rooted, as central as the tree of life itself. She wasn’t a bit of
flotsam, and she wasn’t a dog chained to a dog-kennel. Coo-ee might be
absurd--and she knew it was only a camp. But then where she camped with
Lovat Somers was now the world’s centre to her, and that was enough.
She loved to wake in the morning and open the bedroom door--they had the
north bedroom, on the verandah, the room that had the sun all day long;
then she liked to lie luxuriously in bed and watch the lovely, broken
colours of the Australian dawn: always strange, mixed colours, never the
primary reds and yellows. The sun rose on the north-east--she could
hardly see it. But she watched the first yellow of morning, and then the
strange, strong, smoky red-purple of floating pieces of cloud: then the
rose and mist blue of the horizon, and the sea all reddish, smoky
flesh-colour, moving under a film of gold like a glaze; then the sea
gradually going yellow, going primrose, with the foam breaking blue as
forget-me-nots or frost, in front. And on the near swing of the bluey
primrose, sticking up through the marvellous liquid pale yellow glaze,
the black fins of sharks. The triangular, black fins of sharks, like
small, hard sails of hell-boats, amid the swimming luminousness. Then
she would run out on the verandah. Sharks! Four or five sharks, skulking
in the morning glow, and so near, she could almost have thrown bread to
them. Sharks, slinking along quite near the coast, as if they were
walking on the land. She saw one caught in the heave of a breaker, and
lifted. And then she saw him start, saw the quick flurry of his tail as
he flung himself back. The land to him was horror--as to her the sea,
beyond that wall of ice-blue foam. She made Lovat come to look. He
watched them slowly, holding the brush in his hand. He had made the
fire, and was sweeping the hearth. Coffee was ready by the time Harriet
was dressed: and he was crouching making toast. They had breakfast
together on the front verandah, facing the sea, eastwards. And the sun
slanted warm, though it was mid-winter, and the much-washed
red-and-white tablecloth that had been in so many lands with them and
that they used out-doors, looked almost too strongly coloured in the
tender seeming atmosphere. The coffee had a lot of chickory in it, but
the butter and milk were good, and the brownish honey, that also, like
the landscape, tasted queer, as if touched with unkindled smoke. It
seemed to Somers as if the people of Australia _ought_ to be dusky.
Think of Sicilian honey--like the sound of birds singing: and now this
with a dusky undertone to it. But good too--so good!
CHAP: VI. KANGAROO
They went back to Sydney on the Thursday, for two days, to pack up and
return to Coo-ee. All the time, they could hear the sea. It seemed
strange that they felt the sea so far away, in Sydney. In Sydney itself,
there is no sea. It might be Birmingham. Even in Mullimbimby, a queer
raw little place, when Somers lifted his head and looked down Main
Street and saw, a mile away, the high level of the solid sea, it was
almost a shock to him. Half a mile inland, the influence of the sea has
disappeared, and the land-sense is so heavy, buried, that it is hard to
believe that the dull rumble in the air is the ocean. It sounds like a
coal-mine or something.
“You’ll let Mr Somers and me have a little chat to ourselves, Mrs
Somers, won’t you?” said Jack, appearing after tea.
“Willingly. I assure you _I_ don’t want to be bothered with your
important affairs,” said Harriet. None the less she went over rather
resentfully to Victoria, turned out of her own house. It wasn’t that she
wanted to listen. She would really have hated to attend to all their
high-and-mighty revolution stuff. She didn’t believe in
revolutions--they were _vieux jeu_, out of date.
“Well,” said Jack, settling down in a wooden arm-chair and starting his
pipe. “You’ve thought it over, have you?”
“Over and over,” laughed Somers.
“I knew you would.”
He sucked his pipe and thought for a time.
“I’ve had a long talk with Kangaroo about you to-day,” he said.
“Who’s Kangaroo?”
“He’s the First,” replied Jack slowly. And again there was silence.
Somers kept himself well in hand, and said nothing.
“A lawyer--well up--I knew him in the army, though. He was one of my
lieutenants.”
Still Somers waited, without speaking.
“He’d like to see you. Should you care to have lunch with him and me in
town to-morrow?”
“Have you told him you’ve talked to me?”
“Oh yes--told him before I did it. He knows your writings--read all
you’ve written, apparently. He’d heard about you too from a chap on the
Naldera. That’s the boat you came by, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Somers.
“Yes,” echoed Jack. “He was all over me when I mentioned your name.
You’d like Kangaroo. He’s a great chap.”
“What’s his name?”
“Cooley--Ben--Benjamin Cooley.”
“They like him on the _Bulletin_, don’t they? Didn’t I see something
about Ben Cooley and his straight talk?”
“Yes. Oh, he can talk straight enough--and crooked enough as well, if it
comes to that. You’ll come to lunch then? We lunch in his chambers.”
Somers agreed. Jack was silent, as if he had not much more to say. After
a while he added reflectively:
“Yes, I’m glad to have brought you and Kangaroo together.”
“Why do they call him Kangaroo?”
“Looks like one.”
Again there was a silence, each man thinking his own thoughts.
“You and Kangaroo will catch on like wax, as far as ideas go,” Jack
prognosticated. “But he’s an unfeeling beggar, really. And that’s where
you _won’t_ cotton on to him. That’s where _I_ come in.”
He looked at Somers with a faint smile.
“Come in to what?” laughed Somers.
Jack took his pipe from his mouth with a little flourish.
“In a job like this,” he said, “a man wants a mate--yes, a mate--that he
can say _anything_ to, and be absolutely himself with. Must have it. And
as far as I go--for me--you don’t mind if I say it, do you?--Kangaroo
could never have a mate. He’s as odd as any phœnix bird I’ve ever heard
tell of. You couldn’t mate him to anything in the heavens above or in
the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. No, there’s no
female kangaroo of his species. Fine chap, for all that. But as lonely
as a nail in a post.”
“Sounds something fatal and fixed,” laughed Somers.
“It does. And he _is_ fatal and fixed. Those eyeglasses of his, you
know--they alone make a man into a sort of eye of God, rather glassy.
But my idea is, in a job like this, every man should have a mate--like
most of us had in the war. Mine was Victoria’s brother--and still is, in
a way. But he got some sort of a sickness that seems to have taken all
the fight out of him. Fooling about with the wrong sort of women. Can’t
get his pecker up again now, the fool. Poor devil an’ all.”
Jack sighed and resumed his pipe.
“Men fight better when they’ve got a mate. They’ll stand anything when
they’ve got a mate,” he went on again after a while. “But a mate’s not
all that easy to strike. We’re a lot of decent chaps, stick at nothing
once they wanted to put a thing through, in our lodge--and in my club.
But there’s not one of them I feel’s quite up to me--if you know what I
mean. Rattling good fellows--but nary one of ’em quite my cut.”
“That’s usually so,” laughed Somers.
“It is,” said Jack. Then he narrowed and diminished his voice. “Now I
feel,” he said cautiously and intensely, “that if you and me was mates,
we could put any damn mortal thing through, if we had to knock the
bottom out of the blanky show to do it.”
Somers dropped his head. He liked the man. But what about the cause?
What about the mistrust and reluctancy he felt? And at the same time,
the thrill of desire. What was offered? He wanted so much. To be mates
with Jack in this cause. Life and death mates. And yet he felt he
couldn’t. Not quite. Something stopped him.
He looked up at Callcott. The other man’s face was alert and waiting:
curiously naked a face too. Somers wished it had had even a moustache,
anything rather than this clean, all-clean bare flesh. If Jack had only
had a beard too--like a man--and not one of these clean-shaven, too-much
exposed faces. Alert, waiting face--almost lurking, waiting for an
answer.
“Could we ever be _quite_ mates?” Somers asked gently.
Jack’s dark eyes watched the other man fixedly. Jack himself wasn’t
unlike a kangaroo, thought Somers: a long-faced, smooth-faced, strangely
watchful kangaroo with powerful hindquarters.
“Perhaps not as me and Fred Wilmot was. In a way you’re higher up than I
am. But that’s what I like, you know--a mate that’s better than I am, a
mate who I _feel_ is better than I am. That’s what I feel about you: and
that’s what makes me feel, if we was mates, I’d stick to you through
hell fire and back, and we’d clear some land between us. I _know_ if you
and me was mates, we could put any blooming thing through. There’d be
nothing to stop us.”
“Not even Kangaroo?”
“Oh, he’d be our way, and we’d be his. He’s a sensible chap.”
Somers was tempted to give Jack his hand there and then, and pledge
himself to a friendship, or a comradeship, that nothing should ever
alter. He wanted to do it. Yet something withheld him as if an invisible
hand were upon him, preventing him.
“I’m not sure that I’m a mating man, either,” he said slowly.
“You?” Jack eyed him. “You are and you aren’t. If you’d once come
over--why man, do you think I wouldn’t lay my life down for you!”
Somers went pale. He didn’t want anybody laying down their lives for
him. “Greater love than this--” But he didn’t want this great love. He
didn’t _believe_ in it: in that way of love.
“Let’s leave it, Jack,” he replied, laughing slowly and rising, giving
his hand to the other man. “Don’t let us make any pledges yet. We’re
friends, whatever else we are. As for being mates--wait till I feel
sure. Wait till I’ve seen Kangaroo. Wait till I see my way clear. I feel
I’m only six strides down the way yet, and you ask me to be at the end.”
“At the start you mean,” said Jack, gripping the other man’s hand, and
rising too. “But take your time, old man.” He laid his hand on Somers’
shoulder. “If you’re slow and backward like a woman, it’s because it’s
your nature. Not like me, I go at it in jumps like a kangaroo. I feel I
could jump clean through the blooming tent-canvas sometimes.” As he
spoke he was pale and tense with emotion, and his eyes were like black
holes, almost wounds in the pallor of his face.
Somers was in a dilemma. Did he want to mix and make with this man? One
part of him perhaps did. But not a very big part, since for his life he
could not help resenting it when Jack put his hand on his shoulder, or
called him “old man.” It wasn’t the commonness either. Jack’s “common”
speech and manner was largely assumed--part of the colonial bluff. He
could be accurate enough if he chose--as Somers knew already, and would
soon know more emphatically. No, it was not the commonness, the vulgar
touch in the approach. Jack was sensitive enough, really. And the quiet,
well-bred appeal of upper-class young Englishmen, who have the same
yearning for intimate comradeship, combined with a sensitive delicacy
really finer than a woman’s, this made Somers shrink just the same. He
half wanted to commit himself to this whole affection with a friend, a
comrade, a mate. And then, in the last issue, he didn’t want it at all.
The affection would be deep and genuine enough: that he knew. But--when
it came to the point, he didn’t want any more affection. All his life he
had cherished a beloved ideal of friendship--David and Jonathan. And
now, when true and good friends offered, he found he simply could not
commit himself, even to simple friendship. The whole trend of this
affection, this mingling, this intimacy, this truly beautiful love, he
found his soul just set against it. He couldn’t go along with it. He
didn’t want a friend, he didn’t want loving affection, he didn’t want
comradeship. No, his soul trembled when he tried to drive it along the
way, trembled and stood still, like Balaam’s Ass. It did not want
friendship or comradeship, great or small, deep or shallow.
It took Lovat Somers some time before he would really admit and accept
this new fact. Not till he had striven hard with his soul did he come to
see the angel in the way; not till his soul, like Balaam’s Ass, had
spoken more than once. And then, when forced to admit, it was a
revolution in his mind. He had all his life had this craving for an
absolute friend, a David to his Jonathan, Pylades to his Orestes: a
blood-brother. All his life he had secretly grieved over his
friendlessness. And now at last, when it really offered--and it had
offered twice before, since he had left Europe--he didn’t want it, and
he realised that in his innermost soul he had never wanted it.
Yet he wanted _some_ living fellowship with other men; as it was he was
just isolated. Maybe a living fellowship!--but not affection, not love,
not comradeship. Not mates and equality and mingling. Not
blood-brotherhood. None of that.
What else? He didn’t know. He only knew he was never destined to be mate
or comrade or even friend with any man. Some other living relationship.
But what? He did not know. Perhaps the thing that the dark races know:
that one can still feel in India: the mystery of lordship. That which
white men have struggled so long against, and which is the clue to the
life of the Hindu. The mystery of lordship. The mystery of innate,
natural, sacred priority. The other mystic relationship between men,
which democracy and equality try to deny and obliterate. Not any
arbitrary caste or birth aristocracy. But the mystic recognition of
difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred
responsibility of authority.
Before Somers went down to George Street to find Jack and to be taken by
him to luncheon with the Kangaroo, he had come to the decision, or to
the knowledge that mating or comradeship were contrary to his destiny.
He would never pledge himself to Jack, nor to this venture in which Jack
was concerned.
They arrived at Mr Cooley’s chambers punctually. It was a handsome
apartment with handsome jarrah furniture, dark and suave, and some very
beautiful rugs. Mr Cooley came at once: and he _was_ a kangaroo. His
face was long and lean and pendulous, with eyes set close together
behind his pince-nez: and his body was stout but firm. He was a man of
forty or so, hard to tell, swarthy, with short-cropped dark hair and a
smallish head carried rather forward on his large but sensitive, almost
shy body. He leaned forward in his walk, and seemed as if his hands
didn’t quite belong to him. But he shook hands with a firm grip. He was
really tall, but his way of dropping his head, and his sloping
shoulders, took away from his height. He seemed not much taller than
Somers, towards whom he seemed to lean the sensitive tip of his long
nose, hanging over him as he scrutinised him sharply through his
eyeglasses, and approaching him with the front of his stomach.
“Very glad to see you,” he said, in a voice half Australian, half
official.
The luncheon was almost impressive: a round table with a huge bunch of
violets in a queer old copper bowl, Queen Anne silver, a tablecloth with
heavy point edging, Venetian wine-glases, red and white wine in Venetian
wine-jugs, a Chinaman waiting at table, offering first a silver dish of
hors d’œuvres and a handsome crayfish with mayonnaise.
“Why,” said Somers, equivocally, “I might be anywhere.”
Kangaroo looked at him sharply. Somers noticed that when he sat down,
his thighs in his dark grey, striped trousers were very thick, making
his shoulders seem almost slender; but though his stomach was stout, it
was firm.
“Then I hope you feel at home,” said Kangaroo. “Because I am sure you
are at home anywhere.” And he helped himself to olives, putting one in
his queer, pursed, thick-lipped mouth.
“For which reason I’m never at home, presumably.”
“That may easily be the case. Will you take red or white wine?”
“White,” said Somers, oblivious of the poised Chinaman.
“You have come to a homely country,” said the Kangaroo, without the
ghost of a smile.
“Certainly to a very hospitable one.”
“We rarely lock our doors,” said Kangaroo.
“Or anything else,” said Jack. “Though of course we may slay you in the
scullery if you say a word against us.”
“I’m not going to be so indiscreet,” said Somers.
“Leave the indiscretion to us. We believe in it. Indiscretion is the
better part of valour. You agree, Kangaroo?” said Jack, smiling over his
plate directly at his host.
“I don’t think I’d care to see you turn discreet, boy,” returned the
other. “Though your quotation isn’t new.”
“Even a crystal-gazer can’t gaze to the bottom of a deep well, eh?
Never mind, I’m as shallow as a pie-dish, and proud of it. Red, please.”
This to the Chink.
“That’s why it’s so nice knowing you,” said Kangaroo.
“And you, of course, are a glass finger-bowl with a violet floating on
it, you’re so transparent,” said Jack.
“I think that describes me beautifully. Mr Somers, help yourself to
wine, that’s the most comfortable. I hope you are going to write
something for us. Australia is waiting for her Homer--or her
Theocritus.”
“Or even her Ally Sloper,” said Jack, “if I may be permitted to be so
old-fashioned.”
“If I were but blind,” said Somers, “I might have a shot at Australian
Homerics.”
“His eyes hurt him still, with looking at Sydney,” said Jack.
“There certainly is enough of it to look at,” said Kangaroo.
“In acreage,” said Jack.
“Pity it spreads over so much ground,” said Somers.
“Oh, every man his little lot, and an extended tram-service.”
“In Rome,” said Somers, “they piled up huge houses, vast, and stowed
them away like grubs in a honeycomb.”
“Who did the stowing?” asked Jack sarcastically.
“We don’t like to have anybody overhead here,” said Kangaroo. “We don’t
even care to go upstairs, because we are then one storey higher than our
true, ground-floor selves.”
“Prop us up on a dozen stumps, and we’re cosy,” said Jack. “Just a
little above the earth level, and no higher, you know. Australians in
their heart of hearts hate anything but a bungalow. They feel it’s rock
bottom, don’t you see. None of your stair-climbing shams and upstairs
importance.”
“Good honest fellows,” said Kangaroo, and it was impossible to know if
he were joking or not.
“Till it comes to business,” said Jack.
Kangaroo then started a discussion of the much-mooted and at the moment
fashionable Theory of Relativity.
“Of course it’s popular,” said Jack. “It absolutely takes the wind out
of anybody’s sails who wants to say ‘I’m _It_.’ Even the Lord Almighty
is only relatively so and as it were.”
“How nice for us all,” laughed Somers. “It needed a Jew to lead us this
last step in liberty.”
“Now we’re all little _Its_, chirping like so many molecules one with
another,” said Jack, eyeing the roast duck with a shrewd gaze.
The luncheon passed frivolously. Somers was bored, but he had a shrewd
suspicion that the other two men really enjoyed it. They sauntered into
the study for coffee. It was a smallish room, with big, deep leather
chairs of a delicate brown colour, and a thick, bluey oriental carpet.
The walls even had an upper panelling of old embossed cordovan leather,
a bluish colouring with gilt, old and tarnished away. It was evident
that law pays, even in a new country.
Everybody waited for everybody to speak. Somers, of course, knew it was
not his business to begin.
“The indiscreet Callcott told you about our Kangaroo clubs,” said the
host, smiling faintly. Somers thought that surely he had Jewish blood in
him. He stirred his little gold coffee-cup slowly.
“He gave me a very sketchy outline.”
“It interested you?”
“Exceedingly.”
“I read your series of articles on Democracy,” said Kangaroo. “In fact
they helped me to this attempt now.”
“I thought not a soul read them,” said Somers, “in that absurd
international paper published at the Hague, that they said was run
absolutely by spies and shady people.”
“It may have been. But I was a subscriber, and I read your essays here
in Sydney. There was another man, too, writing on a new aristocracy. But
it seemed to me there was too much fraternising in his scheme, too much
reverence for the upper classes and passionate pity for the working
classes. He wanted them all to be kind to one another, aristocrats of
the spirit.” Kangaroo smiled slowly. And when he smiled like that, there
came an exceedingly sweet charm into his face, for a moment his face was
like a flower. Yet he was quite ugly. And surely, thought Somers, it is
Jewish blood. The very best that is in the Jewish blood: a faculty for
pure disinterestedness, and warm, physically warm love, that seems to
make the corpuscles of the blood glow. And after the smile his face went
stupid and kangaroo-like, pendulous, with the eyes close together above
the long, drooping nose. But the shape of the head was very beautiful,
small, light, and fine. The man had surely Jewish blood. And he was
almost purely _kind_, essential kindliness, embodied in an ancient,
unscrupulous shrewdness. He was so shrewd, so clever. And with a rogue
or a mean man, absolutely unscrupulous. But for any human being who
showed himself sincere and vulnerable, his heart was pure in kindness.
An extraordinary man. This pure kindliness had something Jehovah-like in
it. And in every difficulty and every stress, he would remember it, his
kindly love for real, vulnerable human beings. It had given his soul an
absolute direction, whatever he said about relativity. Yet once he felt
any man or woman was cold, mean, barren of this warmth which was in him,
then he became at once utterly unscrupulous in defeating the creature.
He was not angry or indignant. He was more like a real Jehovah. He had
only to turn on all the levers and forces of his clever, almost
fiendishly subtle will, and he could triumph. And he knew it. Somers had
once had a Jewish friend with this wonderful, Jehovah-like kindliness,
but also, without the shrewd fiendish subtlety of will. But it helped
him to understand Cooley.
“Yes--I think the man sent me his book,” said Somers. “I forget his
name. I only remember there was a feverish adulation of Lord
Something-or-other, and a terrible _cri du cœur_ about the mother of the
people, the poor elderly woman in a battered black bonnet and a shawl,
going out with six-pence ha’-penny to buy a shillings-worth of
necessaries for the home.”
“Just so,” said Kangaroo, smiling again. “No doubt her husband drank. If
he did, who can wonder.”
“The very sight of her makes one want to shove her out of the house--or
out of the world, for that matter,” said Somers.
“Nay,” said Jack. “She’s enjoying her misery, dear old soul. Don’t envy
her her bits of pleasures.”
“Not envy,” laughed Somers. “But I begrudge them her.”
“What would you do with her?” asked Kangaroo.
“I wouldn’t do anything. She mostly creeps in the East End, where one
needn’t bother about her. And she’s as much at home there as an opossum
is in the bush. So don’t bother me about her.”
“Just so,” smiled Kangaroo. “I’d like to provide public kitchens where
the children can get properly fed--and make the husband do a certain
amount of state labour to pay for it. And for the rest, leave them to go
their own way.”
“But their minds, their souls, their spirits?” said Somers.
“They must more or less look after them themselves. I want to keep
_order_. I want to remove physical misery as far as possible. That I am
sure of. And that you can only do by exerting strong, just _power_ from
above. There I agree with you.”
“You don’t believe in education?”
“Not much. That is to say, in ninety per cent. of the people it is
useless. But I do want those ninety per cent. none the less to have
full, substantial lives: as even slaves have had under certain masters,
and as our people hardly have at all. That again, I think, is one of
your ideas.”
“It is,” said Somers. But his heart sank. “You want a kind of benevolent
tyranny, then?”
“Not exactly. You see my tyrant would be so much circumscribed by the
constitution I should establish. But in a sense, he would be a tyrant.
Perhaps it would be nearer to say he would be a patriarch, or a pope:
representing as near as possible the wise, subtle spirit of life. I
should try to establish my state of Australia as a kind of Church, with
the profound reverence for life, for life’s deepest urges, as the motive
power. Dostoevsky suggests this: and I believe it can be done.”
“Perhaps it might be done here,” blurted Somers. “Every continent has
its own way, and its own needs.”