The Daughters of Mars: A Novel Page 3

  I absolutely promise, said Honora Slattery, as if to allay Sally’s sectarian suspicion, I won’t be doing more than three girls plus mine. You see, I want to lay a bit of money up for Mama and himself. The old fella’s a waterside worker. Sometimes we’re flush, sometimes we’re eating kumquats and lard.

  She winked.

  And just in case the hospital ship sinks, Honora Slattery ended.

  Sally laughed and shook her head at the foreshadowing of this unlikely tragedy. They exchanged addresses. You can call my aunt, anyhow, when you’re finished, said Sally. She’s got a telephone.

  Mother of God! said Honora. I’ve blundered in amongst the aristocracy.

  No, Sally said. I’m a dairy farmer’s daughter. But, I tell you, you’d better be good.

  For what mocking, corrective words would Naomi feel entitled to utter, inspired by Slattery’s failure and Sally’s own gullibility?

  Honora Slattery said, You can put the house on it.

  Now a woman with a foghorn—who described herself as Chief Matron Appleton—called them to order. She had open features and that easiness of command of such women.

  She told them they must meet again in a week at eight o’clock in the morning to be instructed on the army, on issues of soldiers and military units. They would be introduced to the whole gamut of duties affecting orderlies and nurses—from the front line to the general hospitals behind it. For now, they would fill in one more form to entitle them to military pay, and then could return either to their homes or to their civil nursing duties until required. Those who had more than twenty miles to travel could apply for a warrant.

  They all took final turns at desks with pens and ink to fill the pay forms, women of forty elbowing their way with twenty-year-olds barely past their exams. Each form was dropped at a desk at the front of the hall where, after an orderly scanned them, they were placed in a cardboard box. The women left uncertainly. The plain dismissal—and the cardboard box where they’d left the record of their years—seemed too flimsy and insignificant to contain the shift they had managed.

  At the top of the steps outside, Naomi was waiting, pulling on velvet gloves. Sally thought the question of shopping for kit would come up. Well, Naomi said instead, we must send poor Papa a telegram. He ought to know tout de suite.

  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.

  The vivid afternoon on which the Archimedes pulled away from the wharf, the patriots and families left behind waved with a startling energy, putting all their sinews into it as if there were a law that said the stronger the farewell the more certain the return. The band played “Annie Laurie” and those unavoidable and glib songs of departure—“Auld Lang Syne” and so on. They could still hear the plaintive brass on the wharf as the swell of Port Phillip hit them, and as the Archimedes saddled itself for its real business with real waters.

  The most casually worldly nurse—Sally had heard by dinnertime in the main dining room—was a girl from Melbourne named Karla Freud. She was dark-haired and had sung for that famous theatrical company in Melbourne, the Tait brothers. But her parents had somehow dragged her off the stage and set her to nursing. Glossy-haired, lovely Freud did not stick with the Melbourne girls but seemed to seek novelty with the New South Wales women and Tasmanians. She brought to conversations with them what people called “presence.” Somehow it became known she was a soprano. Part by her own desire but part due to constant urgings that arise when an obvious “theatrical” appears in a group, she was soon singing in the officers’ mess—“Sally, Sally, Pride of Our Alley” and “Believe Me If All . . .” And humorous songs with a flirtatious edge, such as “Gee! But I Like Music with My Meals”—songs utterly suitable for her energy, her taste for droll fun, and her sculpted, thespian face.

  Just the same, nursing’s won the fight with the Theatre Royal, she declared to her fellow nurses after returning to their table. Because I don’t have the courage to be Sarah Bernhardt.

  Well, now you’re really stuck, said Honora, who suspected Freud of being a bit pretentious. Even the papers can’t pretend that the right side’s winning hands down. We might be busy for a few years.

  Right, said Freud without rancor. If I take nursing as my rehearsal period, I’ll just about be back onstage at the Royal by the time I’m fifty.

  A fair-haired girl named Leonora Casement—a Melbourne nurse—was a year younger than Sally. She must have begun her training as little more than a child. Yet she had confidence and wasn’t callow and was taken round the promenade deck by a tall surgeon named Fellowes. If you looked at them walk past, you thought, there goes an unblighted pair—no dishonesties, no oddities, and no out-of-control signs of attachment. Melbourne girls said these two had known each other before the war, at the Austin Hospital.

  Then the great sea troughs took over—the mad pitching, yawing, rolling, and the spasms and exhausted torpors of mal de mer. The Bight that bit everyone, as someone said. By the time the ship skirted Western Australia without actually sighting it and reached north over the sweltering equator, injuries to the medical orderlies were routine in the ship’s hospital. There was one man badly beaten. A tuberculosis case as well: a nineteen-year-old of good frame, yet who should not have been recruited. But the nurses were under-employed and many were inveigled by officers, as Leonora had been, into turns on the deck.

  Sally met a confident nurse named Carradine—yes, she admitted, the federal politician Mr. Joe Carradine who was attorney-general was also her father-in-law. She was quite open to letting you know she was married. It had been a secret before but on the Archimedes she needed to make it known to others lest she be pressured into man-to-woman promenades. Carradine’s reddish hair framed a bony but lively face, and her body was lean but full-hipped. Her husband was a lieutenant of infantry—in the very first regiment of the First Brigade—who had gone off on the convoy weeks before.

  As Leonora Casement was an exemplar for girls’ courting, Elsie Carradine was a model for the ordained fidelities. Elsie walked by day only and with groups, to ensure nothing in her might be let loose which—through no intent of her own—would call to men in a way from which the dignity of their polished belts and insignia could not protect them or her.

  Naomi amazed her sister by walking the deck at any agreed-upon time with a bulky, broad-shouldered captain named Ellis Hoyle, an infantry soldier left behind by the first convoy, who was—contrary to the letter of international law—fetching a ride aboard the Archimedes. It seemed to Sally that Naomi was thereby showing something her sister had not known was there—a lightness, a social grace. Naomi would never have done this sort of thing in the Macleay, since people there observed any sauntering pair with knowing headwags and smirks, wanting to herd them towards inept marriages. Sally walked the main deck with Honora, Freud, and Carradine, still awkward at the sight of her sister. She was fascinated that Naomi could balance the murder of their mother with a stroll alongside an officer above the ocean.

  Sometimes Sally’s group were squired by medical officers. All parties were free here from the false distance which operated in civil hospitals. Sally gauged that for different reasons—larrikin raucousness in one, aloof whimsy in the other—the officers liked Honora and Freud.

  Three matrons sat at the captain’s table, and the third of them—the most junior—drove the pace of talk and caused men to laugh robustly. She had done a lot of traveling while bush nursing in the Western District, Gippsland, and the northeast of Victoria. Her name was Matron Mitchie. The other two matrons—more entitled to capture the conversation—smiled thin-lipped and shook their heads in a tiny, only half-approving way at Matron Mitchie’s daredevil strut across the narrow wire strung between humor and vulgarity. They seemed to think Mitchie less than an appropriate matron and a poor exemplar for the girls. And yet where were they from? Sally wondered. Probably escaping some enslaving and skimping farm that yielded plenty after flood but was barren in drought. Their fathers, too, had in their day crept to the bank manager and feared that the big stock and station agents would take them over and send them as poor-paid managers back to their land or as less than full beings off to the city.

  The reason she thought of farms was that Sally knew from her own example that country girls were fools for nursing. They believed it was the greatest thing open to them. They perhaps hoped to marry doctors. These three hadn’t married doctors, but Matron Mitchie was having so much fun on her own terms that in her case it was just as well. When she made men laugh, the laugh was not a conces
sion to quaintness but came gushing up from the area between the sternum and abdomen.

  This Mitchie woman had waddled aboard, thick-hipped, in Melbourne. From the start her eyes darted as if the more faces she scammed the happier she’d be. Yet this was the sort of matron whose frown could break a girl’s heart purely because young women would want to please her so much. Whereas the other two were in some ways what Sally wanted to become—unhumbled, immune from the normal shocks to womanhood inherent in household squalor and husbands and children, yet relentlessly careful and outside and above life. They were practiced in unmanning younger doctors and making nurses quake. Patients called them dragons, and Sally could understand how they applied and invested themselves into becoming dragons.

  Across the table at which Sally sat, Honora was having on a small scale the same effect on Dr. Fellowes and other young medical officers that Matron Mitchie was having on the ship’s captain and the colonels. Her liveliness was not muted at all by the fact that the dining rooms of steamers, and officers in Sam Brownes and leather leggings, were not familiar to her. She was a fast learner. At St. Vincent’s, she told the young medical officers, they had the methylated spirits addicts in. These fellows fought each other in the park at Darlinghurst in the shade of the gaol and came into emergency wards in the early mornings displaying gashes they couldn’t remember how they’d received. She had been dressing the leg wound of a derelict, she said, when he began having fits. She ran for help but when she returned with an intern she found the man recovered, sitting on a chair and drinking from her bottle of medicinal alcohol.

  It was how she told it that worked, and their willingness to be amused.

  Affection for Honora had more than crept upon Sally, and she knew her to be a woman of honor by such a simple test as her dealings over the uniforms. So well finished were they that other nurses asked Sally if she had been to a tailor instead of to Hordern’s. A woman of her word, Honora! Of many skittering but honest words. She was one of those girls who said fairly frequently too, When I’m married . . . They didn’t contemplate any other future state and did not even take into their calculations the idea they might live on, solitary but free. Yet Honora was not anxious for doctors, or so she told Sally. Too conceited, she said. Too used to obedience from patients. Likely to bring the habit home!