big red bungalow called to ask if he should bring milk across. The big
red bungalow was a dairy. But Harriet followed eagerly on Jack’s
footsteps across the road. She peeped over the white gate as he
unfastened it. A real lovely brick house, with a roof of bright red
tiles coming down very low over dark wooden verandahs, and huge round
rain-tanks, and a bit of grass and a big shed with double doors. Joy!
The gate was open, and she rushed in, under the tall, over-leaning hedge
that separated them from the neighbour, and that reached almost to touch
the side of her house. A wooden side verandah with bedsteads--old rusty
bedsteads patched with strip and rope--and then grass, a little front
all of grass, with loose hedges on either side--and the sea, the great
Pacific right there and rolling in huge white thunderous rollers not
forty yards away, under her grassy platform of a garden. She walked to
the edge of the grass. Yes, just down the low cliff, really only a bank,
went her own little path, as down a steep bank, and then was smooth
yellow sand, and the long sea swishing white up its incline, and rocks
to the left, and incredible long rollers furling over and crushing down
on the shore. At her feet! At her very feet, the huge rhythmic Pacific.
She turned to the house. There it crouched, with its long windows and
its wide verandah and its various slopes of low, red-tiled roofs.
Perfect! Perfect! The sun had gone down behind the great front of black
mountain wall which she could still see over the hedge. The house inside
was dark, with its deep verandahs like dark eyelids half closed.
Somebody switched on a light. Long cottage windows, and a white ceiling
with narrow dark beams. She rushed indoors. Once more in search of a
home, to be alone with Lovat, where he would be happy. How the sea
thundered!
Harriet liked the house extremely. It was beautifully built, solid, in
the good English fashion. It had a great big room with dark jarrah
timbering on the roof and the walls: it had a dark jarrah floor, and
doors, and some solid, satisfactory jarrah furniture, a big, real table
and a sideboard and strong square chairs with cane seats. The Lord had
sent her here, that was certain.
And how delighted Victoria was with her raptures. Jack whipped his coat
off and went to the shed for wood and coal, and soon had a lavish fire
in the open hearth. A boy came with milk, and another with bread and
fresh butter and eggs, ordered by Mrs Wynne. The big black kettle was
on the fire. And Harriet took Lovat’s arm, she was so moved.
Through the open seaward door, as they sat at the table, the near sea
was glimmering pale and greenish in the sunset, and breaking with a
crash of foam right, as it seemed, under the house. If the house had not
stood with its little grassy garden some thirty or forty feet above the
ocean, sometimes the foam would have flown to the doorstep, or to the
steps of the loggia. The great sea roaring at one’s feet!
After the evening meal the women were busy making up beds and tidying
round, while the men sat by the fire. Jack was quiet, he seemed to
brood, and only spoke abstractedly, vaguely. He just sucked his pipe and
stared in the fire, while the sea boomed outside, and the voices of the
women were heard eager in the bedrooms. When one of the doors leading on
to the verandahs was opened, the noise of the sea came in frightening,
like guns.
The house had been let for seven months to a man and wife with eleven
children. When Somers got up at sunrise, in the morning, he could well
believe it. But the sun rose golden from a low fume of haze in the
northeastern sea. The waves rolled in pale and bluey, glass-green,
wonderfully heavy and liquid. They curved with a long arch, then fell in
a great hollow thud and a spurt of white foam and a long, soft,
snow-pure rush of forward flat foam. Somers watched the crest of fine,
bristling spume fly back from the head of the waves as they turned and
broke. The sea was all yellow-green light.
And through the light came a low, black tramp steamer, lurching up and
down on the waves, disappearing altogether in the lustrous water, save
for her bit of yellow-banded funnel and her mast-tips: then emerging
like some long, out-of-shape dolphin on a wave-top. She was like some
lost mongrel running over a furrowed land. She bellowed and barked
forlornly, and hung round on the up-and-down waves.
Somers saw what she wanted. At the south end of the shallow bay was a
long, high jetty straddling on great tree-trunk poles out on to the sea,
and carrying a long line of little red-coal trucks, the sort that can be
tipped up. Beyond the straddling jetty was a spit of low, yellow-brown
land, grassy, with a stiff little group of trees like ragged Noah’s ark
trees, and further in, a little farm-place with two fascinating big
gum-trees that stuck out their clots of foliage in dark tufts at the end
of slim, up-starting branches.
But the lines from the jetty ran inland for two hundred yards, to where
a tiny colliery was pluming steam and smoke from beyond a marsh-like
little creek. The steamer wanted to land. She saw the line of little
trucks full and ready. She bellowed like a miserable cow, sloping up and
down and turning round on the waters of the bay. Near the jetty the foam
broke high on some sheltering rocks. The steamer seemed to watch
yearningly, like a dog outside a shut door. A little figure walked along
the jetty, slowly, unconcernedly. The steamer bellowed again. The figure
reached the end of the jetty, and hung out a red flag. Then the steamer
shouted no more, but slowly, fearfully turned and slunk up and down the
waves back towards Sydney.
The jetty--the forlorn pale-brown grassy bank running out to sea, with
the clump of sharp, hard-pointed dark conifers, trees of the southern
hemisphere, stiff and mechanical; then the foreshore with yellow sand
and rollers; then two bungalows, and a bit of waste ground full of this;
that was the southern aspect. Northwards, next door, was the big
imitation black and white bungalow, with a tuft of wind-blown trees and
half-dead hedge between it and the Somers’ house. That was north. And
the sun was already sloping upwards and northwards. It gave Somers an
uneasy feeling, the northward travelling of the climbing sun: as if
everything had gone wrong. Inland, lit up dark grey with its plumy trees
in the morning light, was the great mountain or tor, with bare, greying
rock showing near the top, and above the ridge-top the pure blue sky, so
bright and absolutely unsullied, it was always a wonder. There was an
unspeakable beauty about the mornings, the great sun from the sea, such
a big, untamed, proud sun, rising up into a sky of such tender delicacy,
blue, so blue, and yet so frail that even blue seems too coarse a colour
to describe it, more virgin than humanity can conceive; the land inward
lit up, the prettiness of many painted bungalows with tin roofs
clustering up the low up-slopes of the grey-treed bush; and then rising
like a wall, facing the light and still lightless, the tor face, with
its high-up rim so grey, having tiny trees feathering against the most
beautiful frail sky in the world. Morning!
But Somers turned to the house. It stood on one of the regulation lots,
probably fifty feet by a hundred and fifty. The bit of level grass in
front was only fifty feet wide, and perhaps about the same from the
house to the brim of the sea-bank, which dropped bushily down some forty
feet to the sand and the flat shore-rocks and the ocean. But this grassy
garden was littered with bits of rag, and newspapers, sea-shells, tins
and old sponges. And the lot next to it was a marvellous constellation
of tin cans in every stage of rustiness, if you peeped between the
bushes.
“You’ll take the ashes and the rubbish too?” said Somers to the
sanitary-man who came to take the sanitary tin of the earth-closet every
Monday morning.
“No,” responded that individual briefly: a true Australian-Cockney
answer, impossible to spell. A sort of _neow_ sound.
“Does anybody take them?”
“Neow. We take no garbage.”
“Then what do I do with them?”
“Do what you like with ’em.” And he marched off with the can. It was not
rudeness. It was a kind of colonial humour.
After this Somers surveyed the cans and garbage of the next lot, under
the bushes and everywhere, with colonial hopelessness. But he began at
once to pick up rags and cans from his own grass.
The house was very pretty, and beautifully built. But it showed all
signs of the eleven children. On the verandah at the side, on either
side of the “visitors” door, was a bed: one a huge family iron bedstead
with an indescribably rusty, saggy wire mattress, the other a single
iron bedstead with the wire mattress all burst and so mended with a
criss-cross of ropes. These beds were screened from the sea-wind by
sacks, old pieces of awful carpeting, and pieces of linoleum tacked to
the side of the verandah. The same happened on the third side of the
house: two more rope-mended iron bedsteads, and a nailed up lot of
unspeakable rags to screen from the wind.
The house had three little bedrooms, one opening from each of the side
verandahs, and one from the big central room. Each contained two saggy
single beds. That was five people. Remained seven, with the father and
mother. Three children must have gone into the huge bed by the side
entrance door, and the other four must have been sprinkled over the
other three outside, rope-mended beds.
The bungalow contained only the big room with five doors: one on each
side the fire-place, opening into the inner bedroom and the kitchen
respectively, and on each of the other three sides a door opening on to
the verandah. From the kitchen opened a little pantry and a zinc-floored
cubby hole fitted with the inevitable Australian douche and a little
sink-hole to carry off the water. This was the bathroom. There it was,
all compact and nice, two outer bedrooms on the wings, and for the
central block, the big room in front, the bedroom and kitchen at the
back. The kitchen door opened on to the bit of grass at the back, near
the shed.
It was a well-built little place, amazing in a world of wood and tin
shacks. But Somers would not have liked to live in it with a
thirteen-people family. There were eleven white breakfast cups, of which
nine had smashed handles and broad tin substitutes quite cannily put on.
There were two saucers only. And all the rest to match: seven large
brown teapots, of which five had broken spouts: not one whole dish or
basin of any sort, except a sauce boat. And rats! _Torestin_ was a clean
and ratless spot compared with _Coo-ee_. For the house was called
_Coo-ee_, to fetch the rats in, Jack said.
The women flew at the house with hot water and soda. Jack and Somers
spent the morning removing bedsteads into the shed, tearing down the
horrid rag-and-dirt screens, pulling out the nails with which these
screens had been held in place, and pulling out the hundreds of nails
which had nailed down the dirt-grey, thin carpet as if forever to the
floor of the big room. Then they banged and battered this thin old
patternless carpet, and washed it with soda and water. And then they
banged and battered the two sofas, that were like sandbags, so full of
sand and dust. And they took down all the ugly, dirt filmed pictures of
the Dana Gibson sort, and the “My refuge is in God” text.
“I should think so,” said Jack. “Away from the muck they’d made down
here.”
Like demons the four of them flew at this _Coo-ee_ house, and afternoon
saw Jack and Somers polishing floors with a stuff called glowax, and
Harriet and Victoria putting clean papers on all the shelves, and
arranging the battered remnant of well-washed white crockery.
“The crockery is the worst item here,” said Victoria. “You pay
three-and-six and four shillings for one of these cups and saucers, and
four-and-six for a common brown quart jug, and twelve guineas for a
white dinner service.”
Harriet looked at the horrid breakable stuff aghast.
“I feel like buying a tin mug at once,” she said.
But Victoria did not bother. She took it all as it came. The people with
the eleven children had paid three and a half guineas a week for seven
months for the house.
At three o’clock Victoria’s brother, a shy youth of seventeen, arrived
in a buggy and drove Jack and Victoria away the four miles to the home
of the latter. Somers and Harriet had tea alone.
“But I love and adore the place,” said Harriet. “Victoria says we can
have it for thirty shillings a week, and if they’d let you off even half
of the month for Torestin, we should be saving.”
The Callcotts arrived home in the early dark.
“Oh, but doesn’t the house smell different,” cried Victoria.
“Beeswax and turps,” said Jack. “Not a bad smell.”
Again the evening passed quietly. Jack had not been his own boisterous
self at all. He was silent, and you couldn’t get at him. Victoria looked
at him curiously, wondering, and tried to draw him out. He laughed and
was pleasant enough, but relapsed into silence, as if he were sad, or
gloomy.
In the morning sunlight Harriet and Somers were out first, after Somers
had made the fire, having a frightened dip in the sandy foam. They kept
far back from the great rollers, which, as the two sat in the dribbling
backwash, reared up so huge and white and fanged in a front attack,
that Harriet always rose and ran, and it was long before she got really
wet. And then when they did venture to sit in a foot of water, up came a
sudden flush and flung them helpless rolling a dozen yards in, and
banged them against the pebbles. It was distinctly surprising. Somers
had never known that he weighed so little, that he was such a scrap of
unimportance. And he still dared not quite imagine the whole of the
blind, invisible force of that water. It was so different being in it,
even on the edge of it, from looking at it from the outside.
As they came trembling and panting up the bank to the grass-plot,
dripping and smelling so strong and sticky of the Pacific, they saw Jack
standing smoking and watching.
“Are you going to try it?” said Somers.
He shook his head, and lit a cigarette.
“No. It’s past my bathing season,” he said.
They ran to the little tub-house and washed the sand and salt and
sea-stickiness off with fresh water.
Somers wondered whether Jack was going to say anything to him or not. He
was not sure. Perhaps Jack himself was not sure. And Somers had that
shrinking feeling one has from going to see the doctor. In a quiet sort
of way, the two men kept clear of one another. They loitered about in
the sun and round the house during the morning, mending the broken
deck-chairs and doing little jobs. Victoria and Harriet were cooking
roast-pork and apple sauce, and baking little cakes. It had already been
arranged that the Somers should come and live in Coo-ee, and Victoria
was quite happy and determined to leave a supply of nice eatables behind
her.
In the afternoon they all went strolling down the sands, Somers and
Victoria, Jack and Harriet. They picked up big, iridescent abalone
shells, such as people had on their mantel-pieces at home: and bits of
purplish coral stuff. And they walked across two fields to have a look
at an aeroplane which had come down with a broken propeller. Jack of
course had to talk about it to the people there, while Somers hung back
and tried to make himself invisible, as he always did when there were
strange onlookers.
Then the four turned home. Jack and Victoria were leaving by the seven
train next morning, Somers and Harriet were staying on a few days,
before they returned to Sydney to pack up. Harriet was longing to have
the house to themselves. So was Somers. He was also hoping that Jack
wouldn’t talk to him, wouldn’t want anything of him. And at the same
time he was waiting for some sort of approach.
The sea’s edge was smoking with the fume of the waves like a mist, and
the high shore ahead, with the few painted red-roofed bungalows, was all
dim, like a Japanese print. Tier after tier of white-frost foam piled
breaking towards the shore, in a haste. The tide was nearly high. Somers
could hardly see beyond over the white wall-tops of the breaking waves,
only on the clear horizon, far away, a steamer like a small black
scratch, and a fantastic thread of smoke.
He lingered behind the rest, they were nearly home. They were at the
wide sandy place where the creek left off. Its still, brackish waters
just sank into the sands, without ever running to meet the waves. And
beyond the sands was a sort of marsh, bushes and tall stark dead
gum-trees, and a few thin-tufted trees. Half wild ponies walked heavily
from the bush to the sands, and across to the slope where the low cliff
rose again. In the depths of the marsh-like level was the low chimney of
the mine, and tips of roofs: and beyond, a long range of wire-like trees
holding up tufts of foliage in handfuls, in front of the pale blue,
diminishing range of the hills in the distance. It was a weird scene,
full of definite detail, fascinating detail, yet all in the funeral-grey
monotony of the bush.
Somers turned to the piled-up, white-fronted sea again. On the tip of a
rock above him sat a little bird with hunched up shoulders and a long
beak: an absurd silhouette. He went towards it, talking to it. It seemed
to listen to him: really to listen. That is another of the charms of
Australia: the birds are not really afraid, and one can really
communicate with them. In West Australia Somers could sit in the bush
and talk to the flocks of big, handsome, black-and-white birds that they
call magpies, but which are a sort of butcher bird, apparently. And they
would gurgle little answers in their throats, and cock their heads on
one side. Handsome birds they were, some with mottled grey breasts like
fish. And the boldest would even come and take pieces of bread from his
hands. Yet they were quite wild. Only they seemed to have a strange
power of understanding the human psyche.
Now this little kingfisher by the sea. It sat and looked at Somers, and
cocked its head and listened. It _liked_ to be talked to. When he came
quite near, it sped with the straight low flight of kingfishers to
another boulder, and waited for him. It was beautiful too: with a sheeny
sea-green back and a pale breast touched with burnt yellow. A beautiful,
dandy little fellow. And there he waited for Somers like a little
penguin perching on a brown boulder. And Somers came softly near,
talking quietly. Till he could almost touch the bird. Then away it sped
a few yards, and waited. Sheeny greyish green, like the gum-leaves
become vivid: and yellowish breast, like the suave gum-tree trunks. And
listening, and waiting, and wanting to be talked to. Wanting the
contact.
The other three had disappeared from the sea-side. Somers walked slowly
on. Then suddenly he saw Jack running across the sand in a bathing suit,
and entering the shallow rim of a long, swift upwash. He went in
gingerly--then threw himself into a little swell, and rolled in the
water for a minute. Then he was rushing back, before the next big wave
broke. He had gone again by the time Somers came to climb the cliff-bank
to the house.
They had a cup of tea on the wooden verandah. The air had begun to waft
icily from the inland, but in the sheltered place facing the sea it was
still warm. This was only four o’clock--or to-day, five o’clock tea.
Proper tea was at six or half-past, with meat and pies and fruit salad.
The women went indoors with the cups. Jack was smoking his pipe. There
was something unnatural about his stillness.
“You had a dip after all,” said Somers.
“Yes. A dip in and out.”
Then silence again. Somers’ thoughts wandered out to the gently
darkening sea, and the bird, and the whole of vast Australia lying
behind him flat and open to the sky.
“You like it down here?” said Jack.
“I do indeed.”
“Let’s go down to the rocks again, I like to be near the waves.”
Somers rose and followed him. The house was already lit up. The sea was
bluey. They went down the steps cut in the earth of the bank top, and
between the bushes to the sand. The tide was full, and swishing against
a flat ledge of rocks. Jack went to the edge of this ledge, looking in
at the surging water, white, hissing, heavy. Somers followed again. Jack
turned his face to him.
“Funny thing it should go on doing this all the time, for no purpose,”
said Jack, amid all the noise.
“Yes.”
Again they watched the heavy waves unfurl and fling the white challenge
of foam on the shore.
“I say,” Jack turned his face. “I shan’t be making a mistake if I tell
you a few things in confidence, shall I?”
“I hope not. But judge for yourself.”
“Well, it’s like this,” shouted Jack--they had to shout at one another
in unnaturally lifted voices, because of the huge noise of the sea.
“There’s a good many of us chaps as has been in France, you know--and
been through it all--in the army--we jolly well know you can’t keep a
country going on the vote-catching system--as you said the other day. We
know it can’t be done.”
“It can’t,” said Somers, with a shout, “for ever.”
“If you’ve got to command, you don’t have to ask your men first if it’s
right, before you give the command.”
“Of course not,” yelled Somers.
But Jack was musing for the moment.
“What?” he shouted, as he woke up.
“No,” yelled Somers.
A further muse, amid the roar of the waves.
“Do the men know better than the officers, or do the officers know
better than the men?” he barked.
“Of course,” said Somers.
“These damned politicians--they invent a cry--and they wait to see if
the public will take it up. And if it won’t, they drop it. And if it
will, they make a mountain of it, if it’s only an old flower-pot.”
“They do,” yelled Somers.
They stood close side by side, like two mariners in a storm, amid the
breathing spume of the foreshore, while darkness slowly sank. Right at
the tip of the flat, low rocks they stood, like pilots.
“It’s no good,” barked Jack, with his hands in his pockets.
“Not a bit.”
“If you’re an officer, you study what is best, for the cause and for the
men. You study your men. But you don’t ask _them_ what to do. If you do
you’re a wash-out.”
“Quite.”
“And that’s where it is in politics. You see the papers howling and
blubbering for a statesman. Why, if they’d got the finest statesman the
world ever saw, they’d chuck him on to the scrap heap the moment he
really wanted his own way, doing what he saw was the best. That’s where
they’ve got anybody who’s any good--on the scrap-heap.”
“Same the world over.”
“It’s got to alter somewhere.”
“It has.”
“When you’ve been through the army, you know that what you depend on is
a _general_, and on _discipline_, and on _obedience_. And nothing else
is the slightest bit of good.”
“But they say the civil world is _not_ an army: it’s the will of the
people,” cried Somers.
“Will of my grandmother’s old tom-cat. They’ve got no will, except to
stop anybody else from having any.”
“I know.”
“Look at Australia. Absolutely fermenting rotten with politicians and
the will of the people. Look at the country--going rottener every day,
like an old pear.”
“All the democratic world the same.”
“Of course it’s the same. And you may well say Australian soil is
waiting to be watered with blood. It’s waiting to be watered with our
blood, once England’s got too soft to help herself, let alone us, and
the Japs come down this way. They’d squash us like a soft pear.”
“I think it’s quite likely.”
“What?”
“Likely.”
“It’s pretty well a certainty. And would you blame them? If you was
thirsty, wouldn’t you pick a ripe pear if it hung on nobody’s tree? Why,
of course you would. And who’d blame you.”
“Blame myself if I didn’t,” said Somers.
“And then their coloured labour. I tell you, this country’s too far
from Europe to risk it. They’ll swallow us. As sure as guns is guns, if
we let in coloured labour, they’ll swallow us. They hate us. All the
other colours hate the white. And they’re only waiting till we haven’t
got the pull over them. They’re only waiting. And then what about poor
little Australia?”
“Heaven knows.”
“There’ll be the Labour Party, the Socialists, uniting with the workers
of the world. _They’ll_ be the workers, if ever it comes to it. Those
black and yellow people’ll make ’em work--not half. It isn’t one side
only that can keep slaves. Why, the fools, the coloured races don’t have
any _feeling_ for liberty. They only think you’re a fool when you give
it to them, and if they got a chance, they’d drive you out to work in
gangs, and fairly laugh at you. All this world’s-worker business is
simply playing their game.”
“Of course,” said Somers. “What is Indian Nationalism but a strong bid
for power--for tyranny. The Brahmins want their old absolute
caste-power--the most absolute tyranny--back again, and the Mahommedans
want their military tyranny. That’s what they are lusting for--to wield
the rod again. Slavery for millions. Japan the same. And China, in part,
the same. The niggers the same. The real sense of liberty only goes with
white blood. And the ideal of democratic liberty is an exploded ideal.
You’ve got to have wisdom and authority somewhere, and you can’t get it
out of any further democracy.”
“There!” said Jack. “That’s what I mean. We s’ll be wiped out, wiped
out. And we know it. Look here, as man to man, you and me here: if you
were an Australian, wouldn’t you do something if you could do
something?”
“I would.”