This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  The warehouse was not a large one. It formed part of a building known as ‘Gospel House’, the lower floors of which were devoted to the selling of tracts and Bibles. The goods in which Smog & Burns dealt did not demand a large area for display and the firm occupied only one floor, the fourth and top one. The main room was lined with shelves containing cardboard boxes, in which buckles, beads, hairnets, silks and cottons, hair-curlers, combs, brushes—hundreds of items for adornment or for use in beautifying women—were stored.

  A maze of tables covered the floor space. These were used to display ribbons and laces, doily and duchesse sets, linen aprons and cloths bearing transfer designs or picturing Spanish dancers with ribboned tambourines held aloft, or huntsmen blowing horns and leaping horses over fences.

  Lonely women or girls about to marry would one day bend over these materials with stitching fingers, turning the designs into needlework pictures they would store away to show visitors over a cup of afternoon tea.

  Buyers moved round the tables accompanied by Miss Bryce, if it was materials they were purchasing, or by Mrs Fraser, if it was beads or jewellery, or by Mr Robins, if they wanted things stored high up on the shelves.

  Mr Osbert Slade, the manager, after shaking hands with the customer and saying: ‘Well! Well! How are you? We thought you had deserted us,’ handed her over to one of these three.

  Mr Slade was short and rotund. He had a pale moustache with a chewed fringe and he wore glasses that must have functioned satisfactorily only when he gazed through them with his head held back a little, for this position was one he favoured whenever he looked at people. He often rubbed his hands together with pleasure when confronting customers but never when he was alone.

  When he thought he was not observed he looked uncertainly around him wondering what to do next. He began to confide in me, but reluctantly. He suffered from resentments, and this compelled him to say critical things about Mrs Smalpeck which he regretted saying a few minutes afterwards. The regret made him irritable and sent him walking quickly here and there in an effort to shake off the nagging of these compulsive indiscretions.

  Mrs Smalpeck was rarely in the warehouse. She was too busy doing charitable work in the company of society women for whom she had once cooked meals in the days when her late employer had entertained.

  ‘But the least said about that the better,’ Mr Slade warned me before walking quickly round the warehouse.

  Mrs Smalpeck’s name often appeared in the social notes of the daily paper: ‘Mrs Smalpeck, as usual, was there with a helping hand.’

  ‘She gives service rather than money,’ said Mr Slade before hurrying away with a flush on his face.

  ‘She does great work for the hospitals and for invalids,’ said Mr Slade, staying this time. ‘She would understand your difficulties perfectly.’

  I sat on a high stool before a desk hidden behind a partition dividing the office from the main room. I could see over the partition to where Miss Bryce and Mrs Fraser waited on the customers.

  Miss Bryce had only recently started work at Smog & Burns. She was probably in her fifties, with soft, grey hair, a gentle smile and a small, trim figure clad in black. She was deferential in a dignified way to customers who expected such an attitude from a saleswoman, but responded warmly to a friendly manner. Her dignity was a product of Robertson & Moffat’s, an exclusive Melbourne store that catered for the rich and which had recently been taken over by the Myer Emporium, Melbourne’s biggest store.

  Myer’s quickly shed its exclusiveness and threw open the sacred departments to Melbourne’s bargain-hunters who, at the opening sale, surged through the building like a pack of wolves, according to Miss Bryce, who was a saleswoman there at the time.

  Miss Bryce shrank from untoward behaviour she regarded as distasteful to people of breeding and looked on bargain-hunters as a rabble. The well-dressed women upon whom she had waited at Robertson & Moffat’s were all people of breeding, she claimed.

  When I asked her what exactly she meant by the term she replied: ‘It is not something you define, Mr Marshall. It just exists.’

  She always addressed me as ‘Mr’, the first person to do so. I received the title self-consciously, but gained pleasure from the fact that Miss Bryce quite naturally felt I was entitled to it, together with all other men she met. It was a step towards acceptance as a normal man and I liked Miss Bryce.

  We sometimes talked together across the partition. Her conversation centred round the activities of society women, most of whom she had met when they shopped at Robertson & Moffat’s. Their reputation was safe with her. She always praised them. When she allowed herself a word of criticism it stemmed, I felt sure, from a remembered slight to herself.

  ‘She spoke sharply to her inferiors,’ she complained of one woman. ‘A really impossible woman to serve.’

  Miss Bryce was wistfully aware that she was an inferior, but only by reason of her poverty, not for reasons of breeding.

  ‘My father was a colonel in the British Army and my mother came from a wealthy Scots family,’ she told me, ‘but we came on bad times. My father was an impractical man and always invested his money foolishly. The friends he had helped when we were prosperous deserted him when he needed their help. That’s life, of course. One’s only friend is money, if it comes to the point. You realise that as you grow older, though I must say I’ve made some very good friends myself.’

  She rented a room at South Yarra—‘A superior type of people live at South Yarra’—where she organised her visits to friends like a colonel following a set routine of inspection.

  ‘I always have tea with Mr and Mrs Stafford on Thursday nights. On Saturday afternoons I visit Mrs Lawrence and look after the children if she is going out. Every second Monday I play bridge at the Conways’. My life is very full, really.’

  Mrs Fraser, the other saleswoman, was not well-bred by Miss Bryce’s standards. She was a thin, round-shouldered woman of twenty-six who often stood curved over, her two hands clasped against her meagre chest while she complained of the cold.

  Her smiles were tentative, and were withdrawn quickly and in fear if she felt they were being received without friendliness. She had been married two years to a clicker in a boot factory and they lived in a rented room in Carlton while saving to pay a deposit on a home.

  ‘All we want is a little place with a bathroom.’

  Her life was clouded by a mother-in-law who despised her and who resented the loss of a son upon whom her ambitions had always centred, ambitions that, if realised, would have provided the mother with prestige and comfort and a release from responsibility. All that she demanded of the son to achieve this was obedience and a single life of self-sacrifice.

  Each Saturday night Mrs Fraser accompanied her husband to his mother’s home for dinner, where she sat quietly throughout the meal afraid of saying something that would bring her mother-in-law’s implacable glance upon her.

  But her mother-in-law was generally bright and cheerful at the table. She conversed affectionately with her son, guiding the conversation on to subjects that only the two of them could appreciate—the latest news of girls that had once been attracted to her son and stories hingeing on past experiences they had shared. They were a loving mother and son reliving happy days together, it would seem.

  While they talked, Mrs Fraser bent over her plate and suffered. But what she dreaded most was helping her mother-in-law wash up in the kitchen. Her mother-in-law’s voice changed in the kitchen where it could not be heard by her son. It became softly sarcastic or charged with a repressed bitterness: ‘What is wrong with you lately? You’re ageing terribly. Tom looks a boy beside you. You’ll have to smarten up if you want to hold him.’

  Or maybe she attacked from a different angle:

  ‘I hope you are not going to become a drag on my son. He’s always been a brilliant boy and would have gone a long way if he hadn’t married.’

  Mrs Fraser told me all these things, looking up at me as I
leant over the partition.

  ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit if I thought Tom understood and was sympathetic with me. But he thinks his mother is wonderful. He says he has never heard her say a nasty thing to me. He just doesn’t believe what I tell him. He says I misunderstand her, put wrong meanings on things she says. I just can’t tell him now. It makes him angry.’

  I became absorbed in the lives of Miss Bryce and Mrs Fraser. Each week they contributed another chapter to their stories. I became identified with their problems. Their burdens became mine and I forgot my own troubles. I brooded over the perfidy of the mother-in-law, felt anger at Mrs Lawrence for always going out on Saturday and leaving Miss Bryce to mind the children.

  I was impatient for more information from them.

  ‘How did you get on over the week-end?’ I asked each of them on Monday mornings when a chance occurred to carry on a conversation for a few minutes.

  I was living their lives with them, drawing conclusions and seeking solutions along avenues closed to their minds. I saw their lives as akin to my own, as less crushing developments of conditions that had produced Shep and Gunner.

  I became lost in a maze of remedial theories in which I visualised conditions that would free Shep as well as Mrs Fraser, Gunner as well as Miss Bryce. I was confused in my thinking and filled my note-books with rhetoric which, though it denounced and demanded, soared as high as the stars, didn’t explain what it denounced or demanded.

  The lunch-time break was a release from restriction and confinement. I hurriedly ate my sandwiches then went out on to the streets. I always stood on the corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane, my back against the wall of a building. From here I watched the people pass and though I was unnoticed, except for an occasional idler who leaned against the wall beside me for a while, I felt I was one of them.

  To feel myself part of city life, not as one begging for alms in disdainful streets, but one contributing to the throb and power of it, gave me a feeling of elation. Now I was moving forward somewhere, wedged tightly in a mass of people advancing with uplifted faces to a goal that the very nature of man was impelling them to seek—a better life.

  The faces that I gazed at from my street corner reflected the thoughts of individuals concerned with immediate problems, but the flow of thousands with their kindred longings merged purpose with purpose, bound dream with dream until there came from them an inspiring orchestration that rose above the shadows of the city and joined the sun above the buildings.

  Now that I was working, my existence justified by a tiny contribution to man’s endeavour, I could develop my small voice, I thought, until it could be heard above the throng. In the meantime I must learn to move with them unnoticed, to be accepted by them.

  How wonderfully human beings walked! What power for good lay behind their smiles and their laughter! I watched eager girls clinging to the arms of boys, expressions that revealed love, provocation, uncertainty and doubt.

  Men leapt aboard the dummies of cable-trams as they rattled past. Their arms reached out for the stanchions, grabbed them, then were suddenly jerked taut by the strain. They alighted from the trams in motion with a backward lean of the shoulders and a short, restraining run of which they were conscious and in which they took pride.

  Drays loaded with the soil from excavations on building-sites moved slowly past, the horses unsure of their grip on the smooth road and curbing their strength through fear of falling.

  T-model Ford cars shook with mechanical palsy while they waited a signal from a policeman’s hand. At a gesture from him they jerked into motion and people jumped and tram bells clanged while stern-faced drivers thrust desperately with their legs at brake, clutch and gear change. All sounds merged into one great murmur pierced by the cries of newsboys, and I listened entranced.

  Back in my office I faced a ledger, cash-books, a multitude of dockets. My mind, in which impressions and ideas were circling and jamming, would suddenly free itself under a disciplinary whip and would clarify to one, single, sharp declaration.

  ‘I doz. doilys @ 6d. each = 6/-.’

  I entered this information in its appropriate place and drove my mind back to drink once more at the docket trough.

  ‘2 doz. bunches seed-beads @ I/- per bunch = £ I 4s. od.’

  The life of a clerk, I thought, is a burden, and those who carry it are sapped of pride and dignity and the joy of creating. How could a clerk help being servile?

  I thought a lot about servility while working at my desk. It was a quality that was growing in me and I feared its presence in that it could rob me of my strength, destroy my values and thrust me down beneath the feet of men powered by selfish ambition.

  I wondered why I was afraid of Mrs Smalpeck when, on her infrequent visits to the office, she watched me while listening to Mr Slade’s report, why I pretended to work harder, why I never paused or lifted my head as I would normally do.

  My future lay in this job I held. I would not always be a clerk, but it was a vital step to better things. It was progress for me, an escape from the stagnation I had already experienced and which, like some live thing, was always ready to pounce on me again.

  To lose this job would throw me back to utter dependence on my father who was finding it difficult to manage as it was. Its loss would be a disaster to me at this stage, and the greater the loss, the greater the fear.

  Thousands could do the work I was doing. It demanded little knowledge and no initiative.

  The importance of a job does not parallel its value to the employer but the depth of his employee’s need of it. Thus my job was important and I guarded it by a hypocritical industriousness when Mrs Smalpeck looked at me and a painful humbleness when she spoke to me.

  In her hands was the fate of the books I carried in my mind and I bowed before this humiliating situation, suffering it with patience.

  3

  Each Saturday afternoon I took a train to Warpoon. Father met me at the station with the horse and gig, and I spent the night at home. It was an opportunity to let off steam, to replenish resolve and purpose, and to be reassured.

  Sometimes my four sisters were at home and then our ideas merged and became to us more convincing expressions of truth. When all were in agreement, led to the same conclusions by different influences, we became conscious of strong ties with all people. Our unity suggested greater unity beyond the borders of our home and this awareness gave us strength.

  ‘All my children suffer from girth galls,’ Father remarked one night after listening to us protesting against the selfishness and greed we were encountering in people committed to material development.

  I had heard him remark that he felt like a drover’s horse tied behind the wagon now that we had taken the reins. But our opinions pleased him. In agreeing with a complaint I made one day he said: ‘Yes, that’s right; we all flinch at the cracking of whips.’

  We were a rebellious family, often only vaguely aware of what we were rebelling against. Deep within us, I suppose, we were protesting against lack of opportunity to develop some form of self-expression, a purpose that would give meaning to our lives. We felt an inability to understand fully great music, painting and literature, the foundations of such understanding never having been laid in the days of our primitive schooling.

  Our childhood, which should have included preparation for adult appreciation of culture, was a period in which we were learning to pray to God for help in times of trouble and in which we sang under the baton of an exalted school-teacher:

  Work, boys, work and be contented

  As long as you’ve enough to buy a meal,

  For the man, you may rely,

  Will be wealthy by and by,

  If he only puts his shoulder to the wheel.

  Now, still children in the world of aesthetics, we aspired to join the company of those matured people who stood in awe and with understanding before great art.

  Mary’s influence on me was considerable. She was married and lived in a Me
lbourne suburb. In her youth she had been subjected to influences that I had been too young to share fully. In those days she was a sensitive girl, responsive to music and poetry and subject to periods in which, like some inspired crusader, she resolved to lift dark people from suffering and slavery to a life of happiness.

  A man so crippled by arthritis that his life was spent in an invalid chair often visited us, being pushed to our home by Father or by some schoolboy anxious to earn sixpence. He was a naturalist named Frank Radcliffe, and ran a ‘Nature Notes’ column in the Australasian under the initials ‘F.R.’

  Suffering had not embittered him nor hostility crushed the spirit that rested secure behind his steady, amused and tolerant glance. He experienced hostility more than most. He was an atheist in a community where the very word roused fear and repulsion as at the sight of a snake. He always faced his detractors without resentment, certain it was they who needed compassion and help, not himself.

  His twisted hands, curled on his knees, would beat time to the music of a fiddle or a piano, and his eyes would become bright with eager appreciation at a voice singing a Jacobean ballad.

  When the choir of the little Presbyterian church were to sing excerpts from The Messiah or the organist was to play a noble offertory, he would arrange to be taken to the church where his chair would be pushed into an open space beneath the pulpit. Here he would listen to the singing and the organ music, his eyes closed, his head lifted in a still, rapt commitment to beauty under the sombre gaze of the congregation.

  He wrote for the Sydney Bulletin, the English Field and Country Life. Father’s stories supplied him with material and in his written tales he became a drover, a boundary-rider, a bush-hwker, according to the demands of the story Father told him.

  He was the only man I met in my childhood who talked of painting, literature and music with reverence and understanding. I often sat at his feet, my hand clutching the kangaroo-skin rug that covered his poor legs while he told me ‘Uncle Remus’ stories—‘The Tar Baby’, ‘Br’er Rabbit Goes Fishing’, and tales of ‘Miss Meadows and the Gals’.