My Brother Jack

by Johnston, George

  The only thing of importance that happened concerned the Morning Post. They had two of my earlier articles, which they had accepted but had not yet published, and since anonymity had by this time lost its point I wrote to the magazine editor suggesting that the pseudonym of ‘Stunsail’ should be discarded in favour of my own name. The articles appeared on two successive Saturdays under the name of David Meredith. A week later Jack brought me a letter which had been delivered at home. It was from the newspaper, and signed by a Bernard Brewster, magazine editor. There was a subject, the letter said, which he would like to discuss with me and nine o’clock on a Wednesday night would be a good time if it suited my convenience.

  I presented myself at the inquiry-desk in the impressive marble lobby of the Morning Post building. A man wearing a green celluloid eye-shade telephoned my name, nodded, and directed me to the lift, and when I got out at the third floor a boy of about my own age was waiting to escort me to Mr Brewster’s office. We went down a long corridor smelling of linoleum-wax and ink and paper, broken by many doors of frosted glass. I could hear the faint, distant rumble of machines and the familiar chatter of linotypes. The smell of wet ink became more heady.

  The boy knocked on one of the doors of frosted glass, opened it, and motioned me to enter. I walked into a big room lined by books behind glass. A broad-shouldered fat man sat in his shirtsleeves behind a huge glass-topped desk littered with books and papers and proofs on spikes. He had a shock of white, silky hair and a ruddy face with heavy dew-laps folding into his several chins. He wore thin mauve braces.

  He looked up, frowned at me and the other boy, waved an impatient hand, and growled, ‘Later. Later, boy. Not now. I’m expecting a caller.’

  ‘This is Mr Meredith, sir,’ the boy said. ‘He has an appointment.’

  The fat man’s hand sank very slowly to the desk. He stared at me so fixedly, and for so long, that I could feel the hot blood colouring my face as ruddily as his. His neat chubby fingers stroked gently backwards and forwards along the edge of the blotter. I heard the boy go out and close the door behind me.

  ‘Are – you – Stunsail?’ he said at last, spacing each word carefully in a thick, growly voice.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I managed to get out. ‘Well … I … I’m David Meredith, sir.’ I tried to smile, and immediately wished I hadn’t. He bent his head and began to stare very intently at the edge of his desk. He had brought his hands up in front of his face, and his fingers were slowly stroking at his temples.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asked, without looking at me.

  ‘Sixteen, sir,’ I said.

  ‘Take that chair there,’ he said. ‘Sit down.’ He lowered his hands to his thighs and tilted his head back, and stared hard at something on the ceiling.

  ‘Largely because of an article you wrote for us,’ he said, addressing whatever it was he saw up there, ‘the Post has decided to organize a kind of annual race between these rather picturesque Bass Strait timber schooners and ketches which you dealt with in that – er – that piece of yours.’ He rubbed tiredly at his eyes. ‘We – er – we thought you might be able to help us. Preliminary articles and so on.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I mumbled nervously.

  He squirmed his fat body as if his underwear was pricking him. His head came down slowly, almost reluctantly, and he fixed me with a soft dazed gaze from eyes that were moistly brown. ‘It was our impression,’ he said mournfully, ‘that you were a retired sea captain. A sailing-ship man. An old shellback.’

  I felt there was nothing I could say to this. I felt guilty and uncomfortable. I reddened again under his dismal appraisal.

  ‘And you are’ – he cleared his throat carefully —‘you are sixteen, you say?’

  I nodded dumbly.

  ‘Fascinating!’ He said the word as if it were an obscenity. But it seemed to clear some cloudiness and despair from his mind, because he suddenly smiled at me, and his face immediately was amiable and friendly, but this was only for an instant for he folded his arms across the blotter and sank his head on them, and his shoulders began to shake, to shake more and more convulsively until his whole body was shuddering like a huge jelly, at first silently, and then with great choking gasps of laughter mixed up with racking fits of coughing. When he finally lifted his head his eyes were streaming and his cheeks were shining-wet and there was a damp patch on the blotter. It took him a minute or more to get his breath, and then he said, ‘Tell me, boy, why – why did you … call yourself …’ – and he seemed to choke trying to get it out – ‘Stunsail?’ he exploded.

  ‘I – I don’t know, sir,’ I said disconsolately.

  ‘Stunsail!’ he repeated in a tone of wondering amazement.

  In stricken silence I watched his face go redder, but although a spasm or two shook his body he was able to control himself and gradually the kindly expression settled back on his face.

  ‘Anyway, Meredith,’ he said in a tone that was suddenly brisk and pleasant, ‘you seem to know a great deal about ships and shipping. Even if you are not the Ancient Mariner I had envisaged, the old shellback! Not even a young shellback, eh? What do you do, boy? Are you still at school?’

  ‘No, sir. I work in a lithographic studio.’

  He gave me a long, searching look, as if he was convinced that I was lying. ‘How long have you been there?’ he asked.

  ‘Almost two years, sir.’

  ‘Like it?’

  ‘Well … it’s – it’s all right, sir.’

  Again he gave me that long careful scrutiny.

  ‘You write well, boy,’ he said. ‘For a youngster you write very well. I enjoy your pieces, even if you do have a weakness for splitting the infinitive. Have you ever considered journalism as a career? I mean as a full-time thing, not just as a contributor?’

  ‘Well, no … not really … I don’t —’

  ‘Think about it,’ he said crisply. ‘Clearly you have a bent for it. We could start you off here on the Post. On the shipping round would be your place, obviously. Sixteen, eh? Hmm, it is a little young, unless you began as a copy-boy. In the normal course our cadet-reporters are older. We like to take them from one of the public schools, or the University. Two years, you say? Good heavens, you started work at fourteen then? Fantastic! Tell me about it.’

  ‘I – I couldn’t come here to work, sir, because I’m apprenticed, you see,’ I told him, ‘and it’ll be another four years before I get out of my time.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He put his fingertips together and studied them thoughtfully. ‘Quite a long time. Your father, of course, could buy you out of your indentures. Would he want to do that, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t think he would, sir,’ I said, trying to imagine it. ‘He – he doesn’t approve of my writing.’

  ‘Really? How extraordinary.’ He put his thumbs behind his mauve braces and adjusted them more snugly across his shoulders. ‘Well, the matter can wait, there’s no urgency about it, since you are still only a boy. And if at some later stage you feel like working for us you can always get in touch with me. In the meantime just keep on with the articles. On the educational side, a public school education or a university degree are not strictly essential, however desirable. Legally we can only insist on the cadet having his Intermediate Certificate. You took your Intermediate, of course?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course, sir,’ I lied.

  ‘All right. You think about it. And now, Mr Stunsail Meredith, supposing we get down to our muttons and talk about this Bass Strait race of ours …’

  When Jack and I went through the gate into Fitzroy Gardens I knew that I was beaten. The southerly had dropped but the cold wet air it had swept in seemed to lie on the lawns and in the still puddles on the paths. The park benches, wet from the last shower, looked grimly cheerless: little pearly drops of rain were still running from the wood and falling to the soggy trampled mush of fallen leaves that smeared the asphalt with red and golden stains. The tall poplars lining the paths were almost bare, grey and scr
atchy against a colourless, washed-out sky, and the damp air had flattened the smoke from the smouldering mounds of autumn leaves so that all the distances of the park were concealed behind an opaque blue haze. The smells of wet earth, decaying vegetation, and pungent smoke combined towards a chilling sense of melancholy and finality. I knew with a sudden certainty that I would not spend one more night in Sam’s studio, nor one more night on a hard, cold bench.

  ‘Let’s go back the other way,’ I said to Jack. ‘I want to have a look at something up in King Street.’

  ‘What! That’s right over the other side of town!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Come on.’ When we were out of the park and into the street I said, ‘How’s the job with the baker?’

  ‘It’s a fair cow,’ he said. ‘Got to be at the bakehouse at four o’clock, two hours before the bloomin’ sun comes up. Got to clean the stables, wash down the van, load it up, harness up the laziest flamin’ mare you’ve ever seen, then run in an’ out of houses with a basket that weighs a bloomin’ ton until your legs nearly drop off. He’s such a mean stingy bastard he’ll only pay two carters an’ we don’t get through our rounds till four in the afternoon. Twelve hours a day, six days a week, he pays you four lousy quid, no overtime, and he docks your money if you pinch a yeast-bun!’

  We went to the shabby top end of King Street, where there was a whole block of sordid little shops which served as rural labour exchanges. The window of each shop was smeared over inside with streaky whitewash; the outside surface was covered with a peeling skin of glued-up squares of coarse wrapping paper on which was crudely scrawled the details of jobs available in the country districts – jobs for shearers and shearers’ cooks, for general farm-hands, for timber-cutters, fruit-pickers, wheatlumpers, drovers, boundary-riders, general rouseabouts, married couples, farm domestics, sleeper-cutters, mine workers, engine hands. Outside every shop a greasy paste-pot stood on a packing-case, and at intervals someone would come out from one shop or another and slap up another announcement, or sometimes to mark a big red cross on an earlier announcement to signify that the job had been filled.

  There were a good many seedy, shabby men all along the seedy, shabby block, propped against the telegraph poles and walls and doorways, morose individuals or apathetic groups that talked desultorily or rolled cigarettes or borrowed ‘the makings’. The impression they gave was of a kind of mass idleness, the way seamen look outside a shipping office or wharfies waiting for a pick-up, although these men all looked shabbier and there was something in their pinched, suspicious faces that seemed deliberately to exclude hope. There was a constant movement among them, not hurrying, a shuffling up and down the block to check on each deletion and there would always be one among them to offer some curt observation about the condition of the shearing-sheds at Yackandandah or the state of the roads around Mount Elephant or the way the fruit-pickers were treated at Shepparton. There was a kind of purpose in it, though, because every now and then one of them would see something to his liking, and he would slouch into one of the shops in a studiedly casual, off-hand way, and a few minutes later he would come out stuffing a paper into his pocket and he would walk off down King Street very quickly, and another cross would be marked across one of the still-damp sheets.

  They don’t hire rural labour that way any more, of course, because all the grubby little shops were swept away a couple of years later when the depression struck, and there were no spare jobs going up in the bush or anywhere else, but that was the way it was then.

  ‘What’s the bloomin’ big idea?’ said Jack. ‘What are we doin’ up here?’

  ‘I just thought it was time you looked around for another job,’ I said. ‘What you’re doing now doesn’t sound much. What about the bush?’

  ‘Eh?’ He glanced at me sharply.

  ‘I think it’s time you tried it in the bush. You can’t stand the job you’ve got, and you say you’re sick of living at home. Well? You see, Jack, I think it’s about my turn to hold the fort.’

  He thought about this while he rolled a cigarette.

  ‘You still want to go up the bush, don’t you?’

  ‘Wouldn’t mind,’ he said, and licked the cigarette paper. ‘Be a change from that flamin’ bakery round.’ He spat out the tobacco shreds and said, ‘What about you, though?’

  ‘I’ll be all right. I said I think it’s my turn.’

  He nodded. ‘You’d be all right at home now, you know. I keep on telling Mum you’re all right, and she still thinks you’re staying at the YMCA, but she misses you a bit, I think. And things are different now, you know. She thinks the sun shines out of you now they’re printing those things of yours in the paper. She’s always over the back fence skiting to Mrs Gillon or Mrs Hatrick about you. You’d think you were the bloomin’ editor the way she goes on.’

  ‘Yes, but what about Dad?’

  ‘Ah, he just wanted to know what you were doing with the money they pay you. I told him you were keeping a chorus girl from the Tivoli. He nearly had a blue fit! So I took pity on him and said you were saving up to buy a steam-yacht, and he damned near knocked my block off! Oh, I wouldn’t worry about the Old Man. Anyway, he’s building himself a new wireless, a great big six-valve superheterodyne thing, and most of the time he’s got his bowels in a tangle over that.’ He nudged me suddenly. ‘Look, there’s not a bad one.’ A hard-faced man with broken veins all over his nose had just finished pasting up a grey, glue-sodden sheet. Jack read it aloud: ‘Wimmera District. Wheat farm, two thousand acres, small mixed stock, unmechanized, six-team combine. Young, sober, industrious general rouseabout wanted. Separate quarters, Sundays off. Four-pounds-ten a week, all found. Twelve miles from Dimboola railway station. Second-class rail fare provided. Starts June first.’

  ‘You’ve always wanted to try the Wimmera, too,’ I said.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind givin’ it a go.’

  ‘And better money than you’re getting here.’

  ‘With keep chucked in. So I could still send Mum her money and have enough for smokes and a schooner or two and five bob each way on the nags of a Saturday. You know, I think I might give it a burl.’

  Neither of us was aware of it at the time, but that was an important ratchet in Jack’s destiny. It was that job in the Wimmera that closed the door upon his youth forever, that gave him the woman who was to become his wife, that eventually would move him into days of disaster.

  When he came out of the shop his face was one big grin. ‘Thanks, nipper,’ he said.

  ‘For what? It’s my turn, isn’t it?’

  When we got to Young and Jackson’s pub he insisted on taking me into the bar and bought a pot of beer for himself and a glass of sarsaparilla for me, and cracked jokes about the big nude painting of Chloe, and his happiness was so obvious that I began to feel good about what I had done; although up to that point an uneasy guiltiness had nagged at me because the whole thing had been done on a kind of false basis. I’d made him sign up for the Wimmera job only so that I would have an excuse for going home. Not because I wanted to accept responsibility at home or do Jack a good turn, but only because I could no longer face a continuance of discomfort and inconvenience and cold and loneliness. June the first interested me far less because of its being the day when Jack would begin working on a farm than for another reason; it was also when a Melbourne winter would begin.

  Jack wanted to go on drinking so I left him in the bar and I picked up a Yellow Cab and went up to Sam Burlington’s studio and got my typewriter.

  8

  The months that immediately followed Jack’s departure have run together in a peculiar way; they have the dimension of experience but not of time; what remains is a sort of luminous, enduring calm unrelated to days or weeks or the markings on a calendar. I am reminded of a long summer afternoon that Cressida and I shared on the grass beneath the elms at Bray, not far from the lych-gate of the church, from where we could still hear the soft slow dip and splash of punt-poles along the Thames an
d the parties picnicking on the banks, or we could watch or not watch the white figures at the cricket pitch and the fieldsmen on the green and the crowds in indolent movement around the pavilion. It was a still, golden day that seemed to extend itself in an endless tranquillity towards no gloaming; even the darkening of the shadows and the movement of the rooks were only variations on a theme of peace; there was no commitment to a possibility of night.

  So it was in that curious time that stands exactly midway between two wars. The world was so sure of itself then. Everyone was busy, prosperous, snug, complacent, convinced that nothing could disturb security or the solid reassurances of progress. The golden afternoon of benevolent certainties would be forever protracted. Dusk could be held off indefinitely. There would be no night. Not even in the wilderness was there any prophetic voice to give foreboding that within two years the underpinnings of an entire world would brutally be wrenched away.

  So if I was lulled into a false sense of security in that period, I can hardly claim uniqueness. Complacency is one of the more insidious forms of self-deception, and I think it is this that explains my error of judgment. I saw as something profound and permanent a change in my life which, in fact, turned out to be both superficial and temporary; the thing of telling significance, which would mark my career forever and leave a cicatrice upon my soul, I never saw at all.

  After Jack went to Dimboola we moved his bed out into the sleep-out, and I had the room all to myself at last. I bought a long work-table and put it where the bed had been, and on it I set out the big Remington and all my note-books and papers. Nothing had to be concealed any longer.

  Jack each week from his pay sent mother a postal money-order for two pounds, but except for the one letter he wrote to me nearly a year later he sent no news of himself.