“Bah, money, there you are,” said Joseph; “it is the same all over the world.” In his conversation appeared pleasant sophistries and an independence of his meagre present which were only treason to Joseph bound for ever to the same turn-table.
Baruch looked at Joseph and saw his thin dark lips pout. He said:
“Giuseppe mio, what tune did Fulke the Fiddler play you last night?”
Joseph replied grumpily:
“He’s no good, I think. He’s too well brought up. A man called Whiteaway was there; he’s practical.”
Baruch continued:
“If you go often you will have plenty of problems of personality to solve. These glib, rhetorical speakers sometimes fire the men but more often betray them. Follow the interest of your class. Become your own tactician, your own Caesar. Don’t be afraid to criticise the speaker. Don’t become refined, Joseph, your clerical training was a bad start, you always incapacitated yourself by believing in refinement. You could be a fine antique that way, but the workers would stick you in a museum. You can’t follow Fulke or me. You must think for yourself. For preference, listen to those of your class who speak simply, without the flowers of rhetoric, without jokes, without cleverness; none of these glancing, glinting, slithering fellers. I ought to be a leader myself,” continued Baruch in a depressed tone, “but I can’t stand too much discomfort, and I want to be a scholar. You see, it’s harder for me than you. The reigning bourgeoisie offers me prizes.”
Withers began to laugh:
“Mendelssohn is right. Truth in the dumps. I’ve always said he’ll be a rank failure, he’ll fall between two stools.”
“He won’t,” cried Joseph, outraged.
“You say that because you want to see him on top, you like him, but you’ll see,” said Withers, biting his moustache in a catty rage.
Joseph said no more, but he was solaced. He was a slender creature, no apostle, no originator.
“He’s like me, a foredoomed failure,” said Withers, acidly.
No reply.
“A wanderer, a rolling stone gathers no moss, and doesn’t want to gather any, but no house is built on top of it,” emphasised Withers.
Joseph mournfully held a sheet of paper up to the light to examine its texture.
“Baruch is brilliant,” he said at last.
“Of course, he’s brilliant. He’s brilliant—I’m not saying he’s not brilliant, I know he’s brilliant: but brilliance doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s character, it’s will. And then you have to be a bit of a fanatic; not to see too many sides of a question. Like a friend of mine. I don’t like So-and-so, he said, because he sees too many sides of a question; you can’t look at a man’s belly and behind at the same time. You’ve got to take sides.”
“He takes sides,” Joseph said.
“Of course. Because he can talk like a Burke, and grin like a Chinese idol so that, whatever happened, he could make himself a place; he’s brilliant. But it’s not conviction, it’s just involuntary. It’s not heroism, it’s not foresight. He knows the coming world of demagogues is made for tikes like him.”
“You’re jealous.”
“I’m not jealous: listen, you’ve just met the smartest man you ever met. You’re bowled over. I’ve had experience: he won’t go far; he’s a weakling.”
Baruch had been straining his ears but had heard nothing. He sauntered closer.
“Well, I had a letter from my uncle this morning, telling me it’s all right, he has fixed the place as secretary to Farmer, the industrialist.”
“Where does he live?”
“In the States; in Baltimore.”
“Will you go?”
“Will I go? Joseph, I’ve already booked my passage: I’m dying to go.”
Withers went away tee-heeing.
“What’s Withers laughing up his sleeve for?”
“He’s jealous,” said Joseph flatly.
Baruch’s happiness was easy to see. He would be political secretary to an aspiring industrialist who foresaw a more highly-mechanised industrial system. For Baruch, it might be the beginning of a political career. He said to Joseph:
“Horace Greeley was a printer, Benjamin Franklin and Henry George: the last wrote after having been a political secretary. There were lots of others.”
“William Caxton,” said Joseph, and reproaches himself for the contraction of his heart. He tells Baruch, in a minute, how glad, how joyful he is that his problems are solved. But his heart sinks to think he is losing his prospective Greeley, Franklin or George. Why does his newly-cemented world have to be broken up?
“You deserve it,” said Joseph slowly.
“You deserve it,” said old Williams, standing by and grinning like a Cheshire cat, his cheeks flushing at the idea of what can be accomplished by youth. “Joseph and me,” said old Williams, “will stay here, year in, year out, and watch you in your meteoric career. One of these days we will say, when you’re member of Parliament (‘Congress’, said Baruch), we knew him once; he worked side by side with us.”
“He’ll only remember you with a round flourish as picturesque examples of downtrodden men,” said Withers. “He’ll be a liberal reactionary, then.”
“You love to rub salt in a wound, Withers, don’t you?” said Baruch, with glistening eyes. “Why is that?”
“I’m a dog,” said Withers, returning to his work.
Baruch immediately bubbled over and talked long and periphrastically. Chamberlain coming in invited him to lunch. Montagu came in, and with dignified bonhomie invited himself.
“I’ll be taking advantage of your political relations one of these days.”
At the end Baruch was brought to a stop by the trouble and pain he had noted for some time in Joseph. The others went back to their machines. Baruch took Joseph’s hand:
“I’ll be very sorry to leave you here. I’ve never met a more candid or serious man.”
Joseph trembled, turned away, and started to go on with his work. Baruch circled so that he stood in front of him again, plunged his regard into Joseph’s sombre and chagrined eyes, and dismayed, went back to his own machine. Clickety-click, clack-clack, clack-clack, said the machines. Baruch began to smile to himself and a tune burst from his lips. Joseph bit his lips. All the morning their two minds cantered between the two themes, the joy of the one, the sorrow of the other.
Would he like to go to America? wondered Baruch, and then concluded: “How could anyone expatriate this one-rooted plant?”
In the afternoon the close sky clouded. They could have worked with their shirts off. In the evening the rain poured down.
The same evening Baruch and Joseph went to the University to their lecture on light. The Central Railway was blinding wet, the bars crowded and steaming, the tram-tracks congested with trams, motor-cars, home-goers. Electric signs made the vapoury circus brilliant like a house of smoky glass. They rattled in the tram down George Street West full of bright cheap shops, dentists’ parlours with red tasselled curtains and cheap-jack stores of every variety. They alighted at the University steps, near the Men’s Union, and tramped along cuttings and new roads past the Teachers’ College.
“I made a mistake,” said Baruch, “I was thinking of something else. We should have got off at the Vet. School instead of the Union.”
He pronounced the names with a familiar fraternal tone as if he had spent long years there. He dearly missed the years of postgraduate and professorial work he had promised himself already when a schoolboy. Joseph tramped along in silence. They squelched through the fat clay ruts and grass. There were lights in the Medical School and a faint glow in the Fisher Library still. Out here the wind raged, the rain ran down into their socks and their necks, and streaked their uncut hair. The trees lashed about and the few lamps tossed on their stalks. Frogs croaked in the basement of the Teacher’s College and in the University Oval. Faint lights gleamed, as in castles over the bog, in the Methodist and Presbyterian Colleges. They fought their way over
the cinder-paths and marsh leaning against the wind, towards the new Physics Building. Joseph was sick and feeble, the Bovril did not keep him going more than half an hour or so, but Baruch, with pale forehead and dripping body, with hat turned down all round and burning hand, hurried him along. They came to the door at last.
They walked a little way along the corridor, their shoes making a squashing sound, past the hat-racks and feebly-lighted walls. The installation was recent. They came round a corner into a mountainous demonstration room, painted white, immensely high; at the back a panelled wall rose far over their heads. Joseph, who had expected an ordinary class-room, felt transported into the temple of some rigorous superhuman cult. It was like sitting on an artificial hill. A sarcastic man with horn-rimmed glasses, black hair and wrinkled forehead watched them roundly all the way from the door, so that Joseph tripped up the first step and sat down abruptly in the first row. The man was one of those whose sole distinction is a crushing stare; he was in his element, no one could resist him. But Joseph thought Science was looking down on him. This man, when he felt well, when he came out from a not too arduous day, clerking it in a Government Department, would walk stiffly along the street, in his shiny black suit, slaying passers-by with glances of penetration and scorn. This was his sole joy in life, and he exercised it all his life.
An aquarium was let in, in the centre of the long yellow demonstration desk. The desk was crowded with small aquaria, mechanical models, retorts, tubes, glass rods, lantern slides, models of the most beautiful and fantastic imaginable glass-blowing, a dry cell, two microscopes, a magic lantern, a magnet, a knife switch, a bottle with three spouts in the side, a spectroscope, two sheets of optical illusions.
The lights were placed high, too high, and were too bright. They had had the lights on in the workshop since three o’clock on account of the storm, and their eyes were bloodshot; they blinked continually. There was an assistant, an old fellow, bowed, curiously menial in black, with a mean loose smile, who kept shifting the lantern and bringing in things from a laboratory on the left with a cunning servile air. The blackboard, stuck naked in front of them, was empty there for centuries of time, it seemed. Joseph sat dazed, bitterly regretted the evening lost and the long journey home through the wet, his ankles soaked round his boots, and his flushed forehead. Feet scraped, people hung up mackintoshes and closed umbrellas with a flop; the room was cold. There were fifteen people there and others walking in with shabby, nervous assurance, dressed in the drab, bad clothing of struggling workers. They stared at the blank blackboard and struck up subdued conversations. Joseph started and stared at a thin, oldish woman with straggling hair, who came in in a waterproof hat. It was his cousin Catherine. She looked round disdainfully, immediately saw Joseph and came across to them, with her masterful voice raised. There were now twenty persons. Someone walked about creaking, laughing, distributing papers. Joseph put out his hand and got a paper. “Join the Evolution Society!” The distributor was the Secretary, a middle-aged workman, with greying hair and a clerical turn to his dress. “Evolution is an established principle in Nature, but it has enemies in human thought. Do you believe in Evolution? If so, join us and help spread enlightenment, destroy superstition which is retarding man. If not, come and hear what we have to say. Are you sure you are right? Lectures every Wednesday. ‘Evolution in Society.’ ‘Evolution in Nature.’ ‘Geological Ages.’” Joseph turned and stared at this assembly of poor learners. Did they all, actually workmen poorer than him, stone-choppers, linesmen, spend their nights worrying about Evolution? His life must have been spent in a morass. He was the last of the last.
Baruch laughed; that laugh! It would soon cease in his ears for ever. “It is Christian anti-Christian!” said Baruch, crumpling up the notice. Joseph stared in front of him and went over minutely the details of the day. The stooping, black-swirling, frontally-whirling blackboard absorbed him, with its black minion discreetly circulating. The pains in his belly had stopped, everything was yellow, spewy, faint, watery, sick, before the high electric lights, the blackboard, the dry, hungry air. He looked upwards, drew nourishment from the wavering reflections of the aquarium on the ceiling, remained transfixed, staring upwards.
The conversation all around, rising slowly, more confident since Catherine arrived and the Secretary of the Evolution Society had passed, came to him in waves: “The Kitchen Committee is badly managed—Mrs Jones tells everyone how she met her husband and tries to conceal her wig by always wearing hats—Wyn Bates believed in free love till she got a boy—My next book is coming out in a limited edition, de luxe, two guineas the copy, few but fit, as they say—Yes, Nietzsche is still a draw with the submerged intelligentsia—. . . in the Esperanto Club debate, really obvious—Major Barbara, Dora Russell, mental tests, Dr Warner said . . .”
Joseph touched Baruch, who was laughing helplessly at something he had just said himself, and exclaimed softly:
“Do they all know each other? You feel like an outsider!”
Ah, the only thing in life was to get home, have some bread and milk, see the windows were stuffed against the storm, get to bed and sleep. There was a stir:
“Here’s Mewler, Möhler, here’s Mooller, Mueller . . .”
Silence. The black menial stood bowing by.
“Ladies and gentlemen, it is going to be harder for me to speak than for you to listen to me. I understand that you are students who have not had any tuition at all in physics, chemistry or mathematics, that you probably know very little about those things, except what you have had to learn for your own trades. You must interrupt whenever you do not understand. And try to understand what you do not understand. A boy at high school learns certain basic acceptations: if you are not cognisant of these principles—they are not truths, but acceptations—you will not understand me. They are so much accepted by me, that I may assume what you absolutely ignore. You must stop me when I do that.”
He wiped his forehead. Silence again. A soft voice, a man of medium height, with an ivory forehead, ivory silk handkerchief, ivory silk evening shirt. Silence again, reflections on the ceiling, little vanes turning in the tubes, the water in the aquarium, and silence, silence.
Joseph in a moment felt that his soul was built on a firm stone, as he had not felt since he could remember. He felt isolated and light; his head was flushed a bit. The rushing trees have died away, the agony, the griping, the fire in heart and limbs is soothed down and asleep, the wet ankles are a pleasant sensation, the brain is washed in aquarium water. He was joyous, alert. He half turned, and Baruch’s sloping, fleshy dark profile invaded the white world and stayed there still, immobile, with the soft underlip drooping, still shadowy, dreaming in the reflections, in the golden lights, water and silence. “If he goes, I will not be able to understand a thing again!”
Mueller switched out the auditorium lights, and nothing remained but the light underneath the aquarium set in the desk. Mueller took a glass rod and touched the water: the reflections began in the darkness with a sudden flurry, freckling and flowing out and out, larger, paler, shadowier, and dying down the walls. A spasm of love clove everyone, plunged into their hearts, light shot up their midriff in a glass tube between two dark lungs, they expelled light into the air. “Ah!” cried the class.
The submerged cave was swimming with light and air and filled to the ceiling with pellucid waves. The reading-lamp alone glowed on the desk. The professor stood there, a magician, in medium height, with gold cuff-links and glass rods, gleaming glasses and ivory silk handkerchief.
“Look up again!”
He stirred the water again, and this time his exposition came settling down through the waves, pouring through the room, turning, glinting, falling on the counter, growing up into the physical being of Mueller, to whom they presently all turned, a raven flock with pale heads. He stood in the half-light, a man of words, a heavy-grained man of flesh and words, no magician, but a man in evening-dress with elegant, clipped speech.
“Study
their brilliancy and size when they begin and when they reach the limits of the screen: continue to watch them while I speak.”
They glared at the lights above.
“What you see is the action of light waves: light is emitted in waves from a radiant object, as from this globe, and in waves passes through space and matter . . .”
He turned on the light and worked a little serpentine mechanical model which showed the action of waves: he showed them a mano-metric flame. He described the chemical constituents of light, showed them the prismatic distribution of light into elements, made the blacks in the prism significant, described the composition of the atom, the electronic universe, the weighing of the stars, the blasting of an atom, chemical affinities: enough in an evening to send them home in a stupor, drunk with learning. But he expounded with a clear dry passion which shook them and etched his lecture on their memories.
Joseph half-turned to Baruch, his eyes shining.
“It is wonderful; I never knew . . .”
Joseph perceived through a great door in his mind’s eye, a sort of internal cathedral, in which the five senses were as five ogival windows; it was the slow and stable architecture of the universe, in which all was perceptible, computable. His heart throbbed: “All can be seen, discovered: it is not chaos.” He saw a vivid unfolding in thousands of series, spathes unfolding into innumerable buds, cubes developing infinitesimally, groined arches ricocheting infinitely, leaping higher and higher, and the incommensurable perspective of mountainous universes building without builders. He saw thousands of concentric cubes, kingdoms of crystals ascending from needle-tufts to Dolomites, hierarchies and hosts of peaks like the hosts of the empyrean, orderly dissolutions and reformations, like armies in battle, polarisations, crystals in deposition like forests of leaves, chemical affinities resembling human love, the universe in the electron resembling the solar system. The universe seemed more perfect and orderly than it did to the lecturer. He breathed quietly and joyfully, the world fell into order and the furniture of his mind moved mysteriously into the proper places—like the marshalled benches of a class-room, like the austere reading-desk of the lecturer. At the demonstration of the inflexibility of the physical order, he felt more a man, freer. He turned again—Baruch’s dark hair and white thick-skinned profile leaning on his hand, looking melancholy downwards, the symbol of free thought without regulation, of dispute, confusion, sophistry, of man’s untold aberration, anarchy, waste, disappointment, whose relation to him was as a chemical affinity, but dimmer than the relation of the atoms, and troublous, round whose radiant attraction his little dark world had for a time swung out, this strange profile impinged on his demonstration-world, spoiled his gaiety. Darkly, with a pang, the bottom fell out of his jerry-built heart.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 22