The Electrical Experience Read online

  Tutman had cylinders of gas. He had a 2 h.p. American kerosene engine. Tutman’s father indulged him. Considered him a genius. George also, in those days, considered Tutman a genius. Tutman’s father probably didn’t know at first, looking back, just how elaborate and how dangerous the set-up in the shed had been.

  Tutman played around with the early refrigerants. Tutman was always making ice with maniacal ecstasy.

  George would ride his horse into town on Sunday afternoons and go straight to Tutman’s laboratory.

  ‘Want to see me freeze a mouse?’

  A white mouse would be taken from Tutman’s breeding cage.

  He would choke back pity and watch the white mouse, pink-nosed, freeze in a jar in a flurry of squeaks and twistings.

  The ice would form and finally in the clear, solid ice, as if in a glass case, the mouse would be held, paw and nose against the ice.

  He’d always been disappointed, always hoping that when the ice melted the mouse would still be alive. The mouse never revived. They experimented with resuscitation, using electrical shocks, but they never succeeded.

  There was an explosive device, or so Tutman said, and traps of other kinds for anyone who tried to break into the shed. Tutman talked of a ‘secret ray’. Tutman hinted that he would be pleased to see someone try to break into the laboratory—to test the effectiveness of the traps.

  ‘Want to see some fireworks?’

  He had seen Tutman’s gunpowder and home-made fire works many times.

  Tutman lost a finger that way.

  The doctor had been unable to find the finger. Tutman had, in fact, put it in his pocket.

  Tutman showed him the finger later in a jar of formalin.

  Tutman preserved the tattered finger for amusement.

  To have given money to Tutman now, these many years later, would have been to risk catching one’s own hand in the Cogs of Progress. Tutman, who had always been so ahead of his times, had fallen behind and was lost.

  Hallstrom, the Kelvinator, the Leonard refrigerator, and the Cogs of Progress were destroying him. He could always find work—at the diary factory, maybe.

  But he realised that Tutman would never work for wages. He was the independent business man, inventor. In recent years, brooding, drinking, allowing himself and his business to run down.

  Why, he’d suggested to Tutman time and time again that the system of ice delivery to the home was the weak point in his organisation.

  Ice-men dripping water through the house, the unshaven ice-men with their hessian bags. No good. Not modern. They were always hired for their muscle, never for their appearance. They should have been Ambassadors of Ice. And the size of the blocks shrinking in the sun.

  He had suggested to Tutman an ice servery. A flap in the wall of the house so that the ice could be put through into the ice-chest from the outside. Night deliveries. But Tutman stopped thinking somewhere in the late twenties. Shut down his mind. He had at one time suggested to Tutman a partnership in his own cordial-making business, maybe going into ice-cream. That was some years back. Thank god, Tutman had not taken up the offer.

  It did no good to fist-fight with refrigerator salesmen in the street. Or to heckle Hallstrom at the show demonstrations.

  We are but the engine-drivers of Progress—we do not make the timetable.

  He learned by telephone message next day that James Tutman had disappeared during the night, leaving his wife, his two almost grown children, and a bankrupt ice-making business.

  He was, as a man of feeling, disturbed by the news. It was quite a knock. But as a realist he was somewhat relieved. Supposing of course that he had simply left town. Gone to some other town.

  He did not admire himself for his sense of relief, but, on the other hand, did not relish facing Tutman in the street or seeing him decline into god-knows-what. Somehow it was best, he felt in the hours following the news, that Tutman rule off the book at this point. The town could care for his wife.

  Tutman was a lesson. He himself was considering going into shop and café refrigeration. Keeping up. The domestic refrigerator could well mean the end of wholesale ice-cream, and he had decided against that idea. With electric refrigeration people would be making ice-cream in their homes.

  Tutman was a lesson for us all.

  Tutman’s sunburned body was found some days later in the bush not far from town. The post-mortem showed that it had been death by cyanide poisoning, which caused much comment and reached the city papers. His wife testified that for a year or so Tutman had carried in his pocket a small phial of cyanide. She had beseeched him not to be morbid. He had even prepared a phial for her and the children. She described her husband as in a state of chronic depression. He said the town had turned its back on him. No longer needed him. His career had come to an end before his life had run its course.

  The local paper incorrectly stated that Tutman had invented the block of ice.

  How Tutman Froze the Mouse

  George thought that Tutman froze the mouse by first preparing a ten per cent dilution of sulphuric acid in water. He chilled this and then placed it in a stone jug. He added a handful of Glauber’s salts for each quart of solution. The mouse, in a tube of water, was immersed in the solution, which dropped dramatically in temperature.

  Why Ice Is Superior to a Refrigerator

  Ice is instantly ready for use and begins to cool the food immediately.

  Ice carries humidity and moisture necessary for food preservation. There is no dehydration of the food.

  Refrigerators create ‘dry cold’, which takes the moisture from the food.

  Gas could leak from a refrigerator, causing sickness or even death.

  Ice is a natural product, existing in nature.

  Ice keeps a uniform temperature and does not vary with the electrical current.

  Ice-cooling is silent.

  Measuring the Weight of Ice

  This is a method which may serve to remove unjust suspicions or to detect short weight. Multiply the length, breadth and thickness of a block of ice in inches and divide by thirty. This will give, very closely, the weight in pounds.

  RULES AND PRACTICES FOR THE OVERCOMING OF SHYNESS

  RULES AND PRACTICES FOR THE OVERCOMING OF SHYNESS

  Always walk up to a man as if he owes you money.

  Train yourself to look at the bridge of the other man’s nose, to give the impression that you are staring him straight in the eye.

  Speak out with a loud voice and you will finish strongly: begin weakly and you will finish weakly.

  Sometimes to be heard amid the shouting it is necessary to speak softly.

  Learn when to remain silent, thus forcing the other fellow to speak.

  Before meeting with a stranger, make a list of conversational items.

  Learn the beginning and the end of a speech, so that you begin and end fluently.

  Go out of your way to meet the Great. Keep the company of those older and superior to yourself. By doing so, you will gain knowledge and, at the same time, gain confidence through observing the weaknesses and foibles of your superiors.

  Joust with your shyness by putting it constantly to the test.

  Remember that these are but tricks and rules. Learn your trade well. Self-confidence grows from ability, as does your value as a person in the society of men.

  Even so, in 1936, George McDowell was still dogged by shyness. The typed-out rules hung, pasted on cardboard, but he had to admit they’d become somewhat a fixture in the office. But also, he sincerely hoped, a fixture in his mind.

  His experience with American Rotary during a visit to that country as a young man had convinced him of the need to overcome the unconfident reserve in the Australian character and the shyness so painfully hobbling his own character. Yet one had to avoid also the adolescent boisterousness and Sentimental Bloke cockiness which the working-class used to conceal their inferiority. In a talk only recently to his own Rotary Club he had recalled that visit and said, �
��We need to cultivate bonhomie and, to some extent, “abandon” (there had been some winking, a rustle of chuckles at this). As business men we come to dinner bearing the impression of the day’s work, but we need to throw this aside as far as is humanly possible and give ourselves up more to a free exhibition of fellowship.’

  The words expressed his own deep yearning and in some ways his deepest regret that at thirty-three he was known as a man difficult at times to approach and of formal manner.

  Although this appealed to him as an image also of ‘strong character’, he did try at times to relax it. He diligently learned jokes to tell so as to put people at ease, especially staff and such, but, no, he was a stiff man. He didn’t drink, which was a drawback.

  He’d even been embarrassed when, after giving his talk, ‘Bonhomie—the French Have a Word for It’, he was approached by a visiting Rotarian from Nowra who congratulated him on the talk and asked for concrete suggestions on how to achieve this ‘bonhomie’.

  He could only repeat in a rather unhelpful way the idea of ‘stunts’ at club meetings, which was an American idea.

  What he thought, but could not get out with any clarity, was that ‘making a fool’ of oneself, or at least ‘playing the fool’, was a way of ‘getting outside oneself’.

  Yet one had to know how to play the fool without becoming a fool. And he opposed alcohol at club meetings on the grounds of standards. Meetings could become nothing more than smokos with blue jokes, which was not what Rotary was about nor what he had in mind. No, he wanted a sort of circumscribed and clean playing-up, but he had not made it at all clear and nothing came of his talk. He heard later that after he’d left, a few of the jokers at the club had chosen to take his talk the wrong way and to suggest that he had some pretty wild schemes for livening up the meetings. There was always someone who never missed an opportunity to take things the wrong way. Sometimes, he thought, joking was used to chase away an idea.

  His life was a Shyness Test.

  He was shy but not timid. He drove his spirit into combat with shyness, and although on each occasion he defeated shyness, it came back, shyness returned, refreshed.

  He went out of his way to meet the great. He’d met Paul Harris, founder of Rotary, on his recent visit to Australia. He’d met the American writer, Zane Grey, down at Bermagui. But this year one event, more than all others in his life, had seemed to diminish his shyness, terrorise it even, so that it receded as a factor in his life.

  The event was his burning-down of the Crowhurst house.

  H. C. Crowhurst, retired accountant, old friend of George’s father, had lived with his two aged sisters, who both pre deceased him eighteen and twenty months respectively, and his will stated that, there being no surviving relatives, their house and its contents were to be destroyed by fire.

  ‘I do not wish strangers to trespass on, or have the use of, that which my dear sisters and I cherished, shared, and par took of, throughout our lifetimes together on this earth.’ The will named George as executor.

  Crowhurst had declined in the last year, rarely coming down to the town, although he had, until a few years back, done George’s books. George out of respect for his father’s old friends had continued the weekly call, expecting as he walked up the path, on each visit to the house on the hill among the Norfolk pines, to find old Harry dead.

  As it happened, the District Nurse had been the one to find old Harry dead.

  George had at first made some remarks, along with the rest, about the seemingly wanton destruction but inwardly found the commission emotionally quickening, lured by its abnormality. Such an unnatural act for the town, striving as it was to shape itself, the homes and shops along the gravel streets, to make itself a normal town along with the rest in the State. But just this once he was quickened, and allowed him self to be. He went along with the unnatural act which had befallen him. He kept, however, a solemn face when confirming the legality of the will with Sime, a city lawyer.

  For weeks he gave detailed and private consideration to the technique for burning the house and its contents. He even thought of explosives. He tried to talk confidentially and scientifically about it with Tutman, a scientifically minded friend from childhood. Tutman in the old days would have entered into it with relish but now lacked the spark. Tutman had sunk personally through business and other difficulties, maintaining a false sense of superiority by mixing now with inferiors in the public bars.

  So he ended up doing it alone and was glad.

  Although he told only the local fire brigade and police sergeant, the word got around, and children and others drifted up to the house on the hill to see it burn.

  He began by drenching the contents of the house with kerosene. One musty room after another. Sloshing the kerosene over the lace doilies, the crocheted tableclothes, the antimacassars, the rotted brown flowers in vases, the worn arm chairs, where Crowhurst and the sisters had sat each evening for fifty years or more, the potted ferns, the bamboo hall stands. The books of Keats, Kipling, and the complete novels of Sir Walter Scott. The oilskin on the kitchen table, the kitchen smelling of toast, preserves, lysol, and carbolic.

  He drenched the concertina files of letters, the spiked receipts, dockets, years of petty transaction.

  Backhouse, from the local newspaper, joined him and wanted to remove the books.

  ‘A crime, George. Give them to the School of Arts.’

  He respected reading and agreed with Backhouse about the crime, thinking as he did that he had never committed a crime, and thinking then that this was not legally a crime, yet resembled criminality. However, he told Backhouse, one undertook a commission in every detail and to the detail, or not at all. ‘I’m that sort of person.’

  ‘I know you’re that sort of person, George.’

  He went on drenching. Backhouse shook his head.

  Backhouse’s disapproval and the books in the bookcase soon to be aflame opened a throttle in him and he vibrated inwardly with the complete unnaturalness of it, the permitted unnaturalness of it. He drenched the rows of books with great vigour, seeing the kerosene spread and seek its way down the spines, running along the gutters of dust at the tops of the books. Literary genius about to burn. His spirit, far from quailing, was empowered.

  Paintings hung on the wall—of English villages and rustic scenes—none, he’d been told, of high value. He drenched those too.

  The Hoe Man. He stopped at the painting of the Hoe Man and remembered Hubbard’s lines: ‘Let us all hoe a little and then the hoe man will not for ever be looking at the soil.’

  ‘What is it, George?’ Backhouse’s voice reached him distantly. ‘Second thoughts?’

  ‘I was thinking of the Hoe Man.’

  ‘You know the poem?’ Backhouse seemed surprised.

  ‘No—an essay by Elbert Hubbard.’

  Backhouse smiled, knowingly. ‘I didn’t think it would be the poem.’

  ‘I maybe read the poem, but I don’t recall its wording.’

  ‘Not actually your sort of sentiments, George.’

  He didn’t ask Backhouse what he meant.

  He went on with the drenching, soaking the carpets. He found his breathing came out with irregularity because of excitation, but he made out, in front of Backhouse, that it was from exertion.

  He wished damned Backhouse, with his enigmatic remarks, would go away.

  ‘It’s a damn pity in a way,’ he said, covering his feelings, to appease Backhouse, to get him on side.

  ‘You seem to be enjoying it, George.’

  Backhouse was a strange fish.

  Intelligent enough, but one was never really sure that he was agreeing or just listening for his own private meanings. He asked more questions than he ever printed in his paper. What did he do with all the information he got? Where did it go? He never let on whether you had convinced him. He never voted on anything.

  He then said to Backhouse, without reserve, because of the irritating presence of Backhouse, and because he f
elt strong from having the commission, ‘God, you’re right. Yes, I am enjoying it. Yes.’

  And went on with the drenching. That, oddly enough, seemed to please Backhouse. The admission of the enjoyment.

  ‘Watch out, George—I’m not part of the contents—I’m not to be burnt.’ Some kerosene splashed onto Backhouse’s shoes.

  The house had not been connected to the town electricity. Crowhurst always said he liked the ‘soft’ light of gas and the lantern, and that electricity gave ‘hard’ light. No amount of talking could change his mind.

  He drenched the three single beds in the three separate rooms.

  The women’s clothing in the wardrobes, some dating from the turn of the century, hanging there since the death of the sisters.

  ‘That’s enough, George—they’re hellishly old. They’ll burn well enough.’

  George ignored Backhouse and threw some more kerosene over the women’s clothing.

  He emptied the drum and went outside to the Chev to get the third drum. He did the inside walls, the wallpaper coming clean as the kerosene carried away the dust.

  Then he and the police sergeant—Backhouse declining to assist—lugged in bales of straw and placed one or two in each room against the walls, drenching them also with kerosene.

  Outside he saw some shaking of heads.

  George knew of the bad feeling about the burning. A deputation from the local Labor League and a union official from the city had tried to get an injunction. Talk about giving the house to an unemployed family.

  No one appreciated the effect of the Depression and its causes more than George. He had organised a debate on the matter in town quite early. He had used the word Depression when it became necessary. He’d set the Spend for Employment Scheme rolling at Rotary. He’d built a warehouse when his judgement told him to wait a year. It had however turned out well. Except that he could not get the staff and others to call it ‘the warehouse’. They all called it the shed.