“Why, it’s a perfectly healthy emotion to wish to kill anyone who is in your way, simple, effective, very: and don’t tell me you wouldn’t sleep like a child the night after, if you were sure the police weren’t on your trail. Then, what harm would you do? There’s no other thing will neutralise that sprawling creature with his mate who softly engulf everything. If it were not so natural the murder taboo would not be so fearfully strong. I am not like that, I admit. I can never hurt a person without suffering agonies myself. I am not like ‘Bel-Ami’—well, it’s done, and it’s done, so much the better. I cannot even tell a person bad news: but I can appreciate anyone who has the nerve, killing an enemy or a nuisance. Why not? life is after so much the gayer and freer. And look at you with your cold blue eyes—you don’t care for a soul.”
Withers laughed.
Joseph listened miserably to Baruch expanding his joyously macabre notions and funambulesque morals to an infinite number of listeners through numberless years of life in other places and other societies. Joseph felt fall away from him the last undervestments of pride. He wished to be angry, but he breathed heavily as he went away from the dearest creature in his life. Outside on the dirty pavements, greasy with a hot spring shower, looking sidelong into the sordid living-rooms open in the heat, he knew that he was one with the vilest of the poor and corrupted. He hated Baruch whose good digestion and security of future let him ride all storms. There were tears in his eyes. When he got home he found that Catherine and Michael were there, and had been there for supper. Michael proposed to stay with his aunt and uncle a few days. He knew the fishing spots, he knew the fishermen, who had not changed for many years. When he was thoroughly disgruntled, he came to stay with the Baguenaults, kept Joseph company, and went out by himself spending long days on the reefs and fishing rocks.
Joseph recounted to Catherine his evening at Mendelssohn’s. He said clumsily at the end:
“He has just proofed a new plate. The chief figure is a woman—he calls it ‘The Free Woman’. I don’t like it much; but he explained it to me: the free woman is like you, although you are not entirely free.”
Catherine caught her breath.
“What is the woman like?”
“What is she like? I have almost forgotten. She is—she has no clothes, she is coming through thick bush. She has long hair and is rather thin.”
“Long hair?”
“Long black hair.”
“And what is it called?”
“A woman escapes from a forest, or something like that. I told you, a free woman, but not quite free, a woman who is having trouble in getting free. You know Baruch: he is rather sentimental about women. He told me, ‘You should not ask too much about the woman you love, you should believe in her. It is more important than in religion, to believe in love.’ He’s very sentimental. I don’t see any difference between a woman and myself.”
“You’re right,” said Catherine, but left the table and went and walked about in the garden in the cool evening breeze.
“What’s Tom Withers like now?” asked Michael. “I haven’t seen him since before I went to the war. He was a card then: I’ll bet he hasn’t improved.”
“A silly sort of chap, always scrapping, never satisfied, and always got a complaint. And a regular, er, er, what’s the name?—Munchausen. The tales he tells!”
“He hasn’t changed,” said Michael, smiling.
6
Backchat. Acerbity of Winter, effrontery of Fulke;
the recognition of Marx postponed. Catherine wanders.
Joseph and Baruch went after work to the club-room of the Workers’ Education Association, in Rawson Chambers, and sat there idly by the window looking out at the city workers streaming towards the Central Railway Station, at the trams grinding up the ramp, and away to the left to the Darling Harbour goodsyards. Night settled down slowly over the streets and the lamps flicked on. The people were all wilted at the end of the long hot day, but they hurried because they were hungry and they were anxious to get their shoes off. Sometimes they went in pairs and the man carried the girl’s shabby paper case; sometimes they did not go straight home but had something first. The ill-lighted greasy chain restaurant opposite was full of people eating ninepenn’orth of tea, pies and toast. Joseph also yearned for tea and pie. He had come up to the Club to have a bite with Winter before they went to Ross’s. Joseph did not want to go to Ross’s. It is very cool on summer evenings in Fisherman’s Bay. Joseph only wanted at the moment to sit by this cool window fanned by a harbour breeze, looking out at the twinkling city and the last hasty movements of the packers in the boot establishment opposite. He listened to students and workers making tea in the little kitchen behind the stage. He was glad to hear Baruch’s voice at some distance, expostulating with someone in the passage; he was glad to hear his cousin Catherine’s voice at some distance, disputing with someone in the kitchen behind the stage.
The windows were ornamented with coloured papers which Catherine had bought and affixed. Catherine had also stencilled the bold bright designs on the huckaback curtains to the windows, had painted cubist designs in the “Russian genre” on the stage curtains, and arranged the stage decorations and costumes. With scissors, brown paper and paint Catherine had done her best to imitate on an eight-foot square dais the decorations of the new Moscow art theatre. Joseph could still hear her now, back of the stage, describing some political meeting, or some speech, in her excited high voice, going off into peals of laughter, in which she was joined by the gruff, mollified voices of tea-drinking men. He heard Rawson, from the Trades Hall, ready, assured, blatant, a political opportunist, whom Joseph called a “real smart-alec”, Milt Dean and Heinrich Winterbaum, both softies and intellectuals. None of them ever spoke to him at all.
Three women school-teachers did basketry beside Joseph, getting ready for a Labour Party fête, and discussed mentally defective children. One said, “When I look at them, I can’t believe they’ll go to heaven.”Two or three solitary persons looked through the bookshelves and asked advice of Mrs Carey, the old Communist Party militant. The soft air blew over Joseph’s face, he felt unspeakably glad and at peace. How depressing to have to go to Ross’s on this sultry night. If Ross, that great Labour Leader, who had been in gaol, and had fought a case against the Commonwealth Government, should address a word to him he would sink through the floor. He would appear a perfect noodle. On the chair beside him, someone had left a book—Strindberg, “The Spook Sonata.” That sounded funny and Joseph started to read it, but it was very dismal, and reminded him of his mother and father: too dull. Joseph swam off into fancy and watched the trains shunting in the Darling Harbour yards; all he could see now were the tail-lights and red smokes. At the next window two young girls were talking. One had bright golden hair, which curled round her temples and neck. She said:
“Pumblecherri is the one genius the University has: always liquored up, of course. He spoke last night on Beauty in Art. He struggled out of the flies, half-seas over, of course: ‘Ladies and Gen’lemen,’ he says, ‘I represent beauty without art, that is wild art, art in the state of chaos, art unborn, for if I came to you sober,’ he said—he admitted it, quite unashamed—‘I would be mere imitation of the concept man, that is, scholastic art, rigid art, than which is better the mirror reflecting the sun with prismatic faults, the photograph translating a blue water as grey smudge: but if I came as I dare not come, that is, completely tipsy, I would represent beauty and art, that is an approximation to the concept civilised man, his living portrait, but interpreted, and interpreted in a formal medium and traditional style, by means of a revolt against both.’ It was something like that, but beautiful. I just felt beautiful. He makes you understand. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘let’s get down to analysis and flout Keats.’ What did that mean?”
Joseph could no more understand that than Chinese. Everybody here spoke some kind of a learned dialect. Still it was interesting to listen. Such things he heard as he could never imagine; h
is tongue had never learned to crawl, let alone gallop like that. He ran his tongue along the edge of his teeth. His imagination began to move. A funny head he had that would sometimes move without warning. He saw in front of him a copy-book double-ruled, and in copperplate, ‘Qui vult decipi, decipiatur’; likewise ‘Magna est veritas, et praevalebit.’ That sounded very stupid; it did not help him at all with these people. He was sorry he had spent his lesson-hours learning such things. He could just as easily have learned, “Beauty without art, wild art . . .” what was it? Such moonshine; and now he wasn’t in a position to say a word to a soul on earth except his mother: and mother, talking about soup and the people who didn’t go to church. “By God, I’m a man, what did I learn this tommy-rot for?” he cried to himself. “I had better go to a class,” he whispered to himself, looking out in the dark. He still thought of the University grandly mounted, as on horseback, in Camperdown, as a kind of holy place, holy and exciting. Things happened there that amounted to the legendary. There was the famous young surgeon who died, who lectured before European congresses, almost at Joseph’s age. There was Pumblecherri, the wild art lecturer, who was allowed to lecture though drunk; there was Garnet Gotham, who had been a father to the students in his little round-tower room and had been kicked out for having a mistress, so they said, but really, it was whispered, for being a Communist. Was it possible, a professor? Their heads, too, are like little round-tower rooms and no one knows what goes on inside. There was Martinelli who had come from Java and the East Indies, looking for traces of the “bridge” in the flora and fauna. Now, by the mere recalling of their names, Joseph felt that he knew something; he was learned. Baruch had been pumping him full of anecdotes the last few days—no, that was what he was talking about all Friday evening, while Joseph was looking in the shops. It came back. Perhaps these classes were not boring, but were brilliant. He could wake up and get out of his sad rut. Baruch came back at this moment, dragging a small man who looked like a new-laid egg. “Here is So-and-so,” cried Baruch; “I’ve told you what a collection of gramophone records he has.”The little creature began to chatter in a strained, feminine voice—in the back of the Roman Café were great doings: Martinelli was always there smoking, Pumblecherri always there drinking and spouting, there were Lindsays galore. Young, all the artists and intellectuals, Handley, the Rhodes Scholar, who had shoulders like an ox and who was writing an elucidation of Marx for working-class students.
“Come along you two, come along,” urged the little fellow.
Joseph looked at his coat involuntarily.
“Don’t worry about how you’re dressed,” protested the little fellow; “who cares? it’s the feast of reason and the flow of soul.” He made a beck to some one back of the stage. “Oh, it’s too bad,” he continued, stamping his foot; “there’s Catherine backstage, looking like La Tosca, with roses in her arms; I absolutely promised to bring you back those paintings, absolutely Raphaelesque. Watkins said, ‘You should carry through whatever you start: you’ll do something magnificent.’ God, these women with their primeval force, their unregimented talents. God, when I think how giddy I am and I take a person like you, a female Caesar would positively cross the Rubicon twenty times a day; and I see how you hold yourself demurely nun-like in the background, or else go round with a purple tragic air, Cassandras predicting the fall of the human race because they have no children. God, I positively weep. We men are nothing to you girls and you let us impose on you. God, it’s terrific; a real Euripidean situation.”
“Don’t be a fool, Dacre,” cried Catherine, for the little creature had had a romantic mother and was named Dacre Esme Eugene—the last name is immaterial in such a man, for every one calls him by one of the first.
The young woman said:
“It is an indictment of her mind that she loves him so madly. What will he be? A W.E.A. professor?”
“Yes, I said in May, he has a responsibility towards her. She probably came to him untouched; to her he is Dionysus, the divine, inspired youth of men. Men want something different from women. To women they are the fertilising item, spring, corn, trees, Ra ascendant: to men women are a means to become initiated.”
Joseph stared. What sort of women peopled the world; what sort of an ignoramus was he? No wonder he made no progress with them.
The people at the window said:
“Did you hear the latest? Ferry is touchy about his name since the last ‘Hermes.’ In Fiz. yesterday Shaw pronounced the e long. ‘Mr. Shaw, my name is spelled . . .’ ‘I know, F for fornication, E for exotic, R for reverse, R for rural, Y for youth,’ said Shaw. Naturally he was kicked out. There’s trouble now: the Dean had him on the mat. But it’s frightfully obvious. ‘Don’t be surprised at his manners,’ old McWilliams said to James when he got his scholarship and had to work with Ferry; ‘old Ferry is one of the old school and then an old bachelor; he has a rather sentimental interest in young men, having no sons of his own.’ I call that the esprit de corps, being very neat, don’t you?”
Joseph looked sadly at the people at the window. A dunce is a dunce. They rattled on.
“When Young begins to expound his theories of expression,” insisted little Dacre, “God, you see the world in different colours. You see lakes, nymphs, moonlight, portal, colours, as you never saw before. You see Art shadowed by ritual, by spring fertility, by poetry.”
Joseph imagined himself in some such centre now, as he looked out at the vasty, brilliant night sky. He saw the De Rezske tobacco smoke floating around them and cloaking them in a sort of Young dream, the glitter of lightning as derision-wreathed mouths opened and gave issue, like the smoking clefts of rocks of volcanic countries. He imagined himself making a timid remark, for his brain was opening, in this exotic lingo, exotic the word, and everybody receiving it seriously. After all, with borrowing some of Baruch’s expressions, and Baruch that good friend would certainly not object, he could perhaps make a remark even to these—
“. . . voyagers to Cytherea . . .” proclaimed Dacre in his fluty voice. This happy dream dissolved into the present, and in the present stood Winter, just come in, with his built-up boot, his threadbare suit, little ratty face and his bulging pockets.
“Come and have tea?” said Winter, looking over Dacre and Baruch with scorn.
Martinelli and Bedlam dissolved into the tea-steam. Joseph said hungrily:
“What did you bring us?”
Winter had just been paid, and had bought three pies, three rolls and three bananas. Catherine, who had a soft spot for Winter, brought out the cups of tea.
“Hullo, Jo, where are you off to to-night? I see you in better company than you’ve ever been!” She smiled at Baruch, “Thanks to you?” and departed again into the loud region beyond, where Rawson, that skite, was shouting:
“Wait until we corner them in Caucus on Tuesday. A pound to a penny, Donnelly will never get the local committees resolution past Me!”
Much disorder. The Catherine wheel spun and sputtered again. Milt Dean said spongily (he was thirty-six and a bachelor):
“Have you read Mrs Dora Russell’s book on Free Love?”
Joseph and Winter, two humble, hungry and modest creatures, sat dumbly before all the people waiting for their class, before the book-lovers and stray people who eyed them furiously, as if glad of something to fill in a dull half-hour, and they ate their pies, bananas and rolls.
“Yer coming to Ross’s after the meetin’?” said Winter.
“You bet,” said Joseph, more willingly, since he had eaten. He would never have had the nerve to refuse Winter, in any case, short of a toothache. On the way out, Winter said:
“Folliot’s there, and I expect him to speak. I don’t like him, I’ll tell yew frankly.”
“My cousin knows him—Michael Baguenault.”
“Oh, him—oh yes. We’ve got a good number of chaps belongin’ to the Seamen’s Union sheltered down at the Hall. They sleep there, and they’re fed as best we can manage. It’s important
we should all help them to stick out. Some of them’ll be at the meetin’ to-night. If yew look about yew’ll also pick out, I think, some plain-clothes Federal Police. Any working man can tell them in a minute. But don’t expect to hear anything inflammatory: Fulke don’t want to taste gaol.”
“I didn’t know we were going to a meeting first.”
“O’ course. They’re makin’ an election issue out o’ us, the bluebottles; d’ye know the Cockney word? It’s all ridiculous, as there’re only about two thousand real true-blue Communists in the Commonwealth. That’s why every true workin’ man like yew, especially yew in the printin’ trade, that has so much influence, should stick to the movement. Don’t yew realise the fate of the working class depends on men like yew, quiet, honest, severe-thinkin’, who don’t join for no personal pride, or Bohemian quirk?”
“I don’t think it’s right to make trouble,” answered Joseph, troubled; “there is always trouble with workmen anyhow, nothing but strikes and award disputes. I read in the Sun that there were more strikes last year in Australia than anywhere else in the world. Why do you chaps do it? For advertisement, I think. It’s to advertise your ideas to the workers. But it isn’t the right way. You should do it quietly; you can vote, can’t you? I think every one should vote and say what he thinks; then if they’re in the majority, they win.”
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 20