Seven Poor Men of Sydney Read online

  But today, it seems, we are still playing catch-up with Stead. We’re yet to make a place in our hearts for this book in which we find not only a new-minted modernism, but one that has gone feral and struck root; a book that analyses an unevenly modernising city, while willfully remaking it with the volatile materiel of words. Stead’s novel is unnaturally vigorous, disturbing, restless; and it has been one of the great discoveries of my reading life.

  Delia Falconer is the author of two novels, The Service of Clouds and The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, and the memoir, Sydney. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Practices at the University of Technology Sydney.

  Contents

  1 Fisherman’s Bay. First days of the first poor man. An October night’s dream. A stirring sermon has no effect on an ill-fated hero

  2 Four passions of a poor man with a weak heart, ending with an explanation of what love is

  3 A hot morning in Fisherman’s Bay. We find four of our heroes at work in a devil’s kitchen where the word is made bread

  4 The bucolic pill. An unfortunate polygamist. Personal appearance of Mr Silkbreeched Montagu. A family discussion. The seventh poor man. Reflections of Joseph in shop-windows

  5 A southerly buster. Baruch at home. The tongue’s ephemeridae. Baruch in love. A patriotic demonstration. Catherine in love. A female argument. Withers kicked out. Defence of murder. Baruch is very sentimental

  6 Backchat. Acerbity of Winter, effrontery of Fulke; the recognition of Marx postponed. Catherine wanders

  7 Under the eschscholtzias. Montagu a skunk, Withers not a social type. Castaways in a busy harbour. Brother and sister. Examples of the long thoughts of youth; a mediaeval tyrant. The sons of Clovis. Catherine wanders again

  8 Michael recalls his adventures, lets out a secret or two, goes to church, is advised to marry, visits his relatives, sees the early-morning fishing in Fisherman’s Bay, and brings the chapter solemnly to an end

  9 In memoriam: a mass, a dream, a strange narrative. A new love

  10 A chapter of accidents: two poor men in gaol, Montagu skips, three poor men without a job. Jo’s mother sums up

  11 The seventh poor man leaves our shores. A kermesse, but nothing to startle the modest. A madman contributes a tale of beauty and horror. Kol Blount makes a complaint. End of a love affair. And Baruch’s last night in the antipodes. End and beginning

  Endpiece

  The Seven Poor Men

  JOSEPH BAGUENAULT

  a printer

  TOM WITHERS

  a printer

  BARUCH MENDELSSOHN

  a printer

  GREGORY CHAMBERLAIN

  owner of a press

  MICHAEL BAGUENAULT

  a ne’er-do-well

  TOM WINTER

  a librarian

  KOL BLOUNT

  a paralysed youth

  1

  Fisherman’s Bay. First days of the first poor man.

  An October night’s dream.

  A stirring sermon has no effect on an ill-fated hero.

  The hideous low scarred yellow horny and barren headland lies curled like a scorpion in a blinding sea and sky. At night, house-lamps and ships’ lanterns burn with a rousing shine, and the headlights of cars swing over Fisherman’s Bay. In the day, the traffic of the village crawls along the skyline, past the lighthouse and signal station, and drops by cleft and volcanic gully to the old village that has a bare footing on the edge of the bay. It was, and remains, a military and maritime settlement. When the gunners are in camp, searchlights sweep over the bay all night, lighting bedrooms and the china on dressers, discolouring the foliage and making seagulls fly; in the daytime, when the red signal is flown over the barracks, the plates and windows rattle with the report of guns at target practice. From the signal station messages come down of the movements of ships and storms. Flags flutter and red globes swing on its great mast, which is higher than the Catholic Church, higher than the Norfolk Island pines, higher than the lighthouse and than anything else which is between the rocky cornice and the sandy seafloor. In dark nights, from the base of that enormous spectral pole which points up any distance into the starry world, one looks down on the city and northern harbour settlements, on the pilot-lights in the eastern and western channels, and on the unseen dark sea, where the lighthouse ray is lost beyond the horizon and where ships appear through the waves, far out, lighted like a Christmas Tree, small, and disappearing momentarily; and where, after half an hour of increasing radiance, the yellow rim of the great subtropical moon comes up like a lantern from underneath.

  Early in the morning, through the open window, the people hear the clatter of anchors falling into the bay, and the little boys run out to name the liners waiting there for the port doctor, liners from Singapore, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Wellington, Hawaii, San Francisco, Naples, Brindisi, Dunkirk and London, in the face of all these old stone houses, decayed weatherboard cottages, ruinous fences, boathouses and fishermen’s shanties. Presently a toot, the port doctor puts out in the Hygeia; a whistle, the Customs launch goes alongside; a hoot from the Point, and that is the pilot-ship returning to its anchorage. A bell jangles on the wharf where the relief pilot waits for his dinghy, and the ferry whistles to clear the dinghies, rowing-boats and children’s canoes from its path. The fishermen murmur round the beach-path, fishing-nets dry in the sun, a bugle blows in the camp, the inspected ships draw up their anchors and go off up the harbour, superb with sloping masts, or else, in disgrace, flying the yellow flag, to the rightabout, with nose in air, to Quarantine, under North Head and its bleak graveyard. Butchers’ and bakers’ carts rattle, an original milkman yodels, little girls gabble on the way to school, the wind with hands in pockets whistles a tune, and the day goes gaily and blatantly forward.

  There is no place in the estuary, though, so suited for an old tale as this fish-smelling bay, first in the port. Life is poor and unpretentious, life can be quiet. The sun rises just over the cliff, and sailing vessels roll in and out as they have done for a hundred years, and a quarter of a mile away unfurl their full sails to catch the Pacific winds.

  There was a family there named Baguenault, which had settled in the bay directly after its arrival from Ireland thirty years before, and had its roots growing down into the soil and rocky substratum so that nothing seemed to be able to uproot it anymore, so quiet, so circumspect in the narrow life of the humble, it lived; but disaster fell on it, and its inner life, unexpressed, incoherent, unplanned, like most lives, then became visible as a close and tangled web to the neighbours and to itself, to whom it had for so long remained unknown. Who can tell what minor passions running in the undergrowth of poor lives will burst out when a storm breaks on the unknown watershed? There is water in barren hills and when rain comes they spurt like fountains, where the water lies on impermeable rocks.

  Michael Baguenault paddled through his childhood round the beaches, helped the fishermen haul their nets, often rolled out of his warm bunk at four o’clock in spring and autumn mornings to waken the wooden-legged fisherman, Pegleg Jack, who lived near them in a cabin by himself, to light his fire and cook his bacon. In return the Pegleg called him “my little mate”, took him across to George’s Head with the fishermen and gave him black tea for breakfast. He gave him chunks of cedar and taught him to carve model racing-yachts and on his eighth birthday presented him with a fisherman’s knife and sheath. Michael went always on black, rough feet, whose horny skin was split into deep cracks, bleeding in the crevices, from which the winter’s dirt could never be washed. He ran with other little boys in frayed trousers to the beach to collect driftwood and coke for the kitchen, and would return late for breakfast with blue hands; he had chilblains and a running nose all the winter. There were straggle-haired little girls with dirty pinafores and pink skirts. They were all cold; they grasped their sponge-boxes and playtime biscuits, called out the names of teachers in brittle voices and squabbled over hopscotch tors.

  The beach provided not only fuel, but
also dead fish, swollen fruit, loaves, pumpkins, shoes and socks, broken straw-boaters—all varieties of food and clothing cast up from ships and sewers. Once, when a five-thousand tonner was wrecked near the Gap, a hundred tons of butter floated mildly in to the beach. Pegleg salvaged it and sold it. Cases of condensed milk collided with their frail canoes, manufactured in backyards, of canvas and corrugated iron. They went outside the Heads and brought in a butcher’s block, and came back, all their coracles white with flour. They could all swim and were absolutely fearless, despite the frequency of squalls and sharks, paddling all over the harbour in unseaworthy tubs. There were crabs in the rock-pools, little oysters spread all round the bay, and the waters were rich in fish. “If this were a desert island . . .” thought all those verminous little heads joyfully, seeing the bounty of the sea. There was even a great house there, in the last stages of decay, weathered by wind and sea, and standing in a neglected garden with old trees, in which they all could have lived at ease, a pirate brood. The front part of the house, of stone and heavy timber, had been added to the large stone military stables at the back, which had served in the early days. The fences were down, and the house was inhabited fraternally by human, barnyard, and vermin tribes. The goats, ducks, geese, dogs and horses left wandering about the streets of the neighbourhood oftener wound up in the backyard than in the pound, and the children after school found the forbidden front garden, with its tall trees and old bushes, the best spot for playing bushrangers.

  Annie Pennergast lived with her family in part of the house. The little girl was thin, with black eyes and hair. She scratched her head and body all the time, and always smelled of ingrained dirt. In the corners of the house bats flew, swallows dropped mud and dung from every beam, and from all the cracks of the great whitewashed stones at the back ran cockroaches, beetles and rats. Cockchafer beetles, cicadas and mosquitoes shouted loudly in summer evenings in the tall trees; large spiders hung in the outhouses, and fearsome-looking, but innocent, crickets and slaters dwelt under the bits of wood and sheets of corrugated iron fallen off the roof into the grass. The house attracted Michael and the other children with the same charm as a stagnant gutter.

  The little girl, Annie, took him over the house one Saturday afternoon. The windows were starred by stones which now lay on the naked flooring inside. Annie preceded Michael up camel’s-back staircases and adventitious flights of steps connecting the old house with the later front apartments, through heavy doorways pierced in the stone walls. She showed him windows that looked over the barracks, hill and bay, windows without glass or shutters, some surprisingly placed in small cupboards, others letting the dust, sunlight, seeds of weeds, and the swallows into whitewashed landings. Upstairs they went through rooms with sloping roofs, skylights, whitewashed beams hung with old webs, and dusty floors on which their bare feet made tracks. They looked out through open doorways straight down three stories on to the backyard full of plantains and thistles. She led him into the stables, smelling of dung and damp, and held on to his hand with a soft persistence. A stair began in the corner of the stables, passed old plastered walls and withering landings, and ended at last in a garret. In the garret she said, “Do you want to kiss me?” with indifferent naivety. He looked out at the light spring sky which a puff of smoke and a swallow crossed, and at the open door leading on to a silent landing and sunny attic. He kissed her carefully on her cheek, and they went on with their metallic clatter about the bay, school and personalities.

  Rats came up from the waterfront and lived all over the house, with mice and all kinds of small things, bugs, snails, slugs. On a summer night the cockroaches scurried in and out of holes where the cracked asphalt footpath led into the stables’ foundations. Michael pored over them full of languor and content for half an hour and more, kicking his heels and watching the officers going home to the barracks and the couples walking with their heads together; when they went past he sometimes hooted at them. Up the hill went the soldiers clinking their spurs. He stood at the corner one fine summer evening, the year he was ten, watched the eight o’clock ferry trail its golden lights out of the wharf, and studied the little creatures running about in their long-tailed suits. The dusk gathered and the street lamps yellowly came on. The cockroaches streaked out of their holes with a slow rustling, flittered round the lamp and dashed in through open windows at kerosene lamps burning in the old cottages; mosquitoes sang. Annie came out of the only side-door on the street and trod on a cockroach or two as a conversational opening. Michael ducked as a bat swerved through the air. Annie calmly disentangled something struggling in her hair; it was fearfully hot and Michael perspired.

  “Bats,” said Annie, “are worse than cockroaches. If they get in your hair you can’t get out the tangles. That was only a beetle.”

  “Bats don’t get in your hair, they get in your garret,” Michael jeered.

  “Orright, wait till you see; but you don’t know, your hair’s short, like a monkey.” She turned her back and began to jump up and down in the gutter, chanting a nursery rhyme: “Bat, bat, fly into my hair, big, black bat.”

  “There are bats that suck your blood,” volunteered Michael to the dancing back.

  “There ain’t.”

  “There are: I saw in a book; they have beaks.”

  “Beaks! You’re dopey.”

  Michael began toying with a gold tie-pin his mother had given him from his father’s dressing-table, carelessly letting it play in the lamplight.

  “They say I’m your girl!” said Annie, standing sideways and rolling her hair on her finger.

  “Who says?”

  “It’s written on the fence”; she pointed to the opposite fence. They both went over and peered at the feebly-illuminated legend. He hung about her house a few evenings that summer, swung on the gate after school pretending to take an interest in local affairs, would loaf all the afternoon on the verandah pretending to read, or carve a boat, and his heart would beat hard if he saw her go past in the street without speaking to him. If she cooeed to him, or shouted “Ullo, Michael,” he would whisk inside, take his hat and scoot off up into the barracks, without a care in the world, and pleased to get away from her without further conversation. His mother scolded him for hanging round with that Pennergast girl. He was puzzled to know how his mother knew. He assumed that his sister Catherine, called Kate, had told on him. “Kate has a boy,” he said. Kate slapped his face and punched him on the temple, which hurt very much; in return he hit her on her budding breast. She tripped him up and pummelled him all over the face, her own face purple with fury. Kate was twelve, and outrageously bad-tempered. His two elder sisters were mild and kind.

  The hot sun addled his brains. He said one day to a friend, Tommy, as they returned from a long red afternoon in the weatherboard schoolroom, full of the drone of voices and occasional blue hornets, and smelling of wattle pollen and the salt sea:

  “I used to think I would fly home when I was a little kid.” The little village shone below them, through the pines, in the afternoon sun.

  “Me, too; I dream I am flying,” said Tommy.

  “Perhaps you could, with wings like a kite; but I would like to fly just like that.” He raised his arms.

  “Perhaps if you tried,” said Tommy.

  “Perhaps by will-power,” concluded Michael.

  And when he sat at home later and looked up the green and yellow hill where the school sat, and the road home with its houses and bits of bush, he wished that he could see himself on the road home, where he had been a few minutes before. He pretended that images of himself were still marching along every stage of that much-travelled road, and would have liked to see them from this distance, familiar mannikins.

  Reason was awakening in him and in Tommy, like a lazy apprentice who will do freakish things with his tools but doesn’t want to use them just yet. He will do a little work and then try his skinny legs, play truant, graduate as journeyman, traipse round the world, get drunk and disorderly, knock up t
he mayor and dignities, and cry, Why not? Life is very dull for a journeyman so freakish and full of fun. When he has spent all he has, he will beg; and, then, after a few years, he will know himself for what he is, a sober workman in a dull world, and will settle down.

  But happily for Tommy and Michael, at this day, he was just stretching himself under a bush; and looking across the mountains, he thought, “Why, they are so near that I can cross them with a hop, skip and a jump.” And mounting like a stowaway in the satchel of the childish giant Fancy, he found himself in the next town and boasted that he had flown there by his own power, across the mountains in the twinkling of an eye, and almost believed it himself.

  Michael’s father had a bull-roarer, a vane on a cord, which when whirled in the air produces a loud whirring and shrieking noise. It is used by the Australian blacks in their initiation ceremonies. When his father and mother were out he took out the bull-roarer into the backyard and whirled it round and round his head, while its shrieking got louder and louder, and let it die down, like a dying wind, and rise again, like a wind howling in a crevice. Then he put it down, and leaning against the fence laughed with tears in his eyes, or rushed out into the street to find some boys, his lips bursting with shouts, with witticisms; or his heart would beat so hard that he could hardly breathe; this feeling was the greatest pleasure he knew. He rolled a dozen times down the grass slope that ran down to the beach in front of the house to get the same sensation, of brains turning and wits glittering. But he had to be alone to do it, because his parents found it silly and dangerous. They noticed, too, that if he had to pick up something for his mother under the dresser or sweep under the table, he always came up looking slightly dazed.