The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  But Ray continued to look out, hearing her voice or not. The house in which he lived was more acceptable seen as a toy. Roads were less distasteful in the abstract than as dust and stones underfoot. Here and there, slow, oblivious life dawdled, cows near the creek, and, along the lane that ran on that side of their land, a dark rider.

  ‘We’re waiting,’ called Thelma on a desperate gust of wind.

  ‘All right,’ he murmured. ‘I’m coming.’

  Only because he had seen enough.

  ‘What did you see, Ray?’ the mother asked, to speak, when they had reached her.

  ‘Everything,’ he said.

  His voice had grown dull as an aftermath of achievement.

  ‘Home, and paddocks, and cows,’ he said. ‘And someone riding down the lane.’

  ‘I wonder’, said the mother, ‘who that could be. Mr Peabody perhaps.’

  Her words were dead as yellow grass.

  ‘No,’ said the boy. ‘It was a lady.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the mother. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. I could tell. You could see her skirt.’

  Then Amy Parker knew that she would diverge a little through the grove of wattles to where the lane ran along their land. So she walked her children a little quicker. Not knowing what she would say or do, except stand at the fence, enclosed in her own dowdiness, and watch the progress of the dark rider. Because it could only be. Now she knew that she had come for Madeleine.

  ‘Perhaps it’s that lady we saw,’ Thelma was saying.

  ‘Pick your feet up, dear,’ Amy Parker said.

  Thelma began to whimper, for some injustice sensed.

  But just then they reached the small lane where it cut through the wattles. These stood thick on either side, and straight, and dark, so that anything coming down that stretch of the lane was at once intensified. And it was down this that Madeleine was passing on her shiny horse.

  ‘See?’ said Ray. ‘I told you I could see her skirt.’

  Beyond this he was not interested. It was a woman on a horse.

  That day the horse of Madeleine was less inspired. He was more horse. Or they had ridden far perhaps, and he was even a little bit lame; there was something ugly and uncertain in his gait as he came on. He stumbled at a pothole, and his pasterns looked weak. But he was still a fine horse, insisted Amy Parker. The horse ambled closer, flinging his mane and showing the whites of his eyes. She could see the veins in his wet shoulder and the motion of his bones. She saw the horse so closely that she knew exactly how he felt to her touch.

  But she must look also, not now, in a moment, at the rider, but soon. In a stumble of hoofs she must look. Her heart was trampling on her.

  Amy Parker looked up to see the rider, whom she had known intimately for some time, but from whom she could not hide her shyness, even her ridiculousness. For a close moment she looked at Madeleine. Today the rider wore no smiles. She was tired, or head-achy, or involved in relationships with human beings. Her mouth was thinner in her creamy skin, as if it were biting on something. Her eyes did not see that part of the lane. Except for a moment perhaps, when she frowned and jerked at the reins. She rode on. The sturdy woman with her two children continued standing amongst the trees. There had been no mingling. There was no reason why there should have been.

  ‘Why does she ride around like that?’ Thelma asked when they had began to trail across the paddocks of grass.

  ‘I don’t know. For something to do, I suppose,’ Amy Parker said.

  ‘Can’t she do other things? Can’t she go shopping?’

  ‘Hasn’t she got a dog?’ said Ray. ‘I’d have ferrets.’

  ‘She’s a lady,’ hissed Thelma. ‘What’d a lady do with ferrets?’

  ‘What’s the good of being a lady?’ said Ray.

  He began to whip his sister’s calves with a little wattle switch that he had picked.

  ‘Ah, stop it!’ she cried. ‘Mum, make him stop?’

  ‘Now you’re both being silly. Ray!’ said the mother. ‘Let’s have peace. And no questions. I don’t know this lady, so I can’t very well answer them,’ she said.

  And hoped that this would end it.

  But she thought of Madeleine as she lay straight in her bed. Whole skeins of sleep flowed from the brims of their hats as they rode together through the wind of darkness. They were exchanging secrets. I have never had one, murmured Amy Parker, not of any importance, not with anyone. There, said Madeleine, is one. Amy Parker opened her hand. It was a piece of glass, or a rather big diamond. The confused cry of birds that came from her throat folded her words up. Madeleine laughed. They rode, and their stirrup irons held hands. There was no longer even a chinking, they were so close.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Stan Parker.

  ‘I was dreaming,’ sighed his wife. ‘It was funny. About a horse.’

  He cleared his throat, and was asleep.

  She lay gently, hoping if she fell slowly she would recapture that same part of her smooth dream. But the horses had ridden on. And when she woke in the morning it was indeed funny, not to say ridiculous, that dream. She stuck the pins in her hair and fixed a glossy bun. She who had been dreaming of the dark rider all those days could not have told how she longed for them to share a precipice. If they were to meet, which they would not. Their lives were disparate. She put down her brush, of which the bristles had been worn short, and went out to get the buckets.

  Chapter 10

  ABOUT this time Amy Parker received a message from her neighbour, Mrs O’Dowd, by hand of a little girl called Pearl Britt, whose father worked on the road.

  Mrs O’Dowd had written on a piece of paper:

  Tuesday morning

  Dear Mrs Parker,

  I am in some trouble, and would take it kindly if I could see a friend.

  Your ever truly,

  (Mrs) K. O’Dowd

  ‘Thank you, Pearl,’ said Mrs Parker to the little girl, who continued to stand there, picking her nose and stamping her hard feet in the dust to throw the flies off her ankles. ‘I shall come down pretty soon.’

  Then Pearl ran away, pulling the head off a daisy as she went, to play a game of petals with.

  When she had changed the position of one or two things, and put on her hat, Amy Parker was ready to go. She caught the mare, who was swishing her tail under a willow, and got out the second-hand buggy, which by this time had grown dilapidated, while still showing signs of its decent origin. Then she would have gone in search of her husband, but stopped herself. I will not say anything, she said, in case he is angry. Now she was really ready.

  All along the road that had once been theirs exclusively people were now living, so that O’Dowds had ceased to be neighbours except in history and by sentiment. Some people nodded to Mrs Parker as she jogged along, but others considered she was trying to find out something about them, and frowned. In fact, she was thinking of her friend and neighbour, and the lives they had lived on that road, when it ran through the unbroken scrub. But people were not to know this. Fences had made the land theirs, and they resented the intrusion of a strange face. For Mrs Parker was by now unknown to some. She drove on through scenes she could no longer claim.

  The bush had opened up. There was a man tilling the chocolate soil in between his orange trees. Outside a grey shack an old man sat beside his hollyhock. Children spilled from the doors of bursting cottages. Washing blew. It was gay on this morning, as Amy Parker had not seen it, along the two mile to O’Dowds’. Bright birds fell from the sky, and ascended. Voices could be heard where once the sound of the axe barely cut the silence, and your heart beat quicker for its company. But man had come, if it was not the Irish. Wire wound through the scrub. Many uses were found for bags and tin. And at night they sat around, the men with their shirts open on the hair of their chests, the women with their blouses easy, and drank whatever came to hand, as a comfort. If it was sometimes the kerosene, well, that too is drinkable. And more children were got to the tune of the iron
beds.

  The old mare that Mrs Parker drove jogged along this rather joyful road, but her hoofs began to drag as she eased down that last stretch into the dip before O’Dowds’. The brakes were on now, so that the wheels grated on the sandstones. What is this trouble? asked Mrs Parker, moistening her fresh lips, as she remembered it was a trouble had brought her that morning to O’Dowds’. And she would have prolonged her journey, that seemed to plunge down.

  It was a poor lot of land before you came to O’Dowds’ selection, and that too was inclined to be poor, but there they had camped down, in the beginning, and got used to it. They were possessed by the land, and the land was theirs. Now all the country round about appeared quite desolate to Mrs Parker, driving down. All trees in this part seemed to have taken desperate shapes. Some definitely writhed. Some were stuck with black hairy knobs or dismal grey cones. There was a monotonous drumming in that part of the bush, of heat and insect life. Nobody would ever want it. They threw things into it. There was a glint of old tin, and the ribs of dead animals.

  So Mrs Parker grew lower. Although a comparatively young and robust woman, of some experience, she began to feel inside her a thinness of insufficiency. She had never come close to death, and wondered whether she could deal with it. If death it was that beckoned from O’Dowds’. Though there was no reason to suppose. Instead, she began to think of her two growing children and her solid husband, and to persuade herself of her own strength. By degrees it did become plausible. Turning in through what had once been the gate, her strong young shoulders swayed with the buggy and tossed off all doubts. There were moments when she was superb, and this was one. Her strong, rather thick black eyebrows glistened in the light.

  So Amy Parker drove up to O’Dowds’ door, and if there was no sign of death, there was little enough of life. There were two brown ducks with pointed sterns paddling and dipping in some thin mud. A red sow lay on her side and exposed her leather teats. Under the pepper tree the meat-safe hung, and swung, round and round, slowly on a wire. And the house was the same as it had always been, supporting itself on itself, and the hole in the side window still stuffed with a bag.

  Amy Parker went looking for someone when she had chained the wheel, and eventually the face of her friend did come at her through a crack, and it seemed as if shortly everything must be explained.

  ‘You will excuse me,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, manipulating her moist gums, so that the words would pass, and the stubborn door, so that her friend Mrs Parker might squeeze inside, ‘you must excuse me’, she said, ‘if I sent for you in writun, my dear, makun it seem official, like, an I did think at the time, but the kiddy is forgetful that brought it, if her legs are strong. So for that reason I put pen to paper. An now you’uv come. An I am glad.’

  She held a dishcloth in her hand, and that cloth was very grey, and gave out a smell of all the old dishwater it had ever been in, probably grey water too.

  ‘Yes, I am here,’ said Mrs Parker, who was feeling out of breath.

  It was perhaps constricted in the kind of hugger-mugger back kitchen, or storeroom, or dairy, or larder in which they stood, and in which it seemed most of the possessions of O’Dowds were cluttered. There were the buckets not yet washed from that morning’s milking, and the bodies of several flies in that morning’s milk. Several lines of old washed-out shirts and chemises – or was it rags? – hung from overhead, sawing at each other, stiff and dry, catching in the hair, in the small dark space of that room, where your ankles jostled the empty bottles that O’Dowd had not yet flung away. There was a rat trap on a deal table, baited with a lump of yellow cheese, and beside it on a big white dish a piece of dry mutton. Everything that was gathered there seemed to have been put where it could be found, and that is more than can be said for tidiness.

  ‘It is homely, like, as you know, but what can you do?’ said Mrs O’Dowd with a sideways look as she flicked at a fly with the dishcloth and trimmed a splinter of meat from the mutton.

  ‘Then you are well?’ said Mrs Parker her friend.

  ‘An why should I be sick? It is not me health that has ever troubled me, Mrs Parker. It is something far more complicayted.’

  She sucked the air between her gums, as if the teeth were still there, and looked at the little window that the cobwebs had almost closed up.

  So Mrs Parker waited, till her friend should give her a glimpse of something interesting, or horrible, or sad.

  ‘It is him,’ she said finally. ‘It is that bastard. He is on it again.’

  ‘Is he ever off?’ asked Mrs Parker, who had begun to mark time.

  ‘Not that you could notice. But there are occasions when he makes it a welter. An this is one of those. This is the biggest welter,’ Mrs O’Dowd said.

  ‘And what am I to do?’ Mrs Parker asked.

  ‘Why, talk to him, my dear, as a woman, an a mother, an a neighbour, and an old friend. Wheedle him a bit.’

  ‘How am I to wheedle that you can’t?’

  Because this was something that Mrs Parker did not care about. She was all red and spirited in the small room.

  ‘I don’t see,’ Mrs Parker said.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘I am only his wife, an that not quite. It is different for a friend, for he will be less inclined to punch you in the face or kick you in the stomach for your pains. Just talk to him reasonable, an you so nice, he’ll be cryun salt tears of remorse in a winkun, an all will be over, you will see.’

  ‘Where is he?’ Mrs Parker asked.

  ‘He is on the back veranda, settun with his shotgun, an a bottle of eaudy Cologne, which is all we’uv got left. But the gun is only for show, Mrs Parker, take it from me, I know his ways.’

  ‘I think it would be better,’ said Mrs Parker, who did not like this a bit, ‘I think it would be better if we allowed the eaudy Cologne to run its course, if that’s the end of the bottles, as you say. Then he will fall asleep. That is the more natural solution, it seems to me.’

  ‘Ha,’ laughed Mrs O’Dowd. ‘No solution is natural where that bugger’s concerned. He would go to town on his own breath if he was put to it. No, Mrs Parker, it is his conscience that must be appealed to. You wouldn’t forsake an old friend.’

  All this time the house had been quite still. You would not have thought that it contained a situation and that a difficult one. The walls of the small room were simple slab, that they had pasted over with the newspapers, and the flies had done the rest. Amy Parker had never particularly noticed before that there was print to read, but began now to pick out, in slow words, the life of a grazier who had died after an accident with a bull.

  Then the feet began to stir. There was a slurring of boots over boards. O’Dowd, she remembered, had large feet.

  ‘Hsst!’ said his wife behind her hand, on which was the broad wedding ring that she wore for convenience. ‘That is him. He’s for condescendun. Whether it’s for better or worse remains to be seen. Sometimes I think it is better if he sets.’

  The feet had no intention but to move. They came on. They were moving over boards, some of which protested. The house was groaning. A body, and that of a large man, was jostling those rooms through which it passed.

  ‘I think we will be for movun ourselves,’ Mrs O’Dowd said. ‘Come, dear. This way.’

  And Amy Parker felt the grain of her friend’s hand.

  ‘If it is a crisis he wants,’ said Mrs O’Dowd, ‘then it is better to have a choice of avenues, as I discovered on a former occasion, an have not forgot since.’

  So they were whirling through the kitchen, through the smell of cold fat and ash, and were in a kind of small passage, frail certainly, but with several openings. There was a sound of listening, as loud as the silence could make it. Mrs O’Dowd stood with the lobe of her right ear cocked on a finger.

  Then he burst through a door that was obviously cardboard, as was the whole house. It flapped. O’Dowd was terrible. His mouth was moist, and the hairs were black in his nose.

  ‘
Ah,’he cried. ‘Two!’

  ‘Surprised I am’, said his wife, ‘that you are not seeun more.’

  ‘Why,’ O’Dowd bellowed, ‘as if two flickun women is not enough.’

  And he stood there most positively, holding an ugly sort of a gun, that Amy Parker hoped would not go off.

  ‘Mr O’Dowd,’ she said, ‘don’t you recognize me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said his wife, ‘it is our old friend Mrs Parker. Come to pay us a visit for old times’ sake.’

  ‘My arse,’ said O’Dowd. ‘A couple o’ flickun women, an you have a funeral.’

  ‘That is a nice way to speak to a lady,’ protested Mrs O’Dowd.

  ‘I am not nice,’ said her husband simply.

  His eyes frowned on this truth as if he could not look at it too long or too closely. It was a pretty pebble of a thing that required much examination.

  Then he took his gun and shot it off.

  ‘God help us!’ shrieked his wife, holding her hair, that was coming down in bundles about her ears. ‘That we have come to this, in our own home, Christians notwithstandun.’

  ‘Are you hit?’ asked Amy Parker, who had felt the wind.

  ‘I can’t answer for every part of me body,’ Mrs O’Dowd cried. ‘It’s the fright I got. You black bugger! You devul! You’ll kill us yet!’

  ‘What else do you think I am flickun well aimun at? Damn woman!’

  And he took the gun again.

  ‘Quick,’ said Mrs O’Dowd. ‘Mrs Parker, we must make tracks.’

  And in that small space of brown passage, with the flinty smell of the gun and its hot oil, there was such a flapping of women, revolving, and beating against the walls, as they chose some opening through which to escape. In this scrimmage Amy Parker became separated from her friend and found herself in the best room, with the bit of a door to shut and hope against. Where her friend went to she did not know, only that she had removed herself in that same gyration of anxiety and skirt.

  ‘Flick me if it ain’t finished,’ O’Dowd had begun to bellow.

  He could have been breaking his gun the other side of the door, and there was such a slapping of his pockets, as if he were on fire.