Part 31

A strange country. A wonderful country. Who knows what future it may have? Can a great continent breed a people of this magic harmlessness without becoming a sacrifice of some other, external power? The land that invites parasites now--where parasites breed like nightmares--what would happen if the power-lust came that way?

Richard bought himself a big, knobbly, green, soft-crusted apple, at a Chinese shop, and a pretty mother-of-pearl spoon to eat it with. The queer Chinese, with their gabbling-gobbling way of speaking--were they parasites too? A strange, strange world. He took himself off to the gardens to eat his custard apple--a pudding inside a knobbly green skin--and to relax into the magic ease of the afternoon. The warm sun, the big, blue harbour with its hidden bays, the palm trees, the ferry steamers sliding flatly, the perky birds, the inevitable shabby-looking, loafing sort of men strolling across the green slopes, past the red poinsetta bush, under the big flame-tree, under the blue, blue sky--Australian Sydney, with a magic like sleep, like sweet, soft sleep--a vast, endless, sun-hot, afternoon sleep with the world a mirage. He could taste it all in the soft, sweet, creamy custard apple. A wonderful sweet place to drift in. But surely a place that will some day wake terribly from this sleep.

Yet why should it? Why should it not drift marvellously for ever, with its sun and its marsupials?

The meeting in the evening, none the less, was a wild one. And Richard could not believe there was any _real_ vindictiveness. He couldn’t believe that anybody _really_ hated anybody. There was a touch of sardonic tolerance in it all. Oh, that sardonic tolerance! And at the same time that overwhelming obstinacy and power of endurance. The strange, Australian power of enduring--enduring suffering or opposition or difficulty--just blank enduring. In the long run, just endure.

Richard sat next to Jaz. Jaz was very still, very still indeed, seated with his hands in his lap.

“Will there be many diggers here?” Lovat asked.

“Oh, yes. There’s quite a crowd over there, with Jack.”

And Richard looked quickly, and saw Jack. He knew Jack had seen him. But now he was looking the other way. And again, Richard felt afraid of something.

It was a packed hall, tense. There was plenty of noise and interruption, plenty of homethrusts at the speakers from the audience. But still, that sense of sardonic tolerance, endurance. “What’s the odds, boys?”

Willie Struthers gave the main speech: on the solidarity of Labour. He sketched the industrial situation, and elaborated the charge that Labour was cutting its own throat by wrecking industry and commerce.

“But will anything get us away from this fact, mates,” he said: “that there’s never a shop shuts down because it can’t pay the weekly wage-bill. If a shop shuts down, it is because it can’t pay a high enough _dividend_, and there you’ve got it.

“Australian Labour has set out from the first on the principle that huge fortunes should not be made out of its efforts. We have had the obvious example of America before us, and we have been determined from the start that Australia should not fall into the hands of a small number of millionaires and a larger number of semi-millionaires. It has been our idea that a just proportion of all profits should circulate among the workers in the form of wages. Supposing the worker _does_ get his pound a day. It is enormous, isn’t it! It is preposterous. Of course it is. But it isn’t preposterous for a small bunch of owners or shareholders to get their ten pounds a day, _for doing nothing_. Sundays included. That isn’t preposterous, is it?

“They raise the plea that their fathers and their forefathers accumulated the capital by their labours. Well, haven’t _our_ fathers and forefathers laboured? Haven’t they? And what have they accumulated? The right to labour on, and be paid for it what the others like to give ’em.

“We don’t want to wreck industry. But, we say, wages shall go up so that profits shall go down. Why should there be any profits, after all? Forefathers! Why, we’ve all had forefathers, and I’m sure mine worked. Why should there be any profits _at all_, I should like to know. And if profits there _must_ be, well then, the profit grabber isn’t going to get ten times as much as the wage-earner, just because he had a few screwing forefathers. We, who work for what we get, are going to see that the man who doesn’t work shall not receive a large income for not working. If he’s _got_ to have an income for doing nothing, let him have no more than what we call wages. The labourer is worthy of his hire, and the hire is worthy of his labourer. But I can _not_ see that any man is worthy of an unearned income. Let there be no unearned incomes. So much for the basic wage. We know it is not the basic wage that wrecks industry. It’s big profits. When the profits are not forthcoming the directors would rather close down. A criminal proceeding. Because, after all, any big works is run, first, to supply the community with goods, and second, to give a certain proportion of the community a satisfactory occupation. Whatever net profits are made are made by cheating the worker and the consumer, filching a bit from every one of them, no matter how small a bit. And we will not see wages reduced one ha’penny, to help to fill the pockets of shareholders--”

“What about your own shares in Nestles Milk, Willie?” asked a voice.

“I’ll throw them in the fire the minute they’re out of date,” said Willie, promptly, “they’re pretty well wastepaper already.”

He went on to answer the charges of corruption and “Tammany,” with which the Labour Party in Australia had been accused. This led to the point of class hatred.

“It is we who are supposed to foster class hatred,” he said. “Now I put it to you. Does the so-called upper class hate us, or do we hate them more? If you’ll let me answer, I tell you it’s they who do the hating. We don’t wear the flesh off our bones hating them. They aren’t worth it. They’re far beneath hatred.

“We do want one class only--not your various shades of upper and lower. We want The People--and The People means the worker. I don’t mind what a man works at. He can be a doctor or a lawyer even, if men are such fools they must have doctors and lawyers. But look here, mates, what do we all work _for_? For a living? Then why won’t a working-man’s living wage do for a lawyer? Why not? Perhaps a lawyer makes an ideal of his job. Perhaps he is inspired in his efforts to right the wrongs of his client. Very well: virtue is its own reward. If he wants to be paid for it, it isn’t virtue any more. It’s dirty trading in justice, or whatever law means.

“Look at your upper classes, mates. Look at your lawyer charging you two guineas for half an hour’s work. Look at your doctor scrambling for his guinea a visit. Look at your experts with their five thousand a year. Call these _upper_ classes? Upper in what? In the make-and-grab faculties, that’s all.

“To hell with their ‘upper.’ If a working man thinks he’ll be in the running, and demand say half of what these gentry get, then he’s the assassin of his trade and country. It’s his business to grovel before these ‘upper’ gents, is it?

“No, mates, it’s his business to rise up and give ’em a good kick in the seats of their pants, to remind them of their bed-rock bottoms. You’d think, to hear all the fairy tales they let off, that their pants didn’t have such a region as seats. Like the blooming little angels, all fluttery tops and no bottoms. Don’t you be sucked in any more, mates. Look at ’em, and you’ll see they’ve got good, heavy-weight sit-upons, and big, deep trouser-pockets next door. That’s them. Up-end ’em for once, and look at ’em upside down. Greedy fat-arses, mates, if you’ll pardon the vulgarity for once. Greedy fat-arses.

“And that’s what we’ve got to knuckle under to, is it? They’re the upper classes? Them and a few derelict lords and cuttle-fish capitalists. Upper classes? I’m damned if I see much upper about it, mates. Drop ’em in the sea and they’ll float butt-end uppermost, you see if they don’t. For that’s where they keep their fat, like the camel his hump. Upper classes!

“But I wish them no special harm. A bit of a kick in the rear, to remind them that they’ve got a rear, a largely kickable rear. And then, let them pick themselves up and mingle with the rest. Give them a living wage, like any other working man. But it’s hell on earth to see them floating their fat bottoms through the upper regions, and just stooping low enough to lick the cream off things, as it were, and to squeal if a working man asks for more than a gill of the skilly.

“Work? What is one man’s job more than another. Your Andrew Carnegies and your Rothschilds may be very smart at their jobs. All right--give ’em the maximum wage. Give ’em a pound a day. They won’t starve on it. And what do they want with more? A job is nothing but a job, when all’s said and done. And if Mr Hebrew Rothschild is smart on the finance job, so am I a smart sheep-shearer, hold my own with any man. And what’s the odds? Wherein is Mr Hebrew, or Lord Benjamin Israelite any better man than I am? Why does he want so damned much for his dirty financing, and begrudges me my bit for shearing ten score o’ sheep?

“No, mates, we’re not sucked in. It may be Mr Steel-trust Carnegie, it may even be Mr Very-clever Marconi, it may be Marquis Tribes von Israel; and it certainly _is_ Willie Struthers. Now, mates, I, Willie Struthers, a big fortune _I do not want_. But I’m damned if I am going to let a few other brainy vampires suck big fortunes out of me. Not I. I wouldn’t be a man if I did. Upper classes? They’ve got more greedy brains in the seats of their pants than in their top storeys.

“We’re having no more of their classes and masses. We’ll just put a hook in their trouser-bottoms and hook ’em gently to earth. That’s all. And put ’em on a basic wage like all the rest: one job, one wage. Isn’t that fair? No man can do more than his best. And why should one poor devil get ten bob for his level best, and another fat-arse get ten thousand for some blooming trick? No, no, if a man’s a sincere citizen he does his _best_ for the community he belongs to. And his simple wage is enough for him to live on.

“That’s why we’ll have a Soviet. Water finds its own level, and so shall money. It shall not be dammed up by a few sly fat-arses much longer. I don’t pretend it will be paradise. But there’ll be fewer lies about it, and less fat-arsed hypocrisy, and less dirty injustice than there is now. If a man works, he shall not have less than the basic wage, be he even a lying lawyer. There shall be no politicians, thank God. But more than the basic wage also he shall not have. Let us bring things down to a rock-bottom.

“Upper? Why all their uppishness amounts to is extra special greedy guts, ten-thousand-a-year minimum. Upper classes! Upper classes! Upper arses.

“We’ll have a Soviet, mates, and then we shall feel better about it. We s’ll be getting nasty tempered if we put it off much longer. Let’s know our own mind. We’ll unite with the World’s Workers. Which doesn’t mean we’ll take the hearts out of our chests to give it Brother Brown to eat. No, Brother Brown and Brother Yellow had, on the whole, best stop at home and sweep their own streets, rather than come and sweep ours. But that doesn’t mean we can’t come to more or less of an understanding with them. We don’t want to get too much mixed up with them or anybody. But a proper understanding we can have. I don’t say, Open the gates of Australia to all the waiting workers of India and China, let alone Japan. But, mates, you can be quite friendly with your neighbour over the fence without giving him the run of your house. And that is International Labour. You have a genuine understanding with your neighbours down the street. You know they won’t shy stones through your windows or break into your house at night or kill your children in a dark corner. Why not? Because they’re your neighbours and you all have a certain amount of trust in one another. And that is International Labour. That is the World’s Workers.

“After all, mates, the biggest part of our waking lives belongs to our work. And certainly the biggest part of our importance is our importance as workers. Mates we are, and we are bound to be, workers, first and foremost. So were our fathers before us, so will our children be after us. Workers first. And as workers, mates. On this everything else depends. On our being workers depends our being husbands and fathers and playmates: nay, our being men. If we are not workers we are not even men, for we can’t exist.

“Workers we are, mates, workers we must be, and workers we will be, and there’s the end of it. We take our stand on it. Workers first, and whatever soul we have, it must go first into our work. Workers, mates, we are workers. A man is a man because he works. He must work and he does work. Call it a curse, call it a blessing, call it what you like. But the Garden of Eden is gone for ever, and while the ages roll, we must work.

“Let us take our stand on that fact, mates, and trim our lives accordingly. While time lasts, whatever ages come or go, we must work, day in, day out, year in, year out, so for ever. Then, mates, let us abide by it. Let us abide by it, and shape things to fit. No use shuffling, mates. Though you or I may make a little fortune, enough for the moment to keep us in idleness, yet, mates, as sure as ever the sun rises, as long as ever times lasts, the children of men must rise up to their daily toil.

“Is it a curse?--is it a blessing? I prefer to think it is a blessing, so long as, like everything else, it is in just proportion. My happiest days have been shearing sheep, or away in the gold mines--”

“What, not talking on a platform?” asked a voice.

“No, not talking on a platform. Working along with my mates, in the bush, in the mines, wherever it was. That’s where I put my manhood into my work. There I had my mates--my fellow workers. I’ve had playmates as well. Wife, children, friends--playmates all of them. My fellow workers were my mates.

“So, since workers we are and shall be, till the end of time, let us shape the world accordingly. The world is shaped now for the idlers and the play-babies, and we work to keep _that_ going. No, no, mates, it won’t do.

“Join hands with the workers of the world: just a fist-grip, as a token and a pledge. Take nobody to your bosom--a worker hasn’t got a bosom. He’s got a fist, to work with, to hit with, and lastly, to give the tight grip of fellowship to his fellow-workers and fellow-mates, no matter what colour or country he belong to. The World’s Workers--and since they _are_ the world, let them take their own, and not leave it all to a set of silly playboys and Hebrews who are not only silly but worse. The World’s Workers--we, who are the world’s millions, the world is our world. Let it be so, then. And let us so arrange it.

“What’s the scare about being mixed up with Brother Brown and Chinky and all the rest: the Indians in India, the niggers in the Transvaal, for instance? Aren’t we tight mixed up with them as it is? Aren’t we in one box with them, in this Empire business? Aren’t we all children of the same noble Empire, brown, black, white, green, or whatever colour we may be? We may not, of course, be reposing on the bosom of Brother Brown and Brother Black. But we are pretty well chained at his side in a sort of slavery, slaving to keep this marvellous Empire going, with its out-of-date Lords and its fat-arsed, hypocritical upper classes. I don’t know whether you prefer working in the same imperial slave-gang with Brother Brown of India, or whether you’d prefer to shake hands with him as a free worker, one of the world’s workers--but--”

“_One!_” came a loud, distinct voice, as if from nowhere, like a gun going off.

“But one or the other--”

“_Two!_” a solid block of men’s voices, like a bell.

“One or the other you’ll--”

“_Three!_” The voice, like a tolling bell, of men counting the speaker out. It was the diggers.

A thrill went through the audience. The diggers sat mostly together, in the middle of the hall, around Jack. Their faces were lit up with a new light. And like a bell they tolled the numbers against the speaker, counting him out, by their moral unison annihilating him.

Willie Struthers, his dark-yellow face gone demonic, stood and faced them. His eyes too had suddenly leaped with a new look: big, dark, glancing eyes, like an aboriginal’s, glancing strangely. Was it fear, was it a glancing, gulf-like menace? He stood there, a shabby figure of a man, with undignified legs, facing the tolling enemy.

“_Four!_” came the sonorous, perfect rhythm. It was a strange sound, heavy, hypnotic, trance-like. Willie Struthers stood as if he were fascinated, glaring spell-bound.

“_Five!_” The sound was unbearable, a madness, tolling out of a certain devilish cavern in the back of the men’s unconscious mind, in terrible malignancy. The Socialists began to leap to their feet in fury, turning towards the block of Diggers. But the lean, naked faces of the ex-soldiers gleamed with a smiling, demonish light, and from their narrow mouths simultaneously:

“_Six!_”

Struthers, looking as if he were crouching to spring, glared back at them from the platform. They did not even look at him.

“_Seven!_” In two syllables, _Sev-en!_

The sonorous gloating in the sound was unbearable. It was like hammer-strokes on the back of the brain. Everybody had started up save the Diggers. Even Somers was wildly on his feet, feeling as if he could fly, swoop like some enraged bird. But his feeling wavered. At one moment he gloated with the Diggers against the black and devilish figure of the isolated man on the platform, who half-crouched as if he were going to jump, his face black and satanic. And then, as the numbers came, unbearable in its ghastly striking:

“_Eight!_” like some hammer-stroke on the back of his brain it sent him clean mad, and he jumped up into the air like a lunatic, at the same moment as Struthers sprang with a clear leap, like a cat, towards the group of static, grinning ex-soldiers.

There was a crash, and the hall was like a bomb that has exploded. Somers tried to spring forward. In the blind moment he wanted to kill--to kill the soldiers. Jaz held him back, saying something. There was a most fearful roar, and a mad whirl of men, broken chairs, pieces of chairs brandished, men fighting madly with fists, claws, pieces of wood--any weapon they could lay hold of. The red flag suddenly flashing like blood, and bellowing rage at the sight of it. A Union Jack torn to fragments, stamped upon. A mob with many different centres, some fighting frenziedly round a red flag, some clutching fragments of the Union Jack, as if it were God incarnate. But the central heap a mass struggling with the Diggers, in real blood-murder passion, a tense mass with long, naked faces gashed with blood, and hair all wild, and eyes demented, and collars bursted, and arms frantically waving over the dense bunch of horrific life, hands in the air with weapons, hands clawing to drag them down, wrists bleeding, hands bleeding, arms with the sleeves ripped back, white, naked arms with brownish hands, and thud! as the white flesh was struck with a chair-leg.

The doors had been flung open--many men had gone out, but more rushed in. The police in blue uniforms and in blue clothes wielding their batons, the whole place gone mad. Richard, small as he was, felt a great frenzy on him, a great longing to let go. But since he didn’t _really_ know whom he wanted to let go at, he was not quite carried away. And Jaz, quiet, persistent, drew him gradually out into the street. Though not before he had lost his hat and had had his collar torn open, and had received a bang over the forehead that helped to bring him to his senses.

Smash went the lights of the hall--somebody smashing the electric lamps. The place was almost in darkness. It was unthinkable.

Jaz drew Somers into the street, which was already a wide mass of a crowd, and mounted police urging their way to the door, laying about them. The crowd too was waiting to catch fire. Almost beside himself Richard struggled out of the crowd, to get out of the crowd. Then there were shots in the night, and a great howl from the crowd. Among the police on horseback he saw a white hat--a white felt hat looped up at the side--and he seemed to hear the bellowing of a big, husky voice. Surely that was Kangaroo, that was Kangaroo shouting. Then there was a loud explosion and a crash--a bomb of some sort.

And Richard suddenly was faint--Jaz was leading him by the arm--leading him away--in the city night that roared from the direction of the hall, while men and women were running thither madly, and running as madly away, and motor cars came rushing: and even the fire-brigade with bright brass helmets--a great rush towards the centre of conflict--and a rush away, outwards. While hats--white hats--Somers, in his dazed condition saw three or four, and they occupied his consciousness as if they were thousands.

“We must go back,” he cried. “We must go back to them!”

“What for?” said Jaz. “We’re best away.”

And he led him sturdily down a side street, while Somers was conscious only of the scene he had left, and the sound of shots.

They went to one of the smaller, more remote Digger’s Clubs. It consisted only of one large room, meeting room and gymnastics hall in turn, and a couple of small rooms, one belonging to the secretary and the head, and the other a sort of little kitchen with a sink and a stove. The one-armed caretaker was in attendance, but nobody else was there. Jaz and Somers went into the secretary’s room, and Jaz made Richard lie down on the sofa.

“Stay here,” he said, “while I go and have a look round.”

Richard looked at him. He was feeling very sick: perhaps the bang over the head. Yet he wanted to go back into the town, into the melee. He felt he would even die if he did so. But then why not die? Why stay outside the row? He had always been outside the world’s affairs.

“I’ll come with you again,” he said.

“No, I don’t want you,” snapped Jaz. “I have a few of my own things to attend to.”

“Then I’ll go by myself,” said Richard.

“If I were you I wouldn’t,” said Jaz.

And Richard sat back feeling very sick, and confused. But such a pain in his stomach, as if something were torn there. And he could not keep still--he wanted to do something.

Jaz poured out a measure of whiskey for himself and one for Richard. Then he went out, saying:

“You’d best stay here till I come back, Mr Somers. I shan’t be very long.”

Jaz too was very pale, and his manner was furtive, like one full of suppressed excitement.

Richard looked at him, and felt very alien, far from him and everybody. He rose to his feet to rush out again. But the torn feeling at the pit of his stomach was so strong he sat down and shoved his fists in his abdomen, and there remained. It was a kind of grief, a bitter, agonised grief for his fellow-men. He felt it was almost better to die, than to see his fellow-men go mad in this horror. He could hear Jaz talking for some time to the one-armed care-taker, a young soldier who was lame with a bad limp as well as maimed.

“I can’t do anything. I can’t be on either side. I’ve got to keep away from everything,” murmured Richard to himself. “If only one might die, and not have to wait and watch through all the human horror. They are my fellow-men, they are my fellow-men.”