This Is the Grass Read online

  Gunner’s story fixed his eyes in a gaze sharp with visions of himself in violent seizing of money from those who oppressed him. He always fled from violence yet he loved stories of violence. Tales of blows that brought blood, kicks that doubled up arrogant men, furious denouncements—these he hugged to his heart to assuage his hates and resentments. No man looked down on him in the country of his mind; they insulted him there at their peril.

  There was a night when I saw him prone on the stable straw, sobbing between the vomiting: ‘Christ help me!’ I sat down beside him for a little while but went away when he didn’t move.

  When I finished my breakfast I walked across to the Shire Office to begin my first job. Mr R. J. Crowther welcomed me with an abstracted ‘Good morning’. He was writing a letter at a table so littered with papers, inkstands, receptacles for pins, manila envelopes and account books, that he was forced to rest his note-paper on top of some printed forms in front of him.

  ‘Wait a moment,’ he said.

  When he had finished the letter he sealed it, and asked: ‘How did you get on at the pub last night?’

  ‘Very well,’ I said, then added: ‘You were right about it not being a very nice place.’

  He grunted. ‘I knew you would soon find that out. Keep to yourself, that’s the main thing. Come and I’ll show you the work you’ll be doing.’

  He took me into the next office. As he walked ahead of me he said: ‘Did you meet Rose Buckman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you think of her?’

  ‘Well . . .’ I began. ‘I don’t know. . . . I didn’t like her much.’

  ‘Keep away from her,’ he said kindly. He picked up a large, leather-bound book from the table. ‘Now here is the rate-book from which you make out the rate-notices on these forms. And here is the cash-book in which you enter the cheques received. From here you post them into the rate-book.’

  He explained a few more details, then left me.

  I found the work easy, but before the day finished I was longing to get out into the sunshine. Office work, I thought, cuts you off from the world. Cooped in by four walls I have lost association with the earth. Birds have been singing today, things have been growing and I have been unaware of it. A day in my life has been completely wasted.

  I thought of all the confined days ahead of me and realised with horror that the seasons would go on changing the face of the sky and the earth and I would never witness it. Each weekend I would see the results of a week’s magic but never the process.

  The windows of the Shire Office were protected by iron bars like a gaol’s, and I felt I was in gaol. I always had some strange feeling that strength came to me through the earth and the things that grew there. The source of the creative power I longed to tap was outside buildings. It was hidden in trees, in sunshine and bush. It was associated in my mind with beauty, with music, with the laughter of children playing on the grass on summer evenings.

  But something had happened to me these last two days and now I felt the strength the writer sought must come through his knowledge of people. I must know people just as well as I knew trees and birds.

  During the afternoon I pushed the rate-notices aside and wrote some notes on scraps of paper about the people I had met in the hotel, but they had no life and I tore them up.

  When I finished work I sat on the post-and-rail fence beside the office and thoughts like poetry kept moving through me as I watched the changing light alter the mountain spurs and the thrusting trunks of gums. The sheep feeding in the paddock below me were outlined in the light of the long sun. The air was rich with the smell of hay from a stooked paddock on the hillside, and I could hear a dog barking from a farmhouse a mile away. In my imagination I went winging like a bird across the yellow paddocks and over the trees. I banked and rolled in an air that was humming softly like a bee.

  I heard the coach arrive and I went into the hotel yard and watched Arthur unharness and feed the horses. We went into the hotel together and he shifted my things over to his room.

  ‘It wouldn’t do for you to stop in that room,’ he told me. ‘You might be all right during the week, but over the weekend some girl would end up in there. You’ve been turned out into a strange paddock here, different from what you’ve been used to. You’ll be safe in my room.’

  His room was a large one with a bed at each end. It contained a chest of drawers with a swinging mirror, a wardrobe and a washstand. An old sea-chest full of his treasures stood in a corner.

  Beside his bed was a bamboo table with three mottled legs that came together half-way down their length then continued to form a tripod. A tin of tobacco, a packet of cigarette papers, a lid full of butts, an enamel candlestick holding a half-used candle with a tiny, curved wick of black crowded the table-top which was covered with a dirty, white cloth. The cloth’s lace edge hung in tatters towards the floor. In the candlestick two dead bugs lay on their backs amid a tangle of burnt matchsticks.

  The window of the room looked out over a valley of trees; the door opened into the kitchen.

  We had tea together, then sat in the room and talked. He told me stories of his life, stories that were to colour my reaction to experience for years afterwards. Night after night I listened to him. At times he revealed the childlike simplicity of a mind unable to draw mature conclusions from experience. Though many of his experiences left a nutritive sediment behind them he did not always recognise their value or significance until, through relating them, he saw them feed the needs of another. It was then he discovered them.

  Sordid as well as uplifting experience had come his way though one was often disguised as the other. An accumulation of sordid experience leaves stains on the character of most men; Arthur had emerged from it unscathed.

  He had never lost his sense of wonder or wanting to know. When I told him about myself he listened with complete absorption, his eyes never leaving my face. He was slow to comprehend and often made me repeat a remark (‘Say that again’). Once having grasped the significance, the import, of my confession, he never forgot it.

  If it was a problem he took it for his own. He never tossed it aside as of no importance but pondered on it, often mentioning it. It flattered me to know he took everything I said seriously. When I told him I was going to be a writer he accepted it without question. From then on I was a writer to him.

  As our friendship grew he developed a sensitivity to any criticism of me, any suggestion I was to be pitied. Anger rose in him then and he was quick to defend me. If he heard the word ‘crutches’ or ‘crippled’ come into the conversation of any man talking to me in the lounge he would leave what he was doing and join us. He would stand watching the man, waiting to see in what direction his remarks would develop. If they were kindly and sympathetic he would go away.

  When drunken women spoke to me he never joined us but stood near by waiting to call me away if they became suggestive or placed their hands upon me. To me he was the final authority, a rock to cling to in this uncharted sea.

  Each Sunday when Father drove over to take me home he and Arthur would have long talks together. It became his custom to supply Father with reports on my experiences during the week. Father admired him and entrusted him with my care.

  I soon learnt that Arthur referred to me as ‘Young Alan’ in these talks and in any conversation he had with people about me, but he never used the term in my presence.

  He was in his middle thirties and had been born in Melbourne. His ancestors had been Huguenots who had originally fled to England from France. His mother and father had immigrated from England not long after their marriage. They were both dead.

  He had experienced poverty in his youth (‘I’ve seen the time when a two-bob piece looked like a cartwheel to me’). He was restless and wanted to travel and spent a lot of time down at the wharves watching ships unload. When the sailing ship, Archibald Russell, berthed there he visited the agents and after an interview with the captain was signed up as an apprent
ice. When she sailed a few weeks later Arthur was aboard her; it was the beginning of his wanderings round the oceans of the world.

  He grew to manhood on the sea, developed his fierce independence there. His face became weathered with sun and spray, and scarred from fights waged to preserve the standards he valued. He sailed on many ships. He became a rebel and a socialist, acting as spokesman for crews when demands were made to the captain for better conditions.

  ‘You’ll never get your rights without fighting for them,’ he told me.

  He had sailed round the Horn in the winter when the rigging was sheathed in ice and the men aloft at night went swinging in great arcs through the darkness.

  ‘You would be over the sea one minute and you could see the white of foam leaping and your hands would be dead with cold and then you would go swinging over the ship and over the sea again on the other side and you knew if your hands let go it was the end of you.

  ‘I saw a man go once in a gale at night. He fell into the dark and you couldn’t see him but you could hear his scream all the way down to the sea.’

  His ship lay off Iquique in Chile when they were shipping phosphates; another time he was iced in for a winter in Labrador and the crew spent their days smashing the ice that threatened to crush them. He had shipped tombstones from Oporto in Portugal, carried Turkish pilgrims through the Red Sea . . .

  ‘They died like flies in the hold and three of us had to go down to drag out the bodies. They didn’t want to let them go. They screamed and hung on to them. I’ll never forget the stench. I don’t know how any of them lived. The owners of the ship should have been shot.’

  When war broke out in 1914 Arthur joined up in Australia and was trained as a sniper.

  ‘Why I joined up beats me. Here I am fighting for that bastard—I forget his name—the armament manufacturer who supplied both sides. And they kidded us we were fighting for freedom! I tell you, Alan, nothing is worse than war. They’ll hang you for murder in peace, then give you a medal for murder in war. There’s no sense in it.’

  He described his experiences as a sniper:

  ‘We had to go out into no-man’s-land each night and lie up in some old ruin, or a tree, or a shell-hole in sight of the German trenches. We stopped there all day picking them off then came back next night. You didn’t last long if you did your job properly. Once you picked a few off they’d work out where the reports were coming from then they’d throw everything they had at you and you’d go up in pieces with the bricks and the dirt. I mostly just lay on my back and thought. I’d fire a few shots into the air, of course.’

  At Fromelles he took part in an advance, moving forward behind a barrage. He threw two grenades into a pill-box then followed them in after the explosion. A dying German raised himself on his elbow and fired wildly at him. The bullet ricocheted round the concrete walls, then grazed the top of his skull, tearing a gap in the bone.

  ‘When I came to I was lying on a stretcher in a forward clearing-station.’

  He was taken to England where he refused to have a metal plate inserted in his head.

  ‘I’ve heard of blokes with a plate in their head. They all went mad.’

  He was finally invalided back to Australia where doctors successfully grafted a portion of one of his ribs on to his skull and he was discharged with a pension of ten shillings a week and a regular supply of pills to help him sleep when the pain was bad.

  ‘Now I’ve got to be careful when I fight.

  ‘I went bush for a while,’ he told me, ‘but it was no good for me. I was camped out one night and I woke up and grabbed a sapling. I thought I was at sea again. I felt crook—you know, I felt I wanted to be mixing with blokes again . . . sort of close to them or something. You think you can live on your own but you can’t; you’ve got to worry over someone else.’

  He rolled a cigarette then went on: ‘I heard that the bloke who ran the coach down here wanted to get out so I came down and bought him out. It was good once but now cars are killing it. I’ll clear out soon and get near the sea.’

  In my first long talk with him I was anxious to know something about the life that went on in the hotel. I wasn’t sure of my own judgment and I wanted it confirmed. I began to criticise the people I had seen in the lounge. I mentioned the foul language of the men but Arthur interrupted me.

  ‘A man is not bad because he says “bugger”, you know.’

  ‘I know that,’ I argued, ‘but they swear in front of women.’

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘the women that come up here swear in front of men. A man shouldn’t swear in front of a woman who doesn’t like swearing but as far as I’m concerned he can swear as much as he likes in front of women who swear themselves. That doesn’t mean you should swear in front of them. You shouldn’t. If you step in another man’s tracks you walk like him. You don’t belong here. If you start swearing in front of women you’re going back fast. What you’ve got to do is just to look on.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, then asked: ‘Are all the women who come up here bad?’

  ‘Some are and some aren’t.’

  ‘I reckon women who sleep with different men they aren’t married to are bad. They sleep with men here, don’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they do—some of them. Some stop a little while then go home. You see, people are all different. It wouldn’t be right for you to sleep with any of these women. There would be no love in it. Not that I reckon there always should be but for you there should be. But you can’t say it’s wrong for other people to do it. You’ve got to know all about them first. You’ve got to know what happened to them to make them like that.

  ‘If you come to look at it, this is a sad place, not a wicked place. The wicked people don’t come here. They sort of work things from big offices, and what they do ends up with these people boozing and sleeping together. It’s something like that. I can’t explain it. Most of the girls that come here are a Saturday to Monday touch, poor beggars. But don’t you get talking like a parson.’

  ‘Hell, no! I wouldn’t do that!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s just that it’s hard to know what’s the right thing to do in a place like this.’

  ‘The right thing to do is to sit back and watch.’

  ‘I don’t know whether it is,’ I said, almost to myself. ‘What’s wrong with standing up to a man?’

  ‘Look!’ said Arthur, leaning towards me and speaking earnestly from his seat on the bed. ‘In a few years when you are ready you will be able to throw your weight around. Not now, though. Tough men come up here. They’re apt to get the horrors and swing a bottle. That’s the time to make yourself scarce. It’s no use being in the right if you’re dead.’

  ‘No,’ I admitted.

  He told me about the people who lived at the hotel, of the regular visits of wealthy men who periodically left their cars in the hotel yard and retired to a room to drink themselves into a stupor that sometimes lasted for days. When they finally emerged they had glazed eyes and filthy clothes and were twitching like an animal just skinned.

  ‘Shep is like that,’ he said, ‘but he has no money and when he goes out to it they toss him into the dead house beside the stable. He’s a poor, lost bastard. Never chip him. Go along with him till he catches hold again.

  ‘Gunner tries to take a rise out of him every now and then. One night, when Shep was flat out on his back on the stable floor and breathing with a gurgle, Gunner frightened hell out of him. He cut up three candles, then lit them all round him. When Shep woke up he thought he was dead but it sobered him up.

  ‘Be careful with Gunner,’ he added. ‘He’s a bot. He’ll always be wanting to borrow two bob from you. If you lend him two bob he has a bad memory.’

  I mentioned Tiny, and Arthur smiled.

  ‘Tiny Bourke’s a fine bloke. You’d never meet a kinder bloke. He’d do anything for you. In some ways he’s got funny ideas. He thinks the war was good. He got decorated or something—I don’t know what it was—and he reckons he was fighting for his co
untry. He’s the sort of bloke that’d go again if another war broke out. He’s a stupid bastard that way.

  ‘Another strange thing about Tiny is that he has a wonderful wife. He brought her out from England.

  ‘You never want to try and score off Tiny. He was amateur heavy-weight champion of Australia for years and when he hits a bloke that bloke stays hit. He never looks for a fight but he won’t back away from it. I saw a bloke king him one day in the bar. It carried no weight and sort of glanced off Tiny. Tiny just pushed him off—could have killed him if he’d liked—and talked to him as if he were a kid.

  ‘“You know what, Frank!” he said, “you had no right to hit me, no right at all. If I’d called you the cow that you are, then you’d have had the right. Lay off me.”

  ‘He was like that but he’d take a rise out of any skite he met. Rooney, that American light-weight who hammered Silva at the stadium, used to come up here regular. He’d hold the floor in the bar. Like, he’d say: “I put Silva down for the count in Sydney and I’ll put him down for the count in Melbourne on Saturday.” He’d talk like that. He was a blowhard if ever there was one.

  ‘He got on Tiny’s nerves. Tiny caught a snake—only about six inches long but it was pretty lively. He dropped it in Rooney’s pocket when no one was looking, then when Rooney was skiting his head off he tapped him on the shoulder and said: “Excuse me, Mister Rooney, you have a death-adder in your pocket.”

  ‘ “Eh!” says Rooney and shoves his hand in to see.

  ‘He should have been an acrobat, that bloke. He went up in the air like off a springboard. Before he hit the floor again he had his coat off.’

  ‘Was he wild?’ I asked.

  Arthur looked nonplussed. ‘Wild,’ he repeated. ‘Wild! Was he wild, you say. Was he what! I’ll say he was wild.’

  ‘I think I’d like Tiny,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, you’d like him all right. He’s never nasty when he’s drunk. All he does is go stamping round and roaring: “I climbed the deck alongside Nelson with a cutlass in me mouth. There was blood and guts everywhere. It’s not nice to talk about.”