Riders in the Chariot

9

MRS GODBOLD liked to sing as she ironed. She had a rich, but rather trembly, mezzo voice, which her daughter Else once said reminded her of melting chocolate. Certainly the girls would get that sad-and-dreamy look whenever their mother sang, and the kind of feeling that warm, soft chocolate will sometimes also give. Mrs Godbold would iron in long, sad, steamy sweeps, singing as she did. Sometimes her iron would thump the board to emphasize a phrase, just as it always nosed more gently, accompanied by tremolo, into the difficult corners of a shirt. Then the mouths of the older girls would grow loose with wonder for some ineluctable drama which was being prepared for them, and the younger ones stare hypnotized at the pores which had opened in their mother's creamy skin. But the singer sang, oblivious, transported by her own words. Mrs Godbold preferred to treat of death, and judgment, and the future life. Her favourite was: I woke, the dungeon flamed with light, My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee. Though she was also very partial to: See the Conqueror mounts in triumph, See the King in royal state Riding in the clouds His chariot To His heavenly palace gate. At such moments faith or light did convince many eyes. It was certainly most extraordinary the way the light in Godbolds' shed almost always assisted the singer's words. Great blades of fiery light would slash the clouds of cotton-wool, negotiate a rather bleak window, and threaten targets so personal and vulnerable that more than one conscience trembled. Or else the prophetic voice might coincide with the cold white reckoning of a winter afternoon. That was perhaps the sheerest wonder of all. Then the woman in the apron would become the angel of solid light. The colder fell the air, the steamier, the more compassionate the angel's judgment. Outside, but visible through the doorway, which Mr Godbold had fixed crooked in the beginning, was the big copper, which the girls kept stoked with wattle sticks, and which always seemed to be glowing with half-concealed coals. The hint of fire and the great brooding copper cup could appear most awful in the light of Mrs Godbold's hymns. There was only one person who remained sceptical, and that was Mr Godbold, if he happened to be present; if away from home, and that was often, he did not think about it much. Mr Godbold had no time for All That. What he had time for could be very quickly specified. It was beer, sex, and the trots, in that order. Not that he really enjoyed beer, except as a dissolver of the hard line. Not that sex was more than a mug's game, involving the hazards of kids and syph, though he did succeed in losing himself temporarily in the brief sexual act. Nor did a horse appeal to him as horse; it was simply that the material future-which, after all, was all that mattered of it-depended on those four bleeding legs. Any cold mind would soon have concluded that this was an individual to avoid, but for some tart he had been trailing, and who had still to taste Tom Godbold's relentlessness, or his wife, who liked to remember the past, and what she had believed her husband to be before she actually found out, he possessed a kind of eroded beauty, a bitter charm. Time's acid had eaten into the bronze, coarsening the texture, blurring the features. He was scraggy by now, and veined. But his eyes could still destroy the defences of logic and prudence, by seeming to ask for indulgence, and sometimes even love. They were very fine, dark eyes. Those who allowed themselves to be undone were willing to overlook the beery, bilious warnings of the whites. He had, besides, a habit of laying a finger, or two, never more, on the bare skin of somebody's arm, almost tremblingly, or applying pressure to an elbow, with a gentleness in which a command was disguised as an entreaty. Then his wife would waver, and yield, and some woman, from whom he had been peeling the skins of discretion in an upper room, would tear off the last layer herself with reckless hands. It was only later that everybody sat up in bed and realized that Tom Godbold's tragic eyes had merely been looking deeper into himself. Then his most recent conquest would hurry into her protective clothes, and ever after regret her impulsiveness. In his wife's case, her nature, of course, denied her the opportunity of flight. She had to suffer. Permanence enclosed her, like stone, with the difference that thought burst through its veins in little, agonizing spurts, and she would lie there wondering whether she had conceived again in lust. For one so strong, it must be admitted she was regrettably weak. Or else kind. She would lie there until a thinning light released the pressure from her eyelids. Then she would creak out of bed, and light the copper. Faith is not less persuasive for its fluctuations. Rather, it becomes a living thing, like a child fluttering in the womb. So Mrs Godbold's faith would stir and increase inside the grey, gelatinous envelope of morning, until, at last, it was delivered, new-born, with all the glory and confidence of fire. This almost biological aspect of his wife's faith was what the husband hated most. Nor was he the father of it. That, at least, he could honestly confess. "But Tom," she would say, in her gentle, serious, infuriating voice, "the Rebirth, I think it is lovely." Then he would answer from between his teeth, "You will not catch me getting reborn. Not on your bloody life!" He would look at all those girls, of whom the very latest always seemed just to have spilled out of the cornucopia. There was always the smell of warm napkins, there was the unmistakable smell of recent and accusatory wrinkled flesh. "Jesus, no! I've had enough of births!" he would confirm, and go away, or reach for the sporting page. There had been some such exchange of words and opinions the evening Mrs Godbold was observed visiting their neighbour. Tom Godbold had returned from work. He was at that time driving a truck for a firewood contractor, though he was thinking of giving it away, and starting a line in poultry manure. The father was seated with his paper, the mother stood at her ironing. Children came and went. Although they raised their eyes to their mother, it was at their father's work-boots that they habitually stared, at the stiff, trowel-shaped tongues, and blunt, brutal toes. Mrs Godbold, careful to use her rather trembly mezzo _mezza voce__ so as not to inflame feelings further, had just begun her favourite: "I woke, the dungeon flamed with light…" when little Gracie ran in. "Mu-ummm!" she shouted. "Guess what!" And pressed her face against her mother's side, which would smell, she knew, of scones and clean laundry. "What?" Mrs Godbold asked, and braced herself against disaster. "I am saved for Jesus!" Gracie cried. But rather pale, as if, to please her mother, she was taking on something that might be too much for her. Nobody was altogether glad. "You are saved for _what__?" the father asked. His paper rustled. Gracie could not find the word. A robust child, she stood trying to look delicate. "You are saved for Crap!" said the father. Then he took his newspaper. "Crap! Crap! Crap!" Tom Godbold shouted. And beat his wife about the head with the sheets of newspaper, so that it could have appeared funny, only it wasn't. Mrs Godbold bent her head. Her eyelids flickered. There was such a beating and fluttering of light, and white wings. She was, all in all, dazed. "That is what I think," bellowed the husband and father, "though nobody in this place gives a bugger!" The paper was scattered at this point, so that he was left with his hand, it suddenly occurred to him. After looking at it very briefly, he said, "This is what I think of all cater-waulin' Christians!" He caught his wife across the ear with the flat of his hand, with the result that the room and everyone in it rocked and shuddered for her, not least Tom Godbold himself. "And Jesus," he hurtled on, as much to deaden his own pain, "Jesus sticks in my guts! He sticks that _hard__!" In fact, he had to deal his wife a blow in the belly with his fist, and when she had subsided on the floor, against the table, a kick or two for value. Where there had been a white silence, there was now an uproar, as if someone had taken a stick and stirred up a nest-ful of birds. There was a crying and clustering of children. All were pressed against the mother, that is, except the baby, and Else the eldest, who had not yet come in. The father himself was ready to drown, but managed to swallow the waves of loathing, exhilaration, fright, and still rampant masterfulness that were threatening to overwhelm him. "Well?" he gasped. "Well?" But nobody answered. The children were whimpering, away from him. All was turned away, except his wife's face, which she still held exposed to whatever might come. Such was her nature, or faith, he saw again with horror. "I'm gunna get out of this!" he announced at last. "I'm gunna get shickered stiff!" When he had slammed the door, and gone stumbling up the hill, he heard her calling, but would neither stop nor listen, for fear she might use some unfair advantage to weaken him. Once, for instance, she had called after him what they would be having for tea, and he had almost vomited up on the spot his whole bellyful of hopelessness. Mrs Godbold was, indeed, humourless and true enough to employ any and every means, but for the moment she was feeling queasy. Her children were stifling her, too, as they clutched and touched, trying to revive what they knew as certainty, but which they feared was slipping from them, fast and sure. "It is all right," she said. "I must just get my breath. Leave go of me, though, all of yous. Oh, dear!" she exclaimed, holding her side. But it had all happened before, of course. Everything has always happened before. Except to children. So the Godbold children continued to cry. When their mother had got to her feet, it was better. She said, "We mustn't forget that corned breast. Come on, Kate. It's your turn tonight." Only then did they see that they might expect to resume life. And their mother dared sit a moment, though only close to the edge of the chair. She would have liked to talk to somebody about the past, even of those occasions which had racked her most, of emigration, and miscarriages, not to mention her own courtship; she longed to dawdle amongst what had by now become sculpture. For present and future are like a dreadful music, flowing, and flowing, without end, and even Mrs Godbold's courage would sometimes falter as she trudged along the bank of the one turbulent river, towards its junction with the second, always somewhere in the mists. Then she would look back over her shoulder at the garden of statuary, to walk amongst which, it seemed at that enviable distance, faith was no longer needed.

In the flat, fen country from which she had come, she grew to expect what is called monotony by those who are deaf to the variations on it. A grey country. Even though a hollyhock in her father's garden would sometimes flicker up in memory against a grey wall, or rose straggle over eaves, or bosomy elm heave in the heavy summer, it was winter that she remembered best, of many, many greys: boots clattering through grey streets; the mirror-grey of winter fens; naked elms tossing rooks into a mackerel sky; the cathedral-the greyest, the most permanent of all greys, rising into cloud, that sometimes would disperse, sometimes would unite with stone. The cathedral was both a landmark and a mystery, to which the gentry owed allegiance, and were, in fact, loyal in their languid way, observing somewhat frightening rites before Sunday dinner. All of that the little girl knew, but understood none of it, because her folk were chapel, all, as far as her grandmother could remember. Of course her father did not; he did not even attempt to. It was not a man's job. The little girl quickly discovered that women remember; men act, and are. The father was a cobbler. Very devout, in that he observed all the Sabbath demanded, and went to meetings besides, and saw that good was done, within his means, where good must be. In the same way he provided for his children, always enough, without ever contemplating their true needs, or entering into their minds. After his wife died, he seemed no longer to consider there was sufficient reason for coming inside; he would remain in the shop half the night cobbling. And sometimes the girl would go as far as the doorway, to where she could see the back of her father's neck underneath the naked light. He had hard hands, which felt of wax. He was perhaps a hard man, if just; anyway, he might have found it hard to love, although he was fond of his daughter, because she was his, and of all his children, because it was his duty before God. The girl inherited his devotion to duty, in addition to which she was granted a rapture her father had never known. The thumping hymns would lift her up, above the smoking paraffin stoves; it was not only good health that inspired her lungs, but also something of ecstasy. She never forgot herself, however. She never failed to look along the line, to threaten misbehaviour, or find the place for brothers and sisters. She regarded it as her duty; that was clear. She was the eldest, and had become virtually the mother. There was some talk of the eldest girl's studying to be a teacher when she reached a certain age, but that was silly. She would hang her head whenever the possibility was mentioned, as if it was a joke against her. She was not intended for any such dignity. Nor was she really bright enough, she herself was ready to admit, and felt relieved when the matter was dropped. Then she was to have gone into service with old Lady Aveling. It had been discussed at a garden fête, to raise funds for the victims of an earthquake. The girl had stood watching the ferrule of a parasol, while her father continued to answer questions on her behalf. All the while the coolest imaginable young ladies, in lacy blouses, were shooting arrows at the targets which gardeners had set up for their pleasure, or calling back to beautiful young men, whose politeness seemed a kind of insolence. How the arrows pierced the desperate, wooden girl. She was that perturbed for considering what might become of _her__ children once she had entered the great lady's demesne. But, in the end, the plan fizzled, like the first, and she remained at home, helping in the house, holding it up, in truth, with the strength of her young arms. There was the grandmother, certainly, but an ailing body, who did little beyond shell peas, seated in a wicker chair, on a brick path, amongst the gooseberry bushes, whenever there was a bit of sun. It was the eldest girl, already in a starched white apron at an early age, who received people when they came. Her broad face would consider the answer, and always find it in the end. But work and duty did not overwhelm her youth. Far from it. There were many simple pleasures. There were the expeditions, alone with brothers and sisters, or in company with members of the congregation, in winter skating and nutting, in summer haymaking, or those long afternoons, dawdled away beside hedge or water, which are half dreamed, half lived. Once Rob-he was the one who always dared most-had thought to suggest, "Why don't we go up into the cathedral, and muck about? It is too cold outside, and there is nothing else to do. Eh? What about it, sis?" She was accustomed to hesitate, because the responsibility would be hers, but on this occasion she did give in, not because the others were punching and pinching, but because she was already throbbing with expectation. She had never done more than look inside the cathedral in their own town, when, now, the string of children was suddenly being sucked right in by the gasping door, into the smell of hot-water pipes, and a world which, as it formed, did not so much reprove them for their audacity, as ignore them entirely in the beginning. The great, ringed forest rose around them, its stone branches arching above their heads against a firmament of blue and crimson, from which light filtered dimly down, or music. At first the children acted respectful. Their limbs had ceased to be their own. They had stuck holy expressions on their faces, like little, grotesque masks. Thinking that they ought to, they admired uninteresting objects, such as plaques for the dead, and only exclaimed too loud on discovering the Italian greyhound of some recumbent duchess. Such authenticity in stone thawed their natural spirits. They grew confident. They were laughing, and patting unnecessarily hard, ruddy-faced even in that gloom, becoming redder for the smell that somebody made, and just loud enough to carry. Then they were swept away, in one gust, though by different paths, clattering and dispersing, bursting, for all the hissing and snatching of their mentor, the eldest sister. She might as well have hoped to restrain with hands or threats a batch of freshly hatched trout, as catch the children once they had been poured back into their own hilarious element. Soon she had lost them. Soon, that could have been Rob, leaning out from one of the stone branches above, in company with the purple saints. She was glad, though, to feel exhausted by her powerless-ness. She strolled a little, and let herself be influenced by the climate of mild solemnity. And was eventually composed enough to sit down on a rush-bottomed chair in an attitude for listening to sacred music. For the organ never stopped playing. She had been conscious of it, but only now began to hear. A music of a strength and solidity to strain the capacities of the harmonium at home. She had never heard anything like this, and was at first frightened to accept what she was experiencing. The organ lashed together the bars of music until there was a whole shining scaffolding of sound. And always the golden ladders rose, extended and extended, as if to reach the window of a fire. But there was no fire, only bliss, surging, and rising, as she herself climbed upon the heavenly scaffolding, and placed still other ladders, to reach higher. Her courage failed before the summit, at which she must either step right off, into space, crash amongst the falling matchsticks, or be lifted out of sight forever. For an instant she floated in the cloud of indecision, soothed by the infinitely kind fingers. So, in the end, when the organ stopped, she was dazed and sweating. She felt foolish, for her tears, and her recovered awkwardness. And for a strange gentleman who was looking at her. "Well?" laughed the man, with genuine pleasure and interest, but through a lot of phlegm. She blushed. He was a floury, funny-looking person. His wescoat was buttoned wrong. The scurf had fallen from his hair down onto his shoulders. "I shall not ask you what you thought of that, because," he said, "it would only be a ridiculous question." She blushed even worse. There was no ground to walk on. She was feeling awful. "Nobody else," he said, "ever conveys the essence of music in any of the bilge they pour out regularly, trying to." She began the business of extricating herself, but her chair shrieked like slate-pencils on the paving. "That was the Great Composer," the strange gentleman continued, in an agony of enthusiasm and bronchial obstruction. But the reference made him look kinder. "I can see you will remember this day," he said, "when you have forgotten a lot of other things. You have probably been taken closer than you are ever likely to come." Then he walked away, warding off something with his scurfy shoulder. By this time the girl was again almost crying, but purely from mortification now. She escaped furiously to collect her lost children, and was only restored when everyone had been herded together. They went home soberly enough. They had bloaters for a treat, which the eldest sister ate more rapturously than any. As a young girl she had an appetite she would not have known how to disguise. It was only in later years that she learned to pick, in order to make things go round. In youth and strength, she would devour, and sleep it off. Even after the disasters which swallow those concerned, she would drop down, and sleep like a pig. Her capacity for physical exertion, was, it must be admitted, enormous. At haymaking, for example, she would never falter, or on pitching up the hay to load, like a man. At the end of the day, when women and boys were leaning exhausted and fiery, her normally pallid, nondescript skin would seem at last to have come alive, like a moist, transparent brier rose, as she continued to pitch regularly to the drays. It was Rob who liked to stand on the load, to receive. He always had to climb, to where it was highest and most awkward, as on the toppling, dead-coloured hay, on Sailers' cart at Martensfield. When the girl had looked up, and for the first time, life, that ordinarily slack and harmless coil, became a fist, which was aiming at her personally. It hit her in the chest, it seemed. There was Rob, slipping, laughing, slithering, all wooden arms and legs, as the haymakers watched the slow scene. There was Rob lying on the field, his white eyelids. Herself watching. As the wheel of minutes ground. His mouth had hardly finished laughing in time for the teeth to protest a little. They might have been grains of unripe corn. As the wheel of the cart trundled, lurched. Then the girl, whose strong back could formerly have held off the weight of the whole world, was tearing at iron, wood, stubble. She was holding in her hands the crushed melon that had been her brother's head. In the dying field. Several people ran to help. And on the way. But it was she, of course, who had to carry her brother. It was not very far, her blurry mouth explained. From that field. To the outskirts of the town. She was strong, but her thoughts were tearing as she carried the body of her brother. It had been different when their mother died, in bed, at night, surrounded by relatives. Children were forgotten. Until, almost at once, the big girl had taken them on. She was lugging her brother around. So that he was hers to carry now. As her feet dragged along the first of the paving-stones, women clapped fingers to their mouths, and ran inside, trampling geranium and pinks, or burst from their cottages to gape at the girl who was carrying a dead boy, the sun setting in the grey streets, filling them for a moment with blood. She brought the body to their father, who did not look at her straight, she saw, then, or ever again. He would sometimes look at her boots, that strong pair, which he himself had made, and on which blood had fallen. The girl went upstairs, and slept. Some of the younger ones had cried, not for a dead brother, but for fear they might never shake their eldest sister out of her terrifying sleep. Time, however, tidies very quickly. The girl found a new way, the woman remembered, of doing her hair, making it look neat and sleek, with a brown velvet ribbon. She refused to cut off her hair, as others were doing. She would have felt foolish. Or perhaps she was just dowdy. She had been walking, she remembered, in the back garden, in her brown ribbon, and a scent of stocks. It was evening, and the tea was on the stove. Her father had come out to her. He said, looking away, as always, somewhere over her shoulder, but smilingly, for him, "I want you to come inside and meet Miss Jessie Newsom." He even touched her, so that she quailed. "Miss Jessie Who?" she asked, although she had heard plainly. He appeared to take it for granted that she had, for he went on with what he had prepared. "She is a teacher. Over at Broughton." She noticed the Adam's apple, which had always seemed to make speech more difficult for their father. She tore off a bud. Inside, it was a pale, peculiar green. Then he told her, gently, but awfully. "She is going to be your mother." But the girl saw to it, in her own case at least, Miss Jessie Newsom never became that. She was a kind, cool teacher, with apparently confident hands. She was wearing a cameo brooch on the important night, and a cardigan which sagged rather, from the weighty decisions the teacher had been forced to make. In her belief that advantages were open to all those who cared to take the trouble, Miss Newsom had learnt to speak properly, but her origins continually reminded her of the secret cupboards, and sometimes she would blush for their contents. She said, "So this is Ruth. They tell me you have been the most wonderful girl. I hope you will not feel, Ruth, that I am in any way an intruder. I hope we shall be able to-shall we say-share the duties of family life?" Jessie Newsom was so prudent. But now she hesitated, because she found she was looking at the girl's forehead, which was all that had been offered of the face, and it was altogether expressionless. Miss Jessie Newsom made an excellent wife and stepmother, the girl heard, both from those who had been shocked by Ruth Joyner's behaviour, and from her own brothers and sisters, whose letters dwindled as continued distance loosened the relationship. Shortly after Miss Newsom's advent, the eldest girl had approached her father, and announced, "I have decided to look for work now." To which the father replied, "If that is how you feel, Ruth. We will try to find you something close by." "I have decided to emigrate," she said. "Chrissie Watkins's auntie hears Chris is doing well in Sydney. I have got all the information from Mrs Sinnett, and will write about the passage, if you will help me. And with money, too, in the beginning. I will pay the money back, of course, because of all these other children." The father made noises in his throat. What could he say, he wondered, to console? Instead, he brought out something typical of himself. "You should learn to forgive, Ruth. That is what we have been taught." But she did not answer. In her misery, she was afraid she might have fetched up a stone. Nor did she dare touch, for she could have buried herself in her father's chapped lips, and been racked upon the white, unyielding teeth. So she went. Her father bought her a tin box in which to pack her few things. Her brothers and sisters presented her with a mauve satin handkerchief sachet, on which was embroidered across a corner: _A clean nose is not a luxury__. She was wretchedly seasick, or unhappy. Other girls, who lit cigarettes, and crossed their legs with professional ease, and knew how to ask for something called a gimlet, did not care for her company. Her skirts were too long, nor did her conversation add anything to their experience of life. So she sat alone, and watched the ocean, the like of which she had never seen, so huge and glassy. And off the Cape an elderly gentleman, who had a business at some place-Gosford, was it? — proposed to her, but it would have been silly, not to say wrong, to let herself accept. At night, while the other young women were fumbling with temptation on the steerage deck, she said her prayers, and was mysteriously, personally comforted. Released finally from the solid body, her soul was free to accept its mission, but hesitated to trust to its own strength. And hovered, and hovered in the vastness, until recognizing that the rollers were folded into one another, and the stars were fragments of the one light. So she would stir in her sleep, and smile for her conviction, and often one of her cabinmates, as she combed the knots out of her own salty hair in the merciless little flaky mirror, would question the expression of the sleeping girl's face.

On arriving in Sydney, Ruth Joyner discovered that her friend Chrissie Watkins had married, and gone to live in another state. So there was no one. But she found work easy enough, first in some refreshment room, where for a while she carried trays with the thick white cups and the fingers of fruit cake or madeira. She would set the orders carefully down, and return to the urns, which smelled perpetually of dregs. All was going well, it seemed-customers often smiled, sometimes even read her passages from letters, and once she was asked to examine a varicose vein-when the lady supervisor called Ruth, and said, "Look, love, I will tell you something. You will never make good as a waitress. You are too slow. I am only telling you, mind." Because, really, the lady supervisor was kind. She had only been standing a long time, and the heat had eaten the seams of her black satin. Ruth Joyner then turned to domestic service. She took a situation as kitchen-maid in the house of a retired grazier. She would sit cutting the vegetables into shapes. Or, standing at the full sink, she would sing the hymns she remembered from Home. Until the cook objected, who was bringing out her own niece, from Cork, and had never been accustomed to associate with any but Catholic girls. Ruth had worked in several large houses before she came to that of Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, which was, in fact, her final situation, and which remained with her in memory as the most significant phase of her independent life. Though why, it was difficult to say. Certainly she met her husband. Certainly the house was large, and white, and solid, with a magnolia tree standing at the door. But Mrs Chalmers-Robinson herself was the flimsiest of women, and her servant Ruth Joyner received nothing of material advantage from her mistress, beyond her wages, and a few cast-off dresses she would have been too embarrassed to wear. But the house of the Chalmers-Robinsons (for there was a Mister, too) remained important in Ruth Joyner's mind. She had been advised by an employment agency to apply for the situation, which was described as that of house-parlourmaid. "But I have had no experience," the girl suggested. "It does not matter," said the woman. Ruth had discovered a great deal did not matter, but at each fresh piece of evidence her brow would grow corrugated, and her eyes wear an expression of distress. Even Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, who was on her way to a luncheon engagement, and who had just recovered a very pretty sapphire brooch on which she had recently claimed the insurance, did not seem to think it mattered greatly. "We shall give you a trial," she said, "Ruth-isn't it? How amusing! I have never had a maid called Ruth. I think I shall like you. And I am quite easy. There is a cook, too, and my personal maid. The gardener and chauffeur need not concern you. Both the men live out." Ruth looked at Mrs Chalmers-Robinson. She had never met anyone quite so dazzling, or so fragmentary. "Oh, and my husband, I forgot to say, he is in business," the brilliant lady thought to add. "He is away a good deal." Mrs Chalmers-Robinson looked at Ruth, and decided the face was about as flat as a marble tombstone. But one that was waiting to be inscribed. (She would make an effort to remember that, and work it up as a remark for luncheon.) But she did so hope she had discovered in this girl something truly dependable and solid. (If she contemplated Ruth Joyner literally as some _thing__, it was because she did long for marble, or some substance that would not give way beneath her weight and needs, like the elastic souls of human beings.) Then Mrs Chalmers-Robinson got up, in mock haste, protesting mock-hungrily, "Now I must fly to this wretched lunch!" And gashed her new maid with a smile. Ruth said, "Yes, madam. I hope you will enjoy yourself." To the mistress, it sounded quaint. But touching. "Oh, we shall see!" She laughed. "One never can tell!" She allowed herself to feel sad for a little in the car, but turned it into an agreeable sensation. Ruth had soon accustomed herself to life at the Chalmers-Robinsons'. She was quite perfect, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson remarked to her husband-not that perfection does not always have its faults-and it had to be admitted Ruth was slow, that she breathed too hard when handing the vegetables, and preferred not to hear the telephone. Then, sometimes, she would stand at the front door, particularly at evening, as if looking out on a village street. Her mistress intended to mention that, but failed to do so, perhaps even out of delicacy, or affection. So the massive girl continued to stand in the doorway, in the porch, beside the magnolia tree, and as the details of her dress and body, from the points of her starched cap to the toes of her Blancoed shoes, dissolved in evening, she might have been some species of moth, or guardian spirit, poised on magnolia wings before huge, flapping flight. For one so laborious, she moved very quietly, and succeeded in a way in permeating a house which, until then, had worn rather a deserted air. If the flour which dusts a big yellow cottage loaf had fallen on the marquetry table, where the visiting cards were left in a salver, it would have appeared less unnatural after the new maid's arrival. Once Mr Chalmers-Robinson, on returning from a club at dusk, had brushed against her in the entrance. "I beg your pardon, sir," she said. "I was listening to the locusts." "Oh!" he jerked back. "The what? Yes! Damn pests are enough to burst anybody's eardrums!" What did one say, he wondered, to maids? "I am glad you came, sir, tonight. There is something good," she announced. "There is crumb cutlets and diplomatic pudding." So that he began to feel guilty, and realized he was a stranger in his own house. Mr Chalmers-Robinson preferred clubs, where he could come and go as he pleased, without becoming involved in intimate relationships, or irritated by insubstantial furniture. He liked men better than women, not as human beings, but in the context of their achievement and public lives. Women were too apt to reduce everything to a personal level, at which his self-importance began to appear dubious. He resented and avoided such a state of affairs, except when the sexual impulse caused him to run the risk. Then the personal did add somewhat to the pleasurable, and he could always write off his better judgment as the victim of feminine dishonesty. He was certainly attractive to women, in his well-cut English suits, smelling of brilliantine and cigars, and he accepted the favours of a few. If he ceased to find his wife attractive after he had bought her, he continued to admire her ability for getting out of tight corners, and eschewed divorce perhaps for that very reason. E. K. Chalmers-Robinson (Bags to those who claimed to be his friends) was himself an expert at tight corners, though admittedly there had been one or two at which he had failed to make the turn. One such minor crash carried off a yacht, a promising colt, a Sèvres dinner service, and the personal maid, soon after Ruth Joyner appeared. "My husband is a business genius, but no genius is infallible," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson explained. "And Sèvres, one has to face it, is just a little bit-well, blue." "I suppose so, madam," Ruth agreed. She liked genuinely to please, for which, all her life, she remained the friend of children. Her mistress continued. "Between ourselves, Washbourne has always been something of a trial. I used to hope it was only gallstones, but was forced gradually to the conclusion that she is a selfish old creature. You, Ruth, I am going to ask to take on a very few of her duties. No doubt it will be amusing for you to lay out my clothes, and hand me one or two things when I dress." "Of course, madam," Ruth said. And was soon initiated into mysteries she had never suspected. Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had reached the stage of social evolution where appearance is not an end, but a martyrdom. Never for a moment must she cease tempering the instrument of her self-torture. She was forever trying on and putting off, patting and smoothing, forcing and easing, peering into mirrors with hope, and retreating in disgust. She would hate herself bitterly, bitterly, at moments, but often at the eleventh hour, when she had worn herself to a frazzle, she would achieve an unexpected triumph by dint of a few slashes and a judicious diamond. Then she would look at herself in the glass, biting her still doubtful mouth-a Minerva in a beige cloche. She would breathe, "Quickly! Quickly! The side pieces." And Ruth would hand the little whisks of hair which the goddess used to wire beneath her helmet, for motoring, or luncheon. But Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was not all on the surface. Not by any means. Once she confided in her maid, "I am going to let you into a secret, Ruth, because you at least have shown me loyalty and affection. I am thinking of taking up Christian Science. I feel it will be so good for me." "If it is what a person needs," hesitated the slow maid. Once her mistress had dispatched her to the bay with a toy bucket to fetch sea-water for her pearls, because that was what the pearls needed. "Oh, what I _need__!" Mrs Chalmers-Robinson sighed. "I did at one time seriously consider going over to Rome. Because, as you realize, I have such an insatiable craving for beauty, splendour. But I had to give up all thought of it in the end. Quite frankly, I could not have faced my friends." "I believe," Ruth began. But Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had already left to keep an appointment, so she did not hear what her maid believed, and the latter was glad, because her struggling tongue could not have conveyed that infinite simplicity. Alone in the house-for the cook would retire into livery indolence, and the gardener had a down on somebody, and the chauffeur was almost never there, for driving the mistress about the town-the maid would attempt to express her belief, not in words, nor in the attitudes of orthodox worship, but in the surrender of herself to a state of passive adoration, in which she would allow her substantial body to dissolve into a loveliness of air and light, magnolia scent, and dove psalmody. Or, in the performance of her duties, polishing plate, scrubbing floors, mending the abandoned stockings, gathering the slithery dresses from where they had fallen, searching carpets for silverfish, and furs for moth, she could have been offering up the active essence of her being in unstinted praise. And had some left over for a further expression of faith to which she had not been led. Whenever the doorbell rang, she would search the faces of strangers to discover whether she would be required to testify. Always it seemed that some of her strength would be left over to give, for, willing though she was to sacrifice herself in any way to her mistress, the latter would never emerge from her own distraction to receive. So the intentions of the maid haunted the house. They lay rejected on the carpets of the empty rooms. Not always empty, of course. There were the luncheons, and the dinners, but preferably the luncheons, for there the wives were without their husbands, and their minds could move more nimbly divested of the weight: wives who had stupid husbands were in a position to be as clever as they wished, whereas stupid wives might now put their stupidity to its fullest, its most profitable use. It was the period when hostesses were discovering _cuisine__, and introducing to their tables _vol-au-vent__, _sole Véronique__, _beignets au fromage__ and _tournédos Lulu Wattier__, forcing their husbands into clubs, hotels, even railway stations, in their longing for the stench of corned beef. Mrs Chalmers-Robinson, in particular, was famous for her amusing luncheons, at which she would receive the wives of graziers-so safe-barristers, solicitors, bankers, doctors, the Navy-but never the Army-and, with discretion, the wives of storekeepers, some of whom, by that time, had become rich, useful, and therefore tolerable. Many of the ladies she entertained, the hostess hardly knew, and these she liked best of all. How she would glitter for the ones who had not yet dared venture on the Christian name. Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had been christened Madge, but developed into Jinny in the course of things. Those who were really in the know, those whom she _simply adored__, or with whom she shared some of the secrets, would refer to her as "Jinny Chalmers," while those whom she chose to hold at bay would see her in their mind's eye as "that old Ginny Robinson." And it was not true. Of course she would not deny that she took a drop of something if she happened to be feeling tired, but would drink it down quickly because she so loathed the taste, and later on, when her nerves demanded assistance, and Christian Science would not always work, she did cultivate the habit of standing a glass behind a vase. But before a luncheon, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson would invariably dazzle. She would come into the dining-room, to move the cutlery about on the table, and add two or three little Murano bowls filled with different brands of cigarettes. Even if she felt like frowning, she would not let herself. She might say, "How I wish I could sit down on my own to a nice, quiet grill, with you to wait on me, and tell me something interesting. But I must congratulate you, Ruth. You have everything looking perfect." Although it was at her own reflection that she looked, and touched just once-she would not allow herself more-touched her inexorable skin. Then, quickly, she would moisten her mouth until it shone, and widen her eyes as if she had just woken. Her eyes had remained so lovely, they were terrifying in the face. Such a blaze of blue. They should have given pleasure. Just then the bell would start ringing, and Ruth running, to admit the ladies who were arriving. The ladies would be exhausted, from all the committees they had sat on, charity balls at which they had danced, race meetings to which they had worn their most controversial clothes. They had been working so hard at everything they had barely strength left to hold a brandy cruster. The year Ruth Joyner started work at the Chalmers-Robinsons', the ladies were wearing monkey fur. When the girl first encountered that insinuating stuff, it made her go cold. The idea of monkeys! Then she heard it was amusing, and perhaps it was, the live fur of dead monkeys, that strayed down from hats, and into conversation, until forcibly ejected. In the drawing-room, the talk would be all of fur and people. Ladies sat stroking their dreamy wisps, while the smoke reached out and fingered, like the hands of monkeys. Before one lunch, which Ruth foyner had cause to remember, a lady told the company of some acquaintance common to them all who was dying of cancer. It seemed ill-timed. Several of the ladies withdrew inside their sad fur, others began knotting the fringes. One spilled her brandy cruster, and at least her immediate neighbours were able to assist in the mopping. Until the conversation could resume its trajectory of smoke, violet-scented, where for a moment there had been the stench of sick, drooping monkeys. Everyone felt far better in the dining-room, where Ruth, and an elderly woman called May, who came in when help was needed, were soon moving in their creaking white behind the chairs of monkey-ladies. Mrs Chalmers-Robinson kept her eye on everyone, while giving the impression she was eating. She could knit any sort of party together. She heard everything, and rumbles too. She whispered, "Another of the little soles, Ruth, for Mrs du Plessy. Ah, yes, Marion, they are too innocent to refuse!" Or, very, very soft: "Surely you have not forgotten, May, which is the left side?" But the wine had contented everyone. And already, again, there was a smoke, blurry, and blue, of released violets, it could have been. At the end, when a big swan in spun sugar was fetched in, the ladies clapped their rings together. It was so successful. Ruth herself was delighted with the cook's triumphant swan. She could not resist remarking to a lady as she passed behind, "It was the devil to make, you know. And has got a bomb inside of it." Which the visitor considered inexperienced, though comical. Dressed in polka dots, and altogether devoid of fur, the lady was of some importance, if no fashion. She was the daughter of an English lord, a fact which roused the respect of elegant women who might otherwise have neglected. Beside her sat a barrister's wife. They called her Magda. Magda was amusing, it seemed, though there were nicer souls who considered her coarse. It was certainly daring of the hostess to seat the barrister's wife beside the Honourable, but daring Jinny Chalmers had always been. After lunch Magda visibly eased some elastic part of her clothing, and began to light one of her cigars. A few of the ladies were thrilled to see. "These weeds have on many occasions almost led to my divorce," Magda confessed to her Honourable neighbour. "I hope you will decide, like my husband, to stick it out." She spoke in a decidedly deep voice, which vibrated through several of the ladies present, and thrilled almost as much as the cigar. But the Honourable threw up her head, and laughed. Early in life, in the absence of other distinguishing qualities, she had decided on good nature. The other ladies glanced at her skin, which was white and almost unprotected, whereas they themselves had shaded their faces, with orange, with mauve, even with green, not so much to impress one another, as to give them the courage to confront themselves. Now Magda, who had tossed off the dregs of her wine, and planted her elbows in the table, remarked, perhaps to the ash of her cigar, "Who's for stinking out the rabbits?" But very quickly turned to her Honourable neighbour, drawing her into a confidence, of which the latter humbly hoped she might be worthy. "Or should we say: monkeys?" Magda asked. But her strings so muted that the other ladies, however they strained, failed to hear. "Did you ever see,"-the barrister's wife was frowning now-"a bottomful of monkeys? That is to say, a cageful of blooming monkey bottoms?" Magda could not spit it out too hard. "In fur pants?" It was provoking that everyone but the distinguished visitor had missed it, especially when the latter threw back her head, in her most characteristic attitude of defence, and let out a noise so surprising that she herself was startled, by what, in fact, had issued out of memory, where as a little girl on a cold morning, she heard a gamekeeper deride his own performance over an easy bird. On intercepting that animal sound, some of the ladies looked at their hands, kinder ones thought to gibber. But the parlourmaid offered the important guest a dish of chocolates, seeing that she had begun to enjoy herself at last amongst the monkey-ladies. The Honourable Polka Dots accepted a chocolate with trembling fingers, and after rejecting the noisy foil, plunged the chocolate into her mouth, from which there trickled a trace of unsuspected liqueur, at one corner, over the srnear of lip-salve with which she had dared anoint herself. The daughter of the lord remained with Ruth Joyner, not because the guest at table was in any way connected with what came after in the drawing-room, rather as some inconsequential, yet in some way fateful, presence in a dream-Ruth did, indeed, dream about her once or twice-a stone figure, featureless, anonymous, stationed at a still unopened door. Mrs Chalmers-Robinson could not have been altogether pleased with the incident which occurred right at the end of her otherwise successful monkey-luncheon. Or she could have sensed the approach of some more detrimental episode. For she suddenly pushed back her chair, obliquely, and her throat turned stringy to announce, "Let us go into the drawing-room. I dare say some of you would like to make up a table for bridge after we have had our coffee." Magda was soon apologizing to her hostess, it sounded to the maid, as she managed that heavy silver tray, so could not give all her attention. But caught the drift afterwards, and it was something different. "But I am most terribly sorry, darling. Would not have mentioned in the circumstances. Multiple Projects certainly down the drain. Such a noise, practically everyone else has heard. Then, bang on top, comes Interstate Incorporated," The maid bore her tray in the dance of service, surging steadily, sometimes reversing. Her starch no longer crackled, but the tinkling coffee crystals scattered on the chased silver as the ladies helped themselves from an overflowing spoon. Under her complexion, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had turned noticeably pale. "Bags did not mention any of this," she said, "simply because he has not been here." Her confession was a doubtful weapon of defence. "Abandoned as well? But darling, I shall bring my nightie. To say nothing of my toothbrush. I have made shift in so many similar situations, I am almost the professional proxy." Sincerity made Magda blink, or else it was the brandy weighting her eyelids. Her skin was livery as toads. "Nothing is settled in a night!" Mrs Chalmers-Robinson bitterly laughed. "Some things are!" Magda blinked. The maid wove her dance. In her efforts to hear better, she forgot one or two of the steps, and bumped a lady in the small of her monkey fur. But was, in fact, hearing better. "Then we are ruined!" laughed Mrs Chalmers-Robinson. She made it sound like a picnic from which the Thermos had been forgotten. Magda swore she could kick herself. "Darling," she said, "you know I adore you. I shall pawn the cabuchon rubies that Harry gave. They have always sat on me, anyway, like bloody boils." "Coffee, madam?" asked Ruth Joyner of her mistress. But Mrs Chalmers-Robinson's attention was only half diverted. For the first time the maid realized the truth of what she had already known in theory: that a human being can hate a human being; and even though her mistress was looking through her, as if she had been a window, it began to break her. "No, thank you," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson answered whitely. Before she wilted from the waist downward, and was lying, washed-out, on her own ordinarily colourless carpet. In the natural confusion a Wedgwood coffee cup got broken. There was such a bashing and scratching of jewellery, tangling of sympathy and fur fringes, bumping and recoiling, bending and straightening, that even one or two of the guests felt faint and had to help themselves to something. After much advice and a hard slap, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson began to stir. She was actually smiling, but from a distance, it could have been the bottom of the sea. She sat up, holding the ruins of her hair. She continued smiling-she could run to a dimple in one corner-as though she had forgotten the season of enjoyment was over. She was saying, "I am so sorry. I have disgraced." But stopped as she realized the presence of the undertow that must prevent her returning to the surface. "Where," she asked, "where is Ruth?" Feeling the carpet, as if afraid her one hope of rescue was floating away from her. "I shall have to ask you all to go. So maddening." Her laughter was letting her down into a snigger. "But Ruth, where is _Ruth__?" After pushing a good deal, the maid reached her mistress, and began to pull her upright. It was not an elegant operation, but succeeded, finally, in a rush. The hostess was supported, and up the stairs, on the white pillar of her parlourmaid. At the top she would have liked to take something of a Napoleonic farewell of the dispersing guests, but the truth suddenly overcame her, and she was bending, and coughing against it, and stifling it with her handkerchief as the devoted servant bore her away. It was a terrible evening that Ruth had to remember. Never before had she seen her mistress stark naked, and the latter's flesh was grey. Anyone less compassionate might have recoiled from the sac of a slack, sick spider, slithering out of its disguise of silk. But the girl proceeded to pick up what had fallen, and afterwards, when it was Mrs Chalmers-Robinson propped in bed, could look full at her again. A good stiff brandy, and the prospect of a pity she considered her due, even if she paid it herself, had restored the mistress to the pink. She was dressed in pink, too. Pale. A very touching, classic gown, which stopped before it showed how much she had shrivelled. Nor had she forgotten to frizz out the sides of her hair beneath a bandeau embroidered with metal beads. "Whatever happens, Ruth," she said, "and I cannot tell you, cannot even guess, myself, the details of the situation, I cannot, _cannot__ give you up. That is, if you will stand by me in my trouble." The girl was very awkward, opening cupboards, and putting away. "Oh, madam, I am not the one to let anybody down!" She remembered the dead weight of her brother. Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was agreeably racked. She would have given anything to be able to stuff a chocolate into her mouth. Instead, she looked at the open wardrobe. Such light as succeeded in disentangling itself from the bead fringes of the lampshade made the empty dresses look tragic. "All my pretty things!" She began to blubber. Ruth Joyner was breathing hard. But could bear worse blows, if it would help any. "Freshen up my glass, will you?" the mistress begged. "With just a dash of brandy. What will you think of me? Oh, dear, but I am not like this! It is the prospect of losing just the little personal things. Because, when it comes to breaking point, men are quite, quite merciless." This was the first time Ruth had experienced the breath of bankruptcy. She was not to know that Mrs Chalmers-Robinson would always discover some "pretty thing" to help her make an appearance in those of the approved places where she would still be allowed to sign. There are always ways and means of circumventing a reality which has ceased to be real. Jinny Chalmers was something like the mistress of a dog who salts away biscuits for her pet against a rainy day, down loose covers, and in the least expected corners, except that in the case of Jinny Chalmers she was both the mistress and the dog. Her maid was to come across something at a future date, in the toe of an old pink satin slipper. A dutiful girl, she would have to tell. "Oh, yes," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson would answer, but very slowly, thoughtfully. "That is a diamond. Rather a good one, too." And she would take it, and put it somewhere else, almost as if it did not exist. But for the moment, Ruth Joyner remained unaware that tragedy can be stuffed with sawdust. She said, "Hold hard on the brandy, m'mm, and I will bring you a nice hot drink." She even said, "Every cloud has a silver lining." She would have loved an old, burst-open sofa, because that happened to be her nature. She was running upstairs and down, with hot-water bottles and things. Until she heard the key. Mr Chalmers-Robinson let himself in round about ten o'clock. Ruth said, "She is taking it very badly, sir." He laughed. She noticed on this occasion the network of little veins on either cheek. He laughed. He said, "I bet she is!" But walked tired. He was still very well pressed, though. His cuff links glittered on the half-lit stairs. "Something has given me a stomach-ache," he said. Forgetful of the fact that he was addressing a maid. He could have been drunk, she thought. She wondered what they might have talked about if they had been walking together along the gritty paths of the Botanical Gardens, under banana leaves. Coming and going as she had to be-it occurred to her, for instance, that he might decide to stay the night, and went to turn down the bed he used in the dressing-room-she could not help but overhear a certain amount on landings. She was also, to tell the truth, a little bit inquisitive. Though she did not listen, exactly. It simply came out from behind doors which made a halfhearted attempt at discretion. Bags Chalmers-Robinson was telling his wife what had happened, or as much of it as was fit to share. Ruth Joyner imagined how her mistress's brows had darkened under the bead-embroidered flesh bandeau. Could you wonder? "It was after the merger," he was saying. Oh, she said, sarcastic, she had always thought one sat back and breathed after a merger, she who was no financial genius. He replied that she was just about the sourest thing he knew. "But the merger!" she insisted. "Let us keep to the painful point!" How he laughed. He said she was the most unholy bitch. "I was always gentle as a girl," she said, "but simply made the mistake of marriage." "With all its perks!" he suggested. He was helping himself, it sounded, from a bottle. "Which disappear overnight," she said. The mattress was groaning on which she lay, or threw herself into another position. The maid knew how her mistress could whip the sheets around her at a certain stage in a discussion. "Look, Jinny," he said, "if only you give me your assistance, we can manage this situation as we have the others." "I!" She laughed. "Well! It positively staggers me to hear there are uses to which I can be put!" "You are an intelligent woman." She was laughing very short laughs. "If you hate your husband, no doubt it is because he is a stupid beggar who doesn't deserve much more." There was a pause then, in which there was no means of telling who was playing the next card. The maid did not hear her mistress's husband go, because she began to yawn, and sag, and crept away finally. Somewhere in her sleep she heard, perhaps, the front-door knocker clap, and in the morning she found that Mr Chalmers-Robinson was no longer there; nor had he slept in the bed she had prepared for him. Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was particularly funny and dreamy over a cup of early tea. She had frizzed out her hair in some different way, too. She said, "You will not understand, Ruth-you are too good-how other people are forced to behave contrary to their natures." "I don't know about that," the maid agreed, but wondered. Then the mistress suddenly stroked the girl's hand, almost imperceptibly, almost unconsciously, it seemed, until the latter pulled it away. Both were momentarily embarrassed, but forgot that it had happened. On a later occasion, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson did remark, "I think I am only happy, Ruth, with you." But the girl was busy with something. Not long afterwards, a new man brought the ice. He clattered down the back steps, on a morning washed by early rain, though not so clean that it did not smell of lantana and midnight cats. "Good day there!" said the new man. "Where's a bloke expected to put it?" Ethel, who was always cranky early, and particularly on days when she was expected to dish up something hot for lunch, did not look up, but said, "Show him, will you?" "Yes," said Ruth. "The kitchen chest is just through here. In the larder. Then there's a second one, along the passage, beside the pantry. You'll have to mind the step, though." The man was crossing the girls' hall, where Ethel sat with a cup of tea, studying the social page. From the man's hands hung steel claws, weighted with double blocks of ice. It looked like rain was frozen in it. Then he had to go and drop one of the big blocks. How it bumped on the brown lino, and lumps of ice shooting off, into corners. Ethel was ropeable, while Ruth tried to calm her down. "It's all right, Ethel. I'll get the pan, and clean it up in two shakes." The man was already groping after the bigger of the broken bits. His hands were rather pinched and green from handling so much ice. But he did not seem to worry about his clumsiness. "Good job we missed the cook's toe!" he joked. But Ethel did not take it good at all. "Oh, get on with it!" she said, hitting the paper she was reading, without looking up. Ruth was glad to lead the man to the pantry ice-chest. He had one of those long, tanned faces, too thin; it made her think of used pennies. He was rather tall and big, with hollow-looking eyes. He was wearing a greenish old digger coat, from which one of the buttons was hanging, and she would have liked to sew it on. "That is it," she said, closing the lid of the chest. "And double on Saturdays." "If I stay the course till Saturday," he said. "But you've only begun, haven't you?" "That don't mean I'm all that shook on the job," he said. "Ice!" "Oh," she said. "No." They were crossing the girls' dining-room, where already there were pools of water from all those pieces of half-melted ice. "No," she repeated. "But if it is you that comes." Then she thought she would have a look at his face, just once more, although it was a kind of face that made her shy. What it told her was so different from all she knew of herself; it was the difference between a knife and butter. But she would have gone on looking at the man's face, if he had not been in it. In her mind's eye, she saw him without his hat. She liked, she thought, black hair on men. "Gunna rain," said the iceman. "Yes," she said, "it looks like that." Looking at the sky as though she had just discovered it was there. Still, you had to show an interest. "Yes," he said. "It's a funny old weather." She agreed that it was. "You never know, do you?" she said. Then he jerked his head at her. She almost overbalanced from the step to watch the new iceman go, the rotten stitches giving in the seams of his old overcoat. "I thought you was going to do something about all this nasty mess," the cook complained. "Yes," said the parlourmaid. "I'll get the pan." "A cloth and a bucket," said the cook, "is what you'll need by now." That evening as she waited for the mistress to finish powdering herself, Ruth Joyner announced to the dressing-table mirror, "There was a new iceman called today." "But Ruth, when I expect to be _stimulated__!" Mrs Chalmers-Robinson protested. Because she could not have felt flatter. She had a headache, too. "I mean," she said, and frowned, "I should like to be taken out of myself." She would have liked to descend a flight of stairs, in some responsive model, of lamé, in the circumstances, and the faint play of ostrich feathers on her bare arms. Her legs were still exceptional; it was her arms that caused her anxiety. "Tell me something beautiful. Or extraordinary. Even disastrous." Mrs Chalmers-Robinson sighed. She did also hope suddenly that she had not hurt the feelings of her dull maid, for whom she had about as much affection as she would ever be capable of giving. Ruth thought she would not say any more. But smiled. She remembered as much as she had seen of the iceman's rather strong neck above the collar of the greenish overcoat. If she did not dwell on that image, it was because her upbringing suggested it might not be permissible. Though it continued to flicker forth. The following morning, as the mistress's spirits had not improved, the maid was sent to the chemist at the corner. When she returned, and had handed over the little packet, she could not resist looking in the pantry chest. The fresh ice was already in it, double for Saturday. So there she was, herself imprisoned in the mass of two solid days, from which no one would have heard her, even if she had been able to call. Once she went and stood for company beside the cook, who had been very quiet all these days, and was now stirring mysteriously at a bowl. "What is that?" the parlourmaid asked, though she did not particularly want to know. "That is what they call a _liayzong__," Ethel answered, with a cold pride that obviously would not explain further. On Sunday evening Ruth went to service, and felt sad, and got soggy in the nose and did not care to sing the hymns, and lost a glove, and came away. On Monday she clattered early downstairs, in fresh starch, because she had heard, she thought. "How are we?" the iceman called. "It's still you, then," she said. "How me?" "Thought you was fed up." He laughed. "I am always fed up." "Go on!" She was incredulous. Then she noticed. She said, "The button fell off that I saw was going to." "What odds!" he said. "A bloody button!" "I could of sewed it on, easy," she said. But he dumped the ice in the chest, and left. Most days now, she coincided with the iceman, and it was not all by trying; it seemed to happen naturally. Once he showed her a letter from a mate who was starting a carrying business between the city and the near country; and would he come in on it? The name, she discovered, was Mr T. Godbold, from the address on the envelope. Once he asked, "Got a free Sunday, eh? What about takin' a ride on the ferry?" She wore her new hat, a big, rather bulbous velour, of which she had been proud, but which was unfashionable, she realized almost at once. They bought some oranges, and sucked them in the sun, down to the skins, on a little stony promontory, above a green bay. Few houses had been built yet in that quarter, and it seemed that she had never been farther from all else in her closeness to one person. It was not wrong, though; only natural. So she half closed her eyes to the sunlight, and allowed his presence to lap against her. In the course of conversation, when they had thrown aside the orange skins, of which the smell was going to persist for days, she realized he was saying, "I never had much to do with girls like you. You are not my type, you know." "What is your type?" she asked, looking in the mouth of her handbag, of which the plating had begun to reveal the true metal. "Something flasher," Tom Godbold admitted. "Perhaps I could become that," she said. How he laughed. And his arched throat hurt her. "I never had a girl like you!" he laughed. "I am not your girl," she corrected, looking heavy at the water. He thought he had cottoned on to her game. "You're a quiet one, Ruth," he said. Laying his hand, which she already knew intimately from looking at it, along her serge thigh. But she suddenly sat up, overwhelmed by the distance she was compelled to keep between herself and some human beings. "You are not religious?" he asked. Now she wished she had been alone also in fact. "I don't know what you would call religious," she said. "I don't know what other people are." Whereupon he was silent. Fortunately. She could not have borne his remarks touching that most secret part of her. He began throwing stones at the sea, but looking sideways, or so it felt, at her hot and prickly serge costume. Now, indeed, he did wonder why he had tagged along with this lump of a girl. Even had she been willing, it was never worth the risk of putting a loaf in some slow oven on a Sunday afternoon. So that he got resentful in the end. He remarked, "We're gunna miss that ferry." "Yes, " she agreed. He continued to sit, and frown. He put his arms round his knees, and was rocking himself on his behind, quite regardless of her, she saw. She waited, calmer. While the girl watched, it was the man who became the victim of those unspecified threats which the seconds can conjure out of their gulf. Although he was screwing up his eyes, ostensibly to resist fragmentation along with the brittle sunlight and the coruscating water, what he feared more was to melt in the darkness of his own skull, to drift like a green flare across the no-man's-land of memory. This suddenly shrivelled man gave the girl the courage to say, "You are a funny one. You was talking about missing the boat." Nor could she resist dusting his back. It was her most natural gesture. "Dirty old dust and needles!" she mumbled to herself. He shook her off then, and jumped up, though her touch remained. He had always shivered at what was gentlest. Many of his own thoughts made him wince, and it was the simplest of them that fingered most unmercifully: touching a scab, dusting down, pointing, with the bread-dough still caked round arthritic joints. But he became quite cheerful as they walked, and once or twice he took her by the arm, to show her something that attracted his attention, a yacht, or a bird, or the limbs of some tortured tree. Several times he looked into her face, or it could have been into his own more peaceful thoughts. In any case, the lines of his face had eased out. And in her pleasure, she confessed, "I could come out again, Tom. If you will ask me. Will you?" He was caught there. She was too simple. So he had to say yes. Even though he left her in no doubt how she must interpret it. Curiously, though, she did not feel unhappy. She was smiling at the sun, the strength of which had grown bearable by now. She could still smell the smell of oranges. It was the relentless procession of mornings that killed hope, and made for moodiness. And the slam of the lid on the ice-chest. For sometimes the girl would not go out to receive the iceman. "That iceman is a real beast," the cook had to comment once. The parlourmaid did not answer. "You are feeling off colour, Ruth," said the mistress. She was lying on a sofa, reading, and the maid had brought her her coffee as usual on the little Georgian salver. "I hope there is nothing really wrong?" The girl made a face. "I am no different, " she said. But had developed an ugly spot on her chin. "I can see you ought to take up Science," said the mistress. "It is wonderful; you don't know how consoling." The opinions and enthusiasms of those around her would slide off the girl's downcast eyelids. She liked people to have their ideas, though. She would smile gently, as if to encourage those necessities of their complicated minds. "I am not educated," she replied on this occasion. "Understanding is all that is necessary," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson replied. "And it does not always come with education. Quite the contrary, in fact." But Ruth continued listless. Then the mistress had to say, "I am going to give you something. You must not be offended." She took her into the bathroom, and gave her a little flask, in which, she explained, was a preparation of gin and camphor, excellent against pimples. "One simply rubs it into the place. Rather hard," she advised. "I find it infallible." Because, really, Ruth's ugly spot was getting on her nerves. "Of course, I know you will think, in my case, at least: Science should do it." Here Mrs Chalmers-Robinson sighed. "But when you have reached my age, you will have discovered that every little helps." Ruth took the bottle, but she did not think it helped. Although her mistress assured her it was having the desired result. Certainly, one morning very soon after, the girl's skin was suddenly clear and alive. She began to sing in that rather trembly mezzo which Mrs Chalmers-Robinson so deplored. She sang a hymn about redemption. "Do you feel happy when you sing those hymns?" her mistress was compelled to ask. "Oh, yes, I am _happy__!" Ruth replied, and was extra careful with the Brasso. She said that that Sunday she was going to the beach at Bondi with her friend. Mrs Chalmers-Robinson's bracelets rustled. "I am glad you have a friend," she said. "Is she also in domestic service?" The girl folded the rag with which she was polishing the door-knobs. "No," she said. "That is, I got friendly, recently, with the man that brings the ice," she said. "Oh," said Mrs Chalmers-Robinson. She had composed her mouth into a line. On Sunday when her maid was all arrayed, the mistress appeared somewhat feverish, her eyes more brilliant than ever before. She had done her mouth. There it was, blooming like a big crimson flower, with a little, careful, mauve line, apparently to keep it within bounds. "Enjoy yourself, Ruth!" she called, brave and bright. Before she settled down to Science. "God is incorporeal," she read, "divine, supreme, infinite, Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love." Mrs Chalmers-Robinson read and studied, to transform "hard, unloving thoughts," and become a "new creature." Ruth waited on the corner near the park. She waited, and her sensible heels no longer gave her adequate support. On Sundays the few people in the street always belonged to someone. They were marching towards teas in homes similar to their own, or to join hands upon the sand. Whenever people passed her, the waiting girl would look at her watch, to show that she, too, was wanted. When Tom came at last-he had been held up by meeting a couple of blokes-it was quite late, but she was that glad; her face was immediately repaired by happiness. Oh, no, she had not had to wait all that long. By the time they reached the beach at Bondi, the light was already in its decline. They ate some sausages and chips in a refreshment room. Tom was a bit beery, she thought. "I near as anything didn't come this evening," he confessed. "I nearly stayed and got full. Those coves I met wanted me to. They'd stocked up with grog enough for a month of Sundays." "Then it was a pity you had asked me to come," she said, but flat, with no trace of bitterness or censure. "I sort of felt there was no way out." "It would have been better not to come." "Oh, I wanted to," he said. And again, softer, after a pause: "I wanted to." "I wish you would always tell me the truth," she said. It made him start jabbing the tablecloth with a fork. "Like somebody's bleedin' mother!" He dug holes in the tablecloth, till the young lady began to look their way. "Didn't your mother speak like that?" "She died when I was young," said Ruth. "But there was my dad. He brought us up strict, I will admit. I loved him. That was why I came away." "Because you loved him?" "It is wrong to love a person too much. Sinful in a way." "Sinful!" Contempt made him blow down his nose, at which, at times, she could not bear to look, at the nostrils-they were beautiful-but she would again. And his contempt was very quickly spent. He knew the cause of it was that which most attracted him to her: the unshakable-which at the same time he was tempted to assault. After their exchange, he paid the bill at the desk, and they went out. They began to walk along the beach, avoiding in the dark certain darker shapes, making through the heavy, stupefying sand, towards the firmer path beside the sea. "We're going to get our shoes wet," she warned, "if we are not careful." Although the bubbly sea was casting its nets always farther afield, she did not intend to allow herself to be hypnotized by its action, however lovely. She could only see the imprudence of such behaviour. For a moment it was almost as though she were guiding those others, her brothers and sisters, or own unborn children. He did not much care now, and even allowed her to take his arm. They walked sober for a time, in the indifferent grip of friendship, along the unrecognizable sand. Until, finally, exhaustion made them lag. Their legs could have been trembling wires. Such frailty was satisfying, but dangerous, so that when he said they should sit down, she remained standing. Then, suddenly, Tom was down upon his knees. He had put his arms around her thighs. For the first time, against her body, she experienced the desperate bobbing of a human being who had abandoned himself to the current. If she herself had not been pitching in the darkness, his usually masterful head might have appeared less a cork. But in the circumstances, she would not have presumed to look for rescue to what her weight might have dragged under, just as she resisted the desire to touch that wiry hair, in case it should wind about her fingers, and assist in her destruction. Instead, she began to cry out softly in protest. Her mouth had grown distorted and fleshy. She was bearing the weight of them both on her revived legs. But for how much longer, she did not like to think. "Ah, no! Tom! Tom!" she breathed; her voice could have been coming from a shell. As the mouths of darkness sucked her down, some other strangled throat in the distance laughed out from its game of lust. In the spirals of her ears, she heard the waves folding and unfolding on their bed. Then the sand dealt her a blow in the back. It, too, was engaged apparently, beneath her, but with the passive indifference of thick sand. As the two people struggled and fought, the sand only just shifted its surface, grating coldly. The girl was holding the man's head away from her with all her strength, when she would have buried it, rather, in her breast. In the grip of her distress, she cried out with the vehemence of soft, flung sand. "I would marry you, Tom!" she panted. "That is news to me!" Tom Godbold grunted, rather angry. He had known it, though; he had known many women. But her announcement gave him an excuse to pause, without having to admit his lack of success. "You don't know what you would be taking on," he said as soon as he was able. "I would be willing to take it on," she insisted. Again he began to feel oppressed by that honesty which was one of her prevailing qualities, and now, as in later life, he tried to ensure that it would not threaten him. He reached out very gently, and tried by every dishonest strategy of skin to reach that core which he resented. Until at last she took his hand, and laid it against her burning cheek. She said, "But what is it, Tom? It is not as if I did not love you." By now, he realized, he was really very tired. He lay heavy on her. He rested his head against her neck. He was too exhausted, it seemed, for further bitterness. It was only then that she allowed him to make love, which was at best tentative, at worst ashamed, beside her riper one. Her lover allowed her to hold him on her breast. She buoyed him up on that dark sea. He floated in it, a human body, soothed by a mystery which was more than he could attempt to solve. Afterwards as he lay, pushing the wet hair back from her temples, he said to her, "Perhaps you won, Ruth. I dunno how." She did not move, as he continued to stroke her moist skin with the dry, rough skin of his hand. "I hadn't thoughta gettin' married, but, for that matter, we could," he said. "It'll be tough, though, for both of us." She began to kiss the back of his hand, so that he had to pull it away. "Make you a honest woman!" He laughed. "Because, I suppose, by you, it is a sin, eh?" "Both of us has sinned," she said, with a dreamy tenderness which at the same time filled her with horror. She sat up, and the little pearls of sweat ran down between her skin and her chemise towards the pit of her conscience. She sat up straight, and the darkness could have been a board at her back, of the hard pew. Hard words came up out of her memory, of condemnation, in the voices of old men assured of their own salvation. "Both of us! Both of us!" she repeated with shapeless mouth. But he could not have troubled less. "Not me!" He laughed. Again he touched her thigh, and the terrible and lovely part was that she now allowed him. She rested her head against him, and even her tears were a sensation of voluptuous fulfilment. "But I would bear all your sins, Tom, if it was necessary. Oh, I would bear them," she said, "and more." That made him leave off. He was almost frightened by what he meant to her. "I don't see," he complained, "why you gotta take on so, not when you got the conditions you wanted." But he, of course, was not to know what she had forfeited. "No," she said. "I won't take on. We must go now, though. Give me your hand up." Very early she had sensed that her love was on two planes, one of which he might never reach. They began to walk back. Once or twice she had to stifle something rising in her full throat, once or twice she dared to look up, half expecting sentence to be passed in letters of stars. Soon after, the parlourmaid mentioned to the cook-it could not be avoided forever-that she was going to get married. "To Tom Godbold, the iceman," she had to admit. "Well," said Ethel, "you _will__ be finding out!" Contrary to the cook's expectations, the iceman himself referred frequently to the promise he was supposed to have made. "And will he be keeping both of you out of the ice-delivery wages?" she asked of the prospective bride, hoping that she might receive an answer to colour her visions of a pitiful existence. "Oh, no," Ruth replied. "He is giving that up. We are going to live at a place called Sarsaparilla. It is on the outskirts. Tom is going in with a mate of his who is a carrier." "These mates!" Ethel said. But it all seemed to be settled, and it became necessary to tell the mistress. Who knew already, of course. Recently Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had been enjoying every opportunity to exercise her intuition on what might be happening to her friends. Since her husband had got into financial difficulties, there were few who did not respect her feelings by avoiding her. It was as if it had been agreed amongst her acquaintance that she was far too ill to receive visits. Certainly some gift, if not sincerity, is required to transpose the witty tunes of light friendship into a key appropriate to crisis, and lacking that gift, or virtue, the ladies would glance into shop windows, or cross the street, on observing the object of their embarrassment approach. Jinny Chalmers painted on a redder mouth, and studied Science. Once or twice she was also seen dining with her husband at expensive restaurants, but everybody of experience knew how to interpret that. The Chalmers-Robinsons were convening a meeting, as it were, in a public place, where each would be protected to some extent from the accusations of the other, while considering what next. For the most part, however, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was to be found alone, in her depleted décor, in the house which had survived by legal sleight of hand. It had been very complicated, and exhausting. Now that it was more or less over, she lay on the sofa a good deal, and rested, and in time learned how to enter the lives of her friends from a distance. She found that she knew much more than she had ever suspected. If she had been capable of loving, compassion might have compensated her for that insight by which, as it happened, she was mostly disgusted or alarmed. Except in the case of her maid, Ruth Joyner. Here the mistress was chastened by what intuition taught her. To a certain extent affection made her suffer with the girl, or it could have been she was appeased by a sensuality she had experienced at second hand. When the maid told her mistress of her approaching marriage, the latter replied, "I hope you will be terribly happy, Ruth." Because what else would she have said? Even though her words were dead, the shape and colour of their sentiments were irreproachable, like those green hydrangeas of the last phase, less a flower than a semblance, which such ladies dote on, and arrange in bowls. "I have been happy here," Ruth replied, and honestly. "I would like to think you have," her mistress said. "At least, nobody has been unkind to you." Yet she could not resist the thought that nobody is unkind to turnips unless to skin them when the proper moment arrives. So she had to venture on. "Your husband, will he be unkind to you, I wonder?" She positively tingled as the blade went in. Ruth hesitated. When she spoke, it sounded rather hoarse. "I know that he will," she said slowly. "I do not expect the easy way." Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was almost gratified. It related her to this great, white, porous-skinned girl as she could not have been related otherwise. Then her loneliness returned. Because she could not have been gathered into the bosom of anything so comic, or so common, as her starched maid. She began to buy herself off then. "I shall have to give you something," she said. "I must try to think what." "Oh, no, m'mm!" Ruth protested, and blushed. "I was not expecting gifts." For, as she understood it, poverty was never a theory, only a fact. The mistress smiled. The girl's goodness made her feel magnanimous. "We shall see," she said, taking up her book to put an end to a situation that was becoming tedious. As she closed the door, Ruth Joyner suspected that what she had done in innocence was bringing out the worst in people. If she had seen her way to explain how she had surrendered up the woundable part of her by certain acts, everybody might have striven less. But to convey this, she was, she knew, incompetent. So the house continued to bristle with daggers looking for a target. The cook said, "One day, Ruth, I will tell you all about the man I did not marry." And: "It is the children that carry the load. It is the children." "My children will be lovely," Ruth Joyner dared to claim. "My children will not fear nothing in the world. I will see to that." Looking at the girl, the cook was afraid it might come to pass. Then, a couple of evenings later, the bell rang from Mrs Chalmers-Robinson's room. She had gone to bed early, after a poached egg. So Ruth climbed towards the mistress from whom, she realized, she had become separated. "Ruth," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson began, "quite frankly I am unhappy. I have something-no, that is underestimating-I have every, everything on my mind. Why do you suppose I was picked on? Upon? On! You know I am the last person who should be forced to carry weights." And she would have eased hers from off her hair, but encountered only the parting, which needed attending to. It was obvious Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had had a couple. "Sit down, won't you?" she invited, because that was what one said. But Ruth remained standing. She had never faced the better-class people except on her two legs. "Ruth," said the mistress, "Science, I find-though this is in strictest confidence, mind you-Science is, well, something of a disappointment. It does not speak to _me__, me _personally__, if you know what I mean." Here she beat her chest with her remaining rings. By that light the skin appeared as though it had been dusted with the finest grey dust. "I must have something personal. All this religion! Something I can touch. But nothing they can take away. Not pearls. Oh dear, no! Pearls get snapped up amongst the first. Or men. Men, Ruth, do not like to be touched. Men must touch. That is not even a secret. Give me your hand, dear." "You would do better with an aspro and a cup of strong black coffee," advised the maid, almost stern. "I should be sick. I am already sick enough." Mrs Chalmers-Robinson shuddered. Her mouth had wilted and faded to a pale, wrinkled thing. "What do you believe, Ruth?" she asked. Though she did not want to hear. Only to know. "Oh dear, madam," cried the girl, "a person cannot tell what she believes!" And much as she regretted, she was forced to wrench her hand away. Then, it was realized by the woman on the bed, who would have given anything for a peep-she was all goggly for it-this white tower, too, was locked against her. So she began to bare her teeth, and cry. Although rooted firmly in the carpet, the white maid appeared to be swaying. The light was streaming from her shiny cuffs. But it no longer soothed; it slashed and blinded. "If I was to tell," the creature attempted, "it doesn't follow that you would see. Everybody sees different. You must only see it for yourself," she cried, tearing it out helplessly at last. "Tell, Ruth, tell!" begged the mistress. She was now quite soppy with necessity, and ready to mortify herself through somebody else. "Tell!" she coaxed with her wet mouth. One of her breasts had sidled out. "Oh, dear!" cried the girl. "We are tormenting ourselves!" "I like that!" shouted the woman in sudden fury. "What do you know of torments?" The girl swallowed her surprise. "Why, to see you suffer in this way, and nothing to be done about it!" So obvious. "My God! If even the patent saints fail us!" There were times when her teeth could look very ugly. "I am ignorant all right," admitted the maid, "and helpless when I cannot use my hands. Only when it comes to your other suggestion, then I feel ashamed. For both of us." Indeed, she streamed with a steady fire, which illuminated more clearly the contents of her face. When the woman saw that she had failed both to rob and to humiliate, she fell back, and blubbered shapelessly. She was screwing up her eyes tight, tight, as if she had taken medicine, but her words issued with only a slack, spasmodic distaste, which could have been caused by anything, if not herself. "Go on!" she said. "Get out!" she said. "I am not fit. Oh God, I am going round!" And was hitting her head against the hot pillow. She could not quite succeed in running down. "Take it easy, m'mm," said Ruth Joyner, who was preparing to obey orders. "I dare say you won't remember half. Then there will be no reason for us not to stay friends. "See?" her starch breathed. "After you have had a sleep." She had to touch once, for pity's sake, before going. In the short interval between this scene with her employer and her marriage to Tom Godbold, Ruth Joyner was engaged by Mrs Chalmers-Robinson in noticeably formal conversation. For the most part the mistress limited herself to orders such as: "Fetch me the _grey__ gloves, Ruth. Don't tell me you forgot to mend the grey! Sometimes I wonder what you girls spend your time thinking about." Or: "Here I am, all in yellow. Looking the purest fright. Well, nothing can be done about it now. Call the taxi." On the latter occasion, Mrs Chalmers-Robinson was bound for a meeting of some new company formed round about the time her husband got into trouble, and of which she had been made managing director. But Ruth, of course, did not understand anything of that. Only once since the débâcle had the maid encountered her employer's husband. Standing in a public place, he was engaged in eating from a bag of peanuts. His clothes were less impressive than before, though obviously attended to. He had developed a kind of funny twitch. He did not recognize the maid, in spite of the fact that she approached so close he could have seen the words she was preparing on her lips. He was comparatively relaxed. He spat out something that might have been a piece of peanut-shell, from out of the white mess on his tongue. And continued to look, through, and beyond strangers. So the girl had gone on her way, at first taking such precautions of compassion and respect as she might have adopted for sleepers or the dead. And then, suddenly, there was Ruth in her ugly hat, standing before her mistress in the drawing-room. Her box had been carried off that morning. The ceremony would take place early in the afternoon. It was evident that for the occasion of farewell Mrs Chalmers-Robinson had decided to appear exquisite, and to send her servant off, not, perhaps, with a handsome cheque, but at least with a charming memory. She was firm in her refusal to attend the service in the dreary little church. Weddings depressed her, even when done in satin. But she would lavish on the stolid bride a sentimental, though tasteful blessing, for which she had got herself up in rather a pretty informal dress. She had made herself smell lovely, Ruth would have to recall. As she received her maid from the Louis Quinze _fauteuil__, assurance, or was it indifference, seemed to have allowed her skin to fall back into place. Even by the frank light of noon, the parting in her hair was flawless-the whitest, the straightest, the most determined. And as for her eyes, people would try to describe that radiance of blue, long after they had forgotten the details of Jinny Chalmers's décor, her bankruptcy, divorce, and final illness. Now she said, trailing a white hand, "I expect you are the tiniest bit excited." And laughed with the lilt she had picked up early on from an English actress who had toured the country. Ruth giggled. She was grateful for so much attention, but embarrassed by some new stays, which were stiff and tight. "I won't be sorry when it is over," she had to answer, truthfully. "Oh, don't hurry it! Don't!" Mrs Chalmers-Robinson pleaded. "It will be over soon enough." Then she moistened her lips, and remarked, "You girls, the numbers of you who have been married from this house! Falling over one another! Still, it is supposed to be the natural thing to do." In certain circles, this would have been considered deli-ciously comic. Yet Ruth could not help but remember sad things. She remembered stepping back onto a border of mignonette, along the brick path in front of her father's house, while trying to disguise her misery, and how this had risen in her nose, sweeter, and more intolerable, as people said good-bye with handkerchiefs, to wave, and cry into. "Oh, madam," the words began to tumble clumsily, "I hope it will be all right. I hope this Violet will look after things." "She has an astigmatism," Mrs Chalmers-Robinson revealed with gloom. "The milk is on the ice. And bread in the bin. If Ethel is not back. And you want to cut yourself a sandwich." If, indeed. At last the nails were driven. Ruth realized she was biting on a mouthful of hair. It became untidy, always, without her cap. Mrs Chalmers-Robinson took the stiffly gloved hands in both her cajoling, softer ones. "Good-bye, Ruth," she said. "Do not let us prolong last moments; they can become ridiculous." For that reason, and because emotion disarranges the face, she did not kiss her departing maid. But might have, she felt, if circumstances had been a little different. "Yes," said Ruth. "They will be expecting me. Yes. I had better go now." Her smile was that stupid, she knew, but something at least to hang on to. So it stuck, at the cost of strain. She listened to her shoes squeak, one after the other, as she crossed the parquet. She had polished it the day before, till her thoughts, almost, were reflected in it. A fireworks of light, brocade and crystal cascaded at the last moment on her head, just before she closed the door in the way she had been taught to close it, on leaving drawing-rooms. So Ruth Joyner left, and was married that afternoon, and went to live in a shed, temporary like, at Sarsaparilla, and began to bear children, and take in washing. And praised God. For was not the simplest act explicit, unalterable, even glorious in the light of Him?

Mrs Godbold was sitting on the edge of the chair, in that same shed which had started temporary and ended up permanent. Several of the children continued to cling to their mother, soothed by her physical presence, lulled on the waves of her reflective mind. Kate, however, was going about sturdily. She had rinsed the teapot, saving the leaves for their various useful purposes. With an iron spoon, she had given the corned breast an authoritative slap or two. Soon the scents and sighs were stealing out of pan and mouths, as fresh sticks crackled on sulky coals, and coaxed them back to participation. Eyes could not disguise the truth that the smell of imminent food is an intoxicating experience. Even Mrs Godbold, who had felt herself permanently rooted amongst the statuary of time, began to stir, to creak, to cough, all of it gently, for fear of disturbing those ribs which had copped most of her husband's wrath. She would have risen at any moment, to resume her wrestling, as a matter of course, with the many duties from which it was useless to believe one might ever really break free. When Else, her eldest, came in. Else Godbold often got home later of an evening now. Since it had been decided that her fate was secretarial, she had learnt to bash out a business letter, and would take on any other girl, for speed, if not for spelling. As for her shorthand, that was coming along, too: she accepted dictation with disdain, and sometimes even succeeded in reading her results. In her business capacity, she caught the bus for Barranugli every morning at 8:15, in pink, or blue, with accessories of plastic, and a cut lunch. Else had begun to do her lips, as other business young ladies did. Cleverly balanced on her heels, she could make her skirt and petticoats sway, in a time which might have provoked, if it had sounded less austere. Else Godbold was ever so impressive, provided her younger sisters were not around. Now, when she had banged the shed door, because that was the only way to shut it, and kicked off her shoes, because she always felt happier without, she went up close to her mother, and said, "Mum, I ought to tell you, I just seen Dad." Her breath was burning, not to say dramatic. "Ah," replied the mother, slowly, not altogether rousing herself. For Mrs Godbold never tired of examining her eldest, and now that the lipstick was all but eaten off, and Else looking warm, yet dewy, the woman saw the hedges rise again in front of her, in which were all the small secret flowers, and bright berries, with over them the loads of blossom, or pretty fruit. "Yes"-she cleared her throat to continue-"your dad went out not so very long ago." "And is drunk as sin," hissed Else, "already!" Because in Godbolds' shed, it would have been silly, everybody knew, to mince matters at all. Mrs Godbold compressed her nostrils in a certain way she had. "He was coming from Fixer Jensen's." The messenger refused to relent. "He will likely be catching the bus," suggested Mrs God-bold. "Your father was not in the best of tempers. He will almost certain make for the city. Oh, dear! And in his work things, too!" "Not him!" said Else, and now she did hesitate, for one who had learnt that time is not to waste. She did go red, and incline a little, as if she would have touched their mother. "Not him!" she repeated. "Dad," she said, "was making for Khalils'!" Then Else began quite suddenly to cry. So natural a noise, it sounded worse, and that such a secretarial young lady should act like any little girl. Mrs Godbold had to get up, no longer so careful of her ribs. "To Khalils'," she said. "From Fixer Jensen's." The youngest of the children understood their father had fallen from a low level to perhaps the very depths of the pit. And Else heaving and sobbing like that, hot and red, in her business dress. Several others saw fit to join her. But they did not know how to share her shame. "Let me see now," said the mother, really rather confused, when she could least afford to be. "You will attend to the mutton, Kate. And don't forget there's cabbage to warm. Else! Else! This house is too small for having the hysterics in. Grace, keep an eye on Baby. Whatever is she doing with that nasty-looking nail?" Although it was warm, even sultry, Mrs Godbold put on her coat, for decency's sake, and for moral support, her black, better hat. To everybody, her preparations appeared most awful. "I am going out now," she announced, "and may be a little while. I want you girls to behave, as you can, I know. Else! Else! You will see to it, won't you, when you have pulled yourself together?" Else made some sort of sound out of her blurry face. Before their mother was gone. Mrs Godbold went up the hill towards the road, along the track which all of them had helped to wear deep. A blunderer by nature, she was fair game for blackberry bushes, but would tear free, to blunder on, because she was meant to get there, by pushing the darkness down if necessary. And dark it was by now. Once she slithered, and the long, green smell told her of cow-pats. Once she plunged her foot right up to the ankle in a rusty tin. Empty bottles cannoned off one another, while all the time that soft, yet prickly darkness was flicking in her face the names of Fixer Jensen and Mollie Khalil, with the result that the victim's knees were trembly as the stars. If she had lived less retired, she might have been less alarmed, but here she had undertaken an expedition to the dark side of the moon. Fixer Jensen was a joke, of course, even amongst those inhabitants sure enough of their own virtue to enjoy a paddle in the shallows of vice. "Better see Fixer," they used to say, and laugh, anywhere around Sarsa-parilla, if it was a matter of short-notice booze, or commodities that had disappeared, or some horse that had become a cert almost too late in the day. Fixer could fix anything, after picking his nose for a while, and denying his gifts. Who would not overlook a certain unloveliness of behaviour in one who served the community, and supported the crippled kiddies besides, and bred canaries for love? Yet there were a few humourless blobs and wowsers who failed to appreciate that obliging and, all in all, respectable cheat. Why, they asked, did the law not take steps to ensure that Jensen toed the line? Those persons could only have been ignorant or imbecile as well, for it was commonly known that two councillors, at least, accepted Fixer's services. Moreover, Mrs McFaggott, wife of the constable himself, was dependent on him for a ready bottle, and she, poor soul, without her grog, could not have turned a blind eye to the constable's activities. It was obvious, then, that Fixer Jensen's position was both necessary and legal, and that he would continue to oblige those who found themselves in a hole. Nuns had been seen arriving with ports, and little girls with dolls' prams, at Fixer Jensen's place, while almost any evening, after work, and before wives might claim their rights, the sound of manly voices, twined in jolly, extrovert song, could be heard blurting through the vines which helped to hold that bachelor establishment up. Most of this Mrs Godbold knew, by hearsay, if not experience, and now visualized a mess of husband, songful and soulful, bitter and generous at once, as ready to lay his head on a bosom as bash it open on a stone. She would have endured all this, and more, if only she could have caught him by the shirt as he stumbled glassy from Fixer Jensen's, but after Else's recent report, Tom had gone frying further fish, of rather a different kind. Mrs Godbold was almost tripped by her own thoughts at the corner of Alice Avenue, but kept her balance, and went on, turning her wedding-ring round and round, to achieve an assurance which hesitated to develop. She even whimpered a little to herself, something she would never have done by daylight, or in public. Only, in the streets of Sarsaparilla at night, she was less a wife and mother than a humour in a dark hat. In which state she arrived at Khalils'. And found, unexpectedly, discretion. If a piece of the gate did fall off as she opened it, that is always liable to happen, and if the house itself had dissolved, the windows remained an inextinguishable yellow, only partially eclipsed by a variety of materials: crimson plush, check horserug, brown holland, even, it seemed, a pair of old cotton drawers, that the owners had stretched, for privacy like. All was quiet, though, at Khalils'. So that when the visitor knocked, the sound of her knuckles rang out, and she sank a little lower in her shoes. Slippers approached, however, rather annoyed. "Waddaya want there?" called a voice through a tear in the screen door. "I am Mrs Godbold," the darkness answered. "And I have come for my husband. Who must be here." "Oh," said the voice-it was a woman's. "Mrs Godbold." Then there was a long pause, in which breathing and mosquitoes were heard, and someone was waiting for someone else to act. "Mrs Godbold," said the woman at last, through the tear. "Waddaya wanta come 'ere for!" "I came here for my husband," the visitor persisted. It was so simple. But the door was whining and creating. "No one," said the woman, "never came for their husband. Never." She was distressed, it seemed, by some infringement of etiquette. She did not know what to do, so the door creaked, and her slippers shifted grittily. "You are Mrs Khalil?" Mrs Godbold asked. "Yes," said the woman, after a pause. The sticky scent of jasmine hung low, touching strangers. Loving cats pressed against the skirt. "Aohh," protested Mrs Khalil, "whydya wanna go an' do this?" She could have been a decent sort. She was swinging the door, and her cats were at least fed. "You better come in," she said, "Mrs Godbold. I dunno watta do with yer. But come in. It's no faulta mine. Nobody never done this ter me before." Mrs Godbold coughed, because she did not know what to answer, and followed the slippers of her new acquaintance, slit slat slit slat, down a passage, into a yellow light and some confusion. "There we are, anyways," Mrs Khalil said, and smiled, showing a gold tooth. Mollie Khalil was not a bad sort at all. If she was Irish, whose fault was that? And such a long way back. There were those at Sarsaparilla who called her a loose woman, and those could have been right. But an honest woman, too. Doing her job like anyone else. Lived _de facto__ with a Syrian until the bugger shoved off, when she simply turned to, and set up whoring in a quiet way, in a small home behind the fire-station. She was no longer for the men herself, preferring comfort and a glass of gin. Besides, her girls, Lurleen and Janis, were both of an age, and there was a lady would come from Auburn, to help out when necessary. "We might as well be comfortable," Mrs Khalil now said. "Us women!" She laughed. "Take off your hat, dear, if you feel like it." But Mrs Godbold did not. Mrs Khalil was wearing a loose, imaginative gown, in which her flesh swam free, as she moved about what was evidently her kitchen. She said, "This is my youngest kid, Janis, Mrs Godbold." She touched her child's rather frizzy hair as if it had been something else, growing on its own. Janis was having a read of what her mother would have called a Book. She did not look up, but stuck out her jaw, and frowned. She was sitting in her shift. Her bare toes were still wriggly, like a little girl's. "Siddown, dear," said Mrs Khalil to her visitor, and moved something private from a chair. In a far corner there was a gentleman still to be explained, "This is Mr Hoggett," she said. "He is waiting." Mr Hoggett did not know what to say, but made a noise in the region of the singlet which contained his upper part. Mrs Godbold sat down upon an upright chair. Her errand of love remained somehow imperative, though by now she knew it could not be explained. Janis was turning the pages of her Book with a thumb which she licked scornfully. She was black, but not so black as not to know what she was worth. "Ackcherly," said Mrs Khalil, staring dreamy at the vision which represented her younger child, "we was having a sorta discussion when you come around and knocked. I said death is like anythin' else. It is wotcha care to make it, like. It is howya go orff. But Mr Hoggett and Janis still had to voice an opinion." Mr Hoggett had not bargained for anything of this. He turned his head sideways. He scratched his navel through the singlet. "Mr Hoggett's wife died," Mrs Khalil said, and smiled a kind of dreamy smile. " 'Ere! Cut it out!" Mr Hoggett had to protect his rights. "I didn't come 'ere for this. A man can stay at 'ome and listen to the wireless." He looked around, accusing, and what was most unfair, at Mrs Godbold, who was innocent. Then the bawd began to turn nasty. She struck several matches, but they broke. "I toldya, didn't I? I couldn'ta made it plainer. Janis is bespoke. Some men make me wanta reach!" But she got the cigarette alight at last. She began to breathe up smoke and to move about inside her clothes. Mr Hoggett, who was pretty big, simply sat, in his singlet, expressing himself with his belly. He might have expanded further if Mrs Khalil's kitchen had not filled up already, with dishes, and baskets, and piles of women's underclothes, and cats, and an old gas stove with a glass face and mutton fat inside. "Excuse us, dear, if business will raise its head," Mrs Khalil apologized to Mrs Godbold. The latter smiled, because she felt she ought. But the expression did not fit her face. It drifted there, out of someone else's situation. The chair on which she sat was so upright, the flesh itself could not upholster it. Or, at least, she must see to that. At the same time, there was a great deal she did not understand. It left her looking rather sad. "I could wait outside," presently she said. For her intentions, if they had ever formed, had finally grown paralysed. "Oh dear, no!" protested Mrs Khalil. "The night air does no one any good." So Mrs Godbold's statue was not moved from off its chair, and just as she was puzzled by her own position, the sculptor's purpose remained obscure to the beholder. In the kitchen's fearful fug, forms had swelled. For one thing, Mr Hoggett had expended a good deal of emotion. Now, when he suddenly laughed, right the way up his gums, it was perhaps entitlement. He slapped his opulent thigh, and looked across at Janis, and asked, "Havin' a nice read, love?" "Nao," said Jam's. She had done her nails some time ago, and the stuff was flaking off. What she read, following it with a finger, was obviously of grave substance. "There!" she cried. "Mumma, I toldya! Thursday is no good. We are under the influence of Saturn. See?" She slammed the Book together then. "Oh, gee!" she said. She went and threw the window up, so that she let in the moon and a scent of jasmine. A white, sticky stream of night came pouring in, together with a grey cat of great persistence. "Gee," said Janis, "I wish I could make somethink happen!" "That is somethink I would never dare wish for, " asserted her mother. And blew a trumpet of smoke from her nostrils. In the house behind, voices were laid together in the wooden boxes. They would rasp like sandpaper at times, or lie against one another like kid gloves. Mrs Godbold listened to the minutes. She held up her chin. In spite of the aggressively electric light, the side of her face closest to the window had been very faintly moon-washed. It was only just visible, one paler splash. Suddenly she bent down, for something to do, it could have been, and got possession of the smoky cat. She laid it along her cheek, and asked, "What are you after, eh?" So softly. But it was heard. Mrs Khalil nearly bust herself. She answered, "Love, I expect. Like anybody else." And Mrs Godbold had to see that this was true. That was perhaps the dreadful part. Now she really did understand, she thought, almost everything, and only prayed she would not be corrupted by her own knowledge. The chair creaked on which Mr Hoggett sat. He was very heavy. And hair bursting out of his body. "I would like to go away, somewhere on a train," Janis said, and turned quick. "Mumma," she said, "let me have me dress. Go on!" she coaxed. "I gotta go out. Anywheres." "You know what was agreed," the mother replied. The girl began to protest and twist. She was very pretty underneath her shift. In the dream in which she sat, and from which her marble must never be allowed to stir, Mrs Godbold could feel the drops of jasmine trickling down. She began, for protection, to think of her own home, or shed, and the white surface of the ironing-table, cleaner than moonlight, not to say more honest, with the bowl from which she sprinkled the clothes. She must pin her mind on all such flat surfaces and safe objects, not on her husband; he was the weakest side of her. So she fixed her eyes on the floor of Mrs Khalil's kitchen, on a harlequin lino, where much had been trodden in. The moon has touched her up, Mrs Khalil saw, and for a moment the bawd fell quite genuinely in love with that strong but innocent throat, although, mind you, she was sick of men and women, their hot breath, their double-talk, their slack bodies, and worst of all, their urgent ones. She liked best to lay around with the Sunday papers, a cat against her kidneys. Mrs Godbold paddled her hand in the grey cat's very nearly contented fur. She no longer blamed her husband, altogether. She blamed herself for understanding. She might have left, indeed, if she had been able to withdraw her feet. But the moonlight lay in sticky pools, even where invisible, smelling of jasmine, and a man's stale body. Then there was such a to-do, the wooden house was all but knocked sideways, "Don't tell me!" cried Mrs Khalil. "It is that bloody abo again!" "Arrr, Mumma!" Janis had to draw the line at that. "Wot abo?" Mr Hoggett was quick to ask. As if they had not stalled on him enough. "The only one. Our pet one," moaned Mrs Khalil. "Send it orff, and it will turn up again like washin' day." "Arr, Mumma, no!" Janis could have had the belly-ache. "Is it 'im?" Mr Hoggett was fairly running sweat. But nobody listened to that gentleman now. For the screen door was screaming painfully. The boards of the violated house were groaning and recoiling. He came in. He had a purple bruise where he had fallen on his yellow forehead, somewhere or other. He could not use his body by now, but was directed by a superior will. "You dirty, drunken bastard!" shouted Mrs Khalil. "Didn't I tellya we was not accepting any further visits?" He stood, and a smile possessed him. The bawd would have liked to deliver a piece on blacks, but remembered dimly she had been married to one in all but writing. "This is no visit. This is a mission," announced the abo. So surprisingly that Mrs Godbold looked up. She had been half determined to keep her eyes fixed firmly on the lino, in case she might have to witness an indignity which she would not be strong enough to prevent. "A mission?" shouted Mrs Khalil. "Wot sorta mission, I would liketa know?" "A mission of love," replied the abo. And began to laugh happily. "Love!" cried Mrs Khalil. "You got ideas in yer head. I'm tellin' you! This is a decent place. No love for blacks!" Janis had grown giggly. She was biting the red stuff off of her nails, and scratching herself. The black continued to laugh for a little, because he had not yet run down, and because laughter disposed him to resist the roomful of fluctuating furniture. Then he became grave. He said, "Okay, Mrs Khalil. I will sing and dance for you instead. "If you will allow me," he added, very reasonable. "And even if you cut up rough. Because I am compelled to." Many of the words were borrowed, but those could have been the cheaper ones. A certain gravely cultivated tone and assembly of educated phrases were what, it seemed, came natural to him. Even as he rocked, even as his thick tongue tripped over a word here and there, as his fiery breath threatened to burn him up, or he righted himself on the furniture, his eyes were fixed obsessively on some distant standard of honesty and precision. He would never quite lose sight of that-he made it clear-and it was what infuriated some of his audience most. Mr Hoggett, for instance, while affecting the greatest disgust, both for a moral situation, and for the obvious signs of vomit on the abo's pants, was most enraged by a tone of voice, and words that he himself would never have dared use. "Where did 'e learn it, eh?" he asked. "This one beats the band. So much play-actin', and dawg!" The black man, who was conscientiously preparing the attitude and frame of mind necessary for his act, paused enough to answer, in a voice that was as long, and straight, and sober as a stick, "I owe everything to the Reverend Timothy Cal-deron, and his sister, Mrs Pask." "Waddaya know!" exploded Mrs Khalil. She could not help but laugh, although she had decided on no account to do so. The blackfellow, who had at last succeeded in reconciling attitude with balance, now began to sing: "Hi digger, hi digger, My uncle is bigger Than my father, But not as big as Friday night. Friday is the big shivoo, When the swells begin to swell, And poor Mother has her doubts. Hi digger, hi digger, The moon has a trigger, Which shoots the buggers down, Whether they want to be hit, Or to pro-cras-tin-ate…" "Go easy!" interrupted Mrs Khalil. "I don't allow language in my place. Not from clients. If I'm forced ter use a word meself, it's because I got nowhere else ter go." "Why don't they lock 'im up?" Mr Hoggett complained. "Why?" asked Mrs Khalil, and answered it easy. "Cos the constable 'imself is in the front room, as always, with my Lurleen." By this time the black, who had started in a lazy, loving way, only lolling and lurching, as he sowed seed gently with his hands, or took out his heart to present to the different members of the audience, had begun to grow congested. He was darkening over, purpling even. His sandshoes began to beat a faster time. Short, stabbing gestures were aimed, not at another, but inward, rather, at his own breast. He stamped, and sang faster: "Hi digger, hi digger, Nail it! Nail it! Nail the difference till it bleeds! It's the difference, it's the difference That will bleed the best. Poppies are red, and Crimson Ramb-lers, But men are reddest When they bleed. Let 'em! Let 'em! Le-ehtt…" So he sang, and stamped, and stamped on a cat or two, which yowled in their turn. Baskets fell, of lingerie, which the sun had hardened into slabs of salt fish. As the abo jumped and raised hell, Mollie Khalil appeared to have started jumping too, or at least her breasts were boiling inside the floral gown. "Catch 'old of 'im, willya, please! Someone! Mr Hoggett, be a gentleman!" She had revived herself somewhat, with something, to cope with a situation, and now was holding her side hair, so that the sleeves had fallen back, from rather moister, black-and-whitest armpits. "Not me!" said her client, though. "I came 'ere for a purpose. Not for a bloody rough-'ouse." "But the constable!" she had to plead. "He will disturb the constable." "Okay for Daisy…" sang the abo. He was stamping mad. And cutting wood. Or breaking sticks. "Okay for Mrs McWhirter…" the abo sang, and stamped."… and Constable O'Fickle, And Brighta Lamps, To see with, To see see see, And be with…." Just then Lurleen came in. At one moment, where the shambles of sound fell back, leaving a gulf to be filled, her bare feet were heard squelching over lino. Lurleen was a good bit riper than her sister. She suggested bananas turning black. She was rather messed up. She had the bruised-eyelid look, and some rather dirty pink ribbons just succeeded in keeping the slip attached to her sonsy shoulders. "I have had it!" she said. "That man has one single thought." "Waddaya expect? Latin thrown in?" "No, but conversation. There's some tell about their wives. That's the best kind. You can put the screw on them." "Did he pay?" the bawd asked. "Don't tell me! He said to chalk it up!" she said. "I am hungry. What is in the fridge, Mum?" Lurleen asked, but did not bother about an answer. She went to the fridge and began to eat a sausage, which cold and fat had mottled blue. "I gotta get Mantovani," she said, and started twiddling the knob. "Gee, not Mantovani!" Janis hoped. She herself felt the necessity to writhe, and was threatened instead with sticking-plaster. Lurleen twiddled the knob. Except for a couple of bruises, she was really honey-coloured. But now somebody was coming in. "Waddaya know, Fixer?" Mr Hoggett laughed. He was enjoying it at last. The little one had decided to plaster herself against his ribs. Inside his cotton singlet, his belly was jumping to answer her. "The sun rose over the woolshed, The coolabahs stood in a row. My mother sat in the cow-paddock, And heard the Reverend come…." the abo recited; he no longer felt inclined to sing, and had retreated far from the present room. "Arr, Mr Jensen," called the bawd, from the springs of a rusty lounge, where she had extended herself after further revival, "fix me this abo bloke," she invited, "and you are a better man than ever I thought!" But Fixer Jensen, who was tall, thin, putty-coloured, with his wrinkles pricked out in little black dots, stood and picked his nose as usual. He needed, of course, to get inspired. He looked at Mrs Godbold. Not that he knew her. But he had not expected exactly to meet a statue in a room. There one sat. Fixer said, "Waddaya got 'ere? A party?" Then he began to laugh. "It only needs the constable!" he laughed. Lurleen pouted. "The constable has gone home," she advised, and was stroking herself to the accompaniment of music, and revolving, in her pink slip. "Business good, eh?" Fixer asked. "Not since the Heyetalian cow set up," Mrs Khalil snapped. "Business got donged on the head." Suddenly the abo fell down. He lay on the harlequin lino. He was very quiet, and a little gusher of purple blood had spurted from his mouth. "That man is sick," said Mrs Khalil, from much farther than the droopy lounge. "I am not surprised!" laughed Fixer Jensen. "In such a house!" "Mr Jensen, _please__!" laughed the owner. "But he is pretty sick," she said, serious, because it could happen to herself-all the things she had read about; she began to push her breasts around. The abo lay on the harlequin lino. Mrs Godbold, who had been growing from just that spot for the hours of several years, produced a handkerchief which she had down the front of her dress, and stooped, and wiped the blood away. "You should go home," she said, altering her voice, although it was some time since she had used it. "Where do y ou live?" "Along the river at the parson's," he answered. But collected himself. "What do you mean? Now?" "Of course," she said, gently wiping, speaking for themselves alone. "Why, in Barranugli. I got a room with Mrs Noonan, at the end of Smith Street." "Are you comfortable?" she asked. "At home, I mean." As if he was a human being. He worked his head about on the lino. He could not answer. The music had stuck its sticky strips over all the other faces, as if they might break, without it, at any time. Some of them were sleepy. Some were soothed. Still, a hammer could have broken any of them. "What is your name?" Mrs Godbold asked. He did not seem to hear that. He was looking, it was difficult to say, whether at or beyond the gentle woman in the black hat. He held his arm across half his face, not to protect, rather, to see better. He said, "That is how I want it. The faces must be half turned away, but you still gotta understand what is in the part that is hidden. Now I think I see. I will get it all in time." In a voice so oblivious and convinced that Ruth Joyner was again sitting in the cathedral of her home town, watching the scaffolding of music as it was erected, herself taking part in the exquisitely complicated operation. Nor had she heard a voice issue with such certainty and authority out of any mouth since the strange gentleman referred to that same music. Now it was the abo on Mrs Khalil's floor. He was saying, she began again to hear, "When the frosts were over, the Reverend Calderon used to take us down along the river, and Mrs Pask would bring a basket. We used to picnic on the banks. But they would soon be wondering why they had come. I could see that all right. Mrs Pask would begin to remember daffodils. I could see through anything on those days in early spring. I used to roam around on my own when I got tired of sitting with the whites. I would look into holes in the earth. I would feel the real leaves again. Once I came across a nest of red hornets. Hahhh!" He laughed. "I soon shot off, like I had found wings myself! And seven red-hot needles in me!" When he had finished laughing, he added, "Funny I went and remembered that." "It was because you was happiest then," she suggested. "That is not what you remember clearest/' he insisted with some vehemence. "It is the other things." "I suppose _so__." Because she wished to encourage peace of mind, she accepted what she knew, for herself at least, to be only a half-truth. "Still," she offered, tentatively, "it is the winters I can remember best at Home. Because we children were happiest then. We were more dependent on one another. The other seasons we were running in all directions. Seeing and finding things for ourselves. In winter we held hands, and walked together along the hard roads. I can still hear them ringing." Her eyes shone. "Or we huddled up together, against the fire, to eat chestnuts, and tell tales. We loved one another most in winter. There was nothing to come between us." Such a commotion had broken out in the roomful of music and people. It was something to do with Mrs KhaliPs Janis, whom Mr Hoggett wanted bad. He was finally convinced that young flesh must be the only nostrum. But Mrs Khalil herself was of quite an opposite opinion. "Over my body!" she screamed. And could have been shaking it to show. "This ain't no concern of yours," Mr Hoggett was shouting. "Whose else, I'd liketa know?" Fixer Jensen, in his putty-coloured hat with the pulled-down brim, was laughing his head off. He could afford to; nobody had ever known Fixer run a temperature. But the little one was possessed by a far subtler kind of detachment. She suddenly sprang, like a cat, and stuck the point of her tongue in Mr Hoggett's ear. She was almost diabolical in her attitude to love matters. She would jump, and swerve, in her cat's games, and at a certain juncture, leaped on a chair, which collapsed rottenly under her. She became screaming mad then. Everybody was too well occupied to disturb the abo and the laundress, who kept to their island, not exactly watching, for they had their thoughts. "Are you a Christian?" Mrs Godbold asked quickly to get it over. Even so, she was mortified, knowing that the word did not represent what it was intended to. "No," he replied. "I was educated up to it. But gave it away. Pretty early on, in fact. When I found I could do better. I mean," he mumbled, "a man must make use of what he has. There is no point in putting on a pair of boots to walk to town, if you can do it better in your bare feet." She smiled at that. It was true, though, and of her own clumsy tongue, as opposed to her skill in passing the iron over the long strips of fresh, fuming, glistening sheets. "Yes." She smiled, once more beautiful; her skin was like fresh pudding-crust. But he coughed. Then she dabbed again with her handkerchief at the corner of his mouth. This, perhaps, was her work of art, her act of devotion. All the commotion of life, though, continued tumbling in their ears: the ladies protesting their dignity, the gentlemen calling for their rights. Doors were opening, too. So Mrs Godbold looked at the ball of her handkerchief. Soon, she realized, it would be her turn to bleed. A woman had come, or marched into the room. Her skin was the greyer for flesh-colour chenille, from which her arms hung down, with veins in them, and a wrist-watch on a brass chain. "I am shook right out," she announced. "I am gunna catch the bus." She was no longer distinctive in any way. She could have been a splinter, rather sharp. "There is Mr Hoggett," indicated the desperate bawd. "He has waited all this time." But the other was clearing her throat. "Tell 'im I got a cold. Tell 'im to stuff 'imself/' she said. She was the lady from Auburn, and was known as Mrs Johnno. Mrs Khalil near as anything threw a fit. All the blows she was fated to receive in rendering service to mankind. "Some women are that low," she complained, "you can't wonder at the men." And looked to Mrs Godbold for support. Which the latter could no longer give. She had stood up. She did smile, as if to acknowledge guilt in ignoring a request. But must hoard her resources carefully. The room had shrunk. For there was Tom now. Tom Godbold had followed in Mrs Johnno's tracks, and was offering the bawd a note in payment. His wife would have paid more, and torn off a pretty little brooch besides, if she had felt it might redeem. She would have taken him by the hand, and they would have run up the hill together, through the bush, over the breaking sticks, to reach the lights. Instead, when the note had been crumpled up and pocketed, Tom Godbold crossed over to his wife, and said, "You done a lot to show me up, Ruth, in our time, but you just about finished me this go." She was standing before him on her sleeping legs, in her clumsy hat and long, serviceable overcoat. Only a membrane was stretched between her feelings and exposure. He might have kicked her, as in the past, and it would have been a kindness. "Come on," he said. "I got what I wanted. You're the one that's missed out." As they left, the whores, it appeared, were finishing their business. The little one had disappeared. The window was blacker than before, whiter where the jasmine held the frame in its tender grip. Whether Mr Hoggett would allow himself to be appeased might never be known now. He was, at least, accepting refreshment from a bottle which had once contained something else. It made his breath come sharp and quick. While Mrs Khalil continued to deplore the contingencies of life, and Mrs Johnno's toenails created havoc in the tunnels of her stockings as her feet entered them. Godbolds were going out, and away. She followed him as a matter of course. The bush smelled of the leaves they bruised in stumbling. It had rained a little. It was fresh. When they stood beneath a lamp, in a half-made street, on the edge of Sarsaparilla, she saw that the flesh had quite shrivelled from Tom's skull. "I was wrong, Tom," she said. "I know. I _am__ wrong. There!" she said, and made a last attempt to convince him with her hand. "I will follow you to hell if need be." Tom Godbold did not wait to see whether he was strong enough to suffer the full force of his wife's love. "You won't need to follow me no further," he said, and began to pick his way between the heaps of blue-metal. By his deliberate concentration, he appeared, if anything, less his own master. More remorseless than the influence of drink, age seemed also to have mounted on his shoulders, and to hold the reins. So his wife realized, as she watched, there was nothing more she could do for him, and that she herself must accept to be reduced by half. Several years later, summoned to assume the responsibility of kin, she recovered the token of her lost half. On that occasion they allowed her to sit beside a bed, and observe, beneath a thin blanket, stained by the piss and pus of other dying men, what, they told her, was Tom Godbold. Of the husband she had known before disease and indulgence carried him off, nothing lived without the assistance of memory. "No more than half an hour ago," the kind sister told. "After a boiled egg. He enjoyed his food up to the last. He spoke about you." The wife of the man who had just died did not dare inquire for details of those dying remarks. Besides, the sister was busy. She had looked out between the pleated screens at several giggly girls who were washing the bodies of the living far too lingeringly. The sister frowned, and wondered how she might dispose discreetly of the bereaved. Then did, without further ceremony. She could not endure to watch dereliction of duty. The widow who remained behind in her little cell of white screens was ever so well controlled. Or it could have been that she had not cared about her husband. In any case, when at last a glossy young probationer peeped in, the person was gone. She had given instructions, however, downstairs. Mrs Godbold left Tom embedded in the centre of the great square building which a recent coat of shiny paint caused to glimmer, appropriately, like a block of ice. She walked a little. The acid of light was poured at nightfall into the city, to eat redundant faces. Yet, she survived. She walked, in the kind of clothes which, early in life, people had grown to expect of her, which no one would ever notice, except in amusement or contempt, and which would only alter when they fitted her out finally. Mrs Godbold walked by the greenish light of early darkness. A single tram spat violet sparks into the tunnel of brown flannel. Barely clinging to its curve, its metal screeched anachronism. But it was only as she waited at a crossing, watching the stream churn past, that dismay overtook Mrs Godbold, and she began to cry. It seemed as if the group of figures huddled on the bank was ignored not so much by the traffic as by the strong, undeviating flood of time. There they waited, the pale souls, dipping a toe timidly, again retreating, secretly relieved to find their fellows caught in a similar situation, or worse, for here was one who could not conceal her suffering. The large woman was simply standing and crying, the tears running out at her eyes and down her pudding-coloured face. It was at first fascinating, but became disturbing to the other souls-in-waiting. They seldom enjoyed the luxury of watching the self-exposure of others. Yet, this was a crying in no way convulsed. Soft and steady, it streamed out of the holes of the anonymous woman's eyes. It was, it seemed, the pure abstraction of gentle grief. The truth of the matter was: Mrs Godbold's self was by now dead, so she could not cry for the part of her which lay in the keeping of the husband she had just left. She cried, rather, for the condition of men, for all those she had loved, burningly, or at a respectful distance, from her father, seated at his bench in his prison of flesh, and her own brood of puzzled little girls, for her former mistress, always clutching at the hem and finding it come away in her hand, for her fellow initiates, the madwoman and the Jew of Sarsaparilla, even for the blackfellow she had met at Mrs Khalil's, and then never again, unless by common agreement in her thoughts and dreams. She cried, finally, for the people beside her in the street, whose doubts she would never dissolve in words, but understood, perhaps, from those she had experienced. Then, suddenly, the people waiting at the crossing leaped forward in one surge, and Mrs Godbold was carried with them. How the others were hurrying to resume their always importunate lives. But the woman in the black hat drifted when she was not pushed. For the first moment in her life, and no doubt only briefly, she remained above and impervious to the stream of time. So she coasted along for a little after she had reached the opposite side. Although her tears were all run, her eyes still glittered in the distance of their sockets. Fingers of green and crimson neon grappled for possession of her ordinarily suety face, almost as if it had been a prize, and at moments the strife between light and darkness wrung out a royal purple, which drenched the slow figure in black.