CAREER

By KAY BOYLE

THE day was quite fair and the ground soft as spring under foot, and the boy and the diviner set off together to walk to the farm. The diviner was a tall man and he had on his face the look of serenity a religious man might wear, because of his belief in something that had covert life, that went strong as wind blowing, and as imperviouS, underground.

The diviner talked of water passing under a bridge, or passing under a boat, and if he stood on a bridge or stepped in the boat this water's flowing did not change the beating of his heart. But if he went into a house and water was passing unbeknown under it, his pulse told him this. The boy was so new to the work that everything the man said had a sound of wonder. The man said he had a friend who built a house and slept in a front room of it, and day after day his health faded and the doctors could find no reason why it should be so.

" When I went to see him," said the diviner, walking the road with the boy and chewing at a bit of grass between his teeth, " I saw his face and then I knew what it was. It was water."

" Was there water passing by the house ? " said the boy quickly, and the man shook his head.

" Water going by means nothing," he said. " It's water running under the ground that counts. There was water running under the house on the side he slept on, but nobody knew anything about it. He couldn't get any rest at night and his appetite left him. Most people are dead to it," said the diviner. " But this man, he might have died. When I came into the room where he was the hair stood right up straight on my head and the ends of my fingers started tingling. I knew what it was then and I took hold of his hand. But he had to let go of me and sit down because his heart was beating more than he could stand."

The boy listened to everything the man said, for he was setting out in life now.; now he was going _towards what work would bring him to. It seemed to him that he would have to be shaped thought by thought and bone by bone by whatever career he undertook, for he had no clear picture in his mind of what kind of a person he was or what he was intended to be. Whether he would be a man like his father, working as a builder, or like men he saw passing in the street or serving in a store, he did not know. But being young, he believed the choice had fallen on him ; he said little, but he waited, knowing that the choice was made and that he could not be like the others, saying not a word but listening to the men who talked in his father's house, and to his father, knowing without vanity that he could not become the same.

The diviner himself was three men walking along the road, not one of them paying any heed to the black- faced sheep or the coarse, clay-red, small cattle they passed. He was first a man who lived to himself, and he was a man the engineering people employed as a locator of water, and he was as well a stranger speaking to the new boy as they went along to the farm -where water was wanted. January is- a warm month in -Australia, and the farm was far, and the wet grass by the road was already beginning to stand up towards• the sun when it came in sight.

The diviner was saying that the power extended to silver as well as to a twig of hazel he sometimes used, and he took a half-crown and a bit of bent wire from his pocket, and, in his hand as they walked, the wire drew straight of itself and reached out as if in hunger towards the piece of silver he had concealed in the palm of his other hand. Whichever way he moved the hand with the half-crown in it, the wire changed its course and sought the direction of the silver. The man laughed a little, but still he was pleased by the look of awe in the new boy's face.

The boy stopped still in the road, and was staring, for whatever devotion to something else there was in him had been made impure by church taken as a weekly, dutiful thing. But this miracle he saw was what the miracle of voices singing and the high ribs of stone might have been if they had been kept, like gold, until he was old enough to see. The wire straightening out, like a reed in flowing water, and reaching for the coin was the mystery given a name at last. He stood still in the road, with his month open, watching the man put the half- crown and the bit -of wire back in his pocket again.

" Come along, now," said the man. " There's the farm off there where the trees are."

The sky and the sea below the line of land were one now, the same, fresh, loud, unbroken blue as if a wind had cleaned them out. The boy looked down, trying to see and follow the line that lay between them.

" I knew a rock once," he said, " where if you put your ear down against it you could hear the water running underneath."

" Water doesn't always say which way it's going," the diviner said.

The farm-people were in the house when the diviner knocked at the door, and they stopped whatever they were doing, the woman washing dishes and the old man stringing beans by the window, stopped without haste, without interest almost, and asked them at the door if they would have a piece of bread or a drink before setting out over the ground. But the diviner was thinking of the business he had to do, and he said they would take some- thing later when the work was done. There was no reverence or respect in the woman's voice when she spoke to the diviner. She talked of the artesian well they wanted as they all walked out through the garden together, but there was no homage in her manner although the diviner alone had the knowledge of where the well would be.

They went past the rabbit-huts, talking ; and the boy felt the walk in his legs now, and his mouth was dry.

The sun was hot as summer, and he lingered behind in the shade and looked in at the rabbits in their separate nests of hay. They were all of one race, long, limber beasts, brown-coated and sleek, with flecks of yellow at the points of their hairs. He put his hand in quietly through the side of one box where the wire was parted, and the rabbit never stirred in her corner. Only her eye quivered, cool and dark and waking; as he drew his hand down the soft, loose velvet of her hanging ears.

Then he went on quickly after the farm people and the diviner, for this was the work he had to do now, and he must learn it word by word. The work had begun by the diviner taking the bit of fencing wire out of his pocket again and twisting it into the shape of a W.

He carried it held out before him a little way, the apex of the letter turned up, and when the boy looked at his face he saw that it was altered : the eyes had given up their sight and the colour was faded from under his skin, as if a veil had been drawn across. The farm people followed after him, the old man, and the woman, and her husband who had come up from the fields, not speaking, but still not hushed for any kind of wonder they felt, following him as he went slowly, as if blind, across the unresponding land.

They passed over a road packed hard by the feet of cattle, and they were almost at the tree-line along the meadow when suddenly it began. The diviner stopped as if he had been struck, and the first quiverings of declaration went through him ; almost at once then, the wild surge of power began giving battle in his hand.

There he stood rooted, and the others halted behind him, and the boy's breath went out of him at the sight of the W forcing itself inward and downward against the strong outward and upward warring of the man. He had taken his two hands to it now, and his mouth was shut tight against the onslaught of what this was. His body opposed it, his feet braced on the earth in anguish, and the veins stood out in his arms as if ready to burst through the skin.

The boy had scarcely seen it right when the struggle was over. The man had seemingly bowed to the wire's will, and the apex of the letter was pointing earthward to the magnetic thing that passed them under the soil. The diviner moved off, holding the wire out again before him, but his face was quiet and certain now and he did not go far, only enough to feel the truth repeated. Step by step he covered the ground that lay close about, and however he turned, the wire turned in his hands to the chosen place, unswerving, as if thirsting itself for what ran secretly below.

It was so new to the boy that he did not know if he were living or dead, or whether or not there were people standing there in the open air before him. But when they began talking, he saw that it was a business to them, even to the diviner it was a business, as common as the stars moving or the shadow of the earth falling deeper night after night on the side of the moon. But still he could not open his mouth or shut it, but must leave it where it was until the diviner turned to him in a little while with the wire held out in his hand.

" Come along now," the diviner said, " we'll have to see if you have the power."

The boy took hold of the wire in his fingers, and suddenly the tears started running down his face. He knew he was not moving his hand, but the wire was turning, not towards the earth or in any earthward direction, but pointing straight to the centre of life and blood where he had been taught his heart should be.

" Oh, come along now," said the diviner with a laugh, and the farm people as well began laughing at what they hoped to see. " Now take it easy," said the diviner, speaking with patience, as if he might be teaching a lad to put a sole on a boot or plane a piece of timber. " Wipe your face now and take hold of My hand. That'll fix it."

The boy wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and the diviner reached out and took hold of one end of the wire. He was holding the boy's spare hand in his, and before either of them could draw a breath the might of the water struck them. The boy went down under it, thrown as if from the back of a horse, fiat on his back, with his mind wiped out for whatever next would come.

It is warm at this time of year in Australia, and the memory of the cold, is something that happened at some time when the continent was taking shape. They set out from it in the glacial time as penguins do from a breaking coastline in the spring, and for warmth they had drawn the Gulf Stream like a scarf around them.

" We were more than an hour on the road," the diviner said. " Can you fetch him some water from the house ? "—as if this was any explanation.