Ellie came and slipped her fat little hand into Jack's, hanging on to him. Katie and Lennie sat surreptitiously playing cats'-cradle, on the steps: forbidden act, on the Sabbath. The twin boys wriggled their backs against the gate-posts and their toes into the earth, asking each other riddles. Harry as usual aimed stones at birds. It was a close evening, the wind had not come. And they all were uneasy, with that uncanny uneasiness that attacks families, because Gran was not well.
Harry was singing profanely, profaning the Sabbath.
"A blue jay sat on a hickory limb,
He wink at me, I wink at him.
I up with a stone, an' hit him on the shin.
Says he, Little Nigger, don' do that agin!
Clar de kitchen, ol' folk, young folk!
Oar de kitchen, ol' folk, young folk!
An' let us dance till dawn O."
Harry shouted out these wicked words half loud to a tune of his own that was no tune.
Jack did not speak. The sense of evening, Sunday evening, far away from any church or bell, was strong upon him. The sun was slow in the sky, and the light intensely strong, all fine gold. He went out to look. The sunlight flooded the dry, dry earth till it glowed again, and the gum-trees that stood up hung tresses of liquid shadow from trunks of gold, and the buildings seemed to melt blue in the vision of light. Someone was riding in from westward, and a cloud of pure gold-dust rose fuming from the earth about the horse and the horseman, with a vast, overwhelming gold glow of the void heavens above. The whole west was so powerful with pure gold light, coming from immense space and the sea, that it seemed like a transfiguration, and another horseman rode fuming in a dust of light as if he were coming, small and Daniel-like, out of the vast furnace-mouth of creation. Jack looked west, into the welter of yellow light, in fear. He knew again, as he had known before, that his day was not the day of all the world, there was a huger sunset than the sunset of his race. There were vaster, more unspeakable gods than the gods of his fathers. The god in this yellow fire was huger than the white men could understand, and seemed to proclaim their doom.
Out of this immense power of the glory seemed to come a proclamation of doom. Lesser glories must crumble to powder in this greater glow, as the horsemen rode trotting in the glorified cloud of the earth, spuming a glory all round them. They seemed like messengers out of the great West, coming with a proclamation of doom, the small, trotting, aureoled figures kicking tip dust like sun-dust, and gradually growing larger, hardening out of the sea of light. Like sun-arrivals.
Though after all it was only Alec Rice and Tom. But they were gilded men, dusty and sun-luminous, as they came into the yard, with their brown faces strangely vague in shadow, unreal.
The sun was setting, huge and liquid, and sliding down at immense speed behind the far-off molten, wavering, long ridge towards the coast. Fearsome the great liquid sun was, stooping fiercely down like an enemy stooping to hide his glory, leaving the sky hovering and pulsing above, with a sense of wings, and a sense of proclamation, and of doom. It seemed to say to Jack: I and my race are doomed. But even the doom is a splendour.
Shadow lay very thin on the earth, pale as day, though the sun was gone. Jack turned back to the house. The tiny twins were staggering home to find their supper, their hands in the pockets of their Sunday breeches. The pockets of everyday breeches were, for some mysterious reason, always sewn up, so Sunday alone knew this swagger. Harry was being called in to bed. And Len and Katie, rarely far off at meal times, were converging towards supper too.
Monica was still drumming listlessly on the piano, and singing in a little voice. She had a very sweet voice, but she usually sang "small." She was not singing a hymn, Jack became aware of this. She was singing, rather nervously, or irritably, and with her own queer yearning pathos: