From that date I began to have more practice in love, or perhaps it was merely experience.
The following morning I posted my article to Mr. Wilting, then opened my mail. In it was a long letter from Big Ears. He told me that he loved me to distraction. Every day since I had come to town he had perched in a Moreton Bay fig in his grounds which overlooked our route to the ferry, to watch me go by. Would I, could I ever think of him? He would have patience for ten years if necessary. I was shocked. What would Edmée think—when she had been so kind to me! Fortunately she despised him, and was waiting for him to propose solely to dismiss him. With another section of myself I thought, Huh! if I put this down, Mr. Wilting would say I know nothing of how men make love.
I hadn’t time to think just then: the telephone rang and Mrs. Crasterton called me. “You had better hear the whole of this,” she said. “I find you are a wise young thing and seem to know more than those who are trying to instruct you.”
She handed me the second ear piece. Zoë de Vesey was speaking.
Now it appears that Australia has one great literary man, or that one great literary man was a native of Australia? He had been many years in London, had gone HOME on the Press Association but in London had had the opportunity to turn into a real man of letters. He was now one of the most successful playwrights of the day. His plays had record runs in London. Here was a comet with two tails when compared with the LOCAL CACKLERS. He made pots of money, Zoë said, but his expensive tastes kept ahead of his income. He went everywhere and was a social lion. And this great god had expressed the wish to see little me during his visit to his native land.
He had been born on the Northern Tableland as I on the Southern, but he had gone to the University and had swum about in SOCIETY since a tadpole, whereas I had simply been entitled to do so, but had been kept on the cockatoo level because of indigence.
At the time of the Diamond Jubilee he had won a prize for an ode entitled, Australia to England!, and became known as the Australian Swinburne. However, he had quickly renounced all Australian crudities and had written a novel of London entitled The Woman Who Wilted, one of the greatest circulating library successes, which had earned him the title of the Australian Anthony Hope.
“He doesn’t seem to be anything on his own hook”, thinks I to myself.
On going to London he had not stressed his Australian origin but played the game on London lines. He had outdone the Londoners in Londonness through having more of England known in knowing Australia too. His comedies of duchesses and high ladies who knew all about extracting the erotic excitement from amour, as Gaddy put it, were the last word in being risque without being bannable. He was a SUCCESS. He must be just reeking with EXPERIENCE, thinks I, drinking in this titillating news.
He had had to fight for long years in London for recognition, and might never have won it only that he had got away as a war correspondent for the Daily Thunderer for a year with the Boers, and his articles had charmed everyone. He was a sizzling imperialist. Rhodes had condescended to him, Kipling patted him on the back, Barney Barnato nudged him in the ribs. He was on the way to a title and all that. What he needed to complete him was a wealthy and influential marriage. Only now could he afford to emphasise his Australian nativity and turn it to commercial account.
He had always kept in touch with the Press Association and while out was to do some articles on Australia from an imperial angle which would appear in The Thunderer and The Argus, or perhaps it was The Age,—I can’t tell these two apart. He was also connected with a leading publishing house, and if he saw anything worth picking up, was to pick it up. This gave him great importance among us poor LOCAL CACKLERS, of which I was the localest and least. If he could, without compromising his status and deteriorating his attainments, he would insert an Australian character or scene in his next comedy. His former set was jubilant about this. He was trumpeted as a good Australian. Zoë did not tell us all this on the telephone at that moment. This was pieced together later from different sources of information or misinformation.
What Zoë said, and the reason she said some of it was because she ranked Mr. Goring Hardy very high as one who both did and had. She said that to meet him was a unique chance and would be an education for a little girl like me. He thought there was promise in my book, though he did not approve of its point of view. It was possible, Zoë said, that something might come to me through his interest, but she did not want the poor little thing: to be hurt in any way. Goring was a fascinating fellow and he might take the imagination of a girl reared in seclusion. Too many strings had harped to his bow. Zoe’s advice was that I should not be too accessible. “He wants her to call at his office at Cunningham and Bucklers, but he must meet the poor little thing in the proper way.”
“I’ll see to that,” said Mrs Crasterton.
“I want to have her here, but I haven’t a spare hour this week,” said Zoe.
Mrs. Crasterton turned to me. “He must come to us. I shall let him see that you are a celebrity too.”
She telephoned to the Union Club for Mr. Hardy to call her, and he did. He started by ordering that I should be sent to him—like a girl from a registry office seeking employment.
“He does feel his oats,” remarked Mrs. Crasterton. aside. “But my people were bishops and generals when his were mere market gardeners.”
“Oh, no,” she continued into the phone. “I’m so sorry. I haven’t time to go with her this week. We could try to wedge you in here though. So many people are craving for my little friend’s time that the days are not long enough. Perhaps you could come to breakfast.”
At last he was so generous and condescending as to say he would come to dinner that very day if we would not mind his running away immediately after. He had to open an artist’s show at five and was to be at an official gathering at Government House that evening. Mrs. Crasterton said that would fit nicely as we too would be engaged until six and had an after-dinner engagement.
On that night Gaddy went to his Club. His sister asked him to support her, “After all, Mr. Hardy is a really distinguished man,” she observed.
“Don’t lose your head,” Gaddy replied, “he certainly has marketed himself like a politician, but when it comes to literary genius, we have five hundred poets, every blooming one boomed as the greatest, but some of the greatest have yet to be born.”
Derek, on the other hand, loudly lamented that he was not to be home for dinner. “Hardy’s a regular swell,” he said, “not in the same street with the little unwashed ‘potes’.”
Edmée was half through an elaborate toilette when we got home that evening, and poor Mrs. Crasterton was taken with cramps and had to go to bed. Edmée unselfishly gave up her dinner engagement to dine at Geebung Villa.
“It’s really an amazing condescension for Goring Hardy to come to see you,” she said. “It must be because Zoë de Vesey’s mother knew yours and it has become the thing to see you. He is run after right and left. Some panjandrum in the literary world in London has written out to him to find out what you are like, and if you could ever write anything else. You had better make the most of your furore while it lasts.”
A little later Mr. Hardy telephoned that he found himself half-an-hour ahead of his schedule and would have a chat with me before dinner. “Don’t let him paralyse you,” Edmée said. “Women throw themselves at him, especially the married ones . . . I think,” continued Edmée reflectively, “it must be no end of sport to be safely married and then seek a little diversion.”
I sat tight in my room until the maid had a colloquy with Mrs. Crasterton and then came to me. I stole down the back stairway, catching sight of my reflection in a mirror—like a doll in the white dress and Gad’s big sash.
A tall figure in immaculate toggery—a dress-coat knight with silk on heel—rose from a couch and looked so hard at me that I was unable to withstand the battery of his glances. His whole face was indicative of keenness and might have been that of a money-lender, a bishop or any other manager of property and investments, instead of a poet and literary man.
The hard blue brightness of his eyes sent me firmly into my shell. He had light eyelashes that reminded me of our old white boar, whom I despised, as he did so precious little for his upkeep. Mr. Hardy’s bright stare was relentless, and not free from cruelty, though I felt that he gave me swift credit for all my good points—complexion, youth, silky shining hair, feminine lines. My inventory of men was equally comprehensive and penetrating.
In thinking of him in the years that have gone I know it was his unalloyed maleness that hurt me. He would appraise women in the light of the pleasure or service they could give him. He had no scrap of that understanding for which I was hungry. That perhaps is to be found only in men of more complexity, who have something of the mothers who bore them as well as of the fathers whose name they bear.
I could be “simply ripping” to Mr. Hardy if I let fly with one side of my disposition, and there was yet another that would also be tempting to him. A man who had sipped deeply of forbidden women would like thoroughly untried soil, so I sat down primly in the full bloom of conventional innocence and waited for him to play first.
“Well, do you like Sydney?” he asked, quizzically.
“The Harbor is lovely,” I breathed ecstatically.
“Well, well! You really are as young as advertised,” he remarked. “I expected you to be at least thirty, with knives in your socks. Celebrities are usually well on in years before they are known.”
He made remarks in the character of the fake autobiography, but that sent me as far into my shell as a winter snail, so he did a little putting to get me out again, staring with an expression of vivid interest and amusement. He was talking to one whom he estimated as without the defence of social savoir faire.
“How do you come to be putting up with the Old Campaigner? Is she going to see you through?”
“She is very kind to me,” I rebuked him.
“She’s not a bad old bolster, but you needn’t feel indebted to anyone for entertaining you. You ought to charge ’em. You’ve provided a lot of idle resourceless women with a new sensation.”
“More men than women have come to see me, and have given me luncheons and lunch parties,” I said, like a child.
“By jove! Have they? I seem to be behind the times. What stamp of callers does the old Campaigner most encourage? Poets, I suppose. What would you think of a poet for a lover?”
“The Lord preserve me! Common men, when spoony, are sickly enough in poetic quotation.”
“Well done, little one! I believe you could sock the balls across the net like a champion if you liked. What about Gad—the old egg, we used to call him.”
“Gad is a dear,” I said staunchly. “He is so kind to me.”
“I expect he can’t help himself.” Mr. Hardy laughed shortly, with a tantalising gleam in his brilliant eyes.
Edmée appeared in her grand pale green satin with the foamy cloak half-slipping from her shoulders, and made soft coo-ing explanations of poor dear Mrs. Crasterton’s indisposition. Mr. Hardy instantaneously changed into a different man, with a face as grave as a judge’s and which suddenly looked lined and old. He talked in a high tenor drawl and asked if he might telephone.
While he was out, Edmée remarked, “You look all lighted up. Getting your heart cracked right at the jump?”
A little giddy, I said, “He might fall in love with me. Other men have.” Roderic Quinn, Banjo Paterson, John Farrell, Rolf Boldrewood, E. J. Brady, Sidney Jephcott, Henry Lawson, Victor Daley and others had all taken notice of me in some way—some had flattered me in verses and voices of many colours, two had even kissed me—in a fraternal fashion, I ween.
“You little softy! The idea of Goring Hardy falling in love with any woman for more than a week! I heard today from old friends that it was suggested by a high official that he had better take a trip to Australia. That explains why he would waste his time here in his prime. He was much too friendly with a certain titled lady—a relative of royalty, and the husband threatened to use him as co-respondent. That bird is not to be caught with chicken feed.”
We went in to dinner. Mr. Hardy made orthodox remarks with orthodox politeness, that politeness called chivalry, which women are expected to accept in lieu of their rightful control of the race and the ordering of life with sanity and justice for their children.
Mr. Hardy ignored me entirely. Edmée took it as a matter of course that he should. I was twittering internally to realise that little me from ’Possum Gully was in a SOCIETY scene at last. Here was a belle who drove men to distraction, palpitating her snowy bosom and twitching her shoulders so that no contour was wasted, and languishing and ogling in the exercise of sexual attraction on a man who had been clandestinely loved by a titled married lady (there were always clandestine affairs in the novels of lords and ladies I had read) and wearing silk socks. I had never before seen a man wearing silk socks. My own were cashmere, and Mrs. Thrumnoddy earned money by describing them as cotton. Think of the EXPERIENCE I was imbibing in sophistication, in savoir faire—taking these two out of winding.
Mr. Hardy did not seem in a hurry during dinner, and acceded to Edmée’s invitation to coffee before running away. He said he had telephoned, and had a half-hour longer than he expected. In the drawing-room they continued to ignore me, but I sometimes found those hard bright eyes on me in a stimulating way. Edmée gave him all sorts of gossip interesting to a homecomer. I took refuge in a big album. Here were people who by their style of dress had been old when I was born. I forgot Edmée and Mr. Hardy in wondering how many of these album people still lived, how many had gone into that awful silence, which I hate and resent.
Edmée was called to the telephone, and Mr. Hardy surprised me by springing rather than walking to my side of the room.
“Tell me what you are thinking as you look at those old frumps.”
“They aren’t frumps. I was thinking that once they were girls just like me, and wondering did they long for things as I do.”
“Don’t worry about them; they all had their day. Take yours while you can. They weren’t like you: they were ordinary.”
The camellia fell from his button-hole and I hastened to replace it as Edmée returned. She laughed something about the white flower of a blameless life, and her glance had that flicker which saves her from being overlooked by the men who like women who are up in masculine sophistications, and condone them.
As Mr. Hardy was bidding good-night to Edmée he said casually, “I want your little friend to meet Cunningham the publisher tomorrow morning. I could send a cab for her.”
“She will be delighted to go; it is good of you to take an interest in her,” said Edmée without consulting me.
“Imagine him staying all that time—wasn’t going to spare a moment at first—haw-haw, the great man!” said Edmée.
“But he went to telephone to get time immediately he saw you. Why don’t you distract him?”
“What would be the use? A man of his tastes must marry money, and he’s old enough in the horn to know it. But he’s most fascinating.”
Edmée telephoned the friends, to whom she had been going, of her triumph. Mr. Hardy had come for five minutes with the prodigy, but had stayed with her, and, as Mrs. Crasterton was ill, she could not leave the ship, and so on. Well, it was lucky when people came and saw that I was nothing, that Edmée was on hand to save them from disappointment.
The parlour maid was admitting Big Ears, so I sped to my room and left him to Edmée. I felt sure that Mr. Hardy had noticed my sash. I had not previously been noticed so intensely by sophistication, and found it thrilling. I sat down to enjoy my diary.