Текст книги "Oscar and Lucinda"

Автор книги: Peter Carey

Соавторы: Peter Carey,Peter Carey
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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

It was a little silver voice you could fit in a thimble. It did not match the things it said. The shoe stopped bouncing. The penitent had closed her heavy lids across her eyes. She spoke swiftly but quietly, in a silvery sort of rush.

She confessed that she had attended rooms in Drury Lane for the purposes of playing fan-tan (although she had fled when stared at).

She confessed to playing a common dice game on a train full of "racing types," and although she had not gone to the races, she had boarded this train, having read that such things occurred in such trains, for the express purpose of playing dice. She had been asked to leave the game because her sex was apparently repulsive to the patrons.

She had tried to persuade Mr Paxton to take her to a cock fight.

She had eavesdropped on stewards. She had set up a table in her room like a trap for them. She had wished to play poker.

There were other matters but her confessor hardly heard them. He sat with his head bowed, trying to still his wildly beating heart. He clenched his hands and pressed them down between his legs. He groaned.

Lucinda heard this noise. She sat with her head bowed, not daring to look at him. She waited for absolution. She heard another noise, muffled, its meaning not clear. She thought, He will not be my friend now. She clenched her eyes shut to drive out such temporal thought,

Confession

clenched them so tight that luminous bodies floated through the black sea of her retina.

When Oscar tried to think good thoughts he always thought of his father. He did this now: it was this that made him groan-the loneliness he had caused this stern and loving man. The voices of the stewards came through the ventilation, but neither of them listened. Still, the priest withheld absolution.

"This dice you played on the train," he asked, "was it Dutch I Hazards?"

I Lucinda looked up quite sharply, but the priest's head was bowed

it and twisted sideways towards his right shoulder. "Yes," she said. "It I was. We also played another game."

I "Old British, perhaps."

I Lucinda felt her bowed neck assume a mottled pattern. "In New I South Wales," she said, "it is known as 'Seventh Man.' " Her feelings were not focused, were as diffused as a blush, a business of heat and blood. Oscar could not keep the picture of his father clear. A certain reckÎ. less joy-a thing without a definite form, a fog, a cloud of electricity -

replaced the homely holy thoughts.

: "And who was it," he asked, unclenching his hands and bringing them up on to the table, "who provided the Peter?"

Lucinda Leplastrier put her head on one side. She opened her eyes. Her confessor had a blank face, what was almost a blank face, but was prevented from being completely blank by the very slight compression of the lips.

Lucinda narrowed her green eyes. "The Peter?" 'Is the term unknown to you?" She was looking at the mouth. She could not quite believe what she saw there. "No," she said, very carefully. "No, I think it is quite

familiar."

"I thought so," said Oscar Hopkins. He closed the little prayer book and stuffed it in the pocket which contained the caul. When his hand touched the caul, he remembered the ocean behind his book. It caused no more than a prickling in his spine.

"And these terms, Mr Hopkins, are they also familiar to you?"

" Traid so." He smiled, a clear and brilliant smile.

Lucinda also smiled, but less certainly. "Mr Hopkins, this is most improper." Oscar took a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped first his

Oscar and Luanda

clammy hands and then his perspiring brow. "Oh?" he said, "I really do not think so." He looked so pleased with himself.

"But you have not absolved me."

"Where is the sin?"

She was shocked, less by what he said, but by the sudden change of mood that took possession of him. He spoke these words in an angry sort of passion quite foreign to his personality. His eyes went hard. He made a jerky gesture towards the cards-ha! he had seen them after all-in front of him. "Our whole faith is a wager, Miss Leplastrier. We bet-it is all in Pascal and very wise it is too, although the Queen of England might find him not nearly Presbyterian enough-we bet that there is a God. We bet our life on it. We calculate the odds, the return, that we shall sit with the saints in paradise. Our anxiety about our bet will wake us before dawn in a cold sweat. We are out of bed and on our knees, even in the midst of winter. And God sees us, and sees us suffer. And how can this God, a God who sees us at prayer beside our bed…" His hands were quite jerky in their movements. There was a wild sort of passion about him, and the eyes within that sharpchinned face held the reflections of electric lamps. Lucinda felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up. Her eyelids came down. If she had been a cat she would have purred.

"I cannot see," he said, "that such a God, whose fundamental requirement of us is that we gamble our mortal souls, every second of our temporal existence… It is true! We must gamble every instant of our allotted span. We must stake everything on the unprovable fact of His existence." Lucinda shivered, a not unpleasant shiver and one not caused by cold. There were so many reasons for this involuntary ripple, not least the realization that her vice would not lose her his friendship. But it was also caused by recognition: she saw herself mirrored in him, the sudden coldness of the gambler's passion-something steely, angry even, which will not be denied. She was disturbed, too, to find her confessor belittling the worth of her confession and this-the pulling out of the tablecloth beneath the meal-gave a salt of anger to her own emotions even while she delighted-celebrated, even-the vital defence my great-grandfather was assembling, like a wild-haired angel clockmaker gesturing with little cogs, dangerous springs, holding out each part for verification, approbation, before he inserted it in the gleaming structure of his belief.

"Every instant," said Oscar, and held up a finger as he said it, calling attention to a low roly-poly laugh issuing from the ventilator.

Confession

"There," he said triumphantly, as if he had caught the laugh, as if the laugh was the point of it all, and he was like a man who has trapped a grasshopper in mid-air, smiling as if the miracle were tickling

his palm. "There. We will never hear that man laugh that laugh again. The instant is gone."

It would not be apparent to anyone watching Oscar Hopkins that this was a young man who had sworn off gambling now he had no further "use" for it. His views seemed not only passionate but firmly held. So even if you had not agreed with him, you would not have doubted his conviction. Lucinda had no idea that she had witnessed a guilty defence. She thought all sorts of things, but not this. She thought what a rare and wonderful man he was. She thought she should not be alone with him in her cabin. She thought they might play cards. She thought: I could marry, not him, of course not him, but I could marry someone like him. There was a great lightness in her soul.

"Every instant," he said.

She felt she knew him. She imagined not only his passion for salvation, but his fear of damnation. She saw the fear that would take him "before dawn." It was a mirror she looked at, a mirror and

window both.

"That such a God," said Oscar, "knowing the anguish and the trembling hope with which we wager…" He stopped then, looking with wonder at his shaking hands. This shaking was caused by the fervour of his beliefs as he revealed them, but there was another excitement at work-that produced by the open, admiring face of Miss Leplastrier. "That such a God can look unkindly on a chap wagering a few quid on the likelihood of a dumb animal crossing a line first, unless," (and here it seemed he would split his lips with the pleasure of his smile, which was, surely, caused more by Luanda's admiring face than by the new thought which had just, at that moment, taken possession of him) "unless-and no one has ever suggested such a thing to meit might be considered blasphemy to apply to common pleasure that which is by its very nature divine."

"Mr Hopkins," Lucinda said, coming at last to sit down, "we must not place our souls at risk with fancies."

She meant this sincerely. She also did not mean it at all-there was nothing she liked better than to construct a fancy. She put great weight on fancies and was not in the habit of using the word in a dismissive way. The Crystal Palace, that building she admired more than any

Oscar and Lucinda

other, was nothing but a fancy of a kind, and there were ideas like this, the philosophical equivalent of great cathedrals of steel and glass, which were her passion, and she held these to her tightly, secretly.

"Not a fancy," said Oscar.

He picked up the cards and put them together. It was not his intention that they play. It was Lucinda who suggested the game of cards. But later, when she knew Oscar better, she confessed that she had only done it because she thought it was what he had intended. 58

Reputation

It was already a scandal. It was known about by Mr Smith and Mr Borrodaile, by Mr Carraway, Mrs Menzies, Mr and Mrs Johnston. The stewards, of course, all knew-for they were not only judges but also conduits and they wound their way from class to class and even down into the rivet-studded steel innards of the ship, not quite as far as young Master Smiggins (whose task it was to ready the live-stock for the approaching storm). He knew a lady had 'lost her reputation" but he had this from long-nosed Clémence, the apprentice engineer. He did not know it was "his" lady for whom he had planned to work.

"She gone and bleeding done it now. She lost it now," said démence who was frightened by the animals.

"What?" asked Master Smiggins.

"Er reputation. I told you, didn' I? Compreyvous?"

"Course I bloody compreyvous. I got a sister, ain't? Now nick off. I got me animals and the sea's coming up."

"Coming up your back passage more like," said Clémence, but stepped back, ready to run. Master Smiggins kicked the llama doe in the backside and forced it into its crush. He strapped the crush shut.

"There," he said, "all tucked in now. Can't roll out of bed no matter

ttn

Thou Rulest the Raging of the Sea

what." He went to deal with the buck. "Now, don't you fuss," he said. He looked around. Clémence had gone. "Lost her reputation," he said. He had a stick to prod the buck with.

"Course," he said. "Course I bloody compreyvous." r 59

Thou Rulest the Raging of the Sea

Lucinda liked to play poker on a table covered with a grey wool blanket. This, of course, is how she first played cribbage in the house of Mr d'Abbs, and on windy nights, alone in her rented cottage at Longnose Point, she sometimes laid a blanket across the oilskin on her kitchen table and dealt herself a hand of patience. It was a comfort to her: to drink tea, to riddle the grate on the stove, to feel the soft blanket beneath the slippery cards. She did not feel the same affection for the tables in gaming houses. She liked the games, my word she did, but it was a different sort of "like" to the one she had for the grey blanket-covered tables of her home and Mr d'Abbs's. The tables of gaming houses were cold and slippery. It was an icier pleasure, a showy dancer's thrill, like a tight, stretched smile or a pair of shiny patent-leather shoes. In her stateroom, alone with the priest, Lucinda took a blanket from her bed and draped it across the little table. She knew this action lacked propriety but she did not let herself address the matter. She must have it right. She would be blinkered. If he was shocked, she would not look at him. She would have everything in its proper place. She took a little amber lamp and set it to one side.

She thought: Alone in my bedroom with a priest.

"There," she said, but could not bring her eyes up to look at him. She laid her hand flat on the blanket. She had been

Oscar and Luanda

biting her nails. She hid the evidence beneath her palm. H

"So," she said, and looked him boldly in the eye.

His face was not how she had imagined it. She had rebuilt it in her imagination, had made it long and censorious when it was, in reality, doelike, almost pretty, with soft eyes regarding her from beneath long lashes.

"Shall we play?" he asked. < Lucinda blushed.

They played with penny bets.

It was such a still game. She might not have remarked on this quality were it not for the fact that he had previously been so agitated, such a kicker and scuffer, a squirmer in his seat-she had felt him next to her at dinner, had felt the vital life in his body through the table, through the legs of her own chair. But now she felt only this concentrated stillness. It was not a lifeless stillness-it was not that dead-eyed mask most men adopted when playing poker, their eyes gone blind like statues. He was a cello, a violin, he was all strapped down like Ulysses at the mast. She lost. She felt so light, an airy, dragon-fly wing of feeling. It was always like this when she lost. She felt such guilt and fear after she had lost that she did not imagine she liked losing, and yet this sensation always came with it, and once, seeing the carcass of a grasshopper all eaten out by ants, only its delicate and papery form remaining, she had recognized, in that light and lovely shell, the physical expression of this feeling she had when losing.

She shed her money, sloughed it off. A penny, a penny, a three penny piece. Mr Hopkins played the most exquisite poker. She cornplimented him, as another woman might have complimented her partner at a waltz. She sat up straight. She fanned her cards neatly. She had lost a sovereign but she did not wish to stop. She knew she would have the perfect voyage now. She knew herself happy.

At half past one the ship began to bluster in the wind and she felt the beginning of a long, deep swell. The ship made noises which made Lucinda think of a pianist cracking knuckles. She accommodated the motion of the ship to her idea of happiness.

She smiled at Oscar. He smiled back. He rested his left ankle across his knee. He jiggled it, but he did not knock the table and she did not notice.

At two-thirty the game turned again. He pushed through, bluffing to victory three hands in a row. He was breathing through his mouth. There was perspiration on his forehead but she took this to be produced by the excitement of the game.

Thou Rulest the Raging of the Sea

He observed that the ship, although large, seemed to move as one would imagine a small ship to move. He remarked on the size of the sea. It was such a large thing, he said. " 'Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?' " He smiled, showing the neat, ordered set of his lower teeth. She smiled. She had no appreciation of his phobia. He raised his betting. A crown to see her. There was a tremor in his voice it would have taken Mrs Williams to explain.

The game had changed. It was no longer still and calm. Lucinda no longer played leaning back. She bent forward. She rubbed her neck. She was making a small red spot, just from friction. Oscar was pale. He played with a sort of clipped breathlessness. His foot tapped against the table leg. She minded this not at all. He took her for two pounds and five shillings. She raised the betting again. She was so light, almost giddy. She confessed her happiness out loud. She hardly noticed the pitching of the ship. Her hat case tumbled off its rack and a vase of paper flowers-left carelessly on a side table, slipped and rolled-not breaking-across the floor. It was three twenty-three. The first wave washed across the deck. They turned ("Hoo," said Oscar) to see the next wave-its white head towering over them like a ghost in the night. It was frightening. Lucinda found it frightening. She made some silly comment and turned to see her partner, white-faced with terror, his mouth open, crouched over the table trying to pick up cards without looking at them. He was not handling these cards as a card-player might, but like a savage. He was cramming them into his pocket. He made a repetitive noise-"Uh-uh-uh-uh"-that came from the back of his throat, the top of his stomach.

The wave smashed across the deck. You could feel the weight of it in your vital organs.

"Uh-uh-uh." He crumpled up more cards. She was angry with him. They were her Wetherby Suprêmes, from Hare's in Old Bond

Street.

"I have led you astray," he said. He was standing now, gripping the edge of the table. He was not looking at her. He was pulling a paper parcel from his pocket. As he pulled it out he produced a shower of the crumpled playing cards.

The parcel, of course, was his caul.

The ship reared and crashed down so far you could feel your stomach

Oscar and Lucinda

falling after it had landed. You would not think so large a thing could be tossed so far. On the bridge it took ten men to steer the rearing beast.

Through the din (creaking, groaning, a slamming door) she could hear bells ringing. He said: "You must forgive me."

The vase rolled past her feet. She had time to wonder that such an ugly thing should not break, would probably survive a shipwreck when everything beautiful and useful was sunk to the bottom. She picked up the vase. She held it in her lap. The clergyman was banging his thigh with his clenched fist.

"Yes," she shouted, "yes, of course, I forgive you." But she did not understand him. She did not put the two together, the cards and the storm. It did not occur to her that one might be the cause and the other the effect. It did not occur to her to think in so primitive a manner. She could not guess that a man who knew that phosphorescence was produced by sea blubbers could also believe that this storm was a sign from God. But Oscar knew he should not have gambled just for pleasure. He knew his defence of gambling had been displeasing to God. He knew he had led the young woman into sin. Waves slapped the face of the ship. Water surged across its high deck. The mighty Leviathan reared and rolled sideways across the cliff face of the storm.

"Oh, dear," said Oscar, "I am afraid."

The portholes could be opened with a little winding handle. He clutched his caul to his chest and lurched uphill to get there. Then he stood, facing down into the dark pit of the sea while he forced himself to do the thing he dreaded most-unwind the handle.

Lucinda thought he wished to be ill. She stumbled down the sloping floor to help him. Then she saw what he was doing-putting her Wetherby Suprêmes out the window, posting jacks and queens like letters.

"No," she yelled into his ear. She scrabbled at his hands and tried to pull away from the porthole. His lips were moving. His eyes were shut. She scratched the back of his hands but could not stop him. She saved a two of clubs and a five of diamonds. Her emotions were confused anger, sympathy, alarm. He turned to look at her and she saw his eyes wandering in their gaze. He clutched at her. She was frightened and stepped back, and he fell into a swoon at her feet. She did not know how ill he was. She was not even sure what had happened. She felt his pulse and would have loosened his collar except

I

224

Cape Town to Pinchgut

she did not know how. She tried to find the stud, but his neck felt warm, unduly intimate. It was wrong to be angry, but she was angry, about her cards, about the blanket which he had dragged off the card table. The room looked as if a scandal had been committed there. She picked up the money and the blanket. She was thrown against the wall twice. She got the blanket back on to her bed and smoothed it as well as she was able.

She should call the ship's doctor, but it was four o'clock in the morning. Surely he would wake in a moment? She sat and waited.

Oscar did wake, but he was not able to leave her stateroom unassisted. She had had to call two stewards, just before dawn, and it had been their unenviable job-the ship was now pitching and rolling to a disappointing degree, and walking was therefore difficult-to carry the rigid man from the spinster's stateroom, down the stairs and put him to bed in his own quarters. n 60

Cape JJbWtv to Rn$igut

The scene was witnessed by Mr Borrodaile, or so he claimed, for he was able, at breakfast the next morning, to paint a very detailed picture of the scandal for the rather queasy and waxyskinned Mr Smith. The Captain also visited Lucinda, and perhaps his manner was contaminated by the knowledge that his great ship was a failure in bad weather-he had one helmsman in sick bay with a broken arm-but he behaved in a censorious and snobbish way, Lucinda thought, just like a glove salesman in Harrod's who feels he should not be called to wait upon colonials. Lucinda was hurt by all of this, but she could tolerate it. She hardened her heart against all the ship except Mr Hopkins and set herself to wait for his recovery. She expected, as a matter of course, that he would apologize, and she looked forward to the moment when she

Oscar and Lucinda

could say, and sincerely too, that there was nothing to apologize for. It was the Captain who should apologize, and if she had had the power she would have made him. She had a vindictive part to her character, which she recognized and was not proud of. It had started as a tiny thing, but grown larger with the nourishment provided by men like the Captain, and the sniggering Borrodaile whom she met, clad in sou'wester, his grinning lackey at his side, on the rolling, slippery poop deck.

After this she would not go on deck again. Neither, or course, was she free to seek out Mr Hopkins herself, and although his visit to her would not save her reputation, at least he could offer his support and friendship.

It stayed rough down the coast of Africa, and although she understood why this might keep Mr Hopkins in his cabin, by the time she had been five days a prisoner in her stateroom, she felt herself deserving a proper apology.

He did not come.

She took her meals in her room which, for all the grey skies and green cat's-eye-coloured sea, was most unpleasantly hot.

She escaped ashore in Cape Town, and endured the self-righteous "tsk-tsk" of a Mrs Penhaligon (the wife of a Cornish farmer) but she still did not sight Mr Hopkins. Out of Cape Town the weather was rough again and Oscar stayed out of sight, cooped up, green and moaning. He was attended by a steward with the comic name of Sidebottom. He had his caul between his fingers so persistently that it soon became, through the twin agencies of perspiration and agitation, a most unpleasant piece of matter. His stomach could hold no more than beef tea and dry toast. He read his Bible when his eyes could bear the dancing print. He prayed. He promised God that he would never bet again.

My great-grandfather did not manage to emerge from his cabin until the Pinchgut cannons saluted the great ship's entrance into Sydney Harbour, and Lucinda Leplastrier, released at last from the most unpleasant voyage of her life, saw him sitting in the geometrical centre of the ship, on a red plush settee, in the second-class promenade.

He looked up and smiled, but Lucinda had waited so long for that smile that it became, when it arrived, like something which has preoccupied one during a fever-it produced an unpleasant effect, evoking all the twisting tyrannies of an illness which one has, at last, escaped from.;-,. < 7)(.

61

A Business Principle

Owning a business is like having chooks. You cannot go away and leave them, indefinitely, in the care of neighbours. You can buy an automatic feeder, and there are many good ones on the marketyou will see them advertised in the back pages of the Weekly Times. You can arrange for your friend or your neighbour to "keep an eye on them" for a night or two, and no harm done. But do not expect to be away six months or a year and then return to find your hens in good condition. You will have mite and pullorum rampant, the water run out, your best layer dead from a dog, your rooster wounded by goannas-the list is not intended to be exact, merely an indication, but the point is, you cannot do it. And if you want to see Venice, Florence and the Old World, then first eat your chooks, or sell them, and then you will know you will have nothing worse to come back to than a chookyard full of rank

weed.

Lucinda did not know this. Or if she did, she managed to pretend that she did not. She was off to London to be married (although she fully intended that she would-God knows how-return. She imagined a certain type of husband who would make this possible). She thought she could leave the country for a year and entrust the Prince Rupert's Glassworks to the care of others. Note the plural. This compounded the error, for if there is anything worse than leaving your business in the care of one person, it is leaving it in the care of two and if there is anything worse than two people, it is to do what Lucinda Leplastrier did-she left her business in the care of three people, and only one of them with any practical experience of glass.

It is true that the vicar of Woollahra had some knowledge of the chemical composition of glass, but he was the last one to claim himself a manufacturer, and he shared with Wardley-Fish a dislike

227

Oscar and Lucinda

of dirt. He could not bear to have it on his hands. He did not like to be in places-even the ragged school he preached at every third Monday morning-where other people had it on their hands. When he was in the glassworks he could not concentrate.

If Dennis Hasset had imagined himself actually responsible for the well-being of the glassworks he would-for he was a conscientious man-have declared himself unfit. But he knew that Lucinda had also asked her accountant, Mr d'Abbs of d'Abbs and Fig, to keep an eye on the business. He was to bank the incomings, pay the billings and the wages. For all this he was to receive a fee. The Reverend Mr Hasset was to receive no fee. He was a friend. He was there to "keep an eye on things."

Lucinda had asked both of these parties to trust the opinions of her senior blower, Arthur Phelps, who not only knew something about the manufacture of glass, but, being the senior blower, was therefore the natural leader of the men in the works. There is a deeply ingrained hierarchy amongst glass workers, and the senior blowers are its aristocrats. You would only need to watch Arthur Phelps to know that this was true, to see him, with the blowing tube in his mouth, his cheeks distended like a trumpet player, move his ciagrette from his left-hand side of his mouth andwith no manual help at all-"walk" it around the tube and thence to the right corner. Mr d'Abbs was a natty little chap whose dress (a blue corduroy suit, a woollen tie, a curly walking stick, perhaps) suggested more of the aesthete than the accountant. He painted a little, and had tried his hand at verse, but he was not sensitive to Arthur Phelps's displays of skill. He did not "see" the set-up at the works at all. Neither, no matter what his other good qualities were, did the vicar of Woollahra.

Arthur Phelps was a broad man with a plastic face, a big chest and a large belly which he liked to refer to as his bellows. He took his responsibility seriously and he felt himself abandoned by Lucinda and mucked about by the other two. He was forever being given contrary instructions and his sleep was ruined as a result. (Mr d'Abbs would not have credited that an ignorant working man, a grog-artist at that, would behave in such a way.) Arthur Phelps tossed and turned in his bed at night until his wife went to sleep with the children in the kitchen. He worried that they were making too many poison blues and insufficient beers, that their sand would 228

A Business Principle

run out before Mr d'Abbs's clerks paid the carter for the last load and thereby ensured the next, that the vase footings were of a style gone out of fashion, that Mr d'Abbs wanted a greater production,

Ivhilst the vicar of Woollahra, the very next day, would come pokng about with his umbrella, opening a door at the wrong moment, etting in a draught that wrecked a jug handle, and holding up jroduction while he worried at Arthur about the "seeds," those iny air bubbles, which had lately been appearing in their products. This seediness was offensive to Arthur, too. He was ashamed >f it. But it was produced by nothing other than the taste induced >y Mr d'Abbs. No one appreciated how hard the lads were workng, or with what will. It was not for the Natty Gent or the Bible>asher that they did it, but for Miss Lucinda. They talked about 1er fondly. And if they were as patronizing as fathers and brothers, hey were also as protective. They tried to satisfy the demands of icr advisers. They tried to work quickly, even though the corntxands were given in an ignorant manner, with no respect for craft f or the status of the craftsmen. As a result of this haste a young gob-gatherer had his lungs burnt and this, whilst always a possibility, never happens in a well-run works. He was not a silly lad, but helpful. They took up a subscription but Mr d'Abb's contribution was insufficient. It was all wrong. It was because of this that Arthur began to weep. It was from imagining what would happen to the lad, worrying when the clay would arrive for the new crucible, how the twenty gross of seedy

"poisons" would be sold. He was sitting on his stool. The second gatherer was collecting from I the glory-hole. Arthur had a draught from his beer in readiness;. for the next blow. The gatherer handed him the rod, and it was then that he began to weep. The fireman, who had just come on, ran down to Sussex Street to fetch Mr d'Abbs, but the men thought so little of Mr d'Abbs that this did nothing but confirm their already low opinion of the fireman. Arthur said nothing to Mr d'Abbs. He blew his nose and drank his last pint of glassworks beer. He took a bottle for a souvenir, and Mr d'Abbs had the good sense not to attempt to stop him. They kept the furnaces going another week, but the works had lost their heart. Dennis Hasset saw what was happening, but did not even try to arrest the process. His mind was occupied with other matters. He was arraigned before the Bishop of Sydney to explain his sermons. 229