Seven Poor Men of Sydney

by Christina Stead

  Chamberlain came over to Withers, bent over him to see the paper, and quickly took a step back, for Withers smelled badly of sweat, drink and indigestion. In a few minutes while Joseph and Williams, the old odd-job man, were still working on the new job, they saw Chamberlain slip some silver into Withers’ hands, the clinking concealed in the noises of the workshop. They were talking quietly, Withers was smiling and telling some tale. Presently they both went over to the typist’s desk, took out a bottle and drank some brandy with their backs to the room. Effie helped herself to some brandy and drank it openly.

  Williams, a mild old one, old though not more than sixty, who always whispered and went about in black felt slippers in which holes were cut for his bunions, wiped his dry hand across his mouth and winked at Joseph. Joseph nodded, smiling at the “poor old chap”. (“Me in forty years,” he sometimes said to himself, “but I won’t be so lamblike. Poor old beggar, the way he waits round on Saturday mornings with his cap in his hand at twelve, when it’s all a bustle and a hurry to get out to the car, hoping for his pound-note and never daring to ask for it, it breaks your heart.”)

  Danny stopped the press, and Joseph went round to look at the sheet. When he went back to his own end, he kept saying, “Primus inter pares,” the motto pompously introduced into a trademark on the sheet: the press repeated primusinterpares, primusinterpares. Joseph’s mind began to wander with the regular sound and the approach of lunch-time. He remarked to himself, “Contra audentior ite qua tua te fortuna sinet,” a motto the priest had written for him in his prize at school, the only prize he ever got—one for handwriting. When he was alone as now, in the noise of the machines, in his room, on the boat amid the rush of wind and water, on Saturday afternoons lying in the grass, he liked to go over his little store of recitations. He had picked them up from the church service, from his Latin grammar at school, and from three little books bound in silk and stamped leather which his mother kept on the round table in the front room when visitors came for dinner. He had picked some up from Christmas cards and some from the title-pages of books. The great charm of his phrases, which were all in foreign languages, was the uncertainty of their meaning, the adumbrations and suggestions which hovered round them in his mind. Where he understood them, they had the same axiomatic standing as proverbs have for old women; and where he did not understand, they were abracadabra to show him he had power too, whenever he felt saddened by his smallness and weakness. He said now, “Labor omnia vincit.”

  He had spent innumerable long hours of his infancy alone, by the sea, among the bushes on the cliffs, staring at things from a distance, the fishing-boats like peanut-shells, the foam on distant bluffs, sea-gulls and sea-eagles deep in the sky. He had got used to talking to himself, and conversed only at odd intervals with poor and old-fashioned people, like the brothers at the school, the priest, his mother and father. Even when the little boys came together for catechism and skylarked round the church, he always stood, aloof. The headmaster of the Catholic school refused to have any notions of modern science taught in the lower classes. Joseph, leaving school at twelve, moved all his life among old things; his Latin tags were even comforts to him, recalling those quiet, sad old days.

  He had learned his catechism by heart easily. He loved music, resonant words, the greenish sunny light and shadows of his little hillside church, the wind as it passed outside in the grasses, the cricket which would begin to chirp and stop hearing a footfall on the road, the rattle of the milk-cart, the cry of a boy under the wall. He loved the Sunday masses, the respectable smiling people, the bustle of their clothes, the priest in his vestments and the repetition of the ritual that he knew so well. The ritual allowed its participants to enjoy the exaltation of inspiration, although they had none, as each phrase moved to its oft-rehearsed conclusion and the sacred words were born living-on their lips. They were a second transubstantiation, the word becoming spirit. Different from his mother, who muttered her own prayers and plaints, he went through the service like a celebrant. Each moment of the mass perfectly absorbed the small amount of mental energy the quiet allowed him, and the end left him peaceful, quiescent, in a state of grace. The confessional purified him and made it possible for him to live without thinking at all. On Holy Thursday when the cross was exposed on its catafalque and the crowd filed past to kiss it, he would stand aside under a pillar, for half an hour or more, filled with a tremendous joy, only spoilt when some sentimental woman kissed the shoulder or knee of the figure; he would then go past himself, kiss the foot, and thereafter go all the day through his work feeling liberated, like a prisoner who has been in gaol for a long time and is let out on the appointed day. He had been a choir-boy when small; he mingled with and sometimes led their voices now, and was glad to be nothing but a voice.

  Joseph stood beside the window looking through a sheet which had just come wet from the press, his eyes assiduously trained on the print. He kept glancing at the clock, it was nearly lunch-time; and there was running through his mind at the same time a bright current of images which arose out of the sunshine and from one of his phrases, “Orta recens quam pura nites,” the legend of the New South Wales coat-of-arms which he saw on the Bent Street Library when he passed to go to the Cathedral.

  Coloured spokes and plates whirling past on cars in the street were confounded with the wake of the morning’s ferry, boiling silver, and the oily eddies at the side, with flakes of blinding light, like a dragon in plate-mail. The direct ray of sunlight separated him from the rest of the workshop. He now felt no more the irritation of the quarrel between Withers and Chamberlain, the disorder and his misery. It often happened to him in church too, when the light fell on him and he seemed to be alone and in a heavenly choir. Now while he worked with his hands, back at the machine, his mind floated out over the harbour and wove invisible skeins in the invisible fine air. He was busy fitting together his future like a jig-saw puzzle. He thought of sailing outside the heads and going to the old countries, where the morning sun gilded domes, palaces, royal parks and hives of cities, bigger ports, and where men had a history that looked through millenniums. He looked at the ugly letters on the yellow and blue cover of the magazine, and saw between them the bright features of an elzevir Utopia. Why, he was a man, it was not so bad. As the years go on one gets older, one is not so stupid as before; everyone is out for himself, some predestined to high and low life, grouchers only make it worse for themselves, and the poor in spirit inherit the kingdom of Heaven. So one graduates without knowing it into the adult world; mere living makes a man wise. The trouble we have had is not as bad as that we shall see before we die, so we must be prepared for it with a stiff upper lip. But Joseph wondered if it would be possible to stow-away, or get a job as steward on a ship. This had never occurred to his sleeping seaside brain before. There it came again, the mirage which leads people from country to country. His future was a procession of days, laying down line after line of clear print, with a few errors, no doubt, each year a sheet sidling into place and followed by others from the press of the Lord. And the whole printing-world is not like this miserable workshop. There are giant workshops with hundreds of men, artists, engravers, lithographers, electric etchers, superb lights blazing like suns in the roof, workers shut off in gauze covers, benches yards long covered with clean trays of brilliant cast lead; linotypes by the half-dozen. There are great buildings for the printing of books and newspapers, where the lights burn all night, as if in a palace, and reporters and photographers run in in shoals; where the news goes in towards the editor through circles of decreasing diameter of rewrite men, the seven spheres of editing, and runs out again through the corridors of the monstrous newsprint machines, through which printers wander as through a forest. There are hundreds of kinds of printing-works—no industry in the world is so varied. Is it possible that he will stick for ever in one wretched place, where one learns nothing and is maltreated?

  Joseph looked at the clock—five minutes to one. He paused for a moment,
again over the German printers’ magazine. A red knight on a green horse rode through an iron-brown and steel-blue countryside: it filled the eye and the mind with flame. These Germans, thought Joseph, understood that letters were not letters alone; they gave them characters. They are robust, brawny, squawk, joust, ride; they have pedigrees, religions, countries, political parties; they are dour, civic, frivolous, refined and oblique, square-footed, conservative and with money-bags; they have tongues and elbows, chitter, jostle each other too close at law, or march in open formation to make a show when they have little to say; they are disorderly and blatant for a bargain sale and, for a seizure, humdrum but with a lamentable look; they innovate, become austere, have rules of good taste unsuspected by the uninitiated, live altogether in a world of their own within our own. His eye, long used to feeling its way round the shapes of window-saints, conventional and bright as the pack of cards, and the rough Gothic capitals with their foliations in yellow sandstone and yellow light, understood the lustier vigour of the cartoon; the same comic symbolism was there, the same impropriety and escapades of virtuosity, the caricatures of mean bosses and shrewish wives, a fumbling after and fabling with facts, and the workman’s practised, hardy, imaginative implement ascendant. This power of the workman in his element pleased him, relieved him of a Promethean pain, small (for an eagle is a gnat to a god), but often dimly felt within.

  The recurrent squabbling of Withers and Chamberlain rose through the great press’s lunging and the rotary colour-presses with their brief roll. Chamberlain went into his office to find his hat saying:

  “You’re so touchy, I can’t talk to you”; and Withers came to Joseph, repeating in his soft lip and moustache:

  “Silly old woman, his mother ought to’ve put him in petticoats. A Methody parson; Sunday at eleven our dear sisters will meet for prayer, I will be there; Sunday at three our dear ladies of the Dorcas Society will meet to cut out pinnies, I will be there; Sunday at six the young men will meet for the weekly uplift, I will not be there. A good job I got him, printing a thousand copies of a book of gay ladies, ‘The Silk Stockings of Susan’. I know the chap who sells obscene books, it’s upstairs in—I’ll take you there, one day. A good price, and naturally a commission for me: but he’s humming and ha-ing. We’d have to work after hours without the boy and women. The police would find out, and then goodbye. If the bank found out, it would call in the overdraft; I don’t know what other excuses for not looking a few quid straight in the eye: he likes bankruptcy, it must be his middle name. Listen, I wouldn’t mind going in for it, buying a little press, if I could get someone else to go in with me. I knew a chap in Gottingen when I was there, he did nothing else, and wonderful stuff, private translations of Aristophanes, Aretino, funny too, mind you, not only for the purple patches; and illustrated anthologies of obscene drawings and poems, first-class art, let me tell you, because when an artist does that it’s for his own fun and he lets himself go. Rembrandt’s best work is obscene, Raphael too, and the great Flemings. He made a wonderful living.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Well, the police closed the press on the complaint of German printers in the town who lost the business. He was expelled; a wonderful chap, sensitive, brilliant. He had a market all over Europe, but he sold the greater part in Germany itself; the Germans are mad over it. Now, Gregory has the chance of a lifetime, and turns it down. He can’t stand an investigation, I bet, that’s it.”

  Chamberlain frowned, poked over his untidy table and pulled dozens of dirty little papers out of his pockets, looking for some instructions from a client.

  “My best customer,” he said suddenly, putting his head on his hand. “It’s all over, I’m beat: I’m always like this, I’m no good as a business man.”

  “Keep your pecker up, Papa,” said Effie, putting her hand on his poll. “Come and take me out for lunch, you’ll find it after.” They went out.

  Withers giggled, went into the office and imitated Chamberlain: nobody looked. He came out.

  “Why do I stay in this hole?” inquired Withers witheringly of Mendelssohn.

  “Like to know myself: you give a chap a pain.”

  “I’ll let you into the secret, then. Six pounds a week in the air and a half a dollar a week to go on with. Another good reason is to see the livestock lodging in the extra-Persian rugs don’t escape, or to take ’em out for a walk if you want a beer, until you wish for the provident Scotchman who gave his Hielan’ brethren scratching-posts, because they were all lousy. Also I have to receive the influx of orders by telegram and cable, while Greg goes gambolling and gambling in the second-hand artchopsueys of the Rt. Hon. Silkbreeched Montagu. Sylvester B. used to be a private adviser, that is office-boy, to Whistler’s patron. Because of Whistler we must stagger under a swag of phony art, the boss must blow himself to a Bentley to transport Montagu’s goods about, and we may go and hang ourselves on the nearest fig, if we don’t like to work for the family. There’s a clean kronk reason for a crank’s open season: Kyrie Eleison—that’s for Joseph. Where the deuce is the hammer? Here. Keep at it hammer and tongs, mate, till doom cracks, but no crying alack. Keep up the old ensign, brothers, the skull and cross-bones for ever; the ship’s sinking. But we are working men, the bread of the world. So Greg says in his expansive moments of brotherhood. We’ll soon be driven to eating our own behinds, in that case. And we are merry printers’ devils, ta-ra, tay-rum, ta-ra, tay-yay.”

  Williams, standing behind Withers, made the sign of tossing off a small glass, and chuckling, doubled over his belly, as he stole off to the back door where workmen from a forage store were boiling his billy for him. But Withers was not drunk, only more exasperated than usual. As they went out, Joseph asked bitterly:

  “You don’t have to stick here; why do you?”

  Withers said, “Ah, that’s the question,” and ambled out. Pleasant days, pleasant company, jolly little conversazione. Baruch Mendelssohn, the third printer, turning out the covers on the small rotary press, stood quietly taking the last of the leaves as they fell, like a dark angel telling the Lord’s tale in the fall of the year. He stopped the machine and put blotting-paper over the top of the pile. He knew these men backwards: he knew all their cues and their speeches, and he knew their condition. No journeyman’s dreams were his.

  At lunch-time, in the park, Joseph read the newspaper wrapping round his lunch while he ate. In this way he always got the news, although a few days or even a month late. Presently he unwillingly drew out his algebra book and worked through the examples set for the evening class. At night, if he had any difficulty in getting to sleep, he resolved (a+b+c)2 in his head, and always found himself falling asleep before it was done; and he more often nodded with sleep than acquiescence in his night-class.

  He was now joined by Baruch Mendelssohn, an American born of European parents, a young man a little over five feet in height, with a white skin, lively brown eyes, and a black stubble springing all over his round cheek. The excessive heat of the advanced spring on an empty stomach made him sick. When he sat down, Joseph observed large tears balancing themselves on his eyelids. Baruch did not wipe them away, but closed his eyes so that the tears ran down his cheeks and dried off in the sun. He opened his eyes unashamed.

  “Sick again?” asked Joseph.

  Baruch nodded. One would have thought that he did not intend to speak: not Joseph, who knew him. Joseph waited, with eyes roving in the distance, his ears open. Baruch opened his mouth and the words tumbled out:

  “What a lantasque economic system! We all stand about helpless waiting for great Jupiter to descend in overalls on the stage and plaster his bricks into their courses; in the meantime, we act like common clay. Hum! you know the parables? The oldest son of the world goes off voluntarily and keeps pigs and lives on husks. When he decides to come home and get a square meal, his father wants to give him a veal cutlet, but his brother, who’s been running things all the while and expected to see brother cut off, sulks. Gosh, what a
morning! Chamberlain’s not a bad egg, you know, but his weakness is vicious and he’ll sacrifice us any day for his old man of the sea, Montagu. And then, say what you will, he indulges his fantasies at our expense. A man goes mad but his wits are still with him, he knifes someone else: he hasn’t forgotten how sharp a knife is. However weakminded an amiable man is, he buys his own groceries first.”

  “It’s his business,” objected Jo, “he put the money into it.”

  “A philanthropist,” exclaimed Baruch irascibly, “look at you!

  “You can afford to keep Chamberlain in Corona Coronas. You pay for a fur coat for Effie without turning a hair: but you don’t buy one for mother—that simply shows you’re unfilial and hate your family. You save your pennies, don’t you, Jo, to give a penny on Saturdays to the first beggar you see, and to put something in the box on Sundays? You can afford also to support the Church of Rome. You see a business so prosperous that it can afford to keep hundreds of square miles of uncultivated land, hundreds of giant buildings of the finest stone, richest workmanship, with priceless treasuries, laces and coloured windows, with paintings, carvings and woodwork, enough to say masses to all eternity for all the souls on earth, so rich that it can keep regiments of idle, bigfooted lumpkins to tinkle bells and recite a few Latin words that you know as well as they, and has coveys of devout females to work for nothing all their lives, scrubbing, laundering, teaching, without a decent bite of food or a piece of soft linen to cover themselves; you see an institution that conducts prosperous businesses, has printing-presses of its own, ships at sea, casinos and expensive schools, that has laws enacted to protect its interests, that pays no taxes and levies an irregular toll on millions of people, mostly ignorant and wretched. And what do you do? You save your money to put something in the box on Sunday. Yes, the poor are charitable, the poor are religious, the poor have bottomless purses. They buy gold dishes and gold telephones for the Pope and fill the Vatican with priceless marbles that they will never in their lives see or appreciate. They keep silk-robed youths, fat and rosy, singing songs and learning pseudo-history, in all the proud seminaries of Rome. They keep Cardinals’ mistresses and Pope’s nephews on the Seven Hills. They buy satin banners for Santa Maria Maggiore and a broom for the Scala, possibly Santa, and before they pray for their own relatives in distress, pray Heaven to protect the Pope, some black-bearded dago who doesn’t even know they exist and doesn’t give a damn. Does the Pope keep beggars, or the Vatican police hand out alms? Not on your tintype! But you do, Jo. And you likewise give money on Hospital Saturday, and also, I believe, for the missions in China. There’s a world-embracing philanthropy for a poor man who doesn’t have enough to sole his own boots. What characters we all have, the poor! They tell you poverty keeps you from temptation; it certainly does: but what you need, my poor friend, is a little temptation. Items: pride, in belonging to a dominant class; covetousness, in respect of a new pair of pants; lust, enough to make an appointment with a pretty girl; wrath, when you find you’re trod on; gluttony, for a beefsteak; envy, of the bounding health of rich children; sloth, the lying all day on a yellow beach staring into vacancy and getting brown. But the Church has cleansed your heart of the seven deadly sins for working men. You have pints of character, so much that you’re scarcely fit for human conversation, Jo. Who forgive the judge who gaols the Socialist?—the poor. The Socialist’s disturbing the natural order, they say, he’s envious. Who admire the state plug-uglies in their uniforms and lick the hand that snaps on the iron bracelet?—the poor. He’s to protect us, you say,—your pocket-books, your safety-vaults, no doubt. Who tremble when they enter a private bank with portal twenty feet high made out of white marble, dug out, shipped and put up by workmen without a second pair of socks? Why, we do: the poor do. It’s stupendous, we say, how rich he is! And if the banker should pass us on his way to his automobile, we respect the chauffeur’s servile salute, and feel as if Jove had just walked that way. And our imagination opens out into innumerable white marble halls, hung with curtains, with bits of bronze on bits of marble, where tea is served on relatively infinitesimal tables to relatively minute ladies with neat hair. Our soul yearns over all that. Yes, it does; and your precious church, with its yawning vaults and thunderous doors, where you may walk, but may not talk or laugh, has given you since the cradle a holy respect for clinkers, the gold, the jewels, cash and plate, that it would take me years to clean out of your head. But here,” cried Baruch, “in this country where you are technically all free, where you all vote and think yourselves political governors, where the land is free and you have no complications, if it weren’t for your crazy bounties to protect what won’t grow cheaply and your tariffs as high as the moon to protect the uneconomic industries of cheap capitalists, you should live in an earthly paradise: you shouldn’t have to think of any other heaven. And what do we see? Beggars, tramps, thousands of workless in misery, poor mothers whelping yearly generations who get wretcheder, gaols full of criminals, madhouses of madmen, extravagance, superstition. You might as well be in the depths of Bulgaria.”