Patrick White - Riders in the Chariot

Alf Dubbo was reared in a small town on the banks of a river which never wholly dried up, and which, in wet seasons, would overflow its steep banks and flood the houses in the lower town. The river played an important part in the boy's early life, and even after he left his birthplace, his thoughts would frequently return to the dark banks of the brown river, with its curtain of shiny foliage, and the polished stones which he would pick over, always looking for pleasing shapes. Just about dusk the river would become the most fascinating for the small boy, and he would hang about at a certain bend where the townspeople had planted a park. The orange knuckles of the big bamboos became accentuated at dusk, and the shiny foliage of the native trees seemed to sweat a deeper green. The boy's dark river would cut right across the evening. Black gins would begin to congregate along the bank, some in clothes which the white women had cast off, others in flash dresses from the stores, which splashed their flowers upon the dark earth, as the gins lay giggling and anticipating. Who would pick them? There were usually white youths hanging around, and older drunks, all with money on them, and a bottle or two. Once he had seen a gin leave her dress in the arms of her lover, and plunge down towards the river, till the black streak that she made was swallowed up in the deepening night. But that was unusual. And in spite of the fact that it was also exciting, he had gone away. Mrs Pask had been standing at the kitchen door. "Alf, where ever were you?" she asked. And her cocky echoed from beneath the shawl, "Alfwher-aryou? AlfwheraryouAlf? Alf." Not yet sleeping. "By the river," the boy answered. "That is no place," she said, "to loiter about at this time of night. Mr Calderon has been looking for you. He is going to let you conjugate a Latin verb. But first there are several little jobs. Remember, it is the useful boys who are sought after in later life." So Alf took the tea-towel. He hung around dozing while she splashed and talked, and hoped the Latin verb would be forgotten. Actually, Alf Dubbo was not born in that town. He was born not so many miles away, at another bend in the ever-recurring river, on a reserve, to an old gin named Maggie, by which of the whites she had never been able to decide. There he would have remained probably, until work or cunning rescued him. That he was removed earlier, while he was still, in fact, a leggy, awkward little boy, was thanks to the Reverend Timothy Calderon, at that time Anglican rector of Numburra. Mr Calderon and his widowed sister, Mrs Pask, took the boy to institute what they christened their Great Experiment. For Mr Calderon was a man of high ideals, even though, as his more perceptive parishioners noticed, he failed perpetually to live up to them. If it required the more perceptive to notice, it was because his failures up to date had been for the most part harmless ones. He was, indeed, a harmless man, with the result that he had been moved to Numburra from the larger town of Dumbullen. Such perception on the part of his bishop had caused the rector to shed very bitter tears, but of those, only his sister knew, and together they had prayed that he might receive the strength humbly to endure his martyrdom. It was the more distressing as the Reverend Timothy Cal-deron was a cultured man, of birth even, whose ideals had brought him from the Old Country shortly after ordination. Quite apart from the Latin verbs, he was able to unravel the Gospels from the Greek. He knew the dates of battles, and the names of plants, and had inherited a complete edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as well as a signet-ring. If the souls of Numburra appreciated neither his gentle blood nor his education, that was something further he must bear. That he did bear it was due not only to fervid prayer, but also to the timely conception of his Great Experiment. On little Alf Dubbo, the parson decided, he would lavish all he could: fatherly love, and spiritual guidance, to say nothing of Latin verbs, and the dates of battles. Alf Dubbo appeared from the beginning to be an exceedingly bright boy. Those who were interested in him were soon convinced that he might grasp almost anything, provided he wanted to. Only, where did his bent lie? That at once became the problem. He was bright, but he was lazy, the most sceptical of the rector's parishioners observed with tigerish satisfaction. Who but the rector would not have expected laziness from the bastard of an old black gin out at the reserve? It did not occur to the critics, of course, that the boy might have inherited his vice from some Irish ancestor. Propriety alone made them reduce Alf's Irish ancestors to the mythical status of the Great Snake. The rector himself began to suspect his ward of indolence when on one occasion the boy asked, "Mr Calderon, what am I going to do with all these Latin verbs?" "Well," said the rector, "in the first place, they are a discipline. They will help to build character." "But I can't see what use they will be," complained the boy, in his gentle, imitation voice. "I don't think I can be that kind of character." Then he started, regrettably, to sulk. He would sulk, and scribble, and his teacher would have to admit that at such times little more could be done with him. "Sometimes I wonder whether we are not being terribly unwise," the rector once confessed to his sister. "Oh, but in some directions, Timothy, he has made visible progress. In sketching, for instance," Mrs Pask was vain enough to insist. "In sketching I cannot show him enough. He has an eye for colour. Alf is an artistic boy." "Art, yes. But life." The rector sighed, moody for his Latin verbs. Alf Dubbo did love to draw, and would scribble on the walls of the shed where he milked the rector's horny cow. "What are you doing, Alf?" they called. "I was marking up the weeks since she had the bull," the boy replied. That stopped them. He had noticed early on that Mrs Pask preferred to avert her eyes from nature. So that once more he was free to scribble on the walls of the shed, the finespun lines of a world he felt to exist but could not yet corroborate. In the circumstances, he was always undemonstratively happy when Mrs Pask happened to say, "Dear, oh, dear, I have a head! But we must not neglect your education, must we, Alf? Bring out my water-colour box, and we shall continue where we left off last time. I believe you are beginning to grasp the principles of drawing, and may even have a hidden talent." As a young girl, Mrs Pask herself had been compelled to choose between several talents, none of them hidden, it was implied; indeed, they had been far too obvious. What with sketching, and piano, and a light soprano voice, she had led rather a distracted life, until it was revealed to her that she must abandon all personal pretensions for the sake of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the Reverend Arthur Pask. She did, however, retain a reduced interest in sketching and water-colour, and would, on days when the climate allowed, take her easel and dash something off. Her hobby-because, in spite of a technical facility, she would not let herself think of it as more-had proved a particular comfort in the hour of trial. For Mrs Pask was widowed early. "Never forget, Alf, that art is first and foremost a moral force," she remarked once to her pupil, while demonstrating the possibilities of white as a livener of unrelieved surfaces. "Truth," she added, "is so beautiful." He was, at least, fascinated by her brush. "See," she said, dabbing, "one tiny fleck, and each of these cherries comes to life. One has to admit there is something miraculous in the creative act." He could not yet, but became convinced of some potentiality. "Let," he said, "let me, Mrs Pask, now." He was so quick. He could do a bowl of cherries-highlights included-or plaster hand which she had in a cupboard, before his teacher had caught on to the thread of narrative she proposed to follow. It exasperated, even humiliated her at first. "I hope you are not a vain boy, " she would remark. Which was too silly to answer. Once she put in front of him a vase of what she said were Crimson Ramblers-only a shadow of what they could be. For him, they were the substance. He made them stand up stiff and solid. He drew a blue line round each of the crimson roses, so that they were forever contained. She laughed. She said, "You cannot resist colour. There was never anything so red. You must learn in time, though, it is delicacy that counts." Mrs Pask loved best of all to talk while her pupil worked. She would lie back in her chair, with her feet on an embroidered stool. Years afterwards, coming across a print in a public library, Dubbo was forced to realize that Mrs Pask, for all her virtue, had been at heart, one of the turbaned ladies of another more indolent age, leaning, figuratively in her case, on the shoulder of her little coloured boy. There in the weatherboard sitting-room at Numburra, under the cracking, corrugated roof, Mrs Pask's voice would join with the drone of blowflies in unbroken antiphon. "I must tell you, Alf, I gave up all for Mr Pask, even down to face-powder, though of course my skin being of the finest, and my complexion so clear and fresh, that was no very great hardship. And who would not have done the same! He was a lovely man. Of the sweetest disposition. And so slim. But"-she coughed-"athletic. I can see him jump the net at tennis. Arthur would never think of going round." The pupil worked. Or looked up at times, for politeness's sake. Mrs Pask, of former fine complexion, had turned purple by that date. It was blood pressure, and the climate. Sometimes the boy would sit very still at the drawing-board. Then she would complain, "Surely you have not finished, Alf, when I have only just set you the subject?" "No," he would reply, "not yet." For peace. And would sit. And would wait. Then, after he had mixed some fresh colours, he would work. Sometimes she thought his eyes stared too hard. That his chest was too cramped. There was something unhealthy. She would say, "We must try to find some companions for you. Rough games once in a while are good for any boy. Not that I approve of brute strength. Only Christian manliness." He grunted to appease her. He could not have formed words while under such other pressure. For he was all the time painting. And on one occasion the tin box of Mrs Pask's paints had gone clattering. "Oh!" she cried. "If the little porcelain containers should get broken, Alf, I should be so upset. The box-I told you, didn't I? — was a gift from Mr Pask." Nothing was broken, however. "But what," she asked, still breathing hard, "what ever in the world, Alf, is this?" Looking at his paper. It was almost as if she had caught him at something shameful. He sat with his knees together. His innermost being stood erect. "That is a tree," he said when he was able. "A most unnatural tree!" She smiled kindly. He touched it with vermilion, and it bled afresh. "What are these peculiar objects, or fruit-are they? — hanging on your tree?" He did not say. The iron roof was cracking. "They must mean some-thing," Mrs Pask insisted. "Those," he said, then, "are dreams." He was ashamed, though. "Dreams! But there is nothing to indicate that they are any such thing. Just a shape. I should have said mis-shapen kidneys!" So that he was put to worse shame. "That is because they have not been dreamt yet," he uttered slowly. And all the foetuses were palpitating on the porous paper. "I am afraid it is something unhealthy," Mrs Pask confided in her brother. "An untrained mind could not possibly conceive of anything so peculiar unless." "But the boy's mind is not totally untrained. Since you have begun to train it," the parson could not resist. He still smarted for his Latin verbs, and the obvious hold his sister had over Alf Dubbo, through the medium of paint. "I have to admit I am a little frightened. I wonder whether I should go on with it," Mrs Pask meditated. "You have uncovered his imagination. That is all." The rector sighed. Imagination, just a little, was his own misfortune, for it had never been enough to ferment the rest of him, yet too much for failure to support. He was a soggy man, reminiscent of grey bread. If he had been less gentle, more bitter, he might have been admired. He had a handsome nose for a start, which should have cut an offender to the quick. But as it had never occurred to the Reverend Timothy Calderon to use any part of his physical person as a weapon, he was not repaid in fear and respect, not even by his own sister, who only loved him, because it would have been shocking not to, and because there was no other intimate relationship left to her. As he conducted the ritual of his parish life: the tepid, but in every way reverential services, the visits to those of his parishioners who were too passive to intimidate him, the annual fête at which the same ladies guessed the weight of a different-coloured cake-the rector was sustained by secrets. Only two, certainly, for his temperament would not have run to more. But of those two secrets, the one was shocking enough, the other he would never have admitted to, so desperately did he depend upon it for his nourishment. In that northern diocese of bells and lace, Mr Calderon officiated as befitted one born and reared an Anglican. While the temperature rose, so did the incense, though never enough to offend the nostrils. One was relieved to find that taste and the formalities had not been preserved from Rome to be destroyed by any evangelical fervour. Here original purity prevailed. Even when the lace got torn in scuffles, despite the vigilance of Mrs Pask. Even when the Eucharist lulled in summer, and the best intentions slipped beyond the bounds of concentration. Like Sunday, Mr Calderon came and went. His blameless hand would place the wafer, his unexceptionable voice intone, without disturbing the past, or ladies' minds. Blowflies seconded him, under the window of Saint George, which the butter factory had presented. It was beneath the saint, his favourite, the manly, flannel-clad, athletic George, that the rector would most frequently indulge his secret life, while attending to those practical duties of devotional routine which boys regularly forgot. Perhaps the swing of his cassock, not entirely an ascetic garment, suggested to the silent man a somewhat freer choreography for the soul. In any case, as he placed a napkin, or a cruet, or retrieved a battered psalter from underneath a pew, the rector would find himself yearning after some more virile expression of faith which a damp nature and family opinion had never allowed him to profess. In other words, the Reverend Timothy Calderon longed secretly to flame in the demonstration of devotion. But would he really have known how? At least in his imagination, the strong voices of clear-skinned boys, in severest linen surplices, would mount in hymns of praise, carrying his diffident soul towards salvation. He would be saved, not by works, too exhausting in a hot climate, not by words, too banal in any event, but by youth, rather, and ever-straining lung-power. All that he had never been, all that he had not experienced, was fatally attractive to the humble rector. Under the window of the blond saint, bursting the dragon with his lance, his brother-in-law Arthur Pask would appear to Timothy Calderon, and, after jumping the tennis-net, throw his arm around the weaker shoulder. During his brief life, all had been made possible to Arthur: a thrilled, and thrilling faith, the rewards and pains of a missionary fervour, marriage with a lovely girl-nobody had blamed Emily on _seeing__ that her reason for defection was not altogether evangelical-then martyrdom, more or less, for in spite of his aggressive health, Arthur Pask was carried off, at the early age of twenty-six, by rheumatic fever, on the Birdsville Track. Of those who mourned, perhaps it was not his widow who was cut most deeply. A widow is placated by the drama of it; a woman can sweeten herself on what is bitterest in memory. It was the brother-in-law who suffered. Though nobody knew it. Not long after Alf Dubbo came to them, the rector had remarked, "I noticed, Emily, you did not communicate this morning." "No," she said. Their feet were flogging the dust on the short distance to the rectory. "I remembered," she explained, "it is the anniversary of Arthur's death." "You remembered!" He laughed. It sounded odd, but Emily Pask was of those people who, besides forgetting, failed to divine sensibility in others. If less obtuse, of course she would have seen that her brother whipped his sorrows to prevent them lagging. Their life together was full of undercurrents, which sometimes threatened to drag them down. So that the presence of the aboriginal boy did at first relieve, and even promise rescue. If the sister was only partially aware, the brother became fully conscious that his hopes were fastening on Alf Dubbo, and that through him he hoped he might achieve, if not personal salvation, at least a mental cosiness. Until finding he had only added another nail to those he wore. For the rector had never succeeded in communicating with anyone by words. Nor would the boy, it appeared, attempt to express himself, except by those riddles in paint which his teacher so deplored. Soon after the morning on which Mrs Pask had found herself faced with her pupil's daemon, Timothy Calderon discovered Alf looking through a book, as though he were not at all sure he should be doing what he was unable to resist. "Well, Alf," the kindly man slowly opened, "have you found something instructive? Or only to your taste?" He had not meant it that way, but there it was. While the boy continued turning the pages with feverish necessity. "It is a book I found," Alf replied, with some obviousness. "It is interesting," he added. He spoke dully, when he was, in fact, consumed. "Ah," said the rector, "I believe that was a present from a school acquaintance of my sister's. Who knew of her interest in the arts." The man and boy continued looking together at the book. Here the world broke into little particles of light. The limbs of the bathers might have remained stone, if light had not informed the observer that this was indeed flesh of flesh; even the water became a vision of original nakedness. Dancers were caught for an instant in the turmoil of their tulle. Laundresses ironed a diagonally divided world of powdered butterflies. Solid lanterns vibrated with thick, joyous bursts of light. "The French," remarked Mr Calderon, after he had referred to the title, "have a different conception of things." The boy was throbbing over his discovery. "They are a different race," the rector judged, smiling a forgiving smile. Then the boy stopped at a picture he would always remember, and criticize, and wish to improve on. It was the work, he read, of some French painter, a name to him, then as always. In the picture the chariot rose, behind the wooden horses, along the pathway of the sun. The god's arm-for the text implied it was a god-lit the faces of the four figures, so stiff, in the body of the tinny chariot. The rather ineffectual torch trailed its streamers of material light. " 'Apollo,' " read the rector. He was not prepared to continue, or to comment. But Alf Dubbo said, "The arm is not painted good. I could do the arm better. And horses. My horses," the boy claimed, "would have the fire flowing from their tails. And dropping sparks. Or stars. Moving. Everything would move in my picture. Because that is the way it ought to be." "You are the regular little artist!" the rector accused, and laughed against his painful teeth. "Fire and light are movement," the boy persisted. Then the man could bear his own extinction no longer. He touched the boy's head, but very briefly. He said, "Come on, Alf, close up the book now. There is something else I want you to think about." He brought the Bible, and began to read from the Gospel of Saint John. "John," he explained, "was the Beloved Disciple." The parson told of spiritual love and beauty, how each incident in Our Lord's life had been illuminated by those qualities. Of course the boy had heard it all before, but wondered again how he failed continually to appreciate. It did seem as though he could grasp only what he was able to see. And he had not yet seen Jesus Christ, in spite of his guardian's repeated efforts, and a succession of blurry colour-prints. Now he began to remember a night at the reserve when his mother had received a quarter-caste called Joe Mullens, who loved her awful bad, and had brought her a bottle of metho to prove it. Soon the boy's memory was lit by the livid jags of the metho love the two had danced together on the squeaky bed. Afterwards his mother had begun to curse, and complain that she was deceived again by love. But for the boy witness, at least, her failure had destroyed the walls. He was alive to the fur of darkness, and a stench of leaves, as he watched the lightning-flicker of receding passion. "Earthly love is not the faintest reflection of divine compassion," the rector was explaining. "But I can tell you are not concentrating, Alf." The boy looked down, and saw that his guardian's knees, in their thinning and rather crumpled trousers, were touching his. He sensed that, according to precept, he should have felt compassion for this conscientious man, but all he felt was the pressure of knees. He was fascinated by the network of little creases in the worn serge, and by a smell of what he realized later on in cities was that of hot underclothing, as people struggled together, and clung to the little progress they had made. "I think we had better stop there," the rector decided. But could not bring himself to alter his position. It was the boy who shifted, sighing, or grunting, as he looked out into the glare and saw Mrs Pask returning from good works with an empty pudding-basin. While the rector derived little consolation from his attempts to plant faith in the soul of this aboriginal boy, his sister grew quite skittish with what she liked to think the success of her instruction. Admittedly Mrs Pask had always liked the easy things, and admittedly Alf was learning how to please. Here was a whole sheaf of subjects, tastefully shaded, admirably foreshortened. It seemed that with a few ingratiating strokes the boy might reproduce the whole world as his teacher knew it. That would have been consummation, indeed. If, from time to time, she had not come across those other fruits of her pupil's talent. Which made her frightened. And on one occasion the pupil himself rooted out an old, battered box which she had put so carefully away, even she had forgotten. "These are more paints," said Alf. "Oh," she began to explain, half prim, half casual. "Yes. Some old paints I gave up using very early. They did not suit the kind of work which interested me." Alf squeezed a tube, and there shot out, from beneath the crust of ages, a blue so glistening, so blue, his eyes could not focus on it. All he could say was: "Gee, Mrs Pask!" Even then he had to control his mouth. Mrs Pask frowned in replying. "I have tried to explain why we should not, on any account, use such a very horrid expression. I thought you might have remembered." "Yes," he said. "But can I use the paints?" After a pause, she decided: "I think, perhaps, it would not be advisable for you to work in oils." "Arrr, Mrs Pask!" For by now he had coaxed a rosy tongue out of a second tube. And was drowning in a burst of yellow from the bottom of a third. She said with an effort, "Oil paints lead to so much that is sensual, so much that is undesirable in art. But of course, you would not understand anything of that, and must take it on trust from those who do." All he knew for the moment was his desire to expel the sensation in his stomach, the throbbing of his blood, in surge upon surge of thick, and ever-accumulating colour. "I could paint good with these," he maintained. Mrs Pask looked whimsically sad. Then Alf Dubbo played an unexpected card. Put into his hand by divine interest, as it were, he had no cause for feeling guilty. "I could do things with these," he began, "that I never ever would have known how to do before." He touched the tube of supernatural blue. "I would paint Jesus Christ," he ventured, in a voice which he had learnt to be acceptable. "Oh?" Mrs Pask sniggered wheezily. The boy had sounded so quaint. "I would not like to paint Jesus, only in oil paints," he admitted. Mrs Pask averted her old and rather wobbly face. She remembered her young husband, and the strength and loveliness of his uncovered throat. "I will show you," said Alf. "We shall see," said Mrs Pask. "Put away the paints. Now. Please." "You don't _know__!" His voice jumped recklessly. "Oh, but I do!" she said. The words were so bleached, she was on the verge of repeating them. "Well, then?" "How provoking you can be!" she protested. "I did not say no _exactly__. Well, on your thirteenth birthday. But I insist you put away the paints now." He did. And would wait. Longer if necessary. Nobody else would wait so carefully. In the meantime he followed around the one who held his life in her hands, and she often took advantage of the situation. For instance, she might ask, "If you forget to milk poor Possum when it rains, how can you expect me to remember I have promised to let you use the paints?" The rector hated his sister at times. Because, of course, she had told him what had taken place, making it sound both touching and ridiculous. It was dreadful to Timothy Calderon that he was so often aware of what he was unable to avert. Cruelty, for example. He was particularly sensitive to the duller, unspectacular kind. "But you will allow him?" he hoped. Mrs Pask folded in her lips. "I shall pray for guidance," she replied. Frequently Mr Calderon did, too, without always receiving it. Once in the dark hall, in the smell of old books and yesterday's mutton, the rector encountered Alf with almost no warning. The boy gave the impression of doing nothing with an air of some significance, and as always at such moments, the man was walled up more completely in his own ineffec-tuality and lovelessness. Yet, on this occasion, the suddenness of the encounter, or a rush of self-pity, started him off with: "I expect you are waiting pretty anxiously for your birthday, Alf." The boy's smile acknowledged the superfluousness and slight silliness of the remark. But the rector blundered on. "Well, who knows, your gift of painting may have been given to you as a means of expressing your innermost convictions." Suddenly the two people involved in the situation began to sweat. "So that you should have something," mumbled the rector, and repeated with suppressed emotion, "At least, something." At this point an alarming, but not altogether unexpected incident, the boy realized, began to occur. Mr Calderon fumbled at Alf's head, then pressed it against his stomach. They were standing in awkward conjunction, in the semi-darkness and familiar smells. Although at first doubtful how he ought to behave, Alf decided to submit to the pressure. He could feel buttons and a watch-chain eating ravenously into his cheek, and then, deep down in the rector's stomach, he heard a rather pitiful rumble. The sound that uncoiled itself was both apologetic and old. The boy visualized an old, soft, white worm slowly raising its head, swaying, and lolling, before falling back. He was so fascinated by the image that he had even begun to count the rings with which the ghostly worm was scored. But Mr Calderon had suddenly decided, it seemed, that he was not sad at all. A kind of jollity which had taken possession of his stomach almost bounced the boy off. "It is wrong to allow our affections to persuade us we are tragic figures," the rector announced in an unknown voice. And, as the boy continued standing, pushed him away. Mr Calderon then went into his study, where the notes for a sermon were waiting to enmesh him, and in spite of his views on economy, and the early hour, switched on the electric light, with the result that he had never been so exposed before. It was disastrous. The boy crept away, but pursued by the picture of his guardian. For, although the rector's incisive nose was as imposing as ever, right down to the glistening pores at the roots of it, the rest of the face was as white and crumbly as old scones. Or perhaps Mr Calderon had no more than left his teeth out. The image blazed across the boy's mind and away, because, whatever cropped up en route, his thirteenth birthday was only a short distance ahead. When at last he had arrived at it, he asked above the wrappings of the seemly presents, "And the paints, Mrs Pask? Can I use the oil paints that you promised?" There was a dreadful pause. Then Mrs Pask said, "You set too much store, Alf, by what is unimportant. But as I promised." She seemed to have the wind that morning. It made a little pffff against the soft hair on her upper lip. So he got out the paints. He had found an old tea-chest on a rubbish dump, and had hammered it apart, and extracted the nails, and kept the sides in the feed shed. The ply boards were immaculate. He brought them to the back veranda. After sharing with him such technical points as she could remember, his teacher went away. She would not look. Anything might emerge now. So Alf Dubbo began to squeeze the tubes. Regardful of some vow, he dedicated the first board with a coat of flat white. He began moodily to dabble in the blue. He moulded the glistening gobs into arbitrary forms, to demolish them almost at once with voluptuous authority. He mixed the blue with white, until it had quite paled. And was moved to lay it at last upon the board in long, smooth tongues, which, he hoped, might convey his still rather nebulous intention. Sometimes he worked with the brushes he had prepared, more often with his trembling fingers. But he could not, in fact, he could not. A white mist continued to creep up and obscure what should have been a vision of blue. So he took the brush with the sharpest end, and with the point he described an unhappy O. From this cipher, the paint was dripping down in stalactites of bluish white. He took the blood-red, and thinned it, and threw it on in drops. It dripped miserably down. He recognized his failure, and turned the board away from him. He kept on returning, however, to the opaque masses of his paint. He was clogged with it. As he thought about his failure, and wondered how he might penetrate what remained a thick white mist in his mind, he scratched his own face in one of the lower corners of the board. The concave shape, something like that of a banana, was held as if waiting to receive. But he sensed he would never improve on an idea which had come to him in a moment of deceit. For some time he mooned around, until realizing he had, at least, observed a promise. To a certain extent, he had earned his freedom. He felt better then, and thought how he would put into his next picture all that he had ever known. The brown dust. His mother's tits, black and gravelly, hanging down. The figure of the quarter-caste, Joe Mullens, striking again and again with his thighs as though he meant to kill. And the distance, which was sometimes a blue wire tautened round his own throat, and which at others dissolved into terrible listlessness. There would be the white people, of course, perpetually naked inside their flash clothes. And the cup of wine held in the air by the Reverend Tim. That was, again, most important. Even through the dented sides you could see the blood tremble in it. And the white worm stirring and fainting in the reverend pants. And love, very sad. He would paint love as a skeleton from which they had picked the flesh-an old goanna-and could not find more, however much they wanted, and hard they looked. Himself with them. He would have liked to discover whether it really existed, how it tasted. Alf Dubbo was painting at his picture all the morning. Some of it even Mrs Pask and the rector might have understood, but some was so secret, so tender, he could not have borne their getting clumsy with it. Parts of it walked on four legs, but others flowed from his hand in dreams that only he, or some inconceivable stranger, might recognize and interpret. A little while before it was time to set the pickled onions on the table, Mrs Pask came, and stood behind him. "Well, I never!" she called. "That is a funny sort of picture. After all I have taught you! What is it called?" "That is called 'My Life,' " the boy answered. "And this?" she asked, pointing with her toe. "That," he said-he almost could not-"that is the picture of Jesus. It is no good, though, Mrs Pask. You must not look. I don't understand yet." She too, did not know exactly what to say. She had turned her deepest purple. She was munching on her lips. She said, "It all comes of my being so foolish. Things are not like this," she said. "It is downright madness. You must not think this way. My brother must speak to you," she said. "Oh, dear! It is dirty! When there is so much that is beautiful and holy!" She went away nearly crying. And he called after her, "Mrs Pask! It is beautiful! It is all, really, beautiful. It is only me. I am learning to show it. How it is. In me. I'll show you something that you didn't know. You'll see. And get a surprise." But she went away towards the kitchen. And his lips were spilling over with the bubbles of anguish. That dinner, which Alf did not share, the rector and his sister had a slap-up row. "But you have not seen!" she kept on harping, and drumming on the tablecloth. "I do not wish to see," he repeated. "I have confidence in the boy. It is his way of expressing himself." "You are weak, Timothy. If you were not, you would take the matter in hand. But you are weak." He could not answer that one straight, but said, "Our Lord recognized that all human beings are weak. And what did He prescribe? Love! That is what you forget, Emily. Or is it that you choose to ignore?" The window-panes were dancing. "Oh, love!" she said, real loud. She began to cry then. For a while the windows rattled, but they did at last subside, and become again flat glass. After that Alf Dubbo went away, because he was sick from listening. He put his paintings in the shed, behind the bran bin, which had just fallen empty, and which usually stayed that way for some time after it happened. There was no painting or drawing in the following weeks. Mrs Pask said that he must learn to darn, and sew on buttons, in case he should become a soldier. She gave him many other little jobs, like weeding, and errands, and addressing envelopes or the parish news-it was so good for his hand-while she sat and rested her ankles. Nor did she live aloud any more the incidents of her past life. But she thought them instead. Or remembered sick people who needed visiting. She went about much more than before, as if, by staying at home, she might have discovered something she did not want to, just by going into a room. Mrs Pask went her own way, and the Reverend Timothy Calderon and Alf Dubbo went theirs, all separately. It had always been that way more or less, only now it was as though they had been made to see it. In the case of the rector and his sister, at least they had their purposes, but for Alf Dubbo it was terrible, who walked amongst the furniture, and broken flower-pots, and cowpats. Once he squelched his hand in a new turd that old Possy had let drop, and his eyes immediately began to water, as the comforting smell shot up, and because at the same time the fresh cow-dung was so lifeless in texture compared with that of the oil paints. Only twice he looked at the paintings he had hidden in the shed. On the first occasion he could not bear it. On the second it might have been the same: if the rector had not suddenly appeared, looking for something, and said, "I am the only one, Alf, who has not seen the works of art." So Alf Dubbo showed. Mr Calderon stood holding the boards, one in either hand, looking from one to the other of the pictures. His lips were moving. Then the boy realized his guardian was not looking at the paintings, but somewhere into his own thoughts, at the pictures in his mind. Alf did not blame, because, after all, that was mostly the way people did behave. "So these are they," the rector was saying; the veins were old in the backs of his hands. "Well, well." Looking, and not, from one to the other. "I can remember, when I was a boy, before I became aware of my vocation, I had every intention of being an actor. I would learn parts-Shakespeare, you know-just for the fun of it, and even make up characters, the most extraordinary individuals, out of my own rather luxuriant imagination. People told me I had a fine declamatory voice, which, admittedly, I had. I took the part of a Venetian in, I believe it was _The Merchant__. And once"-he giggled-"I played a lady! I wore a pair of rose stockings. Silk. And on my chest a cameo, which had been lent me by some acquaintance of my aunts." The Reverend Timothy Calderon had grown cheerful by now. He stood the painted plywood against the empty bin, and went outside. "One day, Alf, you must explain your paintings to me," he said. "Because I believe, however clearly any artist, or man, for that matter, conveys, there must always remain a hidden half which will need to be explained. And perhaps that is not possible unless implicit trust exists. Between. Between the artist and his audience." It was a limpid morning, in which smoke ascended, and Mrs Pask had discovered a reason for paying a call. As he followed the rector between the rows of bolting lettuces, Alf Dubbo was puzzled to feel that perhaps he was the one who led, for Mr Calderon had turned so very spongy and dependent. The boy walked noticeably well. Upright. He appeared to have grown, too. He was suddenly a young man in whom the scars had healed, of the wounds they had made in his flesh. His nostrils awaited experience. At one point, at a bend in the path, the rector turned, and seemed in particular need of the youth's attention and understanding. "One summer, before we came to this country," he said, "I made a pilgrimage to Stratford-on-Avon-the home of the Bard-with my brother-in-law, Arthur Pask. It was very delightful. We had both already decided to take orders, although Arthur had not yet been directed to follow a different path. We slept in a shed, in a tea-garden. We would come in after the plays, and talk," he said, "half the night. All that week it was moonlight, I remember. Poor Arthur, you know, was a god. That is, as well as being an extremely saintly man, he was most personable." The young blackfellow trod warily, stiffly, through the narrative, and kicked aside the sickly stalks of one or two uprooted cabbages. He was not so much hearing as seeing, and was not altogether convinced by the figure of the second parson, whom moonlight made whiter. He remembered the wooden figure of the god in the chariot, in the French painting. Quite lifeless. Either he could not understand, or gods were perhaps dummies in men's imaginations. When, somewhat to Alf Dubbo's surprise, Mr Calderon took him by the hand, the better to lead him, it seemed, along paths they already knew, under the clothesline, with its loops of heavy-hanging wet linen, and past the ungovernable bushes of lemon-scented geranium. Yet, although the two figures were joined together at the hand, and were crowding through the doorway abreast, bumping at the doorposts with their awkward formation, as if to widen the hole, each could only feel that the other was probably entering a different tunnel. Mr Calderon had turned a bluish, milky white, and would have liked to appear pitiful, to justify his being led. "I am leaning on you," he suggested, "when you are the one who must need support and guidance. If only on account of your age." Then he gave a kind of gasp. "Sometimes I wonder," he added, "what will become of me." "What, are you sick?" asked the boy, in a tone of brutal indifference. Because his teeth were almost chattering, he had to aim his words like stones. "Not exactly," Mr Calderon replied, and added, "That is, there are some to whom I would not admit it. Their efforts to sympathize would be too painful to witness." He continued to act rather sick, or old, because by now the boy was learning to guide him along the passages. It was becoming gently agreeable. But the boy himself was behaving automatically. Guiding under guidance, he was no longer the initiated youth. There were pockets of puppy-fat concealed about his body, and his mind shivered behind the veil which still separated him from life. On normal occasions, delivering a message, or returning a pair of cleaned shoes, he would not have lingered in the rector's room; its personal mystery was too much for him. Now, on arrival at their destination, his movements were ticking painfully. Halted on the carpet from which the pattern had disappeared, Mr Calderon said formally, and somehow differently, "Thank you, dear fellow. I am grateful to you in my infirmity." In which neither of them believed. But Mr Calderon was pleased to have invented it. Then, again surprisingly, he opened Alf Dubbo's shirt, and put in his hand. "It is warmth for which one craves," he explained, older and more trembly than before. The boy feared his heart, which was leaping like a river fish, might be scooped up and held by that cold hand. But he did not resist physically. At no time in his life was Alf Dubbo able to resist what must happen. He had, at least, to let it begin, for he was hypnotized by the many mysteries which his instinct sensed. Mr Calderon was mopping his forehead. "Are you charitable?" he asked. "Or just another human being?" Alf did not know, so he only grunted. As his guardian seemed to ordain it, they were pretty soon divesting themselves of anything that might possibly serve as a refuge for their personalities. The parson's pace became reckless, with the boy following suit, because it would have been worse to have got left behind. They were revolving in the slightly shabby room, their ridiculous shirt-tails flapping like wings. Their shoes were thunderous in coming off. Mr Calderon stubbed his toe on one of the castors of the bedstead, but it was not the moment at which to complain. Time was too short. The past, the future, the appearances of things, his faith, even his desire, could have been escaping from him. Certainly, after the whirlwind of preparation, he was left with his nakedness, always so foolish, and rather bent at the knee. But decided to embrace his intention. It was a warm-cold morning in autumn. It was a morning devoted to regret rather than fulfilment. They lay together on the honeycomb quilt. Pleasure was brief, fearful, and only grudgingly recognized. Very soon the boy was immersed in the surge of words with which his lover lamented his own downfall. In between, Mr Calderon revived his trance of touch. "A kind of dark metal," he pondered, and would have liked to remember poetry, even to have composed some of his own, to write with his finger. "But metal does not feel." So they returned perpetually to where they had left off. "That is what makes it desirable." Metal submitted, however. They lay upon the lumpy bed of words. From under his eyelashes. the boy was fascinated for always by a mound of grey stomach. Mr Calderon resumed quoting from the narrative of his life, and Alf Dubbo snoozed. When he awoke, his guardian was sneezing, overtaken by catarrh, if not an honest-to-God cold. "We should put our things on," he announced irritably, and then: "I wonder what you will think of me, Alf." The boy, who had been dreaming happily, looked contented, all considered. But the man was too obsessed to notice. Groping for his trousers, for his handkerchief, from where he lay, keys, money fell in an ominous cascade. "How I must appear to you," he persisted. The boy began to laugh, showing his broad teeth. "Well?" asked the man. Suspicious. "How you look?" The boy was practically bound with laughter. Then, with an expression which was rather sheepish, but which might have turned to malice if he had been dealing with an equal, he reached out, and seized a handful of the grey belly, and twisted it round, tight, as if it had been stuff. "Hhehhyyy?" Mr Calderon whinged. He did not like the turn affairs had taken. But made himself laugh a little. "You look to me"-the boy laughed-"like you was made out of old wichetty grubs." And twisted the flesh tighter in support. It was a situation which Mr Calderon might have handled badly, if the door had not opened and introduced his sister Mrs Pask. Emily Pask was standing there. On two legs. That was the general impression. In a purple hat. Everybody was looking. Nobody was in any way assisted. They had, in fact, stuck. Until Mrs Pask's throat began to thaw. The blood was again moving in her, till it matched her hat. Her eyes were sewn to her face, otherwise they might have fallen, and even so, despite the stitches, almost did. "You boy!" She began to try her tongue. "You! You devil! What have you done to my brother?" She began to totter at a chair. And fell upon it without mercy. "I never allowed myself to suspect," she rasped. "But knew. Something. Oh, you devil! Sooner or later." The others remained fastened to that bed, the honeycomb pattern eating into their buttocks. In spite of the shock, Alf Dubbo realized pretty soon that he must dress himself. It took a long time, but was eventually accomplished. The Reverend Timothy Calderon had resorted to tears, and to calling on his sister's name. In the blur of white and purple, Alf Dubbo left the room. "AlfwheraryouAlf," called Mrs Pask's cocky. The boy had thought to knot his shoelaces together, and to hang his shoes round his neck. A practical move, it enabled him to run more easily from the township of Numburra, which he never saw again. As he wandered through paddocks and along roads, the fugitive did not reflect on the injustice of Mrs Pask's accusation, sensing with her that all which had happened had to happen, sooner or later. He was only glad to have endured it, and to be able to remember some little spasms of pleasure in a waste of words and bewilderment. Sensual pleasure, certainly, because his arms were strong, and his skin was smooth, and the appeal had been made just then. But he did also recall his protector in many harmless attitudes, and would slow up on his journey, and kick at a stone, or pull a leaf, as he estimated the extent and kind of loss. He felt the wind on him. The absence of his guardian was not unlike that caused by the theft of some old woolly, hitherto undervalued garment snatched from an unsuspecting back on a frosty morning. Less material, more subtly missed, because he would not have admitted, were those equally woolly precepts, of God in cloud and God in man, which the rector had attempted to wind round a mind that found them strange, suffocating, superfluous. Although he had adopted a few of these, in secret, for expediency's sake, and had got into the habit of protecting himself from terrors by wrapping his thoughts in them, beside some waterhole at night. What became of the rector and his sister, Alf Dubbo often wondered, without ever finding out. Their end could have been an awful one. Chained together in a hell of common knowledge, they might have lingered for a little, torturing each other with the dreadful secret and the brother's insufficient faith. Actually, what happened was this: When Mr Calderon had snivelled a while, as he was, on the bed, for even if he had clothed himself it could not have hidden his nakedness, and Mrs Pask had grieved, and brooded, and subsided, the rector, it must be said, did affirm, "As a Christian of a kind, Emily, and I expect even you will grant there are all kinds, I must protest that poor Alf Dubbo was not to blame." Mrs Pask creaked, or the springs of the overgoaded chair. "To blame?" she asked, dreamily. "For what has happened," her brother replied. "You must understand, in all justice, that I was to blame." He began to snivel again. "And will do penance for it ever after." "To blame?" repeated Mrs Pask. "For what has happened?" — dreamier still. Mr Calderon's mouth opened. But Mrs Pask got up. "I do not know, Timothy," she said, "what you are referring to." And looked right at him, as though he had been clothed in one of his two flannel suits, gunmetal tones, or the blue serge, from Anthony Hordern's. "I am going to warm up the Cornish pasty," she announced. "You must excuse me," she said, "if dinner is skimpy. I am feeling off colour. Oh, there will be the bottled plums, of course, for anyone who has the appetite." If his sister had not been a good woman, he might have doubted her morality. As it was, he accepted the state of affairs, and counted his money, which had fallen on the floor. They continued to live together. Mr Calderon was even humbler than before, lighting a candle, offering a text, holding a chalice at eye level. It might have been pitiful, if anyone had ever noticed, how his faith flickered on its bed of ashes in the painful process of rekindling. There was so much to accomplish in such a short time. He was suffering, his eyes suggested, from something secret and internal, as he placed the wafer, shielded the chalice, and wiped the rim with the linen napkin so beautifully laundered by his sister. Mrs Pask was leading a seemingly tranquil life. Only once, she had remarked, over her devilled toast, at tea, "I often wonder what that boy intended to convey through those horrible, horrible obscenities he painted on his birthday with poor Arthur's oils." But quickly mastered her wind, while her brother composed a little mound out of some grains of scattered salt. Mrs Pask no longer took her easel to dash off a sunset or a gum-tree. She had thrown herself into works, and was respected by almost every member of the Mothers' Union and the Ladies' Guild.