Kanga Creek: An Australian Idyll

IN JUNE he had gone to Sydney for the mid-winter holidays. It was delightful even to walk up George Street and back through Pitt Street. The human life of the streets seemed so fresh and joyous, and there was such a strange new assurance and elasticity in his own step. Once in Pitt Street, in the bald waste place that lay beyond the Post Office, he saw a lady standing, with a smile on her face, waiting for her husband. She might have been thirty years old. She looked so strong and elate in every large and gracious curve of her body, so full of life in every fibre of muscle and nerve. He longed to go up to her and put his arms round her and kiss her; the life that was in that woman's body (was it love? he asked himself) was the life that he felt in his own heart.

He stayed at a boarding-house in Castlereagh Street, not far from the Theatre where an Italian Opera Company was playing every evening. The Theatre had just been rebuilt; the pale fresh colors of the place seemed enchanting to him, as he sat usually in the third row of the Stalls, and listened to the music of Rossini or Meyerbeer or Verdi. He knew little of music; he thought "Il Trovatore" beautiful; to sit lazily there when the orchestra had started on its gay or melodiously tragic career, and the swift various play of actors passed across the stage, was enough. All the multitudinous possibilities of life seemed to rehearse themselves deliciously along his nerves; all the sensuous potentialities of his nature were summoned in a sweet vague stream, as though something within him stirred and responded to the far-off sexual cry in which music began. He cared little that he could not always understand the story; the shifting panorama of the stage, so close that it revealed all its nakedness--the tawdry costumes, the unclothed arms with their vaccination scars, the stage tricks--only accentuated the music. Even the preliminary booms and whirs of the instruments in the orchestra, the gloved uplifted hand of the conductor, the playbill, became soon mixed in the same glamor. When the Opera was over he usually walked about the streets for a little while; in George Street near the Market he passed the woman who boldly sought to catch his attention, and he walked quickly and shyly on; in Castlereagh Street he saw the couples who glided up dark alleys; all the frank licence of a colonial city came before him, and fascinated him, and was strange to him.