Books: Lady Bridget in the Never Never Land

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Rosa Praed (1851-1935)
LADY BRIDGET IN THE NEVER-NEVER LAND.(1915)

CONTENTS

BOOK I FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF MRS GILDEA
BOOK II FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF LADY BRIDGET O'HARA
BOOK III FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF COLIN MCKEITH AND OTHERS

BOOK I

FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF MRS GILDEA

CHAPTER 1

Mrs Gildea had settled early to her morning's work in what she called
the veranda-study of her cottage in Leichardt's Town. It was a
primitive cottage of the old style, standing in a garden and built on
the cliff--the Emu Point side--overlooking the broad Leichardt River.
The veranda, quite twelve feet wide, ran--Australian fashion--along
the front of the cottage, except for the two closed-in ends forming,
one a bathroom and the other a kind of store closet. Being raised a few
feet above the ground, the veranda was enclosed by a wooden railing,
and this and the supporting posts were twined with creepers that must
have been planted at least thirty years. One of these, a stephanotis,
showed masses of white bloom, which Joan Gildea casually reflected
would have fetched a pretty sum in Covent Garden, and, joining in with
a fine-growing asparagus fern, formed an arch over the entrance steps.
The end of the veranda, where Mrs Gildea had established herself with
her type-writer and paraphernalia of literary work, was screened by a
thick-stemmed grape-vine, which made a dapple of shadow and sunshine
upon the boarded floor. Some bunches of late grapes--it was the very
beginning of March--hung upon the vine, and, at the other end of the
veranda, grew a passion creeper, its great purple fruit looking like
huge plums amidst its vivid green leaves.

The roof of the veranda was low, with projecting eaves, below which a
bunch of yellowing bananas hung to ripen. In fact, the veranda and
garden beyond would have been paradise to a fruitarian. Against the
wall of the store-room, stood a large tin dish piled with melons,
pine-apples and miscellaneous garden produce, while, between the
veranda posts, could be seen a guava-tree, an elderly fig and a loquat
all in full bearing. The garden seemed a tangle of all manner of
vegetation--an oleander in bloom, a poinsettia, a yucca, lifting its
spike of waxen white blossoms, a narrow flower-border in which the
gardenias had become tall shrubs and the scented verbena shrubs almost
trees. As for the blend of perfume, it was dreamily intoxicating. Two
bamboos, guarding the side entrance gate, made a soft whispering that
heightened the dream-sense. The bottom of the garden looked an inchoate
mass of greenery topped by the upper boughs of tall straggling gum
trees, growing outside where the ground fell gradually to the river.

From where Mrs Gildea sat, she had a view of almost the whole reach of
the river where it circles Emu Point. For, as is known to all who know
Leichardt's Town, the river winds in two great loops girdling two low
points, so that, in striking a bee-line across the whole town, business
and residential, one must cross the river three times. Mrs Gildea could
see the plan of the main street in the Middle Point and the roofs of
shops and offices. The busy wharves of the Leichardt's Land Steam
Navigation Company--familiarly, the L.L.S.N. Co.--lay opposite on her
right, while leftward, across the water, she could trace, as far as the
grape-vine would allow, the boundary of the Botanical Gardens and get a
sight of the white stone and grey slate end of the big Parliamentary
Buildings.

The heat-haze over the town and the brilliant sun-sparkles on the river
suggested a cruel glare outside the shady veranda and over-grown old
garden.

A pleasant study, if a bit distracting from its plenitude of
associations to Australian-born Joan Gildea, who, on her marriage, had
been transplanted into English soil, as care-free as a rose cut from
the parent stem, and who now, after nearly twenty years, had returned
to the scene of her youth--a widow, a working journalist and shorn of
most of her early illusions.

Her typewriter stood on a bamboo table before her. A pile of Australian
Hansards for reference sat on a chair at convenient distance. A large
table with a green cloth, at her elbow, had at one end a tray with the
remains of her breakfast of tea, scones and fruit. The end nearest her
was littered with sheaves of manuscript, newspaper-cuttings,
photographs and sepia sketches--obviously for purposes of
illustration: gum-bottle, stylographs and the rest, with, also, several
note-books held open by bananas, recently plucked from the ripening
bunch, to serve as paper-weights.

She had meant to be very busy that morning. There was her weekly letter
for THE IMPERIALIST to send off by to-morrow's mail, and, moreover, she
had to digest the reasons of the eminent journal for returning to her
an article that had not met with the editor's approval--the great
Gibbs: a potent newspaper-factor in the British policy of the day.

It had been an immense honour when Mr Gibbs had chosen Joan Gildea from
amongst his staff for a roving commission to report upon the political,
financial, economic and social aspects of Australia, and upon Imperial
interests generally, as represented in various sideshows on her route.

But it happened that she was now suffering from a change at the last
moment in that route--a substitution of the commplace P. & O. for the
more exciting Canadian Pacific, Mr Gibbs having suddenly decided that
Imperialism in Australia demanded his special correspondent's immediate
attention.

For this story dates back to the time when Mr Joseph Chamberlain was in
office; when Imperialism, Free Trade and Yellow Labour were the catch
words of a party, and before the great Australian Commonwealth had
become an historical fact.

THE IMPERIALIST's Special Correspondent looked worried. She was
wondering whether the English mail expected to-day would bring her
troublesome editorial instructions. She examined some of the
photographs and drawings with a dissatisfied air. A running
inarticulate commentary might have been put into words like this:

'No good . . . I can manage the letterpress all right once I get the
hang of things. But when it comes to illustrations, I can't make even a
gum-tree look as if it was growing . . . . And Gibbs hates having
amateur snapshots to work up . . . . Hopeless to try for a local
artist. . . . I wonder if Colin McKeith could give me an idea. . . . . Why
to goodness didn't Biddy join me! . . . . If she'd only had the decency to
let me know in time WHY she couldn't. . . . Money, I suppose--or a
Man! . . . . Well, I'll write and tell her never to expect a literary
leg-up from me again . . .'

Mrs Gildea pulled the sheet she had been typing out of the machine,
inserted another, altered the notch to single spacing and rattled off
at top speed till the page was covered. The she appended her signature
and wrote this address:

To the Lady Bridget O'Hara,

Care of Eliza Countess of Gaverick,

Upper Brook Street, London, W.

on an envelope, into which she slipped her letter--a letter never to
be sent.

A snap of the gate between the bamboos added a metallic note to the
tree's reedy whimperings, and the postman tramped along the short
garden path and up the veranda steps.

'Morning, Mrs Gildea . . . a heavy mail for you!'

He planked down the usual editorial packet--two or three rolls of
proofs, a collection of newspapers, a bulky parcel of private
correspondence sent on by the porter of Mrs Gildea's London flat, some
local letters and, finally, two square envelopes, with the remark, as
he turned away on his round. 'My word! Mrs Gildea, those letters seem
to have done a bit of globe-trotting on their own, don't they!'

For the envelopes were covered with directions, some in Japanese and
Chinese hieroglyphics, some in official red ink from various
postoffices, a few with the distinctive markings of British Legations
and Government Houses where the Special Correspondent should have
stayed, but did not--Only her own name showing through the
obliterations, and a final re-addressing by the Bank of Leichardt's
Land.

Mrs Gildea recognised the impulsive, untidy but characteristic
handwriting of Lady Bridget O'Hara.

'From Biddy at last!' she exclaimed, tore the flap of number one
letter, paused and laid it aside. 'Business first.'

So she went carefully through the editorial communication. Mr Gibbs was
not quite so tiresome as she had feared he would be. After him, the
packet from her London flat was inspected and its contents laid aside
for future perusal. Next, she tackled the local letters. One was
embossed with the Bank of Leichardt's Land stamp and contained a
cablegram originally despatched from Rome, which had been received at
Vancouver and, thence, had pursued her--first along the route
originally designed, afterwards, with zigzagging, retrogression and
much delay, along the one she had taken. That it had reached her at
all, said a good deal for Mrs Gildea's fame as a freely paragraphed
newspaper correspondent.

The telegram was phrased thus:

SORRY IMPOSSIBLE NO FUNDS OTHER REASONS WRITING BIDDY

Mrs Gildea's illuminative 'H'm!' implied that her two inductions had
been correct. No funds--and other reasons--meaning--a MAN. She
scented instantly another of Biddy's tempestuous love-affairs. Had it
been merely a question of lack of money with inclination goading, she
felt pretty certain that Lady Bridget would have contrived to beg,
borrow or steal--on a hazardous promissory note, after the
happy-go-lucky financial morals of that section of society to which by
birth she belonged. Or, failing these means, that she would have
threatened some mad enterprise and so have frightened her aunt Eliza
Countess of Gaverick into writing a cheque for three figures. Of
course, less would have been of no account.

Mrs Gildea opened the two envelopes and sorted the pages in order of
their dates. The first had the address of a house in South Belgravia,
where lived Sir Luke Tallant of the Colonial Office and Rosamond his
wife--distant connections of the Gavericks.

Lady Bridget's letters were type-written, most carelessly, with the
mistakes corrected down the margin of the flimsy sheets in the manner
of author's proof--the whole appearance of them suggesting literary
'copy'.

Likewise, the slapdash epistolary style of the MS., which had a certain
vividness of its own.

CHAPTER 2

'Dearest Joan,

You'll have got my wire. Vancouver was right, I suppose. I sent it from
Rome. Since then I have been at Montreux with Chris and Molly, and
since I came back to England with them, I've been in too chaotic a
state of mind to write letters. Really, Chris and Molly's atmosphere of
struggling to keep in the swim on next to nothing a year and of eking
out a precarious income by visits to second-rate country houses and
cadging on their London friends gets on my nerves to such an extent
that Luke and Rosamond's established "Colonial Office" sort of
respectability is quite refreshing by contrast.

I should have loved the Australian trip. Your "Bush" sounds perfectly
captivating, and, of course, I could do the illustrations you want.
Besides, I'm stony-broke and, financially, the great god Gibbs appeals
to me. I'd take my passage straight off--one would raise the money
somehow--if it wasn't for--There! It's out. A MAN has come and upset
the apple-cart.'

Mrs Gildea gave a funny little laugh. The letter answered her thought.

'"Oh, of course!" I can hear you sneer. "Just another of Biddy's
emotional interests--bound to fizzle out before very long." But this
is a good deal more than an emotional interest, and I don't think it
will fizzle out so quickly. For one thing, THIS man is quite different
from all the other men I've ever been interested in. The first moment I
saw him, I had the queerest sort of ARRESTED sensation. He's told me
since, that he felt exactly the same about me. Kind of lived before--
"WHEN I WAS A KING IN BABYLON AND YOU WERE A CHRISTIAN SLAVE" idea.
Though I'm quite certain that if I ever was a slave it must have been a
Pagan and not a Christian one. Joan, the experience was thrilling,
positively electrifying--Glamour--personal magnetism. . . . You
couldn't possibly understand unless you knew HIM. Descriptions are so
hopeless. I'll leave him to your imagination.

By the way, Molly annoyed me horribly the other day. "You know, dear,"
she had the audacity to remark, "he's not of OUR class, and if you
married him, you'd have to give up US! For could you suppose," she went
on to say, "that Chris and Mama--to say nothing of Aunt Eliza--would
tolerate an adventurer who tells tall stories about buried treasure and
native rebellions and expects one to be amused!"

OUR CLASS! Oh, how I detest the label! And that unspeakably dreadful
idea of social sheep and goats--and the unfathomable abyss between
Suburbia and Belgravia! Though I frankly own that to me Suburbia
represents the Absolutely Impossible. After all, one must go right into
the Wilderness to escape the conditions of that state of life to which
you happen to have been born.

Well, that speech of Molly's came out of a fascinating account my
Soldier of Fortune gave us of how he stage-managed a revolution in
South America, and of an expedition he'd made in the Andes on the
strength of a local tradition about the Incas' hidden gold. I call him
my Soldier of Fortune--though he's not in any known Army list, because
it's what he called himself. Likewise a Champion of the Dispossessed.
He has an intense sympathy with the indigenous populations, and thinks
the British system of conquering and corrupting native races simply a
disgrace to civilisation. With all of which sentiments I entirely
agree. Luke has taken to him immensely, chiefly, I fancy, because he
was once private secretary to some Administrating Rajah in an
Eastern-Archipelago or Indian Island, and as Luke is hankering after a
colonial governorship, he wants to scrape up all the information he can
about such posts.

I answered Molly that one may have a violent attraction to a man
without in the least wanting to marry him, and that relieved her mind a
little.

As for HIM, the attraction on his part seems equally violent. We do the
most shockingly unconventional things together. He tells me that I
carry him off his feet--that I've revolutionised his ideas about the
"nice English Girl" (useless to protest that I'm not an English girl
but a hybrid Celt). He says that I've wiped off his slate the scheme of
life he'd been planning for his latter years. A comfortable existence
in England--his doctor advises him to settle down in a temperate
climate--an appointment on some City Board--rubber shares and that
kind of thing--you know it all--a red brick house in South Kensington
and perhaps a little place in the country. He did not fill in the
picture--but I did for him--with the charmingly domesticated wife--
well connected: the typical "nice English Girl," heiress of a
comfortable fortune to supplement his own, which he candidly admitted
needs supplementing.

Of course he's not a mere vulgar fortune-hunter. He must be genuinely
in love with the nice English Girl. And that's where I upset HIS
apple-cart.

In fact, we are both in an IMPASSE. I'm not eligible for his post and I
shouldn't want it if I were. To my mind marriage is only conceivable
with a barbarian or a millionaire. From the sordid atmosphere of
English conjugality upon an income of anything less than an assured
5,000 pounds a year, good Lord deliver me! And you know my reasons for
adding another clause to my litany. Good Lord deliver me also from further
experience of the exciting vicissitudes of a stock-jobbing career!

Then again, apart from personal prejudices, I am appalled, quite
simply, at the cold-blooded marriage traffic that I see going on in
London. Any crime committed in the name of Love is forgivable, but to
sell a girl--soul and body to the highest bidder is to my mind, the
unpardonable sin against the Holy Ghost. Frankly, I'm petrified with
amazement at the way in which mothers hurl their daughters at the head
of any man who will make a good settlement. There's Molly's sister--
she chases the game till she has corralled it, and once inside her
walls the unfortunate prey hasn't swallowed his first cup of tea before
she has wedded him in imagination to one of her girls--"How do you
like Mr CHOSE?" "Like him? What is there to like? He's the same as all
the rest of the men, and they're as like as a box of ninepins. . ."

"But what do you think of him. . .?" "But really there's nothing to
think" . . . "But don't you think he'd do for Hester?" etcetera,
etcetera.

She has just married the one before Hester to what she calls the
perfect type of an English country gentleman--meaning that he owns an
historical castle in Scotland, a coal mine in Wales and a mansion in
Park Lane. Heavens! I'd rather follow the fortunes of a Nihilist and be
sent to Siberia, or drive wild cattle and fight wild blacks with one of
your Bush cowboys, than I'd marry the perfect type of an English
country gentleman! Give me something REAL--anything but the
semi-detached indifference of most of the couples one knows. No. MY man
must be strong enough to carry ME off my feet and to break down all the
conventions of "OUR CLASS." Then, I'd cheerfully tramp through the
forest beside him, if it came to that, or cook his dinner in front of
our wigwam. Now, if my Soldier of Fortune were to ask me to climb the
Andes with him in search of that buried treasure! But he won't: and--I
confess it, Joan--I'm in mortal terror of his insisting upon my
entering the sphere of stock-jobbing respectability instead, and of my
being weak enough to consent. But we haven't got anywhere near that
yet.

So far, I'm just--living--trying to make up my mind what it is that I
want most. Do you know, that since my violent attraction to him--or
whatever you like to call it--all sorts of odd bits of revelation have
come to me as to the things that really matter!

For one thing, I'm pretty certain that the ultimate end of Being is
Beauty and that Love means Beauty and Beauty means Love. The immediate
result of this discovery is that I'm buying clothes with a reckless
disregard of the state of my banking account.

I begin to understand and to sympathise with that pathetic striving
after beauty which one sees in the tawdry finery and exaggerated
hairdressing of a kitchenmaid--Rosamond Tallant has one who is
wonderful to behold as she mounts the area steps on her Sundays out.
Formerly I should have been horrified at that kitchenmaid. Now I have
quite a fellow-feeling with her piteous attempts to make herself
attractive to her young man, the grocer's boy or the under-footman I
suppose. Am I not at this very moment sitting with complexion cream
daubed on my face, in order that I may appear more attractive to MY
young man. I know now how Molly's maid--who is keeping company with
Luke's butler--feels when we all dine early for a theatre and
Josephine gets an evening out at the Earl's Court Exhibition with her
gentleman.

Sounds beastly vulgar, doesn't it? But that's just what I'm making
myself pretty for--dinner there this evening at the French Restaurant
with MY gentleman. It's quite proper: we are a party of four--the
other two I may add are not in Rosamond's or Molly's set.

I've been interrupted--He has telephoned. The other pair have
disappointed us. Will I defy conventions and dine with HIM alone?

Of course I will.'

CHAPTER 3

The particular sheet ended at this point. Mrs Gildea laid it down upon
the earlier ones and took another from the little pile which she had
spread in sequence for perusal. She smiled to herself in mournful
amusement. For she scarcely questioned the probability that her friend
would in due course become disillusioned of a very ordinary
individual--he certainly sounded a little like an adventurer--who for
some occult reason had been idealised by this great-souled, wayward and
utterly foolish creature. How many shattered idols had not Lady Bridget
picked up from beneath their over-turned pedestals and consigned to
Memory's dust-bin! On how many pyres had not that oft-widowed soul
committed suttee to be resurrected at the next freak of Destiny! And
yet with it all, there was something strangely elusive, curiously
virginal about Lady Bridget.

She had been in love so often: nevertheless, she had never loved. Joan
Gildea perfectly realised the distinction. Biddy had been as much, and
more in love with ideas as with persons. Art, Literature, Higher
Thought, Nature, Philanthrophy, Mysticism--she spelled everything with
a capital letter--Platonic Passion--the last most dangerous and most
recurrent. As soon as one Emotional Interest burned out another rose
from the ashes. And, while they lasted, she never counted the cost of
these emotional interests.

But then she was an O'Hara: and all the O'Haras that had been were
recklessly extravagant, squandering alike their feelings and their
money. There wasn't a member of the house of Gaverick decently well to
do, excepting indeed Eliza, Countess of Gaverick. She had been a
Glasgow heiress and only belonged to the aristocracy by right of
marriage with Bridget's uncle, the late Lord Gaverick, who on the death
of his brother, about the time Bridget was grown up, had succeeded to
the earldom, but not to the estate.

Gaverick Castle in the province of Connaught, which with the
unproductive lands appertaining to it, had been in the possession of
O'Haras from time immemorial, was sold by Bridget's father to pay his
debts. His brother--the heiress' husband, who, unlike the traditional
spendthrift O'Haras had accumulated a small fortune in business, was
able by some lucky chance to buy back the Castle--partly with his
wife's money--soon after his accession to the barren honours of the
family. His widow inherited the place as well as the rest of her
husband's property, and could do as she pleased with the whole. Thus
the present holder of that ancient Irish title, young, charming and
poor, stemming from a collateral branch, lived mainly upon his friends
and upon the hope that Eliza, Countess of Gaverick, might at her death
leave him the ancestral home and the wherewithal to maintain it.

As for Bridget's father, the last but one Earl of Gaverick, his career
may be summed up as a series of dramatic episodes, matrimonial, social
and financial.

His first wife had divorced him. His second wife--the mother of Lady
Bridget--had deserted him for an operatic tenor and had died shortly
afterwards. She herself had been an Italian singer.

Lord Gaverick did not marry again, and Mrs Gildea had gathered that the
less said about his social adventures the better. Financially, he had
subsisted precariously as a company promoter. There had come a final
smash: and one morning the Earl of Gaverick had been found dead in his
bed, an empty medicine bottle by his side. As he had been in the habit
of taking chloral the Coroner's jury agreed upon the theory of an
overdose.

Yes, Mrs Gildea could quite understand that apart from general views on
the marriage question, Lady Bridget O'Hara might well shrink from
further connection with City finance.

CHAPTER 4

A naughty little gust--herald of the sub-tropical afternoon breeze
that comes up the Leichardt River from the sea, blew about the typed
sheets on the table, and, among them, those of Lady Bridget's letter,
as Mrs Gildea laid them down.

While she collected the various pages of manuscript that had been
displaced and was bundling them together, with a banana on each sheaf
to keep it safe, there came a second snap of the gate and a man's voice
hailed her.

It was the voice of a man who sang baritone, and his accent was an odd
combination of the Bush drawl grafted on to the mellifluous Gaelic,
from which race he had originated.

'Any admittance, Mrs Gildea, except on business, during working hours?'

'Yes, it is working hours Colin, but you happen to be business because
you're just the person I'm wanting to speak to, so come along.'

'Good for me, Joan,' and the man came along, clearing the rest of the
garden path and the veranda steps in three strides.

He gripped Mrs Gildea's hand.

'You're nice and cool up here, and you get every bit of wind that's
going along the river,' he said. 'It's a good thing you kept this
humpey, Joan--a little nest for the bird to fly home to, eh?'

'Yes, I'm glad, though it seemed a silly piece of sentiment . . . and,
as you say, I always FELT the old bird might want to fly home for a bit
some day. Well, YOU look cool enough, Colin.'

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