Oscar and Lucinda

Who Can Open the Doors of His Face?

His left hand grasped the wall rail. He grinned at Melody Clutterbuck. Miss Clutterbuck barely saw the death's-head grimace. It was the father-he in the doorway behind the son-whom she was anxious about. She watched him creep from the top-tier cabin and thought he gazed around as from a pulpit. When he walked it was slowly; she did not think to attribute this to pain.

She stood and moved towards the other stair, like a customer in a bank who feels there are bank robbers in the queue in front of her but is not quite confident of her intuition. Thus she did not escape the embarrassment. She stood still, pale in the face, blood mottling the plump hands, the hands clutching the gloves she had removed for tea. She saw the elder Hopkins drop to his knees. She thought she heard a groan. She thought: Evangelicals do not kneel!

She saw a steward begin to move towards the old man, and then he stopped. The praying mantis went down beside his father. Miss Clutterbuck imagined she heard the thump of bony knees on a carpet that should have been thick enough to muffle anything. She caught, just then, her fiance's eyes, but only for a second because he-oh, you fool, you fool-was aping the fundamentalists. She looked to the Strattons but he was already on his shiny knees and she was lowering herself, resting her large hand on his shoulder. And now she saw strangers as well, those who had nothing to do with their pathetic party. A short man who smelt of wet animals came and knelt beside her. There was something horribly intimate in the sight of his balding crown. Others, some with crystal wine glasses in their hands, followed suit. The stewards remained standing, but even they folded their hands in front of them and bowed their heads like so many Baptists. Outside the megaphone continued blaring, but inside it was very quiet, and Melody Clutterbuck, not wishing to be thought a Dissenter herself, knelt.

There was a long silence, a minute, perhaps two, before Theophilus Hopkins, FRS, began his prayer.

"Oh, Lord God," he began. His voice was tangled. He began again: "Oh, Lord God, this is my son."

The next pause was shorter, but felt more painful.

"These are his friends, and fellow voyagers."

You could hear Mrs Stratton's asthmatic breathing. She was swaying a little on her knees. Mr Stratton rubbed her back.

"Oh, Lord my God," said Oscar's father, the deep voice so broken that many did not hear the last words: "What can we do?"

Oscar and Lucinda

Then he was on his feet. He touched his son, so briefly, a brush so light Oscar would always wonder if he had not invented it himself. He walked up the stairs quickly and in pain. He went out of sight with a peculiar hobble: fast, short steps and a tightly screwed up face. The congregation rose slowly, and were not keen to meet each other's eye. Down on the wharf, Theophilus Hopkins prayed again. He stood before Leviathan and a crowd gathered around him. But the scales of the giant were fitted tight together and the sound of his voice did not reach the son who would not leave the promenade.

Oscar waited for his father to return. And while he waited, while it became clear, even to him, that his father had left forever, he could look nowhere but towards the busy bulkhead through which the old man had departed. A great pain took possession of his heart and clamped around his lungs so that although he stood, in the midst of his friends, with his red lips parted, no air came to rescue him.

He thought: I will never again look upon his wise old face.

He thought: I have been a poor son to leave him all alone. He embraced Mrs Stratton, shook hands with Wardley-Fish, Miss Clutterbuck, Mr Col ville and the pupils from the school. There was a great fuss of sirens, bells, fireworks. Lucinda, watching from above, wondered why the clergyman sat by himself on the bright red chaise-longue.

Oscar was caught in the web of his phobia in the geometrical centre of the ship. He imagined everyone had gone.

49

The System

Mr Stratton gave Oscar a fright. He pushed his face close up. He did not give a warning. He came creeping over the carpet with one last glass of complimentary sherry in his hand. The boy did not look up, but Mr Stratton did not imagine himself invisible. Quite the

The System

contrary. He was the only visitor left on the promenade. He had been requested, twice already, to leave the ship. He felt his defiance bathed in limelight.

He imagined the young man waiting for him. It was only natural in his view, for there were matters too long postponed which must be spoken of between them. He had expected them to be spoken of earlier, but as they had not been, they must be spoken of now. He was a man with a nervous respect for clocks and timetables. Bells, alarms, sirens, all had a direct effect upon his physiology. But he would not be cowed by sirens today. They could row him ashore if necessary. Mr Stratton sat on the settee three feet from Oscar. He placed his sherry on its back rail. He balanced it nicely there and really did not care that the alcohol might scar the varnish. Oscar did not see him. All Oscar could see was the image cast on his retina by his departed papa's face, most particularly that pennysized area of vulnerable skin beneath the eyes.

"You can no longer put me off," said Mr Stratton. He pushed his face up close to Oscar's. Oscar leapt a good two inches from his seat.

"Hooo," he said. <•••

Mr Stratton's face stayed complacently where it was, although the hand which served it went back, searching blindly along the edge of the settee for its master's sherry. Oscar had remained very fond of both the Strattons and his pity for Mr Stratton had not diminished his feelings, quite the contrary, but today he was repulsed by the too-obvious signs of cunning he saw on the face which had once been-the past showed through the corruption of the present-so innocent and boyish.

Oscar was too preoccupied with the loss of his papa properly to grasp the clergyman's intention. He laid his hand on Mr Stratton's shoulder. "It's time," he said, "and a sad time too." But Mr Stratton's face had become tight with suspicion. It was a face that knew the world was not as it is commonly presented. It knew there were tricks and larks played everywhere, by bishops, provosts, kings, even rural deans. It was a face ripe for some heresy, one that would make even the Lord God of Hosts nothing but a vain and boastful demiurge whose claims to omnipotence were based on ignorance and pride.

"There has been enough of cat and mouse," said Mr Stratton, pinning his eyes to Oscar's, "you must tell me now."

When Oscar looked at Mr Stratton's eyes, he felt that he must never have done so before this moment, that he must have, through

Oscar and Lucinda

politeness, even squeamishness, have slid around them, knowing he would see only unhappiness there. Today he was not permitted to avoid them. They were blue and watery; the whites were yellow, veined, stained, like the porcelain basin at the Swan in Morley. Mr Stratton's hand brought the sherry glass to his mouth. The lower lip reached out to anticipate it. The foot of the glass came close to Oscar's nose.

"We have looked after your poor father," he said, "as best we could. We fed him when we could barely afford to feed ourselves and we could have no expectation of reward, at least not on this earth. Similarly, we looked after you. You could not imagine we had profit in mind," Mr Stratton laughed, a shallow noise made from old air at the back of the throat. "We educated you so you might bear witness. We did not think we were assisting a wealthy man." Mr Stratton looked around the promenade, underlining the opulence of their surroundings in a manner which, had it occurred upon the stage, would have been pure ham but which here, driven before the rough current of his hurt, served only to fill Oscar's heart with shame.

"I thank you," Oscar said, "I have always-"

"I have been thanked before," said Mr Stratton. "I cannot think that it has been beneficial to be taunted with fancy coffee or mysterious packets of currency." For a moment Oscar was angry. The amounts he had sent the Strattons had not been insubstantial.

"Naturally you wish to speak to me," said Mr Stratton. "You do not wish to taunt me any longer." And he opened his mouth a little as was his habit when waiting for someone to speak. The tip of his pink tongue flicked quickly across his sherry-sticky lips.

The sirens were blaring. They had changed their tempo and were now short, sharp, insistent, like dagger thrusts into taut white canvas.

"Now you will tell me, God help me. You cannot leave without it." He took Oscar's wrist and squeezed it. He would not let it go. It hurt. "How does a Christian clergyman acquire the funds to travel in such luxury? I am not a cadger. I do not come to you with a begging letter. I am sunk low enough, but not so low. You must tell me how it is you have managed."

"You would not find the story pretty."

"You need not worry about my sensibilities, little lad." He gave the wrist a harder squeeze and his mouth, for that moment, was twisted by the spasm of his anger. "My poverty does not allow them."

"You would not be proud of me."

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"Would not? Am not. Oh, I pray You, stop him prattling."

"If I were to tell you and my papa were to hear of it, it would be a torture beyond his toleration."

"You have my word he never shall," said Hugh Stratton and, seeing that Oscar still hesitated,

"oh, dear Oscar, you must accept my word."

"I have gambled," said Oscar, "as you long ago suspected."

"So," said Mr Stratton, and let out some air, "gambled."

"I think the ship is moving."

"You have a system, then? Is that what it is called?"

"A system?"

"Yes, a system. Temple has explained them to me. You have a system and you will write it down for me."

And, indeed, he was selecting, from the over-full pocket of his shiny coat, a used envelope and a stubby pencil which he now managed to push at Oscar without ever once letting go his painful hold on the wrist.

"It is not so simple. It is not a thing you can just write down. We have left it too late." Mr Stratum's hand relaxed its grip on the wrist and his jaw was slack and all the skin on his face seemed lifeless and crushed, a second-hand substance from the bottom shelf in the scullery. Oscar wished to retrieve his wrist, but did not.

"Write it down, boy, please, I beg of you."

He did not know what it was he was asking. It was not possible. The charts and tables that made up the system were contained in sixteen black clothbound journals. They were at once as neat as the boxes of buttons he had classified in his father's house, all ruled with columns and divisions, and, at the same time, smudged and blotted. His hand was a poor servant to his mind-the first was a grub whilst the second was a fastidious fellow with white cuffs on his sleeves and a tyrant for having everything in its place.

These notebooks were in his trunk. They would be worth nothing to him in New South Wales. Surely there was time to run to his cabin and thrust them into Mr Stratum's hands. The clergyman would not understand them, of course, but the explanation could be conducted by mail and what was important was the gift. For the books did prove that a man could make a good living at the track if he should apply himself with Christian industry. But no, he could not relinquish them.

He did not know why he could not. He had not expected to be asked, and when it happened he felt not generosity, but anger and confusion.

Oscar and Lucinda

The books were so intimately involved with his life, were his life, his obsession, his diaries, his communion with his God, his tie to the monster who must be fed. They were private. They were secret. They were five years' work. He had travelled all over the south of England recording the coded information therein. He had assembled a history which, blots and smudges aside, was superior to any bookmaker at Tattersall's-the record of five hundred and twenty-five racehorses, positions, weights, whether rising in class or in weight, distances of race, conditions of track, etc, etc. And although he did not bet on mares or fillies, he had the information on them just the same.

"Please, I ask you to leave me, Mr Stratton," said Oscar gently. "You hold a very dangerous secret and can therefore be confident I will write to you from New South Wales. I will tell you how I have achieved it."

He was a miser. He was unchristian. He must give away the books. Even if he had owed the Strattons nothing, he should give away the books. But he was a weasel, cunning with excuses, with substitutes.

"I will send the letter to you by return post from Sydney. I give you my solemn word before God. And you are quite right that I have been thoughtless and unkind in not thinking of your situation. I feared only that you would inform my papa."

Hugh Stratton held the gaze of the young man's clear eyes/not quite daring to trust them.

"Write it down."

"It is not so simple. I cannot." '

"You swear before God?"

"I do."

What did he swear? Simply that he could not transcribe the books in five minutes. This was true, quite true, but he had become too clever at this weaseling kind of "truth," which was not a truth at all.

"Is it horses?"

Give him the books. Give them.

"It is."

Mr Stratton let go the wrists. He nodded. He opened his mouth to say something, but the sirens triumphed. He nodded once more, then again. He was making a dangerous decision on how to fund his betting programme. He ran up the stairs, grimacing with the pain in his sciatic nerve. At the top of the stairs he called out something but Oscar did not hear. He was examining the bright red bracelet Mr Stratton had imprinted on his skin. He sat in the sumptuous cavern of the secondclass promenade, alone with this new knowledge of his corruption.

50 Pachinko

In order that I exist, two gamblers, one Obsessive, the other Compulsive, must meet. A door must open at a certain time. Opposite the door, a red plush settee is necessary. The Obsessive, the one with six bound volumes of eight hundred and eighty pages, ten columns per page, must sit on this red settee, the Book of Common Prayer open on his rumpled lap. The Compulsive gambler must feel herself propelled forward from the open doorway. She must travel towards the Obsessive and say an untruth (although she can have no prior knowledge of her own speech): "I am in the habit of making my confession."

But even this, a conclusion which requires, of the active party, a journey as complex as that of a stainless steel Pachinko ball (rolling along grooved metal tunnels, sloping down, twisting sideways, down into the belly of Leviathan, up, sideways, up, up, and out of the door to face the red settee) might not have taken place if the ventilation system of Leviathan had not displayed a single eccentricity of which its designers had been totally unaware. The eccentricity was this: it carried conversation from one stateroom to another, and that was how Lucinda was haunted by the sounds of bored stewards playing cards all night. They were not in the stateroom next to hers. That was empty, as were all the other first-class staterooms which she had imagined, when looking at the shipping company's brochures, would supply her with companionship for the voyage. (There were Bavarians in Imperial first class, but these were separated by a silken blue rope.) The stewards were several empty staterooms along, and such was the design of the ventilators that had they been closer, she might not have heard them at all. Their conversations were perfectly transmitted, as if every one of them had a voice tube of his own.

She could not read because of it. It was not the noise. It was the subject matter. Now, she thought, it is Tuppenny they play, now Blind

Oscar and Lucinda

Jack, now poker. The cockney with the high voice is the best player. She liked him. She imagined him with sandy, spiky hair and a habit of screwing up his eyes. He would grin a lot. Sometimes he would suck a match. He would give away no secrets. There was another one who always spoke more quickly when his hand was good. This one was from Liverpool. He was, of all of them, the most worried by his new job. He was previously chief steward of the Sobraon and Lucinda would have learned, if she had not known already, that the Sobraon was a wellregarded ship. This man's chief had been so outraged that he would depart his post for another ship that he had said that the chief steward would never be signed on again by him, "Not," he kept repeating, "under no circumstances whatever."

The stewards thought of themselves as the "crème de la crème." They were proud of their work. They were not the simple snobs that Melody Clutterbuck imagined. It was she who was the snob. These men were perfectionists. They were as proud as glass blowers. They had been tricked. They expected to serve people who would respect, or at least recognize, their finesse; but instead they found a preponderance of colonial bullies who wished to lord it. Down in second class there was a Mr Borrodaile, a rich and argumentative man who got drunk and threw biscuits down the ventilator.

Lucinda liked them all without seeing them. She would like to sit around a table with them. They could smoke and have a drop too much. She would not mind.

She did not belong in this stateroom with its vast curved empty space, its maroon carpets, its shiny icing of luxury. She did not even belong in the clothes, smart clothes from Marian Evans's dressmaker in the Burlington Arcade, and she recognized, the first night in her stateroom, with Barchester Toivers resting in her lap, that it was only at Mr d'Abbs's house that she could be relaxed amongst ordinary people.

If these stewards had met her in the company of Mr d'Abbs, Mr Fig and Miss Malcolm (and it was by no means possible) they would play cards with her and not think about it. They would see that she could laugh, even drink and, if they were not careful, fleece them of their shore pay at three in the morning. It was a vulgar house, it was true, and in many ways, quite morally doubtful. It was a shock to realize that one "belonged" there-it was so second rate, colonial, even ignorant, but she could sit at the table there and not feel herself constrained by the corsets of convention. She did not have this dreadful tightness, in the throat, the arms, the chest. In the dining room these stewards were actors in a play-they used

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Pachinko

different voices. She could not match the voice she heard at night with the voice that served her in the morning. When she sat at table she felt complicitous with them. She imagined that they, like her, felt restricted by their parts.

Meals, in any case, were an embarrassment. The dining room was all Grecian, with fluted columns, empty tables. There were four reluctant officers appointed to dine with her. She entered, blushing red. She ate as quickly as politeness would allow. She knew (or imagined) that her character, her passions, her occupation would all be unacceptable, even shocking, at this table. Her companions thought her a mouse. So she was. They made her one. She would rather have been playing Blind Jack or poker. There was, she thought, as she sliced her grey roast beef, so much to be said in favour of a game of cards. One was not compelled to pretend, could be silent without being thought dull, could frown without people being overly solicitous about one's happiness, could triumph over a man and not have to giggle and simper when one did it. One could kill time, obliterate loneliness, have a friendship with strangers one would never see again, and live on that sweet, oiled cycle of anticipation, the expectation that something delicious was about to happen. Which is not to say that the pleasures were all related to gain or greed. One could experience that lovely lightheaded feeling of loss, the knowledge that one had abandoned one more brick from the foundation of one's fortune, that one's purse was quite, quite empty, had nothing in it but a safety pin, some dust, its own water silk lining, and no matter what panic and remorse all this would produce on the morrow, one had in those moments of loss such an immense feeling of relief-there was no responsibility, no choice. One could imagine oneself to be nothing but a cork drifting down a river in a romantic tale by Mr Kingsley. In her first months as proprietor of the Prince Rupert's Glassworks she had played a hand of cribbage with the men during their breaks. She had seen this as a way whereby she could get to know them. But within a month they sent a message to her (back through Mr d'Abbs of all people) that they did not think it "proper" that this practice continue. She would never be able to think of this message-delivered by an embarrassed Mr d'Abbs in the foyer of Petty's Hotel-without feeling the sting of their rejection. It hurt out of all proportion. It would not go away. She thought: All the time I have enjoyed the games, they have thought me a tart or something worse. She wished to weep for her stupidity, or slap them for theirs. She had been proud of what the works produced. She was moved

Oscar and Luanda

by the process as she always would be by the collaborative nature of human endeavour. She saw she had purchased a hell-hole that must always be a hell-hole and yet she was much affected by the way the men made themselves into a chain with chaos at one end and civilization at the other-the cockeyed little first gatherer, the sturdy, barrelchested second gatherer, the handsome old third gatherer who would never be a master, the blower himself with his great grey beard and his arms as big as a boy's legs, the finicky stopper-offer who ran about, fast, bent over, like a mynah bird on a branch. She had felt it wrong to be the proprietor of such a hell-hole where the men must work in water-doused chaff bags, be awake at three a.m. (or ten p.m. or dawn) to meet the demands of the furnaces. But even though she could never become romantic about the hardness of their lives she also came to envy them their useful comradeship and it was through the doorway of a game of cards she hoped to enter it. She aspired only to play a useful part in manufacture, even though she was their "master."

Their rejection of her produced the most unchristian passions in her breast. "No gentleman," they told her, "would gamble with a lady." Her feelings were of the same order as those of a parent who wants to dash a howling baby to the floor.

She listened to the Leviathan's stewards and imagined being admitted to their game. She would knock on their door. She would introduce herself.

But she knew, of course, that they would immediately revert to their "steward" character. It would be an intrusion on their privacy too gross to contemplate. But surely, somewhere, there was a game got up. She imagined carpenters and engineers 'tween decks. She took her own deck of cards, the new ones purchased in Old Bond Street. They were Wetherby Suprêmes with the handsome black and gold filigree on their calendered backs which she always believed to be especially lucky. She snapped open the griffin seal which kept them in their place and shuffled them in her practical little hands, lengthening her top lip as she always did when excited-not a useful tic for a poker player to have-and cut them, splayed them, made a bridge and closed it. She had an ache. She felt it in the back of her knees, in her knuckles, a tension both pleasant and unbearable.

If she just walked, for instance, down to the regions known as 'tween decks, there would be an open door. There would be a game. She would stand and watch. They would not mind. She imagined it exactly. Four working men at a table. She would show them her own cards. 190

Pachinko

Silly. Too stupid for words.

She put her Wetherby Suprêmes in her velvet purse and walked out of her stateroom. She was going for a walk, that was all.

She was going-of course she was-to inspect her cargo in the hold. This was her right. She was a manufacturer. She might not look like one to you, sir, but that only demonstrates your colonial nature. Not all manufacturers have side-whiskers and smoke cigars.

The equipment was from Chance Brothers. It would make the first window glass in New South Wales. She did not expect a town named after her for this. But neither, sir, did she expect to be patronized.

She opened the door to C deck and descended the stairs. She did not think about what she was doing.

Lucinda was looking for a game.

She moved along steel intestines of empty corridors from which she viewed, not four men around a table, but empty cabins whose new mattresses were still wrapped in brown paper; in some there were wood shavings and sawdust, even on D deck-a carpenter's tool box with a set of chisels so sharp that the sticky-beaking passenger cut her finger and had nothing but sawdust with which to staunch the flow.

It was not like being inside a ship at all, but like the innards of a reveted bridge, a great mechanical beast, the organs of an empire whose chimneys rose high into the Atlantic sky. E deck contained animals, stall after stall of sheep, cattle, llamas. There was a sort of terror here. The air was not pleasant. It was rich and thick enough to make her-she who still thought herself a countrywoman, at home with dung, mud, beasts-rich and thick enough to make her gag. There were caged birds, too, and a young lad who said it was his job to feed them and wanted, most of all, to know what it was like atop. He was a strong, well-made boy, but his face was pale, and his face thrust at her from the fetid gloom-one yellow electric light every ten yards-and she did not feel easy with his belligerent curiosity. He was not what she was looking for. He asked if she was a nurse. She was not a nurse. Then he wanted to know if it was true, what he had been told, that there are ladies and gentlemen atop who played racquets and hoops and would she please, when they were in Sydney, employ him, for he was good around animals and practical, and would not, not for his life, ma'am, go back to cruel England again. She barely heard him.

She asked him where the hold was. He did not know, but pretended he did. She knew he was lying with his directions, and yet she had the compassion to see him as innocent and herself

Oscar and Lucinda

not so-a beast in heat looking for a beastly game.

She found her way, by mistake, to the engine-room. She did not actually enter, but opened a great riveted door where the fragrance of oil was strongest and, looking down into the giddy steel pit, saw the two giant connecting rods churning round and round, a nightmare from Gargantua, and men, so far below they seemed like smudged ivory dolls, stripped to the waist, with tiny shovels. No one here was playing cards. They stopped and looked up at the intruder. She stepped back and closed the door.

If she had felt this bad in Sydney, she would have cooled her passion by visiting the Chinese. There were no Chinese here.

She did not like the feeling of this ship. It had tossed like a cork in the Bay of Biscay and all those long steel corridors seemed to be painted with the smear of sweat. There was no life in the ship. There had been races for ladies scheduled by a games committee but now it seemed they would not be held, for there were so few ladies on board and most of them not of a racing age. She climbed steel stairs, heading upwards. She passed an officer who blushed to see a woman where he had not expected one. She did not ask him where the hold was. She continued up. She passed a door on the other side of which something improper seemed to be occurring. She came finally to a small kitchen of the tea-and-toast type. There were two doors. She chose the right-hand one. Ahead of her was a red-headed clergyman sitting on a plush red settee. It was the secondclass promenade. She felt herself "nabbed," "caught in the act." She thought it undignified to turn back. She held up her head and straightened her shoulders. She came forward. She walked directly towards him. She introduced herself to him, and when he said his name, she did not hold it.

"I am in the habit," she said, "of making a confession."

"Quite," he said.

"Perhaps this is not a practice you approve of.",

"No, no," he said, "of course not." '

"I wonder, then," she blurted, "if you might oblige me at a time convenient to you." And then, not quite knowing what she had done, and certainly not why, she fled to those regions of the ship where Oscar dare not follow.

The sea looked like a dreary waste of waters. To the east she could see the smudged ambivalence which was Cape Finisterre. The great smokestacks above her head poured forth the contents of the stomach of the ship, black effluent into the chamber of the sky.

Mr Borrodaile of Ultimo and Mr Smith of the Acclimatization Soc«*y In watched the young clergyman. He had sat at the sarrx e place eveay day for fourteen days, and even now when it was warrrx enough tor Mr Borrodaile to set himself up with a hammock on the d&ck, the Gluepot did not move. He would not come up on deck to see Tenerrfe klthough-he admitted it freely-he had never been away f™n Eng and before In Tenerife Harbour he sat exactly as he had m t*e middle of thl B y of Lay, with his Bible on his lap and his lips — Mr Bo^odade noted it first-moving. Mr Borrodaile imagined the parson moved his ^because he readL Bible, but Percy Smith although he though it best to not contest the big fellow's opinion knew the parso*™* be oravine-he was too well educated to read m such a way. (Mr Borro Sho8 was worth ten thousand pounds, moved his lips whe n reading. Mr Smith had seen him do it.) _^ntton "He's a queer one, no doubt," said the *™^«*-**^ chopped, cleft-chinned Mr Borrodaile, the same one wh o had thrown ship's biscuits down the ventilators.

"He is and all," said Percy Smith, but not unkindly. Kir Smith was a shortish man (the top of his head did not reach Mr Borr odaile' ^ shoul der) but broad, with strong arms showing under his rolled-up ^eves and a sense about him that his thighs and calves would be *££^ He had a slight roll to his walk, a farmer's gait, and tKls rather rura^ air was somehow endorsed by the profusion of Co ourle* sChairs «ound his ears-they gave him a sandy warthoggish quality qiute cos y really Yet he was, for all his rural appearance (the ™™^™J°fe™™ his jacket, the odour of his charges about him), a cultured^an, and if the culture had been acquired piecemeal, by the light of tallow can dies, he was no less cultured for all that.

Percy Smith had talked a lot to the clergyman, but *e haci not ye asked him why he always sat in the same spot or why he would not corne to view the windmills of Santa Cruz. They had discussed Darwin. Mr Smith had been surprised to find a clergyman unruffled by the subject. He was still delighted with Oscar's observation-he had made a note of it in his diary-that if Darwin was in error, then God must have placed dinosaur fossils on earth to puzzle homo sapiens. It was not just what he said, but the way he said it. There was a lightness, a transparency in his manner which seemed to Mr Smith-who was, for all his fervour for things Australian, sentimental about

"Home"-representative of all that was sweet and cultured and cultivated in "Dear Old England." Mr Smith could not reproduce Oscar's manner, and when he repeated the clergyman's observation to Mr Borrodaile, he did not seem to strike the right note. He looked up at Mr Borrodaile and waited for a response. Mr Smith blinked, he could not help it-no matter how intently he held a gaze he always gave the impression of timidity.

Mr Borrodaile grunted and began to talk about a beast he had shot at Cowpastures. It had been, the wet-lipped Mr Borrodaile insisted, a devil. Mr Smith did not quite grasp what position this devil would support in the argument. This embarrassed him, so although he nodded and held the big man's eye, he blinked more furiously than ever.

"Upon my word," said Percy Smith and then began, assiduously, to dust his knees. Mr Borrodaile thought: A dog with fleas.

At the other end of the promenade, Oscar sat in his seat. He had his Tacitus with him. He had his Bible and his Book of Common Prayer. He had a bottle of Florida water, a tea-cup and a saucer and a copy of Punch and these he placed on the velvet plush seat which, with no proper table having been provided, was, due to such prolonged and unbroken habitation, looking as soiled and sweaty as the incumbent whose carrot-coloured hair had become wildly screwed and tightly curled in the steamy atmosphere.

There were passengers who, like people recently fallen in love, must matchmake for everyone around them. The parson did not know what sunsets he was missing. They brought them to him, also their zephyrs, their balmy breezes, their enthusiasm for a hammock beneath the night sky. The Northern Star was still visible but soon it would disappear from their lives, perhaps for ever. The young man with the fine-boned, china-white face smiled and nodded and his green eyes rested carefully, not intrusively, but respectfully, upon their burnt and passionate faces. He smiled and nodded, but was inexplicably resigned to sweating inside his suit. This stubbornness made some people quite

Mr Borrodaile and Mr Smith

cross, but Oscar had other side-effects of his phobia to contend with, and the most pressing was this: what size were the windows in Miss Leplastrier's stateroom?

He had promised to hear her confession, but then a steward had informed him that the windows in the first-class staterooms were so big "you can see all the way to Japan." This was exactly the type of view he must not have. He felt giddy even imagining it.

And yet he had promised. Two days had passed, and the unresolved obligation rested heavily upon him.

There were many Anglicans, the majority, who had held confession to be a very Puseyite idea, by which they meant it was popish and therefore wrong. But the sacrament was in the Book of Common Prayer and although he had never offered it to a stranger, he had often undertaken the service for poor Wardley-Fish who would periodically become so beset by his own sins that he would fall into a debilitating depression from which trough he could contemplate nothing but the damnation of his soul. Oscar had therefore come to see the sacrament of confession as an act of love, like nursing a sick friend, and although it often involved what was bad-smelling (the soul's secretions could be no less disturbing than the body's wastes) there was a profound satisfaction to be obtained from the service thus offered.

He did not, in the case of Miss Leplastrier, expect to have his charity so tested. He could not imagine her sins amounting to more than a little pride or covetousness. He would be pleased to offer her God's peace, but he could not do it if the windows were as large and giddy as he now feared.

His cowardice so tortured his mind that he was relieved when Mr Borrodaile came and offered him diversion by speaking of the tariffs between the colonies. He could more easily ignore the peripheral vision of Miss Leplastrier promenading above him on the first-class deck-he imagined her looking down on him, waiting for him to bring her that peace that passeth all understanding. Mr Borrodaile said it was an outrage that the people who lived in Wodonga should have to pay duty to get an item up from Melbourne. Oscar did not understand either the politics or the geography. This was not apparent to Mr Borrodaile who was not the sort to ask a lot of questions. He had no questions at all; although much to tell.

He told Oscar he had shot a devil at Cowpastures. He described its coat and the contents of its stomach. He said that clergy were needed in New South Wales, that there were whole areas, dubbed "parishes" on the government maps, where the people grew up godless, the 195

Oscar and Lucinda

children never saw a school, and the blasphemies and curses were shocking even to a man of the world like himself.

If Oscar had a thought to convert the blacks, he would be better off not to waste his time. The most remarkable fact about these "chaps" was their total absence of religious belief. Every other nation, Mr Borrodaile asserted, rubbing the odd little plateau at the bridge of his aquiline noselike the arm of a leather chair, this part of his nose appeared shiny from wear-every other nation, no matter how savage, had some deities or idols of wood or stone, but the Australian blacks believed in nothing but a devil-devil which they thought would eat them. He had all this, not as hearsay, but from a black he had named "Bullock" on account of his demeanour. Oscar could not help casting covert glances at Mr Borrodaile's large black shoes. He had never seen a pair so big. Mr Borrodaile also had large and violent hands protruding from his striped starched cuffs. He chewed his nails, right to the quick. Oscar watched the hands fold and rearrange themselves. Mr Borrodaile said there was opium and gambling in Sydney. He held Oscar's eyes when he said this, insisting on something Oscar could not fathom. His eyes were hooded; the whites had a damaged, bloodshot appearance. There were bars, Mr Borrodaile said dolefully, with "gay girlies." He said, also, that it was a practical place and that Oscar would soon have his face burnt red unless he took care to keep a hat on. He said it would do no harm to have some grace said at dinner and it was high time "Your Reverence" stopped sitting by himself; and then he announced he was soon to take a stroll on deck, that two circuits made the mile, that it was no good asking "Your Reverence" who gave new meaning to the term Glue-pot for it looked as if he were not only a Glue-pot himself but that he had also ("Ho ho") sat on one. Mr Borrodaile collected Mr Smith (who had been dozing in a club chair), relieved him of his London Illustrated News (which had lain like a nursery blanket across his wide chest) and set off up the stairs to see if they might spot a flying fish.

Oscar imagined himself watched by the pretty lady in first class. He arranged himself in a certain way which he hoped conveyed authority. He crossed a leg, straightened his back, and turned the pages of his book at regular intervals. He would ask Mr Smith to investigate the size of the firstclass windows on his behalf. Oscar stared at his Tacitus and waited. He stared at the page for perhaps twenty minutes until he heard Mr Smith's soft colonial vowels.

"Hello, Parson, still at your studies?",

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Mi Borrodaile and Mr Smith

He threw himself down beside Oscar who retrieved his Florida water just in time,

"By Jove, Borrodaile sets a pace," Percy Smith wiped his sweat-red brow with a handkerchief.

"He is still up there. 1 would say he has a five-foot stride. He left me by the bow."

"And when you pace," Oscar asked, putting his book away, "do you pace past the first-class cabins?"

"Oh, 1 dare say we do, but it's such a cracking pace," Percy Smith laughed, "it is all pretty much of a blur and I would not know what

1 was passing with those great long legs of his. I am not criticizing. It is admirable. But I'm afraid I'm a disappointment to him in this heat. Now you," he said, tapping Oscar's shin, "have got the right configuration. He has his eye on you. He will get you on the deck with him, I guarantee you."

"Oh, no."

"He has mentioned it," teased Mr Smith.

"Good grief."

"He has compared my legs unfavourably with yours."

"In length perhaps, not strength."

"In strength, too."

"He is mistook."

"In strength, in every respect," smiled Percy Smith. "No, I am afraid you have been chosen. I have been retired. If I were a horse I fear I would be shot."

"But I cannot go on deck, Mr Smith. It is quite impossible."

"When you refused him cards, he understood you. He told me he had a great respect for you. But he is a man of strong feelings, and he's just as likely to take your refusal as a slur of some sort. But perhaps I am wrong. I have only just made his acquaintance. But he is an emotional chap. I can vouch tor that. He told me his grandmother was a beauty from Spain, so that perhaps explains it."

"Yes," said Oscar, "but the fact that it is impossible for me to walk on deck has nothing, nothing whatever, to do with Mr Borrodaile."

"Mr Borrodaile would not see it that way," said Percy Smith and may-it was hard to tell-have suggested something critical of Mr Borrodaile in his censored smile. There was a dogged quality in Oscar which, in the midst of all his nervous excitements, plodded stubbornly onwards in the face of difficulties. This left him no time to see Mr Smith's treasonous smile. "But," he said, "I have an ailment."

When Percy Smith heard that the parson had an ailment he tucked

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Oscar and Lucinda

his chin down into his neck; his sandy brows pressed down heavily on his gentle blue eyes; he folded his big scratched arms across his chest.

"And it is because of this ailment/' said Oscar, beginning to open and shut his hands as if they were hinged lids, "that I would ask you to describe for me the size of the first-class windows."

"Portholes," corrected Percy Smith. "But what is this condition?" Even while he asked this, he was leaping to a conclusion-there was only one reason for looking through a first-class window. There was only one passenger in first-class and she had-Mr Borrodaile had remarked on the feature with disturbing enthusiasm-a very pretty sweep from her back to her backside.

"Portholes seems the wrong term. I have heard they are quite large, but my condition has prevented me discovering the truth for myself."

"You tease me like a girl. Is it meant to be a guessing game we play now?"

"I am sorry, but I find it quite embarrassing."

"It does not concern a young lady by any chance?" Percy Smith was not smiling. But he bit his lower lip and his sandy eyebrows no longer pressed upon his eyes so heavily. Oscar felt the rush of blood to his ears; he felt it gather in great hot pools, one in each lobe. "Oh, no," he said. He really looked quite prudish. "It is nothing ungentlemanly. I really only wish to know the dimensions of the windows. It is the seascape, you see, that actually concerns me. It is the quantity of sea…"

"The quantity of sea?"

"The quantity, yes, of sea, of water, that would be on view from a first-class cabin." He looked quite cross. He picked a fleck of spilt gravy from his rumpled thigh. "It is a professional matter, Mr Smith, please do not laugh at me. It is not an amour."

"Now, now, friend Parson," said Mr Smith and stroked Oscar on the shoulder as if he were a nervous beast who must be quieted. "I do not give a tinker's curse. I am a quiet enough man, I know, but just as I know you are not a wowser, you must see that I am not one either." Oscar had never heard the term before, but he had other more important misunderstandings on his mind.

"But first," said Percy Smith, now picking the animal hairs off his own jacket, "you must unclench your teeth a little and listen to me. Are you listening?" 1Q«

Montaigne "Of course, but your smile suggests you know something you could not know."

"I tell you, young man, relax yourself. There will be nothing done on your behalf today. But tomorrow, perhaps, and then you will no longer need to moon like a certain Montague beneath the window of a

Capulet."

Their conversation was cut short by Mr Borrodaile who returned to fetch Mr Smith for a game of quoits up on deck. As it was to be played "penny a poke" Mr Borrodaile assumed, quite loudly, that the Gluepot would not be interested.

52

Montaigne

Mr Borrodaile did not like a woman at his table. It constrained and restricted the natural flow of conversation. It meant that almost every door was temporarily locked before you. You were shackled, chained to your place, with nothing to talk about. Nothing? Well, what? Flowers? The children's health? The problem of one more maid got above herself or off to marry the footman?

But a man could not, if he were a gentleman, discuss politics (because they knew nothing of it) or question God (because this frightened them). Business was not suitable, nor were sporting matters, and the bottle, which might otherwise move back and forth so gaily, stayed in its place upon the sideboard and could not be sent upon its proper business.

So when Mr Borrodaile strolled into the second-class dining room, two snorts under his belt, as light and pearly as the southern evening light, he was put out of countenance to see at his table, not only the young parson (whom he had invited himself) but the young woman from first class whom Mr Smith had taken upon himself to introduce into their company. He had known, of course; Mr Smith had informed him of his presumption. But he had forgotten. He had forgotten totally.

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Oscar and Luanda

Now, of course, he remembered, and all that well-being he had so carefully nurtured in his measured stride around the deck, the long deep breaths of ozone, the equally satisfying inhalation of good cognac, all of it just went.

He sat down in silence. He was a large man and knew his silence to be heavy. He put on his "cutdowns" and examined the menu. He affected not to hear their good evening. He looked around to find the wine steward, looking also for the perpetrator of this blunder, who was, the nervous nelly, checking his charges 'tween decks. The purser-a hearty chap, too-had been placed amongst the teetotal Cornish farmers.

He heard the clergyman-wrists like a girl, voice all reedy like a flute-enquire of the woman about the book she had been reading.

"Montaigne," she said.

Mr Borrodaile felt his neck go prickly, as though two or three grass ticks had settled home at once. As with grass ticks, he did not scratch, but took his large fingers to the source of irritationand found nothing there but skin.

"Ah, yes," the parson said, folding his white fingers and nodding his head in a parody of prayer,

"ah, yes, Montaigne."

Mr Borrodaile did not like this sort of talk at all. He was a practical man. His father had been a wheelwright and he had, himself, been apprenticed to the same trade, but when he thought of

"practical" he did not mean the kind that leaves wood shavings on the floor and precious little in the bank. He imagined the clergyman well above him and did not like it. And yet-in the case of Montaigne at least-this was not so, or if it was, the advantage was no more than one might have from standing on a brick, that much above, or, if there were no brick available, then the volume itself laid on its side. Oscar, having said "Montaigne" had nothing more to add. He had no knowledge of Montaigne, no more than is obtainable from dozing off three nights in a row with a musty volume cradled in your lap. He had not even reached the second chapter (the one on idleness) before his pointed chin was digging into his chest and his reading glasses had fallen into his lap. So he did not reach-and this is a great shame-Montaigne's essay on smells. It is a shame because Oscar's olfactory sense was as highly developed as his father's sense of sight, and he would have particularly enjoyed that first line: "It is recorded of some men, among them Alexander the Great, that their sweat exuded a sweet odour, owing to some rare and extraordinary property."

Mr Percy Smith, alas, was not one of these men. And when he

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arrived, all bumpy with apology, he brought with him the smell of the fretting llamas which had detained him. Lucinda, for one, did not find this smell unpleasant and was, in contrast to Mr Borrodaile's cigar and brandy, to name it "honest."

Mr Smith bent his head low to attack his consommé which Mr Borrodaile remarked was nothing more than beef tea in a flat plate. Mr Smith nodded, but looked up, blinking from under his sandy eyebrows, to ask about the conversation. He had enjoyed his bit of Darwin with the parson, and when he heard "Montaigne" he judged the couple would be well matched. He was about to confess he knew little of Montaigne but would be pleased to hear. He liked the look of the table far better now that the red-veined purser had removed himself. It looked a friendlier place altogether.

It was Lucinda who had answered Mr Smith. It was she who said Montaigne. Mr Borrodaile did not like the sound of it at all. It produced another three phantom grass ticks, these last just below his collar where he could not touch them. He imagined the young woman was being pretentious, using a foreign word for "mountain" where an English one would have done. He was not entirely confident of this, and yet he wished it known, in a relatively safe sort of way.

"Montaigne," he said, affecting a reasonable chuckle, putting his cutdown spectacles back in his jacket. "Montaigne, hill mound and tussock."

This produced a puzzled silence, but before it had extended more than a second or two, Percy Smith-he would have been faster, but he had been engaged with his consommé-produced an appreciative chuckle. He was well aware of Mr Borrodaile's sensitivities.

"Britt-ayne," said Mr Borrodaile, pushing on like a man slashing at dense undergrowth in country he does not know. Hack, hack. God knows what vines will trip him, thorns snag him. Slash. "Bourgogne. Bretagne. Montana, quite right." He was laughing uproariously now, a high laugh for such a big man, like a string of firecrackers. Tears ran down his cheeks and lost themselves in his moustache. "Oh, dear," he blew his great big nose, "my wounded aunt." The two men felt they had missed something important, but Lucinda Leplastrier, although she did not understand the sense of the words, saw and tasted the prickliness beneath Mr Borrodaile's laughter and it made her remember things about Sydney she had forgotten. This man was rich and powerful in Sydney. She did not know him, but she could be confident he would dine at Government House. He was a barbarian. <,

•>m

Oscar and Luanda

"But speaking seriously," said Mr Borrodaile, as the corned beef was placed in front of him (he prodded it with his knife, separated the slices, but said nothing of its quality). "Speaking seriously," sharing his gaze between Mr Smith and Oscar, "I would like to hear the parson's opinion of tallow."

"I have none," Oscar smiled, and fiddled with something in his pocket. Lucinda, glancing at him sideways, approved of his answer just as much as-having suddenly placed Mr Borrodaile-she disapproved of this fellow who had made his great fortune out of buying land and chopping it up. This was a calling which moved her to great anger, and not only because she had had experience of it at so young an age.

So this was Borrodaile. He named streets after himself.

"You cannot travel," said Mr Borrodaile, swallowing too much at once. "Excuse me." He paused to clear his pipes with burgundy. He wiped the shiny piece of dimpled chin between the hedges of his drooping moustache. "You cannot travel out to New South Wales without an opinion on this subject. Upon my word, Parson, it's like going to Ireland without your umbrella. If it is llamas, then I think it matters not a pickle whether your head is empty or not. Even Mr Smith will tell you this. But tallow, your young Reverence, this is a thing you must know about. The price of town tallow when we sailed was two pounds a hundred-weight and if I were a young man with any capital, this is what I would invest in."

"But the price may change," said Lucinda.

Mr Borrodaile looked at her and blinked.

This was not a subject he would allow disagreement on, not even if the dissenter were protected by crinoline and stays. He had no time for anyone who wished to raise sheep for mutton. There had been too much mutton in the colony already. He was a tallow man, a chop-themup-and-boilthem-down man, and he liked to have a chance to say so.

"Change!" said Mr Borrodaile, holding up his knife and fork and looking down at her along his shiny-bridged nose. "By God, girlie, of course it will change. It will go up." Oscar found this bellow quite upsetting. He did not like the blasphemy. It was even more shocking when it came from so large and powerful an instrument. He saw that the diminutive Miss Leplastrier had done nothing to deserve such vitriol. It offended his sense of what was fair, and he was moved to take up a public position in her defence.

And yet he did not really think of "sides," only of trying to adjudicate,

«

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Montaigne

to assume the responsibility for the harmony of the table. This, really, vvas his great talent. It had made him a good schoolmaster. It was born of his hatred of discord, his fear of loudness. The weakness, therefore, ended up a virtue, and he brought his sense of fairness to every social situation so that he would divide curiosity and attention like a good socialist, dividing them fairly according to the needs of the participants. As for himself, if you left aside the subject of horseracingwhich he imagined he had now abandoned-and the construction of the Leviathan-on which everybody at the table was well versed-he thought he had nothing worth saying on matters secular. He had found his pupils at Mr Colville's school to be more worldly than he was. "And what would you invest in, Miss Leplasrrier?" The question was quite innocent. He did not imagine she was in a position to invest in

anything.

Lucinda Leplastrier put her knife and fork together on her plate, the fork with its tines upwards. She knew her hair was a fright. She could feel it slipping from its clips. Her cheeks were burning but she forced herself to look slowly around the table, to take in every face before she spoke. She had taught herself this trick in Sydney. It was a sea anchor thrown out to slow her before the gale of her emotions, and although she did not actually feel it herself, it gave her an appearance of almost queenly dignity.

"I would invest," she said. She counted to three. She lost her place. "I would put my capital into something that I loved very much." "Very pretty," said Mr Borrodaile, and made a show of applauding. "Perhaps not loved' then, Mr Borrodaile, Let us say that I would invest in something from which I would derive innate pleasure. And if it were land, for instance, I would first find some land which would produce what I wished, and then I would prepare myself for good seasons and bad seasons, but I would cherish my land." "Dear girl. ," Lucinda made a little face which was born in that painful territory

between a wince and a smile.

"But mostly, Mr Hopkins," she said, to Oscar (who leaned forward and thus, although he wished no rudeness, was complicitous in excluding Mr Borrodaile), "I would advise someone with capital in accordance with what I understand the parable of the talents instructs us to. I would advise that they make something that was not there before. I do not like your tallow works, I must admit it, Mr Borrodaile." She returned her attention to him as she spoke. Her voice was soft, even regretful. "And this is not merely because they produce a most

Oscar and Lucinda

unpleasant odour, but because I have lived and worked at farming and I cannot bear to see a beast used for so base a thing, and now I am sure I have allowed you to call me silly and feminine."

"Dear girl, I have thought no such thing." But his hooded bloodshot eyes thought worse things and brought them out, one after the other, and displayed them. It was a private showing and Percy Smith was not aware of it-he smiled at Lucinda and shook his head in such an idiotic and patronizing way that she revised her good opinion of him immediately.

"The principle," said Oscar, inviting them all to join hands in some communion which they were-even Lucinda-now reluctant to approach, "the principle, Mr Borrodaile, is surely a good one."

"Oh, for God's sake," spluttered Mr Borrodaile, then tried to catch his blasphemy before it landed. His mouth, for a second, lay open like someone who has eaten food too hot and wishes to spit it out, expel it, anyway, but cannot do it from politeness. He could not take it back. He could only push on, hack his way forward, and not worry that he could not see where his next step would lead him. "I knew you were a clergyman when I saw you from behind. You see, it's in your walk." He swilled his burgundy.

"By criminee, 111 show you."

Lucinda sucked in her breath. Even Mr Smith accustomed by now to the erratic and energetic movements of his friend, his erupting passions, his hurts, slights, revenges, even Percy Smith, lining up his spoon and fork beside a most unseasonal plum pudding, looked alarmed. Mr Borrodaile was not deterred.

Oscar and Lucinda were both burning red, as if they were parties to an adultery. Mr Borrodaile stood with his back to the mirrored pillar, grinning idiotically. He gave the ends of his moustache a little tweak. He adjusted his shirt cuffs like a baritone about to sing. He was drunk, of course. He composed his face, but his face was not the point. The point was this: Mr Borrodaile would 'do' a walk.

He clasped his big hands together on his breast. He inclined his upper body backwards from the vertical. He sucked in his ruddy cheeks and raised his eyes like a choirboy in procession. He walked. He was a wooden doll with tangled strings. His legs jerked sideways then up. The upper body swung from side to side like the mainmast of a brig at anchor in a swell. The hands unclasped and clasped and then flew apart to grasp at-at what? A butterfly? A hope? A prayer?

Mr Borrodaile perambulated, undulated, swayed and smiled for the

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entire length of the dining room, weaving daintily where architecture

— dictated.

The purser scraped back his chair and those in second class who had previously complained of Borrodaile's "shenanigans," now looked towards the officer expectantly, but he was not moving back his chair to arrest him, but rather to applaud. Mr Borrodaile was walking exactly like the red-haired clergyman, no, not "exactly." He was not like the chap at all, and yet he had its essence. His walk was to the original as a jiggling skeleton is to a dancing boy. Mr Borrodaile's big dimple-chinned face was red with pleasure. He strode along. He put his head back. He swung his arms. The applause was quickly general.

Oh, what a bully he must have been as a boy, thought Lucinda, seeing this most accurate performance, a performance which, in spite of her resolve to the contrary, made her smile. But she would not applaud it. Its intention was too cruel-to make all that was good and kind in the young man appear to be weak and somehow contemptible. She was ashamed of her smile and was therefore surprised, when she at last allowed herself to look at the subject of this mockery, to see that he was not only smiling broadly, but applauding as enthusiastically as the bullies at the purser's table.

He took her breath away. How confident he must be with himself. She resolved there and then that she would like to know him better.

"Well, well," said Oscar who was not as confident as Lucinda imagined but was, rather, protected by a curious blindness about himself. He could not avoid seeing what was comic and grotesque in Mr Borrodaile's walk, and yet it did not occur to him, not even for an instant, that these might be elements of his own physical self. He would never perceive himself as odd and could only see Mr Borrodaile's mannerisms as theatrical devices intended to convey an inner reality. Thus he saw the clasped hands merely as symbols to represent him as unworldly, the jerky legs as enthusiastic, the idiotic smile as kindly. And he was not displeased. Indeed he was touched that Mr Borrodaile should so readily perceive those qualities in his clay that he had so laboured to strengthen.

"Well, well," he said, leaning back in his chair and cracking his knuckles. 'It would seem we cannot keep our hearts secret from those who observe us keenly." He looked up at Mr Borrodaile who had come to stand, smirking, above his shoulder. "My congratulations, Mr Borrodaile, it is a great gift."

Mr Borrodaile could not help but feel irritated. He leaned forward

Oscar and Lucinda

and "borrowed" the parson's glass of wine and stood there smiling and sipping it without apology.

"A great gift," said Oscar, twisting his long neck so he might speak directly to Mr Borrodaile while, at the same time, avoid the portholes which ran along the wall behind him. "And I do not mean your performance-I am pretty well uneducated in theatrics and cannot judge it." Mr Borrodaile was discomforted. He replaced the parson's wine glass and moved to take up his proper seat and it was then that Oscar caught sight of what he had hirtherto succeeded in avoiding.

The sickening silk sheet of sea made a gagging ball in his throat.

He stopped speaking.

"Not the performance," prompted Mr Smith while Mr Borrodaile, realizing that he was at least being spoken to in a respectful and cornplimentary style, now took his seat politely and leaned forward attentively to hear what his victim had to say.

"I cannot judge it," said Oscar, calming the panic in his gagging throat with a little dry bread.

"But your sensitivity to the inner man, to those parts which we do not readily show the world, indeed which we often take great care to hide-this perspicacity, Mr Borrodaile, it is really admirable.";l

Mr Borrodaile looked very pleased. "i

Lucinda hid her delight in her water glass. »

"This is a gift," said Oscar, leaning forward, gesturing as if to hold a casket of some weight. "It is something which should not be used merely to amuse passengers on a long voyage. It is something a Christian should use in life."

As he spoke, Oscar became bigger and more eccentric than even Mr Borrodaile's impersonation might have allowed. He was, with excitement, embarrassment, a little wine, more of the character that WardleyFish loved, more like the schoolmaster sixty boys from Mr Colville's school would still remember in their dotage. He was animated. His long arms waved across the table, missing burgundy glasses and hock bottles, but only because his fellow diners removed them from the radius of his arms. His voice beame higher and took on the famous fluting tone. He looked from one face to the next, drawing them into the bubbling pot of his enthusiasm until they, too, felt that what they had witnessed was not a cruel mockery but an affirmation, an insight, a thing of much greater moment than they had at first realized. They polished it in retrospect, buffed, varnished it until it shone in their imaginations as a precious thing and its perpetrator-the rude and

7f1A

Phosphorescence (1) contemptuous Mr Borrodaile-was made, at least temporarily, into something fine.

Lucinda, who had begun by thinking Mr Hopkins merely clever, was, when she saw there was no guile in this enthusiasm, so moved by his goodness that her eyes watered. Mr Borrodaile was also moved, but in a different way, and for a little while-half an hour or so-he was a different person. He showed an interest in the feelings and opinions of his fellow passengers. And his eyes, when they looked at Lucinda Leplastrier, no longer showed those cold instruments, like surgeons' tools, that he had displayed so nastily (snapping open the case: There!

See!) so short a time before.

There was phosphorescence beside the ship. It was announced by the head steward, and there was a scramble for the deck where the spectacle could be properly enjoyed and that was how Oscar, not wishing the party to break up, turned the full blaze of this enthusiasm to the subject of phosphorescence without ever once looking over his shoulder at the glowing vision which filled the portholes of the dining room.

53

Ph^iorescence (1)

He could see which way his conversation would lead his dinner cornpanions: surely, inevitably up the stairs and into the warm night to which his phobia denied him access. The more he held them with his descriptions, his explanations, the more he was ensuring that they would finally leave him so they might witness this miracle he was so

brilliantly evoking.

To Miss Leplastrier (she spoke with the delectable top lip and bright and curious eyes) he spoke most of all and when, at last, the push of his enthusiasms joined with the pull of his phenomenon, and they rose in a body from the table, he also rose. And although he did not

Oscar and Lucinda

promise he would accompany them up on to the deck, neither did he indicate that he could not, and whilst a court of law would declare he had not misled the party as to his intention, the courts of heaven would not be so easily deceived.

At the bottom of the grand slippery staircase which led to the upper deck, he quietly left the noisy company and felt himself like a sad and ugly creature in a fairytale, one for ever exiled from the light and cornpelled to skulk, pale, big-eyed, sweat-shiny in the dark steel nether regions.

Phosphorescence (2)

The sea rolled around Leviathan's bows as white as milk, studded with bright sparkles of blue light. The milk curdled. The sea was marble with clear black water in between. A bucket was lowered. It banged and swayed and then was lost in darkness. The white clouds dispersed, but the sparkles remained. Then one of the points suddenly exploded. It was a flare beneath the water. The great ship floated in liquid light. The bucket had not yet reached the sea. Lucinda could see, in the luminescent sea, the most splendid globes of fire wheeling and careening like things from a prophecy.

But she had no interest in spectacles. If spectacles had contented her she would have stayed alone in first class. She was thirsty for intelligence and kindness, and the phosphorescence had been merely an agent, a conduit for these emotions. Mr Hopkins had brought them both together, the spectacular and the personal, and she had liked, far more than any phenomenon, the way he had moved his hands, not like an Englishman at all. He seemed full of life, bursting out of himself. His collar stud was popped loose and Lucinda liked him for this almost as much as anything else.

"Then let us go," she had said, standing at the dining-room table. 208

Phosphorescence (2)

"Let us be Witness to the Miracle." She had made herself sound ironic, but she had not felt in the least ironic.

Then they were all up from the table at once, and out of the door and up,the stairs, and she kept herself just ahead of Mr Borrodaile's shepherding hand which felt it necessary to guide her through a doorway as if it might be a dangerous reef she would not otherwise have the wit to navigate. She did not look back. She had imagined Mr Hopkins still in the party. There were not sufficient passengers to crowd the deck, but the phosphorescence had exerted a pull, like a tide, and the inhabitants, against all the rules of rank and conduct, had been sucked up, or had swarmed into the warm night air, clustering beside the great water condensers amidships. There were stewards and cabin boys, engineers, the young lad who tended the animals, third-class passengers with voices born in Limehouse and Holborn, Liverpool and Manchester. It was only then, when she was wedged into this mass, that she discovered that Mr Hopkins was no longer of their party. She imagined this to be somehow her fault. She had been too forward again. She had frightened him away with her imperiousness. Her ironic manner had been offensive. She had not held herself in sufficiently, but why must she always hold herself back? They would have her tie a silk rope between her ankles so she would move in a fettered way. Even Dennis Hasset had tried to persuade her to shorten her stride. His excuse was the cut of her crinoline, but it was not, she suspected, his reason.

She would obviously be wise to take his advice, to leash herself in. But she was everywhere leashed in, in any case. It was the condition of her adult life to feel it. She refused the conventions of whalebone and elastic, but still she was squeezed and blistered, pinched and hobbled.

Lucinda was angry with the phosphorescence. She had jettisoned something much more valuable on its account. As she looked at the sea her upper lip diminished itself as if what she was was nothing but a fairground-whizzing lights, sickly sweetmeats, tawdry barkers. Mr Borrodaile was unpleasantly attentive. He said the globes of light were sea blubbers. She did not like to feel him bow his bulk when he wished to talk so closely into her ear. He had forgotten that he had heard this information from Mr Hopkins at the same time she had. She could not fathom the workings of his mind. For now he continued to regurgitate more of what he had ingested at the dinner table: he told her that the sea blubbers were called medusae, and that what appeared to be sparks were

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Oscar and Lucinda

in reality entomastraca, although he did not say it quite correctly.

"Entromysteriosa," said Mr Borrodaile, not quietly either. But Mr Hopkins had not even bidden her good night. She could not think what she had done to deserve so gross an insult.

The phosphorescence was wonderful, of course. How could it not be wonderful? But wonder, even wonder at one of God's great miracles, cannot be sustained when one feels foolish and unhappy. Luanda made herself stay on deck for a slow and dragging fifteen minutes before she declared herself satisfied with the phosphorescence.

But Mr Smith would have her stay. He put his thumb and forefinger on the sleeve of her jacket, but did it in such a blinky, owl-like sort of way, that she could not be angry with his familiarity, indeed, was pleased to see that he at least thought of her kindly.

"But the bucket is not here, Miss Leplastrier. You must not leave until you have seen the bucket demonstrated."

"Do stay," said Mr Borrodaile, but she could feel that she had, by moving away from his whispering mouth, exhausted his good will towards her.

"But what is in the bucket is only what is in the sea, surely?" Lucinda said. "There is no extra ingredient."

"Wait," said Mr Smith. "Look, here it comes."

"Make way," said Mr Borrodaile.

He stood on Luanda's foot. The pain was quite excruciating, but she said nothing. She could not bear the possibility of fuss, the likelihood that he would, when apologizing, put his big hand on her arm or shoulder.

There was much jostling as the bucket was brought on to the deck. She was smaller than everyone. They pressed around her, and Lucinda, who had come to second class wishing to feel and smell her kind around her, was oppressed and choked by all these bodies. She squeezed her way to the front, more to escape the rich odours of humanity than to view the bucket's contents. It contained a great number of flashing bodies.

"Go on, Smith," said the harsh voice of Mr Borrodaile.

"In a minute, Borrodaile," said Percy Smith. His tone betrayed more independence than was his want. "I am waiting for the engineer."

"I am the engineer," said a man beside Lucinda who smelt strongly, not of oil but whisky. The engineer held out the bottle with a ground-glass stopper. Mr Smith leaned across Lucinda's shoulder and took it. He moved into the small clear space next to the dull zinc-colored bucket and, having

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Jealousy

unstoppered the glass vessel, sought Lucinda amongst the audience. "H2SO4/" he declared.

"Sulphuric acid." He knelt, and dropped a little acid into the bucket. "Quick," he said, stepping back. "Quick and lively now."

Lucinda was pushed so hard she could not have avoided the "demonstration" if she had wished to. The bright points in the bucket grew bright, some white, some yellow, but all intense, like tiny stars suddenly blooming in the heavens. They then flickered, faded, died. The bucket became dark.

"You see, Borradaile," called Mr Smith, "that proves it." Lucinda thought: You dull man. You would murder God through the dullness of your imagination.

She squeezed herself backwards and-with Mr Borrodaile's loud voice asserting that nothing was proven-walked along the empty part of the deck towards her even emptier cabin. She looked up to find the North Star but the Leviathan had drawn a belching black blanket across the sky and the heavens were as dead as the inside of a bucket. She thought: I do not like factories. Am I still living my life to please my mama? She entered the first-class promenade and, without realizing what she would see there, looked down into the second-class promenade. She saw Oscar Hopkins sitting-ostentatiously she imagined-by himself. When he waved at her, she pretended not to have seen him.

55

Jealousy

What Wardley-Fish said in Cremorne Gardens was true: he did not fit. His very position, alone in the second-class promenade, advertised the fact. He was a queer bird, a stork, a mantis, a gawk, an Odd Bod. He was afraid of water. He was separated from life itself. He sat on his settee like a fellow in a bath-chair and had the wonders of the oceans

Oscar and Luanda

reduced so they might be brought to him in an ugly fire bucket.

Mr Smith came down the stairs quite drunk and tried to put a single medusa in a glass of gin. He claimed it was a famous drink in America. The creature flashed bright yellow-a shriek of lightand died. Mr Smith told Oscar he was "poor company" and went off to play poker with Mr Borrodaile and the engineer. The stewards took the bucket away and sponged the carpet. Oscar was, in many respects, a humble man. But he also had the mental habits of a Dissenter who knows himself saved when the rest of his neighbours are damned. So no matter what ascendancy Mr Borrodaile, for instance, might have over him at the dinner table, Oscar felt himself, in his secret heart, to be "above" him. And it offended him, offended him beyond toleration, that such a man might walk up the stairs to witness the phosphorescence when he, who knew more about the phenomenon than anyone else aboard the ship, could not. He had watched the dinner party ascend the stairs as he had once watched pagan singing and dancing at the summer solstice in Hennacombe. He had been jealous then, seeing old women with big bonnets twirl and laugh while he must sit hidden behind a tree. He had felt the same emotions watching his father in the sea. Even when he was afraid of the water, even at the moment he was most in terror of it, he was slashed and whipped by jealousy. He had seen Miss Leplastrier on the promenade. He had waved, but being short-sighted, could not be sure of her response. He could not bear the thought that he had driven her from him. He told himself he was honour bound to hear her confession and it was this, not the vision of her large eyes or her pretty upper lip, which he admitted to himself as he rose at last from his plush velvet seat and made his way unsteadily towards his cabin.

He took out his set of brushes and his hand mirror from the little cedar drawer. He brushed hard at his wiry red hair and tried to make it appear more civilized, but the more he brushed, the more it stuck out sideways. When he had finished his toilet, the top of his head resembled the foliage of a windblown tree. He located the lost collar stud and remedied it. He noticed the beginnings of a small pimple on his nose. He found a porcelain pot of pomatum (intended to subdue hair), opened it, sniffed it, and closed it up again.

He opened the soldering box and took out the wrapped caul. He crammed this in the side pocket of his jacket. It did not do anything to diminish his phobia. He then set out to ascend the stairs to the

Lure

first-class promenade. Once he was up there he enquired of Miss Leplastrier's stateroom so dolefully that the steward who escorted him there imagined not a phobia but a serious spiritual crisis.

56 Lure

Lucinda took her pack of cards and shuffled them. Their waxing was bright and new and the inks shone bright beneath, like coloured stones in an aquarium. She stood in front of the pretty walnut table and dealt herself a hand for poker. She stood hard against the table, its edge pressing her thigh. She splayed the five cards, face down, then turned one over with her fingernail. King of spades. She turned it back. Her hands were actually aching. She pressed them hard together. She walked around the table and stood opposite the five splayed cards. She dealt five more. She cut the pack. She turned up a three of diamonds. She stood looking at the table. If she had been seated at the place the cards suggested she might have looked across her opponent's shoulder at the moonlit millpond of the sea. But had she actually played those cards, the sea would not exist. Nothing would exist but that small spherical world of which the cut pack was the exact geometrical centre.

She walked to her bureau. It was a definite walk with nothing dreamy about it. She took her purse from the bureau drawer. She carried it to the table. She spilled its contents on to the tablebig pennies, chunky sovereigns, pound notes, a single "fiver." She walked around the room then, circling the table in her stockinged feet. There were men playing cards in earshot. Let them see they were not alone in their passion. She tugged a cord, a red rope with a gold tassel on its end. This was to summon a steward. But when the steward came, his eyes refused to see the lovely lure she had constructed for him. He left the stateroom and returned with tea things on a silver

Oscar and Lucinda

tray. He did not avoid her gaze, nor did he meet it especially. He wished the young lady a pleasant good night. She had made a fool of herself twice in one day. 57 Confession

When she found Mr Hopkins standing in her doorway, the first thing she thought, when thought came, was-the cards. She had laid them as a bait, but not for him, for anyone but him. But there was a moment, before this, when she did not think at all. Her mouth echoed the open door. And then she thought: The cards. He must not see the cards, or money either. There were coins and notes, a fiver as purple as a bishop's vest-it was such a luminous colour, like flowering lasiandra, signalling invitations to stumble-footed insects which would help it mate without knowing what they did. All this was calculated to catch the eye, but not this eye, another one. She thought: What a dear face. The extreme delicacy and refinement of the face impressed itself on her. She did not, not yet, question the propriety of this visit, unchaperoned to her room; that would come in a moment, and with it anxiety, like a draught of hot whisky. She had completely forgotten her request for confession. She saw only the very pleasant man she had feared driven away by her forwardness.

"Do come in." These were the only words that either of them spoke. She tried to lead him into the curved corner of the stateroom, further from the game of poker. She thought to point out the luminescent sea. She knew herself favoured with 'landscape windows" and thought to make a conversation of the fact. But he literally turned his back upon them, and moved like a crab in the opposite direction, finding his way into a chair like a blind man, at the very table she did not wish him to sit.

She was aghast, too much in terror about having her vice discovered

01A

Confession

to think his behaviour peculiar. She noticed perspiration on his brow, but it did not come to her mind until much later, when the incident was over.

She thought it odd he did not excuse himself for sitting while she stayed standing. "You must excuse me," he said instead, "for not corning earlier." She smiled and bowed her head. She remained standing so that his eyes, in looking up at her, would not fall upon what was on the table in front of him. He had seen already. He must have seen already. And yet, it seemed, he had not. What was he talking about? Coming earlier? On deck? She wondered if she might find a cloth to throw across the table.

"You see," he said, "I have a phobia about the ocean. It is something I have suffered from since very young. My father is a naturalist, you know, and was in the ocean all the time, and I with him, too, when I was a little chap."

"I see." She did not see. He was agitated and sweating, but she did not notice. She was like someone hearing Spanish when she expected Greek. He had picked up a card from the table and was toying with it.

'In any event I developed a nervousness about it, like the nervousness some get with heights. So to accompany you on deck this evening, or to come up here, with all this glass-to hear your confessionwell, I feared it was more than I could manage."

But she could not confess to him. She wished only his good opinion.

"This is not known to Mr Smith or Mr Borrodaile," he said.

"Frankly, I would prefer they did not hear it. But I owe you an apology for not answering your call to confession when, as you see, I was capable of coming all the time.''

But she must not confess. She wished he would put down the card. (Surely he knew what it was.) She repeated what she had heard from George Lewes, although she did it at ten times his lumbering speed that the Queen had been praying with Presbyterians at Crathie and was becoming passionate about the dangers of genuflexion and confessions. So confession was, she argued, unwise.

"Ah, yes," he said, "the Queen. And yet, you see," (and here he bounced his leg beneath the little table so you might actually hear the coins jingling) "it is not enough she does not like it, because the Church of England has it written into the prayer book and it will take more than the Queen, more than our Lord-it will take an Act of Parliament-to get it out again. I do not support this way of running things, Miss Leplastrier, but you may confess as you

Oscar and Lucinda

wish and know yourself completely free from heresy."

Oscar had a tiny prayer book, just three inches high and two inches across. He was flipping this open in a practiced way, as though he heard confessions every day.

Lucinda was now in a panic. She could not confess to this young man. She could see his wristslong white bridges to beautifully shaped hands-and a little bruised shin showing between rumpled sock and trouser turn-up. He had a heart-shaped face, like an angel by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She could not confess to him, and yet the ceremony had already started. He had a soft burr of West Country in his vowels. She thought she had no voice at all. It was time for her to speak. She heard a voice out on the deck. It was the Belgians crying for their Pomeranian. She clasped the back of the chair in her hands. She felt her voice very small. She watched his shoe and shin protruding like a branch from beneath the table. The shoe bounced up and down. The shoe did not match the sacrament, but when she looked up and saw his hair like the hair of angels and very still, limpid grey-green eyes, she confessed. She talked so quietly he had to lean forward to hear her.

It was a little silver voice you could fit in a thimble. It did not match the things it said. The shoe stopped bouncing. The penitent had closed her heavy lids across her eyes. She spoke swiftly but quietly, in a silvery sort of rush.

She confessed that she had attended rooms in Drury Lane for the purposes of playing fan-tan (although she had fled when stared at).

She confessed to playing a common dice game on a train full of "racing types," and although she had not gone to the races, she had boarded this train, having read that such things occurred in such trains, for the express purpose of playing dice. She had been asked to leave the game because her sex was apparently repulsive to the patrons.

She had tried to persuade Mr Paxton to take her to a cock fight.

She had eavesdropped on stewards. She had set up a table in her room like a trap for them. She had wished to play poker.

There were other matters but her confessor hardly heard them. He sat with his head bowed, trying to still his wildly beating heart. He clenched his hands and pressed them down between his legs. He groaned.

Lucinda heard this noise. She sat with her head bowed, not daring to look at him. She waited for absolution. She heard another noise, muffled, its meaning not clear. She thought, He will not be my friend now. She clenched her eyes shut to drive out such temporal thought,

Confession

clenched them so tight that luminous bodies floated through the black sea of her retina.

When Oscar tried to think good thoughts he always thought of his father. He did this now: it was this that made him groan-the loneliness he had caused this stern and loving man. The voices of the stewards came through the ventilation, but neither of them listened. Still, the priest withheld absolution.

"This dice you played on the train," he asked, "was it Dutch I Hazards?"

I Lucinda looked up quite sharply, but the priest's head was bowed

it and twisted sideways towards his right shoulder. "Yes," she said. "It I was. We also played another game."

I "Old British, perhaps."

I Lucinda felt her bowed neck assume a mottled pattern. "In New I South Wales," she said, "it is known as 'Seventh Man.' " Her feelings were not focused, were as diffused as a blush, a business of heat and blood. Oscar could not keep the picture of his father clear. A certain reckÎ. less joy-a thing without a definite form, a fog, a cloud of electricity -

replaced the homely holy thoughts.

: "And who was it," he asked, unclenching his hands and bringing them up on to the table, "who provided the Peter?"

Lucinda Leplastrier put her head on one side. She opened her eyes. Her confessor had a blank face, what was almost a blank face, but was prevented from being completely blank by the very slight compression of the lips.

Lucinda narrowed her green eyes. "The Peter?" 'Is the term unknown to you?" She was looking at the mouth. She could not quite believe what she saw there. "No," she said, very carefully. "No, I think it is quite

familiar."

"I thought so," said Oscar Hopkins. He closed the little prayer book and stuffed it in the pocket which contained the caul. When his hand touched the caul, he remembered the ocean behind his book. It caused no more than a prickling in his spine.

"And these terms, Mr Hopkins, are they also familiar to you?"

" Traid so." He smiled, a clear and brilliant smile.

Lucinda also smiled, but less certainly. "Mr Hopkins, this is most improper." Oscar took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped first his

Oscar and Luanda

clammy hands and then his perspiring brow. "Oh?" he said, "I really do not think so." He looked so pleased with himself.

"But you have not absolved me."

"Where is the sin?"

She was shocked, less by what he said, but by the sudden change of mood that took possession of him. He spoke these words in an angry sort of passion quite foreign to his personality. His eyes went hard. He made a jerky gesture towards the cards-ha! he had seen them after all-in front of him. "Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet-it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too, although the Queen of England might find him not nearly Presbyterian enough-we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise. Our anxiety about our bet will wake us before dawn in a cold sweat. We are out of bed and on our knees, even in the midst of winter. And God sees us, and sees us suffer. And how can this God, a God who sees us at prayer beside our bed…" His hands were quite jerky in their movements. There was a wild sort of passion about him, and the eyes within that sharpchinned face held the reflections of electric lamps. Lucinda felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Her eyelids came down. If she had been a cat she would have purred.

"I cannot see," he said, "that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence… It is true! We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence." Lucinda shivered, a not unpleasant shiver and one not caused by cold. There were so many reasons for this involuntary ripple, not least the realization that her vice would not lose her his friendship. But it was also caused by recognition: she saw herself mirrored in him, the sudden coldness of the gambler's passion-something steely, angry even, which will not be denied. She was disturbed, too, to find her confessor belittling the worth of her confession and this-the pulling out of the tablecloth beneath the meal-gave a salt of anger to her own emotions even while she delighted-celebrated, even-the vital defence my great-grandfather was assembling, like a wild-haired angel clockmaker gesturing with little cogs, dangerous springs, holding out each part for verification, approbation, before he inserted it in the gleaming structure of his belief.

"Every instant," said Oscar, and held up a finger as he said it, calling attention to a low roly-poly laugh issuing from the ventilator.

Confession

"There," he said triumphantly, as if he had caught the laugh, as if the laugh was the point of it all, and he was like a man who has trapped a grasshopper in mid-air, smiling as if the miracle were tickling

his palm. "There. We will never hear that man laugh that laugh again. The instant is gone."

It would not be apparent to anyone watching Oscar Hopkins that this was a young man who had sworn off gambling now he had no further "use" for it. His views seemed not only passionate but firmly held. So even if you had not agreed with him, you would not have doubted his conviction. Lucinda had no idea that she had witnessed a guilty defence. She thought all sorts of things, but not this. She thought what a rare and wonderful man he was. She thought she should not be alone with him in her cabin. She thought they might play cards. She thought: I could marry, not him, of course not him, but I could marry someone like him. There was a great lightness in her soul.

"Every instant," he said.

She felt she knew him. She imagined not only his passion for salvation, but his fear of damnation. She saw the fear that would take him "before dawn." It was a mirror she looked at, a mirror and

window both.

"That such a God," said Oscar, "knowing the anguish and the trembling hope with which we wager…" He stopped then, looking with wonder at his shaking hands. This shaking was caused by the fervour of his beliefs as he revealed them, but there was another excitement at work-that produced by the open, admiring face of Miss Leplastrier. "That such a God can look unkindly on a chap wagering a few quid on the likelihood of a dumb animal crossing a line first, unless," (and here it seemed he would split his lips with the pleasure of his smile, which was, surely, caused more by Luanda's admiring face than by the new thought which had just, at that moment, taken possession of him) "unless-and no one has ever suggested such a thing to meit might be considered blasphemy to apply to common pleasure that which is by its very nature divine."

"Mr Hopkins," Lucinda said, coming at last to sit down, "we must not place our souls at risk with fancies."

She meant this sincerely. She also did not mean it at all-there was nothing she liked better than to construct a fancy. She put great weight on fancies and was not in the habit of using the word in a dismissive way. The Crystal Palace, that building she admired more than any

Oscar and Lucinda

other, was nothing but a fancy of a kind, and there were ideas like this, the philosophical equivalent of great cathedrals of steel and glass, which were her passion, and she held these to her tightly, secretly.

"Not a fancy," said Oscar.

He picked up the cards and put them together. It was not his intention that they play. It was Lucinda who suggested the game of cards. But later, when she knew Oscar better, she confessed that she had only done it because she thought it was what he had intended. 58

Reputation

It was already a scandal. It was known about by Mr Smith and Mr Borrodaile, by Mr Carraway, Mrs Menzies, Mr and Mrs Johnston. The stewards, of course, all knew-for they were not only judges but also conduits and they wound their way from class to class and even down into the rivet-studded steel innards of the ship, not quite as far as young Master Smiggins (whose task it was to ready the live-stock for the approaching storm). He knew a lady had 'lost her reputation" but he had this from long-nosed Clémence, the apprentice engineer. He did not know it was "his" lady for whom he had planned to work.

"She gone and bleeding done it now. She lost it now," said démence who was frightened by the animals.

"What?" asked Master Smiggins.

"Er reputation. I told you, didn' I? Compreyvous?"

"Course I bloody compreyvous. I got a sister, ain't? Now nick off. I got me animals and the sea's coming up."

"Coming up your back passage more like," said Clémence, but stepped back, ready to run. Master Smiggins kicked the llama doe in the backside and forced it into its crush. He strapped the crush shut.

"There," he said, "all tucked in now. Can't roll out of bed no matter

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Thou Rulest the Raging of the Sea

what." He went to deal with the buck. "Now, don't you fuss," he said. He looked around. Clémence had gone. "Lost her reputation," he said. He had a stick to prod the buck with.

"Course," he said. "Course I bloody compreyvous." r 59

Thou Rulest the Raging of the Sea

Lucinda liked to play poker on a table covered with a grey wool blanket. This, of course, is how she first played cribbage in the house of Mr d'Abbs, and on windy nights, alone in her rented cottage at Longnose Point, she sometimes laid a blanket across the oilskin on her kitchen table and dealt herself a hand of patience. It was a comfort to her: to drink tea, to riddle the grate on the stove, to feel the soft blanket beneath the slippery cards. She did not feel the same affection for the tables in gaming houses. She liked the games, my word she did, but it was a different sort of "like" to the one she had for the grey blanket-covered tables of her home and Mr d'Abbs's. The tables of gaming houses were cold and slippery. It was an icier pleasure, a showy dancer's thrill, like a tight, stretched smile or a pair of shiny patent-leather shoes. In her stateroom, alone with the priest, Lucinda took a blanket from her bed and draped it across the little table. She knew this action lacked propriety but she did not let herself address the matter. She must have it right. She would be blinkered. If he was shocked, she would not look at him. She would have everything in its proper place. She took a little amber lamp and set it to one side.

She thought: Alone in my bedroom with a priest.

"There," she said, but could not bring her eyes up to look at him. She laid her hand flat on the blanket. She had been

Oscar and Luanda

biting her nails. She hid the evidence beneath her palm. H

"So," she said, and looked him boldly in the eye.

His face was not how she had imagined it. She had rebuilt it in her imagination, had made it long and censorious when it was, in reality, doelike, almost pretty, with soft eyes regarding her from beneath long lashes.

"Shall we play?" he asked. < Lucinda blushed.

They played with penny bets.

It was such a still game. She might not have remarked on this quality were it not for the fact that he had previously been so agitated, such a kicker and scuffer, a squirmer in his seat-she had felt him next to her at dinner, had felt the vital life in his body through the table, through the legs of her own chair. But now she felt only this concentrated stillness. It was not a lifeless stillness-it was not that dead-eyed mask most men adopted when playing poker, their eyes gone blind like statues. He was a cello, a violin, he was all strapped down like Ulysses at the mast. She lost. She felt so light, an airy, dragon-fly wing of feeling. It was always like this when she lost. She felt such guilt and fear after she had lost that she did not imagine she liked losing, and yet this sensation always came with it, and once, seeing the carcass of a grasshopper all eaten out by ants, only its delicate and papery form remaining, she had recognized, in that light and lovely shell, the physical expression of this feeling she had when losing.

She shed her money, sloughed it off. A penny, a penny, a three penny piece. Mr Hopkins played the most exquisite poker. She cornplimented him, as another woman might have complimented her partner at a waltz. She sat up straight. She fanned her cards neatly. She had lost a sovereign but she did not wish to stop. She knew she would have the perfect voyage now. She knew herself happy.

At half past one the ship began to bluster in the wind and she felt the beginning of a long, deep swell. The ship made noises which made Lucinda think of a pianist cracking knuckles. She accommodated the motion of the ship to her idea of happiness.

She smiled at Oscar. He smiled back. He rested his left ankle across his knee. He jiggled it, but he did not knock the table and she did not notice.

At two-thirty the game turned again. He pushed through, bluffing to victory three hands in a row. He was breathing through his mouth. There was perspiration on his forehead but she took this to be produced by the excitement of the game.

Thou Rulest the Raging of the Sea

He observed that the ship, although large, seemed to move as one would imagine a small ship to move. He remarked on the size of the sea. It was such a large thing, he said. " 'Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?' " He smiled, showing the neat, ordered set of his lower teeth. She smiled. She had no appreciation of his phobia. He raised his betting. A crown to see her. There was a tremor in his voice it would have taken Mrs Williams to explain.

The game had changed. It was no longer still and calm. Lucinda no longer played leaning back. She bent forward. She rubbed her neck. She was making a small red spot, just from friction. Oscar was pale. He played with a sort of clipped breathlessness. His foot tapped against the table leg. She minded this not at all. He took her for two pounds and five shillings. She raised the betting again. She was so light, almost giddy. She confessed her happiness out loud. She hardly noticed the pitching of the ship. Her hat case tumbled off its rack and a vase of paper flowers-left carelessly on a side table, slipped and rolled-not breaking-across the floor. It was three twenty-three. The first wave washed across the deck. They turned ("Hoo," said Oscar) to see the next wave-its white head towering over them like a ghost in the night. It was frightening. Lucinda found it frightening. She made some silly comment and turned to see her partner, white-faced with terror, his mouth open, crouched over the table trying to pick up cards without looking at them. He was not handling these cards as a card-player might, but like a savage. He was cramming them into his pocket. He made a repetitive noise-"Uh-uh-uh-uh"-that came from the back of his throat, the top of his stomach.

The wave smashed across the deck. You could feel the weight of it in your vital organs.

"Uh-uh-uh." He crumpled up more cards. She was angry with him. They were her Wetherby Suprêmes, from Hare's in Old Bond

Street.

"I have led you astray," he said. He was standing now, gripping the edge of the table. He was not looking at her. He was pulling a paper parcel from his pocket. As he pulled it out he produced a shower of the crumpled playing cards.

The parcel, of course, was his caul.

The ship reared and crashed down so far you could feel your stomach

Oscar and Lucinda

falling after it had landed. You would not think so large a thing could be tossed so far. On the bridge it took ten men to steer the rearing beast.

Through the din (creaking, groaning, a slamming door) she could hear bells ringing. He said: "You must forgive me."

The vase rolled past her feet. She had time to wonder that such an ugly thing should not break, would probably survive a shipwreck when everything beautiful and useful was sunk to the bottom. She picked up the vase. She held it in her lap. The clergyman was banging his thigh with his clenched fist.

"Yes," she shouted, "yes, of course, I forgive you." But she did not understand him. She did not put the two together, the cards and the storm. It did not occur to her that one might be the cause and the other the effect. It did not occur to her to think in so primitive a manner. She could not guess that a man who knew that phosphorescence was produced by sea blubbers could also believe that this storm was a sign from God. But Oscar knew he should not have gambled just for pleasure. He knew his defence of gambling had been displeasing to God. He knew he had led the young woman into sin. Waves slapped the face of the ship. Water surged across its high deck. The mighty Leviathan reared and rolled sideways across the cliff face of the storm.

"Oh, dear," said Oscar, "I am afraid."

The portholes could be opened with a little winding handle. He clutched his caul to his chest and lurched uphill to get there. Then he stood, facing down into the dark pit of the sea while he forced himself to do the thing he dreaded most-unwind the handle.

Lucinda thought he wished to be ill. She stumbled down the sloping floor to help him. Then she saw what he was doing-putting her Wetherby Suprêmes out the window, posting jacks and queens like letters.

"No," she yelled into his ear. She scrabbled at his hands and tried to pull away from the porthole. His lips were moving. His eyes were shut. She scratched the back of his hands but could not stop him. She saved a two of clubs and a five of diamonds. Her emotions were confused anger, sympathy, alarm. He turned to look at her and she saw his eyes wandering in their gaze. He clutched at her. She was frightened and stepped back, and he fell into a swoon at her feet. She did not know how ill he was. She was not even sure what had happened. She felt his pulse and would have loosened his collar except

I

224

Cape Town to Pinchgut

she did not know how. She tried to find the stud, but his neck felt warm, unduly intimate. It was wrong to be angry, but she was angry, about her cards, about the blanket which he had dragged off the card table. The room looked as if a scandal had been committed there. She picked up the money and the blanket. She was thrown against the wall twice. She got the blanket back on to her bed and smoothed it as well as she was able.

She should call the ship's doctor, but it was four o'clock in the morning. Surely he would wake in a moment? She sat and waited.

Oscar did wake, but he was not able to leave her stateroom unassisted. She had had to call two stewards, just before dawn, and it had been their unenviable job-the ship was now pitching and rolling to a disappointing degree, and walking was therefore difficult-to carry the rigid man from the spinster's stateroom, down the stairs and put him to bed in his own quarters. n 60

Cape JJbWtv to Rn$igut

The scene was witnessed by Mr Borrodaile, or so he claimed, for he was able, at breakfast the next morning, to paint a very detailed picture of the scandal for the rather queasy and waxyskinned Mr Smith. The Captain also visited Lucinda, and perhaps his manner was contaminated by the knowledge that his great ship was a failure in bad weather-he had one helmsman in sick bay with a broken arm-but he behaved in a censorious and snobbish way, Lucinda thought, just like a glove salesman in Harrod's who feels he should not be called to wait upon colonials. Lucinda was hurt by all of this, but she could tolerate it. She hardened her heart against all the ship except Mr Hopkins and set herself to wait for his recovery. She expected, as a matter of course, that he would apologize, and she looked forward to the moment when she

Oscar and Lucinda

could say, and sincerely too, that there was nothing to apologize for. It was the Captain who should apologize, and if she had had the power she would have made him. She had a vindictive part to her character, which she recognized and was not proud of. It had started as a tiny thing, but grown larger with the nourishment provided by men like the Captain, and the sniggering Borrodaile whom she met, clad in sou'wester, his grinning lackey at his side, on the rolling, slippery poop deck.

After this she would not go on deck again. Neither, or course, was she free to seek out Mr Hopkins herself, and although his visit to her would not save her reputation, at least he could offer his support and friendship.

It stayed rough down the coast of Africa, and although she understood why this might keep Mr Hopkins in his cabin, by the time she had been five days a prisoner in her stateroom, she felt herself deserving a proper apology.

He did not come.

She took her meals in her room which, for all the grey skies and green cat's-eye-coloured sea, was most unpleasantly hot.

She escaped ashore in Cape Town, and endured the self-righteous "tsk-tsk" of a Mrs Penhaligon (the wife of a Cornish farmer) but she still did not sight Mr Hopkins. Out of Cape Town the weather was rough again and Oscar stayed out of sight, cooped up, green and moaning. He was attended by a steward with the comic name of Sidebottom. He had his caul between his fingers so persistently that it soon became, through the twin agencies of perspiration and agitation, a most unpleasant piece of matter. His stomach could hold no more than beef tea and dry toast. He read his Bible when his eyes could bear the dancing print. He prayed. He promised God that he would never bet again.

My great-grandfather did not manage to emerge from his cabin until the Pinchgut cannons saluted the great ship's entrance into Sydney Harbour, and Lucinda Leplastrier, released at last from the most unpleasant voyage of her life, saw him sitting in the geometrical centre of the ship, on a red plush settee, in the second-class promenade.

He looked up and smiled, but Lucinda had waited so long for that smile that it became, when it arrived, like something which has preoccupied one during a fever-it produced an unpleasant effect, evoking all the twisting tyrannies of an illness which one has, at last, escaped from.;-,. < 7)(.

61

A Business Principle

Owning a business is like having chooks. You cannot go away and leave them, indefinitely, in the care of neighbours. You can buy an automatic feeder, and there are many good ones on the marketyou will see them advertised in the back pages of the Weekly Times. You can arrange for your friend or your neighbour to "keep an eye on them" for a night or two, and no harm done. But do not expect to be away six months or a year and then return to find your hens in good condition. You will have mite and pullorum rampant, the water run out, your best layer dead from a dog, your rooster wounded by goannas-the list is not intended to be exact, merely an indication, but the point is, you cannot do it. And if you want to see Venice, Florence and the Old World, then first eat your chooks, or sell them, and then you will know you will have nothing worse to come back to than a chookyard full of rank

weed.

Lucinda did not know this. Or if she did, she managed to pretend that she did not. She was off to London to be married (although she fully intended that she would-God knows how-return. She imagined a certain type of husband who would make this possible). She thought she could leave the country for a year and entrust the Prince Rupert's Glassworks to the care of others. Note the plural. This compounded the error, for if there is anything worse than leaving your business in the care of one person, it is leaving it in the care of two and if there is anything worse than two people, it is to do what Lucinda Leplastrier did-she left her business in the care of three people, and only one of them with any practical experience of glass.

It is true that the vicar of Woollahra had some knowledge of the chemical composition of glass, but he was the last one to claim himself a manufacturer, and he shared with Wardley-Fish a dislike

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Oscar and Lucinda

of dirt. He could not bear to have it on his hands. He did not like to be in places-even the ragged school he preached at every third Monday morning-where other people had it on their hands. When he was in the glassworks he could not concentrate.

If Dennis Hasset had imagined himself actually responsible for the well-being of the glassworks he would-for he was a conscientious man-have declared himself unfit. But he knew that Lucinda had also asked her accountant, Mr d'Abbs of d'Abbs and Fig, to keep an eye on the business. He was to bank the incomings, pay the billings and the wages. For all this he was to receive a fee. The Reverend Mr Hasset was to receive no fee. He was a friend. He was there to "keep an eye on things."

Lucinda had asked both of these parties to trust the opinions of her senior blower, Arthur Phelps, who not only knew something about the manufacture of glass, but, being the senior blower, was therefore the natural leader of the men in the works. There is a deeply ingrained hierarchy amongst glass workers, and the senior blowers are its aristocrats. You would only need to watch Arthur Phelps to know that this was true, to see him, with the blowing tube in his mouth, his cheeks distended like a trumpet player, move his ciagrette from his left-hand side of his mouth andwith no manual help at all-"walk" it around the tube and thence to the right corner. Mr d'Abbs was a natty little chap whose dress (a blue corduroy suit, a woollen tie, a curly walking stick, perhaps) suggested more of the aesthete than the accountant. He painted a little, and had tried his hand at verse, but he was not sensitive to Arthur Phelps's displays of skill. He did not "see" the set-up at the works at all. Neither, no matter what his other good qualities were, did the vicar of Woollahra.

Arthur Phelps was a broad man with a plastic face, a big chest and a large belly which he liked to refer to as his bellows. He took his responsibility seriously and he felt himself abandoned by Lucinda and mucked about by the other two. He was forever being given contrary instructions and his sleep was ruined as a result. (Mr d'Abbs would not have credited that an ignorant working man, a grog-artist at that, would behave in such a way.) Arthur Phelps tossed and turned in his bed at night until his wife went to sleep with the children in the kitchen. He worried that they were making too many poison blues and insufficient beers, that their sand would 228

A Business Principle

run out before Mr d'Abbs's clerks paid the carter for the last load and thereby ensured the next, that the vase footings were of a style gone out of fashion, that Mr d'Abbs wanted a greater production,

Ivhilst the vicar of Woollahra, the very next day, would come pokng about with his umbrella, opening a door at the wrong moment, etting in a draught that wrecked a jug handle, and holding up jroduction while he worried at Arthur about the "seeds," those iny air bubbles, which had lately been appearing in their products. This seediness was offensive to Arthur, too. He was ashamed >f it. But it was produced by nothing other than the taste induced >y Mr d'Abbs. No one appreciated how hard the lads were workng, or with what will. It was not for the Natty Gent or the Bible>asher that they did it, but for Miss Lucinda. They talked about 1er fondly. And if they were as patronizing as fathers and brothers, hey were also as protective. They tried to satisfy the demands of icr advisers. They tried to work quickly, even though the corntxands were given in an ignorant manner, with no respect for craft f or the status of the craftsmen. As a result of this haste a young gob-gatherer had his lungs burnt and this, whilst always a possibility, never happens in a well-run works. He was not a silly lad, but helpful. They took up a subscription but Mr d'Abb's contribution was insufficient. It was all wrong. It was because of this that Arthur began to weep. It was from imagining what would happen to the lad, worrying when the clay would arrive for the new crucible, how the twenty gross of seedy

"poisons" would be sold. He was sitting on his stool. The second gatherer was collecting from I the glory-hole. Arthur had a draught from his beer in readiness;. for the next blow. The gatherer handed him the rod, and it was then that he began to weep. The fireman, who had just come on, ran down to Sussex Street to fetch Mr d'Abbs, but the men thought so little of Mr d'Abbs that this did nothing but confirm their already low opinion of the fireman. Arthur said nothing to Mr d'Abbs. He blew his nose and drank his last pint of glassworks beer. He took a bottle for a souvenir, and Mr d'Abbs had the good sense not to attempt to stop him. They kept the furnaces going another week, but the works had lost their heart. Dennis Hasset saw what was happening, but did not even try to arrest the process. His mind was occupied with other matters. He was arraigned before the Bishop of Sydney to explain his sermons. 229

; 62

, Home

Dennis Hasset held the Virgin birth to be unproved and inconsistent with the perfect humanity of Christ. He rejected the miracles of the Old Testament. He doubted many of the miracles of the New. He rejected the doctrine of verbal inspiration. He did not think there was sufficient evidence to prove the physical resurrection of Christ. He accepted Darwin's theory of evolution, not merely as it applied to insects and animals (at which point Bishop Dancer drew the line) but also as it applied to humankind. He described his position as Broad Church. Bishop Dancer knew this position by the earlier label of heresy. He was a churchman of the old Tory school and had no time for Evangelicals (on the Low side) or Puseyites (on what was known as the High). He could not tolerate genuflexion or vestments, and the sight of candlesother than for the purpose of illumination-had him doing little manoeuvres with his dental plate. He was of the roast-beef-andYorkshire-pudding school of theology, and thought the vicar of Woollahra's polite and reasonable sermons to be the beginning of the rot. He would like-to use plain language-to "do him over" for heresy. But if this new Clerical Subscription Act would now prevent this, he would take him away from his fireplace and lamps at Woollahra, and send him up to the Bellinger River, to Boat Harbour in the Parish of Never-Never, where he would find his parishioners about as sympathetic as those at Home during the Reform Bill (a time the Bishop remembered all too well-he had been pelted with turnips and had his windows broken). Boat Harbour was filled with foul-mouthed sawyers, ex-convicts to a man, and was, as far as Bishop Dancer could gather, a little hell on earth. In the face of these difficulties the Reverend Mr Hasset's faith might yet be reborn, or so, in any case, the Bishop managed to persuade himself. When Lucinda arrived at the Woollahra vicarage on the Tuesday

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Home

before Palm Sunday, she knew none of this. She was in an emotional state for reasons of her own. She did not know if she had come to censure Dennis Hasset for what she had just found at her glassworks or if she was here to seek comfort in the face of this same catastrophe. All the way across the town-and what a tiny town it now appeared to be-she had thought of sarcastic and bitter things to say to him. But as she dismounted outside the vicarage (which was also meaner than her memory had allowed) she was suddenly fearful-perhaps it was the dullness of the red brick, the hollow shadow of the front verandathat the state in which she had found her works was the result of some personal tragedy that had befallen her friend.

She had found the Prince Rupert's Glassworks deserted, its crucible gone grey and lifeless, the metal set hard inside them. Under the glass blower's wooden throne she found a miaowing kitten with pus-filled eyes and paralysed back legs, a creature in so parlous a state that Lucinda, dressed in an ostrich-feathered hat and expensive black gloves, must take a heavy poker and, with her face twisted, her eyes closed, kill it. She felt the crunch travel up her arm. When the kitten was a soiled and lifeless rag, she leaned the murdering bar against the throne. She thought: I had the strength.

And although she was mostly shaken by what she had done, there was a small part of her that was proud.

So when she was reunited with her old friend, it had already been a most disturbing day. She did not meet him in quite the place she had imagined, not in the gentle book-lined study she had so often recalled, but in a room filled with wooden crates in which Dennis Hasset was permitted to camp while the new incumbent and his family made themselves at home in the remainder. Without a fire, the room proved both cold and damp. Lucinda shrank inside her rabbitskin coat. She had not even been shown into the room politely. She had been greeted at the front door by a too-pretty child with a hoop. She had found her friend sitting on a rough wooden crate and the floor around him slippery with old letters. He was smaller than he had been, hunched over, and although there was no invalid's rug across his knees, his posture suggested one, Even when he stood he did not appear to straighten properly. She thought his hand very cold and bloodless. They looked at each other and although she sought much from the dear and familiar face she imagined she saw nothing there but exhaustion and defeat.

"What a miserable day," she said.

Dennis Hasset thought her eyes "pouchy" and her skin pallid. He 231

Oscar and Lucinda

had looked forward to this reunion, but now he was irritated by her tone. She made it seem as if the condition of the weather was his responsibility. He peered out of the window, shrugged, and then sat down again. He reflected how quickly women age.

"I am afraid," he said, "that I must offer you a crate. The chairs are taken, but not for the purpose of sitting, just taken. I am so very sorry about your works. It came at a bad time."

"Your study is in ruins," she said. ,.

He shrugged. t v i;, ;

"I find it quite disturbing," she said.;> '-K,

"We grow too attached to things."

"Yes, but it is a shock." The shock was not so much to do with what the room had become, but in the realization that this place-which she had all but eliminated from her memory-was the seat of all those feelings which make us call one city "home" above all others. It had been more of a home than her cottage at Longnose Point. It was certainly far more of a home than Mr d'Abbs's house although it was the latter she had so romanticized in her absence, making it into a place of

"comradeship" and "jolly good times," which labels involved forgetting all that was tawdry and corrupted about the house and its occupants.

But this room, Dennis Hasset's room, had contained all that was true and good in her life. She had forgotten this because he had not proposed to her as she had thought he might, and she had been angry with him. But now she was back, she saw that Sydney would be unbearable without this friendship, this room. Everything in her wished to cry out like a child at the injustice of her homecoming. But she was not a child, and she would no longer demand her hot cocoa and her seat to sleep in by the fire. She was a grown woman with a damaged friend and she forced herself to show concern for him, teasing his story from him like a bandage from a congealed wound.

And yet there was a part of her, a substantial part too, that did not give a damn about Dennis Hasset's story. This part was angry. It thought Dennis Hasset a weak fool and a poor friend. It judged him for not valuing her sufficiently, for slumping over in his seat, for not lighting a fire. It coexisted with this other part that loved him. And these two factions fought within her all the while she listened to his story. She thought he had a kind and intelligent face and it was not wise to speak so indulgently about his enemies.

"But surely," she said at last, "Boat Harbour can be appealed against?"

yn

> Home,

He shook his head., e

"But it is unfair. You still see yourself a Christian?" She wished he would sit up straight. v -

"Of course."

"Then damn him," said Lucinda, not softly either, "then damn him in hell." And tears were coursing down her cheeks and he leaned over and enfolded her hand with his. But she did not wish her hand held. It was too late for that now. And, anyway, her tears were selfish tears, not really shed for him at all, but for herself. He had a big hand and it did not comfort her, merely reminded her of how small her own was. "He behaves like a cad," she said, removing her hand on the pretext of finding her handkerchief. "Oh, Mr Hasset, please, and where is Boat Harbour?" He smiled and shrugged. She saw that he did not realize that her life would also be affected.

"Is it far away?" She had come to have war with him about his neglect of her works. She had despised the way he sat so hunched on the crate, but she would not be without him. He was a good man, but

too soft. She felt herself to be red and blotchy in her cheeks. The tiny veins on her eyelids would be showing.

"Far enough," he said. "It is the territory of the Kumbaingiri Tribe. What does 'far' mean in this country? I don't know, Miss Leplastrier. I am so awfully sorry about your glassworks. The two crises arrived coincidentally."

"They were all I had."

"You have them still," he said reprovingly, feeling she cared too much for her own predicament.

"Yes, but not my partner."

The softness of her voice made him catch his breath. He checked himself. He had been, generally, too emotional of late.

"I think I will never forget how you came into my study and I thought you a Mr Leplastrier. Do you remember the to-do we caused?" *