Riders in the Chariot

12

PASSOVER and Easter would fall early that year. The heavy days were still being piled up, and no sign of relief for those who were buried inside. Little wonder that the soul hesitated to prepare itself, whether for deliverance from its perennial Egypt, or redemption through the blood of its Saviour, when the body remained immured in its pyramid of days. Miss Hare burrowed deep, but uselessly, along the tunnels of escape which radiated from Xanadu, and parted the green, her skin palpitating for the moment that did not, would not come. Mrs Godbold, standing in the steam of sheets, awaited the shrill winds of Easter, which sometimes even now would sweep across her memory, out of the fens, rattling the white cherry boughs, and causing the lines of hymns to waver behind shaken panes. But this year, did not blow. For Mrs Flack and Mrs Jolley, mopping themselves amongst the dahlias at Karma, it was easier, of course, to invoke an Easter that was their due, as regular communicants, and members of the Ladies' Guild. For Harry Rosetree, however, in his cardboard office at the factory, the season always brought confusion. Which he overcame by overwork, by blasphemy, and by tearing at his groin. There the pants would ruck up regularly, causing him endless discomfort during rush orders and humid weather. "For Chrissake," Harry Rosetree bellowed, as he thumped and bumped, and eased that unhappy crotch, in his revolving, tillable, chromium-plated chair, "what for is Easter this year so demmed early? A man cannot fulfil his orders." In the outer office Miss Whibley, the plumper of the two ladies who were dashing away at their typewriters, sucked her teeth just enough to censure. Miss Mudge, on the other hand, sniggered, because it was the boss. "Can you tell me, please, Miss Whibley?" Mr Rosetree would insist. He could become intolerable, but paid well for it. "Because it is a movable feast," Miss Whibley replied. She thought perhaps her answer had sounded clever without being altogether rude. Miss Whibley was an adept at remaining the right side of insolence. "Well, move it, move it, or see that it is moved, Miss Whibley, please," Mr Rosetree insisted, plodding through the wads of paper, "next year, well forward, Miss Whibley, please." Miss Mudge sniggered, and wiped her arms on her personal towel. The boss would start to get funny, and keep it up during whole afternoons. Miss Mudge approved, guiltily, of jolly men. She lived with a widowed, invalid, pensioned sister, whose excessive misfortune had sapped them both. "Because I will not rupture myself for any Easter, Miss Whibley, movable or fixed." Mr Rosetree had to kill somebody with his wit. Miss Whibley sucked her teeth harder. "Dear, dear, Mr Rosetree, it is a good thing neether of us is religious. Miss Mudge is even less than I." Miss Mudge blushed, and mumbled something about liking a decent hymn provided nobody expected her to join in. "I am religious." Mr Rosetree slapped the papers. "I am religious! I am religious!" Mr Rosetree sang. Indeed, he attended the church of Saint Aloysius at Paradise East, on Sundays, and at all important feasts, and would stuff notes into the hands of nuns, with a lack of discretion which made them lower their eyes, as if they had been a party to some indecent act. "You gotta be religious, Miss Whibley." Mr Rosetree laughed. "Otherwise you will go to hell, and how will you like that?" Now it was Miss Whibley's turn to blush. Her necklaces of flesh turned their deepest mauve, and she took out a little compact, and began to powder herself, from her forehead down to the yoke of her dress, with the thorough motions of a cat. "Well, I am not at all religious," she said, wetting her lips ever so slightly. "I suppose it is because my friend is a dialectical materialist." Mr Rosetree laughed more than ever. He could not resist: "And what is that?" He was quite unreasonably happy that afternoon. "I cannot be expected to explain _every-__thing!" Miss Whibley sulked. "Ah, you intellectuals!" Mr Rosetree sighed. Miss Mudge coughed, and shifted her lozenge. She loved to listen to other people, and to watch. In that way, she who had never thought what she might contribute to life, did seem to participate. Now she observed that her colleague was becoming annoyed. Miss Mudge could feel the heartburn rise in sympathy in her own somewhat stringy throat. "My friend is a civil servant," Miss Whibley was saying. "In the Taxation Office. He is considered an expert on provisional tax." Then she added, rather irrelevantly, only she had been saving it up for some time as a kind of experiment, "My friend is also a quarter Jewish." Mr Rosetree was disengaging the wads of paper, which could only be prized apart, it seemed, at that season. Miss Whibley did not watch, but sensed. "A quarter Jew? So! A quarter Jew! I am a quarter shoe-fetichist, Miss Whibley, if that is what you wish to know. And five-eighths manic-depressive. That leaves still some small fraction to be accounted for. So we cannot yet work it out what I am." Miss Whibley flung her typewriter carriage as far as it would go. Miss Mudge did not understand, but Miss Whibley knew that she should take offence. And she did, with professional efficiency. "A quarter Jew!" chanted Mr Rosetree. But Miss Whibley would not hear. She lowered her head to study her shorthand notes, though inwardly she had crossed the line which divides reality from resentment. Presently it was time for the ladies to leave. They went out most conspicuously on that afternoon. In the workshop the men were knocking off. Some had begun to move towards the bus-stop, others towards the paddockful of ramshackle cars. Whether they marched, carrying prim-looking ports, or gangled leisurely, with sugar-bags slung by cords across the shoulders, no other act performed by the men during the day so clearly proclaimed their independence. Only a boss, it was implied, would presume that their going out was inevitably linked to their coming in. Although the boss should have left, now that the walls no longer shook, and silence was flowing back into the shed which ostensibly he owned, Harry Rosetree continued to sit. Because he had decided to work on. But did not, in fact. The silence was so impressive he became convinced he was its creator, along with the Brighta Lamps, the Boronia Geometry Sets, the Flannel-Flower Bobby-Pins, and My Own Butterfly Clips. Of course, if he had not been possessed by his irrational joy long before the factory had begun to empty, the illusion might not have endured; he would most probably have been caught out by that same silence which now increased his sense of power and freedom. But his joy, which had made him so distasteful during the afternoon to the ladies he employed, was too rubbery and aggressive to allow itself to be bounced aside. Nor could he have restrained it, any more than he could have halted time, which went ticking on through the last week before the Easter closure, and the most formidable silence of all, when the soul is reborn. Not that Rosetrees were all that observant. But Harry Rose-tree was an honest man. If you signed a contract, you had to abide by the clauses. And religion was like any other business. Rosetrees were Christians now; they would do the necessary. Shirl complained, but of course she was a woman. Shirl said she had been brought up to stay at home, to stuff the fish and knead the dumplings, not to pray along with the men. She did not go much on early mass, but Harry would sometimes persuade, with a bottle of French perfume or pair of stockings. Then Shirl would get herself up in the gold chains which were such a handy investment, and derive quite a lot from the subdued and reverential atmosphere-it was lovely, the elevation of the Host-and the wives of upper-bracket executives in their expensive clothes. But that Easter they had made their reservations at My Blue Mountain Home. It was all very well to be Christians, Shirl said, but surely to God they were Australians too. So they were going to sing "The Little Brown Jug," and "Waltzing Matilda," and "Pack Up Your Troubles," after tea. Along with a lot of bloody reffos, Harry said. What he understood best, usually he suspected most. So that it was not altogether the sweet scent of Easter which had flooded Harry Rosetree's soul, as he worked on, or sat in his office, in the brassy light of late afternoon. As he drifted, he was uplifted, but by something faintly anomalous. Until finally he was stunned. It could only be the cinnamon. It was Miss Mudge: my chest, sir, if I do not take precautions in humid weather, hope you do not object to such a penetrating odour. It smelled, all right. Even now that she was gone, it shrieked down the passages of memory, right to the innermost chamber. They were again seated in the long, but very narrow, dark parlour, raising the mess of brown apples to their lips. The mother had arranged special cushions, on which the father was reclining, or lolling, rather. Such an excess of blood-red plush, with the nap beginning to wear off, filled the chair and made for discomfort. It was the occasion that mattered, and the father throve on occasions. Whatever the state of their fortunes, whatever the temper of the _goyim__, the father would deliver much the same homily: our history is all we have, Haïm, and the peaceful joys of the Sabbath and feast days, the flavour of cinnamon and the scent of spices, the wisdom of Torah and the teaching of the Talmud. What had been the living words of the father would crackle like parchment whenever Haïm ben Ya'akov allowed himself to remember. Or worse, he would see them, written in columns, on scrolls of human skin. But now it was the _scent__ of words that pervaded. Whatever the occasion-and how many there had been-the father wore the _yarmulka__. And the wart with the four little black bristles to the side of the right nostril. At Pesach the father would explain: this, Haïm, is the apple of remembrance, of the brown clay of Egypt, so you must eat up, eat, the taste of cinnamon is good. Haïm Rosenbaum, the boy, had never cared for the stuff, but long after he had become a man, even after he was supposed, officially, to have stripped the Ark of its Passover trappings, and dressed his hopes in the white robe of Easter, the scent of cinnamon remained connected with the deep joy of Pesach. Now as the molten light was poured into the office where Harry Rosetree sat, the two eyes which were watching him seemed to be set at discrepant angles, which, together with the presentation of the facial planes, suggested that here were two, or even more, distinct faces. Yet, on closer examination, all the versions that evolved, all the lines of vision that could be traced from the discrepant eyes, fell into focus. All those features which had appeared wilfully distorted and unrelated, added up quite naturally to make the one great archetypal face. It was most disturbing, exhilarating, not to say frightening. Until Mr Rosetree realized the old Jew he had employed for some time, that Himmelfarb, that Mordecai, had approached along the passage without his having heard, and was glancing in through a hatchway. Passing, passing, but hesitating. So the moment fixed in the hatchway suggested. It was one of these instants that will break with the ease of cotton threads. Mr Rosetree was trembling, whether from anger-he had never been able to stand the face of that old, too humble Jew-or from joy at discovering familiar features transferred from memory to the office hatchway, he would not have been the one to decide. Although his dry throat was compelled, still tremblingly enough. He was forced to mumble, while his joy and relief, fear and anger, swayed and tittupped in the balance, "_Shalom! Shalom, Mordecai__!" The face of the Jew Himmelfarb immediately appeared to brim with light. The windows, of course, were blazing with it at that hour. "_Shalom, Herr Rosenbaum__!" the Jew Mordecai replied. But immediately Mr Rosetree cleared his throat of anything that might have threatened his position. "Why the hell," he asked, "don't you knock off along with other peoples?" He had got up. He was walking about, balanced on the balls of his small feet, rubbery and angry. "Do you want to make trouble with the union?" Mr Rose-tree asked. "I am late," Himmelfarb explained, "because I could not find this case." He produced a small fibre case, of the type carried by schoolchildren and, occasionally, workmen, and laid it as concrete evidence on the hatchway shelf. Mr Rosetree was furious, but fascinated by the miserable object, which had already begun to assume a kind of monstrous importance. "How," he exploded, "you could not find this case?" He might have hit, if he would not have loathed so much as to touch it. "It was mislaid," the old Jew answered very quietly. "Perhaps even hidden. As a joke, of course." "Which men would play such a wretched joke?" "Oh," said Himmelfarb, "a young man." "Which?" The room was shuddering. "Oh," said Himmelfarb, "I cannot say I know his name. Only that they call him Blue." The incident was, of course, ludicrous, but Mr Rosetree had become obsessed by it. "For Chrissake," he asked, "what for do you need this demmed case?" How repellent he found all miserable reffo Jews. And this one in particular, the owner of the cheap, dented case. Then the old Jew looked down his cheekbones. He took a key from an inner pocket. The case sprang tinnily, almost indecently open. "I do not care to leave them at home," Himmelfarb explained. Harry Rosetree held his breath. There was no avoiding it; he would have to look inside the case. And did. Briefly. He saw, indeed, what he had feared: the fringes of the _tallith__, the black thongs of the _tephillin__, wound round and round the Name. Mr Rosetree could have been in some agony. "Put it away, then!" He trembled. "All this _Quatsch__! Will you Jews never learn that you will be made to suffer for the next time also?" "If it has to be," Himmelfarb replied, manipulating the catches of his case. "A lot of _Quatsch__!" Mr Rosetree repeated. That intolerable humid weather had the worst effect on him. As his face showed. The wretched Jew had begun to go. "Himmelfarb!" Mr Rosetree called, through rubbery, almost unmanageable lips. "You better take the two days," he ordered, "for the Seder business. But keep it quiet, the reason why. For all anyone will know"-here he became hatefully congested-"you could have gone…" but still choked, with some disgust for phlegm or words. His veins were protesting, too, to say nothing of his purple skin."… SICK," he succeeded finally in shouting. The employee inclined his head with such discretion, the favour could have been his due. As for the employer, he might have taken further offence, but was a fleshy man, suffering from blood pressure, and already emotionally exhausted. "Who will decide," he sighed, "what forms sickness takes?" But very soft. And was in no way comforted. "_Hier! Himmelfarb__!" he bawled, as his inferior was preparing for the second time to leave. Mr Rosetree had just the strength to remember something, however embarrassing the thought. And was floundering around in his breast pocket. He was flapping a wallet. "_Für Pesach__," Mr Rosetree grunted. The old Jew was rather startled. His employer was dangling what appeared to be a five-pound note. "_Nehmen Sie! Nehmen Sie__!" Mr Rosetree threatened. "_Himmelfarb! Für Pesach__!" Harry Rosetree was not so innocent he did not believe a man might pay for his sins. Yet, an abominable innocence seemed to have washed the face of Himmelfarb quite, quite clean of any such suspicion. He had come back. He said, "I would ask you, Mr Rosetree, to give it, rather, to somebody in need." With that sweetness of innocence which is bitterest to those who taste it. Then Mr Rosetree grew real angry. He began to curse all demmed Jews. He cursed himself for his foolishness. He dared to curse his own father's loins. "This is where I will give these few demmed quids!" Harry Rosetree shouted. As he crumpled up the note. And worried it apart. He did not tear it, exactly, because his fury could not rise to an act of such precision. "So!" Revenge made him sound hoarse. If he had been able to atone in any way for the burst of destruction he had inspired, Himmelfarb would have done so, but for the moment that was impossible. Because, whatever the hatchway suggested, the wall prevented. He could not even have picked up the irregular pieces, which, he saw, had settled round his employer's feet. So he had to say, "I am sorry to have caused you such distress." Aware that humility can appear, at times, more offensive than arrogance itself, he tried to soften the blow by adding, "_Shalom, Hen Rosenbaum__!" And went.

A passive, but possessive heat ushered in the Season of Freedom. The heads of grass were bowed with summer. Limp wigs of willows, black at the seams, yellowing in hanks, were by now the feeblest disguises. Although carpets had been laid on the afternoon of the Seder night, they were of the coarsest, most tarnished yellow that a late-summer light could provide. Mere runners, moreover. But the heavy, felted light did lead, or so it appeared at that hour, over the collapsed grass and tufts of blowsy weed, to the brown house in which the Jew of Sarsaparilla had elected to live. Neighbours were unaware, of course, that peculiar rites might be expected of the owner of the disgraceful, practically derelict house. Nor had the Jew availed himself for some years of the freedom which the season offered, feeling that his solitary trumpet blast might sound thin and poor in a celebration which called for the jubilance of massed brass. Until, at the present time, some welling of the spirit, need to establish identity of soul, foreboding of impending events, made him long to contribute, if only an isolated note. So, in the afternoon, Himmelfarb went about setting the Seder table, as he had seen done. He laid the tablecloth, which his neighbour Mrs Godbold had starched stiff, and ironed flat, and stuck together with its own cleanliness. Moving in a kind of mechanical agitation of recollected gestures, he put the shankbone and the burnt egg. He put the flat _matzoth__, the dish of bitter herbs, and the cup for wine. But was distressed by his own conjuring. The mere recollection of some of the more suggestive wonders would have prevented him performing them. Or the absence of an audience. Or the presence of ghosts: the rows of cousins and aunts, the Cantor Katzmann, the Lady from Czernowitz, the dreadful dyer of his youth-all of them, with the exception of one whom he preferred to leave faceless, expectant of his skill. At that point he remembered the stranger: how they would stand the door open for anyone who chose to walk in. In imitation, he opened his, and put a stone against it. Though he doubted whether he would have dared lift the cup to any stranger's lips, for fear his own emotion might trouble, or even spill the wine. So that he could no longer bear to look at his property table, with its aching folds of buckram, and the papier-mâche symbols of Pesach. It would not have been illogical if, in the course of the farce he was elaborating, a _Hanswurst__ had risen through the floor, and flattened the table with one blow from his bladder. In anticipation, a bird was shrieking out of a bush. Through the open doorway, Himmelfarb saw, the human personality was offered choice of drowning in a grass ocean, or exposure to the great burning-glass of sky. Then the Jew, who had in his day been given to investigating what is above and what is below, took fright at the prospect of what might be in store for him, He began to walk about his house, with little short, quick steps. He was quite boxed. All around him, behind the sticks of trees, were the boxes containing other lives, but involved in their own esoteric rites, or mystical union with banality. He would not have presumed to intrude, yet, it was so very necessary to unite. It was his own open door which finally persuaded that _he__ was the stranger whom some doorway must be waiting to receive. He would walk straight in, into the atmosphere of questions, and cinnamon, and songs. He would sit down without being asked, because he had been expected. It took him seconds to fetch his hat. After first haste, and an episode with the front steps, he settled down quietly enough to the journey. Nor did it disturb him to think he had not locked his house. In Sarsaparilla, Himmelfarb caught the bus. Buses were always amiable enough. It was the trains that still alarmed at times, because of the passengers substituted for those who had started out. But at Barranugli, where the train was waiting for him, he did not experience distress. His tremendous decision to make the journey had restored to the Jew the gentleness of trust. He smiled at faces he had never seen before. With luck, he calculated, he might arrive in time for Kiddush. So they started again. It was the kindest hour of evening, strewing the floors with a light of trodden dandelions. Mostly ladies filled the train. As they sat and talked together, of cakes, and illnesses, and relatives-or just talked-they worked the words inside their mouths like the bread of kindness, or sugared lollies. The mauve plastic of their gums shone. Temporarily the slashes in the train upholstery were concealed by corseted behinds, the brown smells of rotten fruit overcome by the scents of blameless, but synthetic flowers. Himmelfarb the Jew sat and smiled at all faces, even those which saw something to resent. He was delivered by his journey as seldom yet by prayer. Journeys implied a promise, as he had been taught, and known, but never dared accept. A promise that he would not dare, yet, envisage. Only an address, which he had heard discussed at smoke-o, of the Home Beautiful, the promised house. In Persimmon Street, Paradise East. So he clung to that promise. He nursed it all the way in the obviously festive train. Outside, humidity and conformity remained around 93. Round the homes, the dahlias lolled. Who could have told whose were biggest? Who could have told who was who? Not the plastic ladies, many of whom, as they waited to shove chops in front of men, exchanged statements over fences, or sat drooping over magazines, looking for the answers to the questions. By such light, Himmelfarb was persuaded he could have answered many of those. A lady at his side, who, in anticipation of Easter, had pinned kindness to her bosom in letters of glass, told him how she used to bury gramophone needles under hydrangea bushes, when there were gramophone needles, but now there were none. "And here am I," she said, "reared a Congregationalist, but attending the Baptist church, because it pleases my son-in-law. Are you a Baptist, perhaps?" she asked. "I am a Jew," the Jew replied. "Arrrr!" said the lady. She had not heard right, only that it sounded something funny. Her skin closed on itself rather fearfully. All the ladies, it appeared, had paused for a moment in their breathing. They were slavering on their plastic teeth. Before they began to clatter again. Presently they were carried under the city, and many of the ladies, including Himmelfarb's neighbour, were discharged. The train issued lighter out of the earth, with those whose faith drove them on. As they prepared to cross the water, the Jew sat forward on his seat. The sky opened for them, and the bridge put forth its span, and they passed effortlessly over the glittering water. As it had happened before, so it had been arranged again for that day. So the Jew had to give thanks as they mounted the other side, through a consecrated landscape, in which the promised homes began to assemble, in pools of evening and thickets of advanced shrubs. Where Himmelfarb was at last put down, roses met him, and led him all the way. Had he been blind, he could have walked by holding on to ropes of roses. As it was, the rose-light filtering through the nets of leaves intoxicated with its bland liquor. Till the Jew was quite flushed and unsteady from his homecoming. He had grown weak. In fact, on arrival at the gate, he had to get a grip of the post, and ever so slightly bent the metal letter-box, which was in the shape of a little dovecote, empty of doves. It was Shirl Rosetree who looked out of the apricot brick home, and saw. She called at once, "Har-ry! Waddaya know? It is that old Jew. At this hour. Now what the hell? I can't bear it! Do something quick!" "What old Jew?" Harry Rosetree asked. He turned cold. Excitement was bad for him. "Why, the one from over at the factory, of course." "But you never seen him," her husband protested. "I know. But just know. It could only be that one." Even his diversity did not alter the fact that there was only one Jew. It was her father, and her grandmother in a false moustache, and her cousins, and the cousins of cousins. It was the foetus she had dropped years ago, scrambling into the back of a cart, in darkness, to escape from a Polish village. Shulamith Rosenbaum struck herself with the flat of her hand just above her breasts. Too hard. It jarred, and made her cough. "I'm gunna be sick, Harry, if you don't do something about that man." Because she had learnt to suffer from various women's ailments, she added, "I'm not gunna get mixed up in any Jews' arguments. It does things to me. And packing still to finish. I will not be persecuted. First it was the _goy__, now it is the Jew. All I want is peace, and a nice home." She would have liked to look frail, but a grievance always made her swell. "Orright, orright!" Harry Rosetree said. "For what reason, Shirl, are you getting hysterical?" He himself was flickering, for the Jew Mordecai had begun to advance up the gravel drive. If the visitor's pace appeared shambly, his head suggested that he was possessed of a certain strength. "For what reason?" Mrs Rosetree slashed. "Because I know me own husband!" "For Chrissake!" The husband laughed, or flickered. "And is he _soft__!" Shirl Rosetree shouted. "Lets himself be bounced by any Jew because it is the Seder night. And who will have to bounce the Jew?" "Orright, Shirl," her husband said, making it of minor importance. "We will simply tell him we are packing for our journey." "_We__!" Shirl Rosetree laughed. "Jew or Christian, I am the one that has to tell. Because, Haïm, you do not like to. It is easiest to pour the chicken soup into everyone that comes. _My__ chicken soup, gefüllte fish, _Latkes__, and what have you! You are the big noise, the generous man. Well, I will tell this old bludge there is nothing doing here tonight. We do not know what he even means. We are booked at My Blue Mountain Home for Easter, leaving Good Friday, in our own car, after the Stations of the Cross." If she stopped there, it was because she could have shocked herself. They stood looking at each other, but so immersed in the lower depths of the situation, they did not observe that the sweat was streaming from every exposed pore of their skins. They had turned yellow, too. "We was told at the convent we was never on no account to lose our tempers," Rosie Rosetree said, who had come into the hall. She was growing up a thin child. "They better learn you not to be bold," her mother said. "Nobody was losing their tempers." "A gentleman has just come," her father added. "What gentleman?" Rosie wondered, squinting through the pastel-blue Venetians. She was not interested in people. "You may well ask!" her mother could not resist. And laughed, opening a vein of jolly, objective bitterness. The father was making noises which did not in any way explain. The child's face had approached close to that of the stranger, the other side of the intervening blind. She squinted up and down through the slats, to look him right over. "His clothes are awful," Rosie Rosetree announced. Then she went away, for she had completely lost interest. Charity was an abstraction, or at most a virtue she had not seen reason to adopt. It was something lovely, but superfluous, talked about by nuns. Yet, her father was a good man. Now he had opened the door. He sounded funny-loud, but indistinct. Harry Rosetree said, "Well, Mr Himmelfarb, it is quite an unexpected visit." The machinery of social intercourse was turning again. Where Himmelfarb had felt there would be no need for explanation, he now saw that eventually he must account for his behaviour. But not now. He was, simply, too tired. He only hoped their common knowledge might be shared as an implicit joy. "I will sit down. If you don't mind," said the unexpected guest. And did so suddenly, on a little rosewood stool that Mrs Rosetree had never intended to be sat on. It caused the owner of the stool to stand forth. But her husband intervened. "You better sit there for a bit, and relax. You are pretty well flogged," Mr Rosetree said, using a word he did not seem to remember ever having used before. But Mrs Rosetree stood forth. Her housecoat, in one of those colours it was sometimes her good fortune to lose her head over, not only concealed her plumpy forms, it created drama, even tragedy. Earlier that afternoon, she had lacquered her nails. Now she remembered again to stand with her fingers stretched stiff, in an attitude of formal guilt. From the very beginning, the tips of her fingers could have been dripping blood. "It is a pity my husband did not explain, Mr Himmelfarb," Mrs Rosetree said. The fact that nobody had been introduced to anybody did not seem to matter, because by now everybody had grasped the part that each was intended to play. "Did not explain." Mrs Rosetree proceeded to. "That we had planned to go away. For Easter. After tomorrow is already Good Friday, you must know." Mrs Rosetree smiled to assist, and the wet-looking lipstick with which she had anointed her otherwise naked skin, glittered like an accident. "I do not want to appear inhospitable," she said. "Not to anybody. But you know what it is, Mr Himmelfarb, to shut up the home. All those little things. And the kids. Not even hardly time to open a tin of baked beans. Because I will not stock up with a lot of fresh food, to leave for rats to gorge on, and ourselves perhaps contract the yellow jaundice." Mrs Rosetree's head was all barbed with little pins, at mercilessly regular intervals, to control the waves that were being moulded on her. Harry Rosetree had to admire his wife for an unfailingly ruthless materialism, such as he himself had been able to cultivate for use in business only. But to Shirl, of course, life was a business. As he stood looking down upon the crown of the old Jew's head, he said, "We couldn't run to a pick-me-up, eh, for Himmelfarb, to celebrate an occasion?" Mrs Rosetree's throat began to debate, or grumble. "I wouldn't know about occasions. He better sit still first. It isn't right for elderly people to go swilling alcohol after they have been exerting themselves. I wouldn't give it to my own father, for fear it might bring something on." Then, with an air of having laid tribute on an altar, Mrs Rosetree went away, to allow matters to take their course. So that Haïm ben Ya'akov was left with the stranger Mordecai on the Seder night. In the absence of rejoicing, there was nothing he could offer the guest from his full house. Indeed, it was possible that the house no longer belonged to him, that nothing could belong to a Jew beyond his own skin and certain inherited truths. The stranger did not attempt to deny. He sat with his head bent, in a state of apparent exhaustion, or acceptance. He was too passive to imply, yet did. So Harry Rosetree, who was, in any case, not a Jew, began to grow impatient, if not actually irritable. Surrounded by veneer, the stranger's shoes were becoming provokingly meek and dusty. Then Himmelfarb looked up, as if realizing the awkward situation in which he had placed his host. "It is all right," he said, and smiled. "I shall be going soon." "Well, Himmelfarb," Mr Rosetree found it easier to reply, "it was unexpected to say the least. And life does not stand still. You must excuse me if I leave you for a little. I gotta water a few shrubs before it is dark." Because Mr Rosetree had learnt what was done in the suburb in which he happened to be living for the time being. "But," he added, "you are at liberty to rest here just as long as you feel it is necessary. A man of your age cannot afford to neglect the health." Himmelfarb continued sitting in the Rosetrees' hall, which was less a room than a means of protecting the owners from the unwanted; their strength could not be questioned while they remained hidden. At that hour the light was failing. Many of the glassy surfaces were already dulled. But the glint of opulence, together with all the mechanical sounds of success, still issued from the house behind. Presently a boy appeared. He was already tall, but not yet furnished. In that light the contours of his face shone like yellow wax. He himself could have been holding a taper, if not a scroll. The boy frowned, who had not bargained for a visitor. Himmelfarb was grateful even for a presence. "The _bar mitzvah__ boy," he could not help himself. "Eh?" exclaimed the boy, and frowned deeper. All of this was part of something he sensed he must resent, but only sensed. "You are thirteen," the stranger remarked with certainty. The boy grunted agreement, but full of hate. "What is your name?" "Steve," answered the boy. He would get out pretty soon. "What else?" the man insisted. "Haven't you a real name?" The boy's throat was working. "One of ours?" the stranger persevered. The boy was full of disgust, not to say horror. He hated the madman in the hall. And went from there without answering, on his rubber soles. So that there was nothing with which the stranger might identify himself, and he would have gone if his limbs had allowed him. But a girl came. She was looking rather feverish. And thin. Her hair was minced up into little, quivering curls. "Good evening," he began. "You are the daughter." "Oh, yes," she admitted, but that was unimportant. "I have been reading the life of the Little Flower, " she said, because she loved to tell about herself. "It is lovely. It is my favourite book. But any saints are interesting." "Have you come across those of Safed and Galicia?" "Oh," she said, "I never heard about _them__. They wouldn't be real, not Catholic saints." But even that was unimportant. She came closer to him to confess. "Do you know, I am going to have a vocation. I am praying for it, and if you pray hard enough, it comes. I am praying that the wounds will open in my hands." In the half-light she was rubbing the thin palms of her hands, and showing. But the telephone rang, and the mother came. So the daughter hid her hands. Mrs Rosetree, still wearing her housecoat, of which the colour suddenly illuminated in the old man's mind the whole, exhausting, perennial journey, very carefully disentangled the telephone cord, and carried the instrument round the corner. For privacy. Even so, the corner revealed the burning azure of Mrs Rosetree's behind. "Hello?" answered Mrs Rosetree. "This is JM three… Marge! Why, Marge!" Mrs Rosetree cried. "I dunno what's got hold of this line. Come closer into the phone." The daughter made a face. "That is Mumma's friend," she said. "And she's a pain." "Why, Marge, I would of rung you," Mrs Rosetree was protesting, "but went to the hairdresser's…. Yairs. Yairs. That one. I gotta leave him, Marge. His wife is having some trouble. Always the same. Every time…." The child pressed against the stranger in the dusk. She had to whisper. "You know about Saint Tereese and the roses? I think I once saw a rose. A white rose." "Arr, nao, nao, Marge! I would of _rung you__," Mrs Rosetree was saying. "But then I went to the pictures…. Yairs. Yairs…. It was a love story…. Yairs. No story much, but it made you feel good…." In the dusk the paper roses twittered round Himmelfarb. The voices of love breathed a synthetic heliotrope. "Yes, Marge." Mrs Rosetree laughed. "I gotta. I gotta have my ration of love." "Why do you tell me all this?" Himmelfarb whispered to the little girl. "The roses, and the wounds?" "On Good Friday, after… Yairs. After the Stations of the Cross…. Yairs," said Mrs Rosetree with great patience. "Well, dear, we have our obligations to the Church. Well, you see, Marge, that is something you will never understand if you are not one yourself." The daughter was sucking her mouth in, and thinking. "I like to tell somebody," she said. "Once in a while. People I won't ever see again." In fact, she had already dismissed her collaborator. But whirled him back for a moment in a gust of her especial hysteria. "Besides," she giggled, "you are sort of spooky!" "Nao, Marge," Mrs Rosetree was insisting. "There is nobody…. Sure…. Well, yes, a chap came, but is going…. Nobody… Yes, dear, I tell you, he is going…." With the result that the stranger got up and went. The door had been standing open ever since he came. When Mrs Rosetree had finished her conversation, she returned from round the corner with the telephone, and said, "Don't tell me that man has gone! What can you have done to him?" Her daughter, who had given up answering her parents, continued to rub her finger round a window that did not open. "These old Jews," Mrs Rosetree explained, "will land on you, and then you have had it." "Was he a Jew?" the child asked. "Was he a Jew!" Mrs Rosetree spoke and laughed so softly, she could have been referring, not to the stranger, but to some part of her own body that was a secret between herself and the doctor-her womb, for instance. "Like Our Saviour!" exclaimed the little girl. Who began to cry extravagantly. Because she would never experience a miracle. However long she waited for the hands to touch. "Arr, now, Rosie," the mother protested, "I will fetch the milk of magnesia. Cry, cry! Over nothing. "It is the age, perhaps." The mother sighed. And went softly, tenderly, into the kitchen, to heat up some chicken soup with _kneidlach__, and to taste that chopped chicken liver she had bullied the daily into pounding up good. If her husband did not come-he usually did whenever a smell of food arose-it was because he was still in the bush-house. If he had held no further conversation with the Jew Mordecai before the latter left, it was because the bush-house had prevented him from doing this too. The bush-house-and propagation area-which Mrs Rosetree had wanted so bad until she got it, had fascinated him from the beginning, as well as offering a refuge on occasions, never more needful than that evening, as the familiar stars appeared between the twigs, and the feet of the departing guest were heard on the gravel. At one end of the balcony above the narrow street in which they used to live, they would weave a few sticks together, into a rough canopy. At that end the dish-clouts hung at normal times, and even during Succoth there remained the heavy smell of dish-water. Into which they would drag their mattresses, and lie. The whole family. Their blood almost running together. During the festival of Succoth they never seemed to leave their tabernacle, unless the rain came, very unpleasant, causing them to scatter, and the old people to pat one another's clothes to estimate the dangers. But normally they would lie, all through the nights of Succoth, under the smell of dish-water, the grandfather groaning, and snoring, and breaking wind, the boy Haïm ben Ya'akov looking at those same stars. Now Mrs Rosetree called, "Har-ry? All this good soup will be getting cold. You don't wanta be afraid. He's gone. Tt-tt! Har-ry! The night air is gunna play hell with you!"

By the time Himmelfarb returned along the streets of Paradise East, the ropes of roses had disintegrated. The houses, too, had dissolved, although the windows had set into shapes of solid light, thus proving that something does survive. Filled with such certainty, or an evening feed of steak, the bellies of stockbrokers had risen like gasometers. As the stockbrokers stood, pressing their thumbs over the nozzles of hoses, to make the water squirt better, they discussed the rival merits of _thuya orientalis__ and _retinospora pisifera plumosa__. All the gardens of Paradise East were planted for posterity. All the homes were architect-planned. From one window, certainly, a voice had begun to scream, strangled, it seemed, by its boa of roses, and so unexpected, the noise could have carried from some more likely suburb. Himmelfarb reached the station, and caught the little train. Again it appeared to have been waiting for him, as if by arrangement, to run him back into that country which, for the hostage, there is no escaping. He did not complain actively. It was the train. The train rocked and grumbled, and communicated to his still passive body something of the night of desolation. The plastic ladies, of course, had been too pastel to last, and faded out with afternoon. At night it was the men who prevailed and rumbled in the train. The facts they were exchanging might have sounded brutal if they had not already been worn down by the users: by the thin, copper-coloured blokes, and the bluish, pursy ones, bursting with hair like the slashed upholstery in trains. As they rocked, there was a smell of peanuts, and wet paper bags, and beer, and tunnels. Here and there, as it lurched, the train threatened to blunder into the private lives of individuals. In the kitchens of many homes, gentlemen in singlets were only now assaulting their plastic sausages, ladies were limply tumbling the spaghetti off the toast on which they had been so careful to put it, daughters daintier than their mums were hurrying to get finished, forever, but forever. Over all, the genie of beef dripping still hovered in his blue robe. But magic was lacking. And in narrow rooms, emptied boys, rising from sticky contemplation of some old coloured pin-up, prepared to investigate the dark. The train burst across the night where it was suspended, miraculously, over water. In the compartments no one but the Jew appeared to notice they were returning to a state of bondage they had never really left. But the Jew now knew he should not have expected anything else. The train was easing through the city which knives had sliced open to serve up with all the juices running-red, and green, and purple. All the syrups of the sundaes oozing into the streets to sweeten. The neon syrup coloured the pools of vomit and the sailors' piss. By that light, the eyes of the younger, gabardine men were a blinding, blinder blue, when not actually burnt out. The blue-haired grannies had purpled from the roots of their hair down to the ankles of their pants, not from shame, but neon, as their breasts chafed to escape from shammy-leather back to youth, or else roundly asserted themselves, like chamberpots in concrete. As for the young women, they were necessary. As they swung along, or hung around a corner, or on an arm, they were the embodiment of thoughts and melons. As if the thoughts of the gabardine men had risen from the ashes behind their fused eyeballs, and put on flesh at last, of purple, and red, and undulating green. There were the kiddies, too. The kiddies would continue to suck at their slabs of neon, until they had learnt to tell the time, until it was time to mouth other sweets. All along the magnesium lines swayed the drunken train. Because the night itself was drunk, the victims it had seemed to invite were forced to follow suit. Himmelfarb was drunk, not to the extent of brutishness; he had not yet fetched up. Released from the purple embrace, sometimes he tottered. Sometimes hurtled. Watching. As the darkness spat sparks, and asphalt sinews ran with salt sweat, the fuddled trams would be tunnelling farther into the furry air, over the bottletops, through the smell of squashed pennies, and not omitting from time to time to tear an arm out of its screeching socket. But would arrive at last under the frangipani, the breezes sucking with the mouths of sponges. Sodom had not been softer, silkier at night than the sea gardens of Sydney. The streets of Nineveh had not clanged with such metal. The waters of Babylon had not sounded sadder than the sea, ending on a crumpled beach, in a scum of French letters. At one point the train in which Himmelfarb huddled on his homeward journey farted extra good. And stopped. The man opposite paused in stuffing cold potato chips into his mouth. "Whoa-err, Matilda!" shouted the rather large man, and brayed. Through a mash of cold potato. But the foreign cove did not understand a joke. Or was listening to the radio which had begun to sing in the stationary night. Some song which the potato-eater did not bother to recognize. "O city of elastic kisses and retracting dreams!" the psalmist sang; "O rivers of vomit, O little hills of concupiscence, O immense plains of complacency! O great, sprawling body, how will you atone, when your soul is a soft peanut with the weevils in it? O city of der-ree…" But the train choked the voice by starting. And continued. And continued. And after much further travel the old Jew found himself descending the lane-or Avenue-in which he lived. He was shaking now, and threatened with falling amongst the swathes of paspalum which tried perpetually to mow him down. He was almost crying for all that he had seen and experienced that night, not because it existed in itself, but because he had made it live in his own heart. So he reached his door, and felt for the _mezuzah__ on the doorpost, to touch, to touch the Shema, not so much in the hope of being rescued, as to drive the hatred out. The miracle did, in fact, occur almost at the same moment as he noticed a light approaching, swaying and jumping, as the one who held it negotiated the uneven ground. Distance, shadows, light itself finally made way, and Himmel-farb recognized the figure of Mrs Godbold, carrying an old hurricane-lamp which he had known her take before on missions at night. "I listened for you, sir, and heard you come. I am sorry," she apologized, "if I disturb. But have a reason." Even so, she remained embarrassed. And Himmelfarb could have been happier. The love that he should have returned any living creature was still a shabby, tattered one. Then he noticed that his neighbour was holding a dish, on it something insignificant and black. Mrs Godbold looked down. She was made immensely solid by that rudimentary light. Yet, a white transparency of light had transfigured her normally opaque skin. "This is some lamb, sir," she explained, at once heavy and tremulous, "that a lady gives us every year at Easter." "Lamb?" Himmelfarb repeated, in some desperation, from a fit of nausea, not for present circumstances, but perhaps a past incident, he could not for the moment remember what. "Yes," she said, and repeated, "For Easter. Have you forgotten? The day after tomorrow-no, tomorrow already is Good Friday. The factory will be closed. You will have to think of how you will be living for quite a number of days." "Oh," he said. "Yes. It is also Easter." Mrs Godbold was again confused. She looked down at the still only partly explained object on her dish. "The lady gives us the leg," she said, and blushed by lantern-light. "But this year the puppy got hold of it. Not all that much. We tidied up the other end for ourselves. And the shank was not touched. I brought it, sir. I thought you might care to make a little celebration." "For Easter." Now that his voice had stuck, he could not avoid repeating things. "That is not the point," Mrs Godbold said, and again she blushed. "Everybody has got to. eat. Whatever the time of year." Then he took the dish from her. The long, leaping shadows from the jumping lantern made them both look very awkward. He began talking, in quick, nervous, little stabbing phrases, putting his tongue out a good deal. "You will be glad. Not that it will be, well," he chose with some care, "a holiday, exactly. For you. I expect. But for what it signifies." "Oh," she answered, "I am always glad at Eastertide. Because, then, suffering is over. Or so they tell us. For a little." That she should not appear to have offered a variant of her own, she continued rather quickly. "It was more of Easter at Home, of course. There was the flowers. The scent of flowers. The narcissies. And the white anemones we would pick if we cut across the woods. Oh, and blackthorn!" she remembered; it was, indeed, a joyful find. "I think I liked the blackthorn best. The flowers were the whitest, on the black sticks. We children would sometimes bring the flowers to decorate our Table. Oh, it would look lovely when they had lit the candles. It would look alive. Then it did seem as though the world was reborn. The mass of blackthorn was like a whole tree flowering on the Table of our church. It was not much of a one, sir, by any great standards. But on Easter Day we would know Our Lord had risen." Mrs Godbold's trumpet voluntary sounded solitary, but true. "But, of course," she hastened, "we would have known without all that. All the flowers on earth could wither up, and we would still know." Then the Jew hung his head. But she saw, and at once she touched him with her voice, saying, "You must forgive me. I must not waste your time. You will not be up for work. The lamb is nothing, but you are welcome to it-only if you would care." When she had left, and he had gone inside, and switched the light on, and it had rained down on his almost empty living-room, he realized that he had to face the disaster of his Seder table. Still untouched, the past few hours seemed to have made a sculpture of it, not of rejoicing, but of lament. Here, rather, was the tomb of all those, including himself, who had not survived the return journey, and he, risen from the dead, the keeper of it. That he knew, he knew. He touched the clay of Egypt, which time had turned browner. And herbs, never so bitter as facts. That he knew for certainty. Then the Jew saw that he was still carrying Mrs Godbold's dish, and that the wretched shankbone which his neighbour had brought as an offering was almost the twin of the one he had laid that afternoon on his own Seder table.

13

BECAUSE the telephone is the darkest, the most sepulchral oracle of all, Mrs Flack would stalk around that instrument for quite a while before she was persuaded to accept the summons. Although a considerable pythoness herself, it might have been that she felt the need for invocation before encounter with superior powers. Or was it, simply, that she feared to hear the voice of doom addressing her personally? Either way, she would at last be heard. "Oh? Ah? Yairs. No no! _Yairs__! Perhaps. Who can tell? I will have to think it over and give you an answer. Well, now! Those who know, need not ask." As she parried with a shield of wooden words, it would begin to appear as though she had mislaid her matchless sword, and the armour of disbelief, with which she had been careful to gird herself, had turned audibly to buckram. Mrs Jolley, who enjoyed the gift of being able to overhear without actually listening, had even known her friend reply, "You cannot expect me to be wise to everythink. Can you, now?" It made Mrs Jolley wonder, but she continued to immerse the dishes, which was one of the duties she performed in return for friendship and a very small remuneration. Mrs Jolley soon learned that, of all the telephone voices, there was perhaps only one to which Mrs Flack could genuinely respond. On such occasions the true glue of prophecy would be poured back, into the funnel of the telephone, onto the missing questions. Mrs Jolley could tell that her friend's rather dry and freckled hands were moulding the warm Bakélite into an altogether different shape. Mrs Jolley would hear: "If you was so foolish as to leave off your singlet as well, then what can you expect? Oh, dear, dear! I would advise you to rub your chest before retiring, and see as the blanket is pulled right up, and sweat it out with a couple of aspro, and a drop of somethink. It is you who must answer for your own health, whoever else is willin' to." On one occasion Mrs Jolley heard: "I do not expect feelin's where feelin's do not exist. But expect them to be respected where they do. Eh? No, you do not understand. You do not understand. No one understands no more, unless it is put in American." When her friend returned to the kitchen, Mrs Jolley could not resist, "Ah, dear, some people are terrible." But Mrs Flack did not appear to hear. "Some young fellers," Mrs Jolley ventured further, "are all for themselves nowadays." Mrs Flack had risen to the surface, but her thoughts were floating after her. "That nephew of yours is giving you a lot of trouble," said Mrs Jolley and chipped a plate on the tap. "There is no trouble," replied Mrs Flack, "where a person's life is his own." "Oh, no, where a person's life is his own." Mrs Jolley sighed. She did wonder where. There was the morning-it was the Thursday of Easter, Mrs Jolley would remember-the telephone had rung that sharp, she broke the little butter-dish with the gum-nuts on it, which she hid behind the dresser to dispose of when convenient. Mrs Flack answered, as usual, but only after bells had begun to ring at every end of a lady's nerves. Mrs Jolley heard: "Waddaya know! I would never ever! Golly, I am pleased, Blue! But watch out now, won't you? I am telling you people will act different. People, when they get a smell of someone else's luck, are very, very different. People, at the best of times, are different underneath their clothes. Eh? You know, Blue, I did not suggest. You will never ever find me descending to anything low-thoughts or talk-never low. Because there is so much that is far from nice. Which reminds me, Blue, someone that we know of was visiting last night, so I am told, by lantern-light, a certain person. Yairs, dear. Forgetting, it would seem, the time of year. It was _them__ that crucified Our Saviour. Tomorrow. Think of it. Tomorrow! Yet, someone that we know of must _consort__-to put it blunt. Eh? Blue! Blue! I forbid you! Who am I–I would like to know-that you are talking to? Where are you, Blue? I can only think you must be full. In the one across from work? A fat lot of work you'll do this morning, Blue, and what odds!" Here Mrs Flack laughed like a motor-bike. "I do not blame you, neither. It is only right that young people in full possession of their health should take their pleasure. And if they come to grief, well, it is the parents will wear the scars. It is not the children on who the sins. Oh, dear, no! Whatever else. Do not think I am bitter, as has sometimes been suggested. I am not. I am realistic, that is all, and must bear the consequences of seeing things as they really are. And suffer every Easter to know the Jews have crucified Our Lord. Again. Blue? Something that the young do not need to understand. Not while they have their lovely bodies. Eh? Blue? Enjoy, boy, enjoy, then! Bust your skin open, if that is what you want! It is only a game to let the blood run when there is plenty of it. And so red. Nothing is cruel if you don't see it that way. Besides, it lets the bad out, too, and I would be the last to deny there is plenty of that waiting to turn to pus in anybody's veins. "Eh? Blue?" Mrs Flack was calling, it could have been in joy, or desperation. When she entered the kitchen she was glittering dreadfully. Mrs Jolley, who had been excited, puzzled, frightened by all that she had overheard, decided to continue looking at the sink. "Blue," gasped Mrs Flack, "and six workmates"-here she sat hard upon an upright chair-"has gone and won the Lottery. They called the ticket 'Lucky Sevens.' " Mrs Jolley was looking at the sink, of which the grey water, suddenly so flat and still, continued to conceal a variety of objects. "You are not pleased," Mrs Flack only dreamily accused. In her entranced state she did not need to glance. Mrs Jolley would be without her shine. She would be wearing the grey look of mornings of dish-water. It was normal for her now to leave her teeth whole days in the tumbler, beneath the handkerchief, beside her bed. "Some people," said Mrs Flack, "do not like to hear the good." Mrs Jolley stroked the water. "I was only thinking," said Mrs Jolley. She was not all that grey. "I was thinking of his poor mother," she said. Nor was she reproachful, only sympathetic. "What was the name," she asked, "of your sister, Mrs Flack, that passed on?" Mrs Flack grew dreamier. "Eh?" she said. "My sister. My sister Daisy. Daisy," she said. "I was thinking," said Mrs Jolley, "it will be lovely for your sister to know as her boy has struck lucky." Usually when others expressed suitable sentiments, Mrs Flack would be at a loss how to bridge the gap. If she were unable to prevent the moment occurring, she would find herself, as now, squinting down her front into-nothing. On that most brilliant of mornings Mrs Jolley had elected for darkness. Her friend suspected she might even be concealing some long-range plan for breaking open safes, and thieving old letters and deeds. So Mrs Flack arranged her spotless front, and waited. "I bet your hubby, too, was fond of such a sturdy boy. As much an uncle as you an aunt." "Will?" Mrs Flack answered from very far. "Will died when Blue was still a little kiddy." Mrs Jolley sucked her gums. "It was not my intention," she said, "to bring it up. And such a dreadful end." But Mrs Flack could not in every way agree; death is so practical. "I will not deny," she said, "that the manner of it was unexpected, Will being so well thought of in the trade, so well remunerated, a first-class tiler. But it is not the manner of it, Mrs Jolley, that matters-whether a man slips off the roof, or snuffs out in 'is own lounge-room, in an easy chair. The end, why, the _end__ is the same." Mrs Jolley began to see plainly there might be no escaping from out of that cube of kitchen. "Well," she cried, "are we a pair of crows!" "It was not me that chose to enter into morbid speculation," said Mrs Flack, loftier. Mrs Jolley struck the surface of the water with her hand. "And on such a day!" she shrieked, looking at the clock. "I bet that nephew of yours will be full as a piss-ant by eleven!" "Blue is a good boy," claimed Mrs Flack. "No one ever," conceded Mrs Jolley. "Blue never got into trouble. Or not much." "I do not know what I do not know!" Mrs Jolley laughed. "Blue never killed a soul," said Mrs Flack. "Who killed who?" asked Mrs Jolley, her neck turning on a steel spring. "It happens every day. A person has only to read the papers." "You cannot take the papers for true." "Only a person can know the truth, and then not always." There the two ladies were caught up in the morning. Their actions were no longer their own because severed from their bodies by thought and light.

Himmelfarb, who had retired late, rose early on that day. Whatever its conditions were to be, he refused, as always, to allow himself to speculate before he had laid the phylacteries on. Only when he was girt with the Word, and the shawl, covering his shoulders, excluded with its fringes those other desires of heart and eyes, had his own day begun, or was again created, sanctified, and praised. As he stood, reciting the Shema and Benedictions, from behind closed lids, from the innermost part of him, the face began again to appear in the divine likeness, in the clouds of the little mirror, offering itself for an approval that might always remain withheld. But the Jew prayed: "Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the Universe, who hast given to the cock intelligence to distinguish between day and night…." And the light was poured into the four corners of the room, though silently at Sarsaparilla, for man had known better than God or Lévite, and had operated on the cock. But the purest leaf touched the Jew's eyelids; his lids were shaped in gold. His veins were lapis lazuli in a sea of gold, the thongs of the phylacteries were turned to onyx, but the words that fell from his mouth were leaping crystals, each reflecting to infinity the words contained within the words. The Jew prayed, and the statue which had been broken off the pediment of time, and set down on the edge of the morning, became a man. The rather chapped lips were forming words of their own flesh: "Let us obtain this day and every day, grace, favour, and mercy in thine eyes, and in the eyes of all who behold us, and bestow lovingkindnesses upon us. Blessed art Thou, O Lord…" And the light which, until now, had been of a mineral order, a matter of crumbling gold, together with the cold slips of elusive feldspar, forming upon the deposits of porphyry and agate with which the solid firmament was streaked, dissolved at last into a sea of moving crimson. The crimson sea lapped at the skin of the man as he stood at prayer, the tips of his ears and the hollows of his temples grew transparent, his cheeks were flushed with crimson, or the intensity of his petition. The Jew affirmed: "I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and, though he tarry, I will wait daily for his coining. For Thy salvation I hope, O Lord! I hope, O Lord, for Thy salvation! O Lord, for Thy salvation I hope!" And the shawl fell back from his shoulders in the moment of complete union, and the breeze from the window twitched at the corner of his old robe, showing him to be, indeed, a man, made to suffer the torments and indignities. The hair lay in thin, grizzled wisps in the hollow between his breasts; the thongs of veins which bound his scraggy legs, from the ankles to the knees, were most arbitrarily, if not viciously entangled. When he had finished praying, Himmelfarb looked out of the window of his fragile house. Because he had not slept, each act that he observed was of the most innocent, each line the cleanest, each form the simplest. On a ridge the other side of the street, white hens were already picking amongst the black trunks of the wattles. In the street itself, an old man, after unfolding his newspaper, was preparing to read with unconcern of the worst that could have happened. The stream of milk was transfixed between the milkman's measure and the billy-cans. The Jew stood rubbing the stubble on his cheek. Since all was obviously logical, now he could only be prepared. And went about getting himself ready. He could not prevent his hands fumbling and trembling at times, not only because he was moved by the purity of certain objects which he had to touch, but because these were attached by strings of memory to incidents experienced. He did, however, attempt to eat. He drank part of a cupful of coffee, which on that morning tasted peculiarly bitter in his mouth. From the wreckage of his Seder table he tasted a little of the bitter parsley. He pulled splinters from each of the identical shank-bones. Only after they had been chewed, moistened in humility and longing, did the splinters begin to suggest meat. Then he had to swallow the fragments in great, hot, sounding lumps. At the usual hour, he packed the _tallith__ and _tephillin__ into his small fibre case. Although officially excused by Herr Rosenbaum from appearing during Pesach, he knew, of course, that his attendance was virtually expected. By others. Even, perhaps, by Rosenbaums. Himmelfarb would not allow himself to remember the threatened expression of his employer's eyes, but walked up the hill, in the shadow of the grey paling fences, to catch the bus for Barranugli. The morning soon turned grey and resistant, movement rubbery, either slack and disinclined, or taut and desperate. At Rosetree's the machines were already limber. As they ran, they sucked and breathed, but grudgingly. Ladies at their trays were mopping themselves with complaints. One was showing how the night had bruised her. All was as usual. Except everybody knew that this morning would be different. It was, for one thing, the eve of Good Friday, and who was gunna work when Easter had as good as come? Better to close down was the general opinion, and see to it that the meat was got home, and enough booze to last the holidays. But in the absence of common sense and justice, everybody sat and expected. Or toyed slightly with the metal parts which it was the habit of their second natures to put together. Today the hinges were resentful, spikes inclined to pierce the flesh. Moisture gathered in smears on the brilliant plating. Then it was realized Blue was absent from the plating-shop, and that several of the boys were not showing up, or only by fits and starts, shoving their dials round the door, and going, and coming, always grinning elastically. It was the Lucky Sevens, of course. One or two of the less lucky had been better informed from the beginning. Mr Theobalds was laughing as he played with the hair of his armpits and awaited developments. He appeared to be a man the softer for experience. Soon it had passed along the lines of grannies and sulkier girls that some of the blokes had pulled off the Lottery. Well, good on 'em! But there were some could have cried. And one lady produced from her pocket a whistle of the postman type, which she had found that morning on her bedside table, and blew it until the veins were ugly at her temples, and her lips had turned pale and cracked in spite of the layers of pillar-box red. It was humid down on the work-floor. Who was gunna work? Though a few inveterates dabbled. It would be possible very soon to detach from the arms, all of a piece, the films of moisture, or long gloves of greasy skin. Only the Jew remained dry, and unaffected by the outward situation. His hands were tingling but prepared as he sat down at his drill and proceeded to bore the hole, and bore the hole, as would be expected of him, until he was called. In the circumstances, his concentration was distasteful, abominable to many, who could not prevent themselves glancing, however, at the bloody foreign Jew, and especially when he got up and stamped around his drill, to restore circulation, drive out the pins and needles. When he rubbed his hands together, they sounded sandpapery and dry, unlike the soapy streaming skins of people. To some it is always unendurable to watch the antithesis of themselves. But the Jew returned to his stool, and did try to cause as little pain as possible. Though he nodded once at the blackfel-low, in spite of their unexpressed agreement not to recognize each other. The abo did not recognize now. Although the latter had evidently been sick, and had lost weight to the extent of looking emaciated, he continued to strip to the waist on account of the excessive humidity. If nobody commented on his appearance, not even those who were most disgusted by the presence of sickness, or blacks-antithesis in its extremest forms-it was because he had become by now the abstraction of a man. The eyes of the talkers lingered only absently on the construction of ribs. These had no connection with the life of brick homes and washing machines which is led by human beings. At times the abo would shiver, though. Especially when recognized by the Jew. He did not want that. He did not wish to become involved in a situation which he might not have the strength to endure. But which he must learn ultimately to express. So he shivered, and at one stage the salient ribs appeared to grow convulsed and separate, in spite of their attachment to one another in his sides. Round about ten, Mr Rosetree himself came out of his office, after first glancing through the hatchway at the workshop, and deciding that a personal appearance was at least theoretically appropriate. Nobody cared, though. So Mr Rose-tree strutted worse than ever on the balls of his rather small feet. And addressed one or two of the absent-minded ladies. Harry Rosetree was very jolly that day, even when the sweat trickled down his delicatessen skin, at the back of his carefully clipped neck. The sweat trickled under the collar. But Mr Rosetree laughed, ever so jolly, and said what a day it was for the factory, for seven mates to pull the lottery off. And just at Easter. Then he looked at the clock. And laughed again, right back to his gold tooth. The radio was straining all the time from the wall, and one day, if not actually that morning, it would tear itself free at the very moment strangulation was promised. Just then, one of the Lucky Sevens looked in before returning to the pub across the street. The boys were celebrating, he reported, and his smile produced dimples such as are reserved for mention of beer, Old Ireland, or mothers. There had never been another Easter like it. They were pissed as flies. Mr Rosetree laughed fit to stagger the machines. But frowned at the Jew Himmelfarb. The whole human mechanism of the boss was threatened by events that were developing in his own establishment, and for which he must blame somebody. Of course the mates were out of the question; they were sacrosanct. There remained Harry Rosetree himself, or his conscience Haïm ben Ya'akov, or its goad, Himmelfarb. Blood pressure, heat, noise, all contributed to his distress, and confused his attempts to distinguish a cause. "What for you come when I told you to lay off over Pesach?" Mr Rosetree sputtered. Himmelfarb replied, "I have never escaped the consequences by avoiding them." "Eh?" shouted Harry Rosetree. But by now there was too much noise. Over and above the repeated statement of Himmelfarb's drill, and general emotional jamboree of machinery, something was happening in the street. There were drums, and cornets, and probably one fife. A sharp stench of animals began to mingle with the blander smell of oil. In the outer office Miss Whibley, who had been powdering herself all the morning, paused and exclaimed, "Oh, I say, a circus!" Miss Mudge agreed that it was, and together they flung themselves at the window, with the object, it seemed, of widening the hole, and thus penetrating farther into what they hoped to see. At the same time, there was such a squealing of stools and thumping of tables in the workshop, as a scaffolding was erected from which to view the spectacle through the rather high-set louvres. Certain gentlemen took advantage of the situation to squeeze close to certain young ladies. Everything so contiguous, the summer blouses grew as unconscious as blancmange. Although the owner of the whistle did not stop blowing. As the circus returned to the patch of dead grass where some had observed it pitched the night before, fevers that had never been diagnosed sweated their way into the hands and faces of many of the spectators: to see the white bellies of the girls through the fringes of their satins, or to smell the smell of monkeys. A fellow on a skewbald nag could have been anybody's almost extinguished dream, the way he drew a match along the tight flank of his pants, and almost glanced up, out of his burnt-out eyes. Most comical was one of the clowns who pretended to enact a public hanging on the platform of a lorry. Nothing but the jolting and his own skill prevented him from adapting his neck to the noose. He would totter, and fall-wide. Yet, it was suggested, as good as strangled by the air. His tongue would loll outside his mouth, before licking up those invisible fragments which restore to life. "They will kill the silly bugger yet!" screamed one of the grannies of Rosetree's Brighta Bicycle Lamps. "Look! What did I tell yez? And spoil 'is Easter!" It did seem as though the clown's act had been played out at last for a second procession, longer, smoother, less amorphous, had united precipitately with the first. Between the jolting and the screams, flowers were falling, as the second procession was seen to be that of an actual funeral, so well-attended, so black, clothes of such good quality, and faces of such a doubtful cast, it could only have been an alderman that they were putting down quick before the holidays set in. As the clown spun at the end of his rope, and the little property coffin hesitated on the brink of the lorry, and confusion carried voices, brakes, horses' wind into the upper register, a woman rose in the first funeral car, or stuffed herself, rather, in the widow: a large, white woman-could have been the widow-pointing, as if she had recognized at last in the effigy of the clown the depth, and duration, and truth of grief, which she had failed to grasp in connection with that exacting male her now dead husband. The woman was screeching dry screams. A monumental marble could have been clearing its throat of dust, and would not stop since it had learnt. It had not been established whether the clown was dead, or again shamming, when the interlocked processions dragged each other round the corner and out of sight. Those who had longed for a show wondered whether they were appeased, for the clown was surely more or less a puppet, when they had been hoping for a man. On the other hand, the eyes of some of the more thoughtful had receded into their heads as the hands of the controversial clown seemed to jerk at a curtain in their minds. It occurred to these that their boss had remained stranded with the Jew down at the far end of the shed, and that the soundless attitudes of the two men had nothing and everything to do with events. Harry Rosetree's hands were trying to part the air, so that he might come closer to the core of it. He had, in fact, just said, "I must ask you, I must order you to leave!" Of course the vibration of the machinery was enough to dash the words out of anybody's mouth. "It could be for your own good," Mr Rosetree threatened. But the few smiled sadly. He was not so sure. "At once. Before." The boss was booming, and exuding. The shaped, but silent words bounced like blown eggshells. The Jew had replied, in his own vein of sad irony, "You will not be blamed." Sometimes the velvet belting of machinery actually soothed. "Nobody but myself," Himmelfarb could have been saying, "will be held to blame for anything that may happen. You are doubly insured." The strangeness of the situation, the employer trying to extract something from the air, and offer it in the shape of a secret message to one of the least skilled of his employees, would have roused curiosity, if it had not disturbed. Those who noticed averted their eyes. Fortunately there were other things happening. It was just on smoke-o. The machines were easing. Workers were descending from the scaffolding of tables from which they had been employed enjoying the spectacle of the processions. It was now time to relax. When the Lucky Sevens returned from the pub across the street, and the incident of the hanging clown. There was Blue at last, whom many had not seen, let alone congratulated, on the morning of his good fortune. A number of his workmates, noticeably those of the female sex, were rushing to touch, to kiss, to associate, while the shyer waited for him to identify himself in some way, although he had got full enough, to show. Blue was shickered all right. The beer was running out of his navel. The partners in chance advanced. All were clothed, conventionally, in singlets and slacks, with the exception of their leader, who wore the gum-boots in which he was accustomed to wade through the acid of the plating-shop, and the pair of old shorts stained beyond recognition as a fabric, resembling, rather, something sloughed by nature. Blue had always been primarily a torso, an Antinous of the suburbs, breasts emphatically divided on unfeeling marble, or Roman sandstone. Somebody had battered the head, or else the sculptor had recoiled before giving precise form to a vision of which he was ashamed. Whether damaged, or unfinished, the head was infallibly suggestive. Out of the impervious eyes, which should have conveyed at most the finite beauty of stone, filtered glimpses of an infinite squalor: slops of the saloon, the dissolving cigarette butts, reflections of the grey monotonies, the greenish lusts. The mouth was a means of devouring. If ever it opened on words-for it was sometimes necessary to communicate-these issued bound with the brass of beer, from between rotting stumps of teeth. Now Blue called to the surge of his admirers, not with any indication of caring, "Hayadoin?" Notwithstanding, the ladies were lapping him up with the same thirst as she who was closest to him by blood. His rudimentary mouth was soon smeared with red. "Goodonya, mate!" called the heartier of the females, perhaps under the impression that manliness might succeed where femininity had failed. But he laughed from between his stumps, and pushed the ladies aside, leaving them to trample on one another. There was no doubt the Lucky Sevens now predominated on the work-floor. Drink had made them gigantic, or so it appeared to Haïm Rosenbaum, in whose past the gestures and faces of the crowd had often assumed alarming proportions. Now he remembered a telephone call he had promised to make weeks ago. "Take it easy, Blue!" Mr Rosetree called in passing. As everyone had forgotten the boss, some did pause to wonder at the significance of the remark. Mr Rosetree continued up the stairs, inadequately protected by the knowledge that he had done his best. If there was an enemy of reason, it was the damned Jew Himmelfarb, who must now accept the consequences. The latter had just picked up his case, and was about to cross the yard, making for the wash-room, which in the past had provided a certain sanctuary for the spirit. Haïm ben Ya'akov looked back. Had he graduated, by some miracle, from the rank of actor to that of spectator? Then renewed panic carried him on, and, clearing the remainder of the steps, he reached his office. Himmelfarb was walking rather slowly. Although aged by circumstances or the weather, he too had increased in stature, to match those figures with whom he was slowly, slowly becoming involved. That much was evident to the abo at least, whose instincts informed his stomach with a sickening certainty. While standing on the flat floor, Alf Dubbo was stationed as if upon an eminence, watching what he alone was gifted or fated enough to see. Neither the actor nor the spectator, he was that most miserable of human beings, the artist. All aspects, all possibilities were already splintering, forming in him. His thin belly was in revolt. Himmelfarb could have touched the nearest of the Lucky Sevens by raising an elbow. But went out. And began to cross the yard. Nobody but the abo had begun yet to attach significance to the Jew of lolling head. Then Blue, who was hanging his, began to feel lonely, began to feel sad. He could have laid his head on a certain thin bosom, from which the vitriol would spurt in little jets. At the same time he was trying to remember-always a difficult matter where moral problems were concerned. His ear was aching with the effort as it pressed against the telephone of memory. But did at last distinguish the faintest:… _suffer every Easter to know the Jews have crucified Our Lord__. All the sadness pressing, pressing on a certain nerve. _It was Them, Blue__. All the injustices to which he had ever been subjected grew appreciably sadder. But for all the injustices he had committed, somebody had committed worse. Not to say the worst, so he had been told, the very worst. And must not go unpunished. "Hey, Mick!" Blue called. Now several of the Sevens realized what a very scraggy, funny, despicable sight the Jew-cove presented. One, who suspected that a joke was being prepared, laughed quite short and high, but another, who had the wind, belched, and hated. The Jew had turned. "I beg your pardon. Did you speak?" he asked. Though it was hardly necessary. He did not appear anything but fully informed. Blue, who always had to rootle around in his mind before he could find a reason, was not quick enough in finding one now. He knew, though. Reasons which originate in the blood, the belly, or the loins solicit most persistently. And looking at the Jew, Blue experienced the authentic spasm. "We gotta have a talk," he said, "about something that happened." Touching a button on the Jew's shirt, but lightly, even whimsically. Because Blue the vindicator was also Blue the mate. It was possible to practise all manner of cruelties provided the majority might laugh them off as practical jokes. And there is almost no tragedy which cannot be given a red nose. Blue perhaps sensed this as he lightly touched the shirt-button, or remembered some wowser of a parson who had failed to keep it serious as he droned on against the blowflies. "I got a bone to pick," said Blue. Already some of his confederates were bending their elbows in support of whatever situation their leader might choose to develop. "So the parson tells me," Blue pursued. "Or someone." He frowned, and faltered. "Or me auntie," he added, brighter. Indeed, that rekindled a fire which might otherwise have died. Now it flickered afresh with a greenish, acid flame. And Blue began to laugh. He was all gums, and the muscles in his throat. "You bloody buggers!" Blue laughed. "You black bastards!" The Jew's shirt surrendered up, most comically, a long, un-protesting strip. Dubbo looked into his hands. They were weaponless, and without weapons he felt badly afraid. Officially, of course, he was not a man, but a blackfellow. He could have cried for all his failures, but most of all this one. Left with the strip of shirt in his hand, Blue had not yet thought what to do with it. Then the Sevens began to move. It was their simultaneous intention to go into action against the offending Jew, although, for a start, they appeared to be pushing one another around. Their elephant-phalanx rubbed and cannoned. It was in earnest, though. If one or two half sniggered, it was to clear their mouths of phlegm, or something. They were in earnest all right. "Christ!" Even if somebody had to laugh, that seemed to hit right home. It struck Dubbo. Sounds transposed into tones of fear and horror, both personal and limitless, began to pour out over the yard, on the edge of which the struggle was taking place. If it could be called that. For the Jew did not resist. There was, on one side, the milling of the righteous, even to their own detriment. On the other, the Jew, who did not flinch, except that he was jostled. His expression remained one almost of contentment. As Dubbo watched, himself a thinking stick, twitched and tossed, the mob surged out across the yard, over the lavings from the plating-shop. Some were giggling and chanting. Of those who hung back or protested, none was willing as yet to forgo a disgraceful spectacle, but would _grizzle__ at their own lack of decision, in bass undertone. "Go home! Go home!" giggled and chanted the young girls. "Go home to Germany!" sang the older women. There was a clapping and a stamping as the men's chorus interpolated, "Go home! Go home! Go home to hell!" With a joyful, brassy resonance, because the puppet in their lives had been replaced at last by a man of flesh and blood. In the yard, Dubbo realized, there was that old jacaranda, which they had lopped back before its season of blue, perhaps for the very purpose of preventing it. But, however they had mangled its form, the painter was made to visualize the divine tree in its intensity of blue, wrapped in shawls of it, standing in pools of it. Towards the present travesty of tree, its mutilated limbs patched with lichens of a dead stone-colour, with nails, protruding in places from the trunk, together with a segment of now rusted tin, which somebody had hammered in for reasons unknown, it was agreed by consent of instinct to push the victim. Harder now. Indeed, at one point, the Jew went down. And got trampled for a while. At the risk of spoiling it, some of the rout could not resist trying the resilience of the mushroom that they longed to pick, and one man, braver than the rest, suddenly became aware of the dreadful frailty of the human body as he kicked at the fallen victim's ribs. Then Blue reached down and yanked the Jew up. The latter had begun to bleed from above his left eye, which appeared to the mass of the spectators both repulsive and rewarding. Never more plastic than now, Blue was glittering with sweat. Several of the young girls and married women consigned their souls willingly to the bonfire as they surrendered themselves to his image. Some of the men would have taken a hammer, or plunged a knife, if either weapon had been at hand. Into the Jew, of course. Nor would the latter have protested. That was what maddened the crowd. His mouth was not even set to endure suffering, but was ever so slightly open, as if to receive any further bitterness. So they pushed him up against the tree trunk. Ramming. And jamming. His head was heard once. "Hey, hold hard!" shouted Blue. He was not exactly protesting, but could not lose sight of the convention which demanded that cruelty, at least amongst mates, must be kept at the level of a joke. With that perhaps in mind, he broke away briefly, and ran into the plating-shop. And returned with a rope, or coil of lithe cord. The others were not sure they were going to approve. Some of them felt, in fact, they could have attempted heights of tragedy, they could have made blood run redder and more copiously than ever before. However, the majority were pacified by the prospect of becoming involved in some episode that would degrade them lower than they had known yet; the heights were not for them. Blue was very active. Fixing and tying. Shouting orders. Dubbo saw they had begun to hoist the Jew. They would tie him to his tree. Already higher than the crowd, he had been grazed by nail or tin, so that blood, quite a lot of it, did flow. At least one of his hands was pierced. Through the torn shirt, it could be seen that the disgraceful ribs were gashed. The crowd howled, and pushed. A lady who had begun to feel sick saved herself by remembering: "It is the foreigners that take the homes. It is the Jews. Good old Bluey! Let 'im 'ave it! I'll buy yer one when the job's finished." And the lavender curls lolloped on her old head. Now Dubbo knew that he would never, never act, that he would dream, and suffer, and express some of that suffering in paint-but was, in the end, powerless. In his innocence, he blamed his darker skin. Somewhere clocks were chiming.

At that hour, descending the stairs at Xanadu, Miss Hare saw the marble shudder, the crack widen a little farther. She waited for the structure to fall. But it did not. And when she had reached the foot of the stairs, she went on out into some unhappiness of trees. Her skin could read the air. She went, touched and fretted, fretting and touching. So she trundled through the misery of that morning, of which she herself was a troubled particle. In fact, as she shuffled over leaves, she followed the narrowing spiral of her dread almost to the core of it.

At that hour, Mrs Godbold took the sheets which she had washed earlier, and which were dry by now, and smelling of their own freshness. She began to iron the sheets, and soon had them ready in a pile. She would work fast and skilfully, even while remembering painful things: how the women, for instance, had received the body of their Lord. At that time of year Mrs Godbold would experience all that had happened, from bitterest dregs to joyful evidence. And now was pierced, never more deeply. But accepted it as always. And would lay the body in her whitest sheets, with the love of which only she was capable.

Mrs Flack, who had just poured them a cup of tea, looked at the surface of it, to see. "The truth will always out," she said. "It depends," Mrs Jolley dared. "What depends?" returned Mrs Flack, sucking in her breath. "It depends on what you believe the truth to be." Mrs Flack was awful. "The truth," she said, "is what a decent person knows by instinct. Surely that is so?" "Yes," her friend had to agree. Sometimes now Mrs Jolley took fright, particularly at the leaves of the _monstera deliciosa__, at the holes in their dark surfaces. Suddenly to catch sight of them, looming higher than the window-sill, gave Mrs Jolley a turn, but it would have hurt Mrs Flack to cut them back.

The Jew had been hoisted as high as he was likely to go on the mutilated tree. The rope pulleys had been knotted to a standstill; one of Blue's accomplices had fumblingly, but finally, fastened the ankles. There he was, nobody would have said crucified, because from the beginning it had been a joke, and if some blood had run, it had dried quickly. The hands, the temples, and the side testified to that in dark clots and smears, too poor to attract the flies. If some of the spectators suffered the wounds to remain open, it was due probably to an unhealthy state of conscience, which could have been waiting since childhood to break out. For those few, the drops trembled and lived. How they longed to dip their handkerchiefs, unseen. Others had to titter for a burlesque, while turning aside their faces in an attempt to disguise what they suspected might be blasphemy. Blue was laughing, and swallowing his excessive spittle. He stood looking up, with his throat distended on his now rather convulsive torso: a decadence of statuary. He called up out of the depths, "Howyadoin up there, eh? 'Ad enough, eh? Bugger me if the cow don't go for it!" The Jew appeared, in fact, to have been removed from them, while the arch-tormentor himself might have been asking for respite from torments which he had always suffered, and which, in certain circumstances, were eased, he seemed to remember. So the marble body was contorted into the changing forms of wax at the foot of the tree. The Jew hung. If he had not been such a contemptible object, he might have excited pity. Hoisted high at the wrists, the weight of the body threatened to cut them through. The arms strained to maintain that uneasy contact between heaven and earth. Through the torn shirt the skin was stretched transparent on the ribs. The head lolled even more heavily than in life. Those who had remained in touch with reality or tradition might have taken him for dead. But the eyes were visionary rather than fixed. The contemplative mouth dwelled on some breathless word spoken by the mind. Because he was as solitary in the crowd as the man they had crucified, it was again the abo who saw most. All that he had ever suffered, all that he had ever failed to understand, rose to the surface in Dubbo. Instinct and the white man's teaching no longer trampled on each other. As he watched, the colour flowed through the veins of the cold, childhood Christ, at last the nails entered wherever it was acknowledged they should. So he took the cup in his own yellow hands, from those of Mr Calderon, and would have offered it to such celebrants as he was now able to recognize in the crowd. So he understood the concept of the blood, which was sometimes the sick, brown stain on his own pillow, sometimes the clear crimson of redemption. He was blinded now. Choking now. Physically feebler for the revelation that knowledge would never cut the cords which bound the Saviour to the tree. Not that it was asked. Nothing was asked. So he began also to understand acceptance. How he could at last have conveyed it, in its cloak of purple, on the blue tree, the green lips of detached, contemplative suffering. And love in its many kinds began to trouble him as he looked. He saw the old man, the clergyman, searching the boy's body for the lost image of youth on the bedstead at Numburra, and Mrs Spice whirling to her putrefaction in the never-ending dance of the potato-sacks, and Hannah the prostitute curled together with her white capon, Norman Fussell, in their sterile, yet not imperfect, fleshly egg. Many anonymous faces, too, offered without expecting or frowning. There was that blandest experience of love: the milky light of morning poured out unadulterated over his naked shoulders. And the paints as they swirled, and he swathed them on a bare board, sometimes as tenuously as mist, sometimes moulding them with his fingers like bastions of stone. Perhaps this, his own contribution to love, was least explicable, if most comprehensive and comprehensible. Now the Jew stirred on the lump of an ugly tree trunk on which they had stuck him. The crowd pressed forward to see and hear, jostling the stick of an abo half-caste who did not exist for any member of it. The Jew had raised his head. He looked out from under those rather heavy, intolerable lids. From the beginning Himmelfarb had known that he possessed the strength, but did pray for some sign. Through all the cursing, and trampling, and laughter, and hoisting, and aching, and distortion, he had continued to expect. Until now, possibly, it would be given. So, he raised his head. And was conscious of a stillness and clarity, which was the stillness and clarity of pure water, at the centre of which his God was reflected. The people watched the man they had fastened to the tree. That he did not proceed to speak his thoughts was most unnatural, not to say frustrating. The strain became enormous. If they had seen how to go about it, they would have licked the silence from his lips, as a substitute for words. Then a young girl of thin mouth and smoothed hair began to run at, and struggle with the backs of the bystanders, who would not let her through. But must. Hysteria would see to it. The scarlet thread of lips was drawn tight on some demon that she would on no account give up. When she reached the foot of the tree, she took an orange she had brought, and flung it with her awkward, girl's throw at the Jew's mouth, but it fell short, of course, and thumped on his hollow chest. The crowd laughed, or sighed. Then a young fellow, one of the Sevens, called Rowley Britt, came down, who remembered his mother dying of cancer of the bowel. He had filled his mouth with water, and now attempted to spit it in the mouth of the damn crucified Jew. But it missed. And trickled down the chin. The young man stood crying at the foot of the tree, swaying a good deal, because he was still drunk. Many of the onlookers, to whom it had begun to occur that they were honest citizens, with kiddies at school, were turning away by this. Who knows, though, how the show might have dragged on, and ended, if authority had not put a stop to it. The administrative offices were placed in such a way that the three people contained in them had an excellent view, through either the glass hatchway, or the door which led to the workshop, and in spite of their determination to ignore, became involved, whether to positive or negative degree, in the present disgraceful incident. It had been Mr Rosetree's intention to telephone a business connection, suddenly remembered, about an order for geometry sets. He sat and sweated, contracting and expanding like a rubber bulb under pressure, while Miss Whibley fiddled at her switchboard. "For Chrissake, Miss Whibley," Mr Rosetree shouted, "I am waiting for this cheppie's number!" "Bugger it!" blurted Miss Whibley. "It is the _switch]"__ Most unusual. Miss Whibley never used words. "It is the switch! The switch!" she attempted. Her voice could have been nougat. When Miss Mudge, who had ventured to look through the hatchway, exclaimed too loudly, "Oh, look! It is that Mr Himmelson. Something terrible is going to happen." Mr Rosetree and Miss Whibley had always considered that Miss Mudge, a worthy soul, should not be allowed her freedom. This was not the moment, however, for Mr Rosetree and Miss Whibley to share opinions. "It is the switch! It is the switch!" the latter repeated, demonstrating too. Certainly the mechanism seemed most ineffectual. Mr Rosetree bulged. "They are doing something to Mr Himmelson!" Miss Mudge harped against the glass. She was so colourless that any commentary by her sounded the more intolerable. "They are pulling. On that tree. The jacaranda. Oh, no! They are. Mr Rosetree, they are _crucifying__ Mr Himmelson!" For the first time perhaps the knife was entering Miss Mudge, and the agony was so intense, it frightened her. All else that she had known-her invalid sister, trouble over pensions, the leaking roof-was slit from her, and she stood gulping and shivering. Mr Rosetree still sat. Miss Whibley had given the switchboard away. She had begun, "I will not look. Nobody can compel me." She took out her compact, to powder, knowing herself to be inundated with the inevitable purple. "Nobody," she said. "To look. I will hand in my resignation, Mr Rosetree, as from the holidays." Mr Rosetree had not looked, but knew. Nobody need tell him about any human act; he had experienced them all, before he had succeeded in acquiring adequate protection. "They are spitting _water__," Miss Mudge just managed. If it had been piss, it would not have scalded more. "On the man," she protested. "That good man!" What degree of goodness Miss Mudge implied, Mr Rose-tree did not gather. But it made him feel he would have to look. Miss Mudge was trembling horribly for the discovery she had made: that she, herself quite blameless, might be responsible for some man, even all men. Now her responsibility was tearing her. Her hitherto immaculate flesh, white and goosey, with the vaccination marks, did not know how to cope. Mr Rosetree had tiptoed to the door. He was looking and looking. "I will not look," announced Miss Whibley, unwisely blowing the powder out of her mirror. "Do something, please, Mr Rosetree!" Miss Mudge was calling right across the three feet which separated her from the boss. "They are kill. Do. Do." But Mr Rosetree was looking and looking. He might even topple over. "To Mr Himmelson. They say he is a few." Mr Rosetree could have burst out laughing. Instead, he started bellowing, "For Chrissake! Mr Theobalds! Ernie! Do something, please! What for are you employed in this establishment, if not to keep order? It must be restored at once, please, in the entire premises." Then Ernie Theobalds, who was not a bad sort of a cove, not to say as good a mate as a man might expect, strolled out from where he had been standing, exploring the flesh under his singlet and watching events. "Okay, Harry!" he called. "Keep your wool on! It ain't nothun to get worked up over." He laughed that rather indolent, but in no way insolent laugh which revealed his comfortable denture. He walked across and kicked the arses of a couple of lads who were standing at one side. Other spectators began at once to turn, the mass to open for the foreman, who might, the waking eyes hoped, accept responsibility. "What is going on 'ere?" asked Ernie Theobalds, jovial like. As if he did not know. As if nobody knew. Nobody did. Mr Theobalds stood beneath the tree and the shambles of a man. He began, very easy, to negotiate a knot here and there, to loosen the rope pulleys, assisted by a couple of the Sevens who had resumed their own faces. Perce Thompson could not assist enough, but opened his pocket-knife and sawed through one section of rope, with the result that the figure, in its descent, arrived almost too quickly, and might have fallen in a heap of bones, clothes, and silence, if Mr Theobalds had not caught. "Hold hard!" he recommended, rather fat and kind, and supported with his arm, big but soft, with orange fur and freckles. So Himmelfarb was raised too soon from the dead, by the kindness and consideration of those who had never ceased to be his mates. So he must remember not to doubt, or long for a solution that he had never been intended to provide. "Easy does it!" said and laughed the foreman. Himmelfarb himself was persuaded to attempt a laugh, but the bones rattled, and were hurting besides. However, he did manage, "Thank you, Mr Theobalds." To which the foreman replied, "Something you will never learn, Mick, is that I am Ernie to every cove present. That is you included. No man is better than another. It was still early days when Australians found that out. You may say we talk about it a lot, but you can't expect us not to be proud of what we have invented, so to speak. Remember that," advised Ernie Theobalds, laying the palm of his hand flat against his mate's back. "Yes," Himmelfarb said, and nodded. But was unsteady at the level of reality to which he had been returned. Purged of the resentment which made them jump and rattle, the machines seemed to be running smoother in their oil. The muted dies might have been cutting into felt instead of metal. "Remember," Ernie Theobalds continued, "we have a sense of humour, and when the boys start to horse around, it is that that is gettin' the better of 'em. They can't resist a joke. Even when a man is full of beer, you will find the old sense of humour hard at work underneath. It has to play a joke. See? No offence can be taken where a joke is intended." So the foreman spoke, and everyone believed. If Blue had gone into the plating-shop, and was holding his semblance of a head, it was because he felt real crook. It was the beer. It was the beer. It was the fount of blue and crimson sparks. It was the blood that had not touched his lips, in driest memory, or now. But would, in fact, have turned him up. So that, between longing and revulsion, not to mention the hiccups, he went into a corner and vomited. When Ernie Theobalds had delivered his kind and reasonable speech, he squeezed the elbow of the one to whom it had been addressed. "You oughta get along now," he said. "I will mention it to the boss that you have gone off sick." Himmelfarb agreed that he was feeling far from well. But the pulses of his body expressed gratitude for the resolved situation in which he found himself so simply and so naturally placed. And his property returned. For Alf Dubbo the blackfellow had brought the shawl and the phylacteries which had burst from the small fibre case during the hilarious scrimmage, and got somewhat trampled on. The leather cylinder of one phylactery was crushed, there was blood, besides, on the fringes of the shawl. Which the blackfellow handed back. The latter did not speak, though. He would not speak, now, or ever. His mouth could never offer passage to all that he knew to be inside him. "There we are!" the foreman shouted above the noise of the machinery. "There is your old gadgets!" But did frown slightly, and would not have cared to touch. Only when the dubious objects were safely inside the case, Ernie Theobalds fastened the surviving catch, as the Jew seemed unable to. The machinery was working and working. The blackfellow would have done something, but was not told what. The Jew was going, he saw, with the gentle, uncertain motion of an eggshell tossed by flowing water. The blackfellow would have run after him to tell what he had seen and understood. But could not. Unless it burst from his fingertips. Never from his mouth. Very quietly Himmelfarb left the factory in which it had not been accorded to him to expiate the sins of the world. Although nobody watched, everybody saw.

14

WHEN MRS FLACK returned to the back garden, her friend Mrs Jolley was still watching the glow from the fire. It was the hour of green, when the acid light that summer has distilled from foliage eats the copper plate of evening. Mrs Jolley, standing with her arms beneath her apron, had given herself a pregnant look. But Mrs Flack was never impressed by the pregnancies of others. "I do like a fire," Mrs Jolley remarked, out of her girl's face, for the rather peculiar light had swilled away the dross of wrinkles. "I mean," she said, "a _good__ fire. That is not, I mean to say, that I do not sympathize with those concerned. I _do__. But do like a fire." "If you are in need of it," Mrs Flack pronounced, "then it is beneficial." "Eh?" Mrs Jolley asked. Mrs Flack did not reply, nor did Mrs Jolley bother, for she was able to stand and watch the fire, and knew, besides, that answers would not cure her permanent uneasiness, her only really chronic illness. The greenish light of evening had formed a cool cup in which the orange potion would sometimes seethe up into a head of blond sparks. The fire was not so far away, but far enough, for anyone who needed it. "Some people, though," Mrs Flack murmured, and not necessarily for her friend, "some people need to be given a taste of what is coming to them, but will not burn, most likely, not even then." At which point she looked behind her. "Not," she said, "if they was born of fire." Mrs Jolley would have liked to descend from the heights of prophecy, but as she did not dare, she continued staring at the conflagration. This she did with such intensity, her head began to wobble gently. So Mrs Flack noticed. Often she could have pushed her friend, and risked damage to the mechanism. Mrs Jolley, in her innocence, ventured finally to remark, "I would give anything to know whose fire that is." Mrs Flack cleared her throat. "But surely I told you?" she said, so flat. "I told, and always tell." Mrs Jolley did not answer. Mrs Flack drew hard on the surrounding air, the better to expel a reply. "It is _his__ fire," she said. "That man's. It is the Jew, so they tell me, in Montebello Avenue." "Not _that__ man!" Mrs Jolley cried, now quite light and girlish; she held one corner of her apron between a thumb and a finger, and crooked her little finger. "It is the insurance, no doubt," Mrs Jolley cried, and tittered. She could have danced, twitching her apron like a girl. "I doubt," said Mrs Flack, "in fact, I know the insurance does not enter into it." She looked around, at the darkness which was clotting under the few tailored shrubs. "Mrs Jolley," she said, "this is nothing," she said, "if not strickly between ourselves." "Oh, yes!" said Mrs Jolley. Mrs Flack tore off an evergreen leaf which a bird had spattered. "It is a bunch of young fellers," she said, "whose sense of decency was outraged by a certain person. So I am told, mind you. Who come up. Only to give warning, they say. They was flicking little balls of paper, soaked in somethink, into the Jew's place, to put the wind up him like. When matters got out of hand. In a weatherboard home." Mrs Flack sucked her teeth to appease convention. In the last light Mrs Jolley glowed with fire. "It is terrible," Mrs Jolley said. "It is terrible all right," Mrs Flack agreed, "but it is not for us to decide who will burn for it." Which was strange, Mrs Jolley found-that Mrs Flack should feel unable to decide.

From Xanadu, Miss Hare caught sight of the light of fire. It was too jubilant to ignore, blaring out, trumpet-shaped, from amongst the deciduous exotics and shabbier native trees. The complexion of the firelight might have conveyed a ruddy, boisterous, country beauty in other less personal circumstances, although all fire is personal to all animals, as they watch, listen, sniff, from their lair of bushes; fire is the last warning. Of course, Miss Hare, in her equal relationship with air and earth, and responding as she did to the motion of leaves, had known about the fire some little time before she saw it, just as, when placed right at the core of her great house, she would sense mist climbing up out of the gullies-she would feel it behind her knees-or she would usually learn of the approach of strangers, partly by collaboration of the elements, partly by a contraction of her own confidence. On that evening of fire, she had known. Rootling after what she could not remember, in a drawer somewhere in the inner gloom, amongst old letters, hanks of yellow string, bent nails, and pumpkin seeds, her head had suddenly gone up. Very slowly at first she had begun to negotiate the cells and corridors of Xanadu, together with the spiral of her own skull, gathering impetus as the gusts of fear and hatred played upon her out of the remaining shreds of curtains. So that she was soon compelled to run, and by the time she tumbled out on the terrace, her skin was tingling with all the implications of fire, the little hairs were standing up along the line of her jawbone, almost preparing to be singed. There, above the normal spectacle of trees, was the brassy thing, clapping and vibrating as she had expected. Even at a distance the smoke confused her. Miss Hare began to mumble. She ran this way and that. The air was furry with indecision. And all the time the fire-thing, singing in the exhausted evening, dared her to reject her complete association with that place, or to forget that her spirit might be called upon to take part in some painful last rite. Then her foot crunched the little bone. It was the thighbone, she saw, of a rabbit. Lying on the terrace, amongst dandelion and grit, the bone had been weathered to a whiteness that disturbed the memory as orange fire seared the present. In search of a clue to her distress, Miss Hare's toe stirred the bone. She even picked the sharp white reminder up. Because, of course, she remembered at once: the attitude in which he had been standing, and how she had led him in, and held his hand, as if it had been some curious object she had found, bone, or leaf, of which she had to learn the shape and history. It was the Jew who was concerned, she now knew for certain, the Jew for whom the fire had been lit. And at once the air was palpitating with dangers past and present. Faced with the illogic of fire, birds had fallen silent. For the moment it was quite still, except that a solitary church-bell had begun to call believers into the Gothic thicket of prayer. Miss Hare did not waste time-she who always wore a hat did not have to put one on-but set out along the most direct of several tracks that she and animals had flattened through the long grass. Always she knew where to squeeze most easily, or crawl. All around, her kingdom was quivering in agreement. Her skin was not submitted to pricking, rather, to a confirmation of existence. Leaves, which would have whipped at other intruders, made dashing love-play. The waters of a little creek consoled her ankles. The structure of her world might have risen vaster, soaring with her breath out of the merely incidental cage of ribs, if it had not been reduced finally by anguish. In the circumstances, the spirit returned, wounded and doubtful, into the dumb, trundling body of the beast. At one point Miss Hare put her foot in a rabbit burrow, and fell. She was terrified by a blue breathlessness. Which passed. She continued. Moaning from time to time. Not for her present situation, but because she was trying to remember the name of an old servant-Meg? — whose strength had become desirable. The old Meg-Peg, was it? Peg! Peg! — appeared to see the truth quite clearly from behind steel-rimmed spectacles. Of course, truth took many forms, Miss Hare suspected. Or was couched in the formlessness that she herself best knew: of wind and rain, the falling of a leaf, the whirling of the white sky. Whereas Peg's truth was a perfect statue. Miss Hare would have liked to touch her servant's skirt, as she had in girlhood, to be comforted. She would have liked to take the Jew's hand, and shut it up in her withered bosom, together with all those images which could only be preserved in love, as Peg the immemorial had bottled plums. There Miss Hare almost fell again, remembering her lack of skill in the methods of love, and that her own experience had taught her disintegration was the only permanent, perhaps the only desirable state. In the end, if not always, truth was a stillness and a light. So she continued, lumbering, scurrying wherever an absence of obstacles allowed, licking her gelatinous lips, more from habit than in hopes of restoring shape, chafing through the immensity of the kingdom which separated her from the fire. When this being burst at last out of the scrub, she found a fairly respectable blaze in Montebello Avenue. It was, as she had known, the brown house in which her friend lived, which she had seen, but never entered. But must now. That was clear. In order to love and honour the more, she had invested the Jew with a goodness so pure as to render the possessor practically powerless against the consummate forms of evil. Already she saw the dead-seeming face lying upon its pillow of fire, upturned in its indifference to the canopy of golden stalactites. A number of persons had come down to watch, or trail hoses for which taps had never been provided. The fire brigade, they assured themselves, must have either failed or gone away for the holidays. Even so, some of the spectators kept watch, over a shoulder, while continuing to enjoy the progress of the fire. "But if there is a man inside!" Miss Hare protested. Although that was not known for certain, there were those who would have dearly loved to know. Only Miss Hare was shaggy love itself. She was walking at the fiery house with her hands outstretched to trap its rather dangerous spiders. She had never experienced fear of insects, and only momentarily of fire, because, after all, the elemental must come to terms with the elements. So that those who were watching saw the most inhuman behaviour develop in one they had taken to be human until now. "Miss Hare!" they called. "Are you mad?" Almost as though they had always thought her to be sane. And now were overwhelmed by ugliness and terror, as the woman in her great wicker hat walked into the burning house. By this time the framework had become quite a little temple of fire, with lovely dionysiac frieze writhing on its pediment. Similarly, all its golden columns danced. But Miss Hare, who was involved in the inner tragedy, did not notice any of that. The fire came at her first to push her out, but returned as quickly to suck her in. And she was drawn, drawn, sturn-blingly, inside. The agony might have been more intense if she herself had not been molten. The molten stream of her passion ran down the skin of her cheeks and her outstretched hands, the tears ran out of her eyes to burn fire. So she stood in the everlasting moment. A revelation should have been made to one possessed of her especial powers, and indeed, a more rational curtain of flame was almost twitched back for her to see. She did almost, from under her by now transparent eyelids. The sparks were halted. She almost saw the body of her friend, a rather frail old man, or at most, inflammable prophet, his ribs burning like the joists of a house. But it was not possible, she moaned, to go to him as she would have chosen. Or not yet. She was, after all, crinkling up. Under threat of burning, the sticks of her arms were becoming distorted. Her singed trunk was presented to the shimmering, rushing, revolving teeth of fire. Then, mercifully, she was returned to her animal self. She began to scream. The smell of burning fur or feathers had always terrified her. Nobody who saw would ever forget how Miss Hare had emerged from the burning house. She was a blackened thing, yet awful. Her wicker hat was turned to a fizzy Catherine wheel, wings of flame were sprouting from the shoulders of her cardigan, her worsted heels were spurred with fire. Most alarming was the swollen throat from which the terror, or more probable, the spectators felt, the orders and the accusations would not immediately pour. Moving forward, she halted those who might have come to meet her. Then one or two more responsible men did get possession of themselves, ran towards her, and began to beat at the avenging angel with their coats. Until she was at least materially extinguished. All the time this monster of truth was struggling to give vent to her feelings, and did finally bring out, "You have killed him!" "Who?" they asked. "There is no reason to suppose there is anyone," they said, "inside." And continued to belt at her, now with their dislike and their consciences, in addition to their coats. Miss Hare was crying and choking. She hated those who were saving her. "You have burnt my dearest friend!" she bellowed. "I am going to report to the police." Parrying the blows of hateful coats. "I will take the matter, if necessary, to court. By raising funds. By some means. My cousin in Jersey." Just then two ladies, who had come down in second-best hats to enjoy the spectacle, happened to reach the brink of the fire. They realized at once how things stood, though too late, alas, to choose a better moment. Miss Hare saw, too, and advanced. "You," she cried, "are the devils!" More she could not. Mrs Jolley retreated a few paces, and might have escaped altogether if she had not been chained to her protector. The latter stood, pointing a toe at their accuser. She was thinner, yellower perhaps, but retained considerable faith in her oblique powers. Mrs Flack said, "For your own sake, I would not care to hear you repeat that, madam. Accusations are very often confessions." The crowd grew murmurous in appreciation. But Miss Hare, perhaps because of her powerlessness, did dare once again. "The devils!" she repeated, certainly aiming more at random, through the bubbles and the blisters. Then she began to walk away, trailing ribbons of smoke, and of course, crying mad. Longer than any other witness would Constable McFaggott remember that night, and the object which presented itself in the station doorway. "You have done nothing," it cried, "to protect my friend from persecution and arson." "Himmelfarb," Miss Hare at last succeeded in wrenching out the name, "Himmelfarb has been burnt to death!" McFaggott, a personable man, of pretty teeth, strong legs, and white eyeballs, was somewhat in dishabille considering the importance of the evening. Now he touched the holy medal which he wore in the hair of his chest, and which had accompanied him in the past through the most unlikely circumstances. "I will hold you responsible!" the mad thing was shouting. "Steady on!" called the constable, in the high, soft tenor that they liked. "There is such a thing as libel, my lady!" "There is such a thing as truth," replied Miss Hare. "Until it gets into the mouth of the law. Where it seems to fork." It was fortunate for McFaggott that, on the evening of the fire, a difference of opinion with his wife had delayed his going on duty as usual at Mrs Khalil's. Thanks to his wife's contemptuous behaviour, he was available to investigate facts, not to mention face the press. Now he was tired, but amiable. He even touched the crazy creature as she stood in front of him, touched her with gentle, though manly authority, in the way that made normal ladies thrill inside their blouses. McFaggott said, "It is all fate, you know, Miss Hare." With promotion approaching, he would not have been so injudicious as to have called it anything else. "It was fate, you might say, that caused the mechanical defect in the fire-engine, which did not arrive-or, by crikey, there it is!" Indeed, it could be heard clanging, its tires groaning roundly on the stones of Montebello Avenue. "Which did not arrive in time, you might say, to prevent the gutting of this Jewish gentleman's residence." Miss Hare was marooned in her own emotions and the constable's sea of words. "It was fate, too, which removed this same gentleman from his home before the conflagration had broken out." "Removed?" Miss Hare moaned. The constable reaped the harvest of his power and knowledge. He laughed, or showed his excellent teeth-real, as everybody knew. "That is what I said," said the constable. "By Mrs God-bold, and Bob Tanner, the young feller who is going with her eldest girl." "Then where is Mr Himmelfarb?" Miss Hare demanded. "In the temporary dwelling in which Mrs Godbold lives," the constable informed. "Oh," Miss Hare said. "Yes," she said. "I might have known. Mrs Godbold would never allow anything to happen. I mean, anything that might be averted." The constable had to laugh again. "Mrs Godbold is only a woman," he said. "I am a woman," replied Miss Hare, "but do not claim to be her equal." Constable McFaggott would wrinkle up his face to laugh, because he knew how crisp the skin would appear at the corners of his eyes. Now he could not laugh too much. "One day, Miss Hare," he said and laughed, never so silk-ily, "we'll have to get your opinion of we men." But the phone was again calling him from distant places. "Oh, the men," she protested. "I do not know." Sputtering and muttering. "Not the men. A cock is for treading hens." When she got outside, the sparks were settling down again into stars. The moist, blackberry darkness nuzzled against her drawn skin. She could no longer run, only stump, and flounder, past what she knew to be there. The framework of her friend's house was hissing by now beneath the play of water, but she did not really care whether the fire was extinguished or not. On arrival at Mrs Godbold's shed, she forgot to knock, but went in, quite as though she were expected, which, indeed, she was. "Ah, there you are," the owner said. Mrs Godbold stood smiling in the depths of her one room, her solid form fluctuating inside its glistening apron of light. Children were distributed on all sides, watching, or taking for granted. More than this Miss Hare did not attempt to notice. Without wasting any time, she surged forward on the last gust of her physical strength. But her instincts, it seemed, had only to open their reserves of power, as she knelt to lay her scorched face, against the cotton quilt, at the foot of the huge iron bed.

Himmelfarb had returned to his house round about noon. By then his physical distress was considerably increased, not so much from the bruises, cuts, and possibly one or two broken ribs inflicted on him at the factory, but a deeper, numbing pain, above which his mind would burn and flicker with the obsessive blue clarity of an acetylene flame. In the circumstances, the emptiness and silence of his wooden house offered him perfect consolation. How the carvings on the walnut surfaces would have oppressed, the plush fingers desolated, even at their most tenderly solicitous. Instead he lay down on the narrow bed in his bare room. His face was sculptured most economically in dead, but convincing, yellow wax, from which he issued, between spasms, to contend with the figure of Moshe his father, who flickered longingly within the acetylene nebula. Always separate during the illusory life of men, now they touched, it seemed, at the point of failure. How long Mordecai lay there, loved and tormented by his father, he could not have calculated, but when he opened his eyes, things were still preserved in their apparent shapes, and he was relieved to explore from a distance that of his single chair, down to the last crack and familiar abrasion. At the same time he realized he was not alone. That somebody was touching his forehead and his wrists. That a presence of unwavering strength had begun to envelop his momentarily distracted being. It was, he saw, his neighbour, Mrs Godbold. "I have no intention of disturbing you," she said, speaking in tones both practical and absent, "but wonder what to do for the best." In her state of doubt, she only half addressed him, standing by the bed with her face averted, her attention concentrated on a distant, and still confused idea. Her statue had been set down, it appeared, on the edge of a great open space, whether lake or plain he did not bother to investigate, only it was vast, he knew, from the expression of the face, and the unobstructed waves of afternoon. "Yes," she decided at last, though still hesitant. "I shall fetch you down to my place, sir, if you do not mind, as it is close, and where I can give you every attention." Watching the heavy knot of hair in the nape of the thick, but appropriate neck, he did not protest. "I will go now," she said quietly, still addressing someone else; "I will go, but come soon with the others." He did not answer, but waited for that and anything more to be done. He could see now the rightness and inevitability of all that his wife Reha had been allowed in her simplicity to understand, and which she had attempted to convey, not so much by words, for which she had no gift, but by the light of her conviction. It seemed to him as though the mystery of failure might be pierced only by those of extreme simplicity of soul, or else by one who was about to doff the outgrown garment of the body. He was weak enough, certainly, by now, to make the attempt which demands the ultimate in strength. In the meantime, as he prepared, or rid himself of minor objections, he had agreed unreservedly that Reha should become his voice and hands. They had seldom enjoyed such intimacy of spirit as when, in the course of the afternoon, a wind got up from the sea, and hollowed the shell of the house until its walls were thinner still. Willows whipped deliriously, and the rushing of air could have engulfed, if it had not been for his spasms of pain, and the rows of bean-sticks dividing the immense colourlessness at regular intervals. At one such point she put her hand on his shoulder, and he opened his eyes, and saw that Mrs Godbold had returned. The woman who was bending over him straightened at once, for modesty's sake, it seemed. She said, "We are here, sir, as I promised. Else, you know, and this is Bob Tanner, a friend." Else was blushing, and looking into corners, not for what she might discover, but so that she might not be forced to see. She was reddening most prettily, with a blush of hedge-roses along her milky skin. Bob Tanner, in whom Himmelfarb recognized the lad sent on a former occasion to summon him to Xanadu, was all boots and muscles. He was ashamed of the noises that he made by moving on the bare floors, or, simply, in the act of breathing. "Now," explained Mrs Godbold, "we are going to move you onto this contraption." They had made a kind of stretcher out of two saplings and several chaff-bags, onto which they began, awkwardly, to ease the Jew. Bob Tanner, who could carry full sacks on his back, would have undertaken it alone after his fashion, but the women had to have their part. Mrs Godbold bit her lips till the blood almost ran. Else could have cried for her lover's clumsy strength. "Silly thing! Stupid thing!" Else would hiss, and hook an elbow into Bob Tanner's ribs. She could not be too critical. She could not be too close. She loved the veins that were bursting in his strong, but clumsy arms. So they moved the man out of the house in which he had never expected to live for more than a short interval. They brought Himmelfarb down on the stretcher to Mrs Godbold's place. His head lolled. There was a rushing of willows, and a whispering of grass. As he passed, the spearheads of the dead grass pricked his wrists, but without malice now. Whatever the length of the journey, it was consecrated for the sick man by the love and participation of his people. So, whole deserts were crossed. He opened his eyes, and already they had left the most grievous of them far behind. From the fringes of Kadesh, a blue haze promised Nebo over on the right. How they jolted and swayed. Endlessly. But the back of the young man, the bearer at his feet, was a pillar of solid flesh, and the woman who bent above his head supported him less with the strength of her arms than with a pervasive warmth of spirit. "There, sir," she grunted sturdily. "Not much further now." Sometimes she stumbled, but would not fall. Mrs Godbold was quite exalted by the burden it had been given her to bear. Her large breasts were proud inside the washed-out cotton dress, as the procession of faithful staggered at last to a standstill underneath her roof. Two little solemn girls, whom Himmelfarb connected with pushing and singing, had prepared a bed, as ordered, and were standing by. Mottled green by bruised grass, their arms were glowing golden against the white of sheets. Gold of light and green of vines were tangled together in the window, to make a curtain, of which a reflection hung, shimmering and insubstantial, on the wall above the great bed. Gently and rationally somebody was undressing him. After which, inside the tingling, sun-baked sheets, he might have surrendered completely to the pleasures of unconsciousness, if only the vise of pain had offered him release. At one point he was almost crushed by it, and opened his eyes, wondering, with the result that several of the watchers recoiled, and two of Mrs Godbold's younger girls, who had dared to peer into depths for which they were not prepared, began to cry. The mother shushed and shoved. Then she addressed the patient, saying, "I will send one of them to fetch Dr Herborn." But the sick man's face rejected her suggestion, so that she decided to humour him, for the moment at least. Doing as she knew how, she warmed a brick, and put it inside the bed, against his feet. At which he smiled. Or, again, when his lips, dried and cracked by suffering, opened on some request she was unable to interpret, she brought a watery soup made that same day out of a scrag-end of mutton, and tried to tempt him with a little of it. But his expression of nausea restrained her, and immediately she was ashamed for the poorness of her soup, indeed, for her whole house, unworthy even of lesser guests. Perhaps realizing, he opened his eyes at her, and spoke rather odd. "I am content, thank you," he said. Then Mrs Godbold was overwhelmed by that compassion which all suffering roused in her. The sudden pangs forced her to go and put down the cup, which had begun to clatter in its saucer. During the afternoon, Himmelfarb drifted into a doze. He was swallowed up by the whiteness. He was received, as seldom. Of course there had been other occasions when he might have allowed himself: the hills of Zion, spreading their brown pillows in the evening light, had almost opened; the silence of his last and humblest house had promised frequent ladders of escape; as he knelt on the stones, in his blindness, the flames of Friedensdorf had offered certain release. But the rope-end of dedication had always driven him on. Even now it was torturing his side, although the goat-mask and hair shawl had slipped, leaving him hanging abandoned on a tree. Again, he was the Man Kadmon, descending from the Tree of Light to take the Bride. Trembling with white, holding the cup in her chapped hands, she advanced to stand beneath the _chuppah__. So they were brought together in the smell of all primordial velvets. This, explained the cousins and aunts, is at last the Shekinah whom you have carried all these years under your left breast. As he received her, she bent and kissed the wound in his hand. Then they were truly one. They did not break the cup, as the wedding guests expected, but took and drank, again and again. Afterwards Else Godbold straightened his pillows. Else could only improvise little acts to cover up her inexperience. And the sick man was grateful for the touch of balsam, for the almost imperceptible dew brushing the craggy surfaces of pain. But Else withdrew quickly from what she sensed she, too, must eventually suffer. The iron shed which contained them all had begun to stifle, not to say menace. How she longed to slip outside, and hang about the lane, and feel the moonlight slide along her arms and throat, and return the touch of moonlight, until it became impossible to distinguish intention from intention. Then Bob Tanner, who had gone out earlier, returned, and told them of the fire which had started at the Jew's-the continued heaping of orange light confirmed-and she saw that for her lover something was happening which would leave him changed. She saw that his rather clumsy, lad's honesty, which she had loved and derided from the start, was setting in a shape that even she would not alter. He realized that his girl was the uglier for pity, and would alter many times yet. Each was choking with discovery. But the lovers were grateful to know they could still recognize each other, and did not doubt they must continue to, whatever the disguise. Then Else Godbold tore herself out of what was becoming an unbearable embrace of thoughts. She leaned towards the sick man, and said, "Mr Himmelfarb, I wish you would tell me of anything you want, of anything I could do, or bring." She sounded as though she were threatening him, because, she realized bitterly, she was still too young. "If I brought cold water," Else suggested desperately, "to sponge your face with? Eh?" But Himmelfarb had no requests. When he was not dozing, when he was not removed from the compartment of his body into a freedom of time and space, his expression would appear composed, observant, peering out through the visor of his face, from out of what had by now become the protective armature of pain. Once or twice he glanced towards the window, at the scarcely extraordinary orange light, to follow an event that was taking place, at a distance, but of no concern. In the same way, from under his eyelids, he experienced the apparition of Miss Hare. He was not surprised. Nor did the weight of his faithful disciple weigh heavy on his dead feet. Miss Hare came in, and even the older children were afraid, who had known this mad woman ever since they could remember, and looked for her at windows, or in and out of the bush, always to be found, like owls in certain trees, or some old possum-inmate of particular shed or chimney. Now this amiable and familiar beast lay whimpering and grunting across the foot of their mother's bed. She smelled still of burning, but fire could have been the least cause of her distress. The mother, of course, handled this like any other situation. Coming forward, she said, "I was glad you have come, miss. I thought you would. There is perhaps something that only you can do for him." And touched the scorched shoulder. But Miss Hare would not answer at first, or would only moan, which could yet have been a manner of communication with some other soul present. The sick man, however, gave no sign of acknowledgment, but lay with his eyes closed. "Will you take off your jacket, perhaps?" Mrs Godbold asked of her most recent guest. But Miss Hare would only moan, not from pain, it seemed, but because she had again succeeded in closing the circle of her happiness. Yet she must have been suffering, for those of the children who had advanced closest saw that the red down was singed close along her chops, and the skin shiny from the basting it had got. Horrid though her appearance was, all those around her remained rooted in respect. Although the great wicker hat had gone askew, its spokes burnt black, not even Mrs Godbold dared suggest the wearer should remove it. Miss Hare had never been seen without, unless by Mrs Godbold herself, who had nursed her years before in sickness. Nobody else cared to speculate on what might be hidden underneath. Then Miss Hare sat up, as straight as her fubsy body would allow. "His feet," she said, "are cold." For she had stuck her hand under the blanket. "So very, very cold." Miss Hare's slow words followed her fingers, ending in a shiver. "Yes." Mrs Godbold could not evade it. "But you shall warm them." Miss Hare cheered up then, as everybody saw. She sat and chafed her spirits back. Or gradually lolled lower, until her face rested on the forms of feet, printing them on her cheek. All this time the man's face was breathing gently on the pillow, but the air could have been rarefied. "Gracie will go for Dr Herborn," Mrs Godbold had at last decided. But Himmelfarb opened his eyes. He said, "No. No. Not now. Thank you. For the moment I have not the strength to submit to any doctor." And smiled with the least possible irony, to absolve whoever it had been for conceiving a superfluous idea. He was as content by now as he would ever have allowed himself to be in life. Children and chairs conversed with him intimately. Thanks to the texture of their skin, the language of animals was no longer a mystery, as, of course, the Baal-shem had always insisted. So he breathed more gently, and resumed his journey. So Miss Hare was translated. Her animal body became the least part of her, as breathing thoughts turned to being. The night rose and fell, to which the dying fire gave its last touch of purple through the frame of vines and window. Maudie Godbold did think for a moment that she saw a face, but by that hour all the watchers were sleepy, some of them even sleeping.

After leaving the factory on the eve of the holidays for which they had all been longing and waiting, Dubbo went straight to the house where he lodged, on the outskirts of Barranugli. In other years he might have stopped at shops to lay in food against Easter, but now, because something had happened, his sandshoes hurried. Something had happened of extreme importance, but which he would attempt to dismiss. He washed his hands first. He sat for a little on the edge of the bed. He ate some bread, with cold sausage, which tasted of sawdust. He spat it out. But gathered it up at once from the floor. Something he had done contradicted what he had been taught. He sat. In the dusk he washed his hands again. It was so important. He was clean at least by education. He sat in the dusk, and would have liked to look at his few recent paintings, all turned to the wall, but knew he would find them receded into their frames. The disappearing room abandoned him to hopelessness. Shadows would flutter at that hour like insubstantial bats. He remembered his mother had once told him how the spirit of his grandfather was a guardian on whom he might rely, but during one of the many phases of flight, he and his protector had, he suspected, parted company. In any case, for quite some time he had sensed himself to be alone. Now he began to tremble. The frame of the stretcher creaked, creaked. He was ill, of course. Run down, Mrs Pask would have said, and prescribed a tonic. He coughed for a while, too long, and with such force that the joints of that rickety room were heard to protest wheezily. Again he washed his hands, Mrs Pask breathing approval over his shoulder. Then he began to cry as he stood propped against the basin, a sick, hollow crying above the basinful of water. There were days when the blood would not stop. The blood ran down the hands, along the bones of the fingers. The pain was opening again in his side. In his agony, on his knees, Dubbo saw that he was remembering his Lord Jesus. His own guilt was breaking him. He began to crack his finger-joints, of the fingers that had failed to unknot the ropes, which had tied the body to the tree. He had not borne witness. But did not love the less. It came pouring out of him, like blood, or paint. In time, when he could muster the strength for such an undertaking, he would touch the tree to life with blue. Nobody knew the secret of the blue that he would use; no one would have suspected such a jewellery of wounds, who had not watched his own blood glitter and dry slowly under sunlight. Dubbo got up now. He began to move purposefully. He had to put an end to darkness. He switched the light on, and there at least his room was, quite neat, square, and wooden. He changed his singlet, put on best pants, smoothed his rather crinkly hair with water, and went out in the sandshoes which he always wore. In the steamy, bluish night, he caught the bus for Sarsa-parilla. It was an hour when nobody else thought to travel, and the abo had to cling, like a beetle in a lurching tin. Everybody else was already there. All along the road women and girls were entering the brick churches for preliminary Easter services. Without altogether believing they had consented to a murder, the sand-coloured faces saw it would not harm them to be cleared in public. They had dressed themselves nicely for the hearing, all in blameless, pale colours, hats, and so forth. Some of them were wearing jewels of glass. Dubbo knew these parts by heart, both from looking, and from dreaming. He had drawn the houses of Sarsaparilla, with the mushrooms brooding inside. He had drawn the thick, serge-ridden thighs of numerous gentlemen, many from government departments, some with the ink still wet on them. He had drawn Mrs Khalil's two juicy girls, their mouths burst open like pomegranates, their teeth like the bitter pomegranate seeds. And as the serge gentlemen continued to pulp the luminous flesh, all was disappointment and coronary occlusion. So Dubbo had seen to draw. Sometimes in his wanderings through Sarsaparilla, the painter had pushed deep into his own true nature, which men had failed to contaminate, and there where the houses stopped, he had found his thoughts snapping again like sticks in silence. But subordinate to silence. For silence is everything. Then he had come back and drawn the arabesques of thinking leaves. He had drawn the fox-coloured woman looking out of a bush, her nose twitching as the wind altered. He would have liked to draw the touch of air. Once, though, he had attempted, and failed miserably to convey the skin of silence nailed to a tree. Now, remembering the real purpose of his visit to Sarsaparilla in the night, Dubbo's hands grew slithery on the chromium rail of the empty bus. Ostensibly he was steadying himself. The bus was such a void, the conductor came along at last, and after clearing his throat, condescended to enter into conversation with a black. The conductor said, extra loud, there had been a fire at Sarsaparilla-some Jew's place. "Yes?" Dubbo replied. And smiled. "Oh, yes!" he repeated, almost eagerly. "You know about it?" the conductor asked. "Know the bloke perhaps? Worked at Rosetree's." "No," Dubbo said. "No. I don't. I don't know." Because, he saw, with widening horror, it was his nature to betray. So he smiled. "Anyway," said the conductor, "these bloody foreigners, the country's lousy with them." Dubbo smiled. But the cage of his chest was crushing him. "What happened to the bloke?" he asked. His voice was pitched rather too high. "Arr," said the conductor, "I dunno." And yawned. "I didn't hear." He was tired, and began to clean his ears with a key. Dubbo continued to smile away his love and faith. Early on they had told him it was his nature to betray, and often since, they had proved it to him. He had even betrayed his secret gift, but only once, and with that, he knew almost for certain, he would make amends eventually. That would bear witness to his faith, in the man they had crucified, as well as in the risen Lord. When the bus reached Sarsaparilla, the abo got down at the post-office corner, and descended the hill to where he knew the Jew had lived. There, sure enough, was the skeleton of what had been a house. The little, mild blue beads of fire ran and dropped from what remained. Contorted sheets of iron glowed fainter now, and hissed. The sparks, however, were still very beautiful if in any way encouraged. A few women were standing around, hoping something of a personal sort might explode in the ashes to revive their interest, and a couple of volunteers were examining a limp-looking length of hose. To these men the abo called. "Where," he began to ask from a distance. Everybody turned and stared. The voice the strange black-fellow used was slewing round in the slight wind. The firemen were too tired to bother, but their flat faces waited for a little. "Where would," the abo began again; and: "Can you tell us." His question fell, broken. For he had begun to cough, and went stumbling humiliated away. He could only cough, and stagger over ground that might have been designed for his downfall. And after a brief passage through some blackberry bushes, came up abruptly against a shed. There was a light in it. He steadied himself. His hands were holding a window-sill. Then Dubbo looked inside, and saw as well as remembered that this was the shed in which lived Mrs Godbold, whom he had first encountered at Mrs Khalil's, and who had bent down and wiped his mouth as nobody had ever done. Consequently, as she had already testified her love, it did not surprise him now to find the same woman caring for the Jew. There in the bosom of her light the latter lay, amongst the heaps of sleeping children, and the drowsy ones, who still clung to whatever was upright, watching what had never happened before. And the fox-coloured woman from Xanadu lay across the Jew's feet, warming them by methods which her instincts taught her. As Dubbo watched, his picture nagged at him, increasing in miraculous detail, as he had always hoped, and known it must. In fact, the Jew was protesting at something-it could have been the weight of the bedclothes-and the women were preparing to raise him up. The solid, white woman had supported him against her breasts, and the young girl her daughter, of such a delicate, greenish white, had bent to take part, with the result that some of her hair was paddling in the Jew's cheek, and the young fellow, his back moulded by the strain, was raising the body of the sick man, almost by his own strength, from out of the sheets, higher on the stacked pillows. The act itself was insignificant, but became, as the watcher saw it, the supreme act of love. So, in his mind, he loaded with panegyric blue the tree from which the women, and the young man His disciple, were lowering their Lord. And the flowers of the tree lay at its roots in pools of deepening blue. And the blue was reflected in the skins of the women and the young girl. As they lowered their Lord with that almost breathless love, the first Mary received him with her whitest linen, and the second Mary, who had appointed herself the guardian of his feet, kissed the bones which were showing through the cold, yellow skin. Dubbo, taking part at the window, did not think he could survive this Deposition, which, finally, he had conceived. There he stood, sweating, and at last threatened with coughing. So he went away as he had come. He would have been discovered if he had stayed, and could not have explained his vision, any more than declared his secret love.

As soon as the women had settled their charge, his head lay marvellously still. Mrs Godbold, who had arranged the sheet neatly underneath the yellow chin, touched him with the tips of her fingers. She could not feel life, but knew from having carried the body of her brother, and closed the eyes of several babies, that life was there yet. Indeed, nothing would now divert Mordecai ben Moshe from his intention of following to its source that narrower, but still reliable stream. So he would ignore the many hands which tweaked at his cap, or became involved in the flowing folds of his white gown, to distract, to supplicate. As he strode, the particles of petitions fluttered in his face in tinkling scraps, to melt against his hot skin. Pressure of time would not allow him to stop, to piece together, to communicate, although he was expected, he was expected to know. And did, of course, now. He knew all the possible permutations and combinations. Whereas, at Bienenstadt, his green and supple soul had been forced to struggle for release, the scarred and leathery object which it had become would now stand forth with very little effort. So, too, he had only to touch tongues, including his own, and they would speak. As the purple stream-for it was evening now-wound through the rather stony hills, there came to him thousands asking him to tell them of the immediate past, so that they might be prepared against the future, since many of them feared they might soon be expected to return. The strange part was: he knew, he knew. The cliffs of rock were his scroll. He had only to open the flesh of their leaves to identify himself with the souls of plants. So the thousands waited for him along the banks of the interminable river. Sometimes the faces were those of Jews, sometimes they were gentile faces, but no matter; the change could be effected from one to the other simply by twitching a little shutter. Only, he who had drilled holes, could not stop now for souls, whatever the will, whatever the love. His own soul was carrying him forward. The mountains of darkness must be crossed. Such was his anxiety and haste, Himmelfarb shifted his feet beneath the bedclothes: little more than a fluttering of bones, but not so faint that Miss Hare did not feel it against her cheek. For a moment Mrs Godbold was afraid the old creature might be going off into one of her attacks; there was such a convulsion of the body, such a plunging of the blackened hat. But Miss Hare only settled deeper into a state where her friend was too discreet to follow. As she turned to occupy herself with other things, Mrs Godbold saw on the blistered mouth evidence of gentlest joy. Miss Hare had, in fact, entered that state of complete union which her nature had never yet achieved. The softest matter her memory could muster-the fallen breast-feathers, tufts of fur torn in courtship, the downy, brown crooks of bracken-was what she now willed upon the spirit of her love. Their most private union she hid in sheets of silence, such as she had learnt from the approach of early light, or from holding her ear to stone, or walking on thicknesses of rotted leaves. So she wrapped and cherished the heavenly spirit which had entered her, quite simply and painlessly, as Peg had suggested that it might. And all the dancing demons fled out, in peacock feathers, with a tinkling of the fitful little mirrors set in the stuff of their cunning thighs. And the stones of Xanadu could crumble, and she would touch its kinder dust. She herself would embrace the dust, the spirit of which she was able to understand at last. Himmelfarb's face had sunk very deep into the pillow, it seemed to Else Godbold as she watched. He was stretched straight, terrible straight. But warmer now. For it was at this point that he glanced back at the last blaze of earthly fire. It rose up, through the cracks in the now colourless earth, not to consume, but to illuminate the departing spirit. His ankles were wreathed with little anklets of joyous fire. He had passed, he noticed, the two date-palms of smoking plumes. By that light, even the most pitiable or monstrous incidents experienced by human understanding were justified, it seemed, as their statuary stood grouped together on the plain he was about to leave. So he turned, and went on, arranging the white _kittel__, in which he realized he was dressed, and which he had thought abandoned many years ago in the house on the Holzgraben, at Holunderthal. Then Miss Hare uttered a great cry, which reverberated through the iron shed like the last earthly torment, and began to beat the quilt with the flat of her hands. "Himmelfarb," she cried, "Himmelfarb," the name was choking her, "Himmelfarb is dead! Oh! _Ohhhhhh__!" It died away, but she continued to blubber, and feel the quilt for something she hoped might be left. All the little girls had woken, but not one could find the courage to cry. And now Mrs Godbold herself had come, and when she had touched, and listened, and her intuition had confirmed, she saw fit to pronounce, "He will not suffer any more, the poor soul. We should give thanks, Miss Hare, that he went so peaceful, after all." Just then the alarm clock, with which one of the children must have been tinkering during the day, went off before its usual hour, with a jubilance of whirring tin to stir the deepest sleeper, and Mrs Godbold turned toward the mantel. When she was satisfied, she said, "Mr Himmelfarb, too, has died on the Friday." Although her remark was so thoughtfully spoken, its inference was not conveyed to anybody else. Nor had she intended exactly to share what was too precious a conviction. Then the woman and her eldest daughter quietly went about doing the several simple things which had to be done for the man that had died, while Maudie Godbold pulled on her stiff shoes, and trailed up the hill to fetch the previously rejected Dr Herborn. It was very still now, almost cold for the time of year. The lilies of moonlight dropped their cold, slow pearls. The blackberry bushes were glittering. At that hour, before the first cock, if such a bird survived at Sarsaparilla, the only movement was one of dew and moonlight, the only sound that of a goat scattering her pellets. At that hour, Miss Hare came out of the Godbolds' shed, since there was no longer cause for her remaining. She had witnessed everything but the doctor's signature. In the friable white light, she too was crumbling, it seemed, shambling as always, but no longer held in check by the many purposes which direct animal, or human life. She might have reasoned that she had fulfilled her purpose, if she had not always mistrusted reason. Her instinct suggested, rather, that she was being dispersed, but that in so experiencing, she was entering the final ecstasy. Walking and walking through the unresis-tant thorns and twigs. Ploughing through the soft, opalescent remnants of night. Never actually arriving, but that was to be expected, since she had become all-pervasive: scent, sound, the steely dew, the blue glare of white light off rocks. She was all but identified. So Miss Hare stumbled through the night. If she did not choose the obvious direction, it was because direction had at last chosen her.

15

ROSETREES did not go away at Easter. Harry Rosetree said he could not face it. "But we got the reservations," his wife protested frequently. "We shall lose the deposit, Harry," Mrs Rosetree pointed out. "You know what those Hungarians are." Harry Rosetree said that he was feeling sick. Deposit or no deposit, he just could not go away. But went into the lounge-room, and pulled the blinds down. "You are sick?" Mrs Rosetree cried at last. "You are neurotic! I am the one that will get sick, living with a neurotic man." Soon afterwards, she began to cry. She did not dress for several days, but went around in the azure housecoat she had been wearing the evening of that old Jew's visit. It blazed less, perhaps, on Mrs Rosetree now, and the seams were going at the armpits. Nor did Harry Rosetree dress, but sat in pyjamas, over his underwear, and smoked. Or he would just sit, a hand on either thigh. He was tired, really; that was it. He would have preferred to be a turnip. Mrs Rosetree would come in and sit around. "Neurotic," she repeated rather often, which was the worst she could say of anybody after: "What can you expect of Jews?" Then she would peer out through the slats of the Venetians. From a certain angle, Shirl Rosetree still appeared to wear the varnish, but there was another side, where her husband's sudden denial of life had crushed and matted the perm, giving her the look of a crippled bird, or, for Haïrn ben Ya'akov at least, his wife's grandmother, that black old woman whose innocent and almost only joy had been to welcome in the Bride with cup and candle. So that in the room at Paradise East, which normally was just right-oyster satin, rosewood, and the net _Vorhänge__-Harry Rosetree would be shading his eyes, from some distressing effect of light, or flapping of a great, rusty bird. There were moments when the intensity of his experience was such that his wife, who never stopped moving around, or feeling her side, or suspecting her breath, or rearranging the furniture, or again, crying on account of everything, would sit down, and lay her head, the side of crumpled hair, on a little rosewood table, and watch through the slats of her fingers the husband whom she despised, but needed still. Of course Shulamith could not see by the light of reason and the shadowy room what was devouring Haïm, although the surge of her blood would suddenly almost suggest. But she would not accept. She would jump up, and return to the Venetian blinds. Mrs Rosetree would have liked very much to know whether the house in Persimmon Street conveyed an impression of abnormality from the outside. Needless to say, it did not. Since normality alone was recognized in Paradise East, tragedy, vice, retribution would remain incredible until the Angel of the Lord stepped down and split the homes open with his sword, or the Bomb crumbled their ant-hill texture, violating the period suites. For the present, it seemed, from the outside, reality was as square as it was built. The mornings droned on. There was Stevie Rosetree, kicking his heels amongst the standard roses, picking his nose behind the variegated pit-tosporum, as on any other holiday. There was Rosie Rosetree trotting off to mass, again-was it? — or again? — holding the book from which the markers had a habit of scattering, and paper rose-petals of grace. Rosie Rosetree attended all the masses; it was no trouble at all to one trembling on that delicious verge where the self becomes beatified. Even the return to superfluous questions could not destroy bliss at Easter. "Did Father Pelletier wonder why we was not there?" Mrs Rosetree asked. "He asked whether Mumma was sick." "And what did you say, Rosie?" "I said that Dadda was undergoing a mental crisis," Rosie Rosetree answered. And withdrew into that part of her where, she had recently discovered, her parents were unable to follow. Mrs Rosetree was practical enough to respect a certain coldness in her children, because she had, so to speak, paid for it. But she had to resent something. So now she returned to the usually deserted lounge-room which her husband had hoped might be his refuge. She leaned her forearms on the rosewood table, so that her bottom stuck out behind her. She was both formal and dramatic, in azure satin. She said, with some force, "You gotta tell me, Harry, or I'm gunna go plain loopy. Did something happen to that old Jew?" Harry Rosetree was fanning the smoke away from his eyes, although nobody was smoking. She realized, with some horror, she might always have hated his small, cushiony hand. "Eh?" Mrs Rosetree persisted, and the table on which she was leaning tottered. But her husband said, "You let me alone, Shirl." She was frightened then. All that she had ever experienced in darkness and wailing seemed to surge through her bowels. And she went out, out of the house, and was walking up and down in her housecoat, moaning just enough to be heard-fearfully, deafeningly, it sounded to the children on whom she had conferred immunity-as she trod the unconscious, foreign, Torrens-titled soil, beside the barbecue. That way Rosetrees spent their Easter, while for other, less disordered families, Jesus Christ was taken down, and put away, and resurrected, with customary efficiency and varying taste. Outside the churches everyone was smiling to find they had finished with it; they had done their duty, and might continue on their unimpeded way. While Harry Rosetree sat. On the Wednesday Mrs Rosetree, who had begun once more to dress, came and said, neither too casual nor too loud, "Mr Theobalds is on the phone." Harry had to take the call; there was no way out. His wife was unable to follow, though. The conversation was all on Mr Theobalds's end, and Harry, if he answered, that froggy. Afterwards Harry rang a Mr Schildkraut. There was to be _minyan__ for Mordecai Himmelfarb. And however much she was afraid to be, Shirl Rosetree knew that she was glad. She had survived the dangers of the flesh, but did not think she could have endured an interrogation of the spirit. Sometimes she thought she was happiest with her own furniture. So now she began to run the shammy leather over the rosewood and maple veneer, until wood was exalted to a state of almost pure reflection. She got the hiccups in the end.

Shortly after he had shaved himself, Harry Rosetree went out without telling his wife, who knew about it, nevertheless. Through the sealed window in the hall, she watched him get inside the car. He was fumbling a good deal, she could tell; he made the lights wink, over and over, in the car's glass buttocks, as if it had been night. Before he drove away with a jerk. Mr Rosetree drove out towards Sarsaparilla along the main highway, where morning had conspired with the Tudor-style, luxury homes to wrap them in cellophane, thus increasing their market value. But soon he was taking lesser roads, which led him by degrees through the remnants of a countryside: grey sheds, and barbed wire, a repetition of shabby hills-at which he did not care to look. Rural scenes made him nervous, unless some sunlit forest, remembered or illusory, he had never decided, through which he loitered, gathering wild strawberries at the foot of a convent's mottled wall. Unequivocal forms, whether topographical or human, depressed this small, soft man, who saw that he might come to grief. So he would turn aside, on principle, from axe-faced women and muscular men. He liked to eat _Gänsebraten__ and _Torte__. His lips were rather red, and full, with a division in the lower one. But, confronted with the bones of a situation, as in the last few days, the juices had run out of him. He was appalled. Harry Rosetree continued to drive-the long glass car was almost too biddable-towards a duty which he had accepted, less from compulsion than from sentiment, he was trying to believe. But as he drove in his incredible car, Haïm ben Ya'akov found himself abandoning the controls of reason, not to say the whole impressive, steel-and-plastic structure of the present, for the stuffy rooms of memory. His father, who was never far distant, entered almost at once, in _yarmulka__ and rather frowzy curls. He took the boy by the hand, and they stood before the Ark, which the beadle had uncovered as a favour, so that they might read the inscription on the wrapper. See, Haïm, the father was explaining, your own wrapper covering the Scroll. Read, he insisted, since I have paid for you to learn the letters. Read, he said, and let me hear. So the boy read, fearfully: _The Commandment of the Lord is clear__. Then the beadle pulled the cord, and the wonders and terrors were again veiled by the little curtain. Wonders and terrors alternated. Why, you are trembling, Haïm. Once more it was the father, as they stood outside the privy in the unmistakable smell of urine-saturated wood. But there is no reason, the father attempted to persuade, and went so far as to squeeze an elbow as they continued standing in the yard. His eyeballs shone greenish in the last of the pale light which trickled in between the cramped houses. I will let you into a secret, he apparently decided there and then, to give you courage, though perhaps it is too soon to understand more than a little of what is promised. Such light as there was, converged on those glittering eyeballs. I have just come, the father confided, from a conversation with two _rabbanim__, in which we discussed the One who is Expected. Here the eyeballs threatened, and the urine smelled most terribly. The One who, in our time, we are convinced, must come, to lead and save, as it was not, it seems, David, or Hezekiah, and not, most certainly, Sabbatai Zvi, though _all that__ is something you will not have heard about. Listen, Haïm, because this is what concerns you. You will be amongst the first to receive our Saviour. I have prayed for it, and prayed, and know. That you. YOU. It was written on the whitest scrap of sky. Then they called to the father from the shop, to attend to business. Soon there was the sound of hardware, and the shattered boy was left saddled with the greatest wonder, the greatest terror of all. Now Harry Rosetree, whose swirling car had brought him to the outskirts of Sarsaparilla, realized that his tongue was sticking to the roof of his mouth, his throat might have swallowed a handful of dust, his nails were brittle unto breaking. They told him at the post-office that the woman Mrs Godbold lived just down there. In the shed. Other side of the blackberry bushes. He left the car, and began to walk, tottering over the uneven ground, the archway of his legs only groggily dependent on their unhappy groin. In a kind of lean-to adjoining the shed there was a woman he took to be Mrs Godbold, bending down to stoke a copper, from which she rose redder over pale. For a moment he hoped such a very simple person might not understand his manner of speech, as regularly there were some who did not. Then he could apologize, and go away. But the situation continued to develop. And now the woman had turned to face him, while remaining withdrawn, hair harassed, arms wet, for it so happened she was occupied with laundry matters. "My name is Mr Rosetree," her visitor began, but did not add, as was his habit: "Of Brighta Bicycle Lamps at Barranugli." "Ah, yes," said Mrs Godbold, in a voice that was clear, and light, and could have been unlike her own, a voice, moreover, which might not reveal, and certainly would not ask. "I own a business down here," Mr Rosetree mumbled, and waved his arm in any direction. "And have come in connection with a disagreeable incident, involving an _Individuum__ of my employment." Mrs Godbold was rearranging her sodden wash. In the blue water, in the zinc tubs, she pushed the heavy forms around. Once or twice she plunged her arms, and on drawing them out, the skeins of suds fell back. She was so intent, Mr Rosetree doubted he would ever reach her. "An _Individuum__ who died," he added rather hopelessly. At this point Mrs Godbold was at last persuaded to assist. "On Good Friday. Early. Mr Himmelfarb," she said. It was so conclusive, there seemed no reason for looking at her visitor. Then, although he did not wish to, Mr Rosetree had to inquire, "Where, please, is the corpse of this Himmelfarb?" Nothing had ever appeared so brutal as the surfaces of the zinc washtubs. "That is to say," he said, "I wish to know with which funeral establishment you have placed the body. There are friends who will take charge of it." Mrs Godbold was examining a beam of light, in which invisible things were perhaps disclosed. "But he is buried," she said, at last. "Like any Christian." Mr Rosetree opened the mouth which he hoped most desperately to use. "But this Himmelfarb was," he said, "a Jew." Mrs Godbold's throat had contracted inside its thick, porous skin. The intruder was prickling all over. The woman, too, he saw, had broken out in an ugly gooseflesh. "It is the same," she said, and when she had cleared her voice of hoarseness, continued as though she were compelled by much previous consideration: "Men are the same before they are born. They are the same at birth, perhaps you will agree. It is only the coat they are told to put on that makes them all that different. There are some, of course, who feel they are not suited. They think they will change their coat. But remain the same, in themselves. Only at the end, when everything is taken from them, it seems there was never any need. There are the poor souls, at rest, and all naked again, as they were in the beginning. That is how it strikes me, sir. Perhaps you will remember, on thinking it over, that is how Our Lord Himself wished us to see it." Mr Rosetree was confused. "But Himmelfarb was a Jew," something forced him to repeat. Mrs Godbold touched the edge of zinc. "So, they say, was Our Lord and Saviour who we have buried too." Mr Rosetree was no longer able to connect the facts he wanted to communicate. In between, his mouth would form disconcerting bursts of bubbles. "Schildkraut who is waiting. And other nine men. To hold _minyan__." "I did not know as Mr Himmelfarb had any particular friends. He was too well disposed to all," Mrs Godbold thought aloud, then added in unequivocal words, "Tell his friends it was a lovely morning, the morning that we buried him. It was yesterday, it seems. Early, so as Mr Pargeter-that is the minister-and the undertakers, could fit it in. Of course I would have been capable of doing everything myself, and did do many little things that professional undertakers will not recognize. But he was buried official by Thomas and Thomas, a credited firm, of Boundary Street, Barranugli." Her visitor sensed while looking at the floor that Mrs Godbold had become inspired. "I walked to the ground-it is not far-with a couple of my more sensible girls. And was there to receive him. It was that clear. It was that still. You could hear the magpies from all around. The rabbits would not bother themselves to move. There was a heavy dew lying from the night, on grass and bushes. No one would have cried, sir, not at such a peaceful burial, as on yesterday morning when we stood, and afterwards we was glad to dawdle, and feel the sun lovely on our backs." So they buried Himmelfarb again. Mrs Godbold stirred those same sheets which lay soaking in the blue water. "He was, you might say, overlooked," she ventured to judge. "But some of us will remember and love him." Then her visitor began to move. He felt himself to be superfluous. While all the time Mrs Godbold's stream flowed, warmer, stronger, all-healing. Only, Haïm ben Ya'akov regretted, certain wounds will not close. "Ah!" she cried suddenly. Life was too insistent. "I was forgetting!" she panted. And pushed inside the main shed, with such force that she shook it. "It is the bread," she said. When she had flung the oven open, there, indeed, was the bread. The loaves had risen golden. The scent was rushing out of them. "Will I make you a quick cup?" she asked. "With a slice of fresh bread to it? There is quince jam," she coaxed. "No," Mr Rosetree replied. "I have business. Other business." She came out again, almost too close to him; he could smell the agonizing smell of bread. "You have not taken offence?" she asked. "At what I did? To bury the gentleman on Christian ground?" "What for should I go crook?" Rosetree protested, stiff now. "It is this Schildkraut. I am no Jew." "No," said Mrs Godbold. As he could feel she had begun to pity, he went away very quickly, stumbling over the rough ground. Even so, he heard her voice. "Dr Herborn certified it was the heart." Harry Rosetree drove home so smoothly nobody would have guessed. So much chromium. Such a vision of pink paint. He had turned the radio on as a matter of course, and the car was flying streamers, of pretty music, in addition to those it stripped from the wind. It was only inside, amongst the beige upholstery, and faced with the controls, that the music broke up into little tinkly bits of foil, and nervous glass splinters, and ugly, torn sheets of zinc. He drove faster in order to arrive, and did, although it was only at his own house. Shirl said, "Well, Harry, you look as though you seen an accident, or something. You wanta take a good stiff Scotch and a couple of aspro. Though I know it is wrong to offer advice." She would have been interested to examine him closely, but he was walking through their house. He was grunting sort of funny. He sat on the edge of an already overflowing chair, grunting, or belching-grey. "Gee," she said, who had followed him, "you are not going to put the wind up me, are you?" When he began to cry, she was at first too shocked to continue. Mrs Rosetree had a secret longing for hard, blond men, in sweatshirts that revealed their torsos. Now this soft sister, whom she had loved, however, by contract, and even, she could swear, by impulse. Harry was blubbering, and rubbing his knee-caps. "It is the same!" he was saying, she thought. She stared. "It is the same!" he kept on blubbering. Then she did get angry. "It is the same? It is the same?" she shouted back. "I am the same dill that always stuck around!" She began to punch the cushions. "But have had enough for now! At least," she said, "I am gunna ring Marge Pendleburry, and go to some nice picture. To forget. Oh," she called, "I have my sense of duty, too. I will not forget that." Harry Rosetree continued sitting on the overupholstered grey chair until his wife had left the house. She had looked in once, but they were still far too naked to address each other. When she had gone, he went into the bathroom, where she had been powdering her body, and gargling. There was steam on the mirror, in which he began to write, or print, in big letters. MORD…, he put. But rubbed it out. But began again to cry. And stopped. Quite suddenly he bared his teeth at the glass, and the least vein in his terrible eyeballs was fully revealed to him.

When Mrs Rosetree got home, the strings of the parcels were eating into her plump gloves. She was trailing the fox cape as if the bull had been too much for her. "Hoo-oo!" she called. "Hiya?" That was for Colonel Livermore, who made careful noises back. His wife would avert her eyes from the Rosetrees' side, but the colonel, a mild man, and just, had in the beginning offered cuttings of pussy willow, and imparted several Latin names. "Home again!" replied the colonel with his usual exactitude. But Mrs Rosetree seldom listened to the words her neighbour spoke. She was content to bathe in the desirable, if rather colourless distinction the colonel's dried-up person still managed to exude. Now Mrs Rosetree chose to remark, with a special kind of tenderness, from her side of the photinias, "That, I always think, is such a pretty little thing." Although she was in no mood for any bally plant. "That," replied the colonel, "is oxalis." And pulled it smartly up. Mrs Rosetree could not care. "Well," she said, "I am quite fagged out." She had learnt it from Colonel Livermore himself. "I am going to lay-lie down, I don't mind telling you, Colonel," she said, "and rest my poor, exhausted feet before the kids come in." At that hour the shapes of the garden, in which she had never really felt at home, were beginning to dissolve, the bricks of the house were crumbling. If the interior resisted, it was because her instincts kept the rooms stretched tight, at least the essential part of them, or comforting primeval form, and she could have wandered endlessly at dusk through her version of the stuffy, felted tents, touching, when her spirit craved for reassurance, the material advantages with which she had filled a too heroic archetype. So she trailed now. But frowning for her husband. She had no intention of announcing her return. But would let him come to her, out of the shadows, and kiss her on a dimple, or the nape of her neck. But she could not stop frowning. It was for Marge now, who had kept on not exactly looking at her. Somehow sideways. Sort of peculiar. All through that lousy picture. So Mrs Rosetree frowned her way into the bathroom. She had very little confidence, not even in her own breath, but would gargle every so often. The bathroom was lighter, of course, than the other rooms, because it was full of glass, as well as the translucence of pastel plastic. But brittler, too. And constricted. With the window shut, the airlessness would sometimes make a person choke. All of a sudden Mrs Rosetree could have felt a cord tighten round her throat. She began to scream, right down, it seemed, to the source of breath. She was ballooning with it. "_Aacccchhhh__!" she screamed. Then held back what remained. To force out the words when she had mustered them. She did moan a little, in between. "_Oÿ-yoÿ-yoÿ-yoÿ__!" For the forgotten tendernesses. But her shame hung too heavy. Its bulk bumped against her. "_Du__! DU!" she was shouting at the tiles. "_Du verwiester Mamser__!" Mrs Rosetree was running through the house, forgetful of the furniture she knew. One particularly brutal chair struck her in a private place. She kicked free once, hobbled by the soft shadows, or a fox cape. And reached the garden, a place of malice, which she had always hated, she realized, for its twigs messing her hair, spiders tossed down her front, and the voices of the _goyim__ laughing for no reason, at a distance, through redundant trees. "_Hilfe! Hilfe! Hören Sie__!" Mrs Rosetree was imploring quite hysterically by the time she reached the photinia hedge. "_Mein verrückter Mann hat sich__…" Colonel Livermore's emaciated face was shocked by such lack of control. Mrs Rosetree remembered as quickly as she had forgotten. "Colonel," she said, "I am terribly distressed. You will forgive, Colonel Livermore. But my husband. If you will do me the favour, please, to come. My hubby has hung hisself. In the bathroom. With the robe cord." "Great Scott!" cried Colonel Livermore, and started to climb through the photinias. "In the bathroom!" Fleetingly, Mrs Rosetree feared it might have been a lapse of taste. "My husband was nervous, Colonel Livermore. He was sick. Yoÿ-yoÿ! Nobody is to blame. It was never ever anybody's fault when the mind was sick. Eh?" Unless the fault of that old Jew who came. Shulamith remembered. Before darkness slapped her in the face with a bunch of damp leaves. "_Nein__!" she moaned, right from the depths, and continued protesting from some region her companion had never suspected, let alone entered. "There is also the power of evil, that they tell us about in the beginning-oh, long! long! — and we forget, because we are leading this modern life-until we are reminded." Colonel Livermore was relieved that his wife had gone for the day to cousins at Vaucluse, thus avoiding such a distasteful experience. He, who hated to be touched, could feel the rings of the hysterical Jewess eating into his dry skin. So he was borne along, detached, a splinter stuck in the scented flesh of darkness. The night was whirling with insects and implications. His wooden soul might have practised indefinite acceptance, if the brick steps had not jarred him from the toes upward, back into his human form. The woman, too, was jolted back to reason. This return made them both, it seemed, top-heavy, and as they mounted the steps, they were jostling each other with their shoulders and elbows, almost knocking each other down. "Excuse me, Colonel!" Mrs Rosetree laughed, but coughed it away. Rejuvenated by some power unidentified, she was becoming obsessed by a need for tidiness. "So many little details arise out of a sudden death in the family," she had to explain. "I must ring Mr Theobalds. Must come over. Put me in the picture. It is only right. Only practical. With two young kids. To show where I stand." So the details accumulated, and the blood was distending their fingers, but finally there was no reason for delaying their entry into the house of the man who had hanged himself.

16

FROM WHERE he was lying the window contained nothing but sky, and he was content with that. Around the frame the bare walls, white once, and still presentable in spite of flies, did not detract from the abstraction which the faulty glass perpetuated. Details were added in certain lights: a burst of little colourless bubbles would emerge, to imprint their chain of craters on the landscape of hitherto unblemished blue, which was swelling, moreover, with rosy hillocks, and invested with depressions of mauve. Sometimes he was forced to set to work on what he saw someone else had failed to finish. His Adam's apple would move with unconscious arrogance as he surveyed the composition, and added from memory flat masses of the red earth, or a faint wash of the salad-coloured foliage that belonged along the river banks at Numburra. He passed his days in this way, and might have felt happy, if it had not been for his physical inertia, and the knowledge that he still had to commit himself. Then he would begin to torture the quilt. Mrs Noonan's quilt was turned to lint anywhere within reach of his fingers. Dubbo had not returned to Rosetree's factory after the Easter closure. If it had not been for other, catastrophic events, someone might have come in search of him, but in the circumstances, he was left alone, forgotten. Which accorded well enough with his intentions. Often in the past he had left a job in order to work. To have discovered the reason would have made them laugh their heads off. If only for a moment or two. As soon as they had spat the phlegm out, they would have turned, of course, and continued tending the machinery of labour. But his cult of secrecy had always protected him from ridicule. And now, more than ever, even the walls of silence were suspect. Already on the second day after he had taken to his bed-in preparation for the plunge, he persuaded himself, to avoid dwelling on his helplessness-there had been a knocking at the door, and he had scrambled up resentfully to open. It was Mrs Noonan, the landlady herself. Which had never happened before. He scowled at her through the crack. "Ah," she said, and smiled; she was one of the sandy things, and shy. "I got it inter me head like, yer might be feelin' bad. I got a potta tea goin'," she explained. "If yer would care for a cuppa tea, it has not stood all that long." Her scaly eyelids were flickering, he saw, like those of sandy hens. "No," he answered, brutally. "Ah, well," said Mrs Noonan. Flickering and smiling. When she was once more received into the darkness of the hall, he ran to the edge of the landing, and called out over the banisters, "I gave my job away. I've got other business now. For several days. I've gotta be left private." "Ah," her voice floated up. "Business." And he knew from the sound that her mouth would be wavering on the sandy smile. "Thank you," he called, rather woody, as an afterthought. But she must have gone away already. That probability desolated the man stranded on the landing, and he soon went back into his room. He sat on the stretcher. He did not at once lie down, and for several days there recurred to his inward eye the shape of Mrs Noonan's floating smile. On the morning of the fifth day, his melancholy was so intense, his guts so shrivelled, his situation so unresolved, he got up with determination, and went out into the streets. He drank a pint of milk at the Sicilian's, bought two pounds of tomatoes, and a packet of bacon. A bland, almost autumnal light had simplified the architecture of Barranugli to the extent that its purposes could no longer be avoided. All the faces in the streets were expectant down to the last pore. So Dubbo saw, and knew that he had reached the point of compulsion. On returning to Mrs Noonan's, his spirit was running ahead of him, while his cold hand slowly advanced over certain welts on the handrail, which had come to mark the stages in his progress up the stairs. When he arrived, the empty room was full of the yellowest light. The tawny plane tree in the yard below tossed up bursts of green with the flat of its leaves. The wind-screen of a lorry flashed. So that his eyes became pacified by the assistance he was all at once receiving. He began to arrange things with the precision that was peculiar to him. He cleaned the already clean brushes. He ate into a tomato, and some of the golden juice trickled down as far as his chin. He ate a couple of the pink rashers, chewing with teeth that had remained strong and good, and swallowing the laces of rind. Only then he brought out the first of the two canvases which he had bought months before, in anticipation. Of more commanding surface than the boards of ply or masonite which he normally used, the blank canvas no longer frightened him. He took his time preparing the surface, soothed by the scent of shellac with which he was anointing the colourless waste, preoccupied by the proportions of the picture he intended to paint. These suddenly appeared so convincing, so unshakably right, they might have existed many years in his mind. Behind the superficial doubts, and more recent physical listlessness, the structure had been growing. Now his fingers were reaching out, steely and surprising. Not to himself, of course. He was no longer in any way surprised. But knew. He had always known. Dubbo was unaware how many days he had been at work. The act itself destroyed the artificial divisions created both by time and habit. All the emotional whirlpools were waiting to swallow him down, in whorls of blue and crimson, through the long funnel of his most corrosive green, but he clung tenaciously to the structure of his picture, and in that way was saved from disaster. Once on emerging from behind the barricade of planes, the curtain of textures, he ventured to retouch the wounds of the dead Christ with the love that he had never dared express in life, and at once the blood was gushing from his own mouth, the wounds in the canvas were shining and palpitating with his own conviction. After that he rested for a bit. He could have allowed himself to be carried off on any one of the waves of exhaustion. But his prickly eyelids refused him such a suave release. Towards the end of that day, he rose, dipped his face in the basin, and when he had shaken the water out of his eyes, was driven again to give expression to the love he had witnessed, and which, inwardly, he had always known must exist. He touched the cheek of the First Mary quite as she had wiped his mouth with the ball of her handkerchief as he lay on the lino the night at Mollie Khalil's. Her arms, which conveyed the strength of stone, together with that slight and necessary roughness, wore the green badges of all bruised flesh. As he painted, his pinched nostrils were determined to reject the smell of milk that stole gently over him, for the breasts of the immemorial woman were running with a milk that had never, in fact, dried. If he had known opulence, he might have been able to reconcile it with compassion. As it was, such riches of the flesh were distasteful to him, and he began to slash. He hacked at the paint to humble it. He tried to recall the seams of her coat, the hem of her dress, the dust on her blunt shoes, the exact bulge below the armpit as she leaned forward from her chair to wipe his mouth. Perhaps he succeeded at one point, for he smiled at his vision of the Mother of God waiting to clothe the dead Christ in white, and almost at once went into another part of the room, where he stood trembling and sweating. He thought he might not be able to continue. On and off he was bedevilled by that fear. He would go out into the streets. He bought food, and ate it, sometimes standing at a street corner, tearing at the carcase of one of the synthetic, delicatessen chickens, or picking distractedly at little grains of pink popcorn. While all the time men and women were lumbering past, pursuing their own, heavy lives. Almost always he would leave his room when the light had gone. At night the streets of the model town were practically deserted, all its vices put away, only an emptiness remained, and a sputtering of neon. As he hurried along in his sandshoes, beneath the tubes of ectoplasm, the solitary blackfellow might have been escaping from some crime, the frenzy of which was still reflected in his eyeballs and the plate glass. It drove him past the courts of light, where the judges were about to take their places on the blazing furniture, and past the darkened caves, in which plastic fern lay wilting on grey marble slabs. So he would arrive at outer darkness, crunching the last few hundred yards along a strip of clinker, which could have been the residue of all those night thoughts that had ever tortured dark minds. After such a night, and a delayed dawn, he got up to wrestle with the figure of the second woman, whose skeleton huddled, or curled, rather, at the foot of the tree. Once he might have attempted to portray a human desperation in the hands preparing to steady the feet of their dead Lord. But since he had ruffled the coat of darkness, his mind was shooting with little, illuminating sparks. Now he began to paint the madwoman of Xanadu, not as he had seen her in her covert of leaves beside the road, but as he knew her from their brief communion, when he had entered that brindled soul subtly and suddenly as light. So he painted her hands like the curled, hairy crooks of ferns. He painted the Second Mary curled, like a ring-tail possum, in a dreamtime womb of transparent skin, or at centre of a whorl of faintly perceptible wind. As he worked, his memory re-enacted the trustful attitudes of many oblivious animals: drinking, scratching or biting at their own fur, abandoning themselves to grass and sun. But he painted the rather strange smile on the mouth of the fox-coloured woman from remembering a flower that had opened under his eyes with a rush, when he had not been expecting it. His vanity was flattered by his version of this Second Servant of their Lord. The risk of spoiling did not prevent him touching and touching, as he wrapped the bristled creature closer in the almost too skilful paint, or visual rendering of wind. There she was, harsh to the eye, but for all her snouted substance, illuminated by the light of instinct inside the transparent weft of whirling, procreative wind. Dubbo added many other details to his painting, both for his own pleasure, and from the exigencies of composition. He painted flowers, a fierce regiment, the spears and swords of flowers, together with those cooler kinds which were good to lay against the burning skin. He painted the Godbold children, as he had sensed them, some upright with horror for the nightmare into which they had been introduced, others heaped, and dreaming of a different state. There were the workers, too, armed with their rights, together with doubts and oranges. There was the trampled blue of fallen jacaranda. There was the blue showing between the branches of the living tree, and on those same branches, a bird or two, of silent commentary. The Christ, of course, was the tattered Jew from Sarsa-parilla and Rosetree's factory. Who had, it was seen, experienced other lives, together with those diseases of body and mind to which men are subject. If Dubbo portrayed the Christ darker than convention would have approved, it was because he could not resist the impulse. Much was omitted, which, in its absence, conveyed. It could have been that the observer himself contributed the hieroglyphs of his own fears to the flat, almost skimped figure, with elliptical mouth, and divided canvas face, of the Jew-Christ. Although the painter could not feel that he would ever add the last stroke, a moment came when he threw his brush into a corner of the room. He groped his way towards the bed, and got beneath the blanket as he was. There he remained, shut in a solid slab of sleep, except when he emerged for a little to walk along the river bank, beside the Reverend Timothy Cal-deron. But drew away from the rector, who continued mumbling of eels, and sins too slippery to hold. So that, in the end, the figures were waving at each other from a distance. They continued waving, to and back, separated, it seemed, by the great, transparent sinlessness of morning. Joyful parrots celebrated, and only that _Alfwheraryou__ could not have borne their playful beaks, would have entered, and sat picking, inside his cage of ribs. He woke then, with mixed fears and smiles. It was night, and he could not feel the grass, but worked his body deeper in the bed, to widen the hole if possible, for protection. Comfort did not come, and he lay there shivering and whinging, frightened to discover he had remained practically unchanged since boyhood. Only his visions had increased in size, and he had overcome a number of the technical problems connected with them. The painting of his Deposition left Dubbo as flat as bore water. Water might have been trickling through his veins, if a brief haemorrhage experienced at this stage had not reminded him of the truth. He had very little desire for food, but continued to make himself eat, to be prepared for possible events. In the meantime, he would lie and suck his finger-joints. Or hold his elbows, tight. His strength was reduced by now, except when his imagination rose to meet some conjunction of light and colour in the window, in that always changing, but unfinished, abstraction of sky. Then, on a yellow morning of returning summer, when the black lines between the floor-boards were pointing towards him, and the window-panes were temporarily unable to contain the blaze, he found himself again regretting that large drawing they had stolen from him while he was at Hannah's. Because he had grown physically incapable of hating, his capacity for wonder led him to embrace objects he had refused to contemplate until now. So he would examine the face of Humphrey Mortimer, for instance, with the same interest that he might have brought to bear on a flock of pastured maggots, or block of virgin lard. Everything, finally, was a source of wonder, not to say love. Most wonderful was the Jew's voice heard again above the sound of the cistern and the wash-room tap:… And I looked and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding 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…. The blackfellow rolled over on the bed, biting the back of his hand. The window was blinding him, with its four living creatures in the likeness of a man. As he remembered the voice, so Dubbo was still able to see the drawing of "the Chariot-thing." He would have known how to draw it, detail by detail, inch by inch, for he never forgot those places where he had been. There was simply the question of physical strength. Whether he could still paint, he doubted. All that night he was haunted by the wings of the Four Living Creatures. The tips of their wings stroked his eyelids. He would reach up and touch the feathers, to become acquainted with their texture. But he woke horribly from one sleep, in which he had found himself lying stretched under the skin of a dead man. There it had been, sagging slightly above the bed, to shelter, it would have seemed, only for the cold drip drip drip. He lay awake through the false dawn. Then, at sunrise, he got up, and stood at the window, and some of that rekindled fire was distributed through his dead veins. His fingers were liberated, and he began to trace on the glass the lines, not of his lost drawing, but the actual vision as it was revealed. About seven o'clock Dubbo made himself a pannikin of tea. He ate some stale bread, with butter that could have been rancid. But the food comforted him. He felt quite brisk, though brittle. And began at once to restate his conception of the Chariot. The drawing was perhaps too quickly done, but came away so easily, almost as a print, from his memory. There it was in front of him. He knew then that, whatever his condition, he would paint his picture of the Chariot as he had originally intended. The next two days his movements took control of his body, although his mind hovered above, as it were-rather stern, beaky, ready to refuse collaboration in dishonesty. So the firmament was again created. First the foundations were laid in solid blue, very deep, on which he began to build the gold. The road ran obliquely, and cruel enough to deter any but sure-footed horses. The latter could have been rough brumbies, of a speckled grey, rather too coarse, _earthbound__ might have been a legitimate comment, if their manes and tails had not streamed beyond possibility, and the skeins of cloud shed by their flanks appeared at any point to catch on the rocks of heavenly gold. One curious fact emerged. From certain angles the canvas presented a reversal of the relationship between permanence and motion, as though the banks of a river were to begin to flow alongside its stationary waters. The effect pleased the painter, who had achieved more or less by accident what he had discovered years before while lying in the gutter. So he encouraged an illusion which was also a truth, and from which the timid might retreat simply by changing their position. The days grew kind in which Dubbo painted his picture. They were of a fixed, yellow stillness. The creaking of cicadas was not so much a noise, as a thick, unbroken, yellow curtain, hung to protect his exposed senses. All other sound seemed to have been wound into a ball at the centre of the town, as he stood and transferred the effulgence of his spirit onto canvas, or, when overcome by weakness, sat on the edge of a scraping chair, leaning forward so as not to miss anything taking place in the world of his creation. Where he cheated a little was over the form of the Chariot itself. Just as he had not dared completely realize the body of the Christ, here the Chariot was shyly offered. But its tentative nature became, if anything, its glory, causing it to blaze across the sky, or into the soul of the beholder. The Four Living Creatures were a different proposition, of course. He could not shirk those. So, set to work painfully to carve their semblance out of the solid paint. One figure might have been done in marble, massive, white, inviolable. A second was conceived in wire, with a star inside the cage, and a crown of barbed wire. The wind was ruffling the harsh, fox-coloured coat of the third, flattening the pig's snout, while the human eye reflected all that was ever likely to happen. The fourth was constructed of bleeding twigs and spattered leaves, but the head could have been a whirling spectrum. As they sat facing one another in the chariot-sociable, the souls of his Four Living Creatures were illuminating their bodies, in various colours. Their hands, which he painted open, had surrendered their sufferings, but not yet received beatitude. So they were carried on, along the oblique trajectory, towards the top left corner. And the painter signed his name, in the bottom right, in neat red, as Mrs Pask had taught him: A. DUBBO With a line underneath. It was again evening when he had finished. The light was pouring into his room, and might have blinded, if the will to see had continued in him. He sat down stiffly on the bed. The sharp pain poured in crimson tones into the limited space of room, and overflowed. It poured and overflowed his hands. These were gilded, he was forced to observe, with his own gold.

Mrs Noonan was a stranger in her own house, which had belonged, in fact, to her mother-in-law, which caused her to go softly in her rag hat, and coast along the walls in anticipation of strictures, smiling. She had no friends, but two acquaintances, a carrier and his wife, whom she could seldom bear to disturb. But drank a great deal of tea on her own. And loved her hens. And set store by the presence of a lodger, a decent sort of man, whom she did not see. And was puzzled at last, on running a duster along the landing wainscot, to detect an unorthodox smell coming from under the door of the room that she let. It was so peculiar, not to say nasty, she did at last venture to call, "_Eh, mis-ter__?" And to knock once or twice. To rattle the knob of the locked door, though diffidently, because she could never bring herself to consider the rented room any longer part of Mother's house, let alone her own. "Mister! Mister!" She rattled, and smiled, cocking an ear. "Anything wrong? It is me-Mrs Noonan. "It is Mrs Noonan," she repeated, but fainter. Perhaps that was to reassure herself, but she was not really convinced by the sound of her own name, and went away wondering whether she dare disturb her acquaintances, the carrier and his wife. On deciding not, she put on a better hat, and some shoes, and went to a house several blocks away, where she had noticed from a brass plate that a doctor had set up. The young doctor, who was reading a detective story, and scratching himself through his flies, was bored on being disturbed, but also relieved to be asked for advice, since an unpleasantness at the butcher's over credit. "What sort of smell?" the doctor asked. Mrs Noonan flickered her eyelids. "I dunno, Doctor," she said, and smiled. "A sort of peculiar smell like." She breathed more freely when he fetched his bag, and felt important as they walked along the street, not quite abreast, but near enough to signify that they were temporarily connected. It was still hot, and they trod with difficulty through the pavement of heavy yellow sunlight, which had assisted Dubbo in the painting of his picture. "Had he been depressed?" the doctor asked. "Ah, no," she answered. "Not that you could say. Quiet, though. He was always quiet." "Sick?" "Well." She hesitated. Then, when she had considered, she burst out in amazement, "Yes! Sick! I reckon that dark feller was real sick. And that is what it could be. He could of died!" Her own voice abandoned her to a terrible loneliness in the middle of the street, because the doctor was above a human being. They went on, and she tried to think of her hens, now that that decent blackfellow was gone. When they reached the room door, the doctor asked for a key, but as there was no duplicate, he did not suggest anything else; he burst the papery thing open. They went in on the draught, rather too quickly, and at once were pushed back by the stench. The doctor made a noise, and opened the window. "How long since you saw him?" "Could be three days," Mrs Noonan answered, from behind her handkerchief, and smiled. Dubbo was lying on the bed. He was twisted round, but natural-looking, more like some animal, some bird that had experienced the necessity of dying. There was a good deal of blood, though, on the pillow, on his hands, although it had dried by then, with the result that he could have been lying in the midst of a papier-mâche joke. The doctor was carrying out a distasteful examination. "Is he dead?" Mrs Noonan was asking. "Eh, Doctor? Is he dead? "He is dead," she replied, for herself. "Probably a tubercular haemorrhage," mumbled the doctor. He breathed harder to indicate his disapproval. "Ah," said Mrs Noonan. Then she caught sight of the oil paintings, and was flabbergasted. "What do you make of these, Doctor?" she asked, and laughed, or choked behind her handkerchief. The doctor glanced over his shoulder, but only to frown formally. He certainly had no intention of looking. When he had finished, and given all necessary instructions to that inconsiderable object the landlady, and banged the street door shut, Mrs Noonan prepared to go in search of her acquaintances, the carrier and his wife. But she did look once more at the body of the dead man, and the house was less than ever hers. The body of Alf Dubbo was quickly and easily disposed of. He had left money enough-it was found in a condensed-milk tin-so that the funeral expenses were settled, the landlady was paid, and everybody satisfied. The dead man's spirit was more of a problem: the oil paintings became a source of embarrassment to Mrs Noonan. Finally, the helpful carrier advised her to put them in an auction, and for a remuneration carried them there, where they fetched a few shillings, and caused a certain ribaldry. Mrs Noonan was relieved when it was done, but sometimes wondered what became of the paintings. Not even the auctioneers could have told her that, for their books were lost soon after in a fire. Anyway, the paintings disappeared, and, if not destroyed when they ceased to give the buyers a laugh, have still to be discovered.