“I want to make you a present,” said Michael, advancing. The boy watched him steadily.
“Here,” said Michael, “ten pounds, not forgeries. I don’t want ’em. It’s a weakness of mine to give away cash. I’m a millionaire, or almost.”
The boy looked anxiously at the money.
“You won’t be, long, if you give it away,” said he.
Michael smiled.
“Take it, son, I’m not kidding you; I’m giving it to you.”
The boy took it, took out his little purse and stuffed the money in.
“Thanks an awful lot; I don’t know whether it’s a mania, or not, but it’s a windfall for me,” he told Michael cheerily and earnestly. “You’re shicker, though, aren’t you?” he asked woefully.
“Not on your tintype,” said Michael, “just eccentric. I’m going to commit suicide.”
“Oh, don’t do that,” said the boy. “No, you’re not. Fellers with dough don’t commit suicide. Well, I’ll be going. Good-night, and thanks very much.”
He tootled off down the hill whistling.
Michael sat down on the seat outside the barbed-wire fence. The whole sea was in motion rolling into the land. He did not know how long he sat there, but he thought óf very little all that time; his mind was as dark as the weather. He looked up from his seat. The harbour lights still blinked in the channel: the tramway lights still swung on their suspension wires, and very low in the west a faint glimmer in the sky announced the setting of the moon. It must have been about four o’clock in the morning. He began to walk towards Fisherman’s Bay. In a few minutes he reached the top of the road near the signal station and lighthouse, and turned off the road across the sandy cliff-tops strewn with tough little yellow-flowering bushes, to look at the weather, which had surely come up again. For the last two days the horizons had been red and misty morning and evening, and the sea had been gathering force in mile-long rollers which plunged with a slow booming into the caves under the roots of the village. Now the wind had much increased, and when the squalls of rain came from the black clouds overhead, it blew exceedingly hard and the short squalls followed each other like blasts of shot. The sea was running high, and although all was black, at the foot of the cliffs, which are bold and bluff, he could see the dusky white breach of the surf.
At this part of the cliff there is no fence, but the sand and sandy mould, bearing short coarse grass and dry ti-tree, ran to the crumbling edge. One looks down along several headlands, all bleak, low, with surf at foot, into the stormy south. Although the weather was dark, an imperceptible illumination had begun, the morning breaking far down and far behind the cloud. The outlines of the Southern Heads with their surf were clearly distinguishable.
He passed the lighthouse, going down now towards the bay. Above him rolled the pale limb of the wheeling light, hooded in flying spray as it turned out to sea. Next was the flagmast through whose loose strings the wind roared.
The military reservation fence goes to the brink of the cliff. Michael climbed through and looked down at the sea, at the earthy ledges, and at the cowled and formless cliffs below him. He wrapped his coat round him as he wished to wrap the deep sea round him and its sleep fathoms down. He wished to sleep, to have the water sing as now for ever in his ears, and the inextinguishable anguish in his mind to be hushed. So he stood fixed, with fixed and troubled look cleaving the sea, in whose heart he had always found more repose than in any human heart, which understood his miseries through its own rages and revolts, his inconstancies through its tides, his longings through the bottoms grown with various plants and barnacles from foreign ports, and the turbines ploughing its waves.
The wind sways him like the rooted plants and grasses, whistles through his hair as through the pine trees opposite: he is already no longer a man but part of the night. The pine trees crowded him to the ledge, the light wheels, down underneath is the howling parliament of waters deciding on his fate. The gusts on rock and ledge as spirits hold his heart in their shadowy hands and squeeze the blood out of it; darkness only runs through his veins now. He takes a step nearer the edge, and at the same moment this idea splits him from head to foot: “What if I should fall upon a rock?” He falls into the sea, the wave a moment later cracks his skull against the submerged pediment of the cliff, and his brains flow out among the hungry sea-anemones and mussels. It is done; all through the early morning the strings of the giant mast cry out a melody, in triumph over the spirit lost.
9
In memoriam: a mass, a dream, a strange narrative. A new love.
The second storm passed over in a night. The day broke clear, blowily under a sky full of torn drift. In the evening Joseph was too tired to go to the College, and the deck-hand had to wake him up when they came to the Bay. Frowsy with sleep, and with patches of ink on his face Joseph jostled a comical, blonde factory-girl getting off the gang-plank, and was surprised to see the young girl smile at him.
“You didn’t hurt me,” said she. “You were asleep, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was,” replied Joseph.
“You must get awful tired to fall asleep like that,” said the young girl. “I know; I just pray for five o’clock to come, so that it’s only an hour to six o’clock.”
Joseph laughed and looked at her. She had a little nose, Wedgwood blue eyes, and straight if whitish hair which hung round her like a mop. When she laughed she showed all her upper teeth and the gum with them, but she looked kind and frank. She was of middle height and wore high heels.
“Without those heels,” thought Joseph, “she would be my height.”
“Gee, it’s awful windy still,” said the girl, as they came near the Gap and the gust brought down a few drops of spray.
“Yes; well, I’ve got to turn here,” said Joseph.
“Good-bye; I catch the same boat.”
“Good-bye.”
Joseph walked round the beach-path in profound astonishment: she was a nice girl and she liked him. He hardly noticed the beach children jumping in front of the shop saying, “Oo-hoo, Joey’s got a girl!”
He went towards the steep hillock down which boys sped on their scooters. The kitchen lights were shining over the green; warm odours of meals floated in the air, full of spray, and darkness was escaping from its hill prisons, from the troughed water and from the sky of spent storm-clouds. The telegraph lines sang loud.
As he climbed the street once more towards the cove, he saw his father waiting for him at the gate, with his patch-face still against the vines. When Joseph came up, his father said, articulating slowly, as if disturbing himself with a long contemplation:
“Did you read the evening paper?”
“No.”
“Well, Joseph, an accident happened to your cousin Michael: go into your mother, she is upset. Everyone in the Bay knows.”
Joseph licked his lips.
“What is it?”
His father replied in the same tone:
“Your cousin was found dead outside the Gap this morning. On the rocks, washed up.”
Joseph leaned against the gate-post. At last he said, “I’ll go in,” and walked softly and uncertainly into the passage. His mother heard his step, called “Joseph, Joseph”; he went to her and fell upon her breast. When he had comforted his mother a little, at last, he left her dozing and went out to get himself supper in the kitchen. He was very hungry. He cut some bread, with cheese, pickles and cold meat, with tears rushing out of his eyes and down his throat till he was nearly suffocated. He wiped his eyes with his inky handkerchief. Then he set about washing the dishes which had been left over all day. The news had been brought early in the morning.
He was surprised that he was not shaken. He moved like a machine, quite transported by the strangeness and unbelievableness of Michael’s death. He imagined the conversations now going on in every house in the Bay, and tried to understand how disgrace, which he had long accepted as his own, had fallen on his whole family. The idea upset him: the misery
of life spread too far. He seemed to be in a dream from which he would soon wake, to find the moon shining and the sleeping noises of the house coming through doors half-opened. But the gas continued to flare up and bubble, the broken sky was filled with rushing flocculent clouds. He put the plates in their places, shining discs sliding one behind the other, little counterfeit moons in mundane array; he swept up the floor, the bits of fluff scooting about in the various airs coming through chinks in the old cottage. He listened to his father and mother speaking low. The gate opened and shut loudly; there was a step in the hall, and Catherine stood before him, pale and tattered; she must have sat outside on the boat during the journey down. Her eyes were ringed with deep black. He heard Catherine go into the room and speak to his mother, and her voice break. He heard his father’s step, shortly after, as he passed for the sixth time along the half-mile of the barracks road. His father opened the gate at the bottom of the garden and came up to the kitchen, where Joseph was hanging out the towels to dry.
‘“Son!”
“Yes, Father?”
“Do you know why he did it?”
“I don’t know, Father.”
“You saw him pretty often; you saw him on Saturday.”
“He was acting queerly on Saturday, but he often did. If you want to know what I think . . .”
“What?”
“I think he was bound to commit suicide.”
“Ah, pshaw! No one is bound to; there’s always a reason. It was the low-down rotten company he kept.”
“Who knows?”
His father went out again to the road. Presently Joseph heard him turn down the steps to the beach. The weather was clearing up wonderfully: at present the moon was shining. Joseph went and sat on the back-step. It was a tragedy, but he could not fix his mind on it.
The night was now clear and resonant, the wind died down. A high tide clapped round the rocks and against the boats drawn high up to the stone wall. At the change of moon the weather and women change. It was full moon; Catherine herself had changed. She was full of vigour, her voice rich and powerful like a man’s. Joseph turned down the light in the kitchen and looked up the dark barracks hill where the frogs were chirping. A young man and woman passed down the military road between the white guide-stones flickering in the moonlight. The young woman was small, but wore high heels which tapped clearly in the hill. If she had worn low heels she would have been smaller than the man: why did not women like to be little and neat? A tremendous surge of joy rose in Joseph. He began to think, Michael, Michael, I should be thinking about poor Michael. Michael had lots of trouble with women. There were things he had heard alluded to but had never known rightly. Michael had run after women. Joseph went into the room Michael occupied when he came down to the Bay, the spare room under the attic roof, where the window blew in. He sat down in the dark and felt the unblanketed mattress. He put out his hand and began touching the familiar things standing on the bedside table, running his fingers softly round the edges. He felt the embossed frame surrounding a picture, some girl Michael had known before he went to the war, he believed. Who? A patch of moonlight began to move over the groined attic wall. Joseph’s arm shot out without his intention, there was a fearful loud crash, and as he started to his feet he crunched the small pieces of broken glass. His cousin Catherine spoke down below, and his mother cried out in a voice like a kitten’s:
“Who’s that? Who’s that? Is that you, dear?”
He heard his cousin’s voice, strongly, like a man’s, soothing his mother. He went out into the garden and walked among the sweet-smelling flowers. Wearied out, he sat down on some sacking at the end of the garden, then laid his head on the grass and heard the fishermen’s voices from over the Bay quite close to his head. The footsteps of a soldier going past the fence seemed to pass over his ear, the clear air and the earth making a microphone.
When he got up in the early morning, the grass was full of the crepitation of snails: he was soaked with dew and cold as ice. He went in and began to make early morning tea for the household.
Catherine said:
“Joseph, are you up? Put on your coat and come up on the cliffs with me: I want to look at the sea.”
That night always seemed to him a night spent in another planet, so strange and unearthly it was.
The following Sunday the Baguenaults, dressed in sombre dress, attended a mass of special significance being held in St Mary’s Cathedral. They sat down under stone trees among cartwheels and spindles of coloured lights, and waxen creatures, men and children, in black and purple, moved lights, censers, tablets and vases back and forth. The congregation entered quietly, like thoughts of a past life entering meditations. Michael’s relatives thought ceaselessly of his death and wept, and Michael’s spirit embraced them and the towers and foundations of the cathedral in its gigantic folds. But Joseph, crouching apart, with eyes open and hands at his sides, knowing the Mass, heard different words and different plaints. He had been Server of the Mass when a child with decency and piety, and now attended for the last time. He held his hands joined, and saw the little boy come from the sacristy preceding the Priest. The child at the altar placed himself to the right of the priest, made the genuflexion, took the wand, lifted a little the alb of the priest as he mounted the steps.
“I will go unto the altar of God.”
“To God who gives joy to my youth.”
“Judge me, O Lord, and choose my cause from that of unsanctified men; from the wicked and erring man sift me.”
“Because thou art, O God, my strength, wherefore wouldst thou repulse me? And wherefore should I walk sadly, when mine enemy afflicts me?”
“Give thy light and thy verity: they led me forth and to thy sacred hill and in thy tabernacle.”
“I will go unto the altar of God, to God who gives joy to my youth.”
“. . . wherefore art thou sad, my soul, why tormentest thou me? . . .”
A man can die from such tormenting. Joseph sank his head in his hands; his mother sobbed. His father’s head rested on the back of the prie-Dieu. I have never seen anyone die. I saw Michael’s body lying under a tarpaulin in a dinghy on the beach on Wednesday evening, and the children gathered round like flies. As round a dog’s body. Dogsbody, that is no one: Mr Dogsbody he was . . . he used to go fishing and now he is dead.
“. . . till the end of time.”
“Amen.”
“The Lord be with you.”
“And with your soul.”
“Lift up your hearts.”
Joseph looked at his mother; the black satin ribbon on her hat rose towards the priest. Black satin ribbon, you do what you’re told; you’re a good Catholic, but you don’t know men’s hearts. But Michael would have difficulty in lifting up his heart: it is dissolving, running away in brine and blood. Joseph’s mother turned a briny blue glance upon him, and her black cotton-gloved hand fumbled for his sleeve . . .
“Lead us not into temptation,”
“But deliver us from evil . . .”
The sun shone in the transept, and a visitor, with lifted head, perambulated slowly round the chapels, his soft footstep making a vagrant comment on the Mass. Outside the grass flicked silver. That has nothing to do with it: I’ve never had temptation in my life and never done evil, said Joseph, but I’m poor and unhappy, and might just as well as Michael jump off the rock. I’d sink in the sea, the end of me; who would care? I would just be dead like a dead seagull.
“. . .Till the end of time.”
“Amen.”
“The Lord be with you.”
“And with your soul.”
“May they rest in peace.”
“So be it.”
At the end of the Mass, his mother took his arm. They filed slowly out, with the drab mothers and gay girls, between the yellow sandstone pillars. “That’s better,” said his mother: “now I feel better. I prayed for Michael all the time, and I am sure he will be pardoned. But I will have a mass said for him in the cath
edral here. Just one. I have the money. The priest will do it.” Joseph was silent. “What do you say, Joseph? You will be server, won’t you? For old sake’s sake?”
“No.”
“Why? You feel badly?”
“No; he wasn’t religious. He would have thought it was foolery.”
“He didn’t know; we shouldn’t speak of his errors.”
“I don’t know either. I can’t do it.”
“Take the holy water.”
He made the sign of the cross.
“This is Sunday: it doesn’t seem like it to me any more. I never wanted to commit suicide; perhaps there are lots of things I don’t know: who can say Michael was wrong?”
“You know quite well that Michael was—drunk when he fell off the cliff.”
“So they say.”
“Come home. Catherine’ll have a nice dinner ready. You’ll feel better after dinner. You’re upset.”
“All right.”
After lunch he said to Catherine:
“Let’s get out of here. I’ve been up to the cliff every day since Tuesday. I’ve changed. I can’t be in the face of that blue, always changing sea, so wide and pagan; looking at it and thinking Michael was washed about there on the rocks, I feel that the end of the earth is the end of time for us.”
“When I’ve washed up we’ll go. But don’t try to explain to your mother.”
“I’ve told them, but they don’t believe it.”
“So much the better.”
“I’ve been to my last mass.”
“Good.”
At about the same hour Marion and Fulke visited Kol Blount, astonished to find himself so long alone, to apprise him of the death of Michael, a secret five days old. When they came in to the quiet room, swimming in light-barred gloom and fresh with the fat summer breeze, Mrs Blount arose quickly with her darning and gave them chairs.
“He doesn’t know,” she whispered with dramatic emphasis, and wiped her eyes. “Poor Michael! a dear boy—like my own son.”
“What are you whispering about, Mother?” called Blount, “is it a surprise party? I’m bored to tears. Come in. I’ll bet you have Michael with you, the dog, keeping me in suspense like this for a week.”
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 30