The People's Train (3 page)

Wonderful. You spoke about total overthrow as my late husband used to. None of these Kellys and Ryans do that.

Billy Foster then renewed his question. If Bender sacked men for wearing Tramways Union badges, were we sure we would stick with these men and support them in spirit and with any resources of cash and food we could get together? Again, a fury of yelling from the hall.

And let us not forget, he said, the wise advice of our Russian brother. We must be like one fist.

Again there seemed to be universal support for this, from the Wobblies, who liked the word one – one big union that ruled the earth from pole to pole – and from the sculpted smile of Mrs Hope Mockridge. But Brisbane had not had a general strike for twenty years. It was one thing to sign on to occupy foreign ground, but being on it was another thing again. As always on hearing these proposals of action, men and women thought they were listening to glad tidings of the achievement of earthly paradise.

I could have told them of Kharkov and the railway and textile and engineering workers I talked to in those days, six years back. All remembered the great drought and famine of their childhoods, and their mothers baking the bitter famine bread of rye husks and bark, nettles and moss. Some of them even mentioned it in speeches from the floor. The joined fervour they felt, hearing what had begun happening that summer in Moscow and St Petersburg, and therefore what could yet happen in Kharkov, redeemed those bitter half-toxic crumbs they’d eaten in childhood and made them meaningful or even holy. But what they were hearing from our committee were proposals not only of justice but of woe and weeping. For in the meantime, rabbles of Black Hundreds, mobs armed by the gendarmes (as – with our love for all things French – we called the police), went around the streets looking to murder unionists like them, along with Jews, students and anyone with ideas like ours.

Ah well, back to Brisbane. After I had said good evening to Mrs Pethick and Mrs Mockridge, I joined the members of our
soyuz
outside and, not being a drinking man, walked home with Suvarov, who was occasionally a drinker but had gin and vodka waiting for him at Adler’s.

Well, Artem, he said to me, twisting his long reddish features in that peculiar long-lipped smile of his, one does what one can in a distant place.

In early January, as planned on Christmas night, Billy Foster’s Tramways members turned up for work at the depots wearing their union badges and, on the orders of Joseph Freeman Bender, they were immediately dismissed. The sacked men then marched to Brisbane Trades Hall, the House of Kelly as some called it. The word went round the meatworks and wharves, where I was lugging carcases from the meatworks to the refrigerated holds of ships. We immediately stopped work and walked into town. A tremendous number of men and women had turned up to be addressed by Kelly in his sweat-stained homburg.

Kelly suggested that the meeting pass a motion to empower the leadership of unions to attend the city offices of Joseph Freeman Bender and protest the dismissals face to face. The motion was pushed into the heavens by a roar of affirmation. If you think that in talking like that I retain a certain cynicism, it was out of the suspicion that I needed to save some of my breath for the ultimate, coming porridge, the true overthrow which would occur in some indefinite future.

When Kelly read out the forty-three names of the delegation to confront Mr Bender, mine was among the others. So, I noticed, was Hope Mockridge’s, and towards the bottom of the list, close to where my own name lay, was that of the ancient, sturdy Amelia Pethick.

It had been announced in the press, in a notice paid for by Mrs Hope Mockridge, that this union delegation intended to seek a meeting with Mr Bender, and so he could now hardly back out, with the half of the city he usually spoke to telling him to put the delegation in its place, and the half he never spoke to telling him to give way.

The next afternoon there were press photographers ready to take pictures as we assembled in front of the marble gates of the offices of Brisbane Tramways in Adelaide Street. On the pavement with Kelly was a well-dressed couple, the man wiry-haired and studious-looking, the woman pale and slightly freckled under a large straw hat and a parasol, her long neck extended as if she was sniffing peril. She had a pencil in her hand and a notebook, which she kept writing in.

Kelly introduced me. Warwick O’Sullivan, president of the Australian Socialist Party, and his frowning wife, Olive.

Tom is what they call a Bolshevik. You ought to listen to these Russians. They’ve got more brands of socialism than a lolly shop.

Would you mind spelling your name, sir? asked Olive O’Sullivan.

I did so, and she wrote it in her notebook.

No, she said, apart from
Tom Samsurov,
could you spell your Russian

name?

I did so. A-r-t-e-m – but pronounced
Artyom,
I explained. She made a note of it.

They reckon in Melbourne, said O’Sullivan, that Brisbane is the Zurich of the Southern Hemisphere. All the best socialists are here because the state is so backward.
Vide
Russia!

The O’Sullivans had come up from Melbourne to observe the corroboree, Kelly said. Warwick O’Sullivan wrung my hand with a warmth that remained in my memory of him. He said something very few Australians ever said.

I’ve read about you fellows. So which faction do you belong to?

Bolsheviki, I told him. A group inside the Social Democratic Party. Since 1903, that is.

Yes, said O’Sullivan. I was reading the great Julius Martov though.
The Lesson of the Events in Russia.
He doesn’t like your group, does he?

A man from Melbourne who read Martov? This was something.

He belongs to the other faction, I explained. In their way, the differences are very wide.

Well you know, I think they’re right, those people, O’Sullivan confessed. Being a social improver won’t bring the socialist state in the end. I mean, as Olive says, we can work through the unions, but only to bring about the solidarity that will bring the whole rotten edifice down.

And it must come down, Olive murmured, making a note. Her accent was less raw than O’Sullivan’s, and I thought theirs might be the sort of alliance often seen among radicals the world over, between a self-educated worker and some lawyer’s or doctor’s carefully reared daughter.

At Kelly’s signal we moved inside the Brisbane Tramways building. It had a lift, but we took the stairs to the third floor so that our solidarity wasn’t broken up into little groups. As a creaky gentleman, I stayed behind to help Amelia of the Typists and Secretarial Services Union.

Are you sure you don’t want to take the lift? I asked her.

Not at all, said Amelia, with a tight smile. I am my association militant, and so I must take the stairs like the others!

On the third floor the leaders of our brethren found the main office door locked. It was a deliberate humiliation, to keep us there, the sweat from our stair-climbing going dry on us. Kelly knocked a number of times and called to whoever was inside that we had an appointment with Mr Bender.

That brought no response. We’re not going away, Mr Bender, cried Kelly, and don’t forget the gentlemen of the press are observing this.

Still nothing happened. Hope Mockridge in a brown jacket and a hat with flowers stepped up and began hammering on the door.

This is Hope, Freeman, you idiotic man! If you don’t open this door at once, we’ll begin singing and we won’t go away and you’ll look like a coward.

She listened for movement. Then she turned to the rest of us.

Very well, she said. Now, like a churchwoman leading a hymn, she began with ‘Workers of the World, Awaken!’ She sang in a fine contralto, joined more roughly by the rest of us. It was an Industrial Workers of the World song, a song of the Wobblies. But I wasn’t going to argue the difference between the sentiments of syndicalists like them and Marxists like me that afternoon.

We were really belting it out. Kelly the Irish tenor, O’Sullivan the baritone, Hope Mockridge the contralto, and many of the others stuck creakily between registers.

And now the door opened. There was a woman of about thirty-five standing there, flushed in the face.

I’m sorry, miss, said Hope Mockridge. They always send the workers out against the workers.

The delegation on the stairs laughed.

The woman said, Could you all come into the waiting room, please? Mr Bender will be with you in a second.

We crowded in, and the flushed woman returned to her seat behind a desk and buried her head in a journal. Beyond frosted glass beside her desk we could hear the chatter of typewriters. A door from the inner office opened and there, without intermediaries or lieutenants, was Mr Bender. He was a tall man, and he did not look happy. Immediately Hope Mockridge spoke to him.

What game are you up to, Freeman? This won’t do you any good.

I wouldn’t have expected to see you here, Mrs Mockridge. With the rabble.

No one could laugh as quickly as Mrs Mockridge if she wanted to.

With the
rabble?
she asked. Oh, you were always a master of the language.

Why are you a traitor to your kind? asked Bender, angry and stupid enough to concentrate his chagrin on this one vocal woman. What does your husband think of this?

I didn’t ask him. But you’re quite right – class traitor I am! But, Freeman, surely you are here to deal with our forty-three union representatives. Shall we leave
my
chastising to private moments?

And who should I speak to? asked Mr Bender.

Kelly said, I’m here. Charlie Kelly. The Trades and Labour Council.

Bender turned his gaze on Kelly as if he had not known of his existence until now. Clearly he saw Kelly not as the spokesman for the desires and aspirations of workers, but as some sort of accidental opportunist who had found himself a niche. Both readings were correct in a sense, but Bender faced nothing but defeat playing according to the second of these versions.

Kelly exhorted him to accept unionism and union representation within his depots and workshops. A unionised worker was a happier worker, he said. A happy worker was a productive worker. The entire unionised workforce of Queensland, said Kelly, wanted the tramway unionised as well and brought into the twentieth century, and the unions of Queensland would bring on a general strike if Mr Bender did not permit it. Mr Bender’s own business associates would not be happy at such a prospect.

It was gratifying to me as a jumped-up peasant and railway worker to discover that management are as uniformly foolish as we would like to depict them – just as owned by their narrow interest as the poor are by their hunger.

Mr Bender said, I am on record as being opposed to unionism on principle. And on principle, I will not let it operate within my workshops and depots.

Without unionism, Kelly asked, how are your men to ask for better conditions?

Man to man, said Mr Bender. Face to face.

You mean slave to master, Mr Bender?

You paint the picture any way you like.

Some men groaned. Amelia Pethick had recovered her breath and found her voice. She called in a fluting manner, Your relationship to your workers is too unequal, Mr Bender. It’s a machine against flesh. You know that.

More slumming ladies, Mrs Pethick, said Bender.

It was a further mistake of his to attack an old favourite of the crowd’s.

Shame, Freeman, shame! said the tigress Hope Mockridge.

Kelly remained sturdy amid all this. Despised by Bender but not taking a backward step.

So you are sure you want this, Mr Bender? he asked.

You will find, said Bender, that the premier of this splendid state is already swearing in special constables to deal with your scum. Do you know why I oppose unions? Do you really want to know? I’ll tell you. Because they strangle new creation, that’s why. I have in my employ an engineer who has devised a wonder of the age, a single-line train he calls a monorail. This is happening here, in Brisbane – yes, in dreamy old Brisbane. This tram or train or whatever you call it runs on a single rail!

I thought, That engineer is Rybakov.

How am I, asked Bender, full of just rage, to find the funds to build such a system, the first in the world, if I am to be bled white by unions? I won’t find them, and the world will be the poorer.
You
will be the poorer. I ask you to desist and back off and respect the spirit of invention.

You can have both, you bastard, one of our delegates called. Pull something out of your own bloody pocket to build your own fucking railway.

Please, leave my office, Bender cried out, or I shall call the police.

Then, said Kelly, it’s on for young and old.

Let it be, said Bender.

We filed out again, my role among the revolutionaries of Queensland being to help Mrs Pethick back down the steps. I felt I had known that strong old woman a long time. But forthright Mrs Mockridge seemed a more remote figure than that.

We all marched back to Trades Hall and were put to work on the same huge floor. Hope Mockridge worked frantically, speaking to businesses on the telephone, persuading them to give discounts to union members, and calling journalists she knew on the
Brisbane Telegraph,
all of them secretly sympathetic but wary for the sake of their jobs. Mrs Pethick clattered out letters of great length with an ease that spoke well of her ageing knuckles. She had brought some of her union girls in to do work for us.

Suvarov and I took a job no one else seemed to want. From the crowd of strikers milling outside, Rybakov, Suvarov and I recruited three hundred solid men to supervise the marches and keep order when the strike began. I called on men I knew from the railway workshops, from the meatworks, and men from the tramways who were friends of Rybakov – who seemed, for an ailing man, to know every muscular fellow in the state of Queensland. These marshals were to keep order – Kelly was big on that – but also to be a vanguard, and if necessary to protect their fellows from police batons and from arrest.

My and Suvarov’s three hundred constables, once I’d got them together, were suddenly not really mine or Suvarov’s to command – I worked hand in hand with a compact, wiry, and apparently nervous fellow named Riley, an official of the Clerks’ Union who had previously been a sergeant of the Queensland police. Kelly gave the final control to him because Australians did not like to take orders from anyone too foreign. I did not mind so much, since Riley consulted me on everything. Riley was emphatic that our constables were to prevent looting and disorder, because that’s what the press and the government would like to see. But he and I were still arguing the m atter of what they should do if directly attacked by mounted police. It was difficult to form a phalanx against horses and swinging clubs.

Should we put our marshals on horseback? I asked.

Where would we get that many mounts from? asked Riley, making the point that if we gathered the sort of back paddock horse some workers had for the kids to ride to school, in a crush and a panic they could do as much harm to the strikers as the police might.

As I gathered the list of marshals together the idea came to me of asking my two comrades, Pethick and Mockridge, to join me at the Samarkand Café in Merrivale Street for Russian tea. They were curious about Russia, and I had a warm regard for both of them. (I admit I found Hope Mockridge enchanting in a way normal to a man, a way it was best to own up to rather than permit to turn morbid.)

I approached Amelia Pethick and issued my invitation. Amelia smiled and said she would be dependent on Hope for escort but that she would be very interested to taste authentic Russian tea. I then chased down the frenetic Hope Mockridge, who was visiting Trades Hall during her lunch break from her other role as a lawyer in the attorney-general’s office. She stopped work, and she stopped frowning too, and said yes, she would be pleased to accompany Mrs Pethick. We were now forswearing the trams, but she was sure she could get one of the men who were lending their services as drivers to take them over to South Brisbane.

On the day, I finished my day’s work on the docks and washed myself at the pump at Mrs Adler’s back garden and hurried to the Samarkand to await the arrival of the two women. The owners of the teashop were half-Russian, half-Tartar and came from the city after which the teahouse was named. I chatted to the husband and wife as the daughter made sweet cakes in the kitchen out the back, occasionally coming out to join in the conversation herself. A number of the older members of the Russian Emigrants Union, not all of them admirers of mine, were already ensconced at tables reading year-old Russian newspapers. I went to my own table with a Sydney paper that had been shipped up the coast, and read a dreary piece on land taxes. My hands, unaware that I was supposed to be a grown revolutionary, were sweaty enough to pick up ink stains from the newsprint.

When the door opened, Hope Mockridge entered on her own. She was the type of political woman I had seen before and had an attraction to – elegant without having to concentrate on it, or without it having to be the point. Such women frowned greatly but always had a solid income behind them. Mrs Mockridge held her purse in front of her, as to shield herself from Russian strangeness in the middle of South Brisbane, but she also carried the half-smile of a child who expected to have wonders revealed to her.

The old committee members of the
soyuz
watched like stunned fish, mouths agape, as she passed. She was an exotic bird in the Samarkand Café. They closed their mouths and bent to hiss at each other. As if I had put their beloved old association in further peril still by inviting Australians to tea.

Is Mrs Pethick coming separately? I asked her.

She sends her sincerest apologies, Mrs Mockridge told me. She is exhausted by her work. But she said she would be grateful to be asked in the future.

I moved a chair out to seat Mrs Mockridge.

I understand, I told her.

She also said that she didn’t think I needed a chaperone. Do I, Mr Samsurov?

I guarantee your safety, madam. I sat down.

She looked me in the eye. That is a guarantee I trust, she said.

Kelly would never forgive me if I did anything to destroy your faith in the working class, I said.

Dear God, she said. At the end all you care about is the opinion of other men. You are a man of your own mind, aren’t you?

I told her I wouldn’t give myself such high praise.

Are you married, Tom? she asked. In Russia?

I told her no. I have not had the time, I said. But you are married, Mrs Mockridge.

My husband is a very distinguished lawyer, she said, with a trace of mockery. He is ... he’s not well. Certainly not all the time.

I had already spoken to Kelly about this, and knew that her husband was what they called a silk, a King’s Counsel, but that he was a dipsomaniac who had been – until a recent reform – advanced enough in that disease that people had begun to avoid using him, even though his position in society was still very high, the Mockridges being one of those old pastoralist families of Queensland whose mental habits and view of the world might not have been so far from that of Russian nobles.

On the subject of marriage, I asked Hope Mockridge, have you seen the O’Sullivans? They are such a devoted couple.

In fact, they reminded me of my old friends and mentors Vladimir Ilich and Krupskaya, with Krupskaya as the inexhaustible recorder and transcriber of a great mind.

Don’t you think, asked Hope, that she’s perhaps too devoted?

So, a wife can be too devoted?

She can be if she doesn’t have room to look around on her own behalf. And even breathe for herself.

The daughter of the house set the teapot on top of the samovar and laid a plate of sweet cakes on the table. Next she brought a bowl of honey and another of apricot jam. I asked Mrs Hope Mockridge whether she would have honey or jam in her tea, and when she said honey, I spooned some into our sturdy glass tumblers. The daughter took the teapot, poured into it a small concentrate of tea from the samovar, then opened the lower tap to pour water into our pot. This – to me – ordinary process fascinated Hope Mockridge.

Why doesn’t she just pour it straight from the top tap? she asked when the girl had gone.

She’d be arrested for murder, I said. There’s a
zavarka,
an essence of tea, in the samovar. It seeps through the water, but if it’s too highly concentrated it will take your breath away and give you hallucinations, or even a heart attack.

I don’t believe it, she said, smiling.

Prisoners, I said, real prisoners in Russia, drink the
zavarka
in the hope they’ll die.

A person can suicide with tea? asked Hope Mockridge, laughing, but willing to be convinced. Then she frowned. It must be so terrible what the tsar’s police do to prisoners!

Taste the tea. You will find it delightful.

She tasted it, and claimed she found it to be first class.

You must think me a prize idiot, she said then. I am perhaps too fascinated by Russia. It comes from reading
War and Peace
when a person is just seventeen. The most marvellous book to read during a long summer on a Queensland sheep station.

Tolstoy is sentimental about peasants, I told her. He could afford to be. He had enough of them working for him.

Yes, but he worked
with
them, didn’t he? He wore peasant clothing.

I admitted that was so. It was a well-meaning question on her part. Russia was very hard to explain to someone on a humid afternoon in Queensland. Even to a woman so interested in it. When I was a child, my mother’s family still mocked the young city people who had come to the villages before I was born, thinking that the peasant commune was a union of humble people who had renounced their egoism – the commune a sort of model locomotive that would take all Russians straight from agricultural life to a socialist republic.

The Russian peasants Tolstoy worked with will never make a revolution on their own, I told Mrs Mockridge. They will stand up occasionally if their crops or cattle are taken, and face the Cossack cavalry, but they will always lose and go back to God and vodka and prayers for the tsar. They dream of seizing the earth but have no scheme at all to overthrow the things that have made the earth a misery.

I told her about Mikhail Romas, a nobleman, who was what could be called an Agrarian Socialist – that is, one who believed the revolution would come from the countryside. He took with him into the world of the peasants his twenty-year-old protégé, Maxim Gorki, the future author – indeed, my favourite author of all. They tried to set up peasant cooperatives – Romas trying and trying far more than Gorki. Endlessly, against discouragement, even when the local money-lenders put dynamite in his firewood, he tried. Gorki was a peasant like me, and he knew as Romas didn’t what he and his friend were really up against. Whereas people like Romas, those young ‘go-to-the-people’ radicals, didn’t understand that the peasant hated all outsiders for a start. People like Romas did not comprehend the truth about men like my grandfather, a humorous but vicious old goat who had his own capitalist desires – to buy timber land, to acquire a mill, to burn elegant kerosene lamps in his house. And some of his friends, grasping old village shop-owners who wanted to keep prices high and looked upon the young university students with their bourgeois guilt and their talk of the Christian nature of cooperatives with disbelief.

You are hard on the peasants, she said.

Well, I am one. Forgive me, but the idea that people can become ennobled by misery is a very bourgeois one.

And hence the sort of notion I have is false? she asked me with a smile. Oh dear, I do have a great deal to learn.

Please, I said, you can’t be expected to understand all the complications. You know far more than most about the whole sorry mess.

I called for the girl to come and refill Hope’s cup, and urged her to try the cakes.

She took one. I dare not have too many, she told me. My mother and aunts are all very plump. And I am very vain. It’s disgraceful. Why should a woman care how she looks? But for some reason I do.

Because the world is pleased to see beauty, I told her, prickling with sudden internal heat. It’s no small thing to enliven the world with beauty.

Well, she said, Australian men don’t generally speak as well as that of women. If we’re lucky, we might be complimented by comparison to stud cattle or merino sheep.

In Russia too. I regret you might be less preferred than a draughthorse.

She smiled. You seem so sure of what you know, Tom, whereas we are all over the place with our ideas.

We have had the help of great thinkers, I told her. Kelly is a wonderful fellow but no one would say a great thinker.

It’s a long time since a general strike has been contemplated, she told me. If I were a believer I would pray for its success.

I did not dare say yet that sometimes the point was to lose. That losing could be winning. Instead, I asked her about her family.

Hers was in its way a characteristic Queensland tale. Queensland had been a British penal outpost before it was named to honour Britain’s Queen Victoria. When it became its own self-governing region, as it now was under a federal constitution, its size was three times that of the Ukraine. Into the downs country west of Brisbane had come pastoralists, great ranchers who settled on ‘stations’ of thousands upon thousands of acres, and then reached further and further out into fringes of stone and desert, looking for pasture. Her grandfather, she said, was one of the pastoralists whom Kelly and his ilk denounced. He came from Northern Ireland, she told me, and I had already sentimentally decided that Hope Mockridge’s looks were classically Celtic. He was one of the men who had tried to destroy the Shearers’ Union twenty years before, and had brought in troops and Gatling guns.

But he was also a kindly old fellow, she went on, and he loved me, the fact that I had a bit of spirit. But you see, the kindliest of men always
do
combine to protect their interests. It’s almost not their fault, even if it’s unjust. But it’s what humans do. You can’t expect capital not to behave like capital, or property like property. Decent men, affectionate men – they all behave badly under the wrong system, a system of land grabs and land hunger. On the good side, he treated shearers well – he didn’t feed them on offal and off-cuts like some pastoralists. But like Bender, he hated the idea of them banding together to get more out of him. Wasn’t he being generous enough already? That was what he always asked. He certainly thought he was. He said to me once, They’d take my land if they could. He had a strong sense of what socialism is, and talked about it more and more as he got older. I think he made me interested in it too, and that was an outcome he wouldn’t have liked. And yet, men like him ... their story will, I’m sure, not be without interest at some future date.

For the moment, I admitted, I believe your grandfather has little to fear. At least for twenty more years...