The People's Train by Thomas Keneally Read Free Book Online Page B

broken and remade everything in our marriage.
    I stared at her like a rural oaf. She had been happy in a way I found it hard to be. I had never quite got the two things together, the revolutionary self and what one might call, inaccurately maybe, the soul – the place where the trembling spirit lives.
    Amelia said, Hope is married to a powerful man, Mr Samsurov, here in Queensland. A man of powerful connections. His friends blame him for not keeping his wife ‘under control’. May I say this straight out, Tom, without any shadow play? She is an innocent. You can see that by the way she grills you about Russia, surely? I wanted to tell you that. She married an older man when he was very charming and amused by her radicalism, as if her opinions were a dew that would soon evaporate. They didn’t. Now she has been quite ill at times ... I’m babbling ... She has been quite ill. She stays with her husband because that’s what’s done. But she might equally run off with a revolutionary because that’s also what’s done. You understand.
    She looked at me again as wavelets came cresting up the river. I wanted to tell you. I didn’t want you to misread her. If you were thinking of ... well, of some socialist romance, it shouldn’t happen, Tom. She’s not well enough. I tell you for your own good.
    I said I understood.
    I feel like a foolish old woman, she said.
    And we did not talk much on the second half of our walk. I thought there was no escaping the reality. With women, the intimate and the political were all one thing. I had learned that from my fine mother.

7
    Even more people came to Brisbane, attracted by our strike. In the Trades Hall Hotel one day, Kelly introduced me to a small red-headed man of about my own age named Paddy Dykes who had come all the way from the far-off silver and iron-ore fields of Broken Hill in New South Wales.
    You’re the first Russian I’ve met, he told me, raising up his wrinkled face. We don’t have many Russians in Broken Hill.
    I noticed that like me he drank lemonade.
    Paddy’s a journalist, Kelly told me.
    I wouldn’t put it so high as that, said the little man. I’m writing pieces though. The Australian Worker. It really wants to know what’s happening up here. I’ll be at Friday’s march.
    Strangely, he said it as if he was guaranteeing my safety. I liked him at once, this rugged little gnome from the Australian desert, though I could not foresee how closely we would in time be bound.
    But our application for a march on the first Friday of February 1912 was refused by Police Commissioner Urquhart and his lieutenant, Cahill. Riley and I got together again with our marshals. Some of the Labor men had absented themselves – citing their respect for law and order. Just the same, most of our marshals and fifteen thousand unionists arrived at Market Square and rallied in good order. Amelia’s young women were still with us in numbers and made sure the other unionists saw them by getting to Market Square early in the day and waiting there with their banners, patient despite the heat and humidity. Directed by the marshals, we moved off and weaved among the city buildings into Market Street. Ahead was a line of unmounted police. I thought at once, The cavalry will come from the flanks, just as in Russia.
    In front of us an inspector began reading the riot act as we marched towards him. The police now stepped forward to meet our front line, where, among others, Walter O’Sullivan and his recording angel of a wife were again marching. At first our people pushed forward, absorbing blows as the police wielded their batons. I was with our sashed marshals near the head of the procession and could hear men and women calling to the troopers, the Queensland Cossacks, with their splendid mounts and pipe-clayed helmets who now rode in, Join us, mates! Come on, workers, join your cobbers. Mounted troopers were waiting in ambush in Ann Street. Voices pleaded with them too, because once