Читать книгу Prelude to Waking - Miles Franklin - Страница 5

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I first met Merlin in Chicago. We were there on cognate business. I had my flipper shattered early in the war and through my diplomatic connexions, and being a bright young man, was told-off to cross the Atlantic in the cause of inducing the mighty Republic to mop up her military glory on the Allies' side of the Western Front.

Merlin, being a bright young woman, had achieved the Balkan Fronts during some of the first great battles and retreats, and had been persuaded to collect North American funds for the Women's War Hospitals. This, she explained, took much more courage than to cross the Plain of Kossovo in a blizzard, to gather up human fragments under shell-fire around Bitolj, or to go on retreat from Ushtsche to Podgoritza over a trail where the howl of the wolves sometimes blotted out the sound of the pursuing guns, where the lorries decorated the sides of the icy precipices, and where the weak dropped out continuously: but there is an immolating streak of Puritanism in Merlin. It makes her on occasion see duty where every instinct rebels, and this, plus her adoration of the Serbs, sent her on that pilgrimage.

She was whoppingly successful at drawing-room meetings. She is the kind of person by whom the rich love to be slanged, and all American cities are as rich in rich women as a Christmas cake in plums, most of them Nonconformistically industrious in good works. True, some of them accomplish little beyond the sentimental evaporation consequent upon sitting in luxurious halls or "parlours" listening to talks about the unsavoury conditions of less efficient and less enterprising nationals, but the harvest was high for Merlin.

In a toy theatre, artistic and luxurious as a jewel box, on a certain evening, some war lions—French, Belgian and British—were undergoing entertainment, and a Miss Giltinane and I had been yarded to wave the Union Jack. During the obsequies (of enjoyment) my interest was aroused by overhearing a cool British voice insisting, "I haven't time to undergo any private entertainment, really I haven't, though..."

One of Chicago's Great Ladies, who was offering the entertainment, had other things besides wealth, and the wit to show them. "You cute little piece of audacity!" she exclaimed. "Only a Britisher would have the nerve to be impatient with a woman of my dollars, even in such a bewitching way. Let's elope for the evening!"

"But what about my hospitals? If you could see those poor darling Serbs staggering along a trail of death and destruction, shivering with malaria, with nothing in their knapsacks but a sodden hit of bread—nearly all holes! I'm tied on this ghastly collection wheel."

"I'll give you the biggest donation of anyone in Chicago," said the Great Lady, "if you'll slip right out now and spend the evening with me."

"Righto! That's a bargain. I'm engaged," said Miss Giltinane. Off they went together, the rich woman with a protecting arm around the poor one, and agreeing that the merely rich should be compelled to wear their earrings in their noses to the end that the likes of Miss Giltinane and the Great Lady should not be misled into wasting time on the likes of such, i.e. the merely rich.

I was left as waver-in-chief of the Union Jack, and found it more congenial and gracious to assist in acclaiming Belgium as the prodigy of a demented world's martial eruptions.

I grudged my compatriot her escape. Not that I did not enjoy similar attempts at being captured, some of them by the divinest dreams of girls; but they would have wanted to make love to me, or have expected me to make love to them. There were also members of my own sex eager to take me aside, but they would have expected me, being British, to drink and smoke, or even in more arduous ways to vindicate my virility; and as it was I was becoming a faded fratzzzzzzzle in that hysteroid campaign.

Next morning, Monday being the decrescendo day of the week, which, as a precaution against infantile senility, I kept for myself, I looked up the letter-press about Miss Giltinane. War temperature and the possibilities of publicity being what they were at that date in that locality, it screamed all across the country in headlines. In addition to the foregoing facts, it was recorded that Miss Merlin Giltinane was the great-great-grand-great&c-something of the famous Sir Guy de Giltinane, whose exploits had begun in the cradle in the old baronial hall at Dissland Snoring, culminated in the Crusades, and ended with his legs crossed in effigy, beside his good and beautiful lady missus in the little church of St Muckleberry Major.

The father of Miss Giltinane, a distant son of the Crusading house, infused with the love of adventure inbred in the sons of the Great British Empire, had wooed and won a brilliant tripos winner of Cambridge, and had settled in the Great Australian Bush from which, stated the generous reporter, came some of the most magnificent warriors in the stupendous fight for democracy, etc., etc. Miss Giltinane, it was proclaimed, showed her breeding in every line of her features, and, with a courage worthy of it, had led the retreat of the Serbian soldiers from Kragujevatz to Scutari; then to San Giovanni de Medua, where the masts of sunken food ships dotted the harbour, a monument to the enemy submarines—those vermin of the sea...

I rang up Miss Giltinane and introduced myself as a fellow British subject on a similar lay, who, being a little homesick, would like to take her to lunch. This was the wrong note. She said we were not children and had not come over to be homesick. I tried an honester note, apparently the right one with this downright, forthwith Colonial. I confessed my first sally to be a mere convention, the truth being I was so happy in the U.S.A. that I wished it were my own country.

"Good," said she. "I should like to meet you, but I haven't time for the Britishers who come over here without being pressed and then want to get together like spit-grubs and grizzle about their own superiority. The thing to do in another country is to enlarge your understanding by the very differences, not go sour on them."

I assured her that I was sound on this. "And you don't want to meow about the United States because it's not yet in the lunacy?"

"Good gracious no! If I might venture a secret I think it's jealousy."

"The fox without a tail business?"

"Yes. But we must keep our thoughts on that secret, or it would perhaps be high treason—but ah, if all the new nations could only by a Monroe Doctrine..."

"Yes! If..."

"Ssh! When they take the virus here they won't be as subdued as our Motherland birds, and we don't want to cover our missions in scandal."

"Scarcely! And we're in the cattle stampede now. There's no way out but right through."

An hour later she stood before me where she had fixed the meeting in the Allies' Cafeteria on Wabash Avenue.

"I hope you like coming here," was her greeting. "I want to learn all I can of these wonderful places. They're so cheap, and you've no snobby waiter sniffing over your food and despising you if you're not in the tow of a sleek young rake or a corpulent old profiteer; and, besides, I want to start something like this when I go hack to London."

"What for?" I asked, foolishly.

"To earn my living. I'm as poor as a crow, and I have to keep my Daddy too."

I noted her well as she chose a table, where we deposited our overcoats, and then with her tray she led the way, unaffectedly and lithely. I have a horror of burstatious looking women, who seem as if melting would be the only way to get them into their clothes, and to peel them the only way to get them out—ugh! This young person was tallish, narrowly built and compact, with an appearance of well-covered slimness. Close-fitting things on her could never look tight. She was at that date twenty-two, but there were more lines on her face than customary on women of thirty in England. Her native sun had kissed her to a fictitious age, but breeding showed in every feature. And that is claptrap, seeing that eugenics remain too undeveloped to ensure any physical or mental trait, and that the human species is reproduced by hazard. However, Merlin's nose is straight and small with exquisite nostrils. Better, her eyes are clean and fearless, like a boy's before he becomes sex-conscious, and I felt that she was free from servility or pettiness.

"So you love America tool" I said.

"Oh, heavens, yes! If only I could have come here when I was young. But my father and mother went to Australia before I was horn and I've never had a chance."

"What do you mean?"

"I should like to write. It's the universal Australian ambition, of course. Even our swaggies and business men and jockeys write poetry. Housewives and commercial travellers, or magsmen as they're called, write novels. I'd like to write, not that trash, but books on philosophy, only I'm as ignorant as a bandicoot."

"You can be thankful for that," I said, and added the platitudes common to those who have an academic education.

"Don't be silly. I thirsted for real education. Mother gave me all she could in the intervals of doing five times what any working woman in England is asked to do, but oh, to frotter la cervelle among thousands at these beautiful universities. I could have worked my way through, too. I needn't have been a burden on my parents."

The U.S.A. is indeed a country designed to free children from the handicap which a large percentage of parents in all languages undoubtedly are.

"Why don't you bring your Daddy over here? You'd find so many more openings, and a higher return for your efforts."

"I'm too proud. I wasn't bred like a guinea pig, and after spoiling one country we can't come running over here to mess up another. We have an Empiah as large as the United States, and if we can't buck-up and make countries even better than this, where all the world is rushing more eagerly than to get to heaven, well then, I do think we're chumps: because we could pick out the grand things and beware of the awful ones."

My habit is pregnant silence and fruitful observation. I am rarely moved to such a spate of self-revelation as that girl's remark released. Food forgotten, I confessed that the outbreak of war had made me one of the unhappiest of mortals.

My father started in the consular service, and through study of international law, and by reason of his ability, had got into the diplomatic swim as a legal attaché of the British Embassy at the court of Uncle Sam. My parents' earlier peregrinations had resulted in my undergoing education as it is applied to la cervelle in the Public Schools of England as well as in colleges of the United States. My father's design for me was to qualify for both the English and American Bars and to specialize in international law. I craved, rather nebulously, to write, and balked my father's ambition by becoming a teacher of English, and keeping my dream in storage. The welter of chances to earn a living in the U.S.A. makes it possible for individualistic young men to thwart parental dictation, and I had been as happy as larry in good old farraginous U.S.A. till the war broke out and I was shoved back into the restrictive plexus of nationality.

Never was British subject more Americanized than I found myself at that date; but I could become an American citizen only by forswearing my own nationality. That was repugnant to me. I am, I suppose, a snob at heart. No outstanding Europeans were becoming American citizens, though many citizens confined to small compass in Europe had become noted and rich in the U.S.A. Clemenceau, Pasteur, Poincaré, Joffre, Jaurez, Madame Curie, Bernhardt, Karl Marx, Liebknecht, Freud, Nitti, Mussolini, Lenin, Trotsky, Tolstoy, Nansen, Branting, Amundsen, Lenglen, Melba, Bernard Shaw, de Valera, Galsworthy, Sybil Thorndyke, Lord Balfour and Lloyd George had not forsworn their nationality. It wasn't being done by the distinguished. By so doing I should declass myself to myself. By an ugly oath of repudiation I should lose my own nationality, and, in the nationality of my adoption, be for ever suspect unless I adhered to the line of a raucous and materialistic patriotism.

"I'm an internationalist intellectually," I said to Merlin upon this. "I think this rabid nationalism irrational. It's a bacillus the human race has to extirpate, and I feel at the moment that one must courageously meet the obligations of one's nationality and accord the right of self-determination to others."

"Yes, even to the Scilly Isles, if they claim it."

"Perhaps. However, as I couldn't glibly change my nationality as so many Europeans, and even Britishers, can for material advancement—"

"Those who grab the rights and privileges of both countries and evade the duties are the ones that make me sick."

"All the same, I lean towards cosmopolitanism as a form of widening civilization."

"So do I, but you must have roots—a base."

"Quite. But we need something better than internationalism as it is shaping now. Universalism, perhaps, is what I mean, and the stronger and saner the national root the better based we are for that."

"Exactly. Like a person with a sound home-background."

In any case we agreed that it was impossible to denationalize an adult of any strength of character. I had felt the urge to vindicate my nationality by enlisting in time for those first retreats when we had no trenches, in the days of Mons, when we doubled back and fired on ourselves, when the bullets came at us like a swarm of bees, and it was a miracle that retreat did not become a rout.

"But my national self-satisfaction was undermined by having lived over here for years, and I was wretched in the inefficiency of old-world methods. The domestic inconveniences! Comfort is impossible!"

"Yes, just think of the housekeeping arrangements here! Like paradise by comparison."

"Yes! I wasn't at home in the Homeland and could be only a sojourner in the land of my heart. I've been more miserable than I thought possible over the out-worn tin-pot ways of doing things. To see those palsied old women at the Queen's Workrooms trying to make a slipper out of a bit of rag; and the doddering old special constables, about as deadly as a taty-bogle. All the young being blown to pieces to settle their messes, and a new idea regarded as bad form."

"Well, of course," responded Miss Giltinane cheerily, "one expects the Motherland to be rather a back number: but still we must preserve it because it's a rich museum of things that have prestige from the cultural angle. Besides, it's a valuable headquarters for the Empiah in Europe. It's this way: England's like one's grandmother, naturally a bit antiquated, but all the same very important, and knowing and having more than we have. One must stand by one's grannie."

"Hang it all, I'm not your grannie, and most of those boys dying in the mud are as young as you are."

"But you had the good fortune to get shaken up overseas before you ossified. Dear little brushed-and-combed museum England—perfectly darling in its way, but terribly narrowing if one hadn't known the great new parts of the world, don't you think? What can we do to wake them up before everything has slipped from them? My Daddy says England's too full of dead wood."

"He's very likely right."

"He means those old jossers pomping about the clubs in Piccadilly and Whitehall. There's a perfect specimen at the Red Cross in Pall Mall. He inspects all us women going to the Front—an old chook with purple cheeks and shaky hands—Indian Major-General or something. He shrivels up the women, and the silly things aren't game to stand up to him. 'Call yourself a woman! Trying to be a man! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!' he snarled at me. 'I'm ashamed of you—trying to be a fool,' I said to him, and he was going to play old Harry with me; but I told him if he acted like that in the backblocks when a fire was rushing towards the homestead we'd fling him in the dam to cool his head: and that the war's like a terrible fire menacing the whole Empiah, and it's no time to be dillying about waiting for formal introductions and asking if one is male or female. And he calmed down like a lamb and said, 'So you've come all the way from the antipodes to help save the Empiah!' And he shook hands with me and opened the door with a stately bow. So even he wasn't a bad old grub when sense was knocked into him. I expect he was ruined early by pomping about India among submerged millions."

I lay back and laughed, happier than I had been for weeks, at the thought of that capitulating Anglo-Indian. The Empiah could not be lost if this girl's spirit was typical of England's chicks that gathered from afar upon seeing the blaze in the sky.

"Merlin Giltinane," said I, "may I call you by your first name?"

"I should love you to. What's yours?"

"Nigel, but my father has first right to that, so I'm Nije or Nig, but that's too like Nigger."

"Oh, let me call you Niggeh! With your fair complexion it will be a lark and show the dear Negroes that we don't mind. Like the Indians, they don't like to be called 'natives'; and we Australians just burst with pride to be natives of Australia."

"You Australians are chips of the old block. You have no national inferiority complex."

Why the blazes didn't I fall desperately in love with Merlin then instead of...What a lot of trouble it saves a man to have a commanding love affair that lasts! It is just possible that she may have taken me had I offered her a maiden passion. It is more possible that she may not: but virility will have fled the globe and none but Mr Shaw's he-ancients remain when more than a negligible percentage of men doubt their ability to win any woman, princess or pauper.

But how can a man fall in love with a woman, however young and fair and love-worthy, while she is heliographing ideals for the Empiah such as to inspire and demand cerebration by a statesman, and betrays her unconsciousness of the scale of view of the "old chooks" pomping or hibernating on Piccadilly, by referring to England as a valuable pied à terre? How could a man, I insist, for it is true that to "fall in love" a man has to suffer the total bereavement of whatsoever reason and wits he has.