At age seventeen Reo had left home to attend Victoria University College in Wellington, earning his degree “under exceedingly frugal circumstances.”
“What does that mean?” asked Margaret.
“Too poor to board,” he said.
As the story unfolded, it turned out that he’d slept in the psychology lab in order to complete his master’s thesis, which he’d finished in six weeks. Now he was sailing to England with a trunk full of his favorite books, including five volumes of Blake’s poetry. He spoke of his admiration for George Bernard Shaw, whose socialist views used to send his father into a tirade. “If Father thought I admired anyone who was a radical, the whole house would ring with the sound of his voice, as he and I went at each other hammer and tongs.”
“Poetry, radicalism and psychology,” thought Margaret. This talk from Reo was certainly making her feel like she was home. Telling him that she’d spent the last nine months in Samoa, she said, “The shock of having anybody to talk to now is terrific.”
Reo seemed nonplussed.
“Why are you going to England?” she asked.
When Reo said, with a modestly that wasn’t a bit feigned, that he was on his way to attend university, on scholarship, as a prize for an essay he’d written on dreams, she nearly spit out her tea.
“Dreams?” She wanted to know more.
That this awkward but admittedly attractive young man was traveling halfway around the world to study dreams was astonishing.
Dreams and their interpretation were the holy grail of psychoanalysis. Margaret, like others in her circle, viewed psychoanalysis as the only viable tool for unlocking the unconscious, that most mysterious and inaccessible part of each individual. As such the study of dreams—the recording, analyzing, and visualizing of these sleep-induced dramas—was viewed as a near sacred endeavor.
How could a young man who’d been slopping out stalls on a dairy farm in Paraparaumu end up with a scholarship to a British university?
As Reo explained it, in 1923 he had taken a BA in advanced philosophy and the next year his college had submitted his thesis by mail to examiners in the United Kingdom. The following year they had awarded him one of New Zealand’s first traveling fellowships. Then he said the most remarkable thing of all. He would be attending Emmanuel College at Cambridge.
Margaret was unable to hide her astonishment.
Cambridge, along with Oxford, was the Empire’s most prestigious center of higher learning. Usually only the scions of upper-class families were offered admittance.
He told her he’d chosen Emmanuel College because W. H. R. Rivers had taught there.
This was really too coincidental. Remarkably, the now deceased Dr. Rivers was a man Margaret had first become interested in because of his work as an ethnologist in Papua, New Guinea.
Reo had been drawn to him for other reasons. As a Cambridge don Rivers had studied the connection between physiology and psychology, focusing on soldiers who had left the battlefield with deep psychological wounds. He had been the first doctor to pronounce “shell shock” a sickness that required treatment rather than an act of cowardice that deserved punishment.
When Margaret finally pried her attention away from Reo, she was surprised to see that the Palm Court was empty. Everyone except for one lone waiter had retired. Rising from her chair, she said good night. By the time she’d reached her cabin she’d decided this was going to be a very interesting voyage.
The next morning she didn’t see Reo at breakfast. She kept looking for him, but he never appeared. The same thing happened at lunch and then again at dinner.
Then the following morning at breakfast he finally emerged, looking disheveled. He was more attractive than she remembered. She asked how he had occupied himself the night before.
“I fell asleep and missed dinner,” he said. “When I finally came out of my room it was after ten and the only place to eat was that Palm Court.”
“Colonial Burma,” said Margaret, “that’s the theme.”
“It’s fitting,” said Reo. “I met a lone English woman from Kenya and India. She said she knew General Dyer—‘poor dear old man’—he was dreadfully cut up at having to shoot those natives, but then he saved India, after all. She warned me, there are agitators in England who should be shot, also.”
Margaret laughed. “Is she here this morning?”
Reo was looking around. “No, I don’t see her. No doubt a late riser.” Then turning back to Margaret. “You’re a young lady, traveling alone?”
“Yes,” said Margaret.
“She complained that a lady could go nowhere alone, even onboard ship. She was looking for an escort back to her cabin. However, I was intent on getting back to my own room to my writing, and was not to be deviated.”
“Next she’ll be inviting you to her hotel in Paris,” said Margaret.
Reo laughed. “She already did. She showed me the address, a good one, she assured me. She said when I go to Paris, I’m to look her up.”
* * *
That next morning while Margaret was eating oatmeal she felt a shadow over her shoulder. Then a hand was sliding a brown moleskin notebook in front of her.
She looked up. “Oh, hello,” she said. “What’s this for? Something I’m supposed to read?”
“No,” said Reo. “Something you’re to write.” He sat down. “It’s a journal for your dreams.”
“You want to know my dreams?”
“No, I want you to know your dreams.”
They picked up their conversation where they had left off.
It was Dr. Rivers, Reo pointed out, who had said that sleep was “much more than the negation of psychological activity,” explaining that disturbed sleep only exhausts one’s strength and makes “still more unequal the struggle between fear, horror, or shame.” It was this work on sleep that led Rivers to “stand Freud on his head.” Without changing any of Freud’s precepts, Rivers had identified fear, instead of the libido, as the driving force in man. Margaret took all of this in. On the subject of psychology Reo obviously knew so much more than she did, and this made him enormously intriguing.
At the same time, Margaret was starting to understand that in spite of all his intellectual audacity, Reo was more rough around the edges than she could ever have guessed. Like a “cave man,” he was innocent and inexperienced, and out of place. “He had never seen a play professionally performed; he had never seen an original painting by a great artist or heard music played by a symphony orchestra.” Margaret was later to say, “It was like meeting a stranger from another planet, but a stranger with whom I had a great deal in common.”
It was not long before the Chitral’s chief steward noticed that Margaret and Reo were so engrossed in conversation that the others at the table were “simply an impediment.” He suggested that perhaps they might like a table to themselves. They accepted.
* * *
At the end of May, the Chitral docked in Adelaide, and Margaret suggested that they go ashore to visit the University Library. She wanted to introduce Reo to the groundbreaking work of the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. While Reo was reading one of Malinowski’s monographs, Margaret went to post a few letters. Usually an indefatigable correspondent, over the last three weeks she’d barely put pen to paper. She wrote to her mother:
I’m having a nice trip only very stormy. Too stormy to work any. There is a young psychologist on board who’s trying to learn German and we egg each other on. It’s an exceedingly comfortable boat, much food and wonderfully “squishy” couches.
To Ruth, Margaret had scrawled only a cryptic message:
Talking the old jargon is bringing it all back. Reo Fortune, this N.Z. boy, talks poetry, or radicalism or psychology—between the three I might as well be back with you all.
The longest of Margaret’s letters was addressed to her grandmother and it reflected her sanguine mood. It showed, too, that the subject of adolescent rebellion was very much on her mind. Beginning by
acknowledging her upbringing in “a serene and untroubled household,” she indicated that she saw herself as standing outside the cultural norm. Unlike most of her contemporaries, she had no quarrel with the essential thought of her parents, or her grandmother. This she said, was a rare privilege:
… All the energies most of my contemporaries had to put into reconciling affection for their elders with honest revolt against their teachings I could conserve to use for my own development. It’s very much owing to you that I’ve wasted so little time in life, made so few false moves, chased so few chimeras, extraneous to my personality.
* * *
Margaret and Reo were stretched out on deck chairs, gazing out at the smooth steel-blue sea.
“Lascars,” said Reo, nodding toward two oilers, a sinewy East Indian and his older and bulkier companion, who were carrying some crates. “Usually they’re confined below deck.”
“Poor fellows,” said Margaret, as the men passed.
The Lascars were sailors recruited from the Indian subcontinent, from ports in Bengal, Assam, and Gujarat. Living symbols of the Empire, in days past they’d spent their lives in indentured servitude, toiling in the engine rooms of ships that sailed for the British East India Company and then during the war for the King’s Navy. With the advent of the British passenger liners, Lascars were still shoveling coal into the giant furnaces that drove the steam turbines. Referred to as the “black gang,” not because of their skin color but because of the layer of soot that caked their faces, the Lascars on the Chitral were forbidden to appear above deck.
Margaret watched the pair turn and descend down the stairs into the steerage section.
“Heathcliff was a Lascar,” said Reo.
“Really?” said Margaret.
“There was something about Heathcliff I always identified with.”
Margaret took this in. Turning toward him, she said, “I have an idea.”
Reo raised his eyebrows.
“The fancy dress ball…”
He cut her off. “You know I’m not going to that.”
“No, hold on. We could go as Lascars.”
* * *
On June 1, Ruth wrote to Margaret, “This month you’ll be in Europe. The days do pass, and our year will be up.”
Ruth had been marking off the days, much like one would with an advent calendar before Christmas. In less than three weeks now she and Stanley would be sailing for England. After they toured the British Isles, they would travel to Stockholm, where Stanley was scheduled to deliver a scientific paper. Then he’d be returning to New York, and from then on Ruth was free to tour Italy with Margaret. Exultant, she told Margaret, “Two whole months we’ll have—think of it.”
The school year was ending and, for Ruth, ending rapidly. There were loose ends to tie up, including one last visit to campus to clear her belongings out of the seminar room. Back in the city on Monday, she went directly there.
She found the campus in a celebratory state. Construction workers were busy erecting the graduation stage while students were setting up hundreds of folding chairs and draping colorful paper ribbons over the bleachers.
It wasn’t until several hours later, after an afternoon of packing, that Ruth looked out the window and saw dark clouds filling the sky. Soon rain was falling. By eight in the evening, it was coming down in torrents. Carrying out her boxes, she passed through the quad, which was now one vast glistening field of mud and empty bleachers. When she returned to her room she wrote to Margaret:
I’ve just come through the wrecked and decorated campus hung for “Campus Night.” There are thousands of bright-seated chairs and heavy blue hangings with gold—lilies are they? for Columbia—over the speaker’s platform, and hundreds of programs dropped into the puddles as the people ran. Ever since March one department of the university has been working on this program for tonight 6–10,—and the downpour began at 6:30.
It didn’t occur to Ruth that the sodden ruins of graduation might be a foreshadowing of what could happen to her own carefully orchestrated celebration.
* * *
The knock came on her door, a rat-a-tat-tat. Margaret opened it. Reo was standing there, a grin on his face.
“Entrez,” she said, stepping aside with a flourish to let him enter.
He looked around. “Very elegant,” he said, referring to her first-class accommodations, a class up from his own.
On the bed were their Lascar uniforms, washed, pressed, and neatly folded.
“Courtesy of the chief steward,” said Margaret, placing one of the sets into his hands.
“Where’d he get them?”
“From some of the oilers,” she said, referring to the boiler room crew. “Here, put these on.”
She turned her back while he changed.
Turning back, she took him in. The baggy trousers, cut from a rough white cotton, reached to mid-calf; a long, dark, tapered tunic fell to his hips.
She walked over to him, reached around his waist, and wrapped the Lascar belt around him, fastening it on the tightest notch. She lingered there, standing just a few inches from him, adjusting his belt buckle, giving him every opportunity to pull her close. Certainly he had to know that she wanted him.
He stepped back. “Your turn,” he said, picking up the other uniform and handing it to her. “I’ll wait for you outside.”
Alone in the room she smarted. What was stopping him? By the time she finished changing and let him back in she’d regained her composure.
To add to the verisimilitude of the disguise, they applied shoe polish to blacken their faces and exaggerate their lips.
The grand salon had been dressed for a carnival. Ropes of tiny glittering lights were wrapped around banisters and swayed from the ceiling, radiating color on the cream-colored walls. Women wearing elaborate gowns with sequined masks covering their eyes swept past them. In blackface, Margaret and Reo were distinctly out of place. They hesitated at the edge of the dance floor.
Suddenly Margaret saw the chief steward approach, a mischievous grin on his face. “I’ve seated you at the captain’s table,” he said. “Come with me.”
When they arrived, only two people were already seated, an elderly and very proper English naval officer and his sister. The old man acknowledged their presence with an icy reserve.
Margaret smiled and introduced herself.
“We know who you are,” said the officer, before turning his head away in disgust.
A few minutes later the captain appeared. He nodded in their direction, the look on his face impassive.
Near the end of the evening, when Margaret returned to collect her pocketbook, she found the naval officer seated at the table. His eyes met hers.
“It’s an intolerable insult to the captain,” he said. “You owe him an apology.”
Margaret looked for Reo to tell him what had happened.
“Damn that man,” said Reo, referring to the chief steward. “He knew what he was up to the whole time.”
Margaret sighed. “I feel as if I have been accused, as in one of Mother’s stories—of eating peas with a knife.”
“That’s about the gist of it,” said Reo. “If you let it bother you.”
“We ought to go to him to make our apologies,” she said.
“To who?” said Reo, bristling.
“The captain, of course,” said Margaret, whose upbringing dictated that one ought to apologize for an unintended discourtesy. “I’m going to send up our cards.”
Later, as they were standing outside the captain’s quarters, Margaret looked up at Reo and saw that his face was flushed. She reached over and squeezed his hand. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right to tell him we’re sorry.”
When the captain ushered them into his cabin, Reo made a stiff and unbending apology.
Uncertain and defensive over what he was hearing, the captain started to bluster.
Margaret, who had yet to say a word, jumped in. “I know covering our faces with
shoe polish might have seemed excessive,” she said, “and I must tell you, it was my idea. I’m an American and in America blackface is a kind of theatrical makeup.”
“Well, I don’t know,” said the captain.
“It’s a mainstay of the minstrel show,” said Margaret. “You can see blackface on Broadway, any day of the week.”
* * *
After the fiasco with the captain Margaret became aware that the other passengers were going out of their way to avoid them. It hardly mattered. Completely isolated on the big ship, eating three meals together, and so enthralled by what they were talking about, she was grateful not to have any interruptions. Apparently, everyone on shipboard thought they were having an affair, even though they weren’t.
One June night after dinner they walked out to the bow of the ship, “where the spray came up around them and the sea seemed to be on fire.”
Margret stood next to Reo. Their arms were nearly touching, their eyes focused on the ocean’s shimmering phosphorescence.
Margaret could sense his hesitancy.
“I don’t know if I’ve ever told you,” he said. “I had a hard time when Barter was born.” The Barter he was referring to was his brother, five years younger, and now his closest confidant.
“You mean because you weren’t the only son anymore?”
“More than that. It was after Barter was born that my aunt left. My mother chased her off. She found out that it was she who my father really loved.”
“Your father was in love with your aunt?”
“My mother’s younger sister.”
They stood side by side in silence. He said, “I haven’t had much luck in love, either.”
“Now it’s coming,” thought Margaret.
“Eileen,” he said. “Her name is Eileen Pope.”
Margaret thought she detected a change in his face when he said the name.
He told Margaret that Eileen’s father was the headmaster of the Kaiwarra School and that Mr. Pope had been known throughout Wellington as a songwriter.
Coming of Age Page 27