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

fruit-pickers and fruit-packers; and in the battle there he met his first wife, daughter of one of the packers.
    ‘I bounced right back into the boss class. We loved each other; but we thought a long time about it. Neither of us wanted to marry a boss.’
    He was eager now to see the writers and rebels they were to meet in Paris, face to face, to shake hands with, hear from, colleagues, those who had been in battle, in jail, been wounded, founded communist groups, edited papers, written appeals, spoken to crowds; people in exile, people burning with political ambition, and courage in the present doubtful pass, tough and keen with hope for the future, fighters, new people from the new lands. Think, men who had seen socialism in action!
    ‘What glory,’ said she: ‘it will be liking getting a whole sea-roller in your teeth.’
    ‘Did you ever?’
    ‘Yes, and swallowed too much, it ended up just a thin film on the beach.’
    ‘Come and sit with us. You can join your dismal Browne friend later.’
    She refused, ‘I’m a bit scared. You’re too good for me.’
    ‘Well, I’ll be looking for you at the meetings.’
    ‘Oh, Stephen,’ she said involuntarily, ‘I’m not a writer, I’m only a hack, a getter-up of pars. My highest hope is a byline. I’m a westerner as hairy and horned as a bison, Emily Hayseed from Skid Row; and you are a sort of ambassador of culture.’
    ‘I would not be there in glory without Mamma’s money,’ he said peevishly.
    She turned away and began to clap her hands, ‘Oh, look, France! Appleblossom time in Normandy! Oh, and I’m here. Do you care how you got there?’
    There was a pause. Then he said in a low voice, carelessly, ‘Why go with these schoolmasters to the council of the good? Let’s get off at the next station and tramp through Normandy, catch them up in Paris in a couple of days.’
    She was startled, could not speak, a little shocked too, for already she was visualising this great meeting of the new world, already reporting it. He waited, said no more and, someone coming for him from the other coach because they were in committee, he turned without a word and went off. Standing there in the corridor, a cool breeze coming through, she pictured scenes in inns, eating, walking, the night—fresh, innocent though in love, pleasant—a French inn among orchards, the broad white bed linen thrown back. Why had he said it and then gone off? A rich man’s joke?
    She went in and talked to Mrs Browne. There were new settlements, suburban houses, crowning and folded in hills. She was surprised, for some reason. There was in the distance a wide green field inside a square fence with trees along three sides, just inside the farm-gate an old car standing. It reminded her of lessons, ‘Find the area of—’
    The Atlantic was a long way behind now. At the station she saw him walking off with three other men. ‘That finished me with him.’
    Mrs Browne turned warmer on acquaintance. She knew the Paris Americans lived in; and offered to help. But Emily took her guidebook and Thomas Paine and set out to see the Bastille, the Place de la Concorde, Montmartre. She sat down in the Place de la Bastille in a café surveyed the monument and read her book. Everyone was reading Tom Paine in the USA then and some of his words were as well known as the Gettysburg Address. She was surprised to see that the book was dedicated to George Washington. She began to memorize.
The American Constitutions were to Liberty what a grammar is to language.
    Freedom has been hunted around the globe; reason was considered rebellion. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks and all it wants is the liberty of appearing. The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness and no sooner did the American governments display themselves to the world than despotism felt a shock.
    ‘Oh, great! I must change too. I must write that truth,’ she said aloud. She was glad now that she had