Читать книгу Prelude to Waking - Miles Franklin - Страница 6

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Next day our ways separated. Merlin was working north by Minneapolis and St Paul into Canada, and I going farther west. She gave me an address that would always find her, somewhere in the Home Counties, where her maternal grandfather had been rector of St Botolph in the Turnips, a living in the gift of Baron Clingford, his cousin. Miss Clingford, Merlin's maternal aunt, never let anyone overlook the baronial cousinship.

When I returned to England I meant to write immediately to that address, but I never do this day what procrastination can defer to that, so went to Yorkshire to stay with my own maternal aunt. At fifty she was more blooming than many women of thirty-five, but was fretting sadly because the war was killing my grandfather. He was now eighty-two, a fine old buffer of robust intellect, who feared that the war was exterminating Liberal principles in England. After a week at golf with him I thought the Front would be a holiday, and this time I went with a Commission.

On my last night's leave a Serbian prince was to be entertained at one of the Piccadilly Clubs, and noting that members of the Women's War Hospitals were to be present to do him honour, I bethought me of Merlin Giltinane and decided to look in.

This time procrastination did not intervene and I found a few uninteresting people pawing over a gent with a straight hack to his skull, whose uniform proclaimed him a Serb; but no Merlin. My escape was blocked by a large handsome hostess who intimated that she would a word with me, and as she bagged real lions in Africa like fowls, and social lions in London like tame pheasants, I meekly hove to. She was addressing some minion unseen, and sounded quite ruffled in the expensively tailored uniform she favoured. "I don't have as much trouble to get a duchess to accept invitations as I do you."

"Perhaps the duchess has nothing better to do, and I have to work like a horse to save the Empiah and support myself and my Daddy."

Here was my quarry, so I circumvoluted the majestic lady to attain the smaller in the trim short-skirted uniform of the Women's War Hospitals. The powerful Londoner put her arm about her just as the Great Lady in Chicago had done, and coaxed, "There's a pet now, do come to my party. You can leave the moment you like, and you needn't be so proud of working for your Daddy that you turn up your nose at less fortunate mortals who haven't a Daddy left to work for."

"You've put it in such a generous and undermining way that I'll have to do what you want," said Merlin. Then she saw me. "Hullo, Niggeh old grub!" she exclaimed, picking up our congeniality just where it had begun in Chicago.

We spent most of what remained of that night together, re-expounding ourselves and our reactions towards nationality, internationality, imperialism, self-determinism, etc., etc. That was the reason I did not fall desperately in love with Merlin at the second opportunity, for a woman must let slip the garment of intelligence, and let the light of the coquette, or the noodle ( which sentimentality will exalt into that of a dove), rather than that of Minerva or Saint Joan, glint in her eyes ere amour will experience a coming-on disposition.

What I mean is illustrated by this thing in its lower reaches, when a beautiful girl of eighteen, if intelligent, can roam the world alone unmolested, while her moron sister of any age, and lacking beauty, is not in her own bailiwick safe among so-called gentlemen.

Merlin was still the crusader, intent upon salvaging her national section of the human family. Her heart, her intelligence, her energy, were bent to this racial, public purpose. What a different memory from that of her misguided sisters she gave a man to carry into the conflict! For all I dare pretend to know of life's pattern or purpose the others may not be misguided. They were, however, concerned with what they could feverishly snatch and recklessly give through the senses, lest the hour of disintegration find them unproved. Merlin was a spiritual oriflamme. Their preoccupation was with the body, with obtrusion and advertisement of it. Merlin was free from those coquetries that direct a man's observation and, if possible, desire toward it.

"Those poor deah gentle little pink Tommies and subalterns going out to die after the methods of mad gorillas, and never a meow out of them! It's so magnificent yet so stupendously demented—just like men. All one can do is stand by them till they calm down again. Oh, Niggeh dear, you have to go now too! Isn't it lunacy to destroy people who have a thinking apparatus, when they're so scarce! I hope you come back, because it's when it's all over we shall have to do our realest bit."

She was going again to the Balkans amid malaria and typhus. She tiptoed and bestowed on me the white kiss of consecration that sends a man toward death aware of that in him which surmounts the beast and survives the flesh.