by Martin Boyd
“Women only half know what they’re doing. The more respectable they are, the more they are drawn to the roué. Look at Lady Pringle with Wolfie.”
“But Uncle Wolfie isn’t a roué. He’s awfully kind.”
“Whatever makes you think roués aren’t kind?”
“Well, you couldn’t be kind and not treat a girl fairly,” I stammered, blushing slightly. Again on the wings of my innocence I soared into the moral ascendancy.
“I’m glad you think so, my boy,” said Arthur, looking noble.
To get away from awkward subjects I said that I thought Mr Lockwood very nice.
“He’s too precious,” Arthur replied. “He spends his life in Europe chasing beauty and grandees, instead of settling down here sensibly and marrying a girl of his own sort. As this was exactly what Arthur would have liked to do and had done for a short time, he spoke with great moral indignation. “Australia needs to be developed by strong wholesome men,” he said, and he went on to give me an address which might have been delivered by the Minister for Immigration, if there was one at the time.
Although it had been said of Arthur that he began life as a conscious hypocrite, and ended as an unconscious one, this may not have been a true diagnosis. The virtues which he originally affected, he may have come in time to value and was therefore no longer a hypocrite. He may even have originally admired them, but have been prevented from practising them by the demands of expediency and youthful passion. In fact the hypocrisy in later years may have been in the affectation of brutality and cynicism, with which he tried to conceal the excessive kindness of his heart. For everything he did, if not what he said, was kind. Even when he flung Miss Bath and Mr Hemstock to the wolves, it was to give me the pleasure of laughing at their mangled remains. He believed that it did them no harm, and might possibly make them objects of pity, instead of bored dislike.
So now, when he saw the great fertile lands of Australia peopled by bronzed wholesome men and women, he was not being a humbug, as he had come to realize that this would give many people happy lives. He also took into account that they would doubtless have beautiful sons and daughters, also that it was far more fun to be aesthetic against this background. To derive pleasure from decadence or from any pose it is necessary to have a strong bourgeois society. There is no kick in being unconventional in a madhouse.
When we moved into the drawing-room he was still in the exalted frame of mind of the Minister for Immigration, which led him to sit down at the piano, where far from breaking into a patriotic march, he delicately began a Chopin nocturne. From this he broke into the impassioned rhythm of a litany. “I heard this at the Brompton Oratory during the Quarant’ Ore,” he said. “Cardinal Newman was there.” He went on to give a kind of musical resumé of his life, making frequent comments on the things he played so that his performance would have made a good wireless programme. He played some old-fashioned dance tunes and said: “I remember your grandmother dancing to this at Bishopscourt, sixty years ago. How beautiful she was in her wide floating dress. Nowadays girls look like cows hobbled so that they won’t kick over the milk-pail.” Although his nostalgic reveries were interspersed with these ribald attacks on the younger generation, his face had an expression of immense and noble sadness. Towards the end he played “Oft in the Stilly Night” and then again the dance tune.
Arthur was so instinctively an artist, that he would make of something, on which he had entered casually, a creative whole. If he had been asked to give a performance like that which I had just been fortunate enough to overhear, he would have been embarrassed, have fussed about what pieces to choose, have forgotten the best, and would finally have refused. He had the genius to follow his inspiration, but not the talent to produce it in his conscious mind. This was a failing of all the family, even of Diana. They only showed their best in casual moments, in an impromptu charade or an improvised meal, and so always remained amateurs.
When he again played the dance tune, I asked him what my grandmother was like as a girl. He turned on the piano stool.
“She was something like Diana,” he said, “but her hair was not dark. It was a warm golden colour, and she had an air of authority. She was much more sensible than Diana, but in some ways she had the same kind of life. Of course, she was rich, which made a great difference. She had to give all the time to people who took her unending generosity for granted. Though your grandfather was a very different character from Wolfie,” he said, which was not entirely true. “Wolfie has stripped Diana of every comfort and pleasure, and then he bites the hand that feeds him.” He thought a little and then qualified this. “He doesn’t mean to bite the hand that feeds him. He just thinks ‘That’s a nice piece of meat. I’ll have that too.’”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Government House ball, to which I was so pleased to tell the twins that I was invited, needs, like Mrs Radcliffe’s party, a little introduction. Two people were rather surprised to receive invitations.
Sir Roland Cave, aware that his appointment was a consolation prize for his failure to enter the Cabinet, could not endure any suggestion that it was not fundamentally important as well as highly decorative, and he was often irritated by the feeling that his staff thought they were there simply to amuse themselves. He kept a strict eye on the smallest details of Government House activity, and even had the menus submitted to him before every dinner party.
One morning he prowled into the room where Lord Francis was drawing up the list of guests for the ball.
“Who’s this Mrs Montaubyn?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, sir,” said Lord Francis. “I think she’s English.”
“You shouldn’t ask people if you don’t know who they are. And I don’t want all the English tourists invited here. They don’t go to Buckingham Palace at home.”
“Montaubyn is a name, sir,” Lord Francis objected mildly.
“Look it up.”
Lord Francis pulled out a Court Directory, but could not find any Mrs Montaubyn, though there was a baronet of that name.
“Look him up,” said Sir Roland.
Lord Francis yanked out a peerage and turning over the pages muttered: “Gough—Grafton—Hay of Park—Hood—Kinnaird—Limerick—Manvers—Monck—Montaubyn—um-um-um—here we are. James Perry Montaubyn, second son of fourth bart., B. A., Corpus. Canon St Andrew’s Cathedral, Sydney, N.S.W. Married Emily McCarthy, one son, Aidan Perry, killed Spion Kop, poor devil—married Gladys Cumfit. That’s the one—She’s Mrs. A. P. Montaubyn.”
“Very well,” said Sir Roland grudgingly, “but you want to vet these people more carefully.”
Lord Francis was pleased that His Ex. had suspected someone of such unimpeachable standing, and Mrs Montaubyn received a card.
The other person to be surprised at her invitation was Mildy, who had not been asked to a dance of any kind for twenty years. It was probably due to her having a man of the same name in her house. She was pleased, but said: “Of course I shan’t go.”
Mistaking her common sense for that poor spirit she so often showed when brought into contact with “grand people”, I protested peevishly, and at last persuaded her to go. She had foreseen that she would have a far worse evening than at the Radcliffes’ party. There I had spent some of the time with her, but at a ball I would be dancing continuously with the twins and other girls, while she watched bleakly from the wall. She did not know that my insistence was an attempt to strengthen her character and not at all to a desire to have her with me. The eternal hope in her breast began to flutter again. Bright blue and pink fantasies came into her mind. She saw the proud moment when we arrived in the Government House ballroom, and our friends would say: “Here are Guy and Mildy” and they would chaff her about looking so young. Perhaps I would dance with her, not more than twice, as we must be sensible.
“Very well”, she said suddenly, “I’ll go. I’ll get a new ball dress for it.” In her eye was an excited gleam. She began to talk about her new dress, and as I th
ought its purpose was to enable her to hold her own vis-à-vis Sophie and the twins and not to make her appear a suitable girlish companion for myself, I encouraged her. Nearly every evening, between the morning the invitations came and the night of the ball, she talked at dinner about the progress of the new dress.
The occasion of this ball was the arrival in Port Phillip Bay of an English battleship, with an Anglo-German prince on board—a relative of Queen Victoria’s. To the twins, even more exciting than the prince, was the fact that one of the officers on the ship was Lord Saltash, a young unmarried peer, who was a cousin of theirs, but not of ours. Cousin Sophie had a letter from his mother, asking her to be kind to him, but it was like trying to catch a whale in the ocean to be kind to it. Cousin Edward managed to entice him to dine at the Melbourne Club, and instructed by Cousin Sophie gave him a further invitation to dine at her house on the night of the ball.
On the day before this function Lord Saltash rang up to say that he was awfully sorry that he could not come as he was on duty, the duty being, she discovered later, to dine with Freddie Thorpe and Clara Bumpus. This unbalanced her dinner table, and the only person she could think of who would accept these last minute fallen crumbs was myself. She rang me up in the evening. I had never heard her so amiable on the telephone. Her invitations were generally commands delivered by one of the twins. She even apologized for the short notice. I was extremely gratified and thought she must have heard something to my credit, and as I was twenty years old, though unfortunately looked younger, I wanted to get married, and I thought she might regard me as an eligible suitor for one of the twins. My imagination was nearly as idiotic as Mildy’s, to whom I now went back and said excitedly:
“Cousin Sophie has asked me to dine tomorrow.”
“But that’s the night of the ball,” said Mildy.
“Yes, but before the ball. They’ll take me.”
“You haven’t accepted?”
“Of course I have.”
“Oh!” wailed Mildy. “This is too much.”
“But surely you don’t expect me to refuse?” The idea of going first to a dinner party and then to a ball on the same evening, appeared to me an enlargement of experience which only a lunatic would expect me to avoid.
“How am I to go?” asked Mildy.
“In the car of course, as you intended.”
“Alone.” This terrible hollow sound fell flat and dead into the room. It shook my egoism, but I was not prepared to abandon reason. Mildy sat with her hands in her lap, staring into the now empty fireplace, and in the same condition of speechless despair in which I had found her on my return from the Radcliffes’.
“I shan’t go,” she said at last. I was horrified at this sudden end to all the eager anticipation of the last three weeks, but also indignant at the blackmail.
“That’s absurd,” I protested. “I’ll meet you at the ball. It’s only ten minutes’ drive.” In saying this I showed that I recognized her desire to be with me, and accepted it as a fact in our conversation so that in spite of myself I was obliged to be a party to a kind of semi-lovers’-quarrel, taking the role of the neglectful young man. This gave Mildy a slight satisfaction and she prolonged the argument. She was not devoid of the rationality, or even astuteness inherited from her legal ancestors, and finding me so upset, and to some extent at her mercy because of her refusal to go, she saw that she might derive more satisfaction from that than from attending the ball, where she again realized that she would spend a miserable and neglected evening. The apparently enormous sacrifice she made by not going, her expensive new dress wasted, would provide her with material for reproach and blackmail for weeks, possibly months ahead, and in addition to referring to the night of the Radcliffes’ party as “that horrid evening when we quarrelled”, she would now be able to talk of the night of the ball as “that horrid evening when you left me alone, and went off with the twins, and I couldn’t wear my new dress”.
The next evening when I came home, before I went up to change, I begged her to come. I said that although Cousin Sophie had promised to drive me to the ball I would not go with her, but would come back and collect Mildy, but nothing would move her. She wore a faint sweet smile as she said: “No. I must be sensible. I mustn’t be jealous of the twins.”
When I left she kissed me good night rather lusciously and said: “Enjoy yourself,” with the result that in the hansom on the way to Cousin Sophie’s house I felt guilty and miserable; but these feelings could not last long in the twins’ company, unless provoked by themselves.
Cousin Sophie’s servants were so ladylike, rather more so than her daughters, and had so thoroughly assimilated the atmosphere of the house, that if I passed one in the street, from a vague familiarity I thought she must be one of our numerous relatives, and expected her to stop me saying: “Aren’t you Laura’s youngest boy?” One of these now showed me into the drawing-room, and Mildy’s sorrows evaporated from my mind.
The drawing-room was rather like that of an English vicarage, furnished with negative good taste. On the walls were watercolours and prints of the Winged Victory and the Temple of Vesta. In spite of Cousin Sophie’s hatred of vulgarity, and her anxiety to conceal the extent of her husband’s income, if she knew it, there were a few evidences of wealth. On the occasional tables were one or two objects of value, and there was a photograph of the Dowager Lady Saltash, and signed photographs of impressive-looking Governors’ wives, with tiaras and dog-collars, and with coronets on the silver frames. The most conspicuous pieces of furniture were two grand pianos, on which the twins played duets, mostly from The Ring of the Nibelungen. Whether it was because it was played so much by the twins that I came under the spell of this music, or whether it was the music that put me under the spell of the twins, it is hard to say. But for me all that year before the war echoed with the music of Wagner, which filled my life with enchantment. On summer evenings the river at Warrandyte became the Rhine, and it was in the saplings that Siegfried listened to the bird, and blew his hunter’s horn. Because of this music the bludgeonings of the twins was nothing beside their beauty, and when I heard the motif of the golden apples, my heart was pierced with the thought of Anthea. When I was with one of the twins in some woodland place, with a pear tree shimmering in the moonlight, I heard Siegmund’s cry at the approach of spring. When a year later I went to the war, it was the song of the Rhinemaidens I heard in my ears, wailing for the gold that was lost for ever. The gold for me was this year about which I am writing, and it certainly does not seem to have been particularly enjoyable.
Cousin Edward was the first to come into the drawing-room. Although I had been here three or four times since the Radcliffes’ party, I had not been alone with him before, and I felt a little nervous, as I thought that he might think I wanted to seduce his daughters. In the minds of the innocent are these curious pot-holes.
“I hear Mildred’s house is very pretty,” he said, illustrating the attitude of the Enemy, who heard about us, but who preferred to have little first-hand information. There was a babel in the hall and the twins burst in.
“Oh you!” said Cynthia crossly. “I thought it was Mr Hemstock.”
“You’re only faute de mieux,” said Anthea, “faute de Saltash. The peerage has failed us.”
“It was very good of you to come at such short notice,” said Cousin Edward, gravely courteous. I did not know whether to be mortified at finding myself a substitute, or gratified at being thought an adequate one for a peer.
“Has Father been probing into your prospects?” asked Anthea.
“I don’t think I have any,” I said.
“We’ll give you some—vistas anyway. We’ll stretch your mind.”
“It sounds like torture.”
“All growth is painful,” said Cynthia.
“One doesn’t go out to dinner to grow,” I protested.
“Of course you do,” said Anthea. “Eating makes you grow, doesn’t it? Talking makes your mind grow at the same
time.”
“It’s quite Greek,” said Cynthia. “Mind and body growing together.”
“In fact dining out is a classical education,” declared Anthea.
“I thought it was for enjoyment.”
“Not here, it isn’t. It’s just hell.”
“Anthea!” exclaimed Cousin Edward.
“Well, all our visitors leave in tears—utterly shattered. If they don’t, we think the evening’s a failure.”
Mr Hemstock and the two other guests were announced. The latter were a young married couple from Cambridge, both graduates. They were touring Australia in a second-hand car to learn the marriage rites of the aborigines. Cousin Sophie had invited them and Mr Hemstock to meet Lord Saltash, as she thought it would be nice to have an all-English dinner-party. It took her forty years to learn that the English aristocracy do not come to Australia for cultivated conversation in quasivicarages, of which they have ample for their requirements at home, but for race meetings and rowdy fun in rich houses.
“Good evening, sir,” boomed Mr Hemstock. “Good evening, Miss Cynthia. Good evening, Miss Anthea.”
“I think you know our cousin, Guy Langton?” said Anthea.
Mr Hemstock glanced at me, and evidently did not think the question worth answering.
Cousin Sophie, who before her marriage had spent much of her time in vice-regal courts at Dublin Castle and elsewhere, never entered the drawing-room until all her guests were assembled. The reverberations of Mr Hemstock’s voice warned her that she might now appear. Dinner was announced almost immediately and we went in.
“A ball is quite an occasion for me,” said Mr Hemstock as we sat down. “I am not a devotee of Terpsichore, nor shall I tempt the goddess by pretending that I am.”
“I certainly shan’t,” said Cousin Edward, politely putting himself on the same level of decrepitude as his guest. “I’m much too aged, and to be aged is to be damaged.”
“Oh Father!” exclaimed Anthea.