After leaving the factory on the eve of the holidays for which they had all been longing and waiting, Dubbo went straight to the house where he lodged, on the outskirts of Barranugli. In other years he might have stopped at shops to lay in food against Easter, but now, because something had happened, his sandshoes hurried. Something had happened of extreme importance, but which he would attempt to dismiss. He washed his hands first. He sat for a little on the edge of the bed. He ate some bread, with cold sausage, which tasted of sawdust. He spat it out. But gathered it up at once from the floor. Something he had done contradicted what he had been taught. He sat. In the dusk he washed his hands again. It was so important. He was clean at least by education. He sat in the dusk, and would have liked to look at his few recent paintings, all turned to the wall, but knew he would find them receded into their frames. The disappearing room abandoned him to hopelessness. Shadows would flutter at that hour like insubstantial bats. He remembered his mother had once told him how the spirit of his grandfather was a guardian on whom he might rely, but during one of the many phases of flight, he and his protector had, he suspected, parted company. In any case, for quite some time he had sensed himself to be alone. Now he began to tremble. The frame of the stretcher creaked, creaked. He was ill, of course. Run down, Mrs Pask would have said, and prescribed a tonic. He coughed for a while, too long, and with such force that the joints of that rickety room were heard to protest wheezily. Again he washed his hands, Mrs Pask breathing approval over his shoulder. Then he began to cry as he stood propped against the basin, a sick, hollow crying above the basinful of water. There were days when the blood would not stop. The blood ran down the hands, along the bones of the fingers. The pain was opening again in his side. In his agony, on his knees, Dubbo saw that he was remembering his Lord Jesus. His own guilt was breaking him. He began to crack his finger-joints, of the fingers that had failed to unknot the ropes, which had tied the body to the tree. He had not borne witness. But did not love the less. It came pouring out of him, like blood, or paint. In time, when he could muster the strength for such an undertaking, he would touch the tree to life with blue. Nobody knew the secret of the blue that he would use; no one would have suspected such a jewellery of wounds, who had not watched his own blood glitter and dry slowly under sunlight. Dubbo got up now. He began to move purposefully. He had to put an end to darkness. He switched the light on, and there at least his room was, quite neat, square, and wooden. He changed his singlet, put on best pants, smoothed his rather crinkly hair with water, and went out in the sandshoes which he always wore. In the steamy, bluish night, he caught the bus for Sarsa-parilla. It was an hour when nobody else thought to travel, and the abo had to cling, like a beetle in a lurching tin. Everybody else was already there. All along the road women and girls were entering the brick churches for preliminary Easter services. Without altogether believing they had consented to a murder, the sand-coloured faces saw it would not harm them to be cleared in public. They had dressed themselves nicely for the hearing, all in blameless, pale colours, hats, and so forth. Some of them were wearing jewels of glass. Dubbo knew these parts by heart, both from looking, and from dreaming. He had drawn the houses of Sarsaparilla, with the mushrooms brooding inside. He had drawn the thick, serge-ridden thighs of numerous gentlemen, many from government departments, some with the ink still wet on them. He had drawn Mrs Khalil's two juicy girls, their mouths burst open like pomegranates, their teeth like the bitter pomegranate seeds. And as the serge gentlemen continued to pulp the luminous flesh, all was disappointment and coronary occlusion. So Dubbo had seen to draw. Sometimes in his wanderings through Sarsaparilla, the painter had pushed deep into his own true nature, which men had failed to contaminate, and there where the houses stopped, he had found his thoughts snapping again like sticks in silence. But subordinate to silence. For silence is everything. Then he had come back and drawn the arabesques of thinking leaves. He had drawn the fox-coloured woman looking out of a bush, her nose twitching as the wind altered. He would have liked to draw the touch of air. Once, though, he had attempted, and failed miserably to convey the skin of silence nailed to a tree. Now, remembering the real purpose of his visit to Sarsaparilla in the night, Dubbo's hands grew slithery on the chromium rail of the empty bus. Ostensibly he was steadying himself. The bus was such a void, the conductor came along at last, and after clearing his throat, condescended to enter into conversation with a black. The conductor said, extra loud, there had been a fire at Sarsaparilla-some Jew's place. "Yes?" Dubbo replied. And smiled. "Oh, yes!" he repeated, almost eagerly. "You know about it?" the conductor asked. "Know the bloke perhaps? Worked at Rosetree's." "No," Dubbo said. "No. I don't. I don't know." Because, he saw, with widening horror, it was his nature to betray. So he smiled. "Anyway," said the conductor, "these bloody foreigners, the country's lousy with them." Dubbo smiled. But the cage of his chest was crushing him. "What happened to the bloke?" he asked. His voice was pitched rather too high. "Arr," said the conductor, "I dunno." And yawned. "I didn't hear." He was tired, and began to clean his ears with a key. Dubbo continued to smile away his love and faith. Early on they had told him it was his nature to betray, and often since, they had proved it to him. He had even betrayed his secret gift, but only once, and with that, he knew almost for certain, he would make amends eventually. That would bear witness to his faith, in the man they had crucified, as well as in the risen Lord. When the bus reached Sarsaparilla, the abo got down at the post-office corner, and descended the hill to where he knew the Jew had lived. There, sure enough, was the skeleton of what had been a house. The little, mild blue beads of fire ran and dropped from what remained. Contorted sheets of iron glowed fainter now, and hissed. The sparks, however, were still very beautiful if in any way encouraged. A few women were standing around, hoping something of a personal sort might explode in the ashes to revive their interest, and a couple of volunteers were examining a limp-looking length of hose. To these men the abo called. "Where," he began to ask from a distance. Everybody turned and stared. The voice the strange black-fellow used was slewing round in the slight wind. The firemen were too tired to bother, but their flat faces waited for a little. "Where would," the abo began again; and: "Can you tell us." His question fell, broken. For he had begun to cough, and went stumbling humiliated away. He could only cough, and stagger over ground that might have been designed for his downfall. And after a brief passage through some blackberry bushes, came up abruptly against a shed. There was a light in it. He steadied himself. His hands were holding a window-sill. Then Dubbo looked inside, and saw as well as remembered that this was the shed in which lived Mrs Godbold, whom he had first encountered at Mrs Khalil's, and who had bent down and wiped his mouth as nobody had ever done. Consequently, as she had already testified her love, it did not surprise him now to find the same woman caring for the Jew. There in the bosom of her light the latter lay, amongst the heaps of sleeping children, and the drowsy ones, who still clung to whatever was upright, watching what had never happened before. And the fox-coloured woman from Xanadu lay across the Jew's feet, warming them by methods which her instincts taught her. As Dubbo watched, his picture nagged at him, increasing in miraculous detail, as he had always hoped, and known it must. In fact, the Jew was protesting at something-it could have been the weight of the bedclothes-and the women were preparing to raise him up. The solid, white woman had supported him against her breasts, and the young girl her daughter, of such a delicate, greenish white, had bent to take part, with the result that some of her hair was paddling in the Jew's cheek, and the young fellow, his back moulded by the strain, was raising the body of the sick man, almost by his own strength, from out of the sheets, higher on the stacked pillows. The act itself was insignificant, but became, as the watcher saw it, the supreme act of love. So, in his mind, he loaded with panegyric blue the tree from which the women, and the young man His disciple, were lowering their Lord. And the flowers of the tree lay at its roots in pools of deepening blue. And the blue was reflected in the skins of the women and the young girl. As they lowered their Lord with that almost breathless love, the first Mary received him with her whitest linen, and the second Mary, who had appointed herself the guardian of his feet, kissed the bones which were showing through the cold, yellow skin. Dubbo, taking part at the window, did not think he could survive this Deposition, which, finally, he had conceived. There he stood, sweating, and at last threatened with coughing. So he went away as he had come. He would have been discovered if he had stayed, and could not have explained his vision, any more than declared his secret love.