9

Abroad

London and Paris, 1908–1909

KATHARINE LEFT MELBOURNE for London at noon on Wednesday 20 May 1908. ‘The Runic to my enthusiastic imagination was a splendid ship. Crammed with passengers though she was, there were long decks to parade on in the mornings and evenings.’¹

She shared a cabin with red-haired Robbie—real name Ethel Robson—from Sydney.² She was to be a close friend during Katharine’s two stints in London. During the long journey to London, Robbie educated Katharine, telling her ‘more about’—and here the manuscript shows Katharine had trouble choosing the right phrase—‘the wicked ways of men than I had any idea of’, or on the second attempt, the ‘mysterious dangers of sex relationships’, or thirdly, ‘sexual intercourse about which I had never heard’.³ In the manuscript, Katharine eventually settled on the more anodyne ‘affairs’, but then deleted the sentence altogether from the published version of Child of the Hurricane. In fact, Robbie confided in Katharine that she had gonorrhoea, having been infected at the age of sixteen by a friend of her father’s.⁴

Katharine’s other new friend on the six-week voyage was Harry Newton, ‘a typically good-looking, athletic, young Australian, straight and reliable’. With ‘a voice of remarkable range and bell-like purity … he was going to London, hoping to make a career as a concert singer’. Sitting together on the deck at night, he took her hand. She withdrew it. ‘We decided’, Katharine wrote, though she surely meant that she decided, ‘there was to be no flirting or falling in love. We both had our careers to think of’.⁵

The voyage was good for Katharine; she was soothed by ‘the dazzling blue of sea and sky’ and ‘the warm starry nights, free from strain and worry. The tragedy of Father’s death lifted from me’.⁶

THE RUNIC REACHED London on 2 July 1908. The city was even busier than normal, with over a million visitors for the Franco-British Exhibition and the Olympics. In an article for the Herald and Weekly Times, Katharine gave the contrasting impressions of London from two newly arrived Australians. Agusta ‘raves’ about London’s ‘tragedy and poetry’. Bobbie complains about the city: ‘to me it is just a great commercial centre—the world’s core; and yet not half as fine a place to spend one’s life in as any of the wide-streeted, open-air cities camped beneath the blue of Australian skies’.⁷

The poverty struck Katharine. ‘The starved moan of the great degraded, hopeless, wretched poor of London is borne on the wind.’⁸ She spent a night among the poor on the Embankment, visiting a soup kitchen and a homeless shelter in the slums with a stench of ‘unwashed bodies, damp clothing, and physical decay’.⁹ ‘The problem of how such poverty and suffering could be prevented, haunted my mind.’¹⁰ With hindsight, this experience became a moment of clarity about what was wrong with the world. She would come to understand the next decade of her life as a quest to find a solution.

A MAN TRIED to rape Katharine in her first weeks in London. ‘I took a room in a street behind the Russell Hotel. It was a rather shabby house, and my room up three flights of stairs.’ On a Saturday, she returned from the theatre with Harry. ‘A clock had just struck twelve when we said goodnight on the door-step and Harry went off to his own lodgings. I tried to open the door before me, but the key wouldn’t fit.’ A young man offered to help her; he put the key in his pocket and told her he was coming in with her. ‘Horrified by the look on his face and his pale shark’s eyes’ she appealed to him, but ‘he laughed, and made his intentions quite clear’. If she called out for the police, he would accuse her of soliciting. She told him her husband was waiting upstairs. He handed her the key back on the condition she meet him at the corner on Monday night.

‘I rushed upstairs and threw myself on the bed … But before I undressed, a door on the other side of the room slowly opened.’ The man had managed to get into the house and follow her up the stairs; he called out that he was coming in. There was a chair against the door and she pushed her trunk against it as well. She told him that if he came in, she’d jump from the window. Even after he seemed to have gone, she stayed sitting by the window all night. When she saw daylight, she ran downstairs and out of the house to find Harry. ‘He came tumbling downstairs in his pyjamas.’ His landlady told Katharine she could rent a room at her house, and even though it was more than Katharine could afford, she agreed.¹¹

The threat of rape hangs over many of the women in Katharine’s novels. In the finale of Pioneers (1915), Deidre accidently kills her villainous newlywed husband when he comes at her demanding his ‘rights’; she is set to kill herself when an acquaintance, Mrs Cameron, reveals to her that ‘something like what has happened to you happened to me, long ago’.¹² In Black Opal (1921, 1946), Sophie’s great shame has different causes in the two editions, shifting from seduction to rape. In the first edition, she ‘loses her head’ with Adler at a ‘drunken orgy’; in the second edition, she is ‘sick with the shock and shame of being mauled by Adler’.¹³ The pattern of sexual violence continues in Katharine’s later novels, too, a trope which can’t simply be traced to this incident in London, but which can be read in light of it.

ON 2 AUGUST 1908, four weeks after arriving in England, Katharine made a pilgrimage to visit 80-year-old George Meredith. Meredith was then ranked by many as one of the great Victorian novelists; in the decades that followed, he suffered a ‘rapid and sustained decline of his posthumous reputation’ such that he is now a forgotten novelist.¹⁴

Katharine had caught Walter Murdoch’s enthusiasm for Meredith; she ‘loved’ his novels and poems for ‘their exuberant vitality, intellectual brilliance, the exquisite quality of irony that informed them’.¹⁵ Widowed and ailing in the last year of his life, he lived in Flint Cottage at Box Hill, 40 kilometres south of London. He claimed to be unloved and unread, yet in the last years of his life, ‘stricken down with paralysis, an unwilling Grand Old Man, [he] was haunted by journalists and admirers who hoped to write an essay on a Day with the Great’.¹⁶ He refused many but thanks to the letter of introduction from Alfred Deakin, he agreed to meet Katharine.

What happened in that moment, as I stood in the doorway, I’ve never been able to understand. A curious communication passed between us as Meredith’s eyes reached me. I was aware of a magnetic personality, desolation and tragedy. The realization was so swift and devastating that I forgot to be shy and self-conscious. We seemed not to be strangers.¹⁷

Over afternoon tea, Katharine and Meredith talked about his writing and then about hers. He talked with the ‘same brilliant, ironical exuberance’ with which he wrote, yet he was also full of bitterness and despair. He had a writing chalet among the trees behind his house; it’s possible this planted the idea for Katharine’s own writing chalet, built twenty years later at her home in Western Australia.¹⁸

After she left, she sat down under a hawthorn bush and wept. ‘I felt that I should not be young and Meredith old: that I should not have gone from the sunshine into that darkened room and stood in the doorway in my light summer dress … He was waiting for death and I somehow had broken in on him, like his Daughter of Hades.’¹⁹ She felt a painful contrast between her own youth and the dying generation who had formed the world she knew. She had felt it at the Prichard family reunion and when meeting the last of the pioneers in Yarram. She had felt it walking with a ‘worn and disillusioned’ Deakin ‘when English trees along the road were yellow and shedding their leaves’.²⁰ She would feel it again in November in Paris interviewing the famous singing teacher, Mathilde Marchesi.²¹ But she felt it most intensely now at the end of her afternoon with George Meredith.

Even if Meredith had been forgotten by many, Katharine would still talk of her ‘passionate admiration’ for him in an interview late in her life.²² However, the influence on her work is not obvious. The ornate, convoluted prose of Katharine’s ‘Diana of the Inlet’ (1912), written around this time, may owe something to him, but she moved away from it, adopting a more straightforward style by the time her novels began to be published.

KATHARINE TOOK A trip to Paris in October or November 1908, a plan she’d worked out with Reay, who’d told her he’d show her the city one day. ‘There he was, at my hotel, one morning soon after I arrived. He … came from Italy to have those few days in Paris with me.’²³ What Reay was doing in Italy is unknown; he’d landed in Marseilles on the Dumbea in early October and was reported to be ‘sojourning in the south of France for his health’.²⁴ Perhaps the trip and the tryst were timed to celebrate his fiftieth birthday on 10 November.

Katharine described her time with Reay in Paris with the ambivalence of all her depictions of him. They walked along the banks of the Seine, visited the Louvre, and dined at ‘out-of-the-way restaurants’; at night, they visited the opera and the Moulin Rouge. She insisted he ‘made my first visit to Paris a fabulous experience’, but his obsessive streak shows through and she recounted two incidents where she ‘incurred his displeasure’. He was unhappy when she didn’t properly appreciate the ‘famous soup’ of the Café Royal. Then, on an afternoon when he was busy, she visited the cemetery of Père Lachaise to see the tombs of French writers. She wandered the cemetery alone on the foggy afternoon and found herself completely lost. ‘The Preux Chevalier was furious that I had made this excursion without telling him where I was going’.²⁵

She wrote that Reay ‘was a fascinating companion, though I could not be in love with him’ but she does not say their relationship was still chaste.²⁶ She wrote in the draft of Child of the Hurricane that she wouldn’t let boys kiss her in her high school years, ‘taking mother’s advice about keeping everything for the man I would someday love and want to marry’.²⁷ She crossed it out; perhaps because it was not the way things had worked out by the time she married at the age of thirty-five. ‘I was “late” in maturity!’ Katharine wrote to a friend in 1964. ‘Ideas really interested me more than sex—though later I “worshipped with the Egyptians”.’²⁸ Katharine seems to have invented that Old Testament-sounding phrase in a 1928 story, ‘The Cow’, in which the female protagonist says, ‘I worship with the Egyptians … adore life, the life-giver, fecundity, creation’.²⁹

Reading between the lines of her autobiography, Reay was probably her first lover. In a foreign city without anyone to notice them, they had more opportunity for sex than they’d had back in Melbourne. In 1914, still involved with Reay, she published a sensual poem called ‘Lips of My Love’.

Adventurous lips

That o’er me rove,

So swelling soft

And smelling like the rose

Lips of my love! My love!

Lips of the bee

That cling

And fall from clinging, Yearning,

Drunk with bliss!

Dear lips

That to me prove

My body

But a chalice, white,

For thy delight,

My love, my love

Oh, I am faint

When thy lips hang on mine

And there is ecstasy

In their mute questing,

Easting, westing.

So,

They are gentle

As the brooding dove,

Fierce as twin birds of prey,

Lips of my love! My love!

If the poem had a basis in her life, by this time she was ‘worshipping with the Egyptians’. It depicts a woman positive about sex and pleasure but in the context of the uneven power balance between Katharine and Reay, there’s something disturbing about the narrator offering up her body as ‘But a chalice, white / For thy delight’.

IF ANYONE DESERVED to be known as Katharine’s ‘gallant knight’ it was actually Harry. They spent much of their free time together in London, and Katharine ignored the signs he was in love with her. They danced together on Hampstead Heath; they went boating on the Thames; she took him with her when she went to stay with her mother’s wealthy cousin in Huntingdonshire.

The romantic tension between them culminated at the notorious Covent Garden costume ball. They went with Robbie, the two women ‘looking very demure in … pale mauve and pink evening dresses, wearing black masks’, while Harry was ‘handsome and impressive in his concert-platform dress suit’. The ball didn’t start until after half-past eleven; ‘we had never seen such love-making, kissing, and passionate episodes in public. Before long there were girls with torn skirts, and couples embracing in every alcove. But the floor and band were glorious. Harry and I danced happily together’. Somewhere near dawn, thirsty and adrenaline-filled, Harry kissed her ‘for the first, and last, time’ in a hansom cab on the way back to their boarding house. ‘Harry was so staunch and reliable, so trustworthy as a friend and escort wherever I wished to go, that I did not want to complicate our camaraderie by sweethearting. He was quite pleased, too, to be free of any serious entanglement.’³⁰ Katharine may have been thinking of her career, but just as importantly, she was involved with Reay.

There’s an echo of Katharine and Harry’s ‘platonic’ partnership in her London novel, Windlestraws (1916). In it, Gene and Peter are two outsiders to the city who join forces to try to make it in London. They pretend to be a Russian noble couple to fool a theatre producer into staging their show. Despite their attraction for each other, they maintain—for most of the novel—a chaste distance, sleeping in separate beds of the same hotel room, just as Katharine had come to live in the same boarding house as Harry.

Windlestraws being a romance, it ends with Peter forsaking the rich woman he had loved for all his youth and marrying Gene. In real life, Harry eventually left London to work as a singer in Switzerland. He had minor success, but not enough, and he returned to Australia, abandoning his dream of being a professional singer. ‘We did not meet again for years. Then we were both married and could laugh over the hopes and fears of those days in the “Old Smoke”.’³¹

WHILE IN PARIS, Rudolf Broda, the socialist editor of The International, organised a reception for ‘the esteemed young collaborator from Australia’. She met ‘two medical students who were political exiles from Tsarist Russia’. Bloody Sunday, a massacre of petitioners in January 1905, had unleashed strikes and protests; in the government crackdown which followed, many radicals were exiled.

[They] told me of the struggle going on in their country to overthrow the Tsarism … It seemed impossible that such a thing could ever happen. The power of the Russian autocracy stood in my mind like a massive wall … oppressive and impregnable, against which men and women had dashed themselves in futile protests …

Quite ignorant of the people’s growing resistance to such acts of ruthless cruelty, and the strength of the revolutionary movement, I pitied my first Russian friends, and wondered how they could attach themselves to such a vague, hopeless dream.

With hindsight, the encounter became more significant after the Russian revolutions of 1917. ‘I never forgot them and, when their dream came true, began to study the ideas responsible for the success of the revolution in Russia.’³²

RETURNING TO LONDON, her birthday came not at the beginning of summer but winter, ‘cooped up … for dreary months of fog and cold weather’.³³ She shared the date with the essayist Thomas Carlyle, whose work she had loved at school, and so on 4 December 1908, she ‘took a bus to Chelsea, put a bunch of violets on his statue, and sat communing with him for a while, remembering the struggles of his youth, and a spirit which refused to be defeated’.³⁴

Her next step was undecided. The commission to write for the Herald was over, although she did continue to interview celebrities for New Idea. ‘It was time to try an innings on the English press, but manuscripts were returned with discouraging regularity.’ She was homesick and struggling financially when Reay sent an offer of a staff job with the Herald back in Melbourne. The prospect of a regular salary was ‘heavenly’.³⁵

She stayed in England long enough for spring, and spent time with her mother’s cousin in Huntingdonshire. In the tranquil gardens surrounding the Georgian mansion, she wrote a poem which begins: ‘My life will never be long enough to realise the beauty of the world’.³⁶ She was twenty-five and returning to Australia as a journalist who carried the allure of having interviewed a number of British and French celebrities. Her intense year away had confirmed her status as a single woman, focused on her career. She knew more about men and sex and she’d chosen a kind of freedom—an affair with a married man, Reay—over the limitations that marriage even to a man like Harry would have involved.