Riders in the Chariot

10

THAT SUMMER the structure of Xanadu, which had already entered into a conspiracy with nature, opened still farther. Creatures were admitted that had never been inside before, and what had hitherto appeared to be a curtain, loosely woven of light and leaves, was, in fact, seen to be a wall. That which had been hung for privacy, might in the end, it now seemed, stand solider than the substance of stone and mortar which it had been its duty to conceal. One Tuesday afternoon, while Mrs Jolley was gone on an errand, of which the end was terribly suspicious, and while Miss Hare herself was walking through the great rooms, for no other purpose than to associate with the many objects and images with which they and her memory were stuffed full, the brindled woman thought she had begun to hear a sound. From where she listened it was faint but sure, although whether it was coming from a great depth, or horizontal distance, it was quite impossible to tell. It was all around and under her: the grey sound that is given out by tunnels, and the mouths of elephants, and sleepers turning in a dream, and earth falling in a veil from a considerable height. As soon as Miss Hare began to suspect, she held her fingers in her ears. As if that might stop it. Though she knew it would not. For she, too, was rocking and trembling. She had always imagined that, when it happened, it would come as a blast of trumpets, or the shudder of a bronze gong, with herself the core of the vibrating metal. But here it was, little more than a sighing of dust, and at the end, the sound of a large, but unmistakable bone which had given way under pressure. (She had always cried and protested when men were breaking the necks of rabbits, as she waited for the final sound of cracking.) Then it was over. And she had survived. Perhaps Xanadu had not yet fallen. At once Miss Hare began to run through her house to discover to what extent it had suffered. She was quite demented. Although shadow prevailed in the shuttered rooms, a yellow, rubbery light would belly suddenly out through the glass panels of some of the doors, and her figure flickered fearfully. She was more than ever striped, brown, or red, with patches of a clown's white, as she ran to catch the proud spirit, that had fallen, that could still, she hoped, be falling from the height of the trapeze. She ran helter-skelter, and her stumpy, rather grubby fingers were stretched out, tighter than nets. But small. In the drawing-room she found the first serious evidence of damage-in the drawing-room in which ladies in openwork dresses had accepted tea in Lowestoft cups, and told stories of the voyage out, and dancers had rested between waltzes, on the worn step that leads to matrimony, and her parents had failed to escape each other by hiding behind objects of virtu. It was on the drawing-room side that the foundations of Xanadu were now undeniably, visibly sunk. Where there had been a fissure before, where no more than a branch had been able to finger its way inside, a whole victorious segment of light had replaced the solid plaster and stone. Leaves were plapping and hesitating, advancing and retreating, in whispers and explosions of green. Walls were revealed mottled with chlorosis. The scurf of moss had fallen from an oaken shoulder onto the rags of Italian damask. And dust, dust. There was a newer kind, the colour of familiar biscuit, yet smelling of concealment and age. Now spilled freshly out. It lay on the boards together with the grey domestic dust, a thin bed for some future crumbling of stone. Miss Hare stood looking. Then she picked up a fragment of her house, just about the size of a fist, and threw it at a malachite urn which had been her parents' pride. The moment of impact, however, was somewhat disappointing. The sound it produced was even dull: almost that of a stone striking on composition, or wood. Yet, the urn had been genuinely mineral-so cold, and dense, and unresponsive-her skin had always assured her as a child, as well as on lonely occasions in after life. Her mouth, which was working to solve, suddenly subsided on the teeth. All problems had always given way to birds, and here were several, aimed practically at her. Released from the tapestry of light and leaves, the birds whirred and wheeled into life inside the burst drawing-room. What kind, Miss Hare could not have told; names were not of interest. But the plump, shiny, maculated birds, neither black nor grey, but of a common bird colour, were familiar as her own instinct for air and twigs. And one bird touched her deeply, clinging clumsily to a cornice. Confusion had robbed it of its grace, making it a blunt thing, of ruffled gills. From far below, the woman willed the frightened creature back into its element, where the reunited formation completed a figure to the approving motions of her head. She watched them quiver for an instant in flight, wired, it appeared, for inclusion in the museum of her mind. But they were gone, of course. She was left with the shimmer of brocaded light that hung upon the rent in the wall. So Miss Hare, too, went at last, nodding her papier-mâche head. She became her most clumsily obscene whenever she ceased to control her own movements, as now, when she was moved, rather, through the wretched house, as much her doom as her property. So she loomed on the stairs, and in unaccountable passages. Pierced by the anxious brooches that barely held the skin together, the folds of her throat were choking her. Her ankles were elephantine in their plodding. She trailed a sad bladder, filled with the heaviest, coldest sand. Mrs Jolley, when she returned, found her employer occupied with the jigsaw pieces of a bathroom floor. "This is where you are!" the housekeeper exclaimed, as if it had not been obvious. She was angry, but intended to be cold and firm. Miss Hare also was trusting to appearance to hide her true state, of despondency and fear. At least she had the advantage of being seated on the floor, beneath her protective wicker hat. "Why shouldn't I be here?" she answered calmly. "Or there? Or anywhere?" "I have never seen this room before," complained Mrs Jolley, inspecting her surroundings. Miss Hare produced a key: black, of elegant design. "There was no reason why you should have. This was my parents' bathroom. I had almost forgotten about it myself. It was considered very lovely. Italian workmen came to make it." "Gingerbread!" Mrs Jolley snorted. "Give me modern plumbing!" "Oh, plumbing!" said Miss Hare. "That is a different matter." She had begun to feel tired. "Everyone will have plumbing soon. They will be flushed right out." "What is that thing?" Mrs Jolley asked, and pointed with her toe at the part of the floor with which her employer had been occupied. "I would prefer not to say," Miss Hare replied. Then Mrs Jolley laughed. Because she knew. "It is a goat," she said, perverting the word softly in her mouth. "What a decoration for a person's bathroom! A black goat! looking at you!" "No," said Miss Hare, with a firm movement of her jaw, "it would not appeal to you. Goats are perhaps the animals which see the truth most clearly." Mrs Jolley could not control her irritation. In fact, where her toe struck the mosaic, there was a rush of loose tesserae across the uneven surface of the floor. "Oh, I know!" she cried. "You have to throw up at me, don't you, on account of that old goat of yours. The one that got burnt. That you told me of. And nobody to blame." Miss Hare was soothing the scattered tesserae with her freckled hand. "Have you ever seen an armadillo?" she asked. "No." Mrs Jolley was very angry. "Perhaps you have, though, and don't know it!" Miss Hare laughed. "What," asked Mrs Jolley, "is an armerdiller?" "It is an animal which, I believe, is practically invulnerable. It _can__ be _killed__, of course. Anything can be _killed__. Because I once saw an armadillo that somebody had made into a basket." Then she looked up at her companion with such an expression that the latter attempted afterwards to describe it to Mrs Flack. "I know nothing about any such things," the housekeeper said rather primly. "And don't like saucy answers, particularly from those who I have obliged." Miss Hare was filling her pockets with the fragments of mosaic. "Have you engaged a strong boy to carry your box?" she asked. "Then there is no need to tell you!" said Mrs Jolley. But was taken aback. And, as a lady of principle, had to defend herself. "Yes," she said. "I have decided to terminate my service. You cannot expect me," she said, "to risk my neck in a house that is falling down." "You have seen it, then? The drawing-room?" "I'll say I have!" "Perhaps even foresaw-to have made your arrangements in advance, on the very afternoon!" Miss Hare laughed. Momentarily she seemed to have recovered her balance. The pocketfuls of tesserae rattled jollily when slapped. She had never cared for sweets, but would often suck a smooth pebble. "I don't propose to become involved in arguments," Mrs Jolley announced. "I am giving notice. That is all. Though have never done so in a bathroom. That is"-she stumbled-"I mean to say I have never been compelled to discuss matters of importance in any sort of a convenience." Miss Hare began to scramble up. "You will go, I suppose, to Mrs Flack." Mrs Jolley blushed. "For the time being," she admitted. "For life, I expect," Miss Hare murmured. Mrs Jolley hesitated. "It is very comfortable," she said. But did falter slightly. "What makes you say," she asked, "you speak as if"-she raised her voice-"as if I was not my own mistress." Miss Hare, who had arranged her crumpled skirt, was looking, not at Mrs Jolley. "There is a point," she said, "where we do not, cannot move any farther. There is a point at which there is no point. Who knows, perhaps you have reached it. And your friend is so kind. And her eiderdown, you say, is pale blue." "But it may suit me to move," Mrs Jolley insisted, stretching her neck. "You will see no more in other parts-I know because they took me as a girl-than you will from Mrs Flack's. And through Mrs Flack's eyes. The two of you will sit in Mrs Flack's _lounge__, watching us behave. Even directing us." "Have you met her?" "No. But I know her." "You have seen her at the post-office, perhaps?" "Not to my knowledge," Miss Hare replied. "I have seen her in the undergrowth. But you do not go there, of course. Amongst the black sods of rotting leaves. And in the ruins of the little shed in which my poor goat got burnt up. And in my father's eyes. All bad things have a family resemblance, Mrs Jolley, and are easily recognizable. I would recognize Mrs Flack however often she changed her hat. I can smell her when you do not mention her by name." Mrs Jolley had begun by now to leave the bathroom. Although she had arranged for her belongings to be fetched, she had till the following day to put in. If only she could think of some temporary occupation of a known and mechanical kind. In her distraction, she was reiterating, "Mad! Mad!" To preserve her own sanity. "A sad, bad word." Miss Hare sighed. They were walking down the passages in single file. "Because it leaves out half," she added. They were always walking, with Mrs Jolley at the head, with a careful nonchalance, in case the runners should slip from under them. "All right, then," Mrs Jolley gasped. "You can let me alone, though. We could trot out words till the Judgment, and not get anywhere at all. I am going to my room, thank you." But Miss Hare could not tear herself away. She was not so good that she was not fascinated by bad. If they had come across a dead baby lying on that window-sill, she would not have asked herself the reason why, before she had examined the little crimped fingers and limp-violet attitude. She would probably have touched it to see whether it felt of rubber. Only afterwards she would have realized that she, too, had escaped strangling by a miracle. But now they were walking and walking through the passages of Xanadu, and Mrs Jolley's behind was quaking visibly. It seemed as though her corset could do nothing more for her. "And so soft at times," Miss Hare meditated. And pursued. "Soft what?" Mrs Jolley's breath was sucked right in. She would not turn, though. "Eiderdowns," Miss Hare clattered. "Evil, evil eiderdowns!" Rounding a corner Mrs Jolley realized she had overshot the flight of stairs which led higher to her room. And here were the passages of Xanadu, endless before her. Almost at the same moment a pampas wand struck her on the mouth, from a console table, as they passed, and immediately she was turned to stone. But running, running. Her cold, stone legs must never stop. "If you must keep on about evil," she called back, her voice close to brass, or laughter, "I can remind you of some of the things that go on in this town, to say nothing of house. Or _orchard__!" She almost screeched, and her skirt too. While Miss Hare appeared to move on pads of kapok. Or else it was the dust from which the carpets were never free. "I am not surprised," Miss Hare gasped at last. "That you found out. One did expect." "And with a dirty Jew!" Miss Hare was red rage itself. She could not see for the sense of injustice which was rising green out of her. Towering in the perpendicular, it burst into a flower of sparks, like some obscene firework released from the dark of memory. "My _what__ Jew?" The words were choking. "Dirty? What is true, then? My kind man! My good! Then I am offal, offal! Green, putrefying, out of old, starved sheep. Worse, worse! Though not so bad as some. Offal is cleaner than dishonest women. What is lowest of all? You could tell me! Some women! Lower, even. Some women's shit!" So her memory spat, and the brown word plastered the accuser's back. Mrs Jolley, of course, could only stop her ears with the wax of unbelief. When she had opened them again, her white lips pissed back, "Who did the Jews crucify?" "The Jew!" Miss Hare panted. "I know that. Because Peg used to tell me. It was horrible. And blood running out of his hands, and down his poor side. I have never allowed myself to think about it." In the absence of what she might have kissed, she crammed her knuckles into her mouth. If all the windows had shattered, and the splinters entered her, she could have borne that. But just then, Mrs Jolley fell down. There was a little flight of two or three steps leading to a lower level, and from which a rod had worked loose. Mrs Jolley fell. _Crump__. Miss Hare was left standing on an edge. She looked down at her housekeeper, where the latter lay, a bundle of navy, on the carpet. The skirt had rucked up above the knees, the dimples of which looked white and very silly, for Mrs Jolley, apparently, wore her stockings neatly hoist at half-mast. Miss Hare could have gone on looking at the dimpled knees, but forced herself also to examine the face. The first dreadful, inky blue began slowly to drain away. It left a blank, though trembly blotting-paper. Mrs Jolley was gasping now. The tears ran out of her eyes, although she was not crying. "Oh, dear!" she gasped. "I could have broken something. And perhaps have." "No," said Miss Hare. "You are too well protected. And came down all of a piece." Mrs Jolley remembered, and her hate returned. "You will pay a pretty penny if I have!" she announced as hopefully as she was able. Miss Hare touched with the tip of her toe. "No," she said. "Nothing broken." But she was a little bit frightened. Mrs Jolley moved, and more, she began to heave. She was whimpering windily, but cautiously. "This is what happens to a mother forced by circumstances to live separated from her family. Oh, dear!" But although she had fallen smack, she got almost as quickly up. It was her knees that drove her, her blue-and-white, milky knees. She got up, and was wrapping her skirt closer round them, as if there had been a draught blowing. When she raised her face, it was rather a delicate pink, wasted on Miss Hare. The two women stood facing each other with nothing but their dead passions lying between, nothing to protect them but the sound of their breathing. They could not endure it for very long, but turned, and walked in opposite directions, touching a curtain, a pampas duster, or leaf that had blown in. It was pretty obvious they had decided to pretend nothing had happened-at least for the time being. But, in this matter at least, Miss Hare did not succeed in keeping up the deception. Her blood would float the evidence back in sudden, sickening waves. She heard words like stones battering on her memory. She did not see her housekeeper again, except from a distance. The wages she left on a corner of the kitchen table, under a two-ounce weight, and presumably the amount was correct, for nobody ever complained. On the following afternoon the boy came for Mrs Jolley's belongings. There was such a chatter of relief, such a clatter of self-importance, as the owner ran to arrange, lock, direct. The boy had bony wrists, and swollen veins in his muscular arms. He paused for a moment in the hall, to get his breath and recover from the pressure of embarrassment. The lady had run back up the stairs, to fetch an umberella, she said. He had never set eyes on marble before, only in banks and old washstands. Nor did he dream much, or he might have realized, as he looked about him in the hall, that images and incidents do not depend on probability for life. He was trembling slightly, under the pearls of sweat, particularly after he had touched a square of satin which disintegrated in his hand. That made him breathe harder, out of his arched chest. And when, from another direction, there appeared, sudden like, the madwoman of Xanadu, and asked him to do her the favour, in strictest confidence, of delivering an urgent message to a friend. Miss Hare stood on her toes to make the mission more confidential still. Her throat was bursting with its urgency. Her lips fanned the words upward. The lad gathered she must see that Jew cove from Montebello Avenue, soon, soon, at soonest. He was not, on no account, to tell another soul. For the present, he would have been frightened to. Then Miss Hare handed her messenger a shilling, as she had seen her parents doing. And disappeared. For Mrs Jolley's voice was clearly announcing, in light-coloured accents, the return of Mrs Jolley. It was many a day since Miss Hare had run so fast. She ran and climbed to get there in time, almost breaking her knees open, climbing by handfuls of carpet when her toes missed a stair, climbing, and straining, and arriving at last in the little glass dome which had been her father's especial eyrie. Then, venturing out upon a parapet, she peered through a stone balustrade. Here she was, exalted above her late misery and terror. And there, there was Mrs Jolley, distorted by distance and the angle, into a squat navy figure. How her gay eye-veil gesticulated to the boy who laboured underneath her box, and a case hung from his right arm besides. The mauve veil clapped at a distance, like Mrs Jolley's own tongue extolling the morality of motherhood. Miss Hare's mouth opened, her throat distended. She spat once, and laughed to see it fall, wide, of course, curving in the wind, glittering in the sun. She could have sung for the deliriousness of height, the clarity of light. All hers. Until the stanched terrors came seeping back, dressed in the iridescence of slime. Frightful things were threatened, which the Jew, with his experience, might possibly avert. She, in her state of almost complete ignorance, could only undertake to suffer, enough, if necessary, for both of them. So her joy was turned to foreboding. The stone house rocked, and the trees which hid the brick homes of Sarsaparilla. She hung on to the balustrade, sweating at the knees as she tried to reconstruct in physical detail the expression of lovingkindness, to recall its even subtler abstract terms. That alone might save, if it were not obliterated first by conspiracy of evil minds. So she waited. Wherever she spent the rest of the afternoon, walking through her house, or in the garden-at least there was earth on her shoes, and on her scabby hands, and on her skirt a fringe of burrs-Miss Hare could not have mapped her course with any degree of accuracy. But the Jew did come. Late in the afternoon she realized he was walking towards her, through the long, treacly grass, out of the chocked garden. As he climbed the slope, it was not his face that he presented, but the top of his head, with its wings of difficult hair, grizzled, but still thick. Some might have described that hair as matted, and they would have been correct. He must, indeed, have set out immediately on arriving home. He was wearing a kind of boiler-suit which he could only have bought at an army disposal store, and which no doubt he wore to his work at the factory. The suit was too big, the stuff too dun, too coarse. It was chafing him, she began to see, around the neck. It was a skinny, scraggy neck. But she remembered this was an elderly man, who had suffered great privations, and who had been worn down still further by the accumulation of knowledge. So Miss Hare reassured herself, not without a tremor, holding up his frail elderliness against what she knew of the brutality of men. He continued to advance. Once or twice he stumbled, when the grass made loops for him to slip his ankles into, and as he lurched-it was inevitable in such circumstances-his great head tumbled and jerked on his shoulders like that of a human being. The mistress of Xanadu moistened her lips as she waited. She was so brittle herself, it was doubtful whether such another should be added to the collection. Perhaps that gave her just the extra courage needed to receive him as her mother might have, upon the steps. But her mother had enjoyed full possession of that social and economic faith on which the stone mansions are built, whereas in the daughter's worst dreams those foundations were already sunk; only her faith in light and leaves remained to hold the structure up. Whether the Jew would accept the house as reality or myth, depended not a little on whether a divine intuition, which she hoped, insisted, _knew__ him to possess, would inform mere human vision. Actually the Jew had raised his head. He was looking at her. She saw his face then, and he had not shaved, as some men did not, of course, preferring to tidy themselves at night. He was old and ravaged under the stubble. He was old, and green, of a pale, a livid soap-colour. He was hideous and old, the Jew. So that her own face crumpled, which she had been careful to spread over a framework of expectation. A gust of wind could have blown her, rattling, across the terrace. But unmercifully refrained. Then she realized that his eyes were expecting something of her. And she immediately remembered. She hurried down the steps, too quickly for anyone who had been restored suddenly to life-she might have taken a tumble-yet not quick enough for one who recognized that same lovingkindness which might redeem, not only those in whom its lamp stood, but all those who were threatened with darkness. What was oddest, though, the Jew appeared to rediscover something he had known and respected. His expression was so convinced, she was almost compelled to look behind her, in search of some more tangible reason. If she did not, it could have been because she had finally descended. She was standing beside him on the level ground, and the situation seemed to demand that exchange of flatnesses, biscuits rather than oxygen, by which people mostly exist. "Oh," she gasped, and began to crumble words, "I am so sorry. Such an inconvenience. Bringing you, I mean. Like this." "It is no inconvenience," he replied, in the strain that had been established. "It was only fortunate that Bob Tanner caught me so soon after I got off the bus." "Bob Tanner?" "The boy who gave the message." "Oh," she said, thoughtfully, "I did not know there was anyone called Tanner." She sank her chin in. If it had been evening, she might have done something with a fan-if she had had one. But there was only that old flamingo horror of her mother's, so hateful since Mrs Jolley had touched it, and provoked an incident. He was looking at her. He was waiting. But she remembered hearing it was vulgar and inept to bring people straight to the point. So she offered graciously, "I can see the journey has tired you. I insist that you come in. I shall make you rest for a little. You may like to tell me about your work." "It is the same," he said. "Oh, no," she replied, after careful consideration. "Nothing is ever the same." "You have not been engaged in boring a hole in a sheet of steel." "Why must you do just that?" It was time, she suspected, to lead him in. Their heels crunched as they turned on what had once been the gravel drive. Her occupation was making her feel kind and adult. "It is a discipline," he explained, "without which my mind might take its own authority for granted. As it did, in fact, in the days when it was allowed freedom. And grew arrogant. And in that arrogance was guilty of omissions." Miss Hare shivered, as if he had robbed her of her years. "I never could bear discipline. Governesses!" she complained. "It is fortunate I have not got what is called a mind." "You have an instinct." She smiled. She was quite proud. "Is that what it is?" she considered. "I do know a lot. About some things." They had mounted the terrace. "That light, for instance. Those two shiny leaves lying together on the twig. That sort of thing I know and understand. But will it do anybody any good? And your sitting and boring the silly old hole?" "Yes," he answered. "Eventually." They were standing together on the terrace. "It is not yet obvious," he said, "but will be made clear, how we are to use our knowledge, what link we provide in the chain of events." The hour sounded inside the house. The winding of that particular clock had been Mrs Jolley's last attempt to preserve continuity, such as she understood it, at Xanadu. The chiming reminded Miss Hare of her real purpose in sending for the Jew, so she began to wrap her hands in each other. She said, "I am here alone now. Which makes it easier to receive, and discuss. My housekeeper left me, you know, this afternoon. Before that, one never could be certain at what point she might burst into one's thoughts. She had no respect for the privacy of other people's minds. But was always opening, or looking out from behind curtains. Not that she _saw__! I do not think Mrs Jolley sees beyond texture-brick and plastic." Miss Hare had continued to lead her visitor, so that by now they had crossed the threshold, and were actually standing in the house. Out of the corner of her eye, the throbbing beauty of the hall, with its curved staircase and the fragments of a bird's nest, told her of her great courage in attempting to reveal the truth to a second person, even this Jew, after her experience with someone else. Of course the Jew had to look; he was also human. His head was turning on his scraggy neck. His nostrils, she saw, were remarkably fine, in spite of the very pronounced nose. "Extraordinary!" he said. She heard at least that, but did not feel she would attempt to interpret the accompanying smile. "Oh, there is a lot," she said. "I shall show you in time." "But are you not overwhelmed," he asked, "by living here?" "I have always lived here. What is there to overwhelm me?" Fascinated by what he saw, his answer slipped out from behind his usually careful lips. "Its desolation." The heavy word tolled through marble. "You, too!" she cried. "Do you only see what is in front of you?" He threw back his head, it might have been defensively. His laughter sounded quite metallic. "God forbid!" he said. "I could have died of that!" Then he looked at her very closely, following, as it were, in the lines of her face, the thread of his own argument. "It is only that I have grown used to living in a small wooden house, Miss Hare. I chose it purposely. Very fragile and ephemeral. I am a Jew, you see." She did not see why that condition, whatever it was, might not be shared. She felt the spurt of jealousy. She snorted, and began to suck the hot, rubbery lumps of her exasperated lips. "Almost a booth," he continued. "Which the wind may blow down, when one has closed the door for the last time, and moved on to another part of the desert." She hated to contemplate it. "That," she protested, "is morbid." He was looking at her intently, and with the greatest amusement. "It is only realistic to accept what history has proved. And we do not die of it. Even though his limbs may be lopped off from time to time, the Jew cannot die." He persisted in looking at her, as if determined to discover something in hiding behind her face. Could it have been he was sorry for her? When they were sharpening their knives for _him__? When he was the one deserving of pity? Some people, it was true, and more especially those endowed with brilliance, were dazzled by their minds into a state of false security. Unlike animals, for instance. Animals, she well knew, peered out perpetually into what was still to be experienced. So that again she grew agitated. "I must tell you," she almost gasped. In quite a flurry, she had led him into the little sitting-room to which she had retired with her mother the night of the false suicide. Such was her haste on the present occasion, the door would have banged behind them, if it had not decided many years before that it was never again intended to close. It was too stiff. Like the kind of hard _causeuse__ on which she seated herself with her guest, and of which the hospitality had remained strictly theoretical even in the palmy days. There they were, though. After she had looked round, Miss Hare managed, painfully, "I am afraid for you." And did the most extraordinary thing. She took the Jew's hand in her freckled, trembling ones. What she intended to do with it was not apparent to either of them, for they were imprisoned in an attitude. She sat holding the hand as if it had been some thing of value found in the bush: a polished stone, of curious veins, or one of the hooded ground-orchids, or knot of wood, which time, weather, and disease, it was suggested, had related to human disasters. Only the most exquisite sensation destroyed the detached devotion which Miss Hare would normally have experienced on being confronted with such rare matter. "Anybody's life is threatened with a certain amount of hazard," the few answered seriously, after he had recovered with an effort from hilarious surprise, and a thought so obscene he was humiliated for the capacity of his own mind. Miss Hare sat making those little noises of protest reminiscent of frogs and leather. "Clever people," she was saying, "are the victims of words." She herself could have dwindled into a marvellous silence, her body slipping from her, or elongated into such shapes of love and music as she had only noticed long ago in dancers, swaying and looking, no more governed by precept or reason, but by some other lesson which the flesh might at any moment remember, at the touch of peacock feathers. Miss Hare had to glance at her companion to see whether he could be aware that her limbs were, in fact, so long and lovely, and her conical white breasts not so cold as they had been taught to behave unless offered the excuse of music. But the Jew had set himself to observe the strange situation in which his hand had become involved. And at the same time he was saying, "I agree that intellect can be a serious handicap. There are moments when I like to imagine I have overcome it." Then, as the wrinkles gathered at the corners of his mouth: "It is most salutary that you and the drill at which I spend my working life should disillusion me from time to time." He accused with a kindliness, even sweetness, which made her almost throw away the hand. Her evanescent beauty was lit with the little mirrors of fury, before it was destroyed. Which it was, of course. Her condition could not have been less obvious than the sad rags of old cobwebs hanging from a cornice. "Oh," she cried, her mouth full of tears and pebbles, "I am not interested in you! Not what you are, think, feel. I am only concerned for your safety. I am responsible for you!" she gasped. In her anxiety, her tormented skin began to chafe the hand. Whether she had suspected a moment before, probably for the first and only time, what it was to be a woman, her passion was more serious, touching, urgent now that she had been reduced to the status of a troubled human being. Although they continued to sit apart on the terribly formal furniture, it was this latest metamorphosis which brought the two closest together. Himmelfarb stirred inside the aggressive, and in no way personal boiler-suit. After clearing his throat, he asked, "Is there any concrete evidence of danger?" If he played for time, and ignored the last dictates of repulsion which might advise him to withdraw his hand, he could perhaps persuade her into telling him the most secret hiding places. "Concrete? You should know that real danger never begins by being concrete!" Yes, indeed. He could not deny that. When she had recovered from the spasm of exasperation which caused her to jerk, almost to twist the unbelievably passive hand, she began a long, dry, but important, because undoubtedly rehearsed, passage of recitative: "I was going to make a proposal. No. What am I saying? Offer a proposition? It has occurred to me on and off, only there were always too many obstacles. And even now it could sound silly. I mean, it might appear distasteful. But it is what Peg-the old servant-would have called practical. (If only Peg were here, it would be so much easier for all of us.) To cut matters short-because that is necessary since certain things have happened-I want to suggest that you should come here, well, to live." Purposely, she did not look at him, because she would not have cared to witness surprise. "I would hide you," she continued, with blunt tongue. "There are so many rooms, there would be no necessity to stay very long in any one. Which would add to the chances of your safety." She could feel, through his stillness, that he did accept her motives, while remaining critical of her plan. "It would be wrong of you to hide me," he answered, but gently. "Because I can honestly say I have nothing to hide." "They will not ask themselves that," she said. "Men usually decide to destroy for very feeble reasons. Oh, I know from experience! It can be the weather, or boredom after lunch. They will torture almost to death someone who has seen into them. Even their own dogs." "When the time comes for my destruction," he replied quite calmly and evenly, "it will not be decided by men." "That makes it more frightening!" she cried. And burst suddenly into tears. She was at her ugliest, wet and matted, but any disgust which Himmelfarb might have felt was swallowed up in the conviction that, despite the differences of geography and race, they were, and always had been, engaged on a similar mission. Approaching from opposite directions, it was the same darkness and the same marsh which threatened to engulf their movements, but however lumbering and impeded those movements might be, the precious parcel of secrets carried by each must only be given at the end into certain hands. Although the Jew blundered on towards the frontier through the mist of experience, he emerged at one point, and found himself on the hard _causeuse__ in the little sitting-room at Xanadu. There he roused himself, and touched his fellow traveller, and said, "I am going now. I would like to persuade you that the simple acts we have learnt to perform daily are the best protection against evil." "They are very consoling," she admitted. But sighed. The lovely, tarnished light of evening lay upon the floors. In that light, with each object most emphatically intact for the last moments of the day, Himmelfarb could have forgotten he had ever been forced to interrupt those simple daily acts which he now advocated as a shield. Miss Hare followed him across the hall. "At least I must warn you," she said, "when you go from here, that my former housekeeper, Mrs Jolley, suffers from certain delusions. I do not think she is an active agent. But is under the influence of a Mrs Flack, whom I have never met, only suspect. It could be that Mrs Flack also is innocent. But the most devilish ideas will enter the heads of some women as they sit together in a house at dusk and listen to their stomachs rumble. Well, Mrs Jolley is at present staying with Mrs Flack." "And where do these ladies live?" "Oh, in some street. That is unimportant. I think you mentioned, Mr…" (she was no longer ashamed of her inability to manage a name) "… that we were links in some chain. I am convinced myself that there are two chains. Matched against each other. If Mrs Jolley and Mrs Flack were the only two links in theirs, then, of course, we should have nothing to fear. _But__." She was leading him slowly through the house, which the crimson and gold of evening had dyed with a Renaissance splendour. The marble of a torso and crystal of a chandelier shivered for their own beauty. "Is this the way?" he asked. "I am taking you out through the back," she said. "It is shorter." On the kitchen table a knife lay, it, too, a sliver of light. "I would kill for you, you know," Miss Hare suddenly said. "If it would preserve for us what is right." "Then it would no longer be right." Himmelfarb smiled. He took the knife which she had picked up from the table, and dropped it back into its pool of light. "Its purpose is to cut bread," he said. "An unemotional, though noble one." So that she was quenched, and went munching silence on the last stage to the back door. On the step she stood giving him final directions. The rather dead, soapy face of the man who had come towards her up the hill had been touched into life, by last light, or the mysteries of human intercourse. "You always have to leave me about this time," she meditated, as she stood looking down on him from her step. "There is something secret that you do," she complained, "in your own house. But I am not jealous." "There is nothing secret," he replied. "It is the time of evening when I go to say my prayers." "Oh, _prayers__!" she mumbled. Then: "I have never said any. Except when I was not my own mistress. When I was very young." "But you have expressed them in other ways." She shook that off rather irritably, and might have been preparing something rude, if another thought had not risen to trouble the surface. "Oh, dear, what will save us?" she wondered. Before he could answer, she exclaimed, "Look!" And was shading her eyes from the dazzle of gold. "It was at this time of evening," her mouth gasped, and worked at words, "that I would sometimes feel afraid of the consequences. I would fall down in a fit while the wheels were still approaching. It was too much for anyone so weak. And lie sometimes for hours. I think I could not bear to look at it." "There is no reason why you should not look now." Him-melfarb made an effort. "It is an unusually fine sunset." "Yes," she said. And laughed somewhat privately. "And the grey furrows," she observed, "where the wheels have sunk in. And the little soft feathers of the wheels." Himmelfarb took his leave of the mistress of Xanadu. He was not in a position to dismiss her as a madwoman, as other people did, because of his involvement in the same madness. For now that the tops of the trees had caught fire, the bells of the ambulances were again ringing for him, those of the fire-engines clanging, and he shuddered to realize there could never be an end to the rescue of men from the rubble of their own ideas. So the bodies would continue to be carried out, and hidden under a blanket, while those who were persuaded they were still alive would insist on returning to the wreckage, to search for teeth, watches, and other recognized necessities. Most deceived, however, were the souls, who protested in grey voices that they had already been directed to enter the forms of plants, stones, animals, and in some cases, even human beings. So the souls were crying, and combing their smoked-out hair. They were already exhausted by the bells, prayers, orders, and curses of the many fires at which, in the course of their tormented lives, it had been their misfortune to assist. Only the Chariot itself rode straight and silent, both now and on the clouds of recollection. Himmelfarb plodded up the road which led from Xanadu to Sarsaparilla, comforted by physical weariness and the collaboration of his friend. He yawned once or twice. The white faces of nondescript flowers twitched and glimmered at the touch of darkness. Stones brooded. He, the most stubborn of all souls, might well be told off next to invest a stone. As he went up the hill, the sparks shot out from beneath his boots, from the surface of the road, so far distant that, with all the lovingkindness in the world, his back could not have bent for him to lift them up, so elusive that Hezekiah, David, and Akiba had failed to redeem the lost sparks. The Jew wandered, and stumbled over stones, and came at last to his frail house, and touched the Shema upon the doorpost, as he went in.

11

EVERY WORK morning Himmelfarb took the bus to Barranugli, where he seated himself at his drill in Rosetree's factory, and made his contribution to Brighta Bicycle Lamps. Under the windows the smooth green river ran, but not so that you could see it, for the windows were placed rather high, and there were days when the Jew, who had been moved in the beginning by the flow of green water, scarcely noticed it even when he knocked off. As he walked alongside it towards the bus-stop, it had become a green squiggle, or symbol of a river. Once the foreman, Ernie Theobalds, who had just received a flattering bonus, was moved to address the Jew. He asked, "Howyadoin', Mick?" "Good," replied the Jew, in the language he had learnt to use. The foreman, who had already begun to regret things, drove himself still further. He was not unkind. "Never got yerself a mate," Ernie Theobalds remarked. The Jew laughed. "Anybody is my mate," he said. He felt strangely, agreeably relaxed, as though it could have been true. But it made the foreman suspicious and resentful. "Yeah, that's all right," he strained, and sweated. "I don't say we ain't got a pretty dinkum set-up. But a man stands a better chance of a fair go if he's got a mate. That's all I'm sayin'. See?" Himmelfarb laughed again-the morning had made him rash-and replied, "I shall take Providence as my mate." Mr Theobalds was horrified. He hated any sort of educated talk. The little beads of moisture were tingling on the tufts of his armpits. "Okay," he said. "Skip it!" And went away as if he had been treading on eggs. Immediately Himmelfarb would have run after the foreman, and at least touched him on the shoulder, and looked into his face, for he could not have explained how he had been overcome by a fit of happy foolishness. But already the important figure, bending at the knees as well as at the elbows, was too far distant. It was true, too, as Ernie Theobalds was conscious, the Jew had not found himself any friend of his own sex, although since his arrival in the country he had made overtures to many men, and for that purpose would take the train, and often walk the streets of the city at night. There were those who had asked him for advice, or money, and according to his ability he had given both. Some had accepted it undemonstra-tively, as their due, others seemed to regard him as God-sent, with the result that he was forced to retreat, to save them from their presumption, and himself from shame. Others still suspected him of being some kind of nark or perv, and cursed him as he lifted them out of their own vomit. Once or twice, outside the synagogues, on the Sabbath, he had spoken to those of his own kind. They were the most suspicious of all. They became so terribly affable. And collected their wives, who were standing stroking their mink as they waited, and got into their cars, and drove towards the brick warrens where they hoped to burrow into safety. So Himmelfarb remained without a friend. Or mate, he repeated gingerly. And at once remembered the blackfellow with whom he had not yet spoken. For that abo was still around at Rosetree's. A lazy enough bugger, everybody agreed. But somehow or other, it seemed to suit the abo to stick. Sometimes gone on a drunk, he would return, sometimes with a purple eye, or green bruise on yellow. A brute that no decent man would touch, only with a broom. Yet, with this fellow flotsam, the Jew had formed, he now realized, an extraordinary non-relationship. If that could describe anything so solid, while unratified, so silent, while so eloquent. How he would sense the abo's approach. How he went to meet his silence. How they would lay balm on wounds every time they passed each other. It was ridiculous. They were both ashamed. And turned their backs. And resumed their waiting. Sometimes the abo would whistle, derisively, some pop tune he had learnt from the radio. He would blow out his lips, to extend an already considerable vulgarity of theme. To destroy, it was suggested. But knew that his friend, old Big Nose, would never be deceived. They might have left it at that. After all, each in his time had experienced the knife. Then one day during smoke-o Himmelfarb had gone into the wash-room, of which the scribbled woodwork, sweating concrete and stained porcelain had grown quite acceptable. There he sat. There he leaned his head. And the introspective accents of a mumbling cistern and a drizzling tap ministered to his throbbing head. He often sat out smoke-o in the wash-room, which would remain deserted until work began. He would sit perfectly still, but, on this particular occasion his hand had touched the book someone had left open on the bench. It was only natural for Himmelfarb to read whatever print he set his eyes on. Now he began at once, with surprise flooding over him. "And I looked and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber out of the midst of the fire. Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one had four wings…." But it was no longer his own voice which the Jew heard above the soft babble of the cistern and the sharper drizzle of the tap. It was the voice of voices-thick, and too throaty, and desolating in its sense of continuity. It could have been the voice of the Cantor Katzmann. Yet the voice no longer attempted to clothe the creatures themselves in allegorical splendour, of Babylonian gold. They were dressed in the flesh of men: the pug of human gargoyles, the rather soapy skin, the pores of which had been enlarged by sweat, the mouth thinned by trial and error, the dead hair of the living human creatures blowing in the wind of circumstance. The Jew read, or heard: "… two wings of every one were joined one to another, and two covered their bodies…." In spite of which he knew from observing. He could read by heart the veins of the hidden bodies. Now the lips of the past blew the words a little faster, as if the mouth had adapted itself to the acceleration of time. Time, in fact, was almost up. Belts were tightening. Down in the workshop there was a thwack of leather, metal easing greasily. But the reader could not interrupt his reading: "… and when the living creatures went, the wheels went by them: and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up…." When the machinery in the workshop started up, the whole wash-room revolted, but soon drowned, and floated gently enough. Against the noise from the machines, the voices of the tap and cistern were no longer audible. But the voice of the Jew continued reading, now utterly his own, and loud, above the natter of the rejuvenated machines: "… And the likeness of the firmament upon the heads of the living creatures was as the colour of the terrible crystal, stretched forth over their heads above…." When the abo came in. Looking for something he had left. Immediately on seeing how he was caught, he remained poised, rocking on the balls of his normally flat and squelchy feet. He could not decide what to do. The Jew was shining. "It is Ezekiel!" he said, forgetful of that convention by which he and the blackfellow refrained from exchanging words. "Somebody is reading Ezekiel I found here. Open on the bench." The spit jumped out of his mouth with joy. The blackfellow stood there, playing with a ball of cotton waste, backwards and forwards, from hand to hand. He was sulking now, though. "It is your book?" asked the Jew. Then the blackfellow did something extraordinary. He spoke. "Yes," he admitted. "It's my book." "Then you read the Bible. What about the other prophets? Daniel, Ezra, Hosea?" the same unmanageable enthusiasm drove the Jew to ask. But it did not appear as though the blackfellow would allow himself to be trapped again. His lips were very thick and surly. He said, "We better go down now." And jerked his head in the direction of the workshop. "Yes," agreed the Jew. The abo quickly took the book, and hid it amongst what was apparently a bundle of his private belongings. Himmelfarb remained spellbound. He was smiling that slow, inward smile, which could exasperate those whom it excluded. "Interesting," he had to remark. "But I shall not ask any questions, as I see you do not wish me to." "Where'll it lead?" The abo shrugged. "I was reared by a parson bloke. That's all. Sometimes I have a read of the Bible, but not for any of _his__ reasons. I read it because you can see it all. And it passes the time." All of which the abo spoke in a curiously unexpected voice, conjured up from a considerable depth. After that the two men returned to their work, for the machines were deriding them as they belted hell out of Rosetree's shed. Now the Jew began to wonder, as he sat at his drill, and stamped the sheet, and stamped the sheet, whether their relationship would be in any way altered by what had happened. But it did not appear to be. It was as though it had set too long in the form it had originally taken. A certain enduring warmth, established in the beginning, had been perhaps intensified. The Jew was conscious of it if ever the blackfellow passed. Something almost tactile took place between them, but scarcely ever again was there any exchange of words. Sometimes the younger man would almost grunt, sometimes the older one would almost nod. Or they would look for each other, even catch each other at it. And once the blackfellow smiled, not for his acquaintance of elaborate standing, but for anyone who cared to receive it. If the Jew did, that was incidental. It was, the latter saw, a demonstration of perfect detachment. Yet Himmelfarb was heartened by his study of this other living creature, to whom he had become joined, extraordinarily, by silence, and perhaps, also, by dedication. On one other occasion, finding they had arrived simultaneously at the outer gate, and there was no avoiding it, they must go out together, he could not resist addressing the black. "The day we spoke," the Jew ventured, "either I did not think, or have the time, to ask your name." The abo could have been preparing to sulk. But changed his mind quickly, it appeared, on sensing there was no trap. "Dubbo," he answered briskly. "Alf Dubbo." And as briskly went off. He was gay on that day. He picked up a stone, and made it skip, along the surface of the green river. He stood for a moment squinting at the sun, the light from which splintered on his broad teeth. He could have been smiling, but that was more probably the light, concentrated on the planes of his excellent teeth.

Alf Dubbo was reared in a small town on the banks of a river which never wholly dried up, and which, in wet seasons, would overflow its steep banks and flood the houses in the lower town. The river played an important part in the boy's early life, and even after he left his birthplace, his thoughts would frequently return to the dark banks of the brown river, with its curtain of shiny foliage, and the polished stones which he would pick over, always looking for pleasing shapes. Just about dusk the river would become the most fascinating for the small boy, and he would hang about at a certain bend where the townspeople had planted a park. The orange knuckles of the big bamboos became accentuated at dusk, and the shiny foliage of the native trees seemed to sweat a deeper green. The boy's dark river would cut right across the evening. Black gins would begin to congregate along the bank, some in clothes which the white women had cast off, others in flash dresses from the stores, which splashed their flowers upon the dark earth, as the gins lay giggling and anticipating. Who would pick them? There were usually white youths hanging around, and older drunks, all with money on them, and a bottle or two. Once he had seen a gin leave her dress in the arms of her lover, and plunge down towards the river, till the black streak that she made was swallowed up in the deepening night. But that was unusual. And in spite of the fact that it was also exciting, he had gone away. Mrs Pask had been standing at the kitchen door. "Alf, where ever were you?" she asked. And her cocky echoed from beneath the shawl, "Alfwher-aryou? AlfwheraryouAlf? Alf." Not yet sleeping. "By the river," the boy answered. "That is no place," she said, "to loiter about at this time of night. Mr Calderon has been looking for you. He is going to let you conjugate a Latin verb. But first there are several little jobs. Remember, it is the useful boys who are sought after in later life." So Alf took the tea-towel. He hung around dozing while she splashed and talked, and hoped the Latin verb would be forgotten. Actually, Alf Dubbo was not born in that town. He was born not so many miles away, at another bend in the ever-recurring river, on a reserve, to an old gin named Maggie, by which of the whites she had never been able to decide. There he would have remained probably, until work or cunning rescued him. That he was removed earlier, while he was still, in fact, a leggy, awkward little boy, was thanks to the Reverend Timothy Calderon, at that time Anglican rector of Numburra. Mr Calderon and his widowed sister, Mrs Pask, took the boy to institute what they christened their Great Experiment. For Mr Calderon was a man of high ideals, even though, as his more perceptive parishioners noticed, he failed perpetually to live up to them. If it required the more perceptive to notice, it was because his failures up to date had been for the most part harmless ones. He was, indeed, a harmless man, with the result that he had been moved to Numburra from the larger town of Dumbullen. Such perception on the part of his bishop had caused the rector to shed very bitter tears, but of those, only his sister knew, and together they had prayed that he might receive the strength humbly to endure his martyrdom. It was the more distressing as the Reverend Timothy Cal-deron was a cultured man, of birth even, whose ideals had brought him from the Old Country shortly after ordination. Quite apart from the Latin verbs, he was able to unravel the Gospels from the Greek. He knew the dates of battles, and the names of plants, and had inherited a complete edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as a signet-ring. If the souls of Numburra appreciated neither his gentle blood nor his education, that was something further he must bear. That he did bear it was due not only to fervid prayer, but also to the timely conception of his Great Experiment. On little Alf Dubbo, the parson decided, he would lavish all he could: fatherly love, and spiritual guidance, to say nothing of Latin verbs, and the dates of battles. Alf Dubbo appeared from the beginning to be an exceedingly bright boy. Those who were interested in him were soon convinced that he might grasp almost anything, provided he wanted to. Only, where did his bent lie? That at once became the problem. He was bright, but he was lazy, the most sceptical of the rector's parishioners observed with tigerish satisfaction. Who but the rector would not have expected laziness from the bastard of an old black gin out at the reserve? It did not occur to the critics, of course, that the boy might have inherited his vice from some Irish ancestor. Propriety alone made them reduce Alf's Irish ancestors to the mythical status of the Great Snake. The rector himself began to suspect his ward of indolence when on one occasion the boy asked, "Mr Calderon, what am I going to do with all these Latin verbs?" "Well," said the rector, "in the first place, they are a discipline. They will help to build character." "But I can't see what use they will be," complained the boy, in his gentle, imitation voice. "I don't think I can be that kind of character." Then he started, regrettably, to sulk. He would sulk, and scribble, and his teacher would have to admit that at such times little more could be done with him. "Sometimes I wonder whether we are not being terribly unwise," the rector once confessed to his sister. "Oh, but in some directions, Timothy, he has made visible progress. In sketching, for instance," Mrs Pask was vain enough to insist. "In sketching I cannot show him enough. He has an eye for colour. Alf is an artistic boy." "Art, yes. But life." The rector sighed, moody for his Latin verbs. Alf Dubbo did love to draw, and would scribble on the walls of the shed where he milked the rector's horny cow. "What are you doing, Alf?" they called. "I was marking up the weeks since she had the bull," the boy replied. That stopped them. He had noticed early on that Mrs Pask preferred to avert her eyes from nature. So that once more he was free to scribble on the walls of the shed, the finespun lines of a world he felt to exist but could not yet corroborate. In the circumstances, he was always undemonstratively happy when Mrs Pask happened to say, "Dear, oh, dear, I have a head! But we must not neglect your education, must we, Alf? Bring out my water-colour box, and we shall continue where we left off last time. I believe you are beginning to grasp the principles of drawing, and may even have a hidden talent." As a young girl, Mrs Pask herself had been compelled to choose between several talents, none of them hidden, it was implied; indeed, they had been far too obvious. What with sketching, and piano, and a light soprano voice, she had led rather a distracted life, until it was revealed to her that she must abandon all personal pretensions for the sake of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Reverend Arthur Pask. She did, however, retain a reduced interest in sketching and water-colour, and would, on days when the climate allowed, take her easel and dash something off. Her hobby-because, in spite of a technical facility, she would not let herself think of it as more-had proved a particular comfort in the hour of trial. For Mrs Pask was widowed early. "Never forget, Alf, that art is first and foremost a moral force," she remarked once to her pupil, while demonstrating the possibilities of white as a livener of unrelieved surfaces. "Truth," she added, "is so beautiful." He was, at least, fascinated by her brush. "See," she said, dabbing, "one tiny fleck, and each of these cherries comes to life. One has to admit there is something miraculous in the creative act." He could not yet, but became convinced of some potentiality. "Let," he said, "let me, Mrs Pask, now." He was so quick. He could do a bowl of cherries-highlights included-or plaster hand which she had in a cupboard, before his teacher had caught on to the thread of narrative she proposed to follow. It exasperated, even humiliated her at first. "I hope you are not a vain boy, " she would remark. Which was too silly to answer. Once she put in front of him a vase of what she said were Crimson Ramblers-only a shadow of what they could be. For him, they were the substance. He made them stand up stiff and solid. He drew a blue line round each of the crimson roses, so that they were forever contained. She laughed. She said, "You cannot resist colour. There was never anything so red. You must learn in time, though, it is delicacy that counts." Mrs Pask loved best of all to talk while her pupil worked. She would lie back in her chair, with her feet on an embroidered stool. Years afterwards, coming across a print in a public library, Dubbo was forced to realize that Mrs Pask, for all her virtue, had been at heart, one of the turbaned ladies of another more indolent age, leaning, figuratively in her case, on the shoulder of her little coloured boy. There in the weatherboard sitting-room at Numburra, under the cracking, corrugated roof, Mrs Pask's voice would join with the drone of blowflies in unbroken antiphon. "I must tell you, Alf, I gave up all for Mr Pask, even down to face-powder, though of course my skin being of the finest, and my complexion so clear and fresh, that was no very great hardship. And who would not have done the same! He was a lovely man. Of the sweetest disposition. And so slim. But"-she coughed-"athletic. I can see him jump the net at tennis. Arthur would never think of going round." The pupil worked. Or looked up at times, for politeness's sake. Mrs Pask, of former fine complexion, had turned purple by that date. It was blood pressure, and the climate. Sometimes the boy would sit very still at the drawing-board. Then she would complain, "Surely you have not finished, Alf, when I have only just set you the subject?" "No," he would reply, "not yet." For peace. And would sit. And would wait. Then, after he had mixed some fresh colours, he would work. Sometimes she thought his eyes stared too hard. That his chest was too cramped. There was something unhealthy. She would say, "We must try to find some companions for you. Rough games once in a while are good for any boy. Not that I approve of brute strength. Only Christian manliness." He grunted to appease her. He could not have formed words while under such other pressure. For he was all the time painting. And on one occasion the tin box of Mrs Pask's paints had gone clattering. "Oh!" she cried. "If the little porcelain containers should get broken, Alf, I should be so upset. The box-I told you, didn't I? — was a gift from Mr Pask." Nothing was broken, however. "But what," she asked, still breathing hard, "what ever in the world, Alf, is this?" Looking at his paper. It was almost as if she had caught him at something shameful. He sat with his knees together. His innermost being stood erect. "That is a tree," he said when he was able. "A most unnatural tree!" She smiled kindly. He touched it with vermilion, and it bled afresh. "What are these peculiar objects, or fruit-are they? — hanging on your tree?" He did not say. The iron roof was cracking. "They must mean some-thing," Mrs Pask insisted. "Those," he said, then, "are dreams." He was ashamed, though. "Dreams! But there is nothing to indicate that they are any such thing. Just a shape. I should have said mis-shapen kidneys!" So that he was put to worse shame. "That is because they have not been dreamt yet," he uttered slowly. And all the foetuses were palpitating on the porous paper. "I am afraid it is something unhealthy," Mrs Pask confided in her brother. "An untrained mind could not possibly conceive of anything so peculiar unless." "But the boy's mind is not totally untrained. Since you have begun to train it," the parson could not resist. He still smarted for his Latin verbs, and the obvious hold his sister had over Alf Dubbo, through the medium of paint. "I have to admit I am a little frightened. I wonder whether I should go on with it," Mrs Pask meditated. "You have uncovered his imagination. That is all." The rector sighed. Imagination, just a little, was his own misfortune, for it had never been enough to ferment the rest of him, yet too much for failure to support. He was a soggy man, reminiscent of grey bread. If he had been less gentle, more bitter, he might have been admired. He had a handsome nose for a start, which should have cut an offender to the quick. But as it had never occurred to the Reverend Timothy Calderon to use any part of his physical person as a weapon, he was not repaid in fear and respect, not even by his own sister, who only loved him, because it would have been shocking not to, and because there was no other intimate relationship left to her. As he conducted the ritual of his parish life: the tepid, but in every way reverential services, the visits to those of his parishioners who were too passive to intimidate him, the annual fête at which the same ladies guessed the weight of a different-coloured cake-the rector was sustained by secrets. Only two, certainly, for his temperament would not have run to more. But of those two secrets, the one was shocking enough, the other he would never have admitted to, so desperately did he depend upon it for his nourishment. In that northern diocese of bells and lace, Mr Calderon officiated as befitted one born and reared an Anglican. While the temperature rose, so did the incense, though never enough to offend the nostrils. One was relieved to find that taste and the formalities had not been preserved from Rome to be destroyed by any evangelical fervour. Here original purity prevailed. Even when the lace got torn in scuffles, despite the vigilance of Mrs Pask. Even when the Eucharist lulled in summer, and the best intentions slipped beyond the bounds of concentration. Like Sunday, Mr Calderon came and went. His blameless hand would place the wafer, his unexceptionable voice intone, without disturbing the past, or ladies' minds. Blowflies seconded him, under the window of Saint George, which the butter factory had presented. It was beneath the saint, his favourite, the manly, flannel-clad, athletic George, that the rector would most frequently indulge his secret life, while attending to those practical duties of devotional routine which boys regularly forgot. Perhaps the swing of his cassock, not entirely an ascetic garment, suggested to the silent man a somewhat freer choreography for the soul. In any case, as he placed a napkin, or a cruet, or retrieved a battered psalter from underneath a pew, the rector would find himself yearning after some more virile expression of faith which a damp nature and family opinion had never allowed him to profess. In other words, the Reverend Timothy Calderon longed secretly to flame in the demonstration of devotion. But would he really have known how? At least in his imagination, the strong voices of clear-skinned boys, in severest linen surplices, would mount in hymns of praise, carrying his diffident soul towards salvation. He would be saved, not by works, too exhausting in a hot climate, not by words, too banal in any event, but by youth, rather, and ever-straining lung-power. All that he had never been, all that he had not experienced, was fatally attractive to the humble rector. Under the window of the blond saint, bursting the dragon with his lance, his brother-in-law Arthur Pask would appear to Timothy Calderon, and, after jumping the tennis-net, throw his arm around the weaker shoulder. During his brief life, all had been made possible to Arthur: a thrilled, and thrilling faith, the rewards and pains of a missionary fervour, marriage with a lovely girl-nobody had blamed Emily on _seeing__ that her reason for defection was not altogether evangelical-then martyrdom, more or less, for in spite of his aggressive health, Arthur Pask was carried off, at the early age of twenty-six, by rheumatic fever, on the Birdsville Track. Of those who mourned, perhaps it was not his widow who was cut most deeply. A widow is placated by the drama of it; a woman can sweeten herself on what is bitterest in memory. It was the brother-in-law who suffered. Though nobody knew it. Not long after Alf Dubbo came to them, the rector had remarked, "I noticed, Emily, you did not communicate this morning." "No," she said. Their feet were flogging the dust on the short distance to the rectory. "I remembered," she explained, "it is the anniversary of Arthur's death." "You remembered!" He laughed. It sounded odd, but Emily Pask was of those people who, besides forgetting, failed to divine sensibility in others. If less obtuse, of course she would have seen that her brother whipped his sorrows to prevent them lagging. Their life together was full of undercurrents, which sometimes threatened to drag them down. So that the presence of the aboriginal boy did at first relieve, and even promise rescue. If the sister was only partially aware, the brother became fully conscious that his hopes were fastening on Alf Dubbo, and that through him he hoped he might achieve, if not personal salvation, at least a mental cosiness. Until finding he had only added another nail to those he wore. For the rector had never succeeded in communicating with anyone by words. Nor would the boy, it appeared, attempt to express himself, except by those riddles in paint which his teacher so deplored. Soon after the morning on which Mrs Pask had found herself faced with her pupil's daemon, Timothy Calderon discovered Alf looking through a book, as though he were not at all sure he should be doing what he was unable to resist. "Well, Alf," the kindly man slowly opened, "have you found something instructive? Or only to your taste?" He had not meant it that way, but there it was. While the boy continued turning the pages with feverish necessity. "It is a book I found," Alf replied, with some obviousness. "It is interesting," he added. He spoke dully, when he was, in fact, consumed. "Ah," said the rector, "I believe that was a present from a school acquaintance of my sister's. Who knew of her interest in the arts." The man and boy continued looking together at the book. Here the world broke into little particles of light. The limbs of the bathers might have remained stone, if light had not informed the observer that this was indeed flesh of flesh; even the water became a vision of original nakedness. Dancers were caught for an instant in the turmoil of their tulle. Laundresses ironed a diagonally divided world of powdered butterflies. Solid lanterns vibrated with thick, joyous bursts of light. "The French," remarked Mr Calderon, after he had referred to the title, "have a different conception of things." The boy was throbbing over his discovery. "They are a different race," the rector judged, smiling a forgiving smile. Then the boy stopped at a picture he would always remember, and criticize, and wish to improve on. It was the work, he read, of some French painter, a name to him, then as always. In the picture the chariot rose, behind the wooden horses, along the pathway of the sun. The god's arm-for the text implied it was a god-lit the faces of the four figures, so stiff, in the body of the tinny chariot. The rather ineffectual torch trailed its streamers of material light. " 'Apollo,' " read the rector. He was not prepared to continue, or to comment. But Alf Dubbo said, "The arm is not painted good. I could do the arm better. And horses. My horses," the boy claimed, "would have the fire flowing from their tails. And dropping sparks. Or stars. Moving. Everything would move in my picture. Because that is the way it ought to be." "You are the regular little artist!" the rector accused, and laughed against his painful teeth. "Fire and light are movement," the boy persisted. Then the man could bear his own extinction no longer. He touched the boy's head, but very briefly. He said, "Come on, Alf, close up the book now. There is something else I want you to think about." He brought the Bible, and began to read from the Gospel of Saint John. "John," he explained, "was the Beloved Disciple." The parson told of spiritual love and beauty, how each incident in Our Lord's life had been illuminated by those qualities. Of course the boy had heard it all before, but wondered again how he failed continually to appreciate. It did seem as though he could grasp only what he was able to see. And he had not yet seen Jesus Christ, in spite of his guardian's repeated efforts, and a succession of blurry colour-prints. Now he began to remember a night at the reserve when his mother had received a quarter-caste called Joe Mullens, who loved her awful bad, and had brought her a bottle of metho to prove it. Soon the boy's memory was lit by the livid jags of the metho love the two had danced together on the squeaky bed. Afterwards his mother had begun to curse, and complain that she was deceived again by love. But for the boy witness, at least, her failure had destroyed the walls. He was alive to the fur of darkness, and a stench of leaves, as he watched the lightning-flicker of receding passion. "Earthly love is not the faintest reflection of divine compassion," the rector was explaining. "But I can tell you are not concentrating, Alf." The boy looked down, and saw that his guardian's knees, in their thinning and rather crumpled trousers, were touching his. He sensed that, according to precept, he should have felt compassion for this conscientious man, but all he felt was the pressure of knees. He was fascinated by the network of little creases in the worn serge, and by a smell of what he realized later on in cities was that of hot underclothing, as people struggled together, and clung to the little progress they had made. "I think we had better stop there," the rector decided. But could not bring himself to alter his position. It was the boy who shifted, sighing, or grunting, as he looked out into the glare and saw Mrs Pask returning from good works with an empty pudding-basin. While the rector derived little consolation from his attempts to plant faith in the soul of this aboriginal boy, his sister grew quite skittish with what she liked to think the success of her instruction. Admittedly Mrs Pask had always liked the easy things, and admittedly Alf was learning how to please. Here was a whole sheaf of subjects, tastefully shaded, admirably foreshortened. It seemed that with a few ingratiating strokes the boy might reproduce the whole world as his teacher knew it. That would have been consummation, indeed. If, from time to time, she had not come across those other fruits of her pupil's talent. Which made her frightened. And on one occasion the pupil himself rooted out an old, battered box which she had put so carefully away, even she had forgotten. "These are more paints," said Alf. "Oh," she began to explain, half prim, half casual. "Yes. Some old paints I gave up using very early. They did not suit the kind of work which interested me." Alf squeezed a tube, and there shot out, from beneath the crust of ages, a blue so glistening, so blue, his eyes could not focus on it. All he could say was: "Gee, Mrs Pask!" Even then he had to control his mouth. Mrs Pask frowned in replying. "I have tried to explain why we should not, on any account, use such a very horrid expression. I thought you might have remembered." "Yes," he said. "But can I use the paints?" After a pause, she decided: "I think, perhaps, it would not be advisable for you to work in oils." "Arrr, Mrs Pask!" For by now he had coaxed a rosy tongue out of a second tube. And was drowning in a burst of yellow from the bottom of a third. She said with an effort, "Oil paints lead to so much that is sensual, so much that is undesirable in art. But of course, you would not understand anything of that, and must take it on trust from those who do." All he knew for the moment was his desire to expel the sensation in his stomach, the throbbing of his blood, in surge upon surge of thick, and ever-accumulating colour. "I could paint good with these," he maintained. Mrs Pask looked whimsically sad. Then Alf Dubbo played an unexpected card. Put into his hand by divine interest, as it were, he had no cause for feeling guilty. "I could do things with these," he began, "that I never ever would have known how to do before." He touched the tube of supernatural blue. "I would paint Jesus Christ," he ventured, in a voice which he had learnt to be acceptable. "Oh?" Mrs Pask sniggered wheezily. The boy had sounded so quaint. "I would not like to paint Jesus, only in oil paints," he admitted. Mrs Pask averted her old and rather wobbly face. She remembered her young husband, and the strength and loveliness of his uncovered throat. "I will show you," said Alf. "We shall see," said Mrs Pask. "Put away the paints. Now. Please." "You don't _know__!" His voice jumped recklessly. "Oh, but I do!" she said. The words were so bleached, she was on the verge of repeating them. "Well, then?" "How provoking you can be!" she protested. "I did not say no _exactly__. Well, on your thirteenth birthday. But I insist you put away the paints now." He did. And would wait. Longer if necessary. Nobody else would wait so carefully. In the meantime he followed around the one who held his life in her hands, and she often took advantage of the situation. For instance, she might ask, "If you forget to milk poor Possum when it rains, how can you expect me to remember I have promised to let you use the paints?" The rector hated his sister at times. Because, of course, she had told him what had taken place, making it sound both touching and ridiculous. It was dreadful to Timothy Calderon that he was so often aware of what he was unable to avert. Cruelty, for example. He was particularly sensitive to the duller, unspectacular kind. "But you will allow him?" he hoped. Mrs Pask folded in her lips. "I shall pray for guidance," she replied. Frequently Mr Calderon did, too, without always receiving it. Once in the dark hall, in the smell of old books and yesterday's mutton, the rector encountered Alf with almost no warning. The boy gave the impression of doing nothing with an air of some significance, and as always at such moments, the man was walled up more completely in his own ineffec-tuality and lovelessness. Yet, on this occasion, the suddenness of the encounter, or a rush of self-pity, started him off with: "I expect you are waiting pretty anxiously for your birthday, Alf." The boy's smile acknowledged the superfluousness and slight silliness of the remark. But the rector blundered on. "Well, who knows, your gift of painting may have been given to you as a means of expressing your innermost convictions." Suddenly the two people involved in the situation began to sweat. "So that you should have something," mumbled the rector, and repeated with suppressed emotion, "At least, something." At this point an alarming, but not altogether unexpected incident, the boy realized, began to occur. Mr Calderon fumbled at Alf's head, then pressed it against his stomach. They were standing in awkward conjunction, in the semi-darkness and familiar smells. Although at first doubtful how he ought to behave, Alf decided to submit to the pressure. He could feel buttons and a watch-chain eating ravenously into his cheek, and then, deep down in the rector's stomach, he heard a rather pitiful rumble. The sound that uncoiled itself was both apologetic and old. The boy visualized an old, soft, white worm slowly raising its head, swaying, and lolling, before falling back. He was so fascinated by the image that he had even begun to count the rings with which the ghostly worm was scored. But Mr Calderon had suddenly decided, it seemed, that he was not sad at all. A kind of jollity which had taken possession of his stomach almost bounced the boy off. "It is wrong to allow our affections to persuade us we are tragic figures," the rector announced in an unknown voice. And, as the boy continued standing, pushed him away. Mr Calderon then went into his study, where the notes for a sermon were waiting to enmesh him, and in spite of his views on economy, and the early hour, switched on the electric light, with the result that he had never been so exposed before. It was disastrous. The boy crept away, but pursued by the picture of his guardian. For, although the rector's incisive nose was as imposing as ever, right down to the glistening pores at the roots of it, the rest of the face was as white and crumbly as old scones. Or perhaps Mr Calderon had no more than left his teeth out. The image blazed across the boy's mind and away, because, whatever cropped up en route, his thirteenth birthday was only a short distance ahead. When at last he had arrived at it, he asked above the wrappings of the seemly presents, "And the paints, Mrs Pask? Can I use the oil paints that you promised?" There was a dreadful pause. Then Mrs Pask said, "You set too much store, Alf, by what is unimportant. But as I promised." She seemed to have the wind that morning. It made a little pffff against the soft hair on her upper lip. So he got out the paints. He had found an old tea-chest on a rubbish dump, and had hammered it apart, and extracted the nails, and kept the sides in the feed shed. The ply boards were immaculate. He brought them to the back veranda. After sharing with him such technical points as she could remember, his teacher went away. She would not look. Anything might emerge now. So Alf Dubbo began to squeeze the tubes. Regardful of some vow, he dedicated the first board with a coat of flat white. He began moodily to dabble in the blue. He moulded the glistening gobs into arbitrary forms, to demolish them almost at once with voluptuous authority. He mixed the blue with white, until it had quite paled. And was moved to lay it at last upon the board in long, smooth tongues, which, he hoped, might convey his still rather nebulous intention. Sometimes he worked with the brushes he had prepared, more often with his trembling fingers. But he could not, in fact, he could not. A white mist continued to creep up and obscure what should have been a vision of blue. So he took the brush with the sharpest end, and with the point he described an unhappy O. From this cipher, the paint was dripping down in stalactites of bluish white. He took the blood-red, and thinned it, and threw it on in drops. It dripped miserably down. He recognized his failure, and turned the board away from him. He kept on returning, however, to the opaque masses of his paint. He was clogged with it. As he thought about his failure, and wondered how he might penetrate what remained a thick white mist in his mind, he scratched his own face in one of the lower corners of the board. The concave shape, something like that of a banana, was held as if waiting to receive. But he sensed he would never improve on an idea which had come to him in a moment of deceit. For some time he mooned around, until realizing he had, at least, observed a promise. To a certain extent, he had earned his freedom. He felt better then, and thought how he would put into his next picture all that he had ever known. The brown dust. His mother's tits, black and gravelly, hanging down. The figure of the quarter-caste, Joe Mullens, striking again and again with his thighs as though he meant to kill. And the distance, which was sometimes a blue wire tautened round his own throat, and which at others dissolved into terrible listlessness. There would be the white people, of course, perpetually naked inside their flash clothes. And the cup of wine held in the air by the Reverend Tim. That was, again, most important. Even through the dented sides you could see the blood tremble in it. And the white worm stirring and fainting in the reverend pants. And love, very sad. He would paint love as a skeleton from which they had picked the flesh-an old goanna-and could not find more, however much they wanted, and hard they looked. Himself with them. He would have liked to discover whether it really existed, how it tasted. Alf Dubbo was painting at his picture all the morning. Some of it even Mrs Pask and the rector might have understood, but some was so secret, so tender, he could not have borne their getting clumsy with it. Parts of it walked on four legs, but others flowed from his hand in dreams that only he, or some inconceivable stranger, might recognize and interpret. A little while before it was time to set the pickled onions on the table, Mrs Pask came, and stood behind him. "Well, I never!" she called. "That is a funny sort of picture. After all I have taught you! What is it called?" "That is called 'My Life,' " the boy answered. "And this?" she asked, pointing with her toe. "That," he said-he almost could not-"that is the picture of Jesus. It is no good, though, Mrs Pask. You must not look. I don't understand yet." She too, did not know exactly what to say. She had turned her deepest purple. She was munching on her lips. She said, "It all comes of my being so foolish. Things are not like this," she said. "It is downright madness. You must not think this way. My brother must speak to you," she said. "Oh, dear! It is dirty! When there is so much that is beautiful and holy!" She went away nearly crying. And he called after her, "Mrs Pask! It is beautiful! It is all, really, beautiful. It is only me. I am learning to show it. How it is. In me. I'll show you something that you didn't know. You'll see. And get a surprise." But she went away towards the kitchen. And his lips were spilling over with the bubbles of anguish. That dinner, which Alf did not share, the rector and his sister had a slap-up row. "But you have not seen!" she kept on harping, and drumming on the tablecloth. "I do not wish to see," he repeated. "I have confidence in the boy. It is his way of expressing himself." "You are weak, Timothy. If you were not, you would take the matter in hand. But you are weak." He could not answer that one straight, but said, "Our Lord recognized that all human beings are weak. And what did He prescribe? Love! That is what you forget, Emily. Or is it that you choose to ignore?" The window-panes were dancing. "Oh, love!" she said, real loud. She began to cry then. For a while the windows rattled, but they did at last subside, and become again flat glass. After that Alf Dubbo went away, because he was sick from listening. He put his paintings in the shed, behind the bran bin, which had just fallen empty, and which usually stayed that way for some time after it happened. There was no painting or drawing in the following weeks. Mrs Pask said that he must learn to darn, and sew on buttons, in case he should become a soldier. She gave him many other little jobs, like weeding, and errands, and addressing envelopes or the parish news-it was so good for his hand-while she sat and rested her ankles. Nor did she live aloud any more the incidents of her past life. But she thought them instead. Or remembered sick people who needed visiting. She went about much more than before, as if, by staying at home, she might have discovered something she did not want to, just by going into a room. Mrs Pask went her own way, and the Reverend Timothy Calderon and Alf Dubbo went theirs, all separately. It had always been that way more or less, only now it was as though they had been made to see it. In the case of the rector and his sister, at least they had their purposes, but for Alf Dubbo it was terrible, who walked amongst the furniture, and broken flower-pots, and cowpats. Once he squelched his hand in a new turd that old Possy had let drop, and his eyes immediately began to water, as the comforting smell shot up, and because at the same time the fresh cow-dung was so lifeless in texture compared with that of the oil paints. Only twice he looked at the paintings he had hidden in the shed. On the first occasion he could not bear it. On the second it might have been the same: if the rector had not suddenly appeared, looking for something, and said, "I am the only one, Alf, who has not seen the works of art." So Alf Dubbo showed. Mr Calderon stood holding the boards, one in either hand, looking from one to the other of the pictures. His lips were moving. Then the boy realized his guardian was not looking at the paintings, but somewhere into his own thoughts, at the pictures in his mind. Alf did not blame, because, after all, that was mostly the way people did behave. "So these are they," the rector was saying; the veins were old in the backs of his hands. "Well, well." Looking, and not, from one to the other. "I can remember, when I was a boy, before I became aware of my vocation, I had every intention of being an actor. I would learn parts-Shakespeare, you know-just for the fun of it, and even make up characters, the most extraordinary individuals, out of my own rather luxuriant imagination. People told me I had a fine declamatory voice, which, admittedly, I had. I took the part of a Venetian in, I believe it was _The Merchant__. And once"-he giggled-"I played a lady! I wore a pair of rose stockings. Silk. And on my chest a cameo, which had been lent me by some acquaintance of my aunts." The Reverend Timothy Calderon had grown cheerful by now. He stood the painted plywood against the empty bin, and went outside. "One day, Alf, you must explain your paintings to me," he said. "Because I believe, however clearly any artist, or man, for that matter, conveys, there must always remain a hidden half which will need to be explained. And perhaps that is not possible unless implicit trust exists. Between. Between the artist and his audience." It was a limpid morning, in which smoke ascended, and Mrs Pask had discovered a reason for paying a call. As he followed the rector between the rows of bolting lettuces, Alf Dubbo was puzzled to feel that perhaps he was the one who led, for Mr Calderon had turned so very spongy and dependent. The boy walked noticeably well. Upright. He appeared to have grown, too. He was suddenly a young man in whom the scars had healed, of the wounds they had made in his flesh. His nostrils awaited experience. At one point, at a bend in the path, the rector turned, and seemed in particular need of the youth's attention and understanding. "One summer, before we came to this country," he said, "I made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon-the home of the Bard-with my brother-in-law, Arthur Pask. It was very delightful. We had both already decided to take orders, although Arthur had not yet been directed to follow a different path. We slept in a shed, in a tea-garden. We would come in after the plays, and talk," he said, "half the night. All that week it was moonlight, I remember. Poor Arthur, you know, was a god. That is, as well as being an extremely saintly man, he was most personable." The young blackfellow trod warily, stiffly, through the narrative, and kicked aside the sickly stalks of one or two uprooted cabbages. He was not so much hearing as seeing, and was not altogether convinced by the figure of the second parson, whom moonlight made whiter. He remembered the wooden figure of the god in the chariot, in the French painting. Quite lifeless. Either he could not understand, or gods were perhaps dummies in men's imaginations. When, somewhat to Alf Dubbo's surprise, Mr Calderon took him by the hand, the better to lead him, it seemed, along paths they already knew, under the clothesline, with its loops of heavy-hanging wet linen, and past the ungovernable bushes of lemon-scented geranium. Yet, although the two figures were joined together at the hand, and were crowding through the doorway abreast, bumping at the doorposts with their awkward formation, as if to widen the hole, each could only feel that the other was probably entering a different tunnel. Mr Calderon had turned a bluish, milky white, and would have liked to appear pitiful, to justify his being led. "I am leaning on you," he suggested, "when you are the one who must need support and guidance. If only on account of your age." Then he gave a kind of gasp. "Sometimes I wonder," he added, "what will become of me." "What, are you sick?" asked the boy, in a tone of brutal indifference. Because his teeth were almost chattering, he had to aim his words like stones. "Not exactly," Mr Calderon replied, and added, "That is, there are some to whom I would not admit it. Their efforts to sympathize would be too painful to witness." He continued to act rather sick, or old, because by now the boy was learning to guide him along the passages. It was becoming gently agreeable. But the boy himself was behaving automatically. Guiding under guidance, he was no longer the initiated youth. There were pockets of puppy-fat concealed about his body, and his mind shivered behind the veil which still separated him from life. On normal occasions, delivering a message, or returning a pair of cleaned shoes, he would not have lingered in the rector's room; its personal mystery was too much for him. Now, on arrival at their destination, his movements were ticking painfully. Halted on the carpet from which the pattern had disappeared, Mr Calderon said formally, and somehow differently, "Thank you, dear fellow. I am grateful to you in my infirmity." In which neither of them believed. But Mr Calderon was pleased to have invented it. Then, again surprisingly, he opened Alf Dubbo's shirt, and put in his hand. "It is warmth for which one craves," he explained, older and more trembly than before. The boy feared his heart, which was leaping like a river fish, might be scooped up and held by that cold hand. But he did not resist physically. At no time in his life was Alf Dubbo able to resist what must happen. He had, at least, to let it begin, for he was hypnotized by the many mysteries which his instinct sensed. Mr Calderon was mopping his forehead. "Are you charitable?" he asked. "Or just another human being?" Alf did not know, so he only grunted. As his guardian seemed to ordain it, they were pretty soon divesting themselves of anything that might possibly serve as a refuge for their personalities. The parson's pace became reckless, with the boy following suit, because it would have been worse to have got left behind. They were revolving in the slightly shabby room, their ridiculous shirt-tails flapping like wings. Their shoes were thunderous in coming off. Mr Calderon stubbed his toe on one of the castors of the bedstead, but it was not the moment at which to complain. Time was too short. The past, the future, the appearances of things, his faith, even his desire, could have been escaping from him. Certainly, after the whirlwind of preparation, he was left with his nakedness, always so foolish, and rather bent at the knee. But decided to embrace his intention. It was a warm-cold morning in autumn. It was a morning devoted to regret rather than fulfilment. They lay together on the honeycomb quilt. Pleasure was brief, fearful, and only grudgingly recognized. Very soon the boy was immersed in the surge of words with which his lover lamented his own downfall. In between, Mr Calderon revived his trance of touch. "A kind of dark metal," he pondered, and would have liked to remember poetry, even to have composed some of his own, to write with his finger. "But metal does not feel." So they returned perpetually to where they had left off. "That is what makes it desirable." Metal submitted, however. They lay upon the lumpy bed of words. From under his eyelashes. the boy was fascinated for always by a mound of grey stomach. Mr Calderon resumed quoting from the narrative of his life, and Alf Dubbo snoozed. When he awoke, his guardian was sneezing, overtaken by catarrh, if not an honest-to-God cold. "We should put our things on," he announced irritably, and then: "I wonder what you will think of me, Alf." The boy, who had been dreaming happily, looked contented, all considered. But the man was too obsessed to notice. Groping for his trousers, for his handkerchief, from where he lay, keys, money fell in an ominous cascade. "How I must appear to you," he persisted. The boy began to laugh, showing his broad teeth. "Well?" asked the man. Suspicious. "How you look?" The boy was practically bound with laughter. Then, with an expression which was rather sheepish, but which might have turned to malice if he had been dealing with an equal, he reached out, and seized a handful of the grey belly, and twisted it round, tight, as if it had been stuff. "Hhehhyyy?" Mr Calderon whinged. He did not like the turn affairs had taken. But made himself laugh a little. "You look to me"-the boy laughed-"like you was made out of old wichetty grubs." And twisted the flesh tighter in support. It was a situation which Mr Calderon might have handled badly, if the door had not opened and introduced his sister Mrs Pask. Emily Pask was standing there. On two legs. That was the general impression. In a purple hat. Everybody was looking. Nobody was in any way assisted. They had, in fact, stuck. Until Mrs Pask's throat began to thaw. The blood was again moving in her, till it matched her hat. Her eyes were sewn to her face, otherwise they might have fallen, and even so, despite the stitches, almost did. "You boy!" She began to try her tongue. "You! You devil! What have you done to my brother?" She began to totter at a chair. And fell upon it without mercy. "I never allowed myself to suspect," she rasped. "But knew. Something. Oh, you devil! Sooner or later." The others remained fastened to that bed, the honeycomb pattern eating into their buttocks. In spite of the shock, Alf Dubbo realized pretty soon that he must dress himself. It took a long time, but was eventually accomplished. The Reverend Timothy Calderon had resorted to tears, and to calling on his sister's name. In the blur of white and purple, Alf Dubbo left the room. "AlfwheraryouAlf," called Mrs Pask's cocky. The boy had thought to knot his shoelaces together, and to hang his shoes round his neck. A practical move, it enabled him to run more easily from the township of Numburra, which he never saw again. As he wandered through paddocks and along roads, the fugitive did not reflect on the injustice of Mrs Pask's accusation, sensing with her that all which had happened had to happen, sooner or later. He was only glad to have endured it, and to be able to remember some little spasms of pleasure in a waste of words and bewilderment. Sensual pleasure, certainly, because his arms were strong, and his skin was smooth, and the appeal had been made just then. But he did also recall his protector in many harmless attitudes, and would slow up on his journey, and kick at a stone, or pull a leaf, as he estimated the extent and kind of loss. He felt the wind on him. The absence of his guardian was not unlike that caused by the theft of some old woolly, hitherto undervalued garment snatched from an unsuspecting back on a frosty morning. Less material, more subtly missed, because he would not have admitted, were those equally woolly precepts, of God in cloud and God in man, which the rector had attempted to wind round a mind that found them strange, suffocating, superfluous. Although he had adopted a few of these, in secret, for expediency's sake, and had got into the habit of protecting himself from terrors by wrapping his thoughts in them, beside some waterhole at night. What became of the rector and his sister, Alf Dubbo often wondered, without ever finding out. Their end could have been an awful one. Chained together in a hell of common knowledge, they might have lingered for a little, torturing each other with the dreadful secret and the brother's insufficient faith. Actually, what happened was this: When Mr Calderon had snivelled a while, as he was, on the bed, for even if he had clothed himself it could not have hidden his nakedness, and Mrs Pask had grieved, and brooded, and subsided, the rector, it must be said, did affirm, "As a Christian of a kind, Emily, and I expect even you will grant there are all kinds, I must protest that poor Alf Dubbo was not to blame." Mrs Pask creaked, or the springs of the overgoaded chair. "To blame?" she asked, dreamily. "For what has happened," her brother replied. "You must understand, in all justice, that I was to blame." He began to snivel again. "And will do penance for it ever after." "To blame?" repeated Mrs Pask. "For what has happened?" — dreamier still. Mr Calderon's mouth opened. But Mrs Pask got up. "I do not know, Timothy," she said, "what you are referring to." And looked right at him, as though he had been clothed in one of his two flannel suits, gunmetal tones, or the blue serge, from Anthony Hordern's. "I am going to warm up the Cornish pasty," she announced. "You must excuse me," she said, "if dinner is skimpy. I am feeling off colour. Oh, there will be the bottled plums, of course, for anyone who has the appetite." If his sister had not been a good woman, he might have doubted her morality. As it was, he accepted the state of affairs, and counted his money, which had fallen on the floor. They continued to live together. Mr Calderon was even humbler than before, lighting a candle, offering a text, holding a chalice at eye level. It might have been pitiful, if anyone had ever noticed, how his faith flickered on its bed of ashes in the painful process of rekindling. There was so much to accomplish in such a short time. He was suffering, his eyes suggested, from something secret and internal, as he placed the wafer, shielded the chalice, and wiped the rim with the linen napkin so beautifully laundered by his sister. Mrs Pask was leading a seemingly tranquil life. Only once, she had remarked, over her devilled toast, at tea, "I often wonder what that boy intended to convey through those horrible, horrible obscenities he painted on his birthday with poor Arthur's oils." But quickly mastered her wind, while her brother composed a little mound out of some grains of scattered salt. Mrs Pask no longer took her easel to dash off a sunset or a gum-tree. She had thrown herself into works, and was respected by almost every member of the Mothers' Union and the Ladies' Guild.

After travelling several weeks, Alf Dubbo reached the town of Mungindribble. Privation and the fear of capture had made him thinner. But he grew confident by degrees. As the weeks passed, time and his last memories of Mr Calderon and Mrs Pask persuaded him that he would be better lost to them. Still, he tended to avoid towns, and to rely on farmers' sentimental wives for crusts. True to his policy, he skirted round Mungindribble. If he had entered it, he might have been shocked to find himself back at Numburra. Except that there were two additional banks. There was more money at Mungindribble. And its streets were hotter, dustier, its river drier. Wandering along the bank of the river, which on the outskirts of most towns is the lifestream of all outcasts, goats, and aboriginals, Alf could not help feel moved as he remembered the generous waters of Numburra, and the clumps of orange bamboos in which the gins waited at dusk. But at Mungindribble he did come at last to the rubbish dump, filled with objects of use and wonder, including the insides of an old clock, which he thought he might like to keep. He picked about there for a bit. Until he noticed on the edge of the scrub a humpy made of tin, bark, bag, and anything else available, with a woman standing in the doorway, holding up the fringe of a curtain made from a fancier kind of hessian. The woman appeared to be beckoning. When he got closer, he called, "Waddaya want?" "You!" she answered. "A woman could blow 'er head off yellin' at some silly-lookin' buggers. Come on over, and 'ave a yarn." He went, although his instinct warned him. "It's only sociable," she said, when he arrived still in doubt. "You get lonely shut up in the home. I'm in the empty-bottle business," she explained. "I ride around most days in the sulky, all around the town, and pick up bottles, and other things besides, and yarn to people, but the pony's gone an' staked 'isself. God knows 'ow long I'm gunna be mucked up." The woman must have been white once, but the sun and her pursuits had cured her, until she now presented the colour and texture of mature bacon. She was thin enough, but might have plumped out with teeth. Inside the cotton dress, her breasts suggested small, but active animals. Trying to jump at you, it appeared at times. She had those old blue eyes which bring back cold, windy days, and not even a crow in the sky. That was not to say she did not see a great deal; she would have identified what was stowed away under the seat of a stranger's sulky, even if the object had been wrapped in several bags. "Where you from?" she asked Alf. He named a town of which he had heard, in a far corner of the state. "You a quarter-caste?" she asked. "No," he said. "Half. I think." "You could get into trouble," she said, almost eagerly. Then she asked him his age, and about his mum. She showed him that expression which some women put on at mention of a mother. She showed him her rather watery gums. "You're a big boy," she said. "For your age." She told him her name was Mrs Spice, but that he might call her Hazel if he liked. He did not like. At all times during their short association, a kind of fastidiousness prevented him using her first name, though there was much else that he accepted. An association, he now realized with some horror, was forming on the edge of the rubbish dump between himself and Mrs Spice. Of course he could always run away, but had to be released by some mechanism which circumstance must first set off. The agitation he experienced at such an uncertain prospect transferred itself through his fingers to the old clock he was carrying, which started a gentle tinkling and jingling of shaken metal. "What's that you got?" asked Mrs Spice, only to make conversation like, because of course she saw. "A clock," he said. "Or bits of it." "Golly!" She laughed. "That won't do no one any good. You can't eat the guts of a bloody clock." Again he realized that fate was in action. The locked mechanism of his will was allowing Mrs Spice to lead him through the hole of her humpy into a darkness in which she lived. He was at least comforted by the jingling of his little clock. "A bite to eat is what a growin' boy like you needs before any think else, " the lady said. And unwrapped something. It was cold, fatty, and tasted rancid. But he ate it, together with some ant-infested bread, because he was hungry, and because it saved him from the possibility of having to do anything else, particularly talk. Mrs Spice, he soon gathered, was one of those people who do not eat. She rolled herself a cigarette, and poured out a draught into a mug, which made her suck her lips in, right back over the gums, and then blow them out again. The contents of the mug were that strong she was almost sucked into it. How long Alf Dubbo remained camped with Mrs Spice he often wondered. She fed him as much as she thought necessary. He helped her water the pony and sort the bottles. But would not join her on her sulky-rides around the town. He was happiest when he could escape and moon around the rubbish dump, where, it seemed, the inhabitants of Mun-gindribble had shed their true selves, and he was always making discoveries which corroborated certain suspicions he already had of men. Sometimes he would lie on an old mattress, where its overflow of springs and stuffing allowed, and dream the paintings which circumstances prevented him temporarily from doing. He was painting all the time. Except in paint, of course. In these new pictures which his mind created, the bodies of men were of old springs and rubber, equally, with the hair bursting out of them, and sometimes a rusty rabbit-trap for jaws. He would paint the souls inside the bodies, because Mr Calderon had told him all about the souls. Often he would paint them in the shape of unopened tins-of soup, or asparagus, or some such-but pretty battered, and the contents all fermented, waiting to burst out in answer to a nail. He would snooze and compose. The old, broken-down clock, with the altar lights jingling and tinkling inside it, was very reminiscent of his former guardian. Motion still eluded him, though; he could apprehend it, but knew that he would not have been able to convey it. And sometimes the souls, which were the most interesting and obsessive part of his paintings, should have leapt up in the bodies, like the wind of metho, or the delirious throb and dribble of love. For, soon after his arrival, Mrs Spice had introduced him to the rest of his duties. She had uncorked the bottle one night, and said, "I am running short, Alf"-she always was-"but will give you a drop to pick you up, and show I am a good sport. You are a big boy now, you know. You are thin. But that don't matter." He did not know that he wanted the drink, but took it because it might lead him on to fresh discovery. He made her laugh. Himself too, eventually. It was like the time, he remembered, when Mrs Pask had tinkered with the switch. It was as if he had drunk down a real electric shock; it just about shot him back against the wall. He stayed shaky for a little. He felt his skin had gone blue. But Mrs Spice did not seem to notice. She would have mentioned it if, all of a sudden, she had seen him turn blue, because she mentioned almost everything. "That will grow the hair on yers!" She laughed, that was all, rousing herself so that her tits jumped, and the hurricane lamp. Then she got serious, and, after pouring them another, reaching over with her leathery, but quite smooth and nice arm, would have liked to talk about things. "Sometimes I wonder what you think about, Alf," she said. "What is inside of you. Everyone has somethink in them, I suppose." Then she blinked, because she had made a serious contribution, like as if she was in the habit of reading books. Alf could not tell her. Because he could not have simply said: Everything is inside of me, waiting for me to understand it. Mrs Spice would not have understood. Any more than he did, altogether, except in flickers. So he had another drink out of the mug. One day he would paint the Fiery Furnace, with the figures walking in it. He could see them quite distinct now. All the time Mrs Spice was trying to impress. He saw at first faintly, then with cruel bursts of understanding. Her words and gestures were those of some other woman, who already existed in her imagination, and who would at last, with the cooperation of her audience and the bottle, perhaps even exist in fact. "You gotta realize I was not always like this, " she was saying, holding together her straight and loose hair, with both hands, at the nape of her neck. Although she succeeded surprisingly in her aim-there she was, a young woman in a cleaner cotton dress, smoother, smelling of laundry above the strong armpits-he knew the act to be dishonest. Had he not on one occasion promised Mrs Pask to paint the picture of Jesus Christ because he wanted something awful bad? And had known himself to be incapable. At least Mrs Spice was capable of fulfilling promises. "Nobody never accused me of sittin' on it," she said. "Mean is what I am not." "You don't wanta be afraid," she added, when she had crawled over to his side of the shack. He was not afraid, only surprised at the powers which had been given him. "And remember," she shouted, "I am not some bloody black gin! I am NOT-" She shut up then, as they became possessed of the same daemon. During the night she was alternately limp and quarrelsome, until he at last shrank back into the body of a thin and sulky boy. "Go on!" he called out finally. "Get to hell!" He might have rolled himself into a ball, in self-protection, but he was pretty sure she would have picked it open. So he began to hit the old bag. "I'll fetch the Johns in the mornin'!" she shrieked. "Layin' into a white woman!" When she fell asleep. He could hear the breath whistling out of her slack mouth. Towards dawn, Alf Dubbo crawled out of Mrs Spice's hut. He was wearing his skin, which was all she had left him, but it felt good. It was the pearly hour. Damp blankets fell in folds upon his bare shoulders. He wandered a little way along the bank of the almost dry river. Dim trees disputed with him for possession of the silence, as twig or drop fell, and his hard feet scuffed up the dead leaves. The formlessness of the scene united with the aimlessness of his movements in achieving a kind of negative perfection. But he could not leave well alone. He had to start mucking around with the smooth bark of one tree and then another, with a nail he had picked up in leaving the camp. The faint line of his longing began to flow out of him and over the white bark of the trees. He drew languorously sometimes, sometimes almost inflicting wounds. And would move on to express some fresh idea. And never finished, and would never, so hopeless and interminable were the circumstances in which, continually, he found himself fixed. After a bit he began to go back in the direction of the camp. There was nothing else he could do for the moment. Colour was returning to the sky. Out in the open the light was sharpening its edge on tins. Mrs Spice appeared, giggly and abusive, after rising ladylike and late. "You're a fair trimmer!" she repeated several times, and tittered. "But don't think you're goin' to rule the roost," she hastened to add, "just because, I was good to yers once. Generosity has its limits." After which she drew in her chin. But she could not keep it there for long. She had acquired a numerous clientele, through her dealings in bottles, as well as by bush telegraph. It was not uncommon for shearers in town on a spree to look up Hazel, or for a drover on the road to hitch his sulky to her tree. Gentlemen would drive out from town, or even walk late at night, arriving with a clink of bottles and a salvo of ribaldry. It must be said she seldom disappointed. Or if she did, it was usually some timid soul who had suddenly thought better of it. And for such there were always the alternatives of conversation and song. Mrs Spice herself was musical, and, when squeezed in a certain way, would let out a thin soprano in imitation of an oriental bagpipe. There were nights when the moon reverberated with entertainments at the rubbish dump. Alf Dubbo preferred to keep out of all that, suspecting how he would be treated-like an idiot, or a black-but sometimes could not avoid being caught, early and innocently asleep, in Mrs Spice's shack. On one such occasion a shearer from Cowra, particularly leery, and beery, and proud of his easy conquest of a lady, noticed something in the corner, and remarked, "What-o, Hazel! Takin' a swig at the black-jack on the side?" But Mrs Spice, when stood up, could demonstrate that coarseness was never the master of delicacy. "That," she replied, "I would have you know, Mr Er, is a young boy apprenticed to the bottle trade." In between casual custom and the normal business round, she forgot she had warned the abo not to expect anything further of a lady's generosity, and would become fretfully solicitous. Sometimes he laughed in her face, sometimes he beat her with a little switch, but at others they rode together on the tiger, until that slashed and fiery beast turned into an empty skin. At last, apathy and some foreboding descended on Alf Dubbo. He would look at himself, puzzled and frightened. He was feeling off, the distance through the doorway glittering with tins and emptiness. "'Ere," she asked, "what's got inter youse?" "I feel crook," he said, and turned. Then she would swear, and shake the bags on which she slept. She grew more cantankerous. "You are not worth your damper," she said once. "Layin' around!" And spat. A couple of days later she came up to him in the sun. He could see that her thoughts were already spilling out of her. She said, "You _are__ crook! And waddaya done ter me? Eh? A fine present ter give!" He realized how they hated each other. "You old rubbish dump!" he cried. "Who's to know who dropped it on yer? What with drovers, and shearers, and everybody!" She was cursing, and shaking. "Those are the last words you say in my place!" she shouted. "Okay," he said. "Okay, Mrs Spice." He took his shoes and went, although it was already four o'clock in the afternoon. He slept under a tree that night, and woke early, to re-examine the mark of his sickness the first moment possible. Then he sat, during the brief space when the sun deceives with gold. And continued sitting as the world stretched before him in its actual colours, of grey-brown.

Alf Dubbo now went bush, figuratively at least, and as far as other human beings were concerned. Never communicative, he retired into the scrub of half-thoughts, amongst the cruel rocks of obsession. Later he learned to prefer the city, that most savage and impenetrable terrain, for the opportunities it gave him of confusing anyone who might attempt to track him down in his personal hinterland. But for the time being, he hung around country towns, and stations, working for a wage, or earning his keep, sometimes even living on a charitable person for a week or two. He never cared to stay anywhere long. There was always the possibility that he might be collected for some crime he began to suspect he had committed, or confined to a reserve, or shut up at a mission, to satisfy the social conscience, or to ensure the salvation of souls that were in the running for it. He avoided his own people, whatever the degree of colour, because of a certain delicacy with cutlery, acquired from the parson's sister, together with a general niceness or squeamish-ness of behaviour, which he could sink recklessly enough when forced, as he had throughout the reign of Mrs Spice, but which haunted him in its absence like some indefinable misery. There was also, of course, his secret gift. Like his disease. He would no more have confessed those to a black than he would have to a white. They were the two poles, the negative and positive of his being: the furtive, destroying sickness, and the almost as furtive, but regenerating, creative act. As soon as he had saved a few pounds, Dubbo had gone about buying paints through the medium of a store catalogue. They were crude, primary things to amuse children. But they made him tremble. And were quickly used. Then he took to breaking into the tins of paint he discovered in station storerooms, and would slap at any obscure wall until he had exhausted his desire. He would spend Sundays in the shade of an iron water-tank, drawing and tearing off, and drawing, until he had a whole heap of hieroglyphs which perhaps only he could interpret. Not that it would have occurred to him to attempt communication with another. But his forms were crystallizing. While his organism was subjected to the logic of disease, an increased recklessness of mind helped him take short cuts to solving some of the problems. Many others remained, though as he wandered deeper into himself, or watched the extraordinary behaviour of human beings on the periphery of his own existence, he was often hopeful of arriving eventually at understanding. Everything he did, any fruit of his own meaningful relationship with life, he would lock up in a tin box, which grew dented and scratched as it travelled with him from job to job, or lay black and secret underneath his bed, while he played the part of factory-hand or station roustabout. Nobody would have thought of opening that box. Most people respected the moroseness of its owner, and a few were even scared of Dubbo. He grew up, tall, thin, and rather knobbly. He had already matured by the time he developed the courage and curiosity to make for Sydney. Arriving there, he left the tin box in a railway parcels-office, and slept in parks at first, until he discovered a house sufficiently dilapidated, a landlady sufficiently low, and hopeful, and predatory, to accept an abo. He settled at last, although two of his fellow lodgers, a couple of prostitutes, objected eloquently to such an arrangement. But only in the beginning. It soon became obvious that the abo was going to disappoint, by his decency, his silence, by his almost non-existence. The landlady, who had been deserted the year previous by a lover, gave up knocking at his door, and shuffled off into the wastes of linoleum, to nurse her grievance and a climacteric. During those years it was easy to stay in work. Dubbo managed to adapt himself to that monotonous practice for longer stretches by sealing his mind off, and by regarding those dead hours as a period of mental fallow for the cropping of his art. But he longed to close the door of his room, which he had made neat enough to please a parson's sister, and to take from his double-locked box the superior oils he could now afford to buy. There were also the grey days, and the streaming, patent-leather evenings, which turned his skin a dubious yellow, his mind to a shambles of self-examination and longing. Often he would take refuge by slipping into the public library, to look at books. But reading did not come easily; an abstraction of ideas expressed less than the abstraction of forms and the synthesis of colours. There were the art books, of course. Through which he looked with a mixture of disbelief and criticism. On the whole he had little desire to learn from the achievement of other artists, just as he had no wish to profit by, or collaborate in the experience of other men. As if his still incomplete vision would complete itself in time, through revelation. But once he came across the painting by a Frenchman of the Apollonian chariot on its trajectory across the sky. And he sat forward, easing his brown raincoat, his yellow fingers steadying themselves on the slippery page. He realized how differently he saw this painting since his first acquaintance with it, and how he would now transcribe the Frenchman's limited composition into his own terms of motion, and forms partly transcendental, partly evolved from his struggle with daily becoming, and experience of suffering. In the great library, the radiators would be pouring out the consoling soup of warmth. All the readers had found what they had been looking for, the black man noticed with envy. But he was not altogether surprised; words had always been the natural weapons of whites. Only he was defenceless. Only he would be looking around. After reading, and yawning, and skipping, and running his thumb down a handful of pages to hear them rise like a flock of birds, he would arrange the books in an all too solid pile, and stare. On days when he was master of himself, his sense of wonder rewarded him. But in a winter light, if he had not been nourished by his secrets, if he had not enjoyed the actual, physical pleasures of paint, he might have lain down and died, there amongst the varnish and the gratings, instead of resting his head sideways on the table, and falling asleep on the pillow of his hands. Then the sweat would glitter on the one exposed cheekbone, and amongst the stubble at the nape of his neck. On one such occasion he sat up rather suddenly, yawned, tested a sore throat by swallowing carefully once or twice, and picked up a volume which someone else had abandoned along the table. He was reading again, he found, the sad story of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He could remember many of the incidents, and how he had hoped to love and reverence the individuals involved, at least enough to please his guardians. He read, but the expression of the eyes still eluded him. All was pale, pale, washed in love and charity, but pale. He opened the Gospel of the Beloved Disciple. Then his throat did hurt fearfully. It burned. The bubbles of saliva were choking him. He got up, and went away, his badly fitting raincoat, of an ugly and conflicting brown, floating and trailing. He walked a considerable distance that night, with long, sliding steps, and lay down under a sandstone ledge, under some wet lantana bushes, with a woman who told him how she had been done out of a quarter-share in a winning lottery ticket. The couple proceeded to make love, or rather, they vented on each other their misery and rage. The woman had with her a bag of prawns, of which she was smelling, as well as of something slow and sweet, probably gin. She attempted repeatedly to fasten on him her ambitious sea-anemone of a mouth, and he was as determined to avoid being swallowed down. Consequently, he could have killed that poor drunken whore. She was a little bit surprised at some of it. As he held her by the thighs, he could have been furiously ramming a wheelbarrow against the darkness. But her misfortunes were alleviated, for the time being, and until she discovered they had been increased. Even after her lover had left her, in the same rage which she had chosen to interpret as passion, she continued to call to him, in between doing up her dress and searching for her prawns. As for Dubbo, he slithered down the slope through the smell of cat which lantana will give out when disturbed after rain. Since his guardians had taught him to entertain a conscience, he would often suffer from guilt with some part of him, particularly on those occasions when his diseased body took control, in spite of the reproaches of his pastor-mind. Now he might have felt better if he had been able to roll his clothes into a ball, and shove them under a bush. But it was no longer possible, of course, to abandon things so easily. And he had to walk on, tormented by the intolerable clothes, and the lingering sensation of the whore's trustful thighs. In the white hours, he came to the house where he lived, and let himself shivering and groping into the room which was his only certain refuge. When he had switched the light on, the validity of certain forms which he had begun to work out on a sheet of plywood made his return a more overwhelming relief, even though his deviation had to appear more terrible. Shambling and fluctuating in the glass, he lay down at last on the bed, and, where other men might have prayed for grace, he proceeded to stare at what could be his only proof of an Absolute, at the same time, in its soaring blues and commentary of blacks, his act of faith. Dubbo was sufficiently sustained both physically and mentally, by his vocation, to ignore for the most part what people called life. Only the unhappiness of almost complete isolation from other human beings would flicker up in him at times, and he would hurry away from his job-at that period he was working in a Sydney suburb, in a factory which manufactured cardboard boxes and cartons in oiled paper-he would hurry, hurry, for what, but to roam the streets and settle down eventually on a straight-backed bench in one of the parks. There he would indulge in what was commonly called _putting in time__, though it was, in fact, nothing else but _hoping__. One evening he was sitting on such a bench in such a park, and the big fig-trees were casting their most substantial shadows on the white grass, a woman came and sat beside him. With no intentions, however. She looked deliberately in her handbag for a cigarette. And lit one. With her own match. Then she blew a trumpet of smoke, and watched the water of the tranquil little bay. If they had not recrossed their legs at exactly the same moment, they might never have spoken. As it was, the woman had to smile. She said, "Two minds of the same opinion. Eh?" He did not know what to answer, and looked away. But the attitude of his shoulders must have been a receptive one. "How do you find it down here?" the woman asked. Again he was perturbed, but just managed to reply. "All right." Knotting his hands to protect himself. "I came from up the country," the woman persisted, and named a northwestern town. "Many of you boys down in the city?" she asked. She was kind and polite, but bored by now. She frowned for a shred of tobacco that she could taste as it drifted loose in her mouth. "No," he said. Or: "I dunno." He did not like this. She was looking idly at the colour of his hands. "What is that you've got?" she asked. "What?" "That is an ulcer," she said. "On the back of your hand." "It is nothing," he said. It was a sore which had broken out several weeks before, and which he carried for the most part turned away from strangers, as he waited for it to disappear. "Are you sick?" she asked. He did not answer, and was preparing to go away from the seat, from the park, with its dusty grass and little basin of passive water. "You can tell me," she said. "I should know." It was very strange. Now he took a look at the strange woman, with her rather full, marshmallowy face, and her lips that she had painted up to shine. She smelled of the powder with which the white women covered their bodies in an effort to soften the impact of their presence. The woman sighed, and began to tell her life, which he listened to, as though it had been a spoken book. "You are sick," she sighed. "I know. Because I had it. You got a dose of the syph. When I was young and foolish, a handsome young bastard of a Digger put it across me with a hard-luck story. God, I can see 'im! With the strap of his hat hangin' onto 'is lower lip. I can smell the smell the khaki used to have then. Well, that chapter was short, but the consequences was long." The woman was a prostitute, it began to emerge, successful, and fairly satisfied in her profession. She told him that her name was Hannah. "Of course," she said, "I had luck too. I got my own home. An old cove who used to come to me regular left me a couple of semi-detached homes. I let one, live in the other. Oh, I am comfortable!" she said, but aggressively. "We all laughed when some solicitor wrote about Charlie's will. But it was a _good__ joke, as it turned out. No one thought Charlie had the stuff to put away. He was a rag-dealer." This story made her audience glad. He loved to listen to the tales in which the action was finished. They had the sad, pale, rather pretty, but unconvincing colours of Mrs Pask's sacred prints. "Of course," said Hannah, "although I am comfortable, I am not all that. That is why I have never retired from business. You never know." She threw away her cigarette and frowned, so that he noticed how the white powder lay in the cracks between her brows. "Many young fellers would not notice me now," she said. "I know that." Suddenly she screwed up her mouth excruciatingly. "You would not notice me," she fired. He looked down, because he did not know what to answer. He only knew that he would not have noticed Hannah. "Go on!" She laughed. "I was not trying you out. Or rather, I was. I have a proposition to make. And did not want you to think I was offering you the job of a ponce. Oh, I am in no need of men. I have my friend, too. No," she said, sinking her chin. "Sometimes I will take an interest in a person. And you are sort of down on it. See? Well, I have a small room at the back. Lying idle. What do you say, Jack, to dossing down in my small room? Eh? Of course I won't say you needn't pay me a little something for the privilege." He was very, very silent, wondering whether it could be a trap. "It was only an idea," she said, looking over a couple of passers-by. "I never influenced even the cat. Funny, I was to have been a teacher. Can you see me with a mob of kids in a shed beside the road? But do you know what," she said, turning to him, "I was frightened at the whole thing. I took up with men instead. Men are stupider." The blackfellow laughed. "I am a man," he said. "You are something else as well." She pondered something she had not yet solved, but could not begin to speak again too quickly. "I could help you, too." Pointing at his hand. "There is a doc I know a little." She mentioned a certain hospital. "You are not frightened, are you, Jack?" Then he knew that he was, and that this floury woman in her dress of lace doilies was leading him poignantly into a dining-room from which the kindness had not yet fled. "Anyways," said Hannah, "if you decide, I would let you have that small room for ten bob." She had begun suddenly to enunciate very clearly, as some people did for blacks, but dropped her voice a little to give the address at which she lived. It was getting dark by then. People with tidy lives were setting tables, or leaning bare arms on window-sills. The lights were lit. "Well," said Hannah, and began to arrange herself, "business is business, isn't it? It is a queer thing, but I never liked men one little bit. Only you had to do something, and they told me I was pretty good at it." She could not comb too hard. "Oh," she said, "I don't say I don't like a yarn with some man, on a tram, about what he has been doing. I don't mind that. Poor buggers! They are so uninteresting." Soon Hannah, who had snapped her handbag on her comb, and dusted off her dandruff, was ready for the streets. "Then, I might see you," she said. But he could tell that something had made her no longer really care. He was the one that did. He had twisted his body right round till his bones were painful on the hard seat. "At Abercrombie Crescent," he was saying, in a stupid-sounding, muddy-coloured voice, and repeating other directions she had given. "Yes," she called, farther now, throwing the words over her shoulder. "It is a street, though. No one knows how Abercrombie got stuck with a crescent." Her voice fell away from her as she went. "And not before twelve. I'd take the axe to anybody. I am not fit." Hannah walked towards the road, inclining somewhat as she went. The night was darkening and purpling across the park, and soon she was sucked up by it.

Alf Dubbo went to live at 27 Abercrombie Crescent, in the small room which Hannah had offered. He did not take long to decide; he was too relieved. He had locked his box, tied a cord round one or two things he had been working on, and gone. He was happy in the back room, which was stuffed with many objects of doubtful virtue: a spare mattress full of kapok lumps, a rusted, burnerless kero stove, a dressmaker's dummy, boxes of feathers, and a scattering of rat pellets. Outside, the wires of aerials were slackly strung above the slate roofs. He was fascinated by the wires, and began the first day to paint them, as they intercepted the sounds of feathers and his own tentative thanksgiving. But he kept the door locked. Some time after the light had gone, Hannah came and rattled the knob. She announced, "My friend has come, Alf. I will have to introduce you." Dubbo went out to them. Hannah was nervous, but obviously proud. "I want you to know Alf Dubbo," she said. "Mr Norman Fussell." Doing with her hand as she had seen done. Norman Fussell had been arranging his waves in front of the glass. "Norman," Hannah explained, "is a male nurse. He is off duty for a while, and that is how he is able to be here." "Pleased to know you, Alf," said Mr Norman Fussell. He was very brisk for one so round and soft. He began to prepare himself a meal of beans on toast, which was the kind of thing he liked, and which he ate, holding his head on one side, half out of delicacy, half because of a difficult denture. Hannah was solicitous. "How is the sister, Norm?" she asked, but dreaded. "Bloody," said Norman Fussell through his beans. When he had finished, he informed, "Nurse is feeling better now. " And sat and smiled, arranging his canary-coloured waves, and smoking a cigarette which he had taken from a pretty little box. Hannah got Alf Dubbo aside. "They will tell you," she said, "that Norman is a pufter. Well, I am too tired to argue about what anybody is. I am sick of men acting like they never was. Norm could not impress a woman even if he tried. And that is what is restful." Hannah would attempt not to let business interfere with Norman Fussell's off-duty, but if it did, he would doss down with a blanket on the lounge. Though he might also sometimes go in search of trade. Sunday was religiously kept for Norm, if he happened to be free. Sunday was bliss, such as is possible. They would lie in bed overlapping each other, and read the murders and divorces, and consult the stars. Or would slip out to the kitchen to fetch the red tea and snacks they loved: bread spread thickly with condensed milk, or tomato sauce, or squashed banana. Or would snooze and melt together. Dubbo painted them later on, as they appeared to him through the doorway. He painted them in one big egg of flesh, forehead to forehead, knee to knee, compressed into the same dream. It was not his most ambitious painting. But an egg is something; even a sterile one is formally complete. On going to live at Abercrombie Crescent, Dubbo began to receive treatment as an out-patient at the neighbouring hospital of Saint Paul's, either from the young doctor known to Hannah, or from one or other of his colleagues. For a long time the patient could hardly tell them apart. Their white coats and aseptic minds made them about as dissimilar as a row of the white urine bottles. As he had anticipated, the blackfellow was frightened at the touch of hands, but realized in time that he was just a case. He even grew bored and irritated by what was being done to him. It was necessary to endure the manufacture of cardboard boxes, but while he waited at the hospital of an evening, he could see the light was failing. He would be straining to prevent it. There were days when he did not take up a brush. Eventually he was told he had been cured of his venereal condition. He had almost forgotten what it was they were treating him for; it was so much more important to find a way out of other dilemmas. Disease, like his body, was something he had ended by taking for granted. His mind was another matter, because even he could not calculate how it might behave, or what it might become, once it was set free. In the meantime, it would keep jumping and struggling, like a fish left behind in a pool-or two fish, since the white people his guardians had dropped another in. While he continued painting, and attempting to learn how to think, Dubbo discovered that a war had broken out. So they told him, and he did slowly take it in. Wars do not make all that difference to those who have always been at war, and this one would not greatly have affected the abo's life, if it had not been for the altered behaviour of the people who surrounded him. Certainly, after he had been examined medically, and pronounced unfit, he had been drafted from the stapling of cardboard boxes to the spray-painting of aeroplanes, but that was part of his rather unconvincing, to himself always incredible, communal existence. But there were the people in the house, the people in the street, who now forced their way deeper into his mind. His brush would quiver with their jarring emotions, the forms were disintegrating that he had struggled so painfully and honestly to evolve. Now he began to dawdle at night in the streets, where there were more people than ever before investigating the lie of the land. Since the men had gone out to kill, a great many of those who had been left were engaged in far more deadly warfare with their own secret beings. Their unprotected, two-headed souls would look out at the abo, who was no longer so very different from themselves, but still different enough not to matter. Mouths, glittering with paint, would open up in the night like self-inflicted wounds. That, of course, was already familiar, and in another light he would have accepted it along with what he sensed to be other tribal customs. Now it was the eyes that disturbed most, of the white people who had always known the answers, until they discovered those were wrong. So they would burst out laughing, or break into little snatches of tinny song. Some of them danced, with open arms, or catching at a stranger. Others fell down, and lay where they were. Or they would lie together on the trampled grass in the attitudes of love. They would try everything sooner or later, but it was obvious they were disappointed to find they had not succeeded in killing the enemy in themselves, and perhaps there would not be time. Dubbo's workmates were in the habit of allowing him a swig or two, because, when they had got him drunk, he gave them a good laugh. Occasionally he would persuade somebody of an accommodating nature to buy him an illicit bottle. Then he would rediscover the delirious fireworks, as well as the dull hell of disintegration, which he had experienced first in Mrs Spice's shack. Except that by now, an opalescence of contentment would often follow nausea; a heap of his own steaming vomit could yield its treasure. He appeared to succeed, in fact, where the others in the wartime streets failed. Once, after a bout of drinking, he fell down, and lay on the lino, inside the front door at Abercrombie Crescent. Hannah, who came in late and unsuccessful, just about broke her neck. After she had switched on the light, and kicked the body again for value, she felt the need to holler, "Waddaya expect? From a drunken bastard of a useless black!" But he did not hear that. Next evening when he got in, she called him, and said, "Look here, love, some John with a sense of his own importance who finds a piebald lurching around, or even _laying__ in the street, is going to collect _you__, and plenty more said about it." Hannah, without her make-up, was cold, pale, and grave. She was too intent, she let it be understood, on the matter in hand, to bother all that about her lodger's fate. Her naked nails blenched on the little pair of tweezers with which she was pulling the hairs out of her eyebrows. "Of course," she said, and pulled, "it's nothing," she said, "to do with me. Every man's business is his _own__. See?" All the while pulling. She would pull, and squint, and drop the hairs out of the window as if she was doing nothing of the sort. Alf Dubbo listened, but was more fascinated by what he saw. She had not yet made her bed, and the sheets were the colour of Hannah's natural skin-grey, at least in that light. Hannah herself was the colour of oysters, except for the parting of her breasts, where water could have been dripping, like in an old bath, or kitchen sink. "By the way," she mentioned, "that room of yours is going up to twelve bob. There is a war on now." But he remained fascinated by what he saw: Hannah's hand trembling as she worked the tweezers. "Okay, Hannah," he agreed, and smiled for other things. "Don't think I am trying to shake you off, Alf," she had to explain. "I need those two bob." She was smoothing and peering at her eyebrow, to make it as glossy as it might have been. "Any tart," she said, "even the plush ones, is a fool not to take precautions." As she tried rubbing at her eyebrow with spit. So Hannah, too, he saw, was afraid of what might happen, and most of all in mirrors. One day when she was running the feather duster over the more obvious surfaces of the lounge-room, she opened one of the compartments of her mind. She left off in the middle of "The Harbour Lights," to say, or recite, rather: "Those old women, Alf, the ones with the straight, grey, greasy hair hangin' down to their shoulders, like girls. The old girls. With a couple of yeller teeth, but the rest all watery gums. You can see them with an old blue dog, and sometimes a parcel. Pushin' their bellies ahead of 'em. Gee, that is what frightens me! And the snaky veins crawlin' up their legs!" But he could not help her, although he saw she was waiting for some sort of easy sign. He was sitting on the good end of the lounge, the points of his elbows fitted into the shallow grooves of his knee-caps, the slats of his fingers barely open on his cheek-bones. In that position, but for the supporting lounge, he might have been squatted beside a fire. Fire did protect, of course. Indeed, in deserted places it was not desirable to move at night without it. Alf Dubbo was fortunate in that he had his fire, and would close his eyes, and let it play across his mind in those unearthly colours which he loved to reproduce. But which did not satisfy him yet. Not altogether. His eyes would flash with exasperation. He could not master the innermost, incandescent eye of the feathers of fire. As he remained seated, and dreaming, and wordless on the lounge, on that occasion when she had been foolish enough to ask for guidance, Hannah was compelled to shout, "You are no bloody good! Any of yez! That silly sod of a Norm, we know. Not that I don't take 'im for what he is worth. God knows, there is plenty of women without a friend, let alone a human hot-water bottle. But you, Alf, you got something shut up inside of you, and you bloody well won't give another person a look." She began laying about her with the duster with such violence that the back fell off a book, which he had never more than noticed, in spite of the fact that it was the only one; it was too old, and black, and dusty, stuck in behind some ornaments which clients had presented to the owner in moments of drink or affluence. He stooped and picked up the brittle strip of leather, which lay in his fingers curled and superfluous as a shred of fallen bark. The rather large gold lettering of a title was still legible, though. Then he said, quite keen, in that good accent he had learnt somewhere, and would put on at times, "I would like you to lend me this book, Hannah. Where did it come from?" "That! Oh, that belonged to Charlie. My old rag-picker that I told you of. My one and only stroke of luck. Yes, you can have a loan of it. I like a good read of some book. But not that!" The house, squeezed in as it was between two others, had already grown too dark. Dubbo took the book, and went at once to his own room, where light, reduced to its essence, green-white and astonishing, would trickle a little longer, from over the slate roofs, down from the slate-coloured sky, of which they were an extension. He opened the book beside the window. At that hour even the veiled panes seemed to grow translucent as crystal. So, while the true light remained to him, he continued to read, in such desperate and disorderly haste that he introduced here and there words and phrases, whole images of his own. His secret self was singing at last in great bursts: "Praise ye Him, sun and moon: praise Him all ye stars of light. Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens; And wires of aerials, and grey, slippery slates, praise, praise the Lord. Mountains and all hills: fruitful trees, and all cedars: and the grey ghosts of other trees: and soles of the feet on wet leaves: and the dry rivers, praise the name of the Lord. The orange bamboos praise Him with their creaking. Beasts and all cattle: creeping things and flying fowl, praise, praise. Hands praise the God…." His own hands were trembling by now, for the light and his eyesight were nearly gone. So he threw himself, face down, on the bed. His upturned heels were quite wooden and lifeless, but in his innermost mind his hands continued to praise, with the colours of which he was capable. They issued like charmed snakes from the tips of his fingers: the crimsons, and the clear yellows, those corrosive greens, and the intolerable purple with which he might dare eventually to clothe the formless form of God. So he lay and shivered for the audacity of his ambition. Until his body forced him up. Then he switched on the electric light, and did just notice the little dirty trumpet which his mouth must have printed on the pillow. Because it was ugly, he turned it over, so that he should not see the stain. During the nights which followed Dubbo spent hours reading from the rag-collector's Bible. The voices of the Prophets intoxicated him as he had never been in life, and soon he was laying on the grave splendour of their words with the colours of his mind. At this period, too, he constructed the skeletons of several works which he did not have the strength or knowledge to paint. "The Chariot," for instance. Ezekiel's vision superimposed upon that of the French painter in the art book, was not yet his own. All the details were assembled in the paper sky, but the light still had to pour in. And suddenly he furled the cartoon, and hid it. To forget about it, at least with the waking part of his mind. The picture he did paint now was "The Fiery Furnace," almost the whole of it one Friday-he had gone sick on purpose-then the agony of Saturday, in which he sat, touching the surface of paint once or twice, but not seeing how to solve, or not yet daring. And did at last, in several soft strokes, of such simplicity he was exhausted by them. And sweating. His thighs were as sticky as though he had spilled out over himself. After that he cleaned his brushes very carefully and solemnly. He was happy. He went out, past the kitchen. Norm had arrived, and he and Hannah were cutting dainty sandwiches, spreading them with anchovette, or squashed dates. They smiled at him, but guiltily, for the obvious secret they were sharing: there was going to be a party. "Hi, Alf," Norm murmured. That was all. Dubbo went as far as Oxford Street, where he knew a barmaid whose friendship did not have principles attached. He could beckon from the street through the Bottle door, and sometimes Beat would condescend to see. Tonight Beat played, and he took his booze down the hill to a dead end he sometimes frequented, where nobody ever came at night, unless to park a car, or nail a tart against the wall. There he sat on the curb. He began to drink his neat grog. He went about it at first as though it had been a job he had learnt to do, very conscientious, and holding back some of the finer points of technique for difficult passages ahead. Then spasmodic. Glugging heavily into the bottle. He broke wind once or twice. His digestive tract had caught fire. He sang a few lines of a song he had made up in similar circumstances: "Hi digger, hi digger, My dad is bigger Than hiss-sself. My uncle is the brother Of my mother. But the other Is a bugger No-ho-bodee, And not my mother, Knows." By now the moon had entered even the back alleys, and was rinsing them of rubbish, so the black man stood up, and began to walk precariously along the solid stream. He loved the square-eyed houses, although they were blind to him. He was well-disposed towards the unpredictable traffic eyes. He touched a mudguard or two, and in one instance a flying bonnet. In the big street the dim fruitshops were all bananas. An open box of dates reminded him that the flies must be collecting at home. So he began to make for Hannah's place. During the latter years of the war there was often something doing at Hannah's; the streets were that full, some of it could not help pouring in wherever a door opened. There was the Army, there was the Navy, but better the Navy because of the Yanks, and better than the Yanks, the dollar bills and nylons. Hannah herself was not so far gone she could not occasionally strike a lode deep in the heart of Idaho or Texas: some stoker who would pay real well for an opportunity to tell about his mom. Then Hannah would start swilling the booze around in her glass, and staring deep into it, until the time came to collect. But there were the other nights at Abercrombie Crescent when Norm's mob came in. When she was in the right mood, Hannah not only did not mind, but encouraged, and took an intelligent interest in the private life of any perv. The whore would nearly pee herself watching a drag act in some of her own clothes. After the monotony and bruises of the flesh show, it could have been that she liked to sink down on the springs, and enjoy the antics of puppets-tricky, ingenious, virulent, lifelike, but strictly papier-mâche. Now as Alf Dubbo wove through the streets back to Hannah's, he guessed it would be queans' night, if only from the special and secret manner she and Norm had worn while spreading the anchovette and dates. The outlook moved him neither way. It was an aspect of life which did not surprise the abo since he had discovered early that almost all human behaviour is surprising; you must begin to worry only for the little that is not. So he went home, as equably as his condition allowed, and prepared for anything. At Abercrombie Crescent all the inner doors stood open, except that of the room at the back. There were dark whispers in the hall. Somebody was powdering in clouds in front of Hannah's dressing-table, somebody was pulling on stockings. It sounded as though the lavatory cistern would never stop. Dubbo found Hannah right at the heart of the festivities, seated on the lounge with her friend and colleague Reen, whose hair was waved that tight it would have disappeared altogether if its brilliancy had allowed; Reen was one of the golden girls, but thin. In addition to the two whores, there was quite a bunch of queans, who knew, but did not know, Hannah's piebald. There was somebody, besides, whom Dubbo was still too confused to see, but sensed. Hannah shouted, in what was intended as a social whisper, that Alf had arrived in time for Normie's act. When Norman Fussell did, indeed, make his entrance. He was wearing a bunch of feathers on his head, and a bunch of feathers on his arse, and a kind of diamond G-string wherever else. Otherwise Norm was fairly naked, except that he had painted on a pair of formal nipples, and was prinked and powdered in the right places. The bird began to perform what was intended as a ritual-dance, on Hannah's Wilton with the brown roses. Assisted by gin, and the soul of the original chorus girl, by which he was obviously possessed, Norm extemporized with hands, ruffed up the gorgeous feathers, scratched stiffly at an imaginary earth. Although his bird breathed like a rasp, it did not seem to matter; so do hens when chased around the yard in summer. Just as the chorus girl was smuggled into Norm at birth, her elderly but professional soul had now invaded the body of this pink bird, making it real by the conventions which those present recognized. Indeed, if it ever got around that a bird of paradise had been in conjunction with a brush turkey, Norm Fussell could have provided evidence. All the queans were shrieking their approval, if it was not their scorn. Dubbo was laughing loudest and widest. He had squatted down on Hannah's carpet. If there had been space, he, too, would have danced the figures he remembered from some forgotten time. Instead, he clapped his hands. He was so glad, watching Norm strut, and flap his wings of flesh to music, while the stench of bodies caused the small room to shrink still further round the form of the primordial bird. "You are a proper pufter rorter, Hannah!" Reen had to remark, because she was a cow. "If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't watch this, not if I was offered a good night's hay. It sends me goosey." Hannah, who had let herself be drawn to the mystical core of Norm's act, would have preferred not to interrupt her devotions, but did reply from behind an objective smile, "What odds! Capon is just another kind of chook." At the same time, she realized the person who had come with Norm was present, and rewarded him with a deferential glance. So that Dubbo also remembered the fellow wearing a good dark suit was seated in a corner, in what was Hannah's best chair. The youngish man could not leave off looking at the abo, not offensively, however, for half his face was shaded by a hand. And in that position he remained, voluntarily obliterated. The extraordinarily long hand, which held and protected the long white face, appeared to sever it from the body, and the richly decorous dark suit. After appropriate applause for Norman, and drinks for those to whom respect was due, the party proceeded. Dubbo had cadged a drink or two, and was feeling fine, electrically lit. Soon he would sing his song, and dance his dance. He stood swaying in drink and anticipation. When Hannah's colleague Reen called, "What can _you__ do, Dubbo? Tear your clothes off, and show your bottom like everybody else?" She kicked her heels into the carpet, and roared. She was shickered, of course, by now, and sour as always. But Hannah nudged her friend, and looked anxiously at the young fellow who had come with Norm. Dubbo himself was overtaken by a sudden sadness. An Eyetalian boy called Fiddle Paganini was finishing singing a number, in the blond wig and black net stockings he had brought for that purpose in a port. Hannah said in a loud voice, "Alf can do better than sing and dance. Take it from me. Can't you, Alf?" She did not look exactly at him, and stuck her tongue into her cheek, because she was just a little bit nervous at what she was about to suggest. She turned to the young fellow in the corner. "You don't know what we got here, Humphrey." She was addressing the stranger in a voice louder still, in an accent that nobody had ever heard before. "Alf does oil paintings. Don't you, Alf? How about showing the pictures? That would be a real treat, and one that Mr Mortimer would appreciate and remember." Dubbo was struck by lightning right there in the brown lounge. Everyone was looking. Some of the queers were groaning and yawning. "Arr, yes, go on, Alf!" Norman Fussell added. Norm had returned conventionally clothed, and seated himself on his friend's lap, from which he had been dropped almost at once, because he was heavy. This piece of by-play, if of no other significance, forced Humphrey Mortimer's hand to reveal the second half of his face. Which Dubbo saw fully at last. Now the young man leaned forward, and said, "Yes, Alf, there is nothing I should like better than to see those paintings. If you would consider showing them." He spoke in tones so polite and flat they precluded arrogance, enthusiasm, irony, or any definite emotion. That was the way he had been taught, perhaps. To win confidence, without offending against taste by rousing hopes. Dubbo stood. Usually he could sense an ambush. Or was this the one evening when defences might be dropped? It was vanity that began to persuade him, stroking with the most insidious feathers. All that he was capable of expressing was soon suffocating in his chest, writhing in his belly, tingling in the tips of his fingers. He was looking down almost sardonically into the rather pale, lifeless eyes of Humphrey Mortimer, who was obviously unaware that he might have created an explosive situation. Until Dubbo was no longer able to endure that such ignorance should be allowed to exist. "Orright," he answered, furrily. He began to walk, or run, along the dark passage to his room, his hands stretched out brittle in front of him, to guard against something. He could not select quickly enough a couple of the paintings, dropped, and recovered them. Started back. At one point his right shoulder struck the wall, which threw him off. But he did arrive in the reeling lounge, where he propped the boards, on the floor, against a chair, in front of the guest of honour. The whole business was most unorthodox, it was implied by the majority of those present. And the paintings themselves. Some members of the company made it clear they would take no further part in anything so peculiar. But Humphrey Mortimer sat forward, disclosing through his eyes what he would not have allowed his mouth to attempt; he might have committed himself. Perhaps only Dubbo sensed that an undernourished soul was feeding as though it had never eaten before. The abo was very straight and aloof. "Yeeees," said the connoisseur, because it was time he made a remark, provided it was equivocal. Dubbo touched the corner of one board with his toe. "No," he contradicted. "These paintings are no good. I was still trying. Half of them is empty. That corner, see how dead it is? I did not know what to fill it with. I'll paint these out later on." He was still breathless. But from his vantage point he could afford to be contemptuous, not to say honest. "Even so," murmured Humphrey Mortimer. Possessed by the paintings, whether they were indifferent or not, he had grown completely passive. Nothing would control Dubbo's passion now. He ran back along the passage. The things in his pockets were flogging him. He brought paintings and paintings. They lit a bonfire in the mediocre room, the walls of which retreated from the blaze of colour. Although the gramophone continued to piddle manfully, it failed to extinguish even the edges of the fire. Some of the queers were taking their leave. Some of them had curled up. "Wonderful, ain't it, what a touch of paint will do?" Hannah said, and yawned. But in the roomful of dormant or murmurous people, it was the painter and his audience of one that mattered. They were in communication. Dubbo had just brought an offering of two pictures. Increasing sobriety suggested to him that he ought to withdraw. But he propped the paintings lovingly enough. The other sat forward. Since he had grasped the idiom, he was more deeply receptive. But, from habit or policy, would continue only lazily to smile his pleasure and acknowledgment. "Ah," he began intimately, for the painter alone, "Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego?" "Yes!" The abo laughed gently. It was very like a courtship. "And the Angel of the Lord," Dubbo added, in the same caressing voice. He squatted down and almost touched with a finger the stiff, but effulgent figure. It had emerged completely from the chaos of spirit in which it had been born. In that it was so very recent, the paint still wet, the creator could not see his work as it must appear and remain. He could at least admire the feathery texture of the angel's wings as a problem overcome, while forgetting that a little boy on a molten morning had held a live cockatoo in his hands, and opened its feathers to look at their roots, and become involved in a mystery of down. Later perhaps, falling asleep, or waking, it might occur to the man how he had understood to render the essence of divinity. If he could have seen it, the work was already sufficient in itself. All the figures in the furnace were stiff but true. The fire was final. Neither time nor opinion could divert a single tongue of flame into a different shape. And the two actual men, watching the figures in the fiery furnace, were themselves touched with a heavenly dew which protected them momentarily from other voices and mortal dangers. It seemed that honesty must prevail. It was the visitor who broke out first. He shivered violently, and shook off the spell. His eyes could have been regretting a surrender. "You have got something here, Dubbo," he said, languidly, even cynically. It was as far as he had ever gone towards committing himself, and it made him nervous. The abo, too, was nervous, if not angry, as he gathered up what had become an extravagant effusion in paint. "What is this?" Humphrey Mortimer asked. "This big cartoon that you brought along last with 'The Fiery Furnace,' and didn't explain?" "That," said the painter, "is nothing. It is a drawing I might work from later on. I dunno, though." Now that he was stone cold, he bitterly regretted having brought out the drawing for "The Chariot." Bad enough "The Fiery Furnace." All was exposed and defenceless. "I like that particularly," said Mr Mortimer. "The big cartoon. It is most interesting. Let me look at it a moment." "No," said Dubbo. "I don't want. It is too late. Another time." Hurrying his paintings. "You promise, then?" persisted the other. "Yes, yes," said Dubbo. But his nostrils contradicted. As the fire that had been kindled in the lounge-room died, Norm's party began to break up. There was a kissing and a hugging. The queans were restoring their habitual atmosphere of crossed lines. While Dubbo carried off the last ember of true passion. Now he would be able to lock his door and trust the silence. But footsteps followed in the passage, half tentative, half confident. "Look here, Alf," Humphrey Mortimer began. It could not have been anybody else. "I want to suggest something," he said. He had followed the abo as far as his door. Although it was close in the passage, both men were shivering. Mr Mortimer, whose silhouette seldom fell short of perfect, was standing with his fists clenched in his trouser pockets, and his coat rucked up over a protruding bum. He looked ridiculous. "I will make you an offer for at least three of the paintings," he said. "Which I am very anxious to own." He named "The Fiery Furnace" and a couple of others. "And the drawing of the chariot-thing, when it has fulfilled its purpose. That is to say, when you have finished working from it." The young man mentioned a sum, quite the most respectable that had ever been named in Hannah's house of love. "No. No. Sorry," said Alf Dubbo. His voice could not have hacked further words out of his feelings. "Think it over, at least. It is for your own good, you know." Humphrey Mortimer pulled that one. He continued to smile, because life had taught him that his own way was easily bought. But Dubbo, who had laid himself open at certain moments during the evening, was no longer vulnerable. Since beginning to suspect he had been deceived, he had shrivelled right up, and nobody would coax him out again. "Paintings which nobody looks at might never have been painted, " the patron argued. "I will look at them," Dubbo said. "Good night," he said, "Mr Mortimer." And shut the door.

For a week or two the blackfellow experienced no inclination to paint, not even to look at the finished paintings, only to know that they were there. Something seemed to have frightened the daylights out of him. As if, in a moment of exuberant vanity, he had betrayed some mystery, of which he was the humblest and most recent initiate. Now he began to feel sick. He turned the paintings face to the wall, and would lie on his bed for hours, at week-ends or at evening, his knees drawn up, protecting his head with his forearms. The palms of his hands had grown clammy. In that outer and parallel existence, which never altogether convinced him, the war was drawing to a close. The spray-painting of aeroplanes had fizzled out, except on paper. A two-up school was booming in one of the big packing-cases; the hangars were chock-full of stuff for anyone who felt inclined to shake it. Many did feel inclined. In fact, all the maggots on all the carcasses began to wriggle, if anything, a bit harder, suspecting that the feast was almost finished. In a few instances, the conscience was felt to stir, as human features returned to the blunt maggot-faces, and it was realized that the true self, whatever metamorphoses it might have undergone, was still horridly present, and hinting at rehabilitation. Hannah would wake at noon as before, and pluck her eyebrows, and paint her nails, and paddle the big, desperate puff in the shadows of her armpits. But was looking real soggy. Of course, inside the dough of flesh she was still the straight, brown girl, but only she was to know that. And sometimes doubted. Whether she might not have sold herself for a bag of aniseed balls, to some randy kid, under the pepper trees, in break. Oh, the powder made her cough. She was what they called allergic; that was it. She was that soggy. All steamy, open pores. She was that sick. She was eating the aspros by the handful now. They sat sour. Or returned to burn. But she would also break out sometimes in a lovely sweat, no, a perspiration of relief. Until remembering what you could not exactly have called her sickness. It was like as if she had a sick thought. Her conscience would tick inside her like a cheap alarm clock. If a bell had gone off, she would have screamed out loud. And the abo would walk along the passage. Quiet. He was quiet all right, except if he got poisoned and fell about the place, and that was the girls in the bars, who had altogether no discretion. Otherwise nobody could complain. It was painting, painting, all the while. That could have been what wore Hannah down: to think there was a man shut up by himself dead quiet in a room at the back, dabbling nonsense on an old board. What some, some of the clever ones, did claim to understand. Once he came along the passage, quiet as usual, but rather quick. It scared her suddenly to hear him, close by. She broke a nail on the knot of a parcel she had brought back, and was just beginning to untie. If that in itself was not enough to raise the pimples on you. Not that he was any more than only passing. Through the yellower light which poured in, under the blind she had had to adjust, to see what she was doing. "Gee! You aren't training to bust a safe open?" she was compelled to ask. "It's those old sandshoes." "They're easy on the feet," he replied. "Anyways," she said, "what's wrong with your job, Alf? You haven't given it away?" "No," he said. "I been feeling crook. I didn't go. Not for two days." "What's up?" "I dunno," he said. "Nothing." "Ah dear, nothing bad, I hope." She sighed, but did not care. "Everybody's sick. It wouldn't be this flamin' war?" She began again frigging with the parcel, which no longer seemed of much importance. Her mouth was slacker than usual. It shone, because she had had to wet it after she had taken fright. For a moment there flickered up in him the possibility that he might use, or store, passages of yellow light, or Hannah's broken forms against yellow wood and mirrors. She only saw that he was looking at her too long. He went out then, because, he said, he would like to get some air. Although it was doubtful whether he would. That which passed for air would not have squeezed into the lungs, but blocked the tubes like wads of moist blotting paper. A thick, lemony light had been poured into the brick streets and round the roots of the pollarded planes. Somewhere in the distance fire could have been threatening. When all the frightful accidie and imminence of the last few days bubbled up into Dubbo's mouth, and he spat it out in a brown stream, so that an old woman withdrew into the doorway of her own squalor, away from the hollow blackfel-low, who walked casually enough, his hands in his pockets, spitting blood. He did not see, though. He was, to a great extent, released. Now he could have used the impasto of deepening summer, of the thickening, yellow afternoon. He could have wallowed in it. In his own peculiar handwriting, he would have scratched the legend of grey, seamy brick. And against it he would have elongated the already drawn-out face, hollowed still deeper the hollow temples, and conveyed sight through opaque eyelids. For this, he saw, was Humphrey Mortimer's afternoon. Wherever it flowed, it smelled of rotting fruit, of an ether which did not anaesthetize, sweet, but bad. Again the abo was forced to spit, and this time it was clearer. This time, besides, he had to notice. Halted by the note of crimson, he stood staring at the grey pavement, remembering his lapse in devotion to a trust. The inexorable crimson stained his wrong deeper still. Then he spat again, and saw that the colour, like all such thoughts, was mercifully fading, though the original cause and weakness must remain. For, had he not revealed to Humphrey Mortimer secret truths which had been given him to keep? Dubbo sat for a while on a bench, not in a park, but in the street, just where he happened to be passing. From time to time, he spat, to examine the colour, until finding at last that the haemorrhage must have stopped. Presently a man came and sat beside him, and told him that soon the war would be over, because, said the man, it was written in the Scriptures. Dubbo made no reply, suspecting it was as the man had said. And the evil ones, continued the prophet, would be trodden under foot, as would the lesser evil, who betrayed the Lord through pure ignorance and vanity whenever the opportunity occurred. That included the concubines, and sodomites, the black marketeers, and reckless taxi-drivers-all those who in any way betrayed a trust. The dusk was splitting into little particles. There was nothing, almost nothing left except the movement of disintegration. Now Dubbo was aching in the chest, now that all goodness was to break. All the solid forms that he could answer for. All the brilliant colours that could lick across the field of vision. "You'll see," said the man, in the voice in which it was his habit to prophesy. "And the price of eggs will fall. And the price of sardines." But Alf Dubbo was going. He could scarcely control a longing to look once more at those few paintings in which his innocence remained unimpaired, in which the Lord still permitted a solidity of shapes, a continuity of life, even error. So he butted the darkness with his head, and the breath rattled behind his ribs, and the streets made way before him. When he arrived at the house in Abercrombie Crescent, he found that Norman Fussell had come. Norm was trying on a white fur in Hannah's glass. His real self had taken over, and the perv sniggered, and snuggled, and considered himself from all angles. "Hi, Alf!" he called. "Can you resist my piece of Arctic fox?" But Hannah had slammed shut with the opening of the front door. "Lay off it, you silly clown!" She was in no mood for circuses. Norm could have been a little drunk. In his desire to continue fooling, he would not allow his stooge to withdraw from their act, as she would, in fact, have preferred. Both were dressed for it, since it was their custom to take off half their clothes in the house, and let their flesh have its slapstick way. Both bulged, if they did not actually sag, and the white fur for which they were now contending seemed to make them softer, nakeder. Norm was certainly the rounder, as his needs had been fulfilled by the touch of fur. His cheeks oozed cheerfulness. Hannah's face, on the contrary, was dry, and curiously flat. It might have been rendered by a couple of strokes of a whitewash brush. Norm was still arsing about. Obviously he was fairly drunk. He swung, and clung to the tail of the white fox, of which Hannah had recovered the head. "Shall I tell you, Alf," he called, "how us girls got to be financial?" And jerked the fox. "I will dong you one," shouted Hannah, "before you tear this bloody fur!" Dubbo laughed, but out of friendship. He could not wait now. "And financial fanny, anyways!" Hannah had continued to shout. She told how she had got the fur through the trade, from a Jew who was obliged to her for a favour or two in his reffo days. She spoke that loud and clear, she could have suspected somebody might doubt. But Dubbo had already passed. And Norm, who had relinquished the fur, was threatening to pee himself. The giggles were glugging. His flesh was flapping. All the handles on the furniture jumped and rattled. Dubbo had got inside his room at last, in which the blind pictures were standing, and the greeny-black dressmaker's dummy, and all those other irrelevant objects which his life there had made relevant. The room was cracking, it seemed, under the necessity of abandoning its severely finite form. The dummy was inclining forward on its dry-rotten pedestal. Electric wiring whirred. As he began to turn the pictures. And turned. And turned. And his own life was restored by little twinges and great waves. His hands were no longer bones in gloves of papery skin, as he twitched the pictures over, and gave them the support they needed-against the bed, the rusted kero stove, an angle of the room. Once more the paintings were praising and affirming in accents of which his mouth had never been capable. Returned into the bosom of conviction, he might not have resisted the impulse to bring out paints there and then, and reproduce the deepening yellow through which he had watched the evening streets, if that yellow had not begun to sicken in him. If he had not not discovered. Then the teeth were terrible in his face. He began to fumble and bungle through his own possessions as well as the wretched trash of Hannah's lodger's room. His search toppled the dressmaker's dummy, which went down thumping out its dust. Perhaps he had just failed to see what he was looking for. Often, in moments of passion or withdrawal, he would overlook objects which were there all the time before him. But in the present case, only the hard truth emerged: "The Fiery Furnace" was gone, together with that big drawing. _The Chariot-thing__. What else, he did not stop to consider. Nobody bothers to count the blows when he knows that one of them will prove fatal. "Hannah!" A voice had never gone down the passage like that before. He was running on those quiet, spongy feet. And breathing high. Although he arrived almost at once, she was already advancing to meet him through the doorway of her room. She appeared to have decided she would not do any good by talking. That dry, white look, which her face had only recently acquired, had never been more in evidence than against the controversial fur. She had stretched the fox, straight and teachery, along her otherwise naked shoulders. No swagger any more. There was a sort of chain, with a couple of acorns, holding the fur together above the shabby, yellow parting of her breasts. "Hannah!" he breathed. "You done that?" He couldn't, or not very well, get it past a turn in his throat. "I will tell you," Hannah answered, flat, now that the scene was taking place. "Only don't-there is no need-to do your block before you know." And Norm looking over her shoulder. Norman Fussell was very curious to observe how, in the light of what he already knew, the rest of it would turn out. For the present Dubbo was almost bent up. Breathing and grinning. His ribs would have frightened, if they had been visible. But Hannah was slow as suet. With a nerve inside of it. "I will tell you. I will tell you," she seemed to be saying. She did not care very much whether she died. She could have exhausted her life by now. It was only the unimaginable act of dying that made her sick nerve tick. Then Dubbo began to get his hands around her. She went down, quite easy, because she felt that guilty at first, she was offering no resistance. She intended to suffer, if it could not be avoided. She almost wanted to feel his fingers sinking into that soft sickness she had become. So he got her down against the doorway of her room. The chain which had been fastening the fox had burst apart, and she was bundled in her pink slip. Or tearing. Her cheek was grating on the bald carpet when not ploughing the smell of new fur. The abo was tearing mad, and white beneath his yellow skin. All his desperate hate breath hopelessness future all of him and more was streaming into his pair of hands. Then Hannah got her throat free. Perhaps she had expiated enough. She let out, "Aaaahhhhhhh! Normmm! For Crisssake!" Norm Fussell just failed to exorcise the ghost of a giggle. Not that things were getting funny. It had begun to be intolerable for him too, as he was officially a man, and had just been called upon to work a miracle. So now, he who had been hopping around in his normal flesh, after throwing off responsibility with his clothes, began with one arm to apply to the abo a hold which a sailor had once taught him. And which he had never known to work. But at least they were all three involved. Their breath was knotted together in ropes as solid as their arms. At one point, Hannah began again. "Alf, I will tell you. I will tell you." Her tongue was rather swollen, though. It would pop out like a parrot's. In between, she was crying sorry for herself. "I will tell"-she would manage to get it out. "That Mort bug Alf _Chrise__ MORTIMER honest honest only took a few quid commish _on__ Alf." That made him fight worse. All the bad that he had to kill might escape him by cunning. Because all three of the wrestlers understood at last they were really and truly intended to die at some moment, possibly that one. Seeing the muck of blood on her arms, on her slip-it could only have been her blood-Hannah was whimpering afresh for what she had been made to suffer, ever, and so drawn out, when in the history book they chopped the heads cleanly off. But at that moment, Norm Fussell, by dint of pressure, or weight, or the sailor's genuinely skilful hold, got the abo off of Hannah. And Hannah was up. Self-pity did not delay her a second. Her flesh flew. But, of course, she had got thinner. She could not drag out the drawer too quick. Of the dressing-table. Scrabble under handkerchiefs. Fetch out what was flapping more than her own hand. When the abo came at her afresh, she had the envelope to push against him. "Honest," Hannah cried, shaking like paper. "I wouldn't never bite your ear! Look, Alf! Look, only!" Dubbo was unable to look, but nature slowed him up. "See, Alf? There is your name. I wrote. Only took a spot of commission. Bought a fur. What other intention? It was that puf Mortimer would not let me alone. Here, look, Alf, is the rest. I was gunna hand it over, dinkum, when things had settled down." Dubbo was all in for the moment. Seeing the blood on her arms, and her slip reduced to bandages, Hannah began again to cry, for what she had escaped, for all that life had imposed on her. The tufts of her hair, Norman Fussell observed, had turned her into the imitation of a famous clown. There was a knocking on the door then: some neighbour, some Eyetalian, to see whether they wanted the police. No, said Norman Fussell, it was only a slight difference being settled between friends. But Hannah cried. "All the good money!" she blubbed. "And what is old paintings? We only done it for your own good." That, apparently, was something people were unable to resist. "Yes, Hannah," Dubbo agreed. "You are honest. If anybody is." He could not get breath for more. She was relieved to see that the blood she had noticed could not have been her own, but was trickling out of the abo's mouth. "You knocked a tooth, eh?" "Yes," he could just bother. So now Hannah had to whimper because she was tenderhearted, and blood was sad, like hospitals, and wet nights, and old bags of greasy women, and fallen arches on hot feet, and the faces of people going along beneath the green neon. "Arr, dear!" she cried, but checked herself enough to call, "Don't forget your money, Alf. Your money. Arr, well. You know it will be safe with me. You know I never bit anybody's ear." For Dubbo had gone along the passage into that room of which the cardboard walls had failed to protect. Perhaps, after all, only a skull was the box for secrets. But that, too, he knew, and swayed, would not hold forever; it must burst open from all that would collect inside it. All pouring out, from tadpoles and clumsy lizards, to sheets of lightning and pillars of fire. For there was no containing thoughts, unless you persuaded somebody-only a friend would be willing-to take an axe, and smash up the fatal box for good and all. How it would have scared him, though, to step out from amongst the mess, and face those who would have come in, who would be standing round amongst the furniture, waiting to receive. Then the Reverend Jesus Calderon, for all he raised his pale hand, and exerted the authority of his sad eyes, would not save a piebald soul from the touch of fur and feather, or stem the slither of cold scales.

The weight of night fell heavy at last on the house in Abercrombie Crescent. Norm Fussell, a nervous type, said he was going walk-about. Hannah did not go on the job-she was done up-but took an aspro, or three, and knew she would not drop off. Yet, it was proved, she must have floated on the surface of a sleep. About five, the whore got up. She was not accustomed to see the grey light sprawling on an empty bed; it gave her the jimmies. She would have liked a yarn, to put the marsh-mallow back into life by offering right sentiments. There is nothing comforts like worn opinions. But in the absence of opportunity, she looked along the passage, touching her bruises. There she saw the abo's door was open. "Alf!" she called once or twice, but low. She began to go along then, running her hand along the wall. The room, it appeared, was empty. She had to switch on finally to see, although the electric light was cruel. But Dubbo had gone all right. Had taken his tin box, it seemed, and smoked off. All around, amongst the junk she had been in the habit of shoving away in that room, was matchwood. He had, she saw, brought the axe from the yard-it was still standing in the room-and split his old pictures up. Nothing else. All those bloody boards of pictures. There they were, laying. The thin light was screaming down from the bare electric globe. Well, she realized presently, she could let the stuff lay where it was, and use it up in time as kindling. She was glad then. She had known other men do their blocks, and bust up a whole houseful of valuable furniture. As she went back slow along the passage, in which the light was beginning to throb, from grey to white, gradually and naturally, it occurred to her the abo had not asked her for his money; it would still be in there under the handkerchiefs. He would come back, of course, and she would surrender up the envelope, because she was an honest woman. But sometimes a person did not come back. Sometimes a person died. Or sometimes what mattered of a person, the will or something, died in advance, and they did not seem to care. She remembered the abo the night before, after he got blown, propping himself in the middle of the carpet, on the bones of legs, all bones and breathlessness. If anyone had knocked on him at that stage, he might have sounded hollow, like a crab. But she did not think he had shown her his eyes, and in her anxiety to reconstruct a situation, she would have liked to remember. Still, Hannah was throbbing with hopes. In the cool of the morning, she was already on fire. She was back in her room by now. She would move the envelope from the drawer, for safety, since it had been seen. Not that Norm, of course. Norm was honest too.

Dubbo did not return to the house in Abercrombie Crescent. Hannah's place was connected in his mind with some swamp that he remembered without having seen, and from which the white magic of love and charity had failed to exorcise the evil spirits. Certainly he had never expected much, but was sickened afresh each time his attitude was justified. Angels were demons in disguise. Even Mrs Pask had dropped her blue robe, and grown brass nipples and a beak. Such faith as he had, lay in his own hands. Through them he might still redeem what Mr Calderon would have referred to as the soul, and which remained in his imagining something between a material shape and an infinite desire. So, in those acts of praise which became his paintings, he would try to convey and resolve his condition of mind. As far as the practical side of his existence was concerned, it was easy enough to find work, and he went from job to job for a while after he had run from Hannah's. He took a room on the outskirts of Barranugli, in the house of a Mrs Noonan, where no questions were asked, and where bare walls, and a stretcher with counterpane of washed-out roses, provided him with a tranquil background for his thoughts. He read a good deal now, both owing to a physical languor caused by his illness, and because of a rage to arrive at understanding. Mostly he read the Bible, or the few art books he had bought, but for preference the books of the Prophets, and even by now the Gospels. The latter, however, with suspicion and surprise. And he would fail, as he had always failed before, to reconcile those truths with what he had experienced. Where he could accept God because of the spirit that would work in him at times, the duplicity of the white men prevented him considering Christ, except as an ambitious abstraction, or realistically, as a man. When the white man's war ended, several of the whites bought Dubbo drinks to celebrate the peace, and together they spewed up in the streets, out of stomachs that were, for the occasion, of the same colour. At Rosetree's factory, though, where he began to work shortly after, Dubbo was always the abo. Nor would he have wished it otherwise, for that way he could travel quicker, deeper, into the hunting grounds of his imagination. The white men had never appeared pursier, hairier, glassier, or so confidently superior as they became at the excuse of peace. As they sat at their benches at Rosetree's, or went up and down between the machines, they threatened to burst right out of their singlets, and assault a far too passive future. Not to say the suspected envoys of another world. There was a bloke, it was learnt, at one of the drills down the lower end, some kind of bloody foreigner. Whom the abo would watch with interest. But the man seldom raised his eyes. And the abo did not expect. Until certain signs were exchanged, without gesture or direct glance. How they began to communicate, the blackfellow could not have explained. But a state of trust became established by subtler than any human means, so that he resented it when the Jew finally addressed him in the wash-room, as if their code of silence might thus have been compromised. Later, he realized, he was comforted to know that the Chariot did exist outside the prophet's vision and his own mind.