Outbreak of Love (15 page)

When he left they all went out with him to his car, which Wolfie admired ecstatically. “It shines like the swan of Lohengrin!” he exclaimed.

As Russell drove back to Melbourne he smiled to himself, thinking over the evening he had just spent, so unexpected and so enjoyable. He had returned to Australia because he wanted to feel at home and this was the first time he had done so. Everybody had been very kind, and he had been invited to many pleasant dinner parties, but he had the impression that his hostesses were showing him how civilized they were. He could not imagine one of them telling him that she bought more cream on Sundays, and sending him to fetch it. He was delighted, too, at Diana's complete unconsciousness of the obvious cause of Miss Bath's ill-humour; themselves. The immediate ease with which they talked together was extraordinary. He could say anything he liked to her, and she accepted it. He wondered if it was because they had known each other as children, but they had not been particularly close friends in those days. He had even thought she might not remember him. It was a shame that she was stuck out there in that rambling barn of a house, even if it had its attractions, and what a husband Wolfie was for a woman like that! Although he rather liked him, he could not help feeling jealous of the way she accepted his absurd caresses, with kindness, without embarrassment or the loss of any dignity.

She had said “Come again” but he was not likely to find her alone again. That was what happened, he thought, the greatest pleasures of life suddenly blossomed, without planning, and the exact conditions could never be reproduced. He would never again help her prepare a meal in her huge flagged kitchen, or gather herbs in the garden, or lounge in arm-chairs over supper, arranged on a tea-table by the fire, and talk half-serious nonsense. He felt rather melancholy at this realization. But of course they could often meet and talk in other places.

 

At supper in Arthur's dining-room, I listened to a commentary on his guests.

“What an unfortunate afternoon,” he said. “I thought the jaws of Hell were opening—Hemstock and Miss Bath on the same day. Thank God she performed one useful function, and took Mildred away. Otherwise I should have had to ask her to stay.”

It was cruel that Mildy could never know of my loyal retort: “Aunt Mildy's jolly amusing sometimes. We have great fun together.”

Arthur ignored this as it gave me the moral ascendancy. “Did you ever see anyone eat like Miss Bath?” he asked. “She gets crumbs all over her face, but she tidies herself up afterwards with the efficiency of an assiduous charwoman. Her mind hasn't developed since she was seven, when she was told she must eat tidily at a party, and because she's clean after eating she imagines that she's a social asset.”

“If you think she's so awful, why d'you invite her?” I asked.

“Her mother was one of our oldest friends,” said Arthur loftily. It was this method of choosing his guests that gave his parties their particular flavour. Miss Bath sitting next to Cousin Sophie or Elsie Radcliffe, gave the same piquant solidity we feel in an old country house, where a garish beadwork stool is beside a fine Chippendale chair, and next to a Gainsborough portrait is a watercolour of the vicarage garden by Aunt Maggie.

I realized that if I were priggish I would spoil the conversation.

“Don't you like Mr Hemstock?” I asked.

“Like him! That white slug? I can hardly bear to shake hands with him. No man should go about with a hot water-bottle tied to his stomach, especially at this time of year.”

“Does he?” I exclaimed.

“Yes. Couldn't you hear it splashing? People think it's indigestion but it's really the bottle. Very few people who go in for culture are healthy.”

“But I thought you liked culture.” His whole house was arranged to give vistas and to produce soft effects of colour. The chairs on which we were seated were embroidered with a mosaic design from the Baths of Caracalla.

“I hate talking double-dutch about pronunciation,” said Arthur. “Hemstock's the son of a grave-digger. He got a scholarship to Oxford and thinks it's grand to be educated, in the same way that Miss Bath thinks it's grand to be clean, whereas everyone else takes it as a matter of course.”

“Is he really the son of a grave-digger?”

“Something like that. It sounds like it.”

“It sounds to me more like a seamstress.”

“His mother may have been a seamstress. Have you read his poems? Lechery clothed in pomposity.”

“Does Cousin Sophie like that?”

“Women only half know what they're doing. The more respectable they are, the more they are drawn to the roué. Look at Lady Pringle with Wolfie.”

“But Uncle Wolfie isn't a roué. He's awfully kind.”

“Whatever makes you think roués aren't kind?”

“Well, you couldn't be kind and not treat a girl fairly,” I stammered, blushing slightly. Again on the wings of my innocence I soared into the moral ascendancy.

“I'm glad you think so, my boy,” said Arthur, looking noble.

To get away from awkward subjects I said that I thought Mr Lockwood very nice.

“He's too precious,” Arthur replied. “He spends his life in Europe chasing beauty and grandees, instead of settling down here sensibly and marrying a girl of his own sort. As this was exactly what Arthur would have liked to do and had done for a short time, he spoke with great moral indignation. “Australia needs to be developed by strong wholesome men,” he said, and he went on to give me an address which might have been delivered by the Minister for Immigration, if there was one at the time.

Although it had been said of Arthur that he began life as a conscious hypocrite, and ended as an unconscious one, this may not have been a true diagnosis. The virtues which he originally affected, he may have come in time to value and was therefore no longer a hypocrite. He may even have originally admired them, but have been prevented from practising them by the demands of expediency and youthful passion. In fact the hypocrisy in later years may have been in the affectation of brutality and cynicism, with which he tried to conceal the excessive kindness of his heart. For everything he did, if not what he said, was kind. Even when he flung Miss Bath and Mr Hemstock to the wolves, it was to give me the pleasure of laughing at their mangled remains. He believed that it did them no harm, and might possibly make them objects of pity, instead of bored dislike.

So now, when he saw the great fertile lands of Australia peopled by bronzed wholesome men and women, he was not being a humbug, as he had come to realize that this would give many people happy lives. He also took into account that they would doubtless have beautiful sons and daughters, also that it was far more fun to be aesthetic against this background. To derive pleasure from decadence or from any pose it is necessary to have a strong bourgeois society. There is no kick in being unconventional in a madhouse.

When we moved into the drawing-room he was still in the exalted frame of mind of the Minister for Immigration, which led him to sit down at the piano, where far from breaking into a patriotic march, he delicately began a Chopin nocturne. From this he broke into the impassioned rhythm of a litany. “I heard this at the Brompton Oratory during the
Quarant' Ore
,” he said. “Cardinal Newman was there.” He went on to give a kind of musical resumé of his life, making frequent comments on the things he played so that his performance would have made a good wireless programme. He played some old-fashioned dance tunes and said: “I remember your grandmother dancing to this at Bishopscourt, sixty years ago. How beautiful she was in her wide floating dress. Nowadays girls look like cows hobbled so that they won't kick over the milk-pail.” Although his nostalgic reveries were interspersed with these ribald attacks on the younger generation, his face had an expression of immense and noble sadness. Towards the end he played “Oft in the Stilly Night” and then again the dance tune.

Arthur was so instinctively an artist, that he would make of something, on which he had entered casually, a creative whole. If he had been asked to give a performance like that which I had just been fortunate enough to overhear, he would have been embarrassed, have fussed about what pieces to choose, have forgotten the best, and would finally have refused. He had the genius to follow his inspiration, but not the talent to produce it in his conscious mind. This was a failing of all the family, even of Diana. They only showed their best in casual moments, in an impromptu charade or an improvised meal, and so always remained amateurs.

When he again played the dance tune, I asked him what my grandmother was like as a girl. He turned on the piano stool.

“She was something like Diana,” he said, “but her hair was not dark. It was a warm golden colour, and she had an air of authority. She was much more sensible than Diana, but in some ways she had the same kind of life. Of course, she was rich, which made a great difference. She had to give all the time to people who took her unending generosity for granted. Though your grandfather was a very different character from Wolfie,” he said, which was not entirely true. “Wolfie has stripped Diana of every comfort and pleasure, and then he bites the hand that feeds him.” He thought a little and then qualified this. “He doesn't mean to bite the hand that feeds him. He just thinks ‘That's a nice piece of meat. I'll have that too.'”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Government House ball, to which I was so pleased to tell the twins that I was invited, needs, like Mrs Radcliffe's party, a little introduction. Two people were rather surprised to receive invitations.

Sir Roland Cave, aware that his appointment was a consolation prize for his failure to enter the Cabinet, could not endure any suggestion that it was not fundamentally important as well as highly decorative, and he was often irritated by the feeling that his staff thought they were there simply to amuse themselves. He kept a strict eye on the smallest details of Government House activity, and even had the menus submitted to him before every dinner party.

One morning he prowled into the room where Lord Francis was drawing up the list of guests for the ball.

“Who's this Mrs Montaubyn?” he asked.

“I'm not sure, sir,” said Lord Francis. “I think she's English.”

“You shouldn't ask people if you don't know who they are. And I don't want all the English tourists invited here. They don't go to Buckingham Palace at home.”

“Montaubyn
is
a name, sir,” Lord Francis objected mildly.

“Look it up.”

Lord Francis pulled out a Court Directory, but could not find any Mrs Montaubyn, though there was a baronet of that name.

“Look him up,” said Sir Roland.

Lord Francis yanked out a peerage and turning over the pages muttered: “Gough—Grafton—Hay of Park—Hood—Kinnaird—Limerick—Manvers—Monck—Montaubyn—um-um-um—here we are. James Perry Montaubyn, second son of fourth bart.,
B. A.,
Corpus. Canon St Andrew's Cathedral, Sydney, N.S.W. Married Emily McCarthy, one son, Aidan Perry, killed Spion Kop, poor devil—married Gladys Cumfit. That's the one—She's Mrs. A. P. Montaubyn.”

“Very well,” said Sir Roland grudgingly, “but you want to vet these people more carefully.”

Lord Francis was pleased that His Ex. had suspected someone of such unimpeachable standing, and Mrs Montaubyn received a card.

The other person to be surprised at her invitation was Mildy, who had not been asked to a dance of any kind for twenty years. It was probably due to her having a man of the same name in her house. She was pleased, but said: “Of course I shan't go.”

Mistaking her common sense for that poor spirit she so often showed when brought into contact with “grand people”, I protested peevishly, and at last persuaded her to go. She had foreseen that she would have a far worse evening than at the Radcliffes' party. There I had spent some of the time with her, but at a ball I would be dancing continuously with the twins and other girls, while she watched bleakly from the wall. She did not know that my insistence was an attempt to strengthen her character and not at all to a desire to have her with me. The eternal hope in her breast began to flutter again. Bright blue and pink fantasies came into her mind. She saw the proud moment when we arrived in the Government House ballroom, and our friends would say: “Here are Guy and Mildy” and they would chaff her about looking so young. Perhaps I would dance with her, not more than twice, as we must be sensible.

“Very well”, she said suddenly, “I'll go. I'll get a new ball dress for it.” In her eye was an excited gleam. She began to talk about her new dress, and as I thought its purpose was to enable her to hold her own vis-à-vis Sophie and the twins and not to make her appear a suitable girlish companion for myself, I encouraged her. Nearly every evening, between the morning the invitations came and the night of the ball, she talked at dinner about the progress of the new dress.

The occasion of this ball was the arrival in Port Phillip Bay of an English battleship, with an Anglo-German prince on board—a relative of Queen Victoria's. To the twins, even more exciting than the prince, was the fact that one of the officers on the ship was Lord Saltash, a young unmarried peer, who was a cousin of theirs, but not of ours. Cousin Sophie had a letter from his mother, asking her to be kind to him, but it was like trying to catch a whale in the ocean to be kind to it. Cousin Edward managed to entice him to dine at the Melbourne Club, and instructed by Cousin Sophie gave him a further invitation to dine at her house on the night of the ball.

On the day before this function Lord Saltash rang up to say that he was awfully sorry that he could not come as he was on duty, the duty being, she discovered later, to dine with Freddie Thorpe and Clara Bumpus. This unbalanced her dinner table, and the only person she could think of who would accept these last minute fallen crumbs was myself. She rang me up in the evening. I had never heard her so amiable on the telephone. Her invitations were generally commands delivered by one of the twins. She even apologized for the short notice. I was extremely gratified and thought she must have heard something to my credit, and as I was twenty years old, though unfortunately looked younger, I wanted to get married, and I thought she might regard me as an eligible suitor for one of the twins. My imagination was nearly as idiotic as Mildy's, to whom I now went back and said excitedly: