Patrick White - Riders in the Chariot

Alf Dubbo went to live at 27 Abercrombie Crescent, in the small room which Hannah had offered. He did not take long to decide; he was too relieved. He had locked his box, tied a cord round one or two things he had been working on, and gone. He was happy in the back room, which was stuffed with many objects of doubtful virtue: a spare mattress full of kapok lumps, a rusted, burnerless kero stove, a dressmaker's dummy, boxes of feathers, and a scattering of rat pellets. Outside, the wires of aerials were slackly strung above the slate roofs. He was fascinated by the wires, and began the first day to paint them, as they intercepted the sounds of feathers and his own tentative thanksgiving. But he kept the door locked. Some time after the light had gone, Hannah came and rattled the knob. She announced, "My friend has come, Alf. I will have to introduce you." Dubbo went out to them. Hannah was nervous, but obviously proud. "I want you to know Alf Dubbo," she said. "Mr Norman Fussell." Doing with her hand as she had seen done. Norman Fussell had been arranging his waves in front of the glass. "Norman," Hannah explained, "is a male nurse. He is off duty for a while, and that is how he is able to be here." "Pleased to know you, Alf," said Mr Norman Fussell. He was very brisk for one so round and soft. He began to prepare himself a meal of beans on toast, which was the kind of thing he liked, and which he ate, holding his head on one side, half out of delicacy, half because of a difficult denture. Hannah was solicitous. "How is the sister, Norm?" she asked, but dreaded. "Bloody," said Norman Fussell through his beans. When he had finished, he informed, "Nurse is feeling better now. " And sat and smiled, arranging his canary-coloured waves, and smoking a cigarette which he had taken from a pretty little box. Hannah got Alf Dubbo aside. "They will tell you," she said, "that Norman is a pufter. Well, I am too tired to argue about what anybody is. I am sick of men acting like they never was. Norm could not impress a woman even if he tried. And that is what is restful." Hannah would attempt not to let business interfere with Norman Fussell's off-duty, but if it did, he would doss down with a blanket on the lounge. Though he might also sometimes go in search of trade. Sunday was religiously kept for Norm, if he happened to be free. Sunday was bliss, such as is possible. They would lie in bed overlapping each other, and read the murders and divorces, and consult the stars. Or would slip out to the kitchen to fetch the red tea and snacks they loved: bread spread thickly with condensed milk, or tomato sauce, or squashed banana. Or would snooze and melt together. Dubbo painted them later on, as they appeared to him through the doorway. He painted them in one big egg of flesh, forehead to forehead, knee to knee, compressed into the same dream. It was not his most ambitious painting. But an egg is something; even a sterile one is formally complete. On going to live at Abercrombie Crescent, Dubbo began to receive treatment as an out-patient at the neighbouring hospital of Saint Paul's, either from the young doctor known to Hannah, or from one or other of his colleagues. For a long time the patient could hardly tell them apart. Their white coats and aseptic minds made them about as dissimilar as a row of the white urine bottles. As he had anticipated, the blackfellow was frightened at the touch of hands, but realized in time that he was just a case. He even grew bored and irritated by what was being done to him. It was necessary to endure the manufacture of cardboard boxes, but while he waited at the hospital of an evening, he could see the light was failing. He would be straining to prevent it. There were days when he did not take up a brush. Eventually he was told he had been cured of his venereal condition. He had almost forgotten what it was they were treating him for; it was so much more important to find a way out of other dilemmas. Disease, like his body, was something he had ended by taking for granted. His mind was another matter, because even he could not calculate how it might behave, or what it might become, once it was set free. In the meantime, it would keep jumping and struggling, like a fish left behind in a pool-or two fish, since the white people his guardians had dropped another in. While he continued painting, and attempting to learn how to think, Dubbo discovered that a war had broken out. So they told him, and he did slowly take it in. Wars do not make all that difference to those who have always been at war, and this one would not greatly have affected the abo's life, if it had not been for the altered behaviour of the people who surrounded him. Certainly, after he had been examined medically, and pronounced unfit, he had been drafted from the stapling of cardboard boxes to the spray-painting of aeroplanes, but that was part of his rather unconvincing, to himself always incredible, communal existence. But there were the people in the house, the people in the street, who now forced their way deeper into his mind. His brush would quiver with their jarring emotions, the forms were disintegrating that he had struggled so painfully and honestly to evolve. Now he began to dawdle at night in the streets, where there were more people than ever before investigating the lie of the land. Since the men had gone out to kill, a great many of those who had been left were engaged in far more deadly warfare with their own secret beings. Their unprotected, two-headed souls would look out at the abo, who was no longer so very different from themselves, but still different enough not to matter. Mouths, glittering with paint, would open up in the night like self-inflicted wounds. That, of course, was already familiar, and in another light he would have accepted it along with what he sensed to be other tribal customs. Now it was the eyes that disturbed most, of the white people who had always known the answers, until they discovered those were wrong. So they would burst out laughing, or break into little snatches of tinny song. Some of them danced, with open arms, or catching at a stranger. Others fell down, and lay where they were. Or they would lie together on the trampled grass in the attitudes of love. They would try everything sooner or later, but it was obvious they were disappointed to find they had not succeeded in killing the enemy in themselves, and perhaps there would not be time. Dubbo's workmates were in the habit of allowing him a swig or two, because, when they had got him drunk, he gave them a good laugh. Occasionally he would persuade somebody of an accommodating nature to buy him an illicit bottle. Then he would rediscover the delirious fireworks, as well as the dull hell of disintegration, which he had experienced first in Mrs Spice's shack. Except that by now, an opalescence of contentment would often follow nausea; a heap of his own steaming vomit could yield its treasure. He appeared to succeed, in fact, where the others in the wartime streets failed. Once, after a bout of drinking, he fell down, and lay on the lino, inside the front door at Abercrombie Crescent. Hannah, who came in late and unsuccessful, just about broke her neck. After she had switched on the light, and kicked the body again for value, she felt the need to holler, "Waddaya expect? From a drunken bastard of a useless black!" But he did not hear that. Next evening when he got in, she called him, and said, "Look here, love, some John with a sense of his own importance who finds a piebald lurching around, or even _laying__ in the street, is going to collect _you__, and plenty more said about it." Hannah, without her make-up, was cold, pale, and grave. She was too intent, she let it be understood, on the matter in hand, to bother all that about her lodger's fate. Her naked nails blenched on the little pair of tweezers with which she was pulling the hairs out of her eyebrows. "Of course," she said, and pulled, "it's nothing," she said, "to do with me. Every man's business is his _own__. See?" All the while pulling. She would pull, and squint, and drop the hairs out of the window as if she was doing nothing of the sort. Alf Dubbo listened, but was more fascinated by what he saw. She had not yet made her bed, and the sheets were the colour of Hannah's natural skin-grey, at least in that light. Hannah herself was the colour of oysters, except for the parting of her breasts, where water could have been dripping, like in an old bath, or kitchen sink. "By the way," she mentioned, "that room of yours is going up to twelve bob. There is a war on now." But he remained fascinated by what he saw: Hannah's hand trembling as she worked the tweezers. "Okay, Hannah," he agreed, and smiled for other things. "Don't think I am trying to shake you off, Alf," she had to explain. "I need those two bob." She was smoothing and peering at her eyebrow, to make it as glossy as it might have been. "Any tart," she said, "even the plush ones, is a fool not to take precautions." As she tried rubbing at her eyebrow with spit. So Hannah, too, he saw, was afraid of what might happen, and most of all in mirrors. One day when she was running the feather duster over the more obvious surfaces of the lounge-room, she opened one of the compartments of her mind. She left off in the middle of "The Harbour Lights," to say, or recite, rather: "Those old women, Alf, the ones with the straight, grey, greasy hair hangin' down to their shoulders, like girls. The old girls. With a couple of yeller teeth, but the rest all watery gums. You can see them with an old blue dog, and sometimes a parcel. Pushin' their bellies ahead of 'em. Gee, that is what frightens me! And the snaky veins crawlin' up their legs!" But he could not help her, although he saw she was waiting for some sort of easy sign. He was sitting on the good end of the lounge, the points of his elbows fitted into the shallow grooves of his knee-caps, the slats of his fingers barely open on his cheek-bones. In that position, but for the supporting lounge, he might have been squatted beside a fire. Fire did protect, of course. Indeed, in deserted places it was not desirable to move at night without it. Alf Dubbo was fortunate in that he had his fire, and would close his eyes, and let it play across his mind in those unearthly colours which he loved to reproduce. But which did not satisfy him yet. Not altogether. His eyes would flash with exasperation. He could not master the innermost, incandescent eye of the feathers of fire. As he remained seated, and dreaming, and wordless on the lounge, on that occasion when she had been foolish enough to ask for guidance, Hannah was compelled to shout, "You are no bloody good! Any of yez! That silly sod of a Norm, we know. Not that I don't take 'im for what he is worth. God knows, there is plenty of women without a friend, let alone a human hot-water bottle. But you, Alf, you got something shut up inside of you, and you bloody well won't give another person a look." She began laying about her with the duster with such violence that the back fell off a book, which he had never more than noticed, in spite of the fact that it was the only one; it was too old, and black, and dusty, stuck in behind some ornaments which clients had presented to the owner in moments of drink or affluence. He stooped and picked up the brittle strip of leather, which lay in his fingers curled and superfluous as a shred of fallen bark. The rather large gold lettering of a title was still legible, though. Then he said, quite keen, in that good accent he had learnt somewhere, and would put on at times, "I would like you to lend me this book, Hannah. Where did it come from?" "That! Oh, that belonged to Charlie. My old rag-picker that I told you of. My one and only stroke of luck. Yes, you can have a loan of it. I like a good read of some book. But not that!" The house, squeezed in as it was between two others, had already grown too dark. Dubbo took the book, and went at once to his own room, where light, reduced to its essence, green-white and astonishing, would trickle a little longer, from over the slate roofs, down from the slate-coloured sky, of which they were an extension. He opened the book beside the window. At that hour even the veiled panes seemed to grow translucent as crystal. So, while the true light remained to him, he continued to read, in such desperate and disorderly haste that he introduced here and there words and phrases, whole images of his own. His secret self was singing at last in great bursts: "Praise ye Him, sun and moon: praise Him all ye stars of light. Praise Him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens; And wires of aerials, and grey, slippery slates, praise, praise the Lord. Mountains and all hills: fruitful trees, and all cedars: and the grey ghosts of other trees: and soles of the feet on wet leaves: and the dry rivers, praise the name of the Lord. The orange bamboos praise Him with their creaking. Beasts and all cattle: creeping things and flying fowl, praise, praise. Hands praise the God…." His own hands were trembling by now, for the light and his eyesight were nearly gone. So he threw himself, face down, on the bed. His upturned heels were quite wooden and lifeless, but in his innermost mind his hands continued to praise, with the colours of which he was capable. They issued like charmed snakes from the tips of his fingers: the crimsons, and the clear yellows, those corrosive greens, and the intolerable purple with which he might dare eventually to clothe the formless form of God. So he lay and shivered for the audacity of his ambition. Until his body forced him up. Then he switched on the electric light, and did just notice the little dirty trumpet which his mouth must have printed on the pillow. Because it was ugly, he turned it over, so that he should not see the stain. During the nights which followed Dubbo spent hours reading from the rag-collector's Bible. The voices of the Prophets intoxicated him as he had never been in life, and soon he was laying on the grave splendour of their words with the colours of his mind. At this period, too, he constructed the skeletons of several works which he did not have the strength or knowledge to paint. "The Chariot," for instance. Ezekiel's vision superimposed upon that of the French painter in the art book, was not yet his own. All the details were assembled in the paper sky, but the light still had to pour in. And suddenly he furled the cartoon, and hid it. To forget about it, at least with the waking part of his mind. The picture he did paint now was "The Fiery Furnace," almost the whole of it one Friday-he had gone sick on purpose-then the agony of Saturday, in which he sat, touching the surface of paint once or twice, but not seeing how to solve, or not yet daring. And did at last, in several soft strokes, of such simplicity he was exhausted by them. And sweating. His thighs were as sticky as though he had spilled out over himself. After that he cleaned his brushes very carefully and solemnly. He was happy. He went out, past the kitchen. Norm had arrived, and he and Hannah were cutting dainty sandwiches, spreading them with anchovette, or squashed dates. They smiled at him, but guiltily, for the obvious secret they were sharing: there was going to be a party. "Hi, Alf," Norm murmured. That was all. Dubbo went as far as Oxford Street, where he knew a barmaid whose friendship did not have principles attached. He could beckon from the street through the Bottle door, and sometimes Beat would condescend to see. Tonight Beat played, and he took his booze down the hill to a dead end he sometimes frequented, where nobody ever came at night, unless to park a car, or nail a tart against the wall. There he sat on the curb. He began to drink his neat grog. He went about it at first as though it had been a job he had learnt to do, very conscientious, and holding back some of the finer points of technique for difficult passages ahead. Then spasmodic. Glugging heavily into the bottle. He broke wind once or twice. His digestive tract had caught fire. He sang a few lines of a song he had made up in similar circumstances: "Hi digger, hi digger, My dad is bigger Than hiss-sself. My uncle is the brother Of my mother. But the other Is a bugger No-ho-bodee, And not my mother, Knows." By now the moon had entered even the back alleys, and was rinsing them of rubbish, so the black man stood up, and began to walk precariously along the solid stream. He loved the square-eyed houses, although they were blind to him. He was well-disposed towards the unpredictable traffic eyes. He touched a mudguard or two, and in one instance a flying bonnet. In the big street the dim fruitshops were all bananas. An open box of dates reminded him that the flies must be collecting at home. So he began to make for Hannah's place. During the latter years of the war there was often something doing at Hannah's; the streets were that full, some of it could not help pouring in wherever a door opened. There was the Army, there was the Navy, but better the Navy because of the Yanks, and better than the Yanks, the dollar bills and nylons. Hannah herself was not so far gone she could not occasionally strike a lode deep in the heart of Idaho or Texas: some stoker who would pay real well for an opportunity to tell about his mom. Then Hannah would start swilling the booze around in her glass, and staring deep into it, until the time came to collect. But there were the other nights at Abercrombie Crescent when Norm's mob came in. When she was in the right mood, Hannah not only did not mind, but encouraged, and took an intelligent interest in the private life of any perv. The whore would nearly pee herself watching a drag act in some of her own clothes. After the monotony and bruises of the flesh show, it could have been that she liked to sink down on the springs, and enjoy the antics of puppets-tricky, ingenious, virulent, lifelike, but strictly papier-mâche. Now as Alf Dubbo wove through the streets back to Hannah's, he guessed it would be queans' night, if only from the special and secret manner she and Norm had worn while spreading the anchovette and dates. The outlook moved him neither way. It was an aspect of life which did not surprise the abo since he had discovered early that almost all human behaviour is surprising; you must begin to worry only for the little that is not. So he went home, as equably as his condition allowed, and prepared for anything. At Abercrombie Crescent all the inner doors stood open, except that of the room at the back. There were dark whispers in the hall. Somebody was powdering in clouds in front of Hannah's dressing-table, somebody was pulling on stockings. It sounded as though the lavatory cistern would never stop. Dubbo found Hannah right at the heart of the festivities, seated on the lounge with her friend and colleague Reen, whose hair was waved that tight it would have disappeared altogether if its brilliancy had allowed; Reen was one of the golden girls, but thin. In addition to the two whores, there was quite a bunch of queans, who knew, but did not know, Hannah's piebald. There was somebody, besides, whom Dubbo was still too confused to see, but sensed. Hannah shouted, in what was intended as a social whisper, that Alf had arrived in time for Normie's act. When Norman Fussell did, indeed, make his entrance. He was wearing a bunch of feathers on his head, and a bunch of feathers on his arse, and a kind of diamond G-string wherever else. Otherwise Norm was fairly naked, except that he had painted on a pair of formal nipples, and was prinked and powdered in the right places. The bird began to perform what was intended as a ritual-dance, on Hannah's Wilton with the brown roses. Assisted by gin, and the soul of the original chorus girl, by which he was obviously possessed, Norm extemporized with hands, ruffed up the gorgeous feathers, scratched stiffly at an imaginary earth. Although his bird breathed like a rasp, it did not seem to matter; so do hens when chased around the yard in summer. Just as the chorus girl was smuggled into Norm at birth, her elderly but professional soul had now invaded the body of this pink bird, making it real by the conventions which those present recognized. Indeed, if it ever got around that a bird of paradise had been in conjunction with a brush turkey, Norm Fussell could have provided evidence. All the queans were shrieking their approval, if it was not their scorn. Dubbo was laughing loudest and widest. He had squatted down on Hannah's carpet. If there had been space, he, too, would have danced the figures he remembered from some forgotten time. Instead, he clapped his hands. He was so glad, watching Norm strut, and flap his wings of flesh to music, while the stench of bodies caused the small room to shrink still further round the form of the primordial bird. "You are a proper pufter rorter, Hannah!" Reen had to remark, because she was a cow. "If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't watch this, not if I was offered a good night's hay. It sends me goosey." Hannah, who had let herself be drawn to the mystical core of Norm's act, would have preferred not to interrupt her devotions, but did reply from behind an objective smile, "What odds! Capon is just another kind of chook." At the same time, she realized the person who had come with Norm was present, and rewarded him with a deferential glance. So that Dubbo also remembered the fellow wearing a good dark suit was seated in a corner, in what was Hannah's best chair. The youngish man could not leave off looking at the abo, not offensively, however, for half his face was shaded by a hand. And in that position he remained, voluntarily obliterated. The extraordinarily long hand, which held and protected the long white face, appeared to sever it from the body, and the richly decorous dark suit. After appropriate applause for Norman, and drinks for those to whom respect was due, the party proceeded. Dubbo had cadged a drink or two, and was feeling fine, electrically lit. Soon he would sing his song, and dance his dance. He stood swaying in drink and anticipation. When Hannah's colleague Reen called, "What can _you__ do, Dubbo? Tear your clothes off, and show your bottom like everybody else?" She kicked her heels into the carpet, and roared. She was shickered, of course, by now, and sour as always. But Hannah nudged her friend, and looked anxiously at the young fellow who had come with Norm. Dubbo himself was overtaken by a sudden sadness. An Eyetalian boy called Fiddle Paganini was finishing singing a number, in the blond wig and black net stockings he had brought for that purpose in a port. Hannah said in a loud voice, "Alf can do better than sing and dance. Take it from me. Can't you, Alf?" She did not look exactly at him, and stuck her tongue into her cheek, because she was just a little bit nervous at what she was about to suggest. She turned to the young fellow in the corner. "You don't know what we got here, Humphrey." She was addressing the stranger in a voice louder still, in an accent that nobody had ever heard before. "Alf does oil paintings. Don't you, Alf? How about showing the pictures? That would be a real treat, and one that Mr Mortimer would appreciate and remember." Dubbo was struck by lightning right there in the brown lounge. Everyone was looking. Some of the queers were groaning and yawning. "Arr, yes, go on, Alf!" Norman Fussell added. Norm had returned conventionally clothed, and seated himself on his friend's lap, from which he had been dropped almost at once, because he was heavy. This piece of by-play, if of no other significance, forced Humphrey Mortimer's hand to reveal the second half of his face. Which Dubbo saw fully at last. Now the young man leaned forward, and said, "Yes, Alf, there is nothing I should like better than to see those paintings. If you would consider showing them." He spoke in tones so polite and flat they precluded arrogance, enthusiasm, irony, or any definite emotion. That was the way he had been taught, perhaps. To win confidence, without offending against taste by rousing hopes. Dubbo stood. Usually he could sense an ambush. Or was this the one evening when defences might be dropped? It was vanity that began to persuade him, stroking with the most insidious feathers. All that he was capable of expressing was soon suffocating in his chest, writhing in his belly, tingling in the tips of his fingers. He was looking down almost sardonically into the rather pale, lifeless eyes of Humphrey Mortimer, who was obviously unaware that he might have created an explosive situation. Until Dubbo was no longer able to endure that such ignorance should be allowed to exist. "Orright," he answered, furrily. He began to walk, or run, along the dark passage to his room, his hands stretched out brittle in front of him, to guard against something. He could not select quickly enough a couple of the paintings, dropped, and recovered them. Started back. At one point his right shoulder struck the wall, which threw him off. But he did arrive in the reeling lounge, where he propped the boards, on the floor, against a chair, in front of the guest of honour. The whole business was most unorthodox, it was implied by the majority of those present. And the paintings themselves. Some members of the company made it clear they would take no further part in anything so peculiar. But Humphrey Mortimer sat forward, disclosing through his eyes what he would not have allowed his mouth to attempt; he might have committed himself. Perhaps only Dubbo sensed that an undernourished soul was feeding as though it had never eaten before. The abo was very straight and aloof. "Yeeees," said the connoisseur, because it was time he made a remark, provided it was equivocal. Dubbo touched the corner of one board with his toe. "No," he contradicted. "These paintings are no good. I was still trying. Half of them is empty. That corner, see how dead it is? I did not know what to fill it with. I'll paint these out later on." He was still breathless. But from his vantage point he could afford to be contemptuous, not to say honest. "Even so," murmured Humphrey Mortimer. Possessed by the paintings, whether they were indifferent or not, he had grown completely passive. Nothing would control Dubbo's passion now. He ran back along the passage. The things in his pockets were flogging him. He brought paintings and paintings. They lit a bonfire in the mediocre room, the walls of which retreated from the blaze of colour. Although the gramophone continued to piddle manfully, it failed to extinguish even the edges of the fire. Some of the queers were taking their leave. Some of them had curled up. "Wonderful, ain't it, what a touch of paint will do?" Hannah said, and yawned. But in the roomful of dormant or murmurous people, it was the painter and his audience of one that mattered. They were in communication. Dubbo had just brought an offering of two pictures. Increasing sobriety suggested to him that he ought to withdraw. But he propped the paintings lovingly enough. The other sat forward. Since he had grasped the idiom, he was more deeply receptive. But, from habit or policy, would continue only lazily to smile his pleasure and acknowledgment. "Ah," he began intimately, for the painter alone, "Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego?" "Yes!" The abo laughed gently. It was very like a courtship. "And the Angel of the Lord," Dubbo added, in the same caressing voice. He squatted down and almost touched with a finger the stiff, but effulgent figure. It had emerged completely from the chaos of spirit in which it had been born. In that it was so very recent, the paint still wet, the creator could not see his work as it must appear and remain. He could at least admire the feathery texture of the angel's wings as a problem overcome, while forgetting that a little boy on a molten morning had held a live cockatoo in his hands, and opened its feathers to look at their roots, and become involved in a mystery of down. Later perhaps, falling asleep, or waking, it might occur to the man how he had understood to render the essence of divinity. If he could have seen it, the work was already sufficient in itself. All the figures in the furnace were stiff but true. The fire was final. Neither time nor opinion could divert a single tongue of flame into a different shape. And the two actual men, watching the figures in the fiery furnace, were themselves touched with a heavenly dew which protected them momentarily from other voices and mortal dangers. It seemed that honesty must prevail. It was the visitor who broke out first. He shivered violently, and shook off the spell. His eyes could have been regretting a surrender. "You have got something here, Dubbo," he said, languidly, even cynically. It was as far as he had ever gone towards committing himself, and it made him nervous. The abo, too, was nervous, if not angry, as he gathered up what had become an extravagant effusion in paint. "What is this?" Humphrey Mortimer asked. "This big cartoon that you brought along last with 'The Fiery Furnace,' and didn't explain?" "That," said the painter, "is nothing. It is a drawing I might work from later on. I dunno, though." Now that he was stone cold, he bitterly regretted having brought out the drawing for "The Chariot." Bad enough "The Fiery Furnace." All was exposed and defenceless. "I like that particularly," said Mr Mortimer. "The big cartoon. It is most interesting. Let me look at it a moment." "No," said Dubbo. "I don't want. It is too late. Another time." Hurrying his paintings. "You promise, then?" persisted the other. "Yes, yes," said Dubbo. But his nostrils contradicted. As the fire that had been kindled in the lounge-room died, Norm's party began to break up. There was a kissing and a hugging. The queans were restoring their habitual atmosphere of crossed lines. While Dubbo carried off the last ember of true passion. Now he would be able to lock his door and trust the silence. But footsteps followed in the passage, half tentative, half confident. "Look here, Alf," Humphrey Mortimer began. It could not have been anybody else. "I want to suggest something," he said. He had followed the abo as far as his door. Although it was close in the passage, both men were shivering. Mr Mortimer, whose silhouette seldom fell short of perfect, was standing with his fists clenched in his trouser pockets, and his coat rucked up over a protruding bum. He looked ridiculous. "I will make you an offer for at least three of the paintings," he said. "Which I am very anxious to own." He named "The Fiery Furnace" and a couple of others. "And the drawing of the chariot-thing, when it has fulfilled its purpose. That is to say, when you have finished working from it." The young man mentioned a sum, quite the most respectable that had ever been named in Hannah's house of love. "No. No. Sorry," said Alf Dubbo. His voice could not have hacked further words out of his feelings. "Think it over, at least. It is for your own good, you know." Humphrey Mortimer pulled that one. He continued to smile, because life had taught him that his own way was easily bought. But Dubbo, who had laid himself open at certain moments during the evening, was no longer vulnerable. Since beginning to suspect he had been deceived, he had shrivelled right up, and nobody would coax him out again. "Paintings which nobody looks at might never have been painted, " the patron argued. "I will look at them," Dubbo said. "Good night," he said, "Mr Mortimer." And shut the door.