A Difficult Young Man (18 page)

‘It's all right, sir,' I said in a resentful voice. ‘Dominic's here. He's only late changing.'

Colonel Rodgers turned away as if I were not addressing him.

Mrs Sinclair had no carriage or motor-car, and could seldom dine out, so she was now full of charming pleasure, and praised everything.

‘Oh, is Dominic here?' she cried. ‘How very delightful! We're all quite in love with him. The colonel as much as anyone, I'm sure.'

I was like not only Mercury, the messenger of the gods, and particularly of the Uranian Aphrodite, but like that mercury which is put on the backs of looking-glasses to make them reflect. I reflected in my own scarlet face the passion and shame of the colonel, which I had betrayed, and as when I had gone white at the sudden appearance of Lord Dilton at tea, everyone now stared at my flaming cheeks.

‘What's the matter with you?' asked Steven crossly.

‘I've just remembered something,' I said. They looked at me curiously, wondering what could be in a boy's mind to bring that colour to his face. Fortunately at that moment Watts announced dinner. Steven gave Mrs Sinclair his arm, and we trailed out in his wake to the dining-room. Dominic was in the hall, pushing his hair and his tie straight. He gave a general greeting to all of us, and a particular one to the colonel, who, however, ignored it.

The dining-room was in the older part of the house, behind the drawing-room and the library, of which the windows were in the Queen Anne façade. It was long and panelled in oak, and most of the portraits were here. In their armour and wigs, their velvet and satin, they loomed behind the dinner table. Colonel Rodgers on Laura's right was directly opposite Dominic, and it was against this dim rich background that he was compelled to look at him throughout the evening. Though I did not notice it at the time, in the shaded light of the candles, his face full of the repose of his love, Dominic must have looked indescribably beautiful, not now like an El Greco, but like some devout and radiant youth, glowing with the life of the spirit, in a painting by Bronzino, or by Titian of a young Vendramin in adoration.

This only made Colonel Rodgers more angry. If Dominic had had a pimple on his chin and had looked
depressed the colonel would have borne more easily to look at him. To relieve his feelings he began to talk about death at steeplechases.

‘Lot of grief at Aintree this year,' he said.

‘Was there?' asked Laura politely.

‘Yes. Never seen so much grief anywhere. You have steeplechasing in Australia, I suppose?'

‘Oh, yes, at Flemington on the Saturday of Cup week.'

‘Any grief?'

‘A little, I expect,' said. Laura.

‘What are the jumps? Brushwood?'

‘I think so. Aren't they, Steven?'

‘Ah, not really dangerous. You won't get much grief.'

‘Our jockeys
are
killed sometimes,' said Miss Chambers, defending the honour of Australia, and smiling at the colonel, but he did not respond, suspicious that the Flemington course was a disgustingly safe affair.

When the ladies had gone back to the drawing-room, Steven sat beside the colonel for a few minutes, then he said:

‘If you will excuse me I want to write a short note for the post before we join the ladies. Dominic, pass the port to Colonel Rodgers.' He glanced at Brian and me, indicating that we should follow him. He evidently wanted Dominic and the colonel to be left alone together to talk out their quarrel. Steven believed
that people must act according to their natures and the breadth of his culture allowed for many different kinds of nature, though he was strict rather than otherwise in his moral standards.

I was horrified to think what might be happening in the dining-room, but longing to know. Perhaps because I am Australian or half Irish, and to the Irishman everyone, high or low, rich or poor, is primarily a human being, I am prepared to gossip with anyone who shows a similar inclination. The next morning when Jonas brought my clothes, he said:

‘The old colonel was proper angry with Mr Dominic last night. They had a master row.'

‘Did they?' I cried, leaping up in bed and clasping my knees. ‘What happened?'

‘Well, Master Guy, I be just going into the dining-room to clear, thinking 'em had gone, when I hears the old colonel say, “If you'm not faithful to your friends what is prepared to do anything for 'ee, you'm not equal to a dog what is faithful to his master.” '

‘Phew! What did Dominic say?' I asked. ‘Didn't he knife him?'

‘No. He only says, very stuck up, “You'm not my master,” and that there knocked the old colonel flat. He says, “Haven't I been a good friend to 'ee? You've had none better. You comes over here from Australia and you didn't know nuffing. Who taught you how to shoot a snipe and to ride proper English-wise, not like a sack of old 'taties?” '

‘What cheek!' I exclaimed indignantly. ‘Australians ride jolly well.'

‘Yere, that's what him said, “a sack of old 'taties,” ' declared Jonas, pleased to be able to repeat the insult within the safety of inverted commas. “‘Look what I done for 'ee,” 'im says. “I shows 'ee all my daggers and how to draw they wopses,” and he says all this proper savage, with his teeth shut together, and knowing Mr Dominic isn't one to be spoke to I expected to see the old colonel on the floor with one of they silver knives I has to clean in his stummick, as you says. 'Cos then I hears Mr Watts coming from the pantry, and I takes me ear from the keyhole and opens the door and pretends to be surprised to see 'em still there. Yere, I says, “excuse me, sir,” and Mr Dominic he says, “That's all right, Jonas, you can clear away,” and he holds the door for the old colonel who has to go out and don't half look mazed.'

This explained their appearance as they came into the drawing-room, as Dominic had the grave dignity of someone who has administered a rebuke, and the colonel the furious resentment of the one who has received it. He was shocked at the colonel's reminding him of the benefits that he had received from his friendship, which was so against his chivalrous code that one ignored what one gave, that he saw the colonel as beneath him, and so was able to treat him with that immense and usually benevolent aplomb which
the Bynghams showed to their inferiors, and of which Jonas had come into the orbit.

After that it was not a comfortable evening. Mrs Sinclair, making the most of her outing, stayed late, and the colonel could not leave before her. When he did go Dominic, with that condescension which came from the feeling that the colonel had lowered himself, and partly from his security in Sylvia's love, said:

‘I could come to see you tomorrow morning after church.'

‘Just as you please. Just as you please,' said Colonel Rodgers. ‘I may be busy.' But he added, his pride and desire in conflict: ‘Well, come then. Yes, you'd better come.'

People in the grip of emotion should be fat; large, blowsy Ruben figures with plenty of tears. Then one can stroke them and say: ‘My poor darling!' until exhausted with sobbing they fall into a healthy sleep. When they are herring-gutted their nerves and sinews are too exposed. If Colonel Rodgers had been a weeping and bibulous Italian tenor, imploring Dominic to call in the morning, the moment he had left we would have fallen back in our chairs, convulsed with laughter, though it is possible that I credit my family with too much levity, and imagine that as so much that amused me, amused them, this included everything. The colonel's tortured nerves, uncovered with fat, were too painful to contemplate, as his opposing feelings made him emit his little contradictory yapping replies. He looked as Jonas had
said, as if he had just had ‘a master row,' and suggested the exposed sinews in one of those hideous paintings of anatomy lessons, or some surrealist drawing of an ant in anguish. Beside him Dominic appeared all that was noble and human, with his dark but lofty brow, his erect body of which the carriage suggested either the perfect instinctive movement of the animal world, or a natural courtliness, one was never sure which, and, the chief source of his dignity, the serene eyes of a young man in love.

CHAPTER X

DOMINIC'S VISIT
to Colonel Rodgers on the Sunday morning after the dinner party did not result in an enduring
rapprochement
,
and the Eternal Triangle based on the Graeco-Roman model, faded out. The Colonel stayed at home brooding over his dead insects or sorrowfully cataloguing his weapons, but these things, no longer shared with Dominic, were dust and ashes, so Dominic, true to his habit of affecting other people's lives, had robbed him of the interests he had before we came. Yet it is possible, as we may see before the end, that he gave more than he took away.

Colonel Rodgers no longer hung over his garden gate to intercept me on my way to the Vicarage, and although I had disliked these encounters, I was now offended at their omission. At last one afternoon
I walked up the path and knocked at his door. He was quite pleased to see me, did not ask for any explanation of my visit, and invited me to stay to tea. After that I went to see him about twice a week, though I was often very bored, looking at the daggers. But I too was a bit lonely, and I went to see him, partly for variety in my human contacts, and partly to provide a solace for his defeat in his affections. It was I who suggested that he should again be invited to dine, and he came now and then. Steven would open some good wine to cheer him up, but the only effect
of this was to make his eyes shine with a hard bright light, as if the prunes had turned into black beads, and this was doubtless the expression he had when he killed the fuzzy-wuzzies. Dominic always spoke to him kindly, as if he had some special obligation to him.

For my parents this was a very pleasant year. Dominic gave them no anxiety, and the problem of his future appeared to be solved far more satisfactorily than they had ever contemplated. His drawing was good, and his technical ability, even if his subjects were odd, justified their allowing him to choose the career of a professional artist, though they thought it would be little more than a hobby. Part of Sylvia's dowry was to be the farms which Cousin Thomas had sold to Lord Dilton's father, and the estate would then be big enough to give Dominic the work of managing it. Steven must have felt sardonic pleasure when he wrote to Bertie and Baba that his son whom they had wanted to send
to a reformatory was now engaged to the daughter of a peer, that he showed a touch of genius in his work, and that the combined income of himself and his wife would be a good deal more than Baba had when Dominic was her scullion. Brian was also doing well at the Slade, and when he came down to Waterpark he spent his whole time with Steven, sketching out in the summer fields. Myself, they had never expected to give any trouble.
A 
comfortable ecclesiastical niche was prepared for me.

On Christmas Eve the Australian mail arrived, with letters and cards from most of our relatives. From these we learned that George and Baba were leaving for England in March, and that the Craigs were coming on the same ship, bringing Helena, but leaving the boys behind at the Geelong Grammar School.

On Christmas Day Colonel Rodgers came to our mid-day dinner, and in the evening we all went over to dine at Dilton. Over the dessert Lord Dilton, allowing a remission for good conduct, announced the engagement of Sylvia and Dominic, and we drank to their health. Colonel Rodgers looked dismayed when he realized his grotesque part in the design. It would be humbug to pretend that Steven and Laura were not frankly delighted that Dominic was marrying a girl with this splendid background, who was able to bring him enough for them to live in reasonable comfort. They had no qualms about unearned income, as in their class, particularly in their own families, marriage was
the most usual, in fact almost the only way of obtaining money, though if Sylvia had earned her money and Dominic had lived on that, they would have thought it disgraceful.

I never knew what Lady Dilton thought of the engagement. I thought at the time that she must be very much against it, and had given in to her husband, as for all her massive personality and his amiability, she was obliged to do when his mind was made up. Also she disliked the prospect of going to a rented house in London for a season, perhaps two or three, until she had fixed Sylvia with a suitable husband, and this would save her the trouble. She may also, like her husband, have liked the idea of linking themselves with one of the ancient names of the county, in the same way that Buonaparte would have preferred alliances with ancient but ruined royal houses, to one with the family of another self-made emperor, if the latter had existed.

It may also be wondered what Dominic and Sylvia thought about it, but they were sufficiently attractive physically not to want to use their brains. As soon as Dominic was attracted by anything, it immediately became larger or more beautiful than life. Colonel Rodgers described a bull-fight and his eyes glowed with visions of pageantry and scarlet death. He saw Sylvia in the great white plaster drawing-room at Dilton, her frizzy hair making a halo against the high windows, beyond which rose the stately trees of the park, and at
once she became a princess from fairyland. His imagination provided her with the necessary qualities for the part. All she had to present was the outward shell.

Sylvia herself was still young enough to be solely concerned with her immediate desires, and to believe that she could have her cake and eat it. She had always had the cake of a rich background. She did not yet realize that to secure this for life she would have to marry someone very different from Dominic. In this Romeo and Juliet romance the difficulty lay not in the Montagues and Capulets, the Tunstalls and the Langtons, but in the lovers themselves.

On the Christmas night when we dined at Dilton, Alec Hancock, the local doctor's son and his two sisters were invited to come up to join our games and to dance. This invitation, given by Sylvia, had the insolence of many of her actions, as she only made use of the Hancocks when there was no one else available, and they showed very poor spirit in accepting, as it cannot have been kind to their parents to leave them on Christmas night. Alec Hancock, who was not good looking, asked Sylvia to dance. She looked at him as if he were out of his senses and turned away without answering. Dominic saw this happen. If there was anything he detested it was rudeness towards the unimportant and the humble, unless of course thay had asked for it. His eyes blazed for a moment, and then he realized that it was Sylvia who had committed the
offence. He went over to her and said accusingly:

‘Why didn't you dance with Alec?'

She was a little frightened, and replied, ‘I wanted to dance with you.'

He took her in his arms and the physical contact answered for the time being the doubt that had awakened in his heart. This Alec became a brilliant scientist, and is now called a fellow-traveller with the Communists. In political speeches he refers with unusual venom to the landowners, and in fact to most county people as a futile and mischievous survival. He gives talks on moral problems on the wireless in which he ignores that the Christian religion has ever existed. He loses no opportunity of thrusting as it were his steel girders into the shaky palace of our hierarchy, until he is ready to knock its beauty down. So it is possible that Steven was right when he said that if a revolution comes it will be the ill-bred and the brainless like Sylvia who have brought it about, especially when they write memoirs and novels in which they boast of their savage vulgarity, as if it were the hall-mark of rank.

Steven hated the cold, and in the first week of January he and Laura left for the South of France. Dominic still lodged with Cousin Emma in Brompton Square. It is doubtful whether she found this entirely agreeable, but it brought in a little discreet money, and she was afraid of burglars. Brian
shared a studio in Chelsea with another young painter, and came less
often to Waterpark. The servants were put on board wages and I went to live at the Vicarage, where I suffered from the cold, which, like Steven, I hated. Our blood had thinned in the hot climate of Australia, to which all my great-grandparents had emigrated, except Captain Byngham's father, but even he had held Mediterranean appointments in Gibraltar and Corfu. So there can be few people more Australian than myself, though sometimes those who seldom have an opportunity to administer a snub, say to me: ‘Oh, surely you are not Australian?' as an opening to insult my country. It would be as sensible if I were to reply: ‘Oh, surely you are not English? You don't speak like a barrow boy from the Mile End Road.' Also, judging from the Sunday papers, not all the convicts were transported.

Mr Woodhall was a cultivated English gentleman, and yet when a friend from Oxford came to stay, introducing me he said with a smile: ‘He is an Australian, but I have not lost my trophies yet,' and he waved his hand towards some ugly silver mugs on his mantelpiece. He had, however, to my mind a worse trait than these manners. At the Vicarage breakfast was at a time, a thing I had never known except at school. At home the only rule was that one must be out of the dining-room by a quarter to ten for the sake of the servants. I expected that I should be treated as a guest, but on the first morning when I came down, five minutes after the gong had sounded, my cheerful greeting was answered by a rebuke from the Vicar, while Mrs
Woodhall poured out my tea with an expression which showed she fully endorsed his remarks. I saw with dismay that I had to spend three months in a house where routine was not for comfort, but an end in itself, or designed to give an effect of austerity. As Lent approached this grew worse, and when during a hard frost I asked for a fire in my room, Mr Woodhall said: ‘A fire in Septuagesima Week. That is a strange request from a Catholic—a very strange request!' From the thin smile with which he said this I realized that he too had a touch of the pickled boy about him, the pleasure in being disagreeable when it is safe. I also realized that there were other things in religion than plainsong, antiphons, processions and incense.

I had not taken in that limitation is essential to success. I mention this here as it was a failing of my family. They had an Athenian passion for any new thing. If their eye offended them they simply could not pluck it out. My enthusiasm for medievalism was partly because the very old was very new to me, who had been brought up so far in Australia. Apart from the discomforts of Waterpark Vicarage, which was intended as my future home, I do not think that I could ever have become a clergyman because of that restriction which is necessary for success in a profession, and which in some clergy seems even to apply to their religious belief. For if one really believed in the existence of God as one believes for example in the existence of the sun, one would not put on a voice when talking about Him and call Him ‘Gud.' We respect the sun, we know that
it could destroy us and that it is the source of all our physical life, we lie naked in its rays, worshipping it by the edge of the sea, but we do not speak of it in hushed voices as if it were slightly obscene, like the W.C. Brian and I talking cheerfully about the activities of the Holy Ghost showed more real belief in religion than the person who puts on a ‘reverent' voice, and when a Sicilian peasant woman speaks with abuse of the Blessed Virgin, it is because she really believes that her prayers have been deliberately ignored. We only speak in an affected voice of someone we dislike, and the higher Anglican clergy have every reason to dislike Our Lord, whose utterances must be a continual embarrassment to them, as indeed they are to all of us.

Putting an adult glaze over my youthful picture of the Woodhalls, which will soon appear more vividly in a letter which I found amongst Laura's papers forty years later, I see that my real discomfort at the Vicarage was due to the artificiality of Mr Woodhall's discipline, which falsified our relationship. When my parents refused me something it was for a definite reason. Another helping of mushrooms would give me a stomach-ache. I must not loaf indoors on a fine day as it was unhealthy. I must not read rubbishy books as it would make me sillier than I was born. I must accept a dull invitation if it would be unkind not to go. There was no blind obedience. Sweet reason, beloved of my family, softened every restriction. The Woodhalls on the contrary would think out restrictions, divorced
from reason, so that my life should not be too easy.

I asked Mrs Woodhall if Brian might come down for a week-end. To my indignation she did not say: ‘Of course, dear. I'm sorry I didn't think of it before,' but, ‘I must consult the Vicar.' A little later she told me that they did not think it ‘very advisable.' They had taken advantage of the fact that I had presented them with the opportunity to inflict a little self-denial on me. But I expect that they found irritating my assumption that the end of life was pleasure.

Dominic was at Dilton every week-end, and Lady Dilton asked me over to tea, but only twice. She may have thought that I would come if I wanted to, and she did say ‘Come again,' when I left, but Mr Woodhall impressed on me that I must never go to such a grand house without an invitation. Another reason why I did not go to Dilton more often was the way that Dominic behaved on one of the occasions when I was there.

Sylvia was called to the telephone, and when she came back she said that it was only a tiresome invitation which she had refused, adding: ‘I said I'd be in London.'

‘But that is not true,' said Dominic.

‘Well, I had to say something,' retorted Sylvia.

Dominic rebuked her with intolerable pomposity. When his sense of honour was upon him, he was apt to lose his sense of humour. I did not think that Sylvia would put up with this for a moment, but again she looked rather frightened, and almost as if she were going to cry. She had fallen in love with his good looks,
and his dubious Teba passion, but had to take with these the touch of nonconformist rectitude he had learnt from Cousin Sarah, together with wild generosities which were quite outside her self-preserving scheme of life.

As I rode back along the frozen lanes, I was sure the engagement could not last long, and I was very depressed. I thought of the blow its ending would be to Steven and Laura. They would have to cope with Dominic again, and a Dominic who had reverted to type, and had lost the serenity with which being in love had endowed him. Judging by this afternoon it was already wearing thin. I had the feeling that the Fates had decided against us, and that the steady disintegration which had been afflicting the Langtons for the last hundred years was about to reach its climax, not realizing that family disintegration is endemic in mankind. Partly because of Sylvia, and partly because of the atmosphere of the Vicarage, I felt that England was hostile to us, and I wished we could return to Westhill, where at least it was warm, and I pictured our dear retriever, who had been left in charge of the tenants, wandering with heavy eyes and wistful nose about the house, and sniffing perplexed at the doors of rooms we no longer inhabited.