PART 2
7
Sydney, February 1907
‘AFTER FATHER’S DEATH’, Katharine wrote, ‘for a long time I couldn’t sing at all. There was no song in my heart and my voice would not lift’.1 In a fictional echo, Sophie, the heroine of Katharine’s novel, Black Opal (1921), loses her singing voice, too; for her it is tied up with her first sexual experience: ‘I was so sick with the shock and shame of it all … I couldn’t sing any more. I wouldn’t. My voice died’.2 Earlier in Black Opal, mourning her mother transforms Sophie, causing Arthur Henty, the wealthy station-heir to notice her. ‘And he seemed to be seeing Sophie for the first time, too … He could not believe that this tall girl in the black dress was the queer, elfish-like girl he had seen running about the Ridge, bare-legged … not much more than a year ago.’3
In life, it was a man Katharine called Preux Chevalier who noticed her; she said she was so naïve she had no idea what he wanted. ‘He was married, of course, and had a daughter my own age, which I thought was why he was so courteous to me.’4 His obsession with her escalated during Tom’s sickness and he was waiting for her when she disembarked from the Monowai in Sydney on 12 February 1907 on the way home from New Zealand. ‘He said he had heard from the family I was arriving from New Zealand that day, and thought he might be of some assistance, as he was on a business visit and knew Sydney quite well … “I’ll be your preux chevalier and show you Sydney,” he said.’5
The ostensible business the Preux Chevalier had in Sydney left him much time to spend with Katharine. ‘Every night he took me to dinner and the theatre, or to a concert, or for a trip on the harbour. Every day we wandered about the city; or made excursions which revealed the dazzling beauty of its surroundings.’ She was ‘enchanted’ by the city ‘and flattered by the way this man discussed all manner of subjects with me’.
We must have looked an odd pair, going about together. He, a man of the world, elegant and assured, accustomed to authority; and I in my home-made summer dress and floppy hat with a blue ribbon, or ingénue white chiffon evening dress at least three years old. I was not interested in clothes at that time, but conscious of being a little dowdy and gauche in the company of this Preux Chevalier.6
For someone who was uninterested in clothes, she had a vivid memory of what she wore. Rather than an ‘odd’ pair, they appeared all too familiar to a woman sitting beside them on a park bench who told Katharine not to trust him. The woman said, ‘All men are gay deceivers’.7 Later, as they walked along the harbour’s edge near Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, the Preux Chevalier asked Katharine if she thought he was a ‘gay deceiver’. She told him she didn’t; she wouldn’t be deceived if he was. ‘“Don’t wonder too much,” he replied dryly. “There are all sorts of rapprochements between a man and woman beyond reason or argument.”’
The Preux Chevalier was not only obsessive but patient. ‘He did nothing to arouse my dormant senses. He never kissed me, or even pressed my hand suggestively. What he did was to capture my imagination by our companionship in the carefree atmosphere of Sydney, and create an intellectual bond between us.’ When she arrived back in Melbourne, Katharine said nothing to her mother about him. ‘People wouldn’t understand’, he warned her. ‘There would be no end of malicious gossip.’8
They met often and in secret after their return to Melbourne.
There were walks through the tea-tree at Black Rock, occasionally dinner at the seaside restaurant afterwards. But always our talk was of books, my studies and literary work. The intellectual companionship was stimulating with no hint of anything disturbing, except that these accidental, and not so accidental, meetings should not be mentioned. The Preux Chevalier was more interesting to talk to than any of the young men who were my friends. I was flattered, and thrilled too, at the thought of being his chere amie.9
Katharine’s phrase ‘anything disturbing’ could mean ‘anything sexual’, yet sex didn’t seem to particularly disturb her, as coyly as she presented her youthful self. Missing from the published account of the Sydney trip in Child of the Hurricane is a sentence in the draft suggesting she meant something else: ‘Gradually the vines of a possessive passion began to twine about me, but I was not aware of that at the time’.10 She was to be entangled with the Preux Chevalier for the next decade.
ONE CRITIC FINDS the name Preux Chevalier ‘ludicrous’; another writes that ‘her title for him itself tells much’.11 Although Katharine claimed she ‘never indulged in fairytale fantasies’, the ‘gallant knight’ seems central to her ideal of romance at this time. In ‘A City Girl in Central Australia’ (1906) she refers to Bill Northwest as her ‘cavalier’ several times, a related term she also applies to the Preux Chevalier. ‘Preux Chevalier’ was a term borrowed from the romance serials appearing in Australian newspapers at this time. In 1905’s ‘Fair Lilias’, as an example, a hero ‘assisted her down the narrow, difficult path with the tenderness, devotion, and courage of a preux chevalier’.12 Despite his stated intentions, Katharine’s Preux Chevalier proved to bear more resemblance to the stock villains of the same serials. In ME Braddon’s ‘Dead Love Has Chains’, serialised in 1906, the heroine is in love with a ‘preux chevalier … radiant in the glory of enchanting youth’, but is thrown into turmoil when she receives a letter from a villainous former lover. She ‘remembered the tyranny of his love in the days when she had loved him. She was at the age when a girl adores a tyrant. His determined pursuit of her had been the charm that worked to such fatal issues. To be pursued, to be worshipped! It was the schoolgirl’s dream of bliss’.13
IN 1962, AS Katharine was negotiating the publication of Child of the Hurricane, Beatrice Davis at Angus and Robertson asked if Katharine could reveal his name. ‘It would hurt too many people’, Katharine wrote back, ‘so I could never do it’.14
He was probably Lieutenant-Colonel William Thomas Reay. Mentioned under his own name several times in Child of the Hurricane, Reay was a newspaper editor, politician and military officer with the Victorian Mounted Rifles who would become Katharine’s boss at the Herald in 1909 and 1910 before moving to London at the same time as her. ‘A chirpy, sparrow-like man is Reay—active, eager, energetic, and a regular tiger to work, he never has any leisure. As soon as his daily paper is … off his hands, he is hard at the work of some one or other of the numerous organisations to which he belongs.’15 A man of a thousand causes and boundless energy, he was a progressive, successful version of Tom Prichard and he came into Katharine’s life just as she was losing her father.
Reay was born in Balmain, Sydney on 10 November 1858. Katharine calls the Preux Chevalier a ‘friend of the family’; like Katharine’s mother, Edith, Reay spent part of his childhood in Williamstown in Melbourne. He was four years younger than Edith and twenty-five years older than Katharine. As a young bookkeeper, he saved enough money to buy the Coleraine Albion newspaper in country Victoria in 1883.16 It was the year his first child was born, a daughter, to his wife, Lucinda; it was also the year Katharine was born. One hint that their marriage was troubled came in a 1911 trial of a burglar who had stolen jewels from the family; one of their daughters testified that ‘she slept in the same room as her mother. Her father, who had met with an accident, slept in another room’.17
Reay had five daughters, his two sons dying in infancy.18 Katharine was friends with at least one of them, Nan, a nurse. Another of the daughters, Beatrice, married Lionel Bull, the brother of Katharine’s best friend, Hilda.19 In 1962, when Katharine wrote that it would hurt too many people to name the Preux Chevalier, four of Reay’s daughters were still alive.
Katharine’s ‘gaily irreligious and iconoclastic’ Preux Chevalier influenced her to reject her father’s political conservatism.
He opened my mind to political questions, international problems of peace and war, the rights of women, with a broad humanitarian outlook on everything, and an ardent belief in Australia, its progress and future as a powerful, independent nation. Politics, history and poetry, he dipped into them all, with witty observations and amusing anecdotes of politicians and writers he had known.20
This description of the Preux Chevalier matches Reay. He was a member of the Victorian parliament from 1900 to 1902; ‘describing himself as a radical, he often voted with Labor’.21 He was active in the National Anti-Sweating League, a Victorian organisation of middle-class social reformers which had agitated for the passing of the Factory Act in 1896 and then continued as a watchdog and tribunal ensuring fair working hours and minimum wages in factories.22 Matching Katharine’s description of the Preux Chevalier’s ‘ardent belief in Australia’, Reay was president of the Hawthorn branch of the Australian Natives’ Association in Victoria before becoming one of the founders of the London branch in 1915.23 With membership restricted to Australian-born whites, it had pushed for federation, and now in the 1900s ‘supported the White Australia Policy, advocated a strong Australian defence force, promoted the celebration of Australia Day as a national holiday … and defended wider powers for the Commonwealth Government’.24
Katharine carefully avoided mentioning the Preux Chevalier’s occupation, but Ric Throssell reveals he was ‘an influential figure in the Australian press’.25 Reay was a newspaper editor for many decades; after editing the Coleraine Albion he later edited the Hamilton Spectator and then the Herald, Melbourne’s major evening newspaper.26
Ric Throssell describes the Preux Chevalier’s ‘possessive jealousy’; in an earlier draft of Wild Weeds and Windflowers, he adds, ‘that he imposed upon her, following her across the world’.27 The deleted part explains the strange fact that the Preux Chevalier turned up wherever Katharine was from 1907 to 1915. Reay’s movements are the most telling circumstantial evidence he was the Preux Chevalier.
On 11 February 1907, the day before Katharine arrived in Sydney and was met by the Preux Chevalier, Reay travelled on the Wyandra from Melbourne to Sydney.28
In October 1908, the Preux Chevalier appeared in Paris to meet Katharine. That same month, Reay took a ‘sojourn’ to France, without his wife, ‘for his health’.29 When Katharine returned to Melbourne two months after Reay, he employed her at the Herald.
Several months after resigning from the Herald, Katharine unexpectedly travelled to New York in November 1910, where Reay was based for several months on another trip without his wife. The passenger list is difficult to decipher, but she appears to have been on the same ship as him leaving New York for Britain on 28 December 1910.30 Katharine stayed on in London while Reay returned to Melbourne. He was expected to resume his post as editor of the Herald, but instead he created the post of manager of the newspaper’s London office and moved there.31 Reay stayed on in London all the time Katharine was there and beyond, eventually dying there in 1929.32
KATHARINE EMPHASISED THE Preux Chevalier’s charm in Child of the Hurricane, only mentioning incidentally that he had threatened to kill himself if she ever married anyone else. Her son is less protective of him, revealing that Katharine privately ‘warned my daughter, Karen, of the price she paid in years of possessive jealousy; of his demented threats to shoot himself when she attempted to leave him; of her regret for independence bartered to a man capable of the cowardice and deceit of playing upon her fear of suicide, knowing that she could not face the thought of becoming the cause of his self-destruction’.33
Reay’s public persona is of a successful and relentless do-gooder. Beyond all that activity, hints of his weaknesses sometimes show through. In 1901, a gossip column described him as ‘one of the most garrulous men in Victoria State Assembly’.
He likes talking on all things, and one day, when he had held himself in, the Argus described him as ‘suffering from suppression of speech’. This is one of the severest pains Reay can endure, but he very readily gets rid of it. Reay would be a real good man if he condensed more and did not drown his ideas in verbiage.34
Another gossip column in a Melbourne newspaper reported in January 1906 that Reay ‘left for a holiday trip to Europe in the French mail steamer Nera on Thursday. That since his promotion to be chief [of the Herald] his duties have proved so arduous as to bring about nervous prostration, which renders a change of air and scene absolutely necessary’.35 It was on his return he began pursuing Katharine, symptom of—or cure for—his middle-aged malaise.
THERE ARE SOME echoes of Katharine’s relationship with Reay in her work. The most significant is in ‘The New Pygmalion’, one of her only surviving unpublished stories, written in the first year of her relationship with Reay. In late 1907, EJ Brady accepted it for publication in the Native Companion, but the journal folded before it appeared.36 The Greek myth of Pygmalion tells of a sculptor who falls in love with his statue of a woman; the goddess Venus brings the statue to life. The myth was appropriated by many writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Katharine’s version predated the most famous one, George Bernard Shaw’s play, Pygmalion (1913).37
In Katharine’s story, Jean-Marie is a Frenchman who owns a beauty parlour by the sea. He is in love with his mannequin, Mimi. ‘It was her beauty—her imperishable beauty—he adored, he told her … Madame his wife did not understand. She was not beautiful.’ Jean-Marie treats his wife ‘with formal chivalry, a ceremonious respect. Was she not his partner for life? But she was not an artist, Madame. She had not the soul of an artist’.
Madame also has a second rival for her husband’s affection. ‘The only ears besides Mimi’s into which he could pour his trouble were the little ears, like tinted sea shells, of Lise, the orphan child.’ Jean-Marie had promised Lise’s father on his deathbed that he would take care of her. ‘Perhaps he realised possibilities of beauty in the unformed grace of the slender little figure, despite its red, workworn hands and clumsy dirty clothes.’
After Madame destroys Mimi the mannequin in a fit of jealousy, Jean-Marie suffers ‘exhaustion followed on nervous prostration’. Lise ‘would do anything in the world to make him merry and garrulous again’. She tells Jean-Marie she has a secret; he assumes she has a lover and says he will rejoice if the man is worthy of her. Instead, Lise ‘outlined her lips with scarlet, brushed her eyebrows with a tiny blackened brush, smoothed a delicate cream over her face and powdered it. She took the jewel from Mimi’s hair and put it in her own. Then she bared her bosom and folded Mimi’s scarf over it’. When she appears to Jean-Marie, he declares, ‘It is Mimi … Mimi come to life, thou divine one’.38
In the story, Katharine showed a young woman naïvely enthralled by her Pygmalion, oblivious to his faults. Katharine seems to have had no sympathy for Madame, wife of the faithless Jean-Marie, not even giving her a name. Nor did she censure Jean-Marie for abusing his parental role in sexualising Lise. Lise herself shows no hesitation in embracing Jean-Marie; a poor, love-starved orphan, all she wants is to restore him to his ‘garrulous’ self.