Seven Poor Men of Sydney

by Christina Stead

  “I hope she leaves you your shirt,” said Kol Blount drily.

  “What, you don’t believe it?”

  “What do you take me for?”

  The law student looked crestfallen. “It’s not possible; she’s so honest.”

  “In one of the Scandinavian countries,” submitted a young law student interested in sociology, “they suggested having State fathers. I think women need it.”

  “It would be a good idea,” said Withers, interested. “Like that old woman I met in the park.”

  “You’re very kind to women,” remarked the girl who had been snubbed on the satyr story, primly.

  “Let’s have a debate on it, impromptu,” put in the chestnut-haired youth excitedly. “I’d love to hear the girls debate a thing like that. You know, they never really discuss their own affairs; you never know what they’re thinking.”

  “You must admit that women are really becoming free,” said Milt Dean in his dry voice. “Our mothers would never have even listened to such things.”

  “What rot, Milt,” cried a girl. “The Victorian girl in eighteen yards of flounces represented a tiny section of middle-class society in a tiny couple of decades. The great mass of women never knew these post-Stephenson and pre-Ford notions.”

  “What I detest about your mixed parties, Kol,” said Michael, “is this man-woman discussion which goes on for ever. Turn ’em out.”

  “It’s eternal,” said the satyr girl drearily, turning her too-thin face to Michael, “the eternal man-woman question, the eternal struggle.”

  “There are no women,” interposed Baruch flatly. “There are only dependent and exploited classes, of which women make one. The peculiarities are imposed on them to keep them in order. They are told from the cradle to the grave, You are a female and not altogether there, socially and politically: your brain is good but not too good, none of your race was ever a star, except in the theatre. And they believe it. We all believe these great social dogmas.”

  “Where would be feminine charm?” said Milt Dean, his dark cheek mantling with passion. “I don’t want to marry some big husky who shouts orders to wharfingers six hours a day. I want a woman who waits for me at home, who knows how to arrange knick-knacks, who gives me children and wants to bring them up for me, to teach them at her knee, to look after me in sickness, to close my eyes in death.”

  His sweetheart looked a little embarrassed and retired into the shade, while there were shouts of “Mediaeval! Tyrant! Patriarch! Marry a children’s nurse then!” The satyr girl said softly:

  “You are right. Milt, that’s what most women want to do.” She had been in love with Milt secretly for years.

  “I don’t care for equal rights, for political powers, for legislation,” said Kol Blount sternly from his chair. “A person should be free, entirely, absolutely free. If they must fight to settle their rights, let them fight, but let no man have power over another. If they work together, let them work together in mutual understanding with common profit; but let there be no power. I hate power; it is the destroyer of the soul and mind. It produces all those crooked, sick and wretched people I see around me.”

  “Do you mean us too?”

  “You, too. Then you don’t have to live in these forced confrèries, of family, school, society, union, government, nation. You have your own mate, or mates; you assort yourselves, not according to class, that detestable and degrading economic prison, but according to the temperament, will and talents. What beauty in life? Life would have a curious taste, even at its lowest, perhaps a little dull, but satisfying, like drinking your own tears.”

  “A vegetable or mineral philosophy,” remarked one; “not for creatures with legs and fists.”

  “It is the natural one, suitable for inanimate things as well as for us. Inanimate! I am that, and I should be outside all human laws and restrictions. Imagine my misery. To see your fatal errors and degraded manners and have to live among you, have to carry you in my breast like a diseased heart. Perhaps that is why, by the bitter irony of bitter fate, I am as I am. I could do too much harm, I could lead you all back to anarchy; look at me: shackled, tied, garroted. I can’t see free people (there must be some), I can’t see where to start, in which country, climate, nation. I only live with a lot of slaves and pigs of Circe. You live like niggers, glad of your bonds, and licking the hand that whips you and singing to the Lord to make you meek. God, I can’t stand it any more—year after year. From being a baby to being a schoolboy, from schoolboy to manhood, and always sitting here fermenting thoughts, and never able to stir. I say aloud in the middle of the night, Free me, free me, force that sometimes comes to paralysed limbs, to the numb, weak, dying. I pray for the house to be burned down in the night so that I can get frightened and get up out of my chair and run. I would go away a long way, as far as possible from this room, and this street and its sounds, of carts and postman and trees and school-children.”

  “I would carry you on my back,” said Michael in a low voice, with tears in his eyes.

  “Michael would go,” said one of the girls with a disagreeable grimace of satire: “He just said he’d be a scab. It was all we could do to stop him jumping overboard the launch and swimming away with the Fiji islanders!”

  “I can understand it,” said Kol Blount bitterly. He shut his eyes and pressed his hands to his face. Michael sat as if he had not heard these words. Presently he got up and went into the passage, where he sat on the steps biting his nails. One of the girls busied herself with the supper, and presently they were all chewing and drinking. Michael listened for Blount’s voice but did not hear it. He returned to the door, and saw Blount starting at him, waiting for him to come back.

  “I thought you had gone out,” said Blount.

  They had turned the light out and lighted a candle on the roll-top desk, relic of Kol’s father. It fell on the black headless venus which dominated the room. Some were crooning sea-chanties, some revolutionary songs. The young men and women had drawn closer together in twos and threes. Some people left. Michael, who had eaten some pickle and nut sandwiches, an invention of Mrs Blount, began to have gripes; he was in every sense soured and upset. They heard him vomiting outside in the passage. When he came back Kol’s face was hidden under his hand. The guests teased him:

  “. . . ill-digested theories of the evening . . .”

  “At least I don’t ingurgitate it again like some young puppies . . .”

  Kol’s face came back to him and rested on him, blank, melancholy, curious. Baruch left now, taking sleepy Jo with him, to bunk with him for the night. Among the scattered guests, looking at books, talking fitfully in the corners of the room, Michael made his way to Kol Blount and said:

  “I won’t come and see you again on these evenings. It doesn’t suit me: I can’t stand the discussions, so many voices. I have a feeling like lead behind my ears and in my temples.”

  “Go upstairs and sleep!”

  “I never sleep here,” answered Michael, pacing restlessly up and down behind Kol’s chair and round and round, fiddling with the tassels on the window-curtain, kicking against the footrest of Kol’s chair. “I never sleep any more. I have such bad dreams.”

  “What dreams?”

  “Nothing special to relate; my father lying in a pool of blood, long black spectres coming in through the crack of the door, forests of serpents, dismal rivers flowing without end, as in the ‘Sons of Clovis’, at the Art Gallery.”

  He stood looking down at Kol. Kol raised his eyes to Michael, smiling faintly, anxiously. An old-fashioned picture of the sons of Clovis, hamstrung, deathly pale, floating bound on a barge down a ghastly grey river, had been taken by them for a picture of themselves. Michael scratched at the plush of the arm-rest.

  “I didn’t want to stay; I only stayed to please you. I had a rotten evening. You must like it, for all your cynical air. They swarm round you.”

  “Out of pity and aimlessness.”

  “They pity you and despise m
e; a nice situation.”

  Jessica, the satyr girl, seeing Milt Dean with his arm round his sweetheart’s waist, came up and said with brave coquetry;

  “Michael, take me home, will you? It will be good for you: you are in the dumps, and you’re never gallant. I’ll initiate you into good manners; you needn’t be afraid of me. Come along.”

  “No, I won’t,” said Michael, frowning. “I don’t know if I’m going home, and anyhow I’m not going with anyone. I need a long walk; I’m going out of my mind with this buzz round me.”

  Suddenly Catherine appeared in the passage, coming from the kitchen. She made a startling figure at the door, pale, breathless, her hair in wisps, her eyes blazing.

  “Michael, you’ve got to come home with me. A man followed me in the street. I got out my hatpin and held it ready and stood under a lamp and he was afraid; but I’m nervy, I don’t want to go out alone again. And I want you to come home with me.”

  “A pity you women don’t wear breeches, then you wouldn’t be followed: you’ve earned them,” said Michael. “I’m not going home and I don’t care if you don’t. You seem to be able to pass your nights pretty well nearly anywhere: you’ve got lots of friends. Why didn’t you go with the Folliots half an hour ago? I’m a Timon to-night, I am not obliging anybody. I’ve obliged too many people too long. I’m going on the spree, if I haven’t lost the art. I’ll see if I can pick up some whores and some booze, anything to wash out the flavour of this.”

  “Good-bye,” said Kol Blount. “You’d better go, if you feel like that. Send me a note when you have slept it off.”

  “I may not sleep it off.”

  “Don’t be so tragic,” said Catherine sharply. “It doesn’t suit you to be a ham actor. You’ve got stomach-ache or something of the sort; I know you.” She smiled cheerfully at him to get a smile out of him. “You have a poetic temperament, Michael!”

  “Thanks for the general good opinion,” answered Michael, “but none of you will see me for a long time from to-night. I’m going to look for something I lost.”

  “Where did you lose it?”

  “On the seashore. When I was a little boy.”

  “What was it?”

  “The notion that life was worth living.”

  “Aw, cheer up; don’t be so tragic,” said the few guests left, laughing and raising their heads to look Michael over.

  Michael said, “I was a serious rum little cove—“

  “Chekhov . . .” supplemented one of the hearers, smirking at his neighbours.

  Michael continued, biting his lip:

  “. . . I had plenty of fun running round the beach, going fishing with the fishermen, but I didn’t like school, because I couldn’t take a joke and schoolboys are cruel little blighters. I used to row over in a dinghy to talk with the night-watchman on the dredger called the Cormorant that always tied up in Fisherman’s Bay. The old chap’s name was Watson, and he used to give me nips of brandy and ask me if I had any sisters. I told him I had a nice sister, Catherine. He asked me. What sort of eyes has she, what sort of hair? I thought about it then for the first time: I told him, Black eyes, long black hair and her eyebrows meet right across the front. He said, I’d like you to bring your sister to see me, and every night after he asked about my sister. He was very lonely, sitting on deck smoking, his safety lantern swinging on the railings, the tide lapping round the flat-bottomed dredger, waiting for me and my sister to come. But I never wanted to take Catherine. I was hurt he wanted to see her so much and bothered me about her. Then I realised I wasn’t the only person in the world. Catherine was rather a Tartar at home and wasn’t much in favour with our parents: she was a tomboy and much more athletic than me. Things became dull for me after I began to grow up. The only times I remember that I really enjoyed were the days we were taken in to see the Eight Hours’ Day procession. They always have fine weather for Eight Hours’ Day. And I used to love the bakers’ floats especially, with their giant loaves; they seemed to come straight out of a land of food, sun and flowers in their aprons and caps. I always wanted to be a baker. Upon my soul, I should have been a baker. A baker feeds the hungry, he deals likewise in the symbols of life and contentment. What I imagined was a yearning for spiritual things, later on, was a yearning to knead dough and smell new-baked bread and hot ovens, to smell yeast and paraffin, to be respected and respect myself because the housewives respected me. But I had to be something clerical, a teacher, clerk, scholar, student, something soft-handed, at any rate.”

  “In teaching you get corns whacking the lads,” said a young male teacher. “It’s not lily handed, and you get corns elsewhere getting more kicks than ha’pence.”

  “To be continued in our next . . .” said Withers. “You weren’t cut out to be a humorist, or Scheherazade, at any rate; you escaped those two lily-handed fates. Say, Michael, cut out the wailing. Come and we’ll guzzle lemonade in some Greek joint. There’s no beer to be had at this hour of night, and naturally Kol doesn’t think of laying it in.”

  “Right-o,” agreed Michael. “And I’m not coming back. Goodbye, all; we’ll meet in a better world.”

  He was laughing now continually. Catherine looked at Kol Blount, raised her eyebrows, and said under her breath to Kol:

  “There’s nothing the matter, it’s just nerves; nothing will happen to him. Don’t worry.”

  “Ah, you know me, don’t you, Kate?” said Michael, overhearing and looking at them sidelong. “Very well, and you’ve a woman’s instinct, and I’m a transparent beggar anyhow, without any guiding principle, easy to read. Kol can manage me, you can read me. Why not? It’s no harm; it’s no impediment in my slipshod slide to a sloppy end. It makes no difference to some kinds of men.”

  He was silent a moment, knitting his fingers and getting paler. They began to look away from him indifferently and talk amongst themselves. Michael continued violently, to their astonishment:

  “But there are some things which are too much, said at the wrong time of day. At the fatal moment a cast match can let off the train and blow up the magazine. I’m a river of tears inside, from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. I can hardly say why—it’s misery, misery. The world is rotten; if you amuse yourselves, it’s because you are too dull to know what’s going on under your noses. You giggle and flirt; it’s not for me. I want to die. I’m too tired to make believe life’s worth living any more. If I were a baker or shoemaker, it would be different, but now I couldn’t be, I’d get bored; I’d want to be walking round with a lay preacher’s air, talking pseudo-Socialism and questionable humanities.”

  “C’m on,” said Withers, taking his arm.

  Michael went and stood beside Kol Blount’s chair, taking his limp hand in his:

  “Good-bye, dear Kol,” said Michael earnestly.

  Everyone stared; some began to smile.

  Kol looked at him with compassion, with inquietude. Catherine stood by, all still in the poor light, a sketch of a woman, but dramatically poised, her mouth half-open, checked by surprise. Michael nodded to her and moved away, ignoring the people he had to step over to get to the door.

  “Michael,” said Blount in the silence, “come here!”

  “What?”

  “Michael, think of me! What would I be without you?” He spoke in a bantering tone, but he looked strained.

  “I think of you,” said Michael. “If it had not been for you, I would have gone before this.”

  “Where are you going?” said Catherine sharply.

  “Good-bye, Blount!”

  Kol Blount put his hand on his heart, looked fixedly at Michael and uttered no sound. Withers jammed on his hat and made for the door. At the gate Catherine caught up with them.

  “Michael, what’s the matter? Are you ill? Where are you going at this time of night? Tom, you see he’s in no state to go with you. I wish you’d take him home and put him to bed.”

  “He doesn’t want you with him,” said Withers; “he has too many goddamned ment
ors. Let him go on the razzle-dazzle for a day or two. Struth, a man needs it.”

  “Stop butting in, Kate, you’re a nuisance,” said Michael.

  She grabbed his arm.

  “Listen to me! Don’t act the goat. Wake up, you’re acting as if you’re asleep. What’s the matter? You haven’t taken drugs, have you? You seem to be out of your wits. I’ve been thinking about you all the evening. No man followed me, that was the other evening. I came back here solely because I was worried to death, seeing the way you’ve been behaving.”

  “If I’m out of my wits, they’re poor wits and I’m brighter without them. If anyone picks them up on the pavement he’ll take them for Chinese puzzles, not wits: so I’m out of wits, and in some sense. Tatterdemalion looks better naked. Good-bye; never mind where I’m going. Withers doesn’t know either. You don’t have to follow me. I don’t want it, and if you do follow me, I’ll lead you a nice chase and drop you. You’re a girl after all, there are some places where you can’t go, thank God.”

  “I’d go anywhere to look after you at present.”

  “I’d like you better if you weren’t always the hero-woman,” said Michael with cruel intent. Michael smiled at Mrs Blount, who had come to the gate: “Good-bye, sweetheart; if I don’t see you soon, it’s not because I don’t appreciate your nut and pickle sandwiches and your welcome.” She gurgled with pleasure.

  “What the deuce is all this leave-taking?” shouted Kol Blount from the window, where he had been pushed by a guest. “Is he going on a liner in the morning? You women see a man off even when he’s only going to the pub. You like it, it’s your traditional right. Come in here, Mother, and Kate, you come in.”

  “That’s it,” called Michael, “I’m going where there ain’t no traditional rights, or sociology. Good-bye, and my respects to the Seven Deadly Instincts and the Thirty-nine Acquired Characteristics.”

  He ran down the whitened stone steps and out through the wicket, laughing sillily, with Withers after him. They went down the street rapidly, slapping each other on the back and guffawing. Catherine was as white as the steps. She didn’t return to the room, but looked down the street after Michael.