The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  Armstrongs came once or twice to Durilgai after Stan Parker returned. They were obviously confused. They came in a motorcar, high up, and did not speak to people that they met, not out of pride, but because they preferred never to stay long in any one place. Since young Tom Armstrong was killed, who had been a lieutenant, and mentioned in dispatches, and decorated – there was all about it in the papers – the old man had had a kind of stroke, so that his face was down on one side. You felt sorry for old Armstrong. Now he sat in his green car, with the brass snake that wound along the side and gave warning, he sat in his flat cap and good coat of English tweed, and looked ahead, except when his wife nudged him to recognize something or somebody. Then he would slightly raise his hand, offering in the air a greeting that anyone who cared might take. Only old Armstrong himself was indifferent. The skin of the fingers of his dead hand was gathered in cold pleats.

  His wife, though, had a kind of brightness, as of flapping corn. Her hair hung from her scalp like the corn silk, and looked quite moist and vegetable by comparison with her dry but suitable gestures. She smiled as he had learned, and would have liked to talk of illnesses, short, bright ones, or minor operations, surrounded by carnations and grapes.

  When the Armstrongs came to Durilgai they would drive to Glastonbury, where they never lived now, because it had not been finished. The men had been withdrawn when the news was received of young Tom’s death, so that the staircase continued to open into the sky, and mortar hardened into rocks where it had been mixed, and people had stolen the loose bricks on dark nights. The old Armstrongs would take a turn or two in the deserted garden, holding their clothes tightly to their bodies, as if in this way they might appear disguised and Mrs Armstrong would still look for scars of the terrible fire, and would stand where the beds had once existed under the milk thistles and the cow-itch, to tear the roses from their bushes in guilty handfuls. Great handfuls of her own roses. She could not gather too many too quickly, almost as if she wanted them and they were not hers. Then Armstrongs would return in their motorcar, for the afternoon breeze blew dangerously on the hill at Glastonbury. Their legs were uneasy as they sat beneath the Scotch plaid, and the roses wilted on the old woman’s lap, and sometimes she would throw them over the side of the car, wondering why she had picked the lolling heads of spent roses.

  Stan Parker once had cause to go to Glastonbury, after that big Muscovy duck, that flew from the pen because they had delayed cutting its wing, though they had talked about it often enough. The duck made straight for Glastonbury, to stalk and hide in its wilderness, and to endure all kinds of frights and elements in order to preserve its illusion of freedom. Stan Parker went up the hill in pursuit, parting the tall weeds, so that the seed flew from them, and the dusk was floating with a fine down. There was a cabbage gone wild in one place. It had a rank smell beneath the foot. In the stalks of Paddy’s lucerne, of which the sour lashes sprang where the gardenia grove had been, and was still, only sickly and unrecognizable, with pale leaves and buds that had clotted and rotted into wads of brown paper, he stooped and picked up a bundle of old letters. These also were pale and mouldy. Their secrets were more secret in the faint but firm hand of some man, it looked, who had dipped his pen and said what he wanted to.

  How Stan Parker wanted to read the sodden letters in the suffocating grove and discover something that he did not know! There is always a guilty yearning for anonymous advice that makes the hands tremble. So he was prepared to immerse himself in guilt and knowledge, if he had not remembered Tom Armstrong, whether the letters were his or not. He threw them down then and went inside the half-finished house, which no one had thought to shut, because there was no reason to.

  Unreason abounded in the identical twin of the house that had been burned. Some swaggie had camped there once in the twin of the room in which the tapestry had hung, and lit his fire in the twin fireplace, and smeared his excrement on the blank wall. Someone had written of his love in terms of physical urgency. But it was the reasonable face of young Tom Armstrong that recurred to Stan Parker as he walked in the room in which his heel had struck the harp that other evening of fireworks. Because it was not fire, he had realized later. It was the fireworks before the fire. Tom Armstrong, in his good collar and brilliantine, had everything cut and dried, with the confidence of the rich. Unless outside the burning house, with Madeleine on her knees, or when, finally, his face was blown off.

  Stan Parker trod through the house, which did not, in fact, belong to Armstrongs. Vines had taken possession of the half-built staircase; it was not clear through what crevice, but unfurling and writhing where the smoke had been. The man stood at the top, as high as he could go, and from his vantage of vines looked out, and wondered about Tom Armstrong’s girl. She had not been heard of, neither married, nor dancing; Madeleine had vanished, and would never have existed, if it had not been for the moment on the stairs.

  Then Stan Parker leaned his head against the unfinished brick-work and thought quite distinctly how he would finish this unfaithfulness to his wife if the opportunity occurred. Now the dispassionate evening allowed him no feeling of guilt. Under the wide sky, thickening into night, at the top of the deserted, desecrated house, vines crumpled in his hands with a fleshiness, a soft muskiness of flesh. Only he could not remember enough. He could not remember the pores of her skin, the veins in her eyes, her breath on his neck, however hard he tried to. Whole rooms of his mind, in which each separate detail had been stored, seemed to have gone, like those rooms of the top and most significant storey, through which he had run, matching himself against the bravura of the fire, to find her, as he had not expected in his youth and diffidence, awake.

  Now the middle-aged man stood crumpling the vines at the top of the ugly house. Unpleasant lines had come in his face, almost of consummation. But nobody would see, of course, because the place was quite deserted. Except for the duck, that was stalking heavily in the undergrowth, showing its yellow eye. Why, he had come there for the duck, he realized, crumpling the hot vines, and glad of a reason.

  So he swore at the bird. ‘I’ll get that bastard,’ he said.

  While the duck continued to stalk, the man ran down and out at the back, his large body grown ridiculous as it hurtled far outside his recollections. Then he recovered himself and his breath, picked up a long branch of a tree that wind had torn off, and that he noticed lying, rushed at the now desperately regretful duck, and pressed it to the ground with the fork of the branch, pressed as if he would crush the bird through the earth, out of existence, rather than take it alive.

  ‘Got the bastard!’ he exploded.

  The duck hissed, and beat with its wings, and lashed with its long, strong neck. Its ugly wilfulness, and the knobs at the root of its bill, had become quite pathetic. But at present the man could not hate it enough.

  Till suddenly he slid to the end of the bough, still holding it, stooped, and picked up the bird from the fork. After a hiss or two the duck hung neatly, if heavily, from his hand.

  The man turned back and began to go down the hill. Nobody had seen any of this. He walked in the tracks he had already made, through the flattened weed. Nobody would know of any spasm of lust on that evening, which was already growing cold, it was autumn.

  So Stan Parker walked home with his recaptured duck, and felt the cold begin to creep through the sweat beneath his clothes, and an uneasiness in one shoulder that had overreached itself. The crumb of goodness is irretrievable in the light of one lapse. So he was disconsolate. He thought with longing of his wife, whom he loved, and of the soggy bread she had baked when they first lived together in that bit of a shack. He thought of Doll Quigley, and that purity of being, which he recognized but could not apparently convert into terms of his own reality. So he walked through the docks and mallows. In his heavy boots, heavier with moist, gathering earth, he thought of those clods of words he was in the habit of heaping together in some shape of prayer, on which ordinarily he could expect to climb at least i
n the direction of safety. In the dusk, though, of cold passion, the chances were reduced.

  When he got in he went to his wife’s workbox, and took a pair of scissors, and hacked through the satiny but coarse feathers of one of the duck’s wings.

  ‘That’ll fix it,’ she said, looking up calmly through the glasses she had taken to wearing for close work.

  He only grunted, and went in the dark to throw the duck into its pen.

  Amy Parker continued to darn the sock with neat skill. It was the duty she had imposed upon herself that evening, seeing her husband go in the direction of Glastonbury, to catch the duck, he had told her deliberately, looking into her eyes. Remembering her own mission to Glastonbury, on a former evening of ducks, she had wondered what he would find. But Stan was different; he was not given to doubt or recklessness; he strained fences, and planed wood, and gave people the last word on things. So Amy Parker wove the neat, square patch on the man’s thick sock. So Stan would quickly find the duck, even in that undergrowth, which she had seen lately for herself, to satisfy curiosity for what people said of the ruin. So she wove and snipped. She was in her own way skilful and precise, her work wore well. She was a steady, amiable sort of woman now, whom people liked, to look at her pleasant skin, and to ask what she did when the jam did not jell or when the hens were getting the white diarrhoea.

  Then Stan had come in, as she had promised herself he would soon, and hacked off the feathers.

  She had made her comment, not because it contributed anything, but because they were married to each other, and these words of no significance wove them closer and more confidently to each other, and similar threads of daily words, weaving and uniting. Or was it patching?

  Amy Parker cut the last thread she would put that night. She did not intend to do much on that occasion, or go deeply into anything. But if she could have put down the sock, and gone into the darkness of the yard with a hurricane lamp, and held it to her husband’s face to see, she would have done that. She would have liked to reassure herself.

  It will be different now, they had said, when Stan came home at the peace, it will be different, they said, meaning it will be the same as before. Only nothing is ever the same. She could not look too often at his face to wonder what was happening. She would invent excuses for watching, call him to change a washer or lift a weight, and she would find reasons for touching even, some convenient roughness of his skin or shadow of dirt. She would laugh a little then, in apology, and he would frown sometimes. But it gave no clue to the progress of his mind, whether it was making provision for her or whether she had dropped behind, inside the network of acts they performed necessarily together, and words spoken.

  So the woman began to wonder whether their life together was too comfortable for him, or whether he had learned by heart all those thoughts and opinions she was in the habit of expressing. Of course there were others that she kept hidden, which was only natural. And some that she sensed only as an uneasiness, or even terror.

  ‘Stan,’ she said once, ‘we must take the children one day and go for a picnic or something.’

  ‘All right,’ he said, ‘if you want to.’

  Because he was a good-tempered husband.

  ‘It was an idea,’ she said. ‘It would make a change in our lives. And that’s important, isn’t it? I would like to look at the sea again.’

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Whenever you feel like it.’

  His full agreement almost disappointed her. She would think about it, she now said, as if the idea had been his, and in doing so her desire to see the ocean remained theoretical. Standing between pine trees, she was overawed and almost sucked under by the glassy rollers. It will be exhilarating, she said, as if all currents are a spectacle in green glass.

  So the days swelled, and rose out of each other, and were folded under, and her idea of the picnic became a silly whim, then a cause for resentment, that she hadn’t the will to achieve it, or achieve anything much. Resentments bred.

  Not long after the war Stan Parker bought a motorcar, and they felt they had come a long way. Stan learned to drive his car with pride, if not with ease, sitting there too stiffly, with stiff neck and arms, as if he were screwed fast at certain key joints. The car was a Ford, rather a loose thing, but it hung together; no errand was too surprising for the Ford. When Parkers drove out, Amy Parker put on her hat with more than usual formality, and streaked some powder on her face, and took a handbag with lozenges and things. Some neighbours looked and smiled from their verandas; others turned away in anger and pretended that they did not see. But Parkers drove on, fascinated only by the road.

  Sometimes Stan would take the car and drive out quickly, though, before his wife could ask him where he was going. He could feel that she had run out from the house, and was standing in her clean apron watching the car as it disappeared. But he did not look back and wave, or shout an explanation, because he did not know yet where he was going. He drove down sandy side roads, on which the body of the car was almost torn in pieces, and along which, except for the fact that the road did exist, there seemed no reason why human beings should go. It was too sour in that part of the bush, or too pure, to suggest prospects of gain or possibilities of destruction. Black sticks pointed on the sandy soil, in which struggled bushes of stiff, dark needles, and greater trees, of which the bark came away in leaves of blank paper. There were the anthills too, their red, brooding domes perfectly contemplative.

  Stan Parker would draw up in those parts. He would roll a cigarette. He liked to be there. He would sit with his hands on the still wheel, till their dried-up skin had disintegrated in the light of sand and grey leaf, so that his body was no longer surprised at the mystery of stillness, of which he was a part. If his wife continued to stand, in his mind, beside the house in her clean apron, with the anxious and thwarted look on her face, it did not avail her for the moment, he could not have done much to answer her poignance with rational assurances, or even the deceptive gestures of the body.

  So he forgot about her for the time being, knowing that he would return to her, to share their habitual life. There was no question of its being otherwise, even if his soul ventured out beyond the safe limits on reckless, blind expeditions of discovery, and doubt, and adoration.

  Stretching himself finally on the creaking seat of the frail car, till his bones cracked, he would long to express himself by some formal act of recognition, give a shape to his knowledge, or express the great simplicities in simple, luminous words for people to see. But of course he could not.

  There were individuals who said Stan Parker had gone a bit queer from the war, after all he had been through, and him a husband and a father. Now these people began to avoid him. He had never been a talkative man, except on direct practical matters. His advice had been good. But they preferred to take their troubles elsewhere, rather than have his eyes discover any cracks in their demeanour. Stan Parker was queer.

  Once he had told his boy to get into the car, and said that they would go for a drive. Where? Well, just to those parts to which he had grown attached, he could not say it was anywhere particular. The boy was naturally embarrassed, and sat looking at the sober speedometer or gloomily out at the side of the road. He did not like to be with his father, anyway.

  But Stan was full of hope. Now I must speak to this boy, he felt and convey to him something of what I know; it will be easier if we do it like this; and already he had greater confidence, seeing the sandy bushland, in which stood only the essentials of tree and shrub, the absorbed mounds of anthills, and the black sticks pointing in different directions on the ground.

  ‘This is pretty poor country,’ said the father. ‘Sour. But I sort of like it. It gets a hold over you.’

  ‘I don’t know what we’ve come here for,’ said the boy, looking with gloomy distaste at the bushland.

  Although he had never seen a city he longed for it. Much of his unhappiness was due to the fact that he had not discovered the herd.

>   ‘Aren’t we going to do something?’ the boy asked.

  ‘I just wanted to go for a drive,’ said the father, ‘and have a talk.’

  His heart had begun to fail, though.

  ‘About what?’ asked the boy, who was suspicious, thinking it might be some explanation of sex.

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ said the father.

  He was glad that he had the wheel to guide, and could employ himself in this way to some effect.

  ‘We don’t know each other too well, do we, Ray?’

  The boy was quite unhappy. So was the man.

  ‘We know each other all right, I suppose,’ said Ray in self-defence. ‘What is there to know, anyway?’

  The father could not answer that one.

  ‘I haven’t seen you since I got back,’ he said.

  ‘What can I do?’ complained the boy. ‘Hang about all the time?’

  He now definitely disliked his father. He even disliked the smell of him, which was the smell of the solider, steadier men of that age, smelling of tobacco and work, of their regular and reliable bodies. For a moment the father had excited him, at the return, with his rough khaki tunic open at the neck, but it was perhaps more the excitement of the barbarous and foreign objects he had brought with him, the little polished grenade and the sullen helmet, which had been taken, he said, from the head of a dead German.

  But this was already some time ago. Ray was a bigger boy. He had grown at the wrists. And the helmet had been dented and the grenade was lost. He had, in fact, almost forgotten these talismans capable of averting the ordinary, the safe, the good, while his father remained.