“I suppose you put on evening dress for the last dinner on board,” said Aunt Matilda. “Nothing makes me cry like Auld Lang Syne, that last night, before you land next day. But it’s fifteen years since I went over to England.”
“I don’t suppose we shall any of us ever go,” said Grace longingly.
“Unless you marry Bow,” said Monica abruptly.
“I can’t marry him unless he asks me,” said Grace.
“He’ll ask nobody for a good many years to come,” said Aunt Matilda with satisfaction.
“Hasn’t he got lovely eyelashes?” said Grace impersonally.
“He’d almost do for a girl,” said Monica.
“Not if you look at his ears,” said Mary, with odd decision. He felt that Mary was bent on saving his manhood.
He breathed as if the air around him were red-hot. He would have to get out, or die. He plunged into his coat, pulling down his shirt-cuffs with a jerk.
“What funny green cuff-links,” said Grace. “Are they pot?”
“Malachite,” said Jack.
“What’s malachite?”
There was no answer. He put a white silk muffler round his neck to protect his collar.
“Oh, look at his initials in lavender silk!”
At last he was in his overcoat, and in the street with the bevy.
“Leave your overcoat open, so it shows your shirt-front as you walk,” said Grace, forcibly unbuttoning the said coat. “I think that looks so lovely. Doesn’t he look lovely, Monica? Everybody will be asking who he is.”
“Tell them he’s the son of General Grant,” said Aunt Matilda, with complete satisfaction, as she sailed at his side.
Life is principally a matter of endurance. This was the sum of Jack’s philosophy. He put it into practice this evening.
It was a benefit concert in the Town Hall, with the Episcopalian Choir singing, “Angels Ever Bright and Fair,” and a violinist from Germany playing violin solos, and a lady vocalist from Melbourne singing “home” solos, while local stars variously coruscated. Aunt Matilda filled up the end of the seat — like a massive book-end: and the others like slender volumes of romance were squeezed in between her and another stout book-end. Jack had the heaving warmth of Aunt Matilda on his right, the electric wriggle of Monica on his left, and he continued to breathe red-hot air.
The concert was a ludicrous continuation of shameful and ridiculous noise to him. Each item seemed inordinately long and he hoped for the next, which when it came, seemed worse than the last. The people who performed seemed to him in a ghastly humiliating position. One stout mother-of-thousands leaned forward and simply gurgled about riding over the brow of a hill and seeing a fair city beyond, and a young knight in silver armour riding toward her with shining face, to greet her on the spot as his lady fair and lady dear. Jack looked at her in pained amazement. And yet when the songstress from Melbourne, in a rich contralto, began to moan in a Scotch accent:
“And it’s o-o-oh! that I’m longing for my ain folk,
Though the-e-ey be but lowly, puir and plain folk —
I am far across the sea
But my heart will ever be-e-e-e-e
At home in dear old Scotland with my ain folk,”
Jack suddenly wanted to howl. He had never been to Scotland and his father, General Grant, with his mother, was at present in Malta. And he hadn’t got any “ain folk,” and he didn’t want any. Yet it was all he could do to keep the tears from showing in his eyes, as his heart fairly broke in him. And Aunt Matilda crowded him a little more suffocatingly on the right, and Monica, wriggled more hatefully than ever on the left, and that beastly Mary leaned forward to glance appreciatively at him, with her low-down black eyes. And he felt as if the front of his body was, scorched. And a smouldering desire for revenge awoke deep down in him.
People were always trying to “do things” to you. Why couldn’t they leave you alone? Dirty cads to sing “My Ain Folk,” and then stare in your face to see how it got you.
But life was a matter of endurance, with possible revenge later on.
When at last he got home and could go to bed, he felt he had gained a brief respite. There was no lock to the door — so he put the arm-chair against it, for a barricade.
And he felt he had been once more sold. He had thought he was coming to a wild and woolly world. But all the way out he had been forced to play the gentlemanly son of his father. And here it was hell on earth, with these women let loose all over you, and these ghastly concerts, and these hideous meals, and these awful flimsy, choky houses. Far better the Agricultural College. Far better England.
He was sick with homesickness as he flung himself into bed. And it seemed to him he was always homesick for some place which he had never known and perhaps never would know. He was always homesick for somewhere else. He always hated where he was, silently but deeply.
Different people. The place would be all right, but for the people.
He hated women. He hated the kind of nausea he felt after they had crowded on him. The yellow cat-eyes of that deadly Monica! The inky eyes of that low-down Mary! The big nose of that Grace: she was the most tolerable. And the indecency of the red-haired Aunt Matilda, with her gold chains.
He flung his trousers in one direction, and the loathsome starched shirt in another, and his underwear in another. When he was quite clear of all his clothing he clenched his fists and reached them up, and stretched hard, hard as if to stretch himself clear of it all. Then he did a few thoughtless exercises, to shake off the world. He wanted the muscles of his body to move, to shake off the contact of the world. As a dog coming out of the water shakes himself, so Jack stood there slowly, intensely going through his exercises, slowly sloughing the contact of the world from his young, resistant white body. And his hair fell loose into curl, and the alert defiance came into his eyes as he threw apart his arms and opened his young chest. Anything, anything to forget the world and to throw the contact of people off his limbs and his chest. Keen and savage as a Greek gymnast, he struck the air with his arms, with his legs.
Till at last he felt he had broken through the mesh. His blood was running free, he had shattered the film that other people put over him, as if snails had crawled over him. His skin was free and alive. He glowered at the door, and made the barricade more safe. Then he dived into his nightshirt, and felt the world was his own again. At least in his own immediate vicinity, Which was all he cared about for the moment.
CHAPTER III
DRIVING TO WANDOO
I
Jack started before dawn next morning, for Wandoo. Mr. George had business which took him south, so he decided to carry the boy along on the coach. Mr. Ellis also was returning home in the coach, but the twins, those lambs, were staying behind. In the chilly dark, Jack climbed the front of the buggy to sit on the seat beside the driver. He was huddled in his overcoat, the happiest boy alive. For now at last he was “getting away,” as he always wanted to “get away.” From what, he didn’t stop to consider, and still less did he realise towards what. Because however far you may get away from one thing; by so much do you draw near to another.
And this is the Fata Morgana of Liberty, or Freedom. She may lead you very definitely away from to-day’s prison. But she also very definitely leads you towards some other prison. Liberty is a changing of prisons, to people who seek only liberty.
Away went the buggy at a spanking trot, the driver pointing out the phosphoric glow of the river, as they descended to the Causeway. Stars still shone overhead, but the sky was beginning to open inland. The buggy ran softly over the damp sand, the two horses were full of life. There was an aroma of damp sand, and a fresh breeze from the river as they crossed.
Jack didn’t want to talk. But the driver couldn’t miss the opportunity.
“I drives this coach backards and forrards to Albany week in week out, years without end amen, and a good two hundred miles o’ land to cover, taking six days clear with two ‘osses, and them in relay
s fifteen or twenty miles, sometimes over, as on the outland reach past Wagin.”
“Ever get held up?”
“No sir, can’t say as I do. Who’d there be to hold me up in Western Australia? And if there was, the mounted police’d soon settle ‘em. There’s nobody to hold me up but my old woman, and she drives the coach for me up Middle Swan way.”
“Can she drive?”
“You back your life she can. Bred and born to it. Drive an’ swear at the ‘osses like a trooper, when she’s a mind. Swear! I’d never ha’ thought it of ‘er, when I rode behind ‘er as a groom.”
“How?”
“Oh, she took me in, she did, pretty. But after all, what’s a lady but a woman! Though far be it from me to say: ‘What’s a woman but a lady!’ If I’d gone down on my hands an’ knees to her, in them days, I should have expected her to kick me. And what does she do? Rode out of the park gates and stopped. So she did. Turns to me. ‘Grey,’ she says, ‘here’s money. You go to London and buy yourself clothes like what a grocer would buy. Avoid looking like a butler or a groom. And when you’ve got an outfit, dress and make yourself look like a grocer,’ she said, though I never had any connections with grocery in my life — ’and go to the office in Victoria Street and take two passages to Australia.’ That was what she said. Just Australia. When the man in the office asked me, where to in Australia, I didn’t know what to say. ‘Oh, we’ll go in at the first gate,’ I said. And so it was Fremantle. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’re going to elope.’ ‘Nice thing for me,’ thinks I. But I says, ‘All right, Miss.’ She was a pearl beyond price, was Miss Ethel. So she seemed to me then. Now she’s a termagant as ever was: in double ‘arness, collar-proud.”
The coachman flicked the horses. Jack looked at him in amazement. He was a man with a whitish-looking beard, in the dim light.
“And did she have any children?”
“She’s got five.”
“And does she regret it?”
“At times, I suppose. But as I say to her, if anybody was took in, it was me. I always thought her a perfect lady. So when she lets fly at me: ‘Call yourself a man?’ I just say to her: ‘Call yourself a lady?’ And she comes round all right.”
Jack’s consciousness began to go dim. He was aware of a strange dim booming almost like guns in the distance, and the driver’s voice saying, “Frogs, sir. Way back in the days before ever a British ship came here, they say the Dutchmen came, and was frightened off by the croaking of the bull frogs: Couldn’t make it out a-nohow!” — The horses’ hoofs were echoing on the boarded Causeway, and from the little islands alongside came the amazing croaking, barking, booing and booming of the frogs.
II
When Jack looked round again it was day. And the driver’s beard was black. He was a man with a thin red face and black beard and queer grey eyes that had a mocking sort of secret in them.
“I thought your beard was white,” said Jack.
“Ay, with rime. With frost. Not with anything else.”
“I didn’t expect hoar-frost here.”
“Well — it’s not so very common. Not like the Old Country.”
Jack realised they always spoke patronisingly of the Old Country, poor old place, as if it couldn’t help being what it was.
The man’s grey eyes with the amused secret glanced quickly at Jack.
“Not quite awake yet?” he said.
“Oh, yes,” said Jack.
“Coming out to settle, I hope,” said the driver. “We can do with a few spruce young lads. I’ve got five daughters to contend with. Why there’s six A1 families in Perth, maybe you’ve heard, and six in the country, and possibly six round Fremantle, and nary one of ‘em but’s got seven daughters. Seven daughters — — ”
Jack did not hear. He seemed to be saying, in reply to some question, “I’m Jack Hector Grant.”
“Contrairy,” the servants had called him, and “naughty little boy,” his Aunts. Insubordinate, untrustworthy. Such things they said of him. His soul pricked from all the things, but he guessed they were not far wrong.
What did his mother think of him? And his father? He didn’t know them very well. They only came home sometimes, and then they seemed to him reasonable and delightful people. The Wandering Grants, Lady Bewley had called them.
Was he a liar? When they called him a liar, was it true? It was. And yet he never really felt a liar. “Don’t ask, and you’ll get no lies told you.” It was a phrase from his nurse, and he always wanted to use it to his hateful Aunts. “Say you’re sorry! Say you’re sorry!” Wasn’t that forcing him to tell lies, when he wasn’t sorry? His Aunts always seemed to him despicable liars. He himself was just an ordinary liar. He lied because he didn’t want them to know what he’d done, even when he’d done right.
So they threatened him with that loathsome “policeman.” Or they dropped him over the garden fence into the field beyond. There he sat in a sort of Crusoe solitary confinement. A vast row of back fences, and a vast, vast field. Himself squatting immovable, and an Aunt coming to demand sharply through the fence: “Say you’re sorry. Say you want to be a good little boy. Say it, or you won’t come in to dinner. You’ll stay there all night.”
He wasn’t sorry, he didn’t want to be a good little boy, therefore he wouldn’t “say it”; so he got a piece of bread and butter pushed through the fence. And then he faced the emptiness of the field and set off, to find himself somehow in the kitchen-garden of the manor-house. A servant had seen him, and brought him before her ladyship, who was herself walking in the garden.
“Who are you, little boy?”
“I’m Jack Hector Grant” — a pause. “Who are you?”
“I’m Lady Bewley.”
They eyed one another.
“And where were you wandering to, in my garden?”
“I wasn’t wand’rin’. I was walkin’.”
“Were you? Come, then, and walk with me, will you?”
She took his hand and led him along a path. He didn’t quite know if he was a prisoner. But her hand was gentle, and she seemed a quiet, sad lady. She stepped with him through wide-open window-doors. He looked uneasily round the drawing-room, then at the quiet lady.
“Where was you born?” he asked her.
“Why, you funny boy, I was born in this house.”
“My mother wasn’t. She was born in Australia. And my father was born in India. And I can’t remember where I was born.”
A servant had brought in the tea-tray. The child was sitting on a foot-stool. The lady seemed not to be listening. There was a dark cake.
“My mother said I wasn’t never to ask for cake, but if somebody was to offer me some, I needn’t say No fank you.”
“Yes, you shall have some cake,” said the lady. “So you are one of the Wandering Grants, and you don’t know where you were born?”
“But I think. I was born in my mother’s bed.”
“I suppose you were — And how old are you?”
“I’m four. How old are you?”
“A great deal older than that. — But tell me, what were you doing in my garden.”
“I don’t know. Well, I comed by mistake.”
“How was that?”
“‘Cause I wouldn’t say I was sorry I told a lie. Well, I wasn’t sorry. But I wasn’t wandrin’ in your garden. I was only walkin’. I was walkin’ out of the meadow where they put me — — ”
— — ”And I says, she may have been born in a ‘all, but she’ll die in a wooden shack.”
“Who? Who will?”
“I was tellin’ you about my old woman. — Look! There’s a joey runnin’ there along the track.”
Jack looked, and saw a funny little animal half leaping, half running along.
“We call them baby ‘roos, joeys, you understand, and they make the cutest little pets you ever did imagine.”
They were still in sandy country, on a good road not far from the river, and Jack saw the little chap jump to cover. The tall
gum trees with their brownish pale smooth stems and loose strips of bark stood tall and straight and still, scattered like a thin forest that spread unending, rising from a low, heath-like undergrowth. It seemed open, and yet weird, enclosing you in its vast emptiness. This bush, that he had heard so much of! The sun had climbed out of the mist, and was becoming gold and powerful in a limpid sky. The leaves of the gum trees hung like heavy narrow blades, inert and colourless, in a weight of silence. Save when they came to a more open place, and a flock of green parrots flew shrieking, “Twenty-eight! Twenty-eight!” At least that was what the driver said they cried. — The lower air was still somewhat chilly from the mist. A number of black-and-white handsome birds, that they call magpies, flew alongside in the bush, keeping pace for a time with the buggy. And once a wallaby ran alongside for a while on the path, a bigger ‘roo than the joey, and very funny, leaping persistently alongside with his little hands dangling.
It was a new country after all. It was different. A small exultance grew inside the youth. After all, he had got away, into a country that men had not yet clutched into their grip. Where you could do as you liked, without being stifled by people. He still had a secret intention of doing as he liked, though what it was he would do when he could do as he liked, he did not know. Nothing very definite. And yet something stirred in his bowels as he saw the endless bush, and the noisy green parrots and the queer, tame kangaroos: and no man.
“It’s dingy country down here,” the coachman was saying. “Not good for much. No good for nothing except cemetery, though Mr. George says he believes in it. And there’s nothing you can do with it, seeing as how many gents what come in the first place has gone away for ever, lock stock and barrel, leaving nothing but their ‘claims’ on the land itself, so nobody else can touch it.” Here he shook the reins on the horses’ backs. “But I hopes you settles, and makes good, and marries and has children, like me and my old woman, sir. She’ve put five daughters into the total, born in a shack, though their mother was born in Pontesbeach Hall — — ”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 387
