Later, when the creditors united to send him crashing into bankruptcy and he saw with despair the inevitable loss of all he had worked for, he became seized with compassion towards his workmen. He walked round the factory talking to them. He ignored their thefts of tingles and sole leather. He almost encouraged it. He wanted to unite himself with them in confronting a disaster that was going to send him out on to the streets as it was them. He wanted their comfort, their friendship, but most of all their respect.
‘Well, Sam, I have always treated you well, haven’t I?’
Finally he was to become a nightwatchman in a shoe machinery company at five pounds a week but now, as I confronted him, he was going through the stage where he sought to thrust the blame for the firm’s condition on to the shoulders of those he employed.
He looked at the report I handed him then said, ‘Well, they caught him. You’d never credit he’d do this to me.’
He continued reading but suddenly his anger burst into words. ‘Damn him!’
He pushed the form aside and looked up at me, his face flushed.
‘How exactly did they catch him? I want to know. I want to front him with the lot.’
With my realisation of his anger I became angry myself but mine was directed against him.
‘I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘Just follow this, will you! On one visit a docket was given with the purchase. On another no docket was made out for the shoes bought. On a third visit he buys a pair of slippers and a jar of cream but only the slippers were shown on the docket.
‘I check the sales lists handed in by Carlson and find that on the first day the investigator visited him Carlson’s return shows a shortage of ten shillings; on the next day a shortage of fifteen and six and on the third day a shortage of a shilling.
‘Now let me tell you how that shortage came about. Carlson kept the money. I know that, but in keeping it he didn’t come quite as low as we did. The methods employed by these birds are always the same. They deliberately set out to make the salesman thieve.
‘You take this case now. On the first day, the investigator buys a pair of shoes for two pounds and the return for that sale handed in by Carlson shows it at thirty shillings, a difference of ten bob. The correct price of that shoe is thirty shillings. The investigator knows that. He knows it is the most expensive men’s shoe we have but he keeps asking, “Haven’t you got a more expensive pair?” Not a better pair mind you; a more expensive pair.
‘Since it is our policy to encourage the taking of “overs”—you know how all the girls are paid commission on the amounts they obtain over the listed price—since it is our policy to encourage this, Carlson gets another pair of the same line and tells him it is a better quality shoe at two pounds. He doesn’t want to miss the sale.
‘The investigator grabs it at that price and Carlson keeps the extra. Carlson got in first, see. He stole the ten bob that we would otherwise steal.
‘On the second visit this thief-discoverer won’t wait for a docket. No, he hasn’t got time. “I don’t want a docket, thank you. I’ve got to catch a train.”
‘So Carlson finds himself with fifteen and six in his hand and no record of it. He keeps it.
‘On the third visit Carlson makes out a docket for the slippers. The investigator rises to go but he suddenly thinks of cream. “Oh, I forgot! A couple of jars of cream.” He doesn’t wait to have them added to his docket and Carlson pockets the shilling.
‘The trouble was Carlson was tempted to come down as low as we are and he fell for it. Carlson should have been told to leave the thieving to us. We’re experts at it. He’s just a bloody amateur.’
‘What the hell are you talking about!’ exclaimed Fulsham straightening himself.
‘We’re talking business,’ I said. ‘We’re all on the skids—Carlson, you and I, so what the hell! You’ll sack him, but our turn’s coming. Let’s be frank for a change.’
For some reason Fulsham’s anger suddenly left him. He relaxed and smiled at me as if I were a child.
15
Whenever the Modern Shoe Company received a large order for shoes Mr Fulsham experienced feelings of confidence in the future. The sight of a van being loaded with footwear for delivery to some well-known retailer suggested prosperity to him and at these times he walked briskly through the factory pausing beside laden racks with an expression of contentment.
He was never pleased to see me entering his office carrying account books. Statements I had prepared to acquaint him with losses incurred on orders he had costed made him irritable.
‘What is it now?’ he would ask, frowning.
He often disputed my figures, finding it much more comforting to discuss the value of the order rather than the loss my figures disclosed as inevitable at the cut rates he charged.
‘If Carter’s can do it so can we,’ he argued.
I suspected that Carter’s, a rival shoe factory, were also running at a loss in an effort to undercut their rivals but they were a stronger firm than we were and could afford to sell below cost till ‘times came good’.
This was the phrase Fulsham clung to as justification for his frequent displays of confidence. A substantial order suggested to him that the depression was lifting, times were coming good.
He based all his prophecies for the future on a belief in the sudden return of the conditions that prevailed in the past when huge government orders for military boots had rocketed him to wealth.
‘What we want is another war,’ he said one day. ‘There was plenty of money about then. It’ll come.’
I loathed war and it seemed incredible to me that there existed men who would welcome it. The thought of a prosperity dependent on death revolted me.
Nor was I fooled by the peaks in fluctuating orders. My bond with the firm came through figures. The orders Fulsham saw as salvation were revealed in my books as disastrous.
For almost a year I had realised that the bankruptcy of the Modern Shoe Company was inevitable and I was finding it difficult to face up to the consequences for myself. I saw myself standing penniless on street corners unable to get a job, my car gone, and prevented from going more than a few hundred yards from some bleak room because I didn’t have the price of a tram ticket.
When I had first realised that the Modern Shoe Company would crash I had discussed it with Arthur and he had advised me to buy the leasehold of an apartment house.
‘What you’ve got to have is a place to live in where you can’t be kicked out for not paying the rent,’ he told me. ‘You might be out of work for years. You don’t eat that much. You could live on ten bob a week.’
The thought of becoming the proprietor of an apartment house was objectionable to me. I regarded it as a parasitical occupation that demanded the development of enmity between proprietor and tenant however disguised that enmity might be. I would be the active, the dominant antagonist; they would be the resentful victims.
I would also be allying myself with forces I strongly opposed. I would be accepting and encouraging an aspect of society that corrupted and contributed to the misery of which I had seen so much.
It would be impossible for me to get work and I had to find some means of existing until I reached the stage where I could earn a living by writing.
I closed my mind to the realities of what I proposed doing. I saw myself, the Modern Shoe Company gone, writing in my room or entertaining friends. The tenants I visualised smiled at me as they returned from work. They paid their rent then sat down and had a cup of tea with me in my flat. Time would pass, prosperity would return and I would sell the leashold at a profit.
Arthur sought to bring me back to reality by relating stories of tenants who quarrelled and fought in the night but though I listened to him with interest I saw them only in his house not in the one I would run.
Yet he felt it was the only solution for me. The apartment house he and Florrie were conducting brought in enough money to keep them. This was due, I realised later, to qualities th
at Florrie possessed which made her a perfect apartment house proprietress. She was inflexible, efficient, worked hard and never made friends with her tenants.
She knew the signs that revealed the intentions of a tenant planning to abscond. A sudden burst of affability—the feint before the escape—put her on her guard. A tenant leaving for work with a full suitcase and returning without it was moving possessions in stages so that the final load would be light and inconspicuous, according to her.
She often intercepted tenants—in the middle of the night if need be—and demand some payment on account together with their next address. Not many outwitted her. I understood the conditions that produced such tenants, a knowledge that ensured I would fail in coping with them.
Arthur found an apartment house the leasehold of which was for sale.
Opposite the Albert Park railway station two streets converged at an acute angle. Upon the dagger of land formed by their junction was a two-storey brick building that filled the entire space between the streets.
At the point was a little triangular plot of grass. The building widened as it moved back from the grass, following the line of the two streets that confined it till it ended at a small back yard fenced in with galvanised iron.
Along one street the building presented a high brick wall reaching up to a slate roof. Facing the other was the entrance. Here a tiled veranda with iron posts confronted a heavy iron gate that clanged when you shut it.
The door into the building had once been painted green but weather and corrosion had tessellated its paint into dark patches shaped by a network of cracks that exposed the original wood in their depths.
A heavy brass knob sat in the centre of the door which was flanked by glass panels picturing frosted roses. Some of the tiles were missing from the patterned veranda floor and in these depressions dust and leaves had collected.
A balcony fenced with iron lace-work shaded the windows of the top storey. It continued round the truncated end of the building where it looked down on the plot of grass.
The rent of the building was three pounds ten a week. It was divided into four flats each consisting of a bed-sitting room and a kitchenette, the return for which was six pounds ten. There was only one lavatory and that was out in the yard. There was only one bathroom and that was upstairs facing the landing.
Since I intended living in one of the flats the return from the house, provided the other three flats were occupied, would be four pounds fifteen a week.
The twenty-five shillings profit I would be making seemed to me a promise of security when I lost my job. It never occurred to me that I would have to spend money in replacing kitchen utensils, bedding and other items stolen by tenants or broken or just worn out. That twenty-five shillings was presented for my dreaming as a permanent income, inviolate, available in my pocket whenever I stepped out on to the street.
The price of the leashold and the furnishings was a hundred pounds. I borrowed the money from my sister Jane who was nursing in a country hospital and who handed over her entire savings to me without question.
I paid the hundred pounds to the agent and was now owner of the furniture and fittings of four flats. The agent insisted I check each item with the four inventories he produced.
FLAT 1
Kitchen
4 knives
4 teaspoons
4 forks
6 saucepans
1 gas stove
The list filled a page.
Then the bed-sitting room:
1 armchair
4 blankets
4 sheets
1 eiderdown quilt
2 brass candlesticks
1 china ornament—shepherdess (one arm broken)
3 pictures
2 chamber pots
Item after item neatly typed on foolscap sheets. It seemed impossible that I now owned so much. The thought occurred to me that there could be very few men in the world who owned eight chamber pots.
I looked at each object then ticked it on the inventory. I would also have to go through this procedure with my tenants, the agent told me. Each new tenant signed an inventory listing the contents of the flat he was about to occupy. When he vacated it the contents were checked again.
‘By doing this religiously you protect yourself against theft,’ said the agent, a pious man with a drooping mouth and a resigned manner.
I determined to act religiously in this matter and shook his hand gratefully. He exerted faint pressures on my hand while looking at me expectantly but I did not know the responses demanded of his particular lodge and he became depressed.
‘I will call for the rent each Friday,’ he said.
When I took possession of the apartment house only one of the flats was occupied, the lower one across the hall from my room.
Mr and Mrs Percival Scrubbs lived here. Mr Scrubbs was pale and thin like grass grown under a tub. He had round shoulders and a neck so weighted by his head that it projected forward at an angle to his body.
He nodded his head while talking, comforting himself in a patient agreement with all his conclusions. He wore drooping suits stained by cleaning fluids and shoes cracked across the instep yet gleaming with polish.
He was a storeman in a city warehouse but he never talked about this. The subject he liked to discuss was his wife especially her frailness, the inevitability of her early death, the burden this knowledge laid upon him.
‘She is a very delicate woman,’ he told me while standing in the hall beside the aspidistra stand, a twisted column of blackwood carrying a wooden brass-bound container for the plant into which he carefully shook the ashes of his cigarette. ‘She has an ulcerated stomach.’
It was an announcement that demanded it be followed by a few moments’ respectful silence. We paid it this tribute then he continued, ‘She must never be excited; it would be the end of her. Watch that, will you, Mr Marshall?’
I pondered upon this most disturbing revelation with its accompanying suggestion of responsibilities placed on me.
‘How could I excite her?’ I asked. It was the question of an honourable man seeking to protect, but the quick glance he gave me attributed to it a different motive.
We looked into each other’s eyes while I fought to hold the innocence which had accompanied my question and which he was now toppling.
I won.
‘By rowing with her,’ he said.
‘Oh!’ I said. We stood very still for a moment then both turned and walked swiftly away from each other, he to the secrecy of his flat, I to my kitchen where I stood before the dresser looking fixedly at a cracked cup while I thought about ulcerated stomachs.
I did not meet Mrs Scrubbs till next day when I came under observation from one of her eyes. It peered at me from that half of her face visible beyond the frame of her doorway. I was walking down the hall and I turned quickly and met the eye before it was jerked away from me.
It was an eye I got to know very well. I was to see it poised behind a clear patch of glass amid the frosted roses of the front door panels when I was taking some girl home and the iron gate had clanged behind us. From positions of advantage it watched me come and go, assessing, concluding and revelling in its conclusions.
The lives of others was the life of Mrs Scrubbs. She selected from their lives not that which inspired but that which scandalised and upon this she fed. She burned with a renewed will to live when she spoke of the ‘carryings on’ of other tenants. She would have wilted and died amid purity.
My first talk with her took place at the foot of the stairs down which I had been clambering with a brush and a tin of Ezywork, a brown varnish stain that I had been applying to the woodwork each side of the carpet runner.
Ezywork encrusted every stairway and hall in Melbourne’s apartment houses. After years of application it lay in thin slabs beyond the edges of carpets. I sometimes prised a piece free with a knife and held it up for inspection like a piece of toffee.
Mrs Scrubbs liked Ezywork;
I loathed it.
‘I like to see people being clean,’ she said.
She began her conversation by telling me she was Mrs Scrubbs and that she had an ulcerated stomach.
‘Yes. Your husband told me,’ I said. ‘I was sorry to hear it. I hope you soon get well.’
‘I’ll never get well,’ she said and I suddenly saw the Mrs Scrubbs of the lonely nights when tenants slept in purity and there were no pregnant footsteps upon which to nourish the fever that stayed the falling down, down to despair.
She was a thin, almost emaciated woman with a meagre chest and a face like a watchful bird. She dressed in black and looked older than she was, in her forties I imagined.
She sought to establish intimate relationships by quick confidences that anticipated understanding and agreement from those she besieged. She bound them to her in mutual indignation at the perfidy of people, she fostered in them suspicion towards all but herself.
It was always a temporary partnership. The gaze she turned on others was inevitably turned on those who stood beside her in judgment and they in turn became defenders.
‘I’m not a woman to gossip, Mr Marshall. I’m a respectable woman. Everybody knows that. I keep to myself. Perce keeps saying, “Don’t bury yourself; get out and meet people.” That’s all very well for Perce, Mr Marshall, he hasn’t got an ulcerated stomach. But I have and I’ve got to watch it. I keep to myself and I don’t interfere with nobody, but the things I’ve seen going on in this apartment house, Mr Marshall—well! You wouldn’t believe it! I’ve seen married women, married mind you—what sort of men their husbands are . . . Well, I’ll leave that to you. But I’ve seen these women take men into their bedrooms at all hours of the night. And they’re drinking all the while and they’re laughing and going on and what with one thing and another—what they’re doing an’ that—it’s disgusting, that’s what it is. It’s disgusting.
‘I’m a respectable married woman, Mr Marshall, and I can’t tell you what goes on; it wouldn’t be right. But I can tell you, you must be careful what people you get in here. They come to the door and ask for rooms and you don’t know what they’re like.
In Mine Own Heart Page 14
