Riverslake

by T. A. G. Hungerford

  “I don’t know about a back-up, but you’ll be in a blue if Verity cops you,” Randolph advised him. “You’d better get rid of that before he shows up.”

  “Hell, yes!” Charlesworth shot the mess into one of the tins, and beckoned to Radinski. “Dice this, Johnny—if Verity sees it, he’ll sack me instead of poor old Stumblebum over there.” He nodded to where Mancin leaned against the sweets bench, owlishly regarding what ingredients for the day’s sweets he had been able to assemble.

  “God help the tax-payers,” Zigfeld remarked sourly. “A few more pretenders like you, Slim, and the country’d be broke. Give him a hand to open up some more snaggers, Randy.”

  Paramor and Condamine came in, late, red-eyed and sullen with weariness. Paramor, passing Randolph on his way to the stove for a cup of tea, did not throw him the customary bawdy or humorous greeting. Condamine did not even look in the direction of the meat bench.

  The cranky bastards! Murdoch thought. He looked round the kitchen, at Zigfeld chewing his gums beside Warner, Condamine and Paramor hunched over their mugs of tea, at the Balt kitchen-men who were going about their work in tense silence instead of making more noise than a flock of starlings, as they usually did. He had worked in enough kitchens to recognize the makings of a first-class brawl. Things went on for so long on an even keel—sometimes for months on end—with only the day-to-day upsets to keep it interesting, then suddenly they all went haywire and stayed that way for days. Then it simmered down again, and everyone was good mates until the next time. Riverslake kitchen was just about ready to crack wide open. Murdoch could feel it in the air.

  “Kerry!” Zigfeld shouted from the stove. “Don’t stand there mooning, get the blasted spuds started or they won’t be ready for lunch! By God, this place needs a shake-up, and it’s going to get it, too! Para, drain the macaroni! And you, Mr Condamine, if you’ve finished guzzling, what about putting them hams in the end steamer?” His harsh voice became larded with sarcasm. “When you’re ready, of course—don’t choke yourself hurrying!”

  Condamine threw him a sneering glance, and Paramor, instead of laughing good-naturedly as he would have done usually, bit hard.

  “For God’s sake take a powder, Ziggy!” he growled. “Go away and die!”

  Murdoch suddenly burst out laughing. They were like a crowd of ill-mannered children.

  “Let’s in on the joke, then?” Randolph said.

  “You wouldn’t know.” Murdoch walked away to the vegetable room and dragged a bag of potatoes from the rack. Blasted cooks!

  The kitchenmen began to dribble in. When Schmidt walked over to the stove, Paramor looked up over the edge of his mug and pointedly moved away. Schmidt ignored it.

  “Where is you mug, Slim?” he called out.

  “You leave my mug alone, you Balt bludger!” Charlesworth answered, with a grin. “It’s all you think of, stuffing your blasted great gut!”

  Schmidt grinned back at him, thumbing the air. “You are poofter, Slim. One day I fix it you. Kaput.”

  “You couldn’t fix old Blind Freddie.”

  “We see.” Schmidt filled the mug with tea and sauntered over to the coal bin beside the door.

  “The cheeky hooer!” Condamine snapped, shooting a vicious upward glance at Randolph, who was on the other side of the bench. “That’s all they do think about, too, the lazy swine. Filling their guts and getting overtime. You would have thought that what happened to your mate would make them think a bit, instead of chucking their weight around.”

  Randolph engaged his glance coldly. “I should have thought it would make a lot of people think a bit,” he said quietly. He choked back the hot retort that sprang to his tongue, knowing that it would serve no purpose. Condamine’s mind had been conditioned by hatred and prejudice and fear, and it was case-hardened in its mould. All the talk in the world would never shake it free; the only thing to do with him, and with Paramor and Bellairs, for that matter, was to neutralize them, somehow, and save the sermons for someone who yet had the capacity to absorb them. The kids, he thought, they’re probably the only ones left with open minds. But someone has to teach kids.

  Randolph’s mind shied away from the thought because of the responsibility that walked in its shadow. He turned his attention back to the kitchen, and to what was happening around him. With that he could deal.

  “Schmitty’s all right,” Charlesworth had just said to Condamine. He did not like Condamine, and never missed a chance to pick him. “I was only joking about not letting him take my mug.”

  “All right be damned!” Condamine retorted shortly. “They’re all the same—budgers and riff-raff. We could’ve got on all right without dragging this mob out to Australia. We’ve got on all right, so far, haven’t we? What’s the hurry for a change?”

  Charlesworth made no answer. Uneasily, he turned over Condamine’s words in his mind, trying to apply them to the Balts he knew. He accepted them as he accepted the air, had never really thought about them as people. Once they had been curios, to be pointed at in the street, wondered about and discussed; now they were Johnny, Stefan, Felix and the rest, natural phenomena which had been assimilated easily into the pattern of his days, to be teased, abused, or helped as the mood took him. That their presence in Australia must perhaps soon, perhaps later, have a considerable effect on even his own happy-go-lucky life never had occurred to him. He had listened to the gloomy predictions of men like Bellairs that in a depression the Balts would have all the jobs, and to the pronouncements of Torchy Binns that in a depression the Balts would be the first to go, or else; but he felt that they were talking for the sake of talking when they mentioned depression. When a man could get a job in half a dozen places in a radius of a mile, at twice as much as he would have been getting in the pre-war years, and when there were jobs like the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme that would be crying out for men for the next quarter of a century, how could they talk of depressions?

  He knew that there was danger in the anger and antagonism of men like Condamine, but he also knew that the answer to them was out of his reach, even if he had been prepared to do anything about it.

  His eyes were fastened on the tray into which they were stacking the soft pink sausages. That was the reality—it had to be filled and in the oven before Verity came in, short-tempered from the night’s drinking, to demand why it was not ready for the breakfast.

  “Shake a leg,” he said to Condamine, who had been opening the tins of sausages, “the chef’ll be in any tick, and we don’t want a blue.”

  “We don’t?” Condamine smiled sourly. “It’s your blue!”

  “We’ve got to bring Balts out here, whether we like it or not,” Randolph said suddenly. He had not wanted to become embroiled in an argument with Condamine, but felt that he could not let Condamine’s last words be the final impression on Charlesworth. “We’ve got to bring people here, and fast. If we don’t, there’s plenty who will.”

  “Who, for instance?” Condamine demanded with a burlesqued show of interest.

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” Randolph said grimly, ignoring the other’s sarcasm. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Up there—millions of ’em, just waiting for the chance.”

  Charlesworth looked up from the tray. He decided to break up the discussion before it could develop into an all-out argument. He knew Randolph’s dislike of Condamine, and Condamine’s fear of Randolph.

  “You mean the slit-eyes?” he demanded. “Let ’em come! You seen any of them travel talks, about beautiful Bali? Momma!” He whistled and drew his hands down over his lean carcass, waggling his hips inside his dirty white trousers. “Let ’em come. I won’t kick if a couple of them babes tried to occupy me. What a glorious death!”

  “Get your mind above your navel,” Randolph advised him dryly. “They’ve got blokes up there too, you know. A few of them might come along as well.”
<
br />   “You’ve been reading too many damned newspapers,” Condamine snapped.

  Randolph, whose mind had eased under the soothing touch of Charlesworth’s idiocy, felt it harden again into a wary and defensive shell against the antagonism, almost hatred, in Condamine’s voice.

  “It’s not a bad thing to do,” he said coldly.

  “Some of you mugs’ll believe anything,” Condamine went on. “Menzies controls the papers—if his mob gets in next election they’ll whip up a nice old depression, just like they did the last time, and we’ll all be scratching for jobs again. The only difference is that there’ll be a million or so of these bludgers scratching with us. You want to use your brains, not just believe what you read in the papers.”

  Randolph met and held his hot glance, his eyes boring into Condamine’s, seeking the key to the words that tumbled out so easily, so dogmatically and so wrong. If a man believes that black is white, where are the words to convince him otherwise? And yet there must be an answer to Condamine, or we all go down, his thoughts said. Perhaps, even, into civil war. Hate and fear and bigotry were the seeds, planted one or two generations ago and nourished by people like Paramor and Condamine, multiplied a hundred thousand times. And there you have it. It has happened in other countries, where the sane majority wanted nothing other than to live out their normal lives but were caught up and immolated in the hate and lunacy of the screaming few.

  Like a conjurer producing a rabbit from a hat, Randolph’s thoughts suddenly produced from the past the memory of the Lithuanian John, who had wanted to be an architect. It could happen here. Civil war—in Australia.

  Randolph looked away from Condamine’s face, away from the kitchen and through the door to the rolling paddocks of lucerne in the floor of the valley, drowsy in the morning sunshine; to the aerodrome, the runways gleaming black beneath the orange and white control tower, to the hills behind, softly blue, shot with green of trees and red of soil, gently folded one upon the other and melting at some indefinable point into the cloudless morning sky. We have so much, and yet still we cannot live in content with each other. But who causes it? Who has such a stake in our strife? His eyes sought Condamine’s again, but found the heat gone out of them. They were questioning now, in a curious way, apprehensive.

  “It’s you who should use your brain,” he said slowly, picking his words and so stressing each one that the short phrase sounded almost like a sentence of doom. Condamine’s eyes narrowed. “You and everyone like you who’s prepared to be led by the nose by anyone who can get you a two-bob rise in the basic wage—no matter what the cost. You say I shouldn’t believe what I read in the papers. I don’t. I read it and think about it, and you should do the same. But you listen to what some other bloke has to say—Torchy, for instance—and swallow it, hook, line and sinker. Who told you that the Balts would be in all the best jobs if there is another depression? Who told you that there is going to be another depression? Does Torchy have some special power that makes him right, and the papers wrong?”

  He stopped speaking and looked straight into Condamine’s eyes, coldly demanding an answer. He knew that in introducing Torchy Binns’s name into the argument, he was treading on dangerous ground, for someone was sure to report it back to the union representative. And besides, Torchy was the little tin god of every kitchen in the Territory.

  “Torchy’s all right!” Condamine said, with sudden suspicious jealousy.

  “I didn’t say he wasn’t—but where does he get his information that makes him right all the time? He doesn’t know, and neither do you—nor me nor Menzies nor Chifley nor any bastard living. All any man can do is to take advantage of the opportunity that offers and do something. If he happens to be right, he’s a great statesman. If he’s wrong, then he’s a bastard. One of these days, if we live through what comes between, we’ll see if Torchy or the papers are right. But by then it won’t do us much good, because we’ll be grappling with another mob of politicians, and agitators—and papers.”

  “Torchy’s all right,” Condamine repeated. “And we’ll see, all right. We’ll see.”

  Randolph itched for a moment to ask him just what they would see, but desisted. The sting had gone out of the argument for him. What would they see, and what could happen to prove either of them right or wrong? If they survived the bloody revolution that Condamine and his kind seemed to expect, still it would prove nothing. That had happened before, in other places—after the smoke and the stench of death had cleared out of the air, people settled back into the stumbling, mumbling progress by trial and error, but with a new set of guessers at the helm to guide the rejection of the mountain of bad for the molehill of good, the slow building of something that might never be completed this way, but which certainly would not arise overnight out of the ashes of revolution and civil war. They could never know who was right, for not even their sons’ sons would see the completion of the edifice, though they might spend their days in its protective shadow.

  While they were arguing they had been opening tins of sausages, so that when Randolph bent to get another from the case at his feet, he found it was the last. He opened it and slid it along the bench to Slim, who prised the tightly-packed sausages out of it into the heaped tray and rolled it across the edge of the bench where it teetered for a moment before falling with a clatter into the box below.

  Condamine beckoned to Schmidt, and touched the box with his foot. “Out!” he said curtly. He turned away, to get the hams from the freezer.

  By now the kitchen was full of sound and movement as preparations for breakfast got under way. A dull clatter punctuated by laughter and profanity came from the vegetable room where Murdoch and another of the kitchenmen had started up the potato machine to prepare the day’s quota of potatoes. Gummow, the quiet little man who worked the plate-washing machine, was cleaning up some trays left over from the previous night, enveloped in steam and happily intoning a mournful dirge in his native Latvian. Of all the Balts in the kitchen, he seemed to be the happiest. He tended the steaming monster as if it were a Rolls Royce engine, crooning over it and polishing and rubbing it until amongst the other dingy fixtures around the kitchen it shone like a jewel on a trash-heap.

  Schmidt, who replenished the fires, banged and clattered round the range, hammering down the hunks of coal with his shovel, with Zigfeld screaming at him not to make so much noise and not to raise so much dust. Already Schmidt’s dirty singlet was streaked with sweat, and the hot glare from the exposed coals glistened on the stringy muscles of his chest and arms. The butcher backed through the door from the freezer, dragging a deal box piled high with bones and scraps of meat for the stock-pot, and Condamine, Paramor, and Warner converged on the stove with forks and egg-slices and hot trays from the drying racks to begin frying the thousand or so eggs that would be needed for breakfast.

  All the unwieldy, slipshod mechanism that by some inexplicable miracle would produce a couple of thousand meals before it ground to a stop at the end of the day was getting into gear. Randolph looked round slowly, and took curious comfort from the permanence of the established routine. It had been going on in this kitchen for a decade or more, come quarrels, strikes, even a war. Surely it must continue to go on—if it didn’t, what could conceivably take its place?

  “Slim,” Zigfeld barked, waving a dripping egg-slice to emphasize his words, “you get that blasted tray into the oven. If Verity comes in, you might have a please explain. Go on!”

  Charlesworth picked up the tray. “Thanks, boy,” he said to Randolph, “you can break off, now.”

  “Dip your eye.”

  “I did, and you’re the result,” Charlesworth said imperturbably. He walked over to the range, the tray held high on the flat of one hand, his short laugh jerking over his shoulder at Randolph as he went.

  Randolph watched him. Lucky Slim—nothing ever worried him. He took it all in his stride, Zigfeld, work, marriage, all of life. An
d who was to say if he were any the worse off for it? Not me, Randolph thought.

  Verity walked briskly up the steps and into the kitchen. Charlesworth was just bending to put the tray of sausages into the oven. He walked over and stood behind him.

  “Those for breakfast, Slim?” he demanded.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Bit late, aren’t they?” Verity looked at the clock, sniffing sharply as he did so. “Should have been in an hour ago. What’s burning?”

  “I got an idea we mightn’t have enough on,” Zigfeld said ponderously, “so I got ’em to put on another tray. They’ll be ready when the tail-enders come through, and if they aren’t used for breakfast, they’ll go into the cottage-pies for lunch.”

  “O.K., Ziggy, that’s all right.” Verity’s eye darted over to the line of trash-cans by the door. They were empty of tins and burned sausages. The chef had been up until dawn, drinking and playing cards with cooks from another hostel, and he was ragged enough to relish a brawl. “Nearly time,” he said, glancing again at the clock, and strode up the ramp into the mess. Presently the men in the kitchen could hear him bawling acid abuse at one of the mess-stewards over the state of the tables.

  “That’ll cost you a bloody pot,” Zigfeld said unsmilingly when Verity was out of hearing. “He would’a bitten you in half, this morning.”

  “A pot?” Charlesworth echoed. “One pot? I’ll buy you the whole flaming hotel!”

  About the middle of the morning Carmichael left the office to visit the kitchen on his daily round of the camp. As he walked down the steps, Bellairs, who with his party was still pecking at the job of tree-planting on the slope, rose from the shade of a tree, and the men of the party began once more to move, like automatic figures enlivened by the pressing of a button. Carmichael walked down to see how much progress had been made.

  All the holes had been dug, and a line of sturdy young oaks stood near by in old sanitary tins, waiting to be put into them, to join the millions already planted round the city, and to remain there until time or God put an end to them. Carmichael idly scratched at the bark of one of them with a finger-nail. The underbark was soft and sappy.