The first rains had set in. All night the water had thundered down on the slab roof of the cubby, as if the bottom had fallen out of some well above. Outside was cloudy still, and a little chill. A wind was hush-sh-shing round the house. Mary was sitting with Gran, and he was in the parlour, listening to that clock—Tick-tock! Tick-tock! He sat in the armchair with a shawl over his shoulders, trying to read. Curiously enough, in Australia he could not read. The words somehow meant nothing to him.
It was Sunday afternoon, and the smell of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, cabbage, apple pie and cinnamon custard still seemed to taint the house. Jack had come to loathe Sunday dinners. They seemed to him degrading. They hung so heavy afterwards. And now he was sick, it seemed to him particularly repulsive. The peculiar Sundayness of it. The one thing that took him in revulsion back to England: Sunday dinner. The England he didn't want to be taken back to. But it had been a quiet meal. Monica and Grace and the little boy twins had all been invited to York, by Alec Rice's parents, and they had gone away from the shadowed house, leaving a great emptiness. It seemed to Jack they should all have stayed, so that their young life could have united against this slow dissolution.
Everything felt very strange. Tom and Lennie were out, Mrs. Ellis and the children were upstairs, Mr. Ellis had gone to look at some sheep that had got into trouble in the rain. There seemed a darkness, a chill, a deathliness in the air. It is like that in Australia: usually so sunny and absolutely forgetful. Then comes a dark day, and the place seems like an immemorial grave. More gruesome than ever England was, on her dark days. Mankind forever entombed in dissolution, in an endless grave.
"Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord; or who shall stand
in His holy place?
He that hath clean hands and a pure heart,
Who hath not yielded up himself unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully."
Jack was thinking over the words Mr. Ellis had read in the morning, as near as he remembered them. He looked at his own hands: already they seemed pale and soft and very clean. What had the Lord intended hands for? So many things hands must do, and still they remain clean. Clean hands! His left was still discoloured and out of shape. Was it unclean?
No, it was not unclean. Not unclean like the great paw of Easu's hiking Monica out of the saddle.
Clean hands and a pure heart! A pure heart! Jack thought of his own, with two heavy new desires in it: the sudden, shattering desire for Monica, that would rip through him sometimes like a flame. And the slow, smouldering desire to kill Easu. He had to be responsible for them both.
And he was not going to try to pluck them out. They both belonged to his heart, they were sacred even while they were shocking in his blood. Only, driven back on himself, he gave the old pledge: Lord, if you don't want me to have Monica and kill Easu, I won't. But if you want me to, I will. Somewhere he was inclined to cry out to be delivered from the cup. But that would be cowardice towards his own blood. It would be yielding himself up to vanity, if he pretended he hadn't got the desires. And if he swore to eradicate them, it would be swearing deceitfully. Sometimes the hands must move in the darkest acts, if they are to remain really clean, not deathly like Gran's now. And the heart must beat hard in the storm of darkest desires, if it is to keep pure, and not go pale-corrupt.
But always subject to the will of the Lord.
"Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord; or who shall stand in His holy place."