The fire did not come that day, only the smell of it, and the sight of smoke. And at night the wind died, so that the men began to make jokes again. The fire would not move at night, to any great distance, without a wind. They decided to go home and return early in the morning. Some of them hoped secretly there would be no need, that they would wake on a radiant day in which the fires of their own fears had burned out.
All through the days of fire the women went about their business, almost as if the men had not gone. They had really never learned to do otherwise. Only sometimes they looked up at the dirty sky, and seemed to walk more heavily through the yellow light. But the silences, broken by the cries of children, were the same. The sweat running on their skins was the same.
The women made jokes about the fire. Some said they would jump inside the watertanks with what cash they had from the vegetables or the pigs.
‘I would pray,’ Doll Quigley said.
And probably be saved. But not everybody was in the same boat as Doll Quigley, who had learned something from the nuns. Still, they practised stiff phrases of prayer in quiet embarrassment, and looked at the sky, and waited.
And at Glastonbury they waited. As the crisis deepened, and the yellow sky, they felt more isolated. Mr Armstrong, who had set off in the direction of the fires, returned, cut the end off a cigar, walked through the orchard, and returned. He had developed a slight twitch that had not been visible before.
‘For goodness’ sake, sit down, Father, or something,’ said his two daughters, who had come out on to the drive.
The daughters of the butcher stood on the gravel, their unused hands folded, and smelling of eau de Cologne. Miss Dora, who had put on her hat, had more or less decided that she would leave for Sydney, where her brother was conducting their father’s business. But Mabel, the younger sister, who would eventually marry the lord, was always unable to decide. She was amiable and pretty, with faithful eyes that made people think she was listening to them.
‘What will you do, Madeleine?’ asked Dora Armstrong.
Madeleine had come out just then on to the terrace. She too was wearing a hat, but because it suited her, its large, lazy brim moved as she walked with slow, indolent steps. She wore a white, cool, and obviously expensive dress, which on that morning defied circumstance.
‘Why,’ she said, ‘I shall read a book probably, and eat a peach I have just seen on the sideboard in the dining-room.’
Unlike most people, Madeleine remained clean after peaches. Dora hated her skill, for she was anxious in most things. Now she frowned and said, ‘How can you talk about peaches with those dreadful fires?’
‘Somebody will put them out, I expect,’ Madeleine said.
Or else she would be immolated. In spite of her apparent coolness the palms of her hands felt hot. She sat on the stone balustrade and tossed her ankle for an occupation.
Bronze arms of fire suddenly shot up into the sky in the direction of The Islands, out of the clouds of dirty smoke. It appeared as if something had given way. There was now a visible savagery of destruction in the progress of the fire, which made the Armstrongs admit to themselves that it would not stop at Glastonbury. For the first time they were vulnerable. They could not pay to stop the fire.
Madeleine sensed this. She thought about her lover, now sitting at his smooth desk, at which she had visited him once, and kissed the top of his sleek head, because it was hers. It was a devoted head. This admirable virtue was what she supposed she had desired. Tossing her ankle at the balustrade. But doubted since. Her face let fall few shadows of doubt, to the average observer, anyway. They did, however, find expression beneath trees at night, when she would sometimes cry herself hollow, or in the vague shapelessness of sleep, from which she always woke before making a discovery.
But she did not really suppose she would not pocket her doubts in the end, together with Tom Armstrong’s money, and live in broad outline the life she had always intended to live, of parties, and jewels, and mahogany, and candlelight. Only on that morning she was tormented by the fire that could consume, apparently, whole intentions. Anything might go up. So she waited, and exposed her complexion to the sun, in a way that, in normal circumstances, she would not have done, and broke one of her fingernails on the stone balustrade.
In the meantime Miss Armstrong had given up hope of influencing anybody and had gone round to order the horses that would take her to Bangalay to the train. She wished to get away as quickly as possible, and not to think any more about the fire. But her younger sister, although afraid, would have liked to see something happen. She was more emotional, and soft. She had once bandaged a man who had cut himself with an axe. Temporarily she was in love with that man. She was always falling in love, and wondering what to do, before time or her parents solved the problem.
The two young women on the terrace, who did not usually care for each other, except officially, were for the moment united in their indecision and their fascinated acceptance of a situation. They came close together. They almost held hands, only that would have been silly.
‘That was a good one,’ said Mabel Armstrong as trees fell and the fire leaped higher.
‘Oh, the poor people, and the little children,’ cried the butcher’s wife, who was holding her jewel case at an upper window.
She was a softhearted, rather directionless woman, in the style of her younger daughter. Mrs Armstrong was inclined to apologize for her wealth, and to give freely to charities, without realizing she was the cause of them. She was too slow. She spoke slowly, in an improved voice, through a mouth from which you waited for the egg to drop. After several years of perseverance she could recognize a few words of French, in print of course, and consequently felt pleased enough to relax. She liked to put her feet up, and would tell the surprised about a bunion, of which nobody seemed able to rid her.
This was before the fire, still at a distance, had burned through several layers of amiability and sloth, leaving her exposed. That morning she had walked through her house, filled with other people’s china and glass, and realized that the servants had been laughing at her for years. She moved from here to there a priceless little goblet in Bohemian glass, which fell off. But it did not seem important. The butcher’s wife was already too shattered to shiver again.
So they waited for the fire, and had been waiting many years of their lives. And nights. At night the clouds burned along the horizon. There was an intolerable ticking of clocks, and crickets, and the heart wrapped in its wet sheet.
Down below Durilgai the men who had prepared the break awaited the fire the following morning. It seemed inevitable that it should come. The twiggy framework of the bush cracked in the silence, in the intervals between the gusts of a hot wind. Then, about eleven, when one or two of the watchers were snoozing in some thin shade, and several more had almost forgotten, in the drone of anecdotes, the reason for their being in that place, the air suddenly seemed to thicken into molten glass.
‘It is coming,’ they said.
Those who were sitting and lying got to their feet. Those who were without their shirts ostentatiously moved their muscles and rubbed the hair of their chests, to get a hold on their strength. But nearly all of them expressed the secret quandary they were in by spitting on the ground, and the hot grey earth swallowed their spittle up, and there was not a sign of it.
Old Mr Peabody, however, had been sitting all this time on a rock, wrapped up, in spite of the temperature, in a coat that looked as if it had once been the inside of a horse rug. He appeared undisturbed by anything that might happen. It was his age perhaps. He was really very old. His skin stood up on the remains of his flesh in transparent scales. His hands were spread out like matches on the knobs of his knees. In the event of a disaster he would have been useless, a liability even, but now the men liked to have him there. He consoled them because he had survived.
Now he began to move his tongue between his dry lips in little lizardy motions, and to compose a prophecy.
As the men prepared for the fire, shifting on their feet, trailing their cut branches, with which they proposed to beat the flames, or fastening bags with wire to the end of strong sticks – as these preparations were going on, old Mr Peabody spoke.
‘Change is on its way,’ he said, probing the dry air with his tongue.
‘Change?’ said somebody. ‘We shall be changed all right, with the fire lickin at our arses. We shall be changed into jumpin monkeys. Up the hill an over. With the smoke comin out.’
‘Ah, no, the wind’ll turn it. Change is comin,’ said Mr Peabody in his weak voice, and winced, as if someone had walked across his grave, or the cold wind he promised had actually got amongst his wrinkles.
But everyone else sweated in the molten morning. And the bush began to dissolve into stray tendrils of grey smoke, wreathing and twining between the leaves and twigs, like leaves and twigs released. The watchers began to breath the stray smoke, and to stare into the tangled distance for the first flame. Each one realized the insignificance of his stature as he prepared to grasp the fire in a final wrestling.
Then a fox ran screaming from the scrub, his fire fiercer.
It was coming indeed.
Several bursts of yellow smoke were released all of a sudden, as if from a bag. There was a smoking, and smarting, and crackling, and breaking, and crashing. The fire was reaching upward from the undergrowth, and higher upward, to embrace whole trees. There was a sighing of sap. A bird fell, flaming from the beak upward, into an agony of writhing twigs. Snatches of sky showed mercilessly remote and blue in the welter of smoke and fire. Flags of flame were flying from the highest branches, and a victory appeared inevitable.
But when the fire reached the natural break in the side of the barren hill and the strip that the men had prepared for this emergency, it did happen much as old Mr Peabody had predicted. The fighters who had run out to meet the fire with their branches and flapping bags, and who were slapping at the first few lizards of fire that were wriggling out across the bare earth, hitting at these live animals because they must do something, however ludicrous, these men began to feel a change, of little cool puffs at first, in the shoulderblades. They scarcely noticed in the beginning. It was too gentle. But as the fighters hit at the fire, and their arms and chests began to get singed, the wind was gathering strength, till its cool southerly force made itself felt even on the borders of the fire. The wind and the fire swayed together amongst the hot rocks. The men even began to feel they were achieving something. They could laugh.
‘I told yers,’ said old Mr Peabody, to whom nobody listened now, because what had happened was something personal.
Each man breathed the wind that blew the fire. His miracle exalted him. His strength and stature returned, for the fire was cornered, if not by his efforts, at least under his eyes, so that he could tell about it forever after.
By late afternoon the fire appeared to have exhausted itself. After veering up the stony gully, holding the wind for a time, it was forced back on itself, into the country it had burned out, and died there of its own achievement. The wind swept over the blackened, smoky country, morbidly trying in its turn to rouse the few last tatters of flames, but there was nothing for these to live on. Once the enthusiasm was gone, it was difficult to think what it had all been about, in all those smoking miles, or to decide whether greater virtue springs from ashes.
Anyway, the firefighters stood once more in the round after the considerable experience of feeling the smoke pass through them. Now they wiped the sweat from their faces, and laughed, and told each other it had been nothing. Only Stan Parker, who was putting on his shirt, kept his head inside it as long as he could without exciting comment, so as to avoid being picked on to express opinions. And Mr Peabody had shrunk inside the remains of himself, overcome by age, and the truth of his prophecy, and the knowledge that he was no longer needed.
The men were dawdling rather, enjoying their relief and friendship, when three or four children came running along the ridge, as if looking for them. These children had come with a purpose, it seemed, the way they headed for the men, without relenting, their hair streaming straight in the wind, running and running, till they were very close, you could see the freckles on their faces and scabs on their knees, running to a standstill.
The children’s ribs were struggling inside their clothes, but they did find breath, among them, to tell in pieces the story they had brought. There were fires, they said, had broken out to the west of Glastonbury, had broken out that morning, Billy Scrivener had seen one, then there were two, there were several fires, joining and burning, people were frightened that the wind, it was in the right direction, and several farms were burned out already between Durilgai and Bangalay.
The children came to an end, and you could hear their breath as they looked at the men and expected them to do something.
They would, of course. Only for the moment the flesh had shrunk again from their faces, and they would have liked to deny the existence of fire. But on the blackened hillside, exposed to the children’s eyes, which obviously were in the habit of seeing truth, each man remembered his house, whether of brick, wood, iron, or bark, which until now he had considered solid, and all those objects he had accumulated, and without which he would not have been himself. So that after rubbing a palmful of tobacco, or biting off a wad for the journey, they saddled their caked horses or guided them into the shafts, and soon had started home.
All that part of the country to the west of Durilgai, through which the road rose from Bangalay, seemed to be under fire. A perverse wind that had no apparent intention of dying down for the night was helping the fire, which was duller, less passionate and spasmodic, but more determined than that which had consumed The Islands. The men began to feel their limbs ache and their eyes smart as they rode towards their homes and the new fire, so that they were irritable with their wives when they came to the gates to tell them things they already knew. As they flung down from their horses and walked on legs that felt bowed, they were heavy with a responsibility they could not throw off. Cattle, excited by the fire and so much coming and going, threw up their heels and ran to look at the men. Old dogs that had stayed at home crawled through the fences and grinned, between hoarse barks. Children showed off. So that the expectancy and welcome which surrounded the men made them nervous. They would have liked to crawl in somewhere and take refuge in sleep.
After they had messed about the meat their wives had put before them, and scalded their mouths, and belched a few times, the men began to debate where they should go next, for old Mr Peabody seemed to have exhausted his inspiration, or else had got the sulks. Anyway, he had disappeared. A few got on their horses and rode into Durilgai, to be in the centre at least, if that centre was no more than the signpost, the post office, and the store. But the postmistress was glad. She was yellower in that last light. She came out into the dust, folding her brown paper sleeves, over each other, and was able to give information received from people passing through. She was important.
So the defenders gathered and loitered, and those who lived farther out looked desperately for a neighbour, to whom they might attach themselves. In the dissolving evening there was no evidence of direction. Bits of burned stuff floated and settled on the dead grass.
Then the fire itself gave a lead. It began to be obvious that it was heading for those slopes which climbed to Glastonbury. The wind had livened it up. Down in the valleys jaunty tongues of flame rose from the dark mouths, and licked. Patterns of gold emerged from the dark undergrowth as the evening deepened. There was a chalky moon up, lopsided and apologetic, in the white branches of the trees.
Now the people who would fight or watch the fire began to converge on Glastonbury, and children even, as if it had been fireworks. Some women came in their slippers, for comfort, and because it was close. But the men, who had already looked into the depths of the fire that day, and seen goodness knows what, were hollow-eyed and serious. Although it was
not far, most of them stuck to their horses, because that way they sat above the earth. The evening was full of the jingling of bits, the chink of stirrups, and breathing, and talking. Mr Armstrong was glad to see all these people come across the paddocks and up the roads, and was worrying already how he could reward them if they quenched the fire.
A few lamps had been lit in the big house, for nobody could really believe in disaster, somebody would find some way out. But in spite of this hopeful belief most of the inmates had come outside. Moths or maids’ caps flickered amongst the trees, and there were frequent giggles from a full bosom as the soul of the kitchenmaid struggled to extricate itself from her uniform and meet its fate in the dark. The kitchenmaid had nothing to lose beyond a tin box, so that she went more than halfway to meet the fire. With blunt hands she touched for the first time the trunks of trees, and particularly those that exuded gum. Soon she was lost, except for her long, nickering giggle whenever she bumped into other bodies, and once when she took a header into a pricking bush and grasped it, gasping, gulping at the leaves, and embracing it dreadfully.
Down the gully, which in days of peace was the view from Glastonbury, the men had gone to fight the fire, or had trickled rather, in thin streams, hoping they might conceive a plan before they reached the bottom. Darkness had robbed most of them of any powers of thought, or even action. They were not exalted to the level at which miracles take place. They were drawn on mercilessly to the fire, that was running up the trees and falling from the elbows, to roll amongst the dead bracken in balls of the same protean fire, to shatter into sparks, to divide and join, but whatever activity engaged in, whatever form disguised in, always burning. In the midst of such unity of purpose the fighters did not stand a chance. Their leathery faces, emptied by exhaustion and filled with awe, showed it whenever the fire flung itself closer. Some of them had begun to thrash the flames with branches they had torn off, but like men who did not hold the key to their own mechanical limbs. Their lack of faith was in conflict with their actions.
The Tree of Man Page 21