Текст книги "Oscar and Lucinda"

Автор книги: Peter Carey

Соавторы: Peter Carey,Peter Carey
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A Lecture Based upon a Parable

to keep in or out was not exactly clear. There was a cow tethered in its front garden. Mr Ahearn checked his gold fob watch. It was a gift from the Parramatta Benevolent Society of which he had been chairman for twenty years. He did his jacket up around his cardigan and knocked loudly on the door.

The servant was a fright. He had never seen such a servant, not even at Parramatta where every second one was a murderer. He had coal dust on his hands, and on his face. His hair was unruly, sticking out in all directions and although his beard was not heavy, the early sun, cutting in from the direction of The Heads, showed the orange stubble on his skin. His eyes were red and the left one smudged about with black.

"Is your mistress at home?"

He was informed she was still abed. This information was delivered in a voice so well educated that it confused Mr Ahearn a little, but not for long: he decided he was an actor, and having leapt to this conclusion, he clung to it.

He told the servant he would wait, but if he himself had not made to move towards the passageway, it is doubtful he would have been invited in. He was taken to the kitchen with the explanation it was "cosy." As the day was unpleasantly hot and humid Mr Ahearn could see nothing in this "cosy" but a convict form of clever rudeness. It was chaps like this who allowed Englishmen to write such patronizing accounts of their visits to the colony. And what a feast of sneering could be had here. The house was not clean. The kitchen was practically disemboweled. There were empty pots with burned bottoms and if these appeared to Lucinda as symbols of recklessness and joy, they were not perceived as such by Mr Ahearn. There was an item of female clothing strung across a chair like a fisherman's net. A bottle of brandy sat next to a small potted plant. A single tracery of cobweb ran across a sparkling clean glass window. A drawing board was propped on a workbench, which had, until recently, occupied a space more suited to it, inside the garden shed. On the drawing board he found evidence of the folly he had come to stop. Mr Ahearn sat heavily, leaning forward, his hat in his left hand, while the right hand wiped and smoothed and patted his head.

When Lucinda came downstairs to receive him, she found that he had taken it upon himself to remove the drawing from the place where she had left it so carefully pinned. He held it against the window pane, and was kneeling on her three-legged stool with his big sweaty nose (on which his wire-rimmed spectacles were precariously perched)

•ViQ

Oscar and Lucinda

pressed close to it. He was caught in flagrante delicto. He had no time to rearrange his face. His mouth was open, but his forehead creased, as if wonder and censoriousness were there lined up for battle.

He did not greet her formally. In fact he began as if she had, just a moment before, left him with an invitation to inspect her plan. He made no apology for the early hour but rather held out her plan to her as if it were a table napkin he had finished with, and she a woman with nothing better to do than take it to the laundry.

Oscar stood in the doorway and watched. He was quite insensitive to Mr Ahearn's rudeness. He saw only what he imagined Mr Ahearn must see-that in this room, two hours before, he had kissed Miss Leplastrier on her soft and pliant mouth. Lust was visible. Mr Ahearn should surely see it.

"Where will the vicar change into his vestments?" Mr Ahearn demanded. "Where will he blow his nose in private? When he is late, he will be on show, like a fish in an aquarium, and what will you do," asked Mr Ahearn, seating himself upon the three-legged stool, "about the heat?" Lucinda knew it impolite to greet the old goose in her gown, and yet she wished him witness to it. She was a free woman, and she dared stand before her visitor, uncorseted, with burnt pots and unwashed plates around her. She had kissed her lodger's mouth and held him hard against her loins. She stood thus before Mr Chas Ahearn and refused to be ashamed.

"A fatal flaw," intoned Mr Ahearn. "A cardinal error." Lucinda looked at Oscar and pulled a face. Oscar blushed. She knew why he blushed and, in the midst of her growing irritation, was warmed by the heat of it. She smiled at Mr Ahearn who, seeing, but not understanding, the sleepy contentment in the girl's face, was not only puzzled but also, a little, embarrassed.

"It is this which makes this church impossible," he said. He could see that the damned servant was listening to every word he said. "The Australian sun will scorch your congregation as though they were in hell itself."

"It was kind of you to come early to tell me this," said Lucinda.

"And have you become so sarcastic, Miss Leplastrier?"

She was sarcastic, it was true. It was not an attractive quality. But she could not tolerate the satisfaction he had from finding fault in her design. He stood in judgement on her work as passionately as she had so short a time before, stood in judgement on Mr d'Abbs. She could not bear it, even if he were right.

%n

A Lecture Based upon a Parable

But he could not be right.

It was far too late for him to be right.

Oscar came forward and picked up the brandy bottle, using two fingers like tweezers to open its long neck. He carried it from the room. Lucinda opened her mouth as if she would say something in explanation, but then she shut it again.

Mr Ahearn, however, did not seem to notice either Oscar or the bottle.

"Who has ordered this?"

"Ordered?" said Lucinda, anxious that he not attempt to fmd more faults, fearful that there were many there to fmd.

"Commissioned, purchased, requested that you manufacture this?" He knew the answer was "no one." But Lucinda said: "The Lord Jesus Christ." Mr Ahearn hissed.

"Whose glory it celebrates," said Lucinda, wrapping her gown a little tighter.

"The glory of God is not served by folly."

"There are circumstances where it is called folly to be wise."

"Do not banter with me," said Chas Ahearn. "It is not practical. It is too hot to sit in. No congregation will pay for it."

She looked for Oscar in order that he might come to her defence but he had begun to stack cups and saucers in the scullery. "It is," she decided, "to be built beneath a shady tree."

"Oh, fiddlesticks," said Chas Ahearn, rising to his feet. He buttoned his long grey jacket and retrieved his wallet from the secret pocket where no Sydney footpad would ever find it. He took out his parable which, being late in the year, had become very frayed at the edges.

"The Kingdom of Heaven," said Lucinda, "is a man visiting a foreign country."

"Travelling into a far country."

"Yes, I know."

Still, she took the piece of paper when it was offered to her. She had read it before. The paper smelled of boring afternoons in Parramatta.

"But you do not know. You do not act as if you know."

"Yes, yes. My fortune is unearned. It is the fruit of your clever subdivision, and it was bought by the labour of my mother and my father and the blood of the blacks of the Dharuk. I have no right to it."

"The scripture says no such thing."

"Perhaps that is a lack in the scripture.":"

Oscar and Lucinda

"It will be hot," he said, retrieving his parable, "as hot as hell. The congregation will fry inside," he said. "They will curse you. They will curse God's name."

"Mr Ahearn, please do be calm." Lucinda was not calm herself. "Mr Hopkins," she called,

"perhaps you would fetch Mr Ahearn a glass of brandy?"

Mr Ahearn thought: "Mister? She calls her servant Mister." His lips were showing small white bubbles at the sides and he was having a great deal of trouble fitting his parable back inside his wallet.

"I have come to tell you this in respect of the wishes of your mother who was my client. You were given such a start in life, young lady. And I have tried my best to steer you right." But this manner was not as his words. His voice was angry. There was something he did not understand at work within him, a rage so great he could not make his hands stay still. He saw himself tear up his parable. It was not symbolic. It was mechanical-the forces of agitation and rage at work. He could not bear this glass church, and yet he could not explain this, or any of his passions to himself. He saw himself, from a great distance, a tortoise-necked man with a quaking voice. He heard himself shout. He saw himself gently escorted from the sloth-house by the man who, he found out later that day, was not a servant at all, but a defrocked priest, the little harlot's lover. 89

Of the Devil

Lust was an insect, a beetle, a worm. It slipped into his belly like the long pink parasites which had thrived in the intestines of the Strattons's pigs, and he had tried to drown it with long clear draughts of tank water, with holy scriptures, with meditations upon hell. John wrote: "He that committeth sin is of the devil, for the devil sinneth from the beginning."

Of the Devil

In Galatians it is said: "If we live in the spirit, we also walk in the spirit." But the mail from England said that the Reverend Mr Stratton had hanged himself from the rafters of his church while he who had corrupted him, the same Oscar Hopkins, the so-called servant of God, had seduced an honest woman, had pressed his lips against her teasweet mouth and felt the soft curve of her stomach against his loins.

It had been three in the morning. He had come out to draw more water and had found her there, in her Chinese gown. His penis was a hard rod against the softness of her stomach. He felt Satan take his soul like an overripe peach with a yielding stalk.

He kissed her dear, soft lips. He nuzzled her long white neck. He touched and broke away, touched and broke away, moaned and begged his God's forgiveness while the clock in the kitchen struck the hour.

He withdrew from her, made patting motions in the air with long outstretched fingers as if their passion was a silky beast between them that could be soothed and patted into docility. They went into the kitchen and drank tea. They did not discuss this thing, which Oscar, with extraordinary selfcentredness, saw as his responsibility. He did not think, She loves me. He thought, rather, I am seducing her.

They talked earnestly about the glass church, although not of its faults or impracticalities. When his unholy passion rose in him Oscar used fear to still it. He thought of the boat carriage that Mr Jeffris was having built at Mort Bay. Mr Jeffris had described the carriage in the most minute detail, at this very kitchen table and Oscar had listened with a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach as if it were not a vehicle for carrying a boat, but a gallows or a set of stocks. Mr Jeffris was precise and fastidious. He was pleased to demonstrate this in the design of the boat carriage. The two boats were carried one inside the other, like two spoons. Each was suspended on canvas slings and such was the ingenious nature of the design that neither could ever rub against the other.

The thing that made Mr Jeffris so proud served only to paralyze Oscar. He would be called to travel in a boat.

Dear God, give me hard and difficult things. Give me a rocky path that I may not sin. Mr Jeffris loved to talk of rivers, mountains, trigonometry. He Promised Oscar he would have him delivered to Boat Harbour, and do not fear. There was no risk from drowning. >..;.;.,••<

Oscar and Lucinda

Oscar had not known about these rivers when he talked about going overland. The Hastings, the Clarence, the Macleay, these rivers now snaked through his dreams. They were miles wide, bruised and swollen by the rain.

He was ill with fear at the thing he had begun. When he woke from sleep it was there to meet him, as cruel as death.

He thought: I will drown.

He thought: Dear God, take my soul into Thy safe-keeping.

He thought: I love her. He thought: I am impure. In the kitchen they bit each other, dragged at their faces. They wedged themselves together against the door jamb like two clothes pegs. The Reverend Mr Stratton had hanged himself from the rafter above his pulpit. Wardley-Fish must already be in Sydney searching for his friend who was ashamed and hid from him. He lusted after a woman who loved another.

He thought: God, do not have me lead her into sin.

He thought: There is no God. There is nothing. I do not have to cross these six rivers. I do not have to travel with mad Jeff ris with his cornpasses, his journals, his trained criminals, his dumbbells, his picks, his carpenter, his saddler, his three brass chronometers. I am someone put backwards on a horse and paraded through the bush for ridicule. He was baggage, carried by Mr Jeff ris, his ticket paid by Miss Leplastrier.

But he had promised God he would do this. I Although only because he wished Lucinda to love him. j!i >. Did she not love him? j Did she say so?

No, she did not. She kissed his lips and made them as blue as ink, but when he had offered to marry her, on Christmas Day, she had fled, weeping, to her room.

Why was this?; Because she loved Hasset.

Then why go through this danger, this risk, this crippling fear?. So she would love him. Because he had promised God. So he would not be cast into hell.

If there was no God?

But he had bet there was a God. He had bet on Goodness. He had bet he would be rewarded in paradise. He had bet he would carry this jewel of a church through the horrid bush and have it in Boat Harbour by Easter.

His life was riddled with sin and compromise. Mr Stratton had

A Reconciliation

wrapped a rope around his neck and committed the sin of suicide. God forgive him. He was murdered by Oscar Hopkins's system.

He had posed as a holy man to Wardley-Fish. He had enticed him to Botany Bay and then hidden from him.

He could not love his father enough. He had written "dearest papa" but he had been happiest when he was away from him. He had left this good and godly man to die alone and unloved except by his unlettered flock.

Give me a hard journey, dear God. Deliver me from evil. Lead me not into temptation. And then, inside the scullery, at breakfast, he offered his bruised and swollen lips to Miss Leplastrier, and the devil played the tune, and then he saw, in the corner of his mind, the possibility that the glass church was just the devil's trick. Mr Ahearn was right. It would be too hot. The congregation would curse Christ's name.

90

A Reconciliation

Mr d'Abbs had been to Miss Leplastrier's office on four occasions before he found her, at last, inside. He had come up those three wide sets of stairs four times, rehearsed his little speech four times, but when he found her, on the fifth, the meeting did not progress as he had rehearsed it. His first thought was: Consumption.

Her skin was very pale, stretched; it was shining, slightly blue, translucent. Her eyes seemed overly large, the whites not white but that bluish grey you find in certain porcelains. Her manner, in that bright, hot, sun-drenched room-all the windows open and papers smacking each other on a green felt board, and fluttering under glass-bottle Paperweights-seemed too fast, too frantic to Mr d'Abbs who immediately forgot his speech, which was all to do with the lasting value of

Oscar and Lucinda

friendship, that it should not be thrown away through one simple misunderstanding, but that friendship was what he valued more than anything in life. Except that one might guess that he was using "friendship" when what he really meant was "companionship," this was spoken truly. He had brought her a cribbage board and a signed edition of his friend Hill's engravings of Pittwater. He had intended to make the speech and then give the gifts, but when he saw how she looked he was overcome by thoughts of her mortality, and he pressed the gifts on her without proper explanation of his feelings.

He had dressed carefully in his splendid cream linen suit and his white straw hat. He had chosen the colours at least half-conscious of their symbolism: the blank page, the clean start, and if he had it in mind to say anything about Mr Jeffris, it was only as a by the by. But now, so disconcerted was he by Miss Leplastrier's over-bright appearance, that he mentioned Jeffris when she was still opening his gifts.

"Oh, by the by, Miss Leplastrier," he said, closing one of her windows without thinking what he did. (He could not bear paper fluttering in a room.) "You do know about Mr Jeffris's passion, do you not? It occurred to me that you might not. It is impertinent to mention it, were we not such old friends."

This was a dangerous tack to take, and he knew it. He could easily give the impression that he wished to sabotage her project and that he had come here, only pretending friendship, in order to assassinate the character of her trusted guide. And yet he could not protest friendship without telling her: Jeffris was a dangerous fellow, and although you could have him in your employ in an office where he might, like a guard dog on a leash, be at once frightening and useful, it would not be the same to entrust your life to his ambitions.

When he mentioned Mr Jeffris's passion he saw Lucinda tense and he feared he had "set her off" again.

"Oh, Mr d'Abbs," Lucinda sighed, then smiled (Mr d'Abbs thought: Her arms are thin, they were not so thin before). "Do tell me about Mr Jeffris, for I see you have come here with his 'passion'

most particularly in mind." And smiling very broadly, so broadly that Mr d'Abbs could easily have felt himself quite patronized, she sat herself behind her desk and folded her arms across her bosom.

"Indeed," said Mr d'Abbs, "it is not so." There was no chair for him to sit on. He would have shut the second window, but he judged she would misinterpret it. "Quite the contrary. The reverse. I came here intent on keeping it under my hat. I thought: It is not my business, no more than how many windows you wish to have open.

A Reconciliation

I really do take it very ill to be so uncharitably interpreted."

"Forgive me."

"You do not wish to be forgiven, you little scallywag. You completely lack the conventional sense of sin, upon my word I swear it is true."

"Indeed?" said Lucinda, quite pleased to be misunderstood in this particular way.

"Indeed, you have no shame. You are pure will, and I noted this in you when you first came into my office. You hold your chin high." (He thought: You can see the blood vessels in her neck; her lower lip is distinctly blue; these are not good signs.) "I said to Fig, it does not matter what the gossips say, she is above gossips."

Oh, that this were true.

"And what," she asked, "do the gossips say about Mr Jeffris?"

"See," said Mr d'Abbs with genuine admiration, "that is the other thing I always said about youthat you would not be diverted."

"So," said Lucinda, knowing herself flattered and surprised to enjoy such falsehood so immensely.

"So it is not gossip, but, please, really." He felt silly standing in front of her. He came to sit on the edge of the desk, but the desk was a trifle taller than the beginning of his bottom, and having attempted, with one or two discreet little hops which made him look a little like a mynah bird in a cage, he contented himself with leaning. "Really, it is most important that you know-he will use you."

"And I him," said Lucinda, but felt, even while she professed such certainty, the sort of panic and anger which Mr Ahearn had produced when he called the church a "folly."

"He cares only to make a name for himself with his trigonometry and explorations. He courted Mrs Burrows-what a pair, imagine it, eh? – so Miss Malcolm tells me, until he had everything transcribed from her husband's journals and then he courted her no more."

"I do not imagine Mrs Burrows would be so easily used."

"Mrs Burrows is not the tough old thing she pretends to be. And what do you mean with that little smile, but never mind. The point is: you wish Mr Hopkins to be delivered safely." It was cruel to speak to her like this. She said: "Mr Jeffris's trigonometry and explorations would seem the perfect qualifications."

"Mr Jeffris," said Mr d'Abbs, finally getting his backside on to the desk, "is a man in love with danger."

"You must realize, Mr d'Abbs, that I have interviewed Mr Jeffris at some length. We are engaged in this project," she gestured

Oscar and Lucinda

towards the sheets of paper which were pinned, as regular as the bricks of a wall, to the green felt board, "together. I find him to be fastidious."

"You are fastidious," said Mr D'Abbs. "Therefore he is fastidious. He is an actor. His performance will vary with his audience. If you wish to know him as I do you must hear him speak when he is alone with men. With women he is a different creature entirely. His every story, when he is with his own sex, ends with some chap fainting or hollering in horror when they see how brave old Jeffris had got himself bloodied or broken in some way. And now you have supplied him with the funds and he has a little army and he is out to make a name for himself."

"Mr d'Abbs," Lucinda said, "admit it: you have come to frighten me."

"I swear no."

"It was most ill mannered of me to steal away your clerk. Although I did not steal him. It was not my intention to steal, but still I can understand you might wish to punish me. This is why you speak to me like this."

"No," said Mr d'Abbs, waving his hands violently, "no, no, no. That is the past. I came to say nothing, to patch up our quarrel, and then I thought my silence hypocritical."

"Then what would you have me do?"

"Oh, please," said Mr d'Abbs. "Cancel the whole damn thing. It is too silly for words and you will make yourself a laughing stock."

Then he saw he had gone too far. He saw her face close against him, and he suddenly lacked the courage for the continued assault.

"Of course," he said, "I am a skeptic. It is probably a corollary of my age."

"Yes."

"And I am peeved, of course, to have lost a damn good clerk. You must allow for that."

"I do," said Lucinda with some relief.

"And after that I wish only that our friendship be maintained. My wife says she is sorry not to have made a closer friend of you. She was so taken with you. She begs me to patch up my difference with you."

"It is patched," Lucinda said, and when she bade him goodbye, in a minute or two, she kissed him gently on the cheek. It was not something she had ever done before. The effect of Mr d'Abbs's visit was that Lucinda chose to believe that 1

A Reconciliation

Mr d'Abbs had accused Mr Jeffris falsely. What touched her was the picture she made of Mr d'Abbs grappling with the demons of his own falsehood. She did not know what to make of it, except that she was moved, as it seems she was by almost everything in that month of March as they prepared to make the journey. She was in an emotional state where the smallest thing, the frailness of a twig, the unravelling of a cloud in a blue sky, was filled with poignancy and that bursting love which is the anxious harbinger of loss. She saw goodness everywhere, perhaps attributing much of her own character or longings to others, and thus chose to see Mr d'Abbs's

"confession" of his falsehood as the keystone of his character, the main thrust of his speech. It is curious that Lucinda, while rejecting most of Mr d'Abbs's accusations, chose to believe that Mr Jeffris was in love with danger. Believing this allowed her to like Mr Jeffris more. She imagined she knew the disease he suffered from, that she too was in love with danger, not, of course, as it applied to blood and body wounds, but as it applied to the more general business of life. It was not just risk, but actual loss that quickened her. And on the day Mr d'Abbs found her in her office she had come from a Pitt Street solicitor's where she had, in the face of not inconsiderable resistance, formalized her bet in a document which she placed, that night, in her dusty-smelling cedar secretaire.

She did not tell Oscar what she had done and yet it was through the medium of this document that she believed that Oscar would, magically, triumph on his journey. She did not express what she believed, not even to herself. But the confidence she felt when she touched the rolled-up document (which she did often, at least twice each day), could only have its source in this simple superstition: that if she could manage to lose this bet, then Oscar Hopkins would not die. She was a thorough woman and she had a great capacity for detail, and so she did not tmst her beloved's safety solely to this voodoo in a cedar box. She had meetings with Mr Jeffris, far more than Mr Jeffris at first thought necessary. She went through his shopping lists and his accounts and if Mr Jeffris was at first outraged to suffer this from a woman, he soon discovered that his patron-far from being the niggardly boarding-house marm he had at first imagined-would question no expense that might relate to safety. But at first he had not understood her. She had spoken philosophically of the nature of danger. It was hard for him not to smirk at her. He thought her ridicu'ous, a monkey in a top hat, a woman acting like a man. But when 369

Oscar and Lucinda

the philosophy had finished he saw she would pay up for any item which might be seen to lessen danger. And she begged him to tell her the dangers. He took great pleasure in obliging her. He enjoyed himself. He made her very frightened.

Lucinda was too much in love to think of how masculine hierarchies are created, but it was a mistake to have these meetings with Oscar absent. It encouraged Mr Jeffris in his habit of thinking of Oscar scornfully.

Lucinda thought only that she loved him, that he must be safe.

When she had imagined 'love" it had always been with someone broad and square. Even Mr Hasset had been taller than this comforting prototype. When picturing her future husband she had seen strong square hands and a black square beard. She had never imagined the snaky insinuating passion she would feel to hold a thin white man whom she called (although not out loud) "my sweet archangel."

"He is a brave man," she told Mr Jeffris, "far braver than you or I."

"He is an extraordinary chap," said Jeffris.

"You will deal with mountains and rivers, but he will do battle with demons."

"One can only respect him, ma'am," said Mr Jeffris.

Mr Jeffris's eyes were soft and sympathetic, but his mind was totally dedicated to the satisfaction of his present ambition: to extract a cheque for twenty pounds for the purchase of three brass chronometers from Mr Dulwich of Observatory Hill.

91

A Man of Authority

J

Horses and bullocks were scarce in consequence of the long drought and although it was not Mr Jeffris himself who went to Parramatta sales in search of decent beasts, the worry of this item lay heavily on him, for it was no use at all tearing up the road to Wiseman's Ferry with

17f

A Man of Authority

all the finest men, all perfectly kitted out, if all he had to pull them were beasts like you saw everywhere around the colony, with their spines showing like ridgepoles under the baggy canvas of their hides.

He had become a man of authority. He felt himself uncramped at last, free from the petty limitations of Mr d'Abbs's employ. He could say to one man, go, and he went, to another, come, and he came. He was conscious of standing straighter. He could feel the girth of his chest pressing against the buttons of his shirt. He employed tall men he knew he could control with the strength of his eyes. He was stern with them and unsmiling. He dispatched his overseer and bullock driver both with instruction that no beast he bought but that they both be in agreement. They took this order meekly, although they surely found it most distasteful. The bullock driver called him "Captain," Later this misunderstanding was to spread. Mr Jeffris engaged a storekeeper, two blacksmiths, a medical attendant, a collector of birds and a collector of plants (although these last two were entered on the paybook as "riflemen"), a groom, a trumpeter, two carpenters, a shoemaker, a cook.

Miss Leplastrier did not query him on a single point.

He borrowed two mountain barometers and entrusted one of these to the collector of birds and another to the collector of plants, telling them that it was to be their main duty whilst actually travelling to guard the safety of these barometers for he planned to go about this journey like a trigonometrist, knowing always, exactly, where he was in space, and he would not be, he told the red-necked, Belfast-born plant collector, like some fart-faced Irishman crashing through the undergrowth like a wombat.

They would carry axes and they would be razor-sharp at all times, for there is nothing a surveyor despises more than a tree that obscures his trig point.

Miss Leplastrier made a horse and sulky available to him so he might move about smartly. He was soon a familiar sight on the road out to Mort Bay, standing straight and flaying the poor animal to get a skip on. He was on his way to Harrison's shipyards where old Oliver Crawley, a wide, bow-legged shipwright with a white cataract on his left eye, was constructing two light whale boats, the smaller designed to fit inside the larger when the thwarts of the larger one were removed for travelling. The larger boat was then to be suspended within a frame of belts and canvases and the canvas most in contact with the boat was to be guarded with sheepskin and greased

371

Oscar and Lucinda

hide, and this whole sling, of course, was to be fitted into the boat carriage, that machine which rolled silently through the tracks of Oscar Hopkins's nightmares.

Mr Jeffris took each man, as he was engaged, to Anthony Hordern's store where they were kitted out, on account of Miss Leplastrier, with a suit of new clothing. There were strong grey twill trousers, a red woollen shirt which, when crossed with white braces, provided a military appearance. This was as Mr Jeffris had calculated it. He would require absolute obedience and he made it clear from the beginning.