A Difficult Young Man (6 page)

Again, though this glaze may bring out in truer depth the colour of my adult characters, it may falsify my picture of myself by toning down my crudities and eliminating those imbecilities and patches of morbid speculation which must have been part of my make-up, but after all, it is always more decent to tear off other
people's clothes than one's own.

The great event and climax of the holiday was the Strawberry Fête at the Bower, an annual festivity at a kind of village half-way up Mount Wellington, where people ate a great many strawberries at a high price in aid of the little English church. Children know much more than their elders imagine, but as they misinterpret it, they often know less. Before we left the Bower we all knew that there was trouble between Uncle George and Aunt Baba, but we thought it was because she had again been rude to Diana, and that George did not care to see his sister, who in spite of her slight absurdities had far more good nature, sensibility and real intelligence than his wife, insulted by the latter simply because she had no money, the possession of which like all the family he regarded as desirable, but not as an occasion for respect. This may have sharpened his feeling against her, but its main cause was the following letter which came to me amongst his papers. It was still in the envelope which was re-addressed in Cousin Sarah's spindly writing to The Bower Hotel, Mount Wellington. Dolly Potts had written to him more than a year earlier, saying that she could not go against her father's wishes. A few months later he had married Baba. Now he had this letter from Dolly:

‘My dear George,

‘Perhaps you have heard that my father died peacefully in September. He was not ill for more than a week, for which I am thankful, but his death has left a gap in my life. My brother inherits Rathain, and I am going to live with my sister, Mrs Stuart, at Ballinreagh Rectory, Co. Mayo.

‘I hope that you are all well. I have not heard from you for some time. How often I think of those happy days at Waterpark, the happiest of my life, and of that wonderful but sadly ending holiday in Brittany. How amusing your father was, the most amusing man I have ever known, and your dear mother always so wise and kind. Please give my most affectionate remembrances to them, also to Laura and Diana and the children.

‘Forgive this short note, but I feel that I should let you know about my father.

‘Yours very sincerely,

DOROTHEA L. POTTS.'

From this it appears that George, in those few days up at the Bower must have learnt that Dolly was free, and showed herself as clearly as it was proper for a ‘lady' to do, that she was willing to marry him. At the same time he was forced to realize that he was tied to a woman who had only married him from an ambition which he thought grotesque and shoddy. His feelings must have been noticeable
as Alice wrote in her diary: ‘I am worried about George and Barbara. Their relations seem far from harmonious.' We children were aware of a change in George's manner. He was absent-minded and often did not answer when we spoke to him. There was a slight scene outside the hotel on the afternoon we were assembled to drive back to Hobart in two four-in-hand drags and a landau. Steven was to drive one drag and George the other, while the man from the livery stables was to drive the landau, which had been hired for Alice. George and Baba had evidently had some row up in their room, and he came down first to take charge of his horses, which he drove a quarter of a mile along the road and back to get the feel of them before the rather dangerous drive down to Hobart, where the road was winding and narrow, with steep banks protected in places only by a wooden rail. It is possible that during the few minutes of this trial drive he had calmed down, as he hated real animosity and was naturally very good-tempered. He may have thought that the whole situation was just bad luck for both of them, that it was not Baba's fault that Major Potts had died, and that the only course was to make the best of it. When he drew up again at the hotel and Baba came out, mustering all the grace he could, and indicating the place on the box beside him, he said:

‘Come up here, Baba.'

She was already angry with him. His calm assumption that whatever offensive things he had said to her in
their room, and being almost certainly lucid and logical they were far more wounding than mere abuse, could be glossed over in this fashion, made her more so.

‘I prefer to go in the landau,' she said. ‘It'll be less like a school-treat.'

George's eyes looked very blue in his crimson face, and he muttered: ‘Well, go to the devil, then.' Everyone heard him, and the children exchanged sly glances and put their hands over their mouths to conceal their sniggers. He nodded to Dominic and Helena, who were hovering about to make certain of sitting together, to come up beside him. Dominic sat next to him as he wanted to take the reins on the level part, and Helena was on the outside.

Alice, as a snub to Baba, said she would go in Steven's drag. Laura and I were with her, and as soon as our drag was full, Steven, rather disgusted with the little scene, drove off. The landau came next, but we soon left it behind. George's drag, delayed by some discussion as to where Daisy von Flugel should sit, and also by the discovery of some forgotten luggage, set out last. But about half-way down the mountain we saw George's drag close behind us, coming at a good pace, and Alice explained:

‘How on earth did he pass the landau?'

We could see that George was smiling grimly, and that beside him Helena and Dominic were leaning forward, their eyes bright and intent with excitement.
Anger being short madness, George for the time being must have gone mad. He had passed the landau for the fun of giving Baba a fright, and now he was excited and wanted to pass us too, though he could not have wanted to put his mother, to say nothing of the rest of us, in danger. He had perfect confidence in himself which was normally justified by his good driving. Alice looked back anxiously and called up to my father:

‘Don't let him pass, Steven. Keep to the middle of the road.'

There was now excitement in both drags, and we made bets, a bar of chocolate against a top, as to whether Uncle George would be able to pass. Steven now had the same kind of tight, excited smile as Uncle George. We came to a part where the road was widened by the earth to the right being cut away. George saw his chance and flicked his leaders. His drag swerved and lurched, and Helena who at that moment had put up her hands to clutch her hat, was flung out. She gave a loud squeak, and looking like something from an Italian votive picture, with her legs sticking out from the white lace froth of her petticoats and drawers, she went headfirst down into the gully which flanked the left of the road, and crashed amongst the saplings and brambles. This was startling enough, but quick as a flash there followed the incident which made this holiday more memorable than any other, and coloured for ever the attitude of the clan towards Dominic. He
went after Helena. One can only write ‘he went' as it was never finally agreed whether he jumped, or was flung off the box by the same lurch, or whether he fell trying to grab her skirt to save her. Whatever his impulse, he crashed heroically and uselessly into the thicket below.

There was a moment of wild sensation. George pulled his team up so quickly that one of the leaders reared and became tangled with the harness, kicking and struggling. Steven flung Wolfie the reins of our drag and he and Laura ran back to where Dominic and Helena had fallen. Helena was already climbing up from the gully, her dress torn and her face scratched and bleeding a little, but otherwise uninjured. She smiled shakily when she saw Steven and Laura looking down at her, and with that glowing and cheerful courage which she radiated throughout the whole of her life, she explained: ‘I fell off.' But it was Dominic they were looking for. He too had broken no bones, but a sharp stick had pierced his cheek and he was sitting where he had landed, numbed with the shock and bleeding terribly. Steven and Laura, she recklessly tearing her muslin dress, climbed down and lifted him up, and brought him on to the road, where he stood between them, looking completely dazed, while Laura trying to staunch the cheek with the torn muslin of her dress, exclaimed: ‘Thank God he's alive! Thank God he's alive!'

At that moment the landau arrived on the scene.
Aunt Baba, too furious at the fright George had given her to notice at once what had happened, turned on him like a fishwife, and her vulgarity startled the family almost more than the accident. When she noticed Dominic and Helena and learned how they had been injured, instead of keeping quiet out of sympathy for my mother, who had just suffered the shock of thinking she had lost the second of her sons, she used this as a further bludgeon against George, who stood silent and utterly ashamed of himself and of the injury he had caused, but most of all of his wife.

Dominic and Helena were packed into the landau with Laura and we stood about for a while, looking at the places where they had fallen and discussing what actually had happened. George insisted that Dominic had deliberately jumped from the drag, not to lessen his own responsibility but because he believed it was the truth. Uncle Bertie said that was nonsense and that no boy in his senses would do such a thing, which was quite true, but they did not understand that Dominic's spirit frequently leapt ahead of his senses, so that he might be said to be out of them. Bertie said he must have been trying to catch Helena before she fell, and when Dominic recovered he gave him a gold watch with an inscription inside the back cover. Alice looked worried and said nothing, because she could not discuss Dominic before Baba, who had been obliged to give up her place in the landau. At least that is my opinion. As I
proceed I must sometimes state my opinion as fact and occasionally describe scenes which I did not actually witness, but can imagine from what I have heard from people who were present or from my personal knowledge of the characters concerned.

Before they took Dominic away, while he was standing bleeding on the road with that dumb bewildered look in his eyes, I was overcome by one of those anguished waves of sympathy for him which have assailed me at intervals in my life. This may have been because it was not two years since I had stood by his unconscious and bleeding body on the Narre Warren hill, and I imagined that he was doomed to violence and injury. He did suffer more of this than Brian or myself, and it may be that something in his nature brought it upon him, but if it seems disproportionate in this book, it must be remembered that I am dealing with boyhood and youth when one is liable to beatings and accidents resulting from one's own impetuosity. My anguish of sympathy was different from mere concern for his injury. It came from that streak in my nature which was similar to his own, and gave me understanding of what he had done. His intellectual processes were slow, and if he thought before he acted it would be a long time before he could be made to move. But his movements were directed by his spirit which, as Aunt Diana had said, was as quick as a flame. Helena, his playmate and idol, was injured and perhaps dead. His spirit leapt
with her, and unfortunately took his body with it. The motions of his spirit had lead him to physical disaster, and it was his bewilderment at this that I saw in his face, and which caused me to bleat ‘Oh! Oh!' until Steven told me to shut up.

What I remember does not seem to be far wrong. Alice must have believed that he deliberately jumped from the drag, as that evening, after describing the accident in her diary, she wrote:

‘It does seem that the balance of Dominic's mind is liable to more than normal disturbance. We can only hope that he becomes more stable as he grows older. Guy was very upset when he saw the wound in Dominic's cheek and cried piteously. He is an odd little boy and seems to reflect more other people's feelings than to have any of his own. I do not see how George can escape an unhappy life. This perhaps is the last sorrow we have to bear, that we cannot save our children from the results of their mistakes.'

In Hobart Dominic went into hospital to have some stitches put into his cheek, and we and the Flugels stayed there until he was well enough to travel. Alice went with Mildy on a round of visits to friends in central Tasmania, and the Craigs went back to Melbourne as Uncle Bertie's holiday was over. This seemed strange to us, that our richest relative had to work, while those who had little money spent their time as they pleased. Baba, taking George, went with the Craigs, as she saw no social advantage in catching black-backed salmon
in the company of a crowd of noisy children.

After this, Dominic had a scar on his left cheek, close to his mouth.

CHAPTER IV

AFTER THE
holiday Brian and Dominic continued as boarders at Mr Porson's school, and I went as a day-boy from Beaumanoir. For a year or two nothing of particular importance or interest happened in the family. We went to Tasmania again for a holiday, but not in such a crowd, and there were no great squabbles or incidents. In the middle of the following year came the first of a series of crises in Dominic's education, if the various attempts to fit him into some place in the world may be given that description.

Mr Porson had disliked Dominic since the two incidents which I have recalled from his first term. He was useless to enhance the school's academic record, he was not good at games which bored him as he preferred more individual sports like hunting and
sailing, and Mr Porson's slight satisfaction at having ‘landed gentry' at the school was negatived by Dominic's indifference to class distinctions, unless his pride was offended, when his arrogance was preposterous. His reports were consistently shocking, and Mr Porson hoped that they would lead him to be punished at home, but Steven expected nothing else, and would merely pass them to Dominic across the breakfast table with the comment: ‘You don't appear to be gifted with the academic mind.' In those days education was not intended to fit a boy to earn his living, but to make him a certain kind of person. As Dominic was obviously already the kind of person he would always be, Steven saw no reason to worry as yet. But the very lightness with which he accepted these bad reports upset Dominic, giving him the feeling that he was not worth worrying about.

Our clothes at this time were probably rather shabby, as our parents were not well off until after Alice's death. Laura provided us with clothes which were strong and suitable, but which Sarah supervised during term, and if Sarah could make us look needy and impoverished she would certainly do so. Our parents thought Mr Porson's ideas of the grandeur of his school ridiculous. To them a school was simply something you made use of, like a shop, and the idea that grew up with the nineteenth-century middle class, that one derived social standing from a school, had not reached them. They would have thought it as absurd to
expect to derive social importance from their dentist.

Dominic in his sixteenth year was shooting up quickly, and he grew out of clothes which still had a good deal of wear left in
them. Sarah passed them on to Brian, who one day appeared in a suit which was noticeably too big for him. A
boy in a suit too small for him is at least a symbol of bursting life, but in a suit too large, and worn at that, he gives the pitiful impression that he has already begun to shrink. Mr Porson by that time must have been sick of all of us, probably exasperated by some density of Dominic's, and when he saw Brian's discreditable appearance it must have been the last straw, and he gave way to the desire to humiliate us, which he had felt ever since Dominic had kissed Laura's hand. He was also maddened by a slight air of derision which was congenital in us, when faced with any pomposity. It is hard to understand why he fixed on Brian, who was the most satisfactory, but was like a horse harnessed three-in-hand, when the leader kicks and rears, and his companion by the pole is docile, but disinclined to pull the carriage.

However, he called him up to the rostrum, and before the assembled school ridiculed him for his shabby clothes. He took out a tape and measured his trousers, and with an unbelievable vulgarity he sneered at our family, saying what he expected of them and what he received.

Brian simply looked embarrassed, but Dominic
was affronted in his pride, which always meant trouble. I was gaping with dismay at Brian, when suddenly I heard Dominic's voice, barking from the back of the hall, where the bigger boys sat.

‘Will you shut up, sir?'

Dominic did not like Brian, and they were always having rows, but one of his strongest characteristics was loyalty to his own kind. I turned, as did the whole school, to stare at him. He was standing up and his eyes were black and blazing with that anger, which, when it awoke, I found terrifying.

Mr Porson, on the contrary, appeared extremely satisfied. It is likely that he had foreseen some insolence from Dominic, and had intended to provoke it, as he immediately snapped, with a gleam in his eyes: ‘Langton, you are expelled.'

Dominic, as so often when he performed a chivalrous gesture, received in return a knock on the head. He collapsed in his seat as if he had been stunned. He had imagined that he was on the side of the angels, but authority at once turned against him, and inflicted on him the worst disgrace that could happen to a boy at that time.

Mr Porson told Dominic to follow him to his study, where he intended to beat him before sending him home. But Dominic with a touch of Langton logic said that as he was expelled he was no longer a boy at the school, and therefore Mr Porson had no right to
beat him, and he would not cooperate in the punishment. Mr Porson called in a master to help him, but Dominic took from the wall a sword which Mr Porson had worn in the South African War, and said that if they touched him he would use it. Everyone was very shocked when they heard what he had done, and he was thought no better than that llama in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, on whose cage is written: ‘This animal is dangerous. When attacked it defends itself.' But his ideas of honour were always more Aragonese than public school. In the next interval he collected Brian and myself and forced us to accompany him back to Beaumanoir.

This was sheer anarchy, but our parents did not know what to say, as they were outraged by Mr Porson's treatment of Brian. They were also half amused by Dominic's exploit, and not very concerned about our leaving as they had been intending for some time to remove us from the school, disliking Mr Porson's extreme snobbery, which turned out to be too much even for Melbourne, where there was a lot of talk about this incident, and in a year or two the school closed down. At
any rate our parents did not punish Dominic, nor mention the possibility of sending us back. Brian was sent to the Melbourne Grammar School, and I
went to a new school at Kew, where the headmaster, a young clergyman, was very highly spoken of, and would, my mother thought, temper the wind to my excessive sensibility.

Dominic's separation from the world, which was by no means a process of ascetic denial, is one of the things I want to trace in this book. In a way the world's hostility to him was expressed through Baba, its goodness to him through Helena, and some vague and insidious evil through Cousin Sarah, but it would be very much an over-simplification to make a kind of miracle play of his life with these three women as the World, the Flesh and the Devil, and it would certainly be unfair to Helena. But each of them did affect him in a definite and individual way. However, his departure from Mr Porson's school, and the way he carried it out, without any subsequent correction, does appear to be the first recognizable sign of this separation, just as a similar incident a few years later, in which I was the central figure, divorced me, but not so irrevocably from the normal life of my kind.

There was a sense in which our whole family, and even our whole group, those who lived by the land, were becoming divorced from the world. Dominic was so much one of the old order, that when it was considered what he could do, no one thought of anything but the land. Also this was the natural Australian solution for anyone who was unfitted for a learned profession. Steven and Laura did not foresee where he would ultimately farm. Since Westhill was built Austin had gradually accumulated parcels of land in the neighbourhood, until now the place had about one thousand acres, which if cleared would make good
dairying country. He could possibly farm that, or if he ever lived at Waterpark he would be able to occupy himself with the few remaining farms of the estate. As he would presumably have a comfortable income from other sources, it did not really matter much what he did, as long as he was kept out of mischief. Also since the accident on Mount Wellington there had been a conspiracy to keep him away from Helena. Alice in her diary refers two or three times to the danger of marriage between first cousins, and evidently thought the Langtons were already mad enough.

Dominic was to be sent to an agricultural college called Horton in New South Wales, but he was barely sixteen and was thought rather young to go just yet. Also it was the middle of the term, so they sent him first for six months to Rathain. This was Uncle George's farm, twenty miles further into Gippsland than Westhill. It was called after Dolly Potts's home in Ireland, which must have been extremely irritating to Baba. Dominic was to live there, to work on the farm, and to discover if he had any taste for an agricultural life. He had not, of course. He had the artistic temperament without much creative ability, a disastrous combination, though occasionally he made sombre drawings. To send him to George and Baba was one of those inexplicable idiocies which occurs too frequently in the history of our family, in fact in the history of most families which one knows at all intimately.

He could have tested his agricultural capacity just
as well at Westhill, where the land was farmed in a no more dilletante fashion than at Rathain, but if Dominic had stayed at Westhill it would have been too like the school holidays, and he would have spent his time riding Tamburlaine and shooting rabbits. It sounded better to say to inquisitive and censorious relatives: ‘He's learning farming under George.'

It is odd that Baba allowed him to come, but she was inclined to be avaricious, and Steven paid for Dominic's keep and something over. She may even have liked the prospect of licking him into shape. On the day of the accident on Mount Wellington she had established her ascendancy over George. He was bitterly ashamed of his recklessness which had endangered the children, and she took advantage of this. Her practice, if anyone threw down his defences, was immediately to run in and kick him in the stomach. He also, with that detachment which was a family characteristic, may have thought that he had been unfair to Baba to marry her when he was in love with someone else, and brutal to let her know, but most of all he may have been afraid to provoke another of those appalling outbursts of vulgarity, which frightened him more than the cannon's mouth. Also he did not know that Baba had planned to acquire him as cold-bloodedly as gangsters set out to break into a bank.

George was not well off before Alice died, but Baba was very houseproud. She believed that her
social position was enhanced by the spotless cleanliness of the linoleum which covered the floors of her little wooden house. Before George's marriage the interior of this house was quite pleasant, rather like his undergraduate's rooms at Cambridge from which he had brought the furniture. But Baba removed all this, saying it was not smart, and she replaced it by some shoddy ‘new art' stuff, so that the rooms looked as if they were arranged behind the plate glass windows of a bad furniture shop. She had two farm girls, whom she dolled up in starched linen caps and aprons, which ill became their bold-eyed, rollicking rustic faces, and of whom she spoke frequently as ‘my maids.' Baba's maids were already a joke in the family when Dominic went to Rathain. They were a year or two older than he was. Their combined wages were seventeen shillings and sixpence a week.

When Dominic arrived George and Baba were in a state of almost ceaseless hostility, suppressed on his part, but on hers as open as it could be towards someone who did not retaliate. It may have been because of this that George arranged for Dominic to come, hoping that the presence of a third party, even of a boy of sixteen, would ease the situation. If so it was very simple of him to imagine that Dominic could ever ease any situation, between any people, anywhere.

The spirit of the missionary and that of the knight-errant are not dissimilar. Dominic always wanted to right the wrong, and could even bring to what had
nothing to do with him the detachment and sweet reasonableness of his relatives, though, in contrast to his ordinary
contra mundum
mood, he was then a little priggish, but the knight-errant may have been something of a prig. He also had a slightly absurd dignity of manner, due to his awareness, which we all shared, of the fact that he was the next head of the family, and in that hierarchy was of greater consequence, not only than George, but than his great-uncles. In one mood he was an outcast, a black lonely rebellious boy; in another the responsible heir to the throne, quite ready to carry out the duties of his position. This mystical importance, something not based on the possession of hard cash, could be felt but not understood by Baba. It was the thing that irritated her most in the Langtons, especially as they emanated it quite unconsciously, as a fox gives out its smell. She was determined to get as much work as possible out of Dominic, and so save the wages of a farm hand, but when she nagged at George about it, saying that if he was to learn farming he must understand what it meant, she really wanted to destroy the Langton emanation. He had to rise at the same time as the ‘maids' and have breakfast with them in the kitchen, an hour before ‘the family.' George gave in for the sake of peace, and thought it would not do Dominic any harm.

Dominic had luncheon with George and Baba in the ugly little dining-room, where everything was new, and the silver on the table shone, not softly from
years of polishing, but with the recent burnishing of the shop. Baba, as I have already indicated, had trained herself in all those conversational tricks which enabled her to be ‘up' on the other person. One of these was to say something which would suggest an obvious reply to her listener. When he made it she would say crossly: ‘That's not what I mean' and so make him appear a fool. The picture I am giving of Baba at this time is, I admit, without a sorely needed glaze, but it is the view that the family held of her at that time.

One day at luncheon, practising this trick, she said to George: ‘I think the garden gate is too near the house.'