The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  Even on the drive at Glastonbury prosperity was obvious. It shone in the mirror leaves of laurels, and lurked in the glimpses of shrubberies and lawns, and in a little summerhouse, in which a hand of cards had been abandoned beneath the cloying roses. Before she dived down that drive reserved for tradesmen and servants, Amy Parker noticed with some shyness the statue of the naked woman near the front door. Most people were hushed by that statue into a state of respect. They did not look at it, or only casually, and, after enjoying in a furtive flash the suggestiveness of the dimpled hands, accepted it as a respectable symbol of the wealth that had put it there.

  But Amy Parker became hot, and wished that the statue had not been there, as she turned along the side of the house to reach the door which would admit her. On this side they had planted a grove of gardenias, of which the formal leaves and melting flowers might have resisted her in that dusk, if she had not looked through a window of the house and felt impelled. So she loitered, and brushed through the gardenia leaves without thought of guilt, to see inside the window at which she had at first only glanced.

  The room into which she looked glowed in the dusk, for they had lit a big opalescent lamp, and there was a silver branch of candles, of which the flames batted in the breeze. They had encouraged a draught in that heat, throwing the curtains open, and the door, which led back into the house, to other mysteries and other lights. Several people were gathered in the room, Amy Parker saw; the blackcoated, elderly, respectful men, and the more ostentatious younger one. But all absorbed into shadow, except for their white shirt fronts, and their faces held to listen. They were the audience. It was Madeleine by whom they had been sculptured. She stood there. She robbed the lamp even of its light.

  So that Amy Parker came a little closer, drenched by the scent of flowers in the heady darkness, into which the arms of jasmine reached out from the side of the house, and embraced the intruding face with little tremors. From here she could watch, anonymously as a moth, but not hear. She did not want to hear. She would have been afraid. Besides, she could hear too plainly her own deafening heart.

  Now Madeleine raised her arm, and the eyes of the men looked along it, as if it had not been flesh but something more extravagant. They were commanded by it, just as they laughed when the shape of her mouth told them. The old men laughed as if they had been hit, shaking idiotically. But the young man, who had become young Armstrong, laughed for what he hoped was Madeleine’s own deepest satisfaction, as if they had been there alone, and he was holding her. His laughter tried to stroke. But Madeleine did not pay any particular attention to those who were with her in the room. She was speaking for herself. Or she arranged her pearls. Or glanced along her naked shoulders. Or into the cleft of her breasts that she had hidden with a rose. Madeleine was ice. Her icy dress grew from her splendid body, and could have been no other. At this moment Amy Parker quite forgot she had seen her in other circumstances or in other clothes.

  Then Mr Armstrong got up from where he had been sitting beside the window, in the cool of the evening, looking over some papers, letters evidently, before the light failed. Mr Armstrong had been undeterred, it appeared, by the other people in the room. He had paid for their presence there, and was rich enough to ignore. So he moved through the solitude of his room, with the opened letters flapping from his hand, and poured himself a glass of the wine the others had been drinking, and drank, and encouraged his own thoughts. But he had cast a gloom on the narrative of Madeleine. The men’s laughter trailed away into real but slightly bitter smiles. They shifted and drained their glasses, and Madeleine looked into hers, at the wine she did not want. Till Mr Armstrong came and took her glass and put it down, without her asking him. She would obviously have preferred to break it.

  Then it seemed they were all standing or sitting to no purpose, the figures in the room. They would never melt together, for their natures were insoluble. They would remain a fragile metal that one breath of hate could twist. And Amy Parker began to feel she had stayed too long. The breeze had got behind the tapestry, an expensive thing that the butcher had brought from Europe, of lords and ladies on silver horses, and the forest rippled, and the horses shivered in the breeze. The whole room had become unstable, like the rippling tapes-try. The flames of the candles flowed out, like hair, the gold foil of the wine bottle was brittle in the blowing light. Madeleine had gone and sat down in a chair which young Armstrong, the man it was said she would marry, was holding to the ground in an effort to give it stability. Unconscious of his strength and devotion, she sat upon the carved chair, controlling her boredom behind the sticks of her fan. The old men, who had been taught to laugh, had got over their initial annoyance at their host’s approach and now stood there detached and grinning, waiting for the breaking point.

  Amy Parker had begun to feel the weight of the dead ducks on her arm, and of much that she did not understand. So that she sighed and went from the scene she had been watching. It was over, anyway, or had entered a fresh phase. So she trod through the dark grove, in which there was a smell of something rotting, fuller now than the scent of night flowers, and went towards the maids’ door.

  This was opened on a gust of basted beef and mingled laughter and complaints. She trod in shyly, on the clean floors, ashamed of even her best stockings, and battered by the lights.

  ‘I have brought the ducks for tomorrow,’ she said in a voice that would have made her children glance up.

  ‘At a fine time,’ said Mrs Frisby, who was not unkind.

  But she slammed the oven.

  ‘Damn thing,’ she said. ‘Damn oven. Them and their ovens,’ she said. ‘I’m sick and tired of everything. Next week they can find another girl. I shall retire to the seaside.’

  ‘And live on their thanks,’ said Winnie, who was training the ears of her cap to look even sharper.

  ‘Oh dear, no,’ said Mrs Frisby. ‘There is a lady would give me a home just for the pleasure of me company. And breakfast in bed for a treat, if I didn’t mind the crumbs.’

  Everybody roared, till Mrs Frisby hushed, and particularly a young girl called Cassie, with a raw face just out of Ireland, who was beating up some eggs.

  ‘But we are forgetting Mrs Parker,’ Mrs Frisby then said. ‘Sit down, dear, and we will share a secret with you.’

  She took from a cupboard a bottle that tinkled with gold paper, like the one from which the butcher and his guests had drunk, and, after winking, and crooking her finger, poured an elegant glassful.

  ‘It is out of fizz’, she said, ‘because it has been open this little while. But it should lift you up to where you want to be.’

  ‘I have never drunk wine,’ Amy Parker said.

  So that Winnie’s face looked longer and thinner, and she took a buffer from the pocket of her apron and began to attack her nails.

  ‘In the last situation I was in,’ she said, ‘we girls did particularly well in wine. There was so much entertaining. Luncheons every other day. He was a real gentleman. Not like this one, still warm from the making.’

  ‘Tt-tt,’ sucked Mrs Frisby. ‘He pays well. And he’s not a bad poor devil.’ Wine and steam were softening her, and sad thoughts, drifting with the wind she belched, of her lost sailor. ‘Pardon me,’ she said, looking into a saucepan. ‘I am troubled with a bit of resurrection. That is the price of wine.’

  So that the young Irish girl hung trembling and splitting above the basin of egg, that she beat and beat.

  ‘And you take care, my girl, or you’ll rise the floussay too high.’

  It was by this time warm and scintillating in the kitchen. Amy Parker sipped from her glass, which she held delicately, as if it had been a flower, and looked inside, while listening for some indication of the life that was lived in the other part of the house. As the wine flowed through her veins and sparkled in her head, she could have got up and fumbled her way through the baize door, to stand before Madeleine.

  ‘She is beautiful,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ s
aid Mrs Frisby. ‘This lump of a girl from County Cork?’

  And Cassie giggled, and beat the eggs, as if these two functions were all that she could manage.

  ‘Madeleine, of course,’ said Amy Parker soberly. Her lip curled tenderly to pronounce the word she had never dared speak.

  In the silence Winnie returned the buffer to her pocket and pulled the apron closer to her straight breast.

  ‘It is Madeleine who is beautiful,’ Amy Parker said again, now that she dared.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mrs Frisby, plunging a ladle into soup, ‘we have not seen her in bed.’

  ‘That will be somebody else’s business,’ laughed Winnie.

  And Cassie tittered in a shower of egg.

  Mrs Frisby produced great clouds of steam, through which her prophetic face showed, and the soup cascaded into plates, with the little shapes of carrot in the liquid gold.

  ‘Somebody else’s business. If somebody can bring it off. And who is somebody?’

  She poured, and her grey face had grown tragic in the steam.

  ‘The bloody stuff is not clear enough,’she said gloomily. ‘Well, they can lump it. For all I care. And a little bit of grease too. The plates is French, anyway.’

  But it was all splendid to Amy Parker.

  ‘I would like to sit beside her,’ she said, ‘like she was, sitting in there, under that curtain thing, with the horses. And sit beside her. I would tell her about my dream, if I could remember it. I have never been able to talk about the things there are to talk about. When we were married I planted a rose, but we have not talked about it. And it is one of the most beautiful things. You see, I know quite a lot. But it is not possible to tell. Between you and me, Mrs Frisby, it is that that is wrong with the husband of the postmistress. He knows something.’

  ‘Strike a light, Mrs Parker,’ said Mrs Frisby, ‘it is time you were going home.’

  ‘And on one glass,’ said Winnie coldly, who was arranging soup and balancing a tray on her hand, as if suddenly jealous of it.

  ‘Yes,’ said Amy Parker.

  ‘Here is the money for them ducks of yours,’ said Mrs Frisby, flinging a few coins. ‘And if they are not tender, it won’t be me that cares. Stomachs, I am sick of em. I had a friend once that died, and when they cut him open – would you belive it? – it was duck. He was stuffed full.’

  Amy Parker could have believed it.

  ‘Duck!’ screamed Mrs Frisby. ‘Ha-ha-ha!’

  So that it must have entered by the doorway through which Win-nie slipped. Then the baize shuddered and settled.

  ‘I will never speak to her,’ said Amy Parker, gathering her basket.

  ‘You won’t miss nothing,’ said Mrs Frisby. ‘She’s out of tune. It’s all in the eye with Madeleine.’

  But Amy Parker stood with her empty basket.

  Mrs Frisby realized this.

  ‘Here,’ she said and wrapped up some nice remains of cold corned beef.

  She hoped that this might do some good, but, remembering her lost sailor, she doubted it.

  So Amy Parker went from the kitchen, and from the house, with its conflicting noises. Night birds confused her still more, drowning the velvet voices that had dawdled over soup. For the rich people had gone into the dining room and were seated there behind the drawn curtains. In the open room in which they had drunk their wine only the tapestry remained.

  So Amy Parker walked faster through the garden. It was full of the wings of night birds. Once she heard, she thought she heard, footsteps on the same gravel, that she avoided by taking to the pine needles. She strained and hoped. But if Madeleine had escaped from the dining room with a headache, she would have discovered, walking beneath the dark trees, only a stocky woman with wood in her mouth instead of words. So Amy Parker ran on, hating her own breath, and threw the parcel of corned beef into some bushes near the front gate.

  When she came in her husband said, ‘Well, what happened?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Haven’t you got anything to tell?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘There was a lot of silly talk. They gave me a glass of wine. And my head feels hot.’

  ‘You got drunk?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know if it is that,’ she said, bathing her face. ‘I was never drunk before.’

  But she bathed her forehead, and was afraid of what she might have said in the kitchen. She was obsessed by the memory of some nakedness. But the cold water clothed her soul, and she became neat and familiar to her husband, with no suggestion of the poetry she had seen and lived, at the window in the dark garden, or in Mrs Frisby’s steaming cave.

  And the summer dried her up as if she had been a blade of grass. The wind, when it blew down the hot funnels of summer, stirred the flags of dry corn. There were many insects that Amy Parker noticed for the first time, and the veins of dead leaves. During this period while her husband went about his work, doctoring a sick cow or doing things with wire, while her little boy played with a green bottle in the dust, filling and emptying as if it were the sole importance, she was looking over their heads, waiting for something to happen. As it did eventually. In this position, and frame of mind, she saw the first smoke, in that part of the country which is called The Islands, in the direction of Wullunya, where the floods had been.

  ‘Here is the fire now,’ she said, wondering whether she should be frightened.

  The smoke grew skywards, small still, a sapling of smoke, but growing.

  So she went and told her husband.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s a fire all right.’

  He looked up, with the pliers in his hand, from the knot he was tying in a piece of wire. He had seen the fire already, of course, but he was not telling. He half-hoped it would vanish into smoke.

  All around, people were telling each other, the women full of information, the slower men less willing to accept fact. Some men swore when they were told, and one even hit his wife with a bucket, so that she fell down and the blood gushed out.

  But the men began to gather together, after the first moment of hesitation and desire to turn their backs on the fire. They looked for their axes, and fetched out sacking, and filled their water-bags, and asked for a bit of tucker to see them through while they were gone. Then they climbed on to their horses or into their carts, and made off in the direction of The Islands, where the fire was.

  By this time it had grown angry. Passionate volumes of smoke towered above the bush, and in that smoke, dark, indistinguishable bodies, as if something were being translated forcibly into space. The men of Durilgai straggled along the bush tracks, in groups, discussing other fires, or singly, looking at the ground. The latter were surprised at the details of sand, stones, and sticks they saw. They had discovered in the earth an austere beauty that they now loved with a sad love, that comes when it is already too late. The fire causes this inevitably to happen to solitary men. They are reconciled to the lives they are leaving behind, as they ride between the black trees, and the yellow light lowers, and animals begin to run towards them instead of away. Even some of the jocular individuals, who are boasting of bigger fires, begin to sense the approach of the intolerable, try to cover it up with obscenity, and when this fails, ride, and spit, and jerk the mouths of their horses.

  The volunteers from Durilgai had gone several miles when they met a man called Ted Doyle, coming towards them on a wet horse.

  The Islands was as good as burned out, said Ted Doyle, waving his arm in the direction of the fire, in which he had lost his hat and his courage. It was the biggest, flickin fire, protested the messenger, as his sweating horse revolved nakedly on thin legs. And Flanagans’ burned out, and Slatterys’; he had seen the walls cave in on the old man, and there was a woman took fire at Glassons’, a sister of Mrs Glasson’s, had run and lain in the creek, that was dry that year, and had lain twitching on the dry mud – for all they had beat her with the palms of their hands and an old coat or something, she was dead. All that district was just on
cleaned out. The messenger flung this fact with his open hand, which trembled in the yellow air. There was some hadn’t a mattress that was not a stench of feathers. And they opened the yards for the fowls to fly out. They flew flaming, or opened their beaks for air, and died decent like, turning up their eyes, their wattles gone black. The messenger’s eyes were hollowed out by smoke. His white eyes told more, and the Adam’s apple jerking in his scrawny throat. When the wind took the fire, the man said, stretching his arm from his side and moving it gravely as a curtain of fire, the heat withered up the leaves before the fire, and the hair was shrivelled from your hand. They looked at his hand, and it was, in fact, singed of all hair. The hair of his head was frosted with the burnt ends. He had a smell of burning, that they snuffed up, to persuade themselves. And the animals were burning, he said, the wild ones, and snakes, they were lashing on the hot earth, as their flesh burned they lost shape, and knotted, and shrivelled. He had seen a snake bite on itself before it died, to hold someone responsible.

  Then the men who had been listening decided to turn back and find a position from which to defend Durilgai. Old Mr Peabody, who was now very old indeed, sitting like a prophet in a sulky with his son, suggested they should make a stand about a mile back, where there was a stony hillside and a natural break in the scrub. The others listened to his old voice issuing miraculously from between skin and bones, and decided to take his advice. They turned their horses obediently and followed Peabodys’ sulky. Some of them guiltily remembered their fathers, and almost all were grateful for the frail protection of the old man’s authority.

  So they prepared to meet the fire, if it was carried so far by the wind. It was poor country just there, of rocks and rabbit warrens and dead, listing thistles. Along the hill they cleared the scrub, making a wider belt, across which it was hoped the fire would never leap. There were voices and the thud of saplings in that quiet place, all during the day and into the night, with the nickering of horses that turned their muzzles homeward and wondered.