The Touch (42 page)

An application to Sergeant Thwaites of the Kinross police for permission to speak in public in Kinross Square next Sunday afternoon was received with wary suspicion, but a telephone call to Sir Alexander fixed that.

“You can speak, Mr. Talgarth, and so can any other man if he wants. Sir Alexander says that free speech is the foundation of true democracy, and he won’t oppose it.”

So the rumors are correct, thought Bede, striding away with that sailor’s gait. Alexander Kinross did spend time in America. No Scot born and bred who hadn’t been there would use phrases like “true democracy.” Even mention the word “democracy” to a stout supporter of the British in Sydney, and he reacted like a bull to a red rag—arrant American nonsense! All men were not equal!

Damn, where was O’Donnell? They had agreed to meet at the hotel just after lunch, but the afternoon wore on without a sign of the fellow. Finally, coming on dusk, he appeared looking a trifle disheveled.

“What have you been up to, Sam?” Bede asked, picking burrs off O’Donnell’s coat.

“A bit of slap-and-tickle,” said O’Donnell with a chuckle.

“You were supposed to be with me so you could introduce me to the laid-off workers, Sam, not off philandering.”

“I wasn’t phil-whatever,” O’Donnell said sulkily. “If you saw her, you’d understand.”

DURING THE six days he was in Kinross, Bede Talgarth began to make inroads among the laid-off workers who were boilermakers, fitters, turners, mechanics or laborers in the refinery and the many other workshops affected by a cut in gold production; the train would now run only once a week, as coal consumption was well down. Only one in every four coal miners at the Apocalypse colliery in Lithgow still had their jobs.

The gold miners, Bede learned, were impossible to woo for his cause. Extremely well paid, working a six-hour shift once in each twenty-four hours for five out of each seven days with additional compensation for night shifts, they stood at a clean mine face illuminated by strong electric light and well ventilated from air shafts equipped with electric-driven fans. Blasting was safe and no man entered the blast area before the dust had fully settled. Into the bargain, they were heavily outnumbered by colliers in the Amalgamated Miners’ Association, which they deemed a union for colliers. Finally came a point that Bede Talgarth, ex-collier, had never taken into account until he came to Kinross: gold miners looked down on coal miners as inferior beings because gold miners were better paid and did cleaner work in better conditions, didn’t come off a shift black with coal dust and coughing their lungs out from silicosis.

His speech in Kinross Square on Sunday afternoon went down very well. He had had a bright idea, and brought in a big group of colliers from Lithgow to swell that part of the audience willing to cheer. Feeling vindicated, he discovered that the Lithgow contingent also contained men from the brickworks, the ironworks and Samuel Mort’s freezing works. Too clever to rail against Sir Alexander Kinross alone, Bede concentrated upon how little the employees made from Apocalypse’s colossal profits, and painted a verbal picture of utopian days wherein wealth would be equally distributed, no man living in a mansion, no man living in a slum. Then he proceeded to the Chinese, who threatened the livelihood of every white Australian worker; cheap labor was a vital part of the capitalist equation, witness the kidnapping of black Melanesians to work as virtual slaves on the Queensland sugar plantations. They were yet another reason why Australia had to be a white country, all other races excluded. For, said Bede, the human species was naturally exploitative, so the only way to prevent exploitation was to make opportunities to exploit nonexistent.

The speech made Bede Evans Talgarth famous overnight in Kinross, and on the Monday he walked about surrounded by admirers. The Lithgow contingent begged him to speak in Lithgow the following Sunday, and even some of the Apocalypse gold miners patted him on the back. More, he admitted to himself ruefully, because they had enjoyed listening to a superb orator than because they intended any industrial action. That two-faced bastard Sir Alexander was also doing some speaking, but to small groups, and to the tune that he had always been a good employer, therefore they should believe him when he said he couldn’t afford to keep up production. Bede still had a lot of work to do in Kinross.

WORK THAT was not to be done. On August 6 a telegram from the Trades and Labour Council recalled Bede to Sydney. News had come that the Pastoralists’ “Union” was shipping non-union bales of wool from the country to Sydney to be loaded aboard overseas-owned ships. The Sydney Wharf Labourers’ Union declared the wool “black” and refused to load it. In the midst of which a dispute blew up between the shipowners and the maritime unions, starting with the Marine Officers’ Association and going all the way down the pecking order. The Newcastle colliery owners then locked their miners out, so the miners on every other coal-field in the state struck in sympathy. Industrial chaos even extended to the Broken Hill silver mines, where the owners suspended all work due to the fact, they said, that bullion couldn’t be shipped.

The strikes spread like wildfire and eventually involved over 50,000 workers of all kinds. A brawl in Sydney saw the Riot Act read out, and bitterness grew in pace with the privations the strikers began to suffer. Thanks to that huge donation to the London dockers in 1889, union funds couldn’t meet the demand for strike pay on the home front.

The strikes, which had begun early in August of 1890, rolled on until the end of October, when the unions crumbled in the face of more than obdurate employers and lack of money; the whole continent was now feeling the escalating economic crisis. By mid-November the wharf laborers, coal miners and others were forced to return to work with their demands unmet. Employers won a great victory, for they came out of those terrible three months with the right to hire non-union labor, even in industries that until now had been closed shops. The last to yield were the shearers of sheep.

Alexander had closed the Apocalypse Mine completely when the silver mines at Broken Hill shut down, pleading the same excuse: he couldn’t ship his bullion. About the colliers at his Lithgow mine Alexander didn’t care, but he was too astute to punish his Kinross workers, to whom he paid a subsistence wage slightly higher than union strike pay. Luck had been on his side; when the nation went back to work, Alexander’s economy measures seemed pale.

KINROSS HAD become a distant memory for Bede Talgarth. He licked his wounds along with the rest of the labor movement, and turned his attention to the next elections for the New South Wales Legislative Assembly, which was the elected lower house. They weren’t due until 1892, but now was the time for planning. The three-month nationwide strikes had crippled many families on the breadline, and he was going to be one of the men who, by legislation, would take them off the breadline.

A forward-thinking man, he considered the Sydney electorates wherein a Labor candidate stood a chance; they were many, as Sydney now held almost half a million people. Inner-city venues like Redfern, almost certain to return a Labor man, were so hotly contested by senior Labor men that Bede knew he’d lose the race to be Labor’s official candidate. Therefore he would stand for a more marginal seat, and decided to go just southwest of the dreary industrial wastelands around the filthy rivers that trickled into Botany Bay. Here he thought he’d get enough votes in the Labor pre-selection ballot, then enough votes in the state elections themselves to be returned as a Member of the Legislative Assembly. Mind made up, he moved to his chosen electorate and worked with indefatigable energy to become a well-known figure there—warm, passionate, caring.

THE MOMENT the strikes were over Alexander packed his trunks and took ship for San Francisco. Much to his displeasure, Ruby flatly refused to go with him.

NELL’S FIFTEENTH birthday was, in her opinion, a disaster. A letter had come from her father that told her he had undergone a change of mind; she would now wait until 1892 to commence engineering at Sydney University. The four boys, older than she, would also wait out this year of 1891 in Kinross so that the five of them would, as originally planned, go up together.

“I think it’s important that I be in Kinross and Sydney when you start at university,” said his neat, straight up-and-down handwriting. “Of course I realize that this postponement won’t come as a joy to you, but button down your feelings and accept my decision, Nell. It’s made in your best interests.”

Nell went straight to her mother brandishing the letter like a rioter a flaming torch.

“What did you say to him?” the girl demanded, face scarlet.

“I beg your pardon?” Elizabeth asked blankly.

“What did you say to him when you wrote to him?”

“Wrote to whom? Your father?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mum, stop acting the fool!”

“I don’t care for your tone or your language, Nell, and I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”

“This!” Nell cried, shaking the letter under Elizabeth’s nose. “Daddy says I can’t start engineering this year, I have to wait until I’m sixteen!”

“Oh, thank God for that!” said Elizabeth, sighing in relief.

“What an actress you are! As if you didn’t know! Well, you do know! It was you made him change his mind—what did you say?”

“You have my word, Nell, that I have said nothing whatsoever.”

“Your word! What a laugh! You’re the most dishonest woman I know, Mum, and that’s a fact. The only pleasure you get out of life is making mischief for me with Daddy!”

“You are mistaken,” said Elizabeth woodenly, withdrawing. “I cannot pretend that I’m not glad you have to wait, but it’s not of my doing. If you doubt me, go and talk to Auntie Ruby.”

But the tears wouldn’t be stemmed another instant; Nell ran from the conservatory bawling like a six-year-old.

“Her father has spoiled her,” said Mrs. Surtees, an involuntary witness of this outburst. “It is a pity, Lady Kinross, because she is a nice girl at heart. Very unselfish.”

“I know,” said Elizabeth, looking despondent.

“She’ll get over it,” Mrs. Surtees said, and departed.

Yes, she’ll get over it, Elizabeth thought, but she won’t like me any better once she does. I can’t seem to find the key to Nell. The trouble is, I suppose, that she’s so far on her father’s side that I am to blame for anything and everything that doesn’t meet with her approval. Poor little thing! She topped the state in her matriculation exams last November, so what on earth can she do to keep her mind occupied for another year? I think that Alexander came to this decision not so much for Nell’s sake as because he must have realized that the four boys aren’t up to it yet. And if they don’t go, Nell can’t go. But why didn’t he explain that to her? If he had, she’d surely not blame me. A rhetorical question, really. Alexander does whatever he can to keep Nell and me apart.

Nor was it any use going to Ruby for comfort; she had made it up with Alexander, albeit at a distance. When he did come home they would fall into each other’s arms like Venus and Mars. A shiver of fear rippled down Elizabeth’s backbone. With Ruby to come home to, Alexander might well return earlier than planned.

WITHIN TEN minutes of that encounter with Nell, Elizabeth confronted another member of her feminine family. Jade.

“Miss Lizzy, please may I speak to you for a moment?” Jade asked, standing in the conservatory doorway.

How peculiar! thought Elizabeth, staring at her. Pretty, eternally youthful Jade looked ninety years old.

“Come in and sit down, Jade.”

Jade sidled in, perched herself on the edge of a white cane chair and squeezed her hands together in her lap, trembling.

“My dear, what is it?” Elizabeth asked, sitting beside her.

“It’s Anna, Miss Lizzy.”

“Oh, don’t tell me she’s run off again!”

“No, Miss Lizzy.”

“Then what is wrong with Anna?” It was not an anxious query; only yesterday, during her shift with Anna, she had thought how well the girl looked—clear skin, lustrous eyes. At thirteen and three-quarters, Anna was settling into physical maturity far more easily than Nell. If only she didn’t behave so atrociously while she had her courses!

Jade managed to speak. “I suppose it’s all the fuss we’ve had in the last few months—strikes—Sir Alexander going away—” Jade stopped, licked her lips, started to shake rather than tremble.

“Tell me, Jade. Whatever it is, I won’t be annoyed.”

“Anna hasn’t had her courses in four months, Miss Lizzy.”

Eyes wide, jaw dropped, Elizabeth gazed at Jade in dawning horror. “She’s missed three times?”

“Or four. As best I can remember, Miss Lizzy. I dread her courses so much that I don’t want to think of them. My sweet baby held down, fed opium, screaming—I put them out of my mind! Until today, when she said, ‘Anna no bleed anymore.’ ”

Chilled to the bone, a weight on her chest heavier than lead, Elizabeth got to her feet and flew up the stairs, forcing her pace to a walk as she neared Anna’s room.

The girl was sitting on the floor playing with a heap of daisies she had gathered out of the lawn; Jade had taught her to poke a slit in their stems and thread them together to form a chain. Elizabeth surveyed her through new eyes. Anna is a woman in full bloom. A beautiful face and body, a beautiful innocence because the mind belongs to a three-year-old. Anna, my Anna! What have they done to you? You’re thirteen!

“Mum!” said Anna cheerfully, extending her daisy chain.

“Yes, it’s lovely, dear. Thank you.” Elizabeth looped the flowers around her neck and went to Anna to lift her to her feet. “Jade just found a tick in the daisies—tick! Nasty old bitey tick. We have to see if you got a tick on you, so will you take off your clothes?”

“Erk! Nasty tick!” said Anna, who remembered the occasion when she had had a tick embedded in her arm. “Calamine!” she squealed. A three-syllable word of great importance to Anna, who knew that it took the itch and sting out of hurties.