“When I was coming in this morning,” said Joseph, “the gardener was burning off in Admiralty House. You don’t see it, you two, but at this time of year the rocks are draped with flowering creepers which trail in the water. The gardener had thrown the trash into the corner, and the smoke from the fire drifted up into the shining air, like a sacrifice to a sun god. I could not help thinking our radiant city should make sacrifices on holidays, as in the old days.”
“The sight of a large city always stirs me almost to prayer,” said Baruch.
“I always feel most a man when in the city; in the country, I am almost afraid, there are no voices out there,” remarked Joseph.
“That reminds me,” said Winter, “of the last camp. Did you hear about the dryad? One of them, out in the bush, heard music and, looking for a long time, discovered a lightning-struck tree, from which the music came. There was a soft wind blowing backwards and forwards, as it does on a slope or in a hollow, so it was supposed that a natural aeolian harp had been constructed. The camp had got into a poetical mood down there by the sea, with the bush around it, and without sitting round the fire for long starry nights—you know our climate and living out of doors, and the simplicity of our people, make for animistic belief—so there was an expedition to the haunted tree that night, but although they found it after a lot of hunting in the dark, it was silent. Yet the wind was up. We visited it after, but apparently we never went in the right wind, for it was quiet, except if you put your ear close, when you heard noises like you might hear in any tree. There was a lot of discussion afterwards. Mrs Hanngartner, you know, believes there are souls in nature.”
“We are not far from India here,” said Baruch. “If you were simpler people, and had not the drawbacks of public education, you would probably become star-gazers, tower-builders, and use the astrolabe. It is not for nothing you build an open circus on the hill at Cremorne to await the second coming of Christ. Your deserts, if you had no ships, would be full of eremites, sun-worshippers and sandstone temples, with your mystic northern breed transported to the Tropics.”
The moon was now in the central heavens and following them as they trod. They walked through the shaded Domain past the side of the Art Gallery where appeared the names Cimabue, Giotto, Botticelli and Michelangelo, to St Mary’s Cathedral, where they saw a light through the windows of the apse.
“Let’s go in and sit down a bit,” said Baruch.
Only Winter demurred. He hated the smell of incense and the bad paintings.
“Ecrasez l’infame,” he said bitterly.
“Hush,” said Baruch, out of respect for Joseph, but Joseph was indifferent to Winter’s feelings.
Joseph took the holy water as they went in and genuflected when they crossed before the high altar, out of pure habit. He would do it to the end of his life. There was no one at all in the cathedral. They presently came behind the high altar and stood in the shadow beside the painted bleeding Christ. A servant of the cathedral, without seeing them, passed rapidly in felt slippers from one of the doors and began to take money out of the offertory boxes: “Chink, chink, chink, clink-a-clink, chink, chink”—into his hand. A silent hostility emanated from Winter, but Baruch smiled and waved his hand at him. Joseph shifted from one foot to the other and seemed asleep; the wasting candles dropped into the sockets and those that remained the attendant snuffed. He then passed round the other side, and after him came a priest. The priest passed by, and the three companions, tired and chill underfoot, sat on a dark bench below the altar: in front of them the Mater Dolorosa sorrowed over her crucified son, and Saint Anne and Saint Joseph stood one on each side.
“It makes me sick,” said Winter; “let’s get out of here.”
“I understand how all this came about,” said Joseph, out of the dark, to Winter’s great surprise. “People sense some sort of inevitability, and try to run with destiny. They think destiny can be supplicated.”
They sat there for a while, speaking occasionally, softly. It was very cold in the cathedral, and the flagstones struck ice into their bones. Out of weariness Winter fell asleep. Joseph looked at Baruch’s ghostly face and said:
“I must look for work to-morrow.”
“Go to Withers—he’s not a bad sort, he’ll try to help you out. That’s his hobby. He likes old friends, too.”
“You are lucky to be getting out of it.”
“I’ve got to work hard at the other end, Jo, to keep my job.”
“You can do it easy enough. It’s been interesting listening to you, Mendelssohn.”
“Yes, I’m a kind of endless gramophone record, a wax matrix that records the ideas of the times; not inspired.”
“No, you’re an awfully good chap; you’ve done a lot for me. I’ll always remember.”
“I’ve done nothing, you’ve done it all yourself—you’ve got brains, Joseph. What have I done?”
“Through listening to you and Winter I know where I stand.”
“You have found that out. Is it worth while knowing?”
“Yes; I’m not a missionary like Winter, nor an intellectual like you, understanding every step I make. That must be queer, though, to know what you are doing. I’m not selfish and scheming like Withers, and not a straw in the wind like Michael. I don’t get into dramas and excitement like everybody else.”
“What are you, Joseph?”
“This is how I think of it. I’m a letter of ordinary script. Events are printed with me face downwards. I will be thrown away when I am used up and there will be an ‘I’ the less. No one will know. The presses will go on printing; plenty more have been made to replace me. History is at a standstill with me. That is what I am. I see my life, after all; I know what I am doing, too, in my way. Even you and Winter don’t see yours as I see mine. But I realise everything is against me, as my smallness and oddness show. There are—as they say in the Bible—hierarchies and hierarchies over me economically and intellectually, and I shall never rise against them. I know now as much as I can ever know, and that’s due to you and Winter. Perhaps Winter can still teach me a little; but it’s slow. Every single power there is has over me a—sovereignty, jurisdiction and dominion—that was something you said the other day. ‘Do machines have children?’ that sentimental fellow Milt Dean said one day when I was at Blount’s. I am a machine. I am the end of my race.”
Baruch glimmered in the faint light under the great west window. He thought of Catherine sleeping with the insane, and saying she too was a sport without seed.
“It’s curious I should not have known Michael well,” he said. “I never got to know him.”
Joseph looked suddenly at Winter, who coughed in his sleep.
“You know, Winter’s in bad shape. He shouldn’t be sleeping here in the cold. He nearly died last winter, and the last spell in gaol knocked him up.”
They got up, and knocked a long time on the door leading to offices of the cathedral. At length, an angry priest came and let them out into the warm, brilliant air of midnight—everything was drenched with moonlight from horizon to horizon. They took Winter home and Joseph stayed with him. Then Baruch trudged home himself. He sailed at midday the next day, but nobody was there to see him off, for Withers was at work, Winter was ill, and Joseph had got a temporary job cutting sandwiches in a lunch-room.
Endpiece
Joseph goes home late.
Last night the storms gathered round the moon and the wind blew whirling cones of sand and dust about. Over Middle Head was the pale rosy light of the bushfires. The trees raged in the park, which is always turning back to wilderness; they lifted their arms and tossed in the darkness of the under-cliff. The souls of trees are freed in storms, they struggle, arise and commingle in the lower air. Wild flutings, reedy laments and cries of inhuman passions fill the ear. The gale trumpets in the distance, and they tremble as if before the trampling of sabaoth. Let the windbuffeted man run past with his overcoat squatting on his back and his hat running along of itself before hi
m; he is out of his elements. The children of the storm strain and howl, taking no notice of him and oblivious of his world in their recital of lugubrious mysteries, earthy deeps, lost rivers and subterranean caverns.
The leaves clashed together with their opening cry, “Kastelaison, Kastelaison,” and the storm came. What was the history of Kastelaison? But the wind has changed; that is for another day.
The wind blows straight out of the black sky, the moon is one day old, the stars and white-caps leap together. The distant roar of the caged lion in Taronga Park charges the air in a quiet with a single shock of sublunar pain, a prelude to the gale’s second onset.
Now between Joseph, this traveller hurrying on with head thrust forward, and the nearest star something moves which may be a silk mesh such as conjurors used. Underneath is a giant gulf in which rushes the sea: the stars appear therein with intermittent flashes. The threads of the mesh appear and are woven of the bodies of flying men and women with the gestures interlocked in thousands of attitudes of passion. Thought flies along their veins, they move and gesticulate with old motions lost in memory.
“That was long ago,” sighs the traveller, his head still bent. Now the web trembles, now the threads are free and they swing out into space, feeling their way in universal shade and bearing their own light like the rayed bottom-fishes. They sit on saturnic moons, they sway far out in the interstellar spaces. Suns brighten and flash!
“Long ago! Now it is only like a dream from which you awaken and feel tremulously near to tears without knowing the reason,” murmurs Joseph, as he hurries along the cliff-road towards his cottage. “Why were we so shaken then? Was it because we were young?” He shakes his hair out of his eyes and rubs his furrowed face. He is a small, rugged man, and the ill-willed moon peering through thickening vapours throws his odd shape fantastically on broken rocks.
The wind blows up again from the south; the curtain of cloud rushes across the immense sky. As it blows, the delicate beings aloft shiver, they wither and fall apart like thin dry leaves, they fall to earth and perhaps fall into the sea. The sea is fretted with a thickening web of shade, the dark pours into the sea. What were those creatures? Men, or dreams, or magellanic clouds?
The roof of the sky opens for twenty seconds before the titanic wind; he stands erect on the scaffolding with stars in his hair and sends the birds’ nests rolling. Then all is dark.
Roar on, O Pacific sea, and blow the golden weather in with morning; in the dark bad deeds are done, pillows are wet, hearts despair; in the morning everything is resolved. Underneath sleep and snore in their beds the hutted people of the Bay, like dry leaves fallen from the heavenly tree. Far out at sea ships move on towards the port that they must enter at dawn, and all night long goes wheeling through the wet the long ray of the South Head lantern to keep them off the blind openings in the southern cliffs. Seven miles away signs swing and windows rattle in the city, the boats strain at their anchorages, the poor people who sleep under the wharves in Ultimo move their rags closer to the bank, and rats leave their holes.
The traveller hurries on, thinking of the warm stove and his wife. He reaches the wooden doorstep at last, the door comes ajar, he slips in; but the wind and the night enter with him. He shakes out his rough woollen coat, and some leaves which fell in the park fall on to the hearth. He sits down and takes a cup in his hand, but it trembles, and a brown stain spreads over the tablecloth.
“I had a hard day,” he says apologetically. He is tired, but the wind is in his ears. “I saw Withers,” he says, and thinks again. And so he sits long into the night with his hand in his wife’s hand, and tells her the history of him, Joseph, of Michael and Catherine, his cousins, and of many others who surely live no more: for they cannot have a sequel, the creatures of our youth. And thus he begins:
“We were seven friends, at that time, yes, seven poor men . . .”
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 37