“And to think—” said Michael, but before he finished he saw a strange person standing in the room. He came closer to the mirror and recognised himself. He began to laugh. Before he had finished, the younger woman of the two came back to the door, her bodice undone, and struck an inviting attitude, bared her teeth in a sort of smile, and left him, banging the door after her. He stayed in a maudlin state for a while, murmuring phrases over and over. His voice rose higher, he became agitated, and getting his feet together began to move about the room, posturing and acting over the scenes that were passing through his mind. The door opened—someone poked a vicious, thin inquiring face round the corner, smirked, said, “Oh, sorry,” and went out again. Withers sat on the divan in his shirt, baring his yellow ratty teeth to drink, but Michael was sick of him and didn’t want to hear his silly discourse. A silence. Later he heard whispering outside the door. He listened attentively, staggered to the door and threw it open.
“Come in,” he shouted, “come in; you bloody well can take me, take me; but I won’t go back, I’ll shoot myself first. Court-martial me, but I won’t go back.” The piano gave out a crash of discords as he slumped on to the keyboard. He straightened himself up.
“Mustn’t drink any more: I’m a bit shicker,” he said to himself, and tried to keep his eye from twitching nervously. “I’m a bit upset,” he emended. He went to the hall door and looked out. He came back into the room and shut the door carefully. He stood uncertainly in the centre of the space beside the fireplace, his humped shoulders, baggy unpressed trousers, and legs thrust wide apart, giving him the appearance of being blown out with spleen. His wild dark eyes darted back and forth and up and down over the walls cobwebbed with dark and light; his chin jutted out and his lower lip hung down trembling. He was really alone.
The heavy rain driving from the south shattered its lances against the glass door at the back. It came in noisy gusts battering and chattering at the panes, in the chimney cowls, whistling behind the closed grate, and ceased suddenly, leaving the guttering to drip into the night. Now again he heard the heavy roar of guns, far off and sullen, and he was not sure that it was not the thrumming of blood in his temples and breast. In the fire of his brain the hurry and confusion of the retreat he had been in, near Bapaume, ran itself over and over with black footsteps, and in that stormy night where the light flared unceasingly, his eyes still strained to see the men he was with; they all expected to be killed, they were all afraid like himself.
“Like fowls waiting to be killed—what are we waiting for? I can’t stand it—let’s go up and get shot down now,” he said to the man standing next to him. The man did not answer; he looked like a pillar of mud, and might have been asleep on his feet, dead of fright or cold, or merely occupied with his own thoughts. An officer passed along hurriedly; it was a desperate retreat—no one would get out of it alive. Michael did a simple thing: he ran away and miraculously escaped, the only one to escape. He ploughed his way through mud and water, holes and debris, and after hours of running, crawling, hiding, he took refuge in a grange. When in the night rain came into the grange, making rivulets all over the floor, Michael climbed through a window into the large kitchen of a farm. The farmer, with half his things packed ready for an alert when the soldiers swept past in retreat, rushed down in his white night-shirt with a revolver, shot at him in the half-dark of early morning and got him.
“Let me out,” yelled Michael; “I’m not stealing; I’m a soldier looking for shelter,” but the enraged farmer kicked him out into the cold. His savings were in that kitchen under the hearthstone, and he was convinced to the end of his life that Michael was a ruffian stealing his way back from the lines to safety. Michael thought over all this, as he had many times before. No one knew, not even Withers, who liked to worm out your secrets when you were drunk and who remembered them even if he was drunk when he heard them. Michael was picked up after, wounded (by the farmer) after wandering about in all directions. He found himself on furlough in England, and there met the Folliots. They respected him as an honest militant; they immediately started to try to convert him to Socialism. He pretended to be converted for the sake of Marion.
“Why not?” he had often said: “it’s all a game, mine or theirs. And as to the rest, they told me I was a pawn in the financiers’ game—not so much as they think, not the pocket hero.” He sighed. “I’m a coward, but that’s because I’m neurasthenic—there are lots of situations I’d face that many a man wouldn’t. Rules don’t mean anything to me. I want what I want and don’t recognise rules. I’m a man; man made rules, man made cowardice and courage, their ideals. I’m another sort, only not in the majority—that’s all.”
His head ached: he formulated his thoughts very slowly and with great pain, but he was forced to keep thinking it all out.
“I understand my own situation perfectly,” he said.
He walked up and down the room holding his head back and front with both hands as if to keep the brains in.
“I shall burst a blood-vessel,” he said to himself. “It will burst; this can’t go on.”
He sank to his knees beside the piano-stool and tried to rest his head on it, but got up again; thousands of hot needles stuck into his brain.
“Am I going cuckoo?” Is this how it starts? No wonder they shriek out, madmen, if it feels like this.” He had to think.
The pain rushed over his head in great waves, his head was on fire, the roots of his hair burned. It poured into his head stronger and stronger.
“Let me break a blood-vessel; I can’t stand this any longer. Let me pass out, I’d rather die. Now I know what it is to want to die.”
He began to laugh, holding his head and pacing the room. He felt remarkably sane. He stopped in front of Marion and stared at her with tear-wet cheeks, but he was crying for pain.
“Anyone,” he said violently to the photograph, talking aloud to keep his mind off the pain; “you would take anyone you wanted when you wanted them. I came at the right moment, that was all; Fulke was in Manchester, and I was ersatz-Fulke. And here my head’s been splitting all round the town for a couple of years on account of you; and Fulke pitying me for an unfortunate lover. But you’re lovely, Marion, sweet, a woman, little Dooky—ugh, I’ll go mad with this yet. I’ve got to get out of it, it must pass away. How long will this night take, how long can the body keep up without sleeping? If my head would only burst, at the back where the skull is grinding.”
He muttered continually to himself. His reason struggled over a vast battlefield, it seemed, advancing and falling back in front of the floods of pain. He visualised this battle as the one he had escaped from long ago. When his passion and pain swept forward, he saw running men advancing over the field and silhouetted on the skyline once more. Then as each gust died—for these microcosmic conflicts raged during the noise of the driving rain—he remembered the real battlefield once more, and sometimes remote and sometimes growing nearer and clearer every minute, and right at hand, he saw the miserable and condemned band, eleven men. What if he could meet them all one day and find they had all done what he did and been saved? They would look at each other joyfully, a camaraderie of saved men. They were the only brothers he could ever hope to have. But they were not living. He would like to meet them. Barker, a man he had lived with for months, the easiest kind of man to live with—what a pity he was not alive. He could have told him everything and gone off with him somewhere, out of the world. He would shake off the torpor of years if Barker were still alive; he would go anywhere in the world to meet Barker. He would never get these headaches again. But Barker had died the night he ran away, overcome with nausea and nerves, as now. Barker was the pillar of mud. Dust now. Their faces were white and childish as the dark smoke-black warriors of Satan rising from the mud surrounding them, shouting inaudibly, waving their arms tall as forest trees, horribly blown out and lacerated, some with their eyes gouged out, each with a gun cocked. He could not run back to them now over all the space of gro
und and all these years. He had run too far; better to stay where he was. They were all done for, he too, no doubt. It was enough to have come here through the rain in the crack-up of the earth. Chaps got medals for the same thing done in the other direction. There was the levitation of the lights all around; he had been unconscious part of the way, didn’t know what he was doing, a nervous type with signs of tuberculosis that should never have been sent into the front line anyway. It was not treachery; they were dead for sure by now, and he would have been; for nothing. Let him sleep, only let him sleep, only to lay his head on no matter what, log, mud, chair, stone, stump, rut, and sleep for a night and day. Their faces were white in dream; the lights burst and flamed. Michael pressed his hands into his head.
Silence fell again. The candle-flame wavered and grease dropped to the piano-top, where it ran to the edge and formed two small white stalactites. Outside the water rushed from the guttering and spurted upon the sodden earth. Two running past the door splashing. The wind sighed and the door creaked. Did the handle turn? Surely the door moved? No. His eyes moved from the door to the window; he suspiciously watched the wine-stains which had somehow come on the wallpaper near the table—the shape altered just as his eyes reached them. No, it moved no more. Something in the room continually whisked out of sight. His eyes darted from wall to chair; he paused where the palms dangled over the divan, in the alcove. His fearful regard rushed over cornices and mouldings, over carpet, polished floor, waxed piano tail, to the corners where the feeble shadows moved up and down; then back to the handle of the outer door. His eyes narrowed and he watched the handle for at least a minute, but certainly it did not move while he watched it.
He rushed to the door and flung it open; only the black night confronted him and the damp air blew in. The moon must have been shining, for lighter patches appeared in the sky, showing up the summits of gigantic rain-clouds swiftly advancing from the south, bringing another blast of rain. He shut the door again and the windows rattled. He must pull himself together. He was going crazy, definitely batty. Why shouldn’t he go batty indeed at last? No one had ever thought him too sound. Besides, he had had too much trouble, born unfortunate, lived queer.
“An ordinary life,” he said aloud, “is like that crack in the floor, mine is like this,” and he wavered up the crack, sometimes treading on it, sometimes wide of it.
“I am a yelled, that is yelled, yellow—what? Why?” It had been the forlornest chance and what the devil; but why couldn’t he tell even Kol Blount that he had run away? It was so reasonable. Why did he have to have a blind spot? It was Kol’s fault, he knew no more than an old woman, he understood nothing, ranting there in his chair about moonshine. He sat down on the piano-stool. The handle moved. No, the wind blew—then again, Marion lying naked, laughing in a wide, white bed, with a flowered quilt, in the house in Golder’s Green; Marion even weeping because he had not taken her out to dinner. He smiled a little—Marion, the heroine of so many adventures, whom every man looked after, had wept for him. And for that he had run away, no doubt. No one knows where life is leading us.
But then how he had agonised after her these three last years, playing the fool for everyone to see, latterly insulting Catherine who was so visibly hurt. Oh, heaven help me, he said, my head is bursting this time, and in fourteen layers already like a Russian doll. Listen to the footsteps outside and the shouting. Why shouting? There was none; there was no battle here, nothing, that was a dream. Lord, the pain he had suffered; it seemed to be going down now a bit. And for nothing. Nobody makes bread out of blood, red bread—red bread, what is that? The poor in Europe eat black bread. Barker and the ten others would make flour lying in the fields, wheat with the rust, undoubtedly, and tassels high in the wind above the head of the dead; and the dead sleep well. The skulls of the dead are cracked by the roots of wheat; they are emptied out—pollen-dust, golden. Now, was Fulke in the next room, entered softly? You could never tell with that secretive, blond creature, what he knew. His eye was on him—good reason, good reason.
Michael still stood in the centre of the open space swaying. How did he get there again? Presently he sat down in the armchair and ran his fingers through the thick plush. The rain came again; it stopped, and presently two or three voices began outside, lowered. Michael took no note of this, his glance fixed on the reflection of a candle in the polished wood. He was really asleep.
He awakened and found the candles burnt out, the room dark. He took the photograph of Marion to the divan, covered himself with the cushions, and fell asleep with the photograph in his arms.
On Tuesday morning he borrowed some money from Winterbaum at the International Worker and went dawdling about with Lancyman, a leading reporter on the Guardian, friend of Fulke’s. He fought the British in Ireland during the civil war, and went to gaol for it; he fought New York cops in Socialist demonstrations, but was now a retired war-horse who liked to jingle the bit from time to time. A droll lot of stories Lancyman had to tell. He travelled all over the world, and wherever he was, in Rio de Janeiro, in New York, Paris, Shanghai, London, he found a mare’s-nest of dissolute Australians who lived by journalism, stock promotion, defrauding of dowagers, confidence tricks, marrying of landladies, cadging of drinks and general cheap exploitation on the basis of their easy-going and taking manners. Lancyman got to know these fellows for amusement, sometimes lent them money. I prefer a confidence man to a bobby, was his last word. Withers clung to Lancyman with delight, hanging on every word that came from his lips, and would have been only too happy to meet this down-at-heel Australian international, which perhaps only existed in Lancyman’s imagination.
Michael laughed all the morning. As Lancyman paid for his drinks, Michael still had some money. He went out to the Rosebery ponies, put his money on every alternate race. He won in the first race on a horse called Trickster, and successively put his money on The Card, Lucky Streak, Artful Dodger, Jerrybuilt and Tinsel, winning on four, and coming out with £15; a chap who had all the racing sheets and several tipsters’ envelopes hung on him enviously to cadge the fare home and a drink at least. “What’s your system?” he kept on asking, and after he had had a drink got quarrelsome and pugilistic. Michael slipped out by a side door and left him in the pub, which was considered a dirty trick by all there assembled. The bus he took landed him near Elizabeth Street. He went past the Mint and the back of Sydney Hospital, and looked with affection at the morgue with its gloomy motto, and trailed past with melancholy delight the houses in Raymond Terrace. He came down through the Domain to the harbour, mud-coloured at present with the constant wind and tide running in. A coastal collier was putting out. Some young boys leaned over the side pointing out bits of familiar landscape—perhaps harbour lads running away for a bit of sea experience as they often did. He went down through the ’Loo (Woolloomooloo) among the homing crowds with their galoshes, umbrellas, and spoiled hats, and up into Paddington, past the small provision shops and public-houses now getting rid of their customers at closing time. Old women without underclothes sat on the gutters, thin children played with cats and dogs, all skinny and covered with sores, and boys with their scooters and homemade wagons tore along the grey slimy pavements, while some of their mates, little lads with bright eyes and matted yellow hair, hopped on crowded trams selling the evening papers. Opposite him were three terrace houses with twelve-foot frontages. They were built about 1850 by a builder whose affection for the old country had induced him to reproduce on a new free soil the worst slums of Camden Town. They were numbered 10a, 10b, 10c, 10d. Each front had one dark door and one curtained window. Mingily, dingily, the little houses looked on the squalling street. The dull face of 10b became agitated, the black door flung open, a middle-aged woman dressed in bits of skirts shot through the door and the little iron gate, and finding herself on her own property, the public street, stood shouting insults in a rum-ruined voice to her unseen enemy. After a few minutes she began to totter up the street in the direction of the public-house. T
he children gathered round, jeering. A black-dressed woman appeared in the door of 10b, and answered the insults with practised replies. She banged the door. The insulted rushed back with a dodging stride to cry, “Thief . . . I’ll get the policeman.” After a minute the dingy curtain fluttered, the window opened, and a couple of small bundles shot out, hit the pavement with a clatter and crash. Bits of china lay over the pavement and some silver and cutlery spilled into the gutter. The children stood round, delighted. The outcast picked up her property, crying drunkenly over the broken cups and teapot, “I’ll get you, you . . .” and so forth. The window shot up again and the black-dressed woman shouted to the assembled street, “She made up to my husband; she slept with my husband, the dirty street-walker; she ain’t got no man and she tried to steal mine. I’ll throw her into the street too and beat her into pieces.” The window went down, and the dull face of 10b became quiet as a stone again. The inhabitants of an old two-storey house and the workers pouring out of a factory near by, assembled. A woman put out of the public-house, tired of insulting the publican, zigzagged over the street, her skirts hitched up at one side to her waist, her drawers, grey with age, dropping below her knees, her stockings about her ankles. The children were hilarious; no pantomime approached this spectacle. “Come along,” shouted the second and took the arm of the dispossessed one. They quarrelled about the degree of their intimacy and relative position on the social scale. The watchers in the two-storey house applauded. A man with a cap, silk scarf and brightly-striped suit, baggy at the knees, came past, laughing at his success with the girl hanging on his arm. Her front teeth were out and the roots seemed blackened; there were lines radiating from her mouth in all directions. She was dressed with a certain amount of coquetry, had no rouge, a neat waist and new shoes. The watchers in the house shouted prompt, explicit and offensive advice to the two. The man planted his girl at the corner of the street and retired to a distance to watch her game; he spent his time chalking designs and legends on the cement wall of the factory. The woman with the dropping drawers left her dispute and sidled up to him.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 28