Riverslake

by T. A. G. Hungerford

  “Got everything arranged for a nice big strike?”

  Torchy Binns shrugged and spread his hands non-committally, smiling with his eyes. He and Carmichael came from different parts of the forest, but they met often on occasions like the present one. They understood each other completely, and because each knew the other to be sincere, they respected each other’s views.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to spread it, say to Mulwala, Ainslie, and Capitol Hill?” Carmichael inquired with mock seriousness. “They’d come out, wouldn’t they?”

  “Like a shot, if they thought they should,” Binns said crisply. “Like a bloody shot, they would.”

  “Well, what’s holding you?”

  Binns dropped his eyes to the cat, crunching its disgusting meal on the grass. He thought unaccountably of Hughie Mancin, poor, beaten-up old Hughie, who got drunk at midday. When he looked up, he met the manager’s quizzical glance steadily.

  “Why’d you suspend Hughie, Mr Carmichael?”

  “He was rotten drunk.”

  “Drunk?” Synthetic surprise larded the union representative’s voice. It showed in his face, and he made no effort to conceal its falseness. “Hughie Mancin, drunk? Not Hughie, Mr Carmichael—he might’ve been crook, but never drunk!”

  Carmichael laughed with genuine amusement.

  “You bastard, you!” he said. “D’you think I haven’t been in hostels long enough to know a drunk when I see one? Especially when I smell him, too!”

  Binns shook his head.

  “You should’ve overlooked it, Mr Carmichael. Would’ve saved a lot of trouble.”

  “I couldn’t overlook it at all, Torchy!” Impatience sounded in the manager’s voice for the first time. “I’ve got a responsibility to the Department that employs me. If old Hughie tipped a pot of boiling fat over himself or one of the others, the Department’d be up for dough, plenty. Ever think of that?”

  “They got it.”

  Carmichael shook his head curtly. “It’s not that. It’s time you blokes realized that responsibility’s a double-headed matter,” he said. “Ours to you, yours to us.”

  “Yours to us,” Binns said grimly. “We’re on top now, and while we are we’re making the best of it.”

  “For ever?” Carmichael was sarcastic. “It’ll swing again, you know—don’t you ever think of that and try to build up a bit of good will?”

  “Like they did last time?”

  They faced each other for a moment in silence, and the stillness between them seemed to blanket the whole camp, quiet in the afternoon heat. Sparrows hopped twig-legged on the lawn, one wary eye on the cat, and starlings, the sunlight sheening their bronze-green breasts, lined the wires on either side of the road like cork floats on a net. They twittered and flirted restlessly, changing places and dashing off with a swift fretting of wings to the eaves of near-by huts, or to another set of wires. Their white droppings pocked the black surface of the road beneath them.

  “You reckon there’s going to be another depression, eh, Mr Carmichael?” Torchy Binns remarked at length. “Well, perhaps. But if there is, we’ll have had a good run for our dough, and something to look back on. I’d hate to think we give—gave—them a good run now and they clamped down on us again when they got on top. The depression killed my old man and just about finished off my old woman. I’ll never forget it. You wouldn’t know about it.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Carmichael scoffed. “You know those big cuttings on the road down by Gundagai—when you get the time, you can look for my initials on the side of one of them. I swung a mad-mick there for eighteen months during the depression I know nothing about!”

  “You made quite a come-back!” Binns said dispassionately.

  “That’s the point that you blokes don’t realize, or won’t admit if you do—that there’ll always be some on top and some under. It’ll never even up. God help everyone if it does, because the bums won’t rise to the top—the able men will be dragged down. In the meantime, you won’t admit that a lot of employers are trying to make the difference less.”

  “Only because they’ve got to! Watch them put the bloody screws on again when they get back into the driving seat!”

  “You don’t know.”

  “Do you?”

  Carmichael shrugged.

  “We’ll never convince each other, Torchy. Time’ll do that for us. Excuse me now—I’ve got to go and phone.”

  “The Department?”

  “Since you ask,” Carmichael admitted with a grin, “yes. If you decide to put on a strike, and they want me to crawl down, I’m through.”

  “Dicing it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’d be sorry to see you go, Mr Carmichael.”

  “I’d be sorry to go, in a way. But that’s how it is.”

  Torchy Binns studied the cat again, his lips pursed. He looked up suddenly with a grin.

  “Don’t bother about the phone,” he said quietly.

  “No?”

  “No. I had a talk with the boys a while ago, and told them not to jack up.”

  Carmichael stared at him for a moment in silence, and Binns stared back at him, his bland, good-humoured face twisted in a wry grimace.

  “By God,” the manager said at length, “did you? We might be getting somewhere, at last!”

  “I only done—did it because I couldn’t see anything in it for us.” Binns sat down on the step again and picked up his book. “Catching up on a bit of reading,” he explained. “I’ll sit here until the car calls for me—I got one today, for a change.”

  “Das Kapital?” Carmichael asked in a mildly caustic tone, nodding at the book.

  Binns turned over the cover for him to see. The title was Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business.

  “Bit of study,” he said, “although I’ve got Marx at home.”

  “Future Prime Minister, eh?”

  “Could be.”

  Carmichael looked down at the union representative, a curious smile wreathing his lips. “And bloody good luck to you, too, Torchy!” he said.

  He swung round and stalked down the road towards the kitchen. The man on the steps watched him for a few yards before he buried his face again in the book on his lap.

  When Carmichael returned from the kitchen to the office Randolph was waiting for him on the veranda. He was staring out over the valley, but turned when he heard the manager’s footsteps on the path.

  “You want to see me, Bob?” Carmichael asked.

  “Yes, if you’ve got a moment.”

  “Got the rest of the day. Come inside.”

  “No—out here’ll do. It’s only for a moment, and the view’s nice.”

  “It’s nice, all right. Well, what’s eating you?”

  He had a fair idea what Randolph wanted to see him about, for while he was down at the kitchen he had heard from Verity about the threatened strike and Randolph’s refusal to take part. He waited for Randolph to speak.

  “I’m going,” Randolph said, without preamble.

  Carmichael’s glance, which had been roving along the band of green willows by the river, returned to his face and hung there in unhurried inquiry.

  “Over what happened today?” he suggested mildly.

  “And other things—today’s only the last straw. I suppose you heard the gory details?”

  “I heard.” The manager returned his gaze to the valley below. “Why did you do it?”

  “Would you understand if I told you?”

  “I could try.”

  “Then you’re as good as me,” Randolph said moodily. “It was a futile sort of business.”

  “Especially as there’s not going to be a strike.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I only just found out from Torchy,” Carmichael admitted. />
  “The will to sin is as bad as the sin,” Randolph said with a short laugh. “It’s funny—I’d been saving my big protest up, too.”

  “Saving it up—what for?”

  Randolph shrugged. What he wanted to say was hard to put into words.

  “The strike wasn’t fair, if it had gone on. Hughie was drunk. You know it and I know it and everybody in the kitchen knows it—the poor old cow hasn’t been properly sober since I came here. Yet they’d jack up because he was suspended, and pretend that he wasn’t drunk. So where d’ you get off—the line’s got to be drawn somewhere!”

  “And you decided to draw it?”

  “Something like that.” Randolph fixed his gaze on a herd of toy cows that grazed quietly on one of the paddocks by the river. “Poor bastards—I don’t know whether I hate them or pity them or despise them, with their right to strike and rest and bludge, time-and-a-half for this and double-time for that, their danger money and their stop-work meetings. And all the time, right in their hands———”

  He stopped speaking, his gaze boring hungrily into the scene before him, as though to suck it into himself and somehow to keep it safe.

  “What, right in their hands?”

  “Australia.” Randolph swung his arm slowly across the valley, from mountain to mountain over the white buildings and the red-roofed houses, the trees and the lucerne paddocks and the hidden river. He felt the gesture to be somewhat theatrical, but he completed it, driven by a force he could not combat and did not understand. “All this, to make it or to break it. And they’re breaking it, God help them.” His eyes, luminous with the power of his emotion, turned and rested for a moment on the manager’s face. “They are, aren’t they?”

  “Perhaps,” Carmichael said thoughtfully. He removed his gaze from Randolph’s dilated eyes to a small blue sports car that had just buzzed up the road from the camp. The man at the wheel, hatless and bronzed, in slacks and an open-necked shirt, thumbed the air at them as he went by. By the time Carmichael turned to Randolph again, the small blue car was already half-way down the winding road to the gates.

  “Perhaps,” he repeated, “or perhaps we’re just finding a better way to live. See that bloke?” He pointed down the road after the vanished car. “A few years ago he wouldn’t have been in the race to own a car like that. He can now. What’s wrong with it?”

  “What’s he do?”

  “He’s a carpenter.”

  “For the Government?”

  “I think so—but what’s that got to do with it?”

  “It’s only all right if he and not the country pays for the car. You’ve seen Government carpenters on the job—Government anything, for that matter. They earn about a third of their pay, so that it means that the country makes them a present of two-thirds of it. That’d just about be the cost of that bloke’s car. The country gave it to him—and no country can go round giving presents away like that.”

  “We’ll never know, really,” Carmichael said. “We’re too close to things—these things take time.”

  “And that’s just what we haven’t got,” Randolph retorted quickly. “Not now. Other countries had it, centuries of it, but not us. While we’re finding a new way to live, you know who’s going to take over from us. See that?” He pointed down the slope and across the river to where the lucerne flats slumbered coolly green in the afternoon heat. “They’re going to make a bloody lake out of that, all that lovely soil. Have you ever been down there and felt it in your fingers? It’s like chocolate! In China, or Japan, or any country where they really value the soil, it’d be supporting a couple of hundred families, yet they’re going to make a lake out of it so blasted politicians can take their girl-friends for a row in between sessions. Stone the crows! Other countries aren’t worried about looking for a better way to live—the old way’s good enough for them. Enough space to live in and enough tucker. We’ve got both, and to spare, and before long they’re going to want a share of it.”

  “And take it off us?”

  “What else? And who’s going to stop them? Line every man in Australia from Darwin to Townsville with a blasted Bren, and they’d walk past them. If they lost a hundred million doing it, there’d still be a thousand million to come!”

  “That’s why we’re building up our population with the Balts. By the time they’re ready to have a crack at us, we’ll have something to crack back with.”

  “Not enough,” Randolph said, shaking his head. “If they bring out twenty million Balts to do our fighting for us—which in itself is a nice thought!—we’ll still be outnumbered a hundred to one. And people fighting for something they need fight a damned sight better than people fighting to hang on to something they don’t really own and don’t deserve. And that’s us—we don’t have any divine right to this place, you know.”

  Carmichael shrugged. “So you decided to stick it out?”

  “So I decided to scab—that’s what you mean.”

  “It’s immaterial. And now there isn’t any strike.”

  “And now there isn’t any strike. As I said, it was a bit futile.”

  Randolph stared out at the paddocks, the drome, the dark line of the pine plantations on the near hills and the blue mountains that leaned tiredly against the faded blue beyond. He felt a flush mount quickly into his face, and as quickly ebb away. What had seemed at the moment to be a crisis—the crisis—in his life, seemed in retrospect to be futile and silly, like a child puffing in the face of a whirlwind. Would it make much difference tomorrow, in a year’s time, in five years’ time, that he had held back from a twopenny-halfpenny strike in the kitchen at Riverslake?

  Carmichael looked at him from the corner of one eye. What a funny cuss! What did he hope to achieve from standing out? Apart from unpopularity as long as he stayed at Riverslake, and the chance of being black-legged all over the country, he stood to gain nothing! And yet, as he asked himself the question, Carmichael dredged the answer from his vast experience of men and of the funny, futile things they did, of the inexplicable urges that made them act in the way they did. He knew with a degree of shrewd certainty, perhaps even more clearly than did Randolph himself, why Randolph had stood aloof from the threatened strike—and what he would get out of it. He felt a grudging admiration that was tinged with pity. Randolph would bat his head against a brick wall, trying to buck strike-fever in a place like Riverslake and amongst the type of men that worked there. If he wasn’t careful, he would finish up being kicked to pieces one dark night, like Novikowsky. Perhaps he realized that—he had knocked around and must know what he was likely to stir up. Perhaps that was why he was pulling out, though he didn’t seem to be the type to dog.

  “What’re you going to do, Randolph?” he asked. “Go back to teaching?”

  Randolph’s mouth set quickly in a hard line, and he shook his head.

  “No. Queensland, I think.”

  “You know best.” Carmichael turned from the wide view and walked to the office door. He paused, one hand on the lintel. “You didn’t say when you were going.”

  “Oh—no hurry. I’ll finish out the pay period.”

  Nearly a week away, Carmichael thought. He’s not dogging, anyway.

  “O.K.,” he said aloud. “I’ll make out your time to next Wednesday.”

  “Good.”

  “I think you’re doing the wise thing, leaving.”

  “I’m doing it,” Randolph said. “Wise or not, I’m doing it.”

  “If you were going back to the west, it would be the wise thing.” Carmichael walked back from the door. “Randolph,” he said, “mind if I give you a bit of advice?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Why don’t you stop running away?”

  “Don’t be Uncle Willie!” The colour drained out of Randolph’s dark face. “What makes you think I’m on the run?”

  “I don’t mean from
the police,” Carmichael corrected him quickly, “but from something. I don’t know what happened to you, and I’m not asking. But something’s chasing you, or you’d go back to Western Australia. It’s what you want to do.”

  “Well, we’ll leave it at that, eh?”

  Carmichael shook his head. “Come out of your ivory tower,” he said. “I’ve been watching you. It’s not enough just to hate what’s wrong. You’ve got to fight it, too.” He looked keenly at Randolph. “And not enough to love a country—even this country. People count, too.”

  “With you, people count, eh?” Randolph suggested, without heat. “With me, it’s the country—this country. I love it. So what? I don’t make a song about it.”

  “Much, you don’t! Every move you make shouts it out loud!”

  “All right.” Randolph felt that he could not go on laying out his feelings for Carmichael to pick over critically, like a spinster at the rag-stall of a church bazaar. “So I love the country, and I make a song about it. So I don’t like people, and I don’t give a damn who knows it.”

  “Why not? Loving a country’s an unrewarding sort of thing unless you love the people, too. Then you get something back, and it won’t stop you loving the country. Give it a burl, some time.”

  “And glad-hand animals like Bellairs?” Randolph demanded with sudden savagery. “You saw what him and his mob did to Novikowsky, and you can see what they’re doing to the country. And they’re not the exception, these days!”

  “And so can you see,” Carmichael reminded him, “but you’re running away to Queensland. Do you expect it to be any different there? I said that it’s not enough just to see what’s going wrong. You’re like the bloke who’s sorry to see his neighbour’s house burning, but who wouldn’t run to ring the brigade.”

  “Perhaps I don’t like him enough to save his house.”

  “Perhaps you’ll get burned, too, when it caves in!”

  “Perhaps I don’t care very much if I do.”

  “Then don’t go to Queensland,” Carmichael said brutally. “Hitch out to Bullamakanka and live with the blacks. But let me tell you one thing. This country’s got it coming. No place on God’s earth has got anywhere without going through the mill first. This is just a phase now—and a lot of people with no more sense than you, or no more money, or not even as much education, are hanging on. And do you know why? Because they have got faith—and when the time comes, they’ll trot out what they’ve hung on to, and something will be built on it. You can come out then, too—the fighting’ll be over.”