of vacant spaces. The sense of irresponsible freedom. The sense of
do-as-you-please liberty. And all utterly uninteresting. What is more
hopelessly uninteresting than accomplished liberty? Great swarming,
teeming Sydney flowing out into these myriads of bungalows, like shallow
waters spreading, undyked. And what then? Nothing. No inner life, no
high command, no interest in anything, finally.
Somers turned over and shut his eyes. New countries were more
problematic than old ones. One loved the sense of release from old
pressure and old tight control, from the old world of water-tight
compartments. This was Sunday afternoon, but with none of the surfeited
dreariness of English Sunday afternoons. It was still a raw loose world.
All Sydney would be out by the sea or in the bush, a roving, unbroken
world. They all rushed from where they were to somewhere else, on
holidays. And to-morrow they’d all be working away, with just as little
meaning, working without any meaning, playing without any meaning; and
yet quite strenuous at it all. It was just dazing. Even the rush for
money had no real pip in it. They really cared very little for the power
that money can give. And except for the sense of power, that had no real
significance here. When all is said and done, even money is not much
good where there is no genuine culture. Money is a means to rising to a
higher, subtler, fuller state of consciousness, or nothing. And when you
flatly don’t want a fuller consciousness, what good is your money to
you? Just to chuck about and gamble with. Even money is a European
invention--European and American. It has no real magic in Australia.
Poor Richard Lovat wearied himself to death struggling with the problem
of himself, and calling it Australia. There was no actual need for him
to struggle with Australia: he must have done it in the hedonistic
sense, to please himself. But it wore him to rags.
Harriet sat up and began dusting the sand from her coat--Lovat did
likewise. Then they rose to be going back to the tram-car. There was a
motor-car standing on the sand of the road near the gate of the end
house. The end house was called St Columb, and Somers’ heart flew to
Cornwall. It was quite a nice little place, standing on a bluff of sand
sideways above the lagoon.
“I wouldn’t mind that,” said Harriet, looking up at St Columb.
But Somers did not answer. He was shut against any of these humiliating
little bungalows. “Love’s Harbour” he was just passing by, and it was “4
Sale.” It would be. He ploughed grimly through the sand.
“Arcady”--“Stella Maris”--“Racketty-Coo.”
“I say!” called a voice from behind.
It was Mrs Callcott running unevenly over the sand after them, the
colour high in her cheeks. She wore a pale grey crêpe de chine dress and
grey suède shoes. Some distance behind her Jack Callcott was following,
in his shirt-sleeves.
“Fancy you being here!” gasped Mrs Callcott, and Harriet was so
flustered she could only cry:
“Oh, how do you do!”--and effusively shake hands, as if she were meeting
some former acquaintance on Piccadilly. The shaking hands quite put Mrs
Callcott off her track. She felt it almost an affront, and went red. Her
husband sauntered up and put his hands in his pockets, to avoid
mistakes.
“Ha, what are _you_ doing here,” he said to the Somers pair. “Wouldn’t
you like a cup of tea?”
Harriet glanced at Richard Lovat. He was smiling faintly.
“Oh, we should _love_ it,” she replied to Mr Callcott. “But where?--have
you got a house here?”
“My sister has the end house,” said he.
“Oh, but--will she want us?” cried Harriet, backing out.
The Callcotts stood for a moment silent.
“Yes, if you like to come,” said Jack. And it was evident he was aware
of Somers’ desire to avoid contact.
“Well, I should be awfully grateful,” said Harriet. “Wouldn’ you,
Lovat?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling to himself, feeling Jack’s manly touch of
contempt for all this hedging.
So off they went to “St Columb.” The sister was a brown-eyed Australian
with a decided manner, kindly, but a little suspicious of the two
newcomers. Her husband was a young Cornishman, rather stout and short
and silent. He had his hair cut round at the back, in a slightly rounded
line above a smooth, sunburnt, reddened nape of the neck. Somers found
out later that this young Cornishman--his name was Trewhella--had
married his brother’s widow. Mrs Callcott supplied Harriet later on with
all the information concerning her sister-in-law. The first Trewhella,
Alfred John, had died two years ago, leaving his wife with a neat sum of
money and this house, “St Columb,” and also with a little girl named
Gladys, who came running in shaking her long brown hair just after the
Somers appeared. So the present Trewhellas were a newly-married couple.
The present husband, William James, went round in a strange, silent
fashion helping his wife Rose to prepare tea.
The bungalow was pleasant, a large room facing the sea, with verandahs
and other little rooms opening off. There were many family photographs,
and a framed medal and ribbon and letter praising the first Trewhella.
Mrs Trewhella was alert and watchful, and decided to be genteel. So the
party sat around in the basket chairs and on the settles under the
windows, instead of sitting at table for tea. And William James silently
but willingly carried round the bread and butter and the cakes.
He was a queer young man, with an Irish-looking face, rather pale, an
odd kind of humour in his grey eye and in the corners of his pursed
mouth. But he spoke never a word. It was hard to decide his
age--probably about thirty--a little younger than his wife. He seemed
silently pleased about something--perhaps his marriage. Somers noticed
that the whites of his eyes were rather bloodshot. He had been in
Australia since he was a boy of fifteen--he had come with his
brother--from St Columb, near Newquay--St Columb Major. So much Somers
elicited.
“Well, how do you like Sydney?” came the inevitable question from Mrs
Trewhella.
“The harbour, I think, is wonderful,” came Somers’ invariable answer.
“It is a fine harbour, isn’t it. And Sydney is a fine town. Oh yes, I’ve
lived there all my life.”
The conversation languished. Callcott was silent, and William James
seemed as if he were never anything else. Even the little girl only
fluttered into a whisper and went still again. Everybody was a little
embarrassed, rather stiff: too genteel, or not genteel enough. And the
men seemed absolute logs.
“You don’t think much of Australia, then?” said Jack to Somers.
“Why,” answered the latter, “how am I to judge! I haven’t even seen the
fringe of it.”
“Oh, it’s mostly fringe,” said Jack. “But it hasn’t made a good
impression on you?”
“I don’t know yet. My feelings are mixed. The _country_ seems to me to
have a fascination--strange--”
“But you don’t take to the Aussies, at first sight. Bit of a collision
between their aura and yours,” smiled Jack.
“Maybe that’s what it is,” said Somers. “That’s a useful way of putting
it. I can’t help my aura colliding, can I?”
“Of course you can’t. And if it’s a tender sort of aura, of course it
feels the bump.”
“Oh, don’t talk about it,” cried Harriet. “He must be just one big bump,
by the way he grumbles.”
They all laughed--perhaps a trifle uneasily.
“I thought so,” said Jack. “What made you come here? Thought you’d like
to write about it?”
“I thought I might like to live here--and write here,” replied Somers
smiling.
“Write about the bushrangers and the heroine lost in the bush and
wandering into a camp of bullies?” said Jack.
“Maybe,” said Somers.
“Do you mind if I ask you what sort of things you do write?” said Jack,
with some delicacy.
“Oh--poetry--essays.”
“Essays about what?”
“Oh--rubbish mostly.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“Oh, Lovat, don’t be so silly. You _know_ do speakyou don’t think your
essays rubbish,” put in Harriet. “They’re about life, and democracy, and
equality, and all that sort of thing,” Harriet explained.
“Oh, yes?” said Jack. “I’d like to read some.”
“Well,” hesitated Harriet. “He can lend you a volume--you’ve got some
with you, haven’t you?” she added, turning to Somers.
“I’ve got one,” admitted that individual, looking daggers at her.
“Well, you’ll lend it to Mr Callcott, won’t you?”
“If he wants it. But it will only bore him.”
“I might rise up to it, you know,” said Jack laconically, “if I bring
all my mental weight to bear on it.”
Somers flushed, and laughed at the contradiction in metaphor.
“It’s not the loftiness,” he said, rather amused. “It’s that people just
don’t care to hear some things.”
“Well, let me try,” said Jack. “We’re a new country--and we’re out to
learn.”
“That’s exactly what we’re not,” broke out William James, with a Cornish
accent and a blurt of a laugh. “We’re out to show to everybody that we
know everything there is to be known.”
“That’s some of us,” said Jack.
“And most of us,” said William James.
“Have it your own way, boy. But let us speak for the minority. And
there’s a minority that knows we’ve got to learn a big lesson--and
that’s willing to learn it.”
Again there was silence. The women seemed almost effaced.
“There’s one thing,” thought Somers to himself, “when these Colonials
_do_ speak seriously, they speak like men, not like babies.” He looked
up at Jack.
“It’s the world that’s got to learn a lesson,” he said. “Not only
Australia.” His tone was acid and sinister. And he looked with his hard,
pale blue eyes at Callcott. Callcott’s eyes, brown and less
concentrated, less hard, looked back curiously at the other man.
“Possibly it is,” he said. “But my job is Australia.”
Somers watched him. Callcott had a pale, clean-shaven, lean face with
close-shut lips. But his lips weren’t bitten in until they just formed a
slit, as they so often are in Colonials. And his eyes had a touch of
mystery, of aboriginal darkness.
“Do you care very much for Australia?” said Somers, a little wistfully.
“I believe I do,” said Jack. “But if I was out of a job like plenty of
other unlucky diggers, I suppose I should care more about getting a
job.”
“But you care very much about your Australia?”
“My Australia? Yes, I own about seven acres of it, all told. I suppose I
care very much about that. I pay my taxes on it, all right.”
“No, but the future of Australia.”
“You’ll never see me on a platform shouting about it.”
The Lovats said they must be going.
“If you like to crowd in,” said Jack, “we can take you in the car. We
can squeeze in Mr Somers in front, and there’ll be plenty of room for
the others at the back, if Gladys sits on her Dad’s knee.”
This time Somers accepted at once. He felt the halting refusals were
becoming ridiculous.
They left at sunset. The west, over the land, was a clear gush of light
up from the departed sun. The east, over the Pacific, was a tall concave
of rose-coloured clouds, a marvellous high apse. Now the bush had gone
dark and spectral again, on the right hand. You might still imagine
inhuman presences moving among the gum trees. And from time to time, on
the left hand, they caught sight of the long green rollers of the
Pacific, with the star-white foam, and behind that the dusk-green sea
glimmered over with smoky rose, reflected from the eastern horizon where
the bank of flesh-rose colour and pure smoke-blue lingered a long time,
like magic, as if the sky’s rim were cooling down. It seemed to Somers
characteristic of Australia, this far-off flesh-rose bank of colour on
the sky’s horizon, so tender and unvisited, topped with the smoky,
beautiful blueness. And then the thickness of the night’s stars
overhead, and one star very brave in the last effulgence of sunset,
westward over the continent. As soon as night came, all the
raggle-taggle of amorphous white settlements disappeared, and the
continent of the Kangaroo reassumed its strange, unvisited glamour, a
kind of virgin sensual aloofness.
Somers sat in front between Jack and Victoria Callcott, because he was
so slight. He made himself as small as he could, like the ham in the
sandwich. When he looked her way, he found Victoria watching him under
her lashes, and as she met his eyes, she flared into smile that filled
him with wonder. She had such a charming, innocent look, like an
innocent girl, naive and a little gawky. Yet the strange exposed smile
she gave him in the dusk. It puzzled him to know what to make of it.
Like an offering--and yet innocent. Perhaps like the sacred prostitutes
of the temple: acknowledgment of the sacredness of the act. He chose not
to think of it, and stared away across the bonnet of the car at the
fading land.
Queer, thought Somers, this girl at once sees perhaps the most real me,
and most women take me for something I am not at all. Queer to be
recognised at once, as if one were of the same family.
He had to admit that he was flattered also. She seemed to see the wonder
in him. And she had none of the European women’s desire to make a
conquest of him, none of that feminine rapacity which is so hateful in
the old world. She seemed like an old Greek girl just bringing an
offering to the altar of the mystic Bacchus. The offering of herself.
Her husband sat steering the car and smoking his short pipe in silence.
He seemed to have something to think about. At least he had considerable
power of silence, a silence which made itself felt. Perhaps he knew his
wife much better than anyone else. At any rate he did not feel it
necessary to keep an eye on her. If she liked to look at Somers with a
strange, exposed smile, that was her affair. She could do as she liked
in that direction, so far as he, Jack Callcott, was concerned. She was
his wife: she knew it, and he knew it. And it was quite established and
final. So long as she did not betray what was between her and him, as
husband and wife, she could do as she liked with the rest of herself.
And he could, quite rightly, trust her to be faithful to that
undefinable relation which subsisted between them as man and wife. He
didn’t pretend and didn’t want to occupy the whole field of her
consciousness.
And in just the same way, that bond which connected himself with her, he
would always keep unbroken for his part. But that did not mean that he
was sworn body and soul to his wife. Oh no. There was a good deal of him
which did not come into the marriage bond, and with all this part of
himself he was free to make the best he could, according to his own idea.
He loved her, quite sincerely, for her naive sophisticated innocence
which allowed him to be unknown to her, except in so far as they were
truly and intimately related. It was the innocence which has been
through the fire, and knows its own limitations. In the same way he
quite consciously chose not to know anything more about her than just so
much as entered into the absolute relationship between them. He quite
definitely did not want to absorb her, or to occupy the whole field of
her nature. He would trust her to go her own way, only keeping her to
the pledge that was between them. What this pledge consisted in he did
not try to define. It was something indefinite: the field of contact
between their two personalities. Where their two personalities met and
joined, they were one, and pledged to permanent fidelity. But that part
in each of them which did not belong to the other was free from all
enquiry or even from knowledge. Each silently consented to leave the
other in large part unknown, unknown in word and deed and very being.
They didn’t _want_ to know--too much knowledge would be like shackles.
Such marriage is established on a very subtle sense of honour and of
individual integrity. It seems as if each race and each continent has
its own marriage instinct. And the instinct that develops in Australia
will certainly not be the same as the instinct that develops in America.
And each people must follow its own instinct, if it is to live, no
matter whether the marriage law be universal or not.
The Callcotts had come to no agreement, verbally, as to their marriage.
They had not thought it out. They were Australians, of strongly,
subtly-developed desire for freedom, and with considerable indifference
to old formulæ and the conventions based thereon. So they took their
stand instinctively and calmly. Jack had defined his stand as far as he
found necessary. If his wife was good to him and satisfied him in so far
as _he_ went, then he was pledged to trust her to do as she liked
outside his ken, outside his range. He would make a cage for nobody.
This he openly propounded to his mates: to William James, for example,
and later to Somers. William James said yes, but thought the more.
Somers was frankly disturbed, not liking the thought of applying the
same prescription to his own marriage.
They put down the Trewhellas at their house in North Sydney, and went on
to Murdoch Road over the ferry. Jack had still to take the car down to
the garage in town. Victoria said she would prepare the high tea which
takes the place of dinner and supper in Australia, against his return.
So Harriet boldly invited them to this high tea--a real substantial
meal--in her own house. Victoria was to help her prepare it, and Jack
was to come straight back to Torestin. Victoria was as pleased as a lamb
with two tails over this arrangement, and went in to change her dress.
Somers knew why Harriet had launched this invitation. It was because she
had had a wonderfully successful cooking morning. Like plenty of other
women Harriet had learned to cook during war-time, and now she loved it,
once in a while. This had been one of the whiles. Somers had stoked the
excellent little stove, and peeled the apples and potatoes and onions
and pumpkin, and looked after the meat and the sauces, while Harriet had
lashed out in pies and tarts and little cakes and baked custard. She now
surveyed her prize Beeton shelf with love, and began to whisk up a
mayonnaise for potato salad.
Victoria appeared in a pale gauze dress of pale pink with little dabs of
gold--a sort of tea-party dress--and with her brown hair loosely knotted
behind, and with innocent sophistication pulled a bit untidy over her
womanly forehead, she looked winsome. Her colour was very warm, and she
was gawkily excited. Harriet put on an old yellow silk frock, and Somers
changed into a dark suit. For tea there was cold roast pork with
first-class brown crackling on it, and potato salad, beetroot, and
lettuce, and apple chutney; then a dressed lobster--or crayfish, very
good, pink and white; and then apple pie and custard-tarts and cakes
and a dish of apples and passion fruits and oranges, a pine-apple and
some bananas: and of course big cups of tea, breakfast-cups.
Victoria and Harriet were delighted, Somers juggled with colour-schemes
on the table, the one central room in the bungalow was brilliantly
lighted, and the kettle sang on the hearth. After months of India, with
all the Indian decorum and two silent men-servants waiting at table: and
after the old-fashioned gentility of the P. and O. steamer, Somers and
Harriet felt this show rather a come-down maybe, but still good fun.
Victoria felt it was almost “society.” They waited for Jack.
Jack arrived bending forward rather in the doorway, a watchful look on
his pale, clean-shaven face, and that atmosphere of silence about him
which is characteristic of many Australians.
“Kept you waiting?” he asked.
“We were just ready for you,” said Harriet.
Jack had to carve the meat, because Somers was so bad at it and didn’t
like doing it. Harriet poured the great cups of tea. Callcott looked
with a quick eye round the table to see exactly what he wanted to eat,
and Victoria peeped through her lashes to see exactly how Harriet
behaved. As Harriet always behaved in the vaguest manner possible, and
ate her sweets with her fish-fork and her soup with her pudding spoon, a
study of her table manners was not particularly profitable.
To Somers it was like being back twenty-five years, back in an English
farm-house in the Midlands, at Sunday tea. He had gone a long way from
the English Midlands, and got out of the way of them. Only to find them
here again, with hardly a change. To Harriet it was all novel and fun.
But Richard Lovat felt vaguely depressed.
The pleasant heartiness of the life he had known as a boy now depressed
him. He hated the promiscuous mixing in of all the company, the lack of
reserve in manner. He had preferred India for that: the gulf between the
native servants and the whites kept up a sort of tone. He had learned to
be separate, to talk across a slight distance. And that was an immense
relief to him, because it was really more his nature. Now he found
himself soused again in the old familiar “jolly and cosy” spirit of his
childhood and boyhood, and he was depressed.
Jack, of course, had a certain reserve. But of a different sort. Not a
physical reserve. He did keep his coat on, but he might as well have sat
there in his shirt-sleeves. His very silence was, so to speak, in its
shirt-sleeves.
There was a curious battle in silence going on between the two men. To
Harriet, all this familiar shirt-sleeve business was just fun, the
charades. In her most gushing genial moments she was still only
masquerading inside her class--the “upper” class of Europe. But Somers
was of the people himself, and he had that alert _instinct_ of the
common people, the instinctive knowledge of what his neighbour was
wanting and thinking, and the instinctive necessity to answer. With the
other classes, there is a certain definite breach between individual and
individual, and not much goes across except what is intended to go
across. But with the common people, and with most Australians, there is
no breach. The communication is silent and involuntary, the give and
take flows like waves from person to person, and each one knows: unless
he is foiled by speech. Each one knows in silence, reciprocates in
silence, and the talk as a rule just babbles on, on the surface. This is
the common people among themselves. But there is this difference in
Australia. Each individual seems to feel himself pledged to put himself
aside, to keep himself at least half out of count. The whole geniality
is based on a sort of code of “You put yourself aside, and I’ll put
myself aside.” This is done with a watchful will: a sort of duel. And
above this, a great geniality. But the continual holding most of himself
aside, out of count, makes a man go blank in his withheld self. And
that, too, is puzzling.
Probably this is more true of the men than of the women. Probably women
change less, from land to land, play fewer “code” tricks with
themselves. At any rate, Harriet and Victoria got on like a house on
fire, and as they were both beautiful women, and both looking well as
they talked, everything seemed splendid. But Victoria was really paying
just a wee bit of homage all the time, homage to the superior class.
As for the two men: Somers _seemed_ a gentleman, and Jack didn’t want
to be a gentleman. Somers _seemed_ a real gentleman. And yet Jack
recognised in him at once the intuitive response which only subsists,
normally, between members of the same class: between the common people.
Perhaps the best of the upper classes have the same intuitive
understanding of their fellow-man: but there is always a certain reserve
in the response, a preference for the non-intuitive forms of
communication, for deliberate speech. What is not said is supposed not
to exist: that is almost code of honour with the other classes. With the
true common people, only that which is _not_ said is of any vital
significance.
Which brings us back to Jack and Somers. The one thing Somers had kept,
and which he possessed in a very high degree, was the power of intuitive
communication with others. Much as he wanted to be alone, to stand clear
from the weary business of unanimity with everybody, he had never chosen
really to suspend this power of intuitive response: not till he was
personally offended, and then it switched off and became a blank wall.
But the smallest act of real kindness would call it back into life
again.