Withers listened to the tale with a sly pleased air, like someone who hears, by eavesdropping, news he has been waiting for. Chamberlain walked out into the workshop.
“He might be here about six,” said Effie, ignoring her father’s nudge. “Put the vases down there.”
“No,” said Chamberlain, “I won’t have any more rubbish here. It’s not the Old Curiosity Shop. But if you want to see Montagu he might be here this afternoon—I can’t say for sure. Put those damned vases somewhere around; I hope something falls on them. What you’re doing with them, I don’t know. Are you doing my business or Montagu’s ? I thought you were getting orders for me, not him; I’m sick of this; I’ll tell him straight.”
Graham took his vases and started for the storeroom.
“Graham, take a straight tip. Keep out of Montagu’s way if you want to keep your health. People who do his business land in funny ports.”
“I will, you bet.”
When he came back Chamberlain and Withers were hobnobbing at the end of the room, with intent cross faces. Graham came to Joseph.
“Have you seen Montagu?”
“Here, about half an hour ago.”
“Really? Can you beat it? Chamberlain told me . . .”
“I’m not interested in him. Perhaps it was longer than half an hour. We all know him and stay away from him; he’s poison.”
Graham with his fat puckered face and greying hair plucked Joseph’s sleeve.
“Be a pal: I’m in a terrible mess. I don’t know what to do, honest. I could burst out crying. That s.o.b. Montagu got me the job ’ere, you know. I introduced him to a friend, a commercial attaché, ’o said ’e’d bring stuff in for ’im from China, Japan, Singapore and so on. Montagu got me to sign a sort of letter to ’im, saying, that ’is name could not be mixed up in it since the Customs House was suspicious of ’im due to ’im ’aving innocently imported some silks for a friend, bales of silk in which drugs were discovered—God alone knows the length of Montagu’s imagination and lies. The upshot is, that ’ere I am indebted to this man for nearly £500 of stuff, and what stuff! What do you suppose? A Chinese coffin, fourteen original Mandarin robes, an assortment of topknots that they used at court to show their rank, cork pictures, ‘and worked banners, bronze gongs, some Batik strips, some ceramics, which are smashed, by the way. What am I to do with it ? Montagu will only take delivery of part of it on spec, and I’m responsible. Now the commercial attaché talks of suing me. ’E has a friend in the Customs and that end is fixed up for him. I say I’ll sue Montagu, cause I ’ave a letter of ’is; but ’e says, no, nothing is specified, it ain’t the right stuff. ’Is lovely friend, your boss, if you’ll excuse me saying so, but I don’t suppose you ’ave any illusions, is shielding ’im too. Yesterday I rang up this dump; I’m dead certain it was Montagu answered the ’phone. ‘Is that you, Montagu?’ ‘This is the S.M.H. Packing Room,’ ’e answers and rings orf. And rings orf. Smart devil, but ’e leaves too much stink of ’is trade around: ’e’ll be so smart one of these days, ’e’ll trip over ’is own feet, running orf.
“Be a good pal and let me know if’e’s coming back ’ere. Honest, I’m in a ’ell of a mess; my wife. It’s terrible, I ’aven’t the ’eart to keep going; my wife wants to shoot me or divorce me—she’d rather do both, because I was in the Gardens with another woman and her husband came in on us—a coupla weeks ago in the Botanic Gardens about nine o’clock one morning. You’ll see it in the papers to-night or to-morra. I’ve got to get some money, I ’aven’t a penny. I’m an ’ard worker. I never ’armed a fly in my life, and now I’ve got everything on my ’ead. This other woman—Bessie—is a magnificent woman, a friend of mine and my wife’s. It’s true I’m fond of’er, you couldn’t ’elp it yourself, and a man ain’t a saint, but I swear I never ’armed my wife. It’s a love affair, I love ’er and she’s crazy about me. If I ’ad money I’d just give the ’ole pack the slip and take ’er orf with me. We’d make a living in some other place. And yet I like my wife; that’s funny. If I only ’ad money—money washes out all spots; I seen Macbeth one’—‘Out damned spot’—if Macbeth’d ’d more money be’ind ’im there wouldn’t ’a been any damned spot, and that was a bloody murder. That’s the reason I went into this goddamned sickening business with the commercial attaché. I’m smart, I could manage some’ow, but I’m poor: a poor man ’as troubles all ’is life and ’e never ’as anything but a poor, miserable, wretched, untidy, un’appy life. They don’t let ’im even be honest or ’ave a friend, if someone wants to pin ’im.
“Well, I’m making you a moan. I’ll ring you up this afternoon or to-morrow, I’ll talk through my nose, they’ll think it’s someone else; and you can tell me when Montagu’s coming. You’ve only got to say, yes, no; I’ll ask the questions. I’ll stick ’im yet. I know somebody ’o’d like to call ’im to account. It’s a dirty business, but look what ’e’s done to me. What can you do? The jungle must be a decent place beside a pack of men. If they don’t like you they roar at you to let you know, but a feller ’o’s going to let you down, smoodges and smears you with rosy lingo to begin with; or snapping at each other’s ’eels like nasty mongrels, the dog being a sight less decent, clean or honest than a jungle beast. Well, you’ve got to work. I’ll amble along: I’ll ring you. Goo’bye; I’ll see you again.”
Graham patted Joseph dolefully on the arm and trotted out again. Withers said:
“You’re a great friend of the boss, aren’t you ? Why wouldn’t you tell the poor devil, Montagu is out in the cart-dock waiting for him to go: let ’em have it out.”
“What chance has he?” asked Joseph doubtfully.
Baruch said: “God help us, they’re all in the same boat.
Chamberlain is another edition of Graham. Montagu’s down and out for all practical purposes. Give them all a break; I can’t see men fight.”
Joseph said, “He’s going to ring me up, I’ll let him know next time.”
Withers growled: “His heart can break till next time. Stick by, chaps, solidarity, solidarity, no imparity.”
Chamberlain put his sandy head in.
“Has he gone?”
No one answered.
“He’s gone!”
Montagu and Chamberlain came back and went into the office to argue. Withers hung about to catch the drift of the business. All sorts of squint-eyed tales, clumsy business plots, mean usurious combinations between friends tumbled out of their mouths like dirty little bits of paper and danced round the room in the soft summer breeze. Meanwhile the city ran on outside. Typewriters tapped, loiterers and unemployed men lounged in the little park, a hydraulic lift wheezed up and down in the cart dock. The City Council took up and put down tar paving which would not set on account of the heat. A man opposite developing blue prints turned on his heliotrope light, the whistle blew for the cranes working on the Harbour Bridge, ferries whistled, a liner coming down the harbour to berth at midday bellowed, cars rattled past, the messenger boys went out for the lunches, the swallows chased each other off the red roof of the new yellow and blue building opposite which had the blue escutcheon of the Chilean Republic’s consul on its walls. The heat increased, the machines meshed their rhythms, the coursers swerved round the track towards midday and the offices sweated. Presently Montagu stalked out of the office in noble indignation and Chamberlain stretched out his legs and said:
“What a pig!”
Then it was lunch-time.
Baruch went uptown to look at sailing schedules of the Union Steam Navigation Co. and Withers lounged off to one of the popular ninepenny tea-and-pie shops on the quay, leaving Williams to eat his bread and apple and to drink his black tea by the back door. He brought the tea in his billy-can, with a string tied to it, from the back of the court where some friendly gentlemen who lunched uproariously every day in the doorway of the warehouse, and who told him “always to call on his cobbers for tea”. The cobbers talked Union talk and swapped narratives and conundrums of an int
eresting nature which made poor Williams grin a bit as he listened and dreamed about his scattered life. He leaned his head on his hand in the hot sun-ray that came through the chimneys of the warehouse and invented plenty of easy tricky schemes by which he could make money, be his own master again, get back to the old country with his wife, to visit Maidstone once again before they got too old, marry off his Alice, buy a cottage with a half-acre of ground up on the North Shore or over in the new suburbs by Balgowlah. His wife and he went there on Sundays inspecting new subdivisions. He drank his black tea, and presently took out his can to his cobbers for more hot water. Then he took the Telegraph out of Chamberlain’s office and read the political articles; he was seriously concerned with the fate of “the Empire”.
Meanwhile Joseph walked up Macquarie Street, which is fine and broad and looks over all the Harbour and towards the sea. Down at the left is the Cathedral, in yellow sandstone. Joseph thought of the cool inside the padded doors, of dipping his fingers into the holy water, of the light which always blazed through the stained windows: so he went down there to rest for half an hour. There was nobody there but a thin young man of whom Joseph said “Dago, they’re pious,” and a young woman in black. Joseph stood at the first station of the cross. A woman in dirty clothes came up; he heard a noise like the whirring of a very old clock about to strike. He discovered that the old woman had spoken to him.
“I beg pardon.”
“I said, young man, would you like to come to a retreat?”
“A retreat?”
Joseph stared at her. He didn’t get the sense of the words, looking at her bent witch-body looped in black rags. Dismay filled him—what hellish invitation . . .
“Y’know, the Jesuits . . .”
“No thanks, really, no thank you, not to-day,” said Joseph, and felt silly: he said that to the greengrocer.
He hastened down the aisle and came behind the high altar. There he sat and contemplated the candles; his heart was beating. It was strange and submarine up there in the gloom with the diffused lights. He sat there for perhaps a quarter of an hour as if asleep; the candles danced in his eyes and the sun shone through the western windows all at once having passed the meridian. He could scarcely pierce the gloom under this volley of light, to see the three or four darkly-dressed women kneeling at the rail. Here the church kept its images, as in a grotto, and here the most simple-minded knelt. Another dropped a penny in the little tin box, lighted a candle, and started to pray. The smoke went up like a prayer. As he sat there the sun wheeled and fell through a broken leading in the window, smiting his eyes and forehead. He sprang up and gazed up at that effulgence, that miracle—he thought, so I might see the throne of God. Outside the trees murmured, the doves cooed, the purple jacaranda trees were in bloom, and through another small chink he saw the fair blue sky. He remembered how it was outside, the sloping Domain, the far headlands with blue-grey and yellow rounded rocks in Fisherman’s Bay, visible even from here, the soft grass which one sees through the arcades of the Art Gallery in the Domain, the orphanage children in red and blue, exactly as children were in the Italian pictures of virgins and saints.
“O God of infinite majesty, I adore you,” he said, without thinking what he was saying; the words burst from his lips. He went away from the crouching black women who were as if dead, the penny candles and glowing windows, and stood at the top of the central aisle watching the sun turn the architect’s design to motes and confusion. One morning long ago, before Michael went to the war, when he was sometimes devout, Joseph went with him into the Cathedral. The sun was up, a stone in the flagged pavement was red and yellow with reflections: Joseph was only eight then, and sleepily gazed round over Michael’s black head. There was a young woman standing against one of the pillars gazing towards them or at the altar. Michael had looked up sombrely, seen the light all around, said in a quiet voice,
“They even pierced windows in this den,” and risen up.
He started to walk towards the door, when he looked quickly at the young woman as if he had just caught the glimmer of her skirt. He looked at the pavement and continued towards the door.
“Hey, Michael, hey, Michael! look, it’s Catherine, your sister.”
“Come on,” said Michael.
“It was her.”
“I don’t care: come on!”
Joseph had often thought, why doesn’t he take things normally instead of making things difficult for everybody? Now that was Catherine, but he couldn’t say hullo to his own sister. He was ashamed of being caught in a church: he was always under her thumb. Certainly, that is it. As for me, thought Joseph, I have enough to be blue about, but I’m not; and I pray as I—as I piss: it’s no great moral question to me. He burst through the doors. The top of the radiant sky blazed over Elizabeth Street, the air-lifted his hair and blew dust in his eyes, the tram tracks glittered, his heart leapt into the air and he ran down the steps and along the hot asphalt path, his eyes full of blue sun-spots. At the same time Williams dreamed of making a fortune, perhaps picking up a nugget in the slag of the goldfields. The exaltation lasted all lunch-hour, although he got dreamier and dreamier. It was the sun that did it: the sun is very powerful in those parts and intoxicates the soberest natures. Joseph’s gaiety passed out with a last flutter. He trotted back by Philip Street, which has small low houses and runs down a hill. The students stood outside the Law School joking with a spirited air. A young fellow with curly chestnut hair, high colour and a lovely smile was saying:
“You can image him brought up in a brilliant foreign court, not caring two straws for the dun, glum nation of subjugated Celts and Jutes, of whom Thiers wrote . . .”
And in another group a dark-skinned thin student said in a depressed voice:
“Every honest man admits you can’t get on without influence.”
Joseph shambled shabbily on. How far was he from the bottom of the ladder? He was a long way from the top. All that was true, with the professions organised and education so expensive, with a family depending on you, and no money even for a decent shave, what chance had he? Look at the way the fellows jabbered. He didn’t even know what they were talking about, and supposedly they were both using the same language. Yes, with the world organised into watertight compartments what chance had a dunce like him? A man needed influence to get on, influence and money; even those young lawyers said so. A man such as he was would spend all his fertile years scraping together a little sum to pay the mortgage on his father’s house or to save up for a wife. After that, nothing; he was done for: only the dreary round of anxieties and every new acquaintance a new responsibility. He did not see how he would ever afford to have a wife and child, for example. Courage, said his conscience faintly, a good heart, cheerfulness, hard work, trust in the Lord.
“O Lord, sweet well of all blessings, who know and see yourself my needs”—does he? is it possible? “God is a pure spirit, because he has no body and he cannot be seen by our eyes, nor touched by our hands. God,” said Joseph to himself, with the sun beating down on his head, “is above all that: a funny relation, a pure spirit and a dunce. I wish I did not believe in religion, I would feel more insignificant, I would be freer. Bosh, I am a dead man if I go on like this: let’s not think about it.” He tried the poor man’s catechism all the way to work. There he sniffed the ink, the musky flooring, the faint familiar odour of urine, and his spirits rose. He ran in and began to make proofs from the galleys. It was a fine job, it was cool inside, he was glad to work.
Withers came in holding his jaw, and angrily and mournfully set to work.
“What’s up?”
“All my teeth are aching, and my back too.”
“Take an aspirin.”
“No, I won’t, I don’t want anything.”
Withers chewed on a pencil and got flushed under the eyes: he kept watching the door malignantly. Presently he stopped the machine, said pettishly, “I’m done with him,” and sat down on the little boy’s chair.
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p; “Give it a breeze,” groaned Joseph, “it’s like a hundred mosquitoes buzzing to hear you.”
“This is too much, the last straw. If you had my worries you wouldn’t feel so clever.”
“Yes, worries you have, no one can deny that,” remarked Baruch.
“I sweat and I sweat, I worry and I worry, to make a go of this rotten dump. I work more than all of you put together, I do ten men’s work. The whole organisation of the place is due to me; I can’t sleep at night for thinking of it. Any money that comes into this place, I earn. I ought to get a percentage, as a matter of fact, of the profits. My £60 may as well be counted a dead loss. But I can put him into bankruptcy for £60 and I’ve a good mind to.”
“Don’t be an idiot: you’d have to examine your share of the proceeds with a microscope.”
Chamberlain came in cheerfully, waved his hand:
“Hullo, boys; hullo, girls.”
Withers chewed his moustache, flushed, with a naughty expression for a moment, and stalked darkly into the office.
“See here, Gregory, I’m fed up. I want my money, and then I’m quitting. I’ll see about the £60 later.”
“Well, quit: what are you moaning about?”
“I want my money, and now, and you’ve got to give these other beggars their pay too; you must have it. Jacobson just told me he paid his bill at the beginning of this week. Now, where’s the dough? If you’ve given it to Montagu, or bought anything else on the instalment plan, I’ll—I’ll strangle you.” Withers’ high thin voice began to scream.
“I haven’t got it; it’s in the bank.”
“Go to the bank; or give me a cheque, right away. I’ll cash it.”
“I had to pay Montagu, he was pressing me; and I had to give him something to help him out with this Graham fellow.”
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 14