Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.”
The disappointment of Phyl and Dolly in Australia was very bitter.
They were actually in Sydney now, dwelling in furnished rooms, while their mother looked about her and tried to put her plans into execution. It was mere chance that made her choose Sydney rather than any of the other cities; it lay at the end of the vessel’s journey for one thing, and thus added an extra four or five days to the exquisite voyage; for another she was a beauty lover, and had heard of the harbour’s glories all her life; since all places now seemed equally without advantage, financially, to her, she thought she might at least bring her children up where Nature had been most royal.
But Phyl and Dolly were so saddened at the sight of the place, when, once through the frowning Heads, [134] ]they bore slowly down the far-famed waters to the Quay, that they could never afterwards say honestly that their first impressions of the harbour had filled them with rapturous admiration.
All the voyage they had whispered, whispered together, hanging dreamily over the vessel’s side in the tropics; cuddled up wrapped in a rug when the freezing wind made the sailors say an iceberg must be at hand; shut in the cabin when the storms drove the other passengers to the saloon and privacy was impossible. Whispered, whispered, whispered, till a fairy Australia was firmly builded in their heads.
And there was no one to tone down the colouring of their skies for them, or to laughingly crop feet off their towering mountains, and set their notions of gold fields and kindred things aright, for no one knew of the strange building.
Those years of laughing ridicule, when the two were suddenly set down in a large family, had flung them back entirely upon themselves, and filled them with a shyness and reserve that lasted all their lives. Of all the evils the sun looked down upon, the worst seemed to them being laughed at; they would have endured tortures rather than have allowed those big boys and girls to know anything of their ways; they had a vague, shamed feeling that they were rather ridiculous atoms, but how to alter themselves they did not know. Life would have been insupportable if they never “pretended,” and played nothing more [135] ]uneventful than “Chasings” and “Hide-and-seek” and “Hunt the Slipper.” So they shrank together—even, in these matters, from their mother, who had been so busy that last year or two she could not follow them up to their absurd heights. In all the other joys and griefs of their lives they went direct to her; but in the whispering and pretending there was Phyl for Dolly and Dolly for Phyl, and the doors locked firmly on the world.
There was no one therefore to correct the perspective when they drew their plans of Australia.
When they steamed round Bradley’s Head, and Sydney spread itself before their roughly-awakened senses, they both grew from that moment just a little older and sadder, and more like children who see life only as it is.
No chocolate-coloured beings, clad in bright, scanty garments, darted down to a yellow beach and pushed off in strange boats to welcome their ship; no kangaroos leapt back into the thick forests near the water’s edge startled at their approach; no birds of brilliant plumage filled the air with colour and music. On the hill-slopes around there fed no million sheep, there waved no palms, there sprang no dazzling flowers. Nowhere lay a field dug into holes, the greenness of its grass showing up brilliantly the careless heaps of sparkling nuggets.