Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land | Page 5

immense honour when Mr Gibbs had chosen Joan Gildea from amongst his staff for a roving commission to report upon the political, financial, economic and social aspects of Australia, and upon Imperial interests generally, as represented in various sideshows on her route.
But it happened that she was now suffering from a change at the last moment in that route--a substitution of the commplace P. & O. for the more exciting Canadian Pacific, Mr Gibbs having suddenly decided that Imperialism in Australia demanded his special correspondent's immediate attention.
For this story dates back to the time when Mr Joseph Chamberlain was in office; when Imperialism, Free Trade and Yellow Labour were the catch words of a party, and before the great Australian Commonwealth had become an historical fact.
THE IMPERIALIST's Special Correspondent looked worried. She was wondering whether the English mail expected to-day would bring her troublesome editorial instructions. She examined some of the photographs and drawings with a dissatisfied air. A running inarticulate commentary might have been put into words like this:
'No good . . . I can manage the letterpress all right once I get the hang of things. But when it comes to illustrations, I can't make even a gum-tree look as if it was growing . . . . And Gibbs hates having amateur snapshots to work up . . . . Hopeless to try for a local artist. . . . I wonder if Colin McKeith could give me an idea. . . . . Why to goodness didn't Biddy join me! . . . . If she'd only had the decency to let me know in time WHY she couldn't. . . . Money, I suppose--or a Man! . . . . Well, I'll write and tell her never to expect a literary leg-up from me again . . .'
Mrs Gildea pulled the sheet she had been typing out of the machine, inserted another, altered the notch to single spacing and rattled off at top speed till the page was covered. The she appended her signature and wrote this address:
To the Lady Bridget O'Hara,
Care of Eliza Countess of Gaverick,
Upper Brook Street, London, W.
on an envelope, into which she slipped her letter--a letter never to be sent.
A snap of the gate between the bamboos added a metallic note to the tree's reedy whimperings, and the postman tramped along the short garden path and up the veranda steps.
'Morning, Mrs Gildea . . . a heavy mail for you!'
He planked down the usual editorial packet--two or three rolls of proofs, a collection of newspapers, a bulky parcel of private correspondence sent on by the porter of Mrs Gildea's London flat, some local letters and, finally, two square envelopes, with the remark, as he turned away on his round. 'My word! Mrs Gildea, those letters seem to have done a bit of globe-trotting on their own, don't they!'
For the envelopes were covered with directions, some in Japanese and Chinese hieroglyphics, some in official red ink from various postoffices, a few with the distinctive markings of British Legations and Government Houses where the Special Correspondent should have stayed, but did not--Only her own name showing through the obliterations, and a final re-addressing by the Bank of Leichardt's Land.
Mrs Gildea recognised the impulsive, untidy but characteristic handwriting of Lady Bridget O'Hara.
'From Biddy at last!' she exclaimed, tore the flap of number one letter, paused and laid it aside. 'Business first.'
So she went carefully through the editorial communication. Mr Gibbs was not quite so tiresome as she had feared he would be. After him, the packet from her London flat was inspected and its contents laid aside for future perusal. Next, she tackled the local letters. One was embossed with the Bank of Leichardt's Land stamp and contained a cablegram originally despatched from Rome, which had been received at Vancouver and, thence, had pursued her--first along the route originally designed, afterwards, with zigzagging, retrogression and much delay, along the one she had taken. That it had reached her at all, said a good deal for Mrs Gildea's fame as a freely paragraphed newspaper correspondent.
The telegram was phrased thus:
SORRY IMPOSSIBLE NO FUNDS OTHER REASONS WRITING BIDDY
Mrs Gildea's illuminative 'H'm!' implied that her two inductions had been correct. No funds--and other reasons--meaning--a MAN. She scented instantly another of Biddy's tempestuous love-affairs. Had it been merely a question of lack of money with inclination goading, she felt pretty certain that Lady Bridget would have contrived to beg, borrow or steal--on a hazardous promissory note, after the happy-go-lucky financial morals of that section of society to which by birth she belonged. Or, failing these means, that she would have threatened some mad enterprise and so have frightened her aunt Eliza Countess of Gaverick into writing a cheque for three figures. Of course, less would have been of no