19

They did not meet again often during the spring. Aïda was busy moving into her new house in the university grounds, and as she was still in half-mourning for Ada, she did not attend many of the Cup Week festivities.

Sophie and Kenneth had come to Melbourne for a few days and were staying with Caroline. Sim invited them all to drive out in his drag to Flemington on steeplechase day. Sophie had not yet applied divine standards to racing. She believed betting and gambling to be wrong, having come to that conclusion at Monte Carlo, ten years earlier. But she had grown up so much in an atmosphere of horses and racing, that it had seemed to her as normal an activity of mankind as ploughing, or swimming, or travelling by train. Now she was called upon to decide if it were pleasing to the Almighty.

She did not want to create a social hitch by conscientious objection. She equivocated by saying that she had not a suitable frock. Jane offered to buy her one. She told Jane of her doubts.

‘You can’t live in society without accepting its standards,’ said Jane.

‘I want to accept the standards of God,’ Sophie declared.

Jane frowned. She thought this a piece of sheer priggishness. But Sophie had soaked herself in her Bible, and believed it as implicitly as she believed the news in her morning paper. She visualised Christ walking on the Sea of Galilee as clearly as a boy being attacked by a shark, while bathing off St. Kilda. She believed that celestial reward and retribution were as definite and almost as imminent as a fine of forty shillings for spitting in a railway carriage. She pictured the last judgment as materially in the same matter-of-fact way that she would picture the magistrate’s bench. She was far more practical than priggish.

Madeleine des Baux had seen nothing beyond the grave but dust and darkness. Love, or her idea of love, had been the supreme pleasure of her existence, and, practically, she had determined to cram as much of it, and as many lovers as possible, into the short span of life. To Sophie the span of life was nothing but a kindergarten. Love, too, was the supreme interest of her life, and equally, practically, she was going to allow nothing in her kindergarten behaviour to interfere with the prospect of eternal bliss. Their respective careers were governed solely by their eschatological beliefs.

She took the new frock, however, and would rather have sent the money to the Zenana Bible Society, which endeavoured to bring Gospel light to the ladies of the harem.

Sophie sat in the grand stand watching the steeplechase. At the end only three jockeys remained up. Two had been carried on stretchers off the course. Sophie felt sick. In her youth she had taken these accidents as a matter of course. Now they appeared to her part of a system of wanton savagery. She turned and watched the faces of the people behind her. They were tense with excitement, anxious for their stakes. While for those limp figures on the stretchers, tragedy had happened, every one of this vast crowd was only thinking of how much money he would gain or lose. It was the standards of these people that Jane told her she must accept. She looked at them with an unconscious disdain. All our civilization was only a heritage from Babylon the Mighty, the Scarlet Woman. She waited impatiently for the time when they were to enter the drag for the drive home.

On the evening of the previous day there had been a ball at Government House. Sophie went with Kenneth and Caroline. She danced occasionally with Kenneth, and three times with Richard. Simon did not ask her to dance.

She sat against the wall in a kind of throne-room, where the Governor held investitures, and watched the guests as they came in from the ballroom. She compared them with the guests at the last dance she had been to, the hunt ball in Somerset. There the men had been very much of the same type, well-groomed with tight red faces, marked on the whole by no great intelligence of expression. But here there was greater diversity. Some of the men were what is considered typically English, fair, with pinkish colouring. Of these were the aides-de-camp and Richard. There were a number of young squatters from the country, some rather oafish, others with a certain simplicity and kindliness which showed in their wrinkled smiling eyes. There were the Melbourne gentlefolk, mostly of quite a different type from the English county families, partly owing to the tanning of the sun, and partly to the strong admixture of Scottish and Irish blood. There was a considerable percentage of new rich, who had survived the disaster of the boom, fat women blazing with jewels followed by meek wealth-producing husbands, or fat wealth-producing husbands followed by lean, less resplendent wives. Sophie noticed that there was hardly a couple of which both were fat, though there were some of which both were lean.

Dora, with odd bits of jewellery in her fair untidy hair, came up with a kind of huge charwoman clad in red satin and a necklace of enormous diamonds.

‘Sophie,’ she said, ‘this is Mrs. Rodd-Morton. Mrs. Rodd-Morton, my sister Sophie, Mrs. Blair, you know.’ She could never manage an introduction without confusion.

Mrs. Rodd-Morton was like a calm cow. She gazed at Sophie and said it was a fine evening. Sophie, not given to unnecessary conversation, said:

‘Yes.’

Mrs. Rodd-Morton gazed a little longer and then moved away, to pass like a dreadnought through the battle for supper.

Dora, since her marriage, had acquired a new circle of acquaintance, mostly of the type of Mrs. Rodd-Morton. They did not discompose her by the conscious superiority which she found trying in some of her own relatives and their set. On the contrary they were inclined to treat her with respect as one of the old families. They were very rich and, with a malicious smile, she would tell her relatives of their magnificence.

‘Mrs. Rodd-Morton is such a nice woman,’ she said to Sophie.

‘Is she?’ Sophie asked uninterestedly.

‘Yes, she drove me here in her carriage. She is very rich and has a beautiful home—and a butler.’

‘Um,’ said Sophie.

Dora described Mrs. Rodd-Morton’s drawing-room.

If Sophie had a sense of superiority it was subconscious. She had not spoken to Mrs. Rodd-Morton because she had nothing to say, except to ask her if her heart were right with God, and for Dora’s sake, giving way to a weakness of the spirit, she had refrained from doing this.

Dora’s manner implied that Sophie, with her simple farmhouse, need not be so supercilious. Fred Riley’s social standards were set entirely by income, and Dora had adopted these.

‘Dora, do you say your prayers regularly?’ Sophie asked suddenly and solemnly.

Dora flushed and fidgeted.

‘What a question to ask here!’ she exclaimed.

‘God is here, in this room, as much as anywhere else,’ said Sophie. ‘If you open your heart to God He will show you where true happiness lies. It is not in butlers and carriages.’

Sim came up and sat beside them. He began to comment on the people who passed. A weedy-looking youth in ill-fitting clothes went by.

‘That feller’s descended from John of Gaunt and Katharine Swynford,’ Sim said.

Another young man, very smooth and assured, with an orchid in his button-hole, came in.

‘His grandfather was a butcher in Tasmania,’ Sim continued to air his strange and useless knowledge.

‘I think you are horrid, papa,’ said Dora. ‘It’s far, far more important what people are than what they have been.’

‘It’s far more important what they will be,’ said Sophie thoughtfully.

‘Don’t keep nagging at me about Hell,’ said Sim sulkily, and went off to find a pretty girl to take to supper.

Sophie and Dora sat in silence for a while. Then Dora started and put her hand on Sophie’s arm.

‘Look!’ she said, ‘no, don’t look.’

Aïda and Richard had come in from the ballroom. Aïda wore a simple black frock and a rope of pearls, one strand of a magnificent de Moya necklace, which Florez had detached and given her on her marriage. She held her head high, and her colour was bright. Several people turned to look at her, but she and Richard were oblivious of the rest of the company. They were absorbed in each other, talking quietly together, and it seemed, scarcely looking to see where they were going.

‘Isn’t it dreadful?’ Dora said. ‘Whenever they meet they look like that. Just after Aïda arrived I found them alone together in Grantie’s drawing-room. I could feel they didn’t want me.’

‘What do you mean?’ Sophie asked. ‘There is no reason why they shouldn’t look as they feel. They are very old friends. They’ve been playfellows since they were children. Is that how Mrs. Rodd-Morton teaches you to think?’ she added with a touch of scorn.

‘You always turn on me,’ said Dora. ‘I didn’t know your religion let married women have lovers.’

Sophie felt that she could not begin to approach Dora’s standpoint. She could not answer her and rose to greet Aïda.

Dora gave a wry smile, and went off to console herself with a rich friend.

‘Sophie.’ Aïda held out her left hand. They had not met since Sophie’s visit to Spain. Seeing her made more vivid for Aïda the memory of the week at the castle. She and Richard had arrived at the stage of such complete understanding of each other, of having awakened in each other such reserves of love, that they welcomed the presence of a third person whom they both liked, to share their abundant happiness.

They sat down together, Aïda between Sophie and Richard. Sophie could feel their serenity, and it gave her the same sensation that she had when she felt that her prayers were effective, the feeling of loving all things, which now spread to her from Richard and Aïda.

The Governor and his wife, followed by a procession of small vice-royalties from other states, came through from the ballroom. The Governor’s wife, a tall woman with a beaky nose, a tiara, and a cold smile, stopped and spoke to Aïda, who made a curtsy, sinking and rising with something of the rhythm of a wave. Of all those present she was perhaps the only one for whom the brief assumption of royalty would have been without awkwardness or stiffness. Having addressed a few well-meant words to her temporary subject, the Governor’s wife gave a glance and a nod to Sophie, and the procession passed on.

Sim came back and said that he would not have the horses kept waiting any longer, and told Richard to find Jane.