For girls wishing to enter the musical profession the premier University College, Trinity, is open to men and women alike—the Trinity College Hostel adjoining it affording accommodation for the resident students—while the women doctors and dentists hold very high place in the Melbourne world. There is one hospital—the Queen Victoria—where all the visiting surgeons and physicians are women, and where operations of all kinds are carried out. Though it is small, consisting of but two wards, medical and surgical, the out-patients’ department catering, as it does, for the needs of women and children only, is very large indeed. There are absolutely no men at all about the place. It might be the dream of the “Princess” come true, and rendered practicable, the very portress who works the lift in which the patients are carried up to the wards being a woman. I have been a patient in Melbourne hospitals more than once—Providence seeming to have constructed me in a gimcrack and random fashion. The last time does not bear thinking of, save for the delightful kindness and courtesy of the sisters and nurses, for Providence seemed also to have fatally muddled both the manners and the intelligence of the house physician. But the one really happy memory I have of hospital life all hangs round “the Queen Victoria.” It was extraordinarily gay; I do not think I ever heard more laughter and more droll remarks than in that surgical ward, where most of the patients were either waiting for, or recovering from, some serious operation. I remember particularly the storm of laughter and chaff that greeted me the first time I was able to rise from my bed and stand upright They christened me the “Canary”—not on account of my voice, but because of the thinness of my nether limbs, which, as one wit remarked, reminded her of number eleven on a cottage door—cannot you see it, the two straight, stark lines of white chalk on the rough boards?—while others, again, declared that I was like nothing so much as two yards of pump-water.
The work of resident physician and matron were combined in the person of one delightful woman, always immaculate in the whitest of white linen, who used to lend me books—her own books, not the hospital possessions—while the coming of the honoraries was always quite the event of each day. There is a fantastic illusion to the effect that women take no interest in their own sex. Anyone who could have seen how the coming of the visiting doctors was watched for by these poor women, many of them desperately ill, and have heard the conjectures made as to what they would wear, and the way the patients disputed together over the charms and “smartness” of their special honorary, might have lost all illusion on that point, once and for ever; if anything ever can destroy such a hidebound and century-old error. I think that convalescence was the most pleasant I have ever known, lying on a long couch in the balcony, looking out into sunlit courtyard with its huge fig-tree; the nurses in their pale green uniform flitting across it from the office to their dining-room; visitors coming and going; or the portress sweeping up leaves and burning them in a bonfire, from which the pungent smoke floated in a thin blue cloud up to the balcony. Then someone brought me a present of a soft grey dressing-gown, trimmed with pale blue silk, which I loved because I looked nice in it. I remember lending it one visiting day to a pretty girl whose young man used to come and see her—a matter of vast interest to us all; and she looked nicer still, because her blue eyes just matched the blue silk. She died a few months later, and I have always been sorry that I was not strong-minded enough to have given it her “for keeps,” as the children say.
Between the hours of seven and eight, when the ward was all tidied up ready for the night, the women’s husbands were allowed in to see their wives. It was midsummer, I remember, for I had my Christmas dinner there—and at that hour the long ward was filled with a tender twilight. We women who had no one to come and see us used to turn over on our sides and gaze out of the window at the leaves of the fig-tree, black against the pink sky—at least, I did, because there were no beds that way, other lonely patients, with a husband and wife on either side, having to lie on their backs and stare out stolidly in front of them; still, one could not help seeing the men tiptoeing in—some in their Sunday black, others straight from work in their blue dungarees—and noticing how the faces of some of the wives would flush and glow, as if a lamp had been lit behind the transparent white mask. And how the man would hold one hand in his, and fling his other arm over the pillow, above his woman’s head, and say very little, while she talked eagerly, incessantly, in a little weak whisper. We did not want to see all this. Not that they minded, as long as one was not ill-bred enough to stare deliberately; but it gave us a nasty lumpy feeling in our throats—nous autres who had nobody to come and see us during that twilight hour, which always seems so completely made for intimacy.
There is, I suppose, no state of life that does not bring its own pleasure and its own pain; and though perhaps, the ups of life are the most comfortable, on the whole I would award the palm for interest to the downs; and I for one never learnt more, from all of the world that I have known, than I did from the eight weeks in that hospital ward, where the very atmosphere seemed to breathe content and good feeling as palpably as it did iodoform and carbolic.
Taking it all round, I should say that women in Australia, of the working and middle classes, have a much better time of it than in England. In some ways they do not expect so much. A girl marries a man who is earning a decent wage because she loves him—even in the upper classes there is very little question of settlements, nor does she expect to start at exactly the same point as her parents have reached. I have lived in countries where coolie labour of all sorts is ridiculously cheap, and where a girl whose parents have, say, two hundred a year, need not even trouble to put on her own stockings; is literally waited on hand and foot, and knows nothing either of cooking or house-work, and, after all, I have come to the conclusion that the servant difficulty in Melbourne is by no manner of means an unmixed evil, and that certainly it is a great factor in the making of good wives. In England the attitude of men towards women is completely different from what it is in Australia. At home they expect a tremendous lot of their women, but in the smallest possible way. They must be purely domestic angels on the hearth, and not over-interested in anything beyond it. If they have no hearth on which to practise their virtues, then they are indeed unsexed. The women in Victoria naturally do not like to hear of the stone-throwing, etc., practised by their own sex in the fight for political equality at home, and, I believe, are truly sorry that there seems no prospect of the brains of those in authority being reached in any less forcible fashion; but, then, they literally cannot comprehend a woman’s side of the question being disregarded, simply because she is a woman. They have never themselves resorted to violence, because there was no necessity for it; the laws in Australia being the same for the women as for the men, in divorce, in labour, and the ownership and care of children. When one first lands in Melbourne one may, perhaps, form the hasty opinion that the men are not as courteous to women as they are in England—I am not speaking of the rich and travelled minority, who are much the same all over the world, but of the ordinary middle or lower classes. It is true that the men are not fond of parting with their hats, and will stand and talk to a woman with both hands deep in their hip-pockets. But, though they will not refrain from contradicting her because she is a lady, they will yet give her their fullest attention; and in business as well as pleasure weigh her opinion against theirs as carefully as though she were of their own sex. While men at home continue to treat girls and young women like pretty kittens, merely to be petted and played with, they must not be surprised that they develop at times into mature cats, using their claws, if only to show that they have got them. In England there seems always—everywhere—to be running beneath all social and political intercourse between men and women, and even beneath much domestic life—for nothing can be more bitter than the remarks some wives make on their husbands’ characters, pursuits, and pleasures—a sub-current of fierce sex-antagonism that is very rarely indeed felt out here where there is so much true equality between men and women; they know here that it pays them, if nothing else, to stand shoulder to shoulder, and to make of themselves and their family a compact little commonwealth, protecting their interests against outside interference only.
Certainly a very great number of women in Victoria do not use the vote now they have it, but that is no argument against its possession. A great many men—particularly in lonely, scattered districts, do not use theirs, either. Though voting by post is permitted to anyone living more than five miles away from the nearest polling-booth, or suffering from any illness or infirmity which prevents them from voting personally, this is not much help to people who are many more miles than five from a post-office, and probably quite unaware, even, that any election is taking place. As a matter of fact, the disparity between the number of men and women who availed themselves of their privilege at the election of 1906 is very small indeed—considering for how very short a time in the world’s history women have been permitted or expected to use their faculties outside their own homes; the number of male voters in Victoria for the Senate being 335,886, and the votes recorded 209,168; while the female voters enrolled numbered 336,168, and the votes recorded 171,933. But even in Melbourne all women are not interested in the actual possession of this much-coveted privilege, and I remember one labourer’s wife saying to me: “I don’t want no vote, not I! Jim votes as I tell ’im to; an’ if ’e didn’t, I’d let ’im know the reason why.”
She was a wise woman, that labourer’s wife, in more ways than one; an excellent help-mate, keeping her home spotlessly clean, and feeding her menkind—husband and grown-up son—thoroughly well—many a cup of tea and fresh-baked, featherlike scone have I enjoyed at her kitchen-table—but she insisted on her own rights and privileges, all the same. On Sundays her husband and son “lay in,” as she called it, till midday, while she gave them their breakfast in bed. But every Friday morning she “lay in,” and they lit the fire, prepared her breakfast, and took it to her in bed, cut their own lunches, and set off to work, leaving her to lie there quietly and rest till she felt inclined to rise and get herself a midday meal; usually a light one, in any case, for the Australian labouring classes mostly have their dinner, with hot meat and vegetables and, of course, tea,—when the men come back from their day’s work. But in every way there is more give and take, and not only between the sexes. One family I knew, consisting of four sisters who lived with their old mother in the suburbs and went up to town every day for business. They did not have to be at work till nine, and breakfasted a little after eight, the one servant bringing them all round the inevitable cups of tea at seven. On Sunday mornings, however, one of them always got the early tea, and took the maid a cup in bed. I do not in the least suppose that she was especially grateful—though doubtless she enjoyed it thoroughly—but neither did the girls expect her to be so. They simply did it because it seemed to them “fair.” And there you have the keynote of much which prevents the hardest work in Australia from developing into drudgery, or the poorest people from becoming downtrodden and hopeless; for, as far as is humanly to be expected, it is a fair country, while the people that are in it abide, at any rate, by this one great working ideal of “fairness.”
CHAPTER VI
VICTORIAN YOUTH
During the first week I was in Melbourne I came across a notice in the daily paper among the police-court news, stating that “Percy So-and-So, aged two years and four months,” had been “arrested on the charge of being a neglected child.”
“What a brutal country!” I thought. “Can it be possible that any human being can be found so hard-hearted and inhuman as to condemn a helpless child to any form of punishment, because by some tragic fate it has missed both a mother’s love and a father’s care?” Globe-trotters get all sorts of Adelphi-like impressions such as this, and then return home to rave in print about the barbarities and inefficiencies of other countries. Luckily for the correction of my ideas, however, I was to spend more than eight years in learning to understand this particular country a little better.