PETE, beaming, came in from the frosty air to the kitchen, and sniffed the odours of cooking with frank enjoyment. Phyllis, loading the traymobile, looked at him and felt herself stabbed, as she so often was, by his resemblance to his father. Incapable of analysing her own emotions with any detachment, she knew only in a vague, aggrieved way that the undeniable good looks of her children left her not altogether pleased. She had been pleased enough until Pete arrived; for Virginia and Prue both had fair hair and blue eyes, so she had always assumed that they were like her. No one had ever contradicted her—except Pete. He contradicted her every time she set eyes on him, for there was no denying he was the image of his father, and also the image of his sisters. Looking from her children to her husband she could not fail to see that she had contributed nothing to their appearance except the colour of the girls-hair and eyes. Thus, when people complimented her, as they often did, on her good-looking family, she felt it like a prick—an implied criticism of herself. Indeed, there had been occasions when a tactless hint of surprise had crept into the congratulations. “Why, but they’re lovely children!”
“It wasn’t, she always hastened to tell herself, that Gilbert was so handsome. He wasn’t. It was just that somehow the children seemed to have taken his features and improved on them. Pete, poking among the dishes on the table, asked:
“Can I scrape this, Mum? What is it? Teacake?”
“Oh, yes, you can scrape it. Put it on the sink when you’ve done with it. Did you get that kindling wood in when I told you?” Pete stopped with a spoonful of golden dough half-way to his mouth.
“Gee, Mum, I forgot!”
Phyllis, lifting the saucepan lid from the potatoes, felt a rush of steam scald her wrist as he spoke. She rationalised as instinctively as she breathed, and the exasperated anger of momentary pain transferred itself to Pete without a second’s hesitation. She said sharply:
“Put that basin down! No, if you can’t remember to do a little thing like that when I ask you . . .”
“Put it down at once! And go and wash your hands.”
Pete glowered. He said with heavy sarcasm:
“You never forget anything, do you? Oh, no!”
“Don’t be impertinent!” Phyllis snatched the basin, dumped it in the sink, and turned the tap on it. Pete, his brilliant colour more brilliant than ever with mounting resentment, stormed:
“The other day I asked you to mend my football jersey, and you said you would, and when I asked for it you said you’d forgotten!”
The potatoes boiled over. Phyllis, grabbing a dish-cloth, rushed for the stove. Pete jeered maddeningly. She said, shrilly:
“Go away out of the kitchen this minute! How dare you speak to me like that? What if I did forget your jersey? I’m going from morning till night, and you have nothing to do but play! Go and wash your hands immediately, or I’ll get your father to deal with you!”
Pete went, muttering. Phyllis restored order on the stove, transferred used dishes from the table to the sink, and then, quite suddenly, sat down on a chair and slumped, her hands heavy in her lap. Her mind busied itself instantly to justify and account for the tears she felt rising to her eyes. Four other women in the house, and I have to get the meal alone. Aunt Bee’s a selfish old woman—one expects no help from her. But Marty—she’ll offer once, and when you politely protest she’ll sit down at her ease with her everlasting cigarettes. Prue and Virginia should have been home long ago. It’s quite dark, they can’t have been playing this last hour. Gossiping instead of coming home to help their mother . . .
For a moment her thoughts checked upon the image of Virginia. Wasn’t she almost too pretty? Wasn’t she too pleasure-loving, and didn’t she think too much about her clothes and her appearance? Phyllis reflected upon these failings more often and more earnestly than she would have done had it not been for the fact that she was jealous of her elder daughter. Remembering her own sober and restricted youth, she looked askance at Virginia’s “good time,” substituting an anxious maternal disapproval for the envy she would not admit. All this lipstick and powder and nail-varnish. . . . When I was a girl such things weren’t used so much. We relied on our own complexions. And I was married at twenty-two. Well, perhaps after all it’s natural for a young girl to be a little frivolous. More natural than to be interested in politics, and go to lectures and meetings more than to dances, and read queer books, and that ridiculous modern poetry, and reports on housing and malnutrition, and even venereal disease. . . . No, I don’t think I need to worry so much about Virginia, even if she does flirt and drink cocktails more than I like; she’s normal—but I just don’t know what to make of Prue! It isn’t natural for her to think about such things . . . venereal disease . . . ! A child of twenty one! Grandfather was quite right to oppose the idea of her bookshop. It wasn’t as if she had to earn her own living. He said it would give her wrong ideas, and see how right he was. He said she’d be safer and happier helping me at home. But of course her father always gives way to her. . . . She was always his favourite because she’s so mad about books. . . .
Instantly, with the accidental conjunction in her thoughts of “Gilbert” and “books,” her mind bolted like a horse at the prick of a spur. When thought became difficult, disturbing, confusing, she always tried to drown it in physical activity, and to restore confidence in herself by the performance of domestic tasks. She jumped up now and busied herself feverishly. It did not matter in the least, to-night, what time they had their meal; her glance at the clock was merely to set her right with herself, to account for the sudden bustle in some way which saved her from recognising it as a symptom of panic.
“I never understood Gilbert—never!” She pushed the tray-mobile into the dining-room and began laying the table. How many of us? Five in the family, Marty, Nick, Aunt Bee, that’s eight. Knives, forks, table napkins, salt and pepper, even when we were children there was always that—secretiveness in him. Those flowers looked faded. Prue should have done them this morning; and it wasn’t as if I didn’t try . . .
She stood with her finger to her mouth looking critically at the table. Under cover of this attitude her thoughts were of the old man, just buried, who had called her his little sunbeam. What if he was a bit—old-fashioned? He was a good man, the life he had tried to make was steady and solid and respectable, and he had appreciated her. Always, right up to the end, he had depended on her. Why, if it hadn’t been for her insistence that they must look after him, Gilbert mightn’t have agreed to live on at Glenwood after they were married. There wasn’t one of the three of them who wouldn’t have left him in the lurch without a second thought. As it was all the weight of it had fallen on her. During the last few years when he was so old and forsaken, and so angrily be wildered by the changing world, it had been herself who tried to shield him, reassure him, agree with him, make him feel that there were still some people who remembered old standards and old ways. His own children wouldn’t bother. So she had gone every night to sit by him while he read his chapter from the Bible, and she had bent her head and murmured “Amen” to his prayer. She had brought him the paper every morning, and read the leaders to him when he. was too tired to read for himself; and she had listened to his comments, and shaken her head with him over the wickedness of a world forsaking God, over women who smoked and wore trousers, over Sunday sport, over modern art, over strikes, over James Joyce, and contraceptives, and Bolshevism, and cocktails. And, if he was old-fashioned, wasn’t he right? Hadn’t things been better in the old days?
Gilbert said “No.” The steadiness and conviction of his “no” was the root of her confusion, for she had not lived with him for most of her life without learning unwillingly to respect his opinions. Yet when he tried to explain, to justify his “no,” she was not convinced. She had memories of a time when everything had its place, and stayed there. He said that was an illusion. He said that even then there had been turmoil, and the stirrings of that unrest which burst out at last in 1914 as war—but she hadn’t known, because in those days it was still covered up from people of their sort. Thinking back, she had remembered mornings at the breakfast table when Uncle Walter had thundered about politics, and shaken his finger at her mother, saying that, mark his words, these Trade Unions and Labour Governments would bring disaster on the country. Well, perhaps he had been right there, too? Couldn’t you trust a man like Uncle Walter, upright, and God-fearing and scrupulous, to know what was best? But once, answering this with a grim face, Gilbert had said a dreadful thing:
“Could you? With the Dodds’ starving on his doorstep?”
“Starving?” She looked at him in horrified resentment. “Gilbert, don’t be ridiculous! They weren’t starving!”
He said relentlessly:
“How do you know? Did you go and see?”
She answered trembling:
“You know we weren’t allowed to go there!”
“Marty went.” He spoke coldly. “She went once—for the first time, though she and Sally had been friends for years—when she was about sixteen. They were eating bread and jam and tea without milk. All of them, down to the three-year-old. Sally said that was what they usually ate.”
Phyllis had said sharply:
“Well, why was there a three-year-old? There wasn’t ever any Mr. Dodd that I knew of!”
That had silenced him—but Gilbert’s silences were sometimes more disconcerting than his words. Yet the fact that she felt disconcerted was, in itself, another infuriating bewilderment. Were you to condone immorality? Was that what Gilbert meant?
Coming out of her trance, she hurriedly straightened a knife, moved a salt cellar, and bustled out to the kitchen again, trundling the traymobile in front of her.
No, I never understood him. Even when we were about fourteen and he first began writing. He wouldn’t show me his things, or talk about it, though he and Marty had their heads together all the time. Of course she put him against me. Well, I beat her in the end! For a few years how nice he was! Just for a few years! When we were first engaged—just a pair of children—eighteen and nineteen! His lovely letters when he was away at the war, and my trousseau . . .
Her mind jumped from the trousseau. It was necessary to her own conception of herself that she should not admit failure in any of those accomplishments which she thought proper to womankind, so the knowledge of her own ineptitude at sewing and cooking was hustled from her mind whenever it threatened to intrude. It was proper for a girl to make her own trousseau, and it was proper for her to dream over the task. She had done both, but, unwisely, she had once allowed her desire to score over Marty to tempt her into speech about it. Sewing away on the verandah at Glenwood, she had met Marty’s unsympathetic gaze, and said, with gentle triumph that hopes and plans of her future with dear Gilbert were being woven into these white ruffles; and Marty, looking at the large, ungainly stitches, had said sourly: “Look out they don’t fall through.”
Jealous. Poor Marty, she had always adored Gilbert. The chops are done, but the. potatoes need a few minutes more. There are the girls coming in. Is Nick back yet? Well, I’m not going to wait for him. He and Marty between them are simply ruining Gilbert. Now that his father’s dead—well, what? Won’t it make him have more—more steadiness, more sense of responsibility? After all, he is the head of the firm now. Of course he has been, actually, for years, but there was always the feeling that it didn’t really belong to him. Oh, those potatoes will have to do! Good Heavens, the teacake! Well—yes—it’s burnt. That’s Pete’s fault, he got me so upset. . . .
Prue, her racquet still under her arm, stood in the doorway, frowning slightly. Phyllis asked:
“Are you ready for tea, dear? Where’s Virginia?”
“She’s staying the night at the Johnson’s, Mother. She said to tell you she’ll be back by ten to-morrow.”
“Oh, well!” Phyllis turned the potatoes into their dish, and set the dish on the traymobile. Marty wandered in from the passage. “She knows we’re leaving on the eleven-fifteen, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, she knows.”
Marty said:
“Shall I carry that in for you, Phyllis?”
“Don’t bother, Marty. Just go and tell the others we’re ready. Oh, and Marty, see if Pete has washed his hands. Prue, you dish up the other things.”
“All right, Mother.”
Left alone in the kitchen, Prue began to frown again.
The meal was almost over before Nick came in. But for Aunt Bee, conversation might have languished. Phyllis-depressingly determined brightness met with little response; Prue, having repeated to her father that Virginia was staying the night with the Johnson’s, had nothing further to say; Pete was sulking, on his dignity. As for Gilbert, he never spoke for the sake of politeness, of convention, of tiding over an awkward moment. He was unaware of awkward moments. A silent company, he presumed, was a company which did not desire conversation, and was quite within its rights. So it was left, and could safely be left to Aunt Bee, who chattered with happy garrulity, mostly about the past.
That was natural enough just now, Marty reflected. ‘Their father’s death had turned all their thoughts backward during the last few weeks; and on that she had looked up to see Nick in the doorway, and to admit that the past never held his attention for more than an impatient moment. He looked, as usual, angry. She had never been able to make up her mind how much of this characteristic expression of his was a reflection of his uncompromising attitude to life, and how much was due to the structure of his face. The high cheekbones which they all had were so emphasised in Nick as to give his cheeks a hollow gauntness. His mouth, being larger than her own and Gilbert’s, looked thinner; his chin was definitely more square. His thick black eyebrows, almost meeting over the bridge of his nose, were halted by the two deep, frowning furrows between his eyes. How much, Marty often wondered, could you rely on faces as a guide to character? Nick looked both ascetic and at least potentially fanatic. The quality of their father’s belief had descended upon him; and, though he placed Marx and Lenin where Walter Massey had placed the Bible, Marty found his attitude towards his own faith curiously reminiscent of the old man’s remorseless and immovable conviction. Nick was a modern evangelist, sternly scientific, substituting for the Scriptural thunder with which his father had rebuked the unbeliever, a deluge of statistical data. He was tireless, self-denying, austere in his personal habits, a stripper-away of what he regarded as inessentials, a condemner of complacency, a voice crying indefatigably in the wilderness of political inertia. He would not, his sister knew, have been willing to see himself as a spiritual descendant of John the Baptist. Yet listening to him speak from a platform, hearing him exhort the incurious to ask, hearing him urge the heedless to wake up, for the New Order was just round the corner, she heard also the echo of a voice saying Repent ye, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand.
Of the three of them, he, who most resembled their father, was the most bitter and ruthless in his condemnation of their father’s creed. She felt the same narrowness in him, the same dangerous flavour of bigotry, the same threat of intolerance; yet she applauded Nick for daring to be a rebel, which their father had never been; for daring to apply his theory to life, which their father had never done; for daring to present his faith as something that might, and must be practised as well as professed. He made her angry very often, and sometimes he made her afraid, but she respected him.
To-night, however, that air of having a mind full of grim and dammed-back furies was not so much in evidence. He had been out walking all day with his latest girl, Brenda, who seemed to show encouraging signs of responding to political education, and something of the enjoyment and stimulus of open-air and exercise had made him look younger rather than, as was usually the case, older than his years. He said:
“I’m late, Phyl. We got tangled up with a creek-bed—couldn’t get out of it for over an hour. And then I saw Brenda back to her friend’s place, and got talking to her friend’s husband. God, what confusion, what ignorance! He’s one of those who think socialism wouldn’t let you own your own toothbrush. Have you got anything cold to drink, Phyllis?”
Phyllis, who in her attitude to him still clung to the role of nurse and devoted (though now disapproving) slave, which she had adopted during his infancy, answered fretfully:
“Can’t you ever stop talking politics? No, there’s nothing cold but water. Sit down and I’ll bring your dinner in; I’ve kept it hot for you.”
Gilbert asked:
“Where did you go?”
The question which might have been, from anyone else, a mere conversational politeness was, from Gilbert, a serious request for information. For he had recently decided that he needed more exercise, and that he could find it both pleasantly and cheaply in week-end bush-walking. Nick poured himself a glass of water and drank thirstily.
“Right up on top of Solitary, and back across the valley.”
Phyllis, returning, placed a plate before him, and complained:
“You should never have gone. Your cold’s worse—I can see it is. I wish you’d take some of that mixture that I give Pete and the girls.”
“Don’t you, Nick!” Pete advised with his mouth full. Aunt Bee said firmly:
“Hot lemon drink, with a little something in it, and aspirin. But above all, bed. Because one looks such a fright with a cold.”
“Thanks.” Nick, who had discovered that his aunt appreciated a little horseplay, gave her a playful dig in the ribs, so that she squealed happily. “As a matter of fact,” he added, “my cold’s better. What’s the news, Gil?”
“Looks bad in North Africa,” Gilbert said gloomily. “Japan’s still sitting on the fence, and Matsuoka’s on his way to Moscow.” Nick snorted.
“He won’t get anything out of that. Don’t wait for me if you’ve all finished.” He looked at the empty chair beside Prue, and enquired:
Phyllis said:
“She’s staying the night with the Johnsons.”
Nick flashed an alert glance at Prue, who met it with an expression instinctively defensive. He felt a cynical amusement at thus sharing with his niece an unspoken secret, and at the knowledge that she was looking at him, wondering: Now how does he know that isn’t true? Phyllis rose cumbersomely, pushing down on the table with her hands.
“We won’t wait for you, Nick. Aunt Bee, you go and sit by the fire again. I’ll be in as soon as I’ve seen to the washing-up.” She added heavily: “And everything.”
Prue pushed her chair back and began gathering plates together.
“I’ll clear away and wash up, Mother. You go and talk to Aunt Bee.”
“Oh, all right.” Phyllis looked grudgingly at the table, as if afraid that without her supervision even so simple a task could not be properly accomplished. “Don’t forget the milk-jug, and leave a note saying we won’t want any more till next week-end.”
Marty said:
“I’ll put the kettle on while you clear, Prue.” She vanished with a pile of plates into the kitchen. Phyllis, following her husband and Aunt Bee to the door, said sharply to Pete: “You’d better bring in some more wood for the fire. And mind the walls when you’re carrying it through the hall. And lock the woodshed door after you.” Nick, left alone with Prue, grinned at her, and asked:
“What’s the lovely Virginia up to now?”
“Up to?” Prue countered, avoiding his eyes.
“She’s not at the Johnson’s.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw them all outside their gate on the way home. They were just leaving for town.”
“Leaving?” Prue said blankly. “Oh, damn! Have you got a cigarette, Nick?”
He threw a packet across the table to her.
“Where is she, then?”
Prue gave her shoulders an angry shrug.
“How should I know? She told me she was going to the Johnson’s. Of course,” she added coldly, after a slight pause, “I didn’t altogether believe her.”
“One doesn’t,” Nick agreed equably. He remembered that five years ago, when Virginia was just leaving school, Marty had said to him:
“Poor Phyllis’ sinlessness is going to be visited on that child. She’s going to work off all her mother’s complexes before she’s finished. You watch.”
It had been, he thought, worth watching. Virginia, he held, was a useless little bit of pink and blue and golden decoration. As such, believing passionately that the young must cultivate a militant enlightenment, he despised and detested her, but he had to admit that she brought to her paltry purposes an astonishing strategy and technique. Aided and abetted by her mother and her grandfather, she had dodged training in any trade or profession. “Why,” Phyllis had demanded, “shouldn’t one of them be just a home-girl?” “Home-girl, my eye!” Nick thought cynically. “When is she home?”
Prue wheeled the traymobile, laden with crockery, out to the kitchen. Nick finished his meal alone, and then joined the rest of the family in the drawing-room, dismissing Virginia from his mind.
Lying in bed on the verandah, watching the frosty glitter of the stars through a tracery of branches, Marty cursed Aunt Bee and her reminiscent mood. She had been rather startled by her own reluctance to remember, but she found now that the thick black curtain she had hung between her adult life and her child-hood, having once been drawn aside a little by Aunt Bee’s artless chatter, tempted her to draw it still further. And, while she lay awake thinking of what had been for so long forgotten, stars had moved from the black line of the verandah roof across the sky to the tree-tops.
Thought—its forms and techniques so various! Memory, too. Aunt Bee remembered like a child turning the pages of a picture book. Gilbert—how? Probably in a sober, methodical way, as an array of facts, as one remembered things to write them down in an examination paper. For herself memory was either sharp and detailed and poignant—or non-existent. She knew, from hearing other people speak of events in which she had participated, and of people she had met, that there were blind spots in her memory, but when she did remember it was a departure from the body, an excursion into a fourth dimension. She could not re-member and not feel, taste, smell, hear—be in the past. Tonight, resist as she would, anchor her mind as she. would by watching the stars, by thinking how pure and cold was this mountain air, by grabbing at the eiderdown as it slid towards the floor, her thoughts escaped continually, annihilating time, leaving her middle-aged body tenantless, to inhabit the wraith of a child-body, and make it flesh and blood again.
A restless flesh and blood, informed with rebellion, coming to terms with life only in one secret, mystical way. How Nick and Gilbert would laugh at that “mystical!” How Richard, her husband, would laugh! How Phyllis would jeer! Marty—mystical! Yet in a childhood which had been more full of resentments and confusions than most childhoods, she had had her one jealously-guarded, intimate source of tranquillity. The years belonged to her. Curious faith, curious abiding comfort! How had she dis-covered it—when had it begun?
That was lost—so it must have been very, very early. Probably from some words of her mother’s, while she played with blocks or the floor. “Marty and the Twentieth Century were born together, you know. Practically to the minute!” It had made the century seem peculiarly her own; she had resolved quite early in life to live until December 31st, 2000, so that she could die with it too.
Thus, an accident of birth had invited her to see her life in a slick, chronological pattern; the century had grown with her in the slow, slow tempo of their mutual childhood. Its days were long, though its moments flew, things happened in dream-like isolation, events momentarily disturbed an endless flow of weeks and months, and only now she realised that a life which had then seemed so solidly inevitable, was unstable, fluid, breaking down into chaos. At the time, she and the Century had seemed to share, up to the year 1914, an age of innocence, of unsophistication, of downright naïvete. The violence of the next four war-years had inevitably identified itself with the storms and stresses of her own ignorant and rebellious adolescence. She had emerged into young womanhood, discovering life and love, with the century still sympathetically matching her mood in the rosy, pleasure-mad years of the early twenties. The years were hers, she had believed; they kept step with her. Now, in the cold consciousness of maturity, she saw herself as keeping step, willy-nilly, with them, learning throughout the uneasy thirties worry and disillusionment and apprehension, being dragged with them, nervously, nearer and nearer to the climax, borne down with them into catastrophe.
Now she could look back on those early years and see that she had conceived them, in the boundless egotism of childhood, as taking their colour from her. No one had ever suggested to her that she was living in history; no one had ever analysed or dissected those years for her, or even in her hearing, so that she might look at them, and at herself inhabiting them, with comprehension. She had been forced, long after she grew up, to learn laboriously from books, the significance of events in which she had participated; and she reflected now, turning restlessly on her pillow, that the intelligence of children was grossly underestimated. How blandly fatuous, she thought, is our assumption that this topical question, or that current problem, is “beyond” them! As well say that the air they breathe is “beyond” them—and leave them asphyxiated! Are they ghosts, disembodied wraiths blowing through their world like smoke? Why do we hold this black screen of ignorance before their eyes? Is it fear of being shown up? Fear that the searching, logical child-mind which has not yet learned to be afraid will uncover the indolence, the shirking, the confusion and hypocrisy of adult thinking? Is it jealousy of a new generation, stepping forward to take control?
Something ugly, anyhow, she told herself grimly, or there wouldn’t be such a drapery of sentimental fondness spread. Let the little darlings be care-free while they can! They will have to face the wicked world soon enough! Old heads on young shoulders! Keep them carefree, keep them merry, and above all, for Heaven’s sake keep them ignorant while we wreck the machinery of their lives! She sat up, snatching irritably at the eiderdown and thinking bitterly: “There aren’t enough millstones on the earth, the ocean isn’t deep enough to receive us all . . .”
She dropped back on the pillow with a shiver. Oh, well, I was ignorant. Gilbert and I, we were both quite stupendously ignorant. We floundered. But at least we rebelled. What were we taught of the fundamental relationship between man and man? There were “nice” people—and others! We weren’t exactly told—not in so many words—that the others were nasty; that was left to the logic of implication. But bad as it was, it might have been worse. It would have been worse thirty years earlier, just as it’s a little better now, thirty years later.
Her anger quietened at the thought, and she lay on her back looking at the sky, trying to estimate and’ analyse the social atmosphere, the Zeitgeist of her childhood. Still pretty rigid, but begin-ning to give in places. Still complacent and self-righteous, but pricked here and there by doubt. Social conventions, which still flourished lustily in the long-established society which had bred them, necessarily suffered change and dilution in a community still in the throes of shaping itself to a new environment, still experi-mental, still urgently developing its own character. Yes, she thought, rigid as they might remain, and uncompromisingly as they might be cherished in the minds of such people as her father, they were already being discarded by the general public. It was an unconscious by-product of impatience—not a policy; life was too busy here; too mixed up; there was too much interdependence; there simply wasn’t time, except among a small, ridiculous, wealthy section, for the little ceremonies and conventions of class-distinction. Shedding them was like shedding a coat and collar before embarking on strenuous physical work. She felt a rare prick of pity for her father, who could no more shut out this intrusive social evolution than he could shut out the air, but who had continued to the end of his long life in a stubborn opposition, still denouncing and protesting long after the battle had passed over his head.
Yet he had succeeded—believing that he was protecting them—in condemning his children to a life over which there hung a perpetual mist of confusion. He had given them, in place of guidance, a series of tabus and prohibitions; in place of enlightenment a series of condemnations. The clearest and most dominant conception they had was of guilt; and from this conception flowed, inevitably, the pitiable, lonely secrecy of bewildered childhood. So that when they began to write, she and Gilbert, they had at first hidden their new impulse jealously even from each other, vaguely alarmed by anything so demanding, insistent, and mysterious, sure only that, being something sprung from themselves, and lacking parental sanction, it must be carefully hidden, and surreptitiously indulged.
If it had not been for the accident that the Laughlins came suddenly to live in the little cottage at the foot of the hill, what would have become of that writing impulse? Had it been strong enough to survive and develop quite alone, or would it have died when the driving power of adolesence failed? She remembered her own interest (never revealed, never expressed) when she found that another little girl a year or two older than herself had come to live so near them; she remembered, too, and saw it now as significant, that she had not been at all surprised, angered, or even disappointed when it became clear that the Laughlins were not “nice” people, and that the little girl was, therefore, not a suitable playmate for her. Her reaction had been, quite simply, that it would be necessary to play with her by stealth, as she played with Sally Dodd. She neither knew, nor was interested to know, the reason for her father’s disapproval; but she was more than interested—she was staggered—when she discovered that Janet Laughlin not only “wrote things” too, but actually showed them to her father! ,
Inside the hall the clock struck three. Marty heard it, but only vaguely. For her memory was departing again, and there remained with her body only enough consciousness to count three, and then fade. She was still in bed, but not here; it was not night, but morning—the morning of her twelfth birthday. She was sitting up, barely awake, but already filled with the familiar, pleasing sense of sharing her birthday with a year which was one of a hundred years, part of the Twentieth Century, whose vast potentialities, stretching away mysteriously into the future, lent significance to her own small life.
Phyllis still slept in the opposite bed with her mouth slightly open. She would, when she woke, make New Year resolutions of extreme virtue, but Marty’s, though having the added potency of being birthday resolutions as well, would be less concerned with virtue than with getting her own way. Already she was scheming to escape unobtrusively after breakfast before Aunt Ada could summon her to dust the drawing-room. It was a lovely morning, but alas, a Wednesday. On Wednesdays throughout the holidays the three elder children were required to learn a passage from the Bible and recite it to Walter Massey at the end of breakfast. Marty glowered at her Bible, lying on the edge of the washstand near her bed, reached out for it unwillingly, opened it at the marker, yawned and began to read. “Children, obey your parents in the Lord; for this is right. Honour thy father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise, that it may be well with thee, and thou mayesl live long on the earth . . .” Marty gabbled it over to herself, bored, secure in her own faith that she would see her century out, commandment or no commandment. “And ye, fathers, provoke not your children to wrath . . .” The meaning of those words penetrated, halted her, set her musing pleasantly. It would be nice saying that to Father; it lit the dreary task up with a purpose. She memorised the rest sketchily, discarded the Bible, and turned eagerly to matters of more importance. She felt beneath her pillow for a crumpled bit of paper which she unfolded and smoothed out carefully on her knee. There should have been a pencil too, but there wasn’t, so she hung out of bed in her calico nightdress with its long sleeves and its pin tucks and its lace-edged collar, and peered about on the floor for it. Her brown hair swept the linoleum, her cheeks already pink from sleep, grew crimson, but she saw the pencil, stretched, craned, grabbed, and sat up again, triumphant.
She was having trouble with this poem. She looked sadly at two angrily scribled-out lines.
“The bush beyond the creek is lit
As if with sunshine by the wattle,
And fragrant is . . .”
But after all there were no rhymes for wattle except bottle and throttle, and how could you . . .? She swept her hair back from her face impatiently and chewed the end of her pencil. She was vaguely resentful of this tyranny of rhyme, but did not know quite how to escape from it. And yet when rhymes did fall into place with a lovely inevitability there was something very satisfying about them. She studied the only complete verse she had achieved with considerable doubt:
“The rose, they say, is queen of flowers,
The loveliest ’mongst them all,
I mould not for the rarest give
One golden Wattle-ball.”
She put her head on one side, studying it. “ ’Mongst,” she decided, was wrong. You oughtn’t to have to chop bits off words, and anyhow it was an ugly, silly-looking word. No, it wasn’t right at all. And yet she was loath to condemn something which, she dimly felt, did express not only her thought, but herself. She was able to recognise her own independence when it leaked out from the tip of her pencil and confronted her on paper; it gave her a moment of awed pleasure, as if she had worked a miracle by accident. She grabbed the Bible to serve as a table and wrote:
“O lovely golden flower, shine
In shadowed places ’neath the trees . . .”
Neath! ’Mongst! She looked at it despairingly. Words wouldn’t behave for her like they did for Janet, taking their places smoothly and sedately, making a sequence of sounds good to roll upon the tongue. But the thought of Janet suddenly reminded her of something so painful that she stopped thinking about her poem altogether, and stared unhappily out of the window. The Laughlin family had been, for her, in the past year or so, a new, exciting and delightful experience. Mrs. Laughlin, with her amused smile, her casual friendliness, her pretty fair hair, her habit of sitting down at the piano and strumming delectable tunes, was so unlike Marty’s mental picture of what mothers were that she had found it easy to romanticise her. There was something about the Laughlin household which stimulated her—an emotional undercurrent, of which she had seen only the happier manifestations—until last night. Mr. Laughlin, coming home in the evening, would kiss his wife—not with a routine peck such as Marty dimly remembered having seen her own father bestow on her own mother, but vigorously, with enjoyment and ardour, lifting her off her feet, squeezing her till she laughed and pretended to protest, and winking at Marty as he did so. She had felt an expansive and benevolent delight as she watched, but at the back of her mind there had always been an uneasy wonder because Janet did not seem to share that delight. Janet could be merry with her father, or with her mother, but with them both together she became watchful and remote.
And last night Marty had learned, with bewilderment and pain, that love and hate can be disastrously mixed. The emotional aridity of her own home had made her peculiarly susceptible to the warm demonstrativeness which she had found in the Laughlins, and so, hearing them quarrel last night when she had gone down to wait for Janet, and had sprawled on the grass under an open window, had almost stopped her breath with shock. For it was terrible quarrelling, cruel, hurtful, tormented. Nothing they said gave her any clue to what it was all about, but she had felt their desperate love and hatred of each other as if they were physically belabouring her. She had rushed home, not waiting for Janet, feeling a horrified pity for her friend who, surely, could not know of this peril of instability which hung over her home.
This morning she was not so sure. It seemed almost as if things had fitted together in her mind while she slept, and now she remembered Janet’s face wearing that strange, observant look of critical detachment; she could hear the queer, dry note in her voice which suggested that she wasn’t going to take anything at its face value; she remembered that Janet had always made her feel that she was childish in her own overt rebellions; and she realised that Janet had not only a knowledge, but an inner strength, a refuge, which she lacked. In her conscious thoughts it boiled down to a discovery that “Janet knew,” and that Janet had her own way of meeting the situation.
Suddenly it occurred to her that Janet and Gilbert were rather alike. When things went wrong they withdrew inside themselves, as you might go into a room and shut the door. She was overcome by an alarming and unfamiliar sense of humility, which formed itself into the incoherent thought that she herself was “too noisy” and “too rude,” and she must somehow get to be quiet like Jan and Gilbert, and manage life in a more dignified way.
Subdued and chastened, she bent over her paper again. Slowly, cautiously, as if daring the words to present her with further problems, she wrote:
“Under the trees in shadowed places . . .”
She felt more hopeful over that. “Places” ought to be an easy rhyme. Faces, races, graces, braces . . . She giggled. Phyllis woke up. Preparing, even as she rubbed her eyes, a magnanimous forgiveness with which to meet Marty’s ungracious reception of “Many Happy Returns of the Day,” she was thoroughly taken aback by a muttered “Thank you,” and a grimace which, however forced, was meant to be a smile.
Phyllis, now nearly sixteen, was at that intermediate stage when childish prettiness has vanished, and adult prettiness not yet arrived. The emotionalism of adolescence, being connected with sex, was something which, in her mother’s view, could only be ignored. Obscurely conscious of its floods and tides, Phyllis let them escape through the only outlet she knew—religion. She had become very devout. She had also become very fat, and her once petal-clear complexion was afflicted with spots. The hatred which Marty had invited was now lavished on her, but being Phyllis-hatred it had to work under another name. The name she had found for it was Duty It was her duty, she told herself, to exercise a good influence over wilful little Marty; and so, in devious and innocent-seeming ways, she contrived to let her mother and Uncle Walter know when Marty was with Janet or Sally. When Marty played hookey from Sunday-school it was somehow always discovered. Phyllis also had a duty to little Nick, and adroitly she sowed and fostered a legend that Marty didn’t take very good care of him, so Marty was not often allowed to take him out. Marty often forgot to wash his ears, and see that his teeth were brushed, so Marty was not often allowed to preside at his bathing.
Now, staggered by unexpected politeness, her brain set about swift adjustments whereby she might see it in some light which would be a spotlight on herself. This, she told herself, was surely the first sign of that grace which she had prayed might descend on Marty. She jumped out of bed and floundered across the room.
“Marty darling!” she whispered from an enveloping embrace. “Let’s be friends, Marty! Let’s be great friends!”
To Marty’s hard and still skinny child-body Phyllis seemed unpleasantly and rather obscenely plump. She didn’t like feeling overwhelmed by this large soft flesh, so she drove her elbow hard into Phyllis-stomach and snapped:
“Get out! Leave me alone!”
Phyllis smiled at her with sorrowful, forgiving tenderness.
“It’s New Year’s Day, Marty. Let’s make a resolution to be friends this year!”
Marty glared at her. New Year’s Day was her day. She wasn’t going to share it with any fat Phyllis. Her impulse of self-criticism, with its unconscious and spontaneous resolution, had borne its one small, meagre fruit, and was now dead. She said viciously:
“I don’t want to be friends with you. You’re silly and you’re mean.” She paused for inspiration, and found it. “And you’re fat, and you’ve got pimples.”
Phyllis burst into tears. Marty got up and began to dress.
Somewhere just before Phyllis-advance, Phyllis-embrace, memory had slid towards dreaming, and become infected with the obscure horror of nightmare. Marty came wide awake with a start, feeling cold and realising with exasperation that the eider-down was on the floor again. She got out of bed, re-arranged it so that it hung well down between the bed and the wall, and pushed the bed hard up against the weatherboards. She was shivering as she climbed back between the sheets, and she had never felt less sleepy.
Ours wasn’t a home, she thought, where the giving of birthday presents could be made into a ceremony; we were all too selfconscious, and too mistrustful of ourselves and each other. She remembered five presents awkwardly thrust upon her before breakfast; Father, brushing her cheeks with his beard, too close to see her grimace—but surely conscious of her pull away from his encircling arm—saying deeply: “God bless you, my daughter!” and leaving her with a new prayer-book in her hand., Mrs. Miller, busy in the kitchen, giving her a hurried kiss and a work-basket, wicker, with padded pink satin lining. Phyllis with a tissue paper parcel inscribed “To dearest Marty, with love from Phyllis,” and containing two sky-blue hair ribbons. . , .
Marty smiled, hearing the clock strike the half-hour, probing with cold amusement into the emotion which had caused Phyllis-blue eyes to overflow as she offered her present. That she should be bestowing a gift while her eyes were still red with tears which the recipient had provoked, was an act of nobility which affected her so much that they overflowed again. Yet, the hair ribbons were blue. Blue was not Marty’s colour, but it became Phyllis very well. Oh, bitter, wounding, merciless little girl standing against the wall in the long passage, looking into those lachrymose blue eyes with hatred and contempt, saying sweetly: “You keep them in your drawer, so you’ll be able to find them easily!” Phyllis blundering away down the hall with flaming cheeks and incoherent sobs . . .
And Gilbert . . .
Marty’s smile lost its bitterness. To this day Gilbert knew only one birthday present—handkerchiefs. Handkerchiefs, and a tight, hasty, but honest smile. And seven-year-old Nick, presenting a needlebook to match the work-basket, adding a hearty hug and a sticky kiss. . . . I wasn’t the only member of the family, she thought, who found an outlet for damned-back emotions in Nick.
Breakfast . . .
Somehow the memory of breakfast was of a cheerful meal. It could only have been because of the sun coming through the big windows, lying in blocks and streaks across the starched white tablecloth, revealing the steam going up from the blue-bordered plates of oatmeal as an intriguing vapour in which you could actually see each separate particle of moisture. It glittered on the silver toast-rack and the silver jam dish with marmalade in it, and made Mrs. Miller’s perfunctory arrangement of flowers in the centre of the table fairly blaze.
At breakfast father read the paper, and conversation was limited to “Pass the butter, please,” and “Eat up your porridge, Nick,” and “Marty, don’t gobble so.” The children all hoped that the news would hold Mr. Massey’s attention, for occasionally, when it did not, he would put the paper aside and ask them awkward questions, which was his way of taking a paternal interest in their childish affairs. They were careful, therefore, to be quiet, lest they should distract him from his reading. While he held the newspaper in his left hand, and spooned porridge methodically into his mouth with the other, they were all tensely aware of him; even Mrs. Miller ate absent-mindedly, watching so as not to miss the exact moment for pouring his cup of coffee. This came when he lifted the second last spoonful of porridge to his lips. By the time he put his plate aside his cup was full; passed by Mrs. Miller to Gilbert and by Gilbert to Marty, it arrived in its appointed spot two seconds before his right hand began to feel for it.
The newspaper, so the children gathered, gave him (as, indeed, did most things) ample reason for disapproval. The rumblings and mutterings which came from behind it were welcome sounds to them—evidence that his attention was still blessedly fixed on “this fellow Holman,” and “this mountebank, Hughes.” That, they knew vaguely, was “politics,” but it had no personal importance for any of them—not even Mrs. Miller—beyond the fact that it kept Mr. Massey temporarily unaware of his family. He found it necessary, now and then, to have an audience for some comment his reading provoked, and then he addressed himself to Mrs. Miller, who said: “Really?” or “Yes, indeed!” or “How disgraceful!” without having the faintest idea what he was talking about. Thus, in a dim way, as one knows of things one has seen or heard in dreams, Marty was aware that “this fellow Holman” was bent upon squandering the public moneys by building double-track country railways where single-track ones had always been good enough before. But her own suburban train bore her punctually to and from school every day, and beyond that railways were obviously no concern of hers. Explosions from behind an angrily crackling paper conveyed to her and to Gilbert that there were mysterious and sinister organisations known as Trade Unions. Denunciations whose tone could not fail to remind them of Mr. Mackness’ more eloquent moments in the pulpit, revealed that there also existed a hobgoblin personification of evil, a kind of first cousin to Beelzebub, called Eyedoubleyoudoubleyou.
Children and animals, Marty thought sadly, learn to listen for danger-sounds or danger-silences with some sort of extension of their senses. To us politics were a lightning-conductor; politics kept us safe at the breakfast table. And yet, on that first day of 1913 an alarming thing had happened. Suddenly, without warning, politics lost their remoteness. Father uttered an explosive exclamation, lowered the paper, glared across the table at Mrs. Miller, and said with fierce contempt:
“Our neighbour appears to have political ambitions.”
Mrs. Miller gaped at him.
“Neighbour . . . ?”
“Laughlin. Wants to contest a seat in the State elections!” He became conscious that his daughter and his elder son were gazing at him with startled attention. He said with tremendous emphasis: “If men of that stamp are to govern the country, we shall have anarchy! Mark my words—anarchy!”
Gilbert recovered first. His face regained its usual closed impassivity, and he helped himself to butter. Marty wriggled in her chair, remembering miserably the scene she had overheard last night, rebelling violently against the creeping suspicion that Father might—might have been right about the Laughlins. What did it mean—“contesting a seat?” Was it a very bad thing to do? Should a country be governed by people who quarrelled with their wives? And what did “anarchy” mean? Mrs. Miller said, with an anxious attempt to soothe:
“Perhaps he won’t get in.”
“I trust not.” Mr. Massey’s face was still quite red with anger. “I most sincerely trust not. These Labour Governments will ruin the country. A set of agitators and windbags!”
Nick giggled so suddenly that he spat out a little shower of porridge. Mrs. Miller asked hastily: “Another cup of coffee, Walter?” But she was too late.
“You may leave the table, Nick, as you seem unable to behave properly.”
Nick climbed down from his chair, his face suffused, his eyes watering somewhere between laughter and tears. Marty, watching his small retreating figure, suddenly dropped her spoon noisily, pushed her chair back, and prepared to follow.
“Marty, how dare you leave the table in that unmannerly fashion? Sit down immediately and finish your breakfast!”
She said stormily:
“I won’t! And I like Mr. Laughlin, and I hope he does govern the country!”
Outside the door she found Nick. They fled, hand in hand, to the orchard where they cried for a few minutes and then began to eat half-green plums.
“You got out of saying your Scripture,” Nick pointed out consolingly. But Marty frowned.
“I wanted to say it,” she complained. “This time.”
Suddenly she giggled and proclaimed: “And ye, fathers, provoke not your children to wrath!” Nick beamed. They began to chant it together, stamping with their feet in a corroboree rhythm to emphasise these delectable words which held the full flavour of their protest, and which could yet be spoken without fear of rebuke, for they came out of the Bible. Nick stopped, clutched her arm, and urged: “Sh-h! There he is on the verandah!” Yes, there he was, Bible in hand, looking round for her. He called: “Marty! Marty, I am ready to hear your Scripture.” She was suddenly deliriously and defiantly conscious of her invulnerability. After all, it was her birthday and the birthday of the year. Time was friendly, time was her own, time was on her side—and now the Bible was on her side too. She called out quite loudly: “And ye, fathers, provoke not your children to wrath . . .” Nick choked with gleeful apprehension. “He’ll be wild!” Sharp and ominous came the voice from the verandah: “Marty! Come immediately when I call you!” She answered dutifully: “Yes, Father: I was just saying my Scripture over to learn it.” She winked recklessly at Nick. “See? He can’t say anything! He can’t hurt me!” She sniffed with magnificent contempt. “Nothing can hurt me!”
Nick believed her, and she almost believed herself.
Well, they both knew better now. Or perhaps she was wrong about Nick. Can you be hurt if you have no doubts? There was something, she felt, almost inhuman in Nick’s didactic certainty. Being so sure of himself, so certain of the unassailability of his formulas, gave him a kind of rigid strength; but she suspected that in a shifting world-scene, where conditions altered overnight, where tremendous events and dynamic emotions acted and reacted continuously upon each other, it meant a certain weakness too. His brain was furnished less with thoughts than with blueprints. He would produce one for any problem at a moment’s notice; his attitude was: “There it is; take it or leave it.”
So could anything hurt him? Things did anger and disgust him—and what did that mean, after all, but that he was being hurt all the time? Without even, perhaps, the consolation which she and Gilbert could find in a creative interpretation. Nick saw men and women as they are drawn in those diagrams which present a human outline as representing ten thousand of population. She and Gilbert could at least fill it in, colour it. endow it with speech, fears, hopes, the capacity of joy and suffering . . .
At last she was really sleepy. Inside the clock struck four, and outside the gate clicked, and footsteps came softly down the path. Marty’s eyelids struggled up again; a slender, white-clad figure flickered across the verandah and vanished through the french windows of the drawing-room. “Virginia,” Marty thought. rolling over and clutching the bedclothes round her shoulders. Dimly the words “home with the milk” strove to formulate themselves in her mind, and drifted instead into a rambling dream about a milkman hiding in the orchard at Glenwood, while Walter Massey, ten feet high, and dark with judgment, stood on the verandah holding a blue jug.