Brown Bread from a Colonial Oven/Chapter 6

by Blanche Edith Baughan

VI

AN EARLY MORNING WALK

Millicent opened her eyes. A patch of sunlight lay gold along the brown boards of the bedroom wall; the crisp air of April came in through the open window, but there was no rustle of the full white curtain. Footsteps were going to and fro in passage and kitchen, and from the latter she could hear crackling the just-lit kindling wood. Millicent lay still awhile, and luxuriated in those sounds of work. It was so delicious to feel that it was not she who had to sweep the passage this morning, and light the kitchen fire; that at last, at last! she was away for a holiday, and in a house where the daily duties were to be no concern of hers. What! she would actually be able to take note of other things in this fresh morning light than broom and dust-pan, and the tardy bubbles in the family porridge-pot? The thought was so enlivening that she sprang at once out of bed. She would begin with a look at Nature’s morning housekeeping; she would take a before-breakfast stroll out of doors.

Presently she came out into the great corridor beyond her bedroom. The house was old and large; the walls and floor and ceiling of the passage were all alike of the same unpainted wood, pale-brown, and clean, and faintly shining. Here and there, through some open doorway, the sunlight shot a slant of gold, and splashed a golden pool upon the floor, but all the rest was shadowy and dim, and neutral-tinted. Millicent walked the length of the passage, opened the door at the end, stepped out upon the broad verandah, then. . . . “Ah-h-h!” she caught her breath.

There had been a frost in the night. That was the reason why the curtain had not fluttered—there was no wind. The air was still keen, and of a faultless clearness, but the early sun had now melted the rime, and everything was sparkling. On the little lawn in front of the verandah, the thick-strung dewdrops flashed like diamonds; here and there, one that had caught the light at an angle swung to and fro from some slender grass blade a fairy lamp of glow-worm green, of fire-colour, or blue. Down in the little orchard beyond the lawn, the still-ungathered quinces hung like golden moons in a green night, and a rosy globe or two smiled out through the fast-thinning leaves of the apple-boughs. It was none of these several brightnesses, however, that had so captured Millicent’s first look—no! but, out there—beyond the lawn and the orchard, past the aspiring, leafless poplars, and dark mass of macrocarpas that framed between them a glimpse of curved white road . . . out, and above, and beyond—the mountains, the mountains, they were there! The new sunshine fell full upon them, and bright with that, and with the first new snow, up they stood, one glorious great white wall! their summits cleanly cutting the clean blue of the sky, their knees shrouded in a deep bloom of purple, vaporous, velvety.

There was a fine old pine-tree near the gate, swinging out across the distant white-and-purple, its great boughs of kind and sunlit green; and Millicent, her eye still upon the snows it emphasised, moved slowly towards it. Like a blessing upon her head, a warbler hid in its branches trilled out his brave little song, and the honeysuckle on the old grey fence beneath breathed into her face the summer scent with which it was welcoming the summer-like sunshine. Millicent opened the gate, and went out upon the road.

It was, it certainly was, a glorious morning! Here, out on the open road, unhindered by the garden trees, she had it in all its beauty. Between her and the mountains there was spread a mighty prospect, leagues wide, of open burnt-bush country, penetrated by light—bathing, soaking in it as it were. Above, the deep blue sky had not one cloud, and the unmoving air shone with that large serenity, that warm splendour, which is characteristic of a New Zealand day after frost, and, so far as I know, is peculiar to it.

Everywhere there was not only light, but radiance. It was as though the frost, and after the frost, the sunshine, had drunk up every little dimness from the face of earth and air and sky; it was as if all dullness was dead, and that for ever. Nothing but looked as new as though it had just been made; not an object but was suddenly a jewel, and shone. In that atmosphere, so keen, so clean, and yet so genial too, only to breathe was one pure joy, simply to exist another—to see, was exultation! Millicent’s heart laughed within her, and her lips would have laughed aloud, but that something held them silent, as it seemed to hold everything else. Absolute as the glory was the hush.

Not for very long, though. Before she had taken twenty steps along the road, “Get on, you beast! get on!” cried a passionate voice behind her. Startled, she paused beside a paddock-gate, and turned. A little way back, opposite the house, the slip-rails of another paddock were down, and, coming slowly over them, one by one, was a small and very straggling procession of cows, some ten in all. At their heels, bareback upon a bony horse, rode an uncouth stripling. His dress was composed of a blue-striped shirt, very muddy, tucked into tweed trousers, and his bare feet had been thrust into unlaced boots of an amazing thickness of leather, supporting a still thicker deposit of dirt. A shining jewel this object could scarcely be said to resemble, or anything else possessed of the smallest polish. His shouting ceased, however, the moment he caught sight of Millicent.

One by one, and certainly with exasperating slowness, the cows filed over the rails, crossed the road, and came hesitatingly up to the gate by which Millicent had paused—an open gate, that led into a bit of uphill pasture with a grey cow-shed atop. They looked reproachfully at the human obstacle in their path, but, finding that it did not move, obeyed the mitigated adjurations of their driver, and proceeded slowly, and each one with a nervous fling of the head as it passed, through the gate, and up towards the bails.

“Mornin’!” said the boy, as he in turn approached. “Up early, you are, ain’t you?” His voice was now incomparably gentle, his blue eyes shone with friendliness. He had driven Millicent in from the railway the day before; they were, too, old acquaintances. “Beautiful mornin’, ain’t it?” he went on eagerly, as though he longed above all things to speak, and feared to lose the chance of doing so. “Reg’lar germ of a day, I calls it.”

“It’s glorious,” Millicent agreed. “And how are you getting on, Ken?”

“Me? Oh, fair to middlin’,” answered Ken, scratching his hatless head as though puzzled why any one should bother to ask. “’Cep’ for these here jolly cows, which—look here now, Miss Milly, they’re about enough to make a parson swear an’ burn his books—my word, that they are! Old Ruru, now! My word, she’s about the unmannerliest beast God ever put grass into; knocked me over yesterday, she did, flat as I was long—an’ the bucket with me; an’ me with a clean shirt on me shoulders, an’ likin’ to get dirty by degrees. I say, though! you wasn’t comin’ to try your hand again at milkin’, like, I s’pose?” he added, with a sudden lively accent of hope.

“No, indeed, I was not,” replied Millicent, with heartfelt thankfulness—milking is an art which many practise but few, very few, love. “And I’m not going to delay you, either, Ken,” she added, with edge.

Ken sighed. “It’s a poor job, cowbangin’ all alone,” he said wistfully. But he took the hint, and moved on after his charges, pulling to the gate behind him with a bang, and spurring his horse hard on to the tail of the hindmost cow. A lively scene followed.

“I wonder how long it will be before he has all those poor beasts ruined!” Millicent said severely to herself as she walked on. Yet she smiled a little, too. It was very often hard to keep from smiling at irresponsible, irrepressible Ken; though very often still harder to keep from hurling maledictions at him, together with anything else that stood handy.

In the paddock on her left, she soon came abreast of a group of pine-trees, that made a bouquet of grateful duskiness amid all the surrounding tawny-green; and in this duskiness there sat a little cottage of unpainted timber, grey with weather and age. It had a long, narrow garden sloping down towards the road; and this was full of the most gaily coloured chrysanthemums, flame-colour, gold and crimson, pale canary, deep maroon. The frost had not hurt them at all, and they made a splendid show of colour. There was also a line of newly washed garments, pink and white and blue, hanging out already thus early beside them, and fluttering in a little draught of air that had sprung up. They only looked like a row of bigger, more summery blossoms.

Beyond this cottage Millicent found herself between wide, bare paddocks, simply divided off from the road by fences of barbed wire. Just as far as ever she could see, the land between her and that mountain distance still beckoning ahead was all one huge ocean of naked grass country, running up into lumpy ridges, traversed by sharp-lipped gullies, and everywhere, alas! strewn with the unsightly remains of burnt Bush. Here and there, it is true, a clump of native trees might yet be seen; but even these were doomed, for Bush trees are gregarious, and will not long continue to survive without the shelter of their fellows; and for inches of such verdure there were acres and acres of the barren devastation. The great half-burnt skeletons of the forest, grey and black and bleached and piebald, stood gauntly up, as though in mute protest, from tawny hillside and green flat. They were splintered and shattered; at their feet lay multitudes of their brethren—enormous rotting logs, and the mouldering black stumps from which they had been severed; and it was only a question of time before they too would rest their ruins on the ground.

In one paddock Millicent could see, in spite of the bright sunshine, a little bluish film of smoke rising from the earth here and there, with a red flower or two of fire twinkling through it, as it veered and wavered in the unequal breeze. The settler who owned that paddock was trying to clear it. He had set it alight the day before, when there had been a wind. At night, when the fire smouldering at the heart of every stump would show itself in the darkness, the whole paddock would be spotted with crimson, and look all eerie, like a witches’ camp.

The paddocks bordering the road lay low; there were rushes growing in them, and from among the rushes the rains of March looked up into the sky with eyes that were bright blue pools. The grass sprang fresh and thick on these low flats; the ground looked all inlaid with vivid green and blue. Minas, with their bold, important bearing, their yellow beaks, and handsome dark wings patched with white, flew chattering from log to log; larks sprang singing up into the bright, elastic air, and the whole stretch glistened with wet light.

By the time Millicent had walked another mile, surmounted a ridge and reached the house beyond, the Scandinavian settler to whom it belonged, industrious and “fore-handed” as “Scandy” settlers are wont to be, had already finished his milking. The cows were being driven back to the paddock by a couple of sturdy urchins, and the settler himself was loading up his milk-cart. His wife, with a blue handkerchief over her yellow head, was busy washing in the open. She had a tin bath, a fire of logs, and three kerosene-tins full of water upon it, by way of equipment, and, as Millicent passed, was giving orders with a shrill emphasis to a plump little flaxen-haired daughter at the house door. “Melon jam, now, you mind!” Millicent heard her insist—pie-melons are good and fleshy, and one of them will provide quite a large quantity of jam, but the younger and less thrifty members of the family have been known not infrequently to prefer apricots.

Over the “Scandy” garden fence, beside the road, there leant a tall white poplar, its silver leaves already transmuted by April’s finger into the purest gold. It seemed to light up the air like a great, glowing lamp, and the radiant blue of the sky looked amazingly deeper and richer seen through its exquisite filigree, so delicate, alas! so frail . . . like little golden birds, a score of leaves came gently fluttering and twisting through the air as Millicent went by, and the ground beneath was full of faded wealth. Close to the poplar, a wattle was showing already in its plumes a hint of yellow buds; but it would not blossom until spring, and spring was four months away. The warm freshness of the morning made it seem much nearer than that, though; and now upon its clean brightness there came another touch—Mrs. Hansen’s geese, no less: straggling across the road, and down into the rich green of the swamp below, in a long line of shining white.

After Hansen’s, the road went, straight as a shot, up a hill lavishly crowned with trees, and with a number of little grey outhouses. As Millicent neared the summit, she could hear from the outhouses the grunting of numerous pigs, and from among the concealing trees the whirr and humming of machinery. This must be the butter-factory, then; she had heard of Morrisby’s starting one—he was a man who had always some fresh plan in his head. His neighbours were now wishing that they had had the sense to forestall him with a co-operative affair of their own, but they found his factory a boon, nevertheless, and gave it solid support.

Hansen overtook Millicent just as he reached the gate. He drove his low, heavy vehicle, with its load of tall, shining tin cans, and its huge wheels made entirely of wood, alongside the building, into whose open upper door his cans were immediately hoisted for weighing and emptying. Next, he backed his cart, with its emptied cans replaced, alongside another loft, whence, presently, from a great vat connected with the separator, that had got to work at once upon his contribution, he took aboard his cargo of skim-milk, and drove away. Morrisby had handed him down an envelope before he went, and Millicent, still standing by the gate as he came out, could see between his fingers a strip of white and green paper, and on his face a smile of honest satisfaction. It was the cheque for his month’s milk that he had received, and his cows had clearly done well.

And now the road ran level for awhile between a double line of blue-gums. Is there anywhere, for catching the light, anything better than a blue-gum tree? Smooth and bare, its slender silver pillar springs shining up, its delicate twigs respond to every least play of the wind, its long, polished leaves arrest every sunbeam and turn it to a flame of bright white light. Millicent walked the length of this glittering avenue, inhaling with delight its pungent and wholesome aroma, and came out beyond it upon the brink of a sharp declivity, down which the road went winding. This, she realised, must be the limit of her walk; so she sat down for a moment upon a blackened log, carefully choosing a part of it that was not festooned with the delicate but designing tracery of tentacled “lawyer,” and took a good, heart-satisfying look at the country spread beyond.

Burnt Bush, to those that have ever lived in it, has a beauty all its own—a curious beauty, lying in the very lap of ugliness. These great stretches of denuded tawny and russet-colour give room for the spirit to expand. They are spacious, sea-like, still. Here and there, too, amid the solitude and the ruinous remains, a little grey iron roof, amid a handful of new trees from over the water, tells of Man—the successor of the forest he has destroyed. The whole land now lies waiting for his work, and there is room in the landscape for imagination, just as there is room, too, for every ray, every modulation, of the light, and for the faithful reflection of every delicate interplay of shadow and shine.

From a line of willows at the foot of the hill, a thrush sent suddenly up a real “shout of Spring”; he was thinking, perhaps, of English April, yet this withered and wintry landscape before her was also, Millicent reflected, full of another, a figurative sort of spring, brimful of hope. The green leaves of the willows were famished to thin gold, and through them she could see the shining of a creek. It glittered between the dark sparkles of water-cresses as it neared the road; and the road crossed it by means of a little bridge buried in bushes of fuchsia, then climbed away up out of this nest of greenery, streaked the tawny opposite side of the great gully with white loops and angles and zigzags, and disappeared over the ridge into the next gully beyond.

Millicent did not miss it. Road and gully and widespread radiant stretches—all these were only the foreground. The picture, the real picture, lay still beyond—the unimpeded mountain-view. Away to the right, away to the left, ran the immense white barrier, of which, from this vantage-point, she could just discern both the beginning in the north, and, in the south, the end. Shaggy forest, showing at this distance darkly blue, clothed the foot of the ranges, the lower spurs were bare of snow, the middle heights were only slightly powdered—blue gullies gashed them, and they had brown brows of rock; but the soaring peaks above were purely, ethereally white. Already, however, the sunbeams of this summerlike day following the night’s hard frost were at work upon the mountain-tops; and from the highest points were to be seen already floating those little flying pennons of silvery cloud that, as the day advanced, would build another mountain-wall of white air above the snows of earth.

Clank! Clank! Millicent turned her head. An old man was coming up the road from the factory: a very old man, bent low beneath a wooden yoke, from either side of which depended a kerosene-tin, full of skim-milk. He smiled and nodded to Millicent, but did not recognise her; she, however, knew him. It was “Old Mercer,” once, in the old, pre-certificate days, school-teacher of the district. Now, in his eightieth year, he kept the wolf from the door, and himself from the Old Men’s Refuge (he had forfeited his claim to the pension by a few years’ residence in Australia), by means of a few cows; but he had no horse, and was forced to carry his laborious loads himself to and from the factory. “Poor old man!” Millicent said to herself, with a pang of pity—in reality, quite unneeded. With his dog and his liberty, old Mercer, as a matter of fact, was a good deal happier than most people.

His coming had roused her from her reverie. It was time to go back, and she began to retrace her steps. The road now wore quite a different aspect—it was populated. A number of milk-carts were rolling heavily towards the factory; their bright cans glittered in the sun, and the horses’ hides showed finely glossy. It was getting on for school-time, too, and a flutter of little girls came frolicking out of Morrisby’s gate. In their white pinafores and large white sun-bonnets, they looked like a company of frilly daisies. As they flitted past the Hansens’, a whole tribe of little “Scandies” hurried out to join them. Many of these were boys, but boys and girls alike were serviceably clothed in what had evidently been portions of the same roll of thrifty dark-blue dungaree; and the ever-useful flour-bag had manifestly been under contribution for the little girls’ aprons. All the children, Morrisbys and Hansens both, went barefoot, and carried, slung over their shoulders, satchels of yellow leather, containing school-books and lunch—Millicent hoped the melon-jam was generously thick! Two more little boys and one little girl rode up behind her, all bestriding the same fat pony. Stirrups or saddle they had none, only a sheepskin flung across the pony’s back; but they seemed entirely at their ease and quite secure.

As she passed the chrysanthemum cottage, a neat young woman in a clean blouse and dark skirt came daintily down between the flowers; and she guessed, rightly enough, that it was the school-mistress. As she reached the cow-gate, Ken and his cart came rattling at a great pace out of it—he was late, of course; he might even be too late for Morrisby to accept the milk. A white dribble marked his course as he fled; he had not put on his can-covers straight.

Turning at the great pine to go in, Millicent had one last delightful vision. Down the road came a returning milk-cart, furiously driven by a young Scandinavian girl, perhaps fifteen years of age. She was standing upright in the cart, and her lissom body was swaying easily to and fro with its motion; her yellow hair streamed out bright behind from under her crimson cap, her blue eyes shone, her face was all aglow. Very likely she was only hurrying in order to be in time for school; but, as she whirled by, Millicent had a sudden vision of some Viking’s daughter standing at a helm, and felt, as she opened the gate, and re-entered the house, that upon her impressions of country freshness and mountain glory there had suddenly blown in also a sense of the adventurous wide sea.