‘Who?’
‘Oh God, we were kids——’
‘Who?’
‘Charlie.’
‘And who else?’
‘No one! No one!’ She was weeping by this time.
‘You’re an animal,’ he said.
‘Oh, what are you doing?’ she cried. ‘Even Kes couldn’t be so cruel. Not even to Byrnie.’
‘Won’t you admit it? Won’t you confess? It’s not too late to find God.’
‘I’ve done nothing wrong!’
‘You don’t believe that.’
‘Let me go.’
‘Shall I tell you what’s in your mind?’
‘No! You don’t know!’
‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, more softly than ever. And standing there, holding her captive, between the corner of the church and the flowering oleander, he began to give her his interpretation of her thoughts and her desires. And what this was I cannot set down, because Deborah would never tell me, and I would not even if I could. It is enough to know that he poured into her ears such a stream of filth as she had never, and probably none of us has ever, heard, much of it dealing with her supposedly unquenchable lust for his, the diviner’s, body. As he spoke he burned, in zeal and exaltation.
When he saw at last, that she had had enough, he let her slide down to her knees. And she lay, weakly sobbing, at his feet.
‘Will you come to God?’ he asked her.
She could not speak.
‘Do you confess you’ve been a sinner?’
‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘Yes.’
‘Will you come to God?’
‘Yes.’
He towered above her, in the sunlight, all blue and golden. At the top of the path, beyond the oleander, Byrne and Rock were standing.
‘Our sister’s saved,’ he proclaimed. And he stooped and lifted her to her feet, and dropped a chaste kiss on her forehead. While she stood, supported by him, like a baulk of timber, unable to speak or think, or even look about her.
I was wandering on the outskirts of the town, by the place where the Miners’ Institute used to be. All has fallen down by now, only the Mess remains, and that is roofless, doorless, windowless, floorless. I ate there, often, when I was a young man, in the long room full of men and their talk, smelling of sweat and fly-spray. Now there are only the stone-and-plaster walls, dust-red, and the concrete piles that once supported floorboards, and among them rusting utensils of white enamel, basins and pannikins and jugs, the last signs of civilization, in this country, to disappear. By the empty front doorway was a painted board saying: MEAL HOURS. And underneath:
You are asked to be punctual
.
On the road to Lacey’s Find, where a pub once stood, there was (is still, perhaps, if it is not buried) a billiard table; solitary in the desert, with a tall anthill growing through the centre of it.
I have played on it.
I remember when the Tourmaline Hotel was so crowded that men queued at the bar-windows for a drink.
It died in the night.
I stooped to pick up a sheet of paper in the shadow of the wall.
Dear Ned
, I read, through the smeared dust.
I don’t know whether you want me to write to you or not, seeing you never wrote to me. I suppose there are lots of pretty girls in Tourmaline!!!??
Died. Died in the night.
It was the day of the dead, remember. And my thoughts ran a great deal on such things. On such things as rusting pannikins, and the lone billiard table in the desert, at the centre of the curved world, commanding everything.
I let the paper drop. It was too sad. I watched it descend, making little back-and-forth swoops, as a falling leaf does. It returned to the spot where I found it.
I went away, past the big square mud-brick hospital where Bill the Dill and his wife live. There was a huge old armchair spilling its guts on the dirt veranda.
Because it was a shortcut to my house I pushed open the gate in the tin fence of Rock’s garden and began to walk down the path. But someone called: ‘What’s the hurry?’ And I turned and saw Jack and Rock squatting in the fence’s shadow, not far from the gate, looking after me.
So I wandered back again, and sat down beside them, feeling the warm iron glow through my shirt.
In duty bound, I remarked: ‘The garden doesn’t look bad’; although I couldn’t actually see anything of it, as the plants were hidden by brushwood shelters.
‘It’ll be better,’ Rock said.
I asked: ‘How?’ And then, realising, said: ‘Ah, the water.’ To tell the truth, I was beginning to be bored with the water. Hope deferred, in me, blunts the responses; and I was weary in any case. One rises early on the day of the dead. I folded my arms across my knees and put my head down.
They forgot me.
‘My old man won’t like it,’ Jack said, to Rock.
‘What’s it to him?’ Rock said. ‘He don’t live here.’
‘Uh huh,’ said Jack.
I heard him scratch the bristles on his jaw.
I wanted them to go on talking. Their quiet voices were very soothing. And alive. Voices of the living.
‘What did he say to you?’ Jack asked; rather tentatively.
‘I couldn’t tell you exactly,’ Rock said. ‘It’s not what he says, it’s how he says it.’
‘And the way he looks.’
‘Sure, that more than anything.’
‘Like someone burning,’ I murmured, into the crook of my arm. ‘When he stood in the middle of the fire. Burning. And Kes ran away.’
For a while after that they said nothing, and I heard their boot-heels shifting in the ground, underlining the dense afternoon silence.
‘Are you going to?’ Jack said, at last, to Rock.
‘I reckon. Try anything. It’s a kind of duty.’
‘But what he said——?’
‘I believe it.’
‘So do I,’ Jack said, with a certain diffidence. ‘It’s the way he looks.’
I was half asleep, and asked in the shelter of my arms: ‘Who is he? Does he say?’
‘He’ll tell you,’ Rock said.
This afternoon hush, when a sound has ceased, presses down on one like tons of feathers.
‘He’ll be believed,’ I said, ‘whatever he says. Because of the way he looks.’
‘Maybe,’ said Rock, from far away.
I saw that I would soon be asleep if I stayed there, and got, rather stiffly, to my feet. And then the blood rushed up behind my eyes, making everything dark for a time, so that I had to lean against the warm fence and wait for the world to come back again.
‘Are you all right?’ Jack asked, beginning to rise to my assistance, as I could tell from the sound of his belt brushing against the corrugated iron.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ And in fact it was all there, as before; but harsher, redder, harder on the eyes. The burning path through the garden. The church on its glittering hill.
‘I’m a very old man,’ I said.
This information could not surprise them as it did me.
‘And no amount of water can change that.’
Rock sighed.
‘I’ll walk home with you,’ Jack said, beside me.
Well, it was kind of him. And kind of him, too, to support me with his tough young arm, like a devoted grandson. He could not read my mind: in which a memory revived of savage kings, feeding their dead youth on the torn hearts of children.
In the morning I was sitting in my office, writing my testament that you now read, and a long shadow came knifing across the sunlit floor and across the page, and I looked up and saw the diviner, with a halo round his yellow hair. Charlie Yandana was behind him, and went and sat down on the bench beside the door; while he, the diviner, stood studying me, with his thumbs in his belt.
It was hard to see his face, with so much light behind him.
I got up, frowning into the brightness, and made some vague gesture of welcome. ‘Come in,’ I said. And he did, stirring golden dust-motes as he crossed the floor. He sat himself on the corner of the table, with one blue leg swinging. And I sat down again.
I remarked that it was some weeks since we had spoken.
‘Two weeks,’ he said, ‘since Kestrel’s orgy.’
‘So, what have you been doing?’
‘I haven’t been idle.’
His eyes were lowered as he said this, but they smouldered in the crosslights, under the fair lashes. I had seen him like that before. It seemed years ago.
He had changed, and yet he had not. All his qualities, his contradictions, were the same; but now so intensified that they added up almost to another person. He was simpler, more innocent than ever; a solemn boy, indeed. But with this went such fierceness, such coldness of conviction, that the diviner we had first known looked pale by comparison, a faint shadow thrown in advance of the man who had now arrived. He seemed to me, now, rather dazzling; but dangerous, too, with all the ruthlessness of the obsessed.
‘What does that mean?’ I asked rather sharply.
He acted as if he had not heard me, and perhaps he had not.
I began to drum with my fingers on the table. This is a habit most characteristic of the old, I have observed; especially when consumed with impatience, or with dread, or when no one will notice them in their disquiet.
‘Will Kestrel come back?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t think so,’ he said in a dream.
‘But if he does?’
‘We might have to take action.’
‘What action? What is there?’
‘We can decide that,’ he said, ‘if we see him.’
He went on meditating. And I went on drumming, glancing now and then from his profile to the knee and bare foot of Charlie Yandana, which showed around the doorframe.
‘What do you want with me?’ he forced me to ask.
He said nothing.
I slapped my palm on the table, and asked (too loudly, but I was unnerved by him): ‘Who are you?’
‘A voice,’ he said, slightly smiling, with a kind of holy complacency. ‘A voice in the wilderness.’
‘Ah, this is old stuff.’
‘Well, nothing’s new under the sun.’
‘Then what’s
your
business?’
‘To speak for God,’ he said, softly. ‘Because he spoke to me, in the wilderness. Now I’m his mouthpiece.’
This was said so matter-of-factly, with so little expectation of contradiction, that it should have been obvious to me that he had said it often before. But I was hearing it for the first time. And I was confounded.
When I could speak: ‘In the wilderness?’ I echoed.
‘While I was dying,’ he said.
‘You were imagining, maybe——’
He laughed at me, young and genuine laughter.
‘There are other things outside your experience,’ he said, ‘that also exist.’
‘If you believe this,’ I said, ‘and I can’t stop you——’
‘Ah,’ he said, laughing, ‘you innocent.’
‘If you believe it, what’s that to me?’
‘Everything,’ he said; and looked at me so serenely, and at the same time so aggressively, as no one within the memory of those now living has dared to look at me, that I was abashed and let my eyes drop. For this reason, when I think back to that interview what I remember most clearly is not his face, memorable as that was, but the corner of a not over-clean handkerchief or old rag of some kind hanging out of his trouser pocket, and his thin strong hand pressed flat on the table.
‘Yes?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said, or affirmed, with force and elation. ‘This is your business, too.’
‘How could it be?’
‘You can be revived,’ he said, ‘like the land, like everything.’
‘Is it water, then?’
‘That, and a lot more.’
‘Well, tell me,’ I said. For he oppressed me, more than ever, and I wanted him to go.
‘Did you feel,’ he said, ‘when you were speaking in front of the war memorial, did you feel—anything?’
‘The dead,’ I said, wearily. ‘Their presence.’
‘And God? No?’
‘So faintly,’ I said, ‘like always. All guesses—guesses and longings.’
‘With me,’ he said, ‘it’s strength, it’s certainty. And joy. I think that’s the word for it.’
And indeed joy shone out of him, when I looked up.
‘I’ve never meddled,’ I said, ‘with the convictions of people round me.’
‘How could you?’ he asked, cruelly. ‘You’ve been empty, all your life. You haven’t any convictions. Only guesses.’
To myself I said: ‘I thought this day would never come.’
‘What a respectable shack from the outside,’ he said, scorning me. ‘And inside all empty, all derelict, like your gaol. The Law of Tourmaline. Weren’t you ever anything more than this? Solid walls—empty inside? And in the dead of night a few guesses, a few longings, maybe, depending on what you had for supper.’
‘What makes you so hard?’ I burst out. ‘This isn’t the way we are in Tourmaline.’
‘Tourmaline looks like it,’ he said.
‘I wish you’d never come,’ I said, sincerely.
‘Listen,’ he said, bending over the table. ‘There’s work for you.’
I shook my head, dumbly. Ah, my age, my age is incalculable, my age is to be measured in terms of annual rings or sedimentary rocks, or by the changing atoms of unstable elements from which, aeons ago, I was created. And he had come to torment me.
‘What Tourmaline is now,’ he said, ‘is what you made it. By your emptiness.’
‘I had nothing to do,’ I protested, ‘with what happened out there—with those terrible things. They were others—all done by others——’
‘And yet you were the Law here.’
‘Someone had to be.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Because of the tradition—the esprit de corps——’
‘You make me want to herk,’ he said. ‘But there’s nothing personal in that.’
I begged him, trembling a little: ‘Come to the point.’
And he said, leaning over me: ‘I’ve come to fill your emptiness.’
‘Ah, with what?’ I asked. ‘I can read holy books too.’
‘You’re innocent,’ he said, smiling.
‘Then I can enter the kingdom of heaven.’
‘I’ve come,’ he said, ‘to tell you your duty. This is a duty you won’t find in any of your old codes and manuals. And for the first time you’ll be in touch with headquarters. These are no guesses now. This is certainty.’
With great tiredness I asked him: ‘What is my duty?’
‘You’re to become a spring,’ he said, ‘an irrigation channel, if you like, to revive Tourmaline. This is what you should have been always; but you were empty as well as hollow, a poor shabby toy model of the Law. I’m here to wake you up, to tell you what you mean. You’re to follow me.’