Richard bought himself a big, knobbly, green, soft-crusted apple, at a Chinese shop, and a pretty mother-of-pearl spoon to eat it with. The queer Chinese, with their gabbling-gobbling way of speaking—were they parasites too? A strange, strange world. He took himself off to the gardens to eat his custard apple—a pudding inside a knobbly green skin—and to relax into the magic ease of the afternoon. The warm sun, the big, blue harbour with its hidden bays, the palm trees, the ferry steamers sliding flatly, the perky birds, the inevitable shabby-looking, loafing sort of men strolling across the green slopes, past the red poinsetta bush, under the big flame-tree, under the blue, blue sky—Australian Sydney, with a magic like sleep, like sweet, soft sleep—a vast, endless, sun-hot, afternoon sleep with the world a mirage. He could taste it all in the soft, sweet, creamy custard apple. A wonderful sweet place to drift in. But surely a place that will some day wake terribly from this sleep.
Yet why should it? Why should it not drift marvellously for ever, with its sun and its marsupials?
The meeting in the evening, none the less, was a wild one. And Richard could not believe there was any real vindictiveness. He couldn't believe that anybody really hated anybody. There was a touch of sardonic tolerance in it all. Oh, that sardonic tolerance! And at the same time that overwhelmingly obstinacy and power of endurance. The strange, Australian power of enduring—enduring suffering or opposition or difficulty—just blank enduring. In the long run, just endure.
Richard sat next to Jaz. Jaz was very still, very still indeed, seated with his hands in his lap.
"Will there be many diggers here?" Lovat asked.
"Oh, yes. There's quite a crowd over there, with Jack."
And Richard locked quickly, and saw Jack. He knew Jack had seen him. But now he was looking the other way. And again, Richard felt afraid of something.
It was a packed hall, tense. There was plenty of noise and interruption, plenty of homethrusts at the speakers from the audience. But still, that sense of sardonic tolerance, endurance. "What's the odds, boys?"
Willie Struthers gave the main speech: on the solidarity of Labour. He sketched the industrial situation, and
