Being too young and too poor to make a formal début, I was an anomaly. Other youngsters as poor as I already had their shoulders to the working wheel; those of financial status were acquiring extra polish to enhance their value in the matrimonial market. I had not ‘come out’, but was a chicken that walked around inside its shell—a good simile, seeing my lack of an evening dress. I was treated like a visitor of thirty or fifty years of age. Without any fuss or feathers I was just tucked in at dinners and luncheons, and people called to see me by the score. Quite two-thirds were men and half of them over forty. It was rare that there was a youngster of my own youth amid the throng. A great many talked about nothing; others exclaimed, “Oh, how interesting!” People were not described as pretty or clever or entertaining or queer but as interesting. I grew very sick of this description of myself, but had quickly perceived that it was wiser to think what I said than to say what I thought.
I met numerous men, each of whom had written “that beautiful thing” or “this beautiful thing,” each thing according to some authority, being the best thing that had been done since Pope or Dryden or Keats, and the authors designated as the Australian Poe, or Burns or Milton. I was in an uncomfortable predicament owing to my ignorance of all this Australian genius, but I had no difficulty in getting the geniuses on to the subject of their own supremacy and thus hiding my own inferiority.
People asked silly questions about myself. I had brought this to pass by pronunciamentos upon the desirability of honesty in egotism. In this way I found a new angle in the workings of egotism. I did not mind what I said about myself as a subject impersonally, while I stood aloof like a scientist in his laboratory, but I resisted when outsiders tried to intrude behind my reserve. I developed much ingenuity in turning the tables.
One man persisted, “Why, when you speak so frankly against humbug in egotism, why do I find you the most difficult, the most shrinking, little creature I ever met? Can you explain?”
I couldn’t. I can’t.
Perhaps there are two divisions of egotism, one the absorption in self as self, the other the analysis of self as part of a universal complex force, and I am an analyst rather than the normal egotist.
As one of those old professor birds, with less gift for obscurity than usual among the academic, has said, “Criticism means self-consciousness, and self-consciousness means renewed activity on a higher plane. The reflective play of one age becomes the passion of another.”
There was an article about me in a paper that I had not previously known of, but it had a big circulation in Sydney by currying scandals about people of prominence. The Editor said that Sydney people showed their general degeneracy in running after each new thing as it was advertised. Sybylla Melvyn’s dreadful book had been written in six weeks, and when he expressed his disapproval people said, “Yes, but it was wonderful for a girl of sixteen.” Then he felt as Dr. Johnson towards the difficult musical performance which he wished had been impossible. The Editor asserted that I had begun as a conceited and self-assertive hoyden and the foolish lionising of Sydney SOCIETY had confirmed and developed me into an obnoxious specimen.
This was interesting and did not hurt like Mrs. Thrumnoddy’s defection towards a fellow guest. I went to Gaddy. He spluttered. “Did that man ever see me?” I inquired. Gaddy said no, that he was the real scum, that his jealousy in not being able to get within coo-ee of me had inspired this attack. I said if he had ever met or even seen me he would be entitled to his opinion however harsh or undiscerning, but as he hadn’t, there was the rub, because before I had got into print, I had, like other innocents, depended upon the printed word, and another bulwark was going bung. The accusation that I advertised myself was particularly unwarranted. I had no acquaintance among newspaper people, and did not give so much as a backward glance to make myself conspicuous. My strenuous endeavour was to be as inconspicuous as possible.
“Is that Sydney SOCIETY I have been meeting?” I asked.
Gad said I could bet my sweet life it was; not only the nice old parliamentary people and the University professors but some of the real smart-setters among whom even riches would not always buy an entry. There was disillusionment in finding that I had to reef in my standards to be at home here. It was now that I felt the force of Pa’s tenet that Ma was a wonderful woman. I did not come in contact with anyone of Ma’s ability and appearance.
I had hours to put in while Wheeler dressed Mrs. Crasterton, and I wrote in my diary or pondered discontentedly on the waste it was that Ma could not have a nice town house. It was a heinous thing for all Ma’s administrative ability to be squeezed into a petty grind of one irreverent urchin, one rebellious girl and one gentle and easily-pleased man. Ma could have managed a grand hotel or some vast institution, and in the place unto which it had pleased God to mis-direct her she had but a poverty-restricted cubby. No doubt she had found the same luny obstructions to using her ability as I had run my head into with mine.
I was desperately in need of money. If I had had the means I should have been a recluse, but when you are poor you are helpless to build a barrier to keep people away. I stood it as quietly as I could. I told Mrs. Crasterton that I had imposed upon her hospitality long enough, I would now like to go home.
She positively wailed that that would make a fool of her. All of Sydney that had not met me was clamoring to do so, including the Admiral; and some of these high official invitations were really commands. I was tired of high officials and longed for young people like Derek and Edmée. I sometimes played the piano while they practised new steps in the hall. If I could play tennis and dance, and have just one evening dress to show my décolleté I was sure I could have some fun coloured by a little of the romance that swirled around Edmée. When I went swimming the girls always said that the more clothes I took off the prettier I grew. I wished that Derek would give me a lesson in dancing, but his hopeless passion for Edmée’s fatal beauty so burdened him that he thought of me only to play the piano so that he could “hold her in his arms.”
Mrs. Greville de Vesey put the cap on my society rights regardless of the frock of “some kind of white rag”, and my cotton (cashmere) stockings. Her mother had been born on the station adjoining my mother’s, and knew that Ma was as high as herself. Mrs. de Vesey was the chic leader of the younger smart set. People were no longer surprised that I was so properly behaved, my mother being one of the lovely Misses Bossier of Caddagat, which is one of the few original stations entered in the Landholders’ Record. The Melvyns too were among the earliest educated free men to take up stations in the Southern District. It was I who was entitled to look into other people’s pretensions to being of the old squattocracy.
Mrs. de Vesey said that banana-barrow and bottle-o commercialism did not yet rule SOCIETY in Sydney though it was going that way. I loved Zo? de Vesey. She reminded me of a cruiser cutting a clean high wave and sending barges and lesser craft scuttling to their lesser ways. With the Governor-General to announce that I was a genius, and Zo? to vouch for my antecedents, I was established. Zo? said that I need not be shy about imposing on Mrs. Crasterton. Poor old soul had sunk into “innocuous desuetude” following the death of her husband, and this was a happy revival for her. She was really of good family, and Gaddy was a bachelor whom all the girls tried to bag.
“Bag Gaddy!!”
“Gaddy is rich. Edmée Actem camps there every now and again, but he hasn’t given in yet. He’d be a fine instrument for an ambitious woman.”
“He’s silly about Edmée,” I said. “But she cannot be bothered with him.”
Zo? laughed her short mocking laugh, “You are taking Edmée at her own valuation.”
Zo? was almost young, not more than twenty-eight and I loved going to her house and talking to her.
My wearing the jewellery of Big Ears brought me fresh attention. He too was rich, though not of high aristocraticness. His father had made his money in mines. Big Ears had been sent to Cambridge to acquire gentility and was to go into Parliament to establish himself. People seemed to gather importance under Zo?‘s classification, though I had discerned nothing much in them when trying to place them by my own INEXPERIENCE. Her estimate of people was out of EXPERIENCE mixed with CONTACT. She summed them up by what they did and had. I could only measure them by what they were. When I saw Mrs. Crasterton booming across a drawing-room I measured that she was of exactly the same proportions and human texture as Mrs. McSwat, save that Mrs. Crasterton had had some sort of a tilling and wore expensive stays, whereas Mrs. McSwat’s form was unconfined and her culture had camped out at Barney’s Gap and subsisted on bully and damper. I saw that the brass buttons and uniforms of the Admiral’s staff, which have a dangerous charm for the fair, were worn by boys of helplessly English posture and stilted speech. Some of them were clean cut and straight of limb, but I could see that there were any number of bullock drivers, shearers and boundary riders of my acquaintance in patched shirts and thrummy moles who matched them muscle for muscle and thew for thew.
Soon the people who had predicted that I would be ruined by adulation were croaking that there was something the matter with me as I was not impressed by anyone or anything, that I was very difficult, and laughed at the most important people and made friends of those of no substance, just because I liked them. I would never advance by such tactics.
At the end of my first ten days in SOCIETY my true friend hove above the horizon of my bantling career. Ma had warned me that those who flattered me would not be my true friends, they woul............