Seven Poor Men of Sydney Read online

  “I will never be captain of my soul,” said Michael, interested in the subject. “I began, and will end, a beachcomber—spiritually, I mean,” he added at the schoolmaster’s start; “guide as you will, Nature is stronger.”

  “You should wish to oblige—Nature, if you don’t believe in God.”

  “I am surprised you don’t think God superior to your will,” answered Michael. “I assure you if I believed in God, I would do nothing at all, but sink into his bosom. Be reasonable; any action at all would be away from God. The wells of nature, love, ambition, understanding, sleep, gush in us as oil and water in the world and blood in the heart. I follow them lamely; it is I who do their bidding, in following my bent. Listen, is the world full of spirits, as the mind? I see no will or obedience in anything, only the abrupt, spontaneous will and generation; to a certain point water is water, then it is steam or ice, there is no slow change, as I used to think, it is abrupt, and it is mystery. How blunt our senses are, how many thick veils hang between us and the world. How will we ever refine our eyes to see atoms and our ears to hear the messages of ants? There is plenty that we miss; I feel my brain turning to think what we miss. When I see order I am amazed, it seems unnatural, I feel uneasy, as if I were looking at a thing artificially perfect like a china doll’s complexion. You know how astonished you are when you turn a kaleidoscope and see a perfect design fall together by chance. As if harlequins, a drunken mass of masks and ankles, fell tumbling together into a colour wheel. I wish to watch the ordinary movement of life and I see only a succession of dead, shed moments without interrelation: like a man walking through a hall of mirrors and seeing a thousand reflections of himself on every side, each one a shell of himself, and insubstantial. Time, tide, order, I cannot understand; I would go mad; I would rather believe in fairies.”

  “It is this new country,” sighed the schoolmaster. “You have no notion of history; you began yesterday and you all think you are the first men. Doctrine, constitution, order, duty, religion, you have to find them out by long and droughty explorations in the spirit.”

  “You pursue me; my mind is not strong. Leave me alone!” cried Michael furiously.

  The headmaster turned back helplessly.

  His mother, who had stayed away from church for years to please her husband, was now about forty-five and began to have vagaries. She read books of religious edification and spent all her household money on charitable fêtes and collections. A nosing priest found Mrs Baguenault in this state of mind and came to visit her every morning, to have tea, talk scandal and improve her chances of salvation: she had already participated in two Catholic fêtes, and caused a lot of talk in the district. Michael came home from school one day before lunch, because he was sick, and found the priest there. He looked at him: shallow blue eyes bright under thick banded lids, a long snout, small at the bridge and lobed at the point, a round helpless chin and face, but a lemony skin and sprouting reddish beard on a jaw stupidly prognathous like a foetus, and the low-placed mouth shut tight and as if strapped in by the pale lips. He was of medium height with medium shoulders, and a belly protruding already: taken with his sleepy, shut-in, absorbed face, this gave him a pregnant look. A woman, said Michael. He stood at the door studying the couple, who were sitting in the bay-window. His mother bent over some knitting she was doing for a fête; the priest was talking easily and uninterruptedly. One divined that he had been talking like that for an hour and would go on until lunch-time; he had an imperative note and ran on like a sewing-machine. His mother smiled, blushed, and laughed clearly like a young girl.

  “And Michael,” said the priest; “so you think he is cut out to be a teacher?”

  “I would like it so much,” cried the mother. “It is a learned profession, it is well paid and safe. He is a quiet sort of boy and would do better in a quiet profession. I would not like him to go into the city where the young men run round to races, poolrooms and all sorts of horrors.”

  “And is he more spiritually minded?” said the priest. “If he would accept it, perhaps I could talk with him.”

  Michael came into the room.

  “Hullo, mother; I had a belly-ache and came home. It must have been your rissoles.”

  “Michael! Father Bingham, this is Michael; you know him by sight. Father Bingham called in to ask me to do something for the fête,” she said hurriedly to Michael. Michael nodded, sat down on the window-seat, and said:

  “No teaching for me. Imagine! Hang yourself on a pothook, run around brandishing a ruler over a lot of little fellers dirty as cockroaches and smelling of urine: no! You stand up in front. ‘Pi is a surd,’ and the whole class begins to laugh and shout, ‘Pi is absurd.’ ‘The first principle of economics is supply and demand,’ you say, but Brown is whispering, ‘Hey, Sniffles, what do you want for your dictionary of slang?’ The bright ones only look for a chance to catch you napping, to mystify you. What would I do if I found myself face to face with a kid who was really smart? Lie down and let him talk? But I’m paid for talking to him. Besides, no pedagogy for me, it’s too spiritual: the multiplication table is close to metaphysics: I’m going to be a counter-jumper.”

  “Teaching is next to the work of God, almost as spiritual as religion,” said the priest.

  “Spiritual? Look at the Mass, no spiritual elements there: wine, blood, bread, flesh, statue, God the son. Funny thing all religions turn round eating. In that, I must say, the monks used to be very religious; every supper was the last till the next. How do you prove it’s an extra holy day? By eating grass instead of flesh. How do you celebrate the rising of Jesus? By eating stuffed duck! Where did Peter get his money? Out of a fish. Where did the Virgin get her child? From a dove. It was called the spirit, but it was a dove. God is a spirit and has no passions, but if you say, God damn, he gets angry enough to roast your soul in real, red fire. He has no nose, but he likes incense; and no ears, but he likes prayers and psalm-singing. He is praised because he created physics and geography, because he made his prophets write down rules about what women should do during their periods, after child-bearing, and that there should be no love between sheep and goats, or something like that; I won’t mention it in full on account of mother here, but you’re a technician. Father, you know what I mean. And God likes virginity, but what meaning can virginity have to a spirit? And he prefers to be worshipped in church: but what can the Lord of the angels want with coloured glass and crochet lace? Where can you find me a single abstract idea in the whole of practised religion? or a single logical one that a modern working man wouldn’t demolish in two words, if he bothered about it? You can fuddle my poor Mumma,” finished Michael, getting up and sidling behind the priest’s chair, “but I assure you she’s your last conquest.”

  The priest had a mean look, and on his lardy forehead were faint beads of sweat; his mouth was tighter than usual. Mrs Baguenault held her heart as if she thought she would faint.

  “Michael, how could you!”

  Michael laughed and went out of the room. His mother drew a few loud breaths and ran from the room; they heard her vomiting on the verandah. The priest came into the passage, said nothing for a minute, and then said with a serpentine motion of his neck, very quietly:

  “Don’t think you’ve shocked me: you have only not considered one thing, which all your moderns neglect—Mystery. There is an element in life and in deity which surpasses all your reasoning, however logical it is, that is the Mysteries, the Symbols, the Miracles, the Ineffableness of Deity. What you see is only the surface; there is something underneath which you do not see. Do your men of science understand how thought acts on the muscles, how men can receive the notion of God if he does not exist, and how life starts? And as for your men of science, Faraday—”

  “—prayed for rain. I know, thanks! I used to find those problems a poser when I was a kid: now I know you don’t approach them in that light.”

  “It’s a matter of approach: you must have the grace of God, and that is a pure gift t
o be obtained by self-sacrifice, prayer, and because of the merits of Jesus Christ . . .”

  Michael laughed outright.

  “Mr Bingham, don’t you see that it’s all over with me? I’ll never believe in that hocus-pocus again. You’re a fisher of men, aren’t you? You ought to recognise an empty catch and take the day off to mend your nets when you see you’re wasting your time. You know you despise the women you convert, and that if your family had had the dough to put you into business, or give you a profession, you wouldn’t be trailing around in skirts.”

  The priest turned his back. Michael heard his mother and the priest communing for a while, the priest brief, his mother apologising. He went back on tiptoe to hear what his mother was saying, ready to interrupt again rather than have her humiliate herself for him. In a low voice she was saying:

  “Catherine ran away from home when she was fifteen, and now Michael is a rebel: my two eldest girls are such dear good girls. Do you think it is possible for such young people to be—sinful?”

  “It’s easy and very common, unfortunately,” said the priest nastily. “As a mother, you are neglecting your duty.”

  “I feel I am being punished myself,” said the woman.

  “No doubt,” said the priest.

  “It is about Michael,” said the woman. “He was born in, he was born out of, his father was not . . .”

  The priest’s traitless face showed a shade of interest, malice, revenge and victory.

  “Not here,” he said, “but if you wish to come to me this afternoon, at the church, in the chapel of St Joseph . . .”

  “Ah, the bastard,” said Michael to himself, “he won’t get her: I’ll stop her.”

  “Ah-ha, a bastard,” said the priest to himself; “I’ll get her, nothing will stop her.”

  He got up with a satisfied air. She fumbled around in her dress, the woman, her neat hair slightly disordered, her eyes with their swollen tear-sacs, suffused. She looked older than she had a few minutes before. The priest full of spite and pride walked slowly down the garden path along the roses. “So that’s the way the land lies,” he said to himself. “Look at those roses, those French beans: very nice. So that’s how the husband got his touch of satire: well, foh, foh, it’s always the same. These meek dames and meek husbands, the devil gets into one or the other with great ease.” He looked at the roses with a vicious smile, as if he accused them for the soft effusion of their unreligious saps.

  “Not bad,” said he.

  Michael was joyful.

  “Then the old orchid-king is not my papa,” said he to himself. “What a blessing! And Cath, too, the other sinner. But no, she may be my half-sister.”

  He speculated about his father, but could not imagine who he might be. He looked at his mother with respect.

  “Who would have thought that the old girl had it in her?”

  Michael refused to return to the high school, but would give no reason, except to say that the principal was a dummy and he couldn’t stand the staff. He showed an unexpected resistance to his father’s command, carried himself with a lordly air as if the key of the family strongbox were in his possession, and loafed about the house.

  It was a great spring for Michael: his courage was up. The sky was more purple in the evening than he ever remembered it before. He awakened early in the morning with the birds and insects shouting, or slept until midday and got through the day frowsily without his parents reproaching him. This false calm charmed and frightened him. The day when he must get a job came closer and closer, like the strip of dark blue wind-stirred water to the rowing-boat rowing in the calm. He got fatter, with a bit of colour in his cheeks, sang in his bath, although his voice was still weak, took up water-colour painting, fretsaw work, and went swimming in the river. Catherine came home for two months in the summer, tired out with her jobs. She had been working temporarily at fruit-packing on an orchard, at knitting by machine in a stocking-factory, and at dishwashing in a private kitchen, during the year. At home, she relaxed, played the piano, went out painting with Michael; in the bush put wreaths of clematis on her long black hair to pose for Michael, tried to get through the day without arguing with her mother, and ignored her father entirely. Michael informed her with pride that he did not know his real father. Catherine said, “Poor Mother, I don’t blame her, but I never knew she had the guts; I’ve misjudged her.” She began making discreet enquiries and presently told Michael that his father must have been the lonely bachelor, the astronomer and mathematician who had left Mr Baguenault a legacy.

  “Go on,” said Michael. “The family owes all to me? I always felt I had a secret virtue. And your father?”

  “I am legit.,” said Catherine.

  After the vacation Michael went to a business college, but left in six months asserting that the course was a fraud and that he had already learned all their courses through. He went to a large soap-making firm in Balmain, as filing-clerk, and gradually learned the idiotic routine of the office and the obscure jargon used to dignify business letters in their baldness. The soap-making firm had a director of welfare and culture. The directors liked to see their employees reading the classics of economics written before 1840 and the classics of literature written up to 1902. Michael joined the debating and dramatic clubs, read Hamlet for the debate about Hamlet’s sanity, and the Pickwick Papers for the parody session of the club. He debated about equal pay for equal work, the effects of drunkenness, the relative influence of instinct and environment, and free trade and protection. But he was unsuccessful as a debater. He joined a physical culture class, and started to learn French and Esperanto, but dropped both. He took an interest in the white-slave and drug traffics, and in medicine, in venereal diseases. He bought handbooks on the care of dogs, home-plumbing, french polishing, wireless telegraphy, and the terms used in architecture. He collected old iron which he intended to sell to the junk man in order to pay for a bicycle, and stamps, with the hope of finding a Mauritius blue. After eighteen or twenty months he got a job in an advertising firm downtown and found he had a knack for it; his mysticism of the past aided him.

  At eighteen Michael met Tom Withers, then twenty-four, at a smoke-concert of press lithographers, cartoonists, commercial artists and others. Withers was tall, round-shouldered, starved, with a large mouth and soft deep-set eyes behind pince-nez. He wore a good but unpressed suit, and was unshaved. He wore his hat almost all the time, concealing an early baldness. He smoked cheap cigarettes, wore a gold signet ring with a coronet in the seal, and took long, debile steps in old shoes down-at-heel. Except when he was speaking excitedly, or muttering in a friend’s ear over a drink, he sat back with the deathmask face of the overwrought and overworked. A soft moustache drooped round his red lips, his small teeth gleamed like pebbles in his red gums. Tom Withers dropped down by Michael this night, anxious to acquaint himself with the newcomer. He sat by him for hours, slightly fuddled, telling interminable and apparently inter-related histories from the Iliad, from Pietro Aretino, from Terence, Horace and Livy, recommended to Michael special editions in English and Latin, assured him he had a genius for the classics, recited a whole bibliography of obscene books of the most brilliant kind, told Michael all true art lay there, quoted recipes from the unexpurgated Arabian Nights and similes from the Kama-Sutras, revealed the secrets of exotic religions, secret sects, the obsessions of the Flagellantes, the monks of the Thebaïd, the habits of S. Simeon Stylites, and the private history of the Magdalen. Mixed with his erudition were common-room parodies of psalms, epigrams and limericks, all horribly obscene, and adventures, which he said were his own, of thunderstorms of quartz-pebbles containing gold, rivers blown skyhigh leaving the fish baked in baked mud-beds, human monsters hideous but brilliant in wits, and idiotic beauties seduced on roadsides, married women of the highest social class swimming with him by moonlight in a sand-bottomed river, and pearls of girls sleeping with him in the underbrush or in a cave lighted by phosphorescence. There was a night, he said, when he
, Tom Withers, alone was abroad, the Aurora Australis shone and comets streaked the sky. He found an old tramp woman, took her to a Greek dive for food, found her to be an ancient actress, formerly a toast, in distress, and lived with her platonically for three weeks. He had spilled on the ground the milk of milkmaids returning from the cow-pastures, drunk lachryma Christi with the son of a noble Italian family exiled in Australia for unnatural loves. He knew a boy of the best stock who wore two golden armlets bearing spikes on the inside, so that his arms were always covered with blood, to mortify his flesh. He had met funerals at nightfall with lamps and native instruments in the islands, had lived with lepers, rowed nine hundred miles in an open boat to a coral atoll, and had run aground in a merchant-tub in the Solomon Islands. He knew the habits of the Ming dynasty and the authenticity of marks on ceramics. Talking of these things, the voice of Tom Withers flowed almost inaudibly on and on. Michael, astonished and decoyed, listened many hours on many days afterwards to the soft-dropping babble of this troubadour, and was convinced that he had met the most remarkable man in the city.

  But sometimes Withers got into a high passion, began squealing in a female voice: he would not stand this and this, he would do anything to teach that bastard a lesson, they had better be careful, he knew too much about them. And the diarrhoea of defamation then flowed from his lips. He knew everyone’s weak points, who slept with another man’s wife, who was cuckold, who had an illegitimate child, who went to bawdy-houses, why the talents of each one would never get him on in life, what was the brand and catchword treacherously passed round among friends, summing up absent friends, what diseases each one had, how they had made their money, and why each man had married each woman. Nothing was too low for Withers to repeat. He chewed each arch remark, dipping his moustache in beer, chewing his tongue, like a boy chewing sugar-cane until it is dry; his brown eyes shone softly and his face was fully awakened from its mortuary repose.