“Oh, don’t say such a thing!”
“I will walk looking for what I can’t have while alive. You never wanted happiness and you cannot understand the thirst for it, for extreme happiness, even if it costs the lives and fortunes of two or three people. I loved you once when I was a tiny little boy and you gave me milk, my heart still beats with your warmth. You are the only creature that was ever tangible to me; perhaps I loved you.”
She whinnied in a delicate little joyful way, and drawing him to her, put her head against his waist. She thought, as women do, that it was all over, that the masculine stress was past. He kissed her tenderly on brow, neck and hands, and taking up his hat in the hall, went out towards the gate.
“Take care of yourself, my little son! What time will you be home?”
“I can’t say.”
“Not late.”
“Perhaps late.”
“Where are you going?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps to Joseph’s at Fisherman’s Bay, for tea, but I don’t know.”
“Don’t be late.”
She sighed and shook her head. But he did not return; he stayed at his cousin’s all night and got up very early on Monday morning.
The house was still asleep, so he went up into the barracks, that is, into the military reserve. The frank aromatic smells of scrub, garden and sea reminded him of early days, forgotten in the middle years of life; he had a memory of soft dark hair falling half across a pale face, not easily recollected now, for he was so old, not the face of any one, he thought, but the blurred visions of years. When he was a child, at this hour, he would come out into the garden with a trowel to dig where the worm and slug tracks lay silver all over the ground from their night business, while sparrows hopped and jabbered in the oleanders. Or else he would go up into the barracks, pursue weed-grown passages, and look at the seagulls scouring the ribbed sea. Even now the early summer day was idle, simple and companionable, and made him feel a little boy for a few instants; but there was an older thought in its red shadows, and the restlessness of the coming heat stirred already in the small dry plants; the season was on the verge of husky maturity.
The blood-red sun rose through a thick veil which stretched some hundreds of feet above the horizon. The water, shining like oil and burnished metal and bearing oil traces from the ships at Garden Island, ran irregularly round the margin of the beach; the tide was midway down—in an hour it would be fit for fishing. No ships were in the harbour, the houses were shadowy, the water was a clouded mirror. Michael began to sweat, even on the hill where a faint breeze still moved. The city lay far off, folded in morning lavender. Presently the first tram ascended the hill by the Gap, there was a clatter in the cook’s galley in the pilot-ship, the workmen came aboard the dredger; outside the heads sirens, bellowing like the royal bulls at the Easter Show, called the pilot. A fisherman with two dogs went wading along the beach, and Pegleg climbed down the steps and unlocked the boathouse. The chimneys began to smoke in hotel and kitchen leanto; the reveille, so fine and clear in the hill, woke the camp. All began their morning work. Michael looked at the still smokeless chimney of the Baguenaults and walked through the military reserve where the barbed wire fences are tangled and broken. He circumvented the hill full of ditches, grassy trenches and doors into the hill and came to Lady’s Haull, where a fisherman stood on the bluff shouting below. In the bay three fishing-boats were driving in the salmon. Beyond the salmon was a ring of dolphins, the outside the shark which had rounded the salmon up, cleaving the water with dark fin, restlessly patrolled the bay. A warship entering the harbour straits saluted the port; the hills reverberated and the dolphins plunged. Michael went through a gate and by a broken grassy descent to the shale platform under the inner light. In fine weather, with medium tides, this is a fine place to spend the whole day, with the ocean singing in the ears, the rare clouds flying overhead, ships dipping into the swell as they pass in and out, with a fishing-line swinging in the bottleneck pool where fish move fluidly or nose out from the kelp weeds, dark wirrah, spotted kelpfish, rainbow parrot fish, eels and octopus. In storms the whole platform is a sheet of foam, broken by the slaty ebb and all the cries of the deep in the plunge of the decuman.
The Turgot, a new motor-ship, carrying wool, which should have cleared at midnight and had been delayed by a sea-cooks’ strike, went out, sailing into the morning before his eyes, taking the long Pacific swell across her bows, with the pilot-ship dancing before her like a cork on the water. The Turgot carried a Scandinavian crew which had not been affected by the general waterside strike. Now she danced out, with her tall, blond sailors on deck. Everything was pure and sweet that morning. There soon sprang up a strong sea-breeze which still freshened from the southeast, blowing up the welt of cloud. Michael walked among the brilliant rockpools where the boys kept alive the fish that they caught on the reef. He managed to climb on to the farther platform. The swell was increasing despite the low tide and fair weather, and he got fairly wet and stung with spray. North Head with its graveyard above the quarantine station stood out clear in every detail in the lucid summer morning.
Line fishermen were fishing on the sheer, slippery rocks, over whose polished shoulders the deep swell rose and withdrew without foam. He sat down on the stinking rocks, dry-salted since the last storm, perversely sniffing, for people who live in fishing villages get to like strong smells. He remembered the last time he had sat on the edge of that triangular fishing-basin. That had been ten years before. Mae brought him down here, took off her shoes and stockings, lifted up her tennis skirt, and paddled in the standing tide. She had been so merry that her laughter bubbled over the edge of the rock and fell in globules into the water and was carried out to sea. The afternoon sun, coppery, lay in flakes on the sea. Then she walked back with him in the gloaming, and the officers of the permanent staff coming home to their weatherboard cottages in the barracks, greeted them in the dark. They dawdled home, smelling the sea, the marshy lawns, the Norfolk Island pines, the trickling rocks, and hearing the scattered chorus of frogs. Michael wondered now what would have been his history if he had married her. He dipped his fingers in a fissure full of starfish, setting the starfish in a row to see them creep gingerly back to the fissure. The fishermen caught a few rockfish, and a great blue groper stood up two or three times inside the wave about to break foamlessly on their rock, but he managed to get out of the undertow and disappeared. They sensed him nosing round the rocks there, just outside, protecting his fine blue skin and fins; they rebaited their hooks, looked for firmer footholds on the boulder, but he got away.
The fishing was good. Michael got up to go to his cousin’s for his lines. He would not be able to fish for several days thereafter because a storm was clearly coming their way from far out on the Pacific. The tide hummed ominously round the coast; the wind blew regularly. He started to split cunjeboy and put the red and yellow meat in an old tin. His fingers were stained red; he washed them in the pool and saw the hungry anemones close on the juice and fragments. Dawdling over the pools feeding the anemones, he became too sleepy to go back for his lines. He retired under a big rock, boiled three or four crabs, and fried a fish given him by one of the men, and fell asleep in the warm blowy noontide. When he awoke an hour or two later the tide was surging through the mile-wide straits. It was getting too rough to fish; he had missed the tide. A coalie putting in from the south sank behind the waves in a frightening way and reappeared regularly, running in on the rollers.
“The storm will come to-night,” called one of the fishermen, passing him on the way home.
“A coupla days, I should say, it will last,” said another.
“So long,” called Michael.
“So long,” replied the men and waved their hands.
“I’ll go up to town,” said Michael to himself.
He found Heinrich Winterbaum at the offices of the International Worker, borrowed some money from him, and as evening came on he visited several public-houses,
stood drinks to several unknown pals, and was thrown out in Market Street, drunk, at six o’clock. He wandered down to the “Tank Stream” Press and picked up Withers, whom he found looking gloomily through the window at the evening crowds.
“Let’s go and get shicker,” suggested Michael. “But I warn you, I haven’t got a cent. I drank it all already.”
“I have,” said Withers, “and I’d shoot my grandmother to break the ennui. Let’s paint the town red.”
“Orright, good idea, let’s paint the flaming town red.”
Withers took Michael home to his single room in a lodging-house in Woolloomooloo.
“Let’s ask in Mendelssohn,” said Michael.
“No, he doesn’t drink, no use. He’s a mollycoddle of purest ray serene.”
“Yes, a mollycoddle; can’t hold his drink.”
Withers took a pleasure in seeing his friends stewed. They both got undressed and sat round in their shirts drinking and singing. Towards ten o’clock Withers dragged Michael to his feet and shook him.
“Heh, you’re drunk. Get dressed; we’ll go out wenching.”
“No, too drunk.”
But nothing could deter Withers from a debauch. They staggered along Castlereagh Street, Michael leaning on Withers’ arm. After they had walked a few minutes they crossed a young sailor flushed and embarrassed, with two street-walkers on his arms, one old and one young, both haggard and both drunk. “Come on,” cried the old woman, dragging him towards an aperture in the wall between two large buildings, “just a little way down here.” A lamp glowed over a door at the end of a whitewashed passage. Michael began to giggle. Farther along a toothless young woman with painted cheeks hung with heartrending tenderness on to the arm and coat of a vain pimp who looked over his cigarette at her, and preened himself at her worshipping smile. Despite the sea-wind and the great cumulus clouds massing, the summer heat started out from every doorway. But the curtains were beginning to float out of the topmost windows.
“Come along,” urged Withers, going down an alley.
“You bet,” agreed Michael.
Michael awakened the next day about four o’clock in the afternoon, in Withers’ room, feeling ill. He dragged downstairs, received a black look from the lodging-house keeper, and went into the street. A bitter wind was blowing, the sky was black, the street-lamps were on. The ships docked in the port creaked, and the Virginia creeper on the terrace fronts lashed about. Michael found a shilling in his pocket, put there by Withers certainly, and went into a pub for a drink. When he came out he was sick in the gutter.
“I must rest somewhere,” he kept saying to himself. He had a season ticket to the north-shore suburbs where his family lived. The Folliots lived on the same line, a few miles beyond. He walked through the evening bush, glistening as the sun set through a rift in the heavy clouds. He followed a large gully, half-cleared of its turpentines and eucalypts, along the bed of a small stream now bearing away in its waters the rubbish of dry months, and went up through flowering scrub to the lower fence of a descending orchard and private wilderness he knew well. There the Folliots lived. There was no sign of life, no clothes on the line and no light. He sat down for a while in a summer-house at the top of some steps and waited for the sound of voices, or a car drawing up. A lost chicken came piping madly down the wire-netting fence looking for an exit. Michael caught the soft little thing and said, “Silly little beggar, silly little beggar,” a dozen times tenderly, while its heart pumped hard and it squeaked. He went up with it to the chicken-coop. The house was closed. Then he remembered the Folliots had gone to Melbourne for the week. He went to the rain-water tank, removed a brick from the base and took out the key of the back-door, left there for any homeless or unhappy friends who should need asylum.
Michael made some strong tea, with condensed milk, and ate some cold veal. A dust storm had arisen on the road outside the house. This road ran on the ridge between two deep valleys. After the dust came the trampling of heavy rain up the gully, and the storm was upon them. There was a storm also creeping upon him from another quarter, and he could feel it rising. His pulse beat hard, his small heart began to suffocate him: he was fevered. He ate some dry bread and presently located the good port wine that Folliot kept for his late night-work. He drank a lot of this port, lying on the divan. There was a drawing-room grand piano in the sitting-room, a polished walnut table, and on the piano a photograph of Marion in Russian headdress with her black hair falling thickly on each side. On the wall next to the cushioned bow-window was an obscene etching called “The Débutante”, show a voluptuous leering maiden, dressed in a transparent skirt, being led forward by a hairy gnome. Michael looked at this and began to laugh a little to himself. Just off the sitting-room was Fulke’s study. Michael rummaged in there to find something to read while he drank, and came out with The Golden Bough, a large book by Havelock Ellis, two or three by Adler, Freud and Kraft-Ebing. These looked particularly interesting, as they discussed erotic practices and perversions. He laughed again and said: “I’ll knock ’em dead yet at Blount’s.”The reading-lamp gleamed on the hexagonal sides of two brass candlesticks placed on the marble mantelpiece on the other side of the room, and two long-stemmed champagne glasses, greenish, with black dancing figures.
The rain continued and it got darker. Michael got up restlessly, flinging the heavy books helter-skelter on the divan and floor. He began to play some music lying on the piano—Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette”, “The International”; Marion had not gone very far with her music, being too impatient and having little ear. Then Michael began to pick out old tunes he had sung in the army and songs current in England when he was on furlough long ago, idiotic tunes with two sets of words, one for the women, one for the soldiers. Things quite forgotten began to crowd back upon him. He had made a hit with Marion when he met her in London because he had known nothing about Communism and was romantic and had taught her the real words of the songs. Which songs? He remembered. In his fumy brain memories began to assort themselves into a dream of a night such as this that he had passed in a deserted house near Bapaume during the war, and an inn, too, but he could not distinguish the inn from the house nor either from the house Fulke and Marion were staying in at Golder’s Green when he met them in London. He supported his bursting head on his palm and rested against the piano.
The storm thundered on the side of the house and the rain seeped in under the sashes. The street-lamp was lit. He went to the window and looked out at the country road, the tall bush with lathy branches lashing from side to side. Under the lamp stood a man. He whistled, and an older man, only protected from the storm by a scarf and a waistcoat over his ordinary clothes, came out of the scrub, while a third, looking like a tramp, slouched across from the Folliots’ front fence, easily, with the air of a man who takes his own time. They stood under the lamp scarey, blowing to tatters, the lamp-light tossed from cheek to cheek on three rugged and whiskered faces. They did not appear to speak, but in a moment began to spread out again and moved along the road. Michael recognised them for an old family of wood-poachers who had stolen wood out of the government forests, and had done bushranging in the old times. Their family was almost destroyed by gang feuds with competing logrollers and bushrangers. The feuds exist to this day.
In the wall of the house opposite a red-lighted blind appeared and disappeared. The men came back along the road, crossed over and walked along by the house—beleaguered, beleaguered. The lamp-light from the street fell across curtain, floor and mantelpiece, and on to Marion in the Russian costume.
Michael fetched some candles and pulled the curtains. He slept for a moment on the piano-stool, full of dreams. It seemed a strain came from the piano, “O tannenbaum, O tannenbaum, wie treu sind deine Blätter . . .”; the Socialists sang it in London, with different words, but that was how Marion sang it. The aspect of the room changed a little. The ceiling was eighteen feet high, the curtains were of yellow tapestry, the lustres hung from a painted
and gilded oval where cherubs floated between balustrades on a blue sky. Voices, and people like milky glass moved about the room, faint sounds of joy came from them. At a distance soldiers were singing; Michael shifted his ear out of his cupped hand to hear better what was going on. The only light was from the two candles in front of Marion’s picture, but the room was full of windy sound and the storm beat in. He looked at Marion—how young she had been, mild and soft—looking at the picture he could perfectly recall his sentiments of those old days.
Two women came to him and beckoned him to his feet; it seemed Withers was laughing behind him on the divan. Michael plucked their arms, they all ran about the room. They clustered round him again, and he invited them to drink. Although he poured out three glasses, the women did not drink, so he had to drink the wine for them. He poured out wine again, and this time they drank, but they only drank with him; they would not sip it till he raised it to his own lips. There was a murmur of laughter from the piano under his hands. Someone played the tune of an obscene song, somewhere out of sight he knew a girl was sitting on a soldier’s knee, pulling his ear affectionately. He knew that on the wall was a mirror festooned with gilt and decorated with paper roses, and on the ceiling was now Leda and the swan. He didn’t care for obscenity. He was engaged in watching the eyes of the two women, who would certainly go away if he did not insist on them staying, by staring at them through the palm of his hand. They were very voluptuous women and only lightly dressed. It was disconcerting, but he couldn’t get his eyes off a certain movement. They had black eyes and thick hair. He wanted to ask them if they were sisters, but felt too sleepy. He began laughing loudly to amuse them, and then they got up and left him. There was no one else in the room, which was the Folliots’, and only a small grand piano stood before him.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 27