“How much per cent is necessary to win?” asked Winter irritably.
“Well, I don’t know; more than half, I suppose?”
“So, if fifty-one per cent of the people vote Communist, we’ll have Communism?”
“No, there’d be fighting, I suppose,” said Joseph, “‘cause there’s fighting always.”
“And if seventy-five per cent won, there’d be Communism?” insisted Winter.
“I suppose so.”
“Do yew know what Communism is?”
“Well, it’s equal chances for all,” said Joseph wearily.
“Not at all. It’s the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletarian, that’s yew. Can yew imagine yerself havin’ somethin’ to say in life? instead of obeyin’ yer father and mother, the church, yer cousin, admirin’ the intellectuals like Baruch, goin’ to College to try to get a little better pay, knucklin’ under to Chamberlain, keepin’ yer mouth shut, bein’ too poor to have wife or child, to buy a decent coat or eat good meat every day—imagine, instead o’ all that, yew’ve got a right to say how the business should be run, how the machines should be improved, the workin’ hours altered to prevent yew gettin’ tired. Imagine yew bein’ able to go up to the head o’ the State, Sir Spinach Spinach, then Comrade Garlic, and sayin’, Comrade Garlic, yew don’t know a goddamned thing about printers, and he listenin’ to yew.”
“That wouldn’t happen, ever,” said Joseph decidedly; “I don’t know enough.”
“And suppose yew was taught enough, from the time yew was a baby, instead of goin’ to school and learnin’ goddamn nonsense that helps yew nowhere. How did these other chaps learn? ‘ ’Cause they had well-taught fathers, or went to expensive high schools. Not yew, yew poor oppressed workin’ man. It ain’t hard to learn.”
“If I’d been taught a lot; but I’m not smart,” said Joseph sadly. “I couldn’t learn much and you can’t count with me. I’m badly off because I’m not too good, but the majority of working men do pretty well. They have homes, they go to the races, they drink beer. We aren’t so badly off; it’s not right to stir up a land.”
Winter responded irritably:
“Let me tell yew here and now that Terra Felix Australis, this waste and sleepin’ land, this lazy dago land, whose volcanoes died and whose rivers dried up millenniums ago, is on the edge of a social volcano. Because why? we’re primary producers, and we feel every oscillation of the markets as a cloud the wind. Because why? because the shadder of the N.S.W. Corps still blights the wheat-fields, because we’ve all got to work here to keep four thousand elect and fifty thousand mean little rentiers in the boardin’-houses of London. Because ‘their Whitehall’ is breakin’ the sheep’s back.”
“The Australians,” said Joseph, harking back to the sententiousness of his old mother, “are lazy. They don’t like to work; there’s always been labour trouble in this land. Like the South Africans, too.”
“There always has, thank God,” said Winter, “because we’re the seed of rebellious men, all the martyrs of the nineteenth century Trades Union England, all the men who stole bread rather than see their wives and children starve. That’s the sort o’ men we are; that’s why we don’t knuckle down to the man who wants us to go in rags while he gives his wife a fur coat and pays for his daughter’s whoring parties.”
“But we’re better off, with the basic wage, with the arbitration awards, and everything, than almost anyone,” said Joseph, shocked.
“We’re better off than the darkies growin’ opium and rice and rubber in the F.M.S. who can’t even pay for one meal a day. But do yew consider yerself so well off that yew don’t need any more? Yer satisfied as yew are?”
“No, but that’s an accident. Chamberlain . . . Then look at the Labour Party here. They can do practically anything, and look at the scandals.”
Winter threw up his hands.
“La Rochefoucauld said, ‘Yew need a little madness to get out of some situations.’ Here is one. That madness is revolution, and for yew it’s a tap on the napper to wake yew up.”
Winter pulled out of his pocket a paper on which he had listed the names of fifty capitalists in Sydney who had made a profit, ‘or surplus value’, to the tune of more than £5000 net, some going up to £20,000 net, that year; there were more to come.
“And a lot of it’s concealed,” said Winter. “Where does it come from, the £5000 cool?”
“They earn it.”
“Fool,” said Winter: “wrung out of our necks. The sweat yew drop in yer stinkin’ shop is minted; yew don’t know it. Why, because yew were put under ether in school, in church and at home. Yew don’t know currency when yew see it. If Chamberlain ran round in his borrowed car for a hundred years he couldn’t sell his labour for a loaf of bread unless yew were all there to work the machines to produce the print. He could use his brains for a hundred years and turn nothin’ out of it without yer hands, brains, bodies, wills.”
Joseph felt surprised. This acerbity—Winter was poverty-stricken, and had had a horrible accident once, the spoke of a delivery van had run into his leg, and perhaps his leg always hurt him. He had no use for the dignity of work, endurance, saving. Joseph felt his heart thud. Winter sounded right. He had had no idea that these ideas were actually a passion with anyone; with Baruch, of course, but Baruch was a phenomenon, but a plain poor working man like Winter.—He felt a great thirst and desire.
“Where does that car come from?” exclaimed Winter in excitement, with bony fingers gripping his arm. A Hispano-Suiza with the initial letters “IA” flew past.
“Italy?” hazarded Joseph.
“Out of yer belly, or the belly of some Italian brother of yours. Think that there’s a man exactly like yew, doing yer job, thinking yer thoughts, poor, a Catholic, ignorant, beggarly, in Italy. Out of his purse, that is his belly, it came. Yew dropped it as yew skedaddled to work or back home one day, like an improvident cat havin’ her babies in the fairway. Do you suppose his profits suddenly bloom like the rose at the end of each half-year?”
Joseph thought perhaps they did.
“Don’t yew realise they are collected coin by coin and drop by drop every minute of every day of every week in the year? I mean drop of blood by drop of blood, bead of sweat by bead of sweat. Yew look pretty pale at the end. But the Hispano-Suiza has come into the world, neat, natty, lacquered, steel-fitted, with foot-warmers and a radio set installed, and along with it a whole host of strange creatures, the gargoyles, griffins, bloodsuckers, ghouls and flitterbats of the latter days, gramophones, bath-heaters, radiators, wireless sets, electric stoves, other things that neither yew nor yer mother will ever see, that feed on our thin frames invisibly, as it were.”
Joseph looked terrified at Winter, sidelong.
“Do you work more than Chamberlain, or he than you?”
“We work harder!”
“How is the money divided, and the comfort?”
“Unfairly,” said Joseph in a deep voice. They argued it out. Joseph was often lost in thought, trying to reconstruct his shattered “job” as the atom of the economic world.
They turned once more and came to Communist Hall. The name was scarcely legible. Young working men lounged in the doorway. They went up a small wooden stairway, at the top of which was a pamphlet stall, and into a room with a high stage, furnished with schoolroom forms. Round the wall some of the seamen were already sleeping, with their coats under their heads, and bits of blankets and variegated rags over them.
In came Marion Folliot the magnificent. Baruch, standing by, said, “She takes up so much psychic room!” and with her, little ironic Fulke, very pleased with himself, saluting everyone with “Good evening, comrade!” The meeting immediately assembled, the sleepy seamen getting up from their benches. Fulke came forward. Catherine Baguenault sat in the side-benches beside Marion, and both women gazed intently at the stage. Fulke said:
“Mr Wellborn” (the Nationalist Prime Minister) “is fighting you for a principle—and
interest, as you are fighting him for a bed and breakfast according to principle. The opponents are well matched. But Mr Wellborn has a disadvantage, he is a gentleman. You must not blame Mr Wellborn. I went to school with him, and the dear fellow was along with me in Trinity College, that was near seventeen years ago. At that time he was thinking of taking orders, and if he had he would at this moment be sitting in some Paris restaurant swopping mots d’esprit with fashionable actresses and dragging in Jesus Christ very adroitly to honour the cloth. Think of it, he has to drink the tea served in Parliament House, and be bored with the speeches of vulgar Labour politicians with a twang and faulty grammar. Mr Wellborn was always what he is now, a prize boy. I remember when he was in the sixth form of the private school where we were educated—in Sydney, if I may be precise. It was a school for the wealthy, and I was not then aware of the lowness of my birth—he was Captain of the School and Speaker of the School Moot. He always made the speeches he makes now, and was always requested to reply for the school when the Rt. Hon. William Bluebeak came to visit us on Speech Day, and say, ‘Dear lads, looking at your shining faces, I think of the time forty years ago when I sat on those same forms . . .’ and so on. And I, by misadventure, was always, as now, in opposition to Mr Wellborn, and they did not trust me to mention the crimson thread of Empire in the Speech Day oration.
“Now all this preamble is to show you how very little Mr Wellborn must know about economics. Like the celebrated Austrian economist, he begins by discarding his silk-lined overcoat. ‘In summer, I can do without that,’ he says; ‘poor men, to begin with, are men who do not have silk-lined overcoats to discard in summer.’ Then he moves on and shivers as the terrible, although quite hypothetical, case occurs to him—that of a man forced to go without an overcoat in winter. ‘The rebels in the world,’ he says to himself, flipping his hands and drawing his chair into the sun, ‘come from men, alas that there be such, who do not have overcoats even in winter.’ But you, comrades, have never had an overcoat probably, and you begin in the other direction. You begin by saying, ‘Will I so much as get a crust of bread to carry me through to-day?’ and overcoats are a hundred miles above your heads.
“Mr Wellborn means well and was trained in a very expensive school. But as he is, all the members of his class are, and as he thinks when he discards his overcoat, think all the well-intentioned members of his class. There is not a man among them who has suffered hunger, want, cold, mental distortion, scholastic want, thwarting of the simplest and most powerful desires. All comes to them freely, and they believe it comes by the force of their will. They live in a mystic world based on a free allowance of bread and jam. By some mysterious process their larders are always full. To them, the world should be like that; and if your larders are not full, it is because you have managed badly. ‘My great-uncle was a humble labourer,’ says one of them, and assumes that every humble labourer could have been a shipping magnate by integrity and hard work. But that is contrary to reason . . .”
Thus little Fulke, rapidly, sibilantly, smiling, with effrontery. His paper the International Worker had twice been seized by the police. Winter said, sensing Joseph’s confusion:
“I don’t think it’s quite the style for the seamen.”
Joseph was restless.
“It’s hard to understand. Why doesn’t he stand on both feet?”
At the end the seamen applauded respectfully, the women warmly. They knew they were listening to the editor of the Communist paper whose presses had twice been seized by the police, and who might any day be put in the jug. They were the very tail of the workers, ignorant, wretchedly paid, put-upon and misled, and now, owing to the strike, almost starving.
Whiteaway sprang up, a man just come over from Canada by way of the Pacific coast of the United States. He jumped up on to the platform and said, “Let’s talk about practical things.” His tone was not very complimentary. His voice was dry and his stuff matter-of-fact, but in ten minutes the audience was mad with enthusiasm. Some of the seamen put gruff, dry-throated and clumsily phrased questions to him; some applauded him every two or three words, like pepper-shot. He answered the interjectors rapidly, like a man who has to catch a long-distance train. Catherine argued with him about immediate Labour policy—no good in continuing the strike, let them mediate now and strike again later on when there were more funds in hand. Winter found out he had lived with Lenin in exile, and although the joy of speaking to a man who had lived with Lenin illuminated his face, he asked serious questions—“What did Comrade Lenin think would be the immediate Labour history of Australia? How would the traditional Trades Union movement develop here? Would we continue to be betrayed by the P.L.P.?”
Fulke sat smiling on one side and Marion brooded over him, with her hand on his knee.
After the meeting the forms were pushed to the side of the room and the seamen immediately rolled themselves up to sleep. Joseph wished there had been a canteen there; he was very dry. Perhaps Ross would give them tea. Outside they met Tingle, secretary of the Seamen’s Union, and one of the two rival heads of the Trades Union movement. He went with them to Ross’s house, along with the Folliots, Catherine, Baruch and Winter.
Joseph, who perhaps expected to see a monk’s cell decorated with pictures of the labour-class heroes and martyrs, and a Trades Union Vatican of books, was disappointed to see an ordinary middle-class home, with photographs of the family, muslin curtains, bric-à-brac, and a modest yellow-braided Mrs Ross who was fussing because her baby had been crying all the evening. Nothing, thought Joseph, is as I expect it. I must get my bearings in all this world.
“Crying for a good reason,” said Ross, grinning. “He probably knows what he is in for when he grows up. His name,” he said, turning to Joseph, who was distrait, “is Jacob Karl Marx Ross. I gave it to him to allow him the opportunity of being well reviled when he grows up, and that through no fault of his own. When that little feller is a big ’un his name will mean something to the whole world.”
“Naturally you postpone the recognition of Marx for a generation; always one ahead,” said Winter bitterly. Ross believed in conciliation tactics; Tingle wanted to threaten a general strike and disable the country entirely for a week.
“You can’t bring all the unions out on every frivolous excuse,” argued Ross.
“You’ve got to win this strike, or be beaten so badly that you’ll make a retrograde step of ten years,” insisted Tingle.
“If I’m allowed to be personal, I think it would be interpreted to your discredit, as a political move,” cried Ross.
“I don’t care what you think: I’m facing the situation at the moment. Every day the harbour’s tied up, it’s a loss of seventy thousand pounds at least. Everything’s picketed; there are about three blacklegs on the waterfront. You’ve got the thing in the hollow of your hand; and you want to go up there without real authority and attempt conciliation. Browbeat ’em, get your votes, go up with the threat of a general strike and you’ll bring it through this week.”
“No, the unions won’t come out on that. You’re risking the Labour organisation for a bit of fanfaronade.”
Joseph found it hard to follow their quarrel; the undercurrents of jealousy carried it along. It all made Joseph very tired, but he had the feeling that he was expanding in bone and muscle.
He went home by the last tram. At the top of the hill at South Head he looked out at the water, dark on either side, and the multitude of lights in City and suburbs. He tried to think of the homes they represented, the discussions which went on all day and night on all sorts of problems foreign to him, of the division of these people into “classes”, “interests”—all that he had heard filtered through the network of lights. He was very sleepy.
“It is awfully complex,” he said to himself, sitting alone in the back compartment of the tram of which he was the only passenger. “I wish I had been born a clever chap.”
His cousins Michael and Catherine bubbled merrily in that soup. Through the s
tew of these energetic and disputatious people, he saw a white figure emerging in the distance, that of Winter’s commonwealth of workmen, in which he would be somebody as well, and the warm blood coursing roused him for a few moments. He smiled.
“Catherine is right,” he thought, “and Michael is wrong.” Yet Catherine was extremely simple and rather crazy in ideas, but easy to talk to, even simpler than Winter, whereas Michael was subtle and involved; and though both were Socialists, Catherine was poor at definitions, whereas Michael could discuss the meaning of things for hours together. Again Baruch cut across them both, being more sanguine than Catherine and more subtle than Michael and more learned than Winter, loving at once revolution, refinements, the farthest reaches of deduction.
“Baruch,” said Joseph to himself, “is the sign x in man; x equals—anything; the unknown quantity.” The warmth still increased in him at these first steps, and he wondered if he could ever lose himself in the worlds of Catherine, Michael or Winter; he thought it likely if Baruch remained long enough in the shop to turn his head. But Baruch was leaving. “He is so brilliant, we will hear of him,” said Joseph, with the light of pride in his eyes. Baruch had his reward. He could not be so persuaded by the dry, prickly discourse of Winter.
“I don’t like him,” said Joseph; “he is not suave.”
In the morning the world appeared no different. The yellow morning passed gradually, events passed like the shuttering of early moving pictures, all was normal. He did his work, and no commonwealth of workers appeared in the offing.
“I must be a man with no passions for my private trouble,” he said to himself.
Baruch was doing his work with a Gioconda expression; was he without passion? No, he was all passion and he showed it; but Joseph realised that that transparent creature lived behind thousands of glass shutters which oddly transmitted his contours; he resented it. What were those shutters? Refinements of sense and intellect which he got in a different society.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 21