The Boy in the Bush by D. H. Lawrence (Illustrated)

D. H. Lawrence, Delphi Classics

• Éditeur: Delphi Classics (Parts Edition)
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786569288
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: Classics

This eBook features the unabridged text of 'The Boy in the Bush' from the bestselling edition of 'The Complete Works of D. H. Lawrence'.

Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Lawrence includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

eBook features:
* The complete unabridged text of 'The Boy in the Bush'
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CHAPTER I

JACK ARRIVES IN AUSTRALIA

I

He stepped ashore, looking like a lamb. Far be it from me to say he was the lamb he looked. Else why should he have been sent out of England? But a good-looking boy he was, with dark blue eyes and the complexion of a girl and a bearing just a little too lamb-like to be convincing.

He stepped ashore in the newest of new colonies, glancing quickly around, but preserving his lamb-like quietness. Down came his elegant kit, and was dumped on the wharf: a kit that included a brand-new pigskin saddle and bridle, nailed up in a box straight from a smart shop in London. He kept his eye on that also, the tail of his well-bred eye.

Behind him was the wool ship that had brought him from England. This nondescript port was Fremantle, in West Australia; might have been anywhere or nowhere. In his pocket he had a letter of introduction to a well-known colonial lawyer, in which, as he was aware, was folded also a draft on a West Australian bank. In his purse he had a five-pound note. In his head were a few irritating memories. In his heart he felt a certain excited flutter at being in a real new land, where a man could be really free. Though what he meant by “free” he never stopped to define. He left everything suitably vague.

Meanwhile, he waited for events to develop, as if it were none of his business.

This was forty years ago, when it was still a long, long way to Australia, and the land was still full of the lure of promise. There were gold and pearl findings, bush and bush-ranging, the back of beyond and everything desirable. Much misery, too, ignored by all except the miserable.

And Jack was not quite eighteen, so he ignored a great deal. He didn’t pay much attention even to his surroundings, yet from the end of the wharf he saw pure sky above, the pure, unknown, unsullied sea to westward; the ruffled, tumbled sand glistened like fine silver, the air was the air of a new world, unbreathed by man.

The only prize Jack had ever won at school was for Scripture. The Bible language exerted a certain fascination over him, and in the background of his consciousness the Bible images always hovered. When he was moved, it was Scripture that came to his aid. So now he stood, silent with the shyness of youth, thinking over and over: “There shall be a new heaven and a new earth.”

Not far off among the sand near the harbour mouth lay the township, a place of strong, ugly, oblong houses of white stone with unshuttered bottle-glass windows and a low whitewashed wall going round, like a sort of compound; then there was a huge stone prison with a high whitewashed wall. Nearer the harbour, a few new tall warehouse buildings, and sheds, long sheds, and a little wooden railway station. Further out again, windmills for milling flour, the mill-sails turning in the transparent breeze from the sea. Right in the middle of the township was a stolid new Victorian church with a turret: and this was the one thing he knew he disliked in the view.

On the wharf everything was busy. The old wool steamer lay important in dock, people were crowding on deck and crowding the wharf in a very informal manner, porters were running with baggage, a chain was clanking, and little groups of emigrants stood forlorn, looking for their wooden chests, swinging their odd bundles done up in coloured kerchiefs. The uttermost ends of the earth! All so lost, and yet so familiar. So familiar, and so lost. The people like provincial people at home. The railway running through the sand hills. And the feeling of remote unreality.

This was his mother’s country. She had been born and raised here, and she had told him about it, many a time, like a fable. And this was what it was like! How could she feel she actually belonged to it? Nobody could belong to it.

Himself, he belonged to Bedford, England. And Bedford College. But his mind turned away from this in repugnance. Suddenly he turned desirously to the unreality of this remote place.

Jack was waiting for Mr. George, the lawyer to whom his letter of introduction was addressed. Mr. George had shaken hands with him on deck: a stout and breezy gentleman, who had been carried away again on the gusts of his own breeze, among the steamer crowd, and had forgotten his young charge. Jack patiently waited. Adult and responsible people with stout waistcoats had a habit, he knew, of being needed elsewhere.

Mr. George! And all his mother’s humorous stories about him! This notable character of the Western lonely colony, this rumbustical old gentleman who had a “terrific memory,” who was “full of quotations” and who “never forgot a face” — Jack waited the more calmly, sure of being recognised again by him — was to be seen in the distance with his thumbs hooked in his waistcoat armholes, passively surveying the scene with a quiet, shrewd eye, before hailing another acquaintance and delivering another sally. He had a “tongue like a razor” and frightened the women to death. Seeing him there on the wharf, elderly, stout and decidedly old-fashioned, Jack had a little difficulty in reconciling him with the hearty colonial hero of his mother’s stories.

How he had missed a seat on the bench, for example. He was to become a judge. But while acting on probation, or whatever it is called, a man came up before him charged with wife-beating, and serious maltreatment of his better half. A verdict of “not guilty” was returned. “Two years hard labour,” said Mr. George, who didn’t like the looks of the fellow. There was a protest. “Verdict stands!” said Mr. George. “Two years hard labour. Give it him for not beating her and breaking her head. He should have done. He should have done. ’Twas fairly proved!”

So Mr. George had remained a lawyer, instead of becoming a judge. A stout, shabby, provincial-looking old man with baggy trousers that seemed as if they were slipping down. Jack had still to get used to that sort of trousers. One of his mother’s heroes!

But the whole scene was still outside the boy’s vague, almost trancelike state. The commotion of unloading went on — people stood in groups, the lumpers were already at work with the winches, bringing bales and boxes from the hold. The Jewish gentleman standing just there had a red nose. He swung his cane uneasily. He must be well-off, to judge by his links and watch-chain. But then why did his trousers hang so low and baggy, and why was his waistcoat of yellow cloth — that cloth cost a guinea a yard, Jack knew it from his horsey acquaintances — so dirty and frayed?

Western Australia in the year 1882. Jack had read all about it in the official report on the steamer. The colony had three years before celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. Many people still remembered the fiasco of the first attempt at the Swan River Settlement. Captain Stirling brought the first boatload of prospective settlers. The Government promised not to defile the land with convicts. But the promise was broken. The convicts had come: and that stone prison-building must have been the convict station. He knew from his mother’s stories. But he also knew that the convicts were now gone again. The “Establishment” had been closed down already for ten years or more.

A land must have its ups and downs. And the first thing the old world had to ship to the new world was its sins, and the first shipments were of sinners. That was what his mother said. Jack felt a certain sympathy. He felt a sympathy with the empty “Establishment” and the departed convicts. He himself was mysteriously a “sinner.” He felt he was born such: just as he was born with his deceptive handsome look of innocence. He was a sinner, a Cain. Not that he was aware of having committed anything that seemed to himself particularly sinful. No, he was not aware of having “sinned.” He was not aware that he ever would “sin.”

But that wasn’t the point. Curiously enough, that wasn’t the point. The men who commit sins and who know they commit sins usually get on quite well with the world. Jack knew he would never get on well with the world. He was a sinner. He knew that as far as the world went, he was a sinner, born condemned. Perhaps it had come to him from his mother’s careless, rich, uncanny Australian blood. Perhaps it was a recoil from his father’s military-gentleman nature. His father was an officer in Her Majesty’s Army. An officer in Her Majesty’s Army. For some reason, there was always a touch of the fantastic and ridiculous, to Jack, in being an officer in Her Majesty’s Army. Quite a high and responsible officer, usually stationed in command in one or other of Her Britannic Majesty’s Colonies.

Why did Jack find his father slightly fantastic? Why was that gentleman in uniform who appeared occasionally, very resplendent and somehow very “good,” why was he always unreal and fantastic to the little boy left at home in England? Why was he even more fantastic when he wore a black coat and genteel grey trousers? He was handsome and pleasant, and indisputably “good.” Then why, oh, why should he have appeared fantastic to his own little boy, who was so much like him in appearance?

“The spitten image!” one of his nurses had said. And Jack never forgave it. He thought it meant a spat-upon image, or an image in spit. This he resented and repudiated absolutely, though it remained vague.

“Oh, you little sinner!” said the same nurse, half caressingly. And this the boy had accepted as his natural appellation. He was a little sinner. As he grew older, he was a young sinner. Now, as he approached manhood, he was a sinner without modification.

Not, we repeat, that he was ever able to understand wherein his sinfulness lay. He knew his father was a “good man.”— “The colonel, your father, is such a good man, so you must be a good little boy and grow up like him.”— “There is no better example of an English gentleman than your father, the general. All you have to do is to grow up like him.”

Jack knew from the start that he wouldn’t. And therein lay the sin, presumably. Or the root of the sin.

He did not dislike his father. The general was kind and simple and amiable. How could anyone dislike him? But to the boy he was always just a little fantastic, like the policeman in a Punch-and-Judy show.

Jack loved his mother with a love that could not but be intermittent, for sometimes she stayed in England and “lived” with him, and more often she left him and went off with his father to Jamaica or some such place — or to India or Khartoum, names that were in his blood — leaving the boy in the charge of a paternal Aunt. He didn’t think much of the Aunt.

But he liked the warm, flushed, rather muddled delight of his mother. She was a handsome, ripe Australian woman with warm colouring and soft flesh, absolutely kindly in a humorous, off-hand fashion, warm with a jolly sensuousness, and good in a wicked sort of way. She sat in the sun and laughed and refused to quarrel, refused also to weep. When she had to leave her little boy a spasm would contract her face and make her look ugly, so the child was glad if she went quickly. But she was in love with her husband, who was still more in love with her, so off she went laughing sensuously across seven seas, quarrelling with nobody, pitching her camp in true colonial fashion wherever she found herself, yet always with a touch of sensuous luxury, Persian rugs and silk cushions and dresses of rich material. She was the despair of the true English wives, for you couldn’t disapprove of her, she was the dearest thing imaginable, and yet she introduced a pleasant, semi-luxurious sense of — of what? Why, almost of sin. Not positive sin. She was really the dearest thing imaginable. But the feeling that there was no fence between sin and virtue. As if sin were, so to speak, the unreclaimed bush, and goodness were only the claims that the settlers had managed to fence in. And there was so much more bush than settlement. And the one was as good as the other, save that they served different ends. And that you always had the wild and endless bush all round your little claim, and coming and going was always through the wild and innocent, but non-moral bush. Which non-moral bush had a devil in it. Oh, yes! But a wild and comprehensible devil, like bush-rangers who did brutal and lawless things. Whereas the tame devil of the settlement, drunkenness and greediness and foolish pride, he was more scaring.

“My dear, there’s tame innocence and wild innocence, and tame devils and wild devils, and tame morality and wild morality. Let’s camp in the bush and be good.” That was her attitude, always. “Let’s camp in the bush and be good.” She was an Australian from a wild Australian homestead. And she was like a wild sweet animal. Always the sense of space and lack of restrictions, and it didn’t matter what you did, so long as you were good inside yourself.

Her husband was in love with her, completely. To him it mattered very much what you did. So p...