The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  I approached Amelia Pethick and issued my invitation. Amelia smiled and said she would be dependent on Hope for escort but that she would be very interested to taste authentic Russian tea. I then chased down the frenetic Hope Mockridge, who was visiting Trades Hall during her lunch break from her other role as a lawyer in the attorney-general’s office. She stopped work, and she stopped frowning too, and said yes, she would be pleased to accompany Mrs Pethick. We were now forswearing the trams, but she was sure she could get one of the men who were lending their services as drivers to take them over to South Brisbane.

  On the day, I finished my day’s work on the docks and washed myself at the pump at Mrs Adler’s back garden and hurried to the Samarkand to await the arrival of the two women. The owners of the teashop were half-Russian, half-Tartar and came from the city after which the teahouse was named. I chatted to the husband and wife as the daughter made sweet cakes in the kitchen out the back, occasionally coming out to join in the conversation herself. A number of the older members of the Russian Emigrants Union, not all of them admirers of mine, were already ensconced at tables reading year-old Russian newspapers. I went to my own table with a Sydney paper that had been shipped up the coast, and read a dreary piece on land taxes. My hands, unaware that I was supposed to be a grown revolutionary, were sweaty enough to pick up ink stains from the newsprint.

  When the door opened, Hope Mockridge entered on her own. She was the type of political woman I had seen before and had an attraction to – elegant without having to concentrate on it, or without it having to be the point. Such women frowned greatly but always had a solid income behind them. Mrs Mockridge held her purse in front of her, as to shield herself from Russian strangeness in the middle of South Brisbane, but she also carried the half-smile of a child who expected to have wonders revealed to her.

  The old committee members of the soyuz watched like stunned fish, mouths agape, as she passed. She was an exotic bird in the Samarkand Café. They closed their mouths and bent to hiss at each other. As if I had put their beloved old association in further peril still by inviting Australians to tea.

  Is Mrs Pethick coming separately? I asked her.

  She sends her sincerest apologies, Mrs Mockridge told me. She is exhausted by her work. But she said she would be grateful to be asked in the future.

  I moved a chair out to seat Mrs Mockridge.

  I understand, I told her.

  She also said that she didn’t think I needed a chaperone. Do I, Mr Samsurov?

  I guarantee your safety, madam. I sat down.

  She looked me in the eye. That is a guarantee I trust, she said.

  Kelly would never forgive me if I did anything to destroy your faith in the working class, I said.

  Dear God, she said. At the end all you care about is the opinion of other men. You are a man of your own mind, aren’t you?

  I told her I wouldn’t give myself such high praise.

  Are you married, Tom? she asked. In Russia?

  I told her no. I have not had the time, I said. But you are married, Mrs Mockridge.

  My husband is a very distinguished lawyer, she said, with a trace of mockery. He is ... he’s not well. Certainly not all the time.

  I had already spoken to Kelly about this, and knew that her husband was what they called a silk, a King’s Counsel, but that he was a dipsomaniac who had been – until a recent reform – advanced enough in that disease that people had begun to avoid using him, even though his position in society was still very high, the Mockridges being one of those old pastoralist families of Queensland whose mental habits and view of the world might not have been so far from that of Russian nobles.

  On the subject of marriage, I asked Hope Mockridge, have you seen the O’Sullivans? They are such a devoted couple.

  In fact, they reminded me of my old friends and mentors Vladimir Ilich and Krupskaya, with Krupskaya as the inexhaustible recorder and transcriber of a great mind.

  Don’t you think, asked Hope, that she’s perhaps too devoted?

  So, a wife can be too devoted?

  She can be if she doesn’t have room to look around on her own behalf. And even breathe for herself.

  The daughter of the house set the teapot on top of the samovar and laid a plate of sweet cakes on the table. Next she brought a bowl of honey and another of apricot jam. I asked Mrs Hope Mockridge whether she would have honey or jam in her tea, and when she said honey, I spooned some into our sturdy glass tumblers. The daughter took the teapot, poured into it a small concentrate of tea from the samovar, then opened the lower tap to pour water into our pot. This – to me – ordinary process fascinated Hope Mockridge.

  Why doesn’t she just pour it straight from the top tap? she asked when the girl had gone.

  She’d be arrested for murder, I said. There’s a zavarka, an essence of tea, in the samovar. It seeps through the water, but if it’s too highly concentrated it will take your breath away and give you hallucinations, or even a heart attack.

  I don’t believe it, she said, smiling.

  Prisoners, I said, real prisoners in Russia, drink the zavarka in the hope they’ll die.

  A person can suicide with tea? asked Hope Mockridge, laughing, but willing to be convinced. Then she frowned. It must be so terrible what the tsar’s police do to prisoners!

  Taste the tea. You will find it delightful.

  She tasted it, and claimed she found it to be first class.

  You must think me a prize idiot, she said then. I am perhaps too fascinated by Russia. It comes from reading War and Peace when a person is just seventeen. The most marvellous book to read during a long summer on a Queensland sheep station.

  Tolstoy is sentimental about peasants, I told her. He could afford to be. He had enough of them working for him.

  Yes, but he worked with them, didn’t he? He wore peasant clothing.

  I admitted that was so. It was a well-meaning question on her part. Russia was very hard to explain to someone on a humid afternoon in Queensland. Even to a woman so interested in it. When I was a child, my mother’s family still mocked the young city people who had come to the villages before I was born, thinking that the peasant commune was a union of humble people who had renounced their egoism – the commune a sort of model locomotive that would take all Russians straight from agricultural life to a socialist republic.

  The Russian peasants Tolstoy worked with will never make a revolution on their own, I told Mrs Mockridge. They will stand up occasionally if their crops or cattle are taken, and face the Cossack cavalry, but they will always lose and go back to God and vodka and prayers for the tsar. They dream of seizing the earth but have no scheme at all to overthrow the things that have made the earth a misery.

  I told her about Mikhail Romas, a nobleman, who was what could be called an Agrarian Socialist – that is, one who believed the revolution would come from the countryside. He took with him into the world of the peasants his twenty-year-old protégé, Maxim Gorki, the future author – indeed, my favourite author of all. They tried to set up peasant cooperatives – Romas trying and trying far more than Gorki. Endlessly, against discouragement, even when the local money-lenders put dynamite in his firewood, he tried. Gorki was a peasant like me, and he knew as Romas didn’t what he and his friend were really up against. Whereas people like Romas, those young ‘go-to-the-people’ radicals, didn’t understand that the peasant hated all outsiders for a start. People like Romas did not comprehend the truth about men like my grandfather, a humorous but vicious old goat who had his own capitalist desires – to buy timber land, to acquire a mill, to burn elegant kerosene lamps in his house. And some of his friends, grasping old village shop-owners who wanted to keep prices high and looked upon the young university students with their bourgeois guilt and their talk of the Christian nature of cooperatives with disbelief.

  You are hard on the peasants, she said.

  Well, I am one. Forgive me, but the idea that people can become ennobled by misery is a v
ery bourgeois one.

  And hence the sort of notion I have is false? she asked me with a smile. Oh dear, I do have a great deal to learn.

  Please, I said, you can’t be expected to understand all the complications. You know far more than most about the whole sorry mess.

  I called for the girl to come and refill Hope’s cup, and urged her to try the cakes.

  She took one. I dare not have too many, she told me. My mother and aunts are all very plump. And I am very vain. It’s disgraceful. Why should a woman care how she looks? But for some reason I do.

  Because the world is pleased to see beauty, I told her, prickling with sudden internal heat. It’s no small thing to enliven the world with beauty.

  Well, she said, Australian men don’t generally speak as well as that of women. If we’re lucky, we might be complimented by comparison to stud cattle or merino sheep.

  In Russia too. I regret you might be less preferred than a draughthorse.

  She smiled. You seem so sure of what you know, Tom, whereas we are all over the place with our ideas.

  We have had the help of great thinkers, I told her. Kelly is a wonderful fellow but no one would say a great thinker.

  It’s a long time since a general strike has been contemplated, she told me. If I were a believer I would pray for its success.

  I did not dare say yet that sometimes the point was to lose. That losing could be winning. Instead, I asked her about her family.

  Hers was in its way a characteristic Queensland tale. Queensland had been a British penal outpost before it was named to honour Britain’s Queen Victoria. When it became its own self-governing region, as it now was under a federal constitution, its size was three times that of the Ukraine. Into the downs country west of Brisbane had come pastoralists, great ranchers who settled on ‘stations’ of thousands upon thousands of acres, and then reached further and further out into fringes of stone and desert, looking for pasture. Her grandfather, she said, was one of the pastoralists whom Kelly and his ilk denounced. He came from Northern Ireland, she told me, and I had already sentimentally decided that Hope Mockridge’s looks were classically Celtic. He was one of the men who had tried to destroy the Shearers’ Union twenty years before, and had brought in troops and Gatling guns.

  But he was also a kindly old fellow, she went on, and he loved me, the fact that I had a bit of spirit. But you see, the kindliest of men always do combine to protect their interests. It’s almost not their fault, even if it’s unjust. But it’s what humans do. You can’t expect capital not to behave like capital, or property like property. Decent men, affectionate men – they all behave badly under the wrong system, a system of land grabs and land hunger. On the good side, he treated shearers well – he didn’t feed them on offal and off-cuts like some pastoralists. But like Bender, he hated the idea of them banding together to get more out of him. Wasn’t he being generous enough already? That was what he always asked. He certainly thought he was. He said to me once, They’d take my land if they could. He had a strong sense of what socialism is, and talked about it more and more as he got older. I think he made me interested in it too, and that was an outcome he wouldn’t have liked. And yet, men like him ... their story will, I’m sure, not be without interest at some future date.

  For the moment, I admitted, I believe your grandfather has little to fear. At least for twenty more years...

  Twenty more years? she asked. I’ll be a woman of fifty-two.

  A woman unburdened by age, I said, as gallantly as I could.

  Apart from that she was not very interested in talking much further about her family. They were scandalised that she should wilfully insist on studying law – they were frightened about bad influences at the University of Queensland, and indeed she had been attracted to the Socialist Students Club.

  I came here to look into your past, not mine, she told me then, with her wonderful smile of new-world frankness. One didn’t find a smile like that in St Petersburg. So frank, so unabashed, and so commanding.

  The next day a general meeting at Trades Hall voted formally to begin the general strike, and our strike committee went into full operation. There was to be a march from the Trades Hall eastwards to Fortitude Valley. Jolly Tom Ryan argued that a clause concerning the peaceable intentions of the trade unions should be placed at the head of the strike statement. No harm done. Whether a march was to be peaceful depended on the police and the special constables and, to be honest, whether the Wobblies set a fire or whether the Irish broke the windows of Irish-Need-Not-Apply stores in Brunswick and Wickham streets. Likewise the generality of men must be prevented from attacking Chinese businesses on the suspicion that Bender might break the strike with Chinese drivers and conductors.

  The wife of Mr Riley, my co-marshal, had got hold of some red material and made a sash for each of our men, including Suvarov and me. Early in the morning we met our three hundred under the thin shade of the gum trees in the park across from the Trades Hall. How different from the grimy locomotive shops of Kharkov it was! Riley was uneasy about telling the men to put themselves between any police baton and the bulk of marchers. We decided we would have on either side of the vanguard of the march twenty of our marshals marching in a straight line, well spaced but obvious. If the police charged they would be ready to move in front of the first-row dignitaries and absorb the impact. We put together a Praetorian guard of forty or so men. They had a thankless job, but Riley was cheerful and said ‘the big fellers’ were ready for it. A further two hundred and twenty of our men were to line the route of the march, while the final forty were to bring up the rear, to help people escape and to protect them if things went extremely badly.

  Before we moved out Riley wanted to know did I want to speak, but I said, No, you speak. You’re an Irishman and I’m a stranger. When the time came, and Riley’s strong voice was heard through a megaphone, men to whom tobacco was a short commodity stamped out their cigarettes the better to listen to him.

  He did a good job. Our marchers all have different ideas in their heads, he said. Your job is to keep them marching for one thing– unionism’s right to enter the Queensland workplace. We’re not here to fight old quarrels. Our quarrel is to do with the capitalist, and the fact he can’t permit unionism into his head. Now the publican of the Trades Hall Hotel has declared the bar open to men who can produce a union card. I’d just point out that you must have a good head to do your job today. If you walk off pissed, you disgrace the sash my wife made you. Moderation in all things, gentlemen.

  Some of our constables moved away, delighted as workers often were at a rumour of free alcohol. I’m glad I don’t have time for the stuff, I told Suvarov, who was standing by in his red sash.

  The procession moved off at eleven. By that hour there were twenty-five thousand marchers, and fifty thousand spectators along the streets, an army untrained but full of potential. The lines were fifteen or so abreast and the procession two miles long. The front row comprised Tom Ryan, wearing a red rosette, and other Labor parliamentarians, with Warwick O’Sullivan and his wife at the left side of the line. Near the vanguard, in the second or third row, was a battalion of young women led by the magnificent Mrs Amelia Pethick in a straw hat. Wives and children of workers had decorated their family mongrels with bands of red ribbon, and owners of small shops dependent on the earnings of workers cheered us on our way. There were red ribbons tied to telegraph poles and even some of the drays waiting for us to pass through intersections were decorated with red bunting. The office girls from the company of lawyers who did the Trades Hall work waved to us from their upstairs windows. Walter O’Sullivan began to sing in a raw tenor, and others joined in, ragged singing in this ragged nation:

  Arise, ye starvelings from your slumbers,

  Arise, ye prisoners of want,

  For reason in revolt now thunders

  And at last ends the age of cant.

  So, comrades

  Come rally

  And the last fight let us
face...

  Soon the procession passed occasional detachments of police, to whom the strikers called to join the march, some of our red-sashed marshals waving to this policeman or that.

  On open ground at Fortitude Valley the thousands came to a stop and Kelly came forward and made a speech through a megaphone, announcing the strike and applauding the good order with which the march had taken place. He told us again about the causes and provocations that created the strike. Then, becoming practical, he explained that the committee would issue coupons that would be honoured by certain stores, a list of which had been printed and would be prominently displayed and distributed. There would be a daily bulletin. The bulletin would inform men and women of marches, for, said Kelly, repeating my own thought, we have become an army. Indeed, railway men and miners at Ipswich, and fourteen thousand cane-cutters, rail workers and miners in the far north of the huge province, had stopped work in support of us.

  Tommy Ryan formally declared the support of the Labor Party for the strike. He and the other Labor men of course used the general discontent to urge everyone to vote for their party, as if doing that would bring about the promised age. It must have been politeness on the part of Kelly and other Queenslanders not to ask why the Labor prime minister of Australia, Andrew Fisher down in Melbourne, had failed to produce a working man’s paradise in either of his two prime ministerships, even though he made much of the fact that he had started at the coalface in Scotland at the age of ten. Tom Ryan pointed to Fisher’s recent law to create a people’s bank, the Commonwealth Bank, as if it were yet another step on the path to heaven. Fisher himself was a Queenslander by immigration, had been a miner at Gympie, and Kelly hoped for practical favours from him. If the workers were attacked by the police, surely Fisher would offer Australian troops to keep the peace.