‘Poor Byrnie,’ I murmured. ‘Poor Deborah. Poor world.’
The dog broke loose and fled, and stood at some distance barking and growling at us in a ritualistic way. Byrne lay where he was, eyes closed against the sky.
‘Poor Mike,’ he said. ‘Poor bloke. He doesn’t know what he’s up against.’
I mounted the step to the store, and stopped in the doorway, leaning there against the jamb, watching Tom.
He was reading something, and would not look up.
‘Tom,’ I said.
Then he did put aside his book, and scrutinized me for a slow half-minute.
‘You too,’ he said at last, sighing.
‘Me too.’
I thought he looked older, and defeated in some way.
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Why not? What have you got against him, Tom?’
‘It’d be hard to say,’ he said.
‘You must join us. If you could feel the power—the esprit de corps. A whole population with one idea——’
‘A hundred minds with but a single thought,’ said Tom, ‘add up to but a single halfwit.’
‘But he’s inspired. Can you deny it?’
‘Inspired, sure. But not by God. By you, by Tourmaline.’
‘That could never happen.’
‘You thought you needed him. You convinced him he was what was wanted. Well, good luck to you, Mr Frankenstein—it’s a fine healthy boy.’
‘You’re angry,’ I said.
He grinned. I hardly recognized him. He looked savage.
‘Not angry,’ he said. ‘Just very, very hurt.’
‘If we created him, what was he before he came here? Nothing?’
‘He was having a fight with God,’ Tom said. ‘Just the two of them. Now he’s dragged the whole of Tourmaline into it.’
‘Is that bad?’
He looked at me with contempt. And it changed him, utterly.
He said: ‘Haven’t we had enough of these lunatics in the past?’
‘Lunatics?’ I said. ‘Tom——’
‘These black-and-white men,’ he said, ‘these poor holy hillbillies who can only think in terms of God and the devil.’
‘He’s not so simple.’
‘No, he’s not. But what about his disciples? What about you? Oh lord, I can see you in a few years, giving Jack hell for sleeping with a coloured woman and asking Byrnie how he’s getting on with his masturbation problem. That’ll give you an interest in life.’
I turned on him. ‘I’m not like that!’
‘Aren’t you?’ said Tom. ‘Well, by heaven, you used to be.’
And I couldn’t answer.
‘You’re right,’ Tom said, ‘I’m angry. I’ve talked to Deborah.’
‘But she’s happy,’ I said.
‘Happy!’ Tom said. ‘You see a healthy girl turned into a hunchback overnight, and you think she’s happy?’
‘But she loves him.’
‘Isn’t that nice?’ said Tom. ‘And hates herself. And he hates himself. But they both love God. It’s as good as a bloody wedding. Ah, he’s a bright boy, all right, to do all that in a quarter of an hour. It took Kes years to do the same to Byrnie, and he had no luck at all with Deborah.’
‘How can you be so stupid?’ I burst out. ‘To compare
him
with Kestrel——’
‘They’re two sides of a coin,’ Tom said. ‘Shadows of one another. And how is it, anyway, that you’ve lived all these years and not seen that a man who hates himself is the only kind of wild beast we have to watch for?’
‘But don’t we all? Hate ourselves? In different degrees.’
‘We were given this sickness,’ he said. ‘By the incurables. Deborah can be cured, Byrnie can be cured. But not Kestrel, not Michael. There’s nothing to be done for them, except ignore them.’
Suddenly I wanted to needle him, and I said: ‘And me? Am I curable?’
‘Poor old man,’ he said, with a faint smile. ‘Your memory’s going. You’ve been cured once already.’
I think it was the smile that softened me, bringing back the old Tom, making him recognizable. ‘Why are we arguing?’ I said. ‘We’ve never disagreed before. You’ve never been angry before. Silly, at our age.’
‘Can I cure you?’ he wondered, hopefully.
‘You can try,’ I said, to placate him.
And he did try. But so stumblingly, so clumsily, that it was difficult to attend. He unveiled his God to me, and his God had names like the nameless, the sum of all, the ground of being. He spoke of the unity of opposites, and of the overwhelming power of inaction. He talked of becoming a stream, to carve out canyons without ceasing always to yield; of being a tree to grow without thinking; of being a rock to be shaped by winds and tides. He said I must become empty in order to be filled, must unlearn everything, must accept the role of fool. And with curious, fumbling passion he told me of a gate leading into darkness, which was both a valley and a woman, the source and sap of life, the temple of revelation. At moments I thought I glimpsed, through the inept words, something of his vision of fullness and peace; the power and the darkness. Then it was hidden again, obscured behind his battles with the language, and I understood nothing, nothing at all; and I let my mind wander away from him to the diviner, at the altar, brilliant by flamelight, praising a familiar God, through the voice of a ritual bell.
When Tom stopped speaking, I made no remark.
And he said, wearily: ‘That was meaningless to you.’
I was candid, and said: ‘Almost.’
‘Words can’t cope,’ he said. And he added, rather bitterly: ‘Your prophet knows how to cut the truth to fit the language. You don’t get much truth, of course, but it’s well-tailored.’
‘He’s not so simple,’ I protested, for the second time.
‘Ah, he is,’ Tom said. ‘Like the Chinaman who invented gunpowder. “Just a few rockets for granny’s birthday,” he told them. Boom!’
The diviner turned at the altar; burning.
The singing stopped. Only the bell went on, clanging and clanging.
Before the altar. The flame of him. The blaze of his yearning.
He leaned against the altar, his elbows on it. And the brightness then—all muscles and tendons taut. He looked at no one; he saw nothing, only the dancing flame outside the door.
‘God is near,’ he said.
A voice like a far bell.
‘O God,’ he said, ‘O God, remember me. I work for your people. Remember me.’
The bell clashed on. He was crying. In the firelight his tears were like blood.
‘Remember me, father.’
And the bell drowned in our cry. ‘Remember me.’
Suddenly gold was in the air again, the gold of Michael’s Reef, as it had come to be called. And out of this talk of gold a new expression of our unity, vaguely thought of, though never perhaps actually spoken of aloud, as the brotherhood.
It was a way, I suppose, of keeping alive by daylight the spirit of the firelit church. The idea emanated from the diviner; but he himself took no part in it. He had become a nocturnal creature, never seen by us except at those barbaric séances. Byrne was the only one who had to do with him in his less ecstatic moments, and even he was only tolerated for his usefulness as a messenger. Still, he was tolerated, and it was through him that Rock received instructions to form what a colder and more methodical mind than mine might call a co-operative society, for the exploitation of the reef. This brotherhood or society we were all, in the same message, ordered to join.
We met in the street around the war memorial, and no one was missing but Tom, Dave Speed and Jimmy Bogada—and, as expected, the diviner. Every remaining man in Tourmaline had come. I will call the roll. Because they are the names of the sons of Tourmaline, that I love to count, as a miser counts his hoard. Rock was there, with Jack Speed and Byrne as his lieutenants. Then I myself, Horse Carson, Dicko; Pete Macaroni and Bill the Dill; Charlie Yandana with his brother Gentle Jesus; Harry and Tim Bogada; Ben and Matt and Jake Murchison; and apart from the rest, and hardly with us except in the physical sense, old Gloria’s even older brother Boniface, who was both deaf and blind. This was the heterogeneous mass that the flame of one man had welded into an entity.
What the diviner proposed was simple and uncommon: it was hard labour. We were to attack the reef and tear from it every pennyweight of gold it would yield to such methods as we should have to use. I remember feeling, as I listened to Rock, a faint unease, a sense of prevarication. What had become of the water we were promised? Surely that should have come first? But if anyone else thought this, he kept quiet about it.
And the gold, once won, and smelted by Jack Speed at the mine, was to be deposited with me. My capacious safe was to become the exchequer of Tourmaline, and I its chancellor.
I was somewhat moved by this honour. True, there was no other safe in the town but Kestrel’s.
In the red light (it was late afternoon) all faces wore an expression that I can only describe as optimism not quite daring to declare itself. Undoubtedly there was a sense of beginning, of waiting for a birth. Not the mood of the church, but something more sober; the mood of men preparing to work with their muscles, a daylight mood. Something, in short (have I the right to say it?), sane.
Yet, in spite of all this hope and all this corporate feeling, which the gold had aroused, there was never a suggestion that the gold was ours. It was his; it was his gift to Tourmaline. And seeing how unquestioningly this was believed, I felt, once again, an obscure unease.
But if anyone shared it, he kept quiet.
I went past my gaol and up the hill. And I turned off the path, for once, before reaching the church, and took the track to the diviner’s hut.
I knew he didn’t want to see me, and would probably resent it. But I couldn’t keep away. I wanted to look at him; to try to guess what he was. And I was not the only one, of course, to pester him in this way. No wonder he would go out at dawn and wander all day over the pink bed of the lake and through the bleak country beyond it, waiting for nightfall and for the firelight which was his wall against all intruders.
There was a scrubby tree outside the door of his hut, and beneath, a wooden box with an enamel basin on it. He was stooping over this, washing himself, or (more accurately) wiping himself with a damp brownish rag.
His blue shirt hung on the tree. I noticed a line of red dirt, that he probably didn’t know about, on the skin of his back just above his belt, trapped in the faint down there. But more than that I noticed, as one couldn’t help, the deep hollow scar behind his heart.
I said: ‘Hullo,’ apprehensively.
He turned so sharply that one would have thought I had caught him at something shameful. And my eyes were drawn then, naturally, to the other scar on his left breast.
He said: ‘Oh, you,’ with a trace of relief, I thought, but sounding annoyed nevertheless. And he reached out quickly for his shirt and began to put it on, in such a clumsy way that I realized he was using it to hide the scar from me.
And with a kind of dull misery I asked myself: But why the heart? Why not the head, if it was dying he meant?
‘We’ve seen it,’ I said; like a fool, thinking aloud.
‘Seen what?’ he asked, with his dreadful eyes on me. No one else in the world has ever had eyes of quite that colour.
‘The wound. The scar. When you were sick. Everyone’s seen it.’
‘I was afraid of that,’ he said.
‘How could you do it?’
‘It’s my life,’ he said.
‘And robbed us of you. Robbed Tourmaline.’
He shrugged. He tried to grin. But his lips trembled.
‘But you won’t—again?’
He looked down at his hands, methodically tucking his shirt into his trousers, and would not answer.
‘Ah, Michael——’ I said, feeling so cold and wretched suddenly, in the hot sun. Because he had not meant to come to us at all. He had meant to die there, in the wilderness.
‘Why should I justify myself to you?’ he asked, in a low voice, not looking up.
‘That’s twice you’ve tried.’
‘I’m getting more efficient,’ he said, ‘maybe.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘Don’t tell me how to talk, old man.’
‘But you’re ours,’ I tried to explain to him. ‘Not your own, now. Ours. My poor boy——’
‘I’m God’s,’ he said, simply and sullenly. ‘Don’t kid yourselves.’
‘We saved you. We made you. And not for your use. For ours.’
‘I’m God’s,’ he repeated. ‘And my own.’
‘I think you’re selfish,’ I said. It sounded pathetically feeble.
And he laughed, lifting his head and screwing up his eyes against the sun. And something in the look of him then was familiar. I had seen him somewhere, in a picture, perhaps; or perhaps I had dreamed of him. The laugh of a man with despair at the back of him; of a great hater whose hatred has outgrown its strength and died, leaving him empty. That was how he struck me: empty. And yet, still prepossessing.
‘There’s nothing I can say,’ I realized.
And he agreed. ‘There are limits.’
‘You were right. It’s your affair.’
‘Now that you know,’ he said, watching me intently, and seeming amused (although the humourlessness of him was actually aggressive), ‘I suppose everyone will.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘And no one listens to me, anyway.’
And he nodded. But he wasn’t really concerned.
I looked at him, and I felt betrayed. So much health, and hope, and strength, in the look of him; there was nothing I would not have trusted him with, from his appearance. One would have judged him, by his looks, invulnerable; one of those made without a doubt of themselves, without a second thought. And it was all deception. He was not sound. How could I think so, when he did not?
‘What are you thinking about?’ he wondered.
‘Can’t I help you?’ I asked. But it was a question expecting no answer.
If there had been any consciousness of having failed, any regret, my sympathy might have reached him, might have found him human after all. But he had rendered himself almost without qualities; there was nothing to him but his ferocious pride, and his yearning. No creature on earth seemed worth his attention.
And still he kept his brightness. He confronted me like a locked chest, containing unheard-of things. If I could break into him, I thought. If I could. And I had a sudden ludicrous vision of myself, starving in the desert for want of a tin-opener.
Then the gold began to come in, like a harvest.