A Difficult Young Man

by Martin Boyd

  After a week during which, owing to the intervention of the Holy Angels or the influence of the stars, or some other agency which we are told does not exist, I did not break my neck, Uncle George returned like his patron who released the maiden from the dragon. Cousin Terence, his wife and their blue-eyed brood gave me a warm invitation to come again, which I suppose I accepted with effusions of gratitude, but I was determined never again to enter the home of my maternal ancestors. As when I left my school, I was unable to sit down without suffering.

  To recapture much that I write here I have to brood for some hours over the period of which I am writing, but the long railway journey back to Dublin comes easily to my mind. This is not so much because of Uncle George’s gloomy silence or the pain in my own body, which compelled me to stand for long intervals at the carriage window, but because of a trivial incident. At Athlone I had bought some biscuits. I offered some to George but he refused them, so I absently went on munching until I had eaten them all myself. Soon he emerged from his despondency, and not noticing they were finished he said:

  ‘I would like a biscuit.’

  I was filled with shame, and at that moment, in a flash of sympathy, I saw what a dreadful state he was in. Tentatively I asked him what he had done while I was at Kilawly, and if he had enjoyed his visit to Ballinreagh. He said yes, but was not otherwise communicative. I asked him who was there. He said Mr and Mrs Stuart, whom he had known in his militia days. I asked if there was anyone else there and he said:

  ‘Mrs Stuart’s sister, Miss Dolly Potts.’

  He thought this would convey nothing to me, but I nearly whistled. It was never mentioned in his presence so he could not be aware that ever since I could remember I had known the legend of Uncle George and Dolly Potts, and how their engagement had been broken off with mutual sorrow during the trek from Brittany, because of the attitude of her horrible old father. Whenever Baba had been particularly disagreeable I had heard Laura and my aunts say: ‘What a dreadful pity he didn’t marry Dolly Potts.’ Her name had as much romantic association for us as that of Guinevere or the Lily Maid of Astolat. Even if I had not known all this, the way that George said: ‘Dolly Potts’ revealed to my juvenile perception that he had great difficulty in doing so without bursting into tears.

  Because of the pure Christianity of my mental climate, though, to change the metaphor, the soil was shallow, one aspect of my emotional development had been delayed, and this had kept me sexually indeterminate until a year or more after this visit to Ireland. My tenderness of heart could be wounded by almost any creature. To me the perfect symbol of love was Our Lord with the beautiful youth lying on His Breast at supper, and all other love was an extension of this, an extension which included Colonel Rodgers’s attachment to Dominic, and George’s lifelong devotion to Dolly Potts. This attitude, though on a lofty spiritual plane, could appear to a magistrate extremely immoral. So with that mixture of knowing and unknowing to which I have referred, I was upset that George was hurt in his love, though I would have been horrified at the scandal and disruption of a divorce.

  When we arrived back at Waterpark it was evident that during the Byngham motet, the situation had changed. Dominic was still engaged to Sylvia, but no one was talking of the wedding. He did not go to Dilton very frequently and everyone wondered why Sylvia did not break off the engagement. She had gone out of her life-style in becoming engaged to Dominic, and did not want to admit it was a failure, though it is probable that even if she had never met him she would have been like many ambitious girls, who in their first bloom raise their matrimonial sights so high that they miss the target, and then later, betrayed perhaps by the sensuality which often accompanies snobbery, in desperation marry ‘beneath’ them, someone who is unrelieved bourgeois, and they spend their lives in struggling, he to reach and she to retain the position to which she was born. More than this, she felt that in exploring the dark reaches of his soul she would have a fuller and more exciting life than she would ever have with a conventional landowner or a fair and clipped guardee, who would have been a normal match for her. The very arrogance with which he walked into Dilton, when he did go, as if he were conferring an immense favour on the whole family, especially as he was quite unconscious of it, must have attracted the mean side of her nature. Sylvia, like many of the landed gentry was, as Matthew Arnold has observed, a barbarian, but she was a cold northern barbarian, with her savage tastes strictly canalized, and only released in certain directions, in field sports and in safe insolence. Dominic was the genuine article, the full-blooded barbarian resplendent from the south, and she could not let him go. Ultimately Aunt Baba released her.

  It was now early August and Aunt Baba had arrived back at Waterpark. She would have thought it shocking to remain in London after the end of July. Cousin Emma, who could not afford to go away, had pulled down the blinds and was living in the back of the house. George and I arrived about teatime, and amidst all the lively affection of our greetings, it was noticeable that he barely nodded to her. She came down to dinner with her eyes red from weeping. It was almost as startling as if we had seen the village policeman crying. Somehow we knew, either that evening or within a day or two that George had asked her to divorce him, and that Dolly Potts had agreed to go away with him if Baba would proceed with the divorce, but not otherwise. It is perhaps time that I applied the glaze of my adult understanding to soften the outlines of the hard and repellent portrait I have given of Baba. Her situation was really pitiable. It was not her fault that as a child she had been inculcated with the belief that the most important thing in life was to secure a husband in a good position, which was not unusual at that time. Sylvia, on her level had the same belief until she was side-tracked by Dominic, though Sylvia wanted a peer, and Baba only someone who was invited to dine in Toorak. As she was devoid and ignorant of the qualities in George which alone could have made it possible for them to share life, she could not see the impertinence of her marrying him, and when he asked for the divorce thought him not only immoral, but brutal.

  She kept saying: ‘I have been a good wife to you,’ by which she meant that she had made his house uncomfortable with social pretension, and had refrained from committing adultery, for which she had little opportunity or inclination. She was like a child who has stolen a glittering toy and then complains with the greatest moral indignation that it is cracked. She had trapped George into marrying her, but she considered that quite a normal thing to do, and that it was monstrous of him not to keep his part of the ‘bargain,’ and it is true that he should not have been so weak-minded in the first place. But one was sorry for Baba at this time because of her terrible stupidity. My relatives were often silly, but they were never stupid. Stupidity is the result of a complete absence of imagination, silliness of its excess. I am afraid that I reveal the tendency in parts of this book, but the reader must take certain wild statements as intended for fun, though they contain an element of truth too subtle to be confined within the limits of accurate definition. One can make exact statements of fact, but not of truth, which is why the scientist is forever inferior to the artist. Again, the Almighty may give us some affliction, some foolishness of manner, of which, too late for our happiness but not for our wisdom, we become aware, and in correcting it we acquire more depth of character than we could have achieved without our original defect. Here it must be remembered that I can put forward the mask of a character in the story as a defence.

  Baba’s stupidity must have been necessary to her, a thick rhinoceros hide to preserve some little grain of belief at the core of her being, necessary to her survival, which would have been endangered if exposed to the bright assaults of intelligence. So it was a powerful defensive weapon. George might say with patient lucidity:

  ‘I’m very sorry about it, but surely you see that our marriage was a mistake? I am not blaming you for anything. Please don’t think that. We all have to live according to our natures. It is my faul
t really.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ snapped Baba, her mouth mulish, her eyes narrowed and cunning, but wet with tears.

  ‘It is my fault,’ George went on, lowering his voice with patience, ‘for not waiting longer. But wherever the blame lies, and I’m willing to take it, surely the thing is to remedy it? You can’t pretend that we’re happy together, apart from the fact that we have no common interest. You like social activities. That’s quite natural. I’m not making an accusation,’ he said, as he saw a flash of anger in her face. ‘I like a quiet country life. You would be freer to follow your own line of country without me. I would give you half my income.’

  ‘My position wouldn’t be the same,’ said Baba.

  Her stupidity defeated him. She was so convinced that happy human relationships, and peace of heart and mind were nothing compared with social importance, that he could not get past that barrier. He might have had some effect if he had said: ‘You tried to murder my nephew.’ That was the kind of argument she would have understood. It would have terrified her, not because of fear of punishment as no one could prove it, and anyhow it had happened in France, but because it might ‘get about’ and ruin her position. But George had by now either put the incident at Arles out of his head as too sinister to contemplate, or had accepted it as a momentary aberration, without a deep evil intention behind it. Whatever he thought he was too logical to use it now, as it was irrelevant to his argument. He was like someone fencing according to strict rules with an opponent who is flinging bad tomatoes at him.

  George also had a long discussion of a not dissimilar nature with Dominic. He drove him over to see the crusaders in the church at Imber, and on the way warned him of the misery that ensued from marrying a girl one did not love, especially if there existed even on the other side of the world, a girl whom one did. He meant Helena, and in a way Dominic’s situation was similar to George’s when he returned to Australia in the 1890s.

  Dominic listened without resentment to what he said, but replied that it was an impossible thing to jilt a girl. He may also have been influenced by those unworthy considerations which I have suggested.

  All this made the atmosphere very somber at Waterpark that August. A slightly comic relief, but only in retrospect, was provided by the arrival of my tutor, a young man called Ian Cowpath. Generally people who talk much about ‘a great sense of humour’ have none, so I do not like to say about Mr Cowpath that he had no sense of humour, but it was true, and at Waterpark at that time to have one was very necessary. He found it impossible to understand our conversation, which was always more allusive than accurate. He imagined that it was Australian, whereas it was a form of wit brought into the family by the daughter of a Recorder of Oxford in A.D. 1712, whose roguish portrait is actually in the room where I am writing. He tried to cure me of this colonial defect and teach me to speak English like a gentleman. Sometimes he would realize two or three minutes later that a remark of Steven’s was intended to be amusing and he would burst into a belated and disconcerting guffaw. Steven was on edge and used to say:

  ‘Can’t you keep that obtuse young man out of the drawing-room?’

  The only way I could do this was by allowing him to exercise his missionary zeal on me. His father had actually been a missionary and had passed on his hunger for souls to his son, in whom, however, all intellectual curiosity, spiritual aspiration, and moral conviction, had been sublimated into a simple passion for cricket. He was horrified that I could not play this game, as he sincerely believed that those who could not do so must suffer from some grave weakness or even corruption of character. One afternoon when I had shown more promise than usual, and had twice bowled him, as we walked back to the house he put his hand on my shoulder, and his honest eyes were shining like those of a young deacon leading his first convert into the hall of the catechumens.

  In the autumn Mr Woodhall recovered, and Mr Cowpath passed out of our lives into, no doubt, the pickle jar. But he would always be a kind and wholesome pickled boy, that is if anything can be called wholesome in which the development of all the higher faculties is arrested at the age of fifteen. At any rate he showed no signs of a taste for flagellation. I only mention him here as he was another symptom of the malaise of that summer.

  Just as some days may end in a blaze of splendour and leave after sunset a golden glow, so others may end in a thin grey drizzle. In the same way a friendship may end with the sorrow of inevitable parting, or a violent quarrel, or it may just fizzle out in indifference. The end of a phase of one’s life, or one’s leaving a former home has similar possibilities. One may give a ball or have one’s last meal off an enamel plate in the kitchen. Our endings seemed generally to be on the grey side. A sense of discomfort and of things going wrong were omens of the approaching end. To illustrate this I mention a very trivial thing which seemed to depress Steven almost as much as his anxiety about Dominic, and the barely subterranean row going on between George and Baba. There had for years been an apparently incurable damp patch on the staircase, sometimes disappearing for as long as two or three years and then coming back again. It had been very bad in the year that Alice and Austin left in that odd indecisive way to return to Australia. It now appeared again. I am not suggesting that there was anything supernatural about this, as not long afterwards it was found to be due to a lateral fissure in the wall, which made the damp appear some feet away from the outside fault in the stonework, and it was cured. But now it increased Steven’s feeling of worry.

  One day, just before Mr Cowpath left, everything seemed to go wrong. At breakfast Steven had just observed that the damp was worse on the staircase, when he opened a letter from the tenant at Westhill in which he stated that extensive repairs to the roof were necessary. We were having a sketchy breakfast as something had gone wrong with the kitchen range, and then a message came from the village that the mother of one of the housemaids was ill, and would she go to her. These two contretemps upset the domestic arrangements for the day. Laura went into Frome to find an oil stove on which to cook the luncheon, also to take Steven to the train as he was going to London for the day. Before tea I was sent to the village to buy some biscuits and poisonous-looking yellow cake at the little sweet shop. The drawing-room had not been dusted because of the housemaid’s absence, as English servants adhere strictly to their special work, and the flowers in the vases were wilting owing to Laura’s having been too busy to arrange them. The day was cold and grey and the Waterpark drawing-room usually so charming, looked neglected and dreary. We were just sitting down to our skimpy tea of bought cake and biscuits, and complaining bitterly as we were used to hot scones and food dripping with butter and cream, when Jonas in his bucolic voice announced Lady Dilton and Sylvia. This was ostensibly a formal call on Baba, but probably Sylvia, not having seen Dominic for a week, was determined to come over on any pretext. She had a distraught appearance, as if she were both suffering and determined to have her rights.

  Baba and Mr Cowpath were introduced. Mr Cowpath, impressed at meeting a great lady, crushed the bones of Lady Dilton’s hand with such fervour that she winced. Sylvia ignored him. When Dominic saw Sylvia’s expression he gave a slight start and went over to her. If he thought anyone was unhappy he was always kind, and now he felt guilty at having behaved so unfairly to Sylvia, and being the cause of her unhappiness. He paid her great attention, bringing her stale biscuits and the dry yellow cake which tasted of hair-oil. At first she acquiesced in this, and he sat down beside her. The unbecoming light of the day affected Dominic as well as the drawing-room. There was too something hangdog in his expression. He knew that he was only behaving like this towards Sylvia out of kindness and obligation and it made him ashamed. The worst of it was that Sylvia also knew. As we have seen, there were a few points of resemblance between Sylvia and Baba, although during this afternoon Sylvia looked at our aunt with the greatest contempt and astonishment. Sylvia could not bear anyone to pity her. She expected ev
erything she wanted to come to her as her right, not as a result of another person’s kindness. This is a fairly general feeling, but in her and Baba it was more active and conscious than in most people.

  In her ordinary life amongst her friends Baba behaved reasonably well, unless something had roused her, but as soon as she found herself in the company of important people she became excited, and put on a ‘smart’ manner, like a peacock which spreads its tail to attract the female bird, but the feathers in Baba’s tail were not of the kind to attract Lady Dilton. Baba thought we were all very dowdy, and that Waterpark could be smartened up a great deal. She was in the process of using us merely as a stepping stone to higher things, and she wanted Lady Dilton to understand that she was much smarter than Laura, and had much more social life. But Lady Dilton liked to live magnificently at Dilton House and dominate her immediate neighbourhood and was indifferent to social life as Baba understood it. She disliked London parties and was not impressed by them, and she was certainly not impressed by the fact that Baba had given a tea-party for fifty ladies in Orrong Road, Toorak. In her excitement Baba would not let anyone else speak. I was humiliated by the way she was going on, and even Mr Cowpath, seated in the corner, was rubbing his lip with his thumbnail and looking at her with wonder. Perhaps the Tunstalls would have swallowed the talk of parties, as they sounded quite respectable, if Baba had not dropped two particular bricks. Someone mentioned Colonel Rodgers, whom Baba had met and disliked.

  ‘I don’t suppose he’s in the Regular Army,’ she said with a note of disparagement.

  ‘Colonel Rodgers is Lady Dilton’s brother-in-law. He was in the Gurkhas,’ said Laura quietly.