Seven Poor Men of Sydney

by Christina Stead

  Withers rarely got blind-drunk. He pretended there were a hundred stages of drunkenness and that he knew which degree would produce in him a certain state of mind. He liked to stop drinking when he was glowing within, light on his feet, and when his lips talked of themselves. He never told the same tale twice in the same way: something new, foolish, foul, extravagant, had always just occurred to him to embroider the theme.

  He liked to backbite the successful, glorious, ambitious and proud, but his work was cruder with them; his real artistry was called forth in the backbiting of the mean and unfortunate. He suggested solutions of their personal problems in accordance with the most advanced social theories, knowing well that it was impossible for them to solve their problems. He would act the false comforter to these unfortunates, urge them to run away from their wives, disown their children, give all they had to the poor, join the Communist Party and forget personal troubles in a life of self-sacrifice, join the Catholic Church, join the Single Tax movement, drink themselves to death, take a mistress, murder a rich uncle, hold up a banker one dark night. He proffered these solutions with the utmost seriousness, and almost took himself seriously. He would have been pleased to help in any of these adventures. When he had irritated these friends in need, had poured into their ears a host of stories and examples, made them restless with desire and disappointment, given them a drink and tailed them home to be sure they crossed their thresholds with a dismal face he would go home and sleep softly. But he did not do it to do harm; he did it because his life-blood flowed from his tongue and he wished to have as many audiences of as many kinds in as many moods as he could find in a too-short life; and human nature was sluggish—he was obliged to goad it on. If a person were really sick, alone, or in danger of being gaoled Withers was always there, with his theories, his advice, a hot-water bottle, and an aspirin tablet. He fixed bandages, recommended sleeping-draughts and washed babies’ napkins with the equanimity of a trained nurse, all the time relating that one of his friends was sick in hospital with typhoid got through eating oysters, and a friend’s mistress had broken her leg while kneeling down to say the Lord’s Prayer; that another friend had shot her husband with a pearl-handled revolver and had only succeeded in removing a mole which had disfigured him for years on the side of the face; that a doctor he knew went to bed with all his women patients and made a fortune by abortions; that a friend of his in Medical School had just discovered a new cause of paralysis; and that the President of some South American republic would fall soon because he had general paresis. Then he would sit down to amuse the patient, tell him picaresque stories, broad jokes, and show him experiments in chemistry and physics; he could describe to him the nature of bacteria and discuss the principle of life. Strange Withers, womanly, corrupt, fantastic, sottish, shrewish, treacherous, faithful; a person to throw up his chances for a quixotic motive and to undermine the reputation of his nearest and dearest friend; a man to borrow fifty pounds for you from a usurer, if you needed it, and to sponge on you for five years, if you were in funds.

  Withers had not always been on his uppers. Until the age of fifteen he had lived in expectation of a small legacy from an aunt, but the aunt had died poor. Cranky at this disappointment, he had knocked about from pillar to post, had been kept by a rich woman for four months in order to get to Italy and had there deserted her on the landing-stage to make his way by a hundred curious means to Germany and England. Yet he was a good workman; inside the walls of his printing-works he was as crazily methodical as a superannuated book-keeper: he was in a continual pet, was careful of his dignity, took a pleasure in scolding the boss, and saw that things were done to time. He was a tyrant for the minute details, and laid down the law. Yet he had no pride in his work, ran it down, never consorted with workmen, but with the boss, or friends outside, with artists and students, laughed at unionism and hated the Labour movement.

  This pernickety man charmed Michael. Withers, taken with a new fancy, having no bosom friend at the moment, buttonholed Michael and started to run through his tricks with him. Withers liked fishing. Michael invited him to Fisherman’s Bay one Saturday, saying that he had relatives there, who would give them tea. On the ferry, Withers said that he knew two nice girls in Fisherman’s Bay.

  “That’s yours: she’s just your meat,” he said, chuckling, and offered his notebook, in which Michael read:

  “Mae Graham, 16, address, 14 Pound Street, blonde, handfed, dances, typiste, no mortgage.”

  Other names appeared above and below, with different indications, and physical peculiarities were not spared.

  “That’s the girl for you,” said Withers, enjoying Michael’s astonished examination of his notebook. Michael blushed to the roots of his hair.

  “You’re pretty frank, aren’t you? What does that mean, ‘hand-fed, no mortgage’?”

  “Handfed means she has doting parents and shows it,” said Withers; “and no mortgage means she isn’t engaged in heart or hand.”

  A month after, Michael calculated that he had been in the Bay fourteen times on various excuses since that Saturday, had seen Mae only once, the day he had gone out with her and Withers, and had seen his relatives, the Baguenaults, thirteen times. Mae was always “engaged”.

  One day Michael saw her walking with her boy, lanky, serious and deeply in love. Michael knew that they both went to an art class in the evenings: Mae even posed, as other students did, in drapery, at times. She was extremely sensual in face and body. Her face, large below the brow, with a full lower jawbone and strong round chin, caught the eye. Her hair was brassy, rolled on the nape of the neck, with curls at the roots. Her skin was most exceptionally white. She had a light-rose cheek, quite full, but on which appeared already a faint shade, the shade of fatigue and bad light in the office. Her eyes, sunken in the socket, but with globular eyelids, clear blue and liquid, were already ringed faintly. Her red painted lips, narrow but full and fleshy in the corners, shut tight over her regular white teeth. She had, in repose, the expression of a young woman languishing a little at the end of a passionate honeymoon: Withers called her “the odalisque”. When she laughed, as she often did, tormented her friends, or became eager over an outing, generously wept in the pictures, got excited over a history of the cruelty or heroism of love, her face had a very intense expression of enjoyment. She thrust her head forward, with her lips pouted and parted, as if she was trying to bite into a ripe fruit and suck it. She was plump but still small. She walked with a beautiful bounding step, having long and fine legs, and her round thighs moved under her dress freely. She did not move all in a piece like thick-set women, with their heavy basins and ungainly skirts; her silk dress fluttered like a veil on her. When left to herself, she had a half-smiling abstraction, like a sleeping child.

  Withers watched the growth of his affections with a tender satiric pleasure, and tried to bewilder him by taking him out with other girls and by making him get drunk; but Michael came back from these parties wretched, sick with palpitations of the heart. He began to say to Withers, “Go without me. It’s not for me, I don’t like it. Find someone else.” Withers, who never discussed and never burdened his life with other people’s problems, let him go, and gradually gave up seeing him.

  Michael’s father stood watching him from the door some mornings early as he cleaned his boots outside before going to work, frowning over his work with his thin dark cheeks compressed, answering briefly and crossly when they spoke to him. He turned into the wide hall where the mother sat waiting for breakfast, and said:

  “He is crotchety, Michael, an unstable boy. Sometimes it turns out all right; sometimes they go completely nutty, like old Bassett. I heard the other day he married his housekeeper secretly some years before he died. You know what a pepper-pot he was. They led a cat-and-dog life and she tried to get a doctor to certify that he was not all there. You couldn’t expect a practical woman to put up with his tantrums. At any rate, he left her half his estate and she’s doing the genteel widow now in L
eichhardt somewhere, going to whist parties and having people to tea on Sundays.”

  “I didn’t know that he was married,” said Mrs Baguenault. She took an apron out of the linen drawer and tied it round her. “I’m going to cut some roses,” said she. “Do you want to come out with me, Ben?”

  “All right.” He put out his hairy-backed hand and stroked her arm. She pretended not to notice and went into the kitchen to get the garden scissors. There she sat down on a chair and forgot about her husband waiting in the hall. Michael came in presently through the back-door with a cross face and a bluish face, due to insomnia, or a toothache, or a heart-attack: one never knew what; his works were all at fault.

  “Michael,” she cried in such a tone that he went to her.

  “What, Mother?”

  “My baby, no one will ever love you and understand you like your mother: you know that, don’t you? There is a special reason, there is . . . why you are a little morbid. Tell Mother your troubles, she will understand.”

  “Golly, Mother, cut it out,” said Michael. “Who told you I’m morbid? All chaps are morbid at my age; it’s my heart. Don’t notice me, that’s all I ask. And there’s nothing you can tell me I don’t know.” He looked at her expressionlessly and went out of the kitchen.

  Foolish, hoping to awaken a gesture of love, some haphazard touch that would help her illusion along, that she was cherished, that he was grateful to her for having brought him into the world, for having accomplished her “mission”, for having given him suck, she said:

  “Michael, Michael, baby, come here; why are you always so resentful? Why don’t you speak to your mother? It’s not kind. When you were a little boy, you promised to tell Mother everything all your life. You don’t know what a mother goes through, Mikey.”

  “Certainly, I do,” said Michael, laughing in the doorway. “You gestated for nine months, you were in travail for eight hours, you had puerperal fever; I know, Mother.” He came back and smiled more kindly, as he looked down at the coiled grey hair and the soft wrinkled face, the eyes bleared with facile tears, the mouth drawn with a credulous smile. “And then I puked, yowled, got my teeth, had diarrhoea, scarlatina and convulsions; I had great promise and nothing was too good for me, and my sisters used to love me, I know. I’ve heard that tale somewhere.”

  “You love your mother,” she said, with her obsession.

  “Go on,” he cried, impatient. “You always want to be told you’re loved; you’re like all girls, you never hear it enough, you can’t let a man alone: but are you worth all that love? Let me hear what medals for virtue you won.”

  She smiled to be teased by her tall and difficult son. But she could not stop babbling.

  “You haven’t really changed, have you? You believe in God, don’t you, son? There’s nothing unmanly in that.”

  “Don’t bother me with that, Mumma,” he replied with fresh irritation. “It’s enough that the black-skirts got one member of the family: you can go to heaven and save us all.”

  “What do you believe, what, tell me?”

  “I’m an atheist, have been for years: you know it. What’s the good of pretending? And it’s only because you’re old, Mother, that you’re religious yourself: it’s a sign of age.”

  “I’m old, yes, but the old know what life is like.”

  “You don’t bother Catherine with all this, why me? With your little-girl passion for men, I’m all you have in your head.”

  “Catherine,” said the mother indifferently, “she doesn’t really mean it: when she meets the right man, she’ll settle down. The family, a husband, religion—they go together.”

  “It’s enough to make me sick. You don’t know that in Catherine you have a magnificent daughter, a rebel, a gallant character.”

  “A woman should be a woman. What’s the good of her being a rebel? Where did it get her? I hope God will give her a lesson and turn her back to us.”

  “There’s no God, and you know it yourself, but you must amuse yourself with fairy-tales, like all old women. What a breed! it’s enough to make a man turn homosexual. Where’s any evidence of him? The whole blasted world is a museum of trouble, disappointment and malady, and you expect me to take an interest in a fairy-tale like that. You don’t make me respect you any more by running round with priests, Mother. I’m a man, I live with men who make buildings, newspapers, machines, designs for cloth. You housewives are absolutely ignorant of the world; you don’t know how stories are fabricated in newspapers or in scriptures, how the house is put together, how cloth is made or dyed. All you know is, religion, home, fashion, some painted mechanical creatures that come all made into the world. The one bit of creation you can and must all do, does itself unconsciously: you think the rest of men’s work is like that. Let us alone, Mother. I am thinking in terms of reality, the only ones I know. I suffer; Catherine, poor girl, suffers, and fights; you too. God didn’t help you through your labour-pains. That is real, realler than the fantasies of a dreaming God. If he were present, as you say, he would know the degree of misery in a household, the pain of drowning in a fog, firedamp in a mine, cancer, the degree of pain even in a poor creature like me, for instance: all too heady for the thin vessels we are. Are we to be damned for such cruel potions and purges put by him in a phial too weak to hold them? We burst in pieces on the floor. God, anything we can seize here on earth is too little to recompense us for what we suffer.”

  He put his hand to his forehead, turned about, and rushed out of the room. His mother sat staring at the floor, nodding her head to herself and moving her lips. Her husband came to the door:

  “Mary? And the roses?”

  “Never mind now.”

  “Michael’s gone without any breakfast.”

  “Let him be; let him be. Boys get brainstorms.” But she continually repeated to herself, “He’s like that Bassett: that crazy Bassett. I knew Bassett was undependable: imagine marrying a housekeeper.”

  Later she said to the father:

  “Ben, I think Michael must be in love: I never thought of it before.”

  In the evening the father took Michael out for a walk to find orchids and to talk with him privately.

  “Be simple,” said Mr Baguenault. “Don’t get drunk with liquor, or with your wits, or adolescent sufferings. After all, they’re not very real, compared with true trials. It’s called the age of storm and stress, but maturity is for a man; then he has unheard-of troubles, mostly financial: he has to face bankruptcy and blackmail. If you want to know how I have got over many troubles, it is through loving Nature. My orchids have saved me from thinking over human things too deeply. It doesn’t do. Nature is free, you can love her as you might love a girl. It is the same thing, it is to love her as she really is, not a painted doll, not a planted park, but scarred with storms and bushfires, diseases and nests of white-ants, blasted by lightning, dried by the sun: as you love a girl although she has freckles, a turned-up nose and spindly legs and is out of drawing in a bathing-suit.”

  He was silent. He continued:

  “You can be absorbed in Nature, as—as in the sea, as if you melted into the sea and were diffused through the oceans of the earth. There is peace when her mysteries are an open book to you; in her inmost recesses she has perfect peace, even for the most fevered.”

  Michael bit his lip and said nothing; but in the bush behind the house, when he had left his father, he thought over the old man’s words, and poking a stick into the soil thoughtfully, he said aloud:

  “The old fellow has some experience: perhaps there is peace here.”

  He looked around. A tall tree, whose topmost tips were now yellow in the setting sun, waved delicately against the pale high sky. Michael lifted his stick to the yellowed leaves, smiling.

  “Only teach me to believe that, and I would throw myself on your breast. In the ocean, to melt. But the ocean flows and ebbs twice a day. He sees the sky with a great pearl in her bosom and he follows her round the earth, and if I were dissolved t
here, I would only circle the earth for ever, salt with desire; I would sleep not more than he. And at night I used to hear long conversations and much lamenting among the waves on the seashore, when the moon was away. And here at night in the bush is interminable bickering and soughing. Then I am not alone with my tears and restlessness and there is no peace.”

  The next Sunday he went to church with his mother, to please her. The young visiting priest said:

  “Should you not in all functions desire only to serve God the master and return to God the fountain? The minerals do not desire to live as individuals, they stay in their colonies, sorts and orders, and accomplish their destinies, part of the common rock, although they are more beautiful than the rock. Their hidden virtues do not require the sun. There are no mineral Peer Gynts. They only wish to come to the end of their foreordained cycle, to be dissolved, to crumble and enter the earth and be sucked into the roots of plants and enter the higher life of the vegetable kingdom and grow upwards towards the sun in green spires. The plants do not desire to vegetate; there is intense life among them, even though their existence is usually brief. They are humble, ignorant, have no voice, yet look how they are adorned when they are ripe. They put on roots, leaves, flowers, seeds, and fall to dust; millions upon millions richer than eye has seen in the jungles and wastes. They do not rebel, they accomplish their predestined cycle: but the Lord has them in his hand. And if they were sentient and understood what might be their destiny even on earth, would they not give themselves up the more gladly into the maw of animals and become living flesh and blood, to see, feel, hear, have affections, and praise God? Animals would certainly die joyfully if they knew they were to become part of man, if they could understand the higher sense they would enjoy: reason, sacred love, poetry, music, and if they could have any glimmering of the Soul they would inherit. They do not know it. They ruminate in the fields and the Lord accepts their unconscious sacrifice and works out their higher destiny himself. We should take them for a model, these humble creatures, and put ourselves into his hands without revolt. He will sacrifice us for a higher end. And what is that end? We have understanding, small though it is, we know that he will accept the sacrifice of our life, a poor thing, the life of the flesh, at best, to make us one with him, even as all those lower creatures came up to become part of us. What peace and what joy: to stay in one’s place and yet be part of the aspiring universe. What glorious functions, exceeding our understanding, will man not perform, and what divine senses not enjoy, when the final sacrifice is over, his personal will is annihilated to be with God on earth, to be with God in Paradise, at the dissolution of the flesh.”