In the smaller room sat the younger children with a pupil-teacher, a young Miss Purves, who suffered from chronic catarrh and chilblains on the feet. Altogether her time was pretty well taken up in straying from her nose to her feet, with dabbing and scratching, and rolling her handkerchief into a smaller ball or hanging it out to air on the desk. She had another handkerchief stuck through an armlet, as a kind of reserve, but this she seldom used. She just used to dab and scratch, or rest her receding chin on a cold hand.
The big children were dealt with by Ernest Moriarty in the larger and more imposing room, that smelt of a coke stove and clotting ink and settled chalk. When it rained you could hear the water dripping down into the enamel basin from the roof that nobody came to see about. But the room was not so lugubrious, in spite of Mr Moriarty sitting in his overcoat and scarf, for the sake of his asthma, he would have said, sitting there correcting exercises with his bluish hands. It was not so lugubrious. There were maps of Asia and Africa, and a larger one of Australia over the desk. And you could lean on your elbow when you were bored and wander up the Ganges or wonder about Irkutsk. There was also a stuffed fox in a case, and some jars of spirit containing various snakes. And somebody sometimes brought some flowers.
Rodney Halliday sighed. A and B and C. Sharing apples with Andy Everett and Arthur Ball. He experienced a mild shiver of recollected discomfiture, from contact with Andy’s body that smelt of cows. And he could not do sums. If you leant on your elbow and waited till it died, you were lost in the Indian Ocean’s turquoise glaze, you jogged across a saffron steppe east of the Caspian Sea, and the plain of India was a field of blood. But his knuckle no longer hurt. It was numbed from paying tribute to A, B, and C. He sucked his knuckle. His breath was a silver cloud, in spite of the restless coke stove his breath sailed out silverly into the Yellow Sea, beyond this the god’s face in the encyclopaedia, and a bearded cinnamon-tree, and a god squatting on a kind of plant, like Margaret Quong. He looked across at Margaret Quong, who sat, not on a lotus, but on a bench doing sums, and she was good at sums, she was the best, she was thirteen, and she helped her aunt make up the books at the store. He would like to play with Margaret Quong. She had a soft voice. But she was thirteen, and he was only nine. She was also a girl. So he had to go down with Andy and Arthur and Willy behind the lavatory, and you knew, and you knew. But you did not think of that. You turned over a page in the mind till A, B, and C were facing you. It was better like that.
It was better like that, said Ernest Moriarty, correcting an essay by R. Dormer on the Cow and Her Relationship with Man. She kept on saying, it’ll kill you, Ernest, and look at the screw, it’s shameful the way, and a man with all those years of service, and if you got that job up on the North Shore we could easily keep a maid. The Cow is a useful animal. She gives us meat, milk, and menewer. In the evening the Cow went slowly home and they milked her dry. She was content. He was content, of course he was content. He had his stamps. He was secretary to the Moorang Philatelists’ Society. Only Vic, sitting in the front room, said that the sofa was wearing out. She was still very pretty, like those evenings in Marrickville when they licked stamps together and he touched her hand. And then he could not restrain himself, and he had to go home, and perhaps the people in the tram knew why he was wheezing, and it was uncomfortable to walk. The Cow has an udder with four tits. I don’t want to complain, she said, only I’m fond of you, only it’s for your own good. He wrote and nothing happened. He showed her the letters before he sealed them up. And nobody came to mend the roof. It made him feel bad, in spite of those new powders, and at night he could hardly breathe. So he could not very well do more than write. Poor, pretty, pink Vic. It made him proud to possess her, not physically, that is, because that always made him wheeze, but to know that she was there, like the three-cornered Cape of Good Hope blue and the surcharged German New Guinea. He arranged R. Dormer’s exercise book on the pile. It was very neat, a perfect square of exercise books with a rubber on the top. There were four pencils and a pen in a little wooden tray in front of the ink.
I’ve finished that one, Archie Braithwaite said.
Then he cringed back on the desk. Andy Everett had given him a kick.
Turn to page ninety-four. Example number thirty-six.
The Cow resumed her laborious Relationship with Man.
The Yellow Sea and the Red Sea, and the Blue Pool near Moorang, where you went for picnics in the summer, if it was a good summer, if there was no drought, but if there was a drought. Arthur Ball had blood on his face. The way your knuckle stung as it landed on Arthur’s teeth.
Emily Schmidt smelt her handkerchief, passed it to Gladys Rudd to smell. Her lips spelt Parma Violets behind her hand. Emily Schmidt smiled in a vastly superior way and played about with her ring.
It was dull, because this was school, because the feverish chant of the younger children burst in a thin unison through the wooden wall, intensifying the monotony with a twiceoneatwo, twicetwoafour, twicethreeasix, seeming to paralyse the progress of the clock. And there is no monotony so desperate as the activities of A, B, and C, nothing so definitely guaranteed to work havoc with the nails or to make you groan inwardly at the endlessness of time. Until, with the ultimate gesture of a formal hand, the clock points beyond these deserts to a luxuriance of sound and motion and sensation suddenly revived.
Conversation became intricate at twelve o’clock. Somebody banged the door. Somebody dropped a book. Somebody bounced a ball. Then they were going out. Their voices distributed themselves in the open air as they started to walk home, or ran. Rodney Halliday ran very lightly up the road as hard as he could go. He drew his legs up under him and jumped a ditch. He ran on past the wire fence, under the telephone wires, under the truculent murmur that telephone wires have, and a knotting of small birds.
Emily Schmidt walked with Gladys Rudd, letting her smell the handkerchief.
Are you coming up this evening, Emily? asked Margaret Quong.
No, said Emily.
Why ever not?
Because.
Emily Schmidt compressed her lips. She had a face that was small and pale and concentratedly vicious under her pale slender curls.
My Mumma said I’m not to go to Quongs’.
So did mine, agreed Gladys Rudd.
All right, said Margaret.
Her voice was very resigned. She began to walk on ahead, looking down at her feet. Behind her Gladys and Emily began to giggle. They began to sing high up in voices nasally intense, and remarkably alike:
My Mumma said I never should
Play with the gypsies in the wood.
If I did she said she would…
Margaret walked on quickly bending her head. She did not listen. She tried to avoid unpleasantness. She did not ask for reasons, because reasons were unpleasant, and she knew already, vaguely underneath, that it was Father that made Emily giggle and compress her lips. It was that time about the Everett girl, and Mrs Everett going to court, and Mother had gone to court, and there was that time in at Moorang when they ran Father in for doing something you did not think about.
She hung her head and walked along. She was thin and straight, with her hair cut straight in a fringe over the eyes that were more oblique than Amy’s even, or Arthur’s, or Walter’s eyes. Chinese eyes, said Ethel Quong with very definite bitterness. Ethel Quong was Walter’s wife, and before she had married Walter, before Margaret was born, she had been a housemaid at Government House. How Ethel married Walter Quong will keep till later on. It is sufficient to know that she is bitter about it, and that when she looked at Margaret she often said, your sins will always find you out. Only she did not think it was fair that she should pay for her sins on her own, she always insisted that Margaret should share the debt.