The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  Once his father struck out at him, and the boy screamed, he pretended to cry, it was a great game, and the father also liked it.

  In the teeming shed-house, in which the young wife had just fed her latest baby, they sat down to a stew with a few carrots floating in it. There were big heaps of grey potatoes on the men’s plates.

  ‘Bet you men are hungry,’ said young Mrs Peabody, who had a brown skin, and who was a shining, joyful young woman, because of everything. ‘You tuck in, Mr Parker. Mum an I ’ave had ours.’

  ‘I had no appetite, not today,’ said the grandmother, who was a Mrs Peabody too. ‘Nor has Mr Parker, I expect. It is the young ones that are always guzzlin. It’s a good thing there’s the pertaters.’

  ‘I am never off my tucker,’ said Stan Parker, though at that moment he could not look at it.

  ‘It will come to yer that yer will be,’ said old Mrs Peabody in disgust. ‘You are not a young man, I would not say, by any calculation.’

  The visitor was defenceless. Some of the children had ceased to respect him.

  ‘’Ere, cut it out, Mum,’ said the host through a full mouth. ‘Leave a man alone.’

  ‘You won’t get no lolly,’ said her daughter, winking at their guest.

  ‘If you must all bully me,’ complained the old woman, whose hair stood out from her parrot skin in grey tufts. ‘I have reared seven daughters, Mr Parker,’ she said, ‘and got pitched from one to the other of em. Like a parcel.’

  ‘You were lucky’, said young Mrs Peabody, ‘to ’ave ’ad so many. Otherwise, you would not’uv got pitched so long. The parcel would certainly’uv got dropped.’

  She gave her mother a slap in the back with such good humour and gentleness that the old woman began to cry for all the mercy she had received, and went off through the bag curtain, beyond which she lived.

  Stan Parker pushed away his plate after a bit.

  Young Mrs Peabody looked at those potatoes in the sea of stew.

  ‘Eh,’ she said, but did not continue.

  She had an idea that her husband’s friend was a subject for protection, so she curved her arm round him to reach the plate, and as she swept by he felt her protective warmth.

  ‘I’ll give yez a cup of tea,’ she said. ‘You want to drink it, though,’ she said, turning on this old man.

  Stan Parker was full of humility, not that he had ever been a proud man. But he looked humbly at the knees of his pants, and at Peabodys’ earth floor, from which the face of a child was staring back at him. From the end of life he was drawn towards the limpid child. He would have liked to say something to it, but it was too far.

  ‘There you are,’ said the mother, placing the cup of sloping tea. ‘There’s sugar. You can sugar yourself. Don’t you hurry him, Joe. Let the poor man enjoy a nice cup of tea.’

  Stan Parker was no longer hurried. His slow lips drank the tea. He sat making distant conversation, and did go down with Joe Peabody to the fence, but it was advancing without him. Stan wandered off during the afternoon, and Joe Peabody was secretly pleased, thinking, The old cove has become a liability, and for the little he has done, but a good old cove.

  When Stan Parker got home his wife said to him without looking up, ‘You are back earlier than I expected.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I cracked up.’

  ‘How?’ she asked. ‘Cracked up?’

  She started back from him, although he had not hit her.

  ‘We were getting a stone out of a post hole. I went as weak as a little child. It was only a sort of dizzy spell. But it lasted. I was no good today, Amy.’

  But by evening he was again a man of strength and prospects. And they made one or two hilarious jokes about age, underneath that hard electric light in which the room stood square. He was so far recovered that she dealt him a blow at one point.

  ‘We’d better sell up those damn cows,’ she said. ‘What has our life been? But plodding up and down that path to pull the milk out of a mob of blessed cows.’

  She watched even, to see if she had wounded him. He did not flinch, though.

  When she had hung up the damp tea towel to dry she came towards him. The smell of the cold garden flowed in at them through the window, a smell of woodbine and of early violets. She had smoothed her hair down that day, so that he saw, or remembered, her beauty. They kissed, quite fiercely, and were comforted by the illusion of their returned bodies. The man was fortunate enough to fall asleep in this illusion, but the woman lay longer in the bed in which they had slept their sleeping lives, and was moved by gratitude or curiosity to touch his head. She touched his skull, for all the flesh seemed to have gone from it in sleep. He did not object, but lay there breathing from a distance. Not long after, she did fall asleep in the uneasy framework of the house. This time it was she who strained to move the rock, which lay beside her heavy in the bed.

  By daylight, of course, it is easy to resume confidence in flesh. On placid days of winter Amy Parker sat, in that lull of afternoons, on the front veranda, to watch from behind vines, and the canes of an old rose, that must go, it was too possessive and too old. Here she sat, though, in the meantime, watching for something to happen, though mostly it did not.

  Except one day, it was June, there was a cold wind bending the grass down, there was sunlight of that thin kind which is dispelled before it reaches its objective, but that day a car passed, a neat enough small car, it had been polished with some pride and care. Mrs Parker bent a cane down to watch. She could not see that far in any detail. It was aggravating. She could not. Except there was a woman squinting out, looking about, looking for confirmation of some kind. She was dressed in black fur.

  ‘Is that, can you tell me,’ called the woman, who had stopped her small car, ‘does Mrs Parker live here?’

  ‘I beg yours,’ replied Mrs Parker with caution.

  She came out in anonymity, to see.

  ‘There used to be a Mrs Parker,’ said the stationary woman, her voice loud and lonely in that cold country place in which she had pulled up.

  She is an elderly woman to be driving herself around, considered Amy Parker.

  ‘Why, yes, there is,’ she said, but considering, but clearing her throat.

  This woman had a yellow face, like soap. Her voice went into Amy Parker, ferreting after something.

  ‘But aren’t you,’ said the woman, ‘you are surely Mrs Parker?’

  Mrs Parker blushed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mrs Gage, is it?’

  ‘I would not have known you,’ said Mrs Gage. ‘You have put on quite a lot of weight.’

  ‘You have got quite stout yourself,’ said Mrs Parker, looking at the landscape.

  But she was pleased, it seemed, for something she had seen.

  Then both women laughed, a high laughter, as if thin wooden bats had been slapped together in mid-air.

  ‘Well, I never,’ said the ex-postmistress when they had exhausted themselves.

  Amy Parker watched the face, which was yellow and strangely mobile, it could have been filled with liquid soap. She saw that Mrs Gage was comfortably situated, and hoped that the postmistress would tell her story, which soon she did, fingering the nickel knobs of her little car, and looking misty for the past.

  ‘When I put in for a transfer from Durilgai,’ she said, ‘after Mr Gage had taken his life, as you will remember, I was sent to Winbin.’

  At this cruel township in the South, ice crackled on the puddles. You could hear it. You could see the long, yellow rain come down the valley and strike the yellow grass. There was the street with the blacksmith and the pub. There had been a murder once, but many years ago, and then never another. At the office, which was brown, on piles, above a lot of empty kerosene drums and broken chairs, the wind had loosened some of the woodwork. In the brown office, in which Mrs Gage stood, there was a smell of stoves and dry ink. Ink, other than the dregs of ink, frequently froze, so that you were not encouraged to put it. That frozen ink just made you feel bad. So
Mrs Gage, chafing her chilblains and listening to the sound of her brown-paper sleeves, offered the public a pencil instead.

  ‘I got quite thin at Winbin,’ said the postmistress. ‘It was on account of Mr Gage really, passing over in that way. I developed a nervous condition. I began to have difficulty with some of the forms. Would you believe it, I could not account for several sheets of stamps? And most distressing of all, I would fall down sometimes while checking a telegram, I was conscious, mind you, which made it worse. I could hear my pencil bouncing on the boards. I could see the ceiling, quite a distance up. Well, many people did not like this. Because they do not know what to do when a person falls down. So I resigned.’

  Mrs Gage dabbed at her lips with a handkerchief. Her life in the telling always began to seem real.

  ‘It was high time, Mr Goldberg said,’ she said. ‘Otherwise much valuable information would have been lost forever.’

  ‘Mr Goldberg?’ asked Amy Parker, who had folded her arms over each other, she was marmoreal now.

  ‘I will tell you when the time comes,’ the postmistress said. ‘When I left Winbin, retiring from the service, I went to Mrs Small, a second cousin, at Barangoola. She nearly killed me with kindness, soups in winter and jellied fish in summer. She suffers from a stammer, poor thing, from being scalded as a girl. Barangoola is a summer resort, you know, and in heavy seasons Mrs Small would take a visitor or two. In this way we got Mr Goldberg, a gentleman of some education, who read books and had even written some poetry – anyway, he showed me some, and it was quite nice.’

  Summer evenings on the breakwater, which was a rocky mole, too sharp to be anything but discreet, Mr Goldberg gave sympathetic attention to the unfortunate story of Mrs Gage. He listened to the swish of sea lettuce and watched the mouths of anemones, sometimes offering them a crab. Sometimes Mr Goldberg would raise his head like a horse and appear to whinny at the madness of Mrs Gage’s husband.

  ‘Because, of course,’ she said, ‘I had to tell him about all that. But I did not at first show him the paintings, which I had brought from Durilgai to Winbin, and from Winbin to Barangoola, tied with a cord, as I hardly knew what to do with them.

  ‘Well,’ she said, spitting a little, ‘if I did eventually show the paintings, it all happened in this way. We was in the street one morning, en route for a lending library that Mr Goldberg patronized, when a person came up, who was known to him, it appeared, they had many acquaintances in common with unusual sorts of names. This person stayed chatting for quite a while, but looking at me, and smiling, and looking, though in a ladylike way. Of course, I looked at a shop, because I know my own business. Then this lady come at me, she was tastefully dressed too, she took me by the hands, she was that excited. “Mrs Gage,” she said, “it is you,” she said, “that I have wondered, and the paintings your husband did, I have been positively haunted all these years.” You would never guess, it was none other but that Mrs Schreiber, who was there the day that Mr Gage passed on, and saw the paintings with yourself and other ladies, no doubt you will remember, her face was different, but you cannot say it was not refined. So now the paintings was out. There was nothing for it but to show Goldberg. He pressed me. I refused at first. Then finally I did.

  ‘Well,’ said the widow, shiny now, ‘it appears as Mr Gage was a genius, would you believe it? – though all that were acquainted with my husband, poor soul, knew as he was on the unusual side. You did not know my husband.’

  ‘No,’ said Amy Parker, though she did.

  ‘I was soon an object of interest,’ the postmistress continued, removing something unwanted from her fur, ‘on account of the enthusiasm of Mr Goldberg and several other gentlemen for my husband’s oil paintings. Poor Mr Gage himself would have been surprised as one thing, if he had been there. I was only sorry he had gone, as I could see we might have worked up quite a little business. Anyway, to cut the story short, I sold the paintings. I must tell you I did well. I sold all but one, which I would not part with, for sentimental reasons, and because it is a work of art, Mr Goldberg says, unequalled. I have it above the fireplace in the lounge. The frame alone is worth fifteen pounds. It is the one of the woman, but you will not remember. She is standing there – well, she is naked, to be frank. But why not? I am broadminded now, since I know it is worth the while.’

  ‘I remember that picture,’ said Amy Parker.

  ‘You do?’ said Mrs Gage, provoked. ‘And do you like it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the heavy woman. ‘I do not understand it.’

  She did not understand herself, standing heavy in the road, at that moment, or at any. She did not understand the eyes of people. And the dead man, had he seen her as she could not conceive of it? Should she have loved him then, walking between trees at night, his arms no longer skinny? I have not loved someone, she felt. She was agitated. She was a bit afraid.

  ‘Anyway,’ said the ex-postmistress, ‘I had soon got my own home. It is all modern. I have just finished paying off the fridge. And how are you, dear?’ she asked, looking around her in surprise. ‘It is like old times. And Mrs O’Dowd?’

  ‘I can’t say if Mrs O’Dowd is well or not,’ said Mrs Parker formally.

  ‘Ah,’ said Mrs Gage.

  ‘Oh, we never ever had a actual row,’ Mrs Parker hastened. ‘But friends blow cold.’

  Then it was the children that the postmistress had to ask for, in that voice that she put on for the children.

  ‘Thelma is good,’ said Mrs Parker with precision. ‘She is married with a solicitor. She did well.’

  ‘And Ray, was it?’ asked Mrs Gage.

  Because you had to.

  ‘Ray,’ sighed Mrs Parker, smoothing out her apron with long, silky sweeps, ‘Ray grew up too. He is selling motorcars, I think. He is to be married soon, to a good girl.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘To Elsie Tarbutt,’ Mrs Parker said. ‘She is from Sydney.’

  ‘Fancy that,’ said Mrs Gage.

  It is more than strange that other people’s lives are lived. Mrs Gage’s own life had filled the foreground. She could not have believed in much else. Now she began to press and pull the silver knobs that studded the panel of her little car.

  She said, ‘If you are ever down Drummoyne way, you must look in, and I shall be pleased to see anyone for old times’ sake.’

  Because she was pretty certain that Mrs Parker would not look in, it added something to the ex-postmistress’s pure bounty of mind. And Mrs Parker, who would not look in, definitely not, it was ridiculous to think, she too was pleased. She stood murmuring contentedly amongst the stones.

  Just then a cold light of evening was illuminating the sky and Mrs Gage’s face, which was purged besides, by narrative.

  ‘It does you good to talk,’ she said. And added daringly, ‘I am happy at last.’

  Then she pressed something and glided from that place in her enchanted car.

  Amy Parker got back ponderously on to the veranda. Whole afternoons she waited for other witnesses of the past, but saw young people who had not yet lived and strangers who were blank or kind. Because she knew better than these, she was inclined to have trouble with her wind, or breathe hard down her nose, holding herself in and upright, not listening, which made her look fierce. Some people said, That Mrs Parker is a bad-tempered old thing.

  She was and she was not. She had expected something to happen, some act of miraculous revelation, and because this had not occurred, or anyway had gone unrecognized, she was becoming aggravated. She would scratch her leg in a most exasperated manner. She would crane out to look at some distant, desirable scene, which her eyesight of course did not permit her to see. So she got cranky at times, and ugly. Or appeased herself with the past. Growing serene and even wise with these snapshots that she could produce at will from out of her sleeve. The past is a miracle of minor saints.

  When Thelma Forsdyke came down, which she did more frequently than would have been expected, she was amazed to find her moth
er sitting there, an active woman too.

  ‘Are you all right, Mother?’ she would ask.

  Passive herself, she resented passivity in other people. Since she had discovered literature she would disguise her indolence by holding a book. Though she did read too, a lot. She was obsessed by ethics. She was studying anthropology. But to sit unashamedly was suspect or a sign of illness. She was terrified that her mother might develop a cancer in her old age and need intimate attentions. For which the daughter would pay, of course, she was rich. But to come down to the furtive, insinuating smells of illness in a modest room. So Thelma Forsdyke searched her mother’s face for signs of such withering.

  ‘I am not sick,’ said Amy Parker. ‘I have sat down for a bit because I like it.’

  She smiled incredulously at her daughter, at the cloth of her coat, and a string of pearls. They touched cheeks. It was mildly pleasing to the mother. She no longer experienced any desire to possess her daughter, because she had failed to do so. But she did take part in the legend of Thelma Forsdyke, she had indirectly created it, and would at times demand her rights in censure or advice on purely natural matters.

  ‘You should have a baby, Thel,’ she had said once.

  Then the woman who was her daughter turned her head aside and said, ‘I am not ready. It is not just a matter of having a baby.’ She drew her shoulders up tightly. She was angry.

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ said the mother, pursing up her lips.

  She looked at her daughter’s hands. The mother was superior, of course. She was incredulous of the hands, lying in the lap, folded like paper fans. But she did not say any more on that subject.

  Sometimes she inquired after her son-in-law.

  ‘How is Mr Forsdyke?’ she would ask.

  Mr Forsdyke would be preparing for a fishing holiday with other businessmen, or having sinus trouble, once he developed a duodenal ulcer. Almost always he sent his regards to his mother-in-law, because he was by nature a polite man. Passion had not made him rude.