British Islands long enough to branch into distinct
sub-races, and to rise from paloeolithic savagery to the use of metals,
the domestication of animals, and the observance of elaborate religious rites.
Yet, relatively, this antique race is of last week only. For, away beyond
the Celt, paloeontology finds an earlier Brito-Irish people,
of different origin and physical characteristics. And there is little doubt
that, forced westward by Celtic invaders, of more virile type, and more capable
of organisation, that immemorial race is represented by the true Irish
of to-day. The black hair, associated with deep-blue eyes and a skin
of extreme whiteness, found abundantly in Ireland, and amongst the offspring
of Irish emigrants, are, in all probability, tokens of descent from
this appallingly ancient people. The type appears occasionally in the
Basque provinces, and on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, but nowhere else.
Few civilised races inhabit the land where the fossil relics of their own
lineal ancestors mark the furthest point of human occupancy; yet it would seem
to be so with the true Irish. In what other way can this anomalous variety
of the human race be accounted for? Ay, and beyond the earliest era noted
by ethnography, this original Brito-Irish race must have differentiated itself
from the unknown archetype, and, by mere genealogical succession,
must have fixed its characteristics so tenaciously as to persist through
the random admixture of conquests and colonisations during countless
generations. "God is eternal," says a fine French apothegm,
"but man is very old."

And very new. Mary O'Halloran was perfect Young-Australian. To describe her
from after-knowledge--she was a very creature of the phenomena which had
environed her own dawning intelligence. She was a child of the wilderness,
a dryad among her kindred trees. The long-descended poetry of her nature
made the bush vocal with pure gladness of life; endowed each tree
with sympathy, respondent to her own fellowship. She had noticed
the dusky aspect of the ironwood; the volumed cumuli of rich olive-green,
crowning the lordly currajong; the darker shade of the wilga's
massy foliage-cataract; the clearer tint of the tapering pine;
the clean-spotted column of the leopard tree, creamy white on slate,
from base to topmost twig. She pitied the unlovely belar, when the wind sighed
through its coarse, scanty, grey-green tresses; and she loved to contemplate
the silvery plumage of the two drooping myalls which, because of their rarity
here, had been allowed to remain in the horse-paddock. For the last two
or three springs of her vivacious existence, she had watched the deepening
crimson of the quondong, amidst its thick contexture of Nile-green leaves;
she had marked the unfolding bloom of the scrub, in its many-hued beauty;
she had revelled in the audacious black-and-scarlet glory of the desert pea.
She knew the dwelling-place of every loved companion; and, by necessity,
she had her own names for them all--since her explorations were carried out
on Rory's shoulders, or on his saddle, and technicalities never troubled him.
To her it was a new world, and she saw that it was good. All those impressions
which endear the memory of early scenes to the careworn heart were hers
in their vivid present, intensified by the strong ideality of her nature,
and undisturbed by other companionship, save that of her father.

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