ourselves shot, for something that didn’t touch us very close either.
Then why shouldn’t we run a bit of risk for what does touch us very
close. Why, you know, with things as they are, _I_ don’t want Victoria
and me to have any children. I’d a jolly sight rather not--and I’ll
watch it too.”
“Same with me,” yelled Somers.
Jack had come closer to him, and was now holding him by the arm.
“What’s a man’s life for, anyhow? Is it just to save up like rotten
pears on a shelf, in the hopes that one day it’ll rot into a pink canary
or something of that?”
“No,” said Somers.
“What we want in Australia,” said Jack, “isn’t a statesman, not yet.
It’s a set of chaps with some guts in them, who’ll obey orders when they
find a man who’ll give the orders.”
“Yes.”
“And we’ve got such men--we’ve got them. But we want to see our way
clear. We don’t never feel quite _sure_ enough over here. That’s where
it is. We sound as sure as a gas-explosion. But it’s all bang and no
bump. We s’ll never raise no lids. We shall only raise the roof--or our
politicians will--with shouting. Because we’re never quite sure. We know
it when we meet you English people. You’re a lot surer than we are. But
you’re mostly bigger fools as well. It takes a fool to be sure of
himself, sometimes.”
“Fact.”
“And there’s where it is. Most Englishmen are too big cocked-up fools
for us. And there you are. Their sureness may help them along to the end
of the road, but they haven’t the wit to turn a corner: not a proper
corner. And we can see it. They can only go back on themselves.”
“Yes.”
“You’re the only man I’ve met who seems to me sure of himself and what
he means. I may be mistaken, but that’s how it seems to me. And William
James knows it too. But it’s my belief William James doesn’t want you to
come in, because it would spoil his little game.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t. Now, look here. This is absolutely between ourselves,
now, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Certain?”
“Yes.”
Jack was silent for a time. Then he looked round the almost dark shore.
The stars were shining overhead.
“Give me your hand then,” said Jack.
Somers gave him his hand, and Jack clasped it fast, drawing the smaller
man to him and putting his arm round his shoulders and holding him near
to him. It was a tense moment for Richard Lovat. He looked at the dark
sea, and thought of his own everlasting gods, and felt the other man’s
body next to his.
“Well now,” he said in Somers’ ear, in a soothed tone. “There’s quite a
number of us in Sydney--and in the other towns as well--we’re mostly
diggers back from the war--we’ve joined up into a kind of club--and
we’re sworn in--and we’re sworn to _obey_ the leaders, no matter what
the command, when the time is ready--and we’re sworn to keep silent till
then. We don’t let out much, nothing of any consequence, to the general
run of the members.”
Richard listened with his soul. Jack’s eager, conspirator voice seemed
very close to his ear, and it had a kind of caress, a sort of embrace.
Richard was absolutely motionless.
“But who are your leaders?” he asked, thinking of course that it was his
own high destiny to be a leader.
“Why, the first club got fifty members to start with. Then we chose a
leader and talked things over. And then we chose a secretary and a
lieutenant. And every member quietly brought in more chaps. And as soon
as we felt we could afford it, we separated, making the next thirty or
so into a second club, with the lieutenant for a leader. Then we chose a
new lieutenant--and the new club chose a secretary and a lieutenant.”
Richard didn’t follow all this lieutenant and club business very well.
He was thinking of himself entering in with these men in a dangerous,
desperate cause. It seemed unreal. Yet there he was, with Jack’s arm
round him. Jack would want him to be his “mate.” Could he? His cobber.
Could he ever be mate to any man?
“You sort of have a lot of leaders. What if one of them let you down?”
he asked.
“None of them have yet. But we’ve arranged for that.”
“How?”
“I’ll tell you later. But you get a bit of the hang of the thing, do
you?”
“I think so. But what do you call yourselves? How do you appear to the
public?”
“We call ourselves the diggers clubs, and we go in chiefly for
athletics. And we do spend most of the time in athletics. But those that
aren’t diggers can join, if a pal brings them in and vouches for them.”
Richard was now feeling rather out of it. Returned soldiers, and clubs,
and athletics--all unnatural things to him. Was he going to join in with
this? How could he? He was so different from it all.
“And how do you work--I mean together?” he faltered.
“We have a special lodge of the leaders and lieutenants and secretaries
from all the clubs, and again in every lodge they choose a master,
that’s the highest; and then a Jack, he’s like a lieutenant; and a
Teller, he’s the sort of secretary and president. We have lodges in all
the biggish places. And then all the masters of the lodges of the five
states of Australia keep in touch, and they choose five masters who are
called the Five, and these five agree among themselves which order shall
stand in: first, second, third, fourth, and fifth. When once they’ve
chosen the first, then he has two votes towards the placing of the other
four. And so they settle it. And then they grade the five Jacks and the
five Tellers. I tell it you just in rough, you know.”
“Yes. And what are you?”
“I’m a master.”
Richard was still trying to see himself in connection with it all. He
tried to piece together all that Jack had been letting off at him.
Returned soldiers’ clubs, chiefly athletics, with a more or less secret
core to each club, and all the secret cores working together secretly in
all the state under one chief head, and apparently with military
penalties for any transgression. It was not a bad idea. And the aim,
apparently, a sort of revolution and a seizing of political power.
“How long have you been started?” he asked.
“About eighteen months--nearly two years altogether.”
Somers was silent, very much impressed, though his heart felt heavy. Why
did his heart feel so heavy? Politics--conspiracy--political power: it
was all so alien to him. Somehow, in his soul he always meant something
quite different, when he thought of action along with other men. Yet
Australia, the wonderful, lonely Australia, with her seven million
people only--it might begin here. And the Australians, so queer, so
absent, as it were, leaving themselves out all the time--they might be
capable of a beautiful unselfishness and steadfastness of purpose.
Only--his heart refused to respond.
“What is your aim, though? What do you want, finally?” he asked rather
lamely.
Jack hesitated, and his grip on the other man’s arm tightened.
“Well,” he said. “It’s like this. We don’t talk a lot about what we
intend: we fix nothing. But we start certain talks, and we listen, so we
know more or less what most of the ordinary members feel like. Why, the
plan is more or less this. The Labour people, the reds, are always
talking about a revolution, and the Conservatives are always talking
about a disaster. Well, we keep ourselves fit and ready for as soon as
the revolution comes--_or_ the disaster. Then we step in, you see, and
we are the revolution. We’ve got most of the trained fighting men behind
us, and we can _make_ the will of the people, don’t you see: if the
members stand steady. We shall have ‘Australia’ for the word. We stand
for Australia, not for any of your parties.”
Somers at once felt the idea was a good one. Australia is not too
big--seven millions or so, and the biggest part of the seven
concentrated in the five or six cities. Get hold of your cities and
you’ve got hold of Australia. The only thing he mistrusted was the
dryness in Jack’s voice: a sort of that’s-how-it’s-got-to-be dryness,
sharp and authoritative.
“What d’yer think of it?” said Jack.
“Good idea,” said Somers.
“I know that--if we can bite on to it. Feel like joining in, d’yer
think?”
Somers was silent. He was thinking of Jack even more than of the
venture. Jack was trying to put something over him--in some way, to get
a hold over him. He felt like a animal that is being lassoed. Yet here
was his chance, if he wanted to be a leader of men. He had only to give
himself, give himself up to it and to the men.
“Let me think about it a bit, will you?” he replied, “and I’ll tell you
when I come up to Sydney.”
“Right O!” said Jack, a twinge of disappointment in his acquiescence.
“Look before you leap, you know.”
“Yes--for both sides. You wouldn’t want me to jump in, and then squirm
because I didn’t like it.”
“Right you are, old man. You take your own time--I know you won’t be
wagging your jaw to anybody.”
“No. Not even to Harriet.”
“Oh, bless you, no. We’re not having the women in, if we can help it.
Don’t believe in it, do you?”
“Not in real politics, I don’t.”
They stood a moment longer by the sea. Then Jack let go Somers’ arm.
“Well,” he said, “I’d rather die in a forlorn hope than drag my days out
in a forlorn mope. Besides, damn it, I do want to have a shot at
something, I do. These politicians absolutely get my wind up, running
the country. If I can’t do better than that, then let me be shot, and
welcome.”
“I agree,” said Somers.
Jack put his hand on his shoulder, and pressed it hard.
“I knew you would,” he said, in moved tones. “We want a man like you,
you know--like a sort of queen bee to a hive.”
Somers laughed, rather startled by the metaphor. He had thought of
himself as many things, but never as a queen bee to a hive of would-be
revolutionaries. The two men went up to the house.
“Wherever have you been?” said Victoria.
“Talking politics and red-hot treason,” said Jack, rubbing his hands.
“Till you’re almost frozen, I’m sure,” said Victoria.
Harriet looked at the two men in curiosity and suspicion, but she said
nothing. Only next morning when the Callcotts had gone she said to
Lovat:
“What were you and Mr Callcott talking about, really?”
“As he said, politics and hot treason. An idea that some of them have
got for making a change in the constitution.”
“What sort of change?” asked Harriet.
“Why--don’t bother me yet. I don’t know myself.”
“Is it so important you mustn’t tell me?” she asked sarcastically.
“Or else so vague,” he answered.
But she saw by the shut look on his face that he was not going to tell
her: that this was something he intended to keep apart from her: forever
apart. A part of himself which he was not going to share with her. It
seemed to her unnecessary, and a breach of faith on his part, wounding
her. If their marriage was a real thing, then anything very serious was
her matter as much as his, surely. Either her marriage with him was not
very important, or else this Jack Callcott stuff wasn’t very important.
Which probably it wasn’t. Yet she hated the hoity-toity way she was shut
out.
“Pah!” she said. “A bit of little boy’s silly showing off.”
But he had this other cold side to his nature, that could keep a secret
cold and isolated till Doomsday. And for two or three years now, since
the war, he had talked like this about doing some work with men alone,
sharing some activity with men. Turning away from the personal life to
the hateful male impersonal activity, and shutting her out from this.
She continued bright through the day. Then at evening he found her
sitting on her bed with tears in her eyes and her hands in her lap. At
once his heart became very troubled: because after all she was all he
had in the world, and he couldn’t bear her to be really disappointed or
wounded. He wanted to ask her what was the matter, and to try to comfort
her. But he knew it would be false. He knew that her greatest grief was
when he turned away from their personal human life of intimacy to this
impersonal business of male activity for which he was always craving. So
he felt miserable, but went away without saying anything. Because he was
determined, if possible, to go forward in this matter with Jack. He was
also determined that it was not a woman’s matter. As soon as he could he
would tell her about it: as much as it was necessary for her to know.
But, once he had slowly and carefully weighed a course of action, he
would not hold it subject to Harriet’s approval or disapproval. It would
be out of her sphere, outside the personal sphere of their two lives,
and he would keep it there. She emphatically opposed this principle of
her externality. She agreed with the necessity for impersonal activity,
but oh, she insisted on being identified with the activity, impersonal
or not. And he insisted that it could not and should not be: that the
pure male activity should be womanless, beyond woman. No man was beyond
woman. But in his one quality of ultimate maker and breaker, he was
womanless. Harriet denied this, bitterly. She wanted to share, to join
in, not to be left out lonely. He looked at her in distress, and did not
answer. It is a knot that can never be untied; it can only, like a navel
string, be broken or cut.
For the moment, however, he said nothing. But Somers knew from his
dreams what she was feeling: his dreams of a woman, a woman he loved,
something like Harriet, something like his mother, and yet unlike
either, a woman sullen and obstinate against him, repudiating him.
Bitter the woman was grieved beyond words, grieved till her face was
swollen and puffy and almost mad or imbecile, because she had loved him
so much, and now she must see him betray her love. That was how the
dream woman put it: he had betrayed her great love, and she must go down
desolate into an everlasting hell, denied, and denying him absolutely in
return, a sullen, awful soul. The face reminded him of Harriet, and of
his mother, and of his sister, and of girls he had known when he was
younger--strange glimpses of all of them, each glimpse excluding the
last. And at the same time in the terrible face some of the look of that
bloated face of a madwoman which hung over Jane Eyre in the night in Mr
Rochester’s house.
The Somers of the dream was terribly upset. He cried tears from his very
bowels, and laid his hand on the woman’s arm saying:
“But I love you. Don’t you _believe_ in me? Don’t you _believe_ in me?”
But the woman, she seemed almost old now--only shed a few bitter tears,
bitter as vitriol, from her distorted face, and bitterly, hideously
turned away, dragging her arm from the touch of his fingers; turned, as
it seemed to the dream-Somers, away to the sullen and dreary,
everlasting hell of repudiation.
He woke at this, and listened to the thunder of the sea with horror.
With horror. Two women in his life he had loved down to the quick of
life and death: his mother and Harriet. And the woman in the dream was
so awfully his mother, risen from the dead, and at the same time
Harriet, as it were, departing from this life, that he stared at the
night-paleness between the window-curtains in horror.
“They neither of them believed in me,” he said to himself. Still in the
spell of the dream, he put it in the past tense, though Harriet lay
sleeping in the next bed. He could not get over it.
Then he tried to come right awake. In his full consciousness, he was a
great enemy of dreams. For his own private life, he found his dreams
were like devils. When he was asleep and off his guard, then his own
weaknesses, especially his old weaknesses that he had overcome in his
full, day-waking self, rose up again maliciously to take some
picturesque form and torment and overcome his sleeping self. He always
considered dreams as a kind of revenge which old weaknesses took on the
victorious healthy consciousness, like past diseases come back for a
phantom triumph. So he said to himself: “The dream is one of these larvæ
of my past emotions. It means that the danger is passed, the evil is
overcome, so it has to resort to dreams to terrify me. In dreams the
diseases and evil weaknesses of the soul--and of our relations with
other souls--take form to triumph falsely over the living, healthy,
onward-struggling spirit. This dream means that the actual danger is
gone.” So he strengthened his spirit, and in the morning when he got up,
and remembered, he was no longer afraid. A little uneasy still, maybe,
especially as to what Harriet would do. But surely his mother was not
hostile in death! And if she were a little bit hostile at this
forsaking, it was not permanent, it was only the remains of a weakness,
an unbelief which haunted the soul in life.
So he reasoned with himself. For he had an ingrained instinct or habit
of thought which made him feel that he could never take the move into
activity unless Harriet and his dead mother believed in him. They both
loved him: that he knew. They both believed in him terribly, in personal
being. In the individual man he was, and the son of man, they believed
with all the intensity of undivided love. But in the impersonal man, the
man that would go beyond them, with his back to them, away from them
into an activity that excluded them, in this man they did not find it so
easy to believe.
Harriet, however, said nothing for two days. She was happy in her new
house, delighted with the sea and the being alone, she loved her
_Coo-ee_ bungalow, and loved making it look nice. She loved having Lovat
alone with her, and all her desires, as it were, in the hollow of her
hand. She was bright and affectionate with him. But underneath lurked
this chagrin of his wanting to go away from her, for his activity.
“You don’t take Callcott and his politics seriously, do you?” she said
to him at evening.
“Yes,” he said, rather hesitatingly.
“But what does he want?”
“To have another sort of government for the Commonwealth--with a sort of
Dictator: not the democratic vote-cadging sort.”
“But what does that matter to you?”
“It does matter. If you can start a new life-form.”
“You know quite well you say yourself life doesn’t _start_ with a form.
It starts with a new feeling, and ends with a form.”
“I know. But I think there is a new feeling.”
“In Callcott?” She had a very sceptical intonation.
“Yes.”
“I very much doubt it. He’s a returned war hero, and he wants a chance
of keeping on being a hero--or something like that.”
“But even that is a new feeling,” he persisted.
“Yah!” she said, rather wearily sceptical. “I’d rather even believe in
William James. There seems to me more real feeling even in him: deeper,
at any rate. Your Jacks are shallow really.”
“Nay, he seemed a man to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean by your _men_. Really, I give it up, I don’t
know what you do want. You change so. You’ve always said you despise
politics, and yet here you are.” She tailed off as if it were hopeless.
“It’s not the politics. But it is a new life-form, a new social form.
We’re pot-bound inside democracy and the democratic feeling.”
“But you know what you’ve said yourself. You didn’t change the Roman
Empire with a revolution. Christianity grew up for centuries without
having anything at all to do with politics--just a _feeling_, and a
belief.”
This was indeed what he had said himself, often enough: that a new
religious inspiration, and a new religious idea must gradually spring up
and ripen before there could be any constructive change. And yet he felt
that preaching and teaching were both no good, at the world’s present
juncture. There must be action, brave, faithful action: and in the
action the new spirit would arise.
“You see,” he said, “Christianity is a religion which preaches the
despising of the material world. And I don’t believe in that part of it,
at least, any longer. I believe that the men with the real passion for
life, for truth, for _living_ and not for _having_, I feel they now must
seize control of the material possessions, just to safeguard the world
from all the masses who want to seize material possessions for
themselves, blindly, and nothing else. The men with soul and with
passionate truth in them must control the world’s material riches and
supplies: absolutely put possessions out of the reach of the mass of
mankind, and let life begin to live again, in place of this struggle for
existence, or struggle for wealth.”
“Yah, I don’t believe it’s so all-important who controls the world’s
material riches and supplies. That’ll always be the same.”
“It won’t.”
“It will. Conservatives or bolshevists or Labour Party--they’re all
alike: they all want to grab and have things in their clutches, and
they’re devilish with jealousy if they haven’t got them. That’s
politics. You’ve said thousands of times that politics are a game for
the base people with no human soul in them. Thousands of times you’ve
said it. And yet now--”
He was silent for a while.
“Now,” he said slowly. “Now I see that you don’t have only to give all
your possessions to the poor. You’ve got to _have_ no poor that can be
saved just by possessions. You’ve got to put the control of all supplies
into the hands of sincere, sensible men who are still men enough to know
that manhood isn’t the same thing as goods. We don’t want possessions.
Nobody wants possessions--more than just the immediate things: as you
say yourself, one trunk for you, one for me, and one for the household
goods. That’s about all. We don’t want anything else. And the world is
ours--Australia or India, Coo-ee or Ardnaree, or where you like. You
have got to teach people that, by withholding possessions and stopping
the mere frenzy for possession which runs the world to-day. You’ve got
to do that _first_, not last.”
“And you think Jack Callcott will do it?”
“I did think so, as he talked to me.”
“Well, then let him. Why do you want to interfere. In my opinion he’s
chiefly jealous because other people run the show, and he doesn’t have a
look-in. Having once been a Captain with some power, he wants the same
again, and more. I’d rather trust William James to be disinterested.”
“Nay, Jack Callcott is generous by nature, and I believe he’d be
disinterested.”
“In his way, he’s generous. But that isn’t the same as being
disinterested, for all that. He wants to have his finger in the pie,
that’s what he wants.”
“To pull out plums? That’s not true.”
“Perhaps not to pull out money plums. But to be bossy. To be a Captain
once more, feeling his feet and being a boss over something.”
“Why shouldn’t he be?”
“Why not? I don’t care if he bosses all Australia and New Zealand and
all the lot. But I don’t see why you should call it disinterested.
Because it isn’t.”
He paused, struck.
“Am I disinterested?” he asked.
“Not”--she hesitated--“not when you want just _power_.”
“But I don’t want just power. I only see that somebody must have power,
so those should have it who don’t want it selfishly, and who have some
natural gift for it, and some reverence for the sacredness of it.”
“Ha!--power! power! What does it all mean, after all! And especially in
people like Jack Callcott. Where does he see any sacredness. He’s a
sentimentalist, and as you say yourself, nothing is sacred then.”
This discussion ended in a draw. Harriet had struck home once or twice,
and she knew it. That appeased her for the moment. But he stuck to his
essential position, though he was not so sure of the circumstantial
standing.
Harriet loved Coo-ee, and was determined to be happy there. She had at
last gradually realised that Lovat was no longer lover to her or
anybody, or even anything: and amidst the chagrin was a real relief.
Because he was her husband, that was undeniable. And if, as her husband,
he had to go on to other things, outside of marriage: well, that was his
affair. It only angered her when he thought these other
things--revolutions or governments or whatnot--higher than their
essential marriage. But then he would come to himself and acknowledge
that his marriage _was_ the centre of his life, the core, the root,
however he liked to put it: and this other business was the inevitable
excursion into his future, into the unknown, onwards, which man by his
nature was condemned to make, even if he lost his life a dozen times in
it. Well, so be it. Let him make the excursion: even without her. But
she was not, if she could help it, going to have him setting off on a
trip that led nowhere. No, if he was to excurse ahead, it must be ahead,
and her instinct must be convinced as the needle of a mariner’s compass
is convinced. And regarding this Australian business of Callcott’s, she
had her doubts.