Poor Fellow My Country

by Xavier Herbert

  He sighed slightly, said quickly as her eyes widened, ‘Finish that off and let’s have a drink. Let’s get drunk, eh? We’ve never been drunk together.’

  Her face lit up. She squealed, ‘Wheeee!’

  She was finished in no time. Then, drawing the little table close so that he could handle the drinks more easily, she slid herself onto his lap, put an arm about his neck. With her free hand she stayed his handing her the charged glass, and looking into his eyes, asked, ‘You won’t humiliate me again?’

  He held the black eyes for a moment, then swallowed, answered, ‘No.’

  She kissed him quickly, then took the glass. He took his up, clinked it with hers, saying, ‘Your book!’

  She corrected him: ‘Our book!’ They drank.

  Now she snuggled up to him, kissed him in a different way, slowly, not now snatching something denied, but enjoying ownership. She smoothed his brown seamed cheek and silver hair, smiling at him tenderly. She murmured, ‘I love you.’ She kissed him again.

  His breath quivered in a sigh. He said, ‘We’re going to get drunk.’

  ‘I’m drunk already . . . with happiness.’

  ‘After so many tears?’

  ‘I was afraid I was going to lose you.’ She kissed him again, lingeringly. He joined in the sensuousness of it, rolling her back into his arms. She shrugged out of the sleeves of her jacket, unbuttoned her blouse, heaved up to release the brassiere, offered her little breasts to his lips, rumpled his hair and kissed his ears while he attended to them.

  He withdrew to see her laughing face, her sparkling eyes. He asked breathlessly, ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Because I’m happy . . . because I’m getting what I’ve wanted for so long . . . Oh!’ She dragged his lips down to her, kissed him wildly.

  He rose with her in his arms, carried her into the bedroom half-lit by the light from the lounge. She kissed and clung and moaned while he undressed her — dragged at him while he slid out of his own clothes — dragged him onto her, into her — sobbed for joy while they rocked in union.

  Afterwards, still clinging to him, she fell asleep. He tried to move. Still she clung. She slept for minutes, breathing deeply. Then suddenly she woke, began to jerk her loins, just three or four times. What seemed like tension went out of her then. She relaxed with a gusty sigh. She smiled up at Jeremy, reached and smoothed his face and hair. She whispered, ‘It was wonderful.’ She kissed him. When he moved she let him go.

  He went to the wardrobe, took out two dressing-gowns, one heavy, the other a light silk for the tropics. She was sitting up unashamedly on the edge of the bed when he came back. He was going to put the heavy gown on her. She chose the silk. With arms about each other they went back to the radiator-warmed lounge, again into the one armchair.

  Sipping brandy, with thick brows now rumpled, she said suddenly, ‘What are we going to call it?’

  He stared at her. ‘The baby?’

  She laughed delightedly, pressed brow against his as she kissed him. ‘No . . . the book. But I suppose you can call it our baby.’

  ‘I won’t be in this book business, you know.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you will. You have to be.’

  ‘Why have to be.’

  ‘I can’t do it myself. I know I can’t.’

  ‘But I can’t write anything . . . only those stilted articles. I can’t even talk well. I can only get angry about things.’

  ‘That’s what I want . . . your angry strength.’

  He sighed, reached to pour brandy. She became rapt in the book. She hit on the title of True Commonwealth, decided that it should be a novel, a huge novel, about a family — going back to its founders here, Eureka, the early idealism, the hotchpotch history of the land laced in with that of the family, to show the rottenness, the struggle against it, the subtle opposition to the idealism, the growth of the rottenness through frustration — while he plied her with brandy and biscuits and cheese.

  Then she was drunk, burbling, getting her story mixed up with their own. Suddenly she forgot the story, seized him, hissing that she loved him, loved him, loved him. He carried her back to the bedroom. This time, when it was over, she lay relaxed completely. He rose and got pyjamas, dressed her while she lay blinking at him, muttering, ‘Am I dreaming . . . Jeremy . . . am I . . . dreaming?’

  She fell asleep almost as soon as he had tucked her in, clinging to him as he bent over her. Gently he freed himself, tucked her hands in under the bedclothes, kissed her on the brow. For a while he stood looking down at her childish little face, truly the face of an Enchanted One, glowing against the whiteness of the pillow and the darkness of hair and brows. He turned and went quietly back to the lounge, through it to the kitchen.

  He made coffee, brought it into the lounge and laced it with brandy, drank. Then he took pad and pen from the sideboard, dropped with them into his chair. For some time he sat staring, thinking. At length he began to write:

  Little Sweetheart,

  It is proper it is wise, that I go out of your life with the honey taste of you on my lips. The wonder would be spoilt by my hanging about, to become old through aging when by your enchantment I have become young again and shall remain so in my memory of you. You have conceived ‘Our Baby’. Now only you can gestate it, give it birth. Only the weak need the strength of others. It is a tremendous task you have to do. But you have strength, courage, ability, youth. I leave you to it with my love.

  J.D.

  Having written, he left the missive on the table, held down by a brandy bottle beside which were two pink tablets. He went back into the bedroom, stealthily got together his belongings, his suitcase, stole out again. The sleeper was softly snoring. Packed and dressed, he looked in at the bedroom door, at the dark head on the white pillow. He sighed slightly as he turned away, went softly out of the flat, onto the stairs, and up.

  It seemed as if he were walking right into the Cross as he emerged on top. The Moon was not yet down, but out of sight behind the black city. A telephone booth was blazing with light not far away. He went to it, found an advertisement for an all-hours taxi company, and rang.

  A cab was along in no time. He asked to be taken to Central Station, and learnt from the driver as they went that the first train going northward would be the Paper Train to Newcastle, departing at five. At the Station he made himself more or less comfortable on a bench, slept a little.

  Suddenly the huge sleeping place became clamorous with the arrival of the papers and those who would be travelling, the shunting in of the train. The news-stand was opened up for its share of the papers, still damp and reeking off the press. Jeremy bought a paper, took it to the Refreshment Room, opened it on the counter while the sleepy waitress got his coffee and a sandwich. There was a large picture of himself perpetuating the perfection of that punch of his. It had been taken from the foot of the rostrum at the moment the big Liverpool-Irishman was sagging at the knees, hanging as it were on the fist of the stiffly-outstretched left. It was a photographer’s masterpiece. The adversaries had been caught in profile. To right and left of them were standing, or rather crouching, all agape, Alfie and the Bloke. Half the front page was taken up with it and the letter-press concerning it. The heavy heading was: POLITICAL MEETING ENDS IN WILD BRAWL. Beneath it stated: NEW NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY’S INAUGURATION BROKEN UP BY COMMUNISTS. Jeremy glanced at others drinking and eating and reading all about it. He folded the paper, finished his coffee, went to the train. Because few passengers were travelling first class he easily got a compartment to himself.

  He read the piece while waiting for the train to start. His name was mentioned with that of the Bloke, as if they were associates, fellow-travellers the Way of the Crooked Cross. National Socialism, National Socialism. The report flogged the term, as if aiming to anathematise it as dirty a word as Communism. Yet, on the same page was a small piece praisefully reporting on the unity and productivity of National Socialism in Germany resulting from a system of youthful recreation called St
rength Through Joy. Apparently neither Nationalism or Socialism or anything else but British Conservatism could be classed as decent in Australia. It stated that the two National Socialist leaders were not to be found when sought for interview, with the inference that they had taken to funk-holes. No mention was made of the fact that the audience was largely respectable and to some degree distinguished. It was described as ‘Made up of factions obviously spoiling for battle from the outset’. Not a line reporting what Jeremy had said about Love of Country, only something concerning his complaint over having been imprisoned without trial under Federal Jurisdiction, and that in such a way as to suggest that the extraordinary powers of Federal Law were designed for dealing with just such as he.

  Jeremy’s muttered comment was: ‘The bastards, eh? They’ve got it all sewn up!’

  The bells dinned. The engine hooted. They were off. They went picking their way through a maze of gleaming tracks and coloured lights, to enter cuttings that were the backs of mean tenements, in many windows of which lights burnt and in some figures moved, as preparation was made for the certain meanness of the day ahead, wage-slavery at the best, the misery of pinch-pensioned invalidism at worst. They passed out of this pocket of poverty, only one of so many, in the land of greatest plenty and human opportunity in the world — into one of neat little houses on pocket-handkerchief lots, in a land three million square miles wide most of which was empty space. Only a few lights here. Then into a region where the lights were only those on the street poles and the grand houses stood well back from that vulgar thing, the railway, separated from it by common-land and golf-course. Here the inhabitants would be fast asleep, not having to go to work till their wage-slaves were well settled down, or perhaps having no more to do all day but wander about a golf-course with an allegedly fellow creature to tote the clubs. So much for plenty, space, equality, in this land that so loudly boasted these things. At least that must have been what this disillusioned patriot was thinking as with set face he watched from his window — unless it was of an abandoned little girl, still dreaming that she had found what her nature craved and her woman’s desperateness in love had striven so long for, father and lover combined to perfection in the one man.

  Coming into hilly country, they stopped to drop their first bales of papers and to take on another engine for the winding climb. Few lights beyond this point. Jeremy watched the flare of headlights and fireboxes on the curves ahead. It was still too dark for him to see the road the railway mostly followed, that was cut through the great rock masses by the Fathers of the Nation, yoked and flogged as the first beasts of burden of the settlement never were, since considered far more valuable. Such a sight must stir up history in the mind of one not inured to it by use or heedless of the fact that a nation’s future is, for better or worse depending on the intelligence of its people, eternally bound to its past.

  They rolled down at last to the Hawkesbury, dropped papers and extra engine, to go thundering across the bridge. Now dawn was silvering the wide reaches seaward. There was mist on the water, drifting with the tidal stream in detached patches that might, in the strange light, have been taken for trudging gangs of men, or rather the ghosts of them, the clank of their chains drowned by the roar of wheels on girdered rails.

  Why is the unauthenticated death of the presumed Christ made an annual ceremony of deepest solemnity in Australia, while commemoration of the first marching on these shores of those skeletons in chains who had survived the frightful journey from the brutal society that had condemned them and to which we still bow down, Australia Day, is made occasion for skiting about what a Wonderful Mob We Are? A stranger might well be moved to ask that question.

  Beyond the river, as day dawned on the swamplands, there were revealed the small homesteads of poverty-stricken land-holders, so many of them with dwelling houses but half built, although the majority were of long standing. A common enough sight to be seen throughout rural Australia, as perhaps nowhere else on earth. The builders had built the essential back part first: kitchen and a bedroom. Thus they faced the world with strange squashed faces: just a door in the middle that was never opened because it led to nowhere but the vanished dream of the parlour, the best bedroom, the front verandah from which to sit and view the passing world. The stranger might ask again: Why were these buildings never completed? Had their builders, those who had settled the land, lost heart? Was it symbolic of the character of the Nation to do things by halves? Or was it the Banks, pressing for mortgage-money from their London counting-houses? Damn fool Colonials — what did they want with anything save the bare necessities of life? Damn fool Colonials! You can do anything you like with ’em.

  At Newcastle, Jeremy booked a room in a hotel, slept in it till noon. Then he walked the few streets, looking at the faces. Men coming off shift in the coal-mines or the foundries, grimy, seamed with exhaustion, worry, bad nutrition, might have been doing the like in Newcastle-on-Tyne, for all the blue and silver above, the shimmering river rolling to the sapphire sea from faraway mountains, some of those mountains peeping purple above grey bush. Likewise their women lugging their shopping, bitter-mouthed, blowzy, sag-bellied, dowdy, shrill. No one noticed him as the tight-faced fighter against the stupid bullying of frustrates, whose face stared out at them from the papers. Eyes for nothing but the usual. At what age did they cease to see what was not essential to their little living? How many knew what phase the Moon was in, even though it now was peeping over their shoulders of late afternoons? How many knew anything, except what was the best beer, what would win next Saturday, what the woman next door said to the woman next to her about her old man’s getting drunk and belting her? Free Australia! Free for what? It was a Commo Town. Here they didn’t want even the freedom to cheek the Boss. Let’s have a Boss who’ll put us up against the wall and shoot us!

  The evening was well advanced when the Brisbane Mail came in. Jeremy boarded it. He had a companion in the sleeper, who looked up from the evening paper he’d brought from Sydney, stared hard, but evidently only to judge whether he could say what he wished without dispute: ‘Goodnight. Getting cold. Bloody country’s in a hell of a state. What we need’s a dictator . . . but none o’ bullshit.’ Jeremy only grunted. The man grunted back, returned to his paper. Soon afterwards the steward came to ask about making up the bunks. Jeremy, who had the top one, said he would have his done at once.

  IV

  On arrival in Brisbane next afternoon, Jeremy sought out the terminal of the Northern Aerial Service, made a booking for next Sunday. He sent a telegram to Fergus for passing on by radio if necessary: ARRIVING BOULDER CREEK SUNDAY COULD YOU PICK ME UP. He then established himself in a quiet hotel. Fergus’s reply reached him next afternoon. Fergus would be there.

  The intervening days were spent in shopping for what, evidently, were presents for members of the Lily Lagoons household, for books on the things he was concerned with in his practice as veterinarian, and a couple of books on new aspects of Anthropology. Thus it looked as if he were returning to the old work-filled seclusion. He looked older, grimmer. There were bushmen staying at his hotel who gave him the sign that they guessed he was one of them and might join their sessions of Booze and Bullshit. He ignored them.

  Sunday. Truth was on sale at the aerial terminal when the passengers assembled there before dawn. The paper featured the incident at the hall in Sydney as front page, too; or at least in part, beginning with a half-page headline; NAZI MOVEMENT IN AUSTRALIA and introductory stuff about what it called the Riot, neatly boxed in a frame of tiny Swastikas, then continuing the story on an inner page. On the inner page was another picture of Jeremy dropping his man, who was named as Secretary of the Communist Party, a well-known identity. Jeremy was also named. The trouble was that the angle and the moment at which the picture had been taken made it look as if he had struck Below the Belt, as so often accused of doing by his enemies. These were in for a feast this week! A large bundle of Truth went along with other cargo and the passengers to the
airport. One of the enemies, a Vaisey Manager, was amongst the passengers. By the looks Jeremy got from others, information on his identity was quickly passed around.

  The flight began in the red dawn — with cranes and egrets taking off ahead to fly in echelon with the aircraft till outflown. Slowly, with the hours, they overhauled the wilderness, letting drop behind, first the raped coast region, then the near inland with its millions of acres of grey ghosts of trees destroyed for sheep that had their short existence chiefly to fat the Absentee Landlord, to give the millionaire Bradford spinner his wool and the titled butchers of Smithfield cheap meat to sell to the poor, the drained swamps, dried rivers, eroded plains, the centres of the noble national art of Bullshit, to which they kept dropping down to make their deliveries and take on fuel, growing meaner with the distance. Then it was grey wilderness. Then wilderness where only the Dust Devils dwelt. At last over Boulder Creek — and down, down, down to the red earth itself.

  Fergus was waiting. He greeted Jeremy with his split grin, saying as he took his hand, ‘Doctor Bullshit, I presume!’ He added as they got Jeremy’s luggage and packages: ‘Do we have the Bullshit Session here or over at the Prospectors’ Alms?’

  Jeremy answered, ‘I never felt less like shooting the bull than I do now, son.’

  ‘Yes? From the bit I heard on the radio about how things wound up, I’d’ve thought you’d’ve been rearin’ for it. What is it . . . Home James?’

  ‘Not exactly. I don’t feel like facing anybody yet . . . except you.’

  ‘That’s an honour. But I more or less booked you in with the mob at Cullity’s. They heard the radio, too.’

  ‘God save us! I’ll write ’em a note to drop to them. Drop the papers to them, too. Truth’s full of it . . . well, their version of it. I don’t want to go straight home. Let’s get aboard your kite and head in that direction . . . and I’ll explain on the way.’