This Is the Grass

by Alan Marshall

  The ballads and folk songs sung by the people were like that handle to him. After being sung by countless people over years they absorbed something of their aspirations. Crude and sentimental as many of them were, they inspired in him and in others emotions just as worthy and uplifting as those engendered in the minds of cultured people by arias from the grand opera.

  I resolved that one day I would understand and appreciate the works of the great composers, but when I reached that stage I felt sure I would find behind the emotion and intellect that guided the themes of the greatest compositions an embrace of the world’s people.

  5

  The boarders began to tell me their troubles, feeling I was not part of their world. I could not compete with them. Revelations of little weaknesses to one with many obvious weaknesses would not discredit them.

  ‘I’m getting a stye on the eye. Do you think a wedding-ring rubbed on the eye stops it? I want it to clear up by Saturday as I’m visiting friends,’ said Mr Gulliver.

  ‘When they engage you to sing at a party, they should introduce you to the guests and treat you as one. It’s only right; I’m going to demand it,’ said Stewart Mollison.

  ‘There is little real appreciation of talent in Australia. There are times when I feel like giving up study and finding an easier way to make money. I should have been a hair-dresser,’ said Mamie Fulton.

  They were kind, considerate people who always saw I had a chair to sit on, a free passage to walk through the lounge. They would hurry to get me things to save me having to rise, to walk—a glass of water, maybe, a book. . . .

  They thought crutches were ‘terrible’ and told me so with comforting voices. They wished ‘something could be done about it’, and professed themselves willing to get me the addresses of masseurs who, you never know, might do me a lot of good. Mr Burmeister recollected a pulled muscle he had suffered in his youth. A masseur had cured him and the cost was negligible, all things considered.

  ‘Things should be made easier for you,’ they claimed, and they all agreed that no one could imagine how great was the handicap from which I suffered unless they had walked on crutches. Not one of them had walked on crutches, but they all knew people who had and these people were quite definite that it imposed a great strain upon the heart.

  There were staircases and the difficulty of getting on trams and the dangers of slipping on the roadway when it was wet. So many things.

  And, of course, people . . . They were so inconsiderate. Mr Gulliver had, himself, witnessed old people standing in trams while young healthy men retained their seats and Mamie had seen blind men pleading to be helped across the road and ‘no one stopped’.

  Of course, blindness was the worst thing that could happen to anyone, though Mr Gulliver wasn’t so sure about this. Deafness, he thought, would be a far greater handicap. Never to hear music was too terrible to contemplate.

  Mrs Birdsworth felt that, after all, I had much to be thankful for: ‘You have such a happy disposition no one would realise you were crippled,’ she told me.

  They all agreed that this was just what they felt themselves.

  ‘When you are sitting at a table talking and laughing no one would know,’ was Mamie’s way of putting it.

  Stewart Mollison concluded the discussion with a final compliment.

  Well, Alan, we all like you and you will always have our sympathy.’

  A murmur of agreement greeted this declaration that called for a humble thanks to them all.

  The feeling the boarders regarded as compassion was a sentimental pity that served to strengthen them against suffering in others. It destroyed what it was intended to strengthen—resolution in the afflicted. It sapped the will to fight, killed ambition, weakened hope.

  The emotions they experienced when looking at a cripple hurt them, roused a primitive fear of a suspected deterioration in their own bodies and they rid themselves of it by the release of a spoken compassion.

  They sympathised from a position of strength, increasing their respect for themselves by declarations of understanding and concern, believing these emotions sprang from their unselfishness and kindness, not from self-protection.

  They were never inspired to action by their conclusions, only to retreat. They moved back from the obligations placed upon man by man through individual misfortune, shrinking from action that would have disturbed their complacency and brought them to a realisation of their own ephemerality.

  None of them was aware of handicaps in themselves, handicaps that made them restless, frustrated, swallowers of aspirin and frequent visitors to doctors. The lines of tension engraved upon their faces, the sleepless nights of which they sometimes complained, the restless walking from room to room on spring nights, sudden bursts of irritation—these said as much about them as my crutches said about me.

  We were all suffering from handicaps. My handicap lay in the minds of people I met, in their attitude towards me, not in my crutches.

  After that evening in which they all combined to make me happy, I rarely stopped in the boarding-house after dinner. I roamed the city streets where I could avoid their consideration, a consideration that would have destroyed me however worthy its purpose.

  It was summer and after dinner, while the sun was still shining, I walked through the Fitzroy Gardens on my way to the city. Starlings rose from the lawns, their wings almost transparent against the illuminated sky. Shabby men with their hands in their pockets walked with downcast heads amongst the flowers. Women with rouged cheeks stopped their sauntering, turned and watched them with speculative eyes. A stray dog sitting lonely on the pathway licked old sores with a clopping tongue. A girl and a boy lying on the lawn were embracing.

  City murmurs reached me as I walked under the elm trees. I walked slowly, happy that I would soon be part of that murmur, suggestive to me of powerful life. Even the hot north wind, which sometimes shouldered the buildings at the top of Bourke Street before being flung back to greet me in a swirl of dust, was good. The discarded pieces of paper it carried slid harshly along the pavement, jostling each other to reach the shelter of a telephone-booth. Some leaped like ballet dancers, clutching at my crutches a moment before speeding on.

  There were nights when the rain made streaks of silver beneath the lights and the pavements shone with reflections. Gutters prattled and people went thrusting through frail barricades of rain on their way to theatres.

  There were calm nights when voices were clear and laughter was that of a companion.

  It excited me, the lights and bustle. I moved from street to street. I stood motionless in the dark alleys that pulsed in an atmosphere of imminent revelation, waiting and watching and listening. From crammed rubbish-bins surrounded with spilt refuse the rats fled with arched backs and bobbing run. Alley cats picked their way delicately over cobblestones.

  I stood registering every shadow, every blade of light. No sound or movement escaped me. I was poised on the verge of immense discoveries that never came but were always there awaiting an inspired comprehension.

  I walked down Little Lonsdale Street where the prostitutes stood in doorways silhouetted against oblongs of light from sordid rooms. Men stood in indecision on the opposite side of the street fighting their sad battles. Some paced past the doorways in a cruel assessment before making their decision. Some of the girls called softly to the men who passed.

  The street was a canyon of darkness pierced with the light from cave-like openings into which men passed with their burdens. They left the shadows reluctantly, met the shafts of light with bowed shoulders as if the lights were smiting them. When they emerged their burdens were greater, the solution of their problems more deeply hidden.

  Bourke Street was the street I frequented most. Its pleasure-seeking crowds had shed responsibilities, and I could watch people released from care by anticipation of enjoyment, by the company of a lover, by the conviction that this was just a beginning and life would always be like this.

  Radiant girl
s clinging to the arms of proud young men strode into picture theatres where Lillian Gish or the Talmadge sisters lived a screen-life in which, with horrified eyes and hands clasped on bosoms, they spurned the villains who sought to ravish them.

  Melbourne was a film-struck city. Picture theatres dominated Bourke Street. Spruikers in braided uniforms strutted up and down before foyers extolling the virtues of the pictures within. They shouted invitations to enter. They used words like ‘stupendous’ or ‘colossal’, and curled their moustaches and made eyes at the girls.

  I often stood watching them, listening to every word of their spiel. These were men using words as lures to draw people into the glittering theatres behind them. Their appeal was made to unworthy emotions. They trumpeted their message with an acclaim of sex relationships that convention condoned, with unconvincing denunciation of the sex relationships society thought evil. But with their eyes and their tone they suggested the latter relationship was much more exciting and rewarding than followers of convention could expect from their disciplined lives. And, besides, it was so readily available.

  ‘In the arms of the Prince she found the love her husband denied her. Run away, son, you’re blocking the doorway. I’ll give you a kick on the arse if you come here again.’

  One of the spruikers to whom I often listened had a voice like an organ when spruiking, but it changed to the voice of a suburban gossip when he spoke to me.

  ‘Come on, now. You only have two nights in which to see Norma Talmadge in Love’s Test. The glorious Norma Talmadge in a colossal presentation of life’s greatest problem: love that brings ruin and an aching heart in the mansion of a wealthy libertine, or love that takes her into the arms of her devoted chauffeur. How does she decide? See the conflict of a good woman tempted by the lusts of the flesh. Front seats, sixpence; back seats, a shilling. How ya goin’?’ he ended as his parade brought him beside me.

  ‘Not bad. You’re in good form tonight.’

  ‘Aw, I dunno! Thursday’s always a bad night. You waste your breath on half these people.’

  He turned his head away and shouted towards them: ‘The glorious Norma Talmadge . . . Last two nights’, then addressed me again: ‘There’s talk of a police strike, they tell me. I’m not a man with any time for coppers, mind you, but I’m with them on this.’

  I had read the papers and knew the police were demanding better conditions of work, but I had imagined they would naturally get them. I had no experience of the struggle to improve working conditions being waged all around me, in factories, on wharves, in all places where men worked, nor was I aware how strongly these struggles for better conditions were opposed.

  ‘Is it that bad?’ I asked.

  ‘It is,’ he replied, before shouting: ‘Come on, girls. Hold your boy friend’s hand in the darkness of romance.’ There were times when his meaning was obscure.

  Amongst the pleasure-seeking people on the street there moved a few men and women who had no interest in pictures or dancing. Some were young but most were old. They walked slowly, having no destination, or stood hunched in doorways, or searched the gutter for butts, or gazed apathetically into windows.

  These were the derelicts, the outcasts, the ‘metho’ drinkers and the obsessed. They were on the streets because life was there and from it they replenished their dwindling reserves. Company was there, too, and they felt part of it even though it spurned and denied them.

  There was no protest left in them, no fight. They were resigned to misery. Their one pleasure was conversation. But what had they to say to the happy people passing? Where was the common ground? Who amongst all these people would listen with understanding? All that was left was their own kind. They could talk to them. So they became known to each other and often talked together.

  They stopped to talk to me as I stood leaning against some building. They stood beside me and we watched people together. There was no preliminary exchange of pleasantries between us, no reasons given for speaking, no remarks on the weather. My solitary vigil was introduction enough for them. We knew each other well.

  Sometimes a man began with a question seeking an explanation of my crutches: ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  ‘Paralysis.’

  ‘Bastard, isn’t it . . .?’

  He would then forget it.

  ‘Do you ever think of suicide?’ a man once asked me, not because he regarded my appearance as suggesting a person favouring the idea, but because it was a problem he was facing.

  He was thin with a face ravaged by drink and he had stopped abruptly beside me as if on impulse. His cheeks were sunken, his pallid lips rimmed with dirt. His shabby trousers were held up by a piece of rope tied round his waist. The shirt he wore had no buttons. Through a hole in his hat, hair was jutting. Sometimes he shivered though the night was warm. He smelt of rubbish-bins in dark alleys.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t,’ then added: ‘Well, I suppose I do sometimes, but not in connection with myself.’

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I often think about it. But then you might do it just too soon. It’s better to wait.’

  He changed his tone. ‘What are we doing here, anyway? What’s in it for us? I’ve read that the Chinese don’t give a damn if they die. They slave and starve and sleep so they don’t care if they die. That’s how I am half the time. But you got to stop thinking about it; it would drive you crazy. It would be so bloody easy to slip off, you know.’ He held his open hands in front of him and looked at them as if pondering on their value as executioners. ‘I dunno. It might be hard. You couldn’t say till you tried it.

  ‘I think of it on trams and trains—everywhere,’ he went on. ‘What’s the use? We’ll all be dead in fifty years. Say a hundred people were killed on this street. The papers would be full of it, yet in a hundred years they would only say it was a terrible accident or something, and nobody would be upset about it or anything.’

  ‘You go the “metho”, do you?’ I asked him.

  ‘Aw—yes. Sometimes. A bit . . . I’ll drink it if there’s nothing else.’

  ‘It’s hard to knock off grog,’ I observed.

  ‘You can’t. That’s the trouble. You just can’t.’ He thought a moment, then said: ‘I’d like to be up high looking down on the world. I tell you you’d be staggered at what you’d bloody well see.’

  Gradually I got to know them. Some of them were bores, and those I liked would warn me against them: ‘You can’t talk to that bloke you’ve been talking to. He gives you the lot. He wants to tell you your job all the time. Say something and he knows all about it. Once you say “Hullo” to him you’re done.’

  Some of them thought about books: ‘See all the books in this window? You couldn’t read them in our lives. But you know what’s in half of them, anyway. See that picture of a girl with a bloke’s arm around her? That’s what’s in them. Who’d want to read about you and me when they’ve got her?

  ‘See that there book, The Little Minister,’ he went on. ‘Now, I’ll tell you something. That might be the first edition and be worth a lot of money. Like stamps, they are. They get valuable the older they are. I knew a bloke once with a room full of books. He showed them to me. I was doing a job of carpentering for him, see. “A lot of valuable books there,” he said. “They’re first editions.” This bloke was just waiting, then he’d sell them.’

  After these people left me I wrote down what they said in my note-book. Dialogue fascinated me. In conversation with these people I was always waiting for the moment of illumination, the remark that established the man permanently in my mind, or the remark that reached out far beyond the little world of him and me, and gave a glimpse of all people.

  I followed them to their places of entertainment—a street meeting of the Salvation Army or listening to some crank ranting on a street corner. I heard the testimonies of tortured alcoholics proclaiming their degradation and their present salvation before staggering away to a wine saloon.

  ‘Round-the-world-for-thruppence,’
they called the plonk that brought them their shielding stupor.

  I was appalled at the ignorance and superstition I was encountering. I was meeting the dregs of society, but where were the intelligent people who must surely know the truth and could denounce and sweep all this foulness away if they wished? Where were we all going in our madness?

  I stood watching a woman standing on a box at the top of Little Lonsdale Street in view of the silent prostitutes at their doorways. A small group of people surrounded her, their upturned faces flushed from the light of a street lamp. It was a cold night and some wore shabby overcoats, but she had no overcoat, only a blue woollen cardigan over her grey flannel frock.

  She was a thin woman with a smile that contained no mirth. Yet it wasn’t an unpleasant smile. It gave one the impression of having been born of some astonishment a long time ago and the astonishment had never left her. Her eyes were wide open, a little distraught, as if she saw in the darkness beyond the group things she did not understand.

  I began writing in my note-book and the man beside me became interested.

  ‘Are you a writer?’ he asked.

  ‘Well—er—yes,’ I replied.

  ‘I thought so,’ he said, and he turned to his companion. ‘I can always tell ’em.’

  ‘Besides Paul, who are the other ones, the mighty ones?’ cried the woman from the box.

  She waited for an answer. A fat man with puffed, unshaven cheeks standing directly before her in front of the group spat contemptuously. ‘Ah, keep quiet!’ he said disgustedly.

  ‘You are full of drink, brother,’ said the preacher.

  The words galvanised the man into sudden action. He snatched off his hat and threw it to the ground.

  ‘Who said that?’ he cried, and staggered sideways as if an attack upon him was an imminent thing.