She looked at them both with blazing eyes. Winterbaum looked a little shamefaced, and at the same time watched Catherine with an irrepressible curiosity and enthusiasm, as if he saw a new facet turning to the light, a drama rounding itself out.
Marion spoke.
“You are right, Kate, there is none of your brother on the surface. Perhaps he is like you underneath. At any rate you understand him best. Good-bye, I must be off.” She put her hand on Winterbaum’s arm for a moment. “I’m going to the club.” She addressed herself to Catherine. “You’re going to work here, aren’t you, with Heinrich?”
“Yes.”
Marion arranged her scarf on her shoulders.
“Good. I’m going to sleep for half an hour at the club, get my slippers for gym, and I’ll meet you all at the meeting at seven. I’ll have lunch with Patty and tea at the club. Heinrich, see Kate gets tea before she comes to the meeting, won’t you?”
“Of course, of course.”
“Thanks, Marion,” said Catherine with great politeness, and pushed open Fulke’s door before Marion had got out of sight.
Catherine was tired, but she worked away at the old scrap-iron typewriter under the dying bulb in Heinrich’s room. Presently she and Heinrich went into Fulke’s room and ate a sandwich. The afternoon sunlight fell across the green oilcloth. The window looked out at the back of the building, over Hunter Street, beyond some low roofs. The smell of flowers and summer grass came in on the close air. The telephone rang. Heinrich went through the files to find out the antecedents of a parliamentarian making a bid for fame at the moment, a dairy-farmer from the northern rivers, demanding the constitution of a new northern state. The sky tarnished, doors banged, somewhere a glass vessel fell to pieces, picture-frames rapped on the walls, a banner clattered to the floor in the waiting-room, and dust went whirling over the housetops. There rolled rapidly through the sky a long torpedo cloud.
“A southerly buster,” said one of them, “it’s been due.”
When they were ready to go at five o’clock it was very dark outside as if a cloud of dust enveloped the city. Swollen clouds bowled low over the cold, wildly-blustering streets. The palm-leaves in the Hunter Street garden could be heard lashing in the intervals. Abruptly through the broadcasting programme they heard the reedy piping of an S.O.S.
“Somebody turning turtle,” said Heinrich.
They waited. At five-thirty Catherine persuaded Heinrich to go out and have some coffee. Heinrich had to eat every few hours. Heinrich smiled at her wisely, looked at Fulke’s bent yellow head, and nodded.
“I’m a bad cavalier, but Fulke will take my place, I hope.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Catherine with curling lip, but she cast a soft side look on the yellow head.
At six o’clock Fulke got up and said to Catherine:
“Not afraid of getting wet, Katkin? Then let’s turn this in and go and eat.”
“I’ll go down and get some buns and we’ll eat here,” suggested Catherine.
“No, I’ve got to have nourishment,” protested Fulke. “I eat like a whale. I can’t live on rice like you. Do you know, I believe there was a Chinaman in your ancestry.”
Downstairs, Fulke ate steak and kidney pie and Catherine had a bun and a glass of water. When they came out, Fulke was glowing with a happy digestion, and said:
“Let’s walk down to the rocks in the Domain. We’ll get wet anyhow, and I’d do anything for a breath of fresh air.”
They battled up Bent Street and into the Domain. The drive was strewn with large leaves. A bundle of rags in the roots of a giant fig indicated a beggar-woman sheltering there. Fulke began to sing, and cried:
“Magnificent in this wind! The roots of your hair tingle.”
The wind blew loudly, the rain came down in sheets. Catherine called:
“You feel free in storms! Nothing binds me then!”
“I need to sometimes. With giving the Socialists patch-patch on the behind and the trades union secretaries a flea in the ear, with following the strike like a detective, and unmasking private interests and public scandals, entertaining bobbies and proving I’m not a candidate for quod, and neither is Heinrich, I look at the city with a regular jaundiced eye. Why worry? I often think. Take life simply, I say to myself; float and the tide floats with you, for upstream you swim alone. Make no provision for wife, family, or mankind, run off to Tahiti and live under the palm-trees with a hula-hula girl; mankind will be saved just as soon without you. Or engage as supercargo and tramp round the world for ever and aye: that’s the happy man’s life. What is Fulke, the Peter Pan of his father’s house, doing in the hurly-burly?” He sighed. “But I can’t give it up: once you’re in it you’re ashamed of yourself to desert.”
Fulke’s sibilant light voice came fitfully through the wind.
“If we could do everything we had a mind to,” remarked Catherine, “if bread grew on trees, no one would recognise his brother or lover; we’d be a race of angels. You struggle and struggle for years to make a place for yourself, to work out your destiny, to justify yourself, and at the end, nothing is right. You find yourself in a false’ position even with your friends, even with your co-workers.”
They passed along the lower path in the outer Domain opposite Garden Island. In a cave two unemployed men, rolled in newspapers, lay behind the embers of a small fire.
Fulke threw out his hand gracefully.
“Can’t help it, we’ll never be free. My secret thought is—but I never tell Marion this—this struggle will never cease, it will go on generation after generation. There is no system without its error, its revolting seed; the best will fall to subsequent revolt. What am I fighting for? I feel tired to think of history.”
His pale small face moved along the drenched bushes. Catherine looked at him pityingly, but could not help saying with her customary pride,
“I feel I am history: that’s how I feel.”
“We are such slaves.”
“Why,” she said, taking his large, beautiful and pale hand, “here we are: there is no need to go back. We can sleep here if you want to. Now we are free!”
They both laughed: “Impractically practical Catherine!”
They were drenched. The silk dress clung to Catherine’s legs, and the blood bloomed like a carnation in each cheek.
“Let’s take off our shoes; no one is about.”
“And if someone were?”
They planted their shoes in one of the fig-trees and went to the waterside, under the thick unpruned trees at the foot of the rock called Mrs Macquarie’s Chair. Catherine swallowed sweet drops of rain and apostrophised the rough harbour water that swallowed the rocks.
“Come, sweet sea!” She added: “Come sweet death, I mean.” She lay back on the grassy slope, sopping wet. “That is the sort of death I would like, to go down in the swilling storm-waters, ough, guff, gubble, gup, and you’re drowned: that death I could die a thousand times. How thirsty I am!” She put her mouth to the driblets of water coming from the rock and trickling through the grass.
“Come, sweet death. I’m so goddamned tired, Kate, I could die too, only I feel too damp. I’ve a good mind to go for a swim to get rid of the damp feeling.”
“Go on, then; I’ll come too.”
“No, how would we get dry?”
“There are some small caves perhaps unoccupied.”
There were some moments of silence. Catherine waited uneasily. The rain was not falling on them but across the rock. A draught blew on them and they shivered. Fulke got up and strolled to the lamp above the rock to look at his watch, and while he was away, Catherine said to herself:
“I would do better to throw myself into the water and swim to the other side of the harbour so that he finds nothing but darkness and rain here when he comes back. The evening is spoiled, everything is spoiled.” She tightened her long hair, which had come down, and stood up. Fulke came hurriedly round the rock.
“It is late.”
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br /> There was silence for some minutes; they only heard the fresh waves in the rising tide washing higher up the rocks. Tears were streaming down Catherine’s face mixed with rain. Her cheeks burned. Fulke looked at her, noticed her face working, and said, to say something:
“I hope we don’t keep Marion waiting: she worries about us, you know.”
Catherine began to sob.
“Catherine, what is it? Don’t do that, I can’t bear it. Whatever is it? What is the matter?”
She stopped and turned to him. She smiled wrily and put her head lightly on his shoulder for a moment without otherwise touching him, then lifted her head, rearranged the loose ringlets which fell over her face, and said gloomily:
“Fulke, I am so insupportably lonely.”
He looked at her compassionately, but nervously, and said stiffly:
“We all are, we all are.”
At the top of the drive, she turned to him with a smile:
“You’ll have to forgive me, comr’de. I’m not coming to the meeting. My teeth are chattering and I’m beginning to shiver. My heroics don’t suit my physique.”
“Go home quickly,” said Fulke. “I don’t want you to catch anything. If Marion finds out what I’ve done to you she’ll be fearfully anxious and cross with me, too.”
“Don’t tell her then.”
Catherine left him at the word, swung down Macquarie Street towards Hyde Park. She had a room in an old building in Elizabeth Street, left her for the moment by a tubercular friend then working as boundary-rider on a station in the country. There she dried herself, put on a waterproof, and after walking nervously up and down the room for ten minutes, looking gaunt and feverish, walked down to the meeting and stayed at the back of the hall, sitting on one of the long benches, among seamen who were housed in the hall during the strike. Marion and Fulke left early and did not see her. As she returned late to her cold room, she looked over the park towards the Cathedral and Woolloomooloo and said:
“I am getting into a mess: I must see someone new. Joseph knows Baruch’s address—and they say he is ardently interested in economics.”
Baruch lived in a room on the fourth floor back, in a side street in Woolloomooloo Flat, not far from the old public school. His window commanded the Inner Domain, the Art Gallery, the spires of St Mary’s Cathedral and the Elizabeth Street skyline. On the right hand, as he looked from his window, were the wharves of the German, Dutch, Norwegian and Cape lines. In the backyard was a wood-and-coal shed covered with creepers, pumpkins, old tires, kites’-tails, buckets and old scrubbing-brushes. There was a clothes-line across the yard, on a clothes-prop, and upon the line the tenants’ garments, washed by the woman on the ground-floor, appeared in regular succession throughout the week. There were in the house a bachelor Government clerk and Government medical officer, a school-teacher with his wife and two children, a navvy, a bartender, a junior draughtsman in the Lands Department, and a widow with a young child. The house backing on to theirs was only three stones high. A cheap chop-suey restaurant occupied the ground-floor, its private assembly rooms the first floor, while the rooms above were for sleeping and for letting out. A couple of ladders reached from the windows of these upper floors to the roofs of lean-to sheds and outhouses. This house was usually very quiet, although lights appeared at the windows at all hours of the night. On Saturdays and Sundays the whole neighbourhood swarmed with children, and everybody was out of doors with sleeves rolled up. Tiny living-rooms with Japanese screens, fans and bead curtains, and reeking of bugs and kerosene, with bric-à-brac, vases, wilting flowers and countless rags and papers, sent out their heat and animal odours and old dust at seven in the evening when the hot day had gone down into the violet twilight, a deceitfully shady moment promising cool, but bringing in the torrid night. Everywhere couples lounged about, the waists encircled, the lips together; henna Titians, peroxide blondes, and uncoloured women faded beneath their hair still rich and young; women blowsy and painted, worn and tired, with crow’s-feet and unequal powder, fanned their bursting bosoms or their empty sacks of blouses, as they slumped in rickety easy-chairs at their doors.
The doors opened directly into the sleeping and living-rooms and alone admitted air. Little boys argued outside the windows, shrieking and punching.
“My mother is not a whore.”
“She is! Why isn’t she?”
“No, Willy’s mother isn’t; she always has the same blokes, and she has only three.”
“Yes, and I know who they are; a thin little bloke with freckles and . . .”
“Shut up or I’ll gi’ y’ a lift under the lug.”
The onlookers whooped during the set-to that followed. Some father or mother full of ire, separated their darling from the heap of wriggling boys. There were protests, but the boys trailed off, their passions suddenly cooled, and ready in a quarter of an hour or so to begin all over again, apropos of the weather, a cricket hero, or Deadwood Dick. The lamps were lighted. The dwellings on the borders of the hot asphalted pavement were holes in which moved dimly a world of heaving bosoms, gasping mouths, fanning arms. There were visible black-socked feet and bare feet in slippers, bare arms starting upwards from a bush of black hair at the armpit; locks “straight as candles” hung wet and tangled, hairy men’s breasts gaped in the vees of open work-shirts. The oil-lamps or gas-jets lighted corsets and stockings carelessly thrown on beds, discoloured with sweat and dirt. The rancid breeze blew in from the wharves with the smell of weeds grown on the piles, beer from the saloons, rotten vegetables from the garbage-tins. There came the clanking of winches at ships’ sides, and the fitful songs of men at the waterfront. The last cries of children came from the old streets by the Plunkett Street school or from the other side, where they were dashing up into the rank grass of the Domain to wrestle, smother their giggles, lie on their backs, tell inane tales, sing parodies of songs, and contemplate the high southern constellations through the sensuous summer evening.
The neighbourhood is interesting. One Sunday morning an irritable Italian chased a compatriot through Baruch’s backyard with an axe, during a slight difference over Angelina, wife of the first. Sometimes coloured boxers, cheerfully dressed, paraded past with belles of the neighbourhood, and there was a stream of girls, Australian and Italian, large, bright-coloured, buxom, with high heels and transparent blouses. Opposite Baruch’s back window, poor Chinese, sailors and loafers could be seen paying attention to females in the chop-suey gambling and lodging-house.
The morning sun rose clear over the wharves, and the evening sky, with its head dark and its scarves of colour, looked like an Italian woman with an orange in her hand.
There was scarcely any furniture in Baruch’s room, but on the small pine table were papers for drawing, and inks. There he sat early in the evening, breathing seriously over some small black-and-white design, the margin scribbled with faces, legends and monograms. But it was just as likely that he would be miserably stretched out on his bed in his outdoor clothes. The rarity of his bursts of energy, due to his thin purse and bad food, seemed to syllabicate the sentence of a hopeless fate. He had a wide and wandering vision which showed him all kinds of miseries more than physical, the self-deception of vanity unapplauded, drudgery unrewarded, the mind which for recompense kneels to the tintinnabulating priesthood, the symbolist, sick and sunless for ever, the tempestuous who leap from brink to brink and the thin ambitious who wrench their hearts out to put one idea on foot in their lifetime, and those who are for ever in the green-sickness of an unrequited love or desire, and those who work out newfangled systems to detect fate in her workings, those who are swollen with pride and those who creep in their dejection. He was so wretched to see these people swarming around him, with all these evils added to their burden of poverty, that he often fell into a fever, and this idea was with him, day and night, that he was obliged to relieve them in some way. But he hardly knew in what way. He lived by choice among the sordid southern lives of the native and immigrant po
or to get himself impregnated with this fever so that it would never leave him. He suffered at all this misery, but he suffered less in the heart of it, because he thought he was nearer to understanding it and to solving it. He knew by heart the foetid rooms, eyes opening on littered streets, heavy wombs, market-gardeners’ carts trailing a cabbage smell, moustaches washed in beer, working-men’s tramcars rattling out to brown dusty suburbs, Alexandria, Redfern, Waterloo, pawnshop windows advertising their unredeemed pledges, grimy hands, sweat, unfolded papers relating the latest murder, wrinkles, hands with swollen veins, and eyes thick with the circular lucubrations of the dulled mind trying to escape.
There seemed to him to gleam above all this a city as on an adamant island, where the erudite lived and put the world to shame, told the truth to princes, and wrote tracts to enlighten the slaves. It is true, of course, that they write them to enlighten the poor, but they are usually sold at prices ranging from ios. 6d. to £2 2s., and the poor are too pig-headed to buy them.
But he doubted his own future. He described himself as “without malice, without cruelty, without pride and therefore without ambition”: he was the pattern of inexplicable insuccess.
“The stupidest writer,” said Baruch to Joseph, “can remain alive after his death. Even if he only writes letters, some friend will keep them; if he only suffers from epileptic fancies he may be elevated into Holy Writ; he may have the meanest, poorest and most malicious ideas on earth, be a hypocrite, slanderer, madman, next door to a poisoner, he may indeed be a poisoner, steal his wife’s dowry, kill his mistress, rob the state treasury, but has he only a bright and swift pen he can lead the people of a whole country into the maze of controversy, the whirlpool of war; he can be acclaimed as a messiah or at least a fallen angel. But a person like me who talks only, and even becomes warm and radiant in talking, dies with each word as if he spat out nothing but sparks. Look how bright the fire is! It brings wanderers home, it dispels the forest night, it drives away phantoms, it scares away wolves, moths die for it, it revives the mysterious flame of life itself, it prepares a feast with a thousand dishes, it warms wine, it is the source of civilised life, yet it dies in a moment and in a moment more is nothing but a hideous sight, charred ends of wood and grey ashes, ready like an expiring serpent to bite the heel of the child spurning it as he jumps over it. Conversation is the fire of social life, and see how it dies; nothing remains but a few bitter ends to sear some poor souls.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 17