Picnic at Hanging Rock Read online

  ‘Thank you Mr Hussey – you may go now,’ Miss McCraw ordered somewhere from the rear, suddenly aware of non-mathematical responsibilities and in full command.

  They were off; the College already out of sight except for the tower through the trees as they bowled along the level Melbourne-Bendigo road, vibrating with particles of fine red dust. ‘Get up Sailor, you lazy brute . . . Prince, Belmonte, get back in your collars . . .’ For the first mile or two the scenery was familiar through the daily perambulation of the College crocodile. The passengers knew only too well, without bothering to look out, how the scraggy stringy bark forest lined the road on either side, now and then opening out onto a lighter patch of cleared land. The Comptons’ whitewashed cottage whose sprawling quince trees supplied the College with jellies and jams, the clump of wayside willows at which the governess in charge would invariably call a halt and head for home. It was the same in Longman’s Highroads of History, where the class were forever turning back for recapitulation at the death of King George the Fourth before starting off again with Edward the Third next term . . . Now the willows in rich summer green were gaily passed and a sense of adventure ahead took over as heads began to peer through the buttoned tarpaulin flaps of the drag. The road took a slight turn, there was a fresher green amongst the dun coloured foliage and now and then a stand of blue-black pines, a glimpse of Mount Macedon tufted as usual with fluffy white clouds above the southern slopes, where the romantic summer villas hinted at far off adult delights.

  At Appleyard College SILENCE WAS GOLDEN, written up in the corridors and often imposed. There was a delicious freedom about the swift steady motion of the drag and even in the warm dusty air blowing up in their faces that set the passengers chirping and chattering like budgerigars.

  On the box seat, the three senior girls perched beside Mr Hussey were talking in blissful inconsequence of dreams, embroidery, warts, fireworks, the coming Easter Vacation. Mr Hussey, who spent a large part of his working day in listening to miscellaneous conversation, kept his eyes on the road ahead and said nothing.

  ‘Mr Hussey,’ said Miranda, ‘did you know today is Saint Valentine’s Day?’

  ‘Well, Miss Miranda, I can’t say I did. Don’t know much about Saints. What’s this one’s particular job?’

  ‘Mam’selle says he’s the Patron Saint of Lovers,’ Irma explained. ‘He’s a darling – sends people gorgeous cards with tinsel and real lace – have a caramel?’

  ‘Not while I’m driving, thanks all the same.’ At last Mr Hussey had a conversational innings. He had been to the Races last Saturday and seen a horse belonging to Irma’s father come in first. ‘What was the name of the horse and the distance?’ Marion Quade wanted to know. She wasn’t specially interested in horses but liked to store up snippets of useful information, like her late Father, an eminent Q.C.

  Edith Horton, hating to be left out of anything and anxious to show off her ribbons, now leaned forward over Miranda’s shoulder to ask why Mr Hussey called his big brown horse Duchess? Mr Hussey, who had his favourites amongst the passengers, was uncommunicative. ‘Comes to that, Miss, why are you called Edith?’

  ‘Because Edith is my Grandmother’s name,’ she said primly. ‘Only horses don’t have grandmothers like we do.’

  ‘Oh don’t they just!’ Mr Hussey turned his square shoulders away from the silly child.

  The morning grew steadily hotter. The sun bore down on the shiny black roof of the drag, now covered with fine red dust that seeped through the loosely buttoned curtains into eyes and hair. ‘And this we do for pleasure,’ Greta McCraw muttered from the shadows, ‘so that we may shortly be at the mercy of venomous snakes and poisonous ants . . . how foolish can human creatures be!’ Useless, too, to open the book in her satchel with all this schoolgirl chatter in one’s ears.

  The road to Hanging Rock turns sharply away to the right a little way out of the township of Woodend. Here Mr Hussey pulled up outside the leading hotel to rest and water his horses before starting on the last lap of the drive. Already the heat inside the vehicle was oppressive and there was a wholesale peeling off of the obligatory gloves. ‘Can’t we take our hats off too. Mam’selle?’ asked Irma whose ink-black curls were flowing out in a warm tide under the brim of her stiff school sailor. Mademoiselle smiled and looked across at Miss McCraw, sitting opposite, awake and vertical, but with closed eyes, two puce kid hands locked together on her lap. ‘Certainly not. Because we are on an excursion, there is no necessity to look like a wagon load of gypsies.’ And re-entered the world of pure uncluttered reason.

  The rhythmic beat of the horses’ hooves combined with the close air of the drag was making them drowsy. As it was still only eleven o’clock, with plenty of time in which to reach the picnic grounds for lunch, the governesses conferred and Mr Hussey was requested to let down the steps of the drag at a suitable spot off the road. In the shade of an old white gum the zinc-lined wicker basket that kept the milk and lemonade deliciously cool was taken out and unpacked, hats were removed without further comment and biscuits handed round.

  ‘It’s a long time since I tasted this stuff,’ said Mr Hussey sipping at his lemonade. ‘I don’t take any hard liquor though, when I’ve got a big day on my hands like this.’

  Miranda had risen to her feet, a mug of lemonade raised high above her head. ‘To Saint Valentine!’ ‘Saint Valentine!’ Everyone including Mr Hussey raised their mugs and sent the lovely name ringing down the dusty road. Even Greta McCraw, who wouldn’t have cared if they were drinking to Tom of Bedlam or the Shah of Persia and was listening exclusively to the Music of the Spheres in her own head, absently raised an empty mug to her pale lips. ‘And now,’ said Mr Hussey, ‘if your saint has no objections, Miss Miranda, I think we had better be on our way.’

  ‘Humans,’ Miss McCraw confided to a magpie picking up crumbs of shortbread at her feet, ‘are obsessed with the notion of perfectly useless movement. Nobody but an idiot ever seems to want to sit still for a change!’ And she climbed reluctantly back into her seat.

  The basket was re-packed, the passengers counted in case anyone should be left behind, the steps of the drag pulled up under the floorboards and once again they were on the road, moving through the scattered silvery shade of straight young trees, where the horses pressed forward through ripples of golden light that broke on straining shoulders and dark sweating rumps. The five sets of hooves were almost soundless on the soft unmade surface of the country road. No traveller passed by, no bird song splintered the sunflecked silence, the grey pointed leaves of the saplings hung lifeless in the noonday heat. The laughing chattering girls in the warm shadowed vehicle unconsciously fell silent until they were out again in full sunlight. ‘It must be nearly twelve o’clock,’ Mr Hussey told his passengers, looking not at his watch but at the sun. ‘We haven’t done too badly so far, ladies . . . I swore black and blue to your boss I’d have you back at the College by eight o’clock.’ The word ‘College’ sent a chill into the warmth of the drag and nobody answered.

  For once Greta McCraw must have been attending to general conversation, which she seldom did in the teachers’ sitting-room. ‘There is no reason why we should be late, even if we linger for an extra hour at the Rock. Mr Hussey knows as well as I do that two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third. This morning we have driven along two sides of a triangle . . . am I correct, Mr Hussey?’ The driver nodded in rather dazed agreement. Miss McCraw was a queer fish all right. ‘Very well, then – you have only to change your route this afternoon and return by the third side. In this case, since we entered this road at Woodend at right angles the return journey will be along the hypotenuse.’

  This was really too much for Mr Hussey’s practical intelligence. ‘I don’t know about a hippopotamus, ma’am, but if you’re thinking of the Camel’s Hump,’ he pointed with his whip to the Macedon ranges, where the Hump stood out against the sky, ‘it’s a blooming sight longer road than the one we came by, arithmetic or not. You
might be interested to know there isn’t even a made road – only a sort of rough track over the back of the Mount.’

  ‘I was not referring to the Camel’s Hump, Mr Hussey. Thank you for your explanation all the same. Knowing little of horses and roads I tend to become theoretical. Marion, can you hear me up there in front? You understand what I mean, I hope?’ Marion Quade, the only member of the class to take Pythagoras in her stride, was a favourite pupil, in the sense that a savage who understands a few words of the language of a shipwrecked sailor is a favourite savage.

  While they were talking the angle of vision had gradually altered to bring the Hanging Rock into sudden startling view. Directly ahead, the grey volcanic mass rose up slabbed and pinnacled like a fortress from the empty yellow plain. The three girls on the box seat could see the vertical lines of the rocky walls, now and then gashed with indigo shade, patches of grey green dogwood, outcrops of boulders even at this distance immense and formidable. At the summit, apparently bare of living vegetation, a jagged line of rock cut across the serene blue of the sky. The driver was casually flicking at the amazing thing with his long handled whip. ‘There she is ladies . . . only about a mile and a half to go!’

  Mr Hussey was full of comfortable facts and figures. ‘Over five hundred feet in height . . . volcanic . . . several monoliths . . . thousands of years old. Pardon me, Miss McCraw, I should say millions.’ ‘The mountain comes to Mahommed. The Hanging Rock comes to Mr Hussey.’ The very peculiar governess was smiling up at him: a secret crooked smile that seemed to Mr Hussey to have even less sense than the words. Mademoiselle, catching his eye, only just stopped herself from winking at the dear bewildered man. Really, poor Greta was getting more eccentric every day!

  The drag turned sharply to the right, the pace quickened and the voice of practical sanity boomed from the box seat. ‘I reckon you ladies will be wanting your lunches. I know I’ll be ready for that chicken pie I’ve been hearing so much about.’ The girls were all chattering again and Edith was not the only one with thoughts centred on chicken pie. Heads craned out between the flaps for another sight of the Rock, appearing and disappearing with every turn of the road; sometimes close enough for the three girls in front to make out the two great balancing boulders near the summit, sometimes almost obscured by the foreground of scrub and tall forest trees.

  The so-called Picnic Grounds at the base of the Hanging Rock were entered through a sagging wooden gate, now closed. Miranda, an experienced gate opener on the family property at home, had climbed down unasked from the box seat and was expertly manipulating the warped wooden latch under the admiring eye of Mr Hussey, who noted the sure touch of the slender hands, the dragging weight of the gate neatly supported on one hip. As soon as it was opened wide enough on its rusty hinges to allow the safe passage of the drag, a flock of parrots flew out screeching from an overhanging tree, winging away across the sunlit grassy flats towards Mount Macedon, rising up all blue and green to the south.

  ‘Come up Sailor . . . Duchess, get over you . . . Belmonte, what d’you think you’re doing . . .? Cripes Miss Miranda, you’d think they’d never set eyes on a blooming parrot before.’ So Mr Hussey, in the best of holiday tempers, guided the five bay horses out of the known dependable present and into the unknown future, with the same happy confidence with which he daily negotiated the narrow gates of the Macedon Livery Stables and his own backyard.

  2

  Manmade improvements on Nature at the Picnic Grounds consisted of several circles of flat stones to serve as fireplaces and a wooden privy in the shape of a Japanese pagoda. The creek at the close of summer ran sluggishly through long dry glass, now and then almost disappearing to re-appear as a shallow pool. Lunch had been set out on large white tablecloths close by, shaded from the heat of the sun by two or three spreading gums. In addition to the chicken pie, angel cake, jellies and the tepid bananas inseparable from an Australian picnic, Cook had provided a handsome iced cake in the shape of a heart, for which Tom had obligingly cut a mould from a piece of tin. Mr Hussey had boiled up two immense billycans of tea on a fire of bark and leaves and was now enjoying a pipe in the shadow of the drag where he could keep a watchful eye on his horses tethered in the shade.

  The only other occupants of the Picnic Grounds were a party of three or four people encamped some distance away under some blackwoods on the opposite side of the creek, where a large bay horse and a white Arab pony were lunching from two chaffbags beside an open wagonette. ‘How dreadfully quiet it is out here,’ observed Edith, helping herself lavishly to cream. ‘How anyone can prefer to live in the country I can’t imagine. Unless of course they are dreadfully poor.’

  ‘If everyone else in Australia felt like that, you wouldn’t be making yourself fat on rich cream,’ Marion pointed out.

  ‘Except for those people over there with the wagonette we might be the only living creatures in the whole world,’ said Edith, airily dismissing the entire animal kingdom at one stroke.

  The sunny slopes and shadowed forest, to Edith so still and silent, were actually teeming with unheard rustlings and twitterings, scufflings, scratchings, the light brush of unseen wings. Leaves, flowers and grasses glowed and trembled under the canopy of light; cloud shadows gave way to golden motes dancing above the pool where water beetles skimmed and darted. On the rocks and grass the diligent ants were crossing miniature Saharas of dry sand, jungles of seeding grass, in the never ending task of collecting and storing food. Here, scattered about amongst the mountainous human shapes were Heaven-sent crumbs, caraway seeds, a shred of crystallized ginger – strange, exotic but recognizably edible loot. A battalion of sugar ants, almost bent in half with the effort, were laboriously dragging a piece of icing off the cake towards some subterranean larder dangerously situated within inches of Blanche’s yellow head, pillowed on a rock. Lizards basked on the hottest stones, a lumbering armour-plated beetle rolled over in the dry leaves and lay helplessly kicking on its back; fat white grubs and flat grey woodlice preferred the dank security of layers of rotting bark. Torpid snakes lay coiled in their secret holes awaiting the twilight hour when they would come sliding from hollow logs to drink at the creek, while in the hidden depths of the scrub the birds waited for the heat of the day to pass . . .

  Insulated from natural contacts with earth, air and sunlight, by corsets pressing on the solar plexus, by voluminous petticoats, cotton stockings and kid boots, the drowsy well-fed girls lounging in the shade were no more a part of their environment than figures in a photograph album, arbitrarily posed against a backcloth of cork rocks and cardboard trees.

  Hunger satisfied and the unwonted delicacies enjoyed to the last morsel, the cups and plates rinsed at the pool, they settled down to amuse themselves for the remainder of the afternoon. Some wandered off in twos and threes, under strict injunctions not to stray out of sight of the drag; others, drugged with rich food and sunshine, dozed and dreamed. Rosamund produced some fancywork, Blanche was already asleep. Two industrious sisters from New Zealand were making pencil sketches of Miss McCraw, who had at last removed the kid gloves in which she had absently begun to eat a banana with disastrous results. Sitting upright on a fallen log with her knife of a nose in a book, and her steel-rimmed spectacles, she was almost too easy to caricature. Beside her Mademoiselle, her blond hair falling about her face, was relaxed at full length on the grass. Irma had borrowed her mother o’pearl penknife and was peeling a ripe apricot with a voluptuous delicacy worthy of Cleopatra’s banquet. ‘Why is it, Miranda,’ she whispered, ‘that such a sweet pretty creature is a schoolteacher – of all dreary things in the world . . .? Oh here comes Mr Hussey, it seems a shame to wake her.’

  ‘I am not asleep, ma petite – only day-dreaming,’ said the governess, propping her head on an elbow with a far-away smile. ‘What is it, Mr Hussey?’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Miss, but I want to make sure we get away no later than five. Sooner, if my horses are ready.’

  ‘Of course. Whatever
you say. I shall see that the young ladies are ready whenever you are. What time is it now?’

  ‘I was just going to ask you, Miss. My old ticker seems to have stopped dead at twelve o’clock. Today of all days in the whole bloomin’ year.’

  It happened that Mademoiselle’s little French clock was in Bendigo being repaired.

  ‘At Moosoo Montpelier’s, Miss?’

  ‘I think that is the watchmaker’s name.’

  ‘In Golden Square? Then if I may say so, you’ve done real well for yourself.’ A faint unmistakable blush belied the coolness of the French lady’s ‘Indeed?’ However, Mr Hussey had got his teeth into Moosoo Montpelier and seemed unable to let him go, shaking him up and down like a dog with a bone. ‘Let me tell you, Miss, Moosoo Montpelier and his father before him is one of the best men in his line in all Australia. And a fine gentleman, too. You couldn’t have gone to a better man.’

  ‘So I understand. Miranda – you have your pretty little diamond watch – can you tell us the time?’

  ‘I’m sorry Mam’selle. I don’t wear it any more. I can’t stand hearing it ticking all day long just above my heart.’

  ‘If it were mine,’ said Irma, ‘I would never take it off – not even in the bath. Would you, Mr Hussey?’

  Jerked into reluctant action, Miss McCraw closed her book, sent an exploratory pair of bony fingers into the folds of the flat puce bosom and came out with an old-fashioned gold repeater on a chain. ‘Stopped at twelve. Never stopped before. My papa’s.’ Mr Hussey was reduced to looking knowingly at the shadow of the Hanging Rock which ever since luncheon had been creeping down towards the Picnic Grounds on the flat. ‘Shall I put the billy on again for a cup of tea before we go? Say about an hour from now?’

  ‘An hour,’ said Marion Quade, producing some squared paper and a ruler. ‘I should like to make a few measurements at the base of the Rock if we have time.’ As both Miranda and Irma wanted a closer view of the Rock they asked permission to take a walk as far as the lower slope before tea. It was granted after a moment’s hesitation by Mademoiselle, Miss McCraw having disappeared again behind her book. ‘How far is it as the cock crows, Miranda?’