The People's Train (5 page)

At the Sunday meeting of the strike committee, I noticed how pale Hope looked. She was worried, she said, for Amelia, who was resting at home from her warrior deeds of Friday. The question now was whether we should march again, in protest against the necessity for police permits. Kelly proposed that marches be suspended for some days but that one be considered for the following Friday, one week after Baton Friday. The membership could vote to decide what we should do – whether to defy the specials and the police one more time. Kelly declared that the prospect of another such march would bring out the resolve in the membership engaged in the strike.

It will mean bugger all, said Billy Foster of the Tramways Union. He seemed quite dejected.

Kelly said that on Monday he would call on Prime Minister Fisher, the Scottish miner from Queensland, to send his troops to protect us. Some of the Labor Party men argued against it, saying that whichever way Fisher jumped it would be used to embarrass him. But there weren’t as many notables of the Labor Party there that day – with one eye on the ballot box, they had read the Saturday papers and decided that the strike was no longer popular. And they could, after all, plead that it was the Sabbath.

Pongrass of the AWU, a big man, told us, I don’t know how I can keep up my members’ enthusiasm without marches.

We’ll have to march! the cry came back from some at the long table on the stage where we sat.

There was a Wobbly there who said mournfully that sometimes the only action left was direct action.

Suvarov shook his head. We had direct action in Russia, he said, and all it did was give Stolypin and Witte a chance to choke us further and shell the factory suburbs of Moscow. For direct action – in the Wobbly tongue – usually meant explosives.

Hope agreed with Suvarov. Let me tell you all, gentlemen, she said, that Sir Digby Denham and Freeman Bender would be very pleased if one cane truck from the north was dynamited ... that would be a real birthday present to them. A march, on the other hand, by peaceful unionists – they fear that the most.

To sustain us in our discussions, we fetched black tea from a large and battered enamel pot at the end of the room, and then we sat around sipping it and talking particularly on the topic of cash for strikers’ families, and whether or not to march. Others of our membership were blunting their doubts with cut-rate beer at the Trades Hall Hotel. I noticed Paddy Dykes, drawing on his tea at the back of the room and taking many notes, though his method of writing didn’t seem as demented as Olive O’Sullivan’s. I had seen him earlier, talking earnestly and jotting in a little notebook.

G’day, Tom, he called. I’ve telegraphed the editor about you. Would you like to write something on Russia for us?

It was an attractive idea; the
Australian Worker
was fervently read and passed round on the eastern coast of the southern continent. You could help me with my English if I did so? I asked.

No problem. Not that I’m any great stylist. I came on the pen by accident.

It would be an honour, I told Paddy earnestly.

It emerged the next day that Premier Digby Denham had also asked the prime minister for federal troops. It was true that the prime minister was in an impossible position of the political variety. Fisher could last in his post as long as he nodded to the unions while winking at the powers of capital. There was even the risk now that he might send his troops to support the Queensland police. In the end Fisher sent us a donation of thirty pounds but also sent telegrams denying either side troops.

Later in the week it was announced in the
Truth
by a gossip writer masquerading as a political one that Mr Mockridge KC had been catching Joseph Freeman Bender’s private tram car to his offices near the law courts, in contrast to his wife’s actions. Who will triumph in this connubial struggle? the writer asked. But Hope still turned up to Trades Hall before work and after, and during her lunch period, and sat talking to Amelia, now back to her best but still facing charges.

When I ran into Walter O’Sullivan at Trades Hall, he asked me to question my march marshals. In the melee of the police charge, had anyone picked up his wife’s notebook? She had dropped it as her husband wisely shuttled her up a laneway to escape the batons, and it had been full of notes very precious to her. I promised to ask.

O’Sullivan shook his locks and said, It upsets her so much. She feels she has an incomplete record. Women are differently built from us. Sometimes they are defeated by small matters, yet then they survive the ones that tip us off kilter. The notebook means a lot to Olive.

Our initial decision to march again that Friday was rejected by a Tuesday night meeting. There had been an incident. The day before some strikers’ children had hurled stones at Mr Bender’s tram, the Palace, and might have put a dent in one of its panels. They had been chased and some of them taken into custody, and nobody wanted them beaten by officers of the law because of what we might do that Friday. But even those of us who believed in a final salutary defeat arising from the ashes did not want the strike to fall apart so early. Men were now talking of looting, Billy Foster warned me. He was against another march.

When they talk of looting they’re really talking about going back to work, he said. Looting isn’t natural to them; they’re just mouthing off.

The
Truth,
that awful piece of gutter journalism we all nonetheless read, carried a cartoon that weekend of Hope as a dirt-faced urchin hurling rocks at a tram that carried her eminent husband. But yet again she was all day at Trades Hall, writing material for the strike bulletin, discussing legal representation in subcommittees.

Then, on Wednesday, a telegram came. The Commonwealth Arbitration Court would hear the tramworkers’ case. Waved off by men with banners, Kelly and other Trades Hall delegates caught a steamer to Melbourne to appear before the court. Freeman Bender caught the same ship but travelled in greater luxury. Workers lined the shore and cheered Kelly and his gang down the broad reaches of the estuary. An arbitration court seemed a remarkable thing even to me, a cynic about any state other than a workers’ one. It certainly glimmered like a miraculous icon in the imagination of the Queenslanders. Justice Higgins of the court had established the
basic
or
foundational
wage so that men and women could live
in frugal comfort.
He was a hero to the unions, though I did ask Hope whether
frugal
and
comfort
didn’t contradict each other.

Ah, she acknowledged, that’s the question, isn’t it, Tom?

The intimacy of the first name always returned me, in ways I tried to hide, to my peasant callowness, which I hoped she couldn’t see.

She seemed to have been revived by the news. She had met Justice Higgins and said he came from the same Ulster background as her grandparents, yet he’d adopted as his founding principles neither self-interest nor
Das Kapital
but – strangely for a Protestant – Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical,
Rerum Novarum,
which concerned itself – oddly for a priestly document – with social justice.

Anticipation of Higgins’s decision, and an inexact knowledge of the Arbitration Act, kept the unions excited for ten days. It was harsh weather in Brisbane, with violent thunderstorms sweeping up over the mangrove flats of Moreton Bay far too late every afternoon to save the populace from blistering days.

The news was published in the paper before Kelly and his people got back home. Mr Higgins decided that unionists were entitled to wear their badges, and declared that the company should not dismiss its tramway men for such a reason. But he did not have the power to
make
Mr Bender take the men back – he ‘enjoined him’ to do so. When this news broke I called in at the strike bulletin office, where I encountered the little fellow Paddy Dykes.

He asked me, You okay from when the cops whaled into you?

I said I was much better than if he hadn’t been there. Then, Tell me, what does
enjoin
mean?

He screwed up his face in a way that made me cherish his conscientiousness.

You know Christ’s Sermon on the Mount? he asked.

Yes.

Blessed are the meek
– all that?

Yes.

That’s
enjoining.
It is – I have to tell you – so much piss and wind. It’s a prayer, and we all know how hopeless that is.

He held up the latest stencilled strike bulletin, which declared:
Justice Higgins stands up for strikers!

That’s the way they choose to see it.

The steam ferry brought the delegates in from their ship to the wharf near the Customs House. But when Kelly and his team went to see Bender and Digby Denham, they found that neither of them was interested. Bender was not bound to take the tramways men back. He would not answer to Judge Higgins’s enjoining.

We meatworkers of the Australian Workers Union were not nearly finished, however. I had by now almost forgotten my earlier and quite correct Bolshevik scepticism about the strike. It was no more than human to wish that our fraternity would prevail or at least put up a genuine struggle.

At table at Adler’s boarding house, I was occasionally teased by my fellow lodgers, particularly Suvarov, about my sipping tea with a lady such as Hope Mockridge.

Suvarov, set on mischief, had sparkling eyes and a delighted, long-lipped smile. Sometimes in his life, of course, mischief sought him out more readily than he ever sought it. Khlebanov from the Tramways Union looked wearier these days, but he liked to laugh too. With the scarring of his face from a beating during the 1902 strike in St Petersburg, he was in a position to say, We are not all unmarked Russian princes like Artem Samsurov.

I am a man who carries dead sheep for a living, into the cold store. For shipping to feed the industrial masses of Britain. Do you call that a prince?

Suvarov often asked, But how did you get away with your beautiful unmarked face, Artem, long as the Caspian, broad as the Azov? Are you a true Bolshevik? Has no servant of the state ever landed a blow on you?

On the day they opened cannon fire on the railway engineering shop in Kharkov, there were plenty of ruined faces. But I did not like to say so. Khlebanov of the Tramways was the rare sort of fellow who liked to recount what had befallen him, and I let him. Tales of Butyrka Prison and exile. Suvarov, on the other hand, though a joker, kept pretty silent about the catastrophes that had brought about his scars.

At Trades Hall, Hope Mockridge was another person looking tired. Violet patches like the world’s bruises showed beneath her eyes. Amelia was to appear in court the following week, and it seemed to weigh more on Hope than it did on the old woman.

By charging Amelia with malicious damage to a police horse and aggravated assault upon the deputy commissioner himself, Cahill attracted some opprobrium from the cartoonists of the popular press. But that did not stop a number of businesses who had offered discounted clothes and groceries to strikers from removing themselves from our list. Rybakov gave up his lease on his house and returned to Adler’s. He said to me soon after, The tsar would love these Queenslanders. They’re more obedient than Russians.

I wanted very much to go and talk to Hope and reassure her, and tell her that her splendid face and her splendid mind were above all the sniping of the newspapers, but I knew that I did not understand half of what was weighing on her, that I had no grounds to present myself as a comforter.

Then the Director of Public Prosecutions announced one morning that evidence against Amelia Pethick and others, held in his office – including police documents, a record of interview, and seized possessions (among them a bloodied hatpin) – had gone missing. The director said he suspected malfeasance. The more irreverent afternoon paper, which sold well among the working class, suggested that the documents may indeed have been taken by the police, embarrassed for Deputy Commissioner Cahill’s sake lest the trial rallied support for the frail Amelia Pethick, or required him to show his punctured thigh or, as rumour had it, arse. In any case, the prosecution could not proceed until the documents were retrieved.

It occurred even to me that the Director of Public Prosecutions was part of the attorney-general’s department and shared the same premises in splendid George Street, near the top of the hill on which the Queensland parliament building stood. And Hope Mockridge worked in the attorney-general’s department, and might have removed the file. Hence the violet streaks beneath her eyes.

Within a few days the press had raised the same surmise, though very carefully, fearful that the Mockridges or Hope herself might sue for slander. At Trades Hall I noticed Olive O’Sullivan back in womanhood’s bloom and writing in her notebooks. I congratulated O’Sullivan on her revived spirits and he said, Yes, it was wonderful. Along with Amanda’s hatpin, Olive’s notebook had also been rescued from the care of the public prosecutor and had been returned to Olive at the O’Sullivans’ boarding house by messenger.

As happy as Olive was, Amelia had a somewhat less optimistic tale to tell that evening. A lot of her girls were under pressure from their parents to leave the strike.

Their mothers, said Amelia, ask them who will want to marry a girl who takes such an undue part in a strike?

Well, I said, would they want to marry a man who didn’t like women to stand up?

You don’t need to convince me, she sighed. But now there’s the witch-hunt at the attorney-general’s. They’re going to make a scapegoat of the poor girl.

Hope?

Yes, this strike has caused nothing but misery for her. Samsurov, come, let’s take her away to an early tea at my place in Peel Street. If no one will drive us, we can walk.

It was agreed, and I was pleased that tea was seen as the cure-all here as in Russia. But I wondered why Amelia, who’d warned me off Hope the week before, wanted to put us together at the same tea table again.

In the end Hope herself offered to drive us there in her car. She was brisk that afternoon and seemed restored to her old form. All she had said to me when I first met Amelia and herself behind Trades Hall was, Very well then, Tom, we’re going!

To get the thing started I was requested to crank the engine over as she sat at the wheel. The machine thundered with a sudden smell of oil and we had the breeze coming straight at us when we swung down Ann Street, up Roma and past North Quay. During our progress there was quite a degree of what I would call speculation on the streets of Brisbane – people gawped at us, as Hope, her flimsy scarf flying, took us to the great bend in the Brisbane River and off the main road to Milton and into Amelia’s tranquil street.

It is to be noted that climate caused Queenslanders to build their houses on stilts, free of flood water and so as to allow wind to circulate both over the ceiling and under the floor. This was a clever arrangement, I thought. But one needed to ascend steps to reach the front verandah and the door. The three of us did so at Amelia’s house, leaving the car, near-silent, its cooling parts ticking like a clock, under a tree. Amelia opened her front door without a key – an aspect of Australia that I couldn’t help admiring. I was reminded of the remoter villages of Russia, where most people couldn’t afford locks. The air inside the house was thick and smelled of some spice Amelia had been careful to put in place to fight some of the indignities of the climate.

Amelia went to the kitchen to prepare things, insisting that it was her kitchen and she would not tolerate Hope or myself in it. I suddenly found it hard to start a conversation with Hope. I knew I was in the classic and well-worn stages of sentimental love, a delusional sickness. The marriage of souls I respected best in the world was that of my sister to Trofimov the miner. It was a marriage of equals. Or if not, it was Trofimov himself who was the unequal partner, stricken with his miner’s chest. And I thought too of the comradely marriage between Vladimir Ilich, our party leader, and his wife Krupskaya, which I had not observed directly. By contrast the state I was in was the same despicable one that led in the end to such glories as premature age for women, wife-beating, squalor, and a million domestic meannesses. If a man is a Marxist, he is meant to have the attitudes of a monk. There is meant to be no false romance in his life, no doomed and morbid loves as in Tolstoy. Fraternity and utility are the virtues of his existence. When I went to the railways in Perm, I felt I fulfilled my utility there. I found enough belief and hope to sustain me – like a Christian pilgrim of ancient days – in the long escape from the Aldan to Nikolayevsk-on-the-Amur.

Yet my pilgrim composure was – for the moment – gone. I knew it was better for a man to react sensibly to desire without dressing it up in the tatty and theatrical clothes of deathless adoration. Yet I was tempted to spout to Hope about devotion.

From where we sat, Hope and I could see on Amelia’s mantelpiece and occasional tables photos of a younger Amelia and her husband, the English socialist stevedore who had brought her to Australia.

Ah, I said, it is very nice and cool in here.

As she threw her head back to let the cooler air at her throat I studied the wonderful lines of Hope’s face. They were of the kind, I thought, that men would prefer to remain stationary, a head placed on a pedestal, a painting, an object for viewing. She would not consent to such a role, of course, this woman who had stood up for us with such coolness and wit in the magistrates’ courtroom, this counsellor wise and skilled and ironic.

Suddenly she said, We are not going to win this.

No. But winning will be holding out, I told her. People should get used to holding out if they want to win in the end. By enduring they learn, for example, to understand the way the press works, the way most bourgeois support falls away ... how the strikers take the blame for their own hopes. Learning that is no small thing; it is a sort of victory.

She lowered her head, made a doubtful mouth, and did not seem too cheered by my argument.

But do you really, really, Tom, foresee the end you want? I mean, the true end? The golden age?

Oh yes, I told her. These things are hard to believe in until they come about. But the slaves were freed, the serfs were freed. And capital will fall.

She shifted her head to one side. She didn’t have a taste for waiting that afternoon.

Well, I tried to comfort her, some things happen suddenly. At a ... at a gulp.

A gulp?

She laughed at my choice of word. I blushed, as red-faced as some provincial bank clerk. Where we sat, the silence grew, and then dear Amelia arrived with a tray of tea and teacups and put it on her dining table. Both Mrs Mockridge and I stood and bent to the tray, anxious to be helpful in setting things out on the table. I was happy to be at this work. When the tray was clear – milk, sugar, teapot, cups and saucers, ornamental spoons and sugar – Amelia chirped with joy and returned to the kitchen to get what she called
the comestibles.
These turned out to be cucumber sandwiches and a hearty English-style fruitcake, bleeding a fruity sap in the humid air. I saw a great cherry glisten in the midst of the dark cake. Opulence, I thought.

Amelia darted to a cupboard for one last errand and brought forth a decanter of sherry and another of what looked like whisky. She also placed three dainty if minuscule wineglass-shaped vessels for us to take our choice of the liquors.

Amelia said, Not as exciting as the Samarkand Café, Tom, but we rough Queenslanders do our best.

With tongs, Amelia put two sandwiches on my plate and a healthy slice of fruitcake. Oh, she then said, scraping her chair backwards rapidly. I meant also to fetch my atlas. If you don’t mind, Tom – if it involves no personal pain to you, of course – Hope and I would dearly love you to point out where you come from in Russia.

It won’t cause me any pain, I assured her, laughing and partly lying as well.

She excused herself and vanished again from the room.

When she was gone, Hope laughed, a first full-throated laugh.

She blames me for being curious about Russia. But she’s the one who’s curious. Mind you, she knows Russian history...

Amelia was back with the large volume, which looked heavy enough to snap her thin wrists. Please, she said, pour yourself some whisky, Tom.

I nearly did so, to celebrate the headiness of this teatime with Hope, but all my training went against it. The men who drank were the ones most often caught, most often subverted.

Thank you, Mrs Pethick ... Amelia. But I am not a drinker.

Admirable, said Amelia. You, Hope?

Hope was already pouring herself a tumbler, as frankly as a man would.

Amelia was leafing through the enormous atlas.

Mr Samsurov ... Tom ... while I was making tea, did my young friend Hope say anything to you about my prosecution file?

No, I said. But whoever took it did a brave thing.

Or perhaps the public prosecutor is simply inefficient, Hope suggested.

I hope you didn’t do it, my dear, Amelia told Hope, because it was too great a risk. And anyhow, I was rather looking forward to pleading guilty to the impaling of Deputy Commissioner Cahill with a hatpin. I am a soldier at heart. She laughed at her own idea.

Then whoever took the file, said Hope, has really spoiled your fun, haven’t they, Amelia?

They rather have, Amelia agreed, and winked at me, but did not sit until she’d opened the page to a splendid map of Russia. She placed it in front of me. My finger strayed along the north-eastern Ukrainian– Russian border, and I read the transliterated names of rivers and towns. I found the place.

I was born here, I told them, near the Ukrainian border. My village was near this place, Yelets. Yes, Glebovo. There. Well, I’m surprised we are important enough for an atlas of the world! My mother was Ukrainian but of Russian stock. My mother’s family were part of the plantation of Russian people in Ukraine.

A garden of people, I thought. Some of them nettles and weeds, but like many such plants, tall – that couldn’t be denied. It was a long time since I’d spoken the name of Glebovo.

But I kept on prattling away. I think my temperament is like my mother’s and grandmother’s, I announced. I remembered for a second Maxim Gorki’s love for his grandmother.

My father was a decent fellow, I told them. But music and drink consoled him for the state of the world.

I paused. Then on I went. Pulling the clots of information up out of a deep vein.

It is black soil around there, I told them. Like some of the Darling Downs.

All at once I was captured by an image of my young parents, riding in a cart to the Yelets monastery, to the Church of the Assumption, to have their wedding blessed. It was a blessing that left them poorer. I was born at the right time, though, a time when the new system of schooling had arrived. Without my letters, I’m sure I could have been the biggest drunk, the worst brute.

In case they imagined a perfect place, I went on, Sadly, the air is full of the smell of tanneries down by the river. Later, the technical school I went to was here, see. Ekaterinoslav. South of Kharkov. Then the technical university. In Moscow.

I noticed that Moscow lay like a gem of red and black in the map’s middle. If I was for the moment vainglorious in my reminiscences in front of Hope and Amelia, a stab of the old anguish came back soon enough. Uncertainty, a savage grandfather. Arrest.