Brian Penton

by Inheritors (v1. 0) (lit)

  “You mean culture,” Mrs Peppiott guessed. She was a big, toad-like woman with a pendulous, floppy toad gullet and a laborious toadlike way of breathing and a toadlike darting tongue and toadlike bulging eyes. “Spiritual things—music, poetry, the drama.” She turned her eyes up under eyelids crusted with tiny warts, just like a toad's. “How one yearns for them among the Philistines. How one labours to make the people understand and appreciate. But will they ever, dear doctor? Everything's so coarse and vulgar. It's not like Italy, is it? So redolent of the past. The Caesars! The Borgias! The air is full of poetry and romance. But here—no past, no memories.”

  A long pause followed this apostrophe, a very awkward pause, while every one was thinking about the past—Mrs Peppiott's—and wondering if she knew as much as they about her father, who came out in chains.

  “We've got the pioneers,” Peppiott snapped at her.

  “Ah, yes, the pioneers, the glorious pioneers!” It went round the table like a sigh of relief, and everybody looked at the two representatives of that already legendary band of brothers and looked away quickly again. One of them, sitting between Harriet and Mrs Peppiott, was an old man named Purvis, whose father had settled on the land which had been sold that afternoon. He was fabulously rich in real estate, but if it had not been necessary to wheedle and placate him so that Peppiott's brother citizens should be enabled “to take unto themselves more portions of their native soil,” he would not have been invited to dine here among nice people, for he smelt strongly of stables, ate with his fingers, and called crapulously for rum with his soup. He took no part in the conversation at the table, dividing his attention between shovelling food and gaping at the footmen's legs. Served with snipe, he protested, “'Ere, lad, what's thisn? I don't eat sparrers.”

  “It's snipe, dear Mr Purvis,” Mrs Peppiott explained. “My husband's cousin—the Earl, you know—sent the birds to us. Do taste them.”

  “Nothin' but the parson's nose ter taste,” Purvis growled, but he put a snipe in his mouth and chewed it noisily, and he did swallow it, which was better than anybody expected from the look of disgust on his face.

  This was all extremely distressing to Sir Alexander and Lady Todhunter, for Sir Alexander, who was Mr Purvis's grandson, was one of the nicest of nice people, so nice that he could not stand living in Australia for more than six months at a time. The rest of the year he appeared, from hints he dropped, to spend shaking hands with the Prince of Wales, the Marquess of Queensbury, Lord Lonsdale, and other peers of the realm. Nobody believed him, but it was true.

  The other glorious pioneer was Cabell, sitting near Peppiott in his shiny frock-coat and old-fashioned stiff shirt, and fumbling furtively among an unaccustomed variety of forks and glasses. How diminished he looked beside these people, Harriet noticed with surprise. Opposite him sat Doug Peppiott, his broad, handsome face with a cameolike profile radiating health and youthful self-confidence. To Harriet, comparing them, the young man seemed twice as big as her father, twice as strong, and twice as certain of his way through life. She saw the old man in a new light, in a situation he did not dominate. He looked lonely and rather pathetically out of it listening to these strangers' chatter about people and things he had lost all touch with, and several times she saw him blink at the table, the silver, the food, the footmen, as though he wondered if he was dreaming. Once, in talking to Sir Alexander Todhunter, he began to describe how the coach ran from Owerbury to Plymouth, but Sir Alexander waved loftily and said, “My dear fellow, there's been a railway there for the last twenty years.” “Oh? Oh?” Cabell muttered, and after that had nothing to say, twiddled his thumbs in his lap between each course, and “Yes-ma'amed” Mrs Peppiott with strange meekness. When he upset the salt, Harriet saw him reach out to take a pinch and throw it over his shoulder, then pull his hand back and look around guiltily as if he expected someone to laugh. She was touched. It showed her how ill at ease he was, for she knew he would worry all night about that salt, so superstitious was he. “Poor Papa,” she thought for the first time in her life, understanding, in this flash of sympathy, quite a lot of things about the old man which before had seemed so unreasonable—his unremitting hatred for “that mob in Brisbane,” which had insulted him once, his arrogance, his rambling threats about “making them crawl.” And they weren't crawling, Harriet saw, glancing round the table. When Dr Barnett spoke about the railways Cabell had stirred to say something, but young John Dennis interrupted him rudely and every one listened to Dennis and took no notice of Cabell at all. And that was what touched Harriet most deeply, because he was so sure that everybody in Brisbane was now at his feet begging forgiveness for what they had done to him. “Poor Father,” she thought again. “He's silly. He shouldn't come to Brisbane. They're only making use of him and laughing behind his back.” She had just intercepted a look of pained, fastidious distaste, quite involuntary, which Lady Todhunter cast towards his string tie and bone studs when Peppiott spoke of the pioneers. She glared at Lady Todhunter and Lady Todhunter thought the little country girl was gazing at her with the awe she was used to from little country girls, and smiled condescendingly.

  “Yes, the glorious pioneers,” Dr Barnett agreed. “They were gentlemen and lived like gentlemen.”

  Nobody disputed it. They were all children of pioneers.

  “But the confounded politicians changed all that by stopping transportation.” Dr Barnett, insensitive to a slight bristling at various parts of the table, sipped his wine, shot his cuffs, and prepared again to be listened to with respect. “It was a golden age,” he assured them. “A squatter was lord of the manor and the arbiter of his people's fate. His convict servants were like his peasants, on the whole better treated than peasants in Ireland. In time they would have learnt to live in the country, which would have grown slowly and graciously on its own resources without any help from the London Jews. But along come your damned Liberals and humanitarians and turn Jack the jailbird loose to be as good as his master, and the country's in the hands of the dregs of humanity, and you, with your confounded development, draw them all to Brisbane and Sydney and Melbourne to nurture themselves in useless occupations and become a race of city-rats.” He took another sip of wine and commenced to develop a picture of Australia as it would have been if convicts were still transported to be the servants of squatters. A nation of aristocrats and landed gentry, like the Ireland of Charles Lever, he thought. It was his favourite topic. He could afford it to be.

  For others present, however, the topic did not brighten a dinner-table. Peppiott made an effort to turn the conversation by proposing “Our Glorious Pioneers” and delivering a little speech about the debt they all owed to such men as “our dear friend Cabell”—he let fall a little drop of oil precisely on the top of Cabell's head—and “our dear old and highly respected neighbour, Joshua Purvis.”

  Old Purvis had stopped feeding and was beginning to sit up and take notice. “Blamed hot in here,” he grumbled, took his coat off, hung it on the back of the chair, and sat down again. “That's better. What's that you're sayin' about me, Peppiott?”

  “We were remarking upon the debt we owe to those, including yourself and our old friend Cabell, who opened up this great land of ours.”

  Old Purvis finished his rum and smacked his lips. “Ah, them were the days. Them were the days, eh Cabell? Nothin' here but blacks, and a durn sight better neighbours than some white folks they were. Pity we shot 'em all off.”

  “Shot them?” Mrs Peppiott said. “Oh, how dreadful. The poor defenceless creatures. And so interesting. You must come to a meeting of our Aborigines Protection League. You know they prove all about the missing link. So invaluable to science.”

  “I don't know nothing about that,” Purvis said. “I know your old man shot 'em the same as we all did.” He chuckled. “I mind the time he tied a gin up to a cart-wheel and. . .”

  “Yes, yes,” Peppiott said, “Mrs Peppiott merely means that it's a pity the exigencies of the times compelled the
white man to take such extreme measures against a people so unique.”

  “Exigencies of the times, you call it? We called it shortage of wimmen. I mind the day. . .”

  “Do have some more wine, Mr Purvis,” Mrs Peppiott put in. “A drink. Well, I wouldn't spit in it.”

  A servant began to fill his glass, but he snatched it away.

  “'Ere, lad, none of that cat-lap for me. I want something to cut the phlegm. This here,” he nodded towards his grandson while avoiding the outraged Sir Alexander's bulging eye, “he nearly did me in with stuff like that. Something he brought home from France. Might be all right for a skinny Frenchman, no good for a man. Like most of the things he brought home with him.” This was taken to refer to Lady Todhunter, especially as it was underlined with obscure grunts about boots, chimneypots, and collars, a tyranny Lady Todhunter had imposed on the old man. “But I was sayin'. . .”

  Sir Alexander cleared his throat and Mr Purvis kept his eye fixed on Mrs Peppiott, which was as far as he could remove it from the eye of Sir Alexander.

  “I was sayin' I mind the day my old man pegged it. Went out to look for a cow and a tree fell on him. It was burnin' in the butt and it kept on burnin' and burnt him in two halves. Well, I was sayin' wimmen was short, and by gum we'd hardly got the two halves of the old bloke under the ground before the fellers start come ridin' in from fifty miles around, and inside a month the old girl was in harness again. Yes, in the family way once a year—that was the order in them days. Now a dandy young gal like you,” he told Harriet, “you'd bin a ma three times over by your age.”

  “Mr Purvis! How can you!” All the ladies were shocked.

  All except Harriet, who rather liked Mr Purvis's faded blue eyes. She smiled encouragingly. “Oh, I wish I'd been there.”

  “Well, you'd've married a man. Not one of them sore-fingers you see about,” old Purvis said and chucked her under the chin. “By gum, I'd married you meself.”

  Harriet laughed and old Purvis laughed and laughed so heartily that he disorientated himself and accidentally let his eye contact with his grandson's. And that was the end of old Purvis. He licked his lips, grumbled something to himself about “'igh society,” felt to see if his collar was on, and got under the table on the pretence of unlacing a tight boot.

  Mrs Peppiott took advantage of the lull to move the ladies into the drawing-room. When they were all settled to coffee on the veranda she piloted Harriet to a corner. “Oh, I do hope you weren't offended with Mr Purvis, darling. He's SO coarse. But they had no advantages in those days. Nothing to elevate the spirit. I think only the spiritual things matter, don't you? The sweet strains of music, for example. How I love it. When I hear Douglas sing—oh, he has a divine voice! Now wouldn't it be lovely if you sang a duet together. Something really classical. One of those heavenly duets of Sir Arthur Sullivan. I'll speak to Douglas about it. But about Mr Purvis, darling, I must apologize. Of course you did your best. . .”

  “There's nothing to apologize for,” Harriet interrupted. “I liked Mr Purvis.”

  “Yes, yes, of course you were splendid. An extremely awkward moment for the poor Todhunters. Of course, Sir Alexander is a wonderful man—to think he has risen from that. But now, darling, I'm going to give you a TEENY WEENY word of advice. You mustn't encourage such talk. I hope you won't be offended at my saying so, darling, but I wonder you didn't blush. You took it so calmly—those awful words. But then I suppose you didn't know what they meant.”

  “What words? In the family way? Why, they're in Shakespeare.”

  “In Shakespeare? Oh, I'm sure they're not.”

  “Well, something like them. I can show you.”

  “They're certainly not in OUR copy of Shakespeare. And, anyway, they're not nice words, are they? When she hears such words a young lady must pretend she doesn't know what they mean. You know, darling, a lady has to be SO careful. So MANY spiteful eyes.” She glanced at the other ladies on the veranda. “Vipers,” she whispered. “They'll spread it all over the place that you know more than a young girl should. And one day a nice young man will want to marry you and I'm sure—I hope you'll forgive an interfering old woman, dear, but when I look at you, poor, motherless little thing. . .”

  “I've got a mother. What do you mean?” Harriet said surprised.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Mrs Peppiott had repressed the fact that Harriet had a mother. “I mean here in Brisbane. You must be so lonely. Your father's such a busy man, isn't he?”

  “I can look after myself. I'm not a child,” Harriet said, touched on her tender spot.

  Mrs Peppiott smiled wryly—Harriet was certainly making things very difficult—and changed the subject, or, rather, assaulted her object from a new angle.

  “Douglas tells me that your brother, Geoffrey, is going into the bank.” “Yes, he had some trouble with a girl and Father had to buy her off, so he gave Geoffrey a terrible clout and made him go to work,” Harriet said frankly.

  Mrs Peppiott was very pleased to glean this information, though startled by Harriet's complete lack of decent family reticence. But she had given enough advice for the moment and decided to leave a lecture on family honour to the future. “And your brother James?” she asked sweetly.

  “He's in Sydney.”

  “SO providential he was brought to his senses, wasn't it, dear?” Mrs Peppiott simpered. “It would have been most unfortunate if he'd persisted and perhaps married into that dreadful Flanagan family.”

  “Who, Jennis Bowen, do you mean? But he will marry her. He's terribly in love with her.”

  “Your father would surely not allow it.”

  “What's it got to do with him?”

  Mrs Peppiott's eyes widened with slow, toadlike astonishment. “You're not suggesting that they would—elope? Without your father's consent? Oh, what a scandal!”

  “I HOPE they will,” Harriet said. “I'm going to offer James all my jewellery to help him and if he doesn't I shall never, never speak to him again.”

  Mrs Peppiott croaked hoarsely with amusement. “WHAT a romantic child you are, Harriet, my love.”

  “I'm not romantic and I'm not a child,” Harriet said fiercely.

  “Ah, Harriet,” Mrs Peppiott said, coming nearer and lowering her voice again, “you ARE romantic. VERY romantic. One WOULD almost think that you were in love yourself.”

  “Perhaps I am.”

  Mrs Peppiott darted her little green tongue and watched closely, shifting a little, as a toad watches a suspicious movement in the grass.

  “Do tell me, sweet? Who is it? I'd be very interested and sympathetic.”

  Harriet clutched desperately for a name. “It MIGHT be Mr Cash.”

  “Mr Cash!” Mrs Peppiott let out a horrified croak. “Oh, that's impossible. A common man like that.”

  “What of it? My mother was a common woman—a convict. And so was. . .” Mrs Peppiott's comment on Cash had piqued her, and her tongue, which had not yet learnt its way in society, had nearly run too far.

  Mrs Peppiott sprang from the sofa and landed in front of her with a damp, froggy flop. “I feel it my duty to tell your father of this. I'm sure he knows nothing about it.”

  Her unexpected anger startled Harriet. “Oh, no, you needn't. It's not true,” she said quickly. “I was only pretending. I'm not in love with anybody. How could I be? I don't know anybody.”

  Mrs Peppiott dropped on to the sofa and patted her hand. “Forgive me, dear. You frightened me. You see, you're such a nice young girl, and I wouldn't like to see a nice young girl have her reputation spoilt by. . . Yes, yes, I know. But you wait. You'll fall in love with a NICE young man and have a NICE wedding and it will all be NICE. I'm sure it will.”

  Harriet grimaced. “I don't want a nice young man.”

  “Now that's not nice, Harriet,” Mrs Peppiott rebuked her.

  Niceness! The word, which she realized suddenly was always on the lips of Mrs Peppiott and the other women who called at her father's house, irritated her,
and she decided, in revulsion against them, that she loathed niceness more than anything else. It was like an invincible armour, this niceness behind which they smirked and gossiped, and neither her eager frank advances nor the bolts of her rage could penetrate it. After she had somehow betrayed herself, as now she had done with Mrs Peppiott, they cooed over her with a triumphant, kindly niceness, as though she was really some sick or abnormal or pariah thing and the most charitable way to treat her was as a child, a foolish child. They made her feel ashamed, despite herself, and more obstinately angry.

  “I'm not nice,” she told Mrs Peppiott, “and I don't want to be.”

  Mrs Peppiott shook her head and her loose gullet flopped the opposite way. “You ARE very, very contrary, but I'm SURE you're quite nice just the same.”

  “I'm not. I'm nasty. What you mean by nasty. I was born nasty. And I'm glad. My father's nasty. And my mother's nasty.”

  “Your father is really a very nice man when one gets to know him. He has extremely good connexions in England. His third cousin is Lord Felsie.”

  “He's nasty,” Harriet insisted. “He has done nasty, terrible things.”

  “How can you use such words?” Mrs Peppiott said hastily. “It's not nice to bring up the past like that.”

  “It's there whether you bring it up or not,” Harriet said. “Like a rich cake you can't digest,” she added with gratuitous nastiness.

  “It's not nice to talk about it. It doesn't concern us. The present is quite nice, quite different.”

  “The present isn't nice at all,” Harriet snapped. “Look what my father and Mr Peppiott are doing—using money which doesn't belong to either of them. Father explained it to me. Is that nice?”

  “Really, you do say some extraordinary things, Harriet. I'm sure your father and Mr Peppiott are doing no such thing.”

  “They are. You know they are. Everybody knows. Just as everybody knows our fathers or mothers or both were convicts and did nasty, >