Seven Poor Men of Sydney

by Christina Stead

  “I see: we eat beef and God eats us,” whispered Michael. “The lad yonder does not suffer from indigestion. He must have been a cowherd in old Ireland and worked out the simple mysteries of his faith in the fields, chewing the cud.”

  “Don’t come with me, if you can’t feel more reverent,” said his mother.

  “Thank God, then I won’t,” cried Michael: and he never did again, but went out each week-end with Catherine in the bush, or to resorts along the coast. They walked often together arm-in-arm, in the evenings, along the red roads that wound through the bush, smelling the young clematis and singing sea-chanties in their weak and tuneless voices. They caught frilled lizards, green tree-snakes and the brown “double-drummer” cicadas that sing deafeningly in the hand. They pondered over mysterious graves, deserted orchards and closed huts, and often went into some rough shelter at night and slept easily on dried bracken or hay. But Catherine grew restless after two months and sang no more. She turned on her bed at night, and hardly replied to Michael’s musings. Presently she said:

  “I must go back. I must go into the city and work.”

  She left him in a town in the mountains and took the train back. When he returned home he looked for her up and down the town, and at last, through the direction of a friend, located her in a miserable lodging where she had nothing but a blanket on a wire mattress. She wore her oldest dress, torn and faded, and looked at Michael when he entered as if she scarcely recognised him. Never had he seen her more like a witch or beggar-woman.

  “You are starving,” he cried, almost weeping, terrified.

  “I am earning my living,” she replied with scorn.

  “At what?”

  She smiled before replying and raised to him one of her old bright dominating looks.

  “You wouldn’t guess. I am a model for an art-class, old Mr Benson’s. He knows Father, but I have not let on that I know Father.”

  Michael paled a little, but said mildly:

  “Do you do—all sorts of poses?”

  She laughed extravagantly and tapped her foot.

  “Yes, you think I’m too skinny: that’s what makes me picturesque. Look, one of the students admires me, my type: he gave me the finished picture. It’s too bad to go for the Prix de Rome, in any case, so it’s no generosity.”

  She took a piece of sacking off a box in one corner of the room, and stood up an oil-painting on its edge. She looked at it with pride. In it she appeared as a worn, crazy, young gypsy.

  “They said I am the perfect gypsy,” she said contentedly. It was crude and made Catherine seem bold and coarse.

  “It’s very good,” he said faintly.

  She looked at him with malice.

  “And here’s another, the latest.”

  She took out a sheet of Michallet paper with a drawing on it in charcoal.

  “The young drawing-master is preparing an exhibition of his own: I posed for him privately.”

  Her vanity was intense. The drawing was labelled, “Fished up”, and showed an emaciated naked woman lying dead on the quays, while a curious crowd with caricature faces hung over it and a policeman stood by.

  Michael looked at his sister with shame. She laughed again.

  “Naturally he gave me that because it’s not going in the exhibition.”

  Michael went and sat on her bed, feeling his beating heart with his hand. Presently he got up, held on to the foot of the bed, trembling violently, and said:

  “Catherine, Catherine, come out of all this misery. You are unhappy at home. I’ll work for you; we’ll get a little room and I’ll keep you until you feel ready to do steady work; all my life, if it’s necessary.”

  She slapped the two pictures down on the box and turned round with a furious face, controlled herself, stared at him and laughed loudly.

  “You mean well, but you’re a fearful weakling, Michael. You don’t realise I want to be alone so I can beat my head against the wall just when I want to. Keep me!”

  She laughed loudly again, strode across the floor, opened the door and pushed Michael out on to the landing.

  “Good-bye, old thing, thanks. I’ll be better soon.” She slammed the door. Michael hesitated for a long time on the landing, but in the end went very slowly down the bare stairs, listening at each step. He did not sleep all night.

  2

  Four passions of a poor man with a weak heart,

  ending with an explanation of what love is.

  Withers needed a loan of ten shillings some months later and came to borrow it from Michael. He asked, “What do you do in your week-ends? I’m at a loose end at present,” and accepted Michael’s invitation to the Baguenault’s home for the Sunday following. Withers lunched agreeably with the father and mother, enchanting both with his tales. Catherine, throwing a look of scorn at him, rose from the table, taking her plate, and went to eat in the orchard.

  “Your sister has funny habits!”

  “You must not take any notice. Catherine makes a point of love and hate at first sight. She will not debase herself by listening to a train of conversation that she thinks low or stupid.”

  “She is not very amusing.”

  “She is outrageous in every respect,” agreed Michael. “That’s her charm.”

  “Funny thing you get on with a girl like that.”

  “We get on like a house on fire. We go away in the week-end together sometimes. With Cath you have real adventures, meet extraordinary people. My people are two old duffers,” said Michael.

  “Come out with Catherine this afternoon. She’s collecting flowers for a Labour Party bazaar and fête: we are going to take them in by car. Come along, you’ll meet some new people.”

  “No thanks; no Labour Party shivoos. What do they do? Do they all get together at the beginning and sing a hymn of hate, or say the Thirty-nine Articles of Bad Faith, or dance peasant dances: what? Heh, now I see your evil genius, it’s your Catherine. You’re always in her skirts, she’s a nun in-reverse. It’s not religion, but irreligion that drives her mad; but she’ll have your soul in any case, the female devil. She’s like one of those female spiders that eat their husbands. You’re her brother, but they don’t recognise family relations, those man-eating ladies.”

  “Don’t be a fool.”

  Catherine took them out to the houses of the neighbourhood to collect flowers for her fête. When the ladies, gracious for religious Mrs Baguenault, heard that the flowers were for a Labour fête, they refused to give any flowers. Withers laughed and Michael was confused. They went down into the bush, and into the house of an old friend of Catherine’s, now away at the sea-side, to pick wild-flowers and violets. Michael got a backache picking violets, while Withers sat on a tree-trunk and talked. When they made their first journey home, laden with violets, he stayed on the verandah and drank tea with Mrs Baguenault. Seeing in him a disaffected accidental friend of Michael and Catherine, probably a religious man, from his lean, dark look, Mrs Baguenault began to pour her trouble in his ears. Catherine had always been so difficult, even at ten and eleven she had fooled at school and run away, given lip to the teachers, criticised them at home, parodied her father. Not like her sisters. If some sensible person could give her advice, someone who knew her milieu and appreciated the home atmosphere . . . Withers said:

  “Don’t worry yourself, Mrs Baguenault, your daughter is built for revolution and will probably serve a few gaol-sentences before she’s through: she’s a gypsy. They occur in the best of families: it’s atavism, some ancient ancestral strain coming out,’ and he proceeded to tell her tales of freaks in families. In the end Mrs Baguenault felt flattered and ascribed the freakishness of Catherine to her own influence. When Michael returned, Withers said privately:

  “Come along out o’ this. This collection of skirts will drive you dippy before they’ve finished: one with her religion, the other with her reds. What a woman’s man you are! Why don’t you get a real woman and taste their real goods, not all this eyewash? Come along
with me, to-night.”

  “Kate,” said Michael, “Withers wants me to go along with him. Do you mind if I don’t go with you to the fête?”

  She looked at him ironically.

  “No, go along, Michael. Milt Dean’s coming along to give me a lift into town.”

  “Right-o, we’ll be off, then.”

  “Where are you going with Mr Withers, Michael?” asked the mother.

  “To a little dance,” answered Withers.

  “Where at?” asked Michael, surprised.

  “Fisherman’s Bay, at the Grahams’. I was invited before, but didn’t think of going; now I think I’ll drop in.”

  “I don’t think I’ll go: I don’t feel like it,” said Michael uncertainly. Catherine brushed past him furiously.

  “Go and play, God damn it, you ought to amuse yourself like all boys of your age. I’ve got work to do: go, go!”

  Michael looked at her, meditating. At last he said:

  “Well, I’ll go,” and he went upstairs to change his shirt.

  At Mae’s house the same loving cornstalk hung about her. Withers whispered:

  “Go on, duckfoot, make her: that’s what I brought you for. She’s always had a bit of a weakness for you because you’re so backward in coming forward, I suppose: women love nice sissies. Now, she’s ready for it, she’ll probably fall into your arms. Her cavalier, the beanpole, has got her all worked-up, thinks she’s icy perfection and doesn’t know how to make his approach. I’d cackle if you got her instead of him. You pair of mugs!”

  She went past him, in the highest spirits, with another fellow, dancing with swift undulating movements and casting arrowed glances over her partner’s shoulder, her flounced skirt circling and floating. When she passed Michael, she pouted at him. His heart leaped and turned over. She pouted at someone else up the room. Mae had gone to her tall youth and came tangoing past with him: people smiled confidentially in the room. She did not look at anyone now but smiled at the tall youth.

  “Are you going to the wedding?” asked one of the girls of another beside him.

  “I thought they were going to be engaged to-day,” was the answer.

  Michael gazed before him. His defeated heart sank, his aimlessness and loneliness rolled back on him. His life spent in a cocoon seemed black, dusty, dry-mouthed, funereal. When he left the house, after kicking his heels dismally with the boys, who were smoking and talking about cricket, and dancing dispiritedly with a little serious dark girl, he said:

  “They all want to marry and I don’t want to. What’s a chap to do: I can’t go through the mill that other chaps do with a flossy and then leave her with tears, shrieks, and perhaps a kid. I’d rather be a flagellant and suffer for my soul, my own good, forget my turmoil in stripes, than go into trouble on a partnership basis.”

  He walked through the light mist of the spring night towards the cliff and pictured the necessity for love as a shaggy-skinned infernal shepherdess, a brutal Circe. The famous exorcism of the cloister, or of the scientific overall alone banished her: he was sorry he had not become a doctor or a coal-miner. If a man had a cause to fight for, a battle to win, a discovery to make or brutally hard work to do, he could forget woman and only at odd intervals hear her footsteps, and those of her children, passing far-off, regretful, in the grassy ignorant fields. He stood on the cliff-face looking at the distant lamps. It was not this young woman alone who had come back on him suddenly with all the poignancy of his richest summer, but his weakness and failure in all respects. He went along the high cliffs, where he walked up and down the asphalt path, an increasing pain urging him along. He climbed up to the flagstaff at the signal station. It stretched up beyond its normal height into profound heavens where mists now bowled fast and dimly. In its mast and yards he saw the sign of his future, a monstrous pale tree, bitterly infinite, standing footless in the earth and headless in the heavens, a splinter sterile and sapless, a kind of scarecrow, a rack for cast vestments, a mast castaway: underneath the sea ran. He retraced his steps and stood on the lowest cliffs for a few minutes, leaning on the rail and listening to the waves running into the sea-worn caverns beneath, with a dull sound of artillery, and to the hissing as the water drained off the rocks as the wash receded. The sea was hooded, the air cold and damp, a heavy sea-mist was rolling in and nothing was visible but the dim foamline on the jetty of rock beneath the headland. He heard voices passing on various planes and a girl giggling continuously up the hill. He turned resolutely and went round past the military reserve where the water trickled through the grass and the frogs were singing “Cree-cree-creeee . . .” as long ago when he had lived there. They were cheerful at the hissing rain now falling.

  It was about ten at night. Michael walked blindly along, more content to be cased in fog. At the turning of the first street, an old man with a stick hesitated on the corner and was hardly distinguishable, although a street-lamp stood opposite. He gingerly moved his stick one way, withdrew it and softly swayed the other, afraid, perhaps, of the water in the gutter, perhaps of the mist. Michael, loping along, brushed by him and knocked him down. The old man lay on the ground squirming on his side, his hat in the gutter; his red and tan face, with high cheek and nose, shone like grease-paint under the rain in the lamplight. His whiskers were scattered white about his chin, his hands feebly clutched, and his stick lay on the ground. He raised himself on one elbow and tried to get up, without saying a word, as if it were the ignoble fate of old age to be knocked down at street-corners, and nothing else was to be expected. An officer going to the barracks-road appeared up the short street leading from the beach, and ran stiffly and elegantly towards the old man. A little boy, slightly dwarfed and stocky, with an old white face and black eyes, ran over from the side of the street and tugged with the soldier. Michael stood staring at the man squirming like a cockroach at his feet, as if he had been seeing figures in a dream. Seeing the soldier pick up the man’s wet hat and clap it on his head, while darting an indignant look at him, Michael started back and began to circle round the old man, sketching with his hands a gesture of regret or impotence. He murmured in an extinguished voice, “I’m sorry, I’m . . . I didn’t see . . .” The soldier put the old man on his right path, shook his hands in the air with a gesture of disgust, and stared at Michael, dumbfounded by his silence. A woman came up and said, “What a shame! I saw the accident from down the street there. That young man must be drunk.”

  Michael went down towards the steps leading to the beach-path at a business-like pace. At the corner he stood and looked back as a commiserating stranger might. Thank goodness, he said, someone is looking after the old fellow. At the sound of brass heels rapidly ringing on the pavement he turned again. The little boy was there offering him something. He stared at the little boy’s hand.

  “Your purse,” said the little boy, “you dropped your purse.”

  “Jo!” exclaimed Michael. “Is it you, Jo Baguenault?” Jo was nine then.

  “Here, come round to Baxter’s with me and I’ll buy you an ice-cream.”

  “All right: but I’ll have to hurry. They’ll want to know where I am.” Michael bought the ice-cream.

  “Here, Jo; don’t tell them at home you saw me?”

  “All right.”

  After this he sometimes took the queer, faithful little chap out when he went roaming.

  He wanted to join the art-class where Mae went at night with her lover. Since Catherine had posed there it seemed a place that belonged partly to him. He had to pay off the tailor who dressed him on the time-payment system. He went without lunch for two days, but after that felt so faint that he could not continue it. He went about with holes in his shoes and a front tooth out.

  “Time enough to get it in,” he told his mother, “when I get a girl.” But Withers took him out several times in succession and forced him to spend his savings, so that he was always broke.

  The Municipal Library was in the Haymarket Building where the art-class was held. He went there almo
st every day with Withers, or other fellows, all voracious readers, most of whom had collected library tickets from friends and owned from ten to twenty tickets, instead of the regulation two. Michael did not read much. They entered the great barn of a building from the Town Hall end and passed all the closed shop-fronts where exotic societies, herbalists, mind-readers, jewellers and bootmakers lived, as it seemed, without clients, friends or visitors.

  The Library appeared miles away at the other end. In the centre of the building are two large staircases, and a spiral staircase leading to the rooms occupied by the art-school. Just before they reached this staircase, they passed its bare yellow entrance with a bell inside and a small staircase covered with sacking against the inner wall. A girl running up the central stairs, with her light coat tightly belted, a small hat and a roll of paper in her hand, turned the corner abruptly and bumped into Michael, apologised, looked up quickly, said laughing and breathless:

  “Oh, Mr Baguenault!”

  She hung there uncertainly on tiptoe. It was Mae Graham, of course—not queer he should see her when he was always coming on the off-chance. He stood speechless, nevertheless, before the sphinx. Will I solve her, will she destroy me? At the expression on his face, she imagined she had hurt him. She said impulsively, holding out her hand, a little timidly:

  “Mr Baguenault, I’m so sorry . . .”