They were embarrassed. He didn’t talk like a boss, but he was at home here. So what was he? What did he want? They wished after a while that he would leave them alone to get on with it. He felt the hardening in them of something he had touched and offended, and knew what it was but could not help himself. He found excuses for hanging about the factory yard with his hands in his pockets, kicking stones under the firs.
Worst of all were the times when he came on one of them hunched over the soup Meggsie had given him, apart and feeding.
They scared him, these men. Not physically — there was very little that scared him that way. It was his spirit that shivered and got into a sweat. They were everywhere you went: hanging about with no change in their pockets outside the picture shows, the boldest of them still flash enough to whistle at girls; in lines on the pavement. You would have had to tag on to the end of one of these straggling, endlessly shuffling lines to find out what it was, up ahead, that had drawn them. He didn’t really want to know, but felt there was something wrong. He had got off too easily. He was in the wrong dream.
He went out for a time with a girl, not one of Ellie and Lucille’s friends, but a girl he had met at a dance. She lived at Granville and worked as a salesgirl in the city. She had two older brothers who were out of work, her father too, and could type a hundred words a minute and take shorthand, but the only job she could get was selling paint in a hardware shop. He was getting nowhere with her but he didn’t mind, he liked her so much; she was so lively and certain of her own competence, and so pleased with herself because she had a job. Her whole family depended on her.
But one hot night when he went out to meet her, as he sometimes did, at the tram, she was in tears and would not speak to him, just went rushing past in her neat high heels, sobbing, and when he caught up with her she pushed him off.
She had been sacked. They’d sacked her for coming in three minutes late from lunch. It had been so hot that she and another girl had stopped off a minute in the park, sitting on the edge of a fountain to bathe their feet and let the spray blow over them. Three minutes! In a mood of over-confidence set off by their moment at the fountain, which was still bubbling away in her, she had stood up for herself and the manager had sacked them, both of them — and the other girl hadn’t said a word! She was inconsolable. She just looked at him. Didn’t he see what it meant? Was he too stupid even to see that?
What angered her was the vanity of his assumption that he could soothe an outrage in her that he had not even understood.
She had lost the one little bit of ground she stood on that gave her a choice. It was that, and the shame of what she had let them do to her, that had beaten the spark out of her.
They were in a world in which forces were at work that took no account of ordinary lives, and as things everywhere got tougher he saw that Ma’s fears, which he had thought exaggerated at first, were real. All around them people were being swept into the gutter and could not save themselves.
Friends of the Warrenders, a family that had seemed quite safe and prosperous, were revealed overnight to have been living on nothing but show. The father, a solicitor, went to prison. The mother, and the boy and girl, moved to Melbourne.
Things were closing in. It was for Ma’s sake now, as well as Pa’s, that he set to work, but in a practical way, to save them. Pa was too high-strung and sensitive to be a businessman. ‘Well,’ Vic told himself, ‘I’m not sensitive, I can’t afford to be. Business will do fine for me. I’m not so particular.’
He had thought at first that he ought to be; that his readiness to muck in and dirty his hands with money-making was an indication that even his finest instincts might be coarse. But when he got to see things more clearly he began to ask himself what the value was of so much fineness if all it did was spoil you for action — and it was in action that he meant to prove himself.
He took a second look at his coarseness. What it amounted to was a wish to get on in the world, and a view, a hard-headed one, of what you might have to be to do it.
For one thing you had to see things the way they were. No good giving people credit for virtues they did not have. Most people were selfish. They had low motives rather than noble ones. You had to start from that. You ought to act nobly yourself (he always would), but you couldn’t expect others to.
He could live with that, he wasn’t squeamish. The times had revealed pretty clearly what sort of world they were in. Lack of fastidiousness might be an advantage when things got rough.
He kept faith with the glimpse Pa had given him that first day of ‘the changes’; he had been moved by all that, and if it was a term he had any use for he too might have called them poetic. He was not without idealism, or imagination either. But this did not prevent him from seeing these processes, in their real physical form, as what they were: natural occurrences accountable to strict chemical laws, and also, if need be, to the balance of costs.
He had been fascinated by the vat from the moment he saw it sitting there so cool and mysterious, the great rounded girth of it with its rows of darker rivets, the pipes climbing away at all angles, the activity it set up in the air around you, which throbbed with an added heat. Twenty-four hours a day it sat there, quietly humming to itself, and it wasn’t just soap it manufactured, the pure white cakes that moved up and down on conveyor belts, went out at last to be wrapped and packed by the girls in the work room, and from there, in trucks, to the department stores and chemist shops and beauty salons where it was handled by sales ladies, and came back at last in the form of the ready cash that Pa jingled in his pockets and doled out on Saturday mornings as pocket money, and which Ma used to run the house. No, it made something else as well, and they lived on that, too. It was a dynamo pouring out energy that when it crossed the yard was translated into the little actions and reactions that made up their daily lives. (Not literally, of course. He was thinking now in terms that in Pa’s mind would have been ‘poetic’.)
Standing at his bedroom window he would look across the dark of the yard and be reassured by the faint glow of it there, still humming away. He saw it in his sleep as well. Awesome and huge it looked, but comfortably familiar. The energy from it fired his dreams.
In the afternoons after school he would slip across to the factory to ‘bother’ Mr Hicks. But the manager, once he saw the seriousness of him, and that his interest was not just boyish curiosity in the nuts and bolts of things, was happy to show him all he knew. The boy was bright, that’s what he saw. And he had imagination, too. He saw things large.
‘That’s a good question,’ he told Vic once, chewing on his moustache. ‘If we knew the answer to that one, young feller, we’d be on the way to millions.’
‘Would we? Really?’
Hicks paused a moment. Vic, he saw, had taken him literally. The word millions meant something definite to him.
‘Well, millions is an exaggeration,’ he said. ‘Let’s say: to setting ourselves pretty firmly on our feet.’
But that wasn’t enough for Vic. It might do for a start. But millions! He put this bit of information, which was still a question, at the back of his mind. He’d work on it.
What Hicks had failed to see was that millions, even if you took it literally, wasn’t simply, as Vic saw it, cash. It was an evocation of scale rather than an accountable sum. In an action of that size, Vic thought, coarseness would blur into insignificance.