One bright, showery november afternoon, then, the “Petrel” passed Port Phillip Heads: was piloted up the harbour to Port Melbourne pier, and Gildea disembarked. He knew one person in Melbourne, and only one, Charles Maddock. Maddock, and his father before him, had been friends of the Gildea family. Maddock was some fifteen years older than Gildea, whom he had known well as a boy at Katharinasbury, he himself at that time being in the midst of his brilliant scholastic career at Cambridge. Almost immediately after his ordination, Maddock came out to a high ecclesiastical position in Australia. It had been the wish of his life to work in one of the Pacific Colonies, and now his wish was fulfilled. The appointment of one so young to the post he had at first held, had caused a little murmuring both at home and in the Colony, it being known that he was possessed of the highest influence; but the murmuring had soon passed into pleasant greeting, and was now swelled to a regular chorus of applause from friends, foes, and indifferent alike. Maddock had great charm of manner: he was a more or less refined scholar, yet was not lacking in that spiritual robustness which goes so far to make up what is called a personality. It would not be too much to say that he was the most popular man in the colony. Society delighted in the gentleman: the outer world in the man, and both were right, for (here was the secret!) he sympathized with both.
Gildea on his arrival took up his abode at an hotel until he saw rooms that pleased him, and began, after his fashion, to examine the city and its inhabitants. He went everywhere and saw everything, happy to find that his curiositas was not after all dead in him. Pleasure, in the sense of living, is in Melbourne but, what Tennyson says of the pleasure of London, “gross mud-honey,” and had not much attraction to one who had been through the best specimens thereof in London, Paris, New York, and Vienna. Gildea, however, if he did not go through it here, mingled with it as an amused half-spectator half-actor, seeking out its meaning as regards this dawning civilization which was interesting him just at present. He fell in with Sydney Medwin, a squatter’s son and ex-Cambridge undergraduate, whom he had known by repute as an inter-university runner and would-be rake, and they spent some pleasant days together. Medwin’s father wished him to take to station work, but Medwin, having tasted the “gross mud-honey” of London, Paris, and the Continent generally, was doggedly determined to do no such thing.
“Damn it all,” he said once in his half-acute way to Gildea, “there’s quite enough money made already in the family, and now it’s time to spend it. If my governor had wanted me to look after sheep, he shouldn’t have sent me to Europe.”
Europe was to Medwin—to Medwin held down by his inexorable “governor” to an allowance and a place in the home establishment—a sort of far-off beautiful dream which had once to a certain extent been his and, he feared, would never be his again. His life was reckless: he was knowingly doing his best to spoil a fine constitution by his excesses, and looked forward to death within ten or fifteen years with stupid stoicism.
After a little Gildea thought that he would like to see something of colonial society, social and intellectual, and presented himself to Maddock. Maddock knew the Medwins well, and even Sydney Medwin who, in his unreflective way, had a great respect for him.
“The governor,” Medwin said once to Gildea, “the governor has ruined my life! I had an ambition—I was ambitious; yes, I was ambitious! But I had to keep it dark! I can’t argue about it, you know: I haven’t thought for years, and now I can’t. But if Christianity’s good enough for Maddock, it’s good enough for me. I believe in Maddock.”
Accordingly, whenever Maddock was to be met at the Medwins’, Sydney Medwin was to be seen listening attentively to everything the Doctor said, trying to think, trying to understand, the look of intelligence varying on his face with the look of puzzlement.
“A fuddled intelligence,” said Gildea once, smiling and laughing; “now he’ll be off and get drunk with one of his girls at Dicks’.” (Dicks’ was a private hotel where “the set,” as Medwin and his friends called themselves, often met for the purposes of recreation.)
Maddock was very pleased to meet Gildea again, and during the next month they saw much of each other. Gildea mingled with the Colonial society as he had mingled with the outer world, but with less interest. The Colonial outer world is at any rate original: it does not imitate, it is. Colonial society, on the other hand, imitates and imitates badly. It is a case of the new wine in the old bottles. The young people wish to break away from all the old social convenances and bien-séances: they have almost a contempt for the old people; but the old people rule, and their rule is as yet too strong to be openly disobeyed. The young people, therefore, lack social self-reliance: they have no distinctive “style” of their own as in America. “Indeed,” as Medwin used to say, “no one has any style out here, except the people at Government House.—And they,” he would add, admiringly, “look down upon us all as louts.” The young people, then, feel their ideas of happiness to be frail, immature: pleasure is not, as in the European capitals, provided for them; they must provide it for themselves. Pleasure, however, is their aim, and pleasure, so soon as they rule in their turn, they will have. The question is whether this pleasure is to be “mud-honey”—“mud-honey” with its grossness drained somewhat, but still “mud-honey”—or whether that wonderful modern production which we call Culture is going to intervene and complicate matters.
Gildea soon wearied of a society in such a painful state of transition. Having arrived at these conclusions on its tendencies, or what he took to be its tendencies, the painfulness of it began to afflict him. At the same time his interest in the problem of this small social hot-house did not, somewhat to his surprise, show signs of leaving him.