Joseph stared at them all with uncomprehending eyes, and said aloud:
“But the man is absolutely mad.”
“And we are half mad,” said Catherine, with a sort of lamentable smile.
“No, I’m not,” protested Joseph. “I don’t even know what he’s talking about. It doesn’t give me the shivers. It simply doesn’t touch me.”
They smiled at him. Joseph thought to himself:
“Here all these months have gone past and they are still talking a lingo that has no meaning to me. But why should I learn it? They are all throwing fits and I am calm, a dummy, but calm.” He smiled quietly to himself.
At that moment, for the first time, he wished for the presence of Winter, that reasonable, raw, sane friend. His mind flew back to the little economic essay of Winter’s which he had printed himself. Winter in gaol thought of the state of the workers—something easy to think about and understand; these people found it quite reasonable to talk with lunatics. Very odd, somewhat unpleasant. He noticed that his coat was touching Marion’s dress, and shifted a little, disliking her robust form.
But Baruch said at present:
“Insanity has no more excuse for existence than tuberculosis.”
Kol Blount fingered his pocket nervously for a few moments, and seeing that they had all fallen silent, took out a paper, saying in a stilted fashion:
“This is the last time we will all be together, perhaps; friends are dropping off: Baruch is leaving, Fulke and Marion are going to England to live quietly as good middle-class people, since they came into their money; I will be quite alone, it seems. I have a sort of ‘In Memoriam’ written for us all, but begun after the death of one of our close friends. Shall I read it?”
“By all means.”
He began to intone, his pure baritone finding sufficient room in the tree-lined wilderness:
“Thus sang Michael when with opened eyes he streaked upwards towards the Pleiades.
“When in the dim ante-glacial world, monsters rampaged in mountains and seas, a white body rolled in the leaden flow, a nameless land rose from the steamy abyss, awash, awhist and away; and there they made their stamping ground, mammoth, roc and dinosaur, by Java, Malay, Celebes and swimming the Timor Sea.
“Mountains split, graders crept, floods froze, forest fell, ice flowed, earth whirled white in moonshine, the northland was in twilight, hairy men and beasts fled south to the meridian. The vomiting volcanoes extinguished their breed, rivers congealed, lands fell into silence and sleeping creatures died. Seas sank and the water continent solitarily uprising preserved them alone and an antique race of men.
“South without land to the pole, in the rough swilling sullen sudden surly southern ocean, last post of the land world, thence south to the whaleland, to the penguins and seals, to ships shrouded in ice, from Land of the Eendragt, to Aurora Australis, to undiscoverable shores, and mist, fog and snow. Hang out your lantern, old Wrecker, and pick the bones of the clippers; guard your magi’s treasure, sound the fog-horns, breathe, blow and bellow, rip, roar and hollo in your salt torrents; your treasure is sand, that is the lot of misers. False and silvery Venus, who rose likewise from the sea, will guide the adventurers here.
“The youth who then uprose flying with glistening foot over barren hill, sandy stoop, salt inland sea, snowy crop, northern jungle, southern scrub, blue mountains steep, long sea-arms and creeping affluents, over ironstone lodes, coal mouths, quartz jetties and free river gold, barren hills teeming with silver, limestone ridges, opal hills, saw much that affrighted his eye, rolling white under black lid.
“He cast his boomerang at the wild cat and striped dog in the southern thicket, the night-waking opossum, the platypus, echidna and dasyure. He looked forth over the thousand-isled Pacific which ten years could not explore, strewn with reefs and beaches as the sky with stars, and the foam of the coral reef like the Milky Way; and saw the tides and seasons changing with the moon, not wild, but with a mild and musical flow, filling the bays and lagoons with green weed, nacreous shells, fish and cuttlefish, over which the sun rose bright and dripping with dew from the seas and sand-dunes.
“He heard the surf thundering under sandstone bluffs, the frail mists meeting with sighs, intermingling and floating over the face of the sky streaked with morning, fragmented, dissolving, disappearing—or was it ghosts of fleets and wraiths of sailing men?
“Sometimes bold Malays cast on the broken shores and among the perpendicular cliffs found their way into the enamel waters of the Great Barrier Reef, or discouraged fled back to the islands again, or were lost in sudden gusts of the Gulf, or sank slowly down in the green Timor Sea among the pearls, crabs and calamary, or swirled by hot currents, passed by Trengganu and Samarak and had their bones picked by auks and penguins in the China Sea.
“Now the land was more desert and had risen yet more barren from the spume, sea-smoke, salt and shine, ringed on the rising water-line with shells, salt-crystals, wrecks, bones, pearls, weed: hardy, valiant, rib-apparent, hide-burnt, wind-bitten.
“The native youth bound his brows with eucalypt, damara, cedar, araucaria, cypress pine, his limber loins with the ferns of lower valley and sandy crown: he broke open the red seeds of the cycads and ate their flour. His swart foot shone in the pools and water-holes, dried by droughts, and there disturbed the trout and lazy ceratod. There, among flocks of cranes and waterfowl, he saw the gaudy jabiru and the moon-swimming black swan, the crane, spoonbill and the whistling duck, the ponderous pelican, and the sunken grey plain swarming with hawks, eagles and crowds, while over the sea, gannet and albatross breasted the grey amongst the gulls, and the sea eagle with gleaming belly fled upwards from aerial Lilliput.
“He chased the kangaroo, and the wild turkey from its incubating hill, heard the curlew and the boobook owl in solitude and the deep throbbing of the frogmouth’s throat; started from sleep beside a native camp to see the flames; heard drums and stamping feet and brandished spears, the deep bell-notes of males in unison and the cries of women, heard the dogs, and far-off and groaning in the ear of the initiate fresh from trials and vigils in the bush, the bull-roarer; saw the medicine men and feathered dancers challenge the unseen, saw slow fancies creep into the brains of night-watchers, swollen with fear and magic, and the dark man’s torpid blood produce broods moulded on air, and like his form with mean powers of gods and demons. Down in the dismal swamp the bunyip shrieked with the bittern, and the serpent writhed amongst uprooted trees in floods.
“He sometime stood upon the hills in winter and saw the grey rains drift across the flats, climbing the hills, and blind and grey with agelong wandering, thrust their bristles into his skin; saw the sun rise on the Murray and the mountains go up in smoke and the creeks rush down in rainbows, roaring over debris and naked rock, and the leaves burn red, and the pastures under water and dispersed tree-clumps, last haunts of the drooping rains, resound with frogs and crickets. The cicada shouted through the forests, shouting after rain, outsinging frogs, birds and torrents, shouting to the sun after three years underground; their tympani beat as they smelled the conquered land, each one crowned with jewels.
“Centuries passed and the black tribes followed the rains from north to south, east to west, eating the wichitty grub in famine, tree-bark and eucalypt: sometimes the dusty desert pregnant with rain flung out green children, sometimes the land was burned to a rind and the black tribes wandered many arid leagues.
“Catholic Spain, proud Portugal, sent their sailors steering for Solomon’s Isles, the Moluccas with fruits and china bells, and the jewels of the unconquered uncatholic uncommerced new world. Captains from Holland and the North Sea unwound their wakes upon the waters of the world. Fires were lighted, murder done, ships cast away, cargoes plundered, robbers clothed in silk, rafts seaswept, women lost, sacrosancts profaned, mutinies smothered, hostages taken, chartings made, short-lines plumbed, reefs struck, wreckers enriched, the Chinese rolled from port to port, the Kanakas perished in the cane,
mountain bluffs were climbed, the blackfellow destroyed, the plains bore flocks, the desert of spinifex spouted gold, the new world began. And after all this notable pioneer tale of starvation, sorrow, escapades, mutiny, death, labour in common, broad wheat-lands, fat sheep, broad cattle-barons, raw male youth and his wedding to the land, in the over-populated metropolis the sad-eyed youth sits glumly in a harebrained band, and speculates upon the suicide of youth, the despair of the heirs of yellow heavy-headed acres. What a history is that; what an enigma is that?”
The madman at this moment approached solemnly, with quiet dignity, and cried: “My blood is running back to the sea. Out of the sea I rose, you have clipped my wings, I cannot rise again. I must drink the salt of the sea!”
The company sat silent. They heard as a harp twanging in the air for some time after Blount finished. He had begun quietly, and when the first measures took the audience by surprise, a wild strong high note broke into his voice, as in a young man’s where the boy’s voice and man’s are blended. He leaned towards the circle and fixed his glance upon some member of the company for long moments. Catherine had risen from the grass, and sat composed and silent, her eyes roving about the sky and trees. Sometimes the person he fixed shivered, or withdrew his fascinated gaze in an embarrassed way. At other times the person felt a wild, rich, angelic joy as if the universe were a globe of light and his face being approached to the tenuous globe, the light poured through him: it was neither the subject, nor the words of the bard, but the tone of his voice, his passion, his rapture. Everyone thought again of Michael and wondered how such an ordinary person could have aroused so strong a passion of love in Blount. At the end, after a few minutes of perfect silence, during which one heard some faint evening sounds, of beetles winging and a bell ringing for vespers, movement began among them like the rain come quickly from far off over roofs in the summer night. Blount stirred himself, and said:
“Why are we here? Nothing floats down here, this far in the south, but is worn out with wind, tempest and weather; all is flotsam and jetsam. They leave their rags and tatters here; why do we have to be dressed? The sun is hot enough; why can’t we run naked in our own country, on our own land, and work out our own destiny? Eating these regurgitated ideas from the old country makes us sick and die of sickness. Are we vultures to eat the corpses come down here to bleach their bones in the antipodes? This land was last discovered; why? A ghost land, a continent of mystery: the very pole disconcerted the magnetic needle so that ships went astray, ice, fog and storm bound the seas, a horrid destiny in the Abrolhos, in the Philippines, in the Tasman Seas, in the Southern Ocean, all protected the malign and bitter genius of this waste land. Its heart is made of salt: it suddenly oozes from its burning pores, gold which will destroy men in greed, but not water to give them drink. Jealous land! Ravishers overbold! Bitter dilemma! And lost legion! Our land should never have been won.”
The evening shadow was falling across the party. Fulke and Marion wheeled Kol Blount into the upper part of the garden and stayed a little while yet, talking quietly among the flower-beds. But Catherine and Baruch walked in the far alleys, went out across the adjoining paddocks, and inspected the workshops. In the workshop where Catherine taught design and woodcarving, Baruch sat down on a little table and said:
“I am tired with so much walking. I am all impatience to be gone. That’s the truth. Well, Kol let himself go this afternoon. I understand they are going to make an experimental case out of him in one of the hospitals. A Macquarie Street doctor thinks he can be cured. He should never have been in a chair all these years, it seems; a pure case of neglect and poverty. He’s a forceful character. Are you sure of this afternoon’s event? Or are they the last sentence of the legend? Now there is no more of your brother left to be revealed. What an underground life was that! These deaths and youthful suicides show the fearful tension in which we live. That is what my aim will be, to prepare my understanding for the next step. My old self dreaming of academic scholarship I leave here with you, brothers of my past, in the antipodes. What will you do? Think of it! Wednesday I am going! Ah, how sweet life is after so much trouble! I am no more in uncertainty as to what I want to do—Ranke, Fustel de Coulanges, Marx, all that is going on, I will have at my finger-tips; in ten years I will be a citizen of a future state.”
Catherine, fingering the tools of the workshop, said sombrely:
“I hear what you say. Take this knife; can you strike it into my heart without the blade glancing on a rib? The pain would be less than I feel now, my veins would not thicken faster, my eyes not be quicker filled with blood. Yes, while you spoke, I saw as a door open in your speech, leaves drifted in and outside were barren leaves, and nothing but the white bones of death everywhere. I have nothing to look forward to. You are leaving me; in that, I strike the irrevocable, the irretrievable, an absolute of life beside which death is a shiftless, temporary state. Are my lips black? They feel black, as if the venescence coiling the ambushed snake, Terror, which is eternal and circles the world, in the ocean as the ancients thought, for the ocean is also bitter, black and encircling, had already shot into my blood through its black fang. Nothing can satisfy my spleen but to fall into the terror beyond death, but let me only escape the terror of living through so many unhappy loves.”
“What is it? Oh, what is it?”
“You are afraid.”
She laid the knife on her wrist, the skin resisted, then yielded, and the blade sank into the flesh. Her face was stone-white but her eyes welled like luminous jelly. Blood rushed out. She withdrew the knife and the flesh lay apart like the walls of the Red Sea divided.
“Your hand will wither, perhaps.”
“I am withered.”
“What have you done?”
“Your renaissance is too hard for me, there are too many pangs, and your new world is too sane for me. Why? Because I have no seed; I am a freak of nature. To me your science, labour-and-bread humanity is too stable.”
“Why, I imagine spring fever will always send the clerks and farm-boys roving, and good citizens will go on the bust; there will always be poets; what has that to do with it? Look at you, dripping blood on the floor! Here, bandage your arm with my handkerchief—it is not very clean. Why did you do that?”
“I meant to show you the bone, but there is too much blood! I feel the skeleton under the flesh. In all this time I have not felt any pain in my arm, although it is coming now. ‘They are alien,’ said Nietzsche, ‘so alien that they cannot even speak their difference to each other.’ When you speak of the new renaissance, I am thinking that you are going away and that I will never see you again. When you are considering the governance of future states, I am despairing because your relation to the world is dearer to you than anything else—yet it is that in you I love. You are the best man I ever met.”
“But you said nothing of this until to-day!”
“No, it has been growing on me. You are like sunlight, a natural thing when you are there, strangely and universally missed when away.”
Baruch dropped his eyes but could not help ejaculating:
“The light of the world! Oh, women are great lovers. But you will love someone else. Do you realise the relentless ambition at the root of all your loves?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I am sorry. I am leaving you, you love me. You must stay here and I must go. What is to be done?”
“Nothing. I will fall in love with someone else, who is brilliant, ambitious and roving.”
“You will forget me.”
“No; I love passionately still every one I have ever loved. If I only fish their image out of my memory and look at it, feel all the old passions stir.”
“Strange girl that you are. You will always be in trouble; you had better get married.”
She looked at him derisively, said:
“Don’t worry about me, I’ll pull through. Let’s go back. The bell will ring in a minute and you will have to go.”
As the
y came up the cement path between bushes of roses and coxcombs, the bell rang, and the visitors streamed towards the gate. They all said good-bye to Catherine, who accompanied them to the gate. Baruch said in a troubled voice:
“I will write to you.”
“Do,” said Catherine, smiling graciously.
He wrote her a letter the next day. She put it away with a few other letters in a small black lacquered box.
It was Tuesday evening and the eve of Baruch’s departure. Joseph, Baruch and Winter walked down to the Union Steamship wharves to look at Baruch’s boat, and afterwards had a beer at the “Three Bells” public-house, where there were also at the moment a negro pugilist, an English sailor from the Argentine, two Italians and two little blonde girls.
“Come with me,” said one of them to Winter. “It’ll only cost you half a dollar.”
“No thanks,” said Winter, “but I’ll have a beer with you.”
“Married?” said the girl.
“No,” said Winter.
“You’re a nice feller, I’ll do it for nothing,” said the girl.
“No, thanks,” answered Winter. “My friend here, he’s going to America to-morrow, so we’re just going to walk round the harbour a bit.”
“Gosh, I wish I had his luck,” said the girl. “They say Bunos Airs is a good place. Well, tootaloo, bon voyage.”
The young men walked round the semi-circular wharves into Woolloomooloo Flat, and climbed the tall stone steps into the Inner Domain. A cargo boat was coaling and loading: her derricks swung from wharf to hold, and a coaler shot coal into the bunkers. A full moon had risen over the southern shore, the blue slowly-breaking light illuminating the water far and wide, but still too low to light the grassy mounds of the park. The workshops on Garden Island were working full blast with hammering and tapping, and in between the three companions and the Island a full tide ran in, audible to them even on the top of the hill, with metallic musical blows against the piles and stone quays. Above the sky paled.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 36