A Difficult Young Man (7 page)

‘The fence could be moved out as far as the saplings,' he said mildly.

‘That's not what I mean,' she retorted. ‘I don't want a gate there at all.'

This sort of thing went on for the whole meal, until at last George flung down his table-napkin, muttered ‘O damn,' and left the room.

Dominic, scrubby, sixteen years old, smelling slightly of bone dust which he had been scattering on the fields that morning, but with the aplomb of the next Squire of Waterpark, said in calm rebuke:

‘You should not speak to Uncle George like that, Aunt Baba. He doesn't like it.'

It is not recorded what Aunt Baba said. One can only imagine in her little eyes the evil glint of the
outraged bully. She told George that she would not sit down to another meal with Dominic and that henceforth he must have all his meals in the kitchen. George agreed with this, and excused himself by thinking it would be more fun for Dominic, which it was.

At first he was bitterly humiliated, again the insulted and injured. Baba, having ‘got away' with sending him to the kitchen increased his humiliation, and arranged that he should have all the dirtiest jobs, some not even connected with the farm but with the house. It is curious that he accepted all this, when one remembers his reaction to Mr Porson, but he had odd phases of gentleness and submission, and it may have been because he was receiving his ill treatment from a woman. He also had phases of a curious poetical response to the natural world which seemed, ignoring other interests, sufficient to satisfy him. One of these coincided with his period as Baba's scullion.

It was during the spring that he was at Rathain, and there are times in the spring in the Australian countryside, when the air has an extraordinary limpidity and stimulating quality, as if the whole world had become new, and at the full moon the landscape is full of light and colour at midnight. It was on one of these nights that Baba, lying awake, heard the gate click and the dog bark. She went to the window and saw Dominic, naked and barefoot, walking down the path.

I have known of three or four instances of youths
walking naked in the countryside at night, and there must be many more of which one never hears. It is probably no more a sign of depravity or madness than the impulse to plunge into the sea. Perhaps it is the same impulse, and Dominic may have found in it the same sense of unity with nature that gratifies the bather. It may even have had a faintly religious motive. Instructed by Sarah he accepted the Bible literally, and as he walked along the white dusty roads, where he might easily tread on a snake or a scorpion, he might have felt secure in the knowledge that the young lion and the dragon he could tread under his feet, and in the utter stillness of the bush at night, he felt there was nothing between himself and God.

These were hardly considerations to appeal to Baba. She thought Dominic had gone mad, and she woke up George, who drowsy and reluctant, went along to Dominic's room just as he was climbing back through the window.

‘What are you doing?' he demanded.

‘I went for a walk,' said Dominic, startled at finding him there.

‘Why in the devil d'you go for a walk at this hour and with no clothes on?'

Dominic seemed puzzled to find an answer, and then said: ‘It was quiet.'

‘Well, go to bed,' said George, ‘and don't do it again.'

Baba was incredulous at the inadequacy of
Dominic's explanation. She was certain that he was either vicious or mad or both. She recalled his attack on Owen Dell at the sports, his senseless leap from the drag, his threatening Mr Porson with a sword.

‘We might be murdered in our beds,' she exclaimed, and did not make clear whether this was her chief fear, or that one of the neighbours might have seen Dominic naked, and she declared if so: ‘We could never hold up our heads again.' She wanted to send him back to Westhill the next morning, but for once George stood firm. He was embarrassed by the incident and did not want to make it public. He liked Dominic and thought he was odd but not wicked, and did not want to add to the dog's bad name. Also he thought it would worry Steven unnecessarily, and anyhow Dominic was to go in a few months to the agricultural college; where presumably midnight walks in the nude were not part of the curriculum. But while Dominic stayed at Rathain Baba was in a state of suspicion and anxiety, particularly at the time of the full moon.

What followed may have had some connection with his moonlight walks, and have been a reorientation of his poetic impulse, or it may have been a simple abandonment to the humiliation of his lot and the negation of his pride, or seeing his age and situation it may not need any explanation at all,
except for this—how could he forget Helena? Possibly he thought
he was forever below her, that he was the shepherd of Admetus and she a goddess still on Olympus. It is more likely he did not think of her. Like all young people he lived intensely in the present, and was apt to forget what he did not see. After the first shock, he found that it was much more fun in the kitchen. The two maids gave him the best titbits of food instead of the scraggy parts to which Baba helped him in the dining-room. They petted him, joked with him, laughed at his innocence and stage by stage brought into his sombre Spanish eyes a lively impudence.

Again on a moonlight night Baba thought she heard Dominic's window open, and again she sent George along to his room, which he found empty. George thought he must have gone for another walk, and he went out to see if there was any sign of him on the road that ran past the gate. He then walked round the house, hoping to find him before he had to admit to Baba that he was out. As he passed the maids' room he heard, coming from within, sighs and squeaks and sensual chuckles, and occasionally the rumble of Dominic's voice.

So far I seem to have suggested that Dominic was the injured innocent, but this was not always his rôle. One should not seduce one's aunt's maids, even if she is disagreeable, and certainly not two of them. I knew nothing of this at the time, only that he was under an extra black cloud. I was at school and when I came home from the holidays, the sun was still obscured, but all I could find out was that he had behaved very badly
at Rathain. When I asked Aunt Diana, who was generally the most communicative of our aunts, what he had done, she said airily: ‘Oh, I think he ill-treated some cows.' Dominic himself was again clothed in his gloomy dignity, and in any case he would never admit his misdoings to Brian and me, especially of such a nature.

It was generally believed that he had seduced the maids, but there is the possibility that it was just a lively romp. I only learned twenty years later what had happened, and then from Uncle Arthur, the repository of all our scandals. As he embroidered his stories elaborately from his own often indelicate imagination, it is possible that Dominic did not seduce the maids. But the effect was the same as if he had, and a generation which could not imagine a curate driving with a governess in a hansom cab without risk of grave impropriety, could not possibly believe that a youth could spend a night innocently in the housemaids' bedroom.

The news was received in the clan with incredulous horror, at least in the female portion of it. Baba also spread about the story of his moonlight walks, and Dominic was now regarded as a near sexual maniac. The men did not approve of his behaviour, but they regarded it as quite natural, and they laughed a good deal about it, as Baba's ‘maids' were already a joke in the family, and they invented riddles, playing on the meaning of the word ‘maid' which they asked each other. Baba's anger was more due to the fact that Dominic had made her
ménage
ridiculous, than to the loss of her maids' virtue,
if they had lost it. She did not dare dismiss them, as it would oblige her to reveal what had happened to their father, a brawny, irascible red-haired farmer; which might make it impossible for her to continue to live in the neighbourhood. She waited to see if there was any further complication of the incident, and as there was not, she kept them in her service, and tried, amongst the family, to live it down. Her detestation of Dominic was now absolute. Whenever she could she spoke ill of him. As she was not popular this turned the tide in his favour, until at last, when it came out that he had been sent to eat in the kitchen, she was largely blamed for the whole affair, and most people said she had thrown Dominic into the girls' laps. Even so, it made people ask with a touch of contempt: ‘What will he do next?' They hoped that the agricultural college, where he was to start in the new year, would knock some sense into him.

It is annoying to have to rely on a ribald source such as Uncle Arthur for an account of tragic happenings. Perhaps I am equally guilty as my taste is for what is cheerful and gaily coloured, whereas Dominic was a kind of Dostoevskian character, with perhaps a touch of Cervantes, and I cannot drag him down deep enough into the vats of black and purple dye. The reader will have to exercise his ingenuity to construct the inner nature of someone whose exterior is only presented to him lightly drawn.

It may seem incongruous, after revealing what happened at Rathain, to write of Dominic's religious
nature, but Arthur said that when he was sent home from there he looked like a handsome
âme damnée
, and it was not only his public humiliation but some inner conflict between his sensuality and his spiritual nature, which had nearly fused into unity on his moonlight walk, that gave him this appearance. It is possible that strong religious feeling is often accompanied by strong sexual feeling, both the soul and the body trying to escape their loneliness, and by the tension between these two things the soul is either uplifted or damned. One had only to look at the portraits of the great Victorian divines, with their philoprogenitive jaws, to realize this. One feels that if they did not actually enter, at some period of their lives they must have lingered by the housemaid's door. Even Charles Kingsley admitted that as an undergraduate he only preserved his chastity by excessive smoking, which cannot have been very good for him.

CHAPTER V

DURING THOSE
summer holidays Alice was very ill. We did not go away to Tasmania or anywhere else. Whenever the uncles and aunts met together they talked of ‘Mama,' and Dominic's misdemeanours were forgotten. The onion woman who so long and so patiently had borne them on her skirts above the hell of poverty, was about to release her load and ascend into Heaven. Since their earliest childhood she had been an ever present help in time of trouble. They were distressed at the thought of losing her, but they could not help wondering what would happen to them when she was gone. They could not help realizing that she would leave behind the onion itself, to be shared amongst them. We do not contemplate losing advantages we have always possessed, and it did not occur to them that they would no longer have free access to a large and well-run house, where they could dump their children and have excellent meals whenever they liked, and to a generous banker who was only concerned for their good, and who merely asked in return that they should benefit themselves by what she gave, and not just be dreary ‘users-up' without interest in their lasting welfare. The galleon was at last about to founder, and they were looking forward to setting out, each in his own little lifeboat.

They did not talk openly about their financial
prospects, and it is perhaps wrong to suggest that they thought so much about them. There was a general air of foreboding, and even to us children it seemed that the greatest misfortune mankind could suffer would be the death of our grandmother. Every good material thing we had came from her, but with all her indulgence went a standard of conduct which few people could have combined so successfully with a life of pleasure. Her quiet anger at anything untrue or shifty or unkind, made one aware of the strong bones, if not the iron in the velvet glove. Hers was the standard of reference in any problem, and her children may have felt that with her their moral as well as their financial strength might depart. She died a few weeks after Brian and I had gone back to school and Dominic to the agricultural college in New South Wales. In her last delirium she imagined that she was in Rome.

One evening at prep a message came that I was to go to the headmaster. I could not think what I had done wrong, and when I came into his study he smiled slightly at my indignant and frightened face. Then he told me that my grandmother had died, and that I was to go to Beaumanoir on Thursday for the funeral. He was quiet, serious and kind, but perfectly natural, and he said I need not go back to prep. I have no recollection of my feelings.

On Thursday the matron gave me a black tie and armband, and told me that I must be at St. Andrew's Church in Brighton before half-past two. The church
was full of people, as not only had we a great number of relatives, but Alice was a representative of the earliest social life of Melbourne, and had many friends among different groups. I sat in the front pew beside Laura who, like the aunts, was in deep black. After the service she shepherded Brian and me through the sandy churchyard, with its gum trees and scrubby bushes, to where a row of mourning coaches and carriages was drawn up behind the hearse. Many people sent their empty carriages as a token of respect, in the same way that they would leave cards at a house without asking if the mistress was at home. Steven was a pall bearer and with the other nearest relatives went in the first coach. The women did not go to the cemetery. The Waterpark landau, which now rests in the brambles below the cowhouse, was just behind the mourning coaches, and I made a slight scene, saying I wanted to go in that, when Laura was going to put us in one of the gloomy black coaches. While we were arguing about this, Dominic, who was supposed to be three or four hundred miles away at the agricultural college, suddenly appeared on the scene.

‘Dominic!' exclaimed Laura. ‘How on earth did you get here?'

‘I got the telegram,' said Dominic.

‘But we didn't send one.' They had discussed doing so and then had a superstitious feeling that it was safer to let him stay put in a place where he had shown no sign of being in trouble.

‘I sent it,' said Sarah self-righteously. ‘I knew he could arrive in time.'

‘Oh!' Laura hesitated. ‘Well, you must go now you're here, but you look dreadfully grubby.' She looked at him anxiously. He had been all night in the train, and had come straight from the station to the church, but she was not only concerned about his unkempt appearance, but at his distraught expression and the look in his eyes as if his whole world had again crashed on his head. She was afraid too that his grubbiness would be another bad mark against him in the family, and they did say that the only black Dominic wore were the smuts on his face. This was not quite true as somewhere on the journey he had acquired a black armband, but had forgotten to change his bright blue tie.

The drive to the St Kilda cemetery was not so bad, but when Dominic, in his capacity as second mourner, stood at the edge of the grave, and saw at such close quarters the unbelievable sight of the coffin containing our beloved grandmother lowered into the clay, it had an overwhelming effect on him.

The drive back to Beaumanoir was oppressive. Dominic seemed full to the brim with his ‘black soul-mixture.' We felt that at any moment it might overflow and drown us. We did not dare speak. He was now as he had been when he watched the dying fly, aware, not only in the mind, which is bearable, but in his heart, that the ultimate condition of life is death. Perhaps
he was the only one of the grandchildren who really loved Alice, who had something more than a childish affection for a kind old lady. He may have been the only one with enough ‘spiritual perception' to realize her serene goodness. He saw in her a virtue beyond the reach of his own divided soul. He knew that she compared him unfavourably with Bobby who had died, and now her death removed the possibility of his ever gaining her approval.

It was a great relief, but also a slight shock, to come into the dining-room at Beaumanoir and find the whole family sitting round the tea-table, talking cheerfully and even laughing when someone said that Major Blunt's coachman had tacked on to the wrong funeral, and he wondered why he did not recognize anyone at the graveside. Dominic could not endure this, and
he went out into the library, where Laura followed him. She thought the best thing would be to get him back to the agricultural college as soon as possible, and to allay his emotion she began to talk to him in a matter-of-fact way about trains. To her utter dismay he said:

‘Mum, I don't want to go back.'

‘Why not?' she asked sharply, thinking that this inability of Dominic's to stay anywhere was beyond a joke, as indeed it was.

‘They all hate me,' he said.

‘You must imagine it. They can't
all
hate you. Why should they hate you?'

‘They do. Because of my voice. They call me
Looney Langton.'

‘They may mean it kindly,' said Laura, but without conviction.

‘They don't. They try to imitate me. It sounds horrible.'

‘I suppose it does.' Laura smiled in spite of herself, at the idea of the Australian farmers' sons trying to imitate Dominic's quite unconscious ‘English' voice, partly inherited, strengthened at Waterpark in his childhood, and further adorned with some of the expressions of the nineteenth-century military dandy, which he had caught from grandfather Byngham.

‘They can't hate you if they imitate you,' Laura went on. ‘They only think you're funny. They'll soon get used to you. People like those who amuse them.'

‘I can't go back,' exclaimed Dominic. ‘They held me down on my bed and blew smoke into my lungs. They did beastly things. I had to run the gauntlet. Look!' He took off his jacket, pulled up his shirt, and showed great purple weals across his back. ‘And now grannie's dead!' he cried, and
suddenly, the second of the three occasions on which I shall record them, he burst into those deep and racking sobs. He did not sob because of any physical injury he might have suffered, but because he had thought that when he went to the college he was leaving behind all the mistakes which had afflicted his life so far, and he expected at last to find companionship with young men of his own kind.
He sobbed because again he found, as on the road on Mount Wellington, that the generous impulses of his heart were unwanted or disastrous. It may here be suggested that all Dominic needed was a psychologist. I can only reply that unless the psychologist had a profound sense of religious mystery, and a mediaeval sense of personal honour, Dominic, perhaps not unjustly, would have regarded him as some kind of moron, and if the man had spoken to him about sex he would have punched his nose.

Laura could not speak. She was afraid to give way to her impulse to comfort him lest she should be caught in his storm of grief. She was horrified, and having her share of Irish superstition she began to feel there really must be a curse on Dominic, as though he brought many of his troubles on himself, others came upon him from outside. He could have done nothing to provoke this brutality except to be himself, different from the herd. She waited until he had composed himself a little, and blown his nose and dried his eyes, and then she went to fetch Steven, who, already tired from the nervous strain of the funeral, had to brace himself to cope with this enduring trouble, like a man who has just been seriously wounded and then is attacked by intermittent toothache. He questioned Dominic, who answered in a quite calm and factual manner, about the school, and when he heard what he had to say, announced definitely, ‘There is no question of your going back there.' But he had no idea what he could
do with him. If Steven believed a thing was wrong in itself he would never tolerate it, whatever inconvenience might ensue from his refusal.

After tea I was sent back to my school at Kew, and Brian returned to the Melbourne Grammar School. Our parents went back with Dominic to Westhill, but only for two or three nights, as Steven was the principal executor, and found it more convenient to live at Beaumanoir to supervise the division of the spoils, a task that needed unlimited patience and tact. The family when they heard that Dominic was at Westhill knew that again ‘something had happened.' They were rather too busy seeing that they got their fair share of Alice's possessions to give this much attention, but Uncle Bertie attacked Steven about it. He said that he would never ‘make a man' of Dominic if he allowed him to run away from every place he did not like. Young men were naturally rough. Steven replied:

‘A large part of the human race is disgusting. I intend to keep my sons in the civilized part if possible.'

‘They'll do no good if you pamper them,' said Uncle Bertie, and added that Dominic should learn to take it, or whatever was the equivalent of ‘take it' in those days. But one of Steven's convictions was that no one should ‘take' what was brutal or unjust. He would have thought ‘we can take it' a contemptible slogan, especially if invented by those who were not taking it for those who were. Uncle Bertie was disgusted by his attitude, and went about saying that Steven would ruin
his sons, because he had none of the mushy sentimentality of the bully, and the only thing he ‘took' was an added weight of responsibility towards Dominic. It is hard to say whether his attempt to relate his treatment of us to standards of humanity and justice has been as disastrous as Uncle Bertie prophesied.

Bertie and Baba were the centre of the opposition to Dominic, those who thought something should be done about him. Bertie, although he was far above Baba in thought and deed, was friendly with her because he thought she had that common sense so lacking in the family. They were like patches of strong tweed on a piece of beautiful but tarnished brocade, and when they gave a tug at it, expecting it to fulfil their tweedy notions of the function of all fabric, the old silk tore and came apart. So strong was the weakness of the Langtons that when they married into a robust bourgeois stock, the children were all Langtons in their quick intelligence, their shallow wit, and their tenderness of heart, which meant that there was trouble in store for Uncle Bertie.

For the time being Dominic stayed up at Westhill, where Sarah also had been sent, as she was tired from the strain of having to run Beaumanoir during Alice's death and funeral, and also she was very irritable at the present confusion, when the place was no longer under her control, and she quarrelled with the aunts, who were now laying their covetous hands on those treasures, for touching which she had smacked them
as children.

The lawyer's clerk, writing to inform Diana of the amount of her future income, had left a nought off the end, so that just as she expected to be released from her poverty, she thought she would henceforth have to live on a sixth of her former allowance, which would have been impossible. This gave her such a shock that she became prostrate for two days, and sent all her children off to stay with relatives. She sent Daisy, a nice sentimental little girl of fourteen, to Westhill, where Dominic was alone with Sarah. When she found that the clerk had made a mistake and she would after all have the income she had expected, she left her there as it was convenient.

The family were too obsessed with loot to worry much whether this was a suitable arrangement. In their indignation that Baba had managed to secure ‘Mama's writing desk' they did not give much thought to Dominic. On Alice's death Baba showed her claws. She treated Diana and Mildy as if they were dismissed servants and had no right to anything. When she tricked them out of the writing desk which, although a fine piece of furniture, they valued for its associations, she justified herself by saying it would be unsuitable in their humble homes. Steven had the largest share, and George twice as much as his sisters, though as the money came from Alice, if the usual practice had been followed, it would have all gone to the girls. However, Baba thought a doubled income gave her perfect
authority to be rude. In the new rich society which she cultivated her attitude was respected, as rapacity and blatant push were the qualities on which its own success depended. Desmond McCarthy once said that good society was an association of people to give each other pleasure, while second-rate society was competitive. Baba would have been bewildered by this. To her parties were not for fun, and friends for love and pleasure, but means of gratifying her ambition. At any rate she never appeared to make a friend who was not rich or smart, or in some way useful to her.