Harp in the South Trilogy, The by Park Ruth

Author:Park, Ruth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742530949
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2011-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Falling in love with Charlie Rothe was different from falling in love with Tommy Mendel. Had she really been in love with the Jewish boy, so shallow, so emotionally brittle, his mind clouded with the selfishness engendered by his deformity? Yes, yes, cried Roie passionately, as she remembered the subtle sweetness she had experienced at the touch of his hand, and the longing, yearning way she had tried to cover up his defects. But there was nothing left of it. It had all been killed that night in the park. Until then she had successfully fitted him into the mould her dreams had created, but her love had been too fugitive, too insubstantial, to survive that experience. She knew that she would never think of him again, other than as a stranger. But surely, surely, thought Roie piteously, all love isn’t that, fading in a season, like a rose?

So she said farewell to first love, that had bloomed so swiftly, and died so pitifully soon. There had been pity in her heart for Tommy, his loneliness and despair and youth; but there was none for Charlie. Tommy had brought out maternal instincts; she had wanted to shelter him, to do things for him. Charlie brought out the lover in her; she wanted to be sheltered by him. He was one of those rare people who meet life with a non-derivative mind. He watched it go by with a patient and humorously impersonal eye; observing, he created his own opinions, and acted on them. Charlie would never be a great or famous man; he was not the sort that goes into politics and finally dies and is epitomized in the words, ‘Slum Boy Makes Good.’ But he had the sort of heart that great men have, straightforward, undeviating and tranquil.

Roie often looked at him speculatively, and wondered what he was thinking about. He had an interesting face, very brown of skin, with uneven eyebrows, one peaked. His eyes, so hazel they were translucent, rarely clouded or altered from their calm expression. His hands were broad and long, large capable hands with rough stained patches from his work.

Mumma had clucked sympathetically when he told them that he had no parents.

‘They died when I was about seven, I think.’

‘Don’t you know?’ asked Dolour curiously. He shook his head. ‘I was adopted about that age. That’s all I really know.’

‘By kind people?’ asked Mumma.

‘By a bagman. He just picked me up. I was sitting by a fence yowling my head off, and he asked me to come along with him, and I went. He was good to me, old devil that he was.’ Charlie’s eyes looked back into the past and saw the endless dusky, dusty roads of New South Wales, linking station to station, and hamlet to hamlet; always the brazen sky above, and the sense of great unfathomable spaces all around, when not even the wind found a barrier for hundreds of miles. He said quietly: ‘When I was fifteen we came to the city.

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