The Tree of Man

by Patrick White

  ‘I was not taking it in any particular way,’ said Thelma, who could learn a lesson very quickly. ‘The barley sugar was growing sticky in my bag.’

  She continued to look about her at the countryside, which had become uninteresting, insignificant, since she had achieved position. It was existing vaguely in spite of her, she saw, but it was not evident to what purpose. Purpose floated in that sea of leaves plastered against leaves. The paddocks were fat again. But the houses of poverty still stood in them, tumbling down or held up by iron and wire. At times a smell of wet fowl manure penetrated the discreet car and strayed amongst its fittings.

  Now Thelma Forsdyke wished they had not come. She looked at her little diamond watch, not so much to read the time as to assure herself by significant movements that events did follow a sequence. For this same reason she had started to take lessons in French, and was already sitting, though cautiously, always looking, always listening, on the committees of several charitable organizations.

  ‘This is their road now,’ she said, deliberately dissociating herself from the geography of that place.

  The husband’s features, through concentrating on the situation that must be faced, had grown thin.

  ‘This must be their car now, Stan,’ said the mother, looking out from behind the curtains she had washed that Monday.

  She had put powder on her face, and it looked like it, because her face was now normally rather white, drained either by her age or repentance. So the powder lay and did not collaborate. Nor did that dress, naturally her best, of a dark blue, of a rough though quite good material. It had somehow got twisted round, or it was the way it had been cut by Merle Finlayson, it did not fit at the armpits, and had split in one place, though conveniently visible only to others. Still, the mother was presentable. She had put on a white collar, stitched in on to the thick dress. She would launder such white things very carefully and beautifully, starching them just a little, and making them look quite primitive in their essential whiteness. She was decent then.

  And the father, who was determined to look cheerful and creditable, foresaw himself, without great dismay, lost in the silences of odd corners with the solicitor his son-in-law. In the room of their house in which they waited, and which no longer seemed theirs since the approach of strangers stressed its ordinariness, he moved about, and listened to his boots squeak.

  ‘Have you cleaned your boots?’ Amy Parker asked.

  ‘I have,’ he said, putting out his feet for her to see.

  There was nothing now of sufficient importance to be withheld from her.

  ‘Stan,’ she said, dusting him with her hand, ‘do you like this man, the solicitor?’

  ‘I have nothing against him,’ said the father-in-law.

  She began to laugh, like a girl, in her woman’s body, which would have sounded obscene, but the husband was used to obscenity.

  ‘Nobody will ever sue you,’ she laughed.

  But her husband continued gravely, ‘He seems a good sort of man.’

  ‘That is all very well,’ she said; she had stopped laughing, and might never have begun. ‘It is not enough to be good.’

  She stopped there. His eyes, of which the sockets were hollower than they used to be, were not hurt. She had tried repeatedly to prise out some of that goodness. She had failed, but would try again, as if she did not believe in what she could not touch.

  ‘Anyway, his car is good enough,’ said Stan Parker, who was determined to be agreeable.

  All his movements were cheerful. At most times his eyes had a shallow confidence. Lack of expectation, he had found, is easier to bear. So too he had discovered an affection for his wife, which is less terrible than love.

  Amy Parker had looked out again on hearing the mud fly up. The car was there.

  ‘Oh, Stan,’ she said, ‘we had better go out, I suppose. Hadn’t we?’

  Because she was shivering, it was such a raw day, she had pressed against him, to restore warmth, and incidentally familiarity, by touch. Then they were going out together, and what had to be, was. All four people met beside the old rosebush, which was flinging little drops of water into their faces, and pricking their flesh, and tearing at their awkward clothes. There was a kissing and a shaking of hands. All four people were looking at one another, hoping for something they could recognize.

  ‘Well, dear, you did not have a very nice drive,’ said Amy Parker to her daughter. ‘And Dudley. Nothing is at its best, of course, on a day like this.’

  Even so, Amy Parker was ambitious to become on that day some character that she had never yet been.

  ‘I told him not to expect too much,’ said Thelma, who realized that in spite of resolutions her powers of endurance were not great.

  She arranged her good, negative clothes, and received her father’s kiss. This was rougher than she had remembered. She looked at his boots. She began to smile wonderingly at all she saw, as if this might prove to be some new experience, both amusing and touching, and particularly she looked at her father, he was a dear, he had given her this hope. Men are less positive to most women, and so more acceptable.

  ‘Dudley knows absolutely nothing about life in the country. But he is willing to learn,’ said Thelma, poised halfway between the natural irony of the situation and that kindness of which her father had reminded her.

  ‘Thelma has a weakness for making the confessions of other people,’ laughed the solicitor.

  He was lifting up his stomach a good deal just then, underneath his waistcoat, and letting it fall again. With one dry freckled hand he was persuading the corrugations of his bald head.

  ‘He can see all right, whatever there is to see, but there isn’t much to show,’ said Stan Parker without any effort.

  The mother and daughter were surprised, and even a bit annoyed, that he should speak with apparent ease to the dry man his son-in-law. They suspected something. Still more, as he was making first moves to lead the solicitor away among the wet trees.

  ‘But it is raining, Stan,’ said Amy Parker to regain control. ‘I thought we should have a cup of tea first.’

  Those thick, white, bottomless cups, remembered Thelma.

  ‘It may clear up later,’ suggested the mother, though she did not much care, provided the day preserved more or less the shape she had decided on.

  ‘It has cleared. Look,’ smiled Stan, holding up his hand in a goblet.

  Very few drops fell. A charitable sky of cold blue prevailed. So that he laughed at his own powers. It would have mattered once, but did not now. Hence this ease which had overtaken him on his own doorstep. The difficulties of his youth lay thick behind him, even if he could not see a way through the comparatively open future.

  ‘It couldn’t have been better laid on,’ he said, beginning to lead his relations.

  ‘Miraculous,’ laughed the solicitor, looking at the sky, at the path, here and there between bushes, to look at something.

  Stan Parker was sorry for the lost man, and thought that he might like him, if given the chance, although it was improbable that this opportunity would occur.

  ‘But so muddy,’ grumbled the mother, lowering her head and frowning at branches that she knew well.

  They went down deviously to the cow yards. There were rounds of dung lying in their path. They trailed across the brick floor at the empty bails, and along the bank of the creek, where sticks cracked beneath the feet and cows looked at them from above blue tongues, and along the ploughed land from which corn would spring. The mother and daughter were talking about a table cloth, a wedding present, that had got stained at a laundry, with iron mould, and the mother knew how to take it off.

  ‘It is all very interesting,’ said the solicitor, touching a furrow with his toe. ‘The soil. It is a grand life. And productive.’

  Because it was his life, Stan Parker had never thought of it as this. It had taken possession of him. But nothing had ever taken possession of Dudley Forsdyke, except perhaps his wife. Suddenly he would h
ave liked to be possessed by something, some passion, or vice even. The wind was blowing from a southerly quarter and twitching his mackintosh.

  ‘Why don’t we chuck everything and go on the land, dear?’ he called back to his wife.

  ‘Why?’ she considered, drawing her fur collar slowly across her cheek. ‘Because you would hate it.’

  His legs were ridiculous in a wind.

  Dudley Forsdyke was so used to examining reports on living that he had been made drunk suddenly by a smell of life. This came up at him out of the ploughed field and down the wet hill. The sky was overflowing with obstreperous clouds. The wind hit him in the chest. Then the vision of ridiculous man returned to him with his wife’s words. He did not resent them, the possibility that they were meant to hurt, because he deserved such censure for his momentary imprudence. So he made noises in his throat, of agreement, or masochism, and continued to stray across the landscape, across all those other landscapes in which he had not yet lived, and in which he would not live wholly until he was beneath them.

  Poor beggar, said Stan Parker, but does it matter? It did not. It no longer mattered. It was easier to walk this way lightly through the wind, which no longer opposed him, there was no opposition of any kind. The opposition of God, which was withdrawn from him, left him altogether light and carefree. Once he had been bowed down by belief. Each leaf or scroll of bark was heavy with its implications. The man had been weighted who now walked between the openings in the wind, his frank eyes watering a little from the sting. The rims of his eyes had sagged slightly with time, giving an impression of open wounds, which his wife did not like but did not know how to mention.

  ‘He knows that he does not like to get his hands dirty,’ said Thelma, pursuing her husband Dudley Forsdyke’s back, ‘any more than I do. I like to read about the country, though.’

  ‘Do you read much, dear?’ asked the mother vaguely, for this was an occupation in which she could not quite believe.

  ‘I shall never catch up’, said Thelma honestly, ‘now I have begun.’

  ‘It passes away the time, I suppose,’ said Amy Parker, ‘though I never ever understood half of what it seems you can read about. It is different from what things are.’

  ‘It need not be,’ sighed Thelma, but it was a waste of time.

  ‘Oh yes. It must,’ said Amy Parker. ‘It is all different. People are different in books. They would have to be. It would not be bearable.’

  She would have choked herself with her own hair in the mirror.

  ‘This is the fowl yard, Mr Forsdyke – Dudley,’ she found it necessary to say. ‘We don’t go in for them properly. A few layers. And these are the young pullets.’

  She had not intended any of this, but they had come that way.

  The solicitor was staring through the wire, smiling at or for the fowls.

  ‘Are you interested in fowls then?’ asked Amy Parker.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about them before.’

  The smell of wet fowl manure rose up out of the mud.

  ‘Well, they are smelly things,’ said the mother-in-law.

  I shall scream, thought Thelma Forsdyke, inside her incredible coat, that could not have belonged to her.

  ‘How about that cup of tea, Mother?’ said Stan Parker.

  It was a sensible thing. So they all went inside.

  The front room had been prepared for the rites of tea with a few little bunches of early roses, some of which were opening into frail flowers, but others had been picked too tight in bud and would never break, they looked sick. The room had the dark smell of a room that has not been lived in. All the furniture was dark and awful to Thelma Forsdyke, who moved amongst it thoughtfully. She was surprised that she had been able to escape from anything so positive. Or from herself. Suspicions of what she had been lurked amongst mahogany. So that she was forced to turn quickly to present matters. At a clean sweep, it appeared, she took the gloves off her long hands, on which the rings glittered without apology.

  Amy Parker, whose breath preceded everything she did, brought a big teapot ornamented with lustre, and a yellow cake, and some large scones on a glass stand.

  She said, ‘Have you seen the Bourkes, Thel?’

  At times she did deal blows that were not intended for a particular recipient, for those, rather, on whom they happened to land. At these times she would have said, I did not mean anything by it, it was no more than something to say.

  ‘No,’ replied Thelma Forsdyke, looking gravely at her cup. ‘I have not seen them.’

  ‘The Bourkes?’ asked her husband, who was smiling at everything he did not recognize or understand, whether the Bourkes or that erection in nubbly glass on which the scones stood.

  ‘Some relations,’ said Thelma, biting off a very small piece of scone. ‘I lived with them at one time.’

  Her face was quite smooth of expression. She could have admitted the Bourkes perhaps, but not herself, in half-coat of dyed lapin. It was the age of nougat and magazines. She had suffered from spots for a few months, but treated them by correspondence.

  ‘They were very kind,’ she said, rejecting a crumb.

  Now from the pallor of her own tasteful room, to which the Bourkes would not come anyway, even if they read the address in some newspaper, she could afford to be charitable. She had reached that height from which charity is possible. If she did not write an actual cheque, and she was generous, it was said by many, she could pay off by indifference. She seldom committed herself to emotion, which was bad for her health, or to statement of opinion, for this would have meant having one. Even her restful room was noncommittal, in which she arranged big bowls of flowers and would spend whole mornings trying to control a stalk, with anxiety for the general effect.

  How much Thel has learned, mused Amy Parker above her tea, and wearing gloves, and reading books.

  ‘Poor old Horrie Bourke is sick,’ said Stan Parker.

  ‘He could die,’ said his wife, whom tea in strong doses made melancholy.

  Then we are not to escape the Bourkes, decided Thelma Forsdyke. She looked appropriately sad.

  She did genuinely become sad in the dark room, though it was for herself, that she was burying. The scents of little girls’ flowers on sparrows’ graves brought the tears to her eyes. Or nightlights beneath which she was suffocating, before a mother, with those simple, primary features that faces wear in the beginning, gave her breath back. Thelma Forsdyke sat crumbling cake, the big yellow one that had been made too hastily, it had holes. There were many bits of herself that she would have broken off and discarded, if it had been possible that these would not still add up.

  ‘Do you play cards, Dudley?’ asked Amy Parker.

  ‘No,’ he said with a smile.

  This decoration had got upon his face out of turn. Actually he was startled that anyone should suspect him of a taste that suited him so badly. What could this woman his mother-in-law know about him? Or his wife? Or he himself even, in that strange room, from any corner of which an unsuspected habit might arise. The glass stand was winking under a cloud of scones.

  ‘No,’ he said in a crumbly sort of voice, his mouth was full. ‘I have never played cards.’

  ‘We don’t here,’ said Amy Parker. ‘Some people like a hand in the evening, though.’

  I must remember to ask her about herself, said Thelma, before we go, but remember, it is enough to ask, people do not or are not able to tell what is flickering in them. Asking is a kindness, though.

  Then the solicitor drew himself up inside his suit of good English material, a flecked tweed, that will stand instead of virility at a pinch, and said, ‘And how is the other one, Mrs Parker, your boy, the one I have never met?’

  This is what we have been waiting for, Thelma Forsdyke knew.

  Because he had got himself into a bit of a mess, the solicitor was not sure but he suspected it, he was going to poke around, as cautious men do, with a stick.

  The fathe
r sat forward now, rubbing tobacco between his hands, till the scent of tobacco filled the room, and his hands were overflowing with it.

  ‘Oh, Ray,’ said the mother.

  She cut several pieces of cake, though everyone had finished. She left them there.

  ‘Ray is well,’ she said, but cautiously. ‘He will be coming one of these days.’

  Then she looked out of the window, from which the weather was at last withheld, and they were all looking out, past the canes and leaves, into that greenish light and stillness.

  ‘Ray was a lovely boy,’ she said. ‘You will see. Brown skin, red lips. Strong. But he did not seem to think we understood. He was dodging off down the gully. I could not follow him. Once there were some seabirds come over, and he shot one and buried it. Then he was quiet. He thought I did not know, but I could smell it on his hands. Once, that was when he was quite young, there were some little puppies that he took and threw into a pit out at the back. How he cried at night! I couldn’t comfort him for nothing. He did these things because he had to. There was a Greek, I remember, working here some years ago. Ray and the Greek became mates. Because he loved him, Ray could not hurt him enough. No,’ she said, ‘I do not understand. But I know.’

  Then Thelma Forsdyke began to feel her chest tighten with disgust. She began to cough, and no means with her of stopping it.

  The solicitor saw his hat on a chair where he had put it on coming in. He would be glad to return to where all his possessions were arranged. He had cigars in a cabinet, and a collection of stuffed hummingbirds.

  ‘You should not bring up all these old things, Mother,’ said Stan Parker, who had rolled a cigarette of a most uneasy shape.

  ‘Why?’ she said. ‘They are not old.’

  They were not.

  She was looking at him. Then the hands of the woman he had half-throttled were tightening on his own throat, and girls in silky jumpers singing sea songs. There was the man too, the traveller, who was big and probably freckled, would come in, sit with his legs apart, and tell of country towns, as his kind will, chewing the words on thick lips. And veins in his eyes.

  All were looking at one another, knowing rather than understanding. The mother and the father were at last together in the house, in the presence of witnesses, as they had never dared to be on their own.