Catholic Church, as an institution. But the creed and the theology are
not natural to me, quite. Not quite. I think we need something more
flexible, and a power less formal and dogmatic; more generous, shall I
say. A _generous_ power, that sees all the issue here, not in the
after-life, and that does not concern itself with sin and repentance and
redemption. I should try to teach my people what it is truly to be a
_man_, and a woman. The salvation of souls seems too speculative a job.
I think if a man is truly a man, true to his own being, his soul saves
itself in that way. But no two people can save their souls alive, in the
same way. As far as possible, we must leave it to them. _Fata volentem
ducunt, nolentem trahunt._”
“I believe that too.”
“Yet there must be law, and there must be authority. But law more human,
and authority much wiser. If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness
and the mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and
subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to
recognise the imperatives as they arise--or nearly so--and to obey. But
most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their
own new, life-born needs, life’s ever-strange new imperatives. The
secret of all life is in obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in
the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us on to new gestures,
new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations. It is a
subtle and conflicting urge away from the thing we are. And there lies
the pain. Because man builds himself in to his old house of life, builds
his own blood into the roads he lays down, and to break from the old
way, and to change his house of life, is almost like tearing him to
pieces: a sacrilege. Life is cruel--and above all things man needs to be
reassured and suggested into his new issues. And he needs to be relieved
from this terrible responsibility of governing himself when he doesn’t
know what he wants, and has no aim towards which to govern himself. Man
again needs a father--not a friend or a brother sufferer, a suffering
Saviour. Man needs a quiet, gentle father who uses his authority in the
name of living life, and who is absolutely stern against anti-life. I
offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern
where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my
consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will,
for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life,
and to shelter mankind from the madness and the evil of anti-life.”
“You believe in evil?”
“Ah, yes. Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new
urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion,
the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very
voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are
millstones round our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They
are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers--look at
those hibiscus--they don’t want to immortalise themselves into stone. If
they turned into stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating,
and lose its hope and its joy. But they won’t. They will quietly, gently
wither. And I love them for it. And so should all creeds, all gods,
quietly and gently curl up and wither as their evening approaches. That
is the only way of true holiness, in my opinion.”
The man had a beautiful voice, when he was really talking. It was like a
flute, a wood-instrument. And his face, with that odd look of a sheep or
a kangaroo, took on an extraordinary beauty of its own, a glow as if it
were suffused with light. And the eyes shone with a queer, holy light,
behind the eyeglasses. And yet it was still the kangaroo face.
Somers watched the face, and dropped his head. He sat feeling rebuked.
He was so impatient and outrageous himself. And the steady loveliness of
this man’s warm, wise heart was too much for him. He was abashed before
it.
“Ah, yes,” Kangaroo re-echoed. “There is a principle of evil. The
principle of resistance. Malignant resistance to the life principle. And
it uses the very life-force itself against life, and sometimes seems as
if it were absolutely winning. Not only Jesus rose from the dead. Judas
rose as well, and propagated himself on the face of the earth. He has
many children now. The life opposers. The life-resisters. The
life-enemies. But we will see who wins. We will see. In the name of
life, and the love of life, a man is almost invincible. I have found it
so.”
“I believe it also,” said Somers.
They were silent, and Kangaroo sat there with the rapt look on his face:
a pondering, eternal look, like the eternity of the lamb of God grown
into a sheep. This rather wicked idea came into Somers’ mind: the lamb
of God grown into a sheep. So the man sat there, with his wide-eyed,
rapt face sunk forward to his breast, very beautiful, and as eternal as
if it were a dream: so absolute.
A wonderful thing for a sculptor. For Kangaroo was really ugly: his
pendulous Jewish face, his forward shoulders, his round stomach in its
expensively tailored waistcoat and dark grey, striped trousers, his very
big thighs. And yet even his body had become beautiful, to Somers--one
might love it intensely, every one of its contours, its roundnesses and
downward-drooping heaviness. Almost a grotesque, like a Chinese Buddha.
And yet not a grotesque. Beautiful, beautiful as some half-tropical,
bulging flower from a tree.
Then Kangaroo looked with a teasing little smile at Somers.
“But you have your _own_ idea of power, haven’t you?” he said, getting
up suddenly, with quick power in his bulk, and gripping the other man’s
shoulder.
“I thought I had,” said Somers.
“Oh, you have, you have.” There was a calm, easy tone in the voice,
slightly fat, very agreeable. Somers thrilled to it as he had never
thrilled.
“Why, the man is like a god, I love him,” he said to his astonished
self. And Kangaroo was hanging forward his face and smiling heavily and
ambiguously to himself, knowing that Somers was with him.
“‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night’”
he quoted in a queer, sonorous voice, like a priest. “The lion of your
might would be a tiger, wouldn’t it. The tiger and the unicorn were
fighting for the crown. How about me for a unicorn?--if I tied a bayonet
on my nose?” He rubbed his nose with a heavy playfulness.
“Is the tiger your principle of evil?”
“The tiger? Oh dear, no. The jackal, the hyæna, and dear, deadly
humanity. No, no. The tiger stands on one side the shield, and the
unicorn on the other, and they don’t fight for the crown at all. They
keep it up between them. The pillars of the world! The tiger and the
kangaroo!” he boomed this out in a mock heroic voice, strutting with
heavy playfulness. Then he laughed, looking winsomely at Somers. Heaven,
what a beauty he had!
“Tiger, tiger, burning bright,” he resumed, sing-song, abstracted. “I
knew you’d come. Even since I read your first book of poems--how many
years is it ago?--ten?--eleven? I knew you’d come.
‘Your hands are five-branded flames--
_Noli me tangere_.’
Of course you had to come.”
“Well, here I am, anyhow,” said Somers.
“You are. You _are_!” shouted the other, and Somers was quite scared.
Then Kangaroo laughed again. “Get up,” he said. “Stand up and let me
look at you.”
The two men stood facing one another: Kangaroo large, with his full
stomach and his face hulking down, and his queer, glaring eyes; Somers
slight and aloof-looking. Cooley eyed him up and down.
“A little bit of a fellow--too delicate for rough me,” he said, then
started quoting again:
“‘Your hands are five-branded flames--
_Noli me tangere_.’
I’ve got fat and bulky on all the poetry I never wrote. How do you do,
Mr Somers? How do you like Australia, and its national animal, the
kangaroo?” Again he smiled with the sudden glow of warmth in his dark
eyes, startling and wonderful.
“Australia is a weird country, and it’s national animal is beyond me,”
Somers said, smiling rather palely.
“Oh no, it isn’t. You’ll be patting it on the back as soon as you’ve
taken your hands out of your pockets.”
He stood silent a long while, with feet apart, looking abstractedly at
Somers through his _pince nez_.
“Ah, well,” he sighed at last. “We shall see. We shall see. But I’m very
glad you came. You understand what I mean, I know, when I say we are
birds of the same feather. Aren’t we?”
“In some ways I think we are.”
“Yes. In the feathery line. When shall I see you again?”
“We are going back to the South Coast on Saturday.”
“Then let me see you to-morrow. Let me call for you at your house--and
bring you back into town for dinner in the evening. May I do that?”
“Thank you,” said Somers.
“What does ‘thank you’ mean? _Danke!_ No, thank you.”
“Yes, thank you,” said Somers.
“Don’t thank _me_, man,” suddenly shouted the other. “I’m the one to do
the thanking.”
Somers felt simple startled amazement at these sudden shouts--loud
shouts, that you might almost hear in the street.
At last Jack and Somers left. Jack had felt it his business to keep
quiet: he knew his chief. But now he opened his mouth.
“What do you think of Kangaroo?” he asked.
“I’m beyond thinking,” said Somers.
“I know, that’s how he leaves you when he makes a set at you. But he’s a
rattling fine sort, he is. He puts a heart into you when your chest’s as
hollow as an old mustard tin. He’s a wonder, is Kangaroo: and he keeps
on being a wonder.”
“Yes, he’s certainly a wonder.”
“My, the brain the man has! I say, though, talking about tigers and
kangaroos reminded me of a thing I once saw. It was up in the North. I
was going along when I heard snarls out of some long buffalo grass that
made my hair stand on end. I had to see what it was, though, so into the
grass goes I. And there I saw a full-grown male kangaroo backed up
against a tree, with the flesh of one leg torn clean from the bone. He
was gasping, but he was still fighting. And the other was a great big
cat, we call ’em tiger-cats, as big as a smallish leopard, a
beauty--grey and black stripes, and straighter than a leopard. And
before you could breathe, a streak of black and grey shot at that ’roo’s
throat, seemed to twist in mid air--and the ’roo slipped down to the
ground with his entrails ripped right out. I was so dumbfounded I took a
step in the grass, and that great hulking cat stopped and lifted his
face from his warm food that he’d started on without ever looking up. He
stood over that ’roo for ten seconds staring me in the eyes. Then the
skin wrinkled back from his snout, and the fangs were so white and clean
as death itself, and a low growl came out of his ugly throat. ‘Come on,
you swine,’ it said as plain as words. I didn’t you bet. I backed out of
that beastly grass.
“The next one I saw was a dead one. And beside him lay the boss’ best
staghound, that had been trained to tackling wild boars since he was a
pup: dead as well. The cat had come fossicking round our camp on the
Madden River.
“My gad, though, but the size of the brute, and muscle like you couldn’t
find in any other beast. I looked at the claws on the pads. They’re as
sharp as a lancet, and they’d tear the guts out of a man before he could
squeak. It was good-bye ’roo, that time.
“They put that yarn in the _Bulletin_. And some chap wrote and said it
was a stiff ’un, and the wild cat must be descended from escaped tame
cats, because this country has no pussy aboriginal of any sort. Couldn’t
say myself, except I saw that tiger-cat, and it didn’t look much like
the son of a homely tissey, either. Wonder what put the thing in my
head. Perhaps Kangaroo’s fat belly.”
“He’s not so very fat,” said Somers.
“No, he’s not got what you’d call a corporation and a whole urban
council in front of him. Neither is he flat just there, like you and
me.”
Kangaroo arrived the next day at Torestin with a large bunch of violets
in his hand: pale, expensive, late winter violets. He took off his hat
to Harriet and bowed quite deep, without shaking hands. He had been a
student at Munich.
“Oh, how do you do!” cried Harriet. “Please don’t look at the horrid
room, we leave in the morning.”
Kangaroo looked vacantly around. He was not interested, so he saw
nothing: he might as well have been blind.
“It’s a very nice room,” he said. “May I give you the violets? The poet
said you liked having them about.”
She took them in her two hands, smelling their very faint fragrance.
“They’re not like English violets--or those big dark fellows in Italy,”
he said. “But still we persuade ourselves that they _are_ violets.”
“They’re lovely. I feel I could warm my hands over them,” she said.
“And now they’re quite happy violets,” he replied, smiling his rare,
sweet smile at her. “Why are you taking the poet away from Sydney?”
“Lovat? He wants to go.”
“Lovat! What a good name to call him by!” He turned to Somers, looking
at him closely. “May I call you Lovat?”
“Better that than _the poet_,” said Somers, lifting his nose slightly
with aversion.
The other man laughed, but softly and happily.
“His muse he’s not in love with,” he murmured to himself.
“No, he prefers his own name,” said Somers.
“But supposing now,” said Kangaroo, as if alert and interested, “your
name was Cooley: Benjamin Cooley--Ben, for short. You’d prefer even
Kangaroo to that.”
“In Australia the kangaroo is the king of beasts,” said Somers.
“_The kangaroo is the king of beasts,_
_Inviting the other ones out to feasts_,”
sang the big man, continuing: “Won’t you both come to dinner with the
king of beasts? Won’t you come too, Mrs Somers?”
“You know you only want Lovat, to talk your _man’s_ stuff.”
“I’m not a man, I’m a kangaroo. Besides, yesterday I hadn’t seen you. If
I had known, my dear Somers, that your wife, who is at this moment in
her room hastily changing her dress, was such a beautiful person--I
don’t say woman merely--I’d have invited you for her sake, and not for
your own.”
“Then _I_ wouldn’t have come,” said Somers.
“Hear them, what a haughty pair of individuals! I suppose you expect the
king of beasts to go down on his knees to you, like the rest of
democratic kings to their constituents. Won’t you get ready, Mrs
Somers?”
“You are quite sure you want me to come?” said Harriet suspiciously.
“Why, if you won’t come, I shall ask Lovat--dear Lovat, by the happiest
fluke in the world not Lovelace--to let me stay here to tea, dinner, or
supper--that is, to the next meal, whatever name it may bear.”
At this Harriet disappeared to put on a proper dress.
“We will go as soon as you are ready,” called Kangaroo. “We can all
squeeze into that automobile at your gate.”
When Harriet reappeared the men rose. Kangaroo looked at her with
admiration.
“What a remarkably beautiful person you are,” he said. “But mind, I
don’t say _woman_. _Dio liberi!_” He scuttled hurriedly to the door.
They had a gay dinner. Kangaroo wasn’t really witty. But he had such an
innocent charm, an extraordinary winsomeness, that it was much more
delicious than wit. His presence was so warm. You felt you were cuddled
cosily, like a child, on his breast, in the soft glow of his heart, and
that your feet were nestling on his ample, beautiful “tummy.”
“I wonder you were never married,” said Harriet to him.
“I’ve been married several times,” he replied.
“Really!” she cried.
“First to Benny Cooley--then to immortal verse--after that to the
law--once to a haughty lady--and now I’m wedded to my ideals. This time
it is final. I don’t take another wife.”
“I don’t care about the rest. But were you ever married, really?”
“To a woman? A mere woman? Why, yes indeed. A young Baroness too. And
after seven months she told me she couldn’t stand me for another minute,
and went off with Von Rumpeldorf.”
“Is it true?”
“Quite true.”
“And is there still a Mrs Kangaroo?”
“Alas, no! Like the unicorn, the family knows no female.”
“But why couldn’t she stand you?” cried Harriet.
“Think of it now. Could _any_ woman stand me?” he asked, with a slight
shrug.
“I should have thought they’d have _adored_ you,” she cried.
“Of course they do. They can’t stand me, though. And I thoroughly
sympathise with them.”
Harriet looked at him thoughtfully.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “You’re too much like Abraham’s bosom. One would
feel nowhere.”
Kangaroo threw down his napkin and pushed back his chair and roared with
laughter--roared and roared with laughter. The Chinese man-servant stood
back perturbed. Harriet went very red--the dinner waited. Then suddenly
he became quiet, looking comically at Harriet, and still sitting back
from table. Then he opened his arms and held them outstretched, his head
on one side.
“The way to nowhere,” he said, ironically.
She did not say any more, and he turned to the man-servant.
“My glass is empty, John,” he said.
“Ah, well,” he sighed, “if you please one woman you can’t please all
women.”
“And you must please all women,” said Harriet, thoughtfully. “Yes,
perhaps you must. Perhaps it is your mission.”
“Mission! Good God! Now I’m a fat missionary. Dear Mrs Somers, eat my
dinner, but don’t swallow _me_ in a mouthful. Eating your host for hors
d’œuvres. You’re a dangerous ogre, a Medusa with her hair under her hat.
Let’s talk of Peach Melba. Where have you had the very best Peach Melba
you ever tasted?”
After this he became quiet, and a little constrained, and when they had
withdrawn for coffee, the talk went subduedly, with a little difficulty.
“I suppose your husband will have told you, Mrs Somers, of our
heaven-inspired scheme of saving Australia from the thieves, dingoes,
rabbits, rats and starlings, humanly speaking.”
“No, he hasn’t told me. He’s only told me there was some political
business going on.”
“He may as well put it that way as any other. And you advised him not to
have anything to do with it?”
“No,” said Harriet, “I let him do as he likes.”
“Wonderful woman! Even the wind bloweth where it listeth.”
“So does he.”
“With your permission.”
“The wind has permission too,” said Harriet. “Everything goes by
permission of something else, in this world.” But she went rather red.
“Bravo, a Daniel come to judgment!” Then his voice changed, became
gentle and winning again. It was as if he had remembered to love her, in
his way of love. “It’s not quite a political thing,” he said. “We want
to take away the strain, the nervous tension out of life, and let folks
be happy again unconsciously, instead of unhappy consciously. You
wouldn’t say that was wrong, would you?”
“No,” she replied, rather unwilling.
“And if I have to be a fat old Kangaroo with--not an Abraham’s bosom,
but a pouch to carry young Australia in--why--do you really resent it?”
Harriet laughed, glancing involuntarily at his lowest waistcoat button.
It seemed such a true figure.
“Why should I resent it? It’s not my business.”
“Let it be your business just a little bit. I want your sympathy.”
“You mean you want Lovat?”
“Poor Lovat. Richard Lovat Somers! I do indeed want him. But just as
much I want your sympathy.”
Harriet smiled enigmatically. She was being her most annoying. A look of
almost vicious anger came over the man’s face as he leaned back in his
chair, seeming to make his brows narrower, and a convulsion seemed to go
through his belly. Then he recovered his calm, and seemed to forget. For
a long time he lay silent, with a strange, hypnotic stillness, as if he
were thinking far away, quite far away. Both Harriet and Somers felt
spellbound. Then from the distance came his small voice:
“Man that is born of woman is sick of himself. Man that is born of woman
is tired of his day after day. And woman is like a mother with a
tiresome child: what is she to do with him? What is she to do with
him?--man, that is born of woman.
“But the men that are born like ants, out of the cold interval, and are
womanless, they are not sick of themselves. They are full of cold
energy, and they seethe with cold fire in the ant-hill, making new
corridors, new chambers--they alone know what for. And they have cold,
formic-acid females, as restless as themselves, and as active about the
ant-hill, and as identical with the dried clay of the building. And the
active, important, so-called females, and the active, cold-blooded,
energetic males, they shift twig after twig, and lay crumb of earth upon
crumb of earth, and the females deposit cold white eggs of young. This
is the world, and the people of the world. And with their cold, active
bodies the ant-men and the ant-women swarm over the face of the earth.
“And where then are the sons of men? Where are the sons of men, and man
that is born of woman? Man that is born of woman is a slave in the cold,
barren corridors of the ant-hill. Or if he goes out, the open spaces are
but spaces between ant-hill and ant-hill. And as he goes he hears voices
claiming him, saying: ‘Hello, here comes a brother ant.’ And they hail
him as a brother ant. And from this there is no escape. None. Not even
the lap of woman.
“But I am a son of man. I was once a man born of woman. And by the warm
heart of the mother that bore me, even if fifty wives denied me, I would
still go on fighting with a warm heart to break down the ant-hill. I can
fight them with their own weapons: the hard mandibles and the acid sting
of the cold ant. But that is not how I fight them. I fight them with the
warm heart. Deep calls to deep, and fire calls out fire. And for warmth,
for the fire of sympathy, to burn out the ant heap with the heat of
fiery, living hearts: that is what I stand for.
“And if I can make no one single woman happy, I will make none unhappy
either. But if I can let out the real fire of happiness from the heart
and bowels of man that is born of woman and woman that is born of man.”
Then suddenly he broke off: “And whether I can or not, I _love_ them,”
he shouted, in a voice suddenly become loud and passionate. “I love
them. I _love_ you, you woman born of man, I do, and I defy you to
prevent me. Fiery you are, and fiery am I, and fire should be friends
with fire. And when you make me angry, with your jealousy and mistrust
like the ants, I remember, I remind myself: ‘But see the beauty of the
fire in her! And think how the ants have tortured her and filled her
with fear and with horror!’ And then the rage goes down again, and I
know I love you, and I know that fire loves fire, and that therefore you
love me. And I chalk up another mark against the ants, who have tortured
you with their cold energy and their conscious formic-acid that stings
like fire. And I love you because you’ve suffered from them as I have.
And I love you because you and your husband cherish the fire between
you, sacred, apart from the ants. _A bas les fourmis._
“I have been like a man buried up into his neck in an ant-heap: so
buried in the daily world, and stung and stung and stung again, because
I wouldn’t change and grow cold, till now their poison is innocuous, and
the formic acid of social man has no effect on me. And I’ve kept my
warmth. And I will keep it, till I give it up to the unknown, out of my
poor fat body. And it is my banner, and my wife and my children and my
God--just the flicker that is in my heart like a fire, and that I live
by. I _can’t_ speculate about God. I can’t do it. It seems to me a cold,
antish trick. But the fire that is in my heart is God, and I will not
forswear it, no, not if you offer me all the world. And fire is full of
seeds--full of seeds--and let them scatter. I won’t cherish it on a
domestic hearth. I say I won’t. So don’t bring that up against me. I
won’t cherish it on the domestic hearth. I will use it against the ants,
while they swarm over everything. And I’ll call fire to my fire, and set
the ant-heap at last in a blaze. Like kerosene poured in. It shall be
so. It shall be so. Don’t oppose me. Believe the flame in your heart,
once and for all, and don’t oppose me. Believe the flame of your own
heart, and be with me. Remember I am with you against the ants. Remember
that. And if I am Abraham’s bosom--isn’t it better than no bosom, in a
world that simmers with busy ants? And would you leave every young,
warm, naked thing on the ground for the ants to find. Would you?”
He looked at her searchingly. She was pale, and moved, but hostile. He
swung round in his chair, swinging his heavy hips over and lying
sideways.