CHAPTER I

I ANSWER AN ADVERTISEMENT

NATURALLY it was not news to me when old Dr. Grayson told me I was
tired. There are some things one knows without assistance: and for two
months I had suspected that I was getting near the end of my tether. The
twelve-year-olds I taught at school had become stupider and more
stupid—or possibly I had; and Madame Carr—there was no real reason why
she should be called “Madame,” but that she thought it sounded better
than plain “Mrs.”—had grown stricter and more difficult to please. She
had developed a habit of telling me, each afternoon, when school had
been dismissed, what a low standard of deportment I exacted from my
form. This also I knew; twelve-year-olds are not usually models of
deportment, and I suppose I was not very awe-inspiring. But the daily
information got on my nerves.

Then the examinations had been a nightmare. I used to wonder how the
girls who grumbled at the questions would have liked the task of
correcting the papers—taking bundles home at night and working at them
after I had cooked the dinner and helped Colin to wash up. I made
several mistakes, too; and of course Madame found them out. One is not
at one’s best, mentally, after a long day in school, and the little flat
in Prahran was horribly hot and stuffy. Colin had wanted to help me, but
of course I could not let him; the poor old boy used to work at his
medical books every evening, in a wild hope that something might yet
turn up to enable him to take his degree. I did my best at the wretched
papers, but after an hour or so my head would ache until it really did
not matter to me if I met the information that Dublin was situated on
the Ganges. There had been a hideous interview with Madame after the
breaking-up, in which she hinted, in an elephantine fashion, that unless
my services were shown to be of more value she would hardly be justified
in paying me as well as letting Madge have her education free.

It was scarcely a surprise, but, all the same, it staggered me.
Housekeeping, since Father died, had not been an easy matter. Colin was
just the best brother that ever lived, and when we found how little
money there was for us, he had promptly left the University—he was in
his fifth year, too, my poor boy. And how he loved the work! Father’s
practice brought something that we invested, and Colin got a position in
an office. His salary was not much; he helped it out by working overtime
whenever he could get the chance, and he had two pupils whom he coached
for their second year. The big thing was that nothing must interfere
with Madge’s work.

Madge, you see, was the really brilliant one of the family: if we could
keep her at school for another two years, she had a very good chance of
a scholarship that would take her on to the University; and she had
passed so many music exams that it would have been a tragedy not to have
kept that up, too. I was not at all brilliant, and it seemed wonderful
luck when Madame Carr offered me a minor post, at a small salary, with
Madge’s education thrown in. Of course, we knew that Madge was likely to
be a very good advertisement for the school; still, it might not have
happened, and that tiny salary of mine made all the difference in our
finances. We managed, somehow—Colin and I; Madge could not be allowed
to do any of the housework, for she was only fifteen, and she was
working furiously. She fought us very hard about it, especially when we
insisted that she should stay in bed to breakfast on Sunday mornings,
but we were firm: so at last she gave in, more or less gracefully. And
then I would find her sitting up in bed, darning my stockings. As I told
her, it gave me quite a lot of extra work on Saturday night, hiding away
everything she might possibly find to mend.

There never was anyone like Colin. He used to get up at some unearthly
hour and do all the dirty work until it was time for him to rush to the
office: and at night he helped just as cheerfully again. He was always
cheerful; to see him washing-up you would have thought it was the thing
he loved best on earth. I hated to see him scrubbing and polishing, with
the long, slender hands that were just made for a doctor’s. Nobody could
imagine how good he was to me; and we managed as I said, somehow. But as
I looked at Madame Carr’s hard face I did not know how we could possibly
manage without my little salary.

She relented a little towards the end of that unpleasant interview, and
said she would think it over, and give me another chance; and she
advised me to have a good rest, eat nourishing food, and take a few
weeks in the hills. I suppose I must have looked pretty white, and she
didn’t want me to be ill there; at any rate, she said good-bye in a
hurry, wished me a Merry Christmas, and hustled me off. I have no very
clear memory of how I got down the hill to my train. But when I reached
home I was idiotic enough to faint right off, which frightened poor
Madge horribly, and sent her tearing to the nearest telephone for old
Dr. Grayson, who had known us all our lives.

Dr. Grayson came, and was very kind, though his remarks were curiously
like Madame’s. He sounded me thoroughly, asked me innumerable questions,
and finally told me there was nothing organically wrong—I was just
tired, and needed rest and change. “Country air,” he said cheerfully.
“You won’t get well in a back street in Prahran. Get away for a
month—it’s lucky that it is holiday time!” And he went off, airily
oblivious of the fact that he might just as well have ordered me a trip
to Mars.

It did not worry me much, although the bare idea of the country made me
homesick. One expects doctors to say things, but it is not necessary to
acquaint one’s brother with all they say. Unfortunately, however, the
old man met Colin on the doorstep, and must needs say it all over again
to him; and Colin came in with the old worry-look in his eyes that I
hated more than anything. I could hear him and Madge consulting in
stage-whispers, in the kitchenette—they might have known that no
variety of whisper can fail to be heard in a flat the size of ours, the
four rooms of which would easily have fitted into our old dining-room at
home. One could almost hear them adjusting the cheerful looks with which
they presently came in.

They wouldn’t let me do anything but lie on the sofa. Madge cooked the
chops in a determined fashion that made the whole flat smell of burned
fat; and Colin did everything else. After dinner was over—it was a
gruesome meal, at which Colin was laboriously funny all the time—I was
graciously allowed to sit in the kitchenette while they washed up, and
we held a council of war.

All the talking in the world could not alter the main fact. There were
no funds to pay for country holidays. Our friends—they were not so many
as in the old days—were all in Melbourne: our only relations were
distant ones, distant in every sense of the word, for they lived in
Queensland, and might as well have been in Timbuctoo, Madge sourly
remarked, for all the practical use they were. Discuss it as we might,
there was no earthly chance of following my prescription.

Poor old Colin looked more like thirty-three than twenty-three as he
scrubbed the gridiron with sand-soap.

“You needn’t worry yourselves a bit,” I told them. “All I need is to be
away from that horrid old school and Madame Carr, and I’ve got two whole
beautiful months. Doctors don’t know everything. I’ll go and sit in
Fawkner Park every day and look at the cows, and imagine I’m in
Gippsland!”

Colin groaned.

“I don’t see why we haven’t a country uncle or something,” said Madge
vaguely: “a red-faced old darling with a loving heart, and a red-roofed
farm, and a beautiful herd of cows—Wyandottes, don’t you call them? If
we were girls in books we’d have one, and we’d go and stay with him and
get hideously fat, and Doris would marry the nearest squatter!” She
heaved a sigh.

“Hang the squatter!” Colin remarked; “but I’d give something to see
either of you fat. I’m afraid you’re a vain dreamer, Madge. Put down
that dish-cloth and let me finish: I’m not going to have you showing up
at a music-lesson with hands like a charlady’s.”

Madge gave up the dish-cloth with reluctance. She was silent for quite
three minutes—an unusual thing for Madge.

“Look here,” she said at length, with a funny little air of
determination. “There’s one thing a whole lot more important than music,
and that’s Doris’s health. I wonder we didn’t think of it before!”

“Well, I’d hate to contradict you,” Colin answered, slightly puzzled.
“But I don’t see that this highly-original discovery of yours makes it
any the more necessary for you to scour saucepans while I’m about.”

“Oh, bother the saucepans!” said Madge impatiently. “I didn’t mean
that—though it’s more my work than yours to wash them, anyhow.
Washing-up isn’t a man’s job.”

“There isn’t any man-and-woman business about this establishment,” said
Colin firmly, “except that I’m boss. Just get that clearly in your young
mind. And what did you mean, if you meant anything?”

“Why, it’s as clear as daylight,” Madge announced. “Doris’s health is
more important than music: you admitted that yourself. Well, then, let’s
sell the piano!”

We looked at each other in blank amazement. Sell the piano! Madge’s
adored piano, Father’s last gift to her. Beneath her fingers it was a
very wonder-chest of magic and delight: all the fairies of laughter, all
the melody of rippling water, all the dearest dreams come true were
there when Madge played. Already old Ferrari, her Italian music-master,
talked to us of triumphs ahead—triumphs in a wider field than
Australia. And she sat on the kitchen table, swinging her legs, and
talked of selling her Bechstein! No wonder we gasped.

“Talk sense!” growled Colin, when his breath came back.

“It _is_ sense,” Madge retorted. “It’s worth ever so much money: a
cheaper piano would do me just as well to practise on. Even if I gave up
music altogether it would be worth it to give Doris a rest. She can’t go
on as she is—you can see that for yourself, Colin Earle!”

“I certainly can’t go on hearing you rave!” I said. “Why, when you’re a
second Paderewski you have got to be the prop of our declining years. It
would be just about the finish for Colin and me if your music were
interfered with, and——” at which point I suddenly found something hard
in my throat. I suppose it was because I was a bit tired, for we aren’t
a weepy family, but I just howled.

It alarmed Colin and Madge very badly. They patted me on the back and
assured me I shouldn’t be bothered in any way, and begged me to drink
some water: and when I managed to get hold of my voice again I seized
the opportunity to make Madge promise that she wouldn’t mention the word
“selling” in connection with the Bechstein again, unless we were really
at our last gasp. This accomplished, we dispatched her to practice, and
Colin returned to the washing-up.

Madge went, rather reluctantly, and Colin rubbed away at the saucepans,
with the furrow deepening between his brows. I was in the midst of
explaining clearly to him that I did not need a change, quite conscious
the while of my utter failure to convince him, when there was a clatter
in the passage, and Madge burst in, waving a newspaper, and incoherent
with excitement.

“What on earth is the matter with the kid?” Colin asked, a little
wearily. “Do go easy, Madge, and say what you want to, when you have
finished brandishing that paper in your lily hand. Meanwhile, get off my
sand-soap.” He rescued it, and turned a critical eye on the bottom of a
saucepan. We were more or less used to Madge’s outbreaks, but to-night
they seemed to be taking an acute form.

“It’s the very thing!” she cried, the words tumbling over each other.
“Just what we want, and it’s in this morning’s paper, so I don’t suppose
anyone has got it yet, and now she’ll really get fat, and you needn’t be
scornful, Colin, so there!”

“I’m not,” said Colin. “But I’d love to know what it’s all about.”

“Why, this advertisement,” said Madge excitedly. “Listen, you two:

Lady requiring rest and change offered pleasant country home,
few weeks, return light services. Teacher preferred. References
exchanged.”

There followed an address in the south-west of Victoria.

“Oh, get out!” Colin said. “Doris doesn’t want to leave off work to
carry bricks!”

“But it says ‘light services,’ don’t you see?” protested Madge. “There
might not be much to do at all—not more than enough to keep her from
‘broodin’ on bein’ a dorg’! And she’d get rest and change. It says so.
And ‘references exchanged’—it’s so beautifully circumspect.” Our
youngest put on a quaint little air of being at least seventy-five.
“Personally, I think it was made for Doris!”

“You always had a sanguine mind,” was Colin’s comment on this attitude.
“What does the patient think about it?”

“I’m not a patient,” I contradicted. “But—I don’t know—it sounds as if
it might be all right, Colin. The ‘pleasant country home’ sounds
attractive. I wouldn’t mind any ordinary housework, if they were nice
people.”

“But they might be beasts,” said my brother pithily. “I don’t feel like
letting you risk it.” He paused, frowning. “Wish I knew which might be
the greater risk. There’s no doubt that you ought to get away from
here.”

“Well, write for particulars—and references,” suggested Madge. “No harm
in that, at all events.”

Colin pondered heavily.

“I believe the kid has made an illuminating remark,” he said at length.
“You don’t commit yourself by writing: perhaps it would be as well to
give it a trial. Though I wouldn’t dream of it for a moment if I saw the
remotest chance of sending you out of Melbourne in any other way, old
white-face!” He put his arm round my shoulders as we went into the
dining-room—which was very unusual for Colin, and affected me greatly.
I began to wonder was I consumptive or something, but cheered up on
remembering that the doctor had said I was “organically sound.”

I wrote my letter, enclosing a testimonial from Dr. Grayson, as to my
general worth; he was very kind, and drew so touching a picture of my
character and capabilities that I was quite certain in my own mind I
could never live up to it. I told him so, after he made me read it, but
he would not alter it, and threatened me with all kinds of pains and
penalties if I failed to prove every word he had said about me. After
that, it seemed scarcely prudent to ask Madame Carr for a letter—the
difference between my two “references” might have been too marked. Much
to Madge’s disgust, I insisted on telling my prospective employer that I
was only eighteen. This excited the gloomiest forebodings in my sister.

“You’ll queer your pitch altogether,” she said. “Eighteen’s awfully
young; ten to one she wants an old frump of thirty!”

“Well, if she does, she had better not have me,” said I. “I don’t want
her to expect some one old and staid, and then have heart-failure when
she sees my extreme youth.”

“Perhaps not,” Madge agreed reluctantly. “Everything depends on first
impressions, and I suppose heart-failure wouldn’t be the best possible
beginning. Anyhow, you might say that you’re five feet eight and not
shingled. That would give her a vision of some one impressive and
dignified.”

“Then she might get a different kind of shock,” I said. “But I don’t
think we need worry; you may be certain that she’ll have dozens and
dozens of applications, and it isn’t a bit likely that she will want me.
I’m going to forget all about it, as soon as the letter has gone—and
you can look out for other advertisements. It’s foolish to expect to
catch your fish the moment you throw in the first bait.”

“I’m not at all certain that I want to catch her,” said Colin gloomily.
“It’s not much fun to catch your fish and find you’ve hooked a shark!”