The Electrical Experience

by Frank Moorhouse

In the camp-fire light George flushed, realising he’d said an immature thing. It stung. Everyone said he was older than his years. For instance, here he was talking philosophy with the doctor. But most of all George did not want to show his youth, or to make slips.

  The maddening thing was that he was a philosopher. Damn it. How to get this across because he didn’t philosophise about the things the doctor postulated.

  ‘And what about the good life, George?’

  ‘What? How do you mean?’

  ‘The good life—wine, food, women and song.’

  ‘I don’t have much time,’ George mumbled, blushing for his inexperience in these areas. ‘What with getting started in life.’ He put wood on the fire.

  ‘And what books, George, what books have influenced you?’

  George thought. He considered himself a Reader. But now he found he couldn’t recollect any books. Manuals about cordials and their manufacture. Herbert Casson’s business library. An I.C.S. course. Things like that. But they were not what the doctor meant.

  ‘The Message to Garcia,’ he said, remembering. Of course.

  ‘The Message to Garcia,’ the doctor repeated, with a tone George could not interpret.

  ‘I was given a specially printed copy when in America—by Edward J. Nowak, of St Louis, a cordial manufacturer there.’

  ‘How has it influenced you, George?’

  Damn it. How had it influenced him?

  ‘Well Rowan, he did the job. He got the job done. When asked by the President of the United States to take a message to General Garcia in the mountains of Cuba, Rowan didn’t ask who Garcia was, how much he’d be paid, where he could find him, what was his address, whether to take a boat or a horse. He just said, ‘Yes sir’, and took the message and went. He just took the message, and even though it took a long time against all obstacles, he delivered the message to Garcia. Rowan just did the job.’

  George stopped and thought, and then added, ‘It was initiative riding on tenacity.’

  The doctor didn’t say anything.

  ‘That’s the highest stage of personal development, isn’t it, doctor?’

  ‘What is, George?’

  Hadn’t he been listening? Or was it the rum?

  ‘The difference between the Self-mover and those who need to be supervised and led.’

  ‘Maybe, George, but maybe we don’t arrange things properly so that everyone can be a Self-mover.’

  The doctor didn’t elaborate.

  ‘No.—’ on this George was firm—‘No, there are those who are individual and energised and those who simply follow. Everywhere I look in life, and everything I see, confirms this.’

  They sat in silence then. The doctor still sipped rum.

  George sipped tea.

  ‘What if I asked you to go on a mission?’ the doctor asked, breaking across the bush and fire noises.

  ‘I’d go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’re the head of this … expedition.’

  Then George added, ‘To give orders, you have first to be able to take orders.’

  George saw that he would only take orders if it was a step towards giving them. So what.

  The doctor smiled. George bridled. Well, it was true.

  ‘What if I …’ the doctor thought, ‘what if I asked you to find water … now … at this time of the night?’ Waving at the black bush.

  ‘I’d do it.’

  The conversation was adrift. Was moving to a whirlpool.

  ‘Yes, I would go,’ George repeated, to the President of the United States.

  ‘Even if it was just an “exercise”.’

  George could see the distinction, but it didn’t seem to operate against doing it. He could not see that it changed the imperative, the bond, the binding nature of an order.

  ‘Yes.’

  The doctor stopped looking at the fire or the rum bottle and looked across at George.

  ‘Well, do it,’ the doctor said, making a gesture with his mug of rum.

  ‘Are you serious then?’ George asked, firming his voice.

  ‘Would what’s-his-name have asked that?’

  ‘Andrew J. Rowan.’

  ‘Would Andrew J. Rowan have asked that question?’

  Flushing, George without another word got up, took a billy, put on a sweater, and tiredly, stiffly, set off. He knew that water, if any, would be found at the bottom of the valley. Way, way down. There would be a creek of sorts at the bottom. Perhaps.

  It took him well into the night to get to the bottom, after slipping, groping and being torn at by branches and under growth. After losing his footing, falling, grazing his hip, he found the stream by moonlight, scarcely trickling, but a stream, and there was water.

  He said aloud in the wide, empty gorge, ‘General Garcia, I presume’, without enjoying any humour.

  Why!

  Why, he did not really feel like Rowan at all and did not want to be Rowan. He wanted to be a Garcia.

  I am a Garcia.

  I am a Garcia, not a Rowan.

  I am a general, not a messenger of this world.

  He filled the billy, stood very still, looked all around at the stars and the black bush shapes, took a deep, cool breath, and started back.

  The doctor was asleep when he stumbled back up with a billy of creek water, hardly any lost on the uphill climb.

  George slept late into the morning despite the flies.

  When he woke, the doctor had made tea and damper and also taken a reading of the depth of the bottomless pit and collected rock samples.

  ‘Here you are, Garcia,’ the doctor said embarrassed, softer than his usual professional self, handing him a mug of tea. ‘About last night—the rum—shouldn’t take these things so seriously, George.’

  What pleased George was being addressed as Garcia, even if the doctor had not got it clear in his own head. Even if it was Rowan who took the message to Garcia. But in his head George was clear about the incident—he was a Garcia. He was a general.

  By the time they had reached town, he was stumbling with fatigue and unable to think or talk.

  The doctor said good-bye to him at the cordial works where he lived in a room at the back. The doctor patted his back and mumbled something.

  Next day George sat mixing syrup, thinking about having made the moonlight clamber down the valley to fetch water that was not wanted. He did not feel in any way a fool, although it seemed from every side to have been a foolish thing to have done.

  The whole thing had no purpose other than what he wanted to make of it.

  He had gone on and done something in the face of the meaningless.

  For all the meaninglessness, seemingly, George felt personally that he had accomplished something, even if it was not the fetching of the water, which was really only the surface of it all.

  It was something like this. He had forced the meaningless ness of it to a bitter end. He had played it right out. He had been relentless. He had turned the absurdity of it on its own head.

  If he had stopped short at any point it would have been absurd, but he’d taken the bait—and the rod.

  It had a certain perfection to it.

  His father called in and he told him of the events. His father laughed and said, ‘Maybe the doctor wanted a little quiet’, referring to George’s tendency to talk overlong.

  No, he had played the absurdity of it, forced it right through. Acted it right out.

  He’d been relentless.

  George felt perfectly all right about it, went on with his work, fully occupied with his work, with no loose thoughts of unease about it at all.

  He’d been relentless.

  The Rotary Platform (adopted 1911 Rotary Convention)

  Recognising the commercial basis of modern life as a necessary incident in human evolution, the Rotary Club is organised to express the proper relation between private interests and the fusion of private interests which constitute society.

  To accomplish this purpose
more effectively, the principle of limited membership has been adopted, the Rotary Club consisting of one representative from each distinct line of business or profession. Each member is benefited by contact with representative men engaged in different occupations and is enabled thereby to meet more intelligently the responsibilities of civic and business life.

  The basis of club membership ensures the representation of all interests and the domination of none in the consideration of public questions relating to business. On account of its limited membership the Rotary Club does not constitute itself the voice of the entire community on questions of general importance, but its action on such questions is of great influence in advancing the civic and business welfare of the community.

  The Rotary Club demands fair dealings, honest methods, and high standards in business. No obligation, actual or implied, to influence business exists in Rotary. Election to membership therein is an expression of confidence of the club in the member elected, and of its good will towards him. As his business is an expression of himself, he is expected actively to represent it.

  Membership in the Rotary Club is a privilege and an opportunity and its responsibility demands honest and efficient service and thoughtfulness for one’s fellows.

  Service is the basis of all business.

  He profits most who serves best.

  Here’s a Tip

  A good pinch of bicarbonate soda will keep milk from going off when you haven’t an ice-chest or are going on a picnic.

  A Skin Bleach for Blackfellows

  From a talk delivered to the Science Club in 1928 by John Brill, local pharmacist, titled ‘Solving the Problem of Coloured Races’.

  Science can come to the aid of the blackfellow and many of them could become quite white if only they would make the effort. The following preparation is recommended. Take some Yellow Wax 8 ounces, Vaseline 8 ounces, Cocoa Butter 2 ounces. Melt these together in a double boiler. Take off the fire and add a solution of 10 grains of corrosive sublimate in one ounce of alcohol and pour into jars while warm. This may be used before retiring. First wash the face, neck and arms with a good soap and hot water. Rinse well and dry, then apply the cream. In the morning wash off and apply a good powder. Do this at least every other day.

  THE SECRET OF ENDURANCE

  With Zane Grey he had not been at ease and had not, as far as he could see, derived that much—it was partly the fishing, he not being a fisherman as Zane Grey was, and also he’d been lost among the other tourists and what Zee Gee called his ‘fans’ crowding about—despite his letter of introduction to Zee Gee—this changed later at the camp and he was recognised for what he was, a coastal Rotarian wanting to parley with another ‘achiever’, although certainly their achievement lay in different paddocks—Zee Gee the writer and big-game fisherman and he a manufacturer—of aerated waters—still, the man’s style charmed him and even the American manager chap Bowen, who, of course, had at first tried to fob him off, which was understandable with people coming over three hundred miles to see Zee Gee and crowding around, and the Americans could not be expected to have known him after only a few weeks on the coast, because of that, and having heard that Zee Gee was, like himself, a teetotaller, he presented him with a sample range of his aerated waters in way of a calling card—but the fishing was the thing that kept them apart, made the discussion he proposed in the letter—fusion of self and public interest—so difficult because of Zee Gee’s single-mindedness about fishing and his introversion—all men are shy, but introversion was something else—but, still, about the wide-open spaces and reliance on self they could agree, although it had not been intended for discussion, but as a result of his unintended discussion he planned personally to lead a more outdoors life himself, not spend as much time in the smoke of meetings and more time in the cathedral of the bush, although one could lose sight that the ‘meeting’ and the ‘committee’ were two of man’s supreme creations and the answer to Socialism—the meeting was the place where private will and public need were assembled and packed—where talk became motion—he always said the committee was a mill for raw ideas and that the country was really run by a thousand committees—he’d wanted to talk with Zee Gee about disinterested public effort, but they didn’t get on to this—service above self—the death of King George that month shook the nation and business—although he hadn’t noticed any fall-off in the sale of bottled drinks—but the King’s death may have contributed to the not altogether menti-cultural nature of the meeting, although again the death of King George seemed to matter nought to Zee Gee and his party with all their talk about trolling and light lead and heavy lead and revolving bait—use shark to catch shark—he felt uncomfortable there in the canvas chairs under the trees at Bermagui and later, too, when he visited again at Bateman’s Bay camp, but camp in style they did! he granted them that, that was the American Way, a dozen tents or so brightly coloured, two professional cooks, a sit-down dining-room, and a benzine kitchen, that was camping in style—we must keep the open spaces and the natural life, Zee Gee said, not just parks but real open spaces without fences where a man can walk free—don’t let them fence this country in—he replied to Zee Gee that Australians wanted roads before parks—‘We have to tie ourselves together with roads,’ he said, being very ‘road-minded’, still he saw what Zee Gee was saying about unfenced space—he was quite taken by the movie-making at the camp and got a kick out of hearing Bowen say through a megaphone, ‘Roll ’em’, which it was explained was an order to the camera operators to start the electric motors which power the cameras—but he declined the invitation to invest in Zee Gee’s film, though he heard later that others had—Zee Gee said Australia, he sensed, was a far country, one surrounded by vast oceans with something he could not give a name to ‘hanging over the country’—a poetic thing to say—he interposed, less poetic ally, that this was why Australians were ‘road-minded’—the need not for space but to overcome space—‘You Aus tralians do remarkably well with the wrong measures,’ Zee Gee said at another point referring, he took it, to the tackle but also to the wrongheadness, as Zee Gee saw it, of many of the Australian ways of doing things—but he reminded Zee Gee wryly, without meaning to offend, that it was Dr Faithfull of Inverlocky Station who beat the American party to the first swordfish of the season—he, in fact, saw the head and bill at Lynch’s Hotel on the way down—Zee Gee rose at 5 a.m., wrote for three hours and then fished in the ‘insatiate, crawling sea’—he himself did not have a recreation like Zee Gee but he was not altogether sure that this was necessarily a matter for self-disapproval, games were for the young and the old, the game of life was enough for him—in reply to a question about the Australian bush, Zee Gee said that at first the eucalyptus had ‘pasted closed his nostrils’, a writer’s way of saying things—‘Call me Zee Gee,’ he said during the early stages of their discussion—‘As long as you don’t mind me calling you Zee Gee’—‘No, call me Zee Gee’—Zee Gee then showed him how they had put floorboards in all the tents—they knew how to camp!—the party had been discouraged at first by the laughter of the jackass and had fired at them, but now they rather welcomed the morning and the evening laughter—‘If you want to catch fish, you must keep your bait in the water,’ Zee Gee said to him on the subject of Perseverance—he thought, but did not say, that Perversity was not Perseverance and that a man should not hate what he hunts, having perceived in Zee Gee a hatred of the shark—sharks he quickly perceived were an obsession with him and probably also with Australians—Mr Stead, the expert on sharks from Sydney, had a daughter who published stories, but Zee Gee was interested only in talking about the sharks—Zee Gee said Australians got their bigness and their warmth from the Australian bush—again he could not fully agree, feeling neither big nor warm and feeling the bush to be neither big nor warm, and suggested, contrarily, that Australians got their insufficient confidence and fear of life from the fear of the bush and the fear of the shark—from living in a land surrounded by bush that stretches unendingl
y, growing up, as he had, surrounded by unexplored bush that stretched for thousands of miles, and surrounded by dangerous seas, and again he brought in the need for roads—Zee Gee continued on the theme of tenacity, saying that he fished for eighty-three days without a bite—tenacity, and perseverance, and then, lo! on the eighty-fourth day he caught the Tahitian Striped Marlin—he asked Zee Gee what had been the biggest disappointment in his life—Zee Gee answered: when the writer Ernest Hemingway refused to fish with him, he had said to Hemingway, ‘We are both writers and fishermen, but you write better than I, and I fish better than you’—this Ernest Hemingway had turned him down flat—he did not know of this Ernest Hemingway and did not fully grasp the disappointment involved in this for Zee Gee, but he always asked that question of great men for what it might reveal—Zee Gee caught the Leaping Green Fox Thresher Shark, the first caught in Australian waters, but this too meant very little to him—‘I won’t let the white death sharks lick me,’ Zee Gee said, again the hate of the shark—there’d been talk of Tivoli show girls at the camp but he did not see any—apart from fishing, Zee Gee did not seem to be a wastrel—‘We must preserve the uncultivated lands, the feeding and nesting swamps,’ Zee Gee said—like Zee Gee, he supported the Boy Scout movement because it taught the endurance of privation, the endurance of pain, cultivated strength of body and simplicity of mind—he wrote this down in his notes together with Zee Gee’s words, ‘We are driven to roam, hunt and slay’, but did not share the feeling behind these words—he was not a roamer, nor a slayer: he was a stayer and a maker—talking of roaming, Zee Gee said, ‘People travel not to look and learn but to eat and drink’, which he agreed with—on the question Women Today, Zee Gee said the women of the thirties resembled too much the male—the sexes were merging—when are women going to look like women—on this George did not agree, he did not mind shingled hair and liked women to be independent-minded—Zee Gee said that on the matter of sex confusion many of his thirteen million readers did not know his sex and mistook his name for that of a woman, regardless that he wrote of the wild west and self-reliant men—he subscribed to the theory that men should teach boys and women should teach girls—‘The boy exists in me always, nailed to the martyrdom of fishing’—he talked about the cruelty of fishing to the body, the strain, the wet, the cold, the need for manly strength, ‘I say—I endure because I am a fisherman,’ Zee Gee said—in New Zealand, Zee Gee said, returning to the problem of the merging of the sexes, many said they thought he was a woman because of his name, which had very much upset him—I, on the other hand, thought George, I endure because I get off my backside and I bust my gut, I am in no way a fisherman and I have not learned very much at all from Great Men this year.