That’s how I come to be jotting down shorthand notes of my reflections on this Christmas Eve.
Every now and then, I drop my pen to go and take a smoke in the hammock in the veranda, and think a little more of Nan.
I watch the Southern Cross, dipping over the mountains. I listen to the frogs, flopping from the veranda roof on to the grass, and to the hum of the flying ants, and the queer buzzings of the myriads of insects, and the cry of the curlews down by the swamp. I see the heat mist rising on the plain and the lightning zig-zagging on the horizon, west.
It makes me melancholy, a night like this. Those trumpet flowers give out a sickly scent, and there’s a Cape jasmine creeper, twined round a pole, that looks like a ghost. Sets one dreaming—dreaming. And there’s a girl over at the Big House singing; and I can catch the tune and a word here and there. It’s a singing kind of thing. It goes—
“For the old love’s sake,
For the old love’s sake!”
And I seem to see Nan. The jasmine reminds me of her, and the pointers of the Southern Cross are like her eyes. Nan, with her pretty, pale face and her red lips, so resolute and so sweet, and her deep, bright, dark eyes, and her black, curly hair.
We came out to Australia together. She was a second-class passenger, and so was I, but she kept very much to herself; and then she was in her cabin a good bit the first part, and we didn’t get to know each other till the voyage was getting on.
“We came out to Australia together.” (Page [158])