Tourmaline (6 page)

‘You’re a mystery to us,’ I said, to take the burden of conversation off his shoulders. ‘How could a man be found fifty miles from Tourmaline, and not even a bicycle beside him?’

He turned aside, rubbing his peeling forehead with his wrist, nervily. Then: ‘D’you mind if I sit down?’ he asked, laying his loose bones in the basket-chair. We did not, and sat too. ‘I walked,’ he said at last.

‘You walked,’ I repeated. It sounded insane.

‘What a man,’ sighed Byrne, who was disposed to worship this enigma in any case.

‘Only at night,’ the diviner explained. ‘For the first ten days, that is.’

‘But you had no water,’ I said.

‘I had a bag,’ he said. ‘Where is it? In the truck, maybe. Or maybe I threw it away.’

‘It was empty, then. Well, of course, after ten days.’

‘I don’t need much,’ he said, ‘and I depended on, you know, finding some on the way. I have a—a gift, in that line. I’m a diviner, did I tell you?’

I remarked that everyone in Tourmaline now knew of it, and looked to him for salvation. He frowned, under his yellow forelock.

‘But you didn’t find any water,’ Byrne suggested. ‘This is hard country, son.’

‘I know it,’ he said. ‘But no country’s hopeless. Only, I lost my rod, a metal rod—you know? And nothing else would do. When that was gone, the—the virtue went out of me. And I was sick…’

‘What the hell did you eat?’ Byrne wondered.

‘I took as many tins as I could carry. I don’t need much, you see.

‘You don’t drink and you don’t eat,’ Byrne said. ‘Have a smoke, for Christ’s sake, you make us uncomfortable.’ He proffered his tobacco tin, and the diviner, after looking at his face, hesitantly, took it and rolled a cigarette. ‘Anyway,’ Byrne went on, ‘tell us what happened after those ten days. How long was it before the bloke found you?’

‘Two days,’ the diviner said, ‘I think. But I was pretty crook by that time.’

‘You’re telling me you were.’

‘The day before, I woke up about night-time, I found I’d been sleeping all day in the open sun. Face swelled up like a football—you saw it—and not quite right in the head, either.’

He lit his cigarette. I noticed that his hand trembled. ‘Are you cold, still?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he said, ‘no, only—I’m often like this. Anyway, I kept walking all that night, and then I kept on in the morning, because things were looking—not too good, you know, and I reckoned I’d have to get here quick or not get here at all. But the sun sort of knocked me down on the road. Couldn’t do anything. Crawled under a bit of bush that let the sun in on me and just lay there. After that, I don’t remember much, except a bloke pulling me around, and then—then, the heat of that truck.’ He shivered, hunching his shoulders. ‘I thought I was in hell,’ he said, sincerely.

Byrne’s black eyes were fascinated by him. I too was absorbed, but troubled by certain rents in his costume of gallant folly, behind which he remained unchanged and indecipherable.

‘You’ve gone through a lot,’ I said, ‘and you’ve told us a lot. But after all that, we still don’t know why anyone would want to walk to Tourmaline.’

He leaned back, closing his eyes, and directing a jet of smoke at the centre of the room. I saw that I had disturbed him. But he answered, after a minute’s silence: ‘It was here. That’s all.’

‘You’d heard of us, then?’

‘Oh, in a roundabout way. I’d heard of some towns that were supposed to be—well, relics. And Tourmaline was one of them. I don’t suppose it’d hurt your feelings if I said that no one cares a cracker whether the place is still here or not. In fact, most people think it’s been dead for years.’

‘That was Lacey’s Find,’ Byrne said. ‘The sand blew up and buried it.’

‘A buried town.’ The diviner thought about it, dreamily, and with a curious yearning intensity.

I too was remembering, not for the first time, the broad street of Lacey’s, the two-storied hotel, the several stores. I imagined the gentle tidal encroachment of the dunes, the soft red sand, wind-ribbed and untrodden, mounting, mounting. Over the bar of the hotel, over the piano and the billiard table, over the counters and merchandise of the stores; until, in the end, what would be left but a chimney or two of the hotel, dully moaning in the red wind? And those too, of course, the wind would have silenced by now, and the sand would lie unbroken and printless over all the places that knew me. In my terrible loneliness I grow elegiac.

‘I’ve made a song about it,’ Byrne said. ‘Or about Tourmaline—about the same thing happening to Tourmaline. It’s not far from here to the dune country. Just keep on going through the broken fence, and keep an eye open for Leichardt.’

‘I’ve finished walking,’ said the diviner, with his absent and innocent grin. ‘I’ll stay here.’

‘That’s good news,’ said Byrne, returning it.

I got up and went to the bookcase, feeling that at this important moment the diviner must be initiated into the history and condition of our heritage. I fetched the massive
Cyclopedia of Western Australia
(the property of Tom’s grandfather) and read to him the account of our town in its heyday. Like unto those of fabled Ophir (I informed him) were the riches and future prospects of Tourmaline, so recently a trackless wilderness. Where once reigned desolation was now a prosperous town, containing all the comforts and facilities of a city. The streets, two chains in width, were well illumined with acetylene gas, and the principal thoroughfares planted with pepper trees. The town possessed, besides a telephone exchange and the usual government buildings, a hospital, a miners’ institute (containing nearly 1,000 volumes) and several churches. The religious life was strong and vigorous. There was an excellent volunteer fire-brigade. The town was also the place of publication of the principal newspaper of the district, the
Tourmaline Times
, which enjoyed a wide circulation and popularity. The population, in spite of an inadequate water supply, had risen to 900. There was weekly communication by coach with Lacey’s Find and other centres. In point of view of its many facilities, this outpost of civilization could vie with many older established communities; and indeed (so I read) it far distanced some in the race for progress.

When I had concluded this lesson, I carried the book to him and let him gaze upon the photograph of Tourmaline in its pride, the main street thronged with stores and pepper trees, a handsome street lamp prominent in the centre foreground. I don’t know why, but the town was deserted except for a black dog on its way across the road.

He looked at it, smiling faintly, and then glanced through the encomium I had just read him. Suddenly he burst out into a bubbling laugh.

I was bitterly disappointed. I am not humourless, I hope, but the splendour of Tourmaline is not a laughing matter. Still shaking, he went on to ask: ‘Does the—does the volunteer fire-brigade still function?’

‘In case of fire,’ Byrne said, ‘every able-bodied man drops what he’s doing, rushes to the scene of the conflagration and pisses on it. On account of there’s a water shortage, mate.’

Again the laugh bubbled up; infectious, and very youthful. I could not be displeased.

‘You’re a crude beast, Byrnie,’ said Deborah from the door. ‘I’m ashamed of you.’ And she did manage to look severe as she came into the room, so that Byrne blushed, as she had intended he should. He was very modest with women.

We stood up for her. The diviner took her tawny hand and thanked her for her kindness to him in his extremity.

She rested her fathomless gaze on his face. And again I had the impression that he was uneasy, on his guard, with her as with Byrne; and yet with the Springs, with me, there was no hint of such constraint. And I remarked to myself that he seemed to be a diviner of less tangible things than water.

‘You’re famous now,’ she said. ‘The most famous man in Tourmaline. It’s good to see you looking so well.’

‘I’ve got you and Mary to thank for that,’ he said. ‘And Byrnie for my fame, I reckon. Mary tells me it was your husband who saved me from flattening my face on the street out there.’

She turned aside to sit down, and murmured: ‘Fancy Mary speaking well of Kes.’

‘Is that speaking well of him?’

‘In a way. He wouldn’t do much to save Mary from flattening her face.’

‘Deb,’ said Byrne, ‘he doesn’t want to hear this.’ That Kestrel should be disparaged was a blow at whatever shreds he himself possessed of confidence and self-esteem.

‘Will he come here?’ the diviner asked her.

‘Kes? No, never. He’s scared of Mary.’

‘Kes is all right,’ Byrne hastened to explain. ‘She’s joking. He did get you out of the truck. Him and the Law, there. He’s okay.’

‘You’ll find Tourmaline a funny place,’ I said. ‘People like each other. There’s a lot of what we used to call esprit de corps.’

‘Like in the days of the volunteer fire-brigade,’ Byrne put in; with intent, I suppose, to mock me, but the diviner did not respond.

‘In spite of what Deborah says,’ I added (portentously, I need not confess), ‘Kestrel has a great regard for Mary. Tourmaline’s like that.’

‘A funny place, all right,’ the diviner said; and I could not tell from his tone whether he was impressed or covertly amused. But he must have known, behind those blue hills, terrible things. He must have been acquainted, as we are not, with the danger—the terrible danger—that danger of which I know nothing, but which drives me night and morning to prayer, and fills my sleep with images of wind and annihilation.

‘Do you come from the coast?’ I was impelled to ask him. ‘You’re a seaman, perhaps?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘A seaman? Never.’ And would say no more, then or ever.

‘Where do you come from then?’ Byrne asked.

‘From the other end of the road,’ he said; and smiled, evasively. ‘Where else could I come from?’

‘And what’s there?’ asked Deborah. It is the women, always, who are most curious about that road.

He sat twisting in his lap the fingers of his multi-coloured hands, and studying them. Then he said, rather quietly: ‘Hell.’

And I felt cold. No one would speak. He meant it.

‘You seem to believe in hell,’ I said at length, for he oppressed us too much with his sincerity. ‘That’s rare.’

He shrugged. ‘In Tourmaline, maybe.’

‘We’re innocent, I suppose.’

‘More than I ever hoped for.’ He spoke very softly.

All the while Deborah and Byrne were gazing at him, much as children used to stare at Ah Quong the Chinaman. It must have been trying.

‘Tom has told me a lot about the place,’ he said; and I tried to determine what Tom, who was so religiously wordless, could have found to tell, and how much he had observed in his hermit-existence, and whether his observations might not contain elements which had escaped the rest of us. ‘I’ve never met a man like Tom. I’ve never struck a town like this. Maybe there aren’t any more. I could believe it.’

‘You sound as if you’d never had a home,’ said Deborah.

‘No,’ he said, shortly. ‘Out there——’ Then he stopped for a moment, but meeting her eyes for the first time went on, with a sort of despairing candour: ‘I’m not the kind, you see. It’s—ah, chaos. Like nothing here. Tom couldn’t live. I couldn’t live. D’you understand?’ And suddenly he was far younger, terribly eager that we should understand, that we should acquit him—but of what? Again he appeared to me obscure, alien.

‘And the man who drives the truck?’

‘Is a saint, a crazy saint. So they say.’

‘That bastard?’ Byrne said, incredulous.

‘It’s different,’ he said, ‘out there.’

‘You mustn’t tell us,’ I said suddenly. Because I was afraid. Because of the danger—the terrible danger. It was as if my silent wireless had finally spoken, and for Tourmaline’s sake I must clap my hands to my ears, and close my mind, and hear nothing—nothing—but the gathering wind, perhaps, and the slow soft hush of sand at every door.

‘Wild beasts are loose on the world,’ he said, from another place, as it were. ‘When you know that, you don’t need to know much more.’

But Tom, who had come into the room, unnoticed, said: ‘Don’t you?’ And as the diviner turned to look at him the luminous smile transfigured his lean face and Random’s equally. ‘This room’s full of wild beasts, too, that might be let loose at any moment. The question is, what controls them?’

‘You know,’ the diviner said, with great trust and happiness.

And Tom wondered: ‘Do I? Because it might be just a kid’s convention, mightn’t it? What if the Word was only ‘Barleys’, after all?’

The diviner stared into his eyes, and the light went out of him. He said, or rather queried: ‘You’re fooling, Tom.’

‘Tom, Tom,’ I pleaded with him, ‘don’t destroy what you can’t build again.’

‘If I believed that,’ the diviner said, ‘I couldn’t live.’ And he gave to this most grotesque of conversation-killers an awful force and solemnity.

‘Don’t stop at the first gate, Mike,’ Tom gently said. ‘It’s not a substitute for thinking.’ And he stood with his back to the edge of the open door, swaying himself back and forth a little, as he looked down, luminous, on the young man. He was very thin, and somehow shrunken, although I don’t remember that he was ever larger. Deep lines ascended his forehead and almost overtook the receding hair. Even so, the impression he gave was of youth; an impression reinforced by the youthful timbre of his voice, and by a certain diffident and respectful quality in his smile.

‘Then what’s your belief?’ asked the diviner, blind to the rest of us.

‘I’m still waiting,’ Tom said. ‘Who’d dare say before the end of the road?’ And with his hands behind him, palms to the flat of the door, he swayed himself.

The diviner lolled in his basket-chair, limp. I remembered his phrase before, speaking of the loss of his divining rod. ‘The virtue went out of me.’ He looked like that.

‘What’s it matter, anyway?’ Byrne demanded. ‘We’ll live till we die. Who gives a stuff about beliefs?’

‘We’ll live till we die,’ Tom echoed. ‘If we believe we exist, that’s enough.’

‘It’s not enough,’ Deborah said, ‘not if you just believe that you exist. You have to believe that Mary exists, or Byrnie, or someone. You’ve got to believe it in your guts.’ And what startled me was not so much her apparent reading of my thoughts as the ferocity with which she spoke, the bitterness in her. Poor girl, I thought; Kestrel has broken her heart.