In the morning Mrs. Crasterton was again called to the telephone by Sir James Hobnob, who asked for me. “Dear me, poor old Sir James must be getting senile,” she remarked. “Old men can be very silly about young girls. You must exercise common sense, my dear.”
It was Mr. Hardy, chuckling. “Say, I’ve arranged for you to lunch with Mrs. Simms today, and we shall have all the afternoon together.”
He rang again in a few moments in propria persona and arranged the day with Mrs. Crasterton. She was busy otherwise, and content to let me go. I went with bubbles of anticipation inflating me.
Lunch with Mrs. Simms was mere morning tea, as that lady was overworked opening things like bazaars to aid poor babies or golf clubs for rich ladies, and she was glad to be done with me. She said she would see more of me at her house. Would I come tomorrow? She had a big family and many friends and constituents, and some of them were always at home. She lived at Burwood, and a tram would take me to her door. This meeting had been arranged by Mr. Simms and Mr. Hardy, and I was to be left at the publishers. Mrs. Simms said I would be wise to strike while the iron was hot.
Mr. Hardy was nearing the publishers as Mrs. Simms deposited me on the pavement, and he saluted her very politely. She was in a hurry, and away swung the cab. Mr. Hardy, without seeming to see me, eased me off into the crowd and strode along to his Aunt’s flat.
“Hooray!” he exclaimed when we were safely immured. “Another day free from the crowd.”
I said no word lest I should expose my inexperience. I was a scientist with her first case, terrifically interested and as clear-headed as a cucumber. Mr. Hardy was having lunch sent in, and was free until the evening.
“Dear me,” said he, sitting down and looking at me with his bright abashing gaze. “I’m back among the tall trees again with their bloom filling the world like heaven, when I look at you. To think I was once as eager and sensitive as you, ready to worship at the feet of the great! I wouldn’t give up an hour with you for a week with the best girls that Sydney can bring to the post.”
This would have been inebriating if real, but Ma’s training was sticking to me splendidly. Was he going to “lead me astray”? It would be interesting to observe the preliminary stages. I was deprived of evening dress and dancing, but this would be something. Mr. Hardy was sympathetic about my cramped life, my desire to escape, but success, he said, had to be attacked from the jump and given no quarter. Could I stand up to the fray?
I had no more idea of what to do than a wild duck scared up from the reeds of its dam. Mr. Hardy put in that day instructing me. I must get away to London as soon as possible, while I was young and interesting. There was nothing for a person of real gifts here. I would soon be ruined if I lingered among the local cacklers. He used the same term as Mr. Wilting.
I timidly advanced my dream of there being an Australian soul on its own hook, and my desire to be part of its development. Phew! How severe Mr. Hardy was with me. That was a wicked socialistic notion which would ruin me socially and artistically. One should stick to the right crowd.
I gathered that I was well in the right crowd for a start, that I was the intimate of people who ruled the social roost, whom others—with money and position—strove to cultivate in vain. Stiff-necked egotism invaded me, for I felt it difficult to even my wits and ideas to many of the people I met, and they had B FLATS, but I did not expose my INEXPERIENCE.
I brought up the idea in a different form. Wouldn’t it be self-respecting for Australian literature to do something on its own hook? This was on account of his dictum that the first thing to do was to comb the gumleaves out of my hair.
“This tosh of doing things on your own or Australia’s hook, where did you get it? You want to use any hooks that come handy. The other fellows’ when you get the chance: they’ll use your hook if you don’t look out—without saying thank you. The whole secret of success is to beat the Philistines at their own game.”
I just sat and looked mousey. Even a fool is counted wise if she holds her peace.
“As for that notion of the brotherhood of man that you have, and loving the unwashed, anything in that direction is sheer drivel, drivel! Propaganda is fatal to any artist.”
“What does propaganda mean?” I enquired. I knew the word only as a joke to couple with improper geese.
“Aw!” he said impatiently, “it’s any of those luny ideas about the underdogs being superior because they have nothing, and the theory that their betters should support them in a velvet cage.”
“I see. It’s propaganda to advocate justice for the weak and helpless. What is it to uphold the rich?”
“Ha! Ha!” he chuckled. “It’s darned good business. It pays.”
“I see,” I repeated with a chill down my spine. “When you propagand for the top dogs it’s not propaganda: it’s like praising God: and God must be praised all the time or you’ll go to hell.”
Mr. Hardy laughed, but rather grimly. “See here, a man must take pride in his breed, and uphold the Empire.”
“Of course, but couldn’t there be different ways of upholding it?”
“Now, don’t spring any more of that socialist rot about the young men’s dreams, and the old men being able to rest, or you’re a goner as a writer. Editors would scent you a mile off. See here, the biggest literary success, the greatest artist today is the most rousing imperialist. Gad, if only I could write like Kipling!”
To succeed by his recipe I should have to deny what I honestly felt. I should have to keep my inner self hidden from Mr. Hardy or it would be bruised and sore. What puzzled me was that my first attempt was praised for its sincerity, and yet every man who wanted to marry me or to help me in my career immediately set out to change me into something entirely different. Why not in the first place seek the writings and the girls that they wanted me to be like? There were plenty of them. No one would ever have heard of me had I not been different, but that difference was immediately to be erased.
I could not argue with Mr. Hardy. My emotions made my thought go woozy when he dragooned me both for provincialism and drivelling sentiment about the under dog. It was, oh, so easy to fall back on being a girl. That was the only side of any woman Mr. Hardy would really want except those to do his cooking and laundry and other things that could be done for him equally well by men, only that he would have to pay them more.
His aunt was away for some days, and Mr. Hardy spent every one of them except Sunday with me alone. At the beginning it was a game of parry.
“Dear me,” he said on the second afternoon. “It is a shame that you have no pretty things. You are meant for evening dress: you have all the lines, and flesh like pink wax. Let me see your arms.”
I was shocked by this suggestion, but he insisted upon unbuttoning the simple wrist-band and turning up the bishop sleeve.
“Good gracious! And you waste your breath in admiring Edmée Actem. Her arms are drum-sticks compared with yours. To think of the scarecrows with the salt cellars under their ears and necks like a plucked fowl that are thrust upon a fellow in society, while you are covered up like a nun.” He insisted that mine was the arm of an odalisque, with dainty bones and dimpled wrist and elbow.
“Any man who wasn’t ossified would devour your arms,” he exclaimed, proceeding to act upon his word. Then he devoured my lips until I was almost unconscious.
This was magnificently startling and thrilling and quite unexpected, that is in intensity and extent. There was something else that was intoxicating: the lightning intuition that he would not have gone as far as those devouring kisses, had I imposed restraint, even the raising of a finger. I had not invited him, being too modest for that, but neither had I exactly disinvited him.
The old wives’ tales of men that filter to the most secluded girl represent men of maniacal sexual greed. I knew the gruesome tales told by midwives who have to protect their patients. The denigrating knowledge of prostitution was also known to me; there were milder confidences but always of feminine weariness opposed to merciless demands. No one had ever suggested that there would be any sensitiveness among men, that some men, however few, would, like myself, be incapable of amour if they were unacceptable or unless many other things such as the loved one, the time, the place and response struck twelve together.
This was a revelation of another side of the lure of the Groves of Daphne. One felt as the Ancient Mariner when he was the first that ever burst into that silent sea, for all I had heard of this previously.
Ned Crispin, Arthur Masters, Billy Quiver and others had not laid a finger on me. Was that too, male sensitiveness? I had not speculated on this before. Were men sensitive only in the presence of virginity? Once the bar was down did they lose all respect? It did not seem that I could ever find a man with whom I could retain my self-respect in such a surrender.
Mr. Hardy and I were at variance on my deeper and inner ideas, but in playing the most magic game known we were equally matched in this vein of sensitiveness. I was his quarry because of my inexperience, but he was equally mine in my thirst for knowledge.
I was so elated by the discovery that maidenly safety lay in my own hands that I planned some sorties on my own account. This arrangement of going to Mrs. Simms acted admirably for liberty. It was another inebriating thing to discover that in a great city one could have adventures and no one the wiser. In the bush the very crows and magpies reported every movement. Little wonder that city people were wickeder than those in the bush, with opportunities and temptations so available.
I decided to go secretly to the Bulletin office. The Bulletin was a mine of fascination, but not considered nice for young girls or clergymen. I had a friend in its office, Mr. A. G. Stephens. I was much more eager to know him than dozens of silly old Sir James Hobnobs and stuffy professors and ponderous parliamentarians, but Mr. Stephens was regarded as a devil with horns. I asked was he a liar or a thief or a rake, and the reply always was, “Oh, no, not that, but the man is wrong-headed.” By persistent cross-examination I elicited that he discussed sympathetically the works of men who promulgated abashing views on sex and sociology: someone named G. B. Shaw, in particular. I sounded Mr. Hardy about him, and it was laughable to hear his execration of a real hog who would subvert society. As for my meeting “that crowd”, well, that would be to throw pearls of innocence before the swine of dangerous propaganda.
Nothing could now have stopped me from going to Mr. Stephens, and I climbed to his office and spontaneously burst into affection for him in a fraternal and intellectual way. How generous he was! He took me to tea, he gave me books, wonderful new books for my own that I had not dreamed of possessing. He talked in a whimsical way with twinkles in his eyes, add............