Enlightenment

Brown felt curiously alive that Monday morning. It was a day out of the box he reflected as he stood waiting for his tram at the foot of the path in the cliff. Everything in the world seemed to be stirring and shining and singing. The wind purred against his cheek; warmth pulsed out of the rocky face behind him. He pressed his hands flat against the cliff and wondered why he had never experienced before the deep peculiar satisfaction there is in the feel of warm rock beneath your palms. Ice-plants drooled from the terraces above, their brilliant satiny flowers ironed out quite flat already in the early sun. A bird was singing somewhere, a long high, sweet trill that rose and fell, rose and fell. He listened attentively. Why didn’t he know what bird that was? Hepage 21 must have heard such warbling on a thousand similar mornings; but he felt he had never been aware of it before.

A man came along the cliff path, whistling, hands in pockets. He was a stranger to Brown, who studied him at first with casual suburban curiosity, and then realised with a queer shock of delight that he had never seen anything more beautiful than this man’s brow and hair. The line where the dark hair grew from the pale forehead was perfect, he reflected; and wondered a little how he knew. He would like to paint that man’s head – good lord, how many years was it since he had thought of painting? He became aware that the stranger had turned and was regarding him in a hostile fashion, looking right through him with blank cold eyes. Naturally people didn’t like to be stared at. Brown transferred his gaze to the hills, wishing he knew how to explain that he had stared for the simple pleasure of looking at something beautiful, giving to dark hair springing away from a fine brow the same detached admiration he was giving now to the hills. Their lines were perfect too, he thought; strong, shapely, splendid, not one of them badly put together. Their warm bronze summits seemed to melt the sky they pressed against so ardently, giving a liquid quality to its blueness. On their slopes were dark smudges of pines, and occasional English trees that looked too tenderly green in their new summer leafage, defenceless somehow amid the bold colours and contours of these surging hills. Bluegums were perfectly at home; adaptable, like all true Australians. Brown noted their smoky swinging foliage, the casual grace of their long limbs, and again he yearned for a brush and an easel. What had become of those boyish doubts of his, he wondered. As a youngster he had been intensely fond of painting. He had meant to keep on studying art – well, why hadn’t he? He didn’t know. Perhaps he’d been too busy always? No, hardly. What did he do with his week-ends anyhow? He lounged around the pubs with his cobbers, drinking the odd beer and discussing tremendous questions of philosophy. He took his wife to the pictures Saturday nights. He lay in bed till noon on Sundays . . . he felt aghast at the thought of how much of his time, of his life, had dribbled away inanely.

Next week-end I’ll get out on the hills and paint, he thought. I must get some brushes today and oil colours. He laughed suddenly at the thought of his wife’s surprise when he arrived home with artists’ paraphernalia. Of course she wouldn’t understand. But he paused on that thought and considered. She might understand very well. He thought of the garden into which she put all her spare time and energy. Would she work with such passionate concentration if she were not impelled by an urge to create beauty? It was the best garden on the hill. Brown was proud of it without ever having thought of it as a creation of his wife’s. A picture came glowing into his mind now, warm wet banks of colour glowing and throbbing like music. There was the deep organ-roll of purple, red that called clear like trumpets, tinkling merriment of yellow, frail lovely fluting of brown. Brown felt an absurd desire to rush backpage 22 up the hill and look with new eyes on the garden and on his wife.

But the tram was due. In fact, it was overdue. Other regulars had arrived and were looking at their watches. He knew them all by sight. There was the greasy, amiable bloke whose collars, for some reason, always looked whiter but less clean than other people’s. He stood there smiling soft, offensive, trying not to seem middle-aged. Brown had always loathed him; but this morning he felt unaccountable pity instead of contempt. He observed that the fellow had good hands. He probably hadn’t been bad-looking at all, years ago, before something in life, or in himself, had defeated him. He never looked at you now without an easy greasy smile; but in his youth he had been passionately serious, thought Brown. And added soberly: it could happen to me. His glance travelled over the others. There was Miss Smith, lean, fierce, unlovely, standing apart as she always did, at what she apparently considered a judicious distance from the men. She never spoke to anyone. Always she carried a book which she read absorbedly going in and out on the tram. Brown and his friends were in the habit of making jokes about her, she was such an obvious and typical old maid. Pretty poor jokes, both in taste and wit, he felt now watching her standing there gaunt and grim with her mouth shut tight on her loneliness. He felt bewildered by the sympathy that ached in him. What had got into him this morning? Why should he be feeling sorry for sour old Smith, for the odious fat blighter with the too-friendly smile, and for every one of the bunch of human beings waiting there at the tram-stop on this glorious day?

The tram came trundling up the straight at last and they all got aboard. Jones and Robinson were sitting together as usual, and Brown dropped into the seat behind them. He knew them both well. The three of them usually chewed over some local topic as they travelled in and out of town, but this morning these two were so deep in conversation that they didn’t even notice Brown enter the tram. He was glad. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted to sit quietly and look at things he had been seeing all his life but had never really noticed before. He looked at the backs of their necks. Jones’s neck was brown and muscular: Robinson’s was fresh and pink like a little boy’s, with a few odd, rather endearing freckles. Brown’s eyes roved round the tram. There was the Williams youngster, slick and pretty and neat like a girl on a magazine cover, her hair hanging smooth at her shoulders, her lipstick the approved shade for brunettes with fair complexion, her eyes flickering over the men in search of admiration. And there beside her was poor old Smith, deep in her book already. Hell, thought Brown, she must have read all the books there are. He looked at the title on this one. It was unknown to him and so was the author – but then it was years since he’d found time to read a book. He was surprised again by an almost panic-stricken sense of time wasted, time frittered away. I must join the Library again, he resolved.

They were passing the sea now. The smell of salt invaded the tram, harshpage 23 and clean and exciting. A swarm of gulls arose, blotted thick through the sunlight. Points of light glittered on tossing waves. A boy and a dog frisked along the wet sand, jolly little ruffians both of them. Brown had no children. He felt it wasn’t right to bring children into the world, the way things were now. Why make them go through with it, he was fond of asking Jones and Robinson. Why inflict life on them? Everyone who was too busy or too selfish or too fastidious to have kids talked the same way of course, but Brown was quite certain he himself was sincere. Now, sitting quietly in the tram on his way to work on this zestful morning, he found himself confronted by a new idea. The children one decided not to have might be born just the same. Life might not be so easily foiled. Life – he wasn’t sure just what he meant by Life, but it was something you spelled with a capital letter – Life might merely shrug an imperturbable shoulder and choose some other instrument. He felt regret that was as sharp as actual grief when he reflected that the son who might have been his had perhaps been begotten by a loud hearty man with no imagination and no possible chance of understanding him; or by a gloomy passionate bloke with far too much imagination and every chance of ruining him. He pictured his wife’s tender, absorbed face bent over her flowers. Gosh, he thought with an enthusiasm that startled him, we must have a couple of kids. Inflict life on them: why not? He thought of the swimmy brilliance of ice-plant flowers, the grace of gulls, the amazing attractiveness of other human beings, the strong curve and sweep of the hills he was going to paint on Saturday – and he knew he was intensely glad life had been inflicted on him. He felt excited, inspired, as though on the brink of discovering something in life he had never realised before, something coherent, rhythmic, beautiful.

Suddenly he wanted to talk to someone. He wanted to give expression to this new awareness. He bent forward. What were Jones and Robinson nattering about so earnestly, anyhow? He caught his own name and listened reluctantly but avidly, the way one does. ‘Poor old Brown,’ said Robinson. ‘It doesn’t seem possible, somehow. I still can’t understand how he didn’t see the car. He wasn’t full – we’d only had a couple –’.

Memories clawed at Brown out of a hollow place in his mind. Something sudden, something terrifying: what was it? Let’s see now. Saturday morning he had a beer or two with Robbie. They came out of the pub together and stood talking a moment before they separated. He remembered looking back over his shoulder with some parting remark as he stepped off the kerb. What was there after that? A jar, a white flash of pain. Then blackness . . . numbness . . . but that wasn’t real. That was something he had dreamed – wasn’t it?

‘What time’s the funeral?’ Jones asked.

‘Two-thirty. I’ll get time off to go to it of course; the boss will understand –’.

Brown leaned forward, and gripped Robinson’s shoulder with a terrible urgency.

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‘Robbie,’ he pleaded, ‘my God. Robbie, it isn’t true is it? I wasn’t killed, was I?’

Robinson didn’t reply. He didn’t even look round. He took no notice at all, but went on talking quietly to Jones.

Brown shrank back into his seat. He felt himself withering to nothing in a gulf of icy loneliness that told him it was true. He was dead; and they were going to bury him that afternoon.

1945 (17)