Constance Clyde, and “The paying back”

by Whispering Gums

A post in our series featuring works published in 1924 (or by authors who died in 1924). This post’s subject is a short story titled “The paying back” which was published in The Australasian on 26 July 1924, by the Scottish-born writer, Constance McAdam.

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Constance Clyde (born, Constance Jane McAdam) is another of our writers who wrote under a number of different names, but it appears that Constance Clyde was the name by which she was best known, making it a bit more than your usual pseudonym.

Both Austlit and Wikipedia, which cite their sources, have entries for Clyde, though AustLit uses Constance McAdam for its main heading while Wikipedia has Constance Clyde. Given I found articles about her, as well as by her, using the name Constance Clyde, I’m going with Clyde too. However, for the record, AustLit says that she also wrote under Clyde Wright, Pen, C.C. and C. Clyde. Christopher Dawson, writing in the Inside Boggo Road Gaol blog,  describes her as the “author of a novel, contributor to high-class English reviews, sometime social editress of a Christchurch (N.Z.) newspaper, and in 1906 one of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Suffragettes”. He sums her up, in his 2023 article, as “a formidably independent woman”.

Clyde was born, the 11th child in her family, on 25 Jul 1872 in Glasgow, Scotland, and died in Brisbane, Queensland, on 30 Aug 1951. (My guess is that the “Clyde” comes from Glasgow’s Clyde River, which is also Dawson’s guess.) She apparently moved to Dunedin, New Zealand, with her family when she was 7, and was schooled there. She began writing poetry for the Witness (Otago), but her first paid literary effort, says AustLit, was a short story published in the Dunedin Star. She arrived in Sydney in 1898, where she continued her career in literature and journalism, contributing to Australian and English newspapers, including the Sydney Bulletin. Dawson cites one Kirstine Moffatt, as describing her subject matter at this time as encompassing “social, feminist and literary questions”.Wikipedia says that in an essay entitled ‘The Literary Woman’, she apparently urged women to continue “to make brilliant discoveries in the realm of the emotions”.

In 1903, Clyde went to London to pursue a literary career, and her only novel, A pagan’s love, was published there in 1905. Anti-Puritan, it apparently explored ideas about women’s dependence, which included the heroine considering an extra-marital relationship with a man. In 1907, she was imprisoned in Holloway Prison as one of the suffragettes who ’caused a disturbance’ in the House of Commons. Sometime undefined time later, she returned to New Zealand, and in 1925 co-authored a travel book with the journalist Alan Mulgan. In 1928, when she was living in Auckland, she was described by Sydney’s Smith’s Weekly as “one of the most brilliant and versatile of Australasian women journalists”. The article explains that:

In order to understand officialdom, Miss Clyde in recent years accepted appointments in New Zealand institutions, being on the staff of a backward school, sub-matron of a women’s gaol, and attendant at a mental asylum of 1500 inmates. She is strongly opposed to the new N.Z. Child Welfare Act, which she contends gives the official too much power over family life. Her great desire is to have proper Montessori teachers in New Zealand for such backward children as do come into the hands of the State.

In 1931, she was ejected from the New Zealand Parliament for protesting against the 1925 Child Welfare Act.

Sometime after this, she returned to Australia. Austlit has her listed on the 1949 Queensland Electoral Roll as living in South Brisbane, but Wikipedia provides more, stating that she moved to Brisbane in the early 1930s, where she was again imprisoned in 1935, this time for refusing to pay a fine for fortune-telling using tea-leaves. Dawson reports that, when in court for this offence, she said, “I thought that I could do some good in this depression by sympathy, kindness and advice, and especially by telling people that there is nothing wrong with this world except the monetary system.” As Dawson added, “even reading tea leaves could become a political platform” for Constance Clyde. Somehow, in between all this she wrote prolifically, with AustLit listing over 130 works by her, most of them short stories, the latest dated 1938.

Sadly, as Dawson chronicles, her life ended quietly, petering out “in the mundane concerns of suburbia after such an ambitious foray into the bohemian literary circles of turn-of-the-century Sydney and London”. There was no obituary.

The story I’ve chosen for this post is a departure from the last few I’ve shared, which have all been romances at heart. There is reference to a failed romance in “The paying back”, but its subject is the relationship between a mother and her unmarried daughter. The theme? Well, the title might give that away.

The paying back

By Constance Clyde

“I can remember, how indignant I was, mother, and I just could not make people understand.” Her voice, all thin as her mother’s, and almost as old in tone, broke off into a faint giggle. “It wasn’t that I wanted the poor flies to have their wings and legs torn off, but because I thought it such a shame little Jim should learn not to do so at an earlier age than I had learnt. Five was the age in our family for not tearing off flies’ wings,” ended Aunt Emily seriously.

“But we ought to swot flies,” said niece Ada, not comprehending, as Emily remarked later, ‘”the psychology of it”.

“Oh, yes, nowadays, but at that time we used to pick them out of cans and dry their wings; only the little ones were not blamed for murdering them, and so Andrew, your uncle, knew he could jeer at me for having killed them up to five when Jim was now learning to be decent to them at four. Everyone went by age in our family” — handing poor, puzzled eighteen-year-old Ada Fleming her second cup of tea — “we liked everything to be equal and to balance circus at four, panto at five. I remember your mother being so angry, Ada, because Ethel was allotted to go to the pantomime at four and a half when she, Mary, hadn’t been allowed.”

“How funny!” from Mary’s child, wondering how soon she could get away to her jazz lesson.

Grey-haired Aunt Emily ticked off humorously on her thin, somewhat spatulate, fingers, “Not being seen in your nightie by visitors, own sex at nine, other sex at six! And, oh, mother, tell Ada how we inveigled her mother to go down-stairs when the clergyman had called, the day after her sixth birthday, so we could say “When I was a big girl nearly seven years old, I didn’t –“

“Hush, Emily, you chatter too much.” Thus the seventy-year-old mother to the fifty-year-old daughter.

“Oh, you just let me alone, mamma—mother, I mean,” with an affectation of domineering never shown when alone. Ada at last got away, grandmother and aunt to be erased from the tablets of her memory until it was time to pay her duty visit again.

“It’s nice Ada coming here so often,” as the two went back to their room. But Mrs. Poynton was accustomed to daughters’ children.”

It wasn’t nice for me or her hearing you talk such nonsense,”‘ said Mother, trailing her white shawl, and losing her handkerchief, which Emily quickly restored, before slipping out to purchase her parent’s favourite brandy-snaps.

For the last fifteen years or so everyone in the township had been accustomed to say how nice it was for Mrs. Poynton and her eldest daughter “being so nearly of an age.”

This nearness of age, however, did not, to use Emily’s own word, “counter balance” the differentiation arising from lifelong celibacy, and almost lifelong marriage. Mrs. Poynton, marrying at seventeen, had lost forever the right to some margin of adult spinsterhood. As a result she had never left off the tease and satirist frame of mind. She was always talked of by outsiders as “more an eldest sister” to those “great girls and boys of hers.” Why they should be expected to prefer an elder sister to a mother no one could exactly say.

Emily adored her mother, and in earlier years, after her brothers and sisters had gone out into the world, would sometimes sob herself to sleep over the way in which her parent would “take her off” before people and subject her to ridicule. Why did mother go on like this, she questioned herself from thirty to forty? “It isn’t

that she hates me. She likes me. How kind she is when I am ill, but so am I when she is,” she would say, with that love of balance and equality to which she would allude years later. “Why does she depreciate me to others, and try to make me out a nobody when she doesn’t really think me a nobody?”

Then at forty, when Emily looked young for her age, there seemed to come an answer to this query: It began with a visitor to the township, an elderly widower, Mr. Monaghan, a psychologist, who explained to her the law of reaction. His psychology included the cheerful doctrine that the mother who overpraises her daughter, as do nine out of ten, acts thus for the sub-conscious reason that she wants her listener, in a mood of human contra-diction, to disparage. “But when you, my dear Miss Poynton, hear your mother depreciate you she is really hoping, sub-consciously that, obeying the law of re-action, her listeners will believe just the opposite. Both on the speaker and on the listener this law has great force.”

Emily, reserved with the opposite sex, was soon on fairly intimate terms with Mr. Monaghan. She confided in him her domestic difficulties. She liked to hear of this law of reaction. It was pleasant to believe that disparagement meant and created appreciation.

Consequently she bore up bravely when her mother, with the garrulousness that comes of tea and toast and a purely feminine circle, confided in Mr. Monaghan’s talkative sister one afternoon some failings of Emily’s, without adding that these had long been overcome.

Emily laughed at these little anecdotes of herself, but whether because Mr. Monaghan was not subject to the law of reaction himself or because Mother went so far that reaction became logically impossible, Mr. Monaghan ceased calling. Later he was heard of in another township with a middle-aged bride, whose mother had praised her housekeeping steadily and  consistently.

That was ten years ago, and now Emily thought of the episode without conscious emotion. She really was happy with Mother when Mother was nice, and she was now in the decade when reminiscences of childhood and the little pleasures of life assured an aspect of excitement, which properly belongs to bigger things. She liked the little deferences that came her way, even those for dawning elderliness was responsible, even the sound of her maiden name uttered by tradespeople or fellow social worker, “Yes, we’ll be sure to send it home to-morrow, without fail, Miss Poynton.” “Miss Poynton, can you help us with orphanage day?”

It was like being someone in “Cranford” or “Our Village”. Unfortunately, in the joy of what seemed almost a spiritual re-birth she mentioned this absurd little pride of hers to Mother.

“I suppose it’s my getting on in life makes me,” she said elliptically, “but after all,” roguishly, “you’re not proud when people call you Mrs. Poynton, are you?” Then, she rose, feeling Cranfordish still, though it was the telephone bell that rang.

“Yes, it’s Miss Poynton speaking. Yes, quite true. My niece, Miss Frances Poynton, is coming for a visit. We have not seen her since she was a little thing. Very pleased of course–she’ll be staying with her cousins.”

A premonition of evil came over Emily as she slipped back to her mother. She wished she had not told her about that little pride of hers. She cheered herself by thinking of the new niece’s visit from New Zealand, and how the interest of it would make mother agreeable for a time, anyway; yet the fear remained.

Of late years she had instinctively put forward false weaknesses to draw her mother’s fire, so that she might more easily hide her real sensitiveness. There was that time, for instance, 15 years ago, when she had made a fuss about not winning the painting competition, when she really felt hurt at being left out of the bazaar charades for the first time. Mrs. Poynton had been “caught,” and so had left the real sensitiveness unprobed.

Why had she exposed herself to fire now? Why had she let anyone—she hated to say mother—infer that she feared the withdrawal of these little honours and courtesies? They couldn’t be withdrawn she told herself soothingly. Yet the fear remained.

Then Frances Poynton came to pay her first visit to Grandma, bright and affectionate.

“An so you’ve come to take precedence,” said mother, her shawl, as usual, trailing almost to form a train. “The eldest son’s eldest daughter, with the name. You’re Miss Poynton now, my dear. Yes, quite old enough for that.”

“Oh, I won’t, bother,” said Frances awkwardly, swinging her tennis racket.

“Never mind, it’s what you are,” said mother mischievously, “you see, on the female side, you’re head of the family. You’re Miss Poynton.”

“Not quite that, mother.”

A small radius on each of Emily’s cheeks was suddenly very bright. Why did her hand shake a little as she poured out tea? Oh, why should she care?

“I’m Miss Poynton, of course,” she said, and laughed, trying to be nonchalant about it.

“Nonsense, Emily. You’re Miss Emily Poynton now, Frances here, so long as she remains unmarried, is the Miss Poynton.”

“The eldest, whether she be aunt or niece, always has the name,” Emily began to spoon sugar into the cups. “It is that way in all the old etiquette stories.”

Why did she trouble to remonstrate, only making mother more determined. Mrs. Poynton knew very well. She had not realised that Emily, colonial born and home-living, also knew. Unfortunately, Bella, the maid, coming in with hot water, had no ideas on this subject. She was merely a broadcasting apparatus for Mrs. Poynton’s formulas.

“Move Miss Poynton’s chair back from the draught, please. No, not Miss Emily’s, Bella, Miss Poynton’s. Frances, my dear, the Teasdales were along this morning to see if you’d help the committee on Flag Day. You can write from here; or I. Shall I? Very well, ‘Miss Poynton has much pleasure in accepting.'”

The teasing campaign had begun.

Aunt Emily fought manfully. The townspeople, however, took their etiquette from the old lady once in England, so far as their easy humour ever troubled with etiquette at all. Then Emily fought a second round. Some six women’s columns received requests to give the rule as regards the titles of spinster, aunt, and niece when bearing the same surname. Four furnished her with the correct reply. A fifth rebuked E.P. for troubling about forms and ceremonies, so out of place in Australian life, and the sixth gave the wrong answer, ignorant that etiquette does not follow the lines of inheritance of property.

Mrs. Poynton, of course, pounced upon the wrong answer, using it laughingly.

“The niece always takes precedence as regards name. I told you, Emily.” And then Bella announced Miss Poynton, as she had been told to do, and someone rang up from the Workers’ Educational Association to know whether Miss Poynton would like to join as a visitor during her stay; and young men and women who missed Frances at the Flemings’ house came to inquire whether Miss Poynton were with her grandmother.

Emily could do nothing. She dared not carry the contest further. How they would have stared, those laughing, genial, country people, had they known that she suffered from this reversal. They would have thought her “a little mental” to trouble over nothing at all. After all, what did it matter? Nobody thought less of her from her being; Miss Emily. They did not know enough for that. She was exactly as be-fore. But the hurt did lie in this but in the knowledge that mother meant to hurt her. Why should mother intend to hurt, even supposing, as Mr. Monaghan had once said, it was not all intentional. After all, mother had her pet horrors too. There was that time, for instance, during her last illness, when she was so sweet and good, and confided in Emily her dislike of being described in an obituary notice as a relict of James Poynton. Emily must remember to put widow. The word implying that she was something impatiently detached from James Poynton, and laid aside while he went “marching on,” had no charm for individualistic Mrs. Poynton. “She ought to feel for me, even though she may believe I am wrong,” thought Emily.

She was roused by Bella’s knock at the door, then her voice. “Miss Emily, your mother is wanting, to know if you’ll look in on her for a moment.”

“Please call me Miss Poynton,” she said sharply.

“Isn’t she just the old maid,” murmured Bella. And Emily entered the room where Mrs. Poynton was nursing an attack of influenza somewhat more severe than usual.

“Change this for another of Florence Barclay’s at the library and post this letter, if it’s not too much trouble,” said mother. She handed her a letter very plainly addressed to Miss Poynton, care of Mrs Fleming. “I think you’ve got it a little wrong, mother,” said Emily. She snatched the pen and ink from the mantelpiece, and, in as matter of fact way as possible, inserted a capital F between prefix and surname.

Mrs Poynton snatched the letter from her, and tore it open, sacrificing a stamp. She put the missive in another envelope, on which she ran the “Miss” and “Poynton” so close together that the insertion of an “F” would be too obvious an interpolation. “Now, if you please, post this, and not be so childish.”

Emily, sat. in the ladies room of the library because there she could “let her face go.” It recalled her again the times when she had come here in earlier years “to forget.”

The door was gently opened. Bella, hatted and gloved, stole quietly in. “Miss Emily, your mother’s had a sudden bad turn.”

It was two weeks later when they laid Mrs. Poynton to rest. Almost all her little fortune was left to her eldest daughter. Emily knew of these testamentary pro-visions before the funeral. She thought of them with gratitude, but with altruism too. There was that humble friend of mother’s, Mrs. Smith, whom she would remember.

And then, some day a beautiful tombstone for poor mother.

Emily sat at her table, doing some black sewing. Nieces Ada and Frances stole in together. “Miss Fleming and Miss Poynton coming up the path,” Bella announced, looking in from the kitchen.

Miss Poynton! Somehow she did not mind it now.

“Mother just sent us round to remind you of the obituary notice, Auntie. She thought you’d like to write it, of course.”

“It’s here,” replied Emily, and gave it to them.

She looked after them as they went off.

“It balances us, mother. It cancels that last teasing, of yours.”

She buried her face among the new smooth black, and cried, but without repentance.

The two nieces, glad it would soon “all be over,” and breathing enconiums on Aunt Emily, went quickly up the street, taking the obituary notice to the newspaper.

It began thus:—”On the 23rd inst, Mary Poynton, relict of the late James Poynton . . . .”

Sources:

Christopher Dawson, Constance Clyde of Dutton Park: Author and Suffragette, 16 May 2023 [Accessed 22 June 2024]

Christopher Dawson, “A Suffragette Recalls Boggo Road Gaol“, Inside Boggo Road blog, 17 June 2018 [Accessed: 22 June 2024]

Constance Clyde, “The paying back” in The Australasian, 26 July 1924

Constance Clyde, Wikipedia (citing several sources) [Accesed; 21 June 2024]

Constance McAdam, AustLit (sourced from A. G. Stephens, ed., Australian Autobiographies, vol.2) [Accessed 21 June 2024]

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