The People's Train

by Thomas Keneally

  Oh, Hope, I said, you must leave him now if you despise him like that.

  She shook her head and laughed. Perhaps I think he hasn’t suffered enough yet, she told me.

  We crossed the river, blue and spacious on this late winter morning, and as we drew up outside the Trade Union Hotel we saw Buchan sitting calmly and reading at a table under the upper verandah. He did not fold the paper up before I spotted it was a copy of Direct Action, the journal of the Industrial Workers of the World – the Wobblies, with whom Kelly had earlier accused him of having sympathy.

  When we pulled up and Hope called to him, he began lugging to the car a picnic hamper in which one could hear the cold clink of beer bottles. In his checked suit and his spats and the same veldttrekker hat he looked to me a walking affectation.

  Mr Samsurov, he called. And Mrs Mockridge. You have saved me from a terrible fit of the glooms.

  He put the hamper down to extract his newspaper from a pocket.

  Plekhanov, he declared, my favourite socialist – one of the few a normal man can read – he’s come out in favour of supporting the war! Can you believe it? Maybe you can explain this to me, Tom?

  He did not wait for an explanation but took up his hamper again and lugged it to the back of the car.

  Accept this contribution to our expedition! he announced like a priest, opening the luggage area and dropping the hamper in. Again, that icy clink. Returning, he stepped theatrically into the palatial Mockridge vehicle whose door I had swung open, and settled himself beside me on the leather. All his gestures were nearly forgivable, I decided, a mixture of frankness, apparent boyish passion and exhibitionism.

  I had not heard this bad news about Plekhanov. If it were true, then rumours of war sent the best men crazy.

  So do you know the man, Tom? he asked as we drove off. Hope says you know everyone.

  I met him once in Paris, I said. He is getting old. Then I would have met him again at Stockholm in 1909, except the tsar had other ideas.

  By which you mean he arrested you?

  Yes. And not solely myself. My friend Suvarov was arrested at that time too, though I did not know him then. I had many to share the misery with.

  Oh dearie, dearie me, he said. He shook his head furiously.

  He then turned to squint at the people in the two rear seats and on the running boards. And these wee bairns here? he asked.

  I introduced him to Suvarov, Podnaksikov, who was still on the running board, and Podnaksikov’s beloved Lucia.

  Well, he said, indeed we are of many nations, combined together in the brotherhood of Mrs Mockridge’s fine auto!

  Looking around myself, I saw Suvarov shake his head. God knew Russians could be overly poetic, but Buchan was trying too hard, perhaps fancying himself a prose version of Robbie Burns.

  My dear Hope, Buchan continued, I noticed when I put my humble offering in the boot that there is indeed a generous picnic already placed there. Sufficient for a regiment on manoeuvres. Appropriate to the time, eh? But Plekhanov? Ah, Plekhanov!

  I remembered Plekhanov’s face, its honesty, its no-nonsense moustache. He was drinking tea with Vladimir Ilich and Axelrod in the Russian School. I was sure that either the newspaper or Buchan himself were not accurate in the idea that Plekhanov had come out for the tsar. But I had also read that many Irish and Indians were taking enlistment in the event of war in the belief that they would get greater political rights afterwards for faithful service. Surely Plekhanov did not believe that any such implied promise existed in the tsar’s head!

  He may have been misquoted mischievously, I told Buchan. Maybe your paper picked it up from the capitalist press. There will be much misinformation in coming days.

  But you were to meet Plekhanov, you said.

  I was a delegate to the Second International.

  You were elected? A delegate?

  Yes, I was.

  You are a man to be reckoned with, said Buchan, and he whistled.

  But I was arrested before...

  He whistled again, like a man applauding.

  A consultative delegate, I told him.

  Even so, said Buchan. A delegate just the same.

  We rode westwards across the town which, despite the drama of the moment in Europe, was sunk in an Australian Sabbath torpor. Not even the Salvation Army seemed to be out, let alone the colonial armies of King George.

  I descended from the car, struggling past Buchan, as Hope drew up in front of Amelia’s splendid broad-verandahed place.

  We are picking up my friend Amelia Pethick, Hope told him. She was a suffragette and a true fighter.

  Until then, I had not known this about Amelia – the suffragette side. But it did not surprise me.

  Amelia appeared at the head of her stairs, all sheathed in white, belted at the waist, and looking almost lost beneath her huge sun hat. She had lost weight since I last saw her and had become more twig-like.

  I handed her into the car past Buchan, who had the grace to sit sideways.

  Amelia protested. Mr Samsurov, there is no need to give up your seat to me.

  My dear Amelia, I said, I have just heard of your pedigree from Mrs Mockridge. It is my honour to have you take my seat.

  She laughed, the laugh of an ancient, robust, admirable bird.

  Though there might have been room enough for me in the back, I swapped places on the running board with Podnaksikov to give him and Lucia room. Then we were on our way again.

  23

  We rolled south-west through the city’s last suburbs on roads that were not topped by tar. Buchan continued a conversation above the noise of the engine, the road and the wind.

  You know this syndicalism thing that Kelly accuses me of? I can’t ask a fellow like Kelly. He has enough against me already.

  I laughed, however begrudgingly, and heard Hope laughing too.

  It was a French word at the start, Hope told him. It’s the belief in one big union and the use of sabotage to achieve it. Like all big words it’s not as complicated as it sounds.

  Well, shouted Buchan, I have to say you have brought me enlightenment, Mrs Mockridge. Now I too shall be able to use the elegant sentence, You, my son, are just a foul syndicalist.

  We had now reached a badly graded and repaired road on the very edge of the country. The last weatherboard houses were left behind.

  But how does our consciousness of brotherhood then relate, Mr Samsurov, he asked me, to our unfortunate misuse of the natives of this continent?

  The question may have been provoked by a native shanty town we could now see off to the right of the road, below a hill planted with bananas. It couldn’t be denied they lived wretchedly, these people, these former wanderers of the Australian earth. In fragments of European clothing they occupied habitations of bark and cardboard and corrugated iron in so-called ‘missions’ like this one. From the steeple of the mission church the cross rose above them and cast its shadow like a knife – or so it was easy to surmise.

  Their camp is named after a J C. Slaughter, said Hope. A man who did his best.

  His best wasn’t of the highest order, Buchan shouted.

  In fact we were now travelling at perhaps no more than five miles an hour on the bad road and could barely speak to each other without shouting.

  So, Mrs Mockridge, yelled the unstoppably conversational Buchan, again I must ask you, as a native of this colony, how do you feel about these Slaughter people and their piccaninnies?

  She drove on for at least ten seconds before answering at high pitch. They confuse me. My grandfather had them work for him and they lived in the black stockmen’s camp and were wonderful horsemen. And yet there’s something in them that has nothing to do with the world of capital and labour. They come from before the world we know and are too hard to think about. It’s much easier to think about capital and labour.

  We entered on a smooth patch.

  Sadly, said Amelia now, they will die out. It is our duty to smooth the dying pillow. They ar
e not made for our world.

  Buchan looked across at the shanty encampment again.

  He had the wit to say, I don’t think it looks like a very smooth dying pillow, Mrs Pethick.

  You are no doubt right, Mr Buchan, said Amelia.

  Now we were among dairy farms and herds of cattle, and then we entered the hills with their tall shafts of eucalyptus trees. Hope parked her great vehicle in a clearing, pointed up the hill and said that we must walk on a track from there.

  When we had all got out of the car and Buchan had shouldered his hamper and I Hope’s, we began our little climb. I heard Amelia cry, Everyone go ahead. I shall be slowest.

  It was not arduous hiking and Buchan stopped and pointed out the occasional clan of kangaroos or wallabies – advancing and retreating with that easy unfrightened lope – ahead of us or to our flanks. I was always excited to see them, bounding like this, fluid among the verticals of trees. We climbed steps of sandstone and natural shale, but then we began to descend again a little to a clear space and a big sunny rock platform. A creek came down from the further heights and made a small cascade where it went over the lip of the rock. Putting down the hamper, I walked to the edge of the falls and saw the impressive drop, the grey and gold of wet sandstone, and the silver thread of descending water. When I returned, Buchan declared, I don’t dare do what you have just tried, Tom. Hikes and cliffs are my terror.

  It was hard to dislike a man who could be so frank about his fears. From the basket I had been carrying, Hope took and spread a blanket and then, hard by it, a tablecloth onto which she and Buchan and I unloaded food. Hope had brought sliced beef and delicious chicken legs and a bowl of lettuce, huge bananas and mangoes and a rich fruitcake. It was wonderfully warm there, that August, on the rock platform. We were all exhilarated, and I was close to forgiving Buchan for being Buchan. We seemed to be out of the world there – it might have been another planet, and the trees rose behind us with an upright indifference to the designs of humankind, tsars and kaisers though they might be.

  We started a fire, an easy business in Australia where the eucalypts shed their bark and branches all the time, and whose wood burned with a very powerful fragrance that was said to flavour the tea in the billycan. When Hope had distributed plates, we ate our meal, the chicken, beef and ham garnished with mustard and chutney. Suvarov had been quiet today, intent upon the superior food, something for which I could not blame him. Podnaksikov and his Lucia sat to one side and occasionally he would whisper reassurances towards her along the lines of: My friends are not all as strange as they seem. Mrs Mockridge and Mrs Pethick are women like you and they wish you well.

  In the meantime, Buchan described for Amelia his dream of a labour college in Melbourne.

  Amelia nodded, cocked her head with a certain scepticism, and then asked politely how he liked Melbourne.

  Oh, he said, I’m a true Melbourne patriot – it is a grander city than either Edinburgh or Glasgow, and as for Aberdeen ... In my book, the Botanic Gardens of Melbourne are a wonder of the world. The Exhibition buildings are splendid. I would say it was one of the greatest cities of the empire.

  Of the empire? I wondered.

  On the other hand, Buchan went on, given your general strike and the mass arrests over the right of assembly, it’s amazing how Brisbane attracts attention for its size. It is a cockpit. I wanted to come up here and look around and meet you all. And to hold the peace picnic.

  As for the labour college, he told us, returning to his theme, the Victorian Railways Union was ready to support him in arranging classes in economics, philosophy and industrial strategy. It might take a year or two to set up, but it was bound to happen. From there, the college could spread to Sydney where the Labour Council had been similarly interested.

  The question was, if he pretended to be so unread in the major socialist texts, why did he dream of a college? I was surprised to see that Hope listened to his vapouring as a provincial lawyer in Russia might hear the doings of Moscow or St Petersburg. I thought, I stand the risk of losing her to that southern city. I had to admit, though, she could be freed of her Brisbane history in a place like Melbourne.

  And how much longer are you here for this time, Mr Buchan? asked Hope.

  Another two weeks, I’d say. O’Sullivan wants me back to report.

  You must let me take you down the coast next week, said Hope. And to Mount Coot-tha.

  A stupid jealousy seethed away in me then. For I had never been taken to Mount Coot-tha in Hope’s automobile.

  Here, said Hope, sighing, a forkful of beef in her hands, the world of drums and rifles seems a long way off, doesn’t it?

  Thank God it does, sighed Amelia, for a second over-burdened by all the posturings of Europe.

  We all drank big mugs of raw black tea, in which the taste of eucalypt and fire remained. It was not like Russian tea. Laced with white sugar, it was a taste I had had to get used to and was so hot it absorbed a taste of the metal of the billy and pannikin. I found it very agreeable. When we had finished drinking tea and eating fruitcake, Hope, Amelia and the nearly silent Lucia suggested they retreat over the hill carrying their parasols and leave the men to talk – an old-fashioned proposition if calls of nature weren’t taken into account. I could see, as they went, Amelia talking to Lucia very kindly and without condescension, including her, trying to overcome her natural reticence.

  Buchan put on his adventurer’s hat and stood like an African explorer, before going a little way uphill himself and urinating behind a fern. Coming back he suggested that we gentlemen go beating along the brush-lined creek that came down the hill to feed the waterfall.

  God knows we might start some animals, he said. Out of pure passivity, Podnaksikov, Suvarov and I groaned but agreed, and packed up the hampers and set off, walking beside bracken and ferns, climbing the occasional boulder, parting the fronds of fern trees to see the deep plum-coloured pure water of the stream running below.

  What are the chances, said Buchan, that a Scotsman and three Russians go beating about the bush like this? In Queensland, I mean. Who would have laid the odds to that?

  Suvarov wore no hat and his reddish hair blazed beneath the sun. He said, But we are not ashamed to let a Scotsman into our Russian Queensland.

  Podnaksikov and I exchanged amused glances. Suvarov hooted.

  Through bracken and ferns we came to a further platform of sandstone from which the city could be seen. Above us, in the fork of a eucalypt, was a ball of dreaming fur, a koala, which Buchan at first pointed out to us as a wasp’s nest until he excitedly revised his opinion. After we passed on, Buchan turned to examine the small so-called bear again and then pointed up the hill and said, Look up there!

  What is that person doing? he asked. He kept his own eyes on the scrub around the creek, like someone pretending not to have spotted anything. But the rest of us stole a look up the hill.

  My God, it’s the lunatic, I said.

  My God, it is, Suvarov agreed.

  It was Menschkin.

  Suvarov shook his head and laughed. I heard that the Russians in Rockhampton had run him off his land, he said. And here is the bastard back again!

  We looked at the figure, darkly suited, up the hill, and knew that he was about to run.

  He’s a lunatic, I explained to Buchan and Podnaksikov. A Russian agent of the police here. But surely the police haven’t dispatched him to watch a picnic in the bush!

  Menschkin now vanished behind a tall tree on the ridge and stayed there.

  I’m going to catch him, said Podnaksikov suddenly.

  Yes, said Suvarov, and the big youth from the Lena and Suvarov both set off at a jog, Buchan trailing in his less pliable spats.

  No, I called. Let’s see if we can attract him closer.

  They stopped in mid-stride.

  I argued that if we pretended we had somehow lost sight of him and simply sat on the rock platform, he would creep closer and then perhaps could be caught.

  So
we all sat on our haunches and even got chatting about Boggo Road. I noticed how sunburned Podnaksikov’s Siberian complexion was. It was not one designed for this place.

  Buchan took a chance to move closer to me and began murmuring. I must take this moment to say to you two things, Mr Samsurov. One is that I apologise, for I was not aware that you had a close ... a close friendship with Mrs Mockridge.

  I was confused by this. A close friendship, I agreed.

  I will not be such a hypocrite, he then said, as not to desire your friend. Could you tolerate that much, Mr Samsurov?

  That is a matter for you, I said, my skin prickling with a new rage.

  We could see Menschkin moving downhill among the ferns now. The man who wished to sell details of our conversation to the police or else to the consul-general, McDonald, an Englishman who had lived in Russia for a time.

  Tell me when we go after him, muttered Suvarov, pretending not to see Menschkin.

  Yes, tell us when to fly, murmured Podnaksikov.

  We could clearly hear Menschkin wading waist-deep in the creekside ferns.

  Go! I yelled, and we were all up and after Menschkin.

  What? yelled Menschkin when he saw us coming. Comrade Samsurov!

  And he pulled from his coat pocket a revolver, which gave us immediate pause. We slowed down twenty yards from him.

  You would hunt your fellow countryman like a fox? asked Menschkin.

  It was you stalking us, I told him.

  I am sorry I was ever born of the race among which my mother dropped me, said Menschkin.

  Too late to amend that, I said. I felt no fear of the gun in his hands, though in any other hands it would have been different.

  My fellow countrymen in Rockhampton terrorised me, cried Menschkin, burned my cowshed, threw huge rocks on my roof, broke my windows. What am I to do? Didn’t I suffer with them? Am I not their comrade?

  No, I told him, not while the police pay you. Not while you report to McDonald.

  If you had not chased me, I would have simply stood here, looking at your innocence, enjoying it. I would have gone downhill, walked all that way, and somehow got to town and said, Today, some of the socialists had a picnic. Is that a harmful thing? And yet you hunt me.