“Lu of the Ranges,” says a nil admirari Australian newspaper, whose editor could not have known that she was born in England, “is a notable contribution to Australian literature.... It is solidly constructed, finely written, frank to the verge of brutality, and inherently Australian. Lu, pictured on the cover by the fool illustrator as a charming English maiden, is a drab and very human girl of the backwoods, who, to the end of her life, could not speak grammatically. Her language is the sort that looks neater printed with a dash; and she has a temper of her own. A hard, glittering, valiant personality, whom life teaches to take care of herself ‘on her own.’
“A veritable child of the bush, she was inured alike to heat and cold, to hard work and a spare diet, to an almost incredible isolation.... For the children of the bush are, above all things, old, like the primitive forms of vegetation, the wistful-eyed, prehistoric animals which are with their fellows. When they grow up and find their way to the cities, they blossom into a splendid youth, which never again quite leaves them; or else, scared and bewildered, they creep back again to the wild places whence they came. But to the irresponsible gaiety of childhood they are for ever strangers.”
It was the outcome of the seven years of struggles, more than once coming perilously near starvation, which she had in the colony of Victoria. Some of her short stories are good enough for Rudyard Kipling. That she has not assumed her place in the front rank of novelists is due only to the immense barriers to recognition which have to be surmounted owing to the mountains of fiction which are cast up every year, and stand between the new writer and fame.
When I asked Eleanor Mordaunt about her life in Australia she said—
“In Australia I edited a woman’s paper, and made gardens, and blouses for tea-room girls, and worked in an engineer’s shop at metal work, and was four times carried into public hospitals for dying. I never had a penny in the bank—and more than once not in the world. Once I lay in bed for three days because I had nothing to eat. Then came thirty pounds for a manuscript of essays from Lothian of Melbourne (published 1909 under the title of Rosemary), and seven pounds a woman owed me for painting her a set of silk curtains, and two pounds for The Garden of Contentment, and I got up and went out and bought a pound of chops, and cooked and ate them all. I did all my housework at night, and all the washing.
“In Leek this time I lived on fifteen shillings a week with the weavers, and knew no one else except the two daughters of the Trade Union secretary, and never had so much love and kindness in my life. The book comes out next autumn, and is called Bellamy.”
Mary Gaunt, the novelist and traveller, was born and brought up in Victoria. Her father was a well-known judge in the Colony. She had met with considerable success in journalism before she left the Melbourne University.
Dr. George Ernest Morrison, who made himself so famous as correspondent of The Times in Peking, was, as I have said elsewhere, a fellow-student and friend of mine at the Melbourne University, and has been a great friend ever since. It was I who persuaded Horace Cox to publish his An Australian in China, the only book he has ever published, though I myself conveyed to him an offer of a thousand pounds on account for a book about China before the Allied Powers invaded it. He was unwilling to enter into a contract, and the matter dropped. He has since then resigned his position on The Times, and become English adviser to the Government of China. His book on China, whenever it does come, will be read all over the world, because no European has ever understood Chinese politics as well as he has.
His knowledge of the country Chinese, the two hundred million toiling agricultural poor, is just as extraordinary. His gigantic journeys across China have given him a chance of seeing them as no other Anglo-Saxon, and probably no other white man, ever has seen them. His first journey was from Shanghai to Rangoon by land in 1894, which he accomplished at a cost of eighteen pounds, and on which he went unarmed, as usual. That is the journey described in An Australian in China. His second was from Bangkok in Siam to Yunnan city in China and round Tonquin in 1896; his third across Manchuria from Stretensk in Siberia to Vladivostok; his fourth from Peking to the border of Tonquin; his fifth from Honan city in Central China across Asia to Andijan in Russian Turkestan, nearly four thousand miles.
Morrison, whenever he came back to England from the East, used to come straight to Addison Mansions. One night he turned up about 10 p.m.