A woman, one of those flat-chested, neutral-tinted women one sees in country districts, came out of the cottage and stared sombrely at the fallen giant, while the two men—her husband and grownup son, as I afterwards found—walked round it, lopping off a bough here and there. I went up and asked her for a glass of water, impelled more by curiosity than thirst; then, as I sat on the oozing trunk and drank it, I asked her why the tree had been cut down. Surely they would miss it when the summer came, for the shadows of the other trees would not reach to the house.
“Well, it ain’t always summer, you see,” said the woman, and she looked at the tree with a sort of sickened dislike on her dull face. “It wur a deal too near to be pleasant. Night after night I laid awake in the winter when the wind wur blowin’ and ’eard it moanin’ an’ cryin’ out, thinkin’ it ’ud crash down on us one o’ these nights. And where ’ud us be then?”
I gave a little shudder. “I never thought of that,” I said. “And it is horribly big.”
“Big! Yer right there! Ah! when I wur lyin’ in bed thur a’ nights with the wind blowin’ across it and across us, it seemed like as it growed bigger an’ bigger, an’ we growed littler an’ littler. Why, I mind when my Jim there wur born—” and she jerked her thumb in the direction of the younger man.
“Why, was he born here? and with that tree—”
“Yes—twenty years ago, come next July. Awful the weather was, I mind; snow an’ rain an’ wind—the wind fair terrible, an’ that tree a-shriekin’ an’ moaning. There weren’t no doctor anywhere in reach, and there weren’t no nuss; my man ’ee did all ’ee could fur me. But, Lord bless you, miss, when I were in my pains it seemed as if I wur a-bein’ torn up by the roots, the same as that there tree was, an’ I didn’t rightly know which wur goin’ ter end me fust. My man, ’ee promised ’e’d ’ave it down first thing when the weather cleared. But thur was allus a powerful lot to do, an’ it got put off an’ put off; though I wur never not to say easy about it fur one minute o’ time. Allus afraid, then, that it ’ud fall on the kid an’ kill ’im. An’ the higher an’ heavier it got, the worse it seemed, fur them gum-tree roots don’t run not no depth ter speak of. But there it stayed, till only this very mornin’ the boss said as ’ow ’e an’ Jim ’ud ’ave it down. An’ thur it be, but I reckon as ’ow I’ll never quit dreamin’ on it. All my folk were woodcutters, an’ my feyther wur killed by a fallin’ tree, just the dead spit of this one.”
It was a bald enough narrative, rendered all the balder from the sing-song, drawling voice in which it was recounted; but I have never forgotten it. The long, uneventful years there in the clearing, more than twenty years from the time that the drab-faced woman arrived there as a fresh young bride; the fear and fascination of the tree gathering to an obsession during those long nine months before her child was born—with no nurse or doctor to stay her fears. Then that awful night, when she did not know rightly whether it was her or the tree that was to be torn up by the roots; the twenty years of busy days, when doubtless it seemed less terrible, and when her husband was too hard-worked to bother about it; and the twenty years and more of nights when it had seemed to tower over the tiny house like some wild beast; tugging at a too slender chain, which some night would—and must—give way, leaving it free to spring; the only rest possible being when the wind was blowing steadily in the other direction. And, above all, the man who had the strength and the knowledge to rid her once for ever of such torment sleeping heavily night after night by her side.
Still, it is not only women who are tormented by such fears. Men have spoken of having been possessed by a horror of the loneliness of the Bush that has half driven them mad, while a Sister in one of the large Melbourne hospitals told me that they had far more cases of nervous breakdown among men than among women, particularly from the effects of isolation and loneliness; perhaps because, on the whole, a woman’s day is more filled up with a succession of trifling duties, so varied in themselves that she has but little time to brood. Curiously enough—though the number of male and female lunatics in Victoria is very nearly equal—the number of women who had committed suicide during the year before the latest statistics were compiled is less than a third of that of the men; while I honestly believe that any man who had been obsessed by fear during all those years, as was the woodcutter’s wife, and yet was unable to remove the cause of it, would have put an end to himself.
About a couple of hours’ journey from Melbourne, and within a short drive from Haelesville, there is a Blacks’ Settlement, where there is gathered together a remnant of those people who, with their four-footed fellows, were once in undisputed possession of these mountains and forests—before the days of the axe and saw, the “stump-jump,” and the “mallee roller.”
It is a good many years since I was at Coranderrk, as the settlement is named, and therefore I have no very clear memories of it, excepting that the people all seemed exceedingly leisurely and good tempered, and childishly clamorous for pennies. Two or three men emulated each other in throwing the boomerang for our amusement, and in this the older men were certainly by far the best, literally bursting with pride at their achievements; one grey-haired man, taller and bigger-built than his fellows, sending it to such a height and distance that it had dwindled to a hardly distinguishable speck against the blue sky before it turned and came whistling back, in a sweeping semicircle, to drop almost exactly at the place where its owner stood.