And it is with still more emotion that I am to tell you that I was unable to carry out your wishes, for the letter, though impeccably phrased, was signed Stephen. no more. 'I remain, my dear Sir Joseph, your affect. humble servt. Stephen'.

  The purport of the document was abundantly clear: the senior partner admitted this, but he said the bank could not act. I took advice, and both lawyers concurred in saying that the bank's position was unassailable.

  It angered me extremely. Yet no great time had passed before my anger was sensibly diminished by the news that Smith and Clowes had ceased payment. Shortly after this they were made bankrupt, like many other country finns, alas; and their creditors cannot hope for sixpence in the pound. However in spite of all their many faults, your unsatisfactory people were much more substantial and long-established; they had the confidence of the City and they have emerged stronger and if anything wealthier from the crisis; so that your fortune, though rudely and uncivilly kept, lies in their vaults intact: it may even, who knows, have bred. And I can assure you that your orders about annuities, subscriptions and the like will from now on be most scrupulously observed. Of this I give you joy; and remain, my dear Stephen, Your affectionate (though disobedient) humble servant,

  Joseph

  Should you happen to stroll in a mangrove-swamp, and should a specimen (however indifferent) of Eupator ingens happen to pass within easy reach, pray think of me.

  It was some time before he could make out what he felt, what was the prevailing emotion amid the turmoil of so many. There was pleasure of course, but also a strong rebellion against it and against the unsettling of a mind that had grown quite composed; and anger at the trembling of his hand. He reflected for a while on the different levels of belief and disbelief. This inherited fortune, which he had always thought disproportionate and somehow discreditable, was after all tolerably abstract and intangible: a dim, remote set of figures in a book in Sydney's antipodes. How much had its coming or going affected more than the surface of his mind? Yet when the various tides had settled not indeed to a calm but at least to an even swell it appeared to him that upon the whole, whatever the potential disadvantages, it was better to be rich than poor; but privately rich, like that absurd person in Goldsmith. He was about to add 'and probably better to be healthy than sick, whatever Pascal may say' when it occurred to him that the strong emotions of yesterday and today had done away with the exasperation that had been so powerfully with him, as well as the sleepiness and the desire to smoke tobacco.

  'Still and all, I shall indulge in a cigar as I walk up to Government House,' he said, as he put on his second-best coat.

  'Diffused pleasure, or even joy: no feverish exaltation,' he reflected on his way up from the quay, a fragrant cloud wafting before him: but during the time it took to pass three iron-gangs, many unchained figures in coarse, broad-arrowed clothes, and some pitiful whores, all in this short walk, joy was scarcely apparent. Although on the other hand the explanation of Sir Joseph's letter, the strange though not unpleasant familiarity of Sir Joseph's letter, presented itself all of a piece, with startling clarity, as he paused for a moment looking out over Port Jackson, where an outward-bound local brig of about 200 tons was lying to with several boats close by to windward and smoke pouring out of her ports amidst a general indifference. The explanation was that in the tedium of copying the lawyer's power of attorney his mind had wandered to an almost finished note to Diana. He had certainly signed hers S. Maturin, reserving the Stephen for Sir Joseph.

  There was one of the smaller kangaroos on the lawn of Government House and Stephen contemplated it from the steps until ten minutes past five, when he sent up his name and was shown into a waiting-room. Here again Mrs Macquarie showed a certain likeness to Diana: she too was unpunctual. Fortunately the windows looked on to the lawn, the kangaroo and several flights of very small long-tailed blue-green parrots, and Stephen sat, peaceful and content, watching them in the extraordinarily brilliant light. 'At least part of the brilliance arises from the fact that so many of the trees hold their dull leaves straight up, so that there is little shade,' he said. 'It gives a certain air of desolation to the land, if not to the sky itself.'

  The door opened, but instead of a footman Mrs Macquarie herself hurried in, her hair somewhat disordered. Stephen rose, bowed and smiled, yet with a certain reserve: he did not know whether she had been told about his encounter with Lowe before she wrote to him. Her amiable smile and her apology for being late reassured him, and a moment's reflection told him that she (again like Diana) had spent many years in India, where white officers, overfed, too hot, too absolute, fought so often that a mere wound was scarcely noticed.

  She listened attentively to what he had to say and then asked 'Are they pretty?'

  'Not at all, ma'am,' said Stephen. 'They are small-eyed, dull black, thin and graceless. But on the other hand they seem to me quite good-hearted children, attached to one another and to their friends, and remarkably gifted linguists at least. They already speak a most creditable English, one version for before the mast, another for the quarterdeck.'

  'And you do not think of taking them home?'

  'They were born almost on the equator itself, and I can hardly find it in my heart to carry them by way of the Horn to islands so damp and cold and foggy as ours. If I could find them a home here, I should happily maintain and endow them.'

  'Perhaps if I could see them it would be easier for us to find a solution. Would you have time to bring them tomorrow afternoon?'

  'Certainly ma'am,' said Stephen, rising, 'and I am infinitely obliged to you for your kindness.'

  He walked down the lawn to the gate and the kangaroo came across at its awkward four-legged pace, sat up, looked into his face and uttered a very faint bleat. But Stephen had nothing for it and as the kangaroo declined his caress they parted company, the animal watching him until he reached the gate.

  He asked the rigid sentry the way to Riley's hotel: no reply but increased rigidity and an uneasy look, until the lodge-keeper came out and said 'If he was to answer, sir, if he was to answer any but a soldier-officer, he would have a bloody shirt tomorrow: ain't that right, Jock?' Jock closed one eye, never moving his head, still less his person, and the lodge-keeper went on 'Riley's hotel, sir? Straight on, bear left, and it is just before the first brick house you come to.'

  Stephen thanked him now and blessed him later, for his direction was exact; and although the walk had been sad enough, with its many convicts in their dirty prison clothes, some looking vacant, others wicked, others deep in settled melancholy, and its many soldiers, also in a state of harsh servitude but at least with the power of kicking the still more unfortunate, it was somewhat lightened by the friendly greeting of Colonel MacPherson and another officer of the Seventy-Third as they passed by, and much more so by the sight of Martin at their meeting-place, which could have been taken for a crossroads shebeen in the Bog of Allen but for the absence of rain or mud and the presence of three sorts of wild parrot on its sagging thatched roof and a large selection of tame ones in cages or on stands within doors. Martin was still standing by the funereal cockatoo, wrapping the finger it had bit with his handkerchief. 'You buy your experience at a terrible price, I find,' said Stephen, watching the blood soak through.

  'I should never have taken my hand away so quick,' said Martin. 'I startled him, poor bird.' The poor bird ran its dry black tongue across the cutting edge of its bill and looked at him with a malignant eye, gauging the distance: another lunge was very nearly possible. 'Shall we go?' he asked, looking at his watch. 'It is almost time.'

  'We must take something for the good of the house,' said Stephen, sitting down by a tray of objects designed for visiting sailors: beautiful deep-green pitted emu's eggs, Aboriginal stone axes, spears against the wall, and a flat, angled piece of wood like an indifferent circumflex accent some two feet across. 'House,' he called. 'House, there. House. D'ye hear me now?'

  House came, wiping his hands on his apron. 'Was there never a young woman to serve you, gentlemen?' he cried, and when they shook their heads, 'Upstairs with her soldier, for a thousand pound. What may I have the pleasure of bringing your honours?'

  'What have you that is long and cool?' asked Stephen.

  'Well, Mister, there is the Parramatta river, long and cool in that canvas bucket by the cross-draught; and I am after drawing off a gallon of my own whiskey, a delicate drink if ever there was one. At this time of day the two mixed just so would make a long cool drink equal to the best champagne.'

  'Then be so good as to give us a pint of the one and a noggin of the other,' said Stephen. 'But before you go, pray tell me the use of this wooden implement, something between a scimitar and a sickle.'

  'That, sir, is an Aborigine's... toy, as you might say, since they only use them for play. They hold one end and throw it spinning like a Catherine-wheel and when it has gone fifty yards or so it rises up, curves and comes back to hand. There was an old Aboriginal that used to show it for a tot of rum, and that was his undoing.'

  'You throw it from you, and it comes back without rebounding?' asked Martin, who could not easily follow the broad Munster accent.

  'You find it hard to believe, sir, I am sure; and so it is too if you have not seen it: but reflect, sir, you are in the Antipodes- you are standing upside down like a fly on the ceiling - we are all standing upside down; which is much stranger than black swans or sticks that fly back to your hand.'

  When they had drunk their whiskey they walked on, and Martin said 'He was quite right. In many ways this is the opposite of our world. I should say as different as Hades from Earth if it were not for the penetrating light. Do you not find the perpetual sound of chains, the omnipresence of ragged, dirty, cheerless men whom we must suppose criminal deeply depressing?'

  'I do: and if it were not for the prospect of getting out into the open country I should either paddle about this vast harbour in my skiff or stay aboard, classifying my collections and examining yours with a closer eye. But I think it is the eager cruelty of the oppressors that saddens me even more.'

  They paused before crossing the rutted, dusty road to let two iron-gangs go by, one up, the other down, and as they stood a drunk young woman lurched into them, her hair wild, her bosom bare; a handsome young woman, in spite of her blotched face. 'Could they not see where they were going, the awkward buggers? God rot their...' The convicts passed; they crossed the street; her abuse followed them, fouler than anything heard on the forecastle.

  They walked in silence for some time and then Martin said 'Here is Paulton's house.'

  Paulton himself it was who opened the door and made them welcome, a tall bony man with spectacles, small steel-rimmed thick spectacles, that did not appear to suit him, seeing that sometimes he peered through them, sometimes over the top. Very often he took them off and polished them with his handkerchief, a nervous gesture, one of many; indeed he was a nervous man entirely. But a sensible one, thought Stephen, and amiable.

  'May I offer you some tea?' he asked after the ordinary preliminaries. 'In this parching dusty weather I find that hot tea answers better than anything else.'

  They made grateful murmurs, and presently an aged woman brought the tray. 'How kind of you to come, sir,' said Paulton, pouring him a cup. 'Martin tells me you have written many a book.'

  'Only on medicine, sir, and a few aspects of natural philosophy.'

  'And may I ask, sir, whether you can compose at sea, or whether you wait for the peace and calm of a country retreat?'

  'I have written a good deal at sea,' said Stephen, 'but unless the weather is tolerably steady, so that the ink may be relied upon to stay in its well, I usually wait until I am ashore for any long, considered treatise or paper- for the peace and calm of a country retreat, as you say. Yet on the other hand I do not find that the turmoil of a ship prevents me reading: with a good clear candle in my lantern and balls of wax in my ears, I read with the utmost delight. The confinement of my cabin, the motion of my hanging cot, the distantly-heard orders and replies, the working of the ship - all these enhance my enjoyment.'

  'I have tried your wax balls,' said Martin, 'but they make me apprehensive. I am afraid that there will be the cry "She sinks, she sinks! All is lost. She cannot swim," and I shall not hear.'

  'You were always rather apprehensive, Nathaniel,' said Paulton, taking off his spectacles and looking at him kindly with his myopic gaze. 'I remember terrifying you as a little boy by asserting that I was really a corpse inhabited by a grey and hairy ghost. But I imagine, sir,' - to Stephen - 'that you read books on medicine, natural philosophy, perhaps history - that you do not read novels or plays.'

  'Sir,' said Stephen, 'I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them - I look upon good novels - as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints. Had I not read Madame de La Fayette, the Abb�r�st, and the man who wrote Clarissa, that extraordinary feat, I should be very much poorer than I am; and a moment's reflection would add many more.'

  Martin and Paulton instantly added many more; and Paulton, who had hitherto been somewhat shy and nervous, shook Stephen's hand, saying, 'Sir, I honour your judgment. But when you spoke of Clarissa, did the name of Richardson slip your mind?'

  'It did not. I am aware that Samuel Richardson's name appears on the title-page. Yet before ever I read Clarissa Harlowe I read Grandison, to which is appended a low grasping ignoble whining outcry against the Irish booksellers for invading the copyright. It is written by a tradesman in the true spirit of the counting-house; and since there can be no doubt that it was written by Richardson, I for my part have no doubt that Clarissa, with its wonderful delicacy, was written by another hand. The man who wrote the letter could not have written the book. Richardson as of course you know was intimately acquainted with the other printers and booksellers of his time; and it is my conviction that some one of their dependents, a man of singular genius, wrote the book, perhaps in the Fleet, perhaps in the Marshalsea.'

  They both nodded their heads: they had both lodged in Grub Street. 'After all,' said Martin, 'statesmen do not write their own speeches.'

  After a rather solemn pause Paulton called for more tea, and while they were drinking it their talk ran on about the novel, the process of writing a novel, the lively fruitful fluent pen and its sudden inexplicable sterility. 'I was sure, last time I was in Sydney,' said Paulton, 'that I should finish my fourth volume as soon as I was back at Woolloo-Woolloo - for my cousin and I take turns at overseeing the overseer, you know - but the weeks went by, and never a word that I did not strike out next morning.'

  'The country did not suit, I collect?'

  'No, sir. Not at all. Yet I had set great store by it when I was in London, distracted by a hundred trifles and by daily cares, with hardly two hours I could call my own until late in the evening, when I was good for nothing; and it seemed to me that nowhere could country peace and quiet reach a higher point than in New South Wales, a remote settlement in New South Wales, with no post, no newspapers, no untimely visitors.'

  'But is not this the case at Woolloo-Woolloo?'

  'There are no letters, no papers, no visitors, to be sure; but there is no country either. No country as I had conceived it and as I believe most people conceive it - nothing that one could call rural. Imagine riding from Sydney over a dun-coloured plain: shallow stony soil with coarse rank grass, deep bush, and here and there some melancholy trees. I never knew a tree could be ugly until I saw a blue-gum: others of the same kind too, with dull, leathery, discouraged leaves and their bark hanging down in great strips, a vegetable leprosy. You leave what settlements there are, what sheep-walks, and the track grows narrower, entering the bush, a grey-green sombre dusty vegetation, never fresh and green, with vast stretches that have been burnt black and bald by the Aborigines. And I should have stated that it was always the same: these trees never lose their leaves, but they never seem to have new ones either. On and on, skirting several dismal lagoons, where the mosquitoes are even worse, and then at last you climb a slope through lower scrub and there you see a river before you, sometimes a continuous stream, more often pools here and there in the valley. Beyond it stands Woolloo-Woolloo, a stark house set down in the wilderness; to the left the stockade where the convicts live, with the overseer's house beside it; and far inland you can just make out Wilkins' place, the only neighbour within reach. It is true that the convicts have cleared the farther bank for wheat, but it is nothing like a field, only a kind of industrial scar; and in any case it hardly affects the huge featureless expanse of colourless monotonous inhuman primeval waste that stretches away and away before you and on your left hand. The river has a long Aboriginal name: I call it the Styx.'

  'That is a sad approach to a country retreat,' said Stephen. 'And the Styx has dismal associations.'

  'None too dismal for Woolloo-Woolloo, sir, I do assure you. Indeed they are scarcely dismal enough. In Hades there was no triangle permanently installed as there is in the square at Woolloo-Woolloo and Wilkins' place; for though no man can flog his own assigned servants, both my cousin and Wilkins are magistrates, and each can do so for the other. And in Hades there was at least some company, however faded, some conversation: at Woolloo-Woolloo there is none. The overseer is a gross man, with no thoughts apart from the profit of the land, the acres of bush to be cleared, the harvest that Stanley's brig is to take down to Sydney; and he says I must not talk to the convicts except to give them orders. And although the black men I sometimes meet on our beach or walking by the stream are affable enough - one gave me a piece of ochre, and they have quite often painted my arms and face with the oil that exudes from dead fishes, to keep the mosquitoes away: they use it all over their bodies - our exchange is limited to a few score words. So, do you see, I have no conversation. My rural retreat is not unlike Bentham's solitary confinement: and although no doubt there are men who can bring a novel to a splendid resounding close in solitary confinement, I am not one of them. Though Heaven knows I am sadly in need of an end.'

 

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