by A L McCann
But then all those stolid realists who want to embrace the harsh spirit of the land are living in a dream as well, imagining that a few generations of frontier violence could be the basis of a robust national identity. They can’t smell the blood on their own hands. Better to throw the whole thing in, if you ask me, and start again with the freedom of not having to be bound to a place at all.
But I suppose the sea is the epitome of this freedom, and it is monotony itself. On calm days one can look out on one side of the ship and see an eternity of still, flat water, and think that here is an image of one’s own exile and homelessness. It makes me feel slightly nauseous, the light and the gentle, persistent swaying of that great, empty expanse. You long for a good bit of earth to pound your feet upon, something with a stable point of gravity, a city of brick and stone. In Fremantle I went ashore for a day and spent most of it in a drab Italian café, trying to avoid the sun. I must have smoked a packet of cigarettes, and watched the smoke of each of them drift on the blades of sunlight that pierced the tattered curtains. It was a relief to be still for a while, but by the evening I was anxious to be back on board the Abendstern and moving again, feeling as if the dry heat and the still streets were working their way into me and hollowing me out as surely as the ocean had.
My fellow passengers all seem to be suffering from this malaise. Perhaps this accounts for their dullness. There are some members of a scientific party from Freiburg who have been in Queensland studying the Lamington Plateau. The poor fellows are red as beetroots and about as interesting. There are some vaudeville performers heading for Cape Town, a couple of newlyweds who keep to themselves as if they were fugitives fleeing a scandalous past, and a woman from somewhere near Colac taking her gawky daughter on a grand tour to see the great galleries of Europe. There is also a funny little man from Adelaide, Arthur Hume, who claims to be an antiquarian book collector. He had me in his cabin the other night drinking sherry and talking about Byron’s love of young Greek boys. The whole thing was a bit distasteful, but a distraction from the usual round of dinner, drinks and cards, or worse, an evening in the ship’s casino wondering when the shoddily made wheel of fortune will come spinning off its bearings.
I have no love for travel. In fact I detest the farcical conversations one becomes inured to, the triviality of non–space, where the best one can hope for is to be mildly amused and forgetful of the tedium. What else can one do? Of course there is a limit to the amount one can read. Since Fremantle I’ve read Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels, hoping to revive my German, as well as Poe, Melville and Clarke — but I won’t bore you with a reading list. We will be docking in Cape Town in about a week or so.
Yours, Paul
On a warm morning in early November, Paul sat on the deck of the Abendstern resting an unfinished letter in his lap, watching the coast of Africa glide by. Opposite him sat Laura Thomas, the girl from Colac way, and her mother, Eleanor. His eyes wandered back to them every so often as he puzzled over how he might describe the pair to his friend in Melbourne. He tapped his pen lightly on his knee and re-read his last few sentences: “The daughter’s name is Laura. She’s seventeen and is shaped like a gazelle. Or do I mean a giraffe? I don’t know. Awkward but not unsightly. She’s taken by the fact that I’m off to study art, and thinks it the height of romance.”
In the company of this pair, Paul had found himself drawn out into endless discussions about European splendour based on the prosaic guidebook the two of them had memorised. Because he was going to study art they wanted to defer to him on every conceivable matter of taste that might confront the eager tourist. Did he have a preference for the Impressionists? Would he bother with the provinces? How long in Paris? Where in Italy? The questions were never–ending.
He couldn’t make up his mind about Laura. He quizzed her about her family’s farm. Her father was dead and her two older brothers were running the big property. Her mother, never entirely content with the country, had implanted in her daughter a gentle disdain for virtually everything about rural life and a longing for whatever lay beyond it. They were travelling to Europe, like so many Australians, to find culture. Her mother considered it an essential part of Laura’s upbringing.
As the ship laboured along the vast, seemingly endless coast of Africa, Paul listened to her chatter on about spiritual quests and aesthetic education. He bristled at the thought of such a wholly unrealistic attitude to things, until he found his own reflection right there in front of him. Then he cringed. How many times had he complained to Hamish about cultural wastelands? He couldn’t condemn Laura without also condemning himself. Unwilling to shatter her illusions, he played along with her romantic notions of European travel.
“Well, you must visit me in Wien,” he said, conscious of the pretentiousness of using the German name.
“Oh, I will. We are certainly going there. Certainly. It’s all arranged. It will be so nice to be shown around by a real artist.”
And on it went. Paul soon felt sorry for her, and a bit sorry for himself too. When she referred to him as “a real artist” the pathos of both their lots was overwhelming.”The whole thing is really a bit of a farce, isn’t it?” he wrote to Hamish later on. “I mean the fantasy of escape – to be an artist. It’s as transparent in its own way as the Thomas family odyssey to discover the treasures of European culture so that the daughter will be better equipped to live out her days in some rural penitentiary. I felt like a mountebank flaunting the magic of these fantasies as if it were snake oil. If I’ve learnt to loathe Australia, I may end up loathing myself more for the self-deception involved in fleeing it.”
He made up his mind to avoid Laura. Lord knows there were enough people on the Abendstern to hide behind. He imagined the ship must have packed on the passengers like cattle through a turnstile. But despite his resolution, made over and over again, he invariably found himself sitting beside her on the deck, running up against the same impasse. At times it made him sick and he was gripped by a kind of mental nausea. At others he decided to keep up his end of their childish exchange in the vague hope of forgetting himself for a while and perhaps talking himself into a more optimistic frame of mind.
“We can go to the opera and stroll around the Ringstraße, and I’ll introduce you to my artist friends,” he said cheerily, wondering if she were capable of opening her eyes to the great lie of it all. He willed himself on to more extreme performative excesses, flattered her in German, aware that these days he could barely patch together a sentence, and finally kissed her hand like an idiot. She blushed. Was he falling in love? Or was he merely acting a part? He imagined a comedy of manners performed over high tea on a rickety stage made out of corrugated iron and chicken wire.
“Paul,” Laura said as he stared blankly down at the unfinished letter. Her long face, her light freckles and the dark eyebrows and hair against her fair skin struck him as lovely. Did he really want her to come to Vienna? How could he realise his own grandiose ambitions saddled with her and her mother? He looked up at her.
“Never mind,” she said, returning to her novel, biting her lower lip. “It’s just that I hope we do see each other again.”
If her mother hadn’t been there beside them – eyes peering up from her Baedeker’s guide – he’d have touched her arm to reassure her.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
They parted company in Southampton, at which point Laura and her mother were heading to London and then on to Paris. Old Eleanor Thomas spoke longingly about Kensington or wherever it was they had letters of introduction. God help them, Paul thought. Laura kissed him sweetly and promised to come to “Wien” as soon as she could.
As he disembarked in Hamburg a day or so later the girl and her kiss were still with him. The steam of the ships billowed into a grey sky and trailed over the oily water of the port. He pictured a bleak Europe of industrial misery and feared that in it he’d never see her again. He pushed his way through crowds of Russian Jews waiting to sail for America. The sight
of so many people clutching suitcases and staring out at the future with such tired expressions filled him with a sense of his own forlornness as he wandered over the wet cobblestones. With his suitcase in his hand he crossed a narrow walking bridge and gazed down a long canal weaving through a congested slum. It must have been low tide. The water had drained away, leaving an unctuous sludge that trailed off into the mist.
That night, having set himself down in a modest hotel, he was still thinking about her. To test his resolve he decided to walk back to the waterfront and through the infamous St Pauli. Sailors and workers loitered about the streets, drank in taverns and cavorted with prostitutes who looked hard and pitiless in the cold, damp air. He was about to give it up when Arthur Hume, the antiquarian book collector from the Abendstern, appeared at the next corner. He greeted Paul with a reticent, embarrassed grin, and claimed that he was heading off to some theatrical entertainment. Would he like to join him? Why not, Paul thought to himself, curious to see what an old lecher like that could get up to.
They walked to a theatrette a few streets away. Hume said something to the attendant about knowing a man called Wedelkind, but this was to no avail. The old man at the door insisted that they pay just the same, Wedelkind or no Wedelkind. Inside, the audience was seated at separate tables, not in rows as in a conventional theatre. It was a run-down place, full of people who looked to Paul like scions of aristocratic families, fallen dignitaries, and outcast, vagabond royals deprived of their kingdoms by an age of revolution. Men wore dinner suits that appeared as if they’d been slept in the night before while the women wore faded silks, old lace and even the odd tiara. They all reeked of stale cigar smoke. The place had the aura not of genteel poverty, but of fallen empires and historical anachronisms.
“An old friend of mine is performing,” Hume said. “Max Wedelkind.”
Before Paul could ask who he was, clashing cymbals and a run of notes on a double bass announced the commencement of the play. The curtain went up on a stage decked out to look like a hospital ward. In one corner sat a doctor, wearing a white coat and a greenish wig of thick, disordered hair. He was made up with ghoulish white face paint, glossy red lips and deep purplish shadows under his eyes. Paul couldn’t decide whether he looked more like a mad scientist or a disinterred corpse. He was at a desk perusing some medical charts when two other men, evidently newspaper reporters, approached him armed with notepads. The doctor began to describe to them his revolutionary cure for madness and some garbled theories about the flow of the blood through the brain. He spoke very bad, comically-stilted German, as if he were imitating a foreigner’s accent. Offstage the cries of lunatics and their ominous poundings grew gradually louder until finally they almost drowned him out. The doctor raised his voice to a scream and then collapsed into a fit of hysterical twitching, laughing to make light of it. The audience laughed as well while his body shook as if from repeated electrical shocks. It was outlandish. Paul had never seen anything so farcical.
“That’s Wedelkind for you,” Hume whispered to him. Paul smelt something distasteful, like sour milk or week-old flower water, on his breath.
As the doctor laughed the two reporters looked at each other suspiciously. To allay their fears the doctor called out to his attendants and staff, who began to parade like a menagerie of wild animals. Soon the doctor himself had joined in, leading a savage dance around the two journalists, who now realised the danger they were in. As the doctor whipped the attendants into a frenzy they pounced on one of the journalists and dismembered him on stage to the horrified shrieks of the audience. The whole scene was an inspired piece of visual trickery. The marauding lunatics crouched over the prone body, hiding it from the audience, as they seemed to hack into it with their hands and hurl pieces of what must have been butcher’s meat and pulped paper soaked in red dye across the stage. In a moment, the set was strewn with gore, its white surfaces streaked with blood. When the lunatics turned to the second journalist all that remained of the first was a pile of torn clothes and raw body parts. The doctor danced a ridiculous jig and kicked a wax head off the edge of the stage, provoking fits of hysterical laughter. As the head hit the ground and rolled awkwardly across the wooden floor, Paul started in amazement. He stared at the doctor on the stage. Behind the wig, the make-up and the exaggerated antics, the actor was none other than Reuben Gines.
At that moment something gripped him and he too gave out, collapsing into a confused spasm of horror, hilarity and bewilderment. He turned to Hume, who was just about choking, and pointed at the stage.
“Wedelkind,” Hume gasped back at Paul, his face red with the strain of it all.”Wedelkind.”
Finally, some policemen appeared on stage and beat the lunatics back, saving the second reporter. With the menagerie cowering in the corner, the police chief revealed that the lunatics had taken over the madhouse and that the real Dr Goudron had been murdered and replaced by one of his patients. In a horrifying finale, one of the policemen produced the mutilated corpse of the real doctor, which from where Paul sat looked like a side of beef wearing a white coat and a stethoscope. The audience again howled as the curtain fell.
“Wedelkind,” Hume said again, as if his vocabulary had been reduced to this single word, the mere utterance of which was enough to send him head over heels.
“Wedelkind,” Paul repeated, obligingly. “Only that’s not his name. It’s Gines. Reuben Gines.”
Hume blinked absurdly. “But I know him,” he said, still cackling. “Wedelkind.” He had to cough out the laughter before he could continue. “He came through Adelaide on a tour. About six months ago.” He paused to catch his breath and repress the chuckles still mounting in him. “Tamer stuff then – comedy of manners, gentle melodrama, you know.”
“Can we meet him?”
“By all means.”
Hume stood up, still vibrating with the aftershock of the performance, and walked bravely backstage. In the meantime the audience settled down and the theatre assumed a semblance of order.
At any other time Paul might have been ready to thrash Gines or Wedelkind, or whatever his name was. But after such an extravagant performance he was completely purged. Every violent impulse in him, in fact every bit of strength, had leached out with his laughter. He was thoroughly relaxed and at peace.
A few minutes later Hume reappeared with Gines, who had removed the wig and cleaned off the make-up, but who still looked a bit insane anyway. Paul leapt to his feet and congratulated him on such a fine performance.
“Young Paul Walters,” he declared shamelessly and with seemingly little surprise. “How good to see you. Fortune has brought you this far at least.”
Paul was flabbergasted at the ease of his manner, but also vastly amused at the thought of such a versatile charlatan.
“Buy you a drink?” he asked, raising his almost hairless eyebrows (they’d been painted on for the play), and gesturing in futility to an absent waiter.
“You can buy me several,” Paul said in the same spirit of high farce. “Don’t you remember that you ruined me?”
“Oh please,” he said with a laugh. “Much ado about nothing. A little levity.”
Hume was all ears as the encounter unfolded.
“He calls you Gines, Max.”
“Gines? Yes I was, once. Thought you’d get the joke. Gines, engines, something like that. It’s literary. Eighteenth century. The distant past I suppose.”
He thrust his hand out towards Paul and boldly proclaimed, by way of introduction, “Max Wedelkind. Pleased to meet you.” Then he winced, twisting his face into a grimace of self-deprecation. “You’re not still sore at me are you?”
“I don’t much care now. It’s all behind me. Just tell me what happened.”
“Well, your friend played a little trick on you. Mind, it went a bit far, but that was your doing, your own enthusiasm. And his, I suppose. No one could have reckoned on either of you giving in to temptation and going at it with such determination.”
“So, Arthur, Max is a sort of roving confidence man,” Paul said.
“Not a bit of it,”Wedelkind remonstrated.”I’m a reputable actor now, in a reputable company.” And then, with an impish grin plastered on his blubbery face, he pulled a five-mark note from behind Paul’s ear and gave it to him.
“The world of con men, drifters, itinerant showmen, vagabond magicians, and impersonators is fading. The Germans have a lovely word for a man of such callings – Gaukler. Today it means something wonderfully vague – juggler, charlatan, Zauberkünstler. The whole caboodle. But it’s a world that is disappearing, which is a pity, but it’s the truth. People just aren’t gullible enough today. The age of realism has killed off our gullibility, our innocence. It did my old soul no end of good, Paul, to see you so willing to play along. I don’t mind saying so. Perhaps there is hope for an old Gaukler yet, I told myself.”
“All right then Max,” Paul said, “just tell me who actually bought my painting, the one you paid for at the Gallery School.”
“Why you know as well as I do. It was your friend. What’s his name? Ralph.”
“Ralph Matthews?”
“That’s the one.”
Paul was shocked, but in such a ludicrous way that he wouldn’t have been offended to see Matthews walk in at that very moment and sit down with them. There was something so grandly bathetic in the conception of the plot, in Wedelkind himself and in his mesmerisingly absurd performance of insanity that he was overwhelmed with good humour and actually enthused by the air of trickery and the web of petty deceit in which he’d been so thoroughly caught. The thought of the fraud, coupled with the manifest grotesquerie of the play, both comic and horrifying, seemed to open up a new vista for Paul. He acknowledged that Max Wedelkind (and who was to say that that was really his name) was an artist – a bullshit artist – and in his own way a bit of a genius at it.