The Labour talk lacked local picturesqueness. Sir Luke preferred the Blacks, and started the question of danger to white men in the out-districts. How far had officialdom penetrated into the back blocks? He understood that Mr McKeith had explored for the laying of a telegraph-line to the Big Bight. Could Mr McKeith give him any information about all that?
McKeith explained again. He had stopped a week, he said, at the last outpost of Leichardt's land civilisation. The telegraph master there lived in a hut made of sheets of corrugated zinc, raised on piles twenty feet high and fortified against the Blacks. The entrance to it was masked, spear-proof and had two men always on guard—there were four men at the post. McKeith told a gruesome story of an assault by the natives, and of rifles at work through gun-holes in the zinc tower.
Lady Bridget listened in silence. Now and then, she looked up at McKeith, and, though her eyes gave forth ominous red-brown sparks, they had in them something of the same unwilling fascination Joan Gildea had noticed in the eyes of Colin McKeith.
CHAPTER 10
In the drawing room, before the men came in, Bridget talked to Joan Gildea. They hadn't yet had, as Biddy reminded her, a regular outpouring. The outpouring it should be stated, was always mostly on Bridget's side.
'When did you start Socialism?' Mrs Gildea asked. 'That's something new, isn't it?'
Biddy gave one of her slow smiles in which lips, eyes, brows, what could be seen of them under her towzle of hair—all seemed to light up together.
'Why, I've always been a Socialist—in theory, you know. I've ALWAYS rebelled against the established order of things.'
'But latterly,' said Joan, 'I haven't heard anything about your doings—not since you wrote from Castle Gaverick after—after Mr Willoughby Maule's marriage?'
The light died out of Bridget's face. 'Ah, I'll tell you—Do you know, Rosamond saw them—the Willoughby Maules before we all left. She met them at Shoolbred's—buying furniture. Rosamond said SHE was dragging after him looking—a bundle—and cross and ill; and that he seemed intensely bored. Poor Will!'
There was silence, Bridget's thoughts seemed far away.
'But about the Socialism?' prompted Mrs Gildea.
'Oh well, Aunt Eliza made up her mind suddenly to consult her new doctor—Aunt Eliza's chief excitement is changing her doctors, and she grows quite youthful in the process. They say that love and religion are the chief emotional interests of unattached women. I should add on doctors when a woman is growing old. Don't you think, Joan, that in that case, all three come invariably to the same thing?'
'Love, religion and doctors! As emotional interests, do they come to the same thing for elderly women?' repeated Mrs Gildea, as if she were propounding a syllogism. 'No, certainly not, when the elderly woman happens to be a hard-working journalist.'
'Oh, there you have the pull—I suggested the idea to Rosamond the other day and she gave a true Rosamondian answer. "They don't come at all to the same thing," she said, "because usually you have to pay your doctor and SOMETIMES your lover pays you." Rather smart, wasn't it?'
'Yes, but I think you'd better warn Lady Tallant that the Leichardt'stonian ladies are a bit Puritanical in their ideas of repartee.'
'Oh, Rosamond is clever enough to have found that out already for herself;' and the two glanced at Lady Tallant, who seemed to be playing up quite satisfactorily to the female representatives of the Ministerial circle.
'I suppose you made friends with some Socialists when you were in London?' went on Mrs Gildea.
'My dear, I would have made friends with Beelzebub just them, if he would have helped me to escape from myself.'
Bridget sighed and paused.
'But you ARE getting over it, Biddy—the disappointment about Mr Maule? You ARE growing not to care?'
'I don't want to grow not to care—though, of course, now I should prefer to care about someone or something that isn't Willoughby Maule, I feel inside me that my salvation lies in caring—in caring intensely.... But you wouldn't understand, Joan. You weren't built that way.'
'No,' assented Mrs Gildea doubtfully.
'But,' went on Biddy brightly, 'I think sometimes that if one could get to the pitch of feeling nothing matters, it would be a way of reaching the "letting go" stage which one MUST arrive at before one can even BEGIN to live in the Eternal.'
There seemed something a little comic in the notion of Bridget O'Hara living in the Eternal, and yet Mrs Gildea realised that there really was a certain stable quality underneath the flashing, ever changing temperamental sheath, which might perhaps form a base for the Verities to rest upon.
'Beelzebub didn't teach you that,' she said.
'No, quite the contrary. It all came out of my concentration studies and the Higher Thought Centre where I met some most original dears—Christian Scientists and Spiritualists—and then these Socialists—not a bit on the lines of the old Fabians and Bernard Shavians and the rest who used to believe only in Matter—specially landed property matter—and in parcelling that out among themselves. My friends are for parcelling out what they call the Divine Intelligence, which they say will bring them everything they need for the good of others and, incidentally, themselves. Of course none of them have a penny. But they do contrive to get what they want for other people—it was a soup kitchen this winter where they fed 11,000 starving poor. Only, when they begin, they never have the smallest idea of HOW it's going to be done.'
Lady Bridget was so absorbed in her subject matter that she did not notice the entrance of the men; but Mrs Gildea saw that Colin McKeith was making straight towards them. He halted behind Bridget's chair. Biddy went on in reply to a question from her friend.
'You see, they argue this way, "We don't know," they say, "the HOW of the simplest things in life, we don't know the HOW of our actual existence—how we move or think—not even the HOW of the most ordinary fact in science. We only know that there must be an Intelligence who does know and who has forces at command and the power to set them in motion."'
'And how do we know that?' asked Colin McKeith.
Bridget turned with a start and looked at him solemnly for a second or two.
'You paralyse me: you are too big. I can't speak to you when you are standing up. Please sit down.'
He went to fetch a chair. At the moment, Lady Tallant came up.
'Biddy, will you sing. Do for Heaven's sake make a sensation. Help me out! You know how!'
Lady Bridget had a funny inscrutable little smile and a gleam in her eyes which crinkled up when she was going to say or do something rather naughty.
'I'll do my best, Rosamond. But you don't think it would be a dangerous experiment, do you?'
Lady Tallant laughed, and told Captain Vereker Wells to take her to the piano.
'YOU know that Biddy does a lot of mischief when she sings,' said the Governor's wife, sitting down in Lady Bridget's vacant place beside Mrs Gildea. Colin McKeith, still on the outskirts with his chair, stood leaning upon it, watching the performer.
The piano was in such a position that Lady Bridget faced him.
A vain man might have fancied that she was singing at him, and that the by-play of her song—the sudden eye-brightenings, the little twists of her mouth, the head gestures, were for his particular benefit.
She was singing one of the Neapolitan folk-songs which one hears along the shores of the Mediterranean beyond Marseilles—a love song.
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