The Refuge by Kenneth Mackenzie Read Free Book Online

sound, rising above the throb of engines and the scraps of music like torn flags in a wind, was the intermittent blare of taxi-cab horns. When we were forced to halt for some seconds at the Springfield Avenue corner, the voices reached us; and I thought again, as always, how there must be less English spoken in this quarter than in any other equivalent area in the whole country. As the world’s most thickly-populated district of comparable size, it had long ago become a refuge within a refuge. Every foreigner who landed from Sydney harbour or stepped to earth at Mascot aerodrome knew of the Cross already, and went there as though drawn by an irresistible passion, there to fade—if he chose—into a consoling anonymity until, like the beetle or the butterfly from its chrysalis, he was ready to emerge, full of plans for conquest.
    Irma had come here from her ship, she told me; and I knew she had never lived anywhere else in Sydney, never sought or thought of another refuge until she was driven to it; for here she felt at first she had reached her Ultima Thule, the end and the beginning of the world. Like thousands of others in the years just before the second world-war and during it, she felt the safety of the place, its air of plenty, the security of many tongues, most of which she herself knew, and the more animal security of the herd actuated by one itching idea, which was, as I had learned with dismay and a sort of shame, to outwit the Australian hosts in every way, at every turn in every affair, however small. It was when I myself had become a dupe, a voluntary victim of this almost unconscious intention striking at my most real life, my integrity and my very self—it was then that I had been driven, by a force beyond analysis and so beyond proper control, to act.
    ‘Thank God for the Cross,’ Hubble was murmuring; and he seemed to have forgotten the matter to which he had been giving such cold, intense thought two minutes earlier. ‘Where would we poor policemen be without it? Crime—I dote on it. Don’t you?’
    ‘Like you,’ I said, ‘I live by it. If it interests me, it is for reasons you would not understand.’
    ‘Ho-ho-ho.’
    At the end of Darlinghurst Road we turned right, and the car’s headlights swept through sudden comparative gloom and silence. Through the cleared half-moon of glass before me, on which the windscreen-wiper was working with awkward urgency, I could see the wet street above which the night brooded, heavy with rain. We were going downhill now, to the maze of dead-end streets at water-level on the city side of Rushcutters Bay; we were nearly home. Again the despair, the fruitless sense of completion, the loneliness, came upon me, as for days past they had done hereabouts when in the small hours I made my way back, usually on foot from the Cross, to my own flat night after night, knowing that only a wall divided from each other the only two people I had ever fully loved, disinterestedly with my mind as well as with my heart and, indeed, all my flesh, all my spirit, my whole self. Now the two flats would be empty.
    ‘Right at the end still, isn’t it?’ Hubble said doubtfully.
    ‘Right at the end, on the right.’
    ‘On the very edge of the water.’
    ‘Almost in the water. The harbour-side foundation is carried straight ahead to make a tidal breakwater for the swimming pool belonging to the building.’
    We ran gently down the last incline, almost as steep as a ramp, and stopped before the dimly-lighted front entrance. When he cut off the engine, a profound silence enveloped us, emphasized by the faint contracting clicks of hot metal cooling under the bonnet. This was one of the quietest parts of the whole city, for the streets were all
culs-de-sac,
and there was no passage for through traffic within half a mile. Cars could not even approach at speed without risk, and the noise of accelerated departures up the steep street was always a diminishing noise; nor did we whose flats