lky light of morning poured out unadulterated over his naked shoulders. And the paints as they swirled, and he swathed them on a bare board, sometimes as tenuously as mist, sometimes moulding them with his fingers like bastions of stone. Perhaps this, his own contribution to love, was least explicable, if most comprehensive and comprehensible. Now the Jew stirred on the lump of an ugly tree trunk on which they had stuck him. The crowd pressed forward to see and hear, jostling the stick of an abo half-caste who did not exist for any member of it. The Jew had raised his head. He looked out from under those rather heavy, intolerable lids. From the beginning Himmelfarb had known that he possessed the strength, but did pray for some sign. Through all the cursing, and trampling, and laughter, and hoisting, and aching, and distortion, he had continued to expect. Until now, possibly, it would be given. So, he raised his head. And was conscious of a stillness and clarity, which was the stillness and clarity of pure water, at the centre of which his God was reflected. The people watched the man they had fastened to the tree. That he did not proceed to speak his thoughts was most unnatural, not to say frustrating. The strain became enormous. If they had seen how to go about it, they would have licked the silence from his lips, as a substitute for words. Then a young girl of thin mouth and smoothed hair began to run at, and struggle with the backs of the bystanders, who would not let her through. But must. Hysteria would see to it. The scarlet thread of lips was drawn tight on some demon that she would on no account give up. When she reached the foot of the tree, she took an orange she had brought, and flung it with her awkward, girl's throw at the Jew's mouth, but it fell short, of course, and thumped on his hollow chest. The crowd laughed, or sighed. Then a young fellow, one of the Sevens, called Rowley Britt, came down, who remembered his mother dying of cancer of the bowel. He had filled his mouth with water, and now attempted to spit it in the mouth of the damn crucified Jew. But it missed. And trickled down the chin. The young man stood crying at the foot of the tree, swaying a good deal, because he was still drunk. Many of the onlookers, to whom it had begun to occur that they were honest citizens, with kiddies at school, were turning away by this. Who knows, though, how the show might have dragged on, and ended, if authority had not put a stop to it. The administrative offices were placed in such a way that the three people contained in them had an excellent view, through either the glass hatchway, or the door which led to the workshop, and in spite of their determination to ignore, became involved, whether to positive or negative degree, in the present disgraceful incident. It had been Mr Rosetree's intention to telephone a business connection, suddenly remembered, about an order for geometry sets. He sat and sweated, contracting and expanding like a rubber bulb under pressure, while Miss Whibley fiddled at her switchboard. "For Chrissake, Miss Whibley," Mr Rosetree shouted, "I am waiting for this cheppie's number!" "Bugger it!" blurted Miss Whibley. "It is the _switch]"__ Most unusual. Miss Whibley never used words. "It is the switch! The switch!" she attempted. Her voice could have been nougat. When Miss Mudge, who had ventured to look through the hatchway, exclaimed too loudly, "Oh, look! It is that Mr Himmelson. Something terrible is going to happen." Mr Rosetree and Miss Whibley had always considered that Miss Mudge, a worthy soul, should not be allowed her freedom. This was not the moment, however, for Mr Rosetree and Miss Whibley to share opinions. "It is the switch! It is the switch!" the latter repeated, demonstrating too. Certainly the mechanism seemed most ineffectual. Mr Rosetree bulged. "They are doing something to Mr Himmelson!" Miss Mudge harped against the glass. She was so colourless that any commentary by her sounded the more intolerable. "They are pulling. On that tree. The jacaranda. Oh, no! They are. Mr Rosetree, they are _crucifying__ Mr Himmelson!" For the first time perhaps the knife was entering Miss Mudge, and the agony was so intense, it frightened her. All else that she had known-her invalid sister, trouble over pensions, the leaking roof-was slit from her, and she stood gulping and shivering. Mr Rosetree still sat. Miss Whibley had given the switchboard away. She had begun, "I will not look. Nobody can compel me." She took out her compact, to powder, knowing herself to be inundated with the inevitable purple. "Nobody," she said. "To look. I will hand in my resignation, Mr Rosetree, as from the holidays." Mr Rosetree had not looked, but knew. Nobody need tell him about any human act; he had experienced them all, before he had succeeded in acquiring adequate protection. "They are spitting _water__," Miss Mudge just managed. If it had been piss, it would not have scalded more. "On the man," she protested. "That good man!" What degree of goodness Miss Mudge implied, Mr Rose-tree did not gather. But it made him feel he would have to look. Miss Mudge was trembling horribly for the discovery she had made: that she, herself quite blameless, might be responsible for some man, even all men. Now her responsibility was tearing her. Her hitherto immaculate flesh, white and goosey, with the vaccination marks, did not know how to cope. Mr Rosetree had tiptoed to the door. He was looking and looking. "I will not look," announced Miss Whibley, unwisely blowing the powder out of her mirror. "Do something, please, Mr Rosetree!" Miss Mudge was calling right across the three feet which separated her from the boss. "They are kill. Do. Do." But Mr Rosetree was looking and looking. He might even topple over. "To Mr Himmelson. They say he is a few." Mr Rosetree could have burst out laughing. Instead, he started bellowing, "For Chrissake! Mr Theobalds! Ernie! Do something, please! What for are you employed in this establishment, if not to keep order? It must be restored at once, please, in the entire premises." Then Ernie Theobalds, who was not a bad sort of a cove, not to say as good a mate as a man might expect, strolled out from where he had been standing, exploring the flesh under his singlet and watching events. "Okay, Harry!" he called. "Keep your wool on! It ain't nothun to get worked up over." He laughed that rather indolent, but in no way insolent laugh which revealed his comfortable denture. He walked across and kicked the arses of a couple of lads who were standing at one side. Other spectators began at once to turn, the mass to open for the foreman, who might, the waking eyes hoped, accept responsibility. "What is going on 'ere?" asked Ernie Theobalds, jovial like. As if he did not know. As if nobody knew. Nobody did. Mr Theobalds stood beneath the tree and the shambles of a man. He began, very easy, to negotiate a knot here and there, to loosen the rope pulleys, assisted by a couple of the Sevens who had resumed their own faces. Perce Thompson could not assist enough, but opened his pocket-knife and sawed through one section of rope, with the result that the figure, in its descent, arrived almost too quickly, and might have fallen in a heap of bones, clothes, and silence, if Mr Theobalds had not caught. "Hold hard!" he recommended, rather fat and kind, and supported with his arm, big but soft, with orange fur and freckles. So Himmelfarb was raised too soon from the dead, by the kindness and consideration of those who had never ceased to be his mates. So he must remember not to doubt, or long for a solution that he had never been intended to provide. "Easy does it!" said and laughed the foreman. Himmelfarb himself was persuaded to attempt a laugh, but the bones rattled, and were hurting besides. However, he did manage, "Thank you, Mr Theobalds." To which the foreman replied, "Something you will never learn, Mick, is that I am Ernie to every cove present. That is you included. No man is better than another. It was still early days when Australians found that out. You may say we talk about it a lot, but you can't expect us not to be proud of what we have invented, so to speak. Remember that," advised Ernie Theobalds, laying the palm of his hand flat against his mate's back. "Yes," Himmelfarb said, and nodded. But was unsteady at the level of reality to which he had been returned. Purged of the resentment which made them jump and rattle, the machines seemed to be running smoother in their oil. The muted dies might have been cutting into felt instead of metal. "Remember," Ernie Theobalds continued, "we have a sense of humour, and when the boys start to horse around, it is that that is gettin' the better of 'em. They can't resist a joke. Even when a man is full of beer, you will find the old sense of humour hard at work underneath. It has to play a joke. See? No offence can be taken where a joke is intended." So the foreman spoke, and everyone believed. If Blue had gone into the plating-shop, and was holding his semblance of a head, it was because he felt real crook. It was the beer. It was the beer. It was the fount of blue and crimson sparks. It was the blood that had not touched his lips, in driest memory, or now. But would, in fact, have turned him up. So that, between longing and revulsion, not to mention the hiccups, he went into a corner and vomited. When Ernie Theobalds had delivered his kind and reasonable speech, he squeezed the elbow of the one to whom it had been addressed. "You oughta get along now," he said. "I will mention it to the boss that you have gone off sick." Himmelfarb agreed that he was feeling far from well. But the pulses of his body expressed gratitude for the resolved situation in which he found himself so simply and so naturally placed. And his property returned. For Alf Dubbo the blackfellow had brought the shawl and the phylacteries which had burst from the small fibre case during the hilarious scrimmage, and got somewhat trampled on. The leather cylinder of one phylactery was crushed, there was blood, besides, on the fringes of the shawl. Which the blackfellow handed back. The latter did not speak, though. He would not speak, now, or ever. His mouth could never offer passage to all that he knew to be inside him. "There we are!" the foreman shouted above the noise of the machinery. "There is your old gadgets!" But did frown slightly, and would not have cared to touch. Only when the dubious objects were safely inside the case, Ernie Theobalds fastened the surviving catch, as the Jew seemed unable to. The machinery was working and working. The blackfellow would have done something, but was not told what. The Jew was going, he saw, with the gentle, uncertain motion of an eggshell tossed by flowing water. The blackfellow would have run after him to tell what he had seen and understood. But could not. Unless it burst from his fingertips. Never from his mouth. Very quietly Himmelfarb left the factory in which it had not been accorded to him to expiate the sins of the world. Although nobody watched, everybody saw.