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.