The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

by Wayne Johnston

  Then there were the counter-questions: “Who can stop corruption? The socialist. Who believes that all men really are created equal? The socialist. Who cares about the working man? The socialist.” After I read the closing paragraph of What’s So and What Isn’t, I believed that I had found my calling, a way to ensure that the deaths of the men of the S.S. Newfoundland might be redeemed: “A socialist is a man of destiny. He is the only man who has read the signs of the time. He is therefore invulnerable. He draws his shining lance and challenges the champions of every other economic thought to meet him in the arena of debate. And they slink away like whipped curs.”

  That seemed like something worth being, a man someone like Abe Kean would slink away from like a whipped cur, an invulnerable, lance-wielding master of debate. It was all very well to want to be a journalist, but whose life could you save or even improve by writing for a newspaper?

  I put this question to Fielding the next time she came to my boarding-house.

  “To the best of my knowledge,” Fielding said, “I have never saved anyone’s life by writing for the Telegram, though I might save my own if I stopped.”

  I showed her What’s So and What Isn’t, and she browsed through it, every so often drinking from her silver flask. “Well?” I said. “What do you think?” She drew breath as if to say something, looked at me, looked down at the book, shrugged.

  “I suppose there might be something to it,” she said.

  We went straight to Grimes’s house, and on his doorstep I earnestly declared to him our desire to become socialists. Fielding stood wordlessly beside me. “I want to be a socialist,” I said — “like you,” I would have added, except I didn’t want to sound presumptuous. I don’t know what I expected; I suppose to be welcomed into the fold with equal ardour.

  “Step into the porch,” said Grimes. “I’ll be right back.” He closed the front door, opened the door to the hallway, stepped hastily inside, then closed the door.

  Judging from its façade and what I had glimpsed of it when he opened the door, his house was as large and as well-appointed as my uncle Fred’s, which surprised me. As Fielding and I stood waiting in the porch, we heard voices inside, Grimes’s and that of a woman, his wife we presumed, with whom he seemed to be arguing, though the only word I could make out was the one with which she began every reply in a kind of “I will brook no dispute” tone, which was George.

  Soon, the door to the hallway opened again and Grimes backed out, holding in his arms a box of books, fifty copies, he said, of What’s So and What Isn’t. As he was handing me the box, his wife poked her head out of the nearest room. I tipped my hat to her and Fielding said hello. She gave a grudging nod. She looked at me, as Fielding later put it, “as if she hoped you were not a measure of her husband’s standing in the world.” It would be a long time before I cut the kind of figure that would reassure the wives of my associates.

  We never did get past the porch of Grimes’s house, though we spent a lot of time with him over the next few months. I started pressing copies of What’s So and What Isn’t on everyone I knew or met, and one week we joined Grimes in what he called his Sunday walkabout. It was his habit on Sundays to go from door to door, pitching socialism to the citizens of St. John’s. Fielding and I stood mute at his side like the socialist trainees that we were. At each house, he introduced us before reciting his speech, which mostly consisted of phrases pulled straight from John M. Work. Grimes stood on doorsteps and calmly and reasonably explained how the current economic system would be overthrown and another put in its place. And how would this come about? “Preferably by the ballot box,” Grimes said. “If necessary, by revolution. Do you have any questions? Very well, then. Good day to you, now.”

  His manner and his message were so completely at odds that I don’t think people understood what he was advocating. It was hard to square Grimes with the picture of the socialist put forward by Work. “Any revolution,” Fielding said, “that depends upon Grimes drawing his shining lance will be a long time coming.”

  It was true. He was the least ardent, most phlegmatic, deferential socialist I have ever met. No one would be put out or inconvenienced by Grimes’s revolution, let alone disenfranchised. I wondered if the Cause knew what its man in Newfoundland was like. In his arena of debate, the House of Assembly, where he ought to have been challenging the champions of other economic thought, he made speeches about the need for more jobs and better roads.

  Mind you, I didn’t come off too well in comparison with John M. Work’s man of destiny either, in my tattered overcoat and hat and horn-rimmed glasses. We made quite a sight for a while, George Grimes and his post-adolescent aides-de-camp, Joe Smallwood and Sheilagh Fielding. There is a photograph of us from that time, standing on the waterfront with a group of grinning dock-workers we were trying to unionize behind us: the stolid Grimes in his bowler hat and tweed overcoat striking a statesman-like pose with both hands behind his back; me on one side of him like some bespectacled scarecrow, hawk-nosed, owl-eyed; Fielding incongruous on the other, smiling, one eye half-closed as though she is winking at the camera.

  We succeeded in starting up a few locals of the international unions that Grimes was affiliated with, but inevitably, there was a falling out between us. I told him one day I was not content, as he was, to lay the groundwork for a revolution that I would never live to see. “Our day will come,” Grimes said, sounding like some preacher consoling his congregation with the promise that in some nebulous next life, things would be better. If I had known my Marx, I would have warned him against making a religion of socialism.

  “But don’t you want to be there when it happens?” I said. “Don’t you want to be part of it?”

  “I’m part of it now,” Grimes said.

  “We’ll never get anywhere the way you’re going about it,” I said. Grimes looked at me with a kind of wistful fondness, as if I was just the latest in a long line of protégés who had become impatient with him and moved on; as if he had known all along that this would happen. “We’ll have to agree to disagree,” he said, holding out his hand to me and smiling. I fancied there was some principle at stake that was more important than friendship or politeness and refused to shake his hand, keeping both of mine in my pockets. On the verge of tears, blinking rapidly, I half turned away from him. Grimes, as if he assumed I had spoken for her, too, extended his hand to Fielding, who took it.

  “We’ll meet and talk again,” he said, as if he was telling me that I should not let this refusal to shake his hand keep me from contacting him once I realized how foolish I had been.

  “I’m sure we will,” said Fielding.

  The docks, I decided, were where a true socialist should be, not canvassing from door to door.

  All along the waterfront were the fish-merchant warehouses, where the salt cod was brought ashore, dried and stored and later stacked in the holds of ships bound for England, where it was consumed at ten times the rate per person that it was in Newfoundland. Barge cranes moved back and forth all day, loading, unloading stacks of salt cod the size of houses. The technology of preserving fish had not changed in five hundred years. Soak it in brine until its every fibre was so salt-saturated it would be safe from rot for years, then dry it in the open air.

  Salt cod lay drying everywhere within several hundred feet of the harbour. The Battery, the fishing village within the city at the base of Signal Hill, where the rock was so solid that not even holes for outhouses could be dug, was paved with yellow cod. It lay on the rocks in backyards and on elevated fish-flakes near the water, raised up as though in some primitive funeral rite, cod split and cured in brine and set out to dry in arrowhead-like Vs. When it rained, everyone rushed out to turn the cod over so that the side with the rain-impervious, leather-like skin faced upward. Otherwise, the cod was spread out to the sky and whatever flew there, including gulls and crows who, as if to spite the fishermen for salting the cod past what even their palates could endure, shat on it from great height
s. Not that it mattered, for you could not eat the cod anyway without soaking it for days in water and then boiling it for hours, after which it was still so salty that the least of the complaints that were brought against it was that once it had been smeared with birdshit. Still, though he brought it home for the others to eat, my father would not stoop to eating food treated so disdainfully by birds and dogs and everything that flew above or walked upon the earth.

  All along the harbour, outside the white warehouses of the fish merchants, cod was spread out on the ground to dry. It was on every spare square inch of ground of what the merchants liked to call their premises. It was even spread on steps, with just enough room between the cod for men to walk toe to heel as though on two-by-fours. It was leaned slantwise against the buildings, spread on roofs that themselves were spread with tarp or old sails.

  The cod lay airing on the ground through days of overcast and fog. On the rare sunny days, it was covered with flies that would rise up and settle down as you walked along, a single wave passing through this pool of flies, keeping perfect time with you. Inside the warehouses, the salt cod was stacked storeys high. To walk into a warehouse was to walk into a city of salt fish, columns of cod rising up like buildings between which there was barely room for a man to walk.

  The docks reeked of the hybrid smell of fish and brine. The wind off the cod was so salty that it made me sneeze and my eyes run with water. Sometimes when I breathed the air, my throat turned to fire, and when I tried to speak, I had no voice, could get out only a rasping, rattling cough as if I had inhaled a chestful of smoke. I never did acquire the ability to tolerate the omnipresent smell of cod. Walking among it always made me long for the clean-aired elevation of the Brow.

  Backing onto Water Street were the massive, all-white warehouses of the merchant families, warehouses that bore the names of their owners in huge block letters that you could read from the Brow. Also named after the merchants were the little side-streets that led from Water Street to Harbour Drive, the “coves,” inlets between the palisade of buildings. Gower’s Cove, Job’s Cove, Baird’s Cove, Harvey’s Cove, Crosby’s Cove. When you emerged from one of these coves, a gust of wind would hit you in the face as if you had just stepped outside from the cabin of a ship at sea.

  The sealers, the fishermen, the barge-boat crews: it was workers such as these that could most benefit from socialism. I began making speeches on the waterfront. Fielding rounded up my audiences for me while I stood atop a crate, strode up and down the waterfront and gestured with her cane at sailors and stevedores who lined the rails of ships that were moored with hawser ropes thicker than my legs.

  “Joseph Smallwood,” Fielding said, barker-fashion, reciting a pitch I had composed for her, “registered member of the International Socialist Party, will give a speech at three o’clock in Baird’s Cove, the likes of which you have never heard before and will never hear again and which none of you will soon forget.” Curious, bored, incredulous, they came down from the ships to hear me speak. Even at the age of sixteen, I could hold an audience, for a while at least.

  “I am here,” I said, to the men two and three times my age who gathered round me while I stood atop an empty crate, “to tell you how to start a union and to explain to you the principles of socialism. I am here to tell you why your children never have enough to eat; why the men you work for pay you next to nothing; why some of you are risking your lives to keep rich men like the owners of the S.S. Newfoundland in smoking-jackets.…” I had never seen a smoking-jacket in my life, but the heroes of Horatio Alger’s novels, which I read avidly, were always getting their first big break from men who wore them and afterwards aspired to wear one themselves, so I figured I was on safe ground. (I took to heart a curiously amended version of the Algeresque myth; I wanted to rise not from rags to riches, but from obscurity to world renown, and had chosen socialism as my best means of accomplishing this, thereby establishing as my mortal enemies the very characters who had inspired me to self-betterment in the first place.)

  I always told the men that they were working to keep the rich in something; if Alger did not provide me with some item of frivolous affluence, then Fielding did. If it was not smoking-jackets, it was silver spittoons, gold cigarette cases, snifters of brandy, snuffboxes, satin slippers, Persian rugs. I got a roar of indignation from a crowd of stevedores by referring to some man’s “heirloom-laden house,” having no more idea than my listeners apparently had of what an heirloom was.

  I once, at Fielding’s urging, denounced men whose “lives were spent in the acquisition of gewgaws and gimcracks.” This did not elicit any sort of response. “It was a good speech,” Fielding told me afterwards. “The rich of St. John’s will not be so quick to gather gewgaws and gimcracks in the future.”

  One day, a man who was standing at the rail of a ship shouted down to Fielding as she made her way along the waterfront, drumming up an audience for me. “What are you doing down here, now, my dear?” He was a burly, balding redhead whose stomach stuck out between the rails as if his shirt and pants concealed a boulder. “Prohibitionist, are ya?” he said.

  “Imbibitionist,” said Fielding.

  He raised his eyebrows. “What’s that?” he said.

  “I have come to release you from the shackles of ignorance,” said Fielding, “of which you seem to be burdened with more than your share.”

  “Oh, I’ve got more than my share all right,” he said, rubbing his crotch to a chorus of guffaws from the other men along the rail. Fielding looked quickly away so they would not see her smile, which I was shocked to see her do. I ran along the dock towards her.

  “That’s quite a cane,” I heard the man saying. “Big knob on it like that. Ya like big knobs, now, do ya?”

  “Your wife must miss you terribly while you’re away,” Fielding shouted. “Still, I’m sure some kind soul helps her fill the void you leave behind.” The men laughed.

  “That’s enough of that,” I said, shaking my fist at the redhead. He threw back his head and laughed.

  “Fielding,” I said, “you shouldn’t carry on with them like that. Perhaps you shouldn’t be down here on the waterfront at all.”

  “Is that your fella?” the redhead said. “That explains the cane — ”

  “I’ll explain something to you,” I shouted. Fielding put her hand on my shoulder and turned me away from the ship.

  “Thank God you showed up when you did, Smallwood,” she said. “I think that man was on the verge of turning coarse. I don’t know what I would have done.”

  “Very funny,” I said and, as if in retaliation, turned and shook my fist at the redhead. “Come down here and you’ll get your explanation.”

  “No offence,” she said, turning me about with one hand, “but I think he’s had more experience with giving explanations than you have. Let’s just get out of here and let him think he scared us off.”

  I was twenty when I told Fielding I was going to New York. I had got nowhere promoting socialism and, after reading John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World and finding out that he had once worked for the Call, the New World socialist newspaper that was located in New York, I received what Fielding described as “my call to the Call.”

  “It would mean a great deal to me if you came along,” I said. It was the closest to declaring affection for her I had ever come.

  “New York?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “New York.”

  “I’m not sure — I’m not sure that I’m ready for New York,” said Fielding.

  “Do you mean because your mother lives there?” I said. Almost imperceptibly, she shook her head.

  “Then there’s only one way to find out if you’re ready for it,” I said. She looked more troubled by my invitation than it seemed to me she should have been, even if she meant to decline it.

  “Are you worried about leaving your father alone?” I said.

  “My father has been alone all his life,” said Fielding.

  �
��Don’t tell me you’re afraid to quit your job,” I said. “It’s not like we’re making any money. That’s why there’ll always be newspaper jobs. No one else wants them.”

  Fielding nodded distractedly. “You’re going for certain?” she said. “You didn’t tell me you were thinking about it.” I shrugged. So that was it, I thought, flattered. She was sad that I was leaving. I felt a pleasant hurt of fondness for her in my throat. It surprised me. That fleeting look of tenderness was in her eyes, that wistfulness I had seen the day we met at Bishop Feild. It was as if, for an instant, she had stepped outside her life and was seeing everyone in it from a perspective that in a few moments, she would be unable to recall. I wondered how, in those few moments, she regarded me. And I wondered if this feeling that I had for her, this curious affection, might be love.

  She blinked rapidly, and for an awkward few moments I thought she was going to cry. Now she looked panicked, as she had at the Feild when I alluded to her estranged parents and when Slogger Anderson taunted Prowse into proving he was not afraid to flog her.

  “When are you leaving?” she said at last. I told her in two weeks; I had given notice at the Telegram that day.

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t — you see, I couldn’t make it by then,” she said. “Maybe sometime after that, I’m not sure. I’d have to be sure before I — ”

  “Is there something you need help with here?” I said. “I could stay — ”

  “No, no,” Fielding said, “there’s nothing. Really. I’d have to be sure in my mind, that’s all, you see. In my mind. I’d have to think about it for a while.”

  “All right, then,” I said. “But I bet you’ll decide in time to go with me.”

  She extended her hand to me, awkwardly, formally. I was gratified to see that there were tears in her eyes.

  “I don’t expect I’ll see you before you go.”

  I forced a laugh. “I’m not going for another two weeks,” I said.