“What is love? It is the pest in a city: there is no sleep at night, but tolling of bells; the ears do not hear, but they start; the eyes see, but ghosts rage; the body does not feel, but the earth burns and freezes. One is in love with a monster, a creature too much like an angel, too cruel, too feeble, too intimate and too powerful to be human. To love you must dissociate yourself from humanity, as with all great passions. But why should I say all? There is only one.”
His friends were timorously silent, shocked even. Only Marion and Fulke sat tranquilly reflective, side by side. He continued:
“I ask myself why I rage, though, and why that which is so sweet to many I should feel so bitter: and in the end I know that I am despairing because no flesh nor word, and in no common hour, not my friend himself can enjoy with me the beauty he makes my mind imagine. Alone in his depths, you wander like a prospector in a canyon, looking for gold and rock-crystals.
“What is as unfathomable as a simple man? And a man with whom one lives daily is daily fecundated and grows, a Hartz monster towering over life, distorted through vapours and tears, enormous as on rising mountain clouds, infinitely varied, a figure for every hour of our life, like the shadow on a sundial, a thousand lifetimes in one. The puerile philanderer, Don Juan is a schoolboy’s dream: give me fidelity and the endless mystery of monogamy.
“Beautiful is the head of love glancing upwards with the moods of years, dark with yet liquid desires, as the mountain top glows in the night, austere with moderated passions, tender with fidelity, pallid with disappointed ambitions, sorrowful for some passing reason I do not know, as I do not know why children and peasants sing sad lays when they are alone in the grass.”
The hearts of the little circle were shaken. They looked at Blount, flushed, some with tears, some toying with the buttons of their shoes and coats. At last, Catherine Baguenault, who was there, said in a trembling voice:
“And does my brother Michael seem like that to you?”
‘‘That is the song of any lover!” responded Blount drily.
“The oddest thing I ever heard in my life,” said Milt Dean.
“But touching,” added the woman.
“Perhaps there is more in Michael than you see on the surface,” said one dubiously.
“There is more in Kol Blount than any of us dreamed. If he could be cured, we would see a miraculous birth,” cried Catherine.
3
A hot morning in Fisherman’s Bay,
We find four of our heroes at work in a devil’s kitchen where
the word is made bread.
ON A SPRING morning in September Joseph Baguenault came down to breakfast late and found his mother already seated near the window, wearing her red shawl. The crickets trilled in the dewy grass and there was a smell of new perspiration in the room. Joseph kissed her dry cheek: her eyes were full and light.
“Did you sleep well, son?”
“Yes, after I got to sleep, but it was so wild when I got in that I lay awake listening to the house creaking. I did not get in till after eleven from college, because the ferry was late. They broke two ropes trying to tie up at Nielsen Park, with the swell that came from George’s Head. And then the window blew in, in the attic, and I had to put a board over it before I finally got to sleep. Though, you know, I like a wind late at night, when the tide is up and everyone is at home. You feel that something strange is going on.”
“I thought I heard you call out once?”
“No, Mother.”
“I was sure you called. It must have been a dream. I was worried—I thought you were spending the evening with your cousin Michael. He has such strange friends—I don’t think he quite realises what they are. He has a good heart, and since he came home with shell-shock, or whatever it was, he has not been quite the same. Poor boys, I saw only yesterday in the paper, where a shell-shocked soldier killed his wife and two little children. Terrible, terrible, and he had been given a farm by the government, too. It is terrible. I did hope, Joseph, at the beginning, that you would influence Michael; he used to be fond of you. Poor boy—funny, you know, you’re boys to me still, even though poor Michael’s thirty-two and you twenty-one . . .”
“Twenty-two.”
“. . . but now I only think of you. I am too old to worry about others. I think, my baby is not home, and in such a storm! Anything may have happened to him. Well, at last the storm is gone.”
“Time enough—nice spring weather! But, by the sound in the cove, it will come back.”
“Will you say grace, my dear? I have not had my tea yet.” The tea steamed in the sun and skin came over the surface. Joseph said grace, and eyes were shut. He finished: Mrs Baguenault filled her mouth with the steaming tea—a rude pleasure; her eyes got moist, her lips red, her gullet was burned and rejoiced. The breakfast clatter began like a chorus of crickets. Mr Baguenault came in in an apron and laid his boots and a blacking-brush on a chair. The mother discoursed on an infinity of local matters, with the preoccupation of housewives with their five senses.
“I heard yesterday—the radio is so loud—margarine not butter—mine taste better—I said. Where is the smell coming from?—that cheap eau-de-cologne—I saw her hair had been peroxided—you could write your name in the dust—all real silk,” and the sixth, “I had an intuition her husband . . .” The father read the leading article in the Telegraph, through his silver rimmed glasses, but Joseph listened to his mother’s conversation with interest. She was a plain woman. Hearing her speak, the tongue clung to the palate and the throat whirred, one’s own ideas dried up, in sympathy. That was the effect of a dull youth, a devout life, an intelligence developed between smoky kitchenwalls, a slow remastication of ancient events to amuse the long tediums. Sixty years of poverty had extinguished that fountain of life which lives in infant flesh and ejects experiment and improvisation out of the mouth. The cheap print which hung over the piano showing Jesus with his sacred heart, in three colours out of register, blood, thorns, a nightgown, worn hands and tears, represented her own life as she knew it and as she was not ashamed to record it. Then, she went to church to know what was going on in the world, to know what view to take, as people used to go to panoramas, bad paintings artificially lighted in a little round hall, to find out what the country was like that lay about them. She saw the workaday world through a confessional grille, as a weevil through the hole he has gnawed in a nut. It might have opened to the thrust, that grille, if she had had the will, or if her husband had had the patience to teach her; but he had not, he thought too little of her brains.
Within, her heart was a stuffed chasuble continually repeating “Om, Om, with censers swinging and the tin cash-box clinking, making a sort of perpetual low mass in her soul—if she had a soul; but it was no soul, it was a dried leaf. It had once fluttered on the tree, but that was in spring; now it was winter. Daily events and catastrophes treading on each other’s heels over that dried leaf made a faint crepitation and rustling, like a handkerchief wet with tears slipping into a high calico bosom, the prayer of the sacerdotal minister muttering smoke and incantations, the rustle of the assembly crossing itself and jingling rosaries at the name of the Father, or the slow beating of old sleepless blood on the pillow at night. Who can explain how superstition, proverbs, prejudices lay together, taking the place of sense in this simple old head? The face was wrinkled, blackened by age in the folds, but it hung together well, for the body was firmly moulded on the pattern of peasant ancestors bred to survive starvation, fireless winters and the scratching for crops in Irish tenant farms. But her pock-marked face folded most kindly when Joseph ate at table. The mother’s liquid eyes saw that his hair was awry, his tie badly knotted. Her hand, already withered with thousands of household and maternal labours, stretched for the clothes-brush to rub the fluff from his ravelling sleeve. She moved towards Joseph with a fuller motion and she was more graceful with him, she had a faint charm, speaking to him, because he also was dried up and gnarled, but that much before his t
ime. He was the solitary woody pear that sprouted late on the old tree, but he was the very seed of that tree. And she looks at him sentimentally, her blue eyes filmy. Heavens, he thought, comparing her and himself, how can so small a pear carry so grand a universe of suffering in its heart? The reason is, the pear had a thousand, thousand ancestors. In Joseph some of those ancestors, seed of other trees, appeared somewhat different, half-blotted out, by a freak of generation. He had musical undertones in his voice, a pale skin, unbroken patience. But he was dwarfed and seemed to scramble along the street even when he walked straight ahead; and his face was as narrow and feebly-lighted as the evening window of their weatherboard cottage.
Joseph looked at the clock, pushed his chair aside, and put on his hat. His father spoke for the first time. “I’m not going in till eleven-thirty; Simpson’s taking the morning shift. It’s Wednesday, school half-holiday; that means there’ll be students all over the Art Gallery this afternoon. Personally, I prefer it to sitting all the week, without seeing a fly, not a fly, but Simpson don’t like them. He says they clutter up the place. I said to him, They’re students, it’s for them. It makes no difference, he said, they clutter up the place; it’s nice when it’s quiet. So on Wednesdays I’ve arranged to take the afternoons.”
“Well, good-bye,” said Joseph.
“Jo—your uncle Baguenault wrote to me this morning about your cousin Michael. Because you go out with him, your uncle reckons we see more of him than his own home. At any rate, he wants to know if any of your friends can get him into journalism, or as a proof-reader. He wants something quiet, because Michael can’t stand the rough-and-tumble. Do you want a proof-reader or something?”
“No, I told you before, we don’t want anyone, we’re practically overstaffed, and Baguenault wouldn’t thank you for getting Michael into a place like ours. Besides, he’s too old to begin in our game: and they’ve got lots in all the places to do proof-reading, doctors of philosophy, M.B.’s, engineers, lots without a job. A journalist—I don’t know if he’s got the style. At any rate, he knows more journalists than I do. The Folliots.”
“Not a rag like their sheet—a paper like the Telegraph or Smith’s. Your uncle’s an alderman, don’t forget. In any case, you should try to get Michael away from that set of trouble-makers, it’ll get him nowhere, and your uncle blames you. He says, Jo takes him into a set of rascally working-men, without home or religion, foreigners, and even Communists, from what I hear. Now, Jo, I don’t like your uncle to have any basis for saying that, however wrong-headed he may be. I know it’s not true, myself. You had better give up seeing Michael.”
“I don’t see him. And if I did—he’s ten years older than me, and he’s seen plenty more than me: it’s rot. But I’ll see if I can find out where he’s staying if they’re anxious. Though why his sister Catherine can’t locate him better than me, I don’t know; she knows the same crowd. But I know Uncle Jim, he doesn’t know what it’s all about. It’s his fault that Michael and Catherine are always away from home. Anyhow, I’ve got to go.”
“Have you spoken to your boss about your back pay yet?”
“Not this week.”
“Tell him you’ve got to have it: two months—it’s a disgrace. Suppose you weren’t living at home?”
Joseph kissed his mother mechanically and went out. The gloom of the interior dropped from him. He walked smartly round the beach-path while the coral-trees along the shore, wrapped up in themselves, murmured without wind and dropped dead calices on his hat. It was low water; a transparent wave two inches high rang its air-bells along the sand. The receding tide had left dark lines of flotsam along the beach. The poor children of the district and their mothers, with sacks in their hands, were raking through the deposit with their fingers, gathering coke, chips, and even vegetables thrown overboard in port from the vessels. Temperate sun and cool shadow divided the air. The sea-gulls paddled in and out of the water without a cry, and the fishermen pottered about sluicing and scraping their boats. During the night, the tide had risen over the path; there was a broken oar, a boathouse cradle, and part of the gates of a harbour-side bathing-pool. Miles away, south-west, between the side-drops of Bradley’s Head and Shark Point, the city sat in miniature, glittering, without a trace of smoke. Blue-blooded spring was everywhere.
The ferry had not yet come in. Joseph waited outside the Italia fruit-shop at the end of the wharf, looking at a dead shark drawn up on the beach. It was responsible for the first bathing casualty of the season. It had torn off the buttocks and right leg of a bather the day before, and had been caught with a meathook on a clothes-line tied to a buoy, during the night; the bell on the buoy had rung for over an hour. The fishermen were all gathered there, with clusters of school-children and a barman from the hotel. They stood talking amiably and endlessly, like a collection of blue-bottle flies. As Joseph lounged on the railing, Black Jack, the negro fisherman, came up flat-footed, dropped a word in one of the groups and shrugged his shoulders towards the sea-cliffs. A fisherman in the group scratched his chin, hitched up his belt, and planting both broad bare feet on the beach-path spat into the sand. Then he strolled up the shady side of the short street leading to the cliff. There is the Gap, an indentation in the sea-wall, at the foot of which is a shale platform standing out in the waves, a place for fishing at low tide. The Gap is dangerous for shipping on a dark night, because it looks like an opening in the cliffs. Iron hooks in the rocks permit lines to be thrown down, and fishermen climb up and down in any weather. Here have been wrecks, and here is the favourite suicide spot of the city.
Two more fishermen plodded up the street some hundred yards after the first. The school-children pushed and jostled with upturned faces. Another fisherman left them and went up the street, walking on the same side, with his eyes on the ground, meditating and limping on his swollen bare foot, poisoned by a puncture from a stingray spine. The school-children milled round Black Jack, who was spinning out his tale with pleasure; a moment more, and all the little boys had left him and ran shouting towards the Gap, with the little girls at their tails. The pilotship gave a long shriek and started for the Heads. Soon they all appeared against the sky-line on the edge of the Gap, motionless, except for a couple of boys pushing their way in to a better place, and all looked downwards at the sea. Amongst them stood three nuns in black. Black Jack sat on the shark’s head and bit into his plug. It was a sort of dumb-show, the lazy men walking with heads dropped, their time- and weather-beaten faces, naturally sad and grotesque, now creased with interest as if they went to an entertainment, but not a new one.
The ferry whistled and Joseph had to run down the wharf. The school-children came tumbling down from the Gap, and a boy shouted to the deck-hand, “Hey, Nosey, a man committed suicide: there’s a man over the Gap.” The passengers looked round and then took out their papers and began talking cheerfully to their usual companions. A suicide at the Gap was a commonplace affair. Everyone knew why a person committed suicide: if it was a man, because he couldn’t pay his bills or had no job; if a woman, because she was going to have a baby. The boat chugged into town through the glaze of the harbour on the darlingest, dazzlingest day of spring. Morning smoked on the hills, and the trees rose up to meet the sun as if to return to their primal essence and be dissolved in light. The morning was already hot; at Nielsen Park she lolled under the still leaves, the milky tide reflecting her in pools of curdled light. The Città di Genova, bound for Naples, rode out across the eastern channel, her masts rising higher every minute, her flanged bow emboldened by the sun, until she overtopped the little craft on the starboard bow, almost running her down. The engine-room telegraph rang furiously, the engineer shouted down the speaking-tube. They passed under the great red nostrils where the anchors hung, and the schoolboys yelled insults at the blackshirted Italian command. The cicada skirled in the foreshore reserves, the remarks of the season-ticket holders became drowsier and foolisher, and Joseph dreamed. O, lovely estuary with little hills, never to
be approached, never to be altered in perspective, as if they sprang from the artist’s brain and straightway came into life and breath upon canvas—but such canvas, as if blooming under glass, respiring and yet unearthly. Doubtless those windows on the bays reflect beings of some sort, for we see smoke blowing from innumerable small chimneys built over innumerable small kitchen fires, and swinging this way and that in the wind which so lightly agitates these plumy gardens and casts shadows on white sea-garden walls.
The light is tempered by the early season, but the rays neither deflected nor diffused reveal the smallest details with the accuracy of a miniature painter: small rounded bosky copses, walls loaded with creepers, pure flashes of deep green between pine-trees, and a multitude of red roofs swarming over the hills. Between the pine-tops the grey towers of the Rose Bay convent rise, whose buttresses are planted in an evergreen scrub running down to the edge of this still water. Corsica hardly looks into a more lilied and reflectant tide.
Seven Poor Men of Sydney Page 9
