The Cardboard Crown

by Martin Boyd

  The above incident seems to indicate that eccentricity had already slightly debased the Langton currency, that this woman dared to be impertinent to Alice. Recently a young man in Melbourne said to me: ‘The one crime here is to be eccentric.’ He went on to explain that towns with names like Melbourne all have the same ethos, a kind of heavy Sunday luncheon atmosphere, and gave as examples Bournemouth, Eastbourne, Malvern and some others which I have forgotten. It could hardly be expected that the Langtons would flourish there. The repeating pattern, becoming more distinct as the years went on, seems to have been Waterpark, hunting, European travel, and then financial or some other crisis, and back to the bolt-hole, Westhill for some hard-up, easygoing fun. In these last years I myself have repeated it, probably for the last time, with the design grown very faint and wobbly.

  Austin disliked Sarah, not only because of an instinctive temperamental opposition, but because he suspected that she knew the parentage of Hetty’s children. His suspicions were justified. She did know, but how I have not discovered. I have been told that women are able to divine instinctively any sexual relationship between people in their proximity. But if Alice could not divine it, why should Sarah? Alice was unsuspicious and satisfied in her life, while Sarah had all her frustrated senses alert, all her evil antennae extended to contact sin. It is even possible that Hetty was unable to resist boasting to her sister that she had achieved her ambition of the deanery schoolroom, as success loses half its savour if no one knows of it. However she acquired it, the knowledge created in Sarah’s mind a terrible malicious confusion. She had to hold her tongue, because if she had ruined her sister it would have reflected on herself, also she would have had to leave Westhill and experience real poverty instead of that grey film which she tried to spread over the Langton’s prosperity. When she had to sit at the Westhill dinner table and listen to Austin’s Rabelaisian quips, she sometimes felt that she was in the presence of the devil himself, the personification of lust, the man who had ruined her sister—which was how she saw it—and could not even bridle his indecent tongue. Often with glinting, angry eyes she pushed back her chair and left the room, once exclaiming in muddled disgust: ‘Vulgarity I like, wit I detest!’

  This situation produced what was in a way a tragedy. Arthur told me of it, but I shall not give it in his words, as there was something coarse in the way he told it. I do not mean his references to behinds and door handles, but the absence of sympathy he showed for what must have been great mental suffering in a young girl. Again I come to the falsification of history which can come from putting events in the wrong sequence. It has always been assumed that Mildy’s unfortunate characteristics were born with her, and that her nasal voice with its humble note was inculcated at the age of four by Sarah. This may not be true at all, and the injury which produced the traits we laughed at, calling her behind her back ‘Aunt Mildew,’ may have resulted from an incident which happened in her seventeenth year.

  There is no doubt that Sarah, by a thousand ingenious allusions, had made her believe that there was nothing in the world more degraded, more absolutely bestial than irregular sexual love, or even regular. One Christmas holidays when there was a large family party at Westhill, including Bynghams and Dells, they had all gone for a picnic down to the dam. The tea was spread out on a cloth on the ground, but Mildy instead of helping Sarah arrange it, went over to watch one of the Dell boys, who was trying out a fishing-rod he had made. When Sarah called them to tea, having carefully kept a space beside herself for Mildy, the latter ignored it and sat beside Tom Dell. Worse than this, Mildy did not, walking back to the house, take one handle of Sarah’s basket, but dawdled behind with Tom.

  Sarah, savage with jealousy, at once sniffed the most vile immorality, a boy with his half-sister. But with her anger was a gleam of triumph. She now had every right to disclose her secret. Mildy must know, to save her from sin. There was no one to whom she would have greater delight in revealing it. Before bedtime she called her into her room, that horrid little room which I myself remember, with its smell of vinegar and cough drops, and its little black religious books, from which Cousin Sarah tried to teach us a religion which bore no resemblance to Christianity. There was no mention of considering the lilies, of turning water into wine, of breaking boxes of spikenard, of forgiving harlots, of beautiful seamless garments and dining with the publicans, but only of Jezebel flung down for the dogs to lick up the blood. When I told Julian to paint the Assumption of the Virgin in the chapel, I think my motive as much as anything was to send the black ghost of Cousin Sarah and her hell-born Calvinism, shrieking out into the Australian bush. I can imagine the look in her eye as she drew Mildy into her room, probably the same expression she had when she carefully broke the lamp, with the fire extinguisher all ready, in exactly the position where it would destroy the Teba portrait and nothing else—a smile of dishonest, vicious righteousness.

  Mildy had spent the evening in a simmer of quiet happiness, not as definite as the awakening of love, but all the air seemed soft and gentle and the petals of the flowers were like a caress. She came into Sarah’s room with bright eyes and a vague, happy smile. It is not difficult to imagine Sarah drawing her to her side and holding her close in an affectionate alpaca embrace, while she poured the deathly disclosure into her ears, so that Mildy might realise, as her love for her father and her respect for her family, her trust in their security and decency died, that she had a friend who would never fail her, who was all her own. What Mildy said nobody knows, but Sarah may have found out as hissing with an indignation which she expected the girl to share, she told the shameful story, that the effect was very different from what she had intended. It is likely that Mildy, too terribly shocked, too deeply wounded, said nothing, but, leaving Sarah just a little uneasy, went in a daze from the room.

  She must have been uneasy when Maysie’s voice was heard early in the morning, crying out in the passage: ‘Where is Mildy? She hasn’t slept in her bed.’ In a few minutes everyone was awake. Byngham boys, Dell boys, Steven and George, streamed into the passage looking like choristers in their nightshirts, saying: ‘What’s up?’ ‘What’s all the row?’ Alice and Austin came out of their room, Alice anxious, Austin puffy but with a kind of furious look. ‘Mildy’s disappeared,’ Maysie repeated. ‘She hasn’t slept in her bed.’

  ‘She’s probably in Sarah’s room,’ said Alice crossly. She imagined that with a tiresome sentimentality, as she thought of it, Sarah had persuaded Mildy to spend the night with her. Determined at last to put her foot down firmly, she went along to Sarah’s room and rapped sharply on the door. Sarah, who had heard the noise and Mildy’s name called several times had been too frightened to come out. She would be quite ignorant of whatever had happened.

  ‘Come in,’ she said, putting on a sleepy voice which Alice realised at once was not genuine.

  ‘Is Mildy with you?’ asked Alice opening the door, and seeing she was not added: ‘D’you know where she is?’ All the young people crowded behind her staring in at Cousin Sarah in bed as if they expected to see some remarkable sight. Arthur’s description of this was extremely funny, but again quite unprintable.

  ‘I haven’t seen her since she said goodnight,’ replied Sarah.

  ‘Isn’t she here? Oh dear, oh dear! Please shut the door.’ Alice turned back into the passage as Austin said:

  ‘All you boys dress. Tom, you and Steven go to the dam. The rest of you spread out all over the place and see if you can find her.’ To Alice he said: ‘Get that infernal jinx out of bed, and find out where she’s likely to be. She’s always with her.’

  He dressed himself and saddled a horse and went riding about the road, in search of some trace of her. At eleven o’clock everyone was back at the house, hungry, exhausted and depressed, but no longer so anxious, as Maysie had discovered that Mildy had taken with her a small basket with some of her clothes. After a hurried breakfast Austin drove off to Dandenong, where the station master told him that Mildy had gone to
Melbourne early in the morning by the milk train. He sent the dogcart back with the groom, and went on to Melbourne. He went first to the house in Alma Road but she was not there, then to his mother’s house and to the Dells, but none of them had seen her. From St Kilda he went into police headquarters to ask for a search. As he was not only a member of The Legislative Council but at that time Minister for Home Affairs, he could arrange that Mildy’s disappearance was kept secret.

  At Westhill they passed the most gloomy day the house has ever known, except one other, some fourteen years later, when it was darkened by an irrevocable tragedy. The boys stood about in a serious grown-up way, and discussed what could have happened to her. They decided that ‘she had got some idea into her head’ and that ‘girls were silly’.

  It may have been due to her own manner, but as the day progressed a feeling grew up that Sarah was in some way responsible. Her nose and eyes were red with weeping, which made her look more shifty than ever. In every discussion she was on the defensive. At tea time one of the Dell boys who combined Hetty’s pig-headedness with Austin’s directness of speech, the one whose statue is now in the St Kilda Road, said to his aunt:

  ‘I bet you drove her away.’

  ‘Me!’ cried Sarah. ‘I love her!’ and with a horrible throaty sob, which had a family resemblance to Hetty’s roar of pain when Austin brought Alice in to the dinner party at Bishopscourt, she rushed from the room. After that everyone, including Alice, was convinced that Sarah was at the bottom of it, but they could not think how.

  The next evening Austin, looking haggard, returned from Melbourne. Mildy had disappeared into thin air. Alice did not tell him of her suspicions of Sarah as she was afraid that he might do something freakish and frightful. The next day the party, unable to enjoy its usual pastimes, broke up, and they all went back to East St Kilda, to be nearer the region of the search. Sarah still red-eyed was left at Westhill in case Mildy should return there.

  In five days Alice had a letter from Brighton, from a Mrs Hale with whom she was unacquainted. This lady wrote that five days earlier she had engaged a housemaid from the registry office in Melbourne, a very young and pretty girl called Mildred Verso. She was quite unused to the work and seemed to be in a very troubled state and could give no information about her family. As Mrs Hale knew that Alice’s maiden name was Verso she thought this girl was probably a relative, and that Alice might be glad to know where she was.

  Alice at once ordered the brougham and drove off to Brighton. She rang the bell at Mrs Hale’s house and the door was opened by Mildy, in a cap and apron.

  ‘Is Mrs Hale at home?’ said Alice, whose first emotional relief at learning of Mildy’s whereabouts, had given way, during the drive down, to anger at the needless anxiety they had been caused. ‘If she is, say I would like to see her. Then go and take off that ridiculous cap and pack your things. We’ve been worried to death about you.’

  She saw Mrs Hale, told her who Mildred was, said she was unable to explain her conduct, and begged her not to mention it to anyone, to which that lady agreed. Mildred and her basket were packed into the closed carriage and they drove home.

  She would not give any explanation of why she had run away, except that she thought she should earn her own living. Long afterwards she told Maysie, who told Arthur. She could never then have given the real reason. Its obscenity appalled her, though later in life she enjoyed talking of such things in an arch and allusive way. Until now she had been full of family affection and pride. Perhaps it was the strongest feeling she had, and it had been profoundly injured. As she stumbled through the night along the nine miles of stony road from Westhill to Dandenong, carrying her few pathetic possessions in a basket, she must have been engulfed by that sense of complete disaster which can attack a young person with no perspective. She saw her whole life as degraded and false. Alice might have been more sympathetic with her if she had known that Mildred on that night walk had something of the same sensations that herself had had in Hyde Park, on the day that Austin had reacted so strangely to the news of the birth of Horace, and from the same cause. She was sympathetic, but irritated by Mildred’s absolute refusal of any explanation.

  Mildred, partly owing to Sarah’s training, had confused social position with sexual morality, a mistake which the duque de Teba could have corrected for her. On learning of her father’s conduct she thought that the way they lived, the carriages, the crested silver, the general air, Australian and haphazard though it was, of being in the top drawer, was a mockery of the Almighty. She felt even the name of Langton to be a badge of shame. In a sort of expiation she went to the registry office where she knew that Cousin Sarah engaged the servants, and offered herself as a housemaid. When on her return, she would not look Austin in the face, Alice thought it was because she was ashamed of what she, not of what he had done. As I have indicated, later in life Mildy’s attitude changed round. She accepted her shame and took all this as an endorsement of her own frustrated desires. But for the time, she was overwhelmed. By this one disclosure Sarah had done more to twist her nature than by her years of poisonous pious talks.

  The effect of this incident was to send Alice to England again. Steven was overdue to go to Cambridge, and had spent a year at the Melbourne University, filling in time, until Austin and Alice could bestir themselves to take him to England. He could have gone alone but there was a kind of apathy about it. Now Alice said she would go with Steven and take Mildred as well for six months in Europe to give other people and Mildred herself a chance of forgetting that she had behaved in such an extraordinary fashion. So that if Sarah had not made this mischievous revelation to Mildred, my father might never have gone to Cambridge, which, particularly when he inherited Waterpark, he would have felt as a great deprivation, and again as I write this story I am struck by the close connection between evil and fortunate happenings.

  9

  Alice’s diaries again give the only information about this short visit to Europe. Maysie had wanted to go with them. As she was older than Mildy she thought that she should be taken first, which Alice recognised as just, but Mildy had already begun to exercise the prerogative of neurotics, which is to skim the cream off other people’s milk. Sarah also, another neurotic, was partly responsible for Maysie’s not going, as Alice did not think it wise to leave her in charge of the household with no buffer between her and Austin. Sarah pretended to think that this was to protect her virtue from such a monster, though she was now over forty, and as brittle as old sticks. She was paid her usual wages and sent to live with Hetty, where she was rude to all the boys except Horace.

  Alice did not make any very interesting entries on this trip. At Waterpark she wrote: ‘It is a little depressing here now, the house not in good repair. I think that Mr Langton must be short of money. He told me he had sold some of the land. He was apologetic about it, as if he were robbing Austin. They have very kindly asked Steven to spend his vacations here. There is the same damp patch on the wall of the main staircase. I met Lady Dilton today. She told me that Mr Aubrey Tunstall is still in Rome. I shall not go there, especially with Mildred.’

  There are a good many hints that Mildred was unlikely to acquire much finish from her contact with European civilisation.

  ‘Lady Dilton very kindly offered to present me at Court, and then I would be able to present Mildred. When I told M. this she made a great fuss, and said she could never go into the presence of the Queen. She became almost hysterical so I have had to give up the idea. I wish I knew what was the matter with M. She seems so ashamed of herself all the time. It dates from that night when she ran away. I cannot believe that any of the boys wronged her. It has something to do with Sarah, I feel, but again how could it? It is a most disagreeable mystery. I shall present Maysie and Diana when I bring them over.’

  In Paris she wrote:

  ‘This morning I took Mildred into a shop in the Rue St. Honoré to buy her some pearls for her birthday. She made a scene and said she could not wear an
ything costing so much. She chose a brooch in not very good taste. I bought the pearls and shall give them to Diana when she’s old enough.’

  A few days later still in Paris there is this entry:

  ‘Mildred is exceedingly shocked by the statues in the Louvre, and yet she stared at them very intently. Quand on voyage avec M. tout le monde devient plein des indécences.’

  It appears that Alice was glad to be back in Melbourne from this voyage. Although it had not been very lively with Mildred as her sole companion, after she had left Steven at Cambridge, at least it had been free from the major disturbances associated with her two earlier trips to Europe. She was however faced with one disappointment when she arrived home. Maysie was practically engaged and only awaiting her return and approval before making the announcement. The disappointment lay in the fact that no one had ever heard of the young man before. When Alice thought about husbands for her daughters she had always imagined they would be young men of their own sort, Bynghams, or the sons of one of the better clergy or the legal lights of Melbourne, several of whom came from very good Irish county families. Next to these she would have preferred the son of a Western District squatter of good origins. For Diana she had different dreams, unconnected with Australia. But Maysie’s young man came into no category. He had a square solid kind of face, a reserved manner, unnoticeable clothes, a quiet unnoticeable voice, at any rate in Australia, and unlike any of the clan except the despised Percy Dell, he went to the city every morning. His name was Bert Craig. There was nothing one could reasonably object to about him, and nothing one could much admire. Whatever he did in the city—I never knew but think it was something to do with stock and station agents—brought him in a bigger income than was possessed by any young Mayhews or Bynghams. Even so to Alice, fresh from Waterpark, Dilton, Cambridge and Paris, he appeared grim. She was in a dilemma, as she did not want to hurt Maysie, who was deeply in love. If she did so everyone would think she was unreasonable and arrogant. From the Australian point of view there was no objection to him, but in England one simply would not come across a young man like that in the houses which the Langtons frequented. She could not put that forward as a reason to forbid the engagement. He had been to the Melbourne Grammar School with Steven, which was how he had become acquainted with Maysie. Austin did not like him and grumbled that he had no family, and yet here there was nothing discreditable. His father was a Presbyterian minister at Wangaratta. His mother died when he was a baby and there were no other children. He had an uncle a doctor in Bairnsdale.