A storm so bad as this may not occur again for weeks or months. Once in a lifetime is sufficient. It represents the unpleasant side of Nature in a sub-tropical country. Seasoned Colonials, while they dislike these terrible outbursts of Nature in the South, console themselves that these dust storms are nothing in comparison with the dust storms of the north. “You should go to Broken Hill to know what dust can do,” said one of them; “a dust storm there is terrible.” But that of this awful night is quite bad enough for me.
CHAPTER XXIII
CHRISTMAS IN AUSTRALIA
While it may be far from exact to say, with certain modern philosophers, that climate creates and explains religions, it is undoubtedly true that climate exercises a modifying effect upon certain of the traditional observances of religion. Christmas is a case in point. A man brought up in a northern clime associates the great festival with the shortest day, and often with the sharpest weather. Keen frost, deep snow, biting winds, roaring fires, bare gardens—these are the framework of his Christmas. His thought transfers these wintry conditions to the Holy Land, and he pictures the great Birth as having occurred amidst the rigours of a northern winter. In this he is probably wrong, but it is an error taught him by his native soil, and from which often he has not sufficient knowledge or imagination to free himself. Christmas and cold are to him synonymous.
When such a man crosses the seas and lives for a time in a tropical or a sub-tropical climate, he finds it exceedingly difficult to adjust himself to the new Christmas conditions. He finds his new Christmas so utterly different from anything he has hitherto experienced, that the observance of the festival smacks of unreality. It is now midsummer with him; the days of the year are at their longest; the fireplaces are filled with shavings, or discreetly hidden from view by painted screens. The winds that blow come with fiery breath, the gardens are blooming with summer flowers, and the orchards are filled with fruit trees bearing their ripened produce. It requires a particularly powerful imagination to surmount this actual Christmas and to replace it by the traditional Christmas of the Old Land. And this kind of imagination I do not possess.
It was an announcement in a large shop in Collins Street that first made me aware of the proximity of Christmas: “Christmas Presents for the Folks at Home—the last English mail in time for Christmas leaves Melbourne on Nov. 19.” Thus ran the notice. And it struck me in a most curious manner. The calendar distinctly pointed to Christmas, but the weather and the gardens and the general surroundings whispered mockingly: “This is nearing midsummer; the longest day is coming. Christmas is a fiction—poor Englishman, there is no Christmas for you; get out your duck suits and straw hat, and prepare for picnics and a summer holiday.” And then I knew that I must walk by faith and not by sight. For the first time in my life Christmas became empty of meaning. All the sentiment of it vanished in a moment. I was alone, an actor in the midst of a stage devoid of scenery. Every single “property” of the great Christmas festival slowly accumulated during more than forty years of life had been carried away in an instant. Blazing logs, crackling fires, merry parties, mysterious stockings, frosty window panes, keen air, snow-covered ground, and, above all, the waits—all had gone, carried off by the magician who lives on this side of the Equator.
And immediately Collins Street, for the moment, became a place of exile. Its light turned to darkness, its charm fled. I turned to the dear little woman at my side, and I saw that her face was wet with tears.
We had to encounter a new kind of Christmas, and when the first shock was over we settled to the idea, and determined to have a good time. “But why not have the old and the new?” we said. If space had placed 13,000 miles between us and the Christmas we love so well, space could not imprison our thoughts. So we determined to fly to the Old Country and have an old-fashioned English Christmas. In a moment of time we were in Gamage’s, showing the children the wonderful toys. Then we shopped in Regent Street, and afterwards went to Maskelyne and Devant’s, and later took the train into the country. We watched the snow fall, and afterwards did some snowballing. We went to church, and sang hymns and carols. And then came dinner and the family party. We had a real good time, until the maid came and said: “There’s a north wind, madam. I am going to close the windows.” And in a moment we were back to our own Christmas, with the thermometer registering a little over ninety degrees.
That north wind needs a word of explanation. It is the sirocco of Victoria. Its hot breath is heralded by a day or a night of depression. And when it arrives it is pitiless. Great clouds of dust come with it, making life unbearable. Like a funeral pall the dust hangs over everything. The skin becomes hot and dry, and everybody is out of temper. It is useless to fight the north wind. The only thing to be done is to run away from it by closing up the house and hermetically sealing every window until the calamity is overpast. When the change comes and the wind veers to the south, the relief is unspeakably precious. The temperature will drop sometimes no fewer than thirty-five degrees in half an hour. And then it is that influenza is likely to be contracted. I said the thermometer registered ninety degrees; that was when the north wind commenced to blow. But at midday the mercury had mounted up to one hundred degrees in the shade. It was terrible. The wind was as the breath of a fiery oven. The trees drooped, the flowers hung lifeless upon their stalks, the grass of the lawn turned brown in an hour, and the parched earth gaped and gasped. Over the entire soil there quivered the fateful shimmer of the heat. Men and birds and beasts were smitten with an overwhelming languor. It was the African desert over again without relief. Little wonder, then, on the next day, the journals reported fires in every direction. One single spark sufficed to set an entire countryside on fire. Enormous crops of wheat, ripe and ready to be reaped, were consumed by the flames in a single morning. Useless to fight that raging furnace! Once the first fiery tongue leapt from one stalk to another the whole area was doomed. In one part of Victoria the bush and wheat-field fires devastated fifty miles of country.
Thus our Christmas week opened. After that all Christmas ceremony was obviously mere stage acting. Yet the form was rigorously observed. Cards were exchanged and presents given. But such presents! Take the following alluring notices, for example, and let anyone imagine how they struck an Englishman for the first time: