‘Grandeur’ was the word that came to him, and he did not reject it. It did not seem too large for what he saw at times in a man who had been kicked from one side of the world to the other, not even knowing perhaps what part of it he was in, except that he was there in his own skin. That, the skin, is what he had come down to from the realm of noble sentiments.
They were in a place, a continent, where it was mere naked endurance perhaps that best revealed the qualities of men. And that might be true of every place, when the fabric of pageant and the illusion of noble sentiments had been ripped away. In any event, he cared enough for Gemmy now to lay his corrections aside and set off for Mrs Hutchence’s, to see the fellow had got safely home. If he hurried, he thought, he might catch him up on the road.
Leaving the schoolhouse, Gemmy paused a moment, the papers safely in his pocket, and as he looked about him, felt for the first time that he could go any way he pleased; he did not have to go back down the ribbon of road.
To the north, beyond the swamp and its band of ti-tree forest, the sky was a smoky glow, cloudless because what filled it was a single cloud, blooming with a light that might have been that of the fallen sun, its ashes shaken out now and even the deep core failing. The forests up there had all day been climbing into the sky and drifting down again to cover all this side of the range with ash; a breath out of the heart of the country. There was no finality in it. He knew that. One life was burned up, hollowed out with flame, to crack the seeds from which new life would come; that was the law. The seasons here were fire, ash, then the explosion out of blackened earth and charred, unkillable stumps, of springy shoots and loose-folded, sticky little leaves; the hard seed tormented with flame till it splits, springs open, then a hissing as the first raindrops plump and spatter, and the new forest, leaf by leaf in its old shape, ghostly at first in its feathery lightness, breathes out of charred sticks and smoulder in a season too long to be measured by days or moons or by one man’s life or many.
He walked swiftly now over the charred earth and was himself crumbling. If he did not find the word soon that would let him enter here, there would be nothing left of him but a ghost of heat, a whiff as he passed of fallen ash.
A drop of moisture sizzled on his tongue: the word — he had found it. Water. Slow dribbles of rain began to fall. He was entering rain country. Soon the sky let down tangled streamers, and he was walking now in a known landscape; all the names of things, as he met them, even in their ashen form, shone on his breath, sprang up in their real lives about him, succulent green, soft paw and eyeball, muscle tense under fur.
He still carried in his pocket the sheets of paper on which they had written down his life. He took them out now. They were sodden. Rain had begun to wash the writing from them, the names, the events; their black magic now a watery sky-colour, the sooty grains sluicing away even as he watched; the paper turning pulpy, beginning to break up in his hands, dropping like soggy crumbs from his fingers into puddles where he left them, bits all disconnected … and my friens Billy an … pretty little black patch over … thunder Then … of every colour of …
20
THE SISTERS OF St Iona’s, Wynnum, were in a state of mild but pleasant ferment. The motor that emerged between the rusty palms of their drive, with its gleaming radiator grille and swoop of mudguards over spoked wheels, was a novelty. Almost beautiful in its way, it nosed its metal form, all purring, into the quiet of their walled retreat (the walls were ten feet high, spiked at the top with shards of glass from ginger beer and lemonade bottles), an impressive but dangerous reminder of a world they had set themselves apart from, though not entirely, and which had lately become very noisy and tragically interesting. The driver too, when he leapt out, was a novelty. That the occupant of the car was less so did not spoil the effect.
The world he belonged to was familiar. It was that of their fathers and brothers, the bushman in three-piece suit down for The Show. He had none of the up-to-date glamour of the driver, though he too, in fact, was an older man, and drew what they saw in him of the brute world that began at their gates from the animal sheen of his jacketed shoulders and the polish on his boots. He moved round in front of his machine and set his hand to chrome. The Minister’s shaggy head appeared. Manoeuvring his large frame out of the door, he shook himself as it were on the path.
He was here to see their own Sister Monica, who had, in these last weeks, done a quite extraordinary thing: she had got herself into the papers.
Some of her letters had been intercepted by the authorities and she had been suspected, briefly, of being a risk to security, perhaps a spy. It was nonsense of course and soon proved so; but some of the sisters had looked at her for a time with new eyes — the suspicion, after all, the mere possibility, was something — and one or two of them had been pleased to see her momentarily brought down. She was, to say no more, an infuriating woman, in no way humble; though they too, of course, were happy to have the cloud lifted from their little community, and the now famous correspondence declared innocuous, if not quite commonplace; unconnected, anyway, with news, battles, anger and the confirmation, unnecessary one might have thought, of dominion loyalty.
Still, they fluttered at the promise of yet another ministerial visitation. The man had not been cleared, or not in the public eye; and they rather enjoyed the hint, beyond his obvious plain looking and plain speaking, of something not quite trustworthy in him. It confirmed them in their distrust of the world, especially the active, overbearing male part of it. Some of them rushed about to see that the bannisters were without dust, rubbed their elbows on window-glass, peered at the tiles in the entry hall for heel-marks and scratches, as if he were here as an inspector of their devotion to the domestic virtues, to expose them as housewives largely failed. Discreetly, from upper windows, they watched Sister Monica, kilting her skirt up over her boots, go down the stone steps to greet him.
‘Lachlan,’ she said, and kissed him, first on one cheek then the other. ‘Hello,’ he replied, and glanced up under his brows at the watchers, who sprang back behind glass.
Even if no one could hear, he never quite knew how to address her in these moments when they were still in view. Later, she would be plain Janet. He could never quite come at ‘Sister’ or ‘Monica’.
‘Let’s get away from the gallery,’ she said.
‘Forty minutes, Wilson,’ he told the driver, who clicked his heels; then, very aware of the impression he was making above, moved across to the lawn and stood, back to the building, legs apart, with the sun on his shoulders, a thin trail of smoke rising before him, and myna birds pecking boldly round his boots.