The Electrical Experience Read online

  As for the house and the will. George was governed, he felt, by this view: I have been given a commission; I have to carry it through to execution against all obstacles; others may feel it their duty to create obstacles; my duty is to overcome these; I am irrevocably deputed.

  I am irrevocably deputed.

  He told the Labor League that when one carried out a commission, one could not consider and weigh the complete chain of implication, the full stretch of possibilities. People who did achieved nothing, intimidated by the unforeseen. Frozen in their tracks. All activity, he told them, had con sequences which could not be foreseen. Tradition, law and experience guarded against consequences which could be foreseen. One had to know, within tradition and law, when to stop consideration, have the courage to proceed into unforeseen consequences—in a word, to get on with the job.

  They had not been convinced.

  There’d been a story about town, too, that the house contained money, which would be burnt. There was no money. And he would not burn money.

  The fire brigade, out of breath, and in pieces of uniform, pulled their reel up the hill to the house. The water pressure, anyhow, too low, as it always was at the end of summer.

  They couldn’t have done much if the house did get out of control. Still, they stationed themselves about the grounds with beaters.

  Crowhurst had been a stamp collector through his life, and had specifically stated that the collection too was to be burnt. It was considered, in conversation about the town, to be the most valuable thing in the house. He and Backhouse leafed through the thousands of stamps, right up to date with a complete set of the new German stamps.

  George placed no value on stamp-collecting—misspent time. You could not eat it nor hang it on a wall.

  He told Backhouse his thoughts about it, and Backhouse seemed to give the opinion some credit.

  To the detail. As the last act he sloshed the kerosene over the stamp albums, opened to allow easier burning. Opened at random pages, the kerosene running over the impassive faces of monarchs, dictators, emperors, triangular stamps, brightly coloured from islands of the South Seas.

  The face of aviators, generals, and explorers.

  The twenty or so albums lay on a bench, the meticulously fixed stamps glued there by Crowhurst the schoolboy and then Crowhurst the old man, representing the power and the glory of all the nation states.

  Backhouse left at this point, saying that he didn’t want to watch any more.

  George finished the drenching and came out for fresh air, away from the kerosene fumes, wiping his brow with his sleeve. The small crowd were talking with the firemen, children playing with the useless fire-hose reel.

  He went to the sergeant. ‘About ready, Herbert,’ he said seriously. ‘Hot work.’

  They smiled at the unintended joke.

  He spoke to the captain of the brigade, who got the men back to their places with their beaters.

  He opened all the windows for draught.

  He was rather pleased with the crowd, although it had been intended that there should be no spectators.

  He went to the car and got out the blow-torch, which he had decided would be the most suitable method of lighting the house.

  He put on his coat.

  He’d given it some thought. It was, after all, an official act.

  He lit the blow-torch and pumped it until it roared.

  He looked across at the firemen and the sergeant and nodded. They nodded back.

  The crowd stopped talking.

  He pulled out a piece of paper from his side coat-pocket and read, ‘I, George McDowell, executor of this estate, hereby consign this house and all its contents to ashes in accordance with the wishes of the late Herbert Charles Crowhurst as expressed in his last will and testament.’

  The blow-torch roaring.

  Backhouse, he noticed, had not gone but was standing one foot on the running-board of his car, in a pose of dissociation.

  George moved into the house, the roaring torch in his hand, touching the bales of straw and other well-soaked places with the blue flame of the torch. He stopped at the stamp albums and held the torch to them, burning a black hole straight through the faces of the monarchs, dictators, emperors, page after page curled away into ash.

  Through the bedrooms and the women’s clothing. The house filled quickly with crackling and smoke.

  He realised he was lingering in the house. The house, dry from summer, was igniting around him. The paintings on the walls were aflame. The dining-room table was alight, the fruit bowl burning.

  He was lingering. Run. He almost had to instruct himself to run.

  He was held there in the igniting house, as if testing his invulnerability.

  Run. He instructed himself again.

  He came out the front door, eyes watering, and pulled himself stiffly together. Brushed ash from his clothing.

  The firemen had stationed themselves too close and now moved back. The crowd oo-ahed as the flames came fingering out the windows, and they too moved back. George decided to move his car. So did Backhouse.

  Woomph, perhaps a lantern exploding.

  The house roof shingles began to fall in.

  In all, the house and contents took two and a quarter hours to burn to the ground. All that remained was a blackened cement washtub, a bath with four squat legs. A Bega stove and the chimney.

  The intention was that the rubble would be carted away and the land was then to be auctioned, with the proceeds going to Lodge Abercorn, of which Crowhurst had been a member.

  No trace would be left of the Crowhurst family, which had lived in the town almost since it was incorporated as a municipality.

  Later, George could not remember when his body had been more alive, the conflagration raced through him as through the house. It left him burned out, tired, and he went to sleep for a few hours, something he had never done before—sleep during the day. Never.

  He felt it somehow indecent to talk about it now that it was over and done, but he did say to Thelma that very few men in a lifetime had the opportunity to burn the home and possessions of another human.

  He considered it had helped to burn away his shyness, although it was a rule and practice which one could not put on the list. The burning of the house, together with his meeting with Paul Harris, founder of Rotary, made 1936 a memorable year and one of both public and personal progress, although, Thelma said, some people thought he’d become hard and unyielding because of the burning.

  The Man with the Hoe

  The confusion between Backhouse and George about the painting comes about because there are three things titled ‘The Man with the Hoe’—a painting, a poem, and an essay. First, the painting by Millet, which George was admiring before burning. The poem referred to by Backhouse was by Edwin Markham and was inspired by Millet’s painting.

  It goes in part:

  Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans

  Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,

  The emptiness of ages on his face,

  And on his back the burden of the world,

  Who made him dead to rapture and despair,

  A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,

  Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?

  Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?

  Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?

  Whose breath blew out the light within the brain?

  It goes on to deal with the exploitation of the labouring class and ends:

  O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,

  How will the future reckon with this Man?

  How answer his brute question in that hour,

  When whirlwinds and rebellion shake the world?

  How will it be within Kingdoms and with Kings—

  With those who shaped him to the thing he is,

  When this dumb terror shall reply to God

  After the silence of centuries?

  Ambrose Bierce said at the tim
e that the poem had all the life of a dead fish.

  George had only read the essay by Elbert Hubbard inspired by the poem. He had not read the original poem nor, until that day, seen the painting which inspired the poem.

  GEORGE MCDOWELL DELIVERS A MESSAGE TO GENERAL JUAN GARCIA OF THE CUBAN ARMY

  In 1924, after a visit to the United States with his father, George McDowell returned to the town to begin his life. He returned with three passions, he thought—Rotary, the aerated drinks business and the possibilities of town electricity.

  About Rotary he could do very little. It had not come to the South Coast and he lacked the standing and age to do much about it. But the manufacture of aerated soft drinks, with the help of a loan from a business man friend, became his vocation. Although Australia did not have prohibition, which had helped the American industry, he believed ice-chests and refrigeration would allow people to chill drinks in their homes and encourage them to buy bottled drinks.

  Nor could he forward the possibilities of electricity until the town had a generator, and he consequently became vocal about this. He joined the Science Club regardless of its reputation as a hotbed of atheism. His business man friend, James Tutman, local inventor and ice maker, had nominated him. In the Science Club he could at least talk and speculate on electricity and experiment on Demonstration Night with devices, although he was, himself, no inventor. He said that he was simply a person who could move an idea from point A to point B without damaging it (sometimes improving it) and without losing it in transit. Which always got a good laugh and was a modest-enough thing to say.

  He knew in his private mind that he was ahead of his times. Even ahead of Tutman on many things. Tutman knew more about ice, but when you came to look at him, he knew very little else. He was ahead of Tutman philosophically. He sometimes thought that, in truth, he was something of a ‘visionary’.

  But, be that as it may, he was anyhow the youngest in dependent business man in town. He was commonly de scribed as ‘a live wire’ and ‘go ahead’.

  One weekend he and Doctor Trenbow took their blanket roll and groundsheet to walk to the bottomless pit and, on behalf of the Science Club, to measure the depth of the so-called bottomless pit.

  As they picked and slid their way through the sandstone bush, he told the doctor that he would be putting a grape juice in the shops next summer.

  ‘I drink them myself for three weeks,’ he said, ‘as a test.’ Hoping that would satisfy the doctor about purity.

  They clambered down a gully, sliding now and then on their heels, sending one or two rocks bouncing down. George talked about the possibility of ice-cream wholesaling. ‘Say the word “wholesale” and people think “city”. Need not be. A country town could wholesale to the city. Why take our milk more than a hundred miles to buy it back as city ice-cream. As it is now each shop has its own recipe and some don’t have the first idea. Can’t get it cold enough for a start. Some of it’s no more than custard. I’ll take the best recipe, or the best two or three. Try them all. I’ll put it out as the town ice-cream. Take soft drinks. In the United States Dr Pepper is sold thousands of miles from where it’s made. Take flavoured milk. No one has really done much with flavoured milk. First you need go-ahead cafés which put in refrigeration. The South Coast could do it. Our shopkeepers go with the times. First you need reliable electricity.’

  George panting, realised, as they pushed through the snagging bush, that he was gabbling again and pulled himself up, changed to a more reserved demeanour.

  ‘You’re alive with ambition, George,’ the doctor said.

  The doctor said it in a way that meant he himself was not.

  ‘As a doctor you’re a member of a very learned profession’, in case the doctor felt inadequate.

  ‘All a matter of meeting requirements, George. Now you—you’re headed for the uncharted territory.’

  Yes, by golly, thought George, new products are like that.

  The space between conversation was becoming longer as their energy leaked away into the bush, as the bush dragged at their attention, and the bush dullness settled on them.

  ‘Influenced by America, George?’ the doctor asked at a stop.

  ‘Rotary could be bigger than governments.’

  ‘You think so?’

  Little more was said between them until camp.

  By the time they made camp, they had what the doctor called ‘bush stumbles’ from the scrub, foothold finding, wading through knee-high fern, rock clambering. George also suffered from the overbearing darkness of the bush as they went farther from the township. He kept seeing in his mind the scattered smoky houses, the long green grass of the unbuilt-on blocks, the shops which still didn’t all link up to make a solid row, his factory, and the two saw mills nibbling away at the huge endless bush surrounding the town, turning it into building planks. Always in the bush he realised impatiently how little a hold they had yet on the coast. The thin white line of dusty habitation between the sea and the un settled mountains. He urgently wanted for the land to be cleared and the roads properly made.

  They both dozed for an hour or so and then, clumsy with fatigue, made the fire. As they sat there gazing, doped, at the camp fire, they let out with pieces of conversation, like broken biscuits. Tired talk. George went on a little about his ideas for beach kiosks when the rail came farther down the coast.

  The doctor listened, sipping his rum while George sipped his tea.

  The doctor made a surprise shift in the conversation.

  ‘What about divinity, George?’ the doctor asked, after which they sat without talking in the croaking night.

  The doctor was a known sceptic.

  George thought about what he could say judiciously, considering the town, and how to please the doctor, and then about what he really believed, and found that the wide night sky, the mesmerising camp fire, the blackness of the bush, compelled him to try to assemble his true ideas.

  The doctor got up before George answered, and urinated, too close to the camp fire for George’s way of thinking. The doctor always washed his hands before instead of after, because he said his hands were dirtier than his privates.

  ‘I suppose,’ he began when the doctor was back, ‘that I don’t believe in God—I mean a god with shape or residence.’

  That seemed a good start. Sometimes the words were there in the mouth and sometimes not.

  ‘But goodwill and co-operation—that’s a sort of divinity, the sort I would believe in. I try to tread the footpath of goodwill.’

  George looked at the doctor and then at the coals, having not found a reaction in the doctor’s face. He then said some thing about people needing divinity when they had nothing else, no faith in themselves. But not for those who could look after themselves.

  ‘Haven’t you worried about your purpose in creation—about man’s place in nature? Are we, for instance, Lords of Nature?’ The doctor waved his hand at the bush darkness, the starry sky. ‘Do the trees hear us?’

  George had never thought whether the trees could hear. He heard the questions and felt a long way from them, they did not belong in his mind. No, he had not and did not consider such things.

  ‘Or,’ the doctor went on, ‘the great questions of Civics—how to control those with power, why some are rich and some are poor, why some men the masters and some the slaves?’

  George was conscious that the doctor was a university-educated man. He himself had never considered going to university. He had always wanted to become a business man. But he held the highest respect, all the same, for men with degrees.

  He pulled his mind back to the doctor’s big questions. He tried again to say how he thought. ‘No, I don’t ask. I live by the rules inherent in the job at hand. Every trade has its own rules inherent in it.’

  But he was not a tradesman.

  ‘Every Science, too, and every Craft—even, say, the Science of aerated drinks has its rules inherent in it. I suppose I believe that when you follow the rules of t
he craft, the big questions look after themselves. That when you arrive at the Big Questions, if you’ve followed the rules inherent in your craft, the answers will be obvious.’

  Yes, that was what he thought. Yes.

  ‘I’m not sure I follow,’ the doctor said with interest.

  George said that, in manufacturing and employing labour and engaging in commerce, you found natural rules which supplied the answers and suggested what position had to be taken.

  ‘I’m against governments interfering with working arrangements between people. Unions too. Unions are the idea of city men who want power. The rest of us carry the unions on our backs. Unions produce nothing.’

  ‘That’s quite a philosophy, George.’

  George looked at the doctor to see if he was being mocked. He did not feel that it was quite a ‘philosophy’—they were his opinions. Mostly expressed for the first time.

  ‘While the theorists and the theologians worry, men like you make the system work. Even if it doesn’t work well.’

  The doctor drank more rum.

  ‘Yes,’ the doctor said, ‘you justify your life each day—in the market-place.’

  Again, as far as George could tell, it was without mockery, yet without flattery. And again, the doctor talked as if he was not one of those who made the world run nor yet maybe a philosopher either.

  George tried again to say something important, to reach a point where he felt he had said sufficient, made his stand, he wanted to have said enough. He felt he had said nothing.

  ‘I make things people want,’ he added.

  The doctor, maybe, nodded.

  ‘Where there is a conflict between the new and the old, I’d always be with the new,’ George went on, trying to find a list of his beliefs.

  ‘Until you yourself grow old, George.’ The doctor smiled across at him.