The Australians drew together a little; there was something in the bleak grey December morning, in the cheery bustle and excitement, that made them suddenly alone and homesick—homesick for great trees and bare plains, for scorching sunlight and the green and gold splendour of the Bush.
“Doesn’t it seem a long way away?” Norah said, very low; and Jim and Wally, knowing quite well what she meant, nodded silently. To them, too, home was a great way off.
They hurried through an early breakfast, and came again on deck to find the anchor down for the last time, and the Perseus lying at rest. An official launch was alongside; and presently all the passengers were mustered in the saloon, to answer to their names and declare their nationality and business. It was a war precaution, but a perfunctory one; as Wally remarked, the late Mr. Smith would have had no difficulty whatever in passing with full marks.
Then came good-byes, beginning with the captain, somewhat haggard after his final vigil, and ending with little Tommy Field, who insisted on attaching himself to Norah, and was with difficulty removed by his parents. A tender was alongside; great piles of luggage were being shot down to it. There were many delays before the passengers, blue and shivering, were ushered down the gangway to the tossing deck below.
Norah looked back as the tender steamed off slowly. Far above them towered the mighty bulk of the Perseus, as it had towered at Melbourne so many weeks before. Then it had seemed strange and unfriendly; now it had changed; it was all the home she knew, in this cold, grey land. She had a moment’s wild desire to go back to it.
“Well, I am an idiot,” Wally said, beside her. “For weeks I’ve been aching to get off that old ship—and now that I’m off, I feel suddenly like a lost foal, and I want to go back and hide my head in my cabin! Do you feel like that?”
“ ’M,” said Norah, nodding very hard. “England feels very queer and terrifying, all of a sudden, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t you bother your little head,” said Jim. “We’ll worry through all right.”
Ashore there came a long Customs delay, since enthusiastic officials insisted on having a lengthy hunt through luggage for revolvers, which were liable to confiscation. They waited in a huge shed, which smelt of many things, none of them pleasant. Finally they were released, and made their way through a bewildering maze of rough buildings and railway lines, until they found themselves at the station at Falmouth, where a special train awaited them.
It was all strange to the Lintons. The very accent of the Cornish folk around them was unintelligible; the houses, packed closely together, as unfamiliar as the bleak landscape and the leafless trees—trees that Norah considered dead until she suddenly realised that she was no longer in Australia, where a leafless tree is a dead tree, and where there is no long winter sleep for Nature. These trees were bare, but dense with growth of interlaced boughs and twigs; not beaten to gaunt skeletons, like the Australian dead forest giants. Norah found that in their beauty of form and tracery there was something more exquisite than in their spring leafage.