“There is something,” continued Michael. “What? I am a man: I can’t see that deformity, it is not physical. Yes, my forehead is dark and my cheeks sunk in with the many nights when even sleep forsakes my bed, but there are thousands like me, in the crowds of workmen and students going to work in the early boats every morning, with every cast of forlornity.
“Do you remember the summer I was seventeen, I went into the country for the holidays and came back the next day, without saying why? I came to a town and drove down by pony-trap from the station. Oh, the radiant bush with eucalypt leaves and the stench of undergrowth exuding aromatic oils, the red tracks winding down the hills towards cabbage-tree palms, through cycads, the blue sarsaparilla vines and boronia plants, their juices bubbling in the hot air. We came towards the water. Newly varnished rowing-boats were drawn up in rows against the stone pier; no one was there but me. I was whistling with pleasure. There was a hut verandahed, and roofed with blinding unpainted corrugated iron, hot, red and silver under the hill. That was the place I had come to stay in. A woman with moon-white hair and yellow face approached with a rake along a row of wormeaten cabbages, bare-footed; she had no teeth. After her, in rags, came two children, yellow as wax. She grins, ‘Do you want cabbages? I’ll have to arst my bruwernlaw.’ She sends her husband to her brother-in-law’s hut: for they have only one pair of trousers between them. They find out what I have come for; they stare. It is a mistake. ‘But you can stay,’ she says obligingly, ‘ten shilluns a week.’The floor is only made in one room and stacked with fowls’ excrement: as I come out by the back door, I see the brother-in-law having his bath, quite naked in a tub under a water-spout. ‘We wash ’ere,’ says the woman. ‘No thanks,’ I say. They all stare after me with lugubrious, disappointed faces. ‘I jest killed a chicken,’ says the husband; ‘you better pay for it, all the same.’ I paid for it. When I came home, I looked at the day’s paper: there was the same advertisement. I never knew what went wrong, but I know that where I was mixed up a thing something would be wrong.”
“That’s funny, not tragic,” I said, and laughed, remarked Catherine. “I suppose there are people who can’t stand any sort of rebuff or shock, but it’s outside my world,” said Baruch. “However, what happened then?” Michael began to get more excited. He said:
“I went another time with my friend Chaunter on a motor trip. We were to cross the Divide and go into the great plains. We were in the foothills of the mountains at night. The low shrubs moved soundlessly in the breeze and the broad road stretched away among the undulating uplands for many miles, now lost in shade, now shining in the moon on some far hilltop, or curving between brush-lands with rough edges, like a bird’s feather dropped in flight. The car moved swiftly and silently mile after mile. Presently the ridge declined and great areas of sand swamped the vegetation. It was midnight. We stopped the car and walked a bit in the fresh air before turning in. We presently lost sight of the car and came to flats like dried lagoons, caked and split with salt.
“We had now left all vegetation behind and nothing was to be seen but sand: a strange desert, a desert as wide as the earth, strange, strange,” said he in a high-toned voice. The very notes produced a disturbing sensation, mysterious and ominous. The curious diffusion of light elongated his legs and spindled his waist.
“We trod over the sandhills for twenty minutes, bewildered by the illimitable moonlit wastes, sunk in thought, silent, scarce hearing the screech and whirr of the trodden sand, our thoughts rushing round and round as if we inhabited a nightmare. What are those sounds that the mind alone hears at dead of night and when the wind is still? The full moon was now in its zenith: presently a chill wind rushed out of the eastern horizon, out of the darkness, and gathered darkness above it; it wandered about the desert and ever grew in sound. At first it was like the calm full tide in a deep anchorage, murmuring against the chains and bottoms, but shortly it moved towards us upon the hills with a profound murmur stirred up from the bowels of the sand, and hidden caverns I know not where; and at last it roared upon us as the storm in the high wooded mountains, and a thousand imagined terrors found form in sound and gloom; we stood in light but we were consumed in gloom: and then again, it had passed and gone off on its wild errand and we were alone upon the waste.
“A flake of air fell past my ear sighing ‘Gone!’ At my side was nothing but a violin planted in the sand. ‘Look yonder!’ said the air, and the air became full of sounds, thicker and thicker, and the air began to roar and the sand to whirl and we were again in the full blast of the sirocco. In the following storm, which was a minute’s entire length, he bowed beside me, above, around, like half a dozen goblins; looked like a violin, scraped cries out of his own stomach, turned into a mandrake, withered and swelled. The cloud of dust was full of people, rushing past with songs and kickings, old mutterers singular and angularly breaking into yells, bad children, fairies, old professors, confessors, aiders and abbesses, two legged palsied palimpsests, clerks, sharks, narks, shades, suspicions, university janitor, spiral-horned rams, stock exchange rampers, rabbits, whorlie-whorlies, willy-willies, whories, houris, ghosts, gouttes, knouts, ghouls, walking-gourds, grimalkins, widdershins and withering wights, but in such a horrid, enlaced, perplexed, twisted and lolloping rhythm as I shuddered to look upon.
“As for him, fantasy filled him; he shouted, waved his legs, sang; he swayed the people into five lines and a key signature: he took it into his head to do a once-about, and in the shut of an eye, the place was deserted. Then the moon shone, all was still. ‘What is the time?’ said he. There he was at my shoulder. We walked on and neither of us said anything. He limped a little. ‘I trod in an old rabbit warren,’ he said, and pretended, I suppose, to know nothing of what had passed. But he left me the next day, and I never heard of him again. You doubt me? It was so; the ranges of human experience go beyond human belief. All my friends were like that. There’s Kol Blount, ironbound in his chair, like Holger the Dane.
“The third occasion was this. It was fine weather, the night before was a night of brilliance, with the stars swimming in the sky at great altitudes and the black bush like the rough hair of a beast; many legions of stars swarmed at a heavenly height, especially when seen over the neighbour’s wall. It was in 1919, when I first returned from the war and felt reborn.
“The sun rose in the morning, as I saw it, for I was awake all night, with a crest of twenty fine rays. The air was chill with the first breath of autumn, the small sunflowers turned to the sun above the transparent water at the bottom of our gully slope, and on the pond in our house the waterlilies, the nymphae, were not yet awake. The face of the creek was silvery where it had lain quiet all night, until the light slowly dawned upon it and turned it pale: thick autumnal dew on the grass. I got up early.
“I thought of the sea-mist, like this, that crawls over the gunners’ tents with sudden drops and on the leaves of our valley and on my pillow, swaddling all of us in its grey coverlet, as if to march off with us under its cloak. I decided to go up on the northern rivers. I took the night train towards Newcastle and got out at a place not far from Brisbane Water, where if you stand on a knoll called Berry’s Head, you can see on one hand in the distance the white waters of Brisbane Water like a handkerchief in the grass, and opposite the grid of orchards on the slopes, the high pale range beyond, and to the north the fruit-bearing valley with pine-nurseries and vineyards on the way up to Wyong. I know it well.
“Well, it had blown up dirty weather when I got there and I could hardly pick my way along the road, which was only rollered clay. The trees were clashing and the road strewn with branches, It was dangerous walking; although I had intended to come on to Tuggerah, I knocked at the door of a cottage, and the owner, who had a sailor’s ruggedness (and a sailor he had been, sailing from London Pool at twelve), let me in. He had a poor orchard, which cost him money. Williams was his name. A kerosene lamp lighted his kitchen beside the dying fire in the built-in stove. He was waiting for t
he doctor, his wife being very ill with pneumonia and his daughter lying in the other room with a childbed fever. He was a gentle man, but it was freezing in the house and he had no extra covering, nor would I have put him to the trouble of housing me. So I went out again on to the back road towards a house he named. The road ran down a hill between orchards to an old house with all the rooms built in a chain of rough-hewn blocks, long ago quarried by the convicts. In front of the house was an old Araucaria Bidwilli pine, where a convict was hanged, or beaten to death, or caught by bloodhounds, I forget the story. But there was no light, and as I went down the hill, I felt cramped and faint, so I sat down on the clay bank and listened to the lashing trees and crying plantations. Overhead the clouds were black and scurrying; a flying fox flopped off the tree beside me.
“After a while the wind stopped, the storm became more resigned. I looked towards the stone house and thought I saw a light. ‘Is that house awake after all, then?’ I said aloud. In answer, there sprang up a loud wild yell which seemed to come from the tree or house and from close at hand. It continued for a short time and died down into a whistling and a sigh over the paddocks. My blood stopped running: I thought to look upon the materialised face of horror, but nothing more came. That cry of inhospitality and solitude is still in my ears. I turned away from the house which had gone black again, and walked all night through the rain.
“Thus I became afraid; in the nights I lay awake unable to sleep for the beating of my heart, which thought every sound a footstep coming to my side, and which beat faster at the following silence. I resolved to become less human, then I should not miss people so much. I called up the brutish spirit of solitude, saying, Put all sound out of my ears, drive me out with pricks and salt to walk the streets at night, let me wound bitterly my only and dearest friend, start with affectation at his simple words, suffer slight from his unintended innuendoes, give me a dry sharp voice, so that I will be entirely alone. Aggravate and embitter my sorrow with every expedient at your service, and you will not do enough. Your torments are weak compared with those I can invent for myself. Yesterday my cousin Joseph looked at me and laughed in my face. I walked three hours in a fever wishing I had screwed his neck. I saw nothing for three hours but the blood running out of his nostrils. You would never lose my soul as I can lose it, old bit of rubbish that you are. Get out of this, take yourself off, hoppygo devil, with your stage effects, trumpets and storms, you dumb jackanapes with two ideas and a black coat perched on your back, quite devoid of subtlety.
“But so perverse in everything; out of the vice into which I wished to sink, a new life came up into my nostrils. The world imagines that virtue and courage are honourable, because it benefits thereby, but for the possessor and doer they are vile error and sin; they destroy his humanity. The giver-up, the sacrificial agent, the atoner, the ascetic of the body will hereafter have no more restraint in his imagination. His desires flourish as their denial is pressed down; what they lack in satisfaction, they put forth in the fruit of understanding and sensibility. Then when they have fitted him to understand it, they destroy his virtue and make him the subtlest connoisseur of his own destruction.
“I thought my heart would burst my body, it so strained at the chain and wished to augment itself: I burned inwardly and my life flowed three times as fast, so that I could not see any motion in the world, except things blowing in high winds.
“This was what I thought, but this was the perversity—I saw Catherine through a new lens, and thus I am mocked: my destiny is stronger towards unreality than life.”
“Michael was silent for a while,” said Catherine, “and I thought: Who is this Catherine?”
“Who was Catherine?” said Baruch.
“You are serious and sympathetic,” said Catherine; “I will tell you what followed.”
He said: “Why is there so much darkness in the world that even the sun can only illuminate a small part of our day, at noon? There is dewy darkness in the forenoon and dry radiant shadows at midday and dusk pregnant with imaginatory forms in the evening, but all through the day, thus, the kingdom of dark remains and lies in a guet-apens for the time it shall reign. Also in the mind there are very few things which are bright and clear, but the greater part of our day is spent in internal dark—and what of the inenarrable night sessions of dreams? If you dig in the earth, it is dark within, despite the gold and fire contained there. If you penetrate beyond the diffusing envelope of air, the heavens are black; if you even look into the heart of a tree, darkness seems to rush forth as you cleave the bark; thus man goes upon his way peering. The greatest occasions of life are made mysteries, such as birth, love and the adoration of God—the womb, dark and without air, the earth, the same; light is but a temporary star in our existence. Birth strikes the eyeball and says “Let there be light!” I often wonder what makes a child come forth for something which he knows nothing of: does he see a sudden flash of light in prenatal night, and hunger and desire it thereafter? Surely darkness is the condition of man, and light is all he thirsts after, for the Kingdom of Heaven is said to be all light, and it takes a very austere and not a fortified mind even to conceive of Hell without light.
“So a candle is a lovely thing, so I am ravished when I look at the starry way, and limpid Jupiter in the early evening; and also your eyes, Catherine, in their exceptional lucency, and your form, which is all darkness and white, the eternal contrast and composition of the world.”
I was terrified. I said: “Michael, hush! What are you saying?”
He said: “It is not permitted, in this part of the world, to a brother to love his sister. He may grow up with her and become familiar with her ways, and her thoughts, the way she speaks, but he may not love her except coldly and indifferently: he may not love her as any stranger whom she accidentally meets outside may love her. The reasons for this prohibition, unnatural and cruel, which brings it about that brothers often hate their sisters, are among those nameless mysteries and darknesses I was speaking about.
“Whereas, as I was born unnatural, I have come to love my sister as myself, for you are myself, but everything appears in you with a greater perfection, and all that is dark and light in you is the very reflection of my own thoughts, my mind and my desires. A man cannot love himself, but all men do, and so there is no satisfaction in the world, for we must clasp another body, informed by another spirit to ourselves.
“But I love you not for myself, but for you. I cannot explain why in this or that way of speaking, and why in your expressions and glances there is such exquisite pain, such sudden revelations, as if I discovered every hour a new beauty in your face which is so familiar. But so it is, and so I am in love with you; not you, but that which is like you in me. I am lost because part of me is sundered from me for ever.
“You look at me in horror, fear and speculation, but your unquenchable beauty reflected in me, your sun, my moon, move in accord; you cannot hate me. Your silver eyeballs gleam, your silver brow and the lightnings of your aspect. Put your face in your hands. Because you are not beauty, you are terror, you are destiny, what is destiny but death, and what else are you? If I ever kissed you, what would I have under my lips but the very substance and moment of death and dissolution?
“I have no meaning in ordinary life, and this is what releases me from being silent about my love, and it is what makes me love, perhaps, the image of myself: it is a hunger and lust for death at root.”
He said this to me while walking slowly in endless circles round the island. He stopped once or twice and looked at me, and then turned round again and walked on, almost indifferently, as if he spoke about something impersonal. I did not know what to answer. He did not want any answer.
We rowed to the house. We only spoke on that subject once again in our lives, that was the other night at Kol Blount’s house, and then, by allusion. I endured it for a few months and almost believed what he said: I lived in a sort of amazement, so that the sun did not have the same colour. Then I changed.
I met a lot of people: my own world emerged. Michael went away from home, and when he came back and joined our circle I saw he was running after Marion. He knew her abroad.
Catherine was silent.
Baruch unwillingly stirred himself and remarked, “Then it was Marion!”
“No, it was I.”
“How did you feel? You must have felt strange.”
“Didn’t you understand? I loved Michael: I have always loved him. I tried to make plans to go to some other country where they would not know we were related, but all these fantasies went up in smoke; besides, Michael would never have done it. It would have made the thing too real to him, he only wanted to play with the idea.”
“Faithless to each other, you all are,” said Baruch abruptly.
“You can’t believe in a sincere passion. All crazy and all seeking outlandish vagaries to distinguish you, a true oddity seems a disgrace to you. You bark like tykes when a true nonesuch arrives among your eccentricities. I must say, I’m moved by your tale, and I don’t think his feelings misplaced either; he could have found no one but you and Blount amongst all his friends.”
“How lovely you are, Baruch!”
He looked in the glass, pulling a whimsical face.
“Nobody can think so. What a face!”
“You know I mean in nature.”
“An insult, then.”
But he fell silent, moved his chair and looked out of the window. Presently his eyes fell back to his book, and he kept stealing glances at it.
“Excuse me,” said Baruch presently, seeing his two guests sitting still side by side, not willing to move, “I can’t get that tale out of my head. It’s really so peculiar.”
“I’m going,” said Joseph, seeing Baruch absorbed.
Catherine did not move.
“I’m not; this is my last night amongst rational people.”
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 32