Cold Light

by Frank Moorhouse

  Probably from politeness, he said, ‘Perhaps not great, but to the point. I like the line, “no master of the show”. Very modern. Will I continue with the service?’

  ‘Yes.’ Frederick and she nodded.

  ‘I’ll read your mother’s eulogy first because she died first. It was put together by Bertha McNamara, an old friend. She died not long after your mother.

  ‘ “Cecilia Gladys Thomas, a Rationalist and reform organiser, was born on 17 March 1880 at Albury, New South Wales, elder daughter of Australian-born parents. Her father was a sheriff’s officer and her mother was the great-granddaughter of Governor King. As a young woman, she visited the prisons with her father.

  ‘ “The family moved to Melbourne and, as a precocious young woman, she began studying Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Henry George, Thomas Paine and Edward Bellamy with a tutor at home. She attempted an elopement with the tutor at the age of fifteen, which did not last more than a month or so –” ’

  ‘What?’ Edith cried out, half-laughing, giving T. George a start. ‘I’ve never heard this.’ She turned to Frederick. ‘Did you know this?’

  He shook his head and he, too, was laughing. ‘Go on, T. George.’

  T. George was worried. ‘You are not embarrassed by this information, I hope? You shouldn’t be. It is a rather poetic act of passion, I would’ve thought, for a young person. Romeo and Juliet.’

  ‘Continue, George,’ she said. ‘Depends on the age of the tutor. Although, perhaps not.’

  George frowned as if rebuked. ‘I do not know that fact. Perhaps it could be discovered, though time has passed. “. . . an elopement with the tutor at the age of fifteen . . . She returned to her home after the elopement ended and then in her teens left home again to study music and singing in Melbourne under a Mrs Trantham Fryer – I believe that to be her name.

  ‘ “She had a fine contralto voice – a voice I heard at local functions – and performed with the Metropolitan . . .” ’ T. George stopped and frowned. ‘ “Liedertafel” – I hope I pronounced that correctly . . .’ and then tried another pronunciation: ‘Liedertafel.’

  ‘ “She told me that to pay for her musical training, she started a poultry farm at Deepdene, in Victoria. Of necessity using her own labour, she built the poultry sheds herself from scrap timber and carried out the other farm chores herself . . .” ’

  Edith and Frederick and even Janice now laughed. Edith said she had vaguely heard about the poultry farm in her mother’s conversation, but had forgotten it.

  Frederick said he had never heard anything about the poultry farm.

  T. George was disconcerted somewhat by the interruptions and laughter, and his expression showed that he did not see what it was that caused the laughter. He stood on his felt box and waited until he had their attention again and went on. ‘ “By 1900, she was a poultry expert as well as a teacher of singing and voice production. She turned her back on music after marrying Peter Berry at a Rationalist service and came to live in Sydney.”

  ‘As you both remember, your mother refused to wear a wedding ring on the grounds that it symbolised servitude to a spouse. She had this stated during their Rationalist marriage service.’

  Janice said, ‘Good for her.’

  Edith now remembered asking her mother a number of times, at different ages, why she did not wear a wedding ring. She did not recall her mother’s answer. Edith wondered if she would ask that this be stated in her forthcoming registry-office service. No. But she would not wear a ring. She had worn too many rings.

  ‘ “She then trained as a stenographer and for a while worked as a court reporter. The married couple moved to the country at Jasper’s Brush, but travelled weekly to Sydney to engage in social reform, purchasing one of the first automobiles in the district.” ’

  T. George looked up. ‘Actually, I think I might’ve been the first to purchase an automobile – a Chevrolet. It is of no consequence. I will continue. “She distributed early anti-conscription literature for the Australian Freedom League and became a passionate friend of Vida Goldstein, supporting Miss Goldstein’s attempts to get into parliament.

  ‘ “During the Great War, Cecilia and Miss Goldstein created the Women’s Peace Army, which called for the abolition of conscription and militarism, for equal rights for women, and for control of industrial production and banking by the people.” Your mother and Miss Goldstein fell out when Miss Goldstein became more spiritual and more with Christian Science. She was concerned about the indoctrination of children with militaristic ideas, and with others she formed the Children’s Peace Army . . .

  ‘ “With the help of the young people in the Children’s Peace Army, Cecilia made red pennants to celebrate the Russian revolution. But these celebrations sparked three days of riots in 1919 when returned soldiers attacked the unionists, radicals and Russian immigrants who insisted on displaying the red flag, which was an offence under the War Precautions Act.” ’

  T. George looked up and spoke directly to them with some relish. ‘There is a description of how your mother and some of the children from the Peace Army pulled down a big man and, with one foot on his chest, your mother managed to tie a red ribbon round his neck.’ T. George chuckled and returned to his eulogy. ‘ “She sometimes wrote for the Australian Women’s Weekly on sex hygiene, the need for infant welfare centres, and the need for educating young women on motherhood.” ’ Edith remembered reading her mother’s manuscript before it was sent to the Weekly. She thought that she might well need some parent education for motherhood herself – well, stepmotherhood – which was probably something else again.

  ‘ “Both Celia and Peter were also members of the Rationalist Sunday School.” ’

  T. George again changed his tone of voice. ‘This is not in the service, but I thought I would add in that your father and mother once suggested to me that they start a Rationalist Sunday School in Nowra, but I advised against it. It would’ve caused a ruckus in the town. As I recall, your mother at this time seemed too tired to persist and they gave up the idea.

  ‘ “Cecilia later became active both in the local Red Cross and at a state and national level. She was an executive member of the state division and on the military convalescent homes committee, and was a convenor of the Junior Red Cross.” ’ T. George again made an intervention. ‘It is interesting that she had been a pacifist all her life and yet did all she could for those men mutilated by the war.

  ‘ “It is generally agreed that in later life she dressed very well, often in beautifully tailored suits, sometimes with brass buttons carrying her initials.” ’

  Edith remembered the time of the initialled buttons. It didn’t last long.

  ‘ “Following her father’s death, Cecilia inherited his significant shareholding in a major Hunter Valley vineyard.” ’

  These shares had been sold at her death and the money divided between Frederick and her.

  ‘ “Never robust, she died of liver cirrhosis.” ’

  Edith had been told cancer.

  ‘That’s all.’

  Edith became teary again. She now remembered being taken to rallies as a restless child, being at first passionate and proud to be with her mother and then becoming irritable in her adolescent years, not because she disagreed but because she was annoyed at being dragged away from what she herself wanted to do. Oh, how much of her mother was in her. How she understood now – fully – why her mother, when dying, was so insistent that she not leave her work at the League to travel home. The League had been the universal cause of the day, and a cause took precedence over family affairs.

  Her mother and her friends won most of their battles – against conscription, for the role of the trade unions, votes for women, sexual hygiene, sex education, abolition of child labour, a basic wage, free healthcare, sick leave, pensions. In their time, Australia hadn’t become a militaristic country. But now the government had introduced conscription without a referendum. That was a lost cause.

  She had won
none of her causes – the League had not stopped the Second World War. She looked at her brother; she doubted he would live to see his victory.

  Edith was now aware of how often her father and mother had been away from home when they were young, and how they had been looked after by the Aboriginal housemaid, Belle.

  Clearing her voice of her tears, Edith said to Frederick, ‘You are right – they were always in the city. I remember them coming home very late and smelling of drink. I would wake at hearing the car. I sometimes got out of bed and went down to them. Sometimes, I would watch my mother undress and prepare for bed. She would tell me what meeting they had been to. Sometimes, they brought back cakes from the city and left them for us on the kitchen table.’

  Frederick said, ‘I hardly ever went to her bedroom.’

  She thought about this. That might have been the big difference in their upbringing. He never had that slight desperate thread of intimacy that she’d had with her mother, or demanded of her mother. Those captured sleepy-eyed moments in the bedroom after the oh-so-important affairs of the city.

  She must have changed her attitude to the Russian revolution as history unfolded.

  Frederick said, ‘So it was cirrhosis. I didn’t know what she died of – no one ever said.’

  They both knew their mother drank. Edith hoped she would not go the same way.

  Janice said, ‘God, I hope people will be able to record such radical achievements for me. It’s a history of feminist radicalism.’

  ‘Radicalism without a revolutionary theory,’ Frederick said, and then seemed to regret his pontifical tone, and said, forgivingly, ‘It was, I suppose, the radicalism of its time. They had no real training in theory.’

  In the hot sun, T. George again waited patiently on his box while they had their personal conversation.

  She turned to him. ‘Go on, George, do father now. I’ll refill your glass.’

  ‘Water will do – there’s a waterbag hanging on the front bumper of my car.’

  She went over to his car – a late-model American Packard – and filled his glass and her own from the waterbag, and returned. She was amused that George still carried water when he motored about. He gulped down the water and handed the glass back to her. She drank from her glass – the water tasted of canvas and had been chilled in the slipstream of air when the car was moving. She remembered something about always taking the bag off when you parked the car to avoid having a dog pee on it.

  T. George said he would now do the eulogy of their father. ‘I am the humble author of this eulogy,’ he said. ‘I worked long on it and was proud to have been asked. “On almost every day, for as many years back as the present writer can remember . . .” ’ T. George looked up from his notes and said, ‘That is me. I am, of course, the “present writer”.’ He then continued, ‘ “. . . a visitor at the School of Arts, where he’d rented a room between the hours of nine and three, might have noticed, as nearly all did notice, the stooping figure of a man, bending over a desk piled high with leather-bound volumes of history, jurisprudence, political science and constitutional law. Many a child stood and watched this man busily absorbed in studying and writing.

  ‘ “Had the man chanced to raise his head for a moment, the visitor would have seen, framed in long and snowy hair and beard, one of the finest, kindliest, sweetest, strongest, grandest faces that ever gladdened the eyes of man. And the visitor, no matter what age, would have been welcomed in with a gesture and would’ve been engaged in conversation.

  ‘ “But, however impressed by the sight of this solitary scholar or by the words of the conversation he offered, few realised that they had been privileged with a view of a man of towering strength of intellect; still fewer suspected that each sentence, flowing gently from the quill –” ’

  He again stopped and spoke to them. ‘I say “quill”, but he used, of course, a fountain pen – a Waterman, if I remember correctly.’

  T. George went back to the oration. ‘ “. . . in those slowly stiffening fingers, was making a powerful contribution to the resistless sweep of logic and of scornful wrath destined to bring down the ill-founded structure of a false society.” ’

  T. George paused from the oration and explained, ‘The visitor would have seen your father because he always kept the door of that room at the School of Arts open and welcomed conversation no matter how uninformed the visitor was.

  ‘ “For the past month his familiar form –” ’ T. George stopped to explain that ‘past month’ meant the month after the funeral when the oration had been originally composed. ‘ “– has been missing from its accustomed place, and habitués of the School of Arts will never see him there again. For he is dead. His name is Peter Berry.

  ‘ “He died at one o’clock in the afternoon in his room at the School of Arts, surrounded by the books, manuscripts and pamphlets he had gathered about him in his active pamphleteer’s warfare over half a century long, his pen still between his ink-stained fingers.

  ‘ “It began on a dairy farm near Milton. On this farm, belonging to his father, young Berry spent his boyhood and a few years of his manhood.

  ‘ “Then, equipped with such learning as a country-school education and the newly established American International Correspondence Schools afforded, he went to Melbourne at the age of sixteen, where he obtained a clerkship in the Registry of Deeds. It was around this time he became a friend of the now Justice Latham – then, of course, a young lawyer.

  ‘ “His experience in that office, coupled with his painstaking and methodical nature, made him a very reliable conveyancer and examiner of titles.

  ‘ “On throwing up his clerkship, he began to read law in the office with Morris Phillips of Phillips, Fox & Masel, a celebrated member of the Melbourne bar and leading Rationalist and member of the Jewish community.” ’

  Morris Phillips, as well as having taught Edith bridge, had been active in the League of Nations Union. He had handled all the family affairs, the wills, the inheritances, but he had died just before she returned to Australia.

  T. George ploughed on. ‘ “Probably, those around him little imagined what a giant intellect was developing in their office.” ’

  T. George’s voice became more ardent. ‘ “Indeed, it is more than likely that their hopes were slight regarding the future of a young man to whom already the details and formalities and absurdities and quackeries of statute law seemed but so much cobweb, which he must brush away in order to obtain a closer view of those fundamental veracities he called the principles of natural justice. His mind had begun to soar from the realms of pettifoggery into those of high philosophy, and, instead of perfecting himself in the art of bleeding a client, he devoted himself to writing his first pamphlet, entitled Our Financiers: Their Ignorance, Usurpations, and Frauds.

  ‘ “He said he wanted to work with his hands and his mind, with nature, all in the daily flow of work. To everyone’s surprise, he turned to the study of water. He came to Jasper’s Brush, where he set to work finding, storing and caring for water.

  ‘ “He began a business and applied his fine intelligence to the invention and manufacture of all things to do with water – drilling methods, types of piping, tanking, sterilising. He invented and patented a special no-leak tap for water tanks, which should’ve been taken up by every home and council in the country, but never was.” ’ T. George interpolated, ‘We waste a huge amount of water through leaking taps.’

  Edith saw how she shared this yearning of her father’s to work with tangible reality as well as with the abstract and verbal. Oh yes, she had feelings like those of her father when she had been at the League. A desire to work in field projects. She sometimes yearned to be able to do something practical, to bandage, to ladle soup, to spray against malaria, to install wind pumps in Africa.

  ‘ “His study was firstly in the geological sciences – learning where water was to be found and how it was to be harvested, and how to conserve and distribute it.

  ‘ “
He used his legal knowledge to forge a theory of water rights: who should control water and how it should be shared. His thinking went far beyond property rights to ideas of universal rights, which knew no property boundaries.

  ‘ “He believed in cheap, uncensored mail, and free, uncensored libraries, and believed that political pamphlets should be distributed free of charge through the post.

  ‘ “He tried to convince the people that the government had no right to censor, monopolise or interfere with the carriage of mail.

  ‘ “But his arguments had no effect.” ’

  Edith had all his pamphlets somewhere in storage and had hardly read any of them. She turned to Frederick. ‘Did you read the pamphlets?’

  He shook his head. ‘Had other reading to do.’

  T. George said, ‘ “He left a trunk full of manuscripts on a variety of subjects, which his friends, including myself, intend to put into print as soon as we are able.” ’ T. George moved his feet and looked at them and said, ‘We have, alas, not been very diligent about this.’

  Still standing on his felt-covered box, he said, ‘I want to say that I had many an argument with him and that we were close to agreement that cooperativism – he was a great believer in cooperatives – and the Rotary idea of small, free-enterprise businesses and the limited proprietary company were both expressions of the same impulse to innovation, improvement, and the right of people to freely organise themselves productively.’

  She had argued with herself about commerce. It did produce innovation and efficiency, which was for the public good, but more often than not it was driven by simple-minded infantile need for profit, which blinded business to the public good and the welfare of their workers. They did not ask themselves whether what they manufactured and sold was harmful. She liked Rotary’s ‘Four Way Test’: is it the truth? Is it fair to all concerned? Will it build goodwill and better friendships? Will it be beneficial to all concerned?

  T. George said, ‘We both believed that there was nothing more gratifying in life than when your letterhead came from the printer with your company name emblazoned on it with the words “PTY LTD” at the end.’