Cotter's England

by Christina Stead

  She was sorry she had come to London, but there was nothing to go back to. Differently from Nellie, she could see that Nellie had an idea in her constant advice about submitting. It might seem strange in a beaky, restless, gabby person like Nellie to chatter about submission, hypocrisy with an aim in it, but Nellie in her blue half-lights lit on aspects of existence. Was it because she had never submitted and could not, that she had not kept Barry and never had a friend? "Sink the turbulent selfish soul," said Nellie, who never did that—or did she sometimes in her excesses? Caroline had no temperament for excesses. "You are afraid of beauty," said Nellie, "you just want grand, impetuous life to provide you with a living; you'll never be an artist."

  Caroline had taken submission as a word that Nellie used for her own purposes as she used Introspection and Friendship. By introspection she meant a shameless curiosity and crafty use of her knowledge; by friendship what only a clique meant; and it was dishonest since she trapped people that way. But Nellie was ill, and by submission she might mean death, it might be a preconception of death which only the sick could have. And this chilling submission was what Caroline for the first time was feeling now. Caroline now floated along over-shadowed by the lank, hobbling stride of the woman who had taken her up, haunted her, and ruined her. She was walking away from her, but Nellie was someone she carried with her, as you carry a bad parent always with you; Nellie had got into her being, like the knowledge of drunkenness. There had been nothing in Bridgehead, Nellie said, to satisfy their youthful intellectual and moral hungers, so they had taken to drink, vice, unbridled chaotic speculation and gnawing at each other. Hunger will prey on garbage, rather than be extinguished in death. But Nellie had not called it garbage, she called it knowledge.

  George and Eliza Cook and a good many others, plain folk with strong natures and tempers, had seen things were wrong and they wanted to save humanity, their nation in particular and the greater part of the nation, the poor worker, to which they belonged, from making a terrible mistake. Many mistakes had been made by the workers. But Nellie had chosen Bedlam and the lazaret as brothers and sisters. Nellie hammered at Caroline, "What answer have you for the individual? You yourself are an individual. I think of the individual, and I've spent my life among the poor creatures. Textbook answers won't do and crusades won't do except to exculpate the smug. The individual lives, suffers, his heart is beaten out of him, he dies. Society does not die and I don't care about society. Society is a villain. It keeps on living and social arts and social sciences are only charitable dames. Marxism is cruel, because it doesn't care about the individual. Can I go to a man eating garbage out of the gutter and say, The dole is only a palliative. What you need is to starve so that you'll see your position clear and revolt? No decent person would say that, but the Marxists say that and so I say they're self-satisfied black-coated bureaucrats, a petty-bourgeois sect with canting deacons."

  "But George then?".

  "I'm a better revolutionist than he is."

  The revolutionists she saw as fragments of men, all at fault. She went so far as to think of the fighters, the sane, healthy, as thick-skinned Philistines. She was maimed and glad of it. "The most pitiful figure, the most beautiful soul is a woman standing on the scaffold and looking down at the people around her who are going to kill her; she's inherited a heavy burden, she's suffered every disappointment, she's tried to get out of it and they've killed her for it. When she looks down at them she sees into their transparent souls: she knows them. She knows what is under every move of theirs. And so they hang her for witchcraft, for poisoning."

  Nellie for a while had been absorbed by the strange life and sufferings of a woman named Mary who had been a follower of Joanna Southcott and perhaps had imagined herself a savior. Nellie had not understood the story at all and given it to Caroline eagerly with her hurried, nervous high voice, "What's the explanation, sweetheart? Do you understand her? I don't know whether she's an innocent victim that they got after, or whether she was guilty. Was she a real healer or a charlatan or self-deceived?"

  Caroline read the history and rejected it, "Of course she was a poisoner."

  "Ah, but she suffered. And they came to her to be healed."

  Then Nellie lost all interest. But it was clear from many things that with Nellie a naïve, fresh-faced pathos was the visage of criminals. She thought that reason was a cloud hiding bad motives and society a wheel to break individuals upon.

  "As you have been broken, Caroline. An individual is born into society only for society to seize it, crush it, plunder it, force it to work, marry, produce; only to rob the fruit of its labor, marriage, creation, to make it old and empty and shovel it into the grave. Society should live for the individual, but it never will. All those who agree that society is right and who try to follow its rules are mugs or ignorant. And if you understand, you can't escape, sweetheart, but you can penetrate the meaning of things, enjoy yourself in your own way and when you die it is in your own time, as you wish, not squeezed out and trodden out like an orange rind, but if you want to, when you're young. Isn't it better to die as an individual, when you want to, than to wait till you're something else, just a hulk with a cargo of disease and pain?"

  Nellie herself expected to live long. "I feel it in me, Caroline: a gypsy once told me, You've a long life ahead."

  And Nellie was impatient with "revolutionary pipe dreams." No City of the Future! The here and now of pain! Can a slum-mother look beyond the next rat-squeak, or an invalid beyond the next ache? "Most of their rebel talk, sweetheart, is whistling down the wind. It may be heard and may cheer a heart in an orchard two miles away or it may be lost altogether for eternity. You can't feed the hungry on maybes. For those whose torments are like ours, who understand as we do, there is sometimes only one answer." Death was the answer. "How do we know there is nothing beyond? No one ever returned. Perhaps there is something totally unlike anything ever imagined. I'm a materialist, pet, remember, but still we know nothing: there is the Unknowable. It would be an intoxication, the best, to plunge into the unknowable. When you're watching a bird, sweetheart, and see it spread its wings and fly off so easily, don't you want to do the same? To think of it; nothing more! And charity! Understanding! The accounts all settled. All the worries settled. No one to ask you for rent. Supposing there were a world like that, it would be glorious. But who can imagine a world like that? We all fight for life: that's blind animal impulse. The-Bride-of-Death. That would be something glorious to experience, the last submission, the splendid last breath, the sacred swoon. They say it's nothing at all if it's swift, a blinding flash of light, a total darkness, something like that."

  But there was a book in her library by Charles Duff which indicated that sudden death must not be like that, but a long pain.

  "Aye, but that's the animal pain, the consciousness is gone."

  "Who knows?"

  "No one has returned from there to tell us."

  It was strange that months and months they had talked around this theme and how Nellie could harmonize upon it. She had read fitfully in the last few months and brought up all the ideas she had read. Everything Nellie had read had seemed to bear upon death and to confirm her ideas.

  "It would be a great and glorious thing if one of us turned out to have a soul of that quality: I always thought it might be you, Caroline. It would stretch out the measure of existence for us. And to leave a message for us all from the edge of the Unknowable! Oh, Caroline—it's a great vision."

  Nellie could become exalted, and then return downwards as if to examine her listener's strength and faith.

  "There were suicides and deaths when we were young, that was hunger, and despair, the bleak reality." Nellie's hunger for death had come from then. "But I will live old, it's in my bones."

  The woman now began to address Nellie directly. She was taking leave of everything and Nellie was the last one lingering.

  "Go away, go away, Nellie, don't talk to me, don't call me. I am gone. Let me b
e alone. I am alone."

  As she walked she became aware of someone behind her. She stood still. The moon was still slanting and a faint wind blowing like a drapery, touching her off and on. She heard a giant stride behind her, very soft; it came from up the street towards her. An agreeable nondescript young man with cropped hair was there and wearing something loose, like coolie trousers and coat and a yard or so of uncut pale material over his shoulders. He stood faintly dark against the moonlight which slanted behind him. Caroline knew all this without seeing it. It was behind her. She heard two more strides behind her, an enormous, silent gust and his hand touched her coat lightly, with a wave of air and motion.

  "Is it an unknown or death? Is it real?"

  She waited but nothing more happened. She walked on, seeing behind her, without looking, the long moonlit and shadowy street. "Three great sighs, three great strides." She began to rest as she walked. Morning was coming into the moonlight, two fluids which did not mix well. There were a lot of people everywhere about at first, and she sat down to have tea in a place full of men. On the dirty table top she wrote a letter to Nellie. She had to write to Nellie who wanted it and who understood her. Then she wrote a note to the office telling them she was ill and they had better not expect her that day. They gave her envelopes and stamps and she posted the letters outside and began to walk again, though her head was turning.

  She went down to the canal and had a look at it. People were about, there were trams full of people going to work and also sightseers. Everything seemed so strange. It was as if she had just come into this world.

  Now the men had gone and there were women about. She walked; she could not think. Only to lie down or to climb.

  At last she saw an immense apartment building, large rooms, steel girders, brickwork and the frames of windows; everything was rented in advance, a notice said in front. She climbed up a long way through the building and when the first man questioned her she said calmly she was going to see Mr. Whistler, the name of a man in an office she had worked in. "Whistler? Who's he?" were the last words she heard. She went as far up as she could and jumped onto a terrain of the sort she had always liked to play on when a child, clay, lime and sand pits, wheelbarrows, piles of bricks, and plenty of lost nails everywhere. She died that day and was not identified for two days since no one was looking for her; she had at that moment no settled address and she was a long way from Islington.

  It was a…

  IT WAS a Sunday when Nellie returned from her conference. The door in Lamb Street was opened by Mrs. McMahon. Nellie said cheerfully, "Hello, Gwen, what are you doing here? Aren't you cooking for your family today?"

  "I've given Bernard a picnic lunch and he's gone to Mrs. Bobsey's for the weekend; Mr. Cook insisted."

  "Well, who's home, pet? You don't know what it is to be home. Make me a cup o' tea, pet. Where's my brother?"

  "Mr. Cook's in the back yard reading the paper in his battle-dress," said Mrs. McMahon very merry.

  George was stretched out on Tom's cot under the tree, and dressed in an army surplus jungle warfare battledress. He was reading from a pile of dainty foreign books, each a quarter of an inch thick and covered with fancy paper in small light designs. George did not get up. He was reddish brown all over from the sun. The graying strands of his hair had also burned yellow again.

  He called, "Hello, darling; don't throw yourself on my stomach; Mrs. McMahon has been stuffing me for two weeks."

  "You've been here for two weeks?"

  "I stayed at Bob's at first; but not to wear out my welcome I came home about ten days ago. I want to use the farm as a rest home if they chuck me out of my continental office."

  "What's wrong with this rest home? Get up from there, and give us a hug and a kiss. I've been working all hours for two weeks."

  Her voice was hoarse. In her excitement she brought on a fit of coughing, through which she continued to sputter to her husband. He took no notice of her remarks or the coughing. He had dropped one book which was on the art of pottery and had begun on another, about G. Bernard Shaw, that Fabian he had admired as a young boy. Nellie went into a series of coughing spasms and sat down on the grass to finish them off.

  George drawled, "It's witty. It's funny I used to think Shaw was a great man. I wrote to him once, telling him how to improve his style for the workingman."

  Nellie said dryly, "I never fell for him, chick. To me he was just another Irishman pulling the wool over English eyes. I never saw it, pet. From the very first play I denounced him as a mountebank."

  "I'd like to see you write a play half as good as Man and Superman," roared George, not because he was angry.

  Mrs. McMahon's face looked round the open doorway smiling, to hear George laughing; Nellie laughed.

  "It's himself in residence again. Home, home, home!" said Nellie.

  The telephone rang in the front room and Nellie was up the kitchen steps, overturning a chair, throwing her hat on the ground, knocking a cup of tea to the floor and dragging the cloth half off the table, all in one moment. She cried, "It's me brother."

  In a minute they heard her joyous, "Hell-o-o darling!" and the long excited chatter; her voice went down to a contralto croon, became grave and excited again. "And were ye down last weekend, pet? Ah, blast it, I missed you! Did ye sleep here?" and so on. Conversation languished; there were silences, but they still stayed at the phone, in contact. At last she came away.

  "Tom was down! He never told me. Caroline's never come back? There must be a letter for me."

  Very much excited, she looked for her letters, and having run briefly through them, selected some, when she noticed one from Joanna Sterker. This she slid into her dress. She went into the front room, closed the door and read this note.

  Cush—Well, you see me taking up your standing invite two in a row. Not very wise your standing invite was it? Or was it? I didn't take it up when I was in town two weeks ago. Perhaps I missed something. I never thought of you. Not very flattering was it? I was staying with a nice little pal. Expect me Saturday or Sunday.

  Yrs. Johnny, Broke but Game.

  PS/ What about that item in the papers?

  Mrs. McMahon stayed to dinner, and with them was a friend from Wales who was to stay the night, Lewis, a miners' representative.

  Mrs. McMahon was doing the dishes. Inside, they were quarreling. Lewis was a flatfaced, big, serious man of about forty-two, dark and of good complexion.

  George and he were saying the men had changed; "When I was a docker in Cardiff, men in pubs were interested in any kind of topic and the things they talked about intelligently would surprise you; but not now. And the same with singing. When they got a bit drunk and I was a drinking man, then they would all start up and sing and they all could; but not now. It's just silly talk, the pools, what was on telly last night. I was in a pub this evening with a couple of members of the Board; I've just got on, you know, I'm junior member; and they asked one of the men there to give a song. He went to the piano and began to strum on it and then sang a song, but not well; a man can't sing who needs an instrument. And that was to show me people could still sing!"

  George agreed. It was true the men weren't serious in pubs any more. Nellie disagreed. She said the workers were just as serious, but they didn't express it in the old-fashioned sententious way.

  "Wait for the event, Lew; don't get too uppity because you're on the Board. Don't take after George here, who's getting mighty critical of the workers. They're just the same and they'll soon show it."

  "What will they do?" said Lewis, seriously.

  "You'll see, by June, next year, there'll be a general strike."

  "I don't agree with you. The old spirit's gone," said Lewis.

  "The men certainly did talk more seriously twenty years ago," said George.

  Nellie said perhaps it was the radio and TV.

  "It's gone by in a flash: you can't discuss it."

  Mrs. McMahon had finished and came in to listen, her peachy fa
ce lighted up. Said she, "The English do not sing as much as the Welsh."

  Lewis noticed she was Welsh and turned a little towards her. Mrs. McMahon said, "The men think they've paid their way. They pay out their responsibilities in taxes, insurance, all kinds of contributions. They feel they've done their bit; and the little bit over is for the pub and the pools."

  George had his teeth into it, though, "Well, but I remember very well when I first came to London from Tyneside. It wasn't hard to get up an argument then and I did it purposely wherever I went, to learn to speak. I learned a lot from the talking and joking in pubs. I learned to meet the serious opponent, the surly or angry man without temper: I learned to show my temper; I learned the tricks of the heckler. I'm a heckler myself. But now I couldn't learn the soapbox or the platform in the pubs and I never go near them. It's all blamed hush-hush and respect and don't say that. What's happened to men like Cobden? They must still be with us."

  Nellie said there were young fellows coming up but they were not allowed up. Lewis had his teeth into it, too. He said, "It is a smug determination to take what is coming to them. The workers are determined to get what is coming to them, though they don't think for a moment the Labour Government is really their government. They're greedy for their rights. It's a lingering memory of the bad days. Now the job of social democracy is to make use of just this tendency. It's no good saying it was the war. They had much more war on the Continent and over there there are strong revolutionary parties."

  Nellie became very excited at the suggestion that anything on the Continent was better than anything in England; and she theatrically and noisily scolded George when he said the food was better, revolutionary feeling was better and there was a hundred thousand times better discussion. Nellie became angry and went out with Mrs. McMahon to make tea for them and cut some cake.

  "It makes me boil, Gwen, to see them stretching their legs and denouncing their own workers and praising foreigners up. I can't understand what gets into them as soon as they leave the pit and the dockside and become representatives. They're bloody retired. They're looking for a socialist Cheltenham."