A Prayer '

employed by Mr Martin's friend, Mr d'Abbs.

Mr Jeffris could not tolerate incompetence. He could quote scripture to support his view. He could not differentiate it from sloth. It was an offence to God who made us in His image. And yet he found it everywhere. It was as common as dust. There was not a man he had served who had been free from Mr Jeffris's censure.

Mr d'Abbs was incompetent. It was a wonder he had any business at all, and would not have had if he had not set up his kitchen and his cellar in the service of the fuddled complacent friendship of his dinner table. It was all social. That was obvious. He sat down with them at dinner. They drank too much wine and put their arms around each other. They imagined they discussed Philosophy and Great Issues when they could barely pronounce the names of the men they misquoted. He was "good old Jimmy d'Abbs," but he was a tosspot and incompetent. He could not add up. He could not bother to add up, and yet such was the condition of life that Mr Jeffris was called upon to serve him. It made Mr Jeffris angry, angry every minute he was in the office. He spent his days leashed in, trussed up; he could hardly bear to be there, except he must. But one day he would go. One day he would not be there to make sure the work was done correctly, and then all the second-rate firms who had grown to trust the idiot would find themselves in fearful trouble. D'Abbs would never have a head clerk as good, not because there were not others to be had, but because he would not know how to recognize one.

Jeffris had dreams about d'Abbs. He dreamed he slapped him and stabbed him in his sparrow's chest.

But now, like an ass which God has given frankincense to carry, d'Abbs had brought him this gift-an incompetent clerk who had it in his head he would go to Boat Harbour, by land, across unmapped territory. He was a frail little thing, a skippy girl with milk-white skin and a weakness for poker.

With a patron, wrapped and sealed, in tandem.

Mr Jeffris sat very, very still. He must be careful. He must approach the matter as if it were a timid animal, a little birdie to be trapped-no, not trapped, he was not strong enough to think himself a predatorbut to be coaxed, persuaded, wooed.

Mr Jeffris stood and then kneeled. There was barely room for him to squash in between the bookcase and the bed. It was a week Before Christmas. He asked God that he might be granted this Great Journey.

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That Lucinda should greet Mr Jeffris so enthusiastically when he arrived uninvited at her back door late on Christmas night, his arms full of presents, a bottle of warm colonial hock under his arm, should shake his square short-fingered hand and bring him into the parlour and thus ignore all her intuitions about the man she had privately likened to both a spider and a vicious dog, was merely one more product of the devastating sermon the Reverend Mr Dight had preached that morning, Christmas Day.

The reverend gentleman had not planned this controversial sermon, although Mr Chalmers, the warden of the vestry, was always at him with his "Do not be afraid to make a ruckus." But Mr Chalmers was in trade (three butchers' shops with prices writ in whitewash on their window panes) and was too often inclined, the Reverend Mr Dight thought, to regard the building of a Christian congregation as being no different from establishing good will in the High Street. Mr Dight knew his warden to be delighted with his sermon for, in the midst of his passionate address, he had looked down into his congregation and seen, in the midst of two hundred grave and attentive faces, Mr Chalmers's round and polished countenance wreathed in smiles. Mr Chalmers imagined that his nagging for a ruckus had at last produced results, but the Reverend Mr Dight had not planned the sermon. It is possible that he had it in his mind, that he carried it, like black flies on a sweat-damp back, without knowing it was there. But it was only when he stood in his pulpit-in that moment before he would begin to fiddle with his bookmarks-that he saw that They (the fornicators, gamblers) had dared to show their impudent faces on this holiest of days, and then the black flies rose in a fury, and he took for his text, not the Good News he had marked, but rather Matthew

5:27–30. "Ye have heard it said by them of old time, thou shall not commit adultery."

Christmas Day

He then had the pleasure of seeing his impromptu sermon take effect as his most carefully prepared addresses never had. There was a ripple, a shiver that'moved across the congregation like wind across the face of a pond. He froze them. He had them so quiet they hardly dared unfold their arms or cross their legs the other way. They formed a human lock around the two fornicators who sat rigid in their pew, their red necks advertising guilt. On Christmas Day the sky was a rich cobalt blue. The grass at Whitheld's Farm (being understocked) was long and golden and crackling underfoot.

The day had seemed perfect to Lucinda in every detail. She and Oscar had set a table in the garden before they left for church. The jacaranda had lost its flowers and was now a feathery umbrella of cool green. A soft nor'easter came off the harbour. They placed their presents on the parlour hearth and walked through the embarrassing plenty of Whitheld's Farm (all of New South Wales was in the grip of drought, and all the feed between Sydney and Bathurst was eaten down to the roots) through all the golden grass to church. Oscar said the colours felt wrong for Christmas. Lucinda said the colours in Bethlehem must surely have been like this: this dazzling blue sky, this straw-gold earth, and not the cold and bracken-brown of pagan Britain. Oscar smiled at her, his eyes glistening.

She thought: He does love me. And if his behaviour is always proper, then it is perverse of me to be irritated with him because of it. I could not respect him if he were to act improperly, to place, like Mr d'Abbs or Mr Paxton, his hand upon my knee.

She accepted the glistening fluid that threatened to spill over his lower lids as the exact equivalent of a kiss and she was moved, and excited, and bowed her head and fixed her bonnet although she had not planned to do so until they were amongst the new houses of Balmain. And then there was the sermon.

She felt herself slapped and spat on and all that landscape which she had smugly celebrated not half an hour before-she had gone on and on, naming trees and birds for her companion-now seemed a hateful place-dry, harsh, a tinder-box with black snakes coiled amongst its deadly grasses.

The urge to cry was so strong she must battle with her body to subdue it. She bit her lip and breathed through her mouth. She ran the gauntlet of the crowded churchyard with her face blazing red. She thought: They hate me, and it is not only the men. Oscar said: 'They do not even know us," but this voice was high and

Oscar and Lucinda

nervous. This tone was no help. She drew away from him.

"I cannot speak," she managed. She took off her bonnet and, in her agitation, wrapped it around her prayer book while they were still in sight of the church.

"It was a most unchristian sermon," said Oscar to whom had come, in the midst of all this turbulence and upset, the following very simple thought: It is my duty to save her name; there is no question but that I must propose marriage to her. This thought was both respectable and gentlemanly, but because it so neatly coincided with his own desires, he could not believe it uncorrupted. "Most unchristian," he repeated.

"Oh, do not be so hurt," she snapped.

"It is on your behalf I hurt."