Seven Poor Men of Sydney

by Christina Stead

  “Madmen and criminals,” said Joseph, “can’t be helped; you get them everywhere.”

  “Certainly, I recognise the doctrine,” replied Baruch; “the natural, the child of God; the criminal, the hounded of God; the madman, the scourged of God. Our psychologists in America have re-established the Binet-Simon test of intelligence which shows infallibly that poor children are ten per cent, below the average, middle-class children at par, and rich children ten per cent, above the average. That is the democratic way of putting the old doctrine; and it proves that foolery and knavery corrupt the most serious of men. This doctrine is intended to and does crowd ‘human beings into noisome cellars, and squalid tenement houses, fills prisons and brothels, goads men with want and consumes them with greed, robs women of the grace of perfect womanhood, takes from little children the joy and innocence of life’s morning.’ I didn’t make that up, that’s from Henry George. Henry George was himself a journeyman printer and was goaded with want and saw his wife ill and in want before he wrote that. He got a political secretaryship and there got his experience, in California, at the time California was ruined through the Civil War. After that he developed his political economy. You should read it, Jo: so clear, the weft of natural reason, the pure style of English, which a few have had—Hume, Berkeley, Shelley, Bertrand Russell. And he had no more luck than you or I: a poor man, but observant.”

  Baruch’s eyes sparkled; Jo sat silent and doleful, perhaps touched by this discourse. Baruch thought he found it dull and tried to amuse him.

  “But it isn’t an economic relation at all, ours here, it’s a connubial one. We’re married to Chamberlain, or we’re his concubines. He pets us, snarls, he sees to the general supplies and we get no pin-money at all: I am convinced that he looks at it as housekeeping. We can always eat, he says. He keeps Bovril in the cupboard and occasionally stands one or other of us to a meal. But I object to living in a harem, first, from natural jealousy, second, because I carefully surveyed myself in the glass this morning and I can certify I’m not an odalisque.”

  “You are right,” said Joseph, “and my father is bothering me about it too. He’s getting old now and he gets fretful. It’s pretty thick.”

  “Thick? Yes, wait though, listen: what a man! This morning he wrote to his mother. He showed me the letter, being proud of his naturally eloquent style: ‘Dear Mother,—As I write to you from a foreign land, I look out of the window at the bay leaves and think ‘Bay leaves?’, I said, looking at the fig tree. He was really hurt. ‘What does it matter?’ he says; ‘she would like to think I was looking at bay leaves: there was a bay tree in the garden at home.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘what foreign land are you speaking of? Isn’t your mother English and you too?’ ‘Certainly,’ he said, quite nettled, for he is proud of his phrases, ‘but it seems a foreign land to her: she thinks there are hundreds of blacks running round the streets.’ Oh, I had to laugh: he is a human after all, although such a dumbbell. To improve my opinion of his learning, he offers me an old copy of Les Chouans. ‘You read French,’ he says loud, so that the paper-carter waiting in the hall can hear, ‘you might like to look at this,’ he says: ‘what does it mean, “Les Chouans,” some sort of natives, isn’t it?’ ‘Mr Chamberlain,’ said I, ‘let’s be vulgar—and frank. Before the mind some matters, before letters, let’s start with bread, reversing St John by a simple process of the oesophagus. When are you going to let us have the dough, the specie, the shekels? We’ll take it in any currency or form, bullion. Treasury Bills, Argentine bonds, George III pennies, new mint, anything but I.O.U.’s or tram-tickets. I mean, I know Montagu is a worthy character and society ought to keep him on the strength of his having known Whistler’s exploiter, I realise that: but why assume the duty of Society? I mean, what about your honest toilers? Otherwise, Chamberlain,’ I said to him, without making any bones about it, ‘we’ll strike and we’ll put up a notice outside saying why, and then good-bye to your buyer and the bank’ll come down on you.’ I wouldn’t, of course; but we certainly should have struck before. At any rate, next Saturday, the 20th inst., you, Mr J. Baguenault, will get one month’s arrears.”

  “Go on!” said Joseph, flushing.

  “Yes, does that make a difference?” Baruch smiled with satisfaction, and related the incident again in different terms, with varying illustrations and pithy comparisons.

  “Yes,” he finished, “I thought to myself, the shop is going to blazes, and he’s going to get into such a mess one of these days, with Withers, Montagu, the bank, or all three, as mankind has not seen the like; the wreck of the Hesperus will be an ocean regatta in comparison. I like to help you, Joseph: I’m sure you’d do as much for me any day. Wouldn’t you, Joseph?”

  “I would,” said Joseph.

  “Take Withers,” said Baruch, pleased with himself; “he has a kind of moral and perhaps financial pressure, the insidious pressure one weak’man has on another, knowing the weak points in his skin and not being ashamed to jab into them, and he has some blackmail up his sleeve for both of them, from what it appears (singing, the French call it, and Withers sings small in all roles), running about with that greenish look he gets often, like a girl at the wrong time of the month. A defeated woman he is, in fact. And you, Joseph, you’re too humane. I’m not criticising you at all, it’s a fine trait, but it will never get you anywhere when misapplied. You’re the most advanced case of purseless philanthropy I ever saw . . .”

  Joseph always found himself paralysed before any half-dozen consecutive sentences, and now under this torrent of speech gazed blandly at Baruch, wishing to show he understood and was grateful, and only looking vacant. Baruch had now gesticulated himself into a perfect good humour, had forgotten his sickness and empty stomach; he laughed lovingly at his audience, showing his white buck teeth.

  “Yes, you may not believe me!” he concluded, beaming.

  Joseph opened his mouth once or twice, like a fish taking in air, as reflections of words came into his mind and involuntarily contracted the muscles of speech, but by now he had no ideas at all. He felt that there must be holes in any of the traditional remarks he usually brought out and he said nothing. Baruch had come to a stop. Joseph recalled himself with a tremor and said:

  “Oh, really, it’s awfully decent of you: thanks. I never know what to start with, when I ought to talk to a fellow: I always say the wrong thing.”

  “Come down to tin-tacks; that’s the right thing. It’s natural to me, for I am a Jew: we are realists.”

  Joseph smiled to hear the familiar phrase “for I am a Jew”. It meant that Baruch had entered an intimate train of thought. Joseph looked down at his algebra book, and shyly showed the examples, hoping that Baruch would do them for him. But Baruch explained the problem for him, choosing his words simply, glancing up quickly through Joseph’s glasses on which the sun shone brightly, to see if he understood the reasoning, patting his arm, threshing out fine seeds of thought from the golden harvest in his head, till his head presently overflowed again, and he sat chin-deep in a flood of exegesis which bewitched the pupil, his eyes, voice and body mobile with the love, wit and understanding of his nature.

  “Grasp this and this, and you have invaded the whole question. More than that, you are on the road for the capital city, you can take the kingdom, you border on all that is known in science. Not so much is known, don’t think it, that you can’t make your way. The body of science is full of holes, ragged and clear-obscure like a moonlit ghost; but it is there, even if in the moonlight, even if a phantom of a shape that has been. If you make a stab at it, you’ll find the stuff it’s made of.”

  Joseph laughed. “You put things in such a way, nothing is serious to you, but then you have the brains; nobody ever thought me smart. Everything is really hard for me.”

  “Joseph, this is so simple. Here, you have a simple 4—four you have known since you were a baby and counted four fingers, four connie-agates, four sails in the bay; even savages of the most primitive sort have a w
ord for 4. But that is their ultimate, and you, you can count to 10,000 and more with ease. You can multiply, divide, take the square root and calculate prime numbers! Why, your world, by that fact, is infinitely more complex, has many more dimensions. You understand already, without knowing you understand, thousands of relations that savages can’t. But take 4, a simple thing, a final thing. You can begin to philosophise about 4—thus, there are four right angles all the same to a square, never more nor less. Fortresses and palaces, railway lines, skyscrapers, are built through confidence in that principle. Look, doesn’t printing consist of ems and ens, simple measures. Then, with + and —, there you have a very important idea. A man talks. ‘I like this, I don’t like that, Rembrandt is a great artist, Velasquez is a rotten painter, El Greco puts one eyebrow higher than the other, Boucher represents the corruption of the court, Boudin paints the light that is on sea and land.’ Don’t be alarmed, that is only + and −; he makes a song about it, but that is all it is: that is aesthetic criticism, for the most part. If you read the paper, you see (and you get bored with it), Trance has so many submarines, England has less, Germany has armed forces disguised as sporting clubs, Switzerland is swollen with the world’s gold deposits, Russia is spending millions on foreign propaganda, and whether they’ll go to war or not, with whom, for what, where, when, it’s only a question of plus or minus, guns, wheat, bars of gold, soldiers, markets. Thus: ‘the French loan went up to-day’—that’s plus a few votes given to the Conservative Party in a by-election; ‘the Prime Minister is expected to appear in the birthday honours’—that’s plus a lordship and minus a party; ‘riot in Austria’—that’s bread plus three groschen. Even in the crimes, when you read, for example, ‘woman kills man who jilts her,’ you should only read it as ‘woman minus a regular income, gentleman minus his mortgages.’ My ambition has sometimes been to issue a newspaper like that, but it would be suppressed; the professions, the whores, judges, journalists, usurers, kings and commons would be putting a tailor-made halter round my short neck. If the clouds should roll away from poor hearts there’d be too sudden a change to suit the gentry. Pray don’t think mathematics is a mystery, Jo, it’s the bunk that’s obscure.”

  Joseph, surprised, gay, much agitated by the oddities of the young man, stubbornly fought out each problem, confusing and disentangling in turn mathematical conventions, stumbling over the conjugation of an exact idea of multiplicity with an unknown, mystified, but suddenly breaking open the rock so that understanding gushed out and watered earth barren and virgin. For a moment his eyes were opened, a pure stream broke through into the light, a new diagenetic principle began to work and he became aware of science, dimly, palely, because the light passed still through the clerestories of superstition; but it was as a ray of sunlight he had once seen crash through a memorial window in the village church, when he had wandered there with Michael, as a little boy, showing up a middle-aged mystery and the rusty black of devout kneeling women, a light even to the blind.

  Baruch left Joseph to post a letter to an uncle in America. Joseph lay on his back in the sun and fell into a pleasant doze. He heard the rustle of papers being folded and went back with the workers to his workshop, blinded and irrational with the heat. The sun motes hopped about relentlessly all the afternoon, and it was true that his mind was a disk, as they often show to students in the University. The presses clanked a crazy refrain, “Chirk-chank-cho, Chirk-chank-cho, Chirk!” in a sort of mechanical lockjaw Choctaw chinwag in which they conversed among themselves all the afternoon. Graham, a commercial traveller, new to the business, whom Chamberlain had taken on as a freak, that week, brought in the copy for a handbill:

  University Extension Courses.

  A Course of FIVE LECTURES will be given on LIGHT

  by Professor A. MUEULER in the Physics Lecture

  Theatre at the University, Camperdown.

  Single lecture, 1 Course, 4s.

  and so forth.

  Baruch called Joseph over.

  “Like to go myself; would you go, Jo?”

  “It’s too much, and I wouldn’t understand.”

  “Tom Winter sometimes gets tickets sent down to Communist Hall. I’ll see if I can get a couple from him or the Folliots. The first lecture you can get deadhead tickets to attract a crowd. They reckon they get for the course a fifth of the first crowd.”

  Joseph sighed. He knew that Baruch would try to drag him to the lot, that this invitation to the first lecture was a trap. He was so tired and lectures were so dry; he would try to find some way of crying off before the evening. It was best. He looked at himself between his hands. The sole of one boot was attached by a hairpin, the worn knees of the trousers showed the colour of his pale skin when he sat down. His hat was an old one of his cousin’s. The rest of his attire fell in with these items and produced a sort of harmonious costume, the uniform of misery. The children of Fisherman’s Bay shouted after him, “Joey, Jo, Jo, Ullo Jo,” when he went past in the evenings. He knew what this song meant; it meant, “You are rubbish thrown out by men, and we are allowed to play with you, no one even has a salvage interest in you.” The Gown of the Universe had produced a man in his image. The accumulated misery, shame, hunger and ignorance of centuries straddled the path as he advanced against the evening sun, and they shrieked with laughter to see his hat getting taller in the new lamplight and his coat more uncouth as his shadow fell backwards towards them. He was a stranger. It was marked in his face, which, of a dingy pallor, by some effect of skin or reflection appeared with the masterly distinction of an etched face, it was grotesque but more real, more human than the high-nosed, red-skinned, clapper-voiced, mussel-mouthed faces around him. It shone by the quality of its pain, incongruity and isolation. In certain men the flesh is as expressive of emotion as the eyes and voice. The flesh is most responsive to passion; it shows then how thin is the garment the blood puts on, and shines with a white lucent glare in a moment of agony.