The Refuge (29 page)

He was thorough without even a show of effort, enthusiasm or boredom. It must have been nothing to him to sweep and dust and wash and polish away all traces of a couple of women he had never seen before and would never see again. Staring at the natural grey colour of the sheepskin rug, beaten so free that it appeared never to have felt the weight of human bodies, I could imagine him doing it, and thought how good a thing it would be if one could clear and clean out the mind in the same way.

In my own room at last, I changed into working clothes before going to the kitchen to light the fire in the mercilessly-polished stove. Stoves, I thought foolishly, are polished so that they shall radiate as little heat as may be, and no doubt the same effect is achieved with what is commonly called a polished mind: the more polished it is, the less warmth it gives out. How polished was my own mind? Or perhaps it did not matter—perhaps there had never been a fire there anyhow; until now?

Before the kindling wood began to crackle as it took the flame, I heard the muffled thudding blows of an axe higher up the mountain, dulled and unechoing in the white mist. The scene that came into my mind showed me Jack in soiled sandshoes and trousers, the belt tight below the swell of his ribs under the white sports-singlet he wore when he went wood-getting. With his pipe held strongly, he would be addressing himself—there was no other word that so accurately described his attitude—to a dead tree while his grey horse and his black dog Ike waited at a proper distance, too familiar with it all even to look his way. His axemanship was characteristically clean and quick. It reminded me of yet another allusion to his past he had as it were let fall some time, between mouthfuls of food perhaps, or slow puffs at his pipe. He had done a bit of timber-getting, he said, but—using his favourite and most deceptive expression with a sharp, un-smiling glance at me across the intervening space—it was ‘too much like hard work’. He had the shoulders and hips and nimble feet of a good timber-man; and I had seen him looking with shrewd consideration at my few acres of forest above the cleared upper end of the plateau where it melted into the steeper slope of the soaring mountain. He told me it was wood for the taking, easy to get and easy to get out. In the end we decided to let it stand a few years more. Now it could wait for I knew not how long, until the war was over.

I was thinking about Jack, listening to his axe thudding, so that I should not too clearly remember Irma in this kitchen, her face in the tender lamplight rosy and golden with the colour in her cheeks and lips and the revealed lobes of her ears, and the shining candour of her slanted, sly-set eyes looking frankly at me across the yellow table as she laughed with us. How happy she had been, and I too, with Miss Werther between us at the end nearer the stove trilling away in her lilting voice, apologizing to me every now and then for a sudden spontaneous remark in German, at which Irma had frowned and shaken slightly her dark, smooth head with a glance at me inviting the other to remember: ‘He does not understand you.’

Well, I thought now, as I rinsed and filled the heavy iron kettle, it is there, but it is over, finished, and I have made my choice and shall stand by my decision. Yet when I had set the kettle on to heat, I could not resist looking again through the whole place, Donna at my heels. She followed me about with a look of patient contentment on her bright brown-eyed face, between the golden fall of her ears that gave her the appearance, in some moods, of an intelligent blonde film actress. I even looked round the small bathroom next to the larder; but everywhere was a clean impersonality, with not a trace even of myself or of Jack, not even a dark, unidentified hair, a fingerprint, the ghost of a breath on the mirror’s icy surface that mockingly showed me myself only, and in reverse at that, so that it was not even I whom I saw staring self-consciously back at me.

When the fire was firmly in, I took another axe and set off along the north headland by the bank of the little hurrying creek towards where Jack must be chopping. Before I had gone far, the thudding blows ceased to sound through the obliterating mist, and after a pause of seconds I heard it—the groaning brief crescendo of noise as the felled tree tore its dead branches free from the arms of its living company, and flung itself slowly and for the first time and finally down upon the earth that had nourished it for half a century, and upon which, standing upright and defiant and beautiful, it had lived and at last begun to die, high above the scanty scattered life sprung from its own seed.

When we came to the place, old Jack was sitting on the clean stump, smoking imperturbably and looking with mild amusement and distaste at the prostrate silver trunk and the branches that had not smashed in the fall raised now in frozen, rigid gestures of self-defence. It was a large tree. When he saw me he nodded amiably, his lips stretching wider and his sea-blue, lizard-like eyes narrowing in a real smile.

‘Thought I heard the car. Just come in time. Must of knowed sumpin,’ he said moistly round his pipe-stem. I paced the trunk and looked over the branches, trying to see the thing as two or three months’ supply of good firewood. There was all of that. Above us the mist drifted in the green tops whose canopy showed no wound; for the tree had been too long dead, and the seasons had healed over the gap it might once have left, dying.

Later, we got to work with the saw, and in this exercise, when I had remembered how to perform it with least effort, I slowly found a peace of body and mind I had not known for a long time. Perhaps this was the secret of old Jack’s imperturbability, this dissolving of the mind’s tangles of desire and foreboding in unceasing bodily labour, at no matter what, without haste and without end. The snarling hiss of the cross-cut blade, sharp and well-set, rubbed out thoughts and names, and even memory let fade the remorseless pictures that have no words. We lunged rhythmically at each other eight feet apart, down on one knee, listening to the greasy passage of the blade deeper and deeper into the solid trunk, and soon it was necessary to kneel down lower and rest on the free hand, until we could cut no nearer the ground. Even the two horses working together could pull only short-length loads of the heavy hardwood in that dense forest, and we made several more cuts before leaving the saw for the axes. I remembered with surprise the fire and the kettle; everything but the work had gone from my mind. Wiping of the chilly sweat, I went down with him to make tea. The dogs followed, after their fashion, ranging to hunt in the misty undergrowth but returning sometimes to see that all was well with us. On our left the little creek tinkled coldly unseen in the twisting depths of its rocky bed.

By the end of the day we had finished with that tree and got a lot of it down and stacked in the lean-to wood-shed on the north side of the barn, away from the weather. I felt wonderfully weary and cleansed in body and mind. Jack had not shed a drop of sweat nor shown anything but a lazy amusement as at some peculiar characteristic of his own of which no one else knew. While I ran off a bath and soaked my pleasantly-aching muscles, he put on his patched coat and fed his hens and milked his scornful-eyed cow. Donna sat on the bathroom stool with folded paws, drenched with mist and shuddering herself warm, and now and then, between brief dozes, looking down sceptically at my white skin under the colourless hot rainwater in the tub. She was no longer beautiful like a film star, and I told her so, while she wagged her feathered stub of tail frantically in acknowledgment of unexpected compliments. It was an hour of warmth, of profound and unthinking physical and mental peace; for this, and not for a woman or a ghost, I had come.

While Jack and I drank a glass of whisky by the kitchen stove, I remembered I had not brought his flask of rum. It was the first time I had forgotten it; and though I knew he did not depend on me for his modest supply of it, I was put out. He looked surprised.

‘Must have sumpin on your mind,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s this war they tell me’s officially opened.’

‘Maybe it is,’ I said; and I told him I should not be staying that night as I was on duty next morning. He may have remembered that that in itself had seldom been enough to prevent me staying, but I did not think even he, for all his shrewd and smiling silence, could have guessed that the quarter-hour following my arrival, the unused beds, the cloudy smoothness of the sheepskin hearth-rug, the lifeless and immaculate kitchen where once we had so gaily sat down to our meal in the lamp-light, and the whole clean emptiness of the cottage, without a trace of unaccustomed movement anywhere in it, had made me feel for the first time like a stranger there; and I could not stay just yet, after my coming and my animal-like searching about and about had been fruitless.

Yet he took me by surprise when he said, ‘You young fellers is all the same. Dress a bit o’ meat up with a few weird doodahs and give it a foreign name, and you’ll eat it every time, if it burns your guts out . . . Anyway, you’ll be takin’ a risk goin’ down in this,’ and he waved his glass at the window. To hide my consternation and to avoid answering the first part of his remarks at all, I went to look outside. Dusk had come invisibly. Beyond the dark reflecting panes there was only a hinted whiteness catching the light of the lamp behind me.

‘I have driven up and down in worse,’ I reminded him, and he answered after a while, somewhat obscurely, ‘Yes—but not when there’s a war on.’ In the window I could see the side of his face and his shock of flat grey hair in the lamp-light. He had not bothered to turn and look at me to see how I had taken what he first said. It was the first time I had ever heard him volunteer a comment in any way personal upon me and my affairs. No doubt he rested secure in his knowledge that with a smile and eyes and a voice as non-committal as his he could have said almost anything to almost anyone without causing more than a rapid, startled self-inspection. In any case, I liked his wry, probing wisdom, and his air of being mildly and constantly amused, even when he was alone. There could never be trouble of a personal sort between us; he was, in addition, twice my age and harder than I had ever been.

But at that moment I felt incapable of referring to Irma with anyone at all, in however indirect a way of speaking. Telling him to help himself to more whisky, I went out through the cold, moist air that was not yet darkness made tangible, as it would later be, and backed the car from its place among the farm tools and light machinery in the barn. When I returned through the dripping orchard to the kitchen, regretting its quiet warmth and light as though I had already left it behind me in the lowering night, he was still standing by the stove, his face, so ruddy and bright in contrast with the flat thatch of his grey hair, turned sideways still from the lamp as he looked at his thoughts in the corner of the room.

Unconcerned to dissuade me any further from driving alone down the difficult track in that mist and darkness, he spoke coolly of Irma.

‘What become of the little foreign lady?’

‘Nobody knows,’ I said. ‘She changed trains at Blacktown and disappeared west.’

‘I heard you go, that mornin’,’ he said. ‘You ain’t no fool.’

‘You can hear me go again now,’ I said. ‘Sorry about the rum.’

‘Think nothin’ of it,’ he said courteously. ‘I always got a drop left.’ He added, rather surprisingly, ‘Like the widder’s cruse.’

We briefly shook hands, and he said, ‘Well—take care o’ yourself. See you some time.’

It was several weeks before I did go again, however; partly because I was still disinclined to spend a night at the cottage, and partly because several changes were taking place in the office, and some of us were working overtime a good deal, covering a sudden brief staff-shortage, and unobtrusively keeping an eye on the settling-in of some newcomers. More men than might have been expected in a staff where the age-average was not low had been drawn into the slowly accelerating current of war running now through all human affairs. Individual changes near the top affected us all: when the news-editor’s assistant took on a liaison job with the navy, a complicated series of upward and sideways moves followed, for the
Gazette
of those days still held wholly to the policy of internal promotion from a careful if not always happy reserve of strength—a two-edged policy, some thought, which reaped both the sweet fruit of ambition and the sour fruit of discontent. The argument in its favour, a negative one, was that the discontent was not as bad as it would have been had we done as other offices did, and brought in new blood at the top rather than at the bottom, thus avoiding the disaffection so often caused by putting a newcomer in a high post and so arresting that subtle upward movement, slow though it may be, which keeps any office staff alive. Because of this policy, even today the
Gazette
seems to find outside replacements on the upper levels unnecessary; and only the
Herald
has lost good men less frequently. (The argument that both papers are resultantly dull misses the point, which is that the majority of newspaper-readers are dull too.)

Scott, in his booming voice of angry good-humour, put the administration’s attitude clearly.

‘If we can’t replace one of our own men with one of our own men, then we are short-staffed, and if we’re short-staffed we can’t go on producing a newspaper.’ And he added once to me: ‘If a man’s left hand doesn’t know what his right hand’s doing in this office, he’d better start teaching it at once.’ On another occasion, apparently concerned with this same matter of domestic policy, he shouted back into his room from the open doorway, to someone evidently still there within, ‘Any man here who thinks he’s indispensable had better seek other employment, by god!’ in a voice to be heard all over the building.

But with the development of world-scale war, for the second and perhaps not the last time in the lives of so many of us, things became different, even in the most conservative establishments. Promotions were sudden, and replacements at the ladder’s foot more frequent. As the war, with its calamitous false start that ended with Dunkirk, gathered more directed energy as opposed plans were made and put in motion, and the battles were joined, men were lost who had to be replaced abroad from the Sydney head-office staff, however indirectly. The newcomers at our end, many of them very young, many of them, as time went on, having been formerly in one or other of the services, needed careful handling and unobtrusive supervision as they adjusted themselves to the strange and exacting life.