The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  Two days later, events and a suspicion that she was the martyr inspired Thelma to write again:

  …We have not seen Ray since all this happened, not that Mr Bourke would allow him on the place. Mrs Bourke has been sick, I have had her in bed, nursing her at night and working by day is no fun. She is letting her hair grow out, she is so upset. As for Mr Bourke, it has turned him into an old man, who was always so full of kindness for Ray, he can talk of nothing else.

  All this is, needless to say, very difficult for me. As his sister, I have to bear a great deal of it. I do think Dad should come and see if he can do something, or talk to Ray. Although I am sorry for these people and am related to them a little, I would not have chosen them, and feel that that relationship is purely accidental.

  I shall tell you later about my plans for the future, when they will have come to a head. I am getting on all right at the office. I think another girl may be leaving, and that I am pretty sure to benefit by it, judging from something Mr Forsdyke, one of the partners, said.…

  Thelma Parker did, at this point, want to have a cry on the pale mauve notepaper that she kept for more important correspondence, like writing to thank Mrs Gough for an evening party. In sudden detachment she remembered cats in the sun at the back doorstep. She bent down to touch the heap of sleeping cats. The scent of crushed mint made her desperate in the brick room. Whether she was looking forwards or backwards to that freedom which she so desired she was not sure, but her suspicions were horrible. She finished her letter with an action that was less upright. There were softnesses even in the pauses, of sleeping fur.

  …I shall be back, I hope, for Christmas. I would like to do nothing, and wake up in the morning and see the roses, that white rose. I have a plant in a pot that I bought, it is an ornamental chilli, though some people call it a ‘love apple’, whichever may be right. It does not do very well, I am afraid, and should, I suppose, be put in the ground.

  I hope you are well, Mum dear. Look after yourself. The asthma has not been so bad, except when the mornings are foggy, or when I am over-tired. I do work quite hard you know! I have headaches at times, and should see about glasses, I think, but a rimless kind. Still, I must not talk about me!

  You said in your last the roof is leaking. It is too bad. Almost everybody seems to have a leaking roof, or patches on the wall.…

  She never knew how to end a letter, and was even a little embarrassed by it, but finally she wrote quickly:

  Yours ever, with love,

  Thelma

  And read the whole letter over, to see whether she had said too little or too much.

  If she had suggested her father should come, she had not altogether bargained for his coming, for his honest look, which left her speechless. She had been thinking more of her mother as she wrote, and her mother, though not dishonest, was like herself, a woman,. Her elastic code could be made to fit circumstance.

  But Stan Parker came.

  He could not have avoided coming. In the beginning, as a young man, when he was clearing his land, he had hewn at trees with no exact plan in his head, but he got them down, even at the expense of his hands, though these in time became hard, and there were boulders to be moved, that he strained against with his horse, till the soft bellies of man and horse grew hard and stony too, and the stone of will prevailed over rock. It was in this frame of mind that Stan Parker, the father, blundered into town. He had no plan. He was bewildered by much of what he had been told. But he would, if given a chance, harness his will to the situation, and move it by strength and determination. He supposed. In the end he had hewn a shape and order out of the chaos that he had found. He was also an improvisor of honest objects in wood and iron, which, if crude in design, had survived to that day. His only guide in all of this had been his simplicity.

  So he came, and waited at the door of the Bourkes’ brick home, till it was opened to him; it was Thelma, he saw, was there.

  ‘Why, hello, Dad,’ she said. ‘I knew you would come but thought you would let us know.’

  To this he did not make any intelligible reply, because it was a gimcrack remark, stuck on as a formal decoration. Silence had perhaps taught him more about the usages of speech than the practice of it.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘come on in.’

  He was wearing a watch chain across him that she could not remember having seen, when she thought that she knew everything he had. In his awkward serge he was rougher, she saw, the man her father, seated amongst the tassels and fringes of Lilian Bourke’s lounge, uneasy but respectful on leatherette. Soon he had decided somewhere to put his hat, laying it on the floor beside him. She noticed with surprise and slight disgust the hair on the backs of his hands, and grey hair in his nostrils. Ah, she said desperately, this is my father, whom I have not known, and began to talk about train journeys and meals. She even told him the history of an oil painting of a mountain, done by an aunt of Mr Bourke’s at Richmond when a girl. She wondered at herself, that she could talk so fluently to her father, but of course it was his strangeness that made it possible. She was talking to an uncouth but good man in serge, but not her father.

  ‘What’s all this about Ray?’ he said.

  ‘It’s more or less as I said,’ said Thelma. ‘Mr Bourke will tell you the details when he comes in. Because I have never taken an interest in racing, and never shall. But the inquiry has not got to the bottom of it. That boy has retracted some of what he said. Whether he said it about Ray out of spite, in the beginning, I can’t tell. Anyway, they can’t pin anything on Ray except a feeling that he is guilty.’

  ‘So he is not guilty,’ said the father.

  ‘I have been remembering something about some puppies,’ she said very slowly, ‘about some puppies that disappeared. What was it. They were in the shed where the plough is. I just can’t remember.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  She was forcing him into a convention of dishonesty that was not his. He was glad at that moment that he did not know his daughter better. He would have liked to think clearly about his son, and to arrive at some decision, as people are reputed to. But the presence of the furniture and his daughter’s eyes held him constricted in a clumsiness of body and numbness of mind.

  ‘I would like to think better of him,’ she said. ‘Because he could be good too.’

  Sensing that this was what her father expected, she had begun to convert herself. She did want to believe. Because goodness is, of course, desirable.

  ‘He used to come here sometimes,’ she said, ‘and talk about Quigleys and people at home. He brought me a present once, of some stockings. I don’t know why. They were expensive stockings.’

  So that she made herself believe, and was sad, for the handsome young man her brother, who was standing there by the window in his city jacket with the light from the half-drawn blind on his golden skin.

  But the father did not want any of this.

  ‘Where is Ray?’ he asked.

  Then Horrie Bourke came in, with his handkerchief tucked into his collar, and when he had sat down said, ‘If I had not believed in that boy I would not’uv believed in me own self.’

  He was a fat old man with veins in his face, brimming over with the injustice that had been done him, and afraid that someday, if not soon, even tomorrow perhaps, he would have a stroke. So that mixed up with the tears that he shed for the son who was not his but might have been, a recipient of presents as well as a giver of them, was hate for the healthy young man, whose muscles were impressive in his singlet, who stood laughing by the dung heap in a sheen of horses, and threatened him callously with a seizure. Ray was walking across his puffy body as it lay in the yard.

  ‘Whether it was dope or not, or too clever riding, those young fellers were mixed up in it. Tom Schmidt the jockey, him that was on Sir Murgatroyd, is no better than any of em. There was an incident at Toowoomba I am told, though told only. So you came here today, Stan?’ said Horrie Bourke.

  ‘Yes,’
the father said.

  He shifted his thighs to make some speech which should be made. But could not. Words and wallpaper were getting the better of him.

  ‘Lily will be glad to see you,’ said Horrie Bourke. ‘I will retire from racing,’ said Horrie. ‘It is a rich man’s hobby, and a fool’s downfall. To think,’ he said, ‘it begins with horses. Poor hinnocent beggars, they cannot be sure of their own legs.’

  Stan Parker had not made water since early. Somewhere was the lost intention. To see his son, and all would be made clear.

  ‘I want to see Ray,’ he said, his own voice growing, and growing, into the room, till it took possession.

  ‘Yairs, yairs,’ said Horrie. ‘A course. Lily, this is Stan. My wife has been laying down with a headache. This business had hit her hard like everybody else.’

  ‘Stan!’ said Lily Bourke. ‘Why, what do you know! I often remember how you broke that washstand at Yuruga. Mother was rope-able. If it had been a piece of the set, but the slab was solid. And now this awful thing. You have changed, Stan.’

  Her face told him that a great deal had happened, in his life, that is, she would not have believe it possible in hers. Lilian would have liked to sit and read his face, with a mingling of irony and regret. But, like a person at a funeral, she remembered continually that she must show grief.

  ‘It is terrible,’ she sighed. ‘Horrie will be exonerated, of course. There is no question of his honesty. But we have both suffered, and it will not make amends, in no way, Stan, for the inroads on our health.’

  Did she want money? She wanted dreams.

  The powdery Lilian, all cloudy from aspirin, had been a girl with finicking ideas, but not a bad sort. Would she be able to accept the men who did not ask, she had never been able to make up her mind, and was forever brushing hands, and glancing sideways into mirrors, and asking conundrums after the roast pork. The woman of the girl was still uncertain. She had a habit of looking at her wristwatch and wondering whether it was time for a snack.

  ‘You will stay to tea, Stan. Amy was thin’, she said, ‘in those days. You could see the saltcellars in her, and the elbows. We always said that those Fibbens were reared on parrot and skim milk. But of course it was the kind of exaggeration that people make. We girls were always ready for a joke. Poor Clara was unlucky – did you know? – lost her husband and is in reduced circumstances. Alice died of an incurable disease. Yes,’ she said, ‘how we danced then. Till it was time for the boys to go home and milk.’

  Lilian was in a sense appeased by the past, its movement and its multicolour, and would have whirled still in that room, in spite of the lampshades and the Genoa velvet, if her visitor had been willing.

  But he got up and said, ‘I came here to see Ray. Where is he?’

  ‘Oh,’ they said. ‘Yes.’

  Because this shock to their own worlds set up a positive collision of globes.

  Then Horrie Bourke felt for his rupture and said, ‘We don’t know where he is, Stan.’

  ‘He has disappeared,’ said Thelma. She touched the seam of her skirt.

  Stan Parker was left standing. There is nothing you can put your hand on, unless it is wood or iron, but not other people’s motives.

  He could ask, they said, but it was doubtful. Bernie Abrahams, the bookie who had employed Ray, was not too happy about the whole affair and was not saying much. Then there was the boy Curly – he had come back for a pair of sandshoes he had left behind but did not or would not know anything of Ray. Ray had lived above a shop in a certain street, which they had written on a piece of paper, in a drawer.

  ‘There,’ said Lily, holding it up and reading. ‘It is Highclere Street, Surry Hills.’

  It was a dago shop, she said, and he had mentioned a couple of girls, one still a kid. Their names were Rose and Jean.

  ‘Then I shall go and ask,’ said Stan Parker.

  The people in the room all agreed that he should employ himself in this way.

  ‘Ray has been warned off, Stan,’ said Horrie Bourke.

  As an afterthought. Because Ray had gone. It was Horrie’s health and honour that remained.

  ‘Terrible for his mother,’ sighed Lilian. ‘How did she take it, Stan?’

  He murmured, because he did not know, because at that moment, when his wife had been reading words, he had been living them.

  Thelma came and let him out, after she had gone back for his hat, which he had forgotten on the carpet.

  ‘I am sorry, Dad,’ she said, making the affair his. ‘I’d come with you if I thought it would do any good.’

  Then she kissed him, and did quite enjoy being an affectionate daughter for its passing novelty. She thought how his skin was unfamiliar to her.

  Stan Parker took her kiss and went. He would find Ray now. He had great faith in his own legs and staying power. He took trams when they were suggested. He took streets. Some people gave him directions with minute, antlike fidelity, as if they were receiving him with confidence into their own ant-world. Others scuttled across the asphalt, scowling at him, and shook him off. He told one man that he was looking for his son, who was living above a fruiterer’s in Highclere Street, but the man wondered whether the stranger was mad to expose himself thus nakedly at a crossroads.

  So Stan Parker went on his way over the asphalt. Once he thought he saw Ray looking at him from a window, but was mistaken apparently. A young woman who was pinning some material to her bust pulled down the blind. In one street two cars rammed each other, crushing the occupants. He went on, sad to think that the impulse to run to their assistance had been taken from him; it would have been different on a dirt road. Now he no longer looked at people, but for the names of streets nailed to corners. He went on, over a rime of rotting vegetables, and old newspapers, and contraceptive aids.

  In what seemed like the last street to which he might penetrate, then or ever, a man lay spewing in the gutter. This is Highclere St, he read. He began to look for, and found, the fruitshop, of which the door was closed.

  One window of that shop was blind with green paint, the other was boarded up, so that its use might have appeared equivocal if the smell of old fruit had not come out, a sweet, thick rottenness of brown fruit. There was a padlock on the door, but presently a girl looked from an upper window, then a similar girl, though younger, both in coloured jumpers that they would have knitted themselves. The two girls looked down. They were sisters. They had the same greenish skins. Their noses were good.

  ‘Hello there,’ said the riper girl, who would have been Rose. ‘Who are you lookin for?’

  ‘I am looking for Ray Parker,’ said the man who had come.

  They looked down at his stiff clothes, that had been stuck on him by circumstance. The nostrils of the green girls were afraid this was some plant of a particularly honest-looking kind.

  The girl Rose gave a thick grunt. Jean looked. Her eyes were continually looking at scenes from a life which at any moment she might be called upon to enter. But not yet. It was her sister’s life.

  ‘I am his father,’ said the man.

  Whose leathery face was looking flat up, giving itself as a pledge to the girls,

  ‘Ah,’ said Rose.

  Her sister Jean wriggled closer, pushing back her live hair behind her ears, and would listen all day.

  ‘Ray ain’t here,’ said the sullen Rose.

  ‘But I’ve come to see him,’ said the man. ‘I came up from Durilgai on the early train. I could get back perhaps tonight. Not for the milking. But I could get back.’

  Rose listened to incredible things. But she did not speak. With her finger she was tracing a vein of the sick house.

  ‘Tell him,’ breathed the man’s upheld face.

  ‘I cantellim,’ she sulked. ‘Ray’s gone away.’

  ‘Where?’ asked the man’s breaking face.

  Then the young girl who was listening also began to break up. She began to giggle. She began to snicker and laugh. She laughed, and hid her face, and burrowe
d deeper into the flesh of her sister’s side.

  Till Rose laughed too. But deep, common, bubbly laughter from over her short teeth.

  ‘Go on,’ begged the man.

  He began to laugh too, but slower, haltingly, as if he had not yet grasped the full extent of the joke. And the sun was in his eyes.

  ‘Where?’ he said with less strength.

  ‘Up North,’ shrieked Rose, waving somewhere.

  But Jean unfastened her teeth from her mouth, and hung down, and in a couple of awful, dry spasms said, ‘Don’t you listen, mister. Ray went out West. Honest.’

  She could only just say. She was quite young, and convulsed, and sweating from having taken part, as she drew back into the house of rotten fruit.

  Then Stan Parker stood in the street with his shortcomings and omissions. He knew now that he would not see Ray. He no longer felt very strong. His faced ached from the expression of youth and indifference it had worn for the two padlocked sisters.

  Some way back, after several streets, roughly in the direction from which he had come, an old woman showed him a bag of plums she had bought.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘When I bought these they were big luscious plums. Anyways, on the barrer. See these little runts of things?’

  Indignation made her walk by the stranger’s side.

  ‘It ain’t right,’ she said, moving her teeth. ‘A person is always had.’

  He agreed, because that was all he could do.

  The woman walked. She began to tell him about her son. He was a miner.

  ‘Is he good?’ he asked with a stupid smile.

  ‘He is all right,’ she said, looking away. ‘Some people perhaps have different ideas of what is the truth. That is all.’

  Then she broke away, as if she had no further need to know the stranger, and he saw her pitch the paper bag of runty plums into the gutter.

  I am lost by this, he realized. He continued to walk, fumbling through the shapeless, ineffectual state in which his life had ended. Although he had acquired the habit of saying simple prayers, and did sincerely believe in God, he was not yet sufficiently confident in himself to believe in the efficacy of the one or the extent of the other. His simplicity had not yet received that final clarity and strength which can acknowledge the immensity of belief.