not, if it was the way of life? He did not know why not. Perhaps only
old moral habit, or fear, as Jack said, of committing himself. Perhaps
only that. It was Victoria’s high moment; all her high moments would
have this Bacchic, weapon-like momentaneity: since Victoria was
Victoria. Why then deny it?
The pagan way, the many gods, the different service, the sacred moments
of Bacchus. Other sacred moments: Zeus and Hera, for examples, Ares and
Aphrodite, all the great moments of the gods. Why not know them all, all
the great moments of the gods, from the major moment with Hera to the
swift short moments of Io or Leda or Ganymede? Should not a man know the
whole range? And especially the bright, swift, weapon-like Bacchic
occasion, should not any man seize it when it offered?
But his heart of hearts was stubbornly puritanical. And his innermost
soul was dark and sullen, black with a sort of scorn. These moments bred
in the head and born in the eye: he had enough of them. These flashes of
desire for a visual object would no longer carry him into action. He had
no use for them. There was a downslope into Orcus, and a vast, phallic,
sacred darkness, where one was enveloped into the greater god as in an
Egyptian darkness. He would meet there or nowhere. To the visual
travesty he would lend himself no more.
Pondering and turning recklessly he heard Jack come back. Then he began
to doze. He did not sleep well in Australia, it seemed as if the
aboriginal daimon entered his body as he slept, to destroy its old
constitution. Sleep was almost pain, and too full of dreams. This night
he woke almost at once from a vivid little dream. The fact of the
soonness troubled him too, for at home he never dreamed till morning.
But the dream had been just this. He was standing in the living-room at
Coo-ee, bending forward doing some little thing by the couch, perhaps
folding the newspaper, making the room tidy at the last moment before
going to bed, when suddenly a violent darkness came over him, he felt
his arms pinned, and he heard a man’s voice speaking mockingly behind
him, with a laugh. It was as if he saw the man’s face too--a stranger, a
rough, strong sort of Australian. And he realised with horror: “Now they
have put a sack over my head, and fastened my arms, and I am in the
dark, and they are going to steal my little brown handbag from the
bedroom, which contains all the money we have.” The shock of intense
reality made him fight his way out of the depths of the first sleep, but
it was some time before he could really lay hold of facts, like: “I am
not at Coo-ee. I am not at Mullumbimby. I am in Sydney at Wyewurk, and
the Callcotts are in the next room.” So he came really awake. But if the
thing had really happened, it could hardly have happened to him more
than in this dream.
In the morning they were returning to the South Coast. But Jack said to
Somers, a little sarcastically:
“You aren’t altogether pleased with us, then?”
Somers hesitated before replying:
“I’m not altogether pleased with myself, am I?”
“You don’t have to be so particular, in this life,” said Jack.
“I may have to be.”
“You can’t have it all perfect beforehand, you know. You’ve got to sink
a few times before you can swim.”
“Sink in what?”
“Why, it seems to me you want to have a thing all ready in your hand,
know all about it, before you’ll try it. And there’s some things you
can’t do that with. You’ve just got to flop into them, like when you
chuck a dog into water.”
Somers received this rebuke rather sourly. This was the first wintry day
they had really had. There was a cold fog in Sydney in the morning, and
rain in the fog. In the hills it would be snow--away in the Blue
Mountains. But the fog lifted, and the rain held off, and there was a
wash of yellowish sunshine.
Harriet of course had to talk to a fellow-passenger in the train,
because Lovat was his glummest. It was a red-moustached Welshman with a
slightly injured look in his pale blue eyes, as if everything hadn’t
been as good to him as he thought it ought, considering his merit. He
said his name was Evans, and he kept a store. He had been sixteen years
in the country.
“And is it _very_ hot in the summer?” said Harriet. “I suppose it is.”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s very hot. I’ve known the days when I’ve had to lie
down at two o’clock in the afternoon, and not been able to move.
Overpowered, that’s what it is, overpowered.”
Harriet was suitably impressed, having tried heat in India.
“And do you think it takes one long to get used to this country?” she
asked after a while.
“Well, I should say it takes about four or five years for your blood
properly to thin down. You can’t say you’ve begun, under two years.”
“Four or five years!” re-echoed Harriet. But what she was really turning
over in her mind was this phrase: “For your blood to thin down.” To thin
down! how queer! Lovat also heard the sentence, and realised that his
blood took this thinning very badly, and still about four years of
simmering ahead, apparently, if he stayed in this country. And when the
blood had finished its thinning, what then? He looked at Mr Evans, with
the sharp pale nose and the reddish hair and the injured look in his
pale-blue eyes. Mr Evans seemed to find it sweet still to talk to people
from the “old country.” “You’re from the old country?”--the inevitable
question. The thinning down had left him looking as if he felt he lacked
something. Yet he wouldn’t go back to South Wales. Oh no, he wouldn’t go
back.
“The blood is thinner out here than in the old country.” The Australians
seemed to accept this as a scientific fact. Richard felt he didn’t want
his blood thinned down to the Australian constituency. Yet no doubt in
the night, in his sleep, the metabolic change was taking place fast and
furious.
It was raining a little in the late afternoon when Somers and Harriet
got back to Coo-ee. With infinite relief she stepped across her own
threshold.
“Ah!” she said, taking a long breath. “Thank God to be back.” She
looked round, and went to rearrange on the sofa the cushions that they
had whacked so hard to get the dust out.
Somers went to the edge of the grass to be near the sea. It was raving
in long, rasping lines of hissing breakers--not very high ones, but very
long. The sky hung grey, with veils of dark rain out to sea, and in the
south a blackness of much rain blowing nearer in the wind. At the end of
the jetty, in the mist of the sea-wind’s spray, a long, heavy
coal-steamer was slowly toiling to cast loose and get away. The waves
were so long and the current so strong, they would hardly let her turn
and get clear of the misty-black jetty.
Under the dark-grey sky the sea looked bright, but coldly bright, with
its yellow-green waves and its ramparts of white foam. There were
usually three white ramparts, one behind the other, of rasping surf: and
sometimes four. Then the long swish and surge of the shoreward wash. The
coast was quite deserted: the steep sand wet as the backwash slid away:
the rocks wet with rain: the low, long black steamer still laboured in
the fume of the wind, indistinctly.
Somers turned indoors, and suddenly began taking off his clothes. In a
minute he was running naked in the rain which fell with lovely freshness
on his skin. Ah, he felt so stuffy after that sort of emotional heat in
town. Harriet in amazement saw him whitely disappearing over the edge of
the low cliff-bank, and came to the edge to look.
He ran quickly over the sands, where the wind blew cold but velvety, and
the raindrops fell loosely. He walked straight into the fore-wash, and
fell into an advancing ripple. At least it looked a ripple, but was
enough to roll him over so that he went under and got a little taste of
the Pacific. Ah, the fresh cold wetness!--the fresh cold wetness! The
water rushed in the back-wash and the sand melted under him, leaving him
stranded like a fish. He turned again to the water. The walls of surf
were some distance off, but near enough to look rather awful as they
raced in high white walls shattering towards him. And above the ridge of
the raving whiteness the dimness of the labouring steamer, as if it were
perched on a bough.
Of course he did not go near the surf. No, the last green ripples of
the broken swell were enough to catch him by the scruff of the neck and
tumble him rudely up the beach, in a pell-mell. But even the blow did
one good, as the sea struck one heavily on the back, if one were
fleeing; full on the chest, if one were advancing.
It was raining quite heavily as he walked out, and the skies hung low
over the sea, dark over the green and white vigour of the ocean. The
shore was so foam-white it almost suggested sun. The rain felt almost
warm.
Harriet came walking across the grass with a towel.
“What a good idea!” she said. “If I’d known I’d have come. I wish I
had.”
But he ignored the towel, and went into the little wash-place and under
the shower, to wash off the sticky, strong Pacific. Harriet came along
with the towel, and he put his hand to her face and nodded to her. She
knew what he meant, and went wondering, and when he had rubbed the wet
off himself he came to her.
To the end she was more wondering than anything. But when it was the
end, and the night was falling outside, she laughed and said to him:
“That was done in style. That was _chic_. Straight from the sea, like
another creature.”
Style and _chic_ seemed to him somewhat ill suited to the occasion, but
he brought her a bowl of warm water and went and made the tea. The wind
was getting noisier, and the sea was shut out but still calling outside
the house. They had tea and toast and quince jam, and one of the seven
brown teapots with a bit off the spout shone quite nicely and brightly
at a corner of the little red-and-white check tea-cloth, which itself
occupied a corner of the big, polished jarrah table. But, thank God, he
felt cool and fresh and detached, not cosy and domestic. He was so
thankful not to be feeling cosy and “homely.” The room felt as
penetrable to the outside influence as if it were a seashell lying on
the beach, cool with the freshness and insistence of the sea, not a
snug, cosy box to be secured inside.
And Jack Callcott’s rebuke stuck in his throat. Perhaps after all he was
just a Pommy, prescribing things with overmuch emphasis, and wanting to
feel God-Almighty in the face of unborn events. A Pommy is a newcomer in
Australia, from the Old Country.
Teacher: Why did you hit him, Georgie?
Georgie: Please, miss, he called me a Pommy.
Aussie (with a discoloured eye): Well, you’re one, ain’cher? Can I help
it that ch’are one?
Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate, pronounced
invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a
naturally rhyming country. Furthermore, immigrants are known in their
first months, before their blood “thins down,” by their round and ruddy
cheeks. So we are told. Hence again, pomegranate, and hence Pommy. Let
etymologists be appeased: it is the authorised derivation.
Perhaps, said Somers to himself, I am just a Pommy and a fool. If my
blood had thinned down, I shouldn’t make all this fuss over sharing in
with Kangaroo or being mates with Jack Callcott. If I am not a ruddy
Pommy, I am a green one. Of course they take the thing as it comes to
them, and they expect me to do the same. Yet there I am hopping and
hissing like a fish in a frying-pan. Putting too much “soul” into it.
Far too much. When your blood has thinned down, out here, there’s
nothing but the merest sediment of a soul left, and your wits and your
feelings are clear of it. You take things as they come, as Jack says.
Isn’t that the sanest way to take them, instead of trying to drive them
through the exact hole in the hedge that you’ve managed to poke your
head through? Oh, you unlearn a lot as your blood thins down. But
there’s an awful lot to be unlearnt. And when you’ve unlearnt it, you
never say so. In the first place, because it’s dead against the sane old
British tradition. And in the second place, because you don’t really
care about telling what you feel, once your blood has thinned down and
is clear of soul.
“Thin, you Australian burgundy,” said Somers to his own body, when he
caught a glimpse of it unawares, reflected in the glass as he was going
to bed. “You’re thin enough as a bottle, but the wine needs a lot of
maturing. I’ve made a fool of myself latterly.”
Yet he said to himself: “Do I want my blood to thin down like
theirs?--that peculiar emptiness that is in them, because of the
thinning that’s gone out of them? Do I want this curious transparent
blood of the antipodes, with its momentaneous feelings, and its sort of
_absentness_? But of course till my blood has thinned down I shan’t see
with their eyes. And how in the name of heaven is this world-brotherhood
mankind going to see with one eye, eye to eye, when the very blood is of
different thickness on different continents, and with the difference in
blood, the inevitable psychic difference? Different vision!”
CHAP: VIII. VOLCANIC EVIDENCE
Richard Lovat Somers registered a new vow: not to take things with too
overwhelming an amount of emotional seriousness, but to accept
everything that came along with a certain _sang froid_, and not to sit
frenziedly in judgment before he had heard the case. He had come to the
end of his own tether, so why should he go off into tantrums if other
folks strayed about with the broken bits of their tethers trailing from
their ankles. Is it better to be savagely tugging at the end of your
rope, or to wander at random tetherless? Matter of choice!
But the day of the absolute is over, and we’re in for the strange gods
once more. “But when you get to the end of your tether you’ve nothing to
do but die”--so sings an out-of-date vulgar song. But is it so? Why not
all? When you come to the end of your tether you break the rope. When
you come to the end of the lane you straggle on into the bush and beat
about till you find a new way through, and no matter if you raise vipers
or goannas or wallabies, or even only a stink. And if you see a man
beating about for a new track you don’t immediately shout, “Perverted
wretch!” or “Villain!” or “Vicious creature!” or even merely “The fool,”
or mildly: “Poor dear!” You have to let him try. Anything is better than
stewing in your own juice, or grinding at the end of your tether, or
tread-milling away at a career. Better a “wicked creature” any day, than
a mechanical tread-miller of a careerist. Better anything on earth than
the millions of human ants.
In this way Mr Somers had to take himself to task, for his Pommy
stupidity and his pommigrant superiority, and kick himself rather
severely, looking at the ends of the tether he presumed he had just
broken. Why should people who are tethered to a post be so God-Almighty
puffed up about their posts? It seems queer. Yet there they are, going
round and round at the ends of their tethers, and being immensely sniffy
about the people who stray loose trailing the broken end of their old
rope, and looking for a new way through the bush. Yet so men are. They
will set up inquisitions and every manner of torture chamber to _compel_
people to refrain from breaking their tethers. But once man has broken
any old particular hobble-line, not God Himself can safely knot it
together again.
Somers now left off standing on his head in front of the word love, and
looking at it calmly, decided he didn’t care vastly either way. Harriet
had on her dressing-table tray a painted wooden heart, painted red with
dots round it, a Black Forest trifle which she had bought in Baden-Baden
for a penny. On it was the motto:
“Dem Mutigen gehört die Welt.”
That was the motto to have on one’s red heart: not Love or Hope or any
of those aspiring emotions: “The world belongs to the courageous.” To be
sure, it was a rather two-edged motto just now for Germany. And Somers
was not quite sure that it was the “world” that he wanted.
Yes, it was. Not the tuppenny social world of present mankind: but the
genuine world, full of life and eternal creative surprises, including of
course destructive surprises: since destruction is part of creation.
Somers did want the world. He did want to take it away from all the
teeming human ants, human slaves, and all the successful, empty
careerists. He wanted little that the present society can give. But the
lovely other world that is in spite of the social man of to-day: that he
wanted, to clear it, to free it. Freedom! Not for this subnormal slavish
humanity of democratic antics. But for the world itself, and the
_Mutigen_.
_Mut!_ _Muth!_ A good word. Better even than _courage_. Virtue,
_virtus_, manliness. _Mut_--manliness. Not braggadaccio or insolence.
_De l’audace, et de l’audace, et encore de l’audace!_ Danton’s word. But
it was more than daring. It was _Mut_, profound manliness, that is not
afraid of anything except of being cowardly or barren.
“Dem Mutigen gehört die Welt.”
“To the manly brave belongs the world.”
Somers wrote to Kangaroo, and enclosed the red wooden heart, which had a
little loop of ribbon so that it could be hung on the wall.
“Dear Kangaroo--I send you my red heart (never mind that it is wood, the
wood once lived and was the tree of life) with its motto. I hope you
will accept it, after all my annoying behaviour. It is not the love, but
the _Mut_ that I believe in, and join you in. Love may be an ingredient
in _Muth_, so you have it all your own way. Anyhow, I send you my red
motto-heart, and if you don’t want it you can send it back--I will be
your follower, in reverence for your virtue--_Virtus_. And you may
command me.”
The following day came the answer, in Kangaroo’s difficult scrawl:
“Dear Lovat--Love is in your name, notwithstanding. I accept the red
heart gladly, and when I win, I will wear it for my Order of Merit,
pinned on my swelling chest.
“But you are the one person in the world I can never command. I knew it
would be so. Yet I am unspeakably glad to have your approval, and
perhaps your allegiance.
“Come and see me as soon as it is your wish to do so: I won’t invite
you, lest worse befall me. For you are either a terrible disappointment
to me, or a great blessing in store. I wait for you.”
Somers also wrote to Jack, to ask him to come down with Victoria for the
week-end. But Jack replied that he couldn’t get away this week-end,
there was so much doing. Somers then invited him for the following one.
The newspapers were at this time full of the pending strike of
coal-miners and shearers: that is, the Australian papers. The European
papers were in a terrific stew about finance, and the German debt, and
the more imposing Allied debt to America. Bolshevism, Communism, Labour,
had all sunk into a sort of insignificance. The voice of mankind was
against them for the time being, not now in hate and fear, as
previously, but in a kind of bitter contempt: the kind of feeling one
has when one has accepted a glib individual as a serious and remarkable
man, only to find that he is a stupid vulgarian. Communism was a bubble
that would never even float free and iridescent from the nasty pipe of
the theorist.
What then? Nothing evident. There came dreary and fatuous letters from
friends in England, refined young men of the upper middle-class writing
with a guarded kind of friendliness, gentle and sweet, of course, but as
dozy as ripe pears in their _laisser aller_ heaviness. That was what it
amounted to: they were over-ripe, they had been in the sun of prosperity
too long, and all their tissues were soft and sweetish. How could they
react with any sharpness to any appeal on earth? They wanted just to
hang against the warmest wall they could find, as long as ever they
could, till some last wind of death or disturbance shook them down into
earth, mushy and over-ripe. A sardonic letter from a Jewish friend in
London, amusing but a bit dreadful. Letters from women in London,
friendly but irritable. “I have decided I am a comfort-loving
conventional person, with just a dash of the other thing to keep me
fidgetty”--then accounts of buying old furniture, and gossip about
everybody: “Verden Grenfel in a restaurant with _two_ bottles of
champagne, so he must be affluent just now.” A girl taking her honeymoon
trip to Naples by one of the Orient boats, third class: “There are 800
people on board, but room for another 400, so that on account of the
missing 400 we have a six-berth cabin to ourselves. It is a bit noisy
and not luxurious, but clean and comfortable, and you can imagine what
it is to me, to be on the glorious sea, and to go ashore at wonderful
Gibraltar, and to see the blue hills of Spain in the distance. Frederick
is struggling with a mass of Italian irregular verbs at the moment.” And
in spite of all Somers’ love of the Mediterranean, the thought of
sitting on a third class deck with eight hundred emigrants, including
babies, made him almost sick. “The glorious sea--wonderful Gibraltar.”
It takes quite a good eyesight even to _see_ the sea from the deck of a
liner, let alone out of the piled mass of humanity on the third-class
deck. A letter from Germany, about a wedding and a pending journey into
Austria and friends, written with a touch of philosophy that comes to a
man when he’s fallen down and bumped himself, and strokes the bruise. A
cheque for fifteen pounds seventeen shillings and fourpence, from a
publisher: “Kindly acknowledge.” A letter from a farming friend who had
changed places: “A Major Ashworth has got the farm, and has spent about
£600 putting it into order. He has started as a poultry-farm, but has
had bad luck in losing 400 chicks straight away, with the cold weather.
I hope our spell of bad luck doesn’t still hang over the place. I wish
you would come back to England for the summer. Viv. talks of getting a
caravan, and then we might get two. Cold and wet weather for weeks. All
work and no play, not good enough.” A letter from Paris, artist friends:
“I have sold one of the three pictures that are in the last Salon.” A
letter from Somers’ sister: “Louis has been looking round everywhere to
buy a little farm, but there doesn’t seem to be a bit of land to be got
anywhere. What do you think of our coming to Australia? I wish you would
look for something for us, for we are terribly fed up with this place,
nothing doing at all.” A letter from Sicily: “I have had my father and
stepmother over from New York. I had got them rooms here, but when I
said so, the face of Anna, my stepmother, was a sight. She took me aside
and told me that father was spoiling the trip entirely by his economies,
and that she had set her heart on the Villa Igeia. Then Dad took me
aside and said that he didn’t wish to be reckless, but he didn’t want to
thwart Anna’s wishes entirely, and was there nothing in the way of
compromise? It ended by their staying two days here, and Anna said she
thought it was very nice _for me_. Then they went to the Palmes, which
is entirely up to Anna’s ideas of luxury, and she is delighted.”
Somers had fourteen letters by this mail. He read them with a sort of
loathing, one after the other, piling them up on his left hand for
Harriet, and throwing the envelopes in the fire. By the time he had done
he wished that every mail-boat would go down that was bringing any
letter to him, that a flood would rise and cover Europe entirely, that
he could have a little operation performed that would remove from him
for ever his memory of Europe and everything in it--and so on. Then he
went out and looked at the Pacific. He hadn’t even the heart to bathe,
and he felt so trite, with all those letters; he felt quite capable of
saying “Good dog” to the sea: to quote one of the quips from the
_Bulletin_. The sea that had been so full of potency, before the postman
rode up on his pony and whistled with his policeman’s whistle for Somers
to come to the gate for that mass of letters. Never had Richard Lovat
Somers felt so filled with spite against everybody he had ever known in
the old life, as now.
“And there was I, knave, fool, and ninny, whining to go back to Europe,
and abusing Australia for not being like it. That horrible, horrible
staleness of Europe, and all their trite consciousness, and their
dreariness. The dreariness! The sterility of their feelings! And here
was I carping at Kangaroo and at Jack Callcott, who are golden wonders
compared with anything I have known in the old world. Australia has got
some real, positive indifference to ‘questions,’ but Europe is one big
wriggling question and nothing else. A tangle of quibbles. I’d rather be
shot here next week, than quibble the rest of my life away in
over-upholstered Europe.”