lips. It was when the Prince of Wales was in India just now. There had
been a show--and then a dinner given by the governor of the town--some
capital or other. The Prince sat next to the governor’s lady, and he was
glum, silent, tortured by them all a bit beyond bearance. And the
governor’s lady felt she ought to make conversation, ought to say
something to the poor devil, just for the show’s sake and the occasion.
So she _couldn’t_ think what to tell him that would interest him. Then
she had a brilliant idea. ‘Do you know what happened to me last week?’
she said. ‘You’ve seen my adorable little Pekinese, Chu? She had
puppies--four darling queer little things--tiny little creepy-crawlies.
Of course we loved them. But in the night I thought I heard them
crying--I wasn’t sure. But at last I went down. And what do you think!
There was a swarm of white ants, and they were just eating up the last
bits of them. Wasn’t it awful.’ The Prince went white as death. And just
then an ant happened to come on the tablecloth. He took his glass and
banged it over it, and never spoke another word all evening. Now that
story was told by the woman herself. And this was what she did to a poor
nerve-racked lad she was supposed to honour. Now I ask you, where was
the living heart in her? She was an ant, a white ant too.”
He rolled over in his chair, bitterly, with massive bitterness, turning
his back on Harriet. She sat with a pale, blenched face, and tears in
her eyes.
“How cruel!” she said. “But she must have been a fool.”
“Vile! Vile! No fool! Quite brilliant ant-tactics. There was warmth in
the lad’s heart, and she was out to do _her_ bit of the quenching. Oh,
she gave him her nip and sting. Ants, social ants. Social creatures!
Cold--I’m as cold as they are when it comes to them. And as cunning, and
_quite_ as vicious. But that’s not what I care for. I want to collect
together all the fire in all the burning hearts in Australia: that’s
what I want. Collect the heart-fire, and the fire will be our fire.
That’s what I do want; apart from all antics and ant-tricks. ‘_We have
lighted such a fire this day, Master Latimer._’ Yes, and we’ll light
another. You _needn’t_ be with me if you don’t want to--if you’re
frightened of losing your monopoly over your precious husband. Take him
home then--take him home.”
And he rolled his back on her more than ever, finishing in a sudden gust
of anger and weariness. He lay there rolled in his chair, a big, queer,
heavy figure, with his face almost buried in the soft leather, and his
big hips sticking out. Her face was quivering, wanting to cry. Then
suddenly she broke into a laugh, saying rather shakily, venomously:
“Well, anyhow, you needn’t turn the wrong end of you at me quite so
undisguisedly.”
“How do you know it _is_ the wrong end of me?” he said, sitting up
suddenly and letting his head hang, scowling.
“_Facon de parler_,” she said, laughing rather stiffly.
Somers was silent, and kept silent till the end. He was thankful that
Kangaroo was fighting the battle this time.
Their host sent them home in his motor-car. Neither of them had anything
to say. Then, as Harriet shut the door of Torestin, and they were quite
alone, she said:
“Yes, he’s right. I absolutely believe in him. I don’t care _what_ he
does with you.”
“I do, though,” said Somers.
The next day they went to Mullumbimby. And the day after that, each of
them wrote a letter to Kangaroo.
“Dear Kaiser Kangaroo,” began Harriet, “I must thank you very much for
the dinner and the violets, which are still quite fresh and blue in
Coo-ee. I think you were very horrid to me, but also very nice, so I
hope you don’t think the worst of me. I want to tell you that I _do_
sympathise, and that I am awfully glad if I can be of any use to you in
any way. I have a holy terror of ants since I heard you, but I know what
you mean by the fire. Lovat will hand over my portion when he comes to
see you. But I shall make myself into a Fire Brigade, because I am sure
you will be kindling fires all over everywhere, under the table and in
the clothes-cupboard, and I, poor domestic wretch, shall have to be
rushing to put them out. Being only a poor domestic female, I really
don’t feel safe with fires anywhere except in fire-places and in grates
with hearths. But I do want you to know you have my sympathy--and my
Lovat.” She then signed herself Harriet Somers, and felt even more
fluttered than when she had signed the marriage register.
She received for answer:
“Dear Mrs Somers: I am much honoured and very grateful for the assurance
of your sympathy. I have put a one-and-sixpenny government stamp under
your signature, to make your letter a legal document, and have further
forged the signatures of two witnesses to your deed of gift of Lovat, so
I am afraid there is no court of law in New South Wales in which you
could now substantiate a further claim over him. I am sorry to take this
mean advantage over you, but we lawyers know no scruples.
“I should be more than delighted if I could have the honour of
entertaining once more in Sydney--say next Thursday--a beautiful person
and remarkable woman (one and the same individual) who tells me to my
nose that I am a Jew and that my name, instead of Benjamin, should be
Abraham. Do please come again and call me Abraham’s Bosom, but don’t
fail to bring your husband, for the simple look of the thing.”
“The Kangaroo is a fighting beast, I believe,” said Somers, looking at
Harriet and laughing. He was not sorry when for once some other person
gave her a dig.
“I think he’s rather foolish,” she said briefly.
These days Somers, too, was filled with fury. As for loving mankind, or
having a fire of love in his heart, it was all rot. He felt almost
fierily cold. He liked the sea, the pale sea of green glass that fell in
such cold foam. Ice-fiery, fish-burning. He went out on to the low flat
rocks at low tide, skirting the deep pock-holes that were full of
brilliantly clear water and delicately-coloured shells and tiny, crimson
anemones. Strangely sea-scooped sharp sea-bitter rock-floor, all wet and
sea-savage. And standing at the edge looking at the waves rather
terrifying rolling at him, where he stood low and exposed, far out from
the sand-banks, and as he watched the gannets gleaming white, then
falling with a splash like white sky-arrows into the waves, he wished
as he had never wished before that he could be cold, as sea-things are
cold, and murderously fierce. To have oneself exultantly ice-cold, not
one spark of this wretched warm flesh left, and to have all the
terrific, icy energy of a fish. To surge with that cold exultance and
passion of a sea thing! Now he understood the yearning in the
seal-woman’s croon, as she went back to the sea, leaving her husband and
her children of warm flesh. No more cloying warmth. No more of this
horrible stuffy heat of human beings. To be an isolated swift fish in
the big seas, that are bigger than the earth; fierce with cold, cold
life, in the watery twilight before sympathy was created to clog us.
These were his feelings now. Mankind? Ha, he turned his face to the
centre of the seas, away from any land. The noise of waters, and
dumbness like a fish. The cold, lovely silence, before crying and
calling were invented. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, as if it had
relapsed away from speech altogether.
He did not care a straw what Kangaroo said or felt, or what anybody said
or felt, even himself. He had no feelings, and speech had gone out of
him. He wanted to be cold, cold, and alone like a single fish, with no
feeling in his heart at all except a certain icy exultance and wild,
fish-like rapacity. “Homo sum!” All right. Who sets a limit to what a
man is? Man is also a fierce and fish-cold devil, in his hour, filled
with cold fury of desire to get away from the cloy of human life
altogether, not into death, but into that icily self-sufficient vigour
of a fish.
CHAP: VII. THE BATTLE OF TONGUES
As a rule the jetty on its poles straddling a little way into the sea
was as deserted as if it were some relic left by an old invader. Then it
had spurts of activity, when steamer after steamer came blorting and
hanging miserably round, like cows to the cowshed on a winter afternoon.
Then a little engine would chuff along the pier, shoving a string of
tip-up trucks, and little men would saunter across the sky-line, and
there would be a fine dimness of black dust round the low, red ship and
the end of the jetty. Luckily it was far enough away, so that Harriet
need not fear for her beautiful white washing. She washed her linen
herself for the sheer joy of it, and loved nothing so much as thinking
of it getting whiter and whiter, like the Spenserian maid, in the sun
and sea, and visiting it on the grass every five minutes, and finding it
every time really whiter, till Somers said it would reach a point of
whiteness where the colours would break up, and she’d go out and find
pieces of rainbow on the grass and bushes, instead of towels and shirts.
“Shouldn’t I be startled!” she said, accepting it as quite a possible
contingency, and adding thoughtfully: “No, not really.”
One of these afternoons when Somers was walking down on the sands,
looking at the different shells, their sea-colours of pink and brown and
rainbow and brilliant violet and shrimp-red, and when the boats were
loading coal on the moderately quiet sea, he noticed the little engine
standing steaming on the jetty, just overhead where he was going to pass
under. Then his attention was drawn away to the men picking up the
rounded, sea-smooth pebbles of coal in one little place where the beach
was just a black slope of perfectly clean coal-pebbles: just like any
other pebbles. There were usually some men, or women or children,
picking here, putting the bigger pebbles of sea-coal into sacks. From
the edge of the small waves Somers heard one man talking to another, and
the English tones--unconsciously he expected a foreign language--and
particularly the peculiar educated-artisan quality, almost a kind of
uppishness that there is in the speech of Australian working men, struck
him as incongruous with their picking up the coal-cobs from the shore.
He watched them, in the chill of the shadow. Yes, they thought as much
of themselves as anybody. But one was palpably a Welshman, and loved
picking up something for nothing; and the other mixed his democratic
uppishness with a queer lousy quality, like a bushranger. “They are ten
times more foreign to me,” said Somers, “than Italian scoundrels, or
even Indians. They are so _foreign_ to me. And yet their manner of life,
their ordinary way of living is almost exactly what I was used to as a
boy. Why are they so foreign to me?”
They silently objected to his looking, so he went on. He had come to the
huge, high timbers of the tall jetty. There stood the little engine
still overhead: and in the gloom among the timbers underneath water was
dripping down from her, which gave Somers a distaste for passing just
then. He looked up. There was the engine-driver in his dirty shirt and
dirty bare arms, talking to another man. The other man saluted--and to
Somers’ surprise it was William James. He stood quite still, and a
surprised smile of recognition greeted the other man, who saluted.
“Why, what are you doing here?” called Somers.
William James came to the edge of the jetty, but could not hear, because
of the noise of the sea. His face had that small, subtle smile that was
characteristic of him, and which Somers was never quite sure of, whether
it was really jeering or in a cunning way friendly.
“Won’t you come up a minute?” roared William James.
So Somers scrambled round up the banks, on to the railway track.
“I couldn’t come down for the moment,” said William James. “I’ll have to
see the manager, then I’m going off on this boat. We’re ready to go. You
heard her blowing.”
“Where are you going? Back to Sydney.”
“Yes. I come down occasionally on this coal-business, and if I like I go
back on the collier. The sea is quiet, and I needn’t wait for a train.
Well, an’ how’re you gettin’ on, like? Pleased with it down here all by
yourselves?”
“Very.”
“A bit lonely for you. I suppose you wouldn’t like to know the manager
here--Mr Thomas? He’s a decent chap--from South Wales originally.”
“No. I like it best when I don’t know anybody.”
“That’s a compliment for some of us. However--I know what you mean. I
know what you mean. Jack tells me you saw Kangaroo. Made quite a fuss of
you, I hear. I knew he would. Oh, Kangaroo knew all about you: all he
wanted to know, anyhow. I say, if ye think of stoppin’ down here, you
might get in a ton of coal. It looks as if this strike might come off.
That Arbitration Board’s a fine failure, what?”
“As far as I gather.”
“Oh, bound to be. Bound to be. They talk about scraps of paper, why,
every agreement that’s ever come to in this country, you could wrap your
next red herring in it, for all it’s worth.”
“I suppose it’s like Ireland, they don’t want to agree.”
“That’s about it. The Labour people want this revolution of theirs.
What?”--and he looked at Somers with a long, smiling, sardonic leer,
like a wink. “There’s a certain fact,” he continued, “as far as any
electioneering success goes, they’re out of the running for a spell.
What do you think of Trades Unions, one way and another?”
“I dislike them on the whole rather intensely. They’re just the nastiest
profiteering side of the working man--they make a fool of him too, in my
opinion.”
“Just my opinion. They make a fool of him. Wouldn’t it be nice to have
them for bosses of the whole country? They very nearly are. But I doubt
very much if they’ll ever cover the last lap--what?”
“Not if Kangaroo can help it,” said Somers.
“No!” William James flashed a quick look at him from his queer grey
eyes. “What did you make of him then? Could you make him out?”
“Not quite. I never met anyone like him. The wonder to me is, he seems
to have as much spare time for entertaining and amusing his guests, as
if he had no work at all on hand.”
“Oh, that was just a special occasion. But he’s a funny sort of Saviour,
isn’t he? Not much crown of thorns about him. Why, he’d look funny on a
cross, what?”
“He’s no intention of being put on one, I think,” said Somers stiffly.
“Oh, I don’t know. If the wrong party got hold of him. There’s many
mites in a pound of cheese, they say.”
“Then I’ll toast my cheese.”
“Ha-ha! Oh yes, I like a bit of toasted cheese myself--or a Welsh
rabbit, as well as any man.”
“But you don’t think they’d ever let him down, do you?--these
Australians?”
“No-o,” said William James. “I doubt if they’d ever let him down. But if
he happened to _fall_ down, you know, they’d soon forget him.”
“You don’t sound a very warm follower yourself.”
“Oh, warm isn’t my way, in anything. I like to see what I’m about. I can
see that Kangaroo’s a wonder. Oh yes, he’s a world wonder. And I’d
rather be in with him than anybody, if it was only for the sake of the
spree, you know. Bound to be a spree some time--and before long, I
should say, things going as they are. I wouldn’t like to be left out of
the fun.”
“But you don’t feel any strong devotion to your leader?”
“Why, no; I won’t say it’s exactly strong devotion. But I think he’s a
world wonder. He’s not quite the _shape_ of a man that I should throw
away my eyes for, that’s all I mean.” Again William James looked at
Somers with that long, perhaps mocking little smile in his grey eyes.
“I thought even his shape beautiful, when he talked to me.”
“Oh yes, it’s wonderful what a spell he can cast over you. But I’m a
stuggy fellow myself, maybe that’s how it is I can’t ever quite see him
in the same light as the thin chaps do. But that’s just the looks of the
thing. I can see there isn’t another man in the world like him, and I’d
cross the seas to join in with him, if only for the fun of the thing.”
“But what about the end of the fun?” asked Somers.
“Oh, that I don’t know. And nobody does, for that matter.”
“But surely if one believes--”
“One believes a lot, and one believes very little, seems to me. Taking
all in all, seems to me we live from hand to mouth, as far as beliefs
go.”
“You never _would_ believe,” said Somers, laughing.
“Not till I was made to,” replied Jaz, twisting his face in his
enigmatic smile.
Somers looked at the thick, stocky, silent figure in the well-made dark
clothes that didn’t in the least belong to him. There was something
about him like a prisoner in prison uniform, in his town clothes--and
something of that in his bearing. A stocky, silent, unconquerable
prisoner. And in his imprisoned soul another kind of mystery, another
sort of appeal.
The two men stood still in the cold wind that came up the sands to the
south-west. To the left, as they faced the wind, went the black railway
track on the pier, and the small engine stood dribbling. On the right
the track ran curiously black past a little farm-place with a corrugated
iron roof, and past a big field where the stubble of maize or beans
stood ragged and sere, on into the little hollow of bush, where the mine
was, beyond the stagnant creek. It was curious how intensely black,
velvety and unnatural, the railway-track looked on this numb
coast-front. The steamer hooted again.
“Cold it is up here,” said Somers.
“It is cold. He’s coming now, though,” replied William James.
They stood together still another minute, looking down the pale sands at
the foam and the dark-blue sea, the sere grass scattered with bungalows.
It was a strange, different bond of sympathy united them, from that that
subsisted between Somers and Jack, or Somers and Kangaroo. Hardly
sympathy at all, but an ancient sort of root-knowledge.
“Well, good-bye,” said Somers, wanting to be gone before the manager
came up with the papers. He shook hands with William James--but as
usual, Jaz gave him a slack hand. Their eyes met--and the look,
something like a taunt, in Trewhella’s secretive grey eye, made Somers
stiffen his back, and a kind of haughtiness flew into his soul.
“Different men, different ways, Mr Trewhella,” he said.
William James did not answer, but smiled rather stubbornly. It seemed to
Somers the man would be smiling that stubborn, taunting smile till the
crack of doom.
“I told Mrs Somers what I think about it,” said Jaz, with a very Cornish
accent. “I doubt if she’ll ever do much more believin’ than I shall.”
And the taunt was forked this time.
“She says she believes entirely in Kangaroo.”
“Does she now? Who did she tell it to?”
“Me.”
Trewhella still stood with that faint grin on his face, short and stocky
and erect like a little post left standing. Somers looked at him again,
frowning, and turned abruptly down the bank. The smile left the face of
the Cornishman, and he just looked obstinate, indifferent, and curiously
alone, as if he stood there all alone in the world. He watched Somers
emerge on the sands below, and go walking slowly among the sea-ragged
flat shelves of the coast-bed rocks, his head dropping, looking in the
pools, his hands in his pockets. And the obstinate light never changed
in the eyes of the watcher, not even when he turned to the approaching
manager.
Perhaps it was this meeting which made Somers want to see Kangaroo once
more. Everything had suddenly become unreal to him. He went to Sydney
and to Cooley’s rooms. But during the first half hour, the revulsion
from the First persisted. Somers disliked his appearance, and the
kangaroo look made him feel devilish. And then the queer, slow manner of
approach. Kangaroo was not really ready for his visitor, and he seemed
dense, heavy, absent, clownish. It was that kangarooish clownishness
that made a vicious kind of hate spring into Somers’ face. He talked in
a hard, cutting voice.
“Whom can you depend on, in this world,” he was saying. “Look at these
Australians--they’re awfully nice, but they’ve got no inside to them.
They’re hollow. How are you going to built on such hollow stalks. They
may well call them corn-stalks. They’re marvellous and manly and
independent and all that, outside. But inside, they are not. When
they’re _quite_ alone, they don’t exist.”
“Yet many of them have been alone a long time, in the bush,” said
Kangaroo, watching his visitor with slow, dumb, unchanging eyes.
“Alone, what sort of alone. Physically alone. And they’ve just gone
hollow. They’re never alone in spirit: quite, quite alone in spirit. And
the people who have are the only people you can depend on.”
“Where shall I find them?”
“Not here. It seems to me, least of all here. The Colonies make for
_outwardness_. Everything is outward--like hollow stalks of corn. The
life makes this inevitable: all that struggle with bush and water and
what-not, all the mad struggle with the material necessities and
conveniences--the inside soul just withers and goes into the outside,
and they’re all just lusty robust hollow stalks of people.”
“The corn-stalks bear the corn. I find them generous to
recklessness--the greatest quality. The old world is cautious and
forever bargaining about its soul. Here they don’t bother to bargain.”
“They’ve no soul to bargain about. But they’re even more full of
conceit. What do you expect to do with such people. Build a straw
castle?”
“You see I believe in them--perhaps I know them a little better than you
do.”
“Perhaps you do. It’ll be cornstalk castle, for all that. What _do_ you
expect to build on?”
“They’re generous--generous to recklessness,” shouted Kangaroo. “And I
love them. I love them. Don’t you come here carping to me about them.
They are my children, I love them. If I’m not to believe in their
generosity, am I to believe in your cautious, old-world carping, do you
think. I _won’t_!” he shouted fiercely. “I _won’t_. Do you hear that!”
And he sat hulked in his chair glowering like some queer dark god at
bay. Somers paused, and his heart failed.
“Then make me believe in them and their generosity,” he said dryly.
“They’re nice. But they haven’t got the last everlasting central bit of
soul, solitary soul, that makes a man himself. The central bit of
himself. They all merge to the outside, away from the centre. And what
can you do, _permanently_, with such people? You can have a fine
corn-stalk blaze. But as for anything permanent--”
“I tell you I _hate_ permanency,” barked Kangaroo. “The phœnix rises out
of the ashes.” He rolled over angrily in his chair.
“Let her! Like Rider Haggard’s _She_, I don’t feel like risking it a
second time,” said Somers, like the venomous serpent he was.
“Generous, generous men!” Kangaroo muttered to himself. “At least you
can get a blaze out of them. Not like European wet matches, that will
never again strike alight--as you’ve said yourself.”
“But a blaze for what? What’s your blaze for?”
“I don’t care,” yelled Kangaroo, springing with sudden magnificent
swiftness to his feet, and facing Somers, and seizing him by the
shoulders and shaking him till his head nearly fell of, yelling all the
time: “I don’t care, I tell you, I don’t care. Where there’s fire
there’s change. And where the fire is love, there’s creation. Seeds of
fire. That’s enough for me! Fire, and seeds of fire, and love. That’s
all I care about. Don’t carp at me, I tell you. Don’t carp at me with
your old, European, damp spirit. If you can’t take fire, _we can_.
That’s all. Generous, passionate men--and you dare to carp at them. You.
What have you to show?” And he went back to his chair like a great,
sulky bear-god.
Somers sat rather stupefied than convinced. But he found himself again
_wanting_ to be convinced, wanting to be carried away. The desire
hankered in his heart. Kangaroo had become again beautiful: huge and
beautiful like some god that sways and seems clumsy, then suddenly
flashes with all the agility of thunder and lightning. Huge and
beautiful as he sat hulked in his chair. Somers _did_ wish he would get
up again and carry him quite away.
But where to? Where to? Where is one carried to when one is carried
away? He had a bitter mistrust of seventh heavens and all heavens in
general. But then the experience. If Kangaroo had got up at that moment
Somers would have given him heart and soul and body, for the asking, and
damn all consequences. He longed to do it. He knew that by just going
over and laying a hand on the great figure of the sullen god he could
achieve it. Kangaroo would leap like a thunder-cloud and catch him
up--catch him up and away into a transport. A transport that should last
for life. He knew it.