GOLD
I
The boy Jack never rose from that fever. It was a man who got up again.
A man with all the boyishness cut away from him, all the childishness
gone, and a certain unbending recklessness in its place.
He was thin, and pale, and the cherubic look had left his face forever.
His cheeks were longer, leaner, and when he got back his brown-faced
strength again, he was handsome. But it was not the handsomeness, any
more, that would make women like Aunt Matilda exclaim involuntarily:
"Dear boy!" They would look at him twice, but with misgiving, and a
slight recoil.
It was his eyes that had changed most. From being the warm, emotional
dark-blue eyes of a boy, they had become impenetrable, and had a certain
fixity. There was a touch of death in them, a little of the fixity and
changelessness of death. And with this, a peculiar power. As if he had
lost his softness in the otherworld of death, and brought back instead
some of the relentless power that belongs there. And the inevitable
touch of mockery.
As soon as he began to walk about, he was aware of the change. He walked
differently, he put his feet down differently, he carried himself
differently. The old drifting, diffident, careless bearing had left him.
He felt his uprightness hard, bony. Sometimes he was aware of the
skeleton of himself. He was a hard skeleton, built upon the solid bony
column of the back-bone, and pitched for balance on the great bones of
the hips. But the plumb-weight was in the cage of his chest. A skeleton!
But not the dead skeleton. The living bone, the living man of bone,
unyielding and imperishable. The bone of his forehead like iron against
the world, and the blade of his breast like an iron wedge held forward.
He was thin, and built of bone.
And inside this living, rigid man of bone, the dark heart heavy with its
wisdom and passions and emotions and its correspondences. It was living,
softly and intensely living. But heavy and dark, plumb to the earth's
center.
During his convalescence, he got used to this man of bone which he had
become, and accepted his own inevitable. His bones, his skeleton was
isolatedly itself. It had no contact. Except that it was forged in the
kingdom of death, to be durable and effectual. Some strange Lord had
forged his bones in the dark smithy where the dead and the unborn came
and went.
And this was his only permanent contact: the contact with the Lord who
had forged his bones, and put a dark heart in the midst.
But the other contacts, they ware alive and quivering in his flesh. His
passive but enduring affection for Tom and Lennie, and the strange
quiescent hold he held over Mary. Beyond these, the determined molten
stirring of his desire for Monica.
And the other desires. The desire in his heart for masterhood. Not
mastery. He didn't want to master anything. But to be the dark lord of
his own folk: that was a desire in his heart. And the concurrent
knowledge that, to achieve this, he must be master too of gold. Not gold
for the having's sake. Not for the spending's sake. Nor for the sake of
the power to hire services, which is the power of money. But the mastery
of gold, so that gold should no longer be like a yellow star to which
men hitched the wagon of their destinies. To be Master of Gold, in the
name of the dark Lord who had forged his bones neither of gold nor
silver nor iron, but of the white glisten of knife. Masterhood, as a man
forged by the Lord of Hosts, in the innermost fires of life and death.
Because, just as a red fire burning on the hearth is a fusion of death
into what was once live leaves, so the creation of man in the dark is a
fusion of life into death, with the life dominant.
The two are never separate, life and death. And in the vast dark kingdom
of afterwards, the Lord of Death is Lord of Life, and the God of life
and creation is Lord of Death.
But Jack knew his Lord as the Lord of Death. The rich, dark mystery of
death, which lies ahead, and the dark sumptuousness of the halls of
death. Unless Life moves on to the beauty of the darkness of death,
there is no life, there is only automatism. Unless we see the dark
splendour of death ahead, and travel to be lords of darkness at last,
peers in the realms of death, our life is nothing but a petulant,
pitiful backing, like a frightened horse, back, back to the stable, the
manger, the cradle. But onward ahead is the great porch of the entry
into death, with its columns of bone-ivory. And beyond the porch is the
heart of darkness, where the lords of death arrive home out of the
vulgarity of life, into their own dark and silent domains, lordly,
ruling the incipience of life.
II
At the trial Jack said, in absolute truth, he shot Easu in self-defence.
He had not the faintest thought of shooting him when he rode up to the
paddock: nor of shooting anybody. He had called in passing, just to say
good-day. And then he had fired at Easu because he knew the axe would
come down in his skull if he didn't.
Herbert gave the same deposition. The shot was entirely in self-defence.
So Jack was free again. There had been no further mention of Monica,
after Jack had said he was riding south to see her, because he had
always cared for her. No one hinted that Easu was the father of her
child, though Mrs. Ellis knew and Old George knew.
Afterwards Jack wondered why he had called at the Reds' place that
morning. Why had he taken the trail past where he and Easu had fought?
He had intended to see Easu, that was why. But for what unconscious
purpose, who shall say? The death was laid at the door of the old feud
between Jack and Red. Only Old George knew the whole, and he, subtle and
unafraid, pushed justice as it should go, according to his own sense of
justice, like a real Australian.
Meanwhile he had been corresponding with Monica and Percy. They were in
Albany, and on the point of sailing to Melbourne, where Percy would
enter some business or other, and the two would live as man and wife.
Monica was expecting another child. At this news, Mr. George wanted to
let them go, and be damned to them. But he talked to Mary, and Mary said
Jack would want Monica, no matter what happened.
"When he wants a thing really, he can't change," said Mary gloomily. "He
is like that."
"An obstinate young fool that's never had enough lickings," said Old
George. "Devil's blood of his mother's devil of an obstinate father. But
very well then, let him have her, with a couple of babies for a dowry.
Make himself the laughing stock of the colony."
So he wrote to Monica: "If you care about seeing Jack Grant again, you'd
better stop in this colony. He sticks to it he wants to see you, being
more of a fool than a knave, unlike many people in Western Australia."
She being obstinate like the rest, stayed on in Albany, though Percy,
angry and upset, sailed on to Melbourne. He said she could join him if
she liked. He stayed till her baby was born, then went because he didn't
want to face Jack.
Jack arrived by sea. He was still not strong enough to travel by land.
He got a vessel going to Adelaide, that touched at Albany.
Monica, thinner than ever, with a little baby in her arms, and her
flower-face like a chilled flower, was on the dock to meet him. He saw
her at once, and his heart gave a queer lurch.
As he came forward to meet her, their eyes met. Her yellow eyes looked
straight into his, with the same queer, panther-like scrutiny, and the
eternal question. She was a question, and she had got to be answered. It
made her fearless, almost shameless, whatever she did.
But with Percy, the fear had nipped her, the fear that she should go
forever unanswered, as if life had rejected her.
This nipped look and her strange yellow flare of question as she peered
at him under her brows, like a panther, made Jack's cheeks slowly
darken, and the life-blood flow into him stronger, heavier. He knew his
passion for her was the same. Thank God he met her at last.
"You're awfully thin," she said.
"So are you," he answered.
And she laughed her quick, queer, breathless little laugh, showing her
pointed teeth. She had seen the death-look in his eyes and it was her
answer, a bitter answer enough. She stopped to put straight the tiny
bonnet over her little baby's face, with a delicate, remote movement. He
watched her in silence.
"Where do you want to go?" she asked him, without looking at him.
"With you," he said.
Then she looked at him again, with the dry-eyed question. But she saw
the unapproachable death-look there in his eyes, at the back of their
dark-blue, dilated emotion and passion. And her heart gave up. She
looked down the pier, as if to walk away. He carried his own bag. They
set off side by side.
She lived in a tiny slab cottage in a side lane. But she called first at
a neighbour's house, for her other child. It was a tiny, toddling thing
with a defiant stare in its pale-blue eyes. Monica held her baby on one
arm, and led this tottering child by the other. Jack walked at her side
in silence.
The cottage had just two rooms, poorly furnished. But it was clean, and
had bright cotton curtains and a sofa-bed, and a pale-blue convolvulus
vine mingling with a passion vine over the window.
She laid the baby down in its cradle, and began to take off the bonnet
of the little girl. She had called it Jane.
Jack watched the little Jane as if fascinated. The infant had curly
reddish hair, of a lovely fine texture and a beautiful tint, something
like raw silk with threads of red. Her eyes were round and bright blue,
and rather defiant, and she had the delicate complexion of her kind. She
fingered her mother's brooch, like a little monkey touching a bit of
glittering gold, as Monica stooped to her.
"Daddy gone!" she said in her chirping, bird-like, quite emotionless
tone.
"Yes, Daddy gone!" replied Monica, as emotionlessly.
The child then glanced with unmoved curiosity at Jack. She kept on
looking and looking at him, sideways. And he watched her just as
sharply, her sharp, pale-blue eyes.
"Him more Daddy?" she asked.
"I don't know," replied Monica, who was suckling her baby.
"Yes," said Jack in a rather hard tone, smiling with a touch of mockery.
"I'm your new father."
The child smiled back at him a faint, mocking little grin, and put her
finger in her mouth.
The day passed slowly in the strange place, Monica busy all the time
with the children and the house. Poor Monica, she was already a drudge.
She was still careless and hasty in her methods, but clean, and
uncomplaining. She kept herself to herself, and did what she had to do.
And Jack watched, mostly silent.
At last the lamp was lighted, the children were both in bed. Monica
cooked a little supper over the fire.
Before he came to the fable, Jack asked:
"Is Jane Easu's child?"
"I thought you knew," she said.
"No one has told me. Is she?"
Monica turned and faced him, with the yellow flare in her eyes, as she
looked into his eyes, challenging.
"Yes," she said.
But his eyes did not change. The remoteness at the back of them did not
come any nearer.
"Shall you hate her?" she asked, rather breathlessly.
"I don't know," he said slowly.
"Don't!" she pleaded, in the same breathlessness. "Because I rather hate
her."
"She's too little to hate," said Jack.
"I know," said Monica rather doubtfully.
She put the food on the table. But she herself ate nothing.
"Aren't you well? You don't eat," he asked.
"I can't eat just now," she said.
"If you have a child to suckle, you should," he replied.
But she only became more silent, and her hands hung dead in her lap.
Then the baby began to cry, a thin, poor, frail noise, and she went to
soothe it.
When she came back, Jack had left the table and was sitting in Percy's
wooden arm-chair.
"Percy's child doesn't seem to have much life in it," he said.
"Not very much," she replied. And her hands trembled as she cleared away
the dishes.
When she had finished, she moved about, afraid to sit down. He called
her to him.
"Monica!" he said with a little jerk of his head, meaning she should
come to him.
She came rather slowly, her queer, pure-seeming face looking like a
hurt. She stood with her thin hands hanging in front of her apron.
"Monica!" he said, rising and taking her hands. "I should still want you
if you had a hundred children. So we won't say any more about that. And
you won't oppose me when there's anything I want to do, will you?"
She shook her head.
"No, I won't oppose you," she said, in a dead little voice.
"Let me come to you, then," he said. "I should have to come to you if
you went to Melbourne or all round the world.' And I should be glad to
come," he added whimsically, with the warmth of his old smile coming
into his eyes. "I suppose I should be glad to come, if it was in hell."
"But it isn't hell, is it?" she asked, wistfully and a little defiantly.
"Not a bit," he said. "You've got too much pluck in you to spoil. You're
as good to me as you were the first time I knew you. Only Easu might
have spoiled you."
"And you killed him," she said quickly, half in reproach.
"Would you rather he'd killed me?" he asked.
She looked a long time into his eyes, with that watchful, searching look
that used to hurt him. Now it hurt him no more.
She shook her head, saying:
"I'm glad you killed him. I couldn't bear to think of him living on, and
sneering--sneering!--I was always in love with you, really."
"Ah, Monica!" he exclaimed softly, teasingly, with a little smile. And
she flushed, and flashed with anger.
"If you never knew, it was your own fault!" she jerked out.
"_Really_," he said, quoting and echoing the word as she had said it,
and smiling with a touch of raillery at her, before he added:
"You always loved me really, but you loved the others as well,
unreally."
"Yes," she said, baffled, defiant.
"All right, that day is over. You've had your unreal loves. Now come and
have your real one."
In the next room Easu's child was sleeping in its odd little way, a
sleep that was neither innocent nor not innocent, queer and naively
"knowing," even in its sleep. Jack watched it as he took off his things:
this little inheritance he had from Easu. An odd little thing. With an
odd, loveless little spirit of its own, cut off and not daunted. He
wouldn't love it, because it wasn't lovable. But its odd little
dauntlessness and defiance amused him, he would see it had fair play.
And he took Monica in his arms, glad to get into grips with his own fate
again. And it was good. It was better, perhaps, than his passionate
desirings of earlier days had imagined. Because he didn't lose and
scatter himself. He gathered, like a reaper at harvest gathering.
And Monica, who woke for her baby, looked at him as he slept soundly and
she sat in bed suckling her child. She saw in him the eternal stranger.
There he was, the eternal stranger, lying in her bed sleeping at her
side. She rocked her baby slightly as she sat up in the night, still
rocking in the last throes of rebellion. The eternal stranger, whom she
feared, because she could never finally possess him, and never finally
know him! He would never _belong_ to her. This had made her rebel so
terribly against the thought of him. Because she would have to belong to
_him._ Now he had arrived again before her like a doom, a doom she still
fought against, but could no longer withstand. Because the emptiness of
the other men, Easu, Percy, all the men she knew, was worse than the
doom of this man who would never give her his ultimate intimacy, but who
would be able to hold her till the end of time. There was something
enduring and changeless in him. But she would never hold _him_ entirely.
Never! She would have to resign herself to this.
Well, so be it. At least it relieved her of the burden of responsibility
for life. It took away from her, her own strange and fascinating female
power, which she couldn't bear to part with. But at the same time she
felt saved, because her own power frightened her, having brought her to
a brink of nothingness that was like madness. The nothingness that
fronted her with Percy was worse than submitting to this man beside her.
After all, this man was magical.
She put her child in its cradle, and returning waked the man. He put out
his hand quickly for her, as if she were a new, blind discovery. She
quivered and thrilled, and left it to him. It was his mystery, since he
would have it so.
III
They were married in Albany, and stayed there another month waiting for
a ship. Then they sailed away, all the family, away to the North-West.
They did not go to Perth: they did not go to Wandoo. Only Jack saw Mr.
George in Fremantle, and waved to him Good-bye as the ship proceeded
North.
Then came two months of wandering, a pretty business with a baby and a
toddling infant. The second month, Percy's baby suddenly died in the
heat, and Monica hardly mourned for it. As Jack looked at its pinched
little dead face, he said: _You are better dead._ And that was true.
The little Jane, however, showed no signs of dying. The knocking about
seemed to suit her. Monica remained very thin. It was a sort of
hell-life to her, this struggling from place to place in the heat and
dust, no water to wash in, sleeping anywhere like a lost dog, eating the
food that came. Because she loved to be clean and good-looking and in
graceful surroundings. What fiend of hell had ordained that she must be
a sort of tramp-woman in the back of beyond?
She did not know, so it was no good asking. Jack seemed to know what he
wanted. And she was his woman, fated to him. There was no more to it.
Through the purgatory of discomfort she had to go. And he was good to
her, thoughtful for her, in material things. But at the centre of his
soul he was not thoughtful for her. He just possessed her, mysteriously
owned her, and went ahead with his own obsessions.
Sometimes she tried to rebel. Sometimes she wanted to refuse to go any
further, to refuse to be a party to his will. But then he suddenly
looked so angry, and so remote, looked at her with such far-off, cold,
haughty eyes, that she was frightened. She was afraid he would abandon
her, or ship her back to Perth, and put her out of his life forever.
Above all things, she didn't want to be shipped back to Perth. Here in
the wild she could have taken up with another man. She knew that. But
she knew that if she did, Jack would just put her out of his life
altogether. There would be no return. His passion for her would just
take the form of excluding her forever from his being. Because passion
can so reverse itself, and from being a great desire that draws the
beloved towards itself, it can become an eternal revulsion, excluding
the once-beloved forever from any contact at all.
Monica knew this. And whenever she tried to oppose him, and the deathly
anger rose in him, she was pierced with a fear so acute she had to hold
on to some support, to prevent herself sinking to the ground. It was a
strange fear, as if she were going to be cast out of the land of the
living, among the unliving that slink like pariahs outside.
Afterwards she was puzzled. Why had he got this power over her? Why
couldn't she be a free woman, to go where she chose, and be a complete
thing in herself?
She caught at the idea. But it was no good. When he went away
prospecting for a week or more at a time, she would struggle to regain
her woman's freedom. And it would seem to her as if she had got it: she
was free of him again. She was a free being, by herself.
But then, when he came back, tired, sunburnt, ragged, and still
unsuccessful: and when he looked at her with desire in his eyes, the
living desire for her; she was so glad, suddenly, as if she had
forgotten, or as if she had never known what his desire of her meant to
her. She was so glad, she was weak with gladness instead of fear. And
if, in perverseness, she still tried to oppose him, in the light of her
supposedly regained freedom; and she saw the strange glow of desire for
her go out of his eyes, and the strange loveliness, to her, of his
wanting to have her near, in the room, giving him his meal or sitting
near him outside in the shade of the evening; then, when his face
changed, and took on the curious look of aloofness, as if he glistened
with anger looking down on her from a long way off; then she felt all
her own world turn to smoke, and her own will mysteriously evaporated,
leaving her only wanting to be wanted again, back in his world. Her
freedom was worth less than nothing.
Still often, when he was gone, leaving her alone in the little cabin,
she was glad. She was free to spread her own woman's aura round her, she
was free to delight in her own woman's idleness and whimsicality, free
to amuse herself half teasing, half loving that little odd female of a
Jane. And sometimes she would go to the cabins of other women, and
gossip. And sometimes she would flirt with a young miner or prospector
who seemed handsome. And she would get back her young, gay liveliness
and freedom.
But when the man she flirted with wanted to kiss her, or put his arm
round her waist, she found it made her go cold and savagely hostile. It
was not as in the old days, when it gave her a thrill to be seized and
kissed, whether by Easu, by Percy or Jack, or whatever man it was she
was flirting with. Then, there had been a spark between her and many a
man. But now, alas, the spark wouldn't fly. The man might be ever so
good-looking and likeable, yet when he touched her, instead of the spark
flying from her to him, immediately all the spark went dead in her. And
this left her so angry, she could kill herself, or so wretched, she
couldn't even cry.
That little goggle-eyed imp of a Jane, in spite of her one solitary year
of age, seemed somehow to divine what was happening inside her mother's
breast, and she seemed to chuckle wickedly. Monica always felt that the
brat knew, and that she took Jack's side.
Jane always wanted Jack to come back. When he was away, she would toddle
about on her own little affairs, curiously complacent and impervious to
outer influences. But if she heard a horse coming up to the hut, she was
at the door in a flash. And Monica saw with a pang, how steadily intent
the brat was on the man's return. Somehow, from Jane, Monica knew that
Jack would go with other women. Because of the spark that flashed to him
from that brat of a baby of Easu's.
And at evening, Jane hated going to bed if Jack hadn't come home. She
would be a real little hell-monkey. It was as if she felt the house
wasn't safe, wasn't real, till he had come in.
Which annoyed Monica exceedingly. Why wasn't the mother enough for the
child?
But she wasn't. And when Jane was in bed, Monica would take up the
uneasiness of the manless house. She would sit like a cat shut up in a
strange room, unable to settle, unable really to rest, and hating the
night for having come and surprised her in her empty loneliness. Her
loneliness might be really enjoyable during the day. But after nightfall
it was empty, sterile, a mere oppression to her. She wished he would
come home, if only so that she could hate him.
And she felt a flash of joy when she heard his footstep on the stones
outside, even if the flash served only to kindle a great resentment
against him. And he would come in, with his burnt, half-seeing face,
unsuccessful, worn, silent, yet not uncheerful. And he spoke his few
rather low words, from his chest, asking her something. And she knew he
had come back to her. But where from, and what from, she would never
know entirely.
She had always known where Percy had been, and what he had been doing.
She felt she would always have known, with Easu. But with Jack she never
knew. And sometimes this infuriated her. But it was no good. He would
tell her anything she asked. And then she felt there was something she
couldn't ask about.
The months went by. He staked his claim, and worked like a navvy. He was
a navvy, nothing but a navvy. And she was a navvy's wife, in a hut of
one room, in a desert of heat and sand and grey-coloured bush, sleeping
on a piece of canvas stretched on a low trestle, eating on a tin plate,
eating sand by the mouthful when the wind blew. Percy's baby was dead
and buried in the sand: another sop to the avid country. And she herself
was with child again, and thin as a rat. But it was his child this time,
so she had a certain savage satisfaction in it.
He went on working at his claim. It was now more than a year he had
spent at this game of looking for gold, and he had hardly found a cent's
worth. They were very poor, in debt to the keeper of the store. But
everybody had a queer respect for Jack. They dared not be very familiar
with him, but they didn't resent him. He had a good aura. The other men
might jeer sometimes at his frank but unapproachable aloofness, his
subtle delicacy, and his simple sort of pride. Yet when he was spoken
to, his answer was so much in the spirit of the question, so frank, that
you couldn't resent him. In ordinary things he was gay and completely
one of themselves. The self that was beyond them he never let intrude.
Hence their curious respect for him.
Because there was something unordinary in him. The biggest part of
himself he kept entirely to himself, and a curious sombre steadfastness
inside him made shifty men uneasy with him. He could never completely
mix in, in the vulgar way, with men. He would take a drink with the
rest, and laugh and talk half an hour away. Even get a bit tipsy and
talk rather brilliantly. But always, always at the back of his eyes was
this sombre aloofness, that could never come forward and meet and
mingle, but held back, apart, waiting.
They called him, after his father, the General. But never was a General
with so small an army at his command. He was playing a lone hand. The
mate he was working with suddenly chucked up the job, and travelled
away, and the General went on alone. He moved about the camp at his
ease. When he sat in the bar drinking his beer with the other men, he
was really alone, and they knew it. But he had a good aura, so they felt
a certain real respect for his loneliness. And when he was there, they
talked and behaved as if in the aura of a certain blood-purity, although
he was in rags, for Monica hated sewing and couldn't bear, simply
couldn't bear, to mend his old shirts and trousers. And there was no
money to buy new.
He held on. He did not get depressed or melancholy. When he got
absolutely stumped, he went away and did hired work for a spell. Then he
came back to the goldfield. He was now nothing but a miner. The miner's
instinct had developed in him. He had to wait for his instinct to
perfect itself. He knew that. He knew he was not a man to be favoured by
blind luck. Whatever he won, he must win by mystic conquest.
If he wanted gold he must master it in the veins of the earth. He knew
this. And for this reason he gave way neither to melancholy nor to
impatience. "If I can't win," he said to himself, "it's because I'm not
master of the thing I'm up against."
"If I can't win, I'll die fighting," he said to himself. "But in the end
I will win."
There was nothing to do but to fight, and fight on. This was his creed.
And a fighter has no use for melancholy and impatience.
He saw the fight his boyhood had been, against his Aunts, and school and
college. He didn't want to be made _quite_ tame, and they had wanted to
tame him, like all the rest. His father was a good man and a good
soldier: but a tame one. He himself was not a soldier, nor even a good
man. But also he was not tame. Not a tame dog, like all the rest.
For this reason he had come to Australia, away from the welter of
vicious tameness. For tame dogs are far more vicious than wild ones.
Only they can be brought to heel.
In Australia, a new sort of fight. A fight with tame dogs that were
playing wild. Easu was a tame dog, playing the wolf in a mongrel,
back-biting way. Tame dogs escaped and became licentious. That was
Australia. He knew that.
But they were not all quite tame. Tom, the safe Tom, had salt of wild
savour still in his blood. And Lennie had his wild streak. So had
Monica. So, somewhere had the _à terre_ Mary. Some odd freakish
wildness of the splendid, powerful, wild old English blood.
Jack had escaped the tamers: they couldn't touch him now. He had escaped
the insidious tameness, the slight degeneracy, of Wandoo. He had learned
the tricks of the escaped tame dogs who played at licentiousness. And he
had mastered Monica, who had wanted to be a domestic bitch playing wild.
He had captured her wildness, to mate his own wildness.
It was no good playing wild. If he had any real wildness in him, it was
dark, and wary, and collected, self-responsible, and of unbreakable
steadfastness: like the wildness of a wolf or a fox, that knows it will
die if it is caught.
If you had a tang of the old wildness in you, you ran with the most
intense wariness, knowing that the good tame dogs are really turning
into licentious, vicious tame dogs. The vicious tame dogs, pretending to
be wild, hate the real clean wildness of an unbroken thing much more
than do the respectable tame people.
No, if you refuse to be tamed, you have to be most wary, most subtle, on
your guard all the time. You can't afford to be licentious. If you are,
you will die in the trap. For the world is a great trap set wide for the
unwary.
Jack had learned all these things. He refused to be tamed. He knew that
the dark kingdom of death ahead had no room for tame dogs. They merely
were put into the earth as carrion. Only the wild, untamed souls walked
on after death over the border into the porch of death, to be lords of
death and masters of the next living. This he knew. The tame dogs were
put into the earth as carrion, like Easu and Percy's poor little baby,
and Jacob Ellis. He often wondered if that courageous old witch-cat of a
Gran had slipped into the halls of death, to be one of the ladies of the
dark. The lords of death, and the ladies of the dark! He would take his
own Monica over the border when she died. She would sit unbroken, a
quiet, fearless bride in the dark chambers of the dead, the dead who
order the goings of the next living.
That was the goal of the afterwards, that he had at the back of his
eyes. But meanwhile here on earth he had to win. He had to make room
again on earth for those who are not unbroken, those who are not tamed
to carrion. Some place for those who know the dark mystery of being
royal in death (so that they can enact the shadow of their own royalty
on earth). Some place for the souls that are in themselves dark and have
some of the sumptuousness of proud death, no matter what their fathers
were. Jack's father was tame, as kings and dukes to-day are almost
mongrelly tame. But Jack was not tame. And Easu's weird baby was not
tame. She had some of the eternal fearlessness of the aristocrat whose
bones are pure. But a weird sort of aristocrat.
Jack wanted to make a place on earth for a few aristocrats-to-the-bone.
He wanted to conquer the world.
And first he must conquer gold. As things are, only the tame go out and
conquer gold, and make a lucrative tameness. The untamed forfeit their
gold.
"I must conquer gold!" said Jack to himself. "I must open the veins of
the earth and bleed the power of gold into my own veins, for the
fulfilling of the aristocrats-of-the-bone. I must bring the great stream
of gold flowing in another direction, away from the veins of the tame
ones, into the veins of the lords of death. I must start the river of
the wealth of the world rolling in a new course, down the sombre, quiet,
proud valleys of the lords of death and the ladies of the dark, the
aristocrats of the afterwards."
So he talked to himself, as he wandered alone in his search, or sat on
the bench with a pot of beer, or stepped into Monica's hot little hut.
And when he failed he knew it was because he had not fought intensely
enough, and subtly enough.
The bad food, the climate, the hard life gave him a sort of fever and an
eczema. But it was no matter. That was only the pulp of him paying the
penalty. The powerful skeleton he was, was powerful as ever. The pulp of
him, his belly, his heart, his muscle seemed not to be able to affect
his strength, or at least his power, for more than a short time.
Sometimes he broke down. Then he would think what he could do with
himself, do for himself, for his flesh and blood. And what he _could_
do, he would do. And when he could do no more, he would go and lie down
in the mine, or hide in some shade, lying on the earth, alone, away from
anything human. Till the earth itself gave him back his power. Till the
powerful living skeleton of him resumed its sway and serenity and fierce
power.
He knew he was winning, winning slowly, even in his fight with the
earth, his fight for gold. It was on the cards he might die before his
victory. Then it would be death, he would have to accept it. He would
have to go into death, and leave Monica and Jane and the coming baby to
fate.
Meanwhile he would fight, and fight on. The baby was near, there was no
money. He had to stay and watch Monica. She, poor thing, went to bed
with twins, two boys. There was nothing hardly left of her. He had to
give up everything, even his thoughts, and bend his whole life to her,
to help her through, and save her and the two quite healthy baby boys.
For a month he was doctor and nurse and housewife and husband, and he
gave himself absolutely to the work, without a moment's failing. Poor
Monica, when she couldn't bear herself, he held her hips together with
his arm, and she clung to his neck for life.
This time he almost gave up. He almost decided to go and hire himself
out to steady work, to keep her and the babies in peace and safety. To
be a hired workman for the rest of his days.
And as he sat with his eyes dark and unchanging, ready to accept this
fate, since this his fate must be, came a letter from Mr. George with an
enclosure from England, and a cheque for fifty pounds, a legacy from one
of the Aunts, who had so benevolently died at the right moment. He
decided his dark Lord did not intend him to go and hire himself out for
life, as a hired labourer. He decided Monica and the babies did not want
the peace and safety of a hired labourer's cottage. Perhaps better die
and be buried in the sand, and leave their skeletons like white
messengers in the ground of this Australia.
So he went back to his working. And three days later struck gold, so
that there was gold on his pick-point. He was alone, and he refused at
first to get excited. But his trained instinct knew that it was a rich
lode. He worked along the van, and felt the rich weight of the
yellow-streaked stuff he fetched out. The light-coloured softish stuff.
He sat looking at it in his hand, and the glint of it in the dark
earth-rock of the mine, in the light of the lamp. And his bowels leaped
in him, knowing that the white gods of tameness would wilt and perish as
the pale gold flowed out of their veins.
There would be a place on earth for the lords of death. His own Lord had
at last spoken.
Jack sent quickly for Lennie to come and work with him. For Lennie, with
a wife and a child, was struggling vary hard.
Lea and Tom both came. Jack had not expected Tom. But Tom lifted his
brown eyes to Jack and said:
"I sortta felt I couldn't stand even Len being mates with you, an' me
not there. I was your first mate. Jack. I've never been myself since I
parted with you."
"All right," laughed Jack. "You're my first mate."
"That's what I am. General," said Tom.
Jack had showed Monica some of the ore, and told her the mine seemed to
be turning out fairly. She was getting back her own strength, that those
two monstrous young twins had almost robbed from her entirely. Jack was
very careful of her. He wanted above all things that she should become
really strong again.
And she, with her rare vitality, soon began to bloom once more. And as
her strength came back she was very much taken up with her babies. These
were the first she had enjoyed. The other two she had never really
enjoyed. But with these she was as fussy as a young cat with her
kittens. She almost forgot Jack entirely. Left him to be busy with Tom
and Lennie and his mine. Even the gold failed to excite her.
And she had rather a triumph. She was able to be queenly again with Tom
and Lennie. As a girl, she had always been a bit queenly with the rest
of them at Wandoo. And she couldn't bear to be humiliated in their eyes.
Now she needn't. She had the General for her husband, she had his twins.
And he had gold in his mine. Hadn't she a perfect right to be queenly
with Tom and Lennie? She even got into the habit, right at the
beginning, of speaking of Jack as "the General" to them.
"Where's the General? Didn't he come down with you?" she would snap at
them, in her old sparky fashion.
"He's reviewing his troops," Lennie sarcastically answered.
Whereupon Jack appeared in the door, still in rags. And it was Lennie
who mended his shirt for him, when it was torn on the shoulder and
showed the smooth man underneath. Monica still couldn't bring herself to
these fiddling bothering jobs.