David Malouf - The Great World

The presence of so many hippies, he thought, was unfortunate. It did not occur to him till later, when he saw how sober and attentive they were, that some of these people might have the same sort of distant but personal relation to Hugh Warrender that he did and had come in the same spirit. He saw them differently then.

It was February, and hot. Outside in the sunken rose garden where they had milled about waiting, the birds were singing, in a regular, repeatable way but at odd intervals just whenever they pleased, breaking in on the organ music. They were a distraction. Very argumentative and bold they sounded, getting on with their noisy lives while people settled and subdued themselves.

The order of things was impressive. Ellie read one of her father’s poems, quite a short one that was unfamiliar to Digger though he knew all the books. If it spoke of death, and he was by no means certain of that, it did so in a light-hearted way, closer to the hubbub the birds were creating than to the solemn music. There was an image of night-smelling jasmine — the flower itself out of sight somewhere, its invisible presence in the room, and of a household, also unseen, all busy voices. One word was repeated and Digger was moved by it. The word was ‘returns’.

When the poem was over some overtones of it, of its music, lingered in him, and in the others too, he thought. Iris very lightly touched his hand as on that other occasion, and once again what Mr Warrender had to say drew them together.

There was no sadness in it, none at all. Quite the opposite really. It spoke of presence and completeness, of ‘returns’. Much later, Digger would think of the poem and be pleased that he and Iris had heard it together. It would comfort him for his loss. But at the moment it was his mother he was thinking of. It struck him with panic, that image of her sitting in a broken chair out in the yard, with behind her the house and its contents, all she had clung to and held against such odds, turned to ashes in her head.

He had spent so many hours in the consideration of it because the law she had lived by was so like his own. What he was left wondering was how, when the time came, he might let go of things without believing, as she had, that he was not only losing them but had never in any real sense had them.

Mr Warrender’s grandsons, Greg and an older boy, Alex, who had come across with his mother from America, were to read the lessons; and strangely enough, it was precisely what Digger had been turning over in his head that Greg now spoke of.

It was many years since Digger had seen him. He had been just a lad then, a neat little fellow in a duffle coat and new boots. He was rather gangling now (he had heard something of him from Ellie, from Vic too once or twice), and was so much, Digger thought, what Vic had been when he first knew him that he decided the differences he saw must have to do with his eyesight. He forked his glasses out of his right-hand breast pocket as the boy read, but saw, when he set them on his nose, that the lack of focus he had been aware of was in the boy himself.

He was less compact than Vic had been. But it wasn’t that. What he lacked, and it made all the difference, was cockiness. It brought back to Digger, and vividly, considering the years, just what he had felt about Vic in those early days, his intense antipathy — and what had happened to that?

‘In the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble,’ he read, ‘and the strong men bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are too few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened. . Also when they shall be afraid of that which is on high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshoppers shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home and the mourners go about the streets. .’

From his place in the front row Vic looked up. The boy did not read confidently. He stumbled in places and seemed unsure of how the words were connected. Vic’s face in profile, as Digger saw it, wore a concerned look, either because he was anxious for the boy on this public occasion, as Ellie was too — Digger could see that — or because of something in the words themselves.

Iris had remarked earlier when they arrived how little changed he was. It was more than twenty years since she had seen him. Digger was surprised. When he turned up at the Crossing it was his immediate mood that Digger looked out for — little signs he had learned to recognise that meant their time together would go easily, others which, however much he disguised them, indicated the opposite. Till Iris mentioned it, he had never considered him in the light of change.

‘They go fast,’ Iris thought, ‘when they do go. That sort.’ Digger was of the other kind. He was spare and leathery, and under the hat was very nearly bald. She no longer felt any embarrassment when they were out, together. He might have been sixty as she was. (Sixty-seven, in fact.)

The other boy, who spoke with an American accent, was too confident, Digger thought. He read as at a performance. It jarred.

There was a third speaker, a man from the university who had written on Hugh Warrender and came here, as a good many of the mourners did, as a sharer in his public life, though public, as he pointed out, was the wrong word for something which, in the case of each one of them, and in the poet’s case too, was so hidden that if one was to be true to the spirit of it, it could be referred to only in terms that were tentative and indirect.

He was speaking of poetry itself, of the hidden part it played in their lives, especially here in Australia, though it was common enough — that Was the whole point of it — and of their embarrassment when it had, as now, to be brought into the light. How it spoke up, not always in the plainest terms, since that wasn’t always possible, but in precise ones just the same, for what is deeply felt and might otherwise go unrecorded: all those unique and repeatable events, the little sacraments of daily existence, movements of the heart and intimations of the close but inexpressible grandeur and terror of things, that is our other history, the one that goes on, in a quiet way, under the noise and chatter of events and is the major part of what happens each day in the life of the planet, and has been from the very beginning. To find words for that ; to make glow with significance what is usually unseen, and unspoken too — that, when it occurs, is what binds us all, since it speaks immediately out of the centre of each one of us; giving shape to what we too have experienced and did not till then have words for, though as soon as they are spoken we know them as our own.

This speech made an impression on Digger. That ‘other history’ meant something to him. When they stepped outside into the strong sunlight, which was thick with bees, he saw a few people go up to the young man who had said so much, shake hands and congratulate him; he looked embarrassed but also pleased with himself.

Digger did not make the mistake this time of approaching him. He settled for the words themselves. They had struck a chord in him, and touched, he felt, on the very thing he had been thinking of earlier: what it is that cannot be held on to but nonetheless is not lost.

IT WAS THE night of Pa’s funeral and still hot. Big storm clouds were building over the flat land towards Hen and Chicken Bay and nervous shudders of lightning touched the edges of them. Vic came away from the table feeling displeased with everyone, and with himself too.

Pa’s death, which had come without warning, had hit him hard, and Lucille’s arrival with Alex, all adding to the adjustments and changes that had to be made in the household, had made these last days painful to him.