Seven Poor Men of Sydney

by Christina Stead

  “I have a clear head and my brains often burn, and my heart always. I am not sure whether my brains are in my head or my belly, they burn in both places nevertheless. But instead of burning something on paper, so that even if it had the appearance of a devil’s script that is very explosive and unintelligible, like a Fascist proclamation or a tormented futurist poet, it would exist (though God forbid that I should ever produce such a thing), my bright angels go off in smoke, miserable genii without a talisman to call them back. Not that I count on that, but sometimes I think I am like a tree that broadcasts its seeds in every wind, in every respect except in seeing my seedlings sprout. But the tree doesn’t care and I do. Oh fitful, fretful lust for materiality, little imp, little brat, the only disease I ever had.”

  He lived alone in his rented room, and had few friends; he was turned loose on a plain which was barren. When he came home after work loneliness assailed him in every soft spot of his nature. He read long and worked late when his head did not ache, to forget his work and his isolation, and found, to his horror, months slipping past like water, while his situation remained the same and his friends did not increase. He turned to Joseph, that other lonely creature, who was yet so stubborn and secure that he had the appearance of strength. Joseph became his hitching-post in the universal wilderness.

  This evening Baruch missed Joseph badly. He sat a while by the open window sniffing the rich air which came partly from the wooded Domain, partly from the wharves. The evening was full of cups clinking, children shouting in the distance, and the grinding of cranes. The crepuscular sky hung from a vast height, with veils of colour. He began to work, drawing his table to the window. He loved to work thus in the gathering evening, without putting the light on, straining his eyes, sitting on a ledge above the surf of terraces. He bent lower over his drawing; there was a woman, robust, white-skinned, dark-haired, with limbs violently agitated: the face and the background were not yet in. On the table in front of him, above the drawing, pinned with a drawing-pin, was a sheet of writing-paper, and on this was written, “Gloss—to Marion!” After this was written twice in a later ink, “Marion.” Then was written:

  “There is a miasma that rises out of that lake of old memory at night and makes the imagination pestilential. It is like a drug. One deserts the electric bric-à-brac clapper-trap lustre and upper-crusted tone of all your society and wanders under a cloud too thick for lightning to pierce. Like wool in the ears, it distorts sounds, even sweet ones, and your voice is a sweet one. But by this lake and in your charming company the wrong notes are brought together by my love into a continuous song. There is a plot in it, a purpose, a continual interplay of question and answer. You see into my heart and laugh to think without you the thread ravels by itself. You feel like going away an instant, to come back and see the mischief you have made in an instant.

  “It is the dreariest part of life that I am always misunderstood and betrayed by my privileged friends. ‘I understand that type of man, yes, he conceals nothing, besides: a brilliant gift, but he doesn’t care to use it—sure to waste his life nevertheless. You will see, he will be a failure, you will see,’ so I heard you say, kind Marion. And to me, ‘I sympathise, I understand, an unconscripted man, an unregimented brain—but you are rather too much outside my circle: I cannot stir myself to love. Come in, wipe them off their feet and then—love me!’ ‘How can I? I am poor—completely abandoned, deserter of father and country; and then, to tell the truth, you are thick, Marion, you understand nothing at all.’ ‘I know, but between man and woman any question can be settled, everything is resolved, understanding is finer than a needle, clearer than glass. Love me, love me, you can’t escape it, because I need lovers.’ ‘How can I? With your brilliant eyes, your stalwart tread, your adventurous life, those fine scenes that unroll themselves hourly behind your white spacious forehead, your husband, your Dr Grozherz: an unmarriageable man, I.’ ‘Love me!’ ‘You don’t love me.’ ‘I sympathise—and in your condition, with your wasted talent—it might make you.’ As mask play, truly.”

  The lake he meant was the shallow and weed-brown pond at the bottom of the central avenue leading to the University. They passed it at nights coming away from lectures. There was no such miasma—a mist, no doubt, and it was damp there. It was dark under the old figs, and suspicious characters lurked about.

  Marion walked down there with Baruch, sauntering a little in advance of the others, while her husband continued his lecture down the avenue in a group of admiring youngsters. Drunks, beggars, slept on the lawns behind the hedges. Men sometimes followed Catherine in that dark spot, as she came down alone, shunning the crowd, taking her to be a beggarly girl, one in their own class. Round the paddocks at one side, in the bushes, hanging on the picket fence, children of the slums of Golden Grove and Darlington found bloody rags and torn clothes displayed by larrikins. There the regulars of the “University Arms” slept off their spirituous heaviness. In this place Baruch always found his passions rising, because it was dark, brutal, strange. A little water flowed under a wooden bridge. In summer there were trunks covered with ivy and water-plants in the shallow brown water, and children joked beyond the coprosma bushes.

  Baruch laid his head on his arm and conjured up the picture he would have when the etching was finished. At this moment a knock came at the door.

  “Come in!” he cried, sitting up straight, and in came Catherine Baguenault. He looked at her as he knew her, a friend of the Folliots, dark, furious, thin, poor by choice, a woman of revolution without a barricade, with something of the politician in her, an organiser of Labour Branches, a marcher in strike processions, a person who got excited by caucus decisions, a woman who worked in holiday camps and workers’ education theatres, always passionately involved in something, always half-sick.

  “Your landlady is suspicious of me, comr’de,” she announced in a voice which was intended as a trumpet call to the legions of light against Clod sitting in a quagmire, Prosy wrapped in cotton cocoon, and Tradition with fat hams sitting in his pew.

  “Of what does she suspect you?” said Baruch, smiling agreeably.

  “Of being a woman!”

  “She would make a fortune as a detective!”

  They began to talk of various things. Baruch did not ask why she had called on him; it was her way to treat everyone as “comr’de”. She plunged into the present politics of the Labour Party, the unrest among the Seamen’s Union officials. The seamen were in great misery and sleeping all over the place, many in the streets. She went to make soup for them. She talked for half an hour, then stopped, smiled a very sweet smile, sighed, and began on a different tone:

  “Last week I had a dreamy night, Baruch!”

  “Yes.”

  “I was at the Folliots’ house. We went home late from a meeting at Communist Hall. We walked from the station with bare feet. The night was fine and full of smells of the bush. When they got in, they found that some person, probably a friend—but they did not ask, they have hundreds of strange friends and they are welcome—had stayed in their house the night before. Marion and Fulke were away in the city the night before, kept too late by a meeting to get home. There were two candles in front of Marion’s photograph on the piano. The picture, in a Russian headdress from girlish days, resembles an ikon. I said fancifully, ‘I did it myself,’ but that was for Michael: he loves her.”

  Baruch smiled to himself. “I have never been there,” he said.

  “That, perhaps, set me off into a strange and long dream that lasted till morning, except for one wakeful hour.”

  Baruch looking at her found it strange to see that she was suddenly in high spirits. She began taking the pins out of her hair, and let it down. It was long and curling, and gave her a soft, bright, feminine look.

  “A wind came up,” she said. “I woke and I immediately said: ‘Winds of the night arise and wander over wide earth all restlessly.’ I felt as if I were outside with the wind and as if leagues and leagues were in my
bones.”

  “There has been no wind here for a week.”

  “No? They rise there in the night and go down by morning: it is very high.”

  “You are often at Marion’s house?”

  “I am with them at the meetings. It’s very uncomfortable for me at home at present. The Communists are prominent with the seamen, and my family is very respectable, you know; they don’t want to have the neighbours look at them coldly. Mother and Father are very kind to me, they say nothing, but I see they suffer. I simply stay away from home when I am organising. When I get too sick, I go home till I am well enough to go on again. Then—the Folliots are such good friends. Marion—is very good; a good woman to women.”

  She laughed:

  “This morning I told Fulke that I dreamed that walking in my sleep I put the candles back in front of the photograph. He was disagreeably impressed. Why?”

  “That was a curious thing to dream,” said Baruch idly.

  “Marion said so. In fact, it affected her badly and Baruch did not like it—I mean, Fulke did not. An instant of curious understanding and hostility can spring up between you and your dearest friends.”

  “Are they dear to you?” asked Baruch.

  “Both, but differently. I am sometimes jealous of Marion.”

  Catherine flushed faintly. Baruch thought, “I have imagined before that she was sweet on Fulke.” Catherine said, “You are sometimes very quick, Baruch, and sometimes very blind.”

  “I am not very good at character-reading. But women are much better than men in that, it is their business; they don’t learn any profession, but they learn to sniff,” said Baruch. “I underestimate the profound capacity for evil, jealousy and hate in men. Nevertheless, I remain an idealist. I still believe firmly that another state of society is possible where such passions would be bred out, where, rather, they would not be evoked.”

  “The sombre passions exist in all men and women,” said Catherine distinctly; “only, they could be turned to nobler work.”

  “I see no need for them,” remarked Baruch mildly: “I cannot understand them, almost. I am too simple, I regret it sometimes.”

  Catherine got up off her chair impatiently and walked round the room, approaching the table where the drawing lay. Above lay the “Gloss—to Marion!” She saw instantly the phrase, “in your company . . . brought together by my love . . .” She turned her back, took a book from the shelf and read a page, but her hand trembled so violently that there was a rustling sound. What is Time? what is Time? said the book vainly. What does that matter? said Catherine to herself; a life is short, there is more than enough to fill it. She put down the book and went and sat down quietly on a chair with her eyes gleaming, liquid, speaking a thousand times more than her mouth could have, and, lost in passion, began, without thought, to do up her hair again. Baruch, in misery, stared at her, his hands on his knees, his lower lip trembling with rejected consolations. He could not understand how she could have come to dispute him with Marion, as it seemed. He began to glow, and said in a low voice:

  “Catherine . . .”

  Catherine smiled and said quietly:

  “You should have been with us last night, comr’de. Fulke spoke well and Whiteaway spoke more to the point. You should speak yourself. I heard from Marion this morning that there was a ‘manifestation’ after outside the Folliots’ house. The inhabitants gathered outside Fulke’s roses, and sang ‘God save the King’ in scared, after-dinner voices. They gave three cheers for the King, and withdrew in dubious dignity. It sounded so odd on the bush road. The neighbours complain, and the Folliots expect the police at any time to visit the house for contraband literature. Twice the offices of the International Worker have been raided, a publicity stunt by the Labour Party.”

  Baruch said nothing. Catherine continued anxiously, as if telling a private worry:

  “Fulke is getting run down. He told me last night—we walked a long way through the rain together; he says he guesses that this struggle will go on through the centuries as now. Poor Fulke, with his small shoulders, worried about the struggle of centuries. But it shows he needs a rest: he is always so courageous.”

  Baruch made no answer. Catherine raised her head and remarked:

  “You don’t appreciate Fulke sufficiently, comr’de. He works hard. He has his mannerisms, rather charming in so downright and bluff a set, but they are not a sign of dilettantism. He is honest.”

  “The evening comes down quickly in these parts,” said Baruch, peaceably looking out at the yellow and orange west.

  “What do you say to the Folliots?”

  “If I must say what I think,” said Baruch, “they are romantics. They would be delighted to have a police-raid. Ever since their marriage they have had nothing but splendid adventures with the police and frontier-guards, and have always got off scot-free, of course. Fulke’s father is a rich amateur collector of paintings. Marion’s people are high up in the Government service in England. There are no romantic scuffles with a policeman in the life of the working-people. It riles me when I see Fulke get up before a body of bleak-faced, whiskered, half-starved men and get off his cheese-cake eloquence and well-bred witticisms. I don’t care if he has passed a merry quarter-hour with a traffic policeman in Moscow and discussed breakfast with Lenin. He is too darned well-bred. What the deuce does it matter to them whether he went to school with the Conservative Prime Minister, or not? They want to know if he went to school, like them, with poverty and labour, and for what close-weft dissertation on low life he was received to the doctorate. True,” continued Baruch mildly, “he has some good impulses, and even from his inept work the party may get some good, while he stays its friend. We are all imperfect lenses for the sun of human liberty to shine through: in the clearest it shines like a flame, in others artistically, as through a prism, in others murkily, and with specks of dark. In some those specks of dark are as a host of midgets darkening the face of the sun, as they can when they put themselves directly on the eyeline. But, Catherine, Fulke is weak. He will give up sooner or later to comfort or vanity, if no worse. For, on my honour, if I had to pick out one man amongst them all who had the style, graces and talents of a prospective provocateur, it is Fulke!” He had flushed and stopped now, biting his lip, in anger.

  The air became drawn as if congeniality was drained out of it. It was so in fact. Catherine’s dark, clear-cut face and glassy eyes showed the emotion, not visibly, in ordinary terms, as by becoming bloodshot, or watery, but they rather revealed the unillumined interior of her mind swept clear with gusty passions, purged of hesitation, personal regard and love. She receded from social contact, and grew pallid with angry and scornful thoughts. Presently into that chamber of her mind rushed a torrent of sounds, the noise of her heart and her temples beating louder and hotter. A black shadow disengaged itself from her heart and flew up into her head, shouting hate, hate, disgust: thus she looked on him.

  Baruch went ashy pale, and sat sorrowfully mute, like a child.

  It became clear that she was ruled by her impulsive passions which ever strove with her intellect for mastery. Strange crosscurrents and maelstroms in a mind; storms not easily predicted but fated when seen. “I am totally alien to you, and you will never concede me to have your insight. Masterful, resolute and courageous mind, frail, tempestuous and scarified brain, lean, dark form, what will you come to at last? There is no place for you here, there is little understanding for you; but there is for you, as with me, some admiration and sympathy. You win it at the point of the sword: you woo for no favours, you courtesy for none. You are a sword, a reaping-hook and an alpenstock, a goblet. Your will is keen and brandished hither and thither every new moment; it cuts in a thousand directions. The full and golden grain of our most charming traditions fall before you; by your own strength you have climbed out of more than one dark, icy abyss, and by your frailty you will yourself be crushed in the dark hand of fortune, and your martyr’s blood will stain the ground. Perhaps it will bloss
om the next spring.”

  Their duel was over in a few minutes. Catherine stirred as if out of a pose.

  Baruch said: “Catherine, I am sorry. We spend all our lives watching each other, like cats: we understand inwardly, but speak old stuff. You are unhappy.”

  Catherine sighed with tears in her eyes but would not apologise.

  “My character is to undergo. Everyone and everything I meet is the further instrument. You, too. If I find myself in a calm I have a brainstorm, a fit of tears, based on nothing, to break it; thus, I am born to strive. Under many hoods and hats, we are all the same creature all the time trying to make its way out of a thicket. There are cuirassed guards waiting to hack us down at every thinning of the bush, so we try to escape, as a bird, a bat, a floating vampire head, a shadow, a skeleton, a deer, a rat, and what you will. Stability, that is the only character we have never—but we are always in that state of delirium, folly, passion or drunkenness, which is our life. Such a life is without time, it is out of the presumptions of clocks. We are willing to cast away our life because we are always at the end of it, every moment is an experience. We are willing to begin anew because our strength is always fresh. We are insensible to great disasters, because we have met them often and often on our path in company with death; they are old acquaintances. We feel small things so sharp because they mock our heroics.”

  Baruch went to the window and looked into the dusk. He said, in a sorry tone:

  “Go abroad, if you can. See if you can join Saunderson’s party to the Balkans. Get a real cause to fight about. What do I see on your red dress pinned there? The badge of the Kuo-min-tang? Do you know their function in young China? To impede the path of revolution, for example. But to you it is only another flamboyant cause by means of whose symbol you can irritate your folks at home and your vis-à-vis in the tramcar. Isn’t it true that you sang with the Salvation Army several times to irritate some atheist friends, who pressed you too far? Catherine, what are you doing with yourself? The most glorious, and the bloodiest and most serious work is open to you, you who never had a home or work. You can be a martyr and for the sake of liberty; you can with your fire light some cold, shivering hearths. Drop the Folliots, whatever it cost you. They are both opportunists—they will use you for their sentimental ends, and will despise you while they deplore your fate. Marion is a beautiful woman, but an unconscious prima donna. She will see that she is there to get the bouquet in the end, and will knock anyone down who tries to get it away from her. You are madly in love, all the time, and you imagine you are in love with any number of sad little pedants and posers in a backbiting circle where your passion is a subject for conversation over buttered toast.”