The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  There was a goat too, an old doe called Nan, that had been the property of the dead man, and that had followed his sister up to Parkers’, and now pattered back after the two women, bleating and tossing her head, because her udder was tight. Or she would forget her predicament, and crane after tender leaves, and tear them gluttonously from their twigs. But remember, and bleat, pattering, and scattering her black pellets. Hopefully following the two women.

  Presently they came to Quigleys’ place, and Amy Parker, who was a weak woman, who had failed in everything in life prayed for strength, but Doll Quigley was more convinced.

  They took Doll and put her in the nut house at Bangalay, which is a lovely place. Her friend Mrs Parker visited her that winter when she herself had recovered from the shock, taking a few choice oranges and some jujubes. Doll was different. She sat on a straight chair in a bright room to speak with her visitor, whom she was obviously glad to see.

  ‘Are you in good health then, Doll?’ Amy Parker asked, wetting her lips.

  ‘Yes, I am good,’ Doll said languidly.

  Her face had filled out and was different from what one knew.

  ‘Anyways, you have put on weight,’ Amy Parker said.

  ‘It is the suet puddin,’ said Doll Quigley with a grey glint.

  ‘Is there anything that you want to tell to people?’ Amy Parker asked. ‘Any messages for the people round about?’

  ‘That is what my brother is continually asking me,’ said Doll, sitting forward like a frank man. ‘And I cannot remember, Amy. When it was me that knew always, and had to say for both. I have lost my way,’ she said, looking about as if she could hardly divulge this frantic secret. ‘And my sister is pestering me.’

  ‘But Doll, you were all boys,’ Amy Parker said, and could have gone through the list, because in the circumstances it was difficult to converse.

  ‘My sister was a girl,’ said Doll. ‘She knew the names of things. She knew the saints. She would tell us about the Everlasting Mercy, sometimes at night after we had lit the lamp, just the two of us, and it was nice then. Because I never knew nothin much of me own self. I knew the ways of animals. The tracks and nests. I had a boxful of coloured stones and four skeleton leaves. So that the sister would have had to show me most things, you see, and did. She was always kind. Until that day she cut herself off. She pressed with the big meat knife that she had been slappin all Thursday with the steel. She said, “Bub, God will receive you.” But I was not received yet, Amy. Now was this kind?’

  She leaned forward to enter with the situation into her friend’s eyes, and Amy Parker saw that Doll Quigley was in hell.

  ‘We suffer for some purpose,’ said Amy Parker, taking her friend’s hands, ‘but I am one of the stupid ones. I could not answer Mrs O’Dowd either, when the time came.’

  ‘Mrs O’Dowd? Where is she?’ Doll Quigley asked, fixing her hair.

  ‘You know. She is dead,’ said Amy Parker.

  Doll began to rootle in the paper bag, and to chew a jujube, of a lovely orange colour.

  ‘These are nice too,’ she said. ‘I always liked sweet things. When I was a little girl the nuns used to say that this would be my great sin.’

  She smiled.

  Sin then, Doll, Amy Parker would have said, and left her friend to enter heaven by that way.

  So Amy Parker rode home in the smooth bus, everyone together, breathing and sweating, making jokes and having headaches. She dropped her money long before the conductor came, but it did not matter. She sat quiet. She was thinking all this time of the twin knives turning in Doll Quigley and Mrs O’Dowd. Then what tortures are in store? she asked, and was afraid, even though she was going home to her husband, a quiet man who would stand up at the last moment perhaps, and say something. Stan will know, she said.

  So she was comforted. So the green sky of winter flowed by, and all the bodies in the bus ran together. Because she was a superficial and a sensual woman, when the last confessions are made, Amy Parker was soon even thinking about that other man who had been her lover, his freckled calves, and how the suspenders had eaten in. How she had disliked him. How she would have liked to take other men and to have rocked with them on deep seas of passion, and to have forgotten their names, and to remember their features and their eyes, prismatically, some winter, in old age, after the face has fallen back into place.

  The green sky streamed past the homeward bus.

  ‘Oh,’ said the old woman meekly, when they were all looking at her, ‘I dropped the shilling some way back, and the bus was too full to go stooping around. Perhaps it is at someone’s feet.’

  Everyone began shuffling and looking and making simple jokes for the old woman who had lost her money.

  It was found at last.

  ‘There, missus,’ said a hearty man. ‘That’ull save a walk home.’

  Everybody laughed.

  The old woman smiled, but lowered her eyes on those people whose company she was shaming. Sometimes her simplicity would blaze electrically. And the last sky was streaming by. It was late. The collar of her coat was ornamented with a piece of rabbit fur, which she now pulled across her throat, against whatever knife might be prepared to enter in. And in that way she did feel protected for a little. And then they arrived.

  Chapter 25

  THELMA FORSDYKE rang her husband from a dress salon, where she had been made to suffer ridiculously over a simple detail of an important dress. The telephone box was heavily upholstered in a smoky grey, and smelled of faint smoke and the scents of other women. Thelma did not use scent, because of something it did to her sinuses, and she was frowning now, and beating on the little T-piece of the telephone, which was conspiring with other things against her.

  ‘Oh, Dudley,’ she said after she had been having some difficulty, ‘I have had an exhausting afternoon at the hairdresser’s, and with Germaine, the dress, you know, which should have been ready and which is not.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Yes,’ said Dudley Forsdyke, or some reverberation in the machine into which she was talking.

  ‘And so I have decided’, she said, ‘to have a mouthful of something at the club and go on to a concert that I see is advertised.’

  She spoke terribly distinctly and with a confidence that came from long practice. You do not know a thing until you have forgotten how that thing was learned. Well, Thelma Forsdyke had forgotten at last.

  ‘Very well, dear,’ said Dudley Forsdyke. ‘If that is what you think.’

  And would consume his own dinner with much the same indifference as in her presence, a little quicker perhaps, in order to escape from the restrained breathing of the elderly maid.

  ‘I feel it will be good for me,’ said Thelma, smiling into the telephone for her own sensibility. ‘It is a lovely concert.’

  And I cannot go home yet, she tapped on the bakelite, I cannot, or rather, will not, not yet. It was as if she were terrified of some responsibility life might suddenly offer her.

  ‘Well then, good-bye,’ said her husband the solicitor, who did not expect anything further, then or ever. ‘Have a good time,’ he said, out of respect for theory.

  Thelma Forsdyke rang off without saying any more. Inviting husbands to play at fathers is always humiliating. So she took her persecuted gloves and left the smart shop. But looking straight ahead. Annoyance had made her suspect elegance of bad taste. She would still pay for her dress, of course, but she would wear it with the saving grace of her own especial dowdiness.

  She was a thin woman of a certain age, in black. Her stockings were exquisitely expensive, but did not help her. As she walked, and particularly down steps, she extended her legs and planted her feet in a distinctive way, as if convinced that, with less care, she might suffer a fall.

  Since her friend Madeleine Fisher had been found dead, Thelma had known an increase in loneliness and discovered that her circulation was bad. Not that friendship had made her blood flow; it frequently stopped it in her veins by increasing her ignorance of those
mechanics of behaviour which are considered necessary. Though no one by this time would have noticed this. Not even her friend Mrs Fisher, whose glances latterly had been directed inward.

  Then Mrs Fisher had died. How, Mrs Forsdyke had not been able to clear up to her personal satisfaction, owing to the fact that she had never been received sympathetically either by Mr Fisher or any of the Fisher entourage, and on occasions, in fact, had been forced to observe the furniture. So she would never know for certain whether her friend had died, quite simply, of time.

  Mrs Forsdyke walked along the evening street with her crocodile bag.

  At the club, in the presence of several gentlewomen, she ate some languid, crumbed fish.

  ‘We shall meet tomorrow night,’ said Mrs Owens-Johnson.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said and smiled Mrs Forsdyke, with knowledge.

  And wondered whether Madeleine Fisher would have destroyed her glory with some thrust. For this would be the first occasion on which the Forsdykes had dined at Government House, with other burghers of their kind, equally rich and equally destitute. So they were all day thinking about their clothes.

  But in the meantime Mrs Forsdyke was sitting solitary at her concert. As the strings were turning up a golden rain streamed from off her shoulders. She had never been perfect, till now, her ankles crossed, the veins blue in her white skin, of which no use had been made for years. She was waiting on discreet and tasteful pleasures. Her stomach was not too full of food. Her nerves were still.

  I have never felt better, she said, except the dress, she frowned, which must be ready, it is too tiresome of Germaine.

  There were several pieces of programme music that Mrs Forsdyke had learned never to listen to, and would treat even with disgust. Then a grave Jew with black eyelids and a violin was welcomed out to play a great concerto. Mrs Forsdyke rolled her programme into the thinnest cylinder, and would have made herself thinner, if possible, clasping her elbows still tighter, reducing her attentive thighs. Thus compressed, she might have soared upward on the note of release. But she could do nothing about her soul. The soul remains anchored. It is a balloon tied to a branch of bones. Still, it will tug nobly.

  The Jew began to play, touching tenderly at first the flesh of music. It was still within his grasp, and everyone’s. Thelma Forsdyke bowed her head, which was really quite grey by this time, and submitted to such blandishment. What tenderness would she have been capable of, she wondered, if the occasion had ever offered itself? Nothing sensual, but ethereal, swayed in divine winds of music. Music was her love, of course. Even with all her hypocrisies deducted, and these were many, there were still simple strong phrases that she could lie with and understand to the last silence of their simplicity. If by opening her mouth music would enter in, and down the funnel of her throat. She sat drooping now, in a most awkward position, on her standard chair. To listen to music. This was the lovemaking stage of music, when the tendrils creep around the breasts in formal patterns.

  The Jew played. Greater difficulties were reserved. Though he had played them a hundred times with virtuosity, even genius, there were passages which always frightened him on approach, the sweat poured down his shoulderblades and down the backs of his knees at the very moment when he knew they were overcome. In anticipation he had begun to wrestle with the music, though the blood had not yet started to gush out of his yellow eyes.

  The music had really taken over the men who had been brave enough to play it, and in some cases those who were listening. Thelma Forsdyke lowered her eyelids in the face of this assault, shocked and frightened by her approaching nobility. Almost anyone can be raised at some point in his life to heights he dare not own. So this woman looked and retreated. Her understanding of the situation, which she would be allowed to forget almost immediately, was so clear and intense that the tears were coming into her eyes. Her hands had been cut, not by her own nails, but by these formidable pinnacles.

  Just at that moment the music took and almost threw the Jew at the conductor’s feet. Some people sniggered at such extravagance of manner. However, Thelma Forsdyke, who was by this time destroyed and frightened, merely dropped her curled programme on the floor, for which her neighbours frowned at her. She was a miserable woman in good black, with very small, too small diamond drops in the bluish lobes of her ears.

  Afterwards she listened, or was played to, sadly. She was brushed in sad gusts by the branches of the music. All the faces had ripened and were ready to fall from those branches. She was walking across the paddocks. Her stomach was thin and sloping. It was a personal sadness, or sickness, that had infected the music, and that she could not bear. Her omissions were turning over and showing their true side.

  She began to sidle in her uncomfortable chair, and wish that she could get out somehow, but this obviously would have been impossible.

  And the violets. She was standing on the broken concrete path at the side of the house, on which the shrubby gnarled honeysuckle has grown too big, and reached over, and is scratching the side of the house. And all that side is blue with violets. Father is standing there, she saw, he has not shaved this morning, or is it? – is it? – oh Daddy, she began with horror, for she had never said this before, never.

  Nobody noticed any agony, because it is not visible in discreet people, even when whole ganglions of nerves are cut.

  I must get out, said Thelma Forsdyke.

  She did eventually. When the brilliant interpretation of the work was at an end, she slipped past people’s knees, faintly sucking a little cachou that she had had in her bag.

  Mrs Forsdyke came home by degrees to the strange house in which she lived. With its glittering white woodwork and large structure, tossing as it were in a dark-blue sea of leaves and moonlight, for there was a wind on that cold night, it was like a ship, and she looked at it as long as she could before taking the little gangway which connected it with firm land. Her feet made white notes on the dry boards, and almost at once a shadow opened a glass door, and came out along the veranda towards her, lit by the red eye of a cigar.

  ‘Is that you, Dudley?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  They were awkward. It could, of course, just have been their relationship.

  ‘I tried to get you at the club,’ he said, ‘but you had gone.’

  ‘I told you I was going to the concert,’ said the woman, her voice rising.

  All this was happening in the moonlight, which had rinsed their faces of age, and their bodies of environment.

  ‘They rang up from home,’ said Dudley Forsdyke, who was being kind in that way which he had inherited from other decent males.

  ‘Yes,’ she said quickly through her small mouth. ‘It is Father.’ She did not ask.

  ‘I am afraid so,’ said Dudley Forsdyke. ‘The old man died this afternoon.’

  What am I to do now? asked Thelma. The moment of nobility, to which she had been lifted recently by music, would not recur in her lifetime.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ she had learned to say, walking on thin legs, her footsteps following her whitely all the length of the woodwork.

  ‘And the funeral?’ she asked.

  ‘I gather it will be tomorrow afternoon,’ Dudley Forsdyke said.

  ‘I shall go down,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow. Early. I shall drive. I would rather go by myself, Dudley. You will understand. Flowers on the way.’

  Arranging smoothly and with taste.

  ‘But there is the dinner.’ She froze suddenly. ‘At Government House.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dudley Forsdyke.

  Tactfully, or brutally, he would not help her.

  Perhaps funerals in the country, little funerals of simple insignificant people that trail through the yellow grass in hired cars and a variety of dreadful clothes, are over quickly, said the limp Thelma.

  She had had too much for that day. She went into the dining room and drank off a goblet of soda water.

  And in the morning had recovered herself sufficie
ntly to mourn for her father along with herself. Poor Dad. She remembered with fascination his hands, which were those of a working man. She remembered his silences, which she had failed to penetrate, not that she had tried really, but which she suspected at times contained something of worth. Awfulness obscured further speculation as she drove down through the suburban landscape. The moments of illumination would not have been for her anyway.

  As she approached the house of death, terror possessed her, though the naked canes of roses were trembling with birds and the wet earth was steaming after frost. She went up the path without identifying herself with the house in which she had been born.

  A woman in an apron came to the door. It was Ray’s widow, whom Thelma scarcely knew. She thought her name was Elsie. She had a flat, rather heavy, creamy face, from which the hair had been pinned back in some timeless fashion of its own. She was a plain woman. It was a clear brow, though, distinguished by the expanse of its serenity.

  How is Mother?’ Thelma asked.

  Though realizing fearfully, now that she had achieved it, she could lay claim to nothing in this house.

  ‘She is in the kitchen, baking a cake,’ Elsie said.

  Ray’s wife was not surprised by anything.

  ‘Will you go in to her?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Thelma. ‘Oh, there are some flowers that I bought.’ Which Elsie at once fetched from the car, holding them in her square hands, to bring some sense of importance to the thin woman. They were standing on the step then, breathing the rather unpleasant scent of crushed chrysanthemums. But the heads were big expensive ones.

  ‘How lovely they are,’ Elsie said, for Thelma.

  And would indeed love, for, strangely, this was her vocation.

  Thelma Forsdyke, on the other hand, remained uncertain of the direction that life was taking, and at the most would allow herself ungraciously to be led. As she followed Elsie into this house, which, in spite of the immense event that had taken place, was open to birds and leaves on all sides, and to the picking and fossicking of gathering sunlight, Thelma’s nonentity was complete.