Читать книгу Prelude to Waking - Miles Franklin - Страница 8

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To support herself and Daddy, Merlin had intended to introduce a cafeteria to London. The idea bad to be abandoned at that date, owing to the impossibility of imposing a new mechanical plant upon English domestic antiquarianism. Imperviousness to mechanical innovations plus equanimity before a new idea has had an inconsistent effect upon British progress.

Instead of a cafeteria, therefore, Merlin, partnered by two others who had also served in the Women's War Hospitals, opened a little luncheon place on one floor not far from Piccadilly. It quickly increased to three floors. It was called the Mia Mia. Some mistook this for an attempt at a lovalilly title in one of the Mediterranean tongues till they were educated by the construction by Daddy of a little mia mia in an alcove at one end of the second floor, and the explanation that this was an Australian aboriginal shelter against the weather, and that the name had been chosen because of one of the proprietresses' Australian connexions and to indicate an unpretentious place.

The Londoner imagines himself completely aware, but one has only to observe him dabbing his rosy little nose on a new monument to realize how deliciously naïf he is about the most trivial innovations. So the mia mia proved a great advertisement. Similar stunts succeeded it. The Mia Mia Restaurant, Ltd was always packed at meal hours. The success of the undertaking was that these young women worked themselves, and each had special ability. The failure of it, as far as Merlin was concerned, was that poor old Daddy Giltinane, or Merlin's Daddy, as he was affectionately known, had practically nothing to do: and his restlessness could be alleviated only by ceaseless activity.

Daddy had flourished during the war. He loved to tickle the earth, and all the gardeners around St Botolph in the Turnips with the exception of one or two antique grandfathers having been called to dig trenches elsewhere, Daddy Giltinane had valiantly and opportunely filled the home breach. Then only sixty-six, and hale as people who have lived an outdoor life, he felt capable to outdo any man among Kitchener's tea-and-toast Tommies, and early sought to enlist in the regular army. He had, however, suffered rejection, that being the "bursted particular" season for volunteers. Later, his years had accumulated.

That he should thus be saving the Empiah had been a laudable, a gentlemanly, a Crusading enterprise, and Miss Clingford—of the family of Baron Clingford, don't forget!—upon whom he was quartered, managed to endure him by keeping his Crusading pedigree in the foreground and excusing his eccentricities by reason of his long sojourn on barbarous frontiers.

He also wandered around the gentle villages as a special constable, and was an entertaining windfall to the frail old tutor, the athletic butcher, and a couple of others associated with him. It became for them an inspiriting game of follow-my-leader, for Guy revelled in the dark nights and kept his comrades from falling in the ditches, while under the hedges he spun yarns about kangaroos and snakes, and blacks, and bandicoots, and sundowners and buck-jumping, and horse-racing; about birds that enjoyed folk-dancing upon the plains; about birds that laughed uproariously at the foolish antics of man; about droughts when all the world knew not one blade of grass; about floods when all the world was a sea, when settlers used their dog-kennels and pianos and fowl-houses as boats, when the rivers turned on themselves, and steamships lost the track; about rabbits that stretched from the rising to the going-down of the sun with not a needle-point of space between; about sandstorms that buried houses and fences, and many phenomena far from the ken of St Botolph and his turnips.

Daddy had been happily busy from morning till night and unacquainted with bodily fatigue or mental lassitude, while the ladies cooed softly that they did not know what would have happened to their gardens but for "that dear, wonderful, strange Mr Giltinane (he's descended—did you know?—from the Crusading Giltinanes of Dissland Snoring, and went away out into the wilds of Australia ). Isn't it good of him to help us as he does! His dear little daughter is with the Women's War Hospitals. Oh, yes, was on a retreat—with wolves! There's nothing like our own people, you know. They may occasionally be crude and—um—a little rough and urn—lacking in cultchah, but the breed always tells."

Convention forbade that Merlin should let her ageing Daddy out as an odd-jobs man after the Armistice had set. She must needs go to work to support him.

The place in Australia had been left to her brother to work. An accident that had left him with a groggy back debarred him from fighting for his country, even as a stretcher-bearer, so he had sent Daddy and Merlin, and stuck disappointedly to the land to produce that superb wool on which the convolutions of war profits had made fortunes for middle-men while the guns roared. What the Giltinanes inherited through Mrs Giltinane, with something borrowed, had sufficed for second-class passages at pre-war cost.

Thanks to the boom in wool Guy Giltinane managed to send remittances, but Daddy's coruscations not having been as a business man, there was an overdraft and other debts, and Merlin had an ambition to stand on her own feet.

The problem was to employ Daddy. The newspapers held him only an hour or two. Mia Mia stunts were intermittent. He peeled the potatoes for the restaurant, which was tolerated because real ladies were engaged in similar tasks, and Daddy was a pet among them: but only an ocean liner's greed for peeled potatoes could have fully occupied him.

Merlin suggested that he should do my window-boxes. Ah, ha! No more dreary aspidistras for me! I left them for the Express Dairy Company and went in for imantyphillums. The Cobbler and the other tenants also had striking fancies. The result was a revolution in window-boxes, and Daddy and the stairs in a gorgeous mess, but I undertook with Mrs Char Brindle to see to that, proud to be able to serve Merlin. But the window-boxes were soon reconstituted, the potatoes peeled, any messages we could concoct gleefully run—and what was there for Daddy? He was a reader of history and adventurous romance, but reading is a feeble substitute and quickly irked one of his restlessness. He took small boys to the Zoo, but we ran out of small boys, they at that date being industriously engaged in saving the Empiah by imbibing education. We sent him to Exhibitions, war and otherwise, but with the optic celerity and precision of those trained in the strange Australian bush, such artifices were dispatched d'un seul coup d'oeil.

Poor old Guy! He was like one of those caged wild things that people coddle in cities in the delusion that they love animals!

Merlin's idea was a little cottage in the outer suburbs with a garden where Daddy could grow vegetables for the restaurant. "If Daddy can only cover himself entirely with earth like a wombat, he's perfectly happy," she said. But places were impossible to acquire in that post-war era, and domestic helpers were work-shy, and it was altogether hard slogging for Merlin. At the end of the day she was often too spent for anything but bed.

But there was Daddy like a devouring engine of energy demanding manipulation.

He conversed lengthily with the Cobbler, who listened civilly, and Merlin was accordingly considerate of the Cobbler. He likewise yarned to me for hours and was welcome, since, in my glorious emancipation, I had leisure. He was a curious compound of the dreamer and a man of action—that is of physical motion. His ideas had the quality of one who, say in the eighties or nineties, had been exiled to some spot where current ideas rarely percolated, and who therefore had continued in exercise of those of the earlier date. His ideas were as out of mode as a poke-bonnet. A man of ideas, withal, and unconventional. He was distressed by the snobbery and cramped conventionality of England.

"It hasn't changed," he would say. "When the war's over, you'll see. Take the old Blinking-Blowfly at St Botolph in the Turnips; when she carried home her three ha'p'orth of fish she squawked for the whole village to observe her democracy—blooming old parakeet! If she'd seen us carrying home half a beast, or salting a whole one at Coolibah, and never thinking to mention the democracy of it!"

Daddy always referred to this most self-respecting British subject as the Blinking-Blowfly, though her ancient and honoured patronymic was Bleeker-Blofield.

"Dead wood! Dead wood!" he would murmur. "No one who's not a producer or a worker of some sort should live in a nation. They're dead wood. We must all produce. A nation carrying too much dead wood cannot survive."

All those old samples in Piccadilly making a career of their clubs, all those, like my aunt and his sister-in-law, were to Guy dead wood. He had quite a thesis in his producer theory, though production for production's sake, or profit's sake, may result in such irregularities as a boot town choked with unmarketable wares while Whitechapel's chilblained toes protrude.

"There's my sister-in-law, a good, clever woman, but narrow! God! She's like something brought up in a bottle that's only seen as far as the cork—narrow! She'd have been a great woman if she could have been rolled in the gutter!"

One day this thought escaped him, whether in reverie or argument I know not. Miss Clingford had a real lady's horror of a scene and had sustained herself by classifying such philosophizing as "raving", but Merlin had thought it better to abstract Daddy.

The cadet of a branch of an ancient family, Guy lacked the tendencies for prominence in a beast-of-prey civilization, and his upbringing had not helped him; but he had grown up at the time when Australia and New Zealand were the happy banishing grounds for those rendered ineffectual by education, heredity, environment, or all three. From his reminiscent monologues I could reconstruct his life and the lives of those imbricated.

His wife had progressed from St Bodolph in the Turnips to Newnham, thence to teaching, a profession which further removed women from the possibility of lovers in circles where men were already scarce; and one has only to read the novels mirroring life in England from the eighties to the beginning of the century to know how emasculated it was.

Guy Giltinane, lovable, imaginative, had come back on a visit from Australia in 1888, a bachelor of thirty-nine, imposing the colour and movement of his tales upon the drab eviscerated gentility of the clerical middle-class. The suffragettes and the war—Oyez! Oyez! The war has made a difference, not all for the worse.

Miss Clingford was then of an age to gauge that her life in England in the future could hold nothing but a gradual fading from what she had already achieved. Perhaps the Home Counties' lack of imagination spared her from visualizing the reality of hardship and the cultural uncongeniality to be met in Australia. She had been mesmerized by Guy as only the unimaginative can be mesmerized by travellers' tales. I never can be sure if it is English imagination or lack of it that puts us in the lead of world adventurers.

So this lady, a real lady—for such is the second Miss Clingford (of the family of Baron Clingford), in spite of her poke-bonnet views on fundamentalism and good form—a refined lady, a clever lady, reared in an enclosure into which no breath even of suffragettism had come, heard the voice of Guy of Giltinane's descendant. She forsook all that she had arduously and pioneeristically trained for—the higher education of women at that date still being a thing for the vulgar to sharpen their wits upon—and recklessly seizing her one chance of romance, followed the long, long track Down Under.

They had settled in the back country in days when six or nine pence per pound was the top price for wool, and when sheep that did not die of drought succumbed to footrot or fluke. This gentlewoman and gentleman were among the outer settlers; and Guy, though physically resourceful, was not a good manager; and pioneering, often hard and lonely for men, is harder and lonelier for women bringing forth their children without skilled help. This lady of thirty-eight brought forth her two. She educated them, for Merlin, in spite of her lamentations, was better educated than many a girl who has her college degrees either here or in the U.S.A.

I listened to Daddy's yarns of his early married life at first for Merlin's sake, but later for Mrs Giltinane's. She came to stand behind her husband and daughter, and her story was revealed through them. As a congenial companion for a brilliant woman with Cambridge and St Botolph as a background, and as a provider of this world's goods, Guy must have had shortcomings, but Mrs Giltinane had made no grievance of this. Merlin had escaped a number of complexes with which a woman in the case of Mrs Giltinane could have afflicted her child. Merlin delighted in her father and had a boundless affection for him.

"Daddy never spoils your dreams," she would say. "He helps you dream them."

However, by deduction, through Merlin, I sensed that Mrs Giltinane must have been gnawed by nostalgia, for Merlin had an ingrained and passionate rapture for England. She had such a longing for intellectual contacts, such a reverence for what society in the cultured sense must mean to the individual's development, that I dreaded her disillusionment.

Fortunately she was brave and wholesome; there were no festering areas in her mind. Her parents had been deeply friendly; she had not been starved for affection or action or sunlight in the pioneering experience. The upheaval of war brought responsibility and usefulness; the snobbery and pretentiousness, the beggars and poverty, the conditions that are horrifying when returning from the New World to the pied à terre of Empire were for the time in abeyance. Mother England was in trouble, and Merlin, young, hardy and adventurous, was exalted by the deeds she was able to perform in her rescue.

How to compute this sentiment of nationality that lies so lightly and holds so fast and far!

What is this love of native land? Irrational sentiment that will not bear scientific analysis, a fixation? Nevertheless, the richer the sensibility the deeper the well of sentiment to freshen the deserts of life. And this remains true of those so modernistic that they meet themselves returning from the year after next to seek the oil of sympathy for souls shop-worn and chapped by adolescent rebellion against hypocrisy and sentimentality.

Merlin enjoyed the glamour generated by youth and danger meeting in adventure. Behind her I could conjure up the shadow of her mother: hers the long slow contract, inch by inch, with nothing mitigated, nothing skipped. Had she that fortitude which kept our infantry in the mud of Flanders with a patience beyond believing and with the inference of stupidity, while others ventured recklessly with greater kudos? Just sitting and holding the lines amid death and filth and discomfort beyond telling, with never a thought of giving way, no despondency, no turning back, just holding on with a power of resistance incomputable because it was unconscious, an endurance that seemed mere torpidity, till the opposing lines wore out and broke before immobility that was impossible, but nevertheless was. So perhaps had it been with Mrs Giltinane. Or did she retain the glamour? I hope always for that brave lady's sake she did. Torpid or turbulent, each soul is a law unto itself.

Did she come back in spirit, or only in the spirit of her daughter? She died in 1913 without revisiting the Homeland. She lies far away, where the sun opens the earth in wide cracks and the wire-weed chokes the English garden flowers set on her grave in the new churchyard, with the apostle-birds and whistling pigeons to chime in primordial coolibahs, instead of rooks to caw in the immemorial elms of her youth; and Merlin and Daddy had come in the incalculable, individualistic, unorganized, unofficial, unfailing way of their breed to help save Mother England.