The White Body of Evening (34 page)
And a day later in the
Argus:
HE
F
RENCH
M
ALADY
Grand Guignol
is not new. The French, with their own particular flair for the depraved, have been performing these plays since the close of the last century. Regrettably, the taste for public obscenity is now catching on here, especially among ex-Diggers whose overly excited nerves have failed to readjust to the tranquillity of peacetime. A Yarra Bend doctor is even recommending a trip to the Bijou as a therapy for his shell-shocked patients. Notwithstanding, the French malady is a deplorable influence on the moral fibre of the city. But we are loath to say too much on this score for fear that the very thought of such an obscene production will be like a red rag to a bull, attracting larrikins and blackguards from far and wide to its door. It is worth noting that the playwright and director, one Paul Walters, who claims to hail from Zurich, the better to beguile a public of hapless colonials no doubt, is none other than the Paul Walters of Melbourne whose crude paintings disgraced the city a decade ago. A stint in the cesspools of Europe has apparently prepared him for a second assault on the taste and decency of the public with his third-rate plagiarisms of second-rate French plays. We trust that discerning and rational theatre patrons will not stand for it and will vote with their feet.
By the end of the week, when the
Melburnian
responded to these damning reviews,
The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities
was a hit and Paul Walters was infamous.
RAND
G
UIGNOL AND
P
UBLIC
M
ORALITY
Fortunately Melbourne’s theatre-going public is quite able to recognise the difference between fiction and reality, quite able to distinguish between a mere play and a genuinely criminal or immoral act. Theatrical spectacles have always toyed with the boundary between the two. Unfortunately, reviewers at our two major newspapers seem incapable of making this simple distinction and believe that the play currently being performed at the Bijou Theatre is a sufficient threat to civic order to warrant legal intervention. Perhaps they have failed to read their own publications, where they’d find enough real life tales of murder and madness to produce a hundred plays of much greater terror. The real horror of the age is not being performed on the stage, but on our streets and if one has the stomach one can read about it in the pages of our dailies. It is probably too much to expect the writers at the
Peacock
and the
Screechowl,
who have directed opinion and taste almost since the founding of this city, to acknowledge the datedness of their predilection for the theatre of insipid bourgeois compromise, in which a touch of danger gently dissipates in the working out of a conventionally uplifting conclusion.
The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities
pushes into territory that will be unfamiliar to Melburnians, because it presents the dark places of the imagination rather than any directly recognisable reality. It shows us what the cult of realism in our national culture has hitherto disallowed and dismissed – the psychological. To wed morality and art in the name of public respectability, as is so often our want, is to travesty both.
Hamish McDermott was in the Eastern Arcade a few weeks after the play was banned by the Melbourne City Court in a special sitting convened to expedite a decision and conclude the whole affair before Christmas. Paul was fined fifty pounds and all copies of the play were confiscated under the
Obscene Publications Act.
Robert Walters, anxious that his paper’s defence of the play might lead to the discovery that the
Melburnian’s
chief editor was in fact the uncle of the defendant in a public obscenity hearing, had decided to reassign Hamish before the debate over
The Cabinet of Anatomical Curiosities
got any more vitriolic. Disapproving of his nephew’s efforts, which offended his own sense of social hygiene, but at the same time unwilling to undermine Paul’s interests, Robert had allowed Hamish considerable latitude in the play’s defence. But by the time legal proceedings were launched, things were becoming overly heated and he decided to redirect Hamish’s fervour towards a cause that was closer to his heart.
So at the end of 1921, December 30 in fact, it happened that Hamish was in the Eastern Arcade, thinking about a series of articles on the decline of “marvellous Melbourne”. He had just come from a screening of a travel documentary,
Sir Ross Smith’s Flight from England to Australia,
and was struggling to reconcile the aerial camera work – its abstract, joyously dislocated omniscience – with the tangible sense of location he was confronted with now. Once people got used to seeing things from the sky, he thought, the tiny details that distinguish one place from another would be lost to them.
He was supposed to be exploring the moral and physical degradation of what had once been a splendid Victorian city, writing sketches of locations like the arcade, the Eastern Market, and Little Lonsdale Street. Robert held up his own article “Eastern Arcade, or Passage of Crime?” as an indication of the general tone he wanted to convey, but the moralising of the piece was alien enough to Hamish to make him doubt his ability to manufacture it. He went to the arcade hoping to find the “miscreants” of a declining city, and seemed to be loitering himself, watching the odd person slip into one of the brothels or emerge from the stationer’s clutching a brown paper bag or a parcel squirrelled away under a folded jacket. He felt quite purposeless, as if he were waiting for something to hold his attention, and the slow meanderings of the arcade seemed to be lulling him further into this blankness when a large, loutish man with conspicuous gold teeth glistening like nuggets half-buried in his red gums brushed past him, waking him from his daydreaming.
That was when he saw the girl. At least he thought he saw her. When he thought about it afterwards, he really couldn’t be sure. In the following weeks the newspapers were full of such detailed descriptions of her that practically anybody could have accurately visualised Alma Tirtschke gazing longingly through the plate-glass window of a fancy dress shop as she paused on her way through the arcade. She would have looked like any other schoolgirl had not her fate transformed her white cambric blouse, pleated navy-blue tunic and panama hat into symbols of an innocence devoured by the jaws of the city. If he had seen her, Hamish thought, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the exact details of her dress until the newspapers jogged his memory. But in the days and weeks that followed there she was just the same, standing before him in the arcade, the twelve-year-old schoolgirl with pale, freckled skin and auburn hair, clutching the package of butcher’s meat she had just picked up for her aunt.
By the next morning the girl was dead. It was just after dawn when a rag-picker, a veteran down on his luck, stumbled into Gun Alley, a cobbled cul-de-sac running off Little Collins Street opposite the entrance to the arcade. The man scanned the cobblestones for bottles until the bend of the alley led him to the body. In the days that followed, the details of this discovery were not left to anyone’s imagination:
IRL OF
T
WELVE
B
RUTALLY
M
URDERED
. B
ODY
F
OUND IN
C
ITY
L
ANE
. S
TRANGLING
C
ORD AND
C
LOTHES
R
EMOVED FROM
B
ODY
One of the most horrible murders that has ever been committed in Melbourne was discovered early last Saturday morning when the nude body of a child of twelve – Alma Tirtschke – was found in an alleyway off Little Collins Street. She had been outraged, strangled with a thin cord, stripped of all her clothing, borne from the death chamber, and dumped onto the street, where the body was found.
The spot is a narrow alleyway at the rear of shops in Little Collins Street near Exhibition Street. This lane runs east and west off Gun Alley, alongside Lane’s motor garage. Few people use the lane, and probably nobody would be in it after midnight, as an ordinary rule, though during the daytime it is always under observation by men employed in the neighbourhood.
While walking along Gun Alley, shortly after six o’clock on Saturday morning, Henry David Errington, a bottle gatherer, saw the corpse of the murdered girl. She was lying on her back, with her legs doubled beneath her. Errington immediately ran to the butcher’s shop of Watkins and Co. in Bourke Street and telephoned the news of his gruesome discovery to the police, and Senior Constable Salts went to the scene. The girl’s auburn hair was spread out on the ground, and the position of the body suggested that she had been carefully laid down on the granite pitchers.
People who previously had not bothered much with the news of the day certainly read the papers now. As the investigation into the murder gathered pace the pages of the city’s dailies came alive with the grim details of the crime and still grimmer speculation about it. Not since the Crimea Street murder thirty years earlier had a crime aroused such public concern. The papers introduced the phrase “lust murder” into the popular vocabulary, recounting a history that ran from Jack the Ripper to Gun Alley. “What sort of fiendish person could perpetrate this sort of crime?”The question was the subject of endless speculation. The papers were almost unanimous in their conviction that the killer would strike again and could even be hiding behind the veneer of public respectability. Sex maniacs, one prominent alienist claimed, are often “respectable” citizens or even saintly, churchgoing types with a reputation for piety. Still, it didn’t take long for public fear to turn to the arcade itself, and the maze of little alleyways associated with it.
As Hamish read the papers, the girl’s naked body was constantly before him – hair spread out on the stones, legs folded beneath her, bruised skin around the slender, white neck. At night, when he masturbated, he couldn’t help but imagine her posing in the arcade and the killer’s hands trembling around her neck. Afterwards he felt sickened. This fleeting identification with the killer, the merest possibility of it, left him feeling polluted by his own touch. He looked at his hands – obscene lumps of flesh they were. Sometimes he imagined they’d been dug up and sewn on. The smell of them – sweat, semen and the grime of the city – repulsed him.
But when he tried to moralise about the arcade and the murder for the paper, he found his own increasingly florid prose ill-adapted to the task. The daily papers had descended into the most mundane form of journalese. Semiliterate stuff, he thought. But next to their simple clarity his writing seemed tainted. Twice Robert withdrew Hamish’s articles and finally referred him, chidingly, to the
Herald’s
damning evocations of the market area. Hamish ran his eyes over the articles which pitted the menace of the evil-smelling arcade against the longing for clean, modern structures, where the sweet smell of fruit and flowers was not strangled by the reek of old, dirt-begrimed buildings. Hamish understood the metaphor perfectly. Fruit and flowers, dirt and grime. He again looked at his hands and wondered, shamefully, what they were capable of.
O
n the day Alma Tirtschke was buried, crowds of weeping women laid wreaths of flowers in Gun Alley, and then besieged the arcade with such fervour that a police barricade had to be thrown up around the Little Collins Street entrance. The demonstration quickly died down, but a large crowd remained outside as flower-bearers continued to pay homage to the corpse of the city’s innocence.
Paul Walters made his way down Little Collins Street, sardonically pleased at the sight of the mob his banned play had envisioned with such accuracy. He’d heard rumours that the police were close to an arrest and that the suspect was in the arcade itself, so, like hundreds of other Melburnians since the murder, he thought he’d have a look at a genuine crime scene.
He was in need of distraction. The banning of the play had left him at a loose end, and his sister and wife had subsequently formed a conspiracy of the just against him. Under Ondine’s influence Laura had become stubborn and assertive. By the time the court case concluded she seemed glad that the play had been stopped. He suspected his sister of coaching her resentment.
“Why do women only appear as corpses and whores?” Laura asked him.
“It’s not supposed to be realism,” he replied.
“Still, I think I’ve almost had enough, as if I’ve overeaten and am now feeling a bit sick.”
He looked at her suspiciously. “My sister has got to you,” he said.
“Rubbish.”
Paul was already tired of the two of them. He could see they were intent on establishing their own enclave and was happy to get out of the house. He quickly forgot himself in the comforting bustle of the streets and the commotion as he approached Gun Alley.
“Makes me think of Little Nell,” a voice said at his shoulder as he walked towards the arcade entrance. “Who wouldn’t be moved to tears?”
The voice belonged to an impish old man whose eyes were firmly fixed on the crowd of women. He had raised his walking stick slightly in readiness, as if he expected to have to fight his way through.
“How’s a fellow supposed to conduct a business with such a kafuffle going on?”
Paul looked at the man intently. He was older, more wrinkled and a bit smaller, as if he’d shrunk with age. But the same bulbous eyes and round bald head were there under the brim of the flat straw hat.
“Max? Max Wedelkind?” Paul said, astonished.
“Good God, boy. Nobody has called me that for years.”
“It’s Paul Walters. You remember.”
Wedelkind paused on the pavement, put on his glasses and pushed his face closer to Paul’s.
“Paul Walters. So it is,” he said. “I suppose you’ll be coming to me for a bit of help now that your play is bust? I thought you would have been smarter than to try it on back here.”