“Uh-huh!”
“But Michael! No, I can’t always understand it, I can’t understand it. I asked Father Bingham about his case. I had him say a mass for the repose of Michael’s soul, although . . . but he was such a fine lad. I often wished he was my son. He liked me better than his own mother. It’s funny, you know, he told me more than he told her, when he was young. I often thought she was jealous of me for that. So clever; and look at the way he ended.”
“Yes, horrible.”
“They say it was on account of this married woman.”
“Who knows? They talk scandal. I don’t think so myself, and I knew him. He was a queer man, and he was ill.”
“I can’t understand it at all. There are many things in the world that are a mystery to an old woman like me. I do my work in the house and garden, but all the time I am thinking about Michael—it frightens me—with your Mr Chamberlain going bankrupt, and Mr Withers in such trouble, and Mr Montagu with the police after him—who would guess? I can’t understand it. Never mind, the world is all the same, and you’ll never get on except by luck; all dishonest. But I think of you, Jo, how you are so good and trouble has come on you too. I don’t understand it at all. What justice is there in that? How do we come to be mixed up with such people? It’s a bad business. Life’s hard.
“I will tell you, Jo, you’re my son. When I was a young girl, there was a young man, a student, who loved me, but I had no money, so his parents wouldn’t let him call on me. I ran away to another village, and then he married someone else. I married your father after because he was coming out here, and I wanted to get away. Your father’s been kind to me, but my life has been spoilt by thinking of that sorrow. I had you, Jo, you were a consolation to me, but I lay awake so many nights thinking of my sorrow that I feel as if there were too many tears in my life. All because of a bit of money. His parents were landowners, they had five horses and two farmers working for them. He loved me all the time, but he married a young girl whose father had a shop in town. She looked pretty at her wedding with the silk dress they bought her. But he sent me a note telling me he would always suffer because of me; and in ten months they had a son. I thought I would drown myself; but I ran away, and met your father. And your father—well, he took me because I was a hard-working woman, he saw that, and he has always been a just man. No, I have never been happy in my life. I concluded the Lord sent us here to work hard, to till his soil, to save, to be honest and pious, and in the end he will gather us into his bosom and we will have rest. That is what I thought, but seeing so much trouble, there are moments when you doubt. That is the worst of all; so many years gone and perhaps you have been wrong all along, perhaps there is no one looking after you. Then, I have seen some happy people, but people like you and me, my poor son, are never really happy. It’s not right, it’s not according to deserts; it’s often according to hide. It is not easy to understand. Blessed are the poor in spirit; but the proud inherit the earth.”
She looked at him rather timidly. He smiled at her and took her hand:
“Mother, I know.”
He and his mother sat drinking tea till night came on and his father came home. Then they lighted up and had tea—bread, butter and jam, cold veal pie, hot potatoes and many cups of tea. Afterwards, Joseph washed up the dishes and folded the tablecloth while his father smoked on the back veranda, and his mother went across and spoke a few words to Mrs Whortleberry, and came back quite radiant, saying:
“Well, there, Mrs Sanders’ baby turned out to be a boy; another boy. She said it would be.”
The children raced down the hills on scooters, the boys were still playing football in the dark down on the “Lawn Tennis”, and the clatter of tea-plates came out of the open windows in the houses around. Presently the radio sets were turned on, people sang, other people went past to the pictures, the ferries went in and out of the wharf with a ting-ting, ting-ting, bringing home crowds of young people from work, and later, lovers who walked up to the Gap, and evening set in.
Joseph hung about a bit, picking out some tunes on the piano: Massenet’s Elegy, “As pants the Hart for Cooling Streams”, “The Indies” Waltz, Rachmaninoff’s “Prelude”. His father came in and sang some old French tunes with him in his tuneless voice. They then turned out the light and sat at the window looking at the high afterglow: it still lighted dimly the brass bowl on the table, with a dragon spitting fire and playing with a sunball after the Chinese fashion, and Michael’s photograph, the one taken in a sailor suit when he was twelve. Presently Joseph excused himself, saying:
“I’m going out for some cigarettes.”
He walked slowly along the back road and went along by the Gap; the cool breezes blew in from the ocean. Presently he reached a new stucco semi-detached cottage on the Heights, near the signal station. The little blonde girl lived there. She was sitting on the veranda knitting, but when she saw Joseph sauntering carelessly past, she waved her hand, put down her knitting, and jumped off the veranda.
They walked up and down the paths and Joseph realised for the first time how attractive the small front gardens were with their cement paths and standard roses.
11
The seventh poor man leaves our shores. A kermesse, but
nothing to startle the modest. A madman contributes a tale
of beauty and horror. Kol Blount makes a complaint.
End of a love affair. And Baruch’s last night in the antipodes.
End and beginning.
Catherine taught design in the workshops of the insane asylum at Forestville. One Saturday Marion Folliot arranged a party of friends to go out and visit her. The afternoon was fine, the beautiful gardens of the asylum were rich with flourishing arbours and parterres; the inmates sat about in groups, mildly, talking peacefully, like all other people. Catherine came out in her old grey dress, woefully wan and dark-eyed, and smiled with anger at seeing them all there.
“I am not sick,” she said. “I don’t want visitors as if I were an invalid. You all know what is the matter with me.”
“I brought you some papers and some chocolates, Cath,” said Fayre Brant mildly, giving them to her.
She went pale, and put the gifts in the branch of a tree they were passing:
“Thanks, I’ll collect them.”
She turned her dark eyes to Baruch and Fulke Folliot, smiled painfully, put her hand to her heart and led them all down to the grassy wilderness at the bottom of the park, beside a rivulet spanned by a rustic bridge.
“It’s pretty here; let’s sit down and talk.”
They brought out some sandwiches and lemonade and passed it round. Catherine designed the sort of conversation she wished to hold by asking Fulke long questions about Winter, still in gaol but to be released in three days. They began to criticise Winter’s raw theories, but Catherine presently held up her hand and said:
“Baruch, I’m sorry, I can’t stand it! Let’s talk about something else.”
Marion, watching her with pity, whispered to Fulke, and Fulke piped up with:
“We’ll all tell you tales. ‘Soldier, rest, thy warfare o’er.’ A soldier has good cheer, a good time, company, a long pipe and beer in between trenches.”
Catherine smiled at him:
“If you feel up to it, it’s a good idea.”
“Listen,” said Fulke, putting up his hand. “Here is a very odd story. A captain of a tramp steamer held up here met me the other day and told me that his ship got swept away off to an island off Stewart Island to the south of New Zealand. He had a cargo of pine on board and was loaded, as they always are, to the gunwales. He had broken a flange of his screw and was hobbling along looking for the nearest port, perhaps Invercargill; they rigged up a sail aft. One day at daybreak they sighted land, and came up in an hour or two, with the soundings showing a rapidly-rising shelf, to a low, rocky shore where the dispirited cliffs seemed to have given up hope of vegetation and to have lain down with worn flanks to die. They cast anchor, greatly aston
ished, thinking something had put out their compass. The weather after sunrise was fine, and a high mountain arose some distance inland, purple with light vapours, and topped by granite palisades of a strange character. They landed and followed a watercourse inland. In the distance they soon saw a city walled with a sort of Saracen wall, but unattainable on account of deep and continuous marshes, broken only by small reefs of sand on which cottages were built. Only at a great distance ran a causeway about three miles long, straddled by an arch. The sun burned so hot at midday that pigeons, cockatoos, and likewise a family of black swans, and pelicans migrating over the marsh, fell roasted alive in hundreds on the roadway or sank in the marsh. Many were spitted on lightning rods, weathercocks, finials, flagpoles and other points, and the roofs were crowded with chimney-sweeps, roof-menders and lay-climbers like bartenders and hungry midday clerks eating roast pigeon and swan. One particularly savoury dish was a baked pelican containing a mouthful of broiled fish and a bellyful of fish in ragout. Those that fell into the bubbling and steaming marshes were boiled, and had a very fine taste coming from the excellent mud. The trees of the region were fearsomely marked with large footholes scratched by a giant feline animal, and once they saw at a distance a striped creature like a hyena with the markings of a tiger. The crew took fright at this; running at full speed, they passed over the causeway, and soon reached the walls of the city, but in measure as they approached their eyes began to water, their stomachs to turn, and the more delicate began to belch along the highway for the strong smell that guarded the town from enemies. They then perceived that the turrets which rose from the battlements at frequent intervals, to the number of three hundred and more, counting only those in sight, were so many stools used by the soldiers and townspeople . . .”
“Impossible, your manner of tale-telling,” said Marion peremptorily. “Look at Catherine’s face, she is green with boredom. Change, I say; Catherine, you!”
Catherine’s lips curled in a dark smile; she took up:
“Over the causeway galloped an apprentice on a black charger. The itinerant sailors stopped him, saying, Where are you going so quickly? The apprentice, wild-eyed and foaming at the mouth, could hardly wait to reply, but as they held his bridle and would not let him depart, he told them, I am on the track of a secret which will turn this marsh into abundant vineyards and this water into wine.
“I come from a far country where on a plain covered with blue linen grass, prisoned by thousand-foot ranges, is a black imperishable stone with five words written on it. No one can read them—what is the meaning of the words? Those who read them will be as rich as Midas, all their lives, but without his troubles; those who half-perceive their meaning, fumble at the secret and drop it half done, will have their hearts pierced with a golden sword and drop dead, and their souls will fly free in the air. The words are in an unearthly tongue. Travellers cross the mountains on foot, on camels and horses, bringing with them dogs gone mad with thirst, and blacks chained together by their necks, to carry home the treasure. The travellers have planted their staves in the soil of the plain which is now like a vineyard with the staves. The soil of the plain is barren and glitters with mica and with bones, polished to ivory by the rough tongues of hungry dogs—but none can read the words. When they stand at the top of the hills, the valley is alive with activity. There they see the buildings and towers of a mine, with flags flying and trolleys scurrying along a mesh of rails; they see glass roofs, heaps of slag shining with flecks of gold, yellow clearings, new houses with bush above them, heaps of sulphur and silver; and by night, the blinding sparks of furnaces and foundries with smoking funicular railways. Farther afield is the flash of the axe descending in the forest. But when they come into the valley all is silent, naked, untrodden, windless. There is perhaps for the young a field of heath and daisies, a pile of rock and patch of rosy pigface, a patch of daffodils, a light copse. They lead their animals on foot down sun-latticed pathways into a receding distance, they pass hundreds of ruins with nettles beside. Along the paths run dark shapes, foxes, panting dogs and a black fellow or two with poisoned spear, but these are only the shapes of those dead. And the yellow dervish spirit of the desert patches beckons them on the other side. If they pass through everything, ford the mirages, come through the suffocating middays, they reach the black stone, and there they pore over the letters of gold, the five words which mean nothing, however much they know of languages, witchcraft or archaeology. Forms pass them—a golden-fleshed woman floating on a cloud of lilies, a boat sailing in the air with blue cloths, a riderless horse wrapped in gold and roses, a flood of silver, a well of transparent oil, a mountain of diamond, a nugget in a rock, a strange fungus growing on a tree. They lift their tired, red-rimmed eyes from the inscription, and that moment it vanishes. When they look around there is nothing there but a shivered boulder, and in the valley is nothing but sand, fire-blackened splinters, the funnels of ant-lions, the traces of scorpions, naked bushes covered with red flesh-devouring ants. They retrace their way and die at the foot of the hills, for the most part.
“I had a mirror, said the boy; I found it in a cave where once a witch lived. She had only one eye and perhaps that mirror was her eye. It was blue and oval and viscous to the touch and lay among her old rags and bones. I held up that large blue mirror over the stone. They looked in, all, those cracked and grimy scholars. There were people from the British Museum there, men who had dug up Tutankhamen, or perhaps it was not he, but another, people from the Smithsonian Institution, from the Linnean Society, all sorts. In my mirror they looked, a thicket of stubbles and whiskers, and in it they saw the blue country, the black stone, the new visitors approaching on asses and the sun flashing on the inscription. And in the magic mirror I read a translation of the five words. There was a catch in it—it was only the clue to another mystery but the five words were . . .”
Catherine started and stopped, looking at a tall sombre man who was eyeing them from a row of pines.
Baruch went on, heedless:
“Io an qanat, reed pariah!”
“What does that mean?” questioned Marion.
“Nothing at all, that’s the beauty of it, it fits your case perfectly.”
Catherine beckoned to the stranger, who had been wandering previously round and round the pine-walk, treading deeply and thoughtfully into the thick layers of pine-needles and casting envious, curious, friendly glances at the group. Catherine whispered hastily:
“A friend of mine, an inmate.”
The man approached, smiling, with dignity and saluted them, bowing to the women.
“You are telling tales?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I will contribute mine, a tale of beauty and horror.”
“Do so.”
“It is the solution of the magic phrase you spoke of,” he said to Baruch; “I also saw that stone.”
The man sat down cross-legged just within their circle, and lifting up one thin arm, began:
“When the dove cleaves the sky it sheds a clear equal light on heaven and earth which fades into crepuscular gloom in which some flower, some far-off tower, some cleft in a mountain-head, some milestone, some beetle hovering between cloud and field, some sound of a bell rung in a distant village, some whitecap in the bay, appears instantly, glinting, and as soon is lost. After it comes the complete night, full of beating of breasts, falling of cinders and pacing of floors, when the sea draws back and the hideous submarine floor is revealed. Only a brief memory of the paraclete flies across a welter of beings pouring towards the deep in a cataract of grimaces, brandished arms, legs in a windmill, grinding teeth and a rain of carcasses, bile, convulsions, and of wounds, eruptions of viscera, and of monsters, falling for ever through the black humours into the gulf.
“It is very dark all around me. The pages in which I read this tale turn velvety and crisp at the edges like burnt paper, they are dusky yellow, but the letters burn black on borders of red and white in the fire.
�
��The aloe and the paraclete, it says, are the summer lightning of sanity, white in the sky, but immediately wrapped in smoke in the lower regions and stifled on earth. Reason flowers as slowly from as dark a root and dies as suddenly. All else on earth is lost in the cries of the demented, the prayers of the religious, the murmurs of old women muttering their vengeances as they go along the streets after a lifetime of disappointment.” The inmate’s face was covered with sweat. He ended:
“I see the world browbeaten and struggling in the dust under a sulphur sky; they scramble in the marshlights and sink in quicksands. Hermit-crabs and octopuses issue out of bony wrecks, ribands of flame out of the shrunken mouths of sunburn castaways rolling on beaches in a spasm of thirst, barnacles close the seams of coffers holding fortunes.
“Stealthily in the background a giant hand draws back a magnificent Chinese curtain, embroidered with towers, waves, coral caves, dragons and cities, the fair outward false semblance of things; and as the iron-browed prognathous monster with sloping temples turns his face over the hurly-burly, ‘Disorder, Lord of the earth,’ shout the last survivors and quail under his fearful eyes.”
The inmate stopped with pale face and wiped his forehead with a silk handkerchief.
“That is my story. I know a lot of tales like that, but I cannot tell you any more at present; there is such a heavy weight pressing on my head.”
He got up, left them with graceful gestures and took himself off by the pine avenue. Catherine was pale, with bright eyes. She flung herself on the grass and began weeping loudly.
“What is it, Catherine?”
“That is my life; only a madman knows it,” she said, and became silent.
Baruch stared uneasily, took out his handkerchief and wiped his forehead. He turned to Kol Blount and remarked under his breath:
“If I don’t forget all this at once, I won’t sleep to-night. I have to think of sane, material things all the time, or I see blue devils.”
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 35