“Want a good time, dearie?”
The crowd went into shrieks of laughter. She came over to Michael.
“Are you flush, dearie? I’ve got a nice room.”
Michael, who had been staring enchanted at the scene, smiled at her hideous face and forked out a pound-note.
“That’s to keep away from your room; buy yourself some new drawers.”
The crowd applauded him and started to follow him down the street, when the arrival of 10b’s husband retained them, 10b’s husband, a tall, rubicund workman, looked scared to see the people round his house, said, “What’s the matter? Anything up? An accident?” Many voices informed him. Michael hurried away. What to do all this blamed long wet summer night? He was sick of the gang, the Folliots out of town, the boys in the press all boring, he was too tired to go out on the spree with Withers. On the walls someone with a firm hand had written, “Down with the Masons,” “Damn the Jesuits,” “Expel the Jews”. The public-houses were breeding drunken humanity as fast as lice. The sun went down behind torn clouds, the sullen short evening preceded night for a few minutes over the city. The names of the winners of the day’s races were scratched on the walls by happy gamblers, remnants of tipsters’ envelopes lay on the pavement, men greeted each other with the time honoured “’Oo won?” He was lonely. The city was at tea; smells of sausages, stews and cabbage were everywhere. He went down to the “Tank Stream Press”, but Withers was gone. Only Baruch and Joseph remained, heating bovril, and eating sandwiches on the lavatory bench.
“Hallo, Michael; you look down in the mouth, what’s the trouble? Come along o’ us to-night? Professor Muller, the gentleman Democrat, is lecturing again. He looks up at the demonstration room with a slightly fearful look as the most courageous David might look at Goliath. At any rate, this is his first stone against the Goliath of proletarian ignorance. Since the soap and steel companies and technical colleges turned out first-class engineers and chemists, the University must climb off its green horse and blow its trumpet where the masses can hear; the old golden Laputan mysteries don’t work. The subject, you know, ‘Light, or My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky’. Mr Words-Allworthy would have been destroyed by a few lectures on light—he would have deserted the over-chlorophylled lakes for the dry light of reason, perhaps. Come along, Michael, there’s nothing so soothing to a brain-storm as a contemplation of order in the universe. What if the old firms of N. &T. (Nineveh and Tyre), S. & G., Troy & Babylon, and so on, have bit the dust, the ninety-two elements have always been there. A pity we didn’t spend more time on them before. Hannibal could have crossed the Alps by express train. More dry-eyed speculations and fewer thunders of tears in the style of Messrs Root and High-Cockalorum (of course you know them, Racine and Corneille), would have advanced us a few millenniums. We would have missed a few fine examples of delirium tremens, paranoia, and schizophrenia, and Freud would have been on the bread-line from the start, but we would have had more ox-eyed Alices, sleep-bearing Hebes, prolific Joves, literature would have gained. I remember my old Professor Muffanduff, formerly of Ekaterinaslav, now of Oregon, Oregon, used to say that Helmholtz was the night-light of infant mankind. Here, a sandwich—the bovril is ready.”
“No thanks; I’m not hungry.”
“Been boozing?” inquired Baruch sympathetically but perfunctorily, because he knew it. “Yes, you’re hungry, yes, you are, you’ve got a soulful look and you’re almost on the point of committing suicide, aren’t you?”
“I can eat if I want it,” said Michael. “I won fifteen pounds at the races.”
“Beware of spring,” admonished Baruch. “More suicides are committed then than at any other time, and also at the various festival days and commemoration days. On those days the appeal of light is small; it seems to show too plainly certain motes in our brothers’ eyes, or holes in our own ramshackle spiritual tenements; girls look like perambulating Astartes; boys look like fish-eyed egotists. Why is it? We can stand the first blow of winter, the coalman throwing coke down the chute, for it means so many months of chilblains, so many colds, so many dozen handkerchiefs covered with snot, so many blue-fingered mornings getting up at six, cursing at the family and running for the boat with a red nose. But, you think, all will soon change, it will be spring, something good will come in spring, a rise in pay, a nice girl, someone to love you, someone to notice your remarkable, ingrown talents. But in spring, no chance more for a twelvemonth; then it is too plain that things are going on as before. Yet around you are chaps with new girls lovely and fluffy, or jolly and loving, or little and easy to deceive; there are chaps with scholarships going to new schools or abroad, boats going out to foreign countries just awaking in the outlandish way they have, with their trees all bare sticks and all that; there are houses with new coats of paint and spring handicaps. I know what’s in your mind, Michael, cheer up. We can’t lose you yet; we can’t do without our spiritual comforter.”
“Comforter?” asked Michael, smiling.
“Surely, comforter. You’re the cement of all of us, the only chap whose complete life-history is not told. Without you Kol Blount’s barnyard would have no charm, no shadow, no mystery; you’re the poet of life to us.”
“Oh,” said Michael coldly, with a far-away look, as if calculating something like the price of soling his boots. “What’s concealed probably isn’t worth telling.”
“Don’t say that,” urged Baruch, “an insignificant thing may fill a man with passion. Lives wind their way out by curious bypaths. You may have noticed, official drama is so fearfully unsatisfactory because of its big gross themes. Everyone knows it doesn’t represent their own feelings at all. There would be a row if real situations were reproduced; it would undermine the State. The State is built on grotesque comic-opera conventions which no one dares mock at.”
“Yes, too right, it is,” agreed Michael, energetically. “I know something about that.”
“Well, are you coming this evening?” asked Baruch. Joseph blinked and looked at Michael with a dull face to discourage him. He was pleased to go with Baruch alone.
“Come on,” said Baruch.
“No, thanks,” said Michael, frowning; “I see I’m not wanted. I’m going to blow in my smackers.”
“You’re wanted, but don’t come if you don’t want to. At the same time, you’d like it. Jo did.”
“No, I—I have to go to a friend’s house. I remembered just now—it’s a birthday party, or engagement party or something. Is there still time for me to buy something? It might not be bad—they generally have claret cup, champagne, lobster, the hostess is free and easy and a good sport. Yes, I’d better go there.”
“Good, good,” exclaimed Baruch. “Yes, you’d better go there, go and amuse yourself; one makes aphorisms on death at a feast, truisms at a funeral; it’s the aphorism that helps the cat to swim, the truism is the stone that knocks it under. Oftener we change the more constant we become; the more we reflect other people, the clearer our personality emerges. Do you want any more in the same line of goods? I am the old wives’ dictionary unabridged and revised. Go and act the fool.”
“It’s known to be my habit, isn’t it?”
“Of course, you really are a fool, Michael. I always say, I’m glad to know you. I know I’ve touched rock-bottom. I can measure humanity upwards starting from you. You know that.”
“You found me pretty low, eh?” said Michael, smiling ingenuously.
“Absolutely; with you, Michael, the world would be a pit of shifting shadows to me, but on you I plant my ladder and mount to the light. At the top I find—”
“What?”
“Other creatures just like you; it’s very strange. But then we’re in the antipodes.”
“Then I’m top and bottom and tropics too. It sounds so familiar. I’ll tell you a funny thing about myself, Baruch.”
“Yes.”
“I never thought of a joke in my life that went off. Yes, I think of wonderful jokes and la
ugh at them myself, but when I tell them, everyone stares at me anxiously or lugubriously. I go home and repeat what I have said to myself; it sounds perfectly good, and then I repeat the things other chaps palm off, and they don’t sound half as good. That makes me simply despair. It means there is something else, a sort of animal success which I haven’t and can’t get. Another thing, when anyone twits me or insults me, I can’t stand it; I want to cry or kill them, or commit suicide. Even if I answer back it does no good. I go on thinking over the insult for weeks and crying inwardly. It kills me, this wounding and this hatred, it stirs up in me. But other people are not like that. They give back as good as they get, and everyone is happy. People like to quarrel—they only insult to stir up a little fun. But to me, it’s like murder. And all the time I feel foggy.”
Baruch was silent: Joseph stirred uneasily. Baruch said finally:
“You must have suffered to feel like that, that is the reason for your fogginess. You ought to get a steady situation of some sort, get married and get a job. Get a loving wife, to begin with.”
“Wonderfully original idea,” said Michael discontentedly. “Well, I think I’ll take myself off after making myself undesirable. Perhaps I’ll meet my fate at the party.”
“Hey, come on, it’s late,” cried Baruch, getting off his stool. They grabbed their hats and rushed off. Michael followed them deliberately downstairs.
He walked out towards Double Bay. His friends lived there, on the heights. A white-lined cloud, flushed with the afterglow, now appeared large and rapidly driven in the south under the covered sky. A damp wind arose, puffing strongly. The clouds turned black and drove towards the zenith, the harbour seen from the heights of Paddington banded red, purple and grey, grew dark. The night sky still shone with a few stars in the north. The ships creaked and swung at their anchorages. Winches squeaked and chains rattled as they were anchored fore and aft to withstand the coming storm. With quiet long strides up and down the hills of Darlinghurst, Elizabeth Bay and Double Bay, Michael went, smelling fresh gardens, looking at the little households behind lace curtains under silk lamps. Trams rattled past and soft-running cars; lovers were in both going out towards the Gap, Rose Bay. Sometimes he passed the red spark of a motor-car halted in a side road, with its blinds drawn. “Yes, spring is dangerous,” he said. Presently a wide dark stretch lay on his left hand, and brilliant tennis-courts lighted by swaying arc-lamps arose on the right. The dark patch was the Rose Bay golf-links; his friends lived just above them. A car passed him, with boys and girls singing “There’s none so classy as that young lassie”, and stopped several doors away at his friends’ house. They rushed up the steps, shouting “Coo-ee”, and the hostess appeared.
“It was so lovely of you to come. Ellen’s waiting to see you.” He saw through the open window Nancy, the minister’s daughter; Victorine, who was marrying the son of the house; Pam, a little flirt who had just announced her engagement to the minister’s son. Someone tipped him on the shoulder, and he looked round to see two boys and a girl with shallow laughing eyes and long lashes.
“Michael, if it isn’t you! Can’t you scrape up the courage to come in? Or are you going to throw a bomb?” She explained to her two cavaliers:
“Michael’s awful, he really does throw bombs. He’s a Communist.”
The boys looked at him suspiciously, and all three left him standing there. In the side-passage the garage door was softly opened and closed. From the piano inside came the song, blown out brilliant on the gusty wind, “I said goo’bye, but I didn’t mean goo’bye.”
Michael laughed and moved away. “Ellen! Engaged now: used to be ten years old with mousy hair.”
A smothered laugh came from the garage.
“I’ll shove off,” said Michael.
On a vacant lot near, two figures hastened into the deep blackness under the paling fence to avoid him. He went on, remembering that a poltergeist was bothering a family round about and had placed bloody hand-marks on new-plastered walls in vacant dwellings. A few streets away a policeman stopped him and asked him questions, under a lamp. Before he went away, he asked the bobby:
“Who’re you looking for?”
“That feller who raped a coupla girls here the last few weeks.”
He went on. On one side were the dunes, on the other the links, on both sides the waste of water. He stood between two heights. The sand blew into his eyes. The black sea and black harbour seemed to threaten the neck of land; he could hear the long surge over the sandhills.
A young fellow standing near a street lamp came into its light, while approaching Michael modestly. His small hands were manicured, his fine wrists and delicate neck were blackish as with coaldust, but his hairless face, with oval cheeks, was pink and powdered. His eyes, large and timid, looked appealingly at Michael. Michael brushed rudely past him. The boy retreated to the fence once more to wait. Michael heard steps, the boy coming after him, he thought, and he looked back—only a tram conductor going home from the depot.
Going up Rose Bay hill by the side of a well-planted estate that looks over the harbour, he passed an old man, carrying vainly a beard, long, silver-grey and well combed. His aspect was mild but troubled. His hands were clasped over a silver-headed stick. He walked rapidly like a man who has been busy all his life. His long, sensuous, finely-modelled mouth worked, as if he muttered or were nervous. His round back bobbed fast down the hill. The old man hesitated as he passed Michael, lifted his dark glance, his two hands carrying the silver knob, and seemed about to speak. But it was such a slight gesture, that Michael could not be sure. A hundred yards farther on he passed a tough, in poor clothes, who also stooped as he walked, but as if to hide his bad face, repulsive concentrated eyes and thick jaw between his broad shoulders. He walked rapidly, steadily, with a broad soft foot, as if that were his habit also. Michael walked again a hundred yards, stopped, and looked uneasily back, but the young man and the old man had gone down the hill and round the corner.
He thought no more about it, but in the salt fierce wind he shivered. There were so few lights along the road at this point. He said, staring constantly ahead at the dark, “To the alien eye, odd sights.” A tram rattled past, bringing comfort with its commonplace passengers. Its light disappeared up the hill.
“I will go on and sleep in the Bay,” said Michael. He was tired, and sat down to rest on one of the seats provided along the tram-route. He thought:
“To-morrow I can get a regular job, perhaps, if Fulke is back, or Lancyman remembers his promise. But I’d rather take a boat to Samoa, Hong-Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Cochin-China. It’s lovely there in spring, the cosmopolitan crowds, the gutters like canals, the street-sellers, the little girls in tea-houses, the blue sky, the dogs, leprosy, tigers, temples. A man should be able to loaf at my age; it’s too late for him to make a career, he’s settled for life, if he’s a bad ’un, he is, so there’s nothing to do about it; should be pensioned to loaf.”
He looked down at Fisherman’s Bay in the distance. A liner, in evening dress, with all her rows of lights, made towards the Heads; the pilot-ship ran before her and waited for the pilot just outside the Heads. The harbour, freed from the strike, lived again; the liners prepared to leave. A ferry visited the near wharves and rolled in the swell; her long rows of lights rolling, scurried towards the Bay.
“It’s the eleven-thirty,” said Michael. “I suppose Joseph is aboard, coming back from his lecture.”
Two girls, walking home from the pictures, came towards him, discussing with ecstasy the attractions of a cinema star. They looked at Michael in a doubtful way when they came close to him and hurried their steps a little.
He took out about ten pounds in notes and small change. “Silly not to have given it away and so many people need it.” Near the lighthouse stood an old whitewashed stone house of two storeys, large and old-fashioned, like the one little Annie Pennergast lived in when he was a little boy. A light burned in a back window; he heard a baby crying. He looked
through the cracks of the paling fence. A dog barked. A woman, dark, thin, flushed, dressed only in a calico chemise, nursed a young baby. The room was painted in yellow kalsomine; on another bed lay a man and a child of about eight.
“Hey!” cried Michael. The dog barked furiously. The woman started and listened. “Missus,” cried Michael, “just a minute.” The woman strained towards the window and grew sallow.
“What is it, Annie?” said the man in a childish, sleepy voice.
“Shut the winder,” said the woman. “I thought I heard a voice.”
“You’re all nerves; it’s the wind.”
The woman put the baby down, rushed to the window, closed it and pulled the blind. The dog continued to bark. Michael went softly away. As he came out on the road, a man came up, started, and hurried his step.
“Pardon me,” said Michael.
“What do you want?” asked the man, at a distance.
“I want to give you some money,” said Michael. “I don’t want it.”
“You get out of this,” said the man; then relenting, “Go home and sleep it off, mate.” He turned round and quickly got out of sight. Michael sat down to wait. After a very long time during which the lighthouse ray swung over his head, turning and turning, a boy came along on a bicycle. He had no cap, but wore a noble pair of motor-goggles. His bike was shining with rain, his yellow oilskin shone under the lighthouse beam.
“Hey, feller!” called Michael.
“What do you want?” asked the boy fearfully, stopping.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 29