A Difficult Young Man

by Martin Boyd

  Dominic had luncheon with George and Baba in the ugly little dining-room, where everything was new, and the silver on the table shone, not softly from years of polishing, but with the recent burnishing of the shop. Baba, as I have already indicated, had trained herself in all those conversational tricks which enabled her to be ‘up’ on the other person. One of these was to say something which would suggest an obvious reply to her listener. When he made it she would say crossly: ‘That’s not what I mean’ and so make him appear a fool. The picture I am giving of Baba at this time is, I admit, without a sorely needed glaze, but it is the view that the family held of her at that time.

  One day at luncheon, practising this trick, she said to George: ‘I think the garden gate is too near the house.’

  ‘The fence could be moved out as far as the saplings,’ he said mildly.

  ‘That’s not what I mean,’ she retorted. ‘I don’t want a gate there at all.’

  This sort of thing went on for the whole meal, until at last George flung down his table-napkin, muttered ‘O damn,’ and left the room.

  Dominic, scrubby, sixteen years old, smelling slightly of bone dust which he had been scattering on the fields that morning, but with the aplomb of the next Squire of Waterpark, said in calm rebuke:

  ‘You should not speak to Uncle George like that, Aunt Baba. He doesn’t like it.’

  It is not recorded what Aunt Baba said. One can only imagine in her little eyes the evil glint of the outraged bully. She told George that she would not sit down to another meal with Dominic and that henceforth he must have all his meals in the kitchen. George agreed with this, and excused himself by thinking it would be more fun for Dominic, which it was.

  At first he was bitterly humiliated, again the insulted and injured. Baba, having ‘got away’ with sending him to the kitchen increased his humiliation, and arranged that he should have all the dirtiest jobs, some not even connected with the farm but with the house. It is curious that he accepted all this, when one remembers his reaction to Mr Porson, but he had odd phases of gentleness and submission, and it may have been because he was receiving his ill treatment from a woman. He also had phases of a curious poetical response to the natural world which seemed, ignoring other interests, sufficient to satisfy him. One of these coincided with his period as Baba’s scullion.

  It was during the spring that he was at Rathain, and there are times in the spring in the Australian countryside, when the air has an extraordinary limpidity and stimulating quality, as if the whole world had become new, and at the full moon the landscape is full of light and colour at midnight. It was on one of these nights that Baba, lying awake, heard the gate click and the dog bark. She went to the window and saw Dominic, naked and barefoot, walking down the path.

  I have known of three or four instances of youths walking naked in the countryside at night, and there must be many more of which one never hears. It is probably no more a sign of depravity or madness than the impulse to plunge into the sea. Perhaps it is the same impulse, and Dominic may have found in it the same sense of unity with nature that gratifies the bather. It may even have had a faintly religious motive. Instructed by Sarah he accepted the Bible literally, and as he walked along the white dusty roads, where he might easily tread on a snake or a scorpion, he might have felt secure in the knowledge that the young lion and the dragon he could tread under his feet, and in the utter stillness of the bush at night, he felt there was nothing between himself and God.

  These were hardly considerations to appeal to Baba. She thought Dominic had gone mad, and she woke up George, who drowsy and reluctant, went along to Dominic’s room just as he was climbing back through the window.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

  ‘I went for a walk,’ said Dominic, startled at finding him there.

  ‘Why in the devil d’you go for a walk at this hour and with no clothes on?’

  Dominic seemed puzzled to find an answer, and then said: ‘It was quiet.’

  ‘Well, go to bed,’ said George, ‘and don’t do it again.’

  Baba was incredulous at the inadequacy of Dominic’s explanation. She was certain that he was either vicious or mad or both. She recalled his attack on Owen Dell at the sports, his senseless leap from the drag, his threatening Mr Porson with a sword.

  ‘We might be murdered in our beds,’ she exclaimed, and did not make clear whether this was her chief fear, or that one of the neighbours might have seen Dominic naked, and she declared if so: ‘We could never hold up our heads again.’ She wanted to send him back to Westhill the next morning, but for once George stood firm. He was embarrassed by the incident and did not want to make it public. He liked Dominic and thought he was odd but not wicked, and did not want to add to the dog’s bad name. Also he thought it would worry Steven unnecessarily, and anyhow Dominic was to go in a few months to the agricultural college; where presumably midnight walks in the nude were not part of the curriculum. But while Dominic stayed at Rathain Baba was in a state of suspicion and anxiety, particularly at the time of the full moon.

  What followed may have had some connection with his moonlight walks, and have been a reorientation of his poetic impulse, or it may have been a simple abandonment to the humiliation of his lot and the negation of his pride, or seeing his age and situation it may not need any explanation at all, except for this—how could he forget Helena? Possibly he thought he was forever below her, that he was the shepherd of Admetus and she a goddess still on Olympus. It is more likely he did not think of her. Like all young people he lived intensely in the present, and was apt to forget what he did not see. After the first shock, he found that it was much more fun in the kitchen. The two maids gave him the best titbits of food instead of the scraggy parts to which Baba helped him in the dining-room. They petted him, joked with him, laughed at his innocence and stage by stage brought into his sombre Spanish eyes a lively impudence.

  Again on a moonlight night Baba thought she heard Dominic’s window open, and again she sent George along to his room, which he found empty. George thought he must have gone for another walk, and he went out to see if there was any sign of him on the road that ran past the gate. He then walked round the house, hoping to find him before he had to admit to Baba that he was out. As he passed the maids’ room he heard, coming from within, sighs and squeaks and sensual chuckles, and occasionally the rumble of Dominic’s voice.

  So far I seem to have suggested that Dominic was the injured innocent, but this was not always his rôle. One should not seduce one’s aunt’s maids, even if she is disagreeable, and certainly not two of them. I knew nothing of this at the time, only that he was under an extra black cloud. I was at school and when I came home from the holidays, the sun was still obscured, but all I could find out was that he had behaved very badly at Rathain. When I asked Aunt Diana, who was generally the most communicative of our aunts, what he had done, she said airily: ‘Oh, I think he ill-treated some cows.’ Dominic himself was again clothed in his gloomy dignity, and in any case he would never admit his misdoings to Brian and me, especially of such a nature.

  It was generally believed that he had seduced the maids, but there is the possibility that it was just a lively romp. I only learned twenty years later what had happened, and then from Uncle Arthur, the repository of all our scandals. As he embroidered his stories elaborately from his own often indelicate imagination, it is possible that Dominic did not seduce the maids. But the effect was the same as if he had, and a generation which could not imagine a curate driving with a governess in a hansom cab without risk of grave impropriety, could not possibly believe that a youth could spend a night innocently in the housemaids’ bedroom.

  The news was received in the clan with incredulous horror, at least in the female portion of it. Baba also spread about the story of his moonlight walks, and Dominic was now regarded as a near sexual maniac. The men did not approve of h
is behaviour, but they regarded it as quite natural, and they laughed a good deal about it, as Baba’s ‘maids’ were already a joke in the family, and they invented riddles, playing on the meaning of the word ‘maid’ which they asked each other. Baba’s anger was more due to the fact that Dominic had made her ménage ridiculous, than to the loss of her maids’ virtue, if they had lost it. She did not dare dismiss them, as it would oblige her to reveal what had happened to their father, a brawny, irascible red-haired farmer; which might make it impossible for her to continue to live in the neighbourhood. She waited to see if there was any further complication of the incident, and as there was not, she kept them in her service, and tried, amongst the family, to live it down. Her detestation of Dominic was now absolute. Whenever she could she spoke ill of him. As she was not popular this turned the tide in his favour, until at last, when it came out that he had been sent to eat in the kitchen, she was largely blamed for the whole affair, and most people said she had thrown Dominic into the girls’ laps. Even so, it made people ask with a touch of contempt: ‘What will he do next?’ They hoped that the agricultural college, where he was to start in the new year, would knock some sense into him.

  It is annoying to have to rely on a ribald source such as Uncle Arthur for an account of tragic happenings. Perhaps I am equally guilty as my taste is for what is cheerful and gaily coloured, whereas Dominic was a kind of Dostoevskian character, with perhaps a touch of Cervantes, and I cannot drag him down deep enough into the vats of black and purple dye. The reader will have to exercise his ingenuity to construct the inner nature of someone whose exterior is only presented to him lightly drawn.

  It may seem incongruous, after revealing what happened at Rathain, to write of Dominic’s religious nature, but Arthur said that when he was sent home from there he looked like a handsome âme damnée, and it was not only his public humiliation but some inner conflict between his sensuality and his spiritual nature, which had nearly fused into unity on his moonlight walk, that gave him this appearance. It is possible that strong religious feeling is often accompanied by strong sexual feeling, both the soul and the body trying to escape their loneliness, and by the tension between these two things the soul is either uplifted or damned. One had only to look at the portraits of the great Victorian divines, with their philoprogenitive jaws, to realize this. One feels that if they did not actually enter, at some period of their lives they must have lingered by the housemaid’s door. Even Charles Kingsley admitted that as an undergraduate he only preserved his chastity by excessive smoking, which cannot have been very good for him.

  CHAPTER V

  DURING THOSE summer holidays Alice was very ill. We did not go away to Tasmania or anywhere else. Whenever the uncles and aunts met together they talked of ‘Mama,’ and Dominic’s misdemeanours were forgotten. The onion woman who so long and so patiently had borne them on her skirts above the hell of poverty, was about to release her load and ascend into Heaven. Since their earliest childhood she had been an ever present help in time of trouble. They were distressed at the thought of losing her, but they could not help wondering what would happen to them when she was gone. They could not help realizing that she would leave behind the onion itself, to be shared amongst them. We do not contemplate losing advantages we have always possessed, and it did not occur to them that they would no longer have free access to a large and well-run house, where they could dump their children and have excellent meals whenever they liked, and to a generous banker who was only concerned for their good, and who merely asked in return that they should benefit themselves by what she gave, and not just be dreary ‘users-up’ without interest in their lasting welfare. The galleon was at last about to founder, and they were looking forward to setting out, each in his own little lifeboat.

  They did not talk openly about their financial prospects, and it is perhaps wrong to suggest that they thought so much about them. There was a general air of foreboding, and even to us children it seemed that the greatest misfortune mankind could suffer would be the death of our grandmother. Every good material thing we had came from her, but with all her indulgence went a standard of conduct which few people could have combined so successfully with a life of pleasure. Her quiet anger at anything untrue or shifty or unkind, made one aware of the strong bones, if not the iron in the velvet glove. Hers was the standard of reference in any problem, and her children may have felt that with her their moral as well as their financial strength might depart. She died a few weeks after Brian and I had gone back to school and Dominic to the agricultural college in New South Wales. In her last delirium she imagined that she was in Rome.

  One evening at prep a message came that I was to go to the headmaster. I could not think what I had done wrong, and when I came into his study he smiled slightly at my indignant and frightened face. Then he told me that my grandmother had died, and that I was to go to Beaumanoir on Thursday for the funeral. He was quiet, serious and kind, but perfectly natural, and he said I need not go back to prep. I have no recollection of my feelings.

  On Thursday the matron gave me a black tie and armband, and told me that I must be at St. Andrew’s Church in Brighton before half-past two. The church was full of people, as not only had we a great number of relatives, but Alice was a representative of the earliest social life of Melbourne, and had many friends among different groups. I sat in the front pew beside Laura who, like the aunts, was in deep black. After the service she shepherded Brian and me through the sandy churchyard, with its gum trees and scrubby bushes, to where a row of mourning coaches and carriages was drawn up behind the hearse. Many people sent their empty carriages as a token of respect, in the same way that they would leave cards at a house without asking if the mistress was at home. Steven was a pall bearer and with the other nearest relatives went in the first coach. The women did not go to the cemetery. The Waterpark landau, which now rests in the brambles below the cowhouse, was just behind the mourning coaches, and I made a slight scene, saying I wanted to go in that, when Laura was going to put us in one of the gloomy black coaches. While we were arguing about this, Dominic, who was supposed to be three or four hundred miles away at the agricultural college, suddenly appeared on the scene.

  ‘Dominic!’ exclaimed Laura. ‘How on earth did you get here?’

  ‘I got the telegram,’ said Dominic.

  ‘But we didn’t send one.’ They had discussed doing so and then had a superstitious feeling that it was safer to let him stay put in a place where he had shown no sign of being in trouble.

  ‘I sent it,’ said Sarah self-righteously. ‘I knew he could arrive in time.’

  ‘Oh!’ Laura hesitated. ‘Well, you must go now you’re here, but you look dreadfully grubby.’ She looked at him anxiously. He had been all night in the train, and had come straight from the station to the church, but she was not only concerned about his unkempt appearance, but at his distraught expression and the look in his eyes as if his whole world had again crashed on his head. She was afraid too that his grubbiness would be another bad mark against him in the family, and they did say that the only black Dominic wore were the smuts on his face. This was not quite true as somewhere on the journey he had acquired a black armband, but had forgotten to change his bright blue tie.

  The drive to the St Kilda cemetery was not so bad, but when Dominic, in his capacity as second mourner, stood at the edge of the grave, and saw at such close quarters the unbelievable sight of the coffin containing our beloved grandmother lowered into the clay, it had an overwhelming effect on him.

  The drive back to Beaumanoir was oppressive. Dominic seemed full to the brim with his ‘black soul-mixture.’ We felt that at any moment it might overflow and drown us. We did not dare speak. He was now as he had been when he watched the dying fly, aware, not only in the mind, which is bearable, but in his heart, that the ultimate condition of life is death. Perhaps he was the only one of the grandchildren who really loved Alice, who
had something more than a childish affection for a kind old lady. He may have been the only one with enough ‘spiritual perception’ to realize her serene goodness. He saw in her a virtue beyond the reach of his own divided soul. He knew that she compared him unfavourably with Bobby who had died, and now her death removed the possibility of his ever gaining her approval.

  It was a great relief, but also a slight shock, to come into the dining-room at Beaumanoir and find the whole family sitting round the tea-table, talking cheerfully and even laughing when someone said that Major Blunt’s coachman had tacked on to the wrong funeral, and he wondered why he did not recognize anyone at the graveside. Dominic could not endure this, and he went out into the library, where Laura followed him. She thought the best thing would be to get him back to the agricultural college as soon as possible, and to allay his emotion she began to talk to him in a matter-of-fact way about trains. To her utter dismay he said: