by Martin Boyd
We were seated in the front row of the dress circle, and at the first interval a Mr and Mrs Morris, people whom Diana knew quite well, but not intimately, made their way out across our feet. They apologized to Laura, Mildy and Cynthia, but their recognition of Diana and Wolfie was so slight as to amount to a “cut”. Diana thought for a moment that it was because they must have heard some gossip about her through Baba and Miss Bath. Then in a flash of illumination she realized it was because of Wolfie’s German name and birth. She was angry and felt that protective impulse towards him which was so difficult to reconcile with her intention to leave him. She thought she ought to be glad that Mrs Montaubyn was there as a reminder, to prevent her feeling too sharp regrets at the last moment.
I had been sitting next to Mildy, but at the second interval we all changed places and I was between Diana and Cynthia. It seemed as if the opera itself, the plaintive melodies and aesthetic absurdities of Patience, provided curious intervals of unreality in the excitement that possessed the audience, and though when the last curtain fell they clapped and cheered again and again for Bunthorne and his love-sick maidens, it was merely to release their patriotic excitement and enthusiasm for the war.
At last the audience began to move out. Diana said to me quietly: “Don’t hurry. That woman who was tipsy at Government House is behind us, and I don’t want to run into her again.”
I dropped my programme and held up the exit of our party by groping for it under the seat.
“What are you doing?” asked Steven. “You’re blocking the gangway.”
“I’m looking for my programme.”
“It doesn’t matter. If you want one you can have mine.”
There was now no excuse for dawdling. I glanced apologetically at Diana and we moved out. Mrs Montaubyn had seen her and Wolfie, and she talked loudly in the intervals partly because she was elated at having started the whole theatre singing, and partly to let them know that she was there. She went out ahead of us and when we came into the foyer, she was half-way down the stairs. She was conspicuous enough with her brassy hyacinthine curls, but she wanted to draw attention to herself as a kind of goddess of patriotism, the splendid female embodiment of the spirit of the nation. She harangued any young men near her, inciting them to do various things to the Germans.
I was with Laura, and behind us Mildy, with one of those sudden sprouts of intelligence, which were so disconcerting to those who, like Cynthia, regarded her as mentally deficient, was saying: “Gilbert must have been attracted towards aestheticism, as we can only satirise those things which a part of us admires.”
“Look, Mum,” I said, taking Laura’s arm. “Do you see that woman with yellow curls? She’s the one I had to dance with, and who was so rude to Aunt Diana at Government House.”
“She looks strikingly handsome,” said Laura, “but excitable.”
She turned to discuss how everyone was going home. She and Steven were walking back to the hotel where they were staying for the night. A car had been ordered for Cynthia, and Mildy and I were to walk down to the Toorak tram. Diana said that she did not want to walk to the station through the crowds in the streets, and asked if I would fetch her a cab from the rank. I ran down the stairs, and dodged past Mrs Montaubyn without her seeing me, to perform this errand.
The rest of our party went slowly down to the entrance lobby. Mrs Montaubyn, reluctant to leave the scene of her success, had stayed at the bottom of the stairs, where she was giving in lurid language her opinion of the Germans, and receiving good-natured chaff from some men standing near. When Wolfie saw her he was disturbed, because he did not want Diana to be reminded of her, but he did not imagine that she would embarrass him by actually speaking to him, as she had refused him admission to her flat, and their friendship was ended.
He moved to the far side of the stairs, away from the wall against which Mrs Montaubyn was standing. He attempted to walk past as if he were occupied with his own sublime thoughts. Mrs Montaubyn saw him, and she saw too the opportunity of wiping out, backed by the whole weight of public approval, the humiliations which she believed he had put upon her. With the fury of a woman scorned and the vigour of a great patriot, she crossed over to him, and shouting: “Here’s a dirty German!” she slapped his face.
Our party, including Wolfie himself, stood frozen with dismay. Diana could not immediately take in what had happened, because for her it had infinitely greater implications than for the others.
Cynthia was the first to move. At that moment I arrived with a hansom, and through the open door she saw it draw up at the kerb. She took Wolfie’s arm, and in her high-powered voice, vibrant with kindness and indignation, she said:
“There is your cab, Cousin Wolfie. Let me take you to it.”
“He’s a bloody German,” jeered Mrs Montaubyn, “and the only good German’s a dead one.”
Some louts in the street looked in at them with curiosity, and one said: “There’s a dirty German.”
Cynthia, with the arrogance of the English gentlewoman in which she had been trained by Cousin Sophie, which is so atrocious when informed by self-importance, and so splendid when used as now, in the fearless service of humanity and justice, said, as if declaring a fact which her mere statement was sufficient to establish: “You wicked and horrible woman.”
She led Wolfie to the cab, ignoring the menacing louts, who, quelled by the moral force of her personality, stood aside to let them pass. Diana came out of her trance and followed them. She touched Cynthia’s hand in silent gratitude, and saying to me: “Thank Steven and Laura for us,” she entered the cab and they drove away.
Cynthia’s car drew up as they left. She thanked Laura and Steven for a delightful evening, and with no reference to the incident in which she had played such an eminent part, she went home.
Mrs Montaubyn looked almost as bewildered and injured as Wolfie when she had struck him. She had believed that she was behaving virtuously, fulfilling the role for which nature had intended her, that of a daughter of Britannia, the Spirit of Victory, for how could a war be conducted without women of her heroic mould, who encourage the boys with raucous shouts and fruity songs, and reward them with their bodies at a reasonable charge? She had thought that at last she had broken through the barrier excluding her from human society, into a rich companionship; but the men who had been chaffing her, not yet brutalized by propaganda, drifted away disgusted, and she felt as wounded as when none of the swells would talk to her at Government House. She went out into the street with her woman companion, for she was no more anxious to be seen in public with the hall porter than Wolfie had been with herself.
Mildy and I walked along with my parents to the hotel.
“That was nice of Cynthia,” said Mildy, in a dreary, grudging voice.
I was glowing with love and admiration for Cynthia, and Mildy’s half-intentional reduction of her action to the trivial, made me speechless with anger. My parents had something of the same feeling, as they ignored her remark beyond saying: “It was an unfortunate incident,” and they talked about the opera until we arrived at the hotel. I asked if we could have some supper, but they said it was too late. They looked very tired, with a tiredness which was not merely physical. Steven might not want the war to interfere with the enjoyment of a party, but he and Laura saw clearly how it would affect our lives. They had three sons of military age, and the assault on Wolfie had horrified them, and they could not listen to Mildy’s fatuous comments after it had happened.
They said good night, and Laura asked me, expressing a little more hope than usual, if I was coming to Westhill for the weekend.
“Good night,” said Mildy. “Thank you for a lovely birthday party. But I’m not sure it wasn’t a teeny bit naughty to have champagne.”
When we were walking down Collins Street she said: “What a dreadful thing to happen! How could that woman know that Wolfie was a German?”
“She is the one who let fly at Government House,” I said. “I think he kno
ws her.”
“He couldn’t possibly know anyone like that,” said Mildy. “She’s not a nice woman. Some day you’ll know what I mean.”
She evidently wanted me to ask her to explain, which even if it had been necessary, was the last thing I would have done, as, apart from everything else, it was all I could do to be civil to her.
We waited by the Town Hall for the Toorak tram. Across the street I saw the oriflamme of Mrs Montaubyn’s curls. She had recovered her self-confidence and was again the centre of a small chaffing crowd, to which she was apparently preaching a recruiting sermon.
“There she is,” I said.
Mildy stared intently across at her. In her eyes was a strange expression, envious and evil.
When we arrived home, as usual after any outing, we sat down for our “cosy chat” over hot milk and biscuits. Mildy began to talk about the Germans in a way which would have made one expect her to approve Mrs Montaubyn’s assault. I brought up the question of my going to the war.
“Oh no!” wailed Mildy angrily. “It’s a ridiculous idea. Let those go who are fitted for it. You’d never make a soldier. You’re much too used to comfort to sleep in a tent. You’d never stand it, the mud and the guns and everything.”
This outburst, apart from the insult to my manhood and the reminder of the comforts she had lavished on me, destroyed the last traces of my respect for her, as it showed that her love for me, if it could be so called, had no moral basis of any kind. At the age I then was it is possible to have great affection for older people who increase our understanding and show themselves eager to help us forward in our lives, or who simply amuse us with the extravagancies of their generation, like Arthur. But Mildy all the time was trying to hold me back from any move which, however necessary or beneficial to myself, would, she thought, make me less her possession. She did not want me to have wider friendships or the ordinary associates of a young man, not to know anyone more worldly-wise or cultivated than herself, nor even to advance in taste or knowledge, or to fulfil the obligations of honour.
“It is you who make me ridiculous,” I said brutally. “Everyone laughs about us.”
This began dreadful recriminations, which, although I poured out my resentment at the innumerable silken threads, the subtle blackmails with which she tried to hold me, brought Mildy some satisfaction. It was an acknowledgement of the existence of her infatuation. From now on, until I went to the war, which was not for some months as the family decided I must go to England where relatives in the War Office would get me a commission, I accepted Mildy as a phenomenon, and when I acquiesced in her sentimental arrangements, it was without the exhausting effort to display appropriate feelings, which after the flare-up of this evening, she did not seem to demand.
But when I went to bed I forgot Mildy, and I thought of Cynthia’s lovely head in its fearless beauty, the nymph’s head restored.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Diana and Wolfie drove in silence down Collins Street. When the cab turned towards the railway station she put her hand through his arm.
“I am a German,” he said, “and I love my country. But I do not love soldiers. It is sad.” His voice trembled a little.
The trains were crowded. They found seats in the same carriage but not together. From time to time he gave her anxious glances, but they were no longer those reproachful oglings, which originally had been spontaneous, but which later he affected deliberately, as a child will repeat an originally unconscious gesture which has made its elders laugh. But she did not know whether Wolfie was different, or whether she was seeing him in a different light, seeing him as he was instead of through the film of a hallucination in which she had been living for the past six months. That loud slap, as Mrs Montaubyn struck his face, had awakened her to reality.
They drove home in the wagonette from the livery stables, ordered to meet them at the station. When they came into the hall, where the gas had been left burning, still they had hardly spoken. Wolfie, wondering if she was again going to blame him for his associations with Mrs Montaubyn, turned to go to his room, but she put her hand on his arm.
“Wolfie,” she said, “I’m not going to England.”
“You will not go?” he asked, not taking in at once what she had said. “It will not be safe?”
“That isn’t the reason. Listen. Don’t worry. Everything will be all right. Everything is all right.”
He saw her looking at him with an expression he had not seen for a long time.
“My dear wife,” he said, “my dear wife.”
They kissed each other gently. Diana turned and went to her room, as the tears were streaming down her face.
She sat on her bed weeping for about five minutes, and then she tried to understand what had happened. She thought of her life further back than from the last few months. When she was young she had been more lively and therefore often more foolish than most people. Relatives like Arthur had been accustomed to refer to “Diana’s idiocies”. Her mother had brought her up to believe that she was something special, that she was destined for a more brilliant life than her sisters. When she married Wolfie, and so prevented any possibility of such a life, she was still reluctant to abandon the prospect. Her idiocies sometimes took the form of trying to make her life more decorative and exciting than her circumstances permitted. Not all her efforts had been idiotic. She had made a marionette theatre for the children, and done other things which likened her more to Pater’s Duke Carl, who made “a heroic effort of mind at a disadvantage” from which perhaps all Australians suffered to some extent.
But for a long time she had thought that both the good and the foolish efforts to rescue her life from the commonplace were ended. They had consisted in not accepting the realities of her condition. Since her mother had died, and she was no longer able to pretend either that she would inherit a great fortune, or that she would be offered another two or three years in Europe, she had accepted those realities, and had found reasonable happiness in her home and doing what she could to give opportunities to her children.
Then Russell had suddenly appeared on the scene, just at the time when the children needed little from her but money. He had revived the dissatisfactions of her earlier years. Then she had learnt, in such a brutal fashion, of Wolfie’s infidelity, and it seemed to her part of a design; and she told herself that it released her from the condition of her life, and so she had, at forty years of age, fallen into the greatest idiocy of all, and had believed that the fantasies of her youth had only delayed their fulfilment. With Russell she had been building up pictures of life in Italy, the sort of life which probably even Cynthia and Anthea would regard as an adolescent dream. Russell could live that rootless life of pleasure. He had been doing so for twenty years. But how could she begin now? She might perhaps adapt herself to it, but all the time she would be longing for stability, for the familiar things she had always known, and most of all for Wolfie.
She felt that she could not sleep until she had taken the first steps on the return to sanity. Also she must let Russell know immediately, and she went to the drawing-room, lighted the candles on the writing table, the same two she had put on the supper table on the night that they picnicked by the fire, and sat down to write to him.
She wrote two letters and tore them up. The one she finally decided to send was as follows:
“Tomorrow morning I shall send you a telegram to tell you that I cannot come with you. I shall take this letter to the ship, and give it to the purser to give to you when you come on board at Fremantle.
“This evening we went to a small family theatre party given by Steven and Laura. That woman who was Wolfie’s mistress, and who was so offensive to me at the ball at Government House, was at the foot of the stairs as we came out. When she saw Wolfie she crossed over to him and struck his face, shouting: ‘You dirty German.’ I was too shocked to move, and Cynthia Langton, whom more than anyone I should have expected to walk by on the other side, with wonderful kindness and pres
ence of mind, led him away. Russell, it is impossible to apologize for my failing you. Nothing can be adequate. But I cannot come with you. You have been so good and patient, and my behaviour must appear outrageous. It is not a thing that depends on my will, or rather I was putting my will against the natural circumstances of my life. I am tied here by all kinds of fibres. Whatever vegetable I may be, I am bedded in this earth.
“I expect you will be very angry and I cannot blame you. I have wasted months of your time. I have always thought that there was no one more despicable than a vacillating woman, and now I have been one. I wrote two letters before this, trying to give excuses for what I am doing. In one I said that it was because Wolfie was a German and that it would be unfair to leave him now. That may be true but it is not the reason. The real reason is that I am married to him, whatever he does. That woman was only an excuse I seized on, because you offered me such lovely prospects.
“I am worried because one day you said that you did not forgive injuries. If that is so you will never forgive me, as few people can have done you so great an injury. I shall hate to think that you do not forgive me, as I have loved every minute I have spent with you, and would like to be able to look back on those times, feeling that there is no bitterness between us. Perhaps this is too much to ask. It is curious to think that we imagined that our meetings were only a foretaste of pleasures to come, when they were the whole substance of those pleasures. But I always expected too much of life.”