Who is going to send it?
I will. That’s only fair.
So Sally pressed telegram money on her and then surrendered herself to the strangeness of looking out over the parade ground to the Georgian gatehouse, where two soldiers in their big hats guarded Victoria Barracks from the malice of the emperor of Germany. There, as well, young talkative men played around and waited in line for their chance to invade the military premises and offer themselves.
I’ll go home for a few days, Sally said. Since the sergeant’s paying. I have to square things with the matron and with Papa.
But first, for the measuring-up, Sally arrived at Honora’s place in Enmore. It proved a dim but loud home, many brothers and sisters, a thin but young-looking mother, a hulking, sullen father reading the Australian Worker in the kitchen, and beyond all a veranda set up as a seamstress’s workshop.
And that night, it was back to the Currawong. Sally loved the great coastal reach and the strenuous swell now that her mother was safe from suffering it. And the angles headlands adopted to inland mountains—which told her just about where she was on the map. She got one of Kempsey’s two charabancs which waited up the slope from the wharf and took passengers to addresses in town and round the river. At last it rattled over the Sherwood bridge. The house was empty, her father gone somewhere, and the dray gone. It suited her to walk the two or more miles over to Macleay District on its hill above the convenient cemetery and told the matron and was treated as a woman who had somehow managed an astounding stunt. She was back at lunchtime. When she faced her widowed father he answered her with a terrible uncomplaining. After all, he’d already had the telegram.
It’s a good and valorous thing to do, he asserted, nodding and weighing. And the one stipulation is you take care of each other.
When she overexplained the permanent arrangements she would make to get Mrs. Sorley’s daughter in to cook, he waved aside the idea. Then—in her fever of guilt—she rode over to the genial widow Sorley’s house to tell her what had happened. Even the red-yellow dust of the road in between had a different nature, as if it was preparing itself to be sighted by her no longer, her departure written into its atoms, making it someone else’s road. She was greeted with the widow’s full-blooded praise, a jar of blackberry jam as a gift, and an invitation to drink tea. Mrs. Sorley had never seemed reduced to an air of frailty by that freak slippage of the cedar that crushed her marriage. An ax blow left or right might have utterly altered the fall of that great hammer—the one that unluckily toppled on her husband. But these speculations didn’t fill the house.
Mrs. Sorley’s daughter had already brought the news of the original telegram the Durance girls had sent home from Sydney, so Mrs. Sorley was apprised—she said—of the gallantry of the Durance girls, and her fifteen-year-old son made muttering noises about wishing it was him. Sally assured the widow she did not expect her to take any special trouble—Papa had declared himself quite up to the business of sustaining himself. In many ways, Sally knew, he was as strong as when he was a boy. His grief as a bereaved soul was more somber than Mrs. Sorley’s, but he had hammered out a deal with it.
Not only did her father see her off again at the wharf in East Kempsey but so did Mrs. Sorley, her daughter, and two sons. Mrs. Sorley presented Sally this time with two little sacks of lavender to keep the sisters’ clothes fresh. There were a number of young men rowdy on the deck of the steamer, waving good-bye to friends and families from throughout the town and the valley. Their whistling and shouting almost swamped the hushed good-byes of her father. With this mob of overexcited recruits, escaping jobs in Central Kempsey or on some dismal farm, Mr. Durance’s own loss of two daughters did not seem as singular. Shouting went up a pitch and women’s voices from the wharf became shriller when the Currawong eased away from the pier and from the shore on which she had assembled the materials for her mother’s killing. There were men still drinking in the pub above the dock—their shadows could be seen through windows—and from the balcony of the Irish-owned general store which served the east of the town, a girl of perhaps fifteen years gazed out with the half interest worthy of the regular steamer’s going.
Already, separated from the riverbank and turned towards the greater darkness of the less-settled downriver reaches and swamps, Sally felt she was no longer held by the duty of memory and might now be free to forget who she was for long hours at a time. Concern for her father dwindled at once. She was confident again in his ruggedness. She had been taken off that subtle and self-manufactured hook.
The Archimedes I
The corps was of some thirty nurses who were put to work in civil hospitals, the military as yet having neglected to create even one of their own. Sally stayed in Naomi’s flat and worked at the Coast Hospital, which she reached by tram, a conveyance that gave her thought time. She read war news from the opened Heralds and Telegraphs of other riders. She went to Honora Slattery’s again, and the uniform and the on-duty clothes were splendid and neatly stitched as promised. And no alteration was necessary, at which Honora herself seemed unsurprised and smug.
It was not a great wait, however—perhaps a week—until they were given railway tickets to the golden city, to Melbourne—the other pole to Sydney’s civic pretensions, the two cities holding each other in orbits of mutual contempt. On the railway south—especially when they changed from train to train at Albury on the great dividing river, given neither state consented to recognize the value of the other’s rail gauge—committees of women fussed over them, ordered lumpish boys to carry their bags from the New South Wales carriages to the Victorian ones, and gave them tea and pounds of cake. Each cup of tea and morsel of cake Sally absorbed removed her further from the networks of duty and blame. Each cup was the cup of forgetfulness. For stretches of hours, she did not think of her crime or her abandonment.
The ship that would take them lay at Port Melbourne. Its name was Archimedes. They were driven to it direct by motorcar from Swan-ston Street, without being able to test Melbourne’s claim of being supreme in the Antipodes for public gardens and architectural splendor. The Archimedes shone at its dingy pier. Here was a passenger steamer painted white and banded in green with, amidships, a vast red cross. The cross bespoke their right to transit oceans and to turn up in Europe or elsewhere—they were not told where—unmolested. It was therefore unlike the convoys already departed which were vulnerable and for whose sake many—including the prime minister, it was said—held their breath. Nonetheless it was soon clear that even their ship would be darkened by night, and sailors and medical orderlies forbidden to smoke on deck after dusk. The Archimedes was estimated by Naomi—on whatever basis—to be sixteen thousand tons.
The women from New South Wales were first on board and thus created the very first echoing steely cries of their own and the Archimedes’s new careers. Their four-women cabins were forward on the same deck—one deck beneath the promenade—as a cavernous hospital space was created by the removal of partitions amidships. Here medical orderlies would sleep in hammocks as they all steamed to the conflict.
From the railing they watched women from other places come aboard after assembling on the dock. They saw the stylish Victorians in lower-calf-length skirts, and wondered in what other ways these women might assert superiority. They nudged each other at the sight of a dozen Tasmanians in long, hooped skirts which looked to belong to the old century. Yet when these girls came aboard there were hellos and swapped greetings and all the rest of the manic conviviality that suited the situation.