Catherine was white. Baruch turned to her and took one hand, saying in an over-dramatic voice:
“You are a pure artist—don’t you know yourself? What is all this knocking your head against suburban brick walls? You take the last possible drop of pain out of everything. You are a born soldier also. Can you hear the young guard of the proletariat marching through the turpentines in the Folliots’ valley, among the singers of ‘God Save the King’? Up there, it is too nice. I know—you see—I have been in their valley, but uninvited: I spend some Sundays there. I admit my weakness—Marion’s charms took me there once and I got to like the place.”
Tears shone in Catherine’s eyes and her expression was bitter.
Baruch continued, without looking at her:
“You wake up at night in a comfortable home with red roses in the vases and the head of Eros on the wall. They are K. of K. roses. I looked, I saw the label—you know what a poor botanist I am—you wake up with your dark hair curling on the pillow, dreaming you are a happy woman like the others, your sisters. You hear the wind roaring up the hill through the eucalypts, in the darkness is the trampling of armies like locusts, trampling to your ear through your long hair. Why, why these retreats, these gentle dreams? We will win, soon those who can carry a battle-flag will have a host behind them; the host is there now, waiting in the twilight of morning by the wayside, after a long bivouac troubled by dreams and sickness. What are you waiting for? Do you want to be a dilettante heroine like Marion? Less successful.”
Catherine’s face was covered by her two brown hands. She said slowly and distinctly:
“I am too weak; I haven’t the strength. I would die of exhaustion and get nothing for all my troubles, and have no friends and nobody to say what I had done.”
Baruch burst out:
“You have an impatient irritable mind: you bite everyone’s head off—that is the sign of strength frittered away. You must move on; otherwise you will live to old age, true, die miserably and as respectably as anyone at the long dry end of a rut. Leave the country, leave this country, at any rate for a while. Or go up country—but that is too easy: you would soon be back with your gang. Gold has to be looked for with fanaticism and thirst. You can only speculate in it sitting pretty in the city. I remember the night I said our professional rationalists, relics of the R.P.A. era, before-the-war heroes left dreaming behind the battlefield, now help to keep up the belief in God, because they give some life to a dead idea by fighting it. You kept screaming at me, ‘What is God? What do you mean by God?’ All the way home you kept hacking at the notion: what is God, define God. It was senseless, but a wonder how you were enraged: no one could say anything the way you kept it up. That’s an example of your way of behaving. You need refreshment.”
She stared at him as if he had shown her that she was only a bag of bones imagining itself to be a human. He ended:
“After all, Catherine, do you expect ever to be happy? Do you want to be happy as women are, bound to one spot of earth by the delightful chains of ceramics, carpets, cobwebby laces, a marriage ring?”
Catherine laughed shortly:
“If the truth were told, yes; although I would fret against them.”
Baruch shook his head.
“You can’t get that, you’re not the sort. Then get something out of your lovers. I knew a girl who learned eight European languages perfectly from her eight lovers. But you won’t; no. Otherwise you would have done it. Yet you should give your magnificent passion exercise, since it is your sole and jealous interest. It is your way of living: exacerbate existence!”
“You don’t know what you say: Baruch, all is a theme for exposition to you.”
“No; I study you passionately. I cannot see lives wasted. Joseph is another marked one. Joseph does not exist, but he can come to life. That strange, delicate, translucent mind, is a larva of a mind; I never saw a person so confined with so little prejudice.”
Catherine said rudely, laughing:
“Simply a tranquil stupidity. He receives every impression with the same indifferent interest, like a mirror. Yet, it is true; it is true, by Jove, what you say. His dimensions are ambiguous, he has no depth, but he is very profound, nothing can sound him: you can see an infinite distance, if there is one to be reflected, but if you attempt to travel there, you strike an inviolable surface.”
“That is true,” said Baruch, “a good image you have there.”
“Joseph has no understanding whatever of the muscles and nerves of the world. So he rarely smiles, for he sees no humour, that is to say, no shifting of the natural order, no obscurity, gleam and veiling of the plain world in fancy; but if he is in company and somebody cracks a joke and everyone laughs, then he will laugh, to oblige; or he will sit there for a few minutes after smiling, oblivious of the rest of us, until he finds out in what way it was wit. No, sometimes he smiles quietly to himself: that points to something personal and silent in him, but he smiles rarely. However, sometimes doubtless some strange fleeting fancies stir in his brain, and he sees us in a new light: but it is slow, it is like the secular action of the hills and littoral, rising and falling. He can weep of his own accord, and so perhaps he has a sad understanding of his position, that he is a cipher. Once we were going up the North Shore to see Mother: as we left the tunnel at Wollstonecraft, the fading light from the west fell full upon Joseph’s face—it looked aged and grief-stricken, and he is only twenty-one: it was more than that—a drained face, full of want, penury and hopelessness, but not despairing, a submerged face. You can see the same on middle-aged working-men in repose at the end of the day. I saw his life is out of my ken and reach: he is beyond salvation: I never attempt to trouble his repose.”
“I doubt it,” said Baruch warmly; “you see in him the refinement and senescence of all parts through the decay of the family blood? I sense in him a sombreness and passion which I have never yet seen exhibited, but expect to. The quietest and simplest man can develop endlessly: even the lifelong sleeper can be awakened: it is this dull life he leads, the Church and the univocal opinion you all hold of him which retards him.”
“You love him?”
“I believe I do. I love a humble man; when you walk the streets all the well-dressed people have such inflated faces.”
“I don’t love him: patience, stupidity, irritates me. He is part of the human scenery to me, as I said, of the same stuff as the hills and as slow. Not like my brother Michael, a remarkable character, he. He does absolutely nothing, he is positively an abstract personality; he shows an inner struggle to union with himself and his counterparts; Michael eats his own flesh.”
“That is not unique,” said Baruch restlessly. “They all develop this prodigious flowering of the sensibility and aimless intellection. Don’t admire it; wish, rather, that he were like Joseph.”
“It’s a type you don’t understand or feel any sympathy for. Yet I’m surprised; you’re a paper-eater, yourself!”
“We’ll discuss that, later,” said Baruch, smiling. “Michael is aged, too. (I only saw him once; I may go astray.) But it is the chronology of his own lifetime. A small intelligence wasted even in early youth by a disequilibrium of passion. There are such people, wretched, weak, who have no destiny, but are marked out for an eccentric life.”
“H’m, h’m,” concluded Catherine, with an ostentatiously considerate eye on Baruch, “when you strike right, you strike home. Michael was very strange: and only I know how strange. He was my alter ego.”
“You’ll tell me all that some day,” said Baruch politely, examining her wild, romantic, exaggerated pose.
She looked him over, and picked up her hat. “Good-bye!”
“Good-bye!”
Joseph often went home with Baruch for tea. He looked non-committally for a long time, the next evening, at the drawing which Baruch was working at, called, “La Femme s’échappe de la Forêt,” showing a naked woman with agonised contortion of body and face bursting through a thicket, tearing h
er thigh on a splintered tree, while a boa constrictor and a tropical vine loaded with large lilies hung before her and impeded her.
“Queer,” said Joseph; “what does that mean?”
“Woman escapes from the forest. It means, the middle-class woman trying to free herself, and still impeded by romantic notions and ferocious, because ambushed, sensuality.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your cousin Catherine, for example.”
“Is that Catherine?”
“She is an interesting character. She was here yesterday. She had something on her mind, but I don’t know what.”
“Was she? She is a bit—eccentric; yes. But she’s always very kind to me. I don’t know why she can’t settle down, but I suppose there’s a reason; something in the blood.”
As Joseph went out he fell into the arms of Withers, who was entering quietly, or who had been standing there in the dark of the landing. Withers embraced him violently, turned him about, and pushed him into the room before him.
“It’s early,” said he; “you’re in no hurry, you’ve got no rendezvous with a sweetie, have you? Perpend while the Professor decorates the themes of injustice and sings the threnody of capitalism.”
Joseph loosened himself petulantly. Baruch’s glasses gleamed and his opulent personality, gracious, smiling, flattered, considerate, revolved through a dozen facets before he spoke.
“Come in, thing of evil, and sit above my chamber door: Poe would have been twice the man if he’d had you to croak for him. Well, what’s the latest news from the front?”
Withers grinned. His rat-teeth showed through his moustache. He bestrode a chair with his back towards Joseph, picked his teeth with a match, and said through the corner of his mouth:
“I stick to Chamberlain, because I like to scrap; Chamberlain doesn’t like to scrap, but he does it for me.”
“That’s matrimony, son. Wasn’t I saying the same, the other day, Joe?”
“We’re both so feeble. We hold each other up like two drunks, who can’t put one foot backwards or forwards for fear of dropping the other and dropping himself.”
“At the same time, if Chamberlain gave you your £60, you’d duck, wouldn’t you, despite the pshawcological problems?”
Withers looked cunning.
“If Montagu gets him low enough, I hope to get him to make me a partner before the final collapse. Then the buyer will have to treat with me as a partner, and I’ve got enough evidence on Montagu to make him treat me properly. I’m no slouch like Chamberlain. I pretend to do everything Monty wants—but I keep my eyes open. Then, I’ve got Chamberlain. You can put a man into bankruptcy for a debt exceeding £50; that’s my lever for the partnership. I’ll end up owning the business, you’ll see, and then, presto, you’ll see a reformation. I’ll become respectable, never go on the bend, marry my landlady and settle down.”
“Excuse me,” said Baruch, “while I go to the W.C. for a breath of fresh air, as my old boss said on a famous occasion. You don’t get much sleep o’ nights, do you, thinking up these Machiavellian schemes?”
“I don’t sleep well,” complained Withers, “but it’s chiefly due to toothache and neuralgia in general.”
“Go on,” said Baruch, “I recognise the origin of this fiendish ingenuity. The malady is fiscal and your plans vain. If you had £100 clear would you feel like this? Or £20 even, and a good suit of clothes? I am Professor Teufelsdröckh from Weissnichtwo; clothes will do the trick. Invest in a suit of clothes and you’ll get your money and be able to beat it, without giving yourself headaches. Go on, Tom, do it and leave the chap. He’s corrupting your morals. This stupidity is obsessing us. God knows, I am leaving as soon as I get my boatfare, but I advise you and Joseph, and especially you, to get another job at once. Best from all points of view.”
Joseph said, “You are leaving!”
“If I left him,” averred Withers, suddenly serious, “the poor beggar would go bankrupt; and he begged me not to.”
“What happened?”
“I told him to-day I was quitting. He caught me by the arm, told me what an innocent he’d been till twenty-five, never touched a girl or a drop of drink, but that hard luck had made him shifty, trying to overhaul the banks and Monty and me. But that I was his true bosom friend, his mainstay. His apparent confusion of mind, he said, was methodical, no, diabolical, for it deceives Montagu: but all the time he’s looking for the flaw in Montagu’s armour. Oh, ho, ho, I laughed at that; Chamberlain, the demon for strategy. Well, a lot more like that. He would pay us all to-morrow although his wife and child should have no food in the house for a week (it’s probably more or less true); called me his good Tom, and said he knew he was a trial to me, ‘but you are caustic, Tom’; said that without me he would be beat; the banks had him, and Montagu was rotten to the core and only wanted his blood, but Montagu gave him play while I was around, for some reason he couldn’t make out—psychological, no doubt.
“I pushed his hand away, keeping a stiff upper lip, because he began to snivel. I said, ‘No, I must go, I should have gone long ago, and I want my money. I am rotting here and I am not getting any younger.’ I told him some plain truths about Montagu, what a fool he was himself, and how his own business was down at heel, and how he sponged on Chamberlain and would certainly ruin him and go down with him, for all his bombast.
“‘Look at the other day,’ I said; ‘didn’t he steal money from Graham? Well, it’s been the same history with hundreds of people already, to my knowledge.’ I had all the fatuities of the garrulous person who’s held his tongue till it burnt a hole in his cheek. Finally in comes his lordship.
“‘What’s the trouble?’
“‘Tom wants to leave me.’
“‘Go then and God bless you,’ he says lightly; ‘let him go, Gregory, he yowls so much he makes me tired in the end. Mendelssohn will keep you afloat for a while: I don’t know if he’s not the best chap you’ve ever had.’
“Chamberlain can’t resist any suggestion from the old man. He wavered, then said, ‘All right, Tom; if you feel like that. I don’t want to stand in your way, but I don’t want you to have any ill feeling. It’s true Mendelssohn’s dependable.’
“Then I got mad. ‘All right, you let me go?’
“‘Yes,’ he said uncertainly.
“‘Good, you’ll regret it,’ I said. I shouted, ‘When is it convenient to pay me, eh?’
“‘At the end of next week, if I can scrape the money together.’
“‘Well, you’d better scrape it pretty fast. Otherwise . . .’ and I went, leaving it in the air like that to worry him.
“After all these years he has kicked me out: he would never have done it, if Montagu hadn’t come in and given him his cue. As for Monty, I never expected it; he’s cooking something up against me. I’ll get him, though, too.”
“Good heavens, you asked for it,” said Baruch. “But it’s done: don’t yield to the temptation to go back.”
Withers laughed, twisted the match in his mouth again, and said:
“I came down the street feeling cheapened and poor like a woman unexpectedly deserted by her man.”
Joseph laughed loudly and Withers bit his fingers in a kind of cattish anger. Baruch hastened to soothe Withers. Joseph took his hat again, got up darkly behind Withers’ chair and almost limped to the door to show his disapproval and dislike. Baruch cried, “Don’t go, Jo,” and Jo hesitated. At last Withers mumbled:
“Is it true? Did he speak to you about taking my place?”
“Of course not,” said Baruch. “Don’t be foolish, Tom. Ough, what a fellow you are. In a moment you’ll be inventing Machiavellian schemes against me too: and I’m such a little chap; it’s easy to polish me off.”
Withers looked up gaily, then cast a dark look at Joseph, betraying too plainly his desire to be left alone with Baruch.
Joseph said good-night over his shoulder and went out, closing the door briskly. Outside, he stood still for a m
oment. The voices had struck up again in Baruch’s room. His departure caused no comment, and Withers’ feeble-spirited distress seemed to receive an attention which Joseph had thought his own person alone excited. He buttoned his coat and dawdled downstairs, leaning against the wall. At the bottom he found his casus belli; “I am leaving as soon as I get the boat fare.” Baruch had said it casually—thus Withers knew Baruch’s plans better than he knew them. He thought of the midday colloquies in Lachlan Place, the long evenings in Baruch’s room, violent discussions in which Baruch had taken part, flooring them all at the end with his argument and apt memory, wiping the floor with them all by a final conclusion of force and brilliance, and then coming quietly and working beside him. Joseph then quaked with a sudden dissolving pang, and when he reached the bottom stair, in darkness, he felt he must rush back to the door, so close to him then, but which would be so inaccessible at midnight when he was sleepless, and ask some question of Baruch which would bring a reassuring answer and break the bond now existing between Withers and Baruch. He stood with one hand on the banisters, rubbing the back of his head, looking at the outlines of furniture gradually becoming visible in the gloom, listening to the radios downstairs, and from time to time trying to make a decision. He actually climbed the stairs once more and stood for some minutes outside the door straining his ears, although taking no notice of what he heard, fascinated by the splinters of light shining through. When he collected his wits, he heard Baruch say:
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 19