I'm Dying Laughing by Christina Stead Read Free Book Online

would spoil the workers. I said to her, “Look at them! They’re spoiled now. No fish-knives, no boathouses on the lake with their little country cabins, no going to Groton and Princeton. How coarse and makeshift! The life of the workers’ friend is not decent either. You have to see the blackfaced, baldheaded facts of half a nation on the soup-lines; you have to compromise, get insulted, fight, blackguard.” No wonder Mother thinks it is no life for me. It isn’t. But I couldn’t live any other now. And she loves me. She puts up the money for this kind of frolic. For I’m not an elected delegate on this mission. I’m a private observer. She sees me making a mistake and she keeps me dependent to protect me. She’s not buying me. Dependants never have to compromise, they can speak out. No benefactor wants to lose his toady. Mothers even less.
    ‘You know she is very practical. Don’t think she’s asleep. The Howards have seen trouble before. If by chance, the wind is the wind of change, then maybe that wind will blow a Howard into the White House even as a friend of the workers, and that can’t be bad. No matter what Adams got to Washington, it was good for the Adamses.’
    ‘But why do you talk like that?’ Emily said. ‘You’re great and you’re working for the biggest new deal of all, change the world.’
    He said carelessly, ‘Oh, I’m a calculator. I’d rather depend on the poor than the rich, there are more of them. I have an affection for them. They’re used to bearing us on their backs, usually think nothing of it. There we go mowing them down and they shout or whisper, Hosannah! Till, of course, they get up, wipe the dust out of their eyes and have at us. A bad lot. Why can’t they be like us? The rich never revolt.’
    That’s what he had been saying to her. She had laughed quietly that day; and that night, when she lay in her bunk, she laughed aloud and had to tell the reason why to Mrs Browne, who did not think it funny. But such cracks and blisters in the skin of the rich she had never imagined. Was he ridiculing himself or her? Was she, to him, just a yokel from Lumberville? Wasn’t she worse than he pretended to be—for she hadn’t given a thought to these things, in spite of Grandma and her Wobbly.
    ‘But you sound so bitter!’
    He said, ‘Oh, I’m so pickled in contradictions, I’m soured. A vinegary skinflint. Can’t you see me in forty years? I’m going to be a mean old recluse like Grandpa Tanner, living in one room at the Ritz, knocking on the floor with my stick because the gruel they brought me is too hot. I wanted to do the world a good turn, but it turned out of my hands. Everyone knows the workers have no gratitude. So I’ll take it out on my manservant.’
    He said this in an airy, almost girlish way.
    ‘The air’s honey,’ she said to herself later, ‘there’s something odd about this. I’m floating.’
    Now in the train, looking up at him, she said ‘How tall are you? I must know.’
    ‘Just on six feet. I look taller because I’m thin.’
    Then he said, ‘What are you saying, your lips are moving?’
    ‘I was thinking about you. You do what I have never done. I’ve only fought for the family bread and then Emily.’
    Looking out at the countryside, he talked now in quite a different way. He told her how enthusiastic he had been at college. He had got in with a group who thought they ought to use their higher education for society. He studied socialism. He engaged a tutor, a poor scholar, a Marxist, who helped him because he, Stephen, was slow and behind in studies, on account of having spent years in hospital. Stephen had thought it wrong to spend his allowance. He tried to work his way through college as his tutor did. He made himself sick again. But the determination to help the world, which filled him then with an ardour, a fever, had never left him. It burned inside him. As soon as he graduated, he went off to join a labour battle between