All this is why I say Melbourne is not cosmopolitan. Sydney, older and more settled in her ways, perhaps also more languid from the effects of her relaxing climate, is far more so, but in no city anywhere near its size have I heard foreign languages so little spoken as in Melbourne. The newcomer must learn to speak with the tongue of the people, not they with his; in more senses than one. They have no time for “frills,” and as the spirit of the strange country is usually stronger than the homesick spirit of the stranger within its gates, it is the stranger who gives way. That is if he be anything but Irish. Generally speaking, Australia can do little with the Irish; as some old proverb has it: “You can’t hang soft cheese from a hook on the wall.” The summit of the ambition of most Irish colonists is to attain to the dignity of keeping a public-house. There are exceptions, of course. I have in my mind’s eye, as I write, a family of whom the two brothers hold the highest position in Melbourne—but it is not often the case. There is a free and easy feeling about the life which appeals to Pat. He has few ideals; he is too easily contented, and inclined to let things slide. Sad to say, if he loses these faults he loses most of his virtues with them. The successful Irishman in Australia is for the most part something of a toady—hard, and mean, and shifty. I am half Irish myself, and I have the strongest affection for the people. When I first landed in Melbourne I caught eagerly at even the hint of a brogue, or Hibernian name; but only in the poor, the struggling, the unsuccessful, did I ever find the true spirit of Ireland.
I remember driving home from dinner one night, and as I paid the cabman on my return home, remarking his brogue, I asked him how long he had been in Australia.
“A matter of twenty years,” he said, and he had come from such and such a place; in fact, his father, and great-grandfather, and progenitors for centuries back, had, as I found, worked for my own mother’s people, and his joy was unbounded at being able to talk over the old days and the Old Country.
Nearly a year later I was dining at the same house, and a cab was sent for to take me home. My host went out to interview the cabman, and describing my destination, asked if he knew it, whereupon, with a rolling brogue, all of honey and butter, came the answer: “God Almighty, shall I ever forget that. Sure I drove a young lady there from County Galway.”
It is odd how the brogue holds in Australia, so that it is as pronounced in people that have been out here fifty years as if they had landed this week. If you are ever in Melbourne, and want to hear such a round rich brogue as you will seldom chance on, even in the Ireland of to-day, drive out to Heidelberg, one of the loveliest of Melbourne’s offshoots, and ask to be directed to Flynn’s Hotel, a matter of a mile or two farther on. There you will find a little old man and his wife—if they are still alive, and God grant they are, for they are true Irish, warm-hearted, hospitable, and altogether delightful—whose language and outlook on life are still absolutely typical though they landed in Melbourne as much as fifty-five years ago, when the town itself was all canvas or weather-board, and a thickly-wooded creek ran down to the River Yarra, where the cable trams now rush through Elizabeth Street, one of the principal thoroughfares of the whole city.
Still, in spite of all their undeniable cleverness and charm, the Irish do not, as a whole, attain to any high or permanent place in the country, even their adherence to their national characteristics representing a fluidity of will rather than a real spirit of patriotism; they will run into any mould so easily, and out again so easily, that no change is permanent. There is about them none of the passionate desire to remain unchanged, which was shown once in a young Frenchman’s answer to my question, as to whether he liked Melbourne. “I am afraid,” he said; he used no adverb, but the intonation of his voice expressed all he meant in that one word “afraid,” “that I may grow to like it.” He felt the yeast working; he felt himself being chewed up, as it were, in the hungry and compelling maw of the new country, and all that was French in him fought desperately against the process. The Chinaman, of course, remains mysterious, immutable, unmatched; perhaps that is the secret in some measure of his unpopularity, but his unchangeableness lies in his decision, and the Irishman’s in his want of it.
Still, there is one place in Melbourne where people seem to revert back to their original state: where the Frenchman, the German, the Greek, the Italian, and Russian throw off the garment of Australianism, and eat, look, and speak like men of their own country, glorying in it, too. It is as though a little patch had been cut clean out of Soho, and planté là in the midst of this prosaic city. The great and good of Melbourne do not know of its existence, by which I mean the great-and-good in family masses, all hyphened together; but still, there is potential greatness to be met with there, and active goodness, and light-heartedness, and charm—that undefinable, subtle quality in which a balance at the bank mercifully plays no part. And yet it is only a little Italian café—what, in my ultra-English days, I might have called “a common little café.”
When first I knew it, it was situated in a low, straggling building in a rather undesirable street. There were two private rooms in front where the family lived. I know that because I once penetrated into one of them to see a sick baby. Between these was a narrow passage leading to a large room, with one long table running down the centre, the kitchen, at the door of which one usually lingered to have a few words with the hostess, and a smaller dingy room lying to the side. At the end of the long room was a window, and a door opening into a courtyard, patched with yellow light and velvety black shadows; and shaded for the most part with a trellis of vines, most delicately and deliciously green in the spring and early summer, and great dark casks, which had come filled with red wine straight from Italy, the very blood of the country, and about which the old host was for ever busied with a funnel and many bottles, for white or red wine was supplied free of extra charge to all the customers. After a word with the two daughters, busy over the long table at which never more than thirty were served each evening, one moved out, if one were early, as I always took care to be, to a bench in the court yard, pleasantly cool even on the hottest evening to sip one’s vermouth in the open air, and chatter to the old host, who would answer back in slow difficult English—only answering, volunteering no remark. Not that it mattered, for the peace, the sense of having slipped all the burdens of the day off one’s shoulders on to that single meagre door step, made one discursive; besides, a little later on there would be so many people talking, so much to listen to, that one’s chance would be gone.
Then the other guests began to arrive, nearly all men. An Italian, the first violin from the — Theatre; the sub-editor of one of the “dailies”; a Member of Parliament; a man with a scar on his neck, who was said to be an ex-Turkish brigand; a few art-students—one with inordinately long hair, smoothed back from his forehead and cut all to the same length at the back, so that when he grew excited over a song and shook his head violently it all fell forward, like a lion’s mane, well below his breast. Then there was a Frenchman, who owns a vineyard a little way out of Melbourne, a German merchant, and a Greek youth, but these were only a few. For the most part one could fix the people who frequented this little café with no particular place in life, their nationality alone being uppermost. There were usually a few girls, mostly of the quiet, rather wan, student type; saving one vivid creature, of immature years and marvellous maturity of intellect, whose knowledge and self-possession made one feel like a crude child; and who, if her lines had been cast in a wider sphere, and she had been less weakened by admiration, might have developed into one of those mysterious women that—at all times—have been found wire-pulling in court and diplomatic circles, even from the very back of the throne itself, using their wit and their charm with an equal sureness and audacity.
Long before the last glow of day had faded from the little vine-shaded yard—where in a swinging hammock slept the much-pampered, and continually fêted, “Bambina” of our host’s married daughter—the long, low room inside had to be lighted by the hanging kerosene lamp, which threw the corners into an even more sombre darkness, shining but dimly from the very first through the thick veil of cigarette-smoke, the incense of modernity.