Patrick White - The Vivisector

A lopsided moon, he saw, was balancing on the blurred and dripping trees. Father came in dressed for dinner. They kissed good night. Then Maman leaned against Father. He saw how beautifully they fitted together. He had never fitted together with anyone in such a way. He wondered whether he ever would.

Father kept his promise about the visit to Mumbelong. He had these three properties: Mumbelong, Yalladookdook and Sevenoaks, where managers were in charge, though as a young man Harry Courtney himself had lived and worked on the land. When he was particularly what Maman called ‘boring’ he used to tell about the blisters he had got digging holes for fence-posts, and dagging sheep Edith said Mr Courtney had made a fortune several times over from sheep and cattle. At his best there wasn’t any sign of it, like when cleaning his teeth in his underclothes in the swaying train, while the slimy water went sip slop inside the big, railways’ water-bottle. Hurtle lay on the other bunk watching his father. In the dark, afterwards, he listened to his snoring. He had not felt happier since becoming his father’s son.

They had to get up more than early so as not to miss the siding where the manager would meet them. Hurtle was so sleepy he couldn’t find his boots: Father had to help him into them. Before they got down, Father put on an oilskin, not the overcoat of Hurtle’s former imagining. To touch the oilskin made you shiver: it was so stiff and cold; but it made Father look real, more as though he worked. You were the one who was soft, in namby-pamby new clothes, face ghostly green in the glass if you looked: only your thoughts were real.

When they got down at the siding, with their valises, and the rifle father had told him to bring, there were lights in the darkness from what seemed to be a sulky. There was an old man’s voice explaining to them the manager Mr Spargo had strained his back and was laid up. The old man’s name was Sid Cupples.

‘This is the boy,’ Father explained to Sid, making you sound more like a thing the Courtneys owned than their legally adopted son.

The old man made some noises from between his gums. ‘Fine little bloke,’ he gobbled. ‘A chip off the old block, eh?’ As if he didn’t know: perhaps he didn’t.

They were entering a new world for which Father used a different voice. He seemed to be speaking the language old man Cupples would understand. Some way back Hurtle too had known how to speak it, or a version of it, but he no longer particularly wanted to remember. Driving in the sulky, with the lamps focused on the stones along the road and a few white thistles growing at the side, he remembered instead that other journey with the archdeacon and Harry’s father, when Harry was a boy. He wondered what he would have said to the archdeacon in the new language he had learnt, and which Father for the moment didn’t want to use.

As they jogged, Sid began to grumble: ‘Wethers in the Five Mile aren’t doin’ all they could. I told ’im. I told ’im ’e oughter shift the wethers. Give it a spell.’

Father was turning away from Sid, because he was the owner, who ought to be in league with the manager.

‘I told ’im,’ said Sid, whose hands were scaly on the reins, ‘I told ’im ’e oughter bluestone the crick. There’s worm in them wethers.’

Father’s oilskin was making a noise like sheets of metal. ‘Spargo’s sick,’ he reminded Sid.

‘I dunno if ’e’s sick. Spargo ’imself ain’t too sure. ’E oughter shift the wethers. I’m tellin’ yer, Mr Courtney, now yer’ve come. Spargo says ’e ain’t sick, or no more than a woman couldn’t fix.’

The two men were laughing together in the lamplit darkness for something they had both experienced. Although you were out of it, for once it didn’t matter; there was too much else. Sometimes the thistles at the edges of the road looked like cut-out paper when the lamplight showed them up.

And then waking: because you must have fallen asleep, you were suddenly so lumpish and gummy; the darkness had turned into silver paddocks. The silver light was trickling down out of the trees, down the hillside; the rocks themselves were for a second liquid. There were rabbits humped in the white grass, then scuttering away.

Father and Sid were still talking their different language. They seemed to have forgotten you existed, though you joined them together, fitted tightly between Father’s oilskin and Sid’s smelly old overcoat.

Then Father remembered and said: ‘Fine sheep country, son. You wanter keep yer eyes open, and you’ll pick up a wrinkle or two.’

He was speaking as though Maman didn’t exist, nor the painting by Boudin, nor the shelves of leatherbound books: when you knew all about them. Nor did he realize all the wrinkles you were picking up, not from the boring old sheep country, but from the world of light as the sun rose pale out of the hills, and the streams of liquid light were splashed across the white paddocks: from the sheep too, the wrinkled sheep huddling or trudging, coughing something that wouldn’t come up; there were some so close to the road you could look right into their grey, clotted wool.

He almost put out his hands. ‘Shall I be able to touch one?’

‘Touch what?’ Father asked.

‘A sheep. The wool. It looks sort of hard — tarry. I want to feel what it feels like.’

Father grunted, not sure whether he ought to be pleased. ‘You’ll be able to touch as many as you like.’

‘Make a wool classer of ’im!’ Sid Cupples laughed.

But when they explained what it was, you were able to say with certainty: ‘No. I don’t want to be anything like that.’

‘A squatter like yer dad is — or was,’ Mr Cupples corrected himself. ‘That’s a real man’s life.’

Hurtle was silent because of what he knew they wouldn’t believe.

The house was long, dust-coloured, wooden, amongst some dark trees, beside a river. While they were approaching a dark chocolate dog ran out, followed by a yellow mangy one, each gnashing teeth and showing a long pink tongue. The dogs were followed by several men dressed in their work-clothes, one of them less rough than the others who brought Mr Spargo’s apologies: he couldn’t manage to get out of bed.

Hurtle was no longer introduced. There were too many people, and it would have been too much trouble. Father might even be finding him a nuisance now that there were all these men. It would make it easier to sneak off alone while they were at Mumbelong. He stood about, kicking some rusted tins on which the dew still showed, like sweat on skin.

At the same time he couldn’t help being conscious of what was going on the other side of his eyelids. He knew that the rougher-looking men felt superior to Harry Courtney because he was rich and a gentleman, while the young bloke in a clean unironed shirt whose name was Col Forster was trying to please the owner for the same reason the men despised him. Col was a jackaroo, and very anxious about how he must behave as the manager’s representative. Sid Cupples, who was leading the horse round to the stables, seemed to belong to neither side. He was too old. He knew better than everybody and was content with that.

Hurtle too knew better than everybody, than all these anyway, Sid Cupples included; not that he could have explained what he knew: because he saw rather than thought. He often wished he could think like people think in books, but he could only see or feel his way. Again he saw in his mind the rough-looking sheep. He itched to get his fingers in their wool, for the feel of it.

They spent several days at Mumbelong, in which time he did various things Father planned he should do. He rode an old, wide, stubborn pony, which made his thighs stiff and rough. With that rifle Harry Courtney had offered in the beginning as a toy, he shot a rabbit through the back, and watched it kick its way to death. He watched a man called Eldred kill a sheep for them to eat. Eldred hung it on a post, and skinned it, and dragged the guts out with his hands.