Patrick White - Happy Valley

It was better like that, said Ernest Moriarty, correcting an essay by R. Dormer on the Cow and Her Relationship with Man. She kept on saying, it’ll kill you, Ernest, and look at the screw, it’s shameful the way, and a man with all those years of service, and if you got that job up on the North Shore we could easily keep a maid. The Cow is a useful animal. She gives us meat, milk, and menewer. In the evening the Cow went slowly home and they milked her dry. She was content. He was content, of course he was content. He had his stamps. He was secretary to the Moorang Philatelists’ Society. Only Vic, sitting in the front room, said that the sofa was wearing out. She was still very pretty, like those evenings in Marrickville when they licked stamps together and he touched her hand. And then he could not restrain himself, and he had to go home, and perhaps the people in the tram knew why he was wheezing, and it was uncomfortable to walk. The Cow has an udder with four tits. I don’t want to complain, she said, only I’m fond of you, only it’s for your own good. He wrote and nothing happened. He showed her the letters before he sealed them up. And nobody came to mend the roof. It made him feel bad, in spite of those new powders, and at night he could hardly breathe. So he could not very well do more than write. Poor, pretty, pink Vic. It made him proud to possess her, not physically, that is, because that always made him wheeze, but to know that she was there, like the three-cornered Cape of Good Hope blue and the surcharged German New Guinea. He arranged R. Dormer’s exercise book on the pile. It was very neat, a perfect square of exercise books with a rubber on the top. There were four pencils and a pen in a little wooden tray in front of the ink.

I’ve finished that one, Archie Braithwaite said.

Then he cringed back on the desk. Andy Everett had given him a kick.

Turn to page ninety-four. Example number thirty-six.

The Cow resumed her laborious Relationship with Man.

The Yellow Sea and the Red Sea, and the Blue Pool near Moorang, where you went for picnics in the summer, if it was a good summer, if there was no drought, but if there was a drought. Arthur Ball had blood on his face. The way your knuckle stung as it landed on Arthur’s teeth.

Emily Schmidt smelt her handkerchief, passed it to Gladys Rudd to smell. Her lips spelt Parma Violets behind her hand. Emily Schmidt smiled in a vastly superior way and played about with her ring.

It was dull, because this was school, because the feverish chant of the younger children burst in a thin unison through the wooden wall, intensifying the monotony with a twiceoneatwo, twicetwoafour, twicethreeasix, seeming to paralyse the progress of the clock. And there is no monotony so desperate as the activities of A, B, and C, nothing so definitely guaranteed to work havoc with the nails or to make you groan inwardly at the endlessness of time. Until, with the ultimate gesture of a formal hand, the clock points beyond these deserts to a luxuriance of sound and motion and sensation suddenly revived.

Conversation became intricate at twelve o’clock. Somebody banged the door. Somebody dropped a book. Somebody bounced a ball. Then they were going out. Their voices distributed themselves in the open air as they started to walk home, or ran. Rodney Halliday ran very lightly up the road as hard as he could go. He drew his legs up under him and jumped a ditch. He ran on past the wire fence, under the telephone wires, under the truculent murmur that telephone wires have, and a knotting of small birds.

Emily Schmidt walked with Gladys Rudd, letting her smell the handkerchief.

Are you coming up this evening, Emily? asked Margaret Quong.

No, said Emily.

Why ever not?

Because.

Emily Schmidt compressed her lips. She had a face that was small and pale and concentratedly vicious under her pale slender curls.

My Mumma said I’m not to go to Quongs’.

So did mine, agreed Gladys Rudd.

All right, said Margaret.

Her voice was very resigned. She began to walk on ahead, looking down at her feet. Behind her Gladys and Emily began to giggle. They began to sing high up in voices nasally intense, and remarkably alike:

My Mumma said I never should

Play with the gypsies in the wood.

If I did she said she would…

Margaret walked on quickly bending her head. She did not listen. She tried to avoid unpleasantness. She did not ask for reasons, because reasons were unpleasant, and she knew already, vaguely underneath, that it was Father that made Emily giggle and compress her lips. It was that time about the Everett girl, and Mrs Everett going to court, and Mother had gone to court, and there was that time in at Moorang when they ran Father in for doing something you did not think about.

She hung her head and walked along. She was thin and straight, with her hair cut straight in a fringe over the eyes that were more oblique than Amy’s even, or Arthur’s, or Walter’s eyes. Chinese eyes, said Ethel Quong with very definite bitterness. Ethel Quong was Walter’s wife, and before she had married Walter, before Margaret was born, she had been a housemaid at Government House. How Ethel married Walter Quong will keep till later on. It is sufficient to know that she is bitter about it, and that when she looked at Margaret she often said, your sins will always find you out. Only she did not think it was fair that she should pay for her sins on her own, she always insisted that Margaret should share the debt.

And that is why Margaret had acquired the habit of looking down and closing her ears to unpleasantness. She did not hear what Emily and Gladys sang. She would go back to dinner at home, and she did not care, and Father would come in from the garage wearing overalls and make a lot of pleasant jokes. She found it difficult to connect Father in overalls with the things you did not think about and which made Mother bitter, because she had married a Chinaman, Walter Quong. It was too much to unravel, all this. And on the whole she was happy, helping Aunt Amy at the store, or going for a music lesson at Miss Browne’s. Only sometimes, walking home, she felt unhappy. There was a lot inside her that got churned up.

There was a dull, mysterious moan in the telephone wires.

Rodney Halliday no longer ran. He had passed the road that led to Andy Everett’s and Willy Schmidt’s. He felt larger now. He began to whistle. Stooping down, he pulled up his socks and glanced back down the road to see the others straggle along in little groups, preceded by Margaret Quong. He liked being alone. Only sometimes he didn’t, and then he thought about it a bit, and then he preferred to be alone.

He looked from side to side of the road. The air was very sharp. In one of the paddocks a bull was serving a cow. He looked, and he looked away. He remembered the time— he was a good bit younger — when the dogs came into the yard, and his mother went red and shooed them away, and he had cried because she would not let them play. Mother said, later you’ll understand. And later he did. And it made you look sideways at the bull out of the corner of your eye. But of course you understood. A bull and a cow. He stopped at the side of the road and had a proper look. He would have liked to stay there by the fence and see it happen again. He jingled some pennies in his trouser pocket, and a shell he always carried about. But somebody was coming and perhaps they had seen him look. It was Margaret Quong, walking along the side of the road. If Margaret Quong had seen, as she must, then he felt ashamed. But she looked down at the ground.

They both continued to walk along.

He took a look at Margaret, at that funny black hair like a doll’s, and the eyes. He saw that she was almost crying, and that made him embarrassed too, because he didn’t know what to do, or say, or if he should do nothing, or what. But Margaret did not speak. It made him uncomfortable to see her cry.