Seven Poor Men of Sydney

by Christina Stead

  “How is it they all have loving wives and I have nobody? Am I different? Do I look different? How is it they all have got to the haven of life-long closeted connubial love and I have not, cannot, and even will not? I am shut out. What is the matter with me? Am I eunuched of the manly graces?” He examined from head to foot the women by reputation so compliant: they did not yield to him. He often thought of committing suicide, but he could not let the waters close over him without first knowing the sweet profound experience of cleaving to a loving woman’s flesh and sinking into oblivion with her. He thought, “I’m a goner, a rank failure, but I’ll pass out with the toga virilis.”

  The war broke out in August, and the young fellows talked about it with excitement and importance as if it were their own private affair.

  On August 15 Mae and Jameson were married. Two months after Withers said to Michael:

  “I hear Mae’s proprietor has enlisted.”

  Michael stared.

  “What for? A man must be crazy to go: it’s not a jaunt.”

  “He’s tired, perhaps,” suggested Withers gently.

  “Or has to show he’s a hero; he’s that sort of a mooncalf. As if there was anything smart in hoofing it through foreign mud, being a living target for foreign sharpshooters.”

  “You’ll go yet,” said Withers, “so you’d better have a giddy time while you can. Go and see Mae. You know in Italy, when the husbands went to the war, they left a cavalier servente with the wife: in fact, he was often named in the marriage contract.”

  Michael’s two cousins enlisted, tired, the one of school-teaching and the other of clerking in a Government office. They promised themselves Turkish beauties and French chorus-girls while abroad. The people in Wallawee, Michael’s suburb, began to look at Michael with appraisal. He heard the ladies one day in his mother’s drawing-room:

  “I’m sure it’s all you can do to stop Michael from going to the front, Mrs Baguenault. The boys always want to take up arms for their country: it’s young blood. Well, you won’t be able to keep him back in the end.”

  And: “It’s terrible, isn’t it, to see those boys loafing on the street-corners without a thought for the dear mother country they owe everything to. The way they stand, with stooping shoulders, using bad language, taking the name of God in vain, shows what sort of men they are: rotters.”

  And: “Slackers,” said another. “If I had a son and he was a slacker, he’d never see my door or my table again. I’d—I’d rather shoot him than see him disgrace me.”

  The bosoms of the nice ladies his mother knew swelled with righteous venom. Michael saw these suggestions working in his mother’s mind by the glances she gave him in the street when a uniform went past. She began to work, with her two older daughters, at knitting socks for soldiers. Catherine immediately joined a pacifist league. The pictures were full of battleships loaded to the gunwales with cheering soldiers dipping victoriously through freshening seas. The Daughter of the Regiment and other topical musical comedies were revived. Michael was affected by the pictures of gay soldiers and heroic episodes, rousing songs, French estaminets, comics in the pictures showing amusing antics in the mud and other warlike diversions. In the end he began to think he would like to join the rough hearty barracks-life now proper to men. He received by post one morning a package with a white feather, and underneath the name “Mae”. His blood rose with indignation. Later in the day he thought he would go and expostulate with her; she was infringing his individual liberty. In the evening he thought “Poor kid, her husband’s away; that’s what’s eating her.”

  She spent her days idling about her mother’s house. When Michael called on her she wore a large sun-hat, a transparent blouse and a light skirt round her plump hips and belly: she had grown bigger. A wide satin sash of red white and blue bound her athletic waist. At the end of the beach, where a small steep path rises over a stagnant creek and a cliff hung with vines, she said she was tired. The summer shades filtered through her straw flop-hat, dyeing with rich and becoming shades her young face, a little older suddenly, tired. She no longer pranced when she walked. She smiled at him:

  “You must forgive me for sending that package. I was so nervous and upset and Tom Withers was here and told me you said Stan only went away to show off.”

  “It gave me a nasty turn. I didn’t think you were that kind of girl. But I’m sure it’s rotten for you, alone so soon.”

  She read him a long letter from Stan, very sentimental. Michael put it away in the end.

  “I don’t want to hear any more, Mae; he doesn’t want you to read it to me.”

  “Are you—are you going to enlist soon, Michael?”

  He looked at her moist lips, the blazing sea, the quiet villas above with their lawns of buffalo-grass, at the hills like smoke in the dazzling sun. The quiet joyful sounds of a Saturday afternoon came over the waters, oars squeaking in rowlocks, the swish of the ferry, the shout of boys in a sailing-boat. He looked down at her, smiling passionately:

  “Yes, Mae, if you want me to, if you send me, I’ll enlist. But you know what I’ve suffered for you: be kind to me!”

  “I am kind to you.”

  “Be kinder.”

  She was silent, tracing circles in the sand with her toe.

  “Women are funny cattle. They stay at home and ask men to go and get killed.”

  “We go through danger too.”

  “I know; but only once on one day, not a hundred times on a hundred days. That’s incredible to me, anyhow, that you can send away your own or other women’s children. It’s like committing suicide.”

  “Oh, no; I would never commit suicide.”

  “But you want me to?”

  “It’s not the same. If Stan were to die,” she sobbed suddenly, “it would be for his country. I wouldn’t cry; it is my duty.”

  “They have sold it to you,” said Michael grimly.

  “We don’t reason, but we have our instinct. Do you think it’s easy to give up my husband when I’m just married?”

  “You don’t seem to mind it.”

  “It’s not very easy to have the folks say your husband is a coward, in their war-fever.”

  “Cut it out, Mae,” he said gently. “It narks me, of course, it annoys me. I wouldn’t do it for them, not even for my own mother, but if you join the pack too, I’ll enlist for you, I suppose. The war’ll be over in a few months, anyhow.”

  “Will you enlist?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Is it a promise?”

  “If you promise to be my pal until I go.”

  “Of course, I would be proud of you.”

  His calculations were bad. The war went on, and Mae did not give him any peace or any comfort until he had enlisted. It was a silly business and he felt ashamed of himself, but his mother was very pleased. The dowagers, the settled women in Wallawee, had begun to show him the cold shoulder. On the railway-station, waiting for his train, their remarks reached and balanced on his ear, not-intended, hot-veiled (infamous actresses perfected in their roles overnight):

  “A perfect shame—the white feather twice, I heard—a wonder his mother—if my boy—his mother must feel it—for her sake alone—my son writes—the brave boys—the brave boys!”

  On leave in London in 1917, Michael met the Folliots, Marion and Fulke, attending an international Socialist Congress. They returned to Sydney before Michael, and Michael wrote to Catherine telling her to meet them and link up with them, since she was always complaining bitterly of a lack of sympathetic friends.

  When Michael at last returned, in 1919, he was weathered and self-centred. He had to go to a doctor regularly for nerve treatment, and lived apathetically at home, or in friends’ houses, or in places unknown to his family, when the fit took him.

  He knit up his friendship with the Folliots, avoided Catherine; his old friends had passed completely out of his heart. Michael spent a good deal of time with the Folliots, helped Fulke in the office, once or twice wro
te an article for the International Worker, the paper of which Fulke was editor; these were a review of Le Feu of Henri Barbusse, which had made a sensation, and a description of his own in the same line. This done, his pen dried up. One day he sold the International Worker on the streets. His father and mother heard of it and were sure that his brain was affected.

  Marion Folliot had dark hair and a broad half-Slavic face, although she was of English stock. She shook her head, laughed clearly and said: “My deep eye-hollows set skew-whiff were the present of Genghiz Khan to some charming female ancestor.” A candle burnt in each eye. The Folliots worked hard organising meetings, trying to organise the seamen, the poorest members of the Australian working classes, and the wharfingers. They carried high the rushlight of their metropolitan culture at the same time, talked Cezanne, Gauguin, Laforgue, T. S. Eliot, Freud and Havelock Ellis. They had a pleasant home in a wood, on the North Shore. The young Baguenaults were often there and heard Marion sing the songs of the great and heroic post-war Socialist movement in Germany and tell how they had visited “Karl and Rosa”. They painted the “Young Guard of the Proletariat” marching through the young fir forests of Germany, related how Marion had once in Berlin spat in the face of the mounted police, as they tried to compress the crowd, eighty thousand strong, that followed the funeral of Rosa Luxemburg. Marion intoned the mass-songs of the Social-Democrat and Communist gatherings in German, the proletarian question and answer, thus:

  “‘Who are you down there?’

  ‘The people underfoot, the wretched from the mines, the

  goldgetters, the coaldiggers,

  The little ones who work in the mountain,

  Dwarfed, black, hunched, spindle-legged, short of breath,

  Who give up the sun to get gold,

  Who extract coal out of the pitchy night,

  Who get nothing, neither sun, gold nor coal, nor bread,

  They whom the mountain buries, those the firedamp stifles.’”

  And the answer:

  “‘Life will be given you again; the earth you will inherit!’”

  Behind her high white forehead, in the shadow of her beautiful hair, the film of her life for ever unrolled itself and made her happy. She had run away from high-school and taken a job in Sao Paulo, without telling her family. She returned home, met Fulke and fled abroad with him, both living on a small allowance from Fulke’s liberal father, an oyster merchant. Fulke quitted medical school at her instance and joined the Communist Party, working as a journalist for every kind of rag, when the father’s allowance failed. In Berlin they addressed meetings and walked through the countries with staves and rucksacks. In Wiesbaden Marion met Dr Grossherz, who had an invalid wife and fell in love with Marion. He still corresponded with her, sending letters of love which she read to Fulke, full of Heine’s poems and Grossherz’s. She and Fulke had been sent to the frontier on the occasion of a Socialist uprising. They travelled on bicycles through France, and went to Spain for their winter, being now well provided for by Marion’s and Fulke’s families alike. After London they went back to live industriously, hard and gloriously, pioneers of the middle-class defection. They were protected rather than harassed by the police, on account of their parents, and Marion had little difficulty when she went down to smoodge Fulke’s interdicted books in French and German through the Customs.

  The husband and wife did not conceal their passion for each other. The many visitors to the house looked sidelong at their bedroom, decorated with roses, as if at that rare and desirable mystery, a happy union. They were both kind, hospitable and generous. Catherine often lived with them, and Michael visited them. Once when the Folliots were away, Michael found Catherine standing like a statue in the shaded front-room of the villa, smelling of red roses, with a book of Confucius’ poems in her hand, gazing at a head of Eros in pastels which hung on the wall.

  “Michael,” she said briskly, when she heard him, “look at this Eros! I believe Marion did it: it looks like Fulke.”

  He wondered if Catherine liked the gay, small, plump and mellifluous Fulke. Catherine had had, since he left for the war, innumerable passions for intellectual men, but because her circle was small, she usually picked flashy egotists of unstable temperament. Such had been her passion for Milt Dean, a secretary of philanthropic societies, small, dark, with the face of a dried-up Red Indian tribesman. She talked abstractions with Milt Dean for months, argued with him and listened to his monotonous but persuasive discourses about himself. The return of Michael had partly cured her. She was now wavering in every breeze of masculine talent.

  “You are not happy, ever, Cath,” said Michael. “What a girl! Born with grit and nothing to use it for.”

  “What do you mean, nothing! I work my brains out and my legs off. I often have a happiness so great that the happiness of the gods, if there were any, would not compare with it. I feel I have found my path.” She glanced unconsciously at the Eros.

  “Perhaps so.”

  “I welter in such happiness. You don’t know what life means to me, with all its terrors.”

  “You are happy, my poor girl, because you are divorced from life. You are free to enjoy your own tantrums in your own vacuum. I am the same, only with me, I let my will and wits be arrested and clouded. In a morbid fog I dream away the days, without thinking of what I have lost, or what failed at. I am extremely happy too; and it is happier than the gods who have always to be concerned with creation, according to our Western notions.”

  Michael had no opinions. They said loosely that he was a “Socialist” and “Communist”, because he was compliant and repeated what he heard said in his circles, and plumed himself on radical opinions at home. Catherine assumed that he had her convictions, but not her ardour. She often called him “Comrade” in the persuasive serious way she had. He drifted about with her and the Folliots, because a fluid personality passed more easily through that unstable society. Michael only said, when pressed too close, “I think so,” or “I don’t think so at all.” He wanted to live quietly, and they let him alone. The only singularity was his friendship with Kol Blount, a man paralysed from childhood, undergrown but virile, whose sweetness, penetration, rebellion and wit attracted numerous friends to his mother’s house. Round him congregated the gangling youth. But when the two, Michael and Kol Blount, sat still together in the large sitting-room of the apartment, with the Venetian blinds lowered and the breeze mingling its murmurs with theirs, both dark-eyed and thin, absorbed, the others went into the garden, or home, feeling as if those two sat together in a glass globe. Their metaphysical quiets and their long unlaughing relation gave rise, like all things in this society, to a legend. When Michael was away, the others said to Kol Blount, “What do you see in him?”

  Kol Blount answered:

  “Michael is like me, paralysed, armless, a brother. Who does not wish to spend his life in communion with himself? What is stranger, more painful, richer, like the three white nights before suicide? If one could live in a cloister with a friend whom he follows through all the tortuous errors of reason, all the perversions of the emotions, the undeceiving world of the imagination, the grey plain of banality which appears at the closing of each day and night, the twilight land, tasting the flat sweet waters of the well of inaction, he would have reached a haven. Reason is hamstrung, the eyes and tongue alone live, the passions are asleep and dream, the will drives us no more into the thorns and thistles; we are one and yet not in solitude.”

  “What! Your ideal man is not the balanced, fire-hearted liberal, dripping with humanity and sweetness, who loves his enemies because they are men, weeps and fights for pacifism, employs the poor, encourages talent, educates children, and rules his family life like a patriarch; who never vails his crest, blunts his word; who crushes egotism, but pursues his own will through thick and thin; who believes in morality, but runs with a bunch of nettles to clear the haunts of superstition; who reveals hypocrisy even if it rises in his dearest friend?”

  Wh
at Kol designed was no more than a perverse love of death and negations, a prolonged womb-life, a Brahmin self-extinction, a desire to be lapped once more in one’s own excreta, an onanism, if you will. Eagerly, they urged this point on Kol, jealous of Michael’s bond on him.

  “You can’t shame me,” laughed Kol. “All those things you describe have their place in life. You can’t ask a paralysed man to run about with a burning brand driving the bats and phantoms out of churches. I have found a brother: he runs for me, claps his hands for me, runs with a torch for me, if I want it, and yet he has the same emotions as myself. Thus, I know that my state of mind is not solely due to my inertia. I find that paralysis has cleared my mind. In fact, I never was obliged to believe in the knack that most of you do, to help along the illusion of living. Bobbing up and down before an altar, for example; pretending to take an interest in eugenics when what I really need is a girl. In the night of myself I have not needed any bog-lights: I live with a salutary despair.”

  “Atheism,” said Milt Dean sententiously, “must take its mind-life from the poppy, or some internal drug secreted by the endocrine glands, for it has no hope.”

  “Leave me alone with your endocrine glands. I don’t need them either to explain why I am a failure in life. They should be called the endoctrined glands, from your faith in them to push you into the steps of the great.”

  “Jacob’s Ladder has no meaning to a paralysed man,” said Marion Folliot. Blount continued in his twilight, throwing out sparks of feeling, as a cat seems to throw out sparks on a stormy summer evening.

  “You don’t like Michael, you only see that he is not brilliant, and don’t know that I don’t care for his wits but for his qualities as a friend. You blame him for not running about bull-throwing with you all. Why should he? His lassitude has taught him more sense. What is this virtue in company? Why should a man have to like mankind, if he has a universe at home, or in his imagination?

  “A thin heart must always be rubbing shoulders with crowds and sitting in the sun to get a little heat. If it does not exercise daily, it is found defunct the next morning of inanition. But a strong passion moves in chaos and associates with death, its foot goes among hermits and ravens. Love, love passing through many frightful experiences, retchings and convulsions, draws sustenance from them; they only show it the measure of its fortitude. Even so its skin is dyed with the mess it feeds on, but it lives. From the fierceness of its discontent it craves all violences, pains and perversions, and feeds on its disappointments. It shuns joy, sympathy, good; it will rifle, plunder, kill, and always arise purer and more triumphant, and more truly love. It desires to do evil, to crush opponents to death, to stifle critics, to drive the breath from rivals, to cleave the world asunder and let the smoke out that curls in its entrails, Venus should be black: that is the colour of love, the rite of the night. My good sun-born friends, suckled on watered town-milk instead of on blood, as I, unlike me you have not had the time to fathom the heart. I, sitting here so many years, seeing my mother working for me, and friends eddying about me, pitying me and going off to their clerkships and marriages, have had the time to study the few passions that sway mankind.