A Difficult Young Man (3 page)

He took the lilies from Baba and handed them to my mother, who, as the hansom drove away said:

‘You shouldn't have picked Grannie's lilies without asking, darling. Besides, Miss Stanger didn't really want them.'

They all stared at Dominic for a moment in amused scrutiny, then someone said:

‘Well, what d'you think of her?'

The bright babel of criticism broke out, and Dominic drifted away to brood on the fact that whenever he tried to do a kindness it landed him in some degree of trouble, whereas if Brian or myself made a graceful gesture, everyone uttered little cries of appreciation and delight.

CHAPTER II

AS THE
lilies were out when Baba first met the family, it must have been near Christmas, when these flowers bloom in Australia. Shortly afterwards we were up at Westhill, preparing to leave for the Tasmanian holiday. During the long years I lived in England I used at intervals to dream of a place where the air had a limpid clearness and the landscape a soft brilliance of colour, such as I thought could only exist in some heavenly region of the imagination. The voices in this clear air were like bells at morning pealing. When I returned to Westhill I found that I had only been dreaming of the local countryside. I do not know if Grieg's ‘Morning' from the
Peer Gynt
suite is good music, but it does recall for me the mornings in that place. The stillness, the marvellous liquid notes of the magpies, the distant
orchestration of noises at the farm down the hill, where the clang of a milk pail marked the close of a phrase. We liked so much being at Westhill that it is surprising we were eager to go to Tasmania, but we had the family disease of always wanting to be somewhere else.

On one of these perfect mornings, a few days before we were due to leave, a telegram in connection with our departure had to be sent to Alice, and Dominic was told to dispatch it from Narre Warren, and I said I would go with him. Our ponies were out in the paddock, and it would have meant delay to catch them, so we set out on bicycles, which we brought home for the holidays, but did not normally use in the country. Part of the road down to Narre Warren from Westhill is very steep, and was and still is deeply rutted. The brakes on Dominic's bicycle were out of order, but, he relied on the pressure of his foot against the front tyre to stop himself. When we came to the very steep part of the road, the jolting made it impossible to keep up the pressure, his bicycle shot ahead, caught in a rut, and flung him over the handlebars against a young gum tree by the road side. When I came up to him he was lying there perfectly still, with blood coming from his forehead, and I thought he was dead.

I did not behave very sensibly. The golden morning became black with despair for me. Bobby, our eldest brother, had been killed from his pony only a few years earlier, and I thought that when my mother heard
about Dominic she would go mad. Behind the smiling morning I felt that a treacherous malefic force was directed against us, and for a minute, instead of going for help, I stood there, wishing to die myself. I think it is possible that the emotions I had for that minute while I stood by Dominic, believing him to be dead, caused the ‘fixation,' if that is the word, the concern I felt for Dominic all my life, the inability to escape from the thought of the processes to which life subjected him. Not long ago, driving near Westhill, I saw two magpies on the road. One had been wounded by a motor-car, the other was standing beside its mate, unwilling to leave it, unable to help it. At the sight I felt a sudden dreadful depression, which I think must have been an echo of this morning, so long past.

When I recovered from this trance of terror, I took his hands, which fell limp when I let them go. Then I rode on, and
rushed into the cottage of the Schmidts, a family which supplied us with domestics, screaming ‘Dominic's dead! Dominic's dead!' which was, of course, untrue.

He was sitting up, dazedly mopping his forehead, when we returned to the scene of the accident. The Schmidts lifted him into a cart and took him back to their cottage, where they put him to bed. Old Mrs Schmidt, who had been Alice's maid, and was a great friend of our family's, then drove me back to Westhill to break the news to Laura.

It turned out that Dominic had broken a bone in his
ankle and could not walk. He also had slight concussion, and was unfit to come to Tasmania. Our parents decided that no useful purpose would be served by the rest of us forfeiting our holiday, and he was promised a compensating treat when we returned, so in a few days we set out leaving him at Westhill in charge of Cousin Sarah. When he was told that we were going without him he said ‘Of course' but the tears filled his eyes. It might only have been from the pain in his head and in his ankle, but I think it was that he could not bear any further exclusion from his fellows, beyond that which he already knew arose from his nature.

Cousin Sarah was an historical survival, one of those penniless unmarried gentlewomen who were a feature of country house life in the seventeenth century. She was housekeeper at Beaumanoir, and played chess with Alice in the evenings. She had a little dark vinegar-scented room at the head of the main staircase into which she would snatch an unwary child for largely incomprehensible religious instruction. Dominic was the most allergic to this, as he respected Cousin Sarah for her complete absence of conscious levity. He came out from sessions with her, feeling that the devil possessed a large part of him, and that only unremitting efforts to please God, Who faintly disliked him, could save him from eternal torment, which may have been true. It was she who told him of his descent from the duque de Teba, pointed out his physical resemblance to that
monster, and implied that he was capable of committing similar crimes, if he neglected religion. This again may have been true, but it was an unwise thing to tell a boy as moody as Dominic. Possibly from association of ideas, as the duke had performed his villainies in a crypt, he went to hide himself in the wine cellar, where in the darkness he broke some bottles of port, and so got into trouble, as often seemed to happen when Sarah had been trying to lead him into paths of virtue. When she told Brian and myself that we had an ancestor who had strangled altar boys we only thought it terribly funny, like a duke in a butt of Malmsey wine, or Blubeard's wives in the cupboard.

My mother imagined that it would be dull for Dominic to have to spend three weeks with Sarah, but he seemed quite pleased to have her at Westhill. Her mental development had been arrested at about his present age, and so he could have serious discussions with her at his own level, but with the illusion that he was conversing with an adult mind.

The holiday in Tasmania was very pleasant, but had little effect on the course of this story. When we returned we went straight on by train to Dandenong, where Tom Schmidt met us with the drag. Sarah had come with him, as she was returning to her duties at Beaumanoir now that Alice was back. Laura's first question to Sarah was:

‘How is Dominic?'

‘He's getting on well,' said Sarah, and putting on
the smirk she assumed when she mentioned any childish activity, she went on: ‘He's been sitting up on the sofa painting two large cards with “Welcome Home” on them. They're to be a surprise. There's one on the front door and one at the gate. It's kept him occupied.'

My mother's eyes blazed as they could on the rare occasions when she was angry. She turned away without a word and climbed into the drag. When Sarah disappeared into the station she exclaimed: ‘The fool!' For the nine miles drive up to Westhill she was very upset. At intervals she exclaimed: ‘What a fool Sarah is! It's just like her.'

Although Steven was not as distressed as Laura at Dominic's surprise being spoiled, he agreed that Sarah was a universal grey blight, and always had been. At times efforts had been made to remove her, but at first there had been nowhere else for her to go, and now Alice said: ‘I'm used to her.' Steven cautioned us that we were not to give any hint to Dominic that we knew of his notices before they burst on us in their splendour, in painted festoons of daisies and forget-me-nots, as we drove in at the gate and drew up at the front door.

The result of this was that Brian and I over-acted our surprise, exclaiming in wonder at their beauty. But Dominic himself was so generous in his affections and warmth of heart, when they functioned, that his spiritual perception did not reveal to him the falsity of our surprise. Or perhaps he only saw our desire to
please and our good feeling, which made us affect it.

‘Gosh! It must have taken you ages to do!' we cried, standing back, and with our cupped hands excluding from our view everything but the painted cardboard, as we had seen Steven do when appraising his water-colours.

Laura said: ‘They're lovely, darling,' but there was bitterness in her voice, not only because she had been deprived of the spontaneous amusement and delight it would have given her to come unexpectedly on these notices, but because all the pleasure and affection of her homecoming and reunion with Dominic, for whom she had stronger feelings than for Brian and me, of which we were not at all jealous, had been hindered in their expression with a gratuitous element of humbug. Sarah had just stopped something fusing. However, this evaporated when we came into the house, and Brian and I gave him the presents we had brought him because he was ill, a spoon with a map of Tasmania on the handle, and a hideous souvenir made of greenstone. We shouted at him all we had done:

‘Dominic, we climbed right to the top of Mount Wellington.'

‘And of Mount Nelson.'

‘And we went down the Huon in a coach.'

‘And came back in a little steamer.'

‘And we had masses and masses of strawberries.'

‘And Guy was sick.'

‘I wasn't. It was the train made me sick.'

When, in this fashion, we had described our entire holiday, we ran out to see the servants and the ponies, and to give the latter lumps of sugar. At times like this Westhill seemed to us the best place on earth. We might have our dreams of grandeur and appreciate the fleshpots of Beaumanoir, but we would not have changed one detail of our shabby old house. I was at this time only about seven or eight years old, and had not yet a pony of my own. When we went for our frequent excursions and picnics, I drove with my parents while Dominic and Brian rode beside the tea-cart or the drag, or whatever vehicle we might be using, but Dominic was now growing rather tall for his Shetland.

There were certain people who appeared to have a definite effect on the course of Dominic's life. They might do something trivial which one would have thought concerned only themselves, and yet it had a repercussion upon Dominic. Baba was one of these, Sarah another, and the chief of them was Helena Craig, Aunt Maysie's daughter, to whom we shall come presently. Sarah's casual and only half-consciously malicious revelation at Dandenong, had predisposed all of us, but particularly Laura, to feelings of strong loyalty and affection towards Dominic when we met him, and as a result of this, for once he was satisfied with our demonstration. Usually he demanded so much more evidence of affection than he received.
When Dominic was satisfied and happy, it was as if the spanner were removed from the works of our domestic life. This, combined with their natural pleasure at being home again, put my parents into an expansive and generous mood. That night they decided to give Dominic, who had been so good about his illness and missing his holiday, a new horse instead of the visit to the pantomime which was to have been his consolation prize. They told Alice about this, and when she heard of his painting the notices, and as she loved more than anything that the impulses of the heart should blossom into external decoration, she said that she would give him his new horse, which meant it would be a very much better one than Steven could afford.

In this way Tamburlaine came into our lives.

As I proceed to unfold, I hope, the character of Dominic before the reader, I may provoke the criticism: ‘But that is not consistent with what he has just done.' The difficulty about Dominic's character was that it did not appear consistent, and yet, when we have viewed it as a whole I hope to have shown that it was so. In the meantime I can only proceed like the painter Sisley, who when he wished to convey an effect of green, put a dot of blue on his canvas, and then a dot of yellow beside it. From a little way off the green thus appears more lively and luminous. So I must put these dots of contradictory colour next to each other in the hope that Dominic may ultimately appear alive. And this is more or less my method throughout the whole of
this book—to give what information I can, and let the reader form his own conception of the character.

There are certain incidents in his boyhood of which I cannot remember the exact dates, which do throw some light on his nature, and one I shall insert here to form, as it were, a corrective blue to the happy yellow of the day I have just recorded. It is illustrative of his emotional vulnerability. Although at times he appeared entirely self-centred, often, as was said of a very different character, I think a high-minded Cambridge don, ‘he exposed himself to the full force of other people's wrongs.'

In the country in the Australian summer, the flies are a plague, and those who have not fine wire-netting over their windows cannot live in comfort. Even so an occasional fly will find its way down the chimney and buzz maddeningly against the windows. To deal with these we had a kind of rubber squirt, filled with insecticide powder. On one of those spring days when the sudden heat out of doors is like the blast from an oven, I was alone with Dominic in the drawing-room. A fly came down the chimney and Dominic puffed it with the mustard-coloured insecticide. It buzzed furiously against the window, then shot down the length of the room to bang itself against another, where it buzzed more spasmodically and finally lay on the sill subject to one or two last feeble tremors. It took about three minutes to die, and for that time Dominic stood
perfectly still watching it.

At that time I accepted as a matter of course the death of any insect or animal which was troublesome to the human race, or which was good to eat, and could even see a pig killed without qualms. So the buzz of a dying fly was no more disturbing to me than the plop of a falling chestnut. But, again with the spiritual perception of children, or the instinctive animal knowledge they have of each other's moods, I knew that Dominic was going through some horrible experience, that inside himself he was dying with the fly he had killed. His whole expression, not only his sombre face but the dejected hang of his body, told me that he was absorbing for the first time the fact of death. I could not bear the proximity of his wretchedness, and I wished he would move, but I was too afraid of him to say so, and at that moment to interrupt his mood. It is possible that having once gone through this exposure of himself to the idea of death, he felt it to be a form of cowardice, and that to conquer it he gave himself up to the idea of violence. Incidentally, when I state that I was afraid of Dominic, I do not mean that he would injure me physically. I never remember his doing this. I was afraid of the intensity of his feelings.