When he was eighteen he had immediately joined up and was immediately killed; she had seen it in the papers — just the name.
It was Stevie Caine this young man resembled, as she had last seen him in the soft hat and railway worker's serge waistcoat, with the sleeves rolled on his stringy arms. There had been nothing between them, but she had never forgotten. It had to do, as she saw it, with the two forms of injustice: the one that is cruel but can be changed, and the other kind— the tipping of a thirteen-year-old boy off the saddle of his bike into a bottomless pit — that cannot; with that and an empty lunch-tin that she would like to have filled with biscuits with whole peanuts in them that have no special name.
She went out quickly now (the young man was still there on the lawn beyond the window) and counted the biscuits, which were cool enough to be put into a barrel. There were twenty-three, just as before.
He stayed there all afternoon and was still there among the deepening shadows when Jack came in. She was pretty certain now of what he was but didn't want it confirmed — and how awful if you walked up to someone, put your hand out to see if it would go through him, and it didn't.
They had tea, and Jack, after a shy worried look in her direction, which she affected not to see, took one of the biscuits and slowly ate it. She watched. He was trying not to show how broken up he was. Poor Jack!
Twenty-two.
Later, while he sat over his chess set and the mechanical voice told him what moves he should make on its behalf, she ventured to the window and peered through. It was, very gently, raining, and the streetlights were blurred and softened. Slow cars passed, their tyres swishing in the wet. They pushed soft beams before them.
The young man stood there in the same spot. His shabby clothes were drenched and stuck to him. The felt hat was also drenched, and droplets of water had formed at the brim, on one side filled with light, a half-circle of brilliant dots.
“Mustn't it be awful,” she said, "to be out there on a night like this and have nowhere to go? There must be so many of them. Just standing about in the rain, or sleeping in it.”
Something in her tone, which was also flat, but filled with an emotion that deeply touched and disturbed him, made the man leave his game and come to her side. They stood together a moment facing the dark wall of glass, then she turned, looked him full in the face, and did something odd: she reached out towards him and her hand bumped against his ribs — that is how he thought of it: a bump. It was the oddest thing! Then impulsively, as if with sudden relief, she kissed him.
I have so much is what she thought to herself.
Next morning, alone again, she cleared away the breakfast things, washed and dried up, made a grocery list. Only then did she go to the window.
It was a fine clear day and there were two of them, alike but different; both pale and hopeless looking, thin-shouldered, unshaven, wear- ing shabby garments, but not at all similar in feature. They did not appear to be together. That is, they did not stand close, and there was nothing to suggest that they were in league or that the first had brought the other along or summoned him up. But there were two of them just the same, as if some process were involved. Tomorrow, she guessed, there would be four, and the next day sixteen; and at last — for there must be millions to be drawn on — so many that there would be no place on the lawn for them to stand, not even the smallest blade of grass. They would spill out into the street, and from there to the next street as well — there would be no room for cars to get through or park — and so it would go on till the suburb, and the city and a large part of the earth was covered. This was just the start.
She didn't feel at all threatened. There was nothing in either of these figures that suggested menace. They simply stood. But she thought she would refrain from telling Jack till he noticed it himself. Then they would do together what was required of them.
Sorrows and Secrets
You've fallen on yer feet, son, you're in luck. This is the university ‘v hard knocks you've dropped into but I've taken a fancy to yer. I'll see to it the knocks aren't too solid.”
It was the foreman speaking, in a break on the boy's first day. The five of them had knocked off just at eleven and were sitting about on logs, or sprawled on the leaves of the clearing, having a smoke and drinking coppery tea.
The foreman himself had made the tea. Gerry had followed him about, watching carefully how he should trawl the billy through the scummy water so that what he drew was good and clear, how to make a fire, how the billy should hang, when to put in the tea and how much. The foreman was particular. From now on Gerry would make the tea. The foreman was confident he would make it well and that he would do all right at the rest of his work as well. The foreman was taking an interest.
He was a sandy, sad-eyed fellow of maybe forty, with a grey flannel vest instead of a shirt. Gerry felt immediately that he was a man to be trusted, though not an easy man to get along with, and guessed that it was his own newness that made him so ready on this occasion to talk. With the others he was reserved, even hostile. When they sat down to their tea he had set himself apart and then indicated, with a gesture of his tin mug, that Gerry should sit close by. Gerry observed, through the thin smoke of the fire, that the other fellows were narrowly watching, but with no more than tolerant amusement, as they licked their cigarette-papers and rolled them between thumb and finger. As if to say: "Ol’ Claude's found an ear to bash.”
They were quiet fellows in their thirties, rough-looking but cleanshaven, and one of them was a quarter-caste called Slinger. The others were Charlie and Kev. Gerry was to share a hut with them. The foreman Claude had his own sleeping quarters on the track to the thunder-box. He was permanent.
They were working for a Mister McPhearson, a shadowy figure known only to Claude; and even Claude had seen him less often than he let on. They were on McPhearson's land, using McPhearson's equipment, and it was his timber they were felling and to him, finally, that Claude was responsible. His name was frequently on the foreman's lips, especially when there was some question of authority beyond which there could be no appeal. “Don’ ast me, ast McPhearson,” he'd say. And then humourously: "If you can find ‘im.” Or: "Well now, there you'd be dealin’ with McPhearson. That'd be his department,” and there was something in Claude's smile as he said it that was sly. Inside, he was laughing outright.
Claude had a preference for mysteries. If McPhearson's name hadn't been stamped so clearly on all their equipment they might have decided he was one of Claude's humourous inventions.
Gerry had been sent here to learn, the hard way, about life. It was his father's intention that he should discover at first hand that his advantages (meaning Vine Brothers, which was one of the biggest machine-tool operations in the state) were accidental, had not been earned by him, and were in no way deserved; they did not constitute a proof of superiority. His mother spoiled him, as she did all of them. She had let him believe he was special. That's what his father said. He was out here to learn that he was not. The job had been arranged through a fellow his father knew at the Golf Club, who happened also to know McPhearson. Claude had started off by asking questions, as if he suspected a connection between Gerry and the Boss that had not yet been revealed, but there was none. Just that friend of his father's at the Club.
They worked hard and Gerry kept up with them. He didn't want it to show that what for them was hard necessity was for him a rich boy's choice. All day their saws buzzed, their sweat flew in the forest, and at night they were tired.