‘The dead,’ I said, wearily. ‘Their presence.’
‘And God? No?’
‘So faintly,’ I said, ‘like always. All guesses—guesses and longings.’
‘With me,’ he said, ‘it’s strength, it’s certainty. And joy. I think that’s the word for it.’
And indeed joy shone out of him, when I looked up.
‘I’ve never meddled,’ I said, ‘with the convictions of people round me.’
‘How could you?’ he asked, cruelly. ‘You’ve been empty, all your life. You haven’t any convictions. Only guesses.’
To myself I said: ‘I thought this day would never come.’
‘What a respectable shack from the outside,’ he said, scorning me. ‘And inside all empty, all derelict, like your gaol. The Law of Tourmaline. Weren’t you ever anything more than this? Solid walls—empty inside? And in the dead of night a few guesses, a few longings, maybe, depending on what you had for supper.’
‘What makes you so hard?’ I burst out. ‘This isn’t the way we are in Tourmaline.’
‘Tourmaline looks like it,’ he said.
‘I wish you’d never come,’ I said, sincerely.
‘Listen,’ he said, bending over the table. ‘There’s work for you.’
I shook my head, dumbly. Ah, my age, my age is incalculable, my age is to be measured in terms of annual rings or sedimentary rocks, or by the changing atoms of unstable elements from which, aeons ago, I was created. And he had come to torment me.
‘What Tourmaline is now,’ he said, ‘is what you made it. By your emptiness.’
‘I had nothing to do,’ I protested, ‘with what happened out there—with those terrible things. They were others—all done by others——’
‘And yet you were the Law here.’
‘Someone had to be.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Because of the tradition—the esprit de corps——’
‘You make me want to herk,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing personal in that.’
I begged him, trembling a little: ‘Come to the point.’
And he said, leaning over me: ‘I’ve come to fill your emptiness.’
‘Ah, with what?’ I asked. ‘I can read holy books too.’
‘You’re innocent,’ he said, smiling.
‘Then I can enter the kingdom of heaven.’
‘I’ve come,’ he said, ‘to tell you your duty. This is a duty you won’t find in any of your old codes and manuals. And for the first time you’ll be in touch with headquarters. These are no guesses now. This is certainty.’
With great tiredness I asked him: ‘What is my duty?’
‘You’re to become a spring,’ he said, ‘an irrigation channel, if you like, to revive Tourmaline. This is what you should have been always; but you were empty as well as hollow, a poor shabby toy model of the Law. I’m here to wake you up, to tell you what you mean. You’re to follow me.’
‘What is the water,’ I asked (all bearings lost), ‘that’s supposed to flow through me to Tourmaline?’
‘Real water,’ he said, ‘in the ground. And rain as well. And the spirit of God, in and above all that. The spirit that works through me. It speaks through me now; and it’ll work through my hands and my rod when I bring the water from the ground. But you’re to become my follower, and through you I’m to channel the spirit to everyone. You’re to become the Law again, more truly than you ever were. But I’m to have the real dominion.’
A voice like an incantation; a shaman’s voice.
‘“You are to”,’ I quoted him. ‘“I am to”. These are God’s words, I suppose?’
But he ignored my feeble defiance; indeed, had hardly listened.
He stood up, dismissing me. ‘You’re to come to the church,’ he said, ‘when the bell rings.’
‘When?’ I asked, in sudden unease. ‘When?’
But he had gone away, without answering, stepping out into the light that outlined his head with gold and the edges of his clothes with icy blue.
I went to the door and looked after him. Gazed after him, half-doubting his reality.
‘When that bell ring,’ Charlie Yandana said, from the bench by the door, ‘you come.’
‘Why should I listen to him?’ I asked; not of Charlie only, but of everything I could see, the sky, the dead tree, the gate.
‘You better,’ said Charlie.
(Who before has dared to menace me?)
‘You better.’
The diviner went away down the road, his lean blue body a little stooped, like a horseman, and his gait slow, till he came to the store.
Burned sticks still lay on the ground around the war memorial. Dust was heaping on the doorsills of the hotel.
He went up the wooden step into the store, where Tom was sitting in contemplation.
Tom turned his head and looked at him; not smiling, not luminous, but cold and blank, a dead sun.
‘You can guess why I’ve come,’ said the diviner.
‘Yes,’ said Tom.
‘Will you do what I say?’
‘No,’ said Tom.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t happen to share your delusion.’
‘You’ll do nothing for Tourmaline?’
‘For Tourmaline, yes. Not for you.’
‘Then you’ll be an enemy,’ said the diviner, softly.
‘It’ll be an honour,’ said Tom.
‘Why are you against me?’
‘Because you’re dangerous. You’re wrong. And it’ll all begin again, all those terrible things.’
‘If you speak against me, no one will believe you.’
‘I’ve realized that.’
‘Will you, then? Speak against me?’
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘I won’t do anything. The seed you’re planting will grow and poison the air for a while; but I’ll see it out, maybe.’
‘So you’ll come to the church?’ the diviner said. ‘For the sake of peace?’
‘For the sake of peace,’ said Tom; and he seemed as serene as ever. But all the light had gone out of him; a dead sun.
The sun burned to ashes behind the black church. I sat for half an hour in the blue light; too languid, and at the same time too unquiet, to get up and light the lamp. But one must eat, even when without appetite, and the time came to prepare myself a meal of some kind, to sit down at the kitchen table, in the yellow glow, and stoke the poor old machine, and wait.
There was now and again a movement in shadows outside the window, and on the church hill, under the turquoise sky, occasional flashes, like lightning.
Then the bell began. Not as it is when the wind is up, but clear and purposeful, the way it has not sounded since I was a young man; beautiful and arrogant and summoning.
And the moving shadow outside, which had been Charlie Yandana, came up the step to the kitchen door and stood there watching me, all dark and shining.
‘So I must come?’ I said, facing him across the lamp.
‘Yair,’ he said, with two yellow lamps in his eyes.
I stood up, and bent over the smoked glass and blew out the flame. We were left with nothing but the light of the sky.
‘Come on,’ he said, turning and going down the step again. And I, like a tired dog, trailed after him, past my pale prison, and along the dim path that led up the hill to the church; from which came a red glow which was not sunset, but something more intermittent.
He walked too fast for me, and I called to him to slow down.
‘Sorry,’ he said, waiting. ‘You old man. I forgetting.’
I caught him up, and looked at him, in the blue, blue light, bewildered by his intensity, his elation.
‘What is it, Charlie?’ I asked him. ‘What can he mean to you, to make you so excited?’
His head was raised to the sky, to the black skeleton of the bell tower against it.
‘He like Mongga,’ he said, so quietly. ‘I think that’s who he is.’
‘Mongga?’ I tried
to remember. ‘Who is Mongga?’
‘Mongga come from the west,’ he said, ‘and go through all this country. This his country, they reckon, and we Mongga’s people—the people in the camp.’
‘And what did he do?’
‘He go from one place to another. He make a rock in one place, he make a hill in another place, or a cave, or something. Some places he make waterhole. At last he get very tired, and he think: ‘I like to die now.’ So he go deep down into the ground and he never come back again; and the water come rushing out of that hole he make when he go down in the ground, and that water make Lake Tourmaline. He make baby, too, spirit of children, in the waterholes and Lake Tourmaline and some places. He make everything for us, Mongga. But mostly water.’
‘And he is Mongga,’ I said, softly.
‘I reckon,’ Charlie said. But he said it rather curtly, as if this were a private matter that I could not and should not understand.
As the path grew steeper I fell behind, and he looked back impatiently. The church was hidden now by the angle of the hillside. The glow against the sky grew redder.
‘What is it?’ I asked him, panting a little, and waving my hand.
‘Fire,’ he said. And as he reached the top of the path he was suddenly all aglow with it. ‘Look,’ he called back. ‘Here.’
I reached his side. The bell tolled on and on, louder with every step I took. In front of the church a great bonfire was burning, lighting up the whole hill, so that the flowers of the oleander smouldered with it, and the stone of the church glowed peach-coloured and warm. The door was open, and all the interior bright with the blaze. I saw that the pews had been removed and were standing outside, looking into the church, with the fire between them and the doorway.
I walked in a daze, seeing the skin of my arms grow red in the flamelight.
Dark figures were moving. Nearly everyone was there. I walked after Charlie, speaking to no one, greeted by no one, through the red light and into the church, the altar of which was bowered in green leaves, among which oleander flowers made occasional startling firebursts of scarlet. There was also (produced from God knows where) one of those statuettes of the Virgin in mouth-watering marzipan. The stone floor was clean swept. Silent people, white and coloured, were waiting there. I saw Byrne below the altar, with his guitar, and Deborah sitting against a wall, and Rock and Jack Speed, and in fact almost everyone: only the diviner and the Springs were missing.
‘Sit down,’ Charlie said, in a low voice. So I sat myself on the floor beside Deborah, who did not look at me, while he went to join Byrne.
All the while the bell went on clanging and clanging, till a pulse in my brain began to echo it.
I looked round, and saw that Tom and Mary had come, and were waiting in the shadow just inside the door.
Merging with the beat of the bell came chords of Byrne’s guitar; at first very soft, but increasing in volume as time went on.
Then muted voices began to sing; so quiet, when they started, that I could not tell whose they were. But the song grew, and I saw that it was the camp people who were singing, led by Charlie and by old Gloria, and it was some kind of native lament, becoming louder and more plangent as, one by one, others joined in. Beside me, Deborah, to my surprise, took up the chant, singing no words, but singing, nevertheless, with force and emotion.
I wondered where the diviner could be. But the atmosphere was so strange and tense that to turn my head again and look for him would have seemed irreverent.
The bell pounded, pounded, pounded. It was intolerable. The singing grew louder, and more emotional. People began to clap, in corroboree fashion, in time to the crash of the bell and the great shattering chords of the guitar.
Byrne was crying. Deborah was crying. Charlie’s head was back, and his smooth jarrah throat was swollen with singing.
I put my hands to my eyes. The bell tortured me, the guitar and the clapping and the throbbing voices tortured me. Everyone was singing. The noise was wild and tremendous.
I raised my head, and looked up, through the damaged roof, at the cold white stars. What are we doing, I thought; here, sweating together, in this small space, shouting together, shouting no words? What should this mean?
I looked down, from the height of the stars, and saw us united. All Tourmaline, all together; elbow by elbow, cheek by jowl, singing as one, shouting and weeping as one, praising God, beseeching God, wordless, passionate. I felt the power of our unity rise towards the stars like waves of heat from hot rock.
I began to sing, also, clapping my hands. I began to feel my oneness with them; with Deborah, on one side of me, with Rock, on the other. The strength of my love for them, for Deborah, for Rock, swelled my throat. Like them, I began to cry, I began to weep for sheer love, singing no words, singing of my passion. Love choked me: for Deborah, for Rock, for the light of the fire and the cold stars, for Byrne, for Charlie, for the clanging bell, for Tourmaline.
That was what he, the diviner, had done for us. There was never before this strength of unity, this power, this tremendous power. What was said, year after year, at the obelisk, on the day of the dead—what was said and felt there was only a shadow of this. It was he, it was our faith in him (faith which I, astoundingly, now found myself to share) that bound us, in love and passion, together.
Through my tears I saw the white stars. They too were singing. My brothers.
And yet, united as we were, we had never been so alone. Each on his small island, crying to be with the others, to be whole. The bell and the guitar and the meandering voices could not effect that reunion. There remained some act to be done, some act; and what could it be? Great pain, to be in love, and powerless.
I saw Charlie Yandana come to his feet, and in his hand I saw the bugle, brightly polished, gleaming in the red light. He stood before the altar, and brought up his arm, and raised his head, and his throat under the glittering bell was dark and shining. I saw his throat move. And the far forlorn call of the bugle broke out, widening the world, and the stars that had been so close swam away from us, and we sensed again the immensity of space, traced by frail emanations of our unity like radio waves.
The singing stopped, and the guitar. Only the bell went on, clanging and clanging. And heads began to turn, and mine among them, towards the doorway, where the black silhouette of the diviner stood, in a nimbus of fiery gold.
He walked on, where the aisle had been, through the breaking waves of our need and adoration. He turned at the altar, and the light washed over him, blue and golden. There was so much hope in the look of him.
I thought I should cry out, waiting for his voice.
He was not even looking at us; he was gazing back through the door, into the fire. And when he spoke at last, through the tolling bell, his voice was remote from us, though clear. ‘God is very near,’ he said. That was all.
There was a sort of sigh, a sort of cry, that our need wrung from us. Then the guitar began again, and a loud lingering call broke from the bugle, behind him. He started to move away, with his eyes on the fire. But our need would not let him go, there was suddenly a surge of bodies, of outstretched arms, touching him, embracing him, with kisses and tears; all of which he accepted unmoved, as if in a half-trance.
‘He Mongga!’ Charlie cried out, from the altar. And from everywhere murmurs and shouts came. ‘Mongga! Mongga!’ And an old strained voice in tears said: ‘He is Christ.’ These vaguely familiar tones I recognized (oh God) as mine.
He went on, his wake of worshippers behind him. I was among them. Who was not? Only Tom and Mary, in the shadow beside the door. I noticed, with half my mind, that Mary was afraid, and Tom sombre, extinguished, like a dead sun.
Outside, under the cold stars, between the oleander and the fire, the diviner paused and turned back. The bell stopped, and Gentle Jesus Yandana, who had been pulling it, came out exhausted from the wooden tower. An enormous silence took hold of the planet.
‘Go home now,’ the diviner said. ‘Don’
t follow me.’ And he went away, losing all his light; head down, watching the faint track that led to his hut.
And we, deserted by him on the blazing hill—we found no anticlimax in this, that was the strange part. He was the focus, the awakener of all this feeling, but not its source. Nothing was left unfulfilled, nothing was the less for his going. Only, it hung in suspension for the time, it waited. The soul of Tourmaline, tingling and yearning; whispering: A beginning.
Below lay the township, with not a glimmer in it; only the pale shapes of its roofs in the starlight to show that it was still there. Lost, it looked, lying there, at the centre of the dark universe.
There we descended. Each alone, more alone than ever; but united too, as never before, solitary and united, like plants that propagate themselves from the same root, growing apart, but sharing always the same sap, the same food. He was the root and the juice of all of us; he, striding home at that moment, on the narrow dark path between abandoned shafts.
THIRTEEN
There was never, since I was young, such a morning as followed; never a breeze so cool, hissing through the stiff leaves of myall, or earth of so tender a colour. At my door, opening my lungs to the renewed air, a mad thought came to me: that the weather was changing.
I crossed the road and pushed at the gate in the garden fence. I think that for a moment I expected to find a transformation inside, great rectangles and trellises of vivid green; but it was as sad as ever, as drab and dusty, and the high fence kept off the inspiring breeze. Even so, the exaltation of the morning did not leave me; and Rock and Jack Speed, who were standing inside, were in the same frame of mind as I.
‘Ah, what a day,’ I said, pushing the gate, which scraped along the ground. ‘I hope I die on a morning like this.’
‘Why?’ asked Jack, grinning. ‘You want to spoil it for us?’
He has the kindest heart.
‘I want to die happy,’ I said. ‘It might be important.’
‘And hopeful,’ Rock said. ‘Well, you can’t be happy without that, I guess.’
‘I can,’ Jack said. ‘I have been.’
‘So have I,’ I said; thinking back, so many years, to a time when I was in love and not loved in return, and what joy there can be in an accidental touching of hands, or in the lines of a face turned away. Hope did not enter into that. ‘But it takes resignation.’
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