TWO STORIES::David Rowbotham

History: These tales and sketches, along with the author's novel, The Man In The Jungle (A & R, 1964), influenced a generation of Australian writers. Hal Porter acknowledged his debt to David Rowbotham's stories and vignettes - pointillist and impressionist. David Campbell, Ray Mathew, Nancy Keesing, et al, took up the baton. It was a new flourish in Australian literature in the 1940s and 1950s, extending into the 1960s when new poets also added the short story to their accomplishments. There remains an uncollected short story by David Rowbotham, entitled The White Cottage (Sydney Bulletin, August 17, 1955, pp.20-23). His novel, The Man In The Jungle, when it appeared in the 1960s was widely received as an exciting thriller, belonging to a genre rarely found in Australia then. Both prose volumes were extremely influential among writers. David Malouf, Thomas Shapcott and Rodney Hall have all recorded in correspondence how Rowbotham was the first published author they had ever met when they were young, and that his reputation as an "all-rounder" (poet, novelist, short-story writer, critic) strongly persuaded them to follow his example. They have done so. David Rowbotham stopped writing fictional prose when literary journalism, a vital element of his work, engaged him.

The following two sketches have been chosen because the one typfies the "town" character, and the other the "city" character of the book of stories that became an Australian classic. It was compared by Kenneth Slessor to the 19th Century French author Alphonse Daudet's "Lettres de mon Moulin" (Sketches from my Mill, 1866). Its stories have appeared in many Australian and overseas anthologies. Rowbotham's work was influenced by Daudet, and by the American Sherwood Anderson of "Winesburg, Ohio" (1919). He "read", extensively, the short stories of the world, and some of his are included among them in Oxford Classics.

His ear, pressed painfully against the pillow, still heard its swift musical ticking; a blithe trotting sound that, when all other presences and noises had become blurred in delirium, was his one communication with things external to sickness, like voices and sunshine.

He had always wanted a watch, and his father, because of an empty pocket and the belief that an energetic boy of ten wouldn’t know how to look after one, had always merely promised; but when, weak and feverish, the boy had objected about going to hospital because he couldn’t see any reason for such a shift, a bargain had been struck, which amounted to the boy’s receiving a shining pocket-watch with a chain that gathered like mercury in the hand and, in return, his giving consent to be taken to hospital.

He would turn his head on side in bed to squint at it beside his pillow, or dandle it under the bedclothes, or fondle its chain, and tell the time every minute of the day. It was never given a chance to run down. The serrated bead-sized winding-knob clicked magically between his thumb and finger, and there was the long, thin, red second hand that he loved to peer at as, effortlessly revolving, it outpaced the small perceptible movement of the minute hand and the imperceptibble labour of the sluggish hour-arrow. The glass covering the sheer white face, on which were printed in sharp black Roman notation the twelve numbers, with "R---" in flowing italics under the twelve and "Swiss Made" in delicate letters squeezed in under the six, glinted like a sun, and the steel back felt like the smooth warm radiator-cap on his father's old car. He liked pulling the winding-knob out and sweeping the hands round the dial like miniature rays of darkness across clear light, and then snapping the knob back again to rest tight to the rim.

The watch could be held quite a distance away and its tick would still be audible. Naked against the ear, it literally bounded, metallically gallant. Sometimes he would manoeuvre it under the bedclothes to a pleasant position between the soles of his feet. It couldn't be heard then, but it seemed a newer, even more significant thing down there, and the knob against his toe brought an incalculable expression to his eyes. It was there that the nurse found the watch when he at last became oblivious to all but the pain in his chest and shoulders. She restored it to beneath his pillow, where, like some irresistible and sounding spirit, it edged him away from death.

He became inordinately proud of it. He displayed it on all occasions, flaunted it for every eye, told everybody the time without invitation or provocation, "timed" the football matches, made figures and letters out of its chain on his desk at school, put it, once, into a basin to see how much louder it would sound, adjusted the hands studiously each day to the chime of the town hall clock, and, withal, grew a little arrogant.

One afternoon he set off for the big paddock. The football match had already begun when he arrived. To cries of "Hurry up, you're late", he solemnly detached the chain from his trouser-belt and placed the watch, cowled in a grubby handkerchief, in a hole that a dog had dug by the fence; then he joined in the game. At halftime he limped across to where the watch lay and, while eating an orange, swore that the referee had blown the whistle thirty seconds too soon, which meant that Stalky would have had time to score that try, and also proved that the ref. was in league with the other side.

His father went to the home of every boy who had been in the paddock that afternoon, appealing to parents. Every boy fervently denied that he had never been near the hole; which was untrue, but acceptable to the parents, maddening to the boy's father, dully inconsequential to the boy.

He was, in time, given another one. It had "R---" in flowing italics under the twelve and "Swiss Made" in delicate letters squeezed in under the six. It glinted in the sun, and the steel back felt like the smooth radiator-cap on his father's old Morris car. Its chain gathered like mercury in his hand. But he never told anybody the time, unless asked; he kept it hidden on his person, never made letters with its chain on his desk, didn't bother about setting it to the town hall chimes, left it at home when he went playing football, and grew, withal, a little mistrustful.

His face had slumped from the hardness assumed as a result of his several initially exhilarating but finally disturbing and unsuccessful love affairs in youth to the baggy-cheeked double-chinned attitude whose components he himself described as "residue”. He was now moving towards

what Somerset Maugham would call the clinkers of middle age. His hair had a fissure in the middle, his eyes were almosy shuttered by their corticated lids, his complexion was furzed by a day-or-so’s growth and each ear set at right angles to its temple. His nose was negligible since, in looking at him, it was the last and the least appurtenance one noticed.

He had a habit when talking of parting his lips after each utterance and darting his tongue between them, blue-lizard fashion, and, when listening, of manipulating his expression to indicate that he was hearing every word when in reality his mind was a blank, his stomach crackling like far-away thunder from sheer hunger, and forefinger idly stroking its fellow.

He was incredibly poor and alone. He had long ago given up hankering for the one position in the world he desired, and he knew he had not the ability to reach or occupy – that of dentist – and resigned himself to his continual unemployment, not so much a predicament as a state he had dreamt upon himself in his maddening ambitious days. He seemed to be a socialist, but the extent or nature of his political predilections could only be surmised by one remark: that the poor begat more children than the rich because the rich could afford twin beds. He confessed himself a great believer in the Devil, who he knew, by personal experience, existed, and held that, until religions could agree about religion, and God and His good works became less cliquish, his faith would remain a conventionally unacceptable one.

He had a weakness for teeth still – his own were natural and perfect – and for ballads, unmentionsable or otherwise. When he was seen going through the motions of drinking water without any of the calm thankfulness associated with the quaffing of water when one is thisty, it was obvious that he hadn’t been able to beg or borrow ninepence for a beer. Like many beer-drinkers he had a grimacing prejudice against tea, but nevertheless accepted angelically a cupful the day the Salvation Army man offered it to him in lieu of a loan, and so contrived to impress his earnest helper by his polite attention to the sermon dispensed with the beverage that he was given two shillinbgs for a meal, which he assiduously squandered on two schooners and salted peanuts.

He was contented, untidy, and, though mendicant, not miscreant or a pest. He could sting you in the most manly and jocular fashion. Often the most thrifty hands had delved for a coin at his lick-lip overtures. He didn’t have a stock phrase in his vocabulary; each, with the gesture it accompanied- a tip of the hat, a pull at a tieless collar, an innocuous thumbing of braces, an eloquent turn of the palm at frayed trouser-seam, a special unshuttering of one honest-to-goodness eye – was a wonder of impromptu. He forced an impression on the mind that remained conspicuous for minutes afterwards, even if the person acccosted couldn’t give him a penny.

He had some marvellous luck on April the first last, for the pound note he patiently stood upon in Hyde Park, and picked up when at last he felt certain he was unobserved, proved not to be an April Fool’s Day hoax, a fraud, or an illusion after all. It was so genuine he got breezily drunk on part of it and, beaming, took the other part with him to the restaurant from which he had been ejected a week back because of his oversight in eating a meal he had no possible hope of paying for. Large-natured, happy, and steaming, he now paid for the illicit meal, ordered another, smiled an almost miraculous smile at the waitress, and, hailing the manager, assigned him the comradely name oif George while he complimented the house on its past consideration for his feelings – for, despite the fact that they had slightly discommoded him, they had been merciful enough not to enlist the authority of the Law.

He disposed of a heavy four-course meal – oyster soup, spaghetti milanaise, a mixed grill, and steamed pudding – and sipped, with the air of a wine connoisseur somewhat advanced and pleasantly fuddled at his job, strong black sugarless coffee. He was almost delirious with joy. He requested cigarettes. “Sorry, sir, we don’t stock them, but the boy will go and get some for you.”

The management found his humour infectious. He tipped the boy sixpence when the perspiring little fellow returned. He smoked, smiled, stretched luxuriously, and studied his check, and although his appearance and odour diverted incoming patrons from his table, so that he sat islanded like a broken-down celebrity in the middle of the café, he gathered the whole atmosphere to him, licked at it with appreciation, blew at it with delight, nodded in it self-sufficiently.

When he rose to go, his chair retired behind him, the table teetered, lacking the animation for any more respectful gesture, and in his imagination the whole room stood up. He trudged like a pauper king towards the responsible-looking woman behind the cash-register, passed over his check and a ten-shilling note, as if he were giving a dispatch to a grateful follower, and tipped her out of the change, almost in a courtly fashion, head down, and even ventured a wink at her embarrassment.

Rattling the coins in his pocket, the Ardath cornered in his smile accumulating a long ash, he emerged from the restaurant, carried its illusion like a sash on his squared shoulders beyond the kerb, magnanimously ignored the traffic, and was run over by a chocolate company’s van.

He died oblivious of the fact that night in Sydney Hospital, undramatically, unmelodramatically, just as the Town Hall clock struck twelve above George Street. The dozen beats assembled themselves into a diapason round their tower, then rose above St Andrew’s, curled high over Bebarfald’s corner, skipped three blocks, wheeled round the lights in Hyde Park, and swept, echoing, along Macquarie Street, whence the harbour drew them down and smothered them, and carried them in silence out between the Heads to the Pacific sea. And, pacing like a jubilant ghost on the water, hands in pockets and staggering now and then with a prosperous dignity, a tattered shadow went with them, gay, jaunty, familiar, still living the best day of its life.