Prelude to Christopher

By Eleanor Dark

'A terribly beautiful book' - Miles Franklin

Published in 1934 and regarded as Australia's first modernist novel, Prelude to Christopher covers four days following a car crash where a doctor is critically injured, and the women around him struggle with their hopes, inhibitions and knowledge.

'...perfectly captures the feeling of the subterranean horror which flows silently under everyday life' - The Penguin New Literary History of Australia

• Language: English
• Publisher: A&U House Of Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781743433119

Eleanor Dark

Eleanor Dark was born and educated in Sydney. In 1922 she married Dr Eric Dark and soon after settled with him in Katoomba. She published stories and verse throughout the 1920s, and her first novel, Slow Dawning, was published in 1932. Her other novels include Prelude to Christopher, Return to Coolami, Sun Across the Sky, Waterway, The Little Company and Lantana Lane.

Book preview

Part One

TUESDAY

CHAPTER ONE

THE CAR came up gamely over the crest of the long hill, and Nigel, glancing at the speedometer, thought: She’s never done it at twenty-five before. He settled himself back rather wearily, and shifted the grip of his hot, gloved fingers on the wheel; out of the tail of his eye he saw the signpost to his left with SHIRE BOUNDARY on it. Then there was a dazzle of westering sun on his windscreen, a confused impression of something huge looming in front of him, the blaring of a horn…

Glass seemed to be showering all around him. He was lying on the road. He thought: This will send that damned overdraft up to the limit. And then: I wonder if I’m hurt?…

He tried to move. Something was lying across his chest; not very hard, but heavy enough to make him subside again. He turned his head a little, and saw a red, dark stream near his shoulder on the whitish, pebbly road.

Someone said:

’Ere, are you ’urt? Can you can up?

Nigel answered without much difficulty:

I think so—if—you move—this…

It was moved. Nigel recognised it, soaring above his eyes and so out of sight, as the front seat of his car. Two pairs of hands got him under the shoulders. Blackness surged in front of his eyes. One of the men said in a hushed voice:

Christ, look at the blood! ’Ere, put ’im down and go for a doctor!

Still blind, but otherwise alert, Nigel said:

I’m a doctor myself. From Moondoona. Ring Dr Bland and get him to come out from there…

The voice answered:

Right y’are. Do you want anyone else sent for? Your wife?…

Wife. Linda. Hurt and hurtful. Exhausting and exhausted. No, not Linda. And he thought, with a queer sense of relaxation:

Oh, well, if this is the finish it will settle all that…

Sight came back slowly, hazily. Figures loomed and vanished; voices muttered. Black and vast in the gathering dusk a pantechnicon snorted into laborious movement and went blundering away down the hill. That must be what hit me, Nigel thought peacefully, lying there on the road with somebody’s coat under his head.

He asked:

Where’s the pittosporum?

A rough, worried and rather bewildered voice replied:

Hey? What’s that?

Nigel repeated carefully:

I said: ‘Where’s…’

But he realised that his tongue was not forming the words properly, and gave it up. Queer, he reflected, that one’s tongue should rebel while one’s nose still told one with all its accustomed gusto that there was a pittosporum nearby…

It became confused in some vague and increasingly incoherent way with the one which had grown on the bank above his dam at Bingareldie, and dropped its creamy, exotically perfumed flowers on his ten-year-old head. It became part of a fugitive memory of childhood, an elusive breath of childhood’s poignant emotions. It became, even, Mother walking slowly beneath her vast sunshade down to the creek to see how his dam was progressing—and Father, exciting and resplendent, riding by on his way to the township, and waving as he passed. On the breath of its persistent fragrance there came a little picture of himself bending over the gooseberries which he picked at a penny a pint; his bare brown arms scratched by the bushes, and the green, transparent-looking fruit lying like tiny Chinese lanterns in the bucket at his side. There came, thinly and threadily, like very distant music, an echo of long-past sensations. A queer approval, a satisfaction in his home because it was his home, a slight uneasiness because he felt some mysterious mental isolation from his parents; a pain slyly and malevolently nagging in his stomach because he had eaten too many of the gooseberries unripe…

Long rows of gooseberries, rows of strawberries, raspberries, loganberries; apple trees, and pears and plums and cherries; cherries red and yellow on the ground, and the gorgeous parrots shooting up from their feast at his approach. All the orchard, warm and sweet with the smell of ripening fruit, stretching away from the house down the long hill to the creek and the dam. And up on the other side across the paddock, the bush, climbing sullenly and steadily in rocky cliffs and terraces to that one wild, triumphant summit which the aborigines had called Morandoona, Throne of the Sun…

Morandoona—and the pain of his broken arm the first time he had tried…

Splints and bandages. Iodine…

Tonsils. The little cottage hospital, and the tight clutch of his mother’s hand as they walked up to it together. White aprons, white coats, anaesthetic smells—and the raw pain of his aching throat…

Pain—one came back and back to it. From the scent of a flowering tree always back to physical pain—the two things flashed rhythmically into his consciousness and out like the opposite sides of some vast, slowly revolving wheel. His mind began to clear a little, and he tried to say:

Of course they’re both real—the scent of the tree and the pain—is it a fractured rib? but again he knew he was only mumbling. Old Martin Bland’s voice said:

Is that the ambulance? About time, too. Come and help me here, Barker.

The world suddenly went mad with noise and pain, reddish darkness whirled around Nigel’s head, and harsh screaming noises crashed down on his brain like physical blows. He thought wildly, frantically, Morphia! Morphia! And then again with that curious sense of relief: But I’ll be dead in a moment—that will be better still.

Life, as he became aware of it again in the swaying dimness of the ambulance, pressed down on him like a burden mercilessly heavy, suffocating. Confused, vaguely remembering the seat they had lifted from his chest, he wondered querulously why they did not move, too, this monstrous, crushing thing which he was not strong enough to support.

A black, bulky figure stirred beside him and a pale blur of face, a faintly shining dome of bald head came close to his eyes. Bland’s voice growled:

Keep still, keep still…

Nigel said:

Move this away—I can’t breathe.

But obviously he wasn’t speaking properly yet, for the old man only said: Eh? Yes, yes, that’s all right, and settled back into obscurity again.

Nigel lay still and fought silently with this vast inimical burden which was his life. And as he studied it, grappled with it, a little thread emerged from the mass, and he saw an old sailor sitting on a bench in the sunshine…

With that glimmer of reawakened interest, that flicker of a cherished memory, the weight seemed to lift, to become less overpowering. And he thought, still hazy and half-unconscious with pain and weakness, that this little thread must be pulled patiently, patiently, like the unravelling of wool, till the mass was gone—finished—conquered. And as he pulled it came more and more easily, an endless, multicoloured thread.

He had come away from that talk with the old sailor as one comes back from a long journey, looking with surprise at places because they seem so familiar, feeling irrationally that they should somehow be touched with the glamorous strangeness of other places just found, and lost. From the top of the hill he had looked back and seen the old man still sitting on the seat, his knees crossed, and his foul-smelling pipe between his teeth. His cap was tilted forward over eyes half closed by the glare of tropical sun on endless miles of ocean. From where he sat—almost at his feet—the harbour glittered away to the distant slopes of the opposite foreshores; there were all kinds of craft for an old salt to feast his eyes on—but he was not feasting them. Even from where he stood on the top of the hill, Nigel had seen that he was still staring at his boot. From that boot, through the tortuous by-ways of conversation, had come the whole story of the island. He had drawn such a picture of it that Nigel’s mind was aflame; he could think of nothing but cliffs which shot up four hundred feet from a white thunder of surf, of a coastline which swept down to long curves of creamy beach, jagged promontories of foam-veiled rock, a tiny, almost land-locked harbour: of a little world almost exquisitely alone; green, fertile, well-watered by three rivers that came down from its one overwhelming snow-capped mountain. A little Eden…

All the seething irritation of the last few days and the nagging discontent of the last few years had seemed to melt under the influence of that vision. There was no reason why it should. Or was there? He had begun to walk quickly along the asphalt road under the vastly spreading trees, his eyes on the ground, his brain toiling. Always unrelenting in the pursuit of any truth, he was, in the analysing of his own obscurer moods and impulses, brutally ruthless. By the time he had emerged from the stormy cynicism of his precocious adolescence, breathlessly shaken, like a swimmer battling his way out of a heavy surf, he had realised that some standard, some faith, was a necessity to the human animal. He had evolved his own—this rigid and utterly merciless self-control. He played tyrant to his body and his mind. His body he had found easy enough—its needs simple and simply governed. But before his mind he stood often aghast, staggered by its subtleties, its intricacies of thought and deduction, its sudden unexpected divergences, its unending mystery. He was, at one moment, exasperated by its limitations, the next, staggered by its versatility. He would say: "Now I know myself," and on the same day be confronted by some thought, some fear, some fleeting desire, haled like a prisoner before his unrecognising eyes for analysis and sentence.

He was trying, as he walked, to hunt down a reason for the sense of relief and freedom that this mental picture of a possibly quite legendary island had brought him. Slowly, from the depths of his mind he had dragged it up and considered it; it was an antidote. To what? To his years of study and research—of delving into all kinds of complicated problems? Yes, that, but more besides.

He had sat down on the grass in the shade, and piled the fallen leaves of the Moreton Bay fig into a little heap before him. He thought rather anxiously:

"An obsession? This hatred of existing things? Have I worked too hard? Am I too young? But there’s so little time—I couldn’t stop thinking, anyhow—Lord deliver me from obsessions!…"

He moved his shoulders impatiently. What rot! It was natural enough that anyone’s mind, wearied by long, exasperated contemplation of incredible ignorance, incredible ugliness and futility, should leap with a sense of deliverance to such a tale of elemental beauty. All the same…

And then the old man’s words turned a key in his brain—flung open a door. It’s like being in a little world of your own…

A little world—unpeopled.

At that, he frowned disapprovingly. To have grasped with such an ecstasy of relief at the idea of an unpeopled world was cynicism—blatant, inexcusable. However, there it was. Properly rebuked, he laughed at himself and stood up, dusting his trousers and the palms of his hands.

He began to walk briskly again, thinking now of small matters of his everyday life. There was a theatre party tonight—his mother and Professor Harwood and little What’s-her-name Fleming. He smiled again to himself at the thought of his mother’s transparent manoeuvres to make Nigel a little more human. Theatres and dances and pretty girls; like a mother bird bringing fat worms to its fledgling, she fed him pretty girls, ever hoping, ever disappointed.

For a young man of Nigel’s age to work as he worked—as he had worked for years—was, she felt, preposterous. It was unnecessary. He was so clever, so brilliantly clever that he could pass all his exams without such incessant studying. Anyhow, she argued, what was it all for, this endless research? He had had his medical degree for two years now. Why on earth didn’t he marry one of the nice fat worms and buy a practice somewhere? Or if he must go in for this psychology stuff, why not specialise, in Macquarie Street?

Oh, my God! said Nigel.

I don’t see why you should swear, Nigel. You can afford to do it, you know.

I do know, mother. And I can afford not to do it, which is what matters.

But why?

Because I don’t want to do it. I’ve only begun to learn.

He had found her in his little study, hovering unhappily over his books.

"Nigel, dear—why—all these have nothing to do with your work. I know some of them have…" (her fingers fluttered distastefully over The Science of Eugenics and the second volume of The Psychology of Sex) but all those others—this one of religion, and these on electricity—and one here on cattle-breeding—and look at this… (she turned it over in what seemed to him pathetic indignation) "about wheat—wheat! Now, Nigel, what has wheat to do with your being a doctor?"

He tried patiently to make her understand.

Nothing, mother, if I meant to be only a doctor; but that’s just incidental—one of the things I want to know about. I think it’s a good foundation, that’s all.

But Nigel, what do you mean to be, then?

As though her remembered words had pricked him, he quickened his pace. What did he mean to be? To do? Certainly not all his life to go on lecturing to only half-attentive students, writing articles for only half-intelligent readers, dancing and theatre-going with less than half a proper appreciation.

To learn, he answered himself. To learn and go on learning. To what end? All his irritation rushed back on him. Futility stared at him even from the pages of his beloved books. Mere learning, however great its sum, stored in the brain of a man—of what use was it? What sense in accumulating a mass of barren knowledge? There must be some goal in view, some scheme to which one could harness the power of one’s richly stored mind, and drive it tirelessly to some magnificent fulfilment.

He recognised that it was his youth speaking now. Well, let it. The impulses of youth had their definite value, they were the goads that drove mankind on, changed things, held off the stagnation which is followed by decay. Their twin flames of energy and idealism flickered and died down, Heaven knew, soon enough. He gave his youth its head, and went on thinking.

Some magnificent fulfilment. The mere words were a spur. He walked faster under their impetus, as though the elusive goal he sought were somewhere over there in the Gardens—or down by the bustling Quay—or across the harbour—or even out through the Heads, to sea. That thought of the sea brought him back with a queer little shock to the island. A kind of physical hunger for it flared up in him, and he stopped short and stared away with troubled eyes to a glimpse of glittering blue between the trees. It was not often, for his health was perfect, that he was aware of having a body at all, but now he was suddenly acutely conscious of it. He was tall and tough, his muscles hard from exercise conscientiously taken; he had sound teeth and a good digestion because his tastes were simple and his habits temperate. He amazed himself now with a sudden fierce obscure desire for physical hardship, for some desperate battle for mere existence…

He was used to such abrupt clamourings from his mind, but for his body to turn rebel startled him. The surface of his brain threw it sops in a slightly panic-stricken manner—he would go down for a swim, he would clear out somewhere up the Hawkesbury for a week’s camping, he would go and tackle that trip through the Burragorang Valley—but still something in him clamoured angrily.

He knew that it was not such brief and, after all, merely make-believe battle that he wanted. It was simply his mother’s question: What are you going to do? answered by a suddenly impatient young body:

"I don’t know—but only let it be hard!"

And before he quite realised what he was doing, he had turned and was hurrying back the way he had come. He pulled himself up with an exclamation of annoyance, and then in a kind of fatalistic submission went on again. He thought ruefully as he walked:

Let me never doubt again when I hear of people getting a ‘call’! And it was, indeed, a sort of religious ecstasy which grew on him as he walked. It became the most important thing in the world to him that he should know where that island was; it loomed up before him, a vast symbol of something that he most passionately desired, as the fasting saint his vision of God, as woman her freedom from the ever-lasting tyranny of her sex. It was as remote, as intangible as that, and yet most torturingly real. And he quickened his pace until, almost running, he came again to the top of the hill.

A cold sweat broke out on him as he looked down at a discarded tobacco tin on the grass, an empty seat.

CHAPTER TWO

TERRIBLE, terrible moment! It was like a tangle or a harsh spot on the bright thread as it slipped through his mind, and he gave a groan for a pain that was only half physical. They moved him a little, thinking to ease him, and the sweat ran into his eyes. He said anxiously:

I mustn’t stop working…

That sentence was recognisable, and old Martin Bland, who thought he was speaking of his practice, scowled a little. But Nigel was already twenty-three years away, on the threshold of his mother’s drawing-room, where she, glancing up from her sewing, saw him standing preoccupied, frowning slightly, staring with eyes that obviously saw nothing at the little brass tray with its two coffee-cups and its brightly gleaming silver.

She sat very straight although the chair was deep and soft. Her hair, only touched with grey and built into a pile immaculately neat, added to her height—gave her, indeed, an air of being almost overpoweringly tall. She moved slowly, with deliberation; she spoke slowly and never stumbled. There were no I mean to say’s in her speech; she took it for granted that you understood her to mean what she said, and she said it with a certainty, a blind non-recognition of other points of view, which often left her brilliant son helpless, speechless before her. It was her religion, he supposed, that made her so unassailable. And yet, hidden deeply away in her was a vein of shyness that had hardened into resolve. Her belief was simple, childlike, utterly inviolable. She could not understand why everyone did not share it, and she prayed at night for her unbelieving son. On her knees she lost no jot of her dignity. As a lady of breeding to one of her own class, she explained Nigel’s good points, offered his youth, his precocious brilliance, as excuses. It would no more have occurred to her to doubt that the Almighty was sympathetically listening than it would have occurred to her that her son might fail to open the door for her—might sit while she remained standing. Her Deity was a gentleman, and as such she trusted Him. It gave her strength and poise and a certain rather barren comfort.

She looked at Nigel, and then, quickly, back at her work. Her fine, heavy-lidded eyes never gave her away. She waited silently till he spoke.

Have I kept you waiting, mother? I’m sorry.

He sat beside her and gave her, as she put her sewing down, one of his sudden, vivid smiles. He reminded her painfully at such times of his father—the laughing, lazy, eccentric genius who, scoffing openly at her religion, had yet not allowed her to hate him—had forced her, in spite of herself, to love him restlessly, painfully, unhappily, until he died. She poured the coffee and spoke her thoughts as she handed Nigel his cup.

You look very much like your father sometimes.

He answered with a twinkle:

I’d rather look like you.

She said imperturbably:

Your father was Irish by descent. He used to say such things. I learnt to take no notice of them. Then, sipping her coffee, she gave a small, amused smile and asked:

Why are you frowning?

He said shortly:

I meant it.

She sighed a little.

Thank you, dear. Drink your coffee and have your cigarette, because Linda and her uncle will be here quite soon.

Linda? Who’s Linda? I thought it was to be that little Fleming girl and old Professor Harwood.

No, they couldn’t come. I thought I told you. Dr Hamlin and his niece are coming instead. I met them at Bowral last summer.

Interest leapt into his eyes.

Is that Hamlin the biologist?

I suppose so—do you know him?

I went to some lectures he gave. I’d like to ask him…

Nigel, do remember it’s a theatre party and I asked Linda for you. She’s a beautiful girl in a rather—queer way; and very clever, too, I believe. So don’t talk shop to the uncle all the time.

He put his cup down and stood up impatiently. All his life seemed to be closing round him like a prison instead of opening upon wide vistas of adventure. He said angrily:

Mother, for heaven’s sake stop trying to marry me off!

She winced a little, but did not attempt to deny it.

"Most men of your age would be far too young to marry, Nigel, but—you’re so restless. You don’t seem to know what to do with your

Reviews for Prelude to Christopher

[lydia1879 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this for a university course in my undergrad, and I'm so glad I did!

This book is very modernist, so if you like that style, you might really enjoy this. This book is an Australian classic, written by Eleanor Dark. (Isn't that a fantastic name?)

The writing itself is very interesting and not something I would usually find in a book, but I still remember some of the lines or passages really well. I liked the female characters in this book, particularly the main character's wife. (I'm terrible with names! Apologies.)

I thought this novel was really dark and brooding and atmospheric - one of the female characters was almost witch-like, really haunting and arresting. I like how complex and layered this book is, I feel like I could reread it and get a lot out of it.

(And just a quick trigger warning, this book contains self-harm themes, mental health themes and suicide.)

4 stars from me. c: