Fisherman’s Bay. First days of the first poor man.
An October night’s dream.
A stirring sermon has no effect on an ill-fated hero.
The hideous low scarred yellow horny and barren headland lies curled like a scorpion in a blinding sea and sky. At night, house-lamps and ships’ lanterns burn with a rousing shine, and the headlights of cars swing over Fisherman’s Bay. In the day, the traffic of the village crawls along the skyline, past the lighthouse and signal station, and drops by cleft and volcanic gully to the old village that has a bare footing on the edge of the bay. It was, and remains, a military and maritime settlement. When the gunners are in camp, searchlights sweep over the bay all night, lighting bedrooms and the china on dressers, discolouring the foliage and making seagulls fly; in the daytime, when the red signal is flown over the barracks, the plates and windows rattle with the report of guns at target practice. From the signal station messages come down of the movements of ships and storms. Flags flutter and red globes swing on its great mast, which is higher than the Catholic Church, higher than the Norfolk Island pines, higher than the lighthouse and than anything else which is between the rocky cornice and the sandy seafloor. In dark nights, from the base of that enormous spectral pole which points up any distance into the starry world, one looks down on the city and northern harbour settlements, on the pilot-lights in the eastern and western channels, and on the unseen dark sea, where the lighthouse ray is lost beyond the horizon and where ships appear through the waves, far out, lighted like a Christmas Tree, small, and disappearing momentarily; and where, after half an hour of increasing radiance, the yellow rim of the great subtropical moon comes up like a lantern from underneath.
Early in the morning, through the open window, the people hear the clatter of anchors falling into the bay, and the little boys run out to name the liners waiting there for the port doctor, liners from Singapore, Shanghai, Nagasaki, Wellington, Hawaii, San Francisco, Naples, Brindisi, Dunkirk and London, in the face of all these old stone houses, decayed weatherboard cottages, ruinous fences, boathouses and fishermen’s shanties. Presently a toot, the port doctor puts out in the Hygeia; a whistle, the Customs launch goes alongside; a hoot from the Point, and that is the pilot-ship returning to its anchorage. A bell jangles on the wharf where the relief pilot waits for his dinghy, and the ferry whistles to clear the dinghies, rowing-boats and children’s canoes from its path. The fishermen murmur round the beach-path, fishing-nets dry in the sun, a bugle blows in the camp, the inspected ships draw up their anchors and go off up the harbour, superb with sloping masts, or else, in disgrace, flying the yellow flag, to the rightabout, with nose in air, to Quarantine, under North Head and its bleak graveyard. Butchers’ and bakers’ carts rattle, an original milkman yodels, little girls gabble on the way to school, the wind with hands in pockets whistles a tune, and the day goes gaily and blatantly forward.
There is no place in the estuary, though, so suited for an old tale as this fish-smelling bay, first in the port. Life is poor and unpretentious, life can be quiet. The sun rises just over the cliff, and sailing vessels roll in and out as they have done for a hundred years, and a quarter of a mile away unfurl their full sails to catch the Pacific winds.
There was a family there named Baguenault, which had settled in the bay directly after its arrival from Ireland thirty years before, and had its roots growing down into the soil and rocky substratum so that nothing seemed to be able to uproot it anymore, so quiet, so circumspect in the narrow life of the humble, it lived; but disaster fell on it, and its inner life, unexpressed, incoherent, unplanned, like most lives, then became visible as a close and tangled web to the neighbours and to itself, to whom it had for so long remained unknown. Who can tell what minor passions running in the undergrowth of poor lives will burst out when a storm breaks on the unknown watershed? There is water in barren hills and when rain comes they spurt like fountains, where the water lies on impermeable rocks.
Michael Baguenault paddled through his childhood round the beaches, helped the fishermen haul their nets, often rolled out of his warm bunk at four o’clock in spring and autumn mornings to waken the wooden-legged fisherman, Pegleg Jack, who lived near them in a cabin by himself, to light his fire and cook his bacon. In return the Pegleg called him “my little mate”, took him across to George’s Head with the fishermen and gave him black tea for breakfast. He gave him chunks of cedar and taught him to carve model racing-yachts and on his eighth birthday presented him with a fisherman’s knife and sheath. Michael went always on black, rough feet, whose horny skin was split into deep cracks, bleeding in the crevices, from which the winter’s dirt could never be washed. He ran with other little boys in frayed trousers to the beach to collect driftwood and coke for the kitchen, and would return late for breakfast with blue hands; he had chilblains and a running nose all the winter. There were straggle-haired little girls with dirty pinafores and pink skirts. They were all cold; they grasped their sponge-boxes and playtime biscuits, called out the names of teachers in brittle voices and squabbled over hopscotch tors.
The beach provided not only fuel, but also dead fish, swollen fruit, loaves, pumpkins, shoes and socks, broken straw-boaters—all varieties of food and clothing cast up from ships and sewers. Once, when a five-thousand tonner was wrecked near the Gap, a hundred tons of butter floated mildly in to the beach. Pegleg salvaged it and sold it. Cases of condensed milk collided with their frail canoes, manufactured in backyards, of canvas and corrugated iron. They went outside the Heads and brought in a butcher’s block, and came back, all their coracles white with flour. They could all swim and were absolutely fearless, despite the frequency of squalls and sharks, paddling all over the harbour in unseaworthy tubs. There were crabs in the rock-pools, little oysters spread all round the bay, and the waters were rich in fish. “If this were a desert island . . .” thought all those verminous little heads joyfully, seeing the bounty of the sea. There was even a great house there, in the last stages of decay, weathered by wind and sea, and standing in a neglected garden with old trees, in which they all could have lived at ease, a pirate brood. The front part of the house, of stone and heavy timber, had been added to the large stone military stables at the back, which had served in the early days. The fences were down, and the house was inhabited fraternally by human, barnyard, and vermin tribes. The goats, ducks, geese, dogs and horses left wandering about the streets of the neighbourhood oftener wound up in the backyard than in the pound, and the children after school found the forbidden front garden, with its tall trees and old bushes, the best spot for playing bushrangers.
Annie Pennergast lived with her family in part of the house. The little girl was thin, with black eyes and hair. She scratched her head and body all the time, and always smelled of ingrained dirt. In the corners of the house bats flew, swallows dropped mud and dung from every beam, and from all the cracks of the great whitewashed stones at the back ran cockroaches, beetles and rats. Cockchafer beetles, cicadas and mosquitoes shouted loudly in summer evenings in the tall trees; large spiders hung in the outhouses, and fearsome-looking, but innocent, crickets and slaters dwelt under the bits of wood and sheets of corrugated iron fallen off the roof into the grass. The house attracted Michael and the other children with the same charm as a stagnant gutter.
The little girl, Annie, took him over the house one Saturday afternoon. The windows were starred by stones which now lay on the naked flooring inside. Annie preceded Michael up camel’s-back staircases and adventitious flights of steps connecting the old house with the later front apartments, through heavy doorways pierced in the stone walls. She showed him windows that looked over the barracks, hill and bay, windows without glass or shutters, some surprisingly placed in small cupboards, others letting the dust, sunlight, seeds of weeds, and the swallows into whitewashed landings. Upstairs they went through rooms with sloping roofs, skylights, whitewashed beams hung with old webs, and dusty floors on which their bare feet made tracks. They looked out through open doorways straight down three stories on to the backyard full of plantains and thistles. She led him into the stables, smelling of dung and damp, and held on to his hand with a soft persistence. A stair began in the corner of the stables, passed old plastered walls and withering landings, and ended at last in a garret. In the garret she said, “Do you want to kiss me?” with indifferent naivety. He looked out at the light spring sky which a puff of smoke and a swallow crossed, and at the open door leading on to a silent landing and sunny attic. He kissed her carefully on her cheek, and they went on with their metallic clatter about the bay, school and personalities.
Rats came up from the waterfront and lived all over the house, with mice and all kinds of small things, bugs, snails, slugs. On a summer night the cockroaches scurried in and out of holes where the cracked asphalt footpath led into the stables’ foundations. Michael pored over them full of languor and content for half an hour and more, kicking his heels and watching the officers going home to the barracks and the couples walking with their heads together; when they went past he sometimes hooted at them. Up the hill went the soldiers clinking their spurs. He stood at the corner one fine summer evening, the year he was ten, watched the eight o’clock ferry trail its golden lights out of the wharf, and studied the little creatures running about in their long-tailed suits. The dusk gathered and the street lamps yellowly came on. The cockroaches streaked out of their holes with a slow rustling, flittered round the lamp and dashed in through open windows at kerosene lamps burning in the old cottages; mosquitoes sang. Annie came out of the only side-door on the street and trod on a cockroach or two as a conversational opening. Michael ducked as a bat swerved through the air. Annie calmly disentangled something struggling in her hair; it was fearfully hot and Michael perspired.
“Bats,” said Annie, “are worse than cockroaches. If they get in your hair you can’t get out the tangles. That was only a beetle.”
“Bats don’t get in your hair, they get in your garret,” Michael jeered.
“Orright, wait till you see; but you don’t know, your hair’s short, like a monkey.” She turned her back and began to jump up and down in the gutter, chanting a nursery rhyme: “Bat, bat, fly into my hair, big, black bat.”
“There are bats that suck your blood,” volunteered Michael to the dancing back.
“There ain’t.”
“There are: I saw in a book; they have beaks.”
“Beaks! You’re dopey.”
Michael began toying with a gold tie-pin his mother had given him from his father’s dressing-table, carelessly letting it play in the lamplight.
“They say I’m your girl!” said Annie, standing sideways and rolling her hair on her finger.
“Who says?”
“It’s written on the fence”; she pointed to the opposite fence. They both went over and peered at the feebly-illuminated legend. He hung about her house a few evenings that summer, swung on the gate after school pretending to take an interest in local affairs, would loaf all the afternoon on the verandah pretending to read, or carve a boat, and his heart would beat hard if he saw her go past in the street without speaking to him. If she cooeed to him, or shouted “Ullo, Michael,” he would whisk inside, take his hat and scoot off up into the barracks, without a care in the world, and pleased to get away from her without further conversation. His mother scolded him for hanging round with that Pennergast girl. He was puzzled to know how his mother knew. He assumed that his sister Catherine, called Kate, had told on him. “Kate has a boy,” he said. Kate slapped his face and punched him on the temple, which hurt very much; in return he hit her on her budding breast. She tripped him up and pummelled him all over the face, her own face purple with fury. Kate was twelve, and outrageously bad-tempered. His two elder sisters were mild and kind.
The hot sun addled his brains. He said one day to a friend, Tommy, as they returned from a long red afternoon in the weatherboard schoolroom, full of the drone of voices and occasional blue hornets, and smelling of wattle pollen and the salt sea:
“I used to think I would fly home when I was a little kid.” The little village shone below them, through the pines, in the afternoon sun.
“Me, too; I dream I am flying,” said Tommy.
“Perhaps you could, with wings like a kite; but I would like to fly just like that.” He raised his arms.
“Perhaps if you tried,” said Tommy.
“Perhaps by will-power,” concluded Michael.
And when he sat at home later and looked up the green and yellow hill where the school sat, and the road home with its houses and bits of bush, he wished that he could see himself on the road home, where he had been a few minutes before. He pretended that images of himself were still marching along every stage of that much-travelled road, and would have liked to see them from this distance, familiar mannikins.
Reason was awakening in him and in Tommy, like a lazy apprentice who will do freakish things with his tools but doesn’t want to use them just yet. He will do a little work and then try his skinny legs, play truant, graduate as journeyman, traipse round the world, get drunk and disorderly, knock up the mayor and dignities, and cry, Why not? Life is very dull for a journeyman so freakish and full of fun. When he has spent all he has, he will beg; and, then, after a few years, he will know himself for what he is, a sober workman in a dull world, and will settle down.
But happily for Tommy and Michael, at this day, he was just stretching himself under a bush; and looking across the mountains, he thought, “Why, they are so near that I can cross them with a hop, skip and a jump.” And mounting like a stowaway in the satchel of the childish giant Fancy, he found himself in the next town and boasted that he had flown there by his own power, across the mountains in the twinkling of an eye, and almost believed it himself.
Michael’s father had a bull-roarer, a vane on a cord, which when whirled in the air produces a loud whirring and shrieking noise. It is used by the Australian blacks in their initiation ceremonies. When his father and mother were out he took out the bull-roarer into the backyard and whirled it round and round his head, while its shrieking got louder and louder, and let it die down, like a dying wind, and rise again, like a wind howling in a crevice. Then he put it down, and leaning against the fence laughed with tears in his eyes, or rushed out into the street to find some boys, his lips bursting with shouts, with witticisms; or his heart would beat so hard that he could hardly breathe; this feeling was the greatest pleasure he knew. He rolled a dozen times down the grass slope that ran down to the beach in front of the house to get the same sensation, of brains turning and wits glittering. But he had to be alone to do it, because his parents found it silly and dangerous. They noticed, too, that if he had to pick up something for his mother under the dresser or sweep under the table, he always came up looking slightly dazed.
“That is a weakness to be cured in childhood,” said his father firmly, and dragged him out with his sister Catherine, across country, up and down slopes and on the edges of the cliffs. Once he made him descend the cliff at Rosa Gully, a precipitous opening in the cliffs, formed by the crumbling of a basaltic dyke, where a few rocks stand in the waves and make a fishing foothold. His sister Kate sprang down without help, but Michael stuck half-way almost dead with terror and vertigo, and his father, though furious, had to carry him the rest of the way on his back. Michael closed his eyes, and after a long time found his feet on firm ground; he looked up at the tall cliff, shuddering. The waves dashed and whistled in the narrow cleft. His father carried him back up the cliff and never tried his great cure for vertigo again. But Michael, impressed with the horrors of that day, often went to the verge of the highest cliff, sat under a sandstone boulder and looked out at the smooth blue sea and flawless sky, to feel adolescence creeping on him, and the surges of excitement which made him at one moment want to throw himself savagely at the lawny slopes and bite them, like an animal, and at the next, to leap from the cliff among the seagulls, ending fatally but sweetly in the sea.
He said to his mother, “Am I your son?” and at her startled question, only replied: “I don’t know why I said it. I can’t believe I’m anybody’s son. I feel as if I just grew out of myself.”
“Don’t be silly.”
His father thought the time ripe to inform him of the mysteries. He was himself an amateur naturalist and gathered orchids. Taking his son before the pots of orchids arranged in a glassed lean-to at the back of the house, he explained to him pollen, ovule; he vaguely called in the help of the sparrows engaged in flirting on the guttering.
When he was twelve, his father inherited five thousand pounds from a childless bachelor friend of his named Bassett, a retired surveyor and amateur astronomer, who was a little queer in his last years and built himself a hut in the bush on the North Shore in order to work out a system of divination by the movements of planets. The legacy caused surprise, for the old friends had not corresponded since Bassett’s retirement, Bassett’s peculiarities making him cranky and misanthropic. With part of the money the Baguenaults bought themselves a house in the new suburbs of the North Shore, where the ground was cheap, the soil good, and the bush almost undisturbed. Michael’s two sisters now had scholarships at the University, Kate was put in a boarding-school, because she had got out of hand, and Michael was alone at home. Mr Baguenault speculated in gold and oil shares and made money. Their house was airy, with wide verandahs on three sides, and stood far back from the street, in a partly cultivated garden that looked over a gully. They seemed to have the mild wilderness to themselves. Across the street was visible from the top windows a flourishing, spacious graveyard. Michael’s mother began to be regarded with consideration in the community, because of her interests in charity, and her two clever daughters at the University. Catherine was not mentioned, nor Michael, who was sent to an undistinguished private school recommended by an ambitious priest whom Mrs Baguenault met at afternoon tea.
Michael was weedy at twelve. He caught diphtheria at the school and was ill a long time. The still hours of convalescence bred light fancies, and these returned to him, rounder and brighter, when he drowsed. He was outside lying on a long chair one morning and came to himself to observe his father standing stockstill among the sweet-pea stakes, looking at him intently. When he saw Michael move, he closed his eyes and then opened them, remarking that he had been thinking there in the sun about sweet-peas. There were too many blooms, he must carry a handful to Mrs Vickers, who had none. The peculiar glance of his father turned Michael’s thoughts into a gloomy channel. His father, obtuse in his sympathies, was maliciously alert when he found people depressed. Michael did not like him at all. Now, after looking at him again with an unusual persistence, his father said unexpectedly:
“Take care of yourself, Michael; you have been at death’s door,” and sauntered down towards the orchard, singing “The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la, have nothing to do with the case.”
Someone had said before that he had been at death’s door, and that metaphor, yawning, produced many ideas of solitariness, cold, fear and mental penury. He now said to himself that his hesitant, susceptible, timorous nature would be his ruin; for example, his father, whom he despised, with his orchids and surveying, still had entire dominion over him. If he spoke an idea out aloud and his father guffawed, he felt nauseous: “I will never be any different,” he said now, in his convalescent weakness. Yet that same morning as he lay on his couch he felt a new crystalline person arise out of him, as if he had given rise to a new third. He had found a time-yellowed book among his father’s old books and read that “the maniac was merely too much awake, as a man possessed by a demon would have excessive strength, excessive malice”. He felt his head swelling with each successive phrase like a bud.
When he looked over the edge of the woven rattan at the garden, everything was more lively than a moment before. The dusty leaves blazed, the grass reared itself with a pugnacious thrust, the plants were marshalled, the snail crawled over the leaf with a rushing voluptuous impulse, and all animal and vegetable creations were aware of the sun, wind, sky, shadow, and of their neighbours and of the footfalls and shadows of men, through prehensile senses. A ladybird on the melon-leaf looked like a tortoise; the melon, scarcely pressing the grass, rolled in space as a green universe, self-creative. He thought of the growth of the melon, and immediately saw it bounding towards maturity. The veils of the flesh were torn; he saw the sun pouring in torrents through translucent creatures with millions of cells. Dehiscent seeds burst, pods split, sheaths flew back, grass sprouted, ants scurried, the sun leaped, the sky vibrated, sap hissed, the eucalypt at the foot of the path arched its foolish light head, and the cicadas shouted to turn one’s brain. At the same moment that he feared he would lose this pitch of vision, indeed, the phoenix passed over the house, leaving no more than a bright feather, a brilliant hour, for him ruefully to contemplate. He felt dimly that he had in his bosom, if he could only force it out, the secret of greatness; that if he could always be as he had been that moment, his mere word would sway vast crowds of men.
His father often quoted to him: “And they, while their companions slept, were toiling upwards in the night.” He stayed awake that night to see if he could toil upwards in the night. A slight fever aided him. The night passed. He slept a little in the day and tossed. The night approached again, and when all had gone to bed he got up and smoothed his pillow.
He stood a long time at his window looking over the garden, street and churchyard on the second night of his vigil. The river of heaven flowed wide, deep and windless, and the suffocated stars rolled slowly on their white flanks through the celestial currents. It was October; the strewn silver meteors shaken fresh from the airy crests went silting and glinting down through the signs of the zodiac, and the hoofs of the Centaur, plunging and curvetting, beat up the dust of the Milky Way. The early morning moon in its last quarter sank gradually to the foot of the sky and entered the feathery boughs of the churchyard yews. Its sallow beam stole over the scattered tombs like bones, sunken in wet clay and smirched with mosses; it drew out the coarse grass and ivy-ends in shadows. Sleep crouched malignantly over the houses. Many bodies in disordered beds struggled with the phantasms abroad; the feeble beam which now entered Michael’s bedroom horizontally showed his bed distinctly on its four legs as if ready to career off bewitched. The sheets were smooth and the pillow unpressed. The moonbeam laboured from the open book on the table beside an extinguished candle to Michael’s shoulder and on to his pale quarter-moon cheek, capped with black hair and deeply graved in profile.
A slight noise began in the garden. The wind, after raising itself irresolutely three times, moved across the sill and passed over the page which lay curled upon Michael’s hand; a faint sound was heard. Michael stirred, pressed his fingers into his eyes and struggled up out of the sickly lethargy into which he had sunk. The breeze reflectively turned over one more page of the book. Michael’s eyes swam in their orbits. He looked without interest at the dull moon and lawn. Then his glance moved to the top of the torrid flood of air. His wits turning topsy-turvy rolled upward along the eyebeam, and once more began wandering and stumbling about among rhythms and numbers hideously mixed: visions had long deserted him and he was now in a chaos of tottering gulfs and complex mazes. His heart went on counting stupidly, plom-ploum, plom-ploum, but except for that one earthly thing, he was lost. He seemed to sit in a conciliabule of black extinguisher hats looking at processions of abstract geometrical forms. He reeled against the pane and stood thus, drunk with fatigue. A cock crew, the moon lay on the horizon, the large hole which someone had cut for the turf in the graveyard looked black and deep.
The daylight began to grow in slow undulations. Michael dreamed. The slow, wilful wind rose and sank around the foundations. Moths hovered round the persimmon tree, crickets zithered in the sourgrass, lizards scit-scuttled on the path, and purple-stained wingcases filled the shrubbery night with a slick, minor lightning; all bewitched garden Lilliput, motley and flea-brained, continued its multitudinous creeping and exhausting razzle-dazzle.
Michael lighted the candle. But the bare edges of the table obliterated his dreams; he blew the candle out. In the south he heard faintly the continued droning of the metropolis, and beyond the valley at the bottom of the orchard came the ribanded shrieks of freight-engines labouring towards the city. Beneath the wind was the delicate chipping of the leaves against the stucco wall; an occasional soft surge disturbed the sleep of the turpentines on the next hill. Their street lay drugged in sleep and the churchyard was dark, freed from the dead eye of the lunar world, now dropping out of sight. Hours ago the last footfall had gone rapidly along the pavement; it was the footfall of a woman, he knew, for the light and unequal tapping left the pavement when it came to the church and hurried along the middle of the road where the moon then shone clear. He waited. A cock crew again. Another answered him, and he heard the call going all over the district, diminishing and increasing, moving in discords of twos and threes, and ending suddenly in silence, close at hand, when the first cock crew last and for all. A smile of beatitude flowed over his face; he put his face against the cool plastered wall and tears trickled out; morning was at hand. At the same time he heard someone coming down the street, a firm, crisp, lonely tread, the tread of the early workman. He did not look out of the window again, he was too weak, but he heard the steps surprisingly near till they resounded as if the pavement had been hollow: they lessened and passed on in the distance. Michael, ravaged by waking dreams, thought the man had passed through his breast.
He fell into bed like a log. He opened his eyes a little while afterwards and saw half a red-hot platter risen above the horizon; the birds were making a deafening clatter. “The sun is up,” said Michael, and fell dead asleep until twelve o’clock, when his mother, frightened, wakened him. “Let me sleep,” said Michael, “I will be better when I wake up.”
His mother told her friends of the miraculous sleep that cured him entirely. For a few months he was happy. His parents took advantage of his good days to give him moral advice, to urge him to work at school, and to vaunt him to their friends. “Michael has changed so much; you know at this period . . .” He thought it patronage, got angry with them and with everyone about the house, wanted to live alone, in a forest, on a hill-top. He hoped his father and mother, or at least his father, would die so that he could live alone and free. He wished he had been born a Bedouin to range the desert like a lion, or in some tribe of natives where the little boys were all lodged and taught together. He moved circularly. He learned along the courses of his passions. To himself he seemed either curiously talented with mystic virtues, or a tatterdemalion. He was untidy about his dress, never cleaned his shoes, hated washing his hands and feet, and felt his clothes unbearably thick, clumsy and ill-cut on him; and for this he blamed his parents. He had a very poor grasp of ordinary life: he could not bear a reproach, and would have killed a person who remonstrated with him if he had not feared the prison or reformatory. He was thrown off his balance, and suffered headaches and nausea many times on account of arguments or scoldings. He cried out at night, dreaming that he was suffocating or being attacked by bears, or being followed by gigantic funereal phantoms, and he had half a dozen tics, twisting his hair, biting his cheeks, scratching his gums with his nails, plucking his knee. He had austere ideals. He would not cry out when the door shut on him, when a boy stuck a pin into him, when the doctor came to sew up a wound where a dog bit him: but he would cry when his father said something insulting to him, for a joke. He scarcely spoke to the other children except to say, “The reason is . . .” “That comes from . . .” or in analogy, “Cloth flows like water . . .”
He did not play much at school, could not bear to take part in the gang quarrels of the boys, liked to sit behind bushes and enter into long colloquies with friendly children, about marbles, history, the sky, ghosts, the characters of the teachers. He was inarticulate in his love-affairs and suffered intensely for them. He preferred to maunder about amongst rocks, trees, pools of water, beside the sea, in the wind, in the bush rushing with storm where he could divine or imagine presences, voices, miracles. At such times he would feel a rush of saliva in the mouth, and his jaws would work of themselves as if it were imperious for him to cry aloud, to make a speech, to chant. And when he was alone in his room at night, drowsy, he heard long conversations carried on between his teeth and his tongue, between the towel and the washstand, the mosquito and the ceiling he was hitting. Whenever he stood on one foot gazing into the garden, or propped himself against the door looking dreamily about him, or pored a long time over some stuff or surface examining its grain, he was listening with half his mind to these interminable, stupid conversations which went on inside him.
“Floor, you are dusty, but I am dustier still.”
“Mat, I know you are dustier still, but that is because everyone treads on you, your design will soon be worn off and you will be nothing but dust.”
“But it is good dust, worth having, the dust off the feet of these great creatures.”
“Pooh, they got it in the garden, where dogs have pissed and cats stink.”
“What do I care if I’m dirty, that’s my mission; I don’t mind accomplishing my mission.”
“I prefer to shine with floor-wax.”
This inaudible whispering would keep up for hours; and if it was not a dialogue between two objects or creatures, it was an argument between himself and some creature, an ant, a cloud, a coat. He liked to be alone.
He was lively on birthdays, on Christmas Day, when he was sure to get some presents. He awakened in the early morning, gay, tingling, full of jokes; the whole day he was flushed and amiable, helping his mother, doing whatever his father wanted, complimenting his sisters, making them gifts. If he got a new suit, he would be merry too, and if there was a party given in the house, he hung about, did tricks in the doorway, and recited poetry until he was reproved and sent away. He received twopence a week to spend, and would spend it gladly every Saturday, looking over his new possessions all the afternoon, eating slowly and pleasurably the sweets he had bought, and hating to give any away.
Michael now took to science and would engage with any of the teachers in religious, philosophic and logical discussions; his long years of fanciful reasoning had given him an agility in argument; he found himself in his words, the schoolmen’s world, the world of pure verbalism. In Botany, once, having drawn thirty diagrams of the stages of union of two cells of the gutter-weed, Spirogyra, which is thin and long like a green hair, a kind of frenzy took hold of him. He looked through the microscope and saw that not only was the series, taken as a series of poses, like a cinematograph, infinite, but that even with all his care and preoccupation he could not seize the important moment of change, it was not there, it seemed to him mystic. When he saw a person going downstairs and compared the last appearance of that one’s head with the empty space when he was no longer there, the change seemed to him infinitely great, even impossible, a freak that could not take place in the natural world in which he breathed. In his imagination a thing was, and then disappeared, dark remained, and in between was a space of dreams, of nonentity. He held up his mind, a cracked and yellow mirror to reflect the machinery of the world, and in that dark space the world ceased for a moment to exist.
But at these times especially, he would fall back against his seat or lean on his elbow looking out of the window at the trees, and powerful visions would pass through his head; he laboured automatically to increase and perfect these visions, to make them logical, grandiose. He believed in intellectual miracles. He suffered states which were ecstasy, although they were not joyful but rapt and inhuman. In those moments he gave out cold as a genial person gives out warmth and love.
One day when the school was out on a picnic, the headmaster walked a little way aside with him. “Your character is like that ship,” said he, looking down from the heights of a bay; “it can be guided by you, your will the pilot, or cast away, for the immediate gain in a cheap profession, or the pleasures a young man likes, or cast adrift and someone, man or woman, may earn the salvage of it.”
“I will never be captain of my soul,” said Michael, interested in the subject. “I began, and will end, a beachcomber—spiritually, I mean,” he added at the schoolmaster’s start; “guide as you will, Nature is stronger.”
“You should wish to oblige—Nature, if you don’t believe in God.”
“I am surprised you don’t think God superior to your will,” answered Michael. “I assure you if I believed in God, I would do nothing at all, but sink into his bosom. Be reasonable; any action at all would be away from God. The wells of nature, love, ambition, understanding, sleep, gush in us as oil and water in the world and blood in the heart. I follow them lamely; it is I who do their bidding, in following my bent. Listen, is the world full of spirits, as the mind? I see no will or obedience in anything, only the abrupt, spontaneous will and generation; to a certain point water is water, then it is steam or ice, there is no slow change, as I used to think, it is abrupt, and it is mystery. How blunt our senses are, how many thick veils hang between us and the world. How will we ever refine our eyes to see atoms and our ears to hear the messages of ants? There is plenty that we miss; I feel my brain turning to think what we miss. When I see order I am amazed, it seems unnatural, I feel uneasy, as if I were looking at a thing artificially perfect like a china doll’s complexion. You know how astonished you are when you turn a kaleidoscope and see a perfect design fall together by chance. As if harlequins, a drunken mass of masks and ankles, fell tumbling together into a colour wheel. I wish to watch the ordinary movement of life and I see only a succession of dead, shed moments without interrelation: like a man walking through a hall of mirrors and seeing a thousand reflections of himself on every side, each one a shell of himself, and insubstantial. Time, tide, order, I cannot understand; I would go mad; I would rather believe in fairies.”
“It is this new country,” sighed the schoolmaster. “You have no notion of history; you began yesterday and you all think you are the first men. Doctrine, constitution, order, duty, religion, you have to find them out by long and droughty explorations in the spirit.”
“You pursue me; my mind is not strong. Leave me alone!” cried Michael furiously.
The headmaster turned back helplessly.
His mother, who had stayed away from church for years to please her husband, was now about forty-five and began to have vagaries. She read books of religious edification and spent all her household money on charitable fêtes and collections. A nosing priest found Mrs Baguenault in this state of mind and came to visit her every morning, to have tea, talk scandal and improve her chances of salvation: she had already participated in two Catholic fêtes, and caused a lot of talk in the district. Michael came home from school one day before lunch, because he was sick, and found the priest there. He looked at him: shallow blue eyes bright under thick banded lids, a long snout, small at the bridge and lobed at the point, a round helpless chin and face, but a lemony skin and sprouting reddish beard on a jaw stupidly prognathous like a foetus, and the low-placed mouth shut tight and as if strapped in by the pale lips. He was of medium height with medium shoulders, and a belly protruding already: taken with his sleepy, shut-in, absorbed face, this gave him a pregnant look. A woman, said Michael. He stood at the door studying the couple, who were sitting in the bay-window. His mother bent over some knitting she was doing for a fête; the priest was talking easily and uninterruptedly. One divined that he had been talking like that for an hour and would go on until lunch-time; he had an imperative note and ran on like a sewing-machine. His mother smiled, blushed, and laughed clearly like a young girl.
“And Michael,” said the priest; “so you think he is cut out to be a teacher?”
“I would like it so much,” cried the mother. “It is a learned profession, it is well paid and safe. He is a quiet sort of boy and would do better in a quiet profession. I would not like him to go into the city where the young men run round to races, poolrooms and all sorts of horrors.”
“And is he more spiritually minded?” said the priest. “If he would accept it, perhaps I could talk with him.”
Michael came into the room.
“Hullo, mother; I had a belly-ache and came home. It must have been your rissoles.”
“Michael! Father Bingham, this is Michael; you know him by sight. Father Bingham called in to ask me to do something for the fête,” she said hurriedly to Michael. Michael nodded, sat down on the window-seat, and said:
“No teaching for me. Imagine! Hang yourself on a pothook, run around brandishing a ruler over a lot of little fellers dirty as cockroaches and smelling of urine: no! You stand up in front. ‘Pi is a surd,’ and the whole class begins to laugh and shout, ‘Pi is absurd.’ ‘The first principle of economics is supply and demand,’ you say, but Brown is whispering, ‘Hey, Sniffles, what do you want for your dictionary of slang?’ The bright ones only look for a chance to catch you napping, to mystify you. What would I do if I found myself face to face with a kid who was really smart? Lie down and let him talk? But I’m paid for talking to him. Besides, no pedagogy for me, it’s too spiritual: the multiplication table is close to metaphysics: I’m going to be a counter-jumper.”
“Teaching is next to the work of God, almost as spiritual as religion,” said the priest.
“Spiritual? Look at the Mass, no spiritual elements there: wine, blood, bread, flesh, statue, God the son. Funny thing all religions turn round eating. In that, I must say, the monks used to be very religious; every supper was the last till the next. How do you prove it’s an extra holy day? By eating grass instead of flesh. How do you celebrate the rising of Jesus? By eating stuffed duck! Where did Peter get his money? Out of a fish. Where did the Virgin get her child? From a dove. It was called the spirit, but it was a dove. God is a spirit and has no passions, but if you say, God damn, he gets angry enough to roast your soul in real, red fire. He has no nose, but he likes incense; and no ears, but he likes prayers and psalm-singing. He is praised because he created physics and geography, because he made his prophets write down rules about what women should do during their periods, after child-bearing, and that there should be no love between sheep and goats, or something like that; I won’t mention it in full on account of mother here, but you’re a technician. Father, you know what I mean. And God likes virginity, but what meaning can virginity have to a spirit? And he prefers to be worshipped in church: but what can the Lord of the angels want with coloured glass and crochet lace? Where can you find me a single abstract idea in the whole of practised religion? or a single logical one that a modern working man wouldn’t demolish in two words, if he bothered about it? You can fuddle my poor Mumma,” finished Michael, getting up and sidling behind the priest’s chair, “but I assure you she’s your last conquest.”
The priest had a mean look, and on his lardy forehead were faint beads of sweat; his mouth was tighter than usual. Mrs Baguenault held her heart as if she thought she would faint.
“Michael, how could you!”
Michael laughed and went out of the room. His mother drew a few loud breaths and ran from the room; they heard her vomiting on the verandah. The priest came into the passage, said nothing for a minute, and then said with a serpentine motion of his neck, very quietly:
“Don’t think you’ve shocked me: you have only not considered one thing, which all your moderns neglect—Mystery. There is an element in life and in deity which surpasses all your reasoning, however logical it is, that is the Mysteries, the Symbols, the Miracles, the Ineffableness of Deity. What you see is only the surface; there is something underneath which you do not see. Do your men of science understand how thought acts on the muscles, how men can receive the notion of God if he does not exist, and how life starts? And as for your men of science, Faraday—”
“—prayed for rain. I know, thanks! I used to find those problems a poser when I was a kid: now I know you don’t approach them in that light.”
“It’s a matter of approach: you must have the grace of God, and that is a pure gift to be obtained by self-sacrifice, prayer, and because of the merits of Jesus Christ . . .”
Michael laughed outright.
“Mr Bingham, don’t you see that it’s all over with me? I’ll never believe in that hocus-pocus again. You’re a fisher of men, aren’t you? You ought to recognise an empty catch and take the day off to mend your nets when you see you’re wasting your time. You know you despise the women you convert, and that if your family had had the dough to put you into business, or give you a profession, you wouldn’t be trailing around in skirts.”
The priest turned his back. Michael heard his mother and the priest communing for a while, the priest brief, his mother apologising. He went back on tiptoe to hear what his mother was saying, ready to interrupt again rather than have her humiliate herself for him. In a low voice she was saying:
“Catherine ran away from home when she was fifteen, and now Michael is a rebel: my two eldest girls are such dear good girls. Do you think it is possible for such young people to be—sinful?”
“It’s easy and very common, unfortunately,” said the priest nastily. “As a mother, you are neglecting your duty.”
“I feel I am being punished myself,” said the woman.
“No doubt,” said the priest.
“It is about Michael,” said the woman. “He was born in, he was born out of, his father was not . . .”
The priest’s traitless face showed a shade of interest, malice, revenge and victory.
“Not here,” he said, “but if you wish to come to me this afternoon, at the church, in the chapel of St Joseph . . .”
“Ah, the bastard,” said Michael to himself, “he won’t get her: I’ll stop her.”
“Ah-ha, a bastard,” said the priest to himself; “I’ll get her, nothing will stop her.”
He got up with a satisfied air. She fumbled around in her dress, the woman, her neat hair slightly disordered, her eyes with their swollen tear-sacs, suffused. She looked older than she had a few minutes before. The priest full of spite and pride walked slowly down the garden path along the roses. “So that’s the way the land lies,” he said to himself. “Look at those roses, those French beans: very nice. So that’s how the husband got his touch of satire: well, foh, foh, it’s always the same. These meek dames and meek husbands, the devil gets into one or the other with great ease.” He looked at the roses with a vicious smile, as if he accused them for the soft effusion of their unreligious saps.
“Not bad,” said he.
Michael was joyful.
“Then the old orchid-king is not my papa,” said he to himself. “What a blessing! And Cath, too, the other sinner. But no, she may be my half-sister.”
He speculated about his father, but could not imagine who he might be. He looked at his mother with respect.
“Who would have thought that the old girl had it in her?”
Michael refused to return to the high school, but would give no reason, except to say that the principal was a dummy and he couldn’t stand the staff. He showed an unexpected resistance to his father’s command, carried himself with a lordly air as if the key of the family strongbox were in his possession, and loafed about the house.
It was a great spring for Michael: his courage was up. The sky was more purple in the evening than he ever remembered it before. He awakened early in the morning with the birds and insects shouting, or slept until midday and got through the day frowsily without his parents reproaching him. This false calm charmed and frightened him. The day when he must get a job came closer and closer, like the strip of dark blue wind-stirred water to the rowing-boat rowing in the calm. He got fatter, with a bit of colour in his cheeks, sang in his bath, although his voice was still weak, took up water-colour painting, fretsaw work, and went swimming in the river. Catherine came home for two months in the summer, tired out with her jobs. She had been working temporarily at fruit-packing on an orchard, at knitting by machine in a stocking-factory, and at dishwashing in a private kitchen, during the year. At home, she relaxed, played the piano, went out painting with Michael; in the bush put wreaths of clematis on her long black hair to pose for Michael, tried to get through the day without arguing with her mother, and ignored her father entirely. Michael informed her with pride that he did not know his real father. Catherine said, “Poor Mother, I don’t blame her, but I never knew she had the guts; I’ve misjudged her.” She began making discreet enquiries and presently told Michael that his father must have been the lonely bachelor, the astronomer and mathematician who had left Mr Baguenault a legacy.
“Go on,” said Michael. “The family owes all to me? I always felt I had a secret virtue. And your father?”
“I am legit.,” said Catherine.
After the vacation Michael went to a business college, but left in six months asserting that the course was a fraud and that he had already learned all their courses through. He went to a large soap-making firm in Balmain, as filing-clerk, and gradually learned the idiotic routine of the office and the obscure jargon used to dignify business letters in their baldness. The soap-making firm had a director of welfare and culture. The directors liked to see their employees reading the classics of economics written before 1840 and the classics of literature written up to 1902. Michael joined the debating and dramatic clubs, read Hamlet for the debate about Hamlet’s sanity, and the Pickwick Papers for the parody session of the club. He debated about equal pay for equal work, the effects of drunkenness, the relative influence of instinct and environment, and free trade and protection. But he was unsuccessful as a debater. He joined a physical culture class, and started to learn French and Esperanto, but dropped both. He took an interest in the white-slave and drug traffics, and in medicine, in venereal diseases. He bought handbooks on the care of dogs, home-plumbing, french polishing, wireless telegraphy, and the terms used in architecture. He collected old iron which he intended to sell to the junk man in order to pay for a bicycle, and stamps, with the hope of finding a Mauritius blue. After eighteen or twenty months he got a job in an advertising firm downtown and found he had a knack for it; his mysticism of the past aided him.
At eighteen Michael met Tom Withers, then twenty-four, at a smoke-concert of press lithographers, cartoonists, commercial artists and others. Withers was tall, round-shouldered, starved, with a large mouth and soft deep-set eyes behind pince-nez. He wore a good but unpressed suit, and was unshaved. He wore his hat almost all the time, concealing an early baldness. He smoked cheap cigarettes, wore a gold signet ring with a coronet in the seal, and took long, debile steps in old shoes down-at-heel. Except when he was speaking excitedly, or muttering in a friend’s ear over a drink, he sat back with the deathmask face of the overwrought and overworked. A soft moustache drooped round his red lips, his small teeth gleamed like pebbles in his red gums. Tom Withers dropped down by Michael this night, anxious to acquaint himself with the newcomer. He sat by him for hours, slightly fuddled, telling interminable and apparently inter-related histories from the Iliad, from Pietro Aretino, from Terence, Horace and Livy, recommended to Michael special editions in English and Latin, assured him he had a genius for the classics, recited a whole bibliography of obscene books of the most brilliant kind, told Michael all true art lay there, quoted recipes from the unexpurgated Arabian Nights and similes from the Kama-Sutras, revealed the secrets of exotic religions, secret sects, the obsessions of the Flagellantes, the monks of the Thebaïd, the habits of S. Simeon Stylites, and the private history of the Magdalen. Mixed with his erudition were common-room parodies of psalms, epigrams and limericks, all horribly obscene, and adventures, which he said were his own, of thunderstorms of quartz-pebbles containing gold, rivers blown skyhigh leaving the fish baked in baked mud-beds, human monsters hideous but brilliant in wits, and idiotic beauties seduced on roadsides, married women of the highest social class swimming with him by moonlight in a sand-bottomed river, and pearls of girls sleeping with him in the underbrush or in a cave lighted by phosphorescence. There was a night, he said, when he, Tom Withers, alone was abroad, the Aurora Australis shone and comets streaked the sky. He found an old tramp woman, took her to a Greek dive for food, found her to be an ancient actress, formerly a toast, in distress, and lived with her platonically for three weeks. He had spilled on the ground the milk of milkmaids returning from the cow-pastures, drunk lachryma Christi with the son of a noble Italian family exiled in Australia for unnatural loves. He knew a boy of the best stock who wore two golden armlets bearing spikes on the inside, so that his arms were always covered with blood, to mortify his flesh. He had met funerals at nightfall with lamps and native instruments in the islands, had lived with lepers, rowed nine hundred miles in an open boat to a coral atoll, and had run aground in a merchant-tub in the Solomon Islands. He knew the habits of the Ming dynasty and the authenticity of marks on ceramics. Talking of these things, the voice of Tom Withers flowed almost inaudibly on and on. Michael, astonished and decoyed, listened many hours on many days afterwards to the soft-dropping babble of this troubadour, and was convinced that he had met the most remarkable man in the city.
But sometimes Withers got into a high passion, began squealing in a female voice: he would not stand this and this, he would do anything to teach that bastard a lesson, they had better be careful, he knew too much about them. And the diarrhoea of defamation then flowed from his lips. He knew everyone’s weak points, who slept with another man’s wife, who was cuckold, who had an illegitimate child, who went to bawdy-houses, why the talents of each one would never get him on in life, what was the brand and catchword treacherously passed round among friends, summing up absent friends, what diseases each one had, how they had made their money, and why each man had married each woman. Nothing was too low for Withers to repeat. He chewed each arch remark, dipping his moustache in beer, chewing his tongue, like a boy chewing sugar-cane until it is dry; his brown eyes shone softly and his face was fully awakened from its mortuary repose.
Withers rarely got blind-drunk. He pretended there were a hundred stages of drunkenness and that he knew which degree would produce in him a certain state of mind. He liked to stop drinking when he was glowing within, light on his feet, and when his lips talked of themselves. He never told the same tale twice in the same way: something new, foolish, foul, extravagant, had always just occurred to him to embroider the theme.
He liked to backbite the successful, glorious, ambitious and proud, but his work was cruder with them; his real artistry was called forth in the backbiting of the mean and unfortunate. He suggested solutions of their personal problems in accordance with the most advanced social theories, knowing well that it was impossible for them to solve their problems. He would act the false comforter to these unfortunates, urge them to run away from their wives, disown their children, give all they had to the poor, join the Communist Party and forget personal troubles in a life of self-sacrifice, join the Catholic Church, join the Single Tax movement, drink themselves to death, take a mistress, murder a rich uncle, hold up a banker one dark night. He proffered these solutions with the utmost seriousness, and almost took himself seriously. He would have been pleased to help in any of these adventures. When he had irritated these friends in need, had poured into their ears a host of stories and examples, made them restless with desire and disappointment, given them a drink and tailed them home to be sure they crossed their thresholds with a dismal face he would go home and sleep softly. But he did not do it to do harm; he did it because his life-blood flowed from his tongue and he wished to have as many audiences of as many kinds in as many moods as he could find in a too-short life; and human nature was sluggish—he was obliged to goad it on. If a person were really sick, alone, or in danger of being gaoled Withers was always there, with his theories, his advice, a hot-water bottle, and an aspirin tablet. He fixed bandages, recommended sleeping-draughts and washed babies’ napkins with the equanimity of a trained nurse, all the time relating that one of his friends was sick in hospital with typhoid got through eating oysters, and a friend’s mistress had broken her leg while kneeling down to say the Lord’s Prayer; that another friend had shot her husband with a pearl-handled revolver and had only succeeded in removing a mole which had disfigured him for years on the side of the face; that a doctor he knew went to bed with all his women patients and made a fortune by abortions; that a friend of his in Medical School had just discovered a new cause of paralysis; and that the President of some South American republic would fall soon because he had general paresis. Then he would sit down to amuse the patient, tell him picaresque stories, broad jokes, and show him experiments in chemistry and physics; he could describe to him the nature of bacteria and discuss the principle of life. Strange Withers, womanly, corrupt, fantastic, sottish, shrewish, treacherous, faithful; a person to throw up his chances for a quixotic motive and to undermine the reputation of his nearest and dearest friend; a man to borrow fifty pounds for you from a usurer, if you needed it, and to sponge on you for five years, if you were in funds.
Withers had not always been on his uppers. Until the age of fifteen he had lived in expectation of a small legacy from an aunt, but the aunt had died poor. Cranky at this disappointment, he had knocked about from pillar to post, had been kept by a rich woman for four months in order to get to Italy and had there deserted her on the landing-stage to make his way by a hundred curious means to Germany and England. Yet he was a good workman; inside the walls of his printing-works he was as crazily methodical as a superannuated book-keeper: he was in a continual pet, was careful of his dignity, took a pleasure in scolding the boss, and saw that things were done to time. He was a tyrant for the minute details, and laid down the law. Yet he had no pride in his work, ran it down, never consorted with workmen, but with the boss, or friends outside, with artists and students, laughed at unionism and hated the Labour movement.
This pernickety man charmed Michael. Withers, taken with a new fancy, having no bosom friend at the moment, buttonholed Michael and started to run through his tricks with him. Withers liked fishing. Michael invited him to Fisherman’s Bay one Saturday, saying that he had relatives there, who would give them tea. On the ferry, Withers said that he knew two nice girls in Fisherman’s Bay.
“That’s yours: she’s just your meat,” he said, chuckling, and offered his notebook, in which Michael read:
“Mae Graham, 16, address, 14 Pound Street, blonde, handfed, dances, typiste, no mortgage.”
Other names appeared above and below, with different indications, and physical peculiarities were not spared.
“That’s the girl for you,” said Withers, enjoying Michael’s astonished examination of his notebook. Michael blushed to the roots of his hair.
“You’re pretty frank, aren’t you? What does that mean, ‘hand-fed, no mortgage’?”
“Handfed means she has doting parents and shows it,” said Withers; “and no mortgage means she isn’t engaged in heart or hand.”
A month after, Michael calculated that he had been in the Bay fourteen times on various excuses since that Saturday, had seen Mae only once, the day he had gone out with her and Withers, and had seen his relatives, the Baguenaults, thirteen times. Mae was always “engaged”.
One day Michael saw her walking with her boy, lanky, serious and deeply in love. Michael knew that they both went to an art class in the evenings: Mae even posed, as other students did, in drapery, at times. She was extremely sensual in face and body. Her face, large below the brow, with a full lower jawbone and strong round chin, caught the eye. Her hair was brassy, rolled on the nape of the neck, with curls at the roots. Her skin was most exceptionally white. She had a light-rose cheek, quite full, but on which appeared already a faint shade, the shade of fatigue and bad light in the office. Her eyes, sunken in the socket, but with globular eyelids, clear blue and liquid, were already ringed faintly. Her red painted lips, narrow but full and fleshy in the corners, shut tight over her regular white teeth. She had, in repose, the expression of a young woman languishing a little at the end of a passionate honeymoon: Withers called her “the odalisque”. When she laughed, as she often did, tormented her friends, or became eager over an outing, generously wept in the pictures, got excited over a history of the cruelty or heroism of love, her face had a very intense expression of enjoyment. She thrust her head forward, with her lips pouted and parted, as if she was trying to bite into a ripe fruit and suck it. She was plump but still small. She walked with a beautiful bounding step, having long and fine legs, and her round thighs moved under her dress freely. She did not move all in a piece like thick-set women, with their heavy basins and ungainly skirts; her silk dress fluttered like a veil on her. When left to herself, she had a half-smiling abstraction, like a sleeping child.
Withers watched the growth of his affections with a tender satiric pleasure, and tried to bewilder him by taking him out with other girls and by making him get drunk; but Michael came back from these parties wretched, sick with palpitations of the heart. He began to say to Withers, “Go without me. It’s not for me, I don’t like it. Find someone else.” Withers, who never discussed and never burdened his life with other people’s problems, let him go, and gradually gave up seeing him.
Michael’s father stood watching him from the door some mornings early as he cleaned his boots outside before going to work, frowning over his work with his thin dark cheeks compressed, answering briefly and crossly when they spoke to him. He turned into the wide hall where the mother sat waiting for breakfast, and said:
“He is crotchety, Michael, an unstable boy. Sometimes it turns out all right; sometimes they go completely nutty, like old Bassett. I heard the other day he married his housekeeper secretly some years before he died. You know what a pepper-pot he was. They led a cat-and-dog life and she tried to get a doctor to certify that he was not all there. You couldn’t expect a practical woman to put up with his tantrums. At any rate, he left her half his estate and she’s doing the genteel widow now in Leichhardt somewhere, going to whist parties and having people to tea on Sundays.”
“I didn’t know that he was married,” said Mrs Baguenault. She took an apron out of the linen drawer and tied it round her. “I’m going to cut some roses,” said she. “Do you want to come out with me, Ben?”
“All right.” He put out his hairy-backed hand and stroked her arm. She pretended not to notice and went into the kitchen to get the garden scissors. There she sat down on a chair and forgot about her husband waiting in the hall. Michael came in presently through the back-door with a cross face and a bluish face, due to insomnia, or a toothache, or a heart-attack: one never knew what; his works were all at fault.
“Michael,” she cried in such a tone that he went to her.
“What, Mother?”
“My baby, no one will ever love you and understand you like your mother: you know that, don’t you? There is a special reason, there is . . . why you are a little morbid. Tell Mother your troubles, she will understand.”
“Golly, Mother, cut it out,” said Michael. “Who told you I’m morbid? All chaps are morbid at my age; it’s my heart. Don’t notice me, that’s all I ask. And there’s nothing you can tell me I don’t know.” He looked at her expressionlessly and went out of the kitchen.
Foolish, hoping to awaken a gesture of love, some haphazard touch that would help her illusion along, that she was cherished, that he was grateful to her for having brought him into the world, for having accomplished her “mission”, for having given him suck, she said:
“Michael, Michael, baby, come here; why are you always so resentful? Why don’t you speak to your mother? It’s not kind. When you were a little boy, you promised to tell Mother everything all your life. You don’t know what a mother goes through, Mikey.”
“Certainly, I do,” said Michael, laughing in the doorway. “You gestated for nine months, you were in travail for eight hours, you had puerperal fever; I know, Mother.” He came back and smiled more kindly, as he looked down at the coiled grey hair and the soft wrinkled face, the eyes bleared with facile tears, the mouth drawn with a credulous smile. “And then I puked, yowled, got my teeth, had diarrhoea, scarlatina and convulsions; I had great promise and nothing was too good for me, and my sisters used to love me, I know. I’ve heard that tale somewhere.”
“You love your mother,” she said, with her obsession.
“Go on,” he cried, impatient. “You always want to be told you’re loved; you’re like all girls, you never hear it enough, you can’t let a man alone: but are you worth all that love? Let me hear what medals for virtue you won.”
She smiled to be teased by her tall and difficult son. But she could not stop babbling.
“You haven’t really changed, have you? You believe in God, don’t you, son? There’s nothing unmanly in that.”
“Don’t bother me with that, Mumma,” he replied with fresh irritation. “It’s enough that the black-skirts got one member of the family: you can go to heaven and save us all.”
“What do you believe, what, tell me?”
“I’m an atheist, have been for years: you know it. What’s the good of pretending? And it’s only because you’re old, Mother, that you’re religious yourself: it’s a sign of age.”
“I’m old, yes, but the old know what life is like.”
“You don’t bother Catherine with all this, why me? With your little-girl passion for men, I’m all you have in your head.”
“Catherine,” said the mother indifferently, “she doesn’t really mean it: when she meets the right man, she’ll settle down. The family, a husband, religion—they go together.”
“It’s enough to make me sick. You don’t know that in Catherine you have a magnificent daughter, a rebel, a gallant character.”
“A woman should be a woman. What’s the good of her being a rebel? Where did it get her? I hope God will give her a lesson and turn her back to us.”
“There’s no God, and you know it yourself, but you must amuse yourself with fairy-tales, like all old women. What a breed! it’s enough to make a man turn homosexual. Where’s any evidence of him? The whole blasted world is a museum of trouble, disappointment and malady, and you expect me to take an interest in a fairy-tale like that. You don’t make me respect you any more by running round with priests, Mother. I’m a man, I live with men who make buildings, newspapers, machines, designs for cloth. You housewives are absolutely ignorant of the world; you don’t know how stories are fabricated in newspapers or in scriptures, how the house is put together, how cloth is made or dyed. All you know is, religion, home, fashion, some painted mechanical creatures that come all made into the world. The one bit of creation you can and must all do, does itself unconsciously: you think the rest of men’s work is like that. Let us alone, Mother. I am thinking in terms of reality, the only ones I know. I suffer; Catherine, poor girl, suffers, and fights; you too. God didn’t help you through your labour-pains. That is real, realler than the fantasies of a dreaming God. If he were present, as you say, he would know the degree of misery in a household, the pain of drowning in a fog, firedamp in a mine, cancer, the degree of pain even in a poor creature like me, for instance: all too heady for the thin vessels we are. Are we to be damned for such cruel potions and purges put by him in a phial too weak to hold them? We burst in pieces on the floor. God, anything we can seize here on earth is too little to recompense us for what we suffer.”
He put his hand to his forehead, turned about, and rushed out of the room. His mother sat staring at the floor, nodding her head to herself and moving her lips. Her husband came to the door:
“Mary? And the roses?”
“Never mind now.”
“Michael’s gone without any breakfast.”
“Let him be; let him be. Boys get brainstorms.” But she continually repeated to herself, “He’s like that Bassett: that crazy Bassett. I knew Bassett was undependable: imagine marrying a housekeeper.”
Later she said to the father:
“Ben, I think Michael must be in love: I never thought of it before.”
In the evening the father took Michael out for a walk to find orchids and to talk with him privately.
“Be simple,” said Mr Baguenault. “Don’t get drunk with liquor, or with your wits, or adolescent sufferings. After all, they’re not very real, compared with true trials. It’s called the age of storm and stress, but maturity is for a man; then he has unheard-of troubles, mostly financial: he has to face bankruptcy and blackmail. If you want to know how I have got over many troubles, it is through loving Nature. My orchids have saved me from thinking over human things too deeply. It doesn’t do. Nature is free, you can love her as you might love a girl. It is the same thing, it is to love her as she really is, not a painted doll, not a planted park, but scarred with storms and bushfires, diseases and nests of white-ants, blasted by lightning, dried by the sun: as you love a girl although she has freckles, a turned-up nose and spindly legs and is out of drawing in a bathing-suit.”
He was silent. He continued:
“You can be absorbed in Nature, as—as in the sea, as if you melted into the sea and were diffused through the oceans of the earth. There is peace when her mysteries are an open book to you; in her inmost recesses she has perfect peace, even for the most fevered.”
Michael bit his lip and said nothing; but in the bush behind the house, when he had left his father, he thought over the old man’s words, and poking a stick into the soil thoughtfully, he said aloud:
“The old fellow has some experience: perhaps there is peace here.”
He looked around. A tall tree, whose topmost tips were now yellow in the setting sun, waved delicately against the pale high sky. Michael lifted his stick to the yellowed leaves, smiling.
“Only teach me to believe that, and I would throw myself on your breast. In the ocean, to melt. But the ocean flows and ebbs twice a day. He sees the sky with a great pearl in her bosom and he follows her round the earth, and if I were dissolved there, I would only circle the earth for ever, salt with desire; I would sleep not more than he. And at night I used to hear long conversations and much lamenting among the waves on the seashore, when the moon was away. And here at night in the bush is interminable bickering and soughing. Then I am not alone with my tears and restlessness and there is no peace.”
The next Sunday he went to church with his mother, to please her. The young visiting priest said:
“Should you not in all functions desire only to serve God the master and return to God the fountain? The minerals do not desire to live as individuals, they stay in their colonies, sorts and orders, and accomplish their destinies, part of the common rock, although they are more beautiful than the rock. Their hidden virtues do not require the sun. There are no mineral Peer Gynts. They only wish to come to the end of their foreordained cycle, to be dissolved, to crumble and enter the earth and be sucked into the roots of plants and enter the higher life of the vegetable kingdom and grow upwards towards the sun in green spires. The plants do not desire to vegetate; there is intense life among them, even though their existence is usually brief. They are humble, ignorant, have no voice, yet look how they are adorned when they are ripe. They put on roots, leaves, flowers, seeds, and fall to dust; millions upon millions richer than eye has seen in the jungles and wastes. They do not rebel, they accomplish their predestined cycle: but the Lord has them in his hand. And if they were sentient and understood what might be their destiny even on earth, would they not give themselves up the more gladly into the maw of animals and become living flesh and blood, to see, feel, hear, have affections, and praise God? Animals would certainly die joyfully if they knew they were to become part of man, if they could understand the higher sense they would enjoy: reason, sacred love, poetry, music, and if they could have any glimmering of the Soul they would inherit. They do not know it. They ruminate in the fields and the Lord accepts their unconscious sacrifice and works out their higher destiny himself. We should take them for a model, these humble creatures, and put ourselves into his hands without revolt. He will sacrifice us for a higher end. And what is that end? We have understanding, small though it is, we know that he will accept the sacrifice of our life, a poor thing, the life of the flesh, at best, to make us one with him, even as all those lower creatures came up to become part of us. What peace and what joy: to stay in one’s place and yet be part of the aspiring universe. What glorious functions, exceeding our understanding, will man not perform, and what divine senses not enjoy, when the final sacrifice is over, his personal will is annihilated to be with God on earth, to be with God in Paradise, at the dissolution of the flesh.”
“I see: we eat beef and God eats us,” whispered Michael. “The lad yonder does not suffer from indigestion. He must have been a cowherd in old Ireland and worked out the simple mysteries of his faith in the fields, chewing the cud.”
“Don’t come with me, if you can’t feel more reverent,” said his mother.
“Thank God, then I won’t,” cried Michael: and he never did again, but went out each week-end with Catherine in the bush, or to resorts along the coast. They walked often together arm-in-arm, in the evenings, along the red roads that wound through the bush, smelling the young clematis and singing sea-chanties in their weak and tuneless voices. They caught frilled lizards, green tree-snakes and the brown “double-drummer” cicadas that sing deafeningly in the hand. They pondered over mysterious graves, deserted orchards and closed huts, and often went into some rough shelter at night and slept easily on dried bracken or hay. But Catherine grew restless after two months and sang no more. She turned on her bed at night, and hardly replied to Michael’s musings. Presently she said:
“I must go back. I must go into the city and work.”
She left him in a town in the mountains and took the train back. When he returned home he looked for her up and down the town, and at last, through the direction of a friend, located her in a miserable lodging where she had nothing but a blanket on a wire mattress. She wore her oldest dress, torn and faded, and looked at Michael when he entered as if she scarcely recognised him. Never had he seen her more like a witch or beggar-woman.
“You are starving,” he cried, almost weeping, terrified.
“I am earning my living,” she replied with scorn.
“At what?”
She smiled before replying and raised to him one of her old bright dominating looks.
“You wouldn’t guess. I am a model for an art-class, old Mr Benson’s. He knows Father, but I have not let on that I know Father.”
Michael paled a little, but said mildly:
“Do you do—all sorts of poses?”
She laughed extravagantly and tapped her foot.
“Yes, you think I’m too skinny: that’s what makes me picturesque. Look, one of the students admires me, my type: he gave me the finished picture. It’s too bad to go for the Prix de Rome, in any case, so it’s no generosity.”
She took a piece of sacking off a box in one corner of the room, and stood up an oil-painting on its edge. She looked at it with pride. In it she appeared as a worn, crazy, young gypsy.
“They said I am the perfect gypsy,” she said contentedly. It was crude and made Catherine seem bold and coarse.
“It’s very good,” he said faintly.
She looked at him with malice.
“And here’s another, the latest.”
She took out a sheet of Michallet paper with a drawing on it in charcoal.
“The young drawing-master is preparing an exhibition of his own: I posed for him privately.”
Her vanity was intense. The drawing was labelled, “Fished up”, and showed an emaciated naked woman lying dead on the quays, while a curious crowd with caricature faces hung over it and a policeman stood by.
Michael looked at his sister with shame. She laughed again.
“Naturally he gave me that because it’s not going in the exhibition.”
Michael went and sat on her bed, feeling his beating heart with his hand. Presently he got up, held on to the foot of the bed, trembling violently, and said:
“Catherine, Catherine, come out of all this misery. You are unhappy at home. I’ll work for you; we’ll get a little room and I’ll keep you until you feel ready to do steady work; all my life, if it’s necessary.”
She slapped the two pictures down on the box and turned round with a furious face, controlled herself, stared at him and laughed loudly.
“You mean well, but you’re a fearful weakling, Michael. You don’t realise I want to be alone so I can beat my head against the wall just when I want to. Keep me!”
She laughed loudly again, strode across the floor, opened the door and pushed Michael out on to the landing.
“Good-bye, old thing, thanks. I’ll be better soon.” She slammed the door. Michael hesitated for a long time on the landing, but in the end went very slowly down the bare stairs, listening at each step. He did not sleep all night.