Gradually the poor self-persecuted man must have come to see his own family failing as he himself had failed, and this he could attribute only to the contamination spreading from the poisoned source. His eldest child had been able to do no better for herself than marriage to a maimed country bumpkin, one of the soldier-pets they had had to support for years … his eldest son had turned into a young larrikin who would end up in a cell at Pentridge or get the whole family smeared all over Beckett’s Budget … and he would have seen me, I am sure, as some sort of furtive spineless weakling with that same taint in me that would take me down the drain with all the rest of them …
Mother seemed to come very slowly up the passageway to the hall, and my heart sank when she pushed through the heavy curtains. I realized there must have been a row before I got home; she looked pale and ill, and her eyes were swollen behind her glasses. Dad just made a sweeping contemptuous gesture at the Remington, which now looked huge and ugly and useless against the frayed, faded square of Axminster.
‘David, what have you got that for?’ Her question shivered a bit, on the verge of shrillness.
There was something in the way she spoke that unsettled me, and when I opened my mouth to explain no words would come. I could not understand how a quite ordinary thing like a secondhand typewriter could upset them both the way it seemed to, and I had a bewildered sense of being forced out beyond what I could explain into a wilderness of baffling terrors and prejudices which had nothing to do with me at all. Mother kept staring down at the typewriter with a blankness in her eyes, as if she was doing it only so that she would not have to look at Dad or at me, and she was quite still except for her hands which kept clenching and unclenching.
‘All right, get that infernal blasted contraption out of my sight!’ he ordered roughly. ‘Go on! Get rid of it!’ I began to make some sort of protest but he cut me short. ‘This minute, do you hear me. Get it right out of the house. I know what you’re damned well up to, so you get rid of it.’ There were thick veins, like pale worms, throbbing at his temples. I tried to explain, to protest, to plead with him, I even began to stammer out my confession about writing articles for the Morning Post, but his rage had turned almost icy and seemed to be directed at Mother rather than at me, at the source of contamination:
‘I told you this, didn’t I?’ he said to her. ‘I told you the sly young devil was scribbling all that muck in his room: hiding it away in his mattress! We sacrifice everything to see he gets an education. We try to bring him up properly. We work our fingers to the bone to make sure he learns a trade. But he has his own ideas, doesn’t he? He’s decided he’ll follow in the footsteps of his wonderful bloody namesake … that brilliant writer … his clever Uncle Davy! That waster of a brother of yours who’s drunk himself and his family into the poorhouse! He’s to become just like the rest of that damned, worthless, rotten, stuck-up family of yours …’ He was almost beside himself now, ranting and cursing and spattering spittle everywhere, and Mother was backed into a corner of the hall, sobbing, and God knows what else he said because I was caught in a dark whirlwind of hopeless bewildered misery, but I do remember him shaking me furiously and shouting, ‘Get that infernal bloody contraption out of this house, this minute, you, and either come back without it or don’t come back at all!’
And then I was outside in the street beyond the wire fence and the privet hedge, with the huge Remington in my arms and the rain beating down upon my tears.
It must have been about half past nine by the time I got to Sam Burlington’s studio in Spring Street, above the doctors’ surgeries, and I don’t really know why I went there, except that I couldn’t think of any other place to go.
I had to ring the door-bell four or five times, but I knew he was home, for I could hear the subdued sound of voices and Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ playing softly on a phonograph. When he finally did come his sandy hair was stuck out in sharp funny spikes against the dim light in the passageway and all the orange-and-black décor, and his shirt was unbuttoned.
It must have given him a shock to see me standing there on the porch landing with the big typewriter all glistening with rainwater, and my hair plastered down over my forehead, because I was soaked to the skin by this time, and he must have known I had been weeping, from exhaustion as much as from misery, but he didn’t really show much surprise. He looked more pleased than anything, really, but then he was always happiest when things occurred outside a range of expectation. He tried to make a joke of it at first.
‘Well, well, well, so our distinguished young confrère Meredith has gone into commercial travelling,’ he said. ‘Alas, dear Meredith, I have inherited a Corona portable from a deceased great-aunt of mine. So I am not in the market for this excellent linotype machine you offer in your palsied hands. Now, had you been peddling illegal narcotics, good drummer, or autographed photographs of Clara Bow, or —’ But he broke off at that, seeing the expression on my face, and he was silent for a moment, watching me, and then he stepped back from the door and said, quite casually, ‘Come on in and tell me the news.’
There was a girl in the studio sitting on the edge of the sofa, a pretty blonde whom I remembered seeing once or twice in the Antique Class. Her hair was loose and she was fastening the buttons of her blouse.
7
Sam Burlington put me up that night on the sofa in his studio. The sofa had a smell of Evening in Paris, and a disturbing musky scent I didn’t recognize at that time.
The blonde girl went away soon after I arrived. She and Sam talked together for a while in the passageway in low voices, with a lot of smothered giggling on her part, and I heard her say, ‘But it’s high time I went home anyway, after the way you’ve been carrying on, you devil.’
Sam came back into the room and went over to where I had put the typewriter on the table where he kept his art books and folios and old copies of The Studio and The Lone Hand. A puddle of water had dropped on to the table and he wiped it off with the sleeve of his shirt. The sheet of note-paper was still in the carriage, by this time all rain-blotched and cockled, and Sam bent over to work out what the man with the attaché-case had typed, and then let out a short snorting laugh and with his own two fingers awkwardly typed out The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, then S. J. Burlington … Sam, Sam, pick up thy musket, but at that point the keys went through the soggy paper and it ripped off the carriage in wads of pulp.
‘Better get some oil into this thing or it’ll rust up inside,’ Sam said, and then he turned to me and straddled a chair and said, ‘Well, what is it all about?’
So I told him what had happened. Not only at home, but everything that had led up to it. Exhaustion had collapsed the last of my defences; it was like the drawing of a bung from a charged barrel; the contents, so long sealed up, poured out in a flow that couldn’t be checked. He listened intently. He never questioned or interrupted. I don’t think his eyes ever left my face. I can still see him, sitting there in his unbuttoned shirt watching me, his arms across the back of the chair, his little soft chin mounted on the back of his wrist.
Sam Burlington was shorter than I and built rather slight, and his very immobility came as a surprise, because there was always a perkiness and a quickness of movement about him that gave him a kind of skittery, bird-like quality. He was not really attractive at first sight because his skin was sallow, almost pasty, and he had somewhat protuberant honey-coloured eyes – the sort of eyes my mother would always define as ‘goitrous’ – and his sharply pinched nose and recessive chin, together with the way his nondescript feather-coloured hair would never stay down but fly into spiky little crests, enhanced the avian look he had. The odd thing was that after you had been with him a minute or two you quite forgot what he looked like and he became personable and charming.
Gradually, as I talked, I began to feel less unhappy. I could see that the story gave him pleasure. His eyes would glitter with satisfaction as I recounted each of my defections, gleam with an impish and whimsical
delight at the absurdities of the Garthsnaid, my theft of the Steiner paintings, the pieces in the Morning Post, my history of the wool clippers. I don’t think he was at all interested in my ambitions, but he relished the unorthodoxies of the situation.
‘So, not to make a pun of it, you have cut the painter, young Meredith,’ he said when I had finished. ‘And you are now adrift in the great big world … a useful analogy this, old boy, since you appear to have seen your destiny in watery things. Coal-hulks and clipper-ships and hoary old shellbacks, eh?’ He rubbed his hands together delightedly. ‘ “Stunsail” I like, I honestly do,’ he said with his sudden explosive honk of laughter. ‘I think I shall have to call you Stunsail, it somehow suits the bold absurdity of your cause!’ (Sam Burlington adored talking; he handled words with the comic skill of a vaudeville juggler tossing Indian clubs; he loved to play with puns and flowery phrases and ludicrous images; he had that overflowing confidence in words, in verbal sleight-of-hand, which, a few years later, would have been a rich asset had he wanted to be a radio commentator, instead of sinking himself in seclusion and growing roses, the way it finally worked out.)
His face suddenly was serious, his forefinger lifted in admonition, his voice grew stern. ‘Stunsail,’ he said, ‘stay away from home!’
‘Well, yes, that’s all right, but … but where can —?’
He stopped me with a grand gesture. ‘To-night you will rest your caravan here,’ he said. ‘Your infernal machine, in fact, you may lodge here indefinitely. I may practise on it myself. You can come here to write your epics and in emergencies you can present yourself for beggarly hand-outs. On wet nights or when you feel defeated I dare say we can always find a gunyah for you in some odd corner. You will, naturally, sometimes have to avert your eyes from our scenes of licence and depravity: otherwise, Stunsail old cock, you will test your abilities now on the great big world. You will sleep on park benches, pass out in doss-houses, be ritually arrested on vagrancy charges. I shall arrange meetings for you with accommodating harlots who are both cheap and clean. I shall show you a place for down-and-outs in Russell Street where you will be able to get sausage-and-mashed, roll and butter, and two mugs of foul but hot coffee for fourpence-halfpenny. For a mere fourpence-halfpenny, my dear Stunsail, for a handful of coppers, you can stay alive and round Cape Horn with a muse of fire! Do you not find this challenging and marvellous? The world will be your oyster – likewise a creature of the salty deeps. Stunsail, your great chance has come!’ He flung his arms wide. His laughter snorted. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you get those bloody wet things off and go and have a shower, and I’ll make you up a shake-down on the sofa.’
This happened early in the Australian autumn of 1928, and I did stay away from home almost until winter settled in. My brother Jack found me two days after I had left home. It was at night, and I was alone in Sam Burlington’s studio when he came.
‘So I tracked you down, eh?’ he said, without any other greeting, and pushed past me into the passageway, his shoulders forward a little and his mouth set aggressively. Sam had gone out half an hour earlier on a sudden impulse to round up friends for a party, and since my role in the impending function had not been made by any means clear, I was even more dubious about what he would think of somebody like Jack calling there, because Jack stank of brilliantine and he was wearing his widest Oxford bags. (Sam was careless but conservative in his dress. Clothes were one of the things he was never excessive about, and he detested the art students who wore floppy black bows and beards and their hair long, and his own hair was always clippered ‘short back and sides’ the way the Richmond and Collingwood footballers wore theirs.)
‘You on your own here?’ Jack asked curtly.
‘Yes,’ I said, and closed the door. ‘Well I am for the moment. Sam’s gone out to bring some friends back.’
He had gone ahead of me down the passageway, walking a little stiffly and with a kind of studied swagger that told me he had an unsure feeling about his surroundings, but he had balked at the studio door.
‘You better go in,’ I said awkwardly.
‘I dropped in to that Art School place,’ he said, talking ahead of himself and not looking back at me at all, ‘and there was some peroxided sheila told me where you were.’ He went into the studio with his hands in his pockets. ‘I reckoned that was where I might find you,’ he said. ‘You weren’t among those present, eh?’
‘Well, no … I stayed here to-night. There was an article I wanted to write.’
He glanced across at the big typewriter, and my unfinished article on the Hobart Town whalers, and nodded disapprovingly. Already the room was heavy with the smell of his brilliantine. I was suddenly shocked to think of Jack going to the Gallery School, and asking questions.
‘You been going to Klebendorf’s?’ he said.
‘To work? Of course. I was there yesterday and to-day.’
‘I would’ve looked you up down there, but I didn’t know what the lurk was, see, and I didn’t want to put you in. Do they know?’
‘No.’
‘Well, that’s all right.’ He was looking at me now. ‘Mum wanted to get the police when you didn’t come home,’ he said.
I just stared at him, waiting.
‘Yeah. She and Pop were at each other hammer and tongs half the bloomin’ night. Pop didn’t want to have a bar of the rozzers and started to shout the flaming place down, so I thought I’d better come out and try to find you.’ He was nosing round the studio now, picking things up and putting them down in distaste, and making it very clear that he strongly disapproved of the place where he had found me. ‘Listen, what sort of a frigging joint is this you’ve got yourself into?’ he asked.
Looking back, I can see Sam Burlington’s studio quite clearly, but now it is difficult to set it in its time, and quite impossible to visualize it as Jack must have seen it. The predominating colour scheme was orange and black – ‘tango style’ it was called and it was all the rage then in Melbourne – and there were a good many fringed ‘Spanish’ shawls tossed about and parchment lampshades which Sam had decorated either in flat geometrical shapes or in the swirly, elongated, prancing and pirouetting nudes of art nouveau, and there were the books that everybody then was making such a fuss about – The Green Hat and Private Lives of Helen of Troy and The Sun Also Rises – and lots of prints pinned up on the walls – some Picasso reproductions and Modigliani’s illegal ‘Red Nude’ (you could always be perfectly certain that Sam would have anything that had been banned by the Customs Department), and a Conder fan and a whole collection of the naughtier Norman Lindsay prints and some Aubrey Beardsley illustrations torn from old copies of the Yellow Book. On an easel in the corner was a large stretched canvas of a not-quite-finished but extremely frank female nude which Sam was working on. There were also some bronze incense-burners and pink jade horses and a New Guinea totem drum which Sam, for a joke, had stolen one night from the museum’s ethnological collection and had never been able to smuggle back and a Mexican straw hat.
Jack just walked around among all this, looking and poking at things and grunting and hating it all. Suddenly he whipped round at me and said, ‘Listen, is the codger who owns this place another of your bloomin’ tonk friends or what?’
‘Sam? Oh, don’t be idiotic, Jack. He’s very nice.’
‘I didn’t ask whether he was very nice. I asked if he was a poofter.’
‘Listen, Sam’s my friend. He’s at the Gallery with me. He’s —’
‘Yeah!’ He pulled a face. ‘I met some of them coves at the Gallery to-night. Bloody bunch o’ stuck-up bastards if ever I’ve seen ’em, with those effing ties they wear, and some of ’em with their hair longer than the girls’!’
He was glowering now at Sam’s canvas in the corner.
‘Who did this thing?’ he wanted to know.
‘Sam,’ I said.
‘Cripes! It don’t leave much to the imagination, does it?’
‘Oh, stop this stupid business, Jack
,’ I said impatiently. I was growing more and more aghast at the thought that Sam would return and find him there. ‘It’s Sam’s place, and this is the way he likes it. It’s nothing to do with you. Why don’t you sit down for a minute and tell me what I should do and what Mum and Dad have been saying?’
‘What you should do?’ He turned away from the easel and examined me. ‘Well, I’d better see this mate of yours first, hadn’t I?’
That made me chew on my lip. ‘Well … yes,’ I said evasively. ‘He shouldn’t be much longer, I suppose. Or, if you like, we could go down the street to a café and talk about it there.’ I suggested this eagerly, hoping he would agree. But it just added to his truculence.
‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘I’m going to see this mate of yours, don’t make any mistake about that. That’s one of the reasons I came up here.’ He turned away to resume his examination, and said, ‘Have you moved in with him here?’
‘Yes … no … well, I don’t know. He let me stay here last night and the night before … just while I’m working things out.’
He nodded without any pleasure or approval and said, ‘Wonder it hasn’t given you the willies! You know, the way he lives I reckon he must be a poofter of some sort.’ He spoke with undisguised disgust. ‘Just take a dekko yourself. This looks like a tart’s place! Smells like one too!’ He made a business of holding his nose, although by this time the reek of his own brilliantine had conquered every other smell in the studio, even the pungency of Sam’s oils and turps. ‘And what’s he do with all the slinky shawls, and that Rudolph Valentino muck over there? And those dirty pictures on the wall?’ He moved over to the end door and poked his head into the little bedroom and recoiled and said, ‘Struth! Stinks like a mick church!’
My Brother Jack Page 12