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Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.
If Albert was right and they were only schoolgirls about the same age as his sisters in England, how was it they were allowed to set out alone, at the end of a summer afternoon? He reminded himself that he was in Australia now: Australia, where anything might happen. In England everything had been done before: quite often by one’s own ancestors, over and over again.
‘Nobody,’ said the old man, ‘can be held responsible for the pranks of destiny.’
Edith Horton, for once in her life something of a heroine, was pronounced by Doctor McKenzie to be in good physical trim thanks to the prolonged fit of screaming –
As always, in matters of surpassing human interest, those who knew nothing whatever either at first or even second hand were the most emphatic in expressing their opinions; which are well known to have a way of turning into established facts overnight.
Actually, his friend was listening to the murmuring life of the forest welling up out of the warm green depth. In the noonday stillness all living creatures except man, who long ago renounced the god-given sense of balance between rest and action, had slowed down their normal pace.
Strong-minded persons in authority can ordinarily grapple with practical problems of facts. Facts, no matter how outrageous, can be dealt with by other facts. The problems of mood and atmosphere known to the Press as ‘Situations’ are infinitely more sinister. A ‘situation’ cannot be pigeonholed for reference and the appropriate answer pulled out of a filing cabinet. An atmosphere can be generated overnight out of nothing or everything, anywhere that human beings are congregated in unnatural conditions. At the Court of Versailles, at Pentridge Gaol, at a select College for Young Ladies where
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The reader taking a bird’s eye view of events since the picnic will have noted how various individuals on its outer circumference have somehow become involved in the spreading pattern: Mrs Valange, Reg Lumley, Monsieur Louis Montpelier, Minnie and Tom – all of whose lives have already been disrupted, sometimes violently. So too have the lives of innumerable lesser fry – spiders, mice, beetles – whose scuttlings, burrowings and terrified retreats are comparable, if on a smaller scale.
At Appleyard College, out of a clear sky, from the moment the first rays of light had fired the dahlias on the morning of Saint Valentine’s Day, and the boarders, waking early, had begun the innocent interchange of cards and favours, the pattern had begun to form. Until now, on the evening of Friday the thirteenth of March, it was still spreading; still fanning out in depth and intensity, still incomplete. On the lower levels of Mount Macedon it continued to spread, though in gayer colours, to the upper slopes, where the inhabitants of Lake View, unaware of their allotted places in the general
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A portion of the delicate mechanism of the brain appeared to be irrevocably damaged. ‘Like a clock, you know,’ the doctor explained. ‘A clock that stops under a certain set of unusual conditions and refuses ever to go again beyond a particular point. I had one at home. Never got beyond three o’clock on an afternoon . . .’
‘You cast-iron goose! Have you no crumb of social sense?
That night the mountain mist came rolling down from the pine forest and lingered far into the morning. At the Lodge the view of the lake from Irma’s window was blotted out and Mr Cutler went off to see to his glasshouses, predicting an early winter. At Manassa’s store an occasional customer calling in for the morning paper enquired with flagging interest, ‘Anything more about the College Mystery?’ There wasn’t – at least nothing that could be remotely classed as news on Manassa’s verandah. It was generally conceded by the locals that the goings-on at the Rock were over and done with and best
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Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn.
The College was already being talked about as haunted and God knows what other mischievous nonsense. She might sit in her study behind closed doors for the better part of the day but she had eyes in her head, and ears. Only yesterday Cook had mentioned quite casually to Minnie, that ‘they’ were saying in the village that strange lights had been seen moving about the College grounds after dark.
To take a sword and plunge it through your enemy’s vitals in broad daylight is a matter of physical courage, whereas the strangling of an invisible foe in the dark calls for quite other qualities.
Despite the restrictive rules of silence, a highly sensitized ear would have been aware of a ceaseless gnat-like buzzing on stairs and landings; the wordless hum of female curiosity aroused but as yet unsatisfied.
It is probably just as well for our nervous equilibrium that such cataclysms of personal fortune are usually disguised as ordinary everyday occurrences, like the choice of boiled or poached eggs for breakfast. The young coachman settling down in the rocking chair after tea that Monday evening had no sense of having already embarked on a long and fateful journey of no return.
‘And Laws, Tom,’ said Minnie that night, ‘the old girl looked something awful – white as chalk and breathing like a steam engine. Five pound? You could have knocked me down with a feather.’ ‘Glory be – wonders will never cease,’ Tom said, putting his arm round her waist with a smacking kiss. He was right. They never will.
Could it be true that the moon actually had something to do with the thoughts and even the actions of human beings millions of miles below on the earth?
