sense of wonder rewarded him. But in a winter light, if he had not been nourished by his secrets, if he had not enjoyed the actual, physical pleasures of paint, he might have lain down and died, there amongst the varnish and the gratings, instead of resting his head sideways on the table, and falling asleep on the pillow of his hands. Then the sweat would glitter on the one exposed cheekbone, and amongst the stubble at the nape of his neck. On one such occasion he sat up rather suddenly, yawned, tested a sore throat by swallowing carefully once or twice, and picked up a volume which someone else had abandoned along the table. He was reading again, he found, the sad story of Our Lord Jesus Christ. He could remember many of the incidents, and how he had hoped to love and reverence the individuals involved, at least enough to please his guardians. He read, but the expression of the eyes still eluded him. All was pale, pale, washed in love and charity, but pale. He opened the Gospel of the Beloved Disciple. Then his throat did hurt fearfully. It burned. The bubbles of saliva were choking him. He got up, and went away, his badly fitting raincoat, of an ugly and conflicting brown, floating and trailing. He walked a considerable distance that night, with long, sliding steps, and lay down under a sandstone ledge, under some wet lantana bushes, with a woman who told him how she had been done out of a quarter-share in a winning lottery ticket. The couple proceeded to make love, or rather, they vented on each other their misery and rage. The woman had with her a bag of prawns, of which she was smelling, as well as of something slow and sweet, probably gin. She attempted repeatedly to fasten on him her ambitious sea-anemone of a mouth, and he was as determined to avoid being swallowed down. Consequently, he could have killed that poor drunken whore. She was a little bit surprised at some of it. As he held her by the thighs, he could have been furiously ramming a wheelbarrow against the darkness. But her misfortunes were alleviated, for the time being, and until she discovered they had been increased. Even after her lover had left her, in the same rage which she had chosen to interpret as passion, she continued to call to him, in between doing up her dress and searching for her prawns. As for Dubbo, he slithered down the slope through the smell of cat which lantana will give out when disturbed after rain. Since his guardians had taught him to entertain a conscience, he would often suffer from guilt with some part of him, particularly on those occasions when his diseased body took control, in spite of the reproaches of his pastor-mind. Now he might have felt better if he had been able to roll his clothes into a ball, and shove them under a bush. But it was no longer possible, of course, to abandon things so easily. And he had to walk on, tormented by the intolerable clothes, and the lingering sensation of the whore's trustful thighs. In the white hours, he came to the house where he lived, and let himself shivering and groping into the room which was his only certain refuge. When he had switched the light on, the validity of certain forms which he had begun to work out on a sheet of plywood made his return a more overwhelming relief, even though his deviation had to appear more terrible. Shambling and fluctuating in the glass, he lay down at last on the bed, and, where other men might have prayed for grace, he proceeded to stare at what could be his only proof of an Absolute, at the same time, in its soaring blues and commentary of blacks, his act of faith. Dubbo was sufficiently sustained both physically and mentally, by his vocation, to ignore for the most part what people called life. Only the unhappiness of almost complete isolation from other human beings would flicker up in him at times, and he would hurry away from his job-at that period he was working in a Sydney suburb, in a factory which manufactured cardboard boxes and cartons in oiled paper-he would hurry, hurry, for what, but to roam the streets and settle down eventually on a straight-backed bench in one of the parks. There he would indulge in what was commonly called _putting in time__, though it was, in fact, nothing else but _hoping__. One evening he was sitting on such a bench in such a park, and the big fig-trees were casting their most substantial shadows on the white grass, a woman came and sat beside him. With no intentions, however. She looked deliberately in her handbag for a cigarette. And lit one. With her own match. Then she blew a trumpet of smoke, and watched the water of the tranquil little bay. If they had not recrossed their legs at exactly the same moment, they might never have spoken. As it was, the woman had to smile. She said, "Two minds of the same opinion. Eh?" He did not know what to answer, and looked away. But the attitude of his shoulders must have been a receptive one. "How do you find it down here?" the woman asked. Again he was perturbed, but just managed to reply. "All right." Knotting his hands to protect himself. "I came from up the country," the woman persisted, and named a northwestern town. "Many of you boys down in the city?" she asked. She was kind and polite, but bored by now. She frowned for a shred of tobacco that she could taste as it drifted loose in her mouth. "No," he said. Or: "I dunno." He did not like this. She was looking idly at the colour of his hands. "What is that you've got?" she asked. "What?" "That is an ulcer," she said. "On the back of your hand." "It is nothing," he said. It was a sore which had broken out several weeks before, and which he carried for the most part turned away from strangers, as he waited for it to disappear. "Are you sick?" she asked. He did not answer, and was preparing to go away from the seat, from the park, with its dusty grass and little basin of passive water. "You can tell me," she said. "I should know." It was very strange. Now he took a look at the strange woman, with her rather full, marshmallowy face, and her lips that she had painted up to shine. She smelled of the powder with which the white women covered their bodies in an effort to soften the impact of their presence. The woman sighed, and began to tell her life, which he listened to, as though it had been a spoken book. "You are sick," she sighed. "I know. Because I had it. You got a dose of the syph. When I was young and foolish, a handsome young bastard of a Digger put it across me with a hard-luck story. God, I can see 'im! With the strap of his hat hangin' onto 'is lower lip. I can smell the smell the khaki used to have then. Well, that chapter was short, but the consequences was long." The woman was a prostitute, it began to emerge, successful, and fairly satisfied in her profession. She told him that her name was Hannah. "Of course," she said, "I had luck too. I got my own home. An old cove who used to come to me regular left me a couple of semi-detached homes. I let one, live in the other. Oh, I am comfortable!" she said, but aggressively. "We all laughed when some solicitor wrote about Charlie's will. But it was a _good__ joke, as it turned out. No one thought Charlie had the stuff to put away. He was a rag-dealer." This story made her audience glad. He loved to listen to the tales in which the action was finished. They had the sad, pale, rather pretty, but unconvincing colours of Mrs Pask's sacred prints. "Of course," said Hannah, "although I am comfortable, I am not all that. That is why I have never retired from business. You never know." She threw away her cigarette and frowned, so that he noticed how the white powder lay in the cracks between her brows. "Many young fellers would not notice me now," she said. "I know that." Suddenly she screwed up her mouth excruciatingly. "You would not notice me," she fired. He looked down, because he did not know what to answer. He only knew that he would not have noticed Hannah. "Go on!" She laughed. "I was not trying you out. Or rather, I was. I have a proposition to make. And did not want you to think I was offering you the job of a ponce. Oh, I am in no need of men. I have my friend, too. No," she said, sinking her chin. "Sometimes I will take an interest in a person. And you are sort of down on it. See? Well, I have a small room at the back. Lying idle. What do you say, Jack, to dossing down in my small room? Eh? Of course I won't say you needn't pay me a little something for the privilege." He was very, very silent, wondering whether it could be a trap. "It was only an idea," she said, looking over a couple of passers-by. "I never influenced even the cat. Funny, I was to have been a teacher. Can you see me with a mob of kids in a shed beside the road? But do you know what," she said, turning to him, "I was frightened at the whole thing. I took up with men instead. Men are stupider." The blackfellow laughed. "I am a man," he said. "You are something else as well." She pondered something she had not yet solved, but could not begin to speak again too quickly. "I could help you, too." Pointing at his hand. "There is a doc I know a little." She mentioned a certain hospital. "You are not frightened, are you, Jack?" Then he knew that he was, and that this floury woman in her dress of lace doilies was leading him poignantly into a dining-room from which the kindness had not yet fled. "Anyways," said Hannah, "if you decide, I would let you have that small room for ten bob." She had begun suddenly to enunciate very clearly, as some people did for blacks, but dropped her voice a little to give the address at which she lived. It was getting dark by then. People with tidy lives were setting tables, or leaning bare arms on window-sills. The lights were lit. "Well," said Hannah, and began to arrange herself, "business is business, isn't it? It is a queer thing, but I never liked men one little bit. Only you had to do something, and they told me I was pretty good at it." She could not comb too hard. "Oh," she said, "I don't say I don't like a yarn with some man, on a tram, about what he has been doing. I don't mind that. Poor buggers! They are so uninteresting." Soon Hannah, who had snapped her handbag on her comb, and dusted off her dandruff, was ready for the streets. "Then, I might see you," she said. But he could tell that something had made her no longer really care. He was the one that did. He had twisted his body right round till his bones were painful on the hard seat. "At Abercrombie Crescent," he was saying, in a stupid-sounding, muddy-coloured voice, and repeating other directions she had given. "Yes," she called, farther now, throwing the words over her shoulder. "It is a street, though. No one knows how Abercrombie got stuck with a crescent." Her voice fell away from her as she went. "And not before twelve. I'd take the axe to anybody. I am not fit." Hannah walked towards the road, inclining somewhat as she went. The night was darkening and purpling across the park, and soon she was sucked up by it.