withhold his soul from responding to him, in a measure. And Jack, what
did he want? He saw this other little fellow, a gentleman, apparently,
and yet different, not exactly a gentleman. And he wanted to know him,
to talk to him. He wanted to get at the bottom of him. For there was
something about Somers--he might be a German, he might be a bolshevist,
he might be anything, and he _must_ be something, because he was
different, a gentleman and not a gentleman. He was different because,
when he looked at you, he knew you more or less in your own terms, not
as an outsider. He looked at you as if he were one of your own sort. He
answered you intuitively as if he were one of your own sort. And yet he
had the speech and the clear definiteness of a gentleman. Neither one
thing nor the other. And he seemed to know a lot. Jack was sure that
Somers knew a lot, and could tell him a lot, if he would but let it out.
If he had been just a gentleman, of course, Jack would never have
thought of wanting him to open out. Because a gentleman has nothing to
open towards a man of the people. He can only talk, and the working man
can only listen across a distance. But seeing that this little fellow
was both a gentleman and not a gentleman; seeing he was just like one of
yourselves, and yet had all the other qualities of a gentleman: why, you
might just as well get the secret out of him.
Somers knew the attitude, and was not going to be drawn. He talked
freely and pleasantly enough--but never as Jack wanted. He knew well
enough what Jack wanted: which was that they should talk together as man
to man--as pals, you know, with a little difference. But Somers would
never be pals with any man. It wasn’t in his nature. He talked
pleasantly and familiarly--fascinating to Victoria, who sat with her
brown eyes watching him, while she clung to Jack’s arm on the sofa. When
Somers was talking and telling, it was fascinating, and his quick,
mobile face changed and seemed full of magic. Perhaps it was difficult
to locate any definite _Somers_, any one individual in all this ripple
of animation and communication. The man himself seemed lost in the
bright aura of his rapid consciousness. This fascinated Victoria: she of
course imagined some sort of God in the fiery bush. But Jack was
mistrustful. He mistrusted all this bright quickness. If there was an
individual inside the brightly-burning bush of consciousness, let him
come out, man to man. Even if it was a sort of God in the bush, let him
come out, man to man. Otherwise let him be considered a sort of
mountebank, a show-man, too clever by half.
Somers knew pretty well Jack’s estimation of him. Jack, sitting there
smoking his little short pipe, with his lovely wife in her pink
georgette frock hanging on to his side, and the watchful look on his
face, was the manly man, the consciously manly man. And he had just a
bit of contempt for the brilliant little fellow opposite, and he felt
just a bit uneasy because the same little fellow laughed at his
“manliness,” knowing it didn’t go right through. It takes more than
“manliness” to make a man.
Somers’ very brilliance had an overtone of contempt in it, for the other
man. The women, of course, not demanding any orthodox “manliness,”
didn’t mind the knock at Jack’s particular sort. And to them Somers’
chief fascination lay in the fact that he was never “pals.” They were
too deeply women to care for the sham of pals.
So Jack went home after a whisky and soda with his nose a little bit out
of joint. The little man was never going to be pals, that was the first
fact to be digested. And he couldn’t be despised as a softy, he was too
keen; he just laughed at the other man’s attempt at despising him. Yet
Jack did want to get at him, somehow or other.
CHAP: III. LARBOARD WATCH AHOY!
“What do you think of things in general?” Callcott asked of Somers one
evening, a fortnight or so after their first encounter. They were
getting used to one another: and they liked one another, in a separated
sort of way. When neither of them was on the warpath, they were quite
happy together. They played chess together now and then, a wild and
haphazard game. Somers invented quite brilliant attacks, and rushed in
recklessly, occasionally wiping Jack off the board in a quarter of an
hour. But he was very careless of his defence. The other man played at
this. To give Callcott justice, he was more accustomed to draughts than
to chess, and Somers had never played draughts, not to remember. So Jack
played a draughts game, aiming at seizing odd pieces. It wasn’t Somers’
idea of chess, so he wouldn’t take the trouble to defend himself. His
men fell to this ambush, and he lost the game. Because at the end, when
he had only one or two pieces to attack, Jack was very clever at
cornering, having the draughts moves off by heart.
“But it isn’t chess,” protested Somers.
“You’ve lost, haven’t you?” said Jack.
“Yes. And I shall always lose that way. I can’t piggle with those
draughtsmen dodges.”
“Ah well, if I can win that way, I have to do it. I don’t know the game
as well as you do,” said Jack. And there was a quiet sense of victory,
“done you down,” in his tones. Somers required all his dignity not to
become angry. But he shrugged his shoulders.
Sometimes, too, if he suggested a game, Callcott would object that he
had something he must do. Lovat took the slight rebuff without
troubling. Then an hour or an hour and a half later, Callcott would come
tapping at the door, and would enter saying:
“Well, if you are ready for a game.”
And Lovat would unsuspectingly acquiesce. But on these occasions Jack
had been silently, secretly accumulating his forces; there was a
silence, almost a stealth in his game. And at the same time his bearing
was soft as it were submissive, and Somers was put quite off his guard.
He began to play with his usual freedom. And then Jack wiped the floor
with his little neighbour: simply wiped the floor with him, and left him
gasping. One, two, three games--it was the same every time.
“But I can’t see the board,” cried Somers, startled. “I can hardly
distinguish black from white.”
He was really distressed. It was true what he said. He was as if
stupefied, as if some drug had been injected straight into his brain.
For his life he could not gather his consciousness together--not till he
realised the state he was in. And then he refused to try. Jack gave a
quiet little laugh. There was on his face a subtle little smile of
satisfaction. He had done his high-flying opponent down. He was the
better man.
After the first evening that this had taken place, Somers was much more
wary of his neighbour, much less ready to open towards him than he had
been. _He never again invited Jack to a game of chess._ And when
Callcott suggested a game, Somers played, but coldly, without the
recklessness and the laughter which were the chief charm of his game.
And Jack was once more snubbed, put back into second place. Then once he
was reduced, Somers began to relent, and the old guerilla warfare
started again.
The moment Somers heard this question of Jack’s: “What do you think of
things in general?”--he went on his guard.
“The man is trying to draw me, to fool me,” he said to himself. He knew
by a certain quiet, almost sly intention in Jack’s voice, and a certain
false deference in his bearing. It was this false deference he was most
wary of. This was the Judas approach.
“How in general?” he asked. “Do you mean the cosmos?”
“No,” said Jack, foiled in his first move. He had been through the
Australian high-school course, and was accustomed to think for himself.
Over a great field he was quite indifferent to thought, and hostile to
consciousness. It seemed to him more manly to be unconscious, even
blank, to most of the great questions. But on his own subjects,
Australian politics, Japan, and machinery, he thought straight and manly
enough. And when he met a man whose being puzzled him, he wanted to get
at the bottom of that, too. He looked up at Somers with a searching,
penetrating, inimical look, that he tried to cover with an appearance of
false deference. For he was always aware of the big empty spaces of his
own consciousness; like his country, a vast empty “desert” at the centre
of him.
“No,” he repeated. “I mean the world--economics and politics. The
welfare of the world.”
“It’s no good asking me,” said Somers. “Since the war burst my bubble of
humanity I’m a pessimist, a black pessimist about the present human
world.”
“You think it’s going to the bad?” said Jack, still drawing him with the
same appearance of deference, of wanting to hear.
“Yes, I do. Faster or slower. Probably I shall never see any great
change in my lifetime, but the tendency is all downhill, in my opinion.
But then I’m a pessimist, so you needn’t bother about my opinion.”
Somers wanted to let it all go at that. But Callcott persisted.
“Do you think there’ll be more wars? Do you think Germany will be in a
position to fight again very soon?”
“Bah, you bolster up an old bogey out here. Germany is the bogey of
yesterday, not of to-morrow.”
“She frightened us out of our sleep before,” said Jack, resentful.
“And now, for the time being, she’s done. As a war-machine she’s done,
and done for ever. So much scrap-iron, her iron fist.”
“You think so?” said Jack, with all the animosity of a returned hero who
wants to think his old enemy the one and only bugbear, and who feels
quite injured if you tell him there’s no more point in his old hate.
“That’s my opinion. Of course I may be wrong.”
“Yes, you may,” said Jack.
“Sure,” said Somers. And there was silence. This time Somers smiled a
little to himself.
“And what do you consider, then, is the bogey of to-morrow?” asked Jack
at length, in a rather small, unwilling voice.
“I don’t really know. What should you say?”
“Me? I wanted to hear what you have to say.”
“And I’d rather hear what you have to say,” laughed Somers.
There was a pause. Jack seemed to be pondering. At last he came out with
his bluff, manly Australian self.
“If you ask me,” he said, “I should say that Labour is the bogey you
speak of.”
Again Somers knew that this was a draw. “He wants to find out if I’m
socialist or anti,” he thought to himself.
“You think Labour is a menace to society?” he returned.
“Well,” Jack hedged. “I won’t say that Labour is the menace, exactly.
Perhaps the state of affairs forces Labour to be the menace.”
“Oh, quite. But what’s the state of affairs?”
“That’s what nobody seems to know.”
“So it’s quite safe to lay the blame on,” laughed Somers. He looked with
real dislike at the other man, who sat silent and piqued and rather
diminished: “Coming here just to draw me and get to know what’s inside
me!” he said to himself angrily. And he would carry the conversation no
further. He would not even offer Jack a whisky and soda. “No,” he
thought to himself. “If he trespasses on my hospitality, coming creeping
in here, into my house, just to draw me and get the better of me,
underhandedly, then I’ll pour no drink for him. He can go back to where
he came from.” But Somers was mistaken. He only didn’t understand Jack’s
way of leaving seven-tenths of himself out of any intercourse. Richard
wanted the whole man there, openly. And Jack wanted his own way, of
seven-tenths left out.
So that after a while Jack rose slowly, saying:
“Well, I’ll be turning in. It’s work to-morrow for some of us.”
“If we’re lucky enough to have jobs,” laughed Somers.
“Or luckier still, to have the money so that we don’t need a job,”
returned Jack.
“Think how bored most folks would be on a little money and no settled
occupation,” said Somers.
“Yes, I might be myself,” said Jack, honestly admitting it, and at the
same time slightly despising the man who had no job, and therefore no
significance in life.
“Why, of course.”
When Callcott came over to Torestin, either Victoria came with him, or
she invited Harriet across to Wyewurk. Wyewurk was the name of Jack’s
bungalow. It had been built by a man who had inherited from an aunt a
modest income, and who had written thus permanently his retort against
society on his door.
“Wyewurk?” said Jack. “Because you’ve jolly well got to.”
The neighbours nearly always spoke of their respective homes by their
elegant names. “Won’t Mrs Somers go across to Wyewurk, Vicky says. She’s
making a blouse or something, sewing some old bits of rag together--or
new bits--and I expect she’ll need a pageful of advice about it.” This
was what Jack had said. Harriet had gone with apparent alacrity, but
with real resentment. She had never in all her life had “neighbours,”
and she didn’t know what neighbouring really meant. She didn’t care for
it, on trial. Not after she and Victoria had said and heard most of the
things they wanted to say and hear. But they liked each other also. And
though Victoria could be a terribly venomous little cat, once she
unsheathed her claws and became rather “common,” still, so long as her
claws were sheathed her paws were quite velvety and pretty, she was
winsome and charming to Harriet, a bit deferential before her, which
flattered the other woman. And then, lastly, Victoria had quite a decent
piano, and played nicely, whereas Harriet had a good voice, and played
badly. So that often, as the two men played chess or had one of their
famous encounters, they would hear Harriet’s strong, clear voice singing
Schubert or Schumann or French or English folk songs, whilst Victoria
played. And both women were happy, because though Victoria was fond of
music and had an instinct for it, her knowledge of songs was slight, and
to be learning these old English and old French melodies, as well as the
German and the Italian songs, was a real adventure and a pleasure to
her.
They were still singing when Jack returned.
“Still at it!” he said manfully, from the background, chewing his little
pipe.
Harriet looked round. She was just finishing the joyous moan of _Plaisir
d’amour_, a song she loved because it tickled her so. “_Dure toute la
vie--i--i--ie--i--e_,” she sang the concluding words at him, laughing in
his face.
“You’re back early,” she said.
“Felt a mental twilight coming on,” he said, “so thought we’d better
close down for the night.”
Harriet divined that, to use her expression, Somers had been
“disagreeable to him.”
“Don’t you sing?” she cried.
“Me! Have you ever heard a cow at a gate when she wants to come in and
be milked?”
“Oh, he does!” cried Victoria. “He sang a duet at the Harbour Lights
Concert.”
“There!” cried Harriet. “How exciting! What duet did he sing?”
“Larboard Watch Ahoy!”
“Oh! Oh! I know that,” cried Harriet, remembering a farmer friend of
Somers’, who had initiated her into the thrilling harmony, down in
Cornwall.
“There wasn’t a soul left in the hall, when we’d finished, except
Victoria and the other chap’s wife,” said Jack.
“Oh, what a fib. They applauded like anything, and made you give an
_encore_.”
“Ay, and we didn’t know another bally duet between us, so we had to sing
Larboard Watch over again. It was Larboard Alarum Clock by the time we
got to the end of it, it went off with such a rattle.”
“Oh, do let us sing it,” said Harriet. “You must help me when I go
wrong, because I don’t know it well.”
“What part do you want to sing?” said Jack.
“Oh, I sing the first part.”
“Nay,” said Jack. “I sing that part myself. I’m a high tenor, I am, once
I get the wind up.”
“I couldn’t possibly sing the alto,” said Harriet.
“Oh, Jack, do sing the alto,” said Victoria. “Go on, do! I’ll help you.”
“Oh well, if you’ll go bail for me, I don’t care what I do,” said Jack.
And very shortly Somers heard a gorgeous uproar in Wyewurk. Harriet
breaking down occasionally, and being picked up. She insisted on keeping
on till she had it perfect, and the other two banged and warbled away
with no signs of fatigue. So that they were still hailing the Larboard
Watch Ahoy when the clock struck eleven.
Then when silence did ensue for a moment, Mrs Callcott came flying over
to Torestin.
“Oh, Mr Somers, won’t you come and have a drink with Jack? Mrs Somers is
having a glass of hop bitters.”
When Somers entered the living room of Wyewurk, Jack looked up at him
with a smile and a glow in his dark eyes, almost like love.
“Beer?” he said.
“What’s the alternative?”
“Nothing but gas-water.”
“Then beer.”
Harriet and Victoria were still at the piano, excitedly talking songs.
Harriet was teaching Victoria to pronounce the words of a Schubert song:
for there was still one person in the world unacquainted with: “Du bist
wie eine Blume.” And Victoria was singing it in a wavering, shy little
voice.
“Let’s drink our beer by the kitchen fire,” said Jack. “Then we shall be
able to hear ourselves speak, which is more than we can do in this
aviary.”
Somers solemnly followed into the tiny kitchen, and they sat in front of
the still hot stove.
“The women will keep up the throat-stretching for quite a time yet,”
said Jack.
“If we let them. It’s getting late.”
“Oh, I’ve just started my second awakening--feel as sharp as a new
tin-tack.”
“Talking about pessimism,” he resumed after a pause. “There’s some of us
here that feels things are pretty shaky, you know.” He spoke in a
subdued, important sort of voice.
“What is shaky--Australian finance?”
“Ay, Australian everything.”
“Well, it’s pretty much the same in every country. Where there’s such a
lot of black smoke there’s not a very big fire. The world’s been going
to the dogs ever since it started to toddle, apparently.”
“Ay, I suppose it has. But it’ll get there one day. At least Australia
will.”
“What kind of dogs?”
“Maybe financial smash, and then hell to pay all round. Maybe, you know.
We’ve got to think about it.”
Somers watched him for some moments with serious eyes. Jack seemed as if
he were a little bit drunk. Yet he had only drunk a glass of lager beer.
He wasn’t drunk. But his face had changed, it had a kind of eagerness,
and his eyes glowed big. Strange, he seemed, as if in a slight ecstasy.
“It may be,” said Somers slowly. “I am neither a financier nor a
politician. It seems as if the next thing to come a cropper were
capital: now there are no more kings to speak of. It may be the middle
classes are coming smash--which is the same thing as finance--as
capital. But also it may not be. I’ve given up trying to know.”
“What will be will be, eh,” said Jack with a smile.
“I suppose so, in this matter.”
“Ay, but, look here, I believe it’s right what you say. The middle
classes _are_ coming down. What do they sit on?--they sit on money, on
capital. And this country is as good as bankrupt, so then what have they
left to stand on?”
“They say most countries are really bankrupt. But if they agree among
themselves to carry on, the word doesn’t amount to much.”
“Oh, but it does. It amounts to a hull of a lot, here in this country.
If it ever came to the push, and the state was bankrupt, there’d be no
holding New South Wales in.”
“The state never will be bankrupt.”
“Won’t it? Won’t there be a financial smash, a proper cave in, before
we’re much older? Won’t there? We’ll see. But look here, do you care if
there is?”
“I don’t know what it means, so I can’t say. Theoretically I don’t mind
a bit if international finance goes bust: if it can go bust.”
“Never mind about theoretically. You’d like to see the power of money,
the power of capital, _broke_. Would you or wouldn’t you?”
Somers watched the excited, handsome face opposite him, and answered
slowly:
“Theoretically, yes. Actually, I really don’t know.”
“Oh to hell with your theoretically. Drown it. Speak like a man with
some feeling in your guts. You either would or wouldn’t. Don’t leave
your shirt-tail hanging out, with a theoretically. Would you or wouldn’t
you.”
Somers laughed.
“Why, yes, I would,” he said, “and be damned to everything.”
“Shake,” cried Jack, stretching over. And he took Somers’ small hand
between both his own. “I knew,” he said in a broken voice, “that we was
mates.”
Somers was rather bewildered.
“But you know,” he said, “I never take any part in politics at all. They
aren’t my affair.”
“They’re not! They’re not! You’re quite right. You’re quite right, you
are. You’re a damned sight too good to be mixing up in any dirty
politics. But all I want is that your feelings should be the same as
mine, and they are, thank my stars, they are.”
By this time Somers was almost scared.
“But why should you care?” he said, with some reserve. The other however
did not heed him.
“You’re not with the middle classes, as you call them, the money-men, as
I call them, and I know you’re not. And if you’re not with them you’re
against them.”
“My father was a working-man. I come from the working people. My
sympathy is with them, when it’s with anybody, I assure you.”
Jack stared at Somers wide-eyed, a smile gathering round his mouth.
“Your father was a working-man, was he? Is that really so? Well, that
_is_ a surprise! And yet,” he changed his tone, “no, it isn’t. I might
have known. Of course I might. How should I have felt for you as I did,
the very first minute I saw you, if it hadn’t been so. Of course you’re
one of us: same flesh and blood, same clay. Only you’ve had the
advantages of a money-man. But you’ve stuck true to your flesh and
blood, which is what most of them don’t do. They turn into so much dirt,
like the washings in the pan, a lot of dirt to a very little gold. Well,
well, and your father was a working man! And you now being as you are!
Wonderful what we may be, isn’t it?”
“It is indeed,” said Somers, who was infinitely more amazed at the
present Jack, than ever Jack could be at him.
“Well, well, that brings us a great deal nearer than ever, that does,”
said Callcott, looking at Somers with glowing, smiling eyes which the
other man could not quite understand, eyes with something desirous, and
something perhaps fanatical in them. Somers could not understand. As for
the being brought nearer to Callcott, that was apparently entirely a
matter of Jack’s own feeling. Somers himself had never felt more alone
and far off. Yet he trembled at the other man’s strange fervour. He
vibrated helplessly in some sort of troubled response.
The vibration from the two men had by this time quite penetrated into
the other room and into the consciousness of the two women. Harriet came
in all wondering and full of alert curiosity. She looked from one to the
other, saw the eyes of both men shining, saw the puzzled, slightly
scared look on her husband’s face, and the glowing handsomeness on
Jack’s, and she wondered more than ever.
“What are you two men talking about?” she asked pointedly. “You look
very much moved about something.”
“Moved!” laughed Jack. “We’re doing fifty miles an hour, and not turning
a hair.”
“I’m glad I’m not going with you then,” said Harriet. “It’s much too
late at night for me for that sort of thing.”
Victoria went over to her husband and stood close at his side ruffling
up his brown, short, crisp, bright hair.
“Doesn’t he talk nonsense, Mrs Somers, doesn’t he talk nonsense,” the
young wife crooned, in her singing, contralto voice, as she looked down
at him.
Harriet started at the sudden revelation of palpitating intimacy. She
wanted to go away, quick. So did Somers. But neither Jack nor Victoria
wanted them to go.
Jack was looking up at Victoria with a curious smile, touched with a
leer. It gave his face, his rather long, clean-shaven face with the
thick eyebrows, most extraordinarily the look of an old mask. One of
those old Greek masks that give a fixed mockery to every feeling.
Leering up at his young wife with the hearty leer of a player masked as
a faun that is at home, on its own ground. Both Harriet and Somers felt
amazed, as if they had strayed into the wrong wood.
“You talk all the sense, don’t you, kiddie?” he said, with a strong
Australian accent again. And as he spoke with his face upturned to her,
his Adam’s apple moved in his strong white throat as if it chuckled.
“Of course I do,” she crooned in her mocking, crooning contralto. “Of
course I do.”
He put his arm round her hips. They continued to look into each other’s
faces.
“It’s awfully late. We shall have simply to fly to bed. I’m so sleepy
now. Good-night. Thank you so much for the singing. I enjoyed it
awfully. Good-night!”
Victoria looked up with a brightly-flushed face, entirely unashamed, her
eyes glowing like an animal’s. Jack relaxed his grip of her, but did not
rise. He looked at the Somers pair with eyes gone dusky, as if unseeing,
and the mask-like smile lingering on his face like the reflection from
some fire, curiously natural, not even grotesque.
“Find your way across all right?” he said. “Good-night! Good-night!” But
he was as unaware of them, actually, as if they did not exist within his
ken.
“Well,” said Harriet, as they closed the door of Torestin. “I think they
might have waited just _two_ minutes before they started their love
making. After all, one doesn’t want to be implicated, does one?”
“One emphatically doesn’t,” said Somers.