Tom Murphy Chapter 10

Look! Look! I shouted and pointed.

Gustav took a deep breath. We were standing together on a small hill. When we looked up, a vast snowy mountain range dazzled and blinded our eyes. At dawn, we had left a barren land and tramped into this cold wet valley. We sniffed the valley air steaming of water, wild tussock grasses, and a mysterious faint perfume of horses.

It had been a cold body breaking journey. Gustav and I had slipped out of the town at dawn a fortnight ago, glad to escape our pain and shame. The town knew of the letter. As I had feared, Dad had talked through his home-brew and the gossips had spread the scandal as fast as a telegraph wire. We had, as the Prody preacher had put it, shaken the dust of the town off our feet.

I was on holiday as the Mayor had gone to Wellington for a week to prod for more money for the relief workers. We wore our trousers and jackets but not a scrap of clothes appropriate for a long tramp in Spring into the mountains. But we were young and head-strong. In the cramped city, the blue hazy ranges had beckoned to us. We were as free to choose either the town or the blue hills as the children of Hamlin town.

Indeed, you could say that the famous Irishman Bernard Shaw was our Pied Piper. A few weeks before I had left Tech to work for the Mayor, the entire town had been gripped by Bernard Shaw fever. A rumour had circulated that the great man would be making a personal special visit to our town because ours was the most progressive in the Dominion.

When I started in my new job, Mr Shaw's arrival was imminent. The city fathers had voted a large sum to royally welcome him at the city's most shiny apple. That was the new art gallery which had been founded by Mr McLean. On my first days at the Council Chambers, Mr McLean had been quoting Mr Shaw to every visitor to his office with a glee that made his normally dead-pan face light up like a Chinese lantern.

As Bernard Shaw said, ‘New Zealand was the first country to give her women the vote, who has ever written a sonnet to a New Zealand woman?’

The men visitors would laugh in a shared knowing joke sort of way. The female visitors would say nothing but look pained. But when Councillor Barrie MacDonald heard it, he challenged the Mayor in his booming voice.

Ach, Mon, wher‒r‒e is the source?

The Mayor confessed he had read it somewhere, but could not recall at all.

Aarrh, then don't quote what you can't back up.

That began a furious argument over whether Mr Shaw was a canny Protestant Irishman or a champion of everything that was good and pure in the world.

I kept my own opinions about Bernard Shaw to myself. His pictures in the newspapers resembled strikingly my own uncle Bernard. Uncle Bernard touted miracle cures door to door. As Dad put it, he prospered on talking the hind leg off a donkey. I had last heard he was making a small fortune on a powder that dissolved faulty bowel encrustations that stuck to your insides as rust coats a water pipe.

All the town's excitement came to naught. Mr Shaw dodged our town by many miles. But no sooner had the town as quickly forgotten everything about Mr Shaw, that Gustav became more earnest about him than any one else.

He had discovered that the great man had visited the chateau on the blue mountain that glowed on the horizon. He had mused over that striking fact for several days. Then after the events of the letter, he had hatched a scheme the boldness of which had taken my breath away.

You and I will go to this chateau. We will find out the exact spot where Bernard Shaw meditated. At that spot I will signal a message to him.

As he had revealed before in his plots to marry Vicky, Gustav had this astonishing belief that he could communicate with the chosen ones through the exercise of his mind. I believed he could do that the way an audience was led into the conjuring trick of a magician.

What are you going to say to him? I gasped.

Gustav pondered this practical point. His eyes blazed and he gripped my hand.

I will tell him how he can bring peace to all the world. He will do it because I will make him think they are all his own thoughts.

That struck me as ingenuous and I was proud of my friend's unexpected idealism.

Gustav took out his notebook, and for the rest of the evening scribbled down his message for Bernard Shaw. Before we parted, he read it out aloud and my eyes got wider and wider.

As I recall it, Bernard Shaw was instructed to summon the most important leaders of the world. He would bring them to the most far away but comfortable place in the world, that was the chateau. There, as they sat stupefied with astonishment, he would introduce them to a brilliant and wise sixteen year old youth. That was Gustav.

Gustav would berate their cruelty and stupidity in starting wars. He would tell them the armament manufacturers trick them into wars to make war profits. The common people who have nothing to do with starting wars suffer the most. That denunciation of war sounded just like Dad.

By the eloquence of his words and the publicity of the world press, Gustav would summon the life force of all the peoples of the world to end wars for ever. From then on, they would settle conflicts by consultation. That is, they would consult with Gustav. Gustav explained to me the life force was Bernard Shaw's special discovery.

I at last became doubtful and recalled his past grand plans.

Will all these important elderly men listen to a sixteen year old boy? I inquired mildly.

Of course they will! screamed Gustav. They will have to when I make public my ways of settling conflicts between nations. They're so sensible that the common people will not stand for it if they don't listen to me. Pack your knapsack, we are leaving tomorrow morning. And don't tell anyone. If anyone ever has a good idea, the people of this town will squash it.

We bought tickets for the river steamer. Actually I had bought the tickets. Gustav ordered everything but had no money. As the sun rose over the river, we sat together on the salty and oily deck and I had had my old imagining. As we moved, the places and people we left steadily shrunk. Even the powerful McLeans shrunk to the size of scurrying ants. The steamer's cast reflection followed us through the mirror water. Colonies of fish rippled and swarmed through its mirage and along the shimmering water banks. Above us, seagulls hovered and called.

Gustav turned to me with tears flooding his eyes.
This is how the Rhine once was before its cities and vineyards were built. Why do people fight and make themselves rich? Nature has given us all we need in these forests and rivers.

I was too content to spoil these words with the thought that neither Gustav nor I could last for long living in this landscape. The sun rays and the billowing smoke spread a haze over the river and the banks. The steamboat soon left the wharf and the town suburbs.

We were entering into a bush Eden. The throb throb throb of the engine and the wash of the water was luring me to sleep. Only the hardness of the wooden bench kept me from floating away and dissolving into the haze. Around me disembodied voices and shadows murmured and moved like ghosts in a ghost ship.

We passengers had that morning climbed the gangway on to the steamboat. We were as disparate as if a dragnet had been thrown over the town and hauled us away. A stooped man, with a weather beaten face and rough working clothes, sat on the bench beside me. On his lap a ginger cat purred and licked itself as if it was on the safest place on earth.

As I drowsed my ears irritatingly picked up the name Coates. In our street that name had an elemental force. Whenever I heard it, I ducked my head and lowered my ears under my collar as if thunder and forked lightening had struck.

A voice – what Dad would call ‘hoity-toity’ – was railing against Coates.

Coates is the lackey of the capitalists and bankers! He is their bent penny so they can flood us with their surplus capital and steal our labour.

I had heard worse about Coates, but there were women and children aboard.

We need Coates, a voice suddenly rasped above us.

The effect was electric. Everyone, even the elderly Maoris hunched in their blankets among the deck cargo of sacks and boxes of supplies for the river people, started from their somnolence and looked up. A man, with a glass in one hand and a twinkle in his ruddy face, was gazing down at us from an open saloon window on the upper deck. The cusser of Coates, I now found out, was a young man in a long overcoat, dirty dungarees, thick lensed glasses, and a black beard. He let loose a stream of further cusses about Mr Coates.

We all need coats in this cold season, replied the saloon man.

A roar of relieved laughter resounded through the boat. The young man gave a sickly grin and disappeared. I was glad that Dad was not among us. He would never have let pass any joker who joked about Coates.

When I looked up, I recognised Tar Billy in the pilot house. I was startled to see he was piloting the boat. The last time I had seen him, he was under the table after finishing off the dregs of Dad's home-brew. He recognised me and gestured to me to come up to the pilot house. I nudged Gustav and together we climbed up. I began to chat to Tar Billy, but his attention remained fixed on the river. I was relieved not to smell any fumes of Dad's home-brew.

I marvelled that below us everyone from gentlemen to tramps remained fixed in their own business and utterly trusting in Tar Billy. A single mistake by Tar Billy and everyone would come to disaster. I watched him directing the passage of this boat. Every crook in the bank, every current in the river, every breath of the wind were his allies. The captain spoke to Tar Billy and he replied sharply. The captain meekly nodded and turned away.

In this floating world it seemed, the pilot, who spoke and drank like a hobo, was King over all scrubbed gentlemen in tailor cut suits and uniforms.