The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  ‘Nobody need come to what they don’t like,’ said the old man. ‘And liking is a matter for their conscience.’

  ‘I shall come with you, Father dear,’ said Thelma, bowing her head with a grave sweet smile.

  He would have preferred not.

  ‘I shall drive you,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said the old man.

  He did not want that car.

  ‘There is nothing wrong with the old car,’ he said. ‘It is good enough.’

  They would go, erect, in it.

  But Amy Parker was silent.

  I cannot understand this either, she said. Suspicion of people who maintained a relationship with God sometimes entered her. Of course, she had said her prayers, and would continue to do so, but conscious not so much of the words as of the hands behind which she was breathing, and of many familiar objects that she saw in that darkness. Only when she suspected that her husband had received the grace of God, and that even he, a simple enough man, was wrapping it in mystery, then she began to fret.

  ‘Those early services are cold,’ she sighed now. ‘It is that disagreeable sitting without your feet. I wonder they don’t give up till the warmer weather comes. Nobody would come to worse harm, I am sure. Sin will keep like most things.’

  The next morning, though, when Stan had gone to milk the cow with ugly horns, she was throwing water at her face. She was shivering in the room. What else could she have done but turn in bed? So shivered, buttoning and pulling. And afterwards, gathering to go, Thelma in gloves and her most expensive humility, and Stan, with mild lines from nose to mouth, everybody was quieter for the cold, still Sunday. Amy Parker could hear her own shivering, though. Will I be any better? she would ask expectantly before church. She would have been ashamed to admit she was looking for miracles, like some young girls.

  ‘You are coming then, Amy?’ Stan asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said, angry for the obvious, her hat was on her head. ‘What would I do here after you have gone? You have not heard that car roaring out of the yard, you are always in it.’

  She was quite red with anger for the stupidity of Stan. But nobody noticed. And they went out counting their money.

  That morning frost lay on the black earth.

  Shall I be exalted or destroyed? asked Mrs Forsdyke as she sat in her father’s old car, her eyes watering.

  The old man drove them very soberly between the silver trees, towards the one bell that tolled in the steeple. The church at Durilgai was the same straight church, in which souls had drowsed, and birds had died, and sin had escaped from the children, in sharp cries at the touch of water, always. The church stood amongst docks and milk thistles. Some of the stones to the dead had crumbled. But it was the new strong ones, in black granite and washstand marble, that exalted their terrible incapacity. As the car of Mr Parker arrived, other people were going in, old women and cold girls, in black or grey, and decent men in stiff collars faintly yellow where they met the neck. There was a yellow dog too, that had been temporarily disowned, that stood showing its ribs and pointing its wet nose in the surrounding cold.

  Thelma Forsdyke, who was no longer a Parker except in theory, clenched her teeth for what she was about to endure. She enjoyed the rich purples of religion. Then her soul responded in like purple. Or in discussions of personal faith with respectful clergymen. She sometimes rose to great heights, but failed to remain there, because there was nobody to hold her up, except God, and she quailed before a sustained intimacy on that scale.

  ‘That is Mrs Westlake,’ said Amy Parker. ‘She has had a tumour taken out.’

  People were looking at Parkers’ daughter, at her clothes. Old ones remembered her when her nose was running, but they hid their knowledge. Young girls were moon-eyed with disbelief.

  Floating on such distraction, they were going in. The box, which was reverberating still with the peals of the jerking bell, did not fill up. Too few were brave enough. Those that were had not yet risen from their bodies. They opened books and read the words for other occasions, as if they might find clues to the present. Everybody was very wooden, it seemed, in the little church, which smelled of cold wood. Tentative faces were hoping for grace to descend. In the meantime chilblains wept.

  When the parson came in, shutting the vestry door with a bang, because he was a positive man, in strong boots, who might not respect her wealth sufficiently, suspected Mrs Forsdyke, and regretted, everybody stood up in a supreme gesture of awkwardness, quite forgetting the object of their coming. The parson did not help matters. He had scrubbed the face of religion till any nostalgia that might have answered the personal ones had fled out of it. He was rather a strong man, it would seem. His own muscles would not allow him to have doubts, anyway for a few years yet, as he wrestled with the evidence of indifference. The pores of this Laocoön were permanently exuding sweat, sometimes radiant, sometimes just sweat.

  Mrs Forsdyke shuddered.

  The bleakness of faith had settled upon her. Then I do not believe, she said. She would have surrendered her furs, with shameful speed, and fled. Her mother, who was holding her book in an unnatural way, and turning the pages with the method of the old, did not notice her. Nobody noticed Mrs Forsdyke. That was the strange, the awful, even the tragic part. So that in the absence of a disposition to pray, which she did truly have at times, surging towards God, clutching her petitions as it they might break, she was forced to stray amongst the tablets and plaques to dead people, and sadden herself, adding to her own sterility their prevailing ugliness.

  The service that was unfolding in the cold did warm in time. The marble phrases climbing upward, one upon the other, were chafed by some fervour, or breath of the congregation, as they knelt there, or rested their buttocks in compromise on the edges of the pews. The blood began to flow. The flesh of words grew out of marble. So that Amy Parker was brought closer to devotion. She felt the words. How they hiss at times, she heard. And drowsed, listening to them. Or kissing. Words do kiss. Yawns broke her up just then, and a thought of such obscenity that she looked to see whether people recognized in the old woman that they knew, some other. But they did not.

  Each person was absorbed in his own mysteries. They bowed their heads beneath a hood of prayer, which had temporarily extinguished their personalities. Even the faces of the children had been drained, their necks were fragile and unrecognizable, as they knelt there, scratching and picking at themselves.

  Amy Parker, the old woman in the dark dress, or not so old woman indeed, her skin would sometimes revive, listened to the words that the strong clergyman was delivering with such force. These words were for other people naturally, and for that reason she could bear to hear the worst of them. They fell upon her bowed head without penetrating the dark shield of her hat, so that she was able to get up eventually out of the awkward position, her leg was paining her too, and declare her belief with love and fervour, it came tumbling out of her on the strings of memory, through moist lips, and she was chafing her hands in front of her, and her wrists, and through her coat her appreciative arms, bringing them back to life.

  I did not think that I could have enjoyed this service, ever, Amy Parker said. But it ran sinuously ahead of her, with its man’s voice, and she listening to it, glowed, even in its darker mysteries, she could have healed pain by putting her warm hands.

  Am I wrong then? she asked, looking sideways at her husband, who was not knowing her for the time being, and who looked rather thin and miserable, with his bent and scraggy neck.

  The old woman would have liked to enjoy the crimson light falling from the glass hem of Christ on to the floor, lying on the floor in little checkers, in the dust, but crimsonly. Jewels glittered in her own eyes as she followed the male words of the service with the slight motion of her head that had become habit. She would have embraced a religion of her own needs, and mounted quite high. But her husband would not let her. What is God to Stan? she wondered, at his shoulder, I do not know God, Stan will not let
me. She liked to blame other people for herself, and was almost persuaded. Now she went grumbling, mumbling, through the words. He has made me like this, she said, relaxing on the cushions of her own triviality. She began to think about a pudding that she would make that day, for the first time, with bottled quinces and a suet crust.

  Stan Parker, though, had not thought about his wife that morning after entering the car. Standing there, he was in fact empty of all thought, which can be a state of failure, or else of dedication. I cannot pray, he said, not trying, as he knew the hopelessness of it. So he stood, or knelt, a prisoner in his own ribs.

  The parson had begun to force faith into the souls of his people. He would hammer it down, if need be. Hear what comfortable words, said his humble yet brazen, young man’s voice. Hear also what St Paul saith…. Hear also what St John saith…. If any man sin….

  Ah, if this were true, Thelma Forsdyke said, it is not intended as blasphemy, but I cannot believe that it is true. As she shivered into her furs. There was a draught, because they had not shut the door, and she alone would contract a chill. She attempted, shivering, to believe that this would not matter. To believe. The enviable word. It was not that she was without faith, only that there were different altitudes of inspiration. Wondering then, she looked round to see which face of these would be saved by implicit faith, the old woman who had had the tumour, the man with the hair gummed down in strips, who had learned the gymnastics of ritual, several ugly people who had risen on an impulse from their beds, or on a spring, was it, you must perhaps have the necessary mechanism wound for devotion, to shoot up to heaven.

  Yet I do believe, I do, I do, begged Thelma Forsdyke.

  And the priest of God, who was taking bread with the tips of his fingers and tasting wine with his fumbling mouth, was also trying desperately to transcend bread and wine. But the act in its sublimity was too difficult. His wretched cheeks continued to munch. A piece of dough had stuck to his gum.

  People had begun to go up, to kneel at the Communion rail. Their bodies were terrible. The soles of their shoes, exposed to the nave of the church, did a double penance.

  This is the awful part, said Thelma Forsdyke, I am afraid.

  Relinquishing her expensive handkerchief, which she had rolled into a soft ball, moist, and rather scented, she also went up, solicitous of her parents, whom for the time being she had turned into invalids.

  They were all going up. They were kneeling. Somebody’s bones were creaking.

  The anticipation was, indeed, dreadful. Some people, who in private life would have been referred to as elderly, had passed beyond old and come to death. Their masks were beyond joy and suffering. They were quite pure as they waited in suspense. Others were hungry, their stomachs rumbling not merely for that morning but for all their lives, so that when their turn came to eat they did so greedily, furtively, and licking up the crumbs afterwards, even when none were there, from the palms of their hands, on which their lives were spread. That did make some shiver. The audacity of their hands.

  In spite of the weight of his strong boots, which tried to fix him to the carpet, the young clergyman was mounting at last. But in the struggle had become elongated. He had increased in stature but was held. As he moved along the line a purple light of transcendent glass flowed through his marble robes. His head, at the extremity of his body, filled with the sonorities of his voice, was touching at last in achievement. The substantial squares of bread were true by the very fact of their substance.

  So the people were fed by degrees. Some felt their sins go out of them blessedly. Others, though, were stuck with them forever, except that they had received the favour of knowing those sins better.

  To be forgiven, it is necessary to be very simple, very good, like my parents, said Thelma Forsdyke as she received and ate the sacrament, with the merest gesture, making it appear to observers as if the act had not taken place. Of course, she had learned discretion in all things. But my father and my mother, she said, She was comforted by their presence, kneeling beside her, more than she was by the sacrament. Their lives were transparent and lovely in that early light. Thelma Forsdyke knelt, worshipping a state of first innocence, which was the only redemption from sin, and because she could not recover this, any more than resume the body of Thelly Parker, sin would have to stay.

  At this point she was preparing to wipe the corner of her mouth with her handkerchief, but because she wondered whether this would have been seemly, and because in any case her handkerchief was abandoned in the pew, she coughed. It was a rattly cough. Perhaps she would have an attack.

  Stan Parker, who was temporarily as innocent as his daughter had wished, took bread, and ate. His hands were hard. He would have prayed, if he had known how. But his throat was dry. He was in every way correct, but dry.

  Why have I come here … Lord? he asked.

  That word which he had slipped in last did not come naturally to him, though he could feel it. He knew it. He closed his eyes now, either to hide an emptiness, or to resist a light that was too strong. In either case the eyelids gave him no protection. He had an exposed look, kneeling there.

  The light shone on the dust of the carpet, of which the pattern had worn away. Weariness was almost bliss. The flowers of the vases were so taut, so tight, that only a law of nature was preventing them from flying apart by strength of their own stillness.

  The words were falling like precious blood as the priest brought the cup to each man. There was nothing between them now except his large wrists. The cup and the words dissolved most mercifully, so that with some, who were particularly grateful and ashamed of themselves, the wine gurgled hotly at the backs of their mouths.

  Amy Parker, at whom the moment of forgiveness had arrived, took the cup, holding it rather high, tilting it only just, so that she should feel on her lips the infinitesimal drop, more she dared not, and as it was the blood began to flow electrically down from her neck, with poison of old thoughts. So the queen had held the other cup, the wooden one, or that was how it sounded, before she fell dead upon the stage. They poisoned the queen, who had had her conscience as well, working in her for some time. The wine worked. I have hated, said the old woman. Do I love or hate? She was confused under her best hat, a velours. It was the wine. It is Stan, she said, again with love or hatred, ah, look at me, Stan, but he cannot of course, now. Then she realized it was finally between herself and God, and that it was quite possible she would never succeed in opening her husband and looking inside, that he was being kept shut for other purposes.

  Then the priest took the cup from the old woman, who seemed to be hanging on to it for some reason.

  If I should drop this cup like the poisoned queen did, Amy Parker said, and shuddered, they would hear it like thunder.

  The crimson wine sounded and looked intolerable as it was flowing through her.

  But the parson took the cup and gave it to her upright husband, as if she had not existed.

  As he received it the old man extended his lips tentatively to drink, advancing his chin, down which the vomit had run, it was still there, and bile mingling in his mouth with hot wine. He swallowed it, though. Then he hoped for God.

  It was very peaceful kneeling there on the carpet, once you had got down to it, leaning on the varnished rail, which heat had cracked in its seasons. Peace is desirable in itself, he said, and so in the absence of evidence that he would receive more, he accepted this with humility and gratitude.

  Why, then, was he waiting, as indeed several were, after the priest had turned his back on them, after it was all over? A fly crawling on the rail travelled across the old man’s hand, that was not conscious of it. He was waiting, listening, looking at some fixed point, quite feverishly. It is not possible, he considered, that I shall not eventually receive a glimpse. Which made him smile luminously. Or else it was the warmth beginning to pervade him on a cold morning, or else the benevolence that some old men achieve for their fellows towards the end of their lives.


  This has gone far enough, said his daughter, however, who always liked to tidy up a situation.

  She put a hand beneath her father’s elbow, to indicate a state of convalescence, or return to childhood, and drove her parents down into the body of the church, as if they had been wearing little reins attached to their upper arms, and she was guiding them.

  Still, it is touching, said Thelma Forsdyke, that old people should be convinced, and enviable their lack of effort. As she walked behind them. For a moment her own soul attempted to ascend in a spasm of love and charity, but it was too weak and quickly fell back. Afterwards, kneeling in the pew, blowing her nose, almost listening to those last prayers, which did not concern her, for she had already done duty enough, she was convinced that she had caught the cold she had expected and feared, and which would be appreciated neither by her mother, in that dark hat which nobody else could have discovered, nor her father, who was smelling of old men.

  When they went out it was Stan Parker who led the way. He had recovered some of his authority, while remaining at a distance in the arrangement of objects and sequence of events. He went amongst his acquaintances at the steps, smiling from out of that queer distance and plane, as he talked to them of cattle and of vegetables. Some of them noticed his hollow voice without inquiring into it, for all were floating on their empty stomachs, in the now peerless morning, of magpies and wet grass.

  They began to slip away with hesitant expressions of good will on their awakening faces. And Parkers were going. The two women were telling the old fellow what to do, for he seemed to be rather vague. He was considering, and fingering, he was contemplating his inadequacy, which also can be, in a sense, a prize.

  Chapter 22

  LOST at times in the jungle of her past failures, Amy Parker had her plants, not so much those shrubs which had grown and oppressed the house in overbearing clumps and thickets, themselves a jungle which enticed with obsessive smells of rot and scents of cold flowers into the lemon-coloured light of secrets and of large leaves, not so much these, but those plants which she kept around the verandas of the house, the more tender, waxy ones in pots, that she would prod and sigh over, looking into them till she saw the insects there, and pores and knobs of dark leaves. These plants that she loved, and for which she made moist nests of bark and fibre, were almost all dark and fleshy. And anonymous of course. She could not name things.