going to sink herself to the level of a convenience. She didn’t really
want protestations of gratitude or love. They only puzzled her and
confused her. But she wanted him _inwardly_ to keep a connection with
her. Silently, he must maintain the flow between him and her, and
safeguard it carefully. It is a thing which a man cannot do with his
head: it isn’t _remembering_. And it is a thing which a woman cannot
explain or understand, because it is quite irrational. But it is one of
the deepest realities in life. When a man and woman truly come together,
when there is a marriage, then an unconscious, vital connection is
established between them, like a throbbing blood-circuit. A man may
forget a woman entirely with his head, and fling himself with energy and
fervour into whatever job he is tackling, and all is well, all is good,
if he does not break that inner vital connection which is the mystery of
marriage. But let him once get out of unison, out of conjunction, let
him inwardly break loose and come apart, let him fall into that worst of
male vices, the vice of abstraction and mechanisation, and have a
concert of working _alone_ and of himself, then he commits the breach.
He hurts the woman and he hurts himself, though neither may know why.
The greatest hero that ever existed was heroic only whilst he kept the
throbbing inner union with something, God, or Fatherland, or woman. The
most immediate is woman, the wife. But the most grovelling
wife-worshippers are the foulest of traitors and renegades to the inner
unison. A man must strive onward, but from the root of marriage,
marriage with God, with wife, with mankind. Like a tree that is rooted,
always growing and flowering away from its root, so is a vitally active
man. But let him take some false direction, and there is torture through
the whole organism, roots and all. The woman suffers blindly from the
man’s mistaken direction, and reacts blindly.
Now in this revolution stunt, and his insistence on “male” activity,
Somers had upturned the root flow, and Harriet was a devil to him--quite
rightly--for he knew that inside himself he was devilish. She tried to
keep her kindness and happiness. But no, it was false when the inner
connection was betrayed. So her silent rage accumulated, and it was no
good playing mental tricks of suppression with it. As for him, he was
forced to recognise the devil in his own belly. He just felt devilish.
While Harriet went about trying to be fair and happy, he realised that
it was awful for him to be there, as black inside as an ink-bottle;
however, he practised being nice. Theoretically he was grateful to her,
and all that. But nothing conjured away that bellyful of black
devilishness with which he was _enceinte_. He really felt like a woman
who is with child by a corrosive fiend. In his lower man, just girning
and demoniacal. No good pretending otherwise. No good playing tricks of
being nice. Seven thousand devils!
When he saw a motor-car parked in the waste lot next to Coo-ee, and saw
two women in twelve-guinea black coats and skirts hobbling across the
grass to the bungalow farther down, perhaps wanting to hire it: then the
devil came and sat black and naked in his eyes. They hobbled along the
uneven place so commonly, they looked so crassly common in spite of
their tailors’ bills, so _low_, in spite of their motor-car, that the
devil in him fairly lashed its tail like a cat. And yet, he knew, they
were probably just two nice, kindly women, as the world goes. And truly,
even the devil in him did not want to do them any _personal_ harm. If
they had fallen, or got into difficulty, he would have gone out at once
to help them all he could. And yet, at the sight of their backs in their
tailored “costumes” hobbling past the bushes, the devil in him lashed
its tail till he writhed.
So there you are. Or rather, there was Richard Lovat Somers. He tried to
square accounts with himself. Surely, he said to himself, I am not just
merely a sort of human bomb, all black inside, waiting to explode I
don’t know when or how or where. That’s what I seem like to myself,
nowadays. Yet surely it is not the only truth about me. When I feel at
peace with myself, and, as it were, so quietly at the _centre_ of
things--like last evening, for example--surely that is also me. Harriet
seems fairly to detest me for having this nice feeling all to myself.
Well, it wasn’t my fault if I had it. I did have it. What does she want?
She won’t leave a fellow alone. I felt fairly beatific last evening--I
felt I could swim Australia into a future, and that Jaz was wonderful,
and I was a sort of central angel. So now I must admit I am
flabbergasted at finding my devil coiled up exultant like a black cat in
my belly this morning, purring all the more loudly because of my
“goodness” of last evening, and lashing his tail so venomously at the
sight of the two women in the black “costumes.” Is this devil after all
my god? Do I stand with the debbil-debbil worshippers, in spite of all
my efforts and protestations?
This morning I do, and I admit it. I can’t help it: it is so, then let
it be so. I shall change again, I know. I shall feel white again, and
like a pearl, suave and quiet within the oyster of time. I shall feel
again that, given but the _answer_, the black poisonous bud will burst
into a lovely new, unknown flower in me. The bud is deadly poison: the
flower will be the flower of the tree of life. If Harriet let me alone,
and people like Jaz really believed in me! Because they have a right to
believe in me when I am at my best. Or perhaps he believes in me when I
am my worst, and Kangaroo likes me when I am good. Yet I don’t really
like Kangaroo. The devil in me fairly hates him. Him and everybody.
Well, all right then, if I _am_ finally a sort of human bomb, black
inside, and primed; I hope the hour and the place will come for my going
off: for my exploding with the maximum amount of havoc. _Some_ men have
to be bombs, to explode and make breaches in the walls that shut life
in. Blind, havoc-working bombs too. Then so be it.
That morning as luck would have it Somers read an article by A. Meston
in an old _Sydney Daily Telegraph_, headed:
EARTHQUAKES.
IS AUSTRALIA SAFE?
SLEEPING VOLCANOES.
“The fact that Australia so far has had no trouble with volcanoes
or earthquakes, and appears to be the most immune country in the
world, accounts for our entire indifference to the whole subject.
But there are phases of this problem entitled to some serious
consideration by those in whom the thinking and observant faculties
are not altogether dormant, and who have not a calm, cool disregard
of very ominous inexorable facts. Australia is a very peaceful
reposeful area, with the serious volcanoes of New Zealand on one
side, and the still more serious volcanoes of Java on the other. We
live in a soft flowery meadow between two jungles, a lion in one
and a tiger in the other, but as neither animal has chased or
bitten us, up to the present time, we go calmly to sleep quite
satisfied they are harmless.
“Now the line of volcanic action on the east coast of Australia is
very clearly defined, from the basalt of Illawarra, north to the
basalt within three miles of Cape York. The chief areas over all
that distance are the Big Scrup on the Richmond River, the Darling
Downs, and the Atherton Tableland, behind Cairns.
“These are the largest basalt areas in Australia, the Darling Downs
and Atherton containing each about 2,000,000 acres of basalt, the
one chiefly black, and the other all red. The other conspicuous
areas are the red basalt Isis and Woongarra scrubs, and north of
Atherton the next basalt area is on the M‘Ivor and Morgan Rivers,
40 miles north of Cooktown. From there I saw no basalt on the coast
of the Peninsula, until somewhat surprised to find great piles of
black basaltic stone, like artificial quarry heaps, in the dense
Seaforthia palm scrubs ten miles west of Somerset.
VOLCANIC EVIDENCE.
“Here, then, is a clearly defined but very intermittent line of
volcanic action along our entire east coast for over two thousand
miles. Yet to-day there is not only not one active volcano on the
whole of that area, but not even one clearly authentic dead one.
There is nothing to show whence came the basalt of the Darling
Downs, the Big Scrup, or the Atherton Tableland, unless in the last
case the two deep freshwater lakes, Barrine and Eacham, the Barrang
and Zeetcham of the aboriginals, represent the craters of extinct
volcanoes.
“Whence, then, came the basalt spread along a narrow line of our
east coast for two thousand miles, and all of it east of the
Dividing Range? There is a lot of room for theories....
“When the late Captain Audley Coote was laying the cable from New
Caledonia to Sandy Cape, at the north end of Fraser Island, on the
South Queensland coast, he passed a submerged mountain 6000 feet in
height, and found a tremendous chasm, so deep that they could find
no bottom, and had to work the cable round the edge. When he
reached the coast of Fraser Island he got the same soundings as
Cook and Flinders and the Admiralty survey in the ’sixties, six to
eight fathoms, but there came a break in the cable in after years,
located in that six and eight fathom area, and they found the
broken cable hanging over a submarine precipice of eight hundred
feet!
“That I read in Captain Coote’s own manuscript journal, and it was
confirmed by Captain John Mackay, the Brisbane harbourmaster, who
assured me that an 800 feet chasm had suddenly formed there in the
bottom of the ocean.
“On the coast of Japan, the ocean bottoms sank in one place
suddenly from four or five fathoms to 4,000 feet.
“The old Fraser Island aboriginals told me that the deep blue lake,
two miles from the White Cliffs, was once a level plateau, on which
their fathers held fights and corroborees, and that it sank in one
night. On the North Queensland coast, there is fairly shallow water
from the seashore out to the edge of the Barrier, and then the
ocean goes down to depths up to two and three thousand feet, so if
the sea were removed you would look down from the outer Barrier
into a tremendous valley with a wall of granite cliffs.
“When the town of Port Royal in Jamaica was destroyed by an
earthquake on June 7, 1692, the houses all disappeared into an
ocean chasm 300 feet in depth; and in the terrible earthquake at
Lisbon, 1755, destroying 2,000 houses and 5,000 people, the wharves
and piers, and even the vessels lying beside them, disappeared into
some tremendous gulf, leaving no trace whatever.
“It is a singular fact that the heights of the loftiest mountains
correspond with the depths of the deepest seas, and that the 29,000
feet of Mount Everest is equal with what is known as the ‘Tuscarora
Deep,’ fathomed by the U.S.A. vessel Tuscarora.
ISLANDS THAT VANISHED.
“From the days of Seneca there are records of islands suddenly
appearing before astonished mariners, and others disappearing
suddenly before mariners equally astonished. In the dreadful
volcanic explosion of Krakatoa in August, 1883, one mountain peak
was blown to pieces, while others were thrown up from the ocean.
The tidal wave created by Krakatoa destroyed 40,000 people, and the
air wave from the concussion pulsated three times round the world.
And Krakatoa and the Javanese volcanoes are only a short distance
from the coast of Australia!
“Doubtless many of the ships that have mysteriously disappeared,
leaving no trace, have gone down in the vortex of a submarine
earthquake, or a chasm created by a sudden shrinkage in the bottom
of the ocean. From the facts above available it is reasonable to
believe that the present continent of Australia is only a portion
of the original, and that in some remote period it extended
hundreds or thousands of miles to the eastward, probably including
Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands and New Zealand, possibly New
Caledonia. How came the ancient Cretaceous Ocean, which once
covered all Central Australia, from the gulf to the Bight, to
withdraw from the land, leaving nothing but marine fossils in the
desert sandstone?
“Was the Cretaceous Ocean shallow all round this continent, and did
it suddenly subside to fill some tremendous chasm caused by a
sudden submarine shrinkage of the earth’s crust, followed by the
inland sea, which naturally rushed out into the vacancy?
“What seems the only real danger to Australia lies not in the
eruptions of some suddenly created new volcano, or any ordinary
earthquake, but in just such shrinkages in the sea bottom as
occurred on the coast of Japan, off Fraser Island, and many other
localities, including Lisbon and Port Royal.
“If such a subsidence were to come under Sydney, Melbourne,
Adelaide or Brisbane, it might be of such a magnitude that the
whole city would disappear into the gulf.
“We know nothing whatever of the awful forces at work beneath the
crust of the earth, and nothing of the internal fires, or that
awful subterranean abode where Shelley said ‘the old earthquake
Demon nurses her young Ruin.’ The history of volcanoes and
earthquakes is an appalling record of lost countless millions of
lives and awful destruction.
“One Pekin earthquake destroyed 300,000 people, one in Naples
70,000, another at Naples 40,000; and we are not far from July,
1902, when the volcano of Mount Pelee, in the island of Martinique,
wiped out the town of St Pierre and 30,000 inhabitants.
“Still nearer is that 18th April, 1906, when the San Francisco
earthquake killed over a thousand people, and did damage to the
extent of sixty millions.
“And so far in Australian history we have not had an earthquake
that would capsize a tumbler of hot punch.”
Why hot punch, thought Somers, why not hop bitters or ice-cream soda,
which are much more Austral and to the point? But he had read this
almost thrilling bit of journalism with satisfaction. If the mother
earth herself is so unstable, and upsets the applecart without caring a
straw, why, what can a man say to himself if he _does_ happen to have a
devil in his belly!
And he looked at the ocean uneasily moving, and wondered when next it
would thrust an angry shoulder out of the watery bed-covering, to give
things a little jog. Or when his own devil would get a leg up into
affairs.
CHAP: IX.
HARRIET AND LOVAT AT SEA IN MARRIAGE
When a sincere man marries a wife, he has one or two courses open to
him, which he can pursue with that wife. He can propose to himself to be
(_a_) the lord and master who is honoured and obeyed, (_b_) the perfect
lover, (_c_) the true friend and companion. Of these (_a_) is now rather
out of date. The lord and master has been proved, by most women quite
satisfactorily, to be no more than a grown-up child, and his arrogance
is to be tolerated just as a little boy’s arrogance is tolerated,
because it is rather amusing, and up to a certain point becoming. The
case of (_b_), the perfect lover, is the crux of all ideal marriage
to-day. But alas, not even the lord and master turns out such a fiasco
as does the perfect lover, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. The
perfect-lover marriage ends usually in a quite ghastly anti-climax,
divorce and horrors and the basest vituperation. Alas for the fact, as
compared with the ideal. A marriage of the perfect-lover type is bound
either to end in catastrophe, or to slide away towards (_a_) or (_c_).
It must either revert to a mild form of the lord-and-master marriage,
and a wise woman, who knows the sickeningness of catastrophes and the
ridiculous futility of second shots at the perfect-love paradise, often
wisely pushes the marriage back gradually into one of the little bays or
creeks of this Pacific ocean of marriage, lord-and-masterdom. Not that
either party really believes in the lordship of man. But you’ve got to
get into still water some time or other. The perfect-love business
inevitably turns out to be a wildly stormy strait, like the Straits of
Magellan, where two fierce and opposing currents meet and there is the
devil of a business trying to keep the bark of marriage, with the flag
of perfect-love at the mast, from dashing on a rock or foundering in the
heavy seas. Two fierce and opposing currents meet in the narrows of
perfect love. They may meet in blue and perfect weather, when the
albatross hovers in the great sky like a permanent benediction, and the
sea shimmers a second heaven. But you needn’t wait long. The seas will
soon begin to rise, the ship to roll. And the waters of perfect
love--when once this love is consummated in marriage--become inevitably
a perfect hell of storms and furies.
Then, as I say, the hymeneal bark either founders, or dashes on a rock,
or more wisely gets out of the clash of meeting oceans and takes one
tide or the other, where the flood has things all its own way. The
woman, being to-day the captain of the marriage bark, either steers into
the vast Pacific waters of lord-and-masterdom, though never, of course,
hauling down the flag of perfect love; or else, much more frequently
these latter days, she steers into the rather grey Atlantic of true
friendship and companionship, still keeping the flag of perfect love
bravely afloat.
And now the bark is fairly safe. In the great Pacific, the woman can
take the ease and warm repose of her new dependence, but she is usually
laughing up her sleeve. She lets the lord and master manage the ship,
but woe betide him if he seeks to haul down the flag of perfect love.
There is mutiny in a moment. And his chief officers and his crew,
namely, his children and his household servants, are up and ready to put
him in irons at once, at a word from that wondrous goddess of the bark,
the wife of his bosom. It is Aphrodite, mistress of the seas, in her
grand capacity of motherhood and attendant wifehood. None the less, with
a bit of managing the hymeneal bark sails on across the great waters
into port. A lord and master is not much more than an upper servant
while the flag of perfect love is flying and the sea-mother is on board.
But a servant with the name of captain, and the pleasant job of sailing
the ship and giving the necessary orders. He feels it is quite all
right. He is supreme servant-in-command, while the mistress of
mistresses smiles as she suckles his children. She is suckling him too.
Nevertheless, this is the course I would recommend young married women
to _drift into_, after the first two years of “perfect love.”
They won’t often take my advice, I know that. Ha-ha! they will say. We
see through your lord-and-master tricks. Course East-North-East,
helmsman, into the safer and more populous waters of perfect
companionship. If we can’t have one thing perfect we’ll have another.
If it isn’t exactly perfect love, it is perfect companionship, and the
two are pretty nearly one and the same.
For woman, even more than man, when once she gets an idea into her head,
or worse, when once she gets _herself_ into her head, will have nothing
short of perfection. She simply will tolerate nothing short of
perfection. E.N.E., then, into the democratic Atlantic of _perfect_
companionship.
Well, they are grey waters, and the perfect companionship usually
resolves, subtly, and always under the perfect love flag, into a very
nearly perfect limited liability company, the bark steering nicely
according to profit and loss, and usually “getting on” fabulously. The
Golden Vanity. If this perfect love flag is a vanity, the
perfect-companionship management is certainly Golden. I would recommend
perfect-companionship to all those married couples who truly and
sincerely want _to get on_.
Now the good bark _Harriet and Lovat_ had risen from the waves, like
Aphrodite’s shell as well as Aphrodite, in the extremest waters of
perfect love. Love and love alone! Wide, wild, lonely waters, with the
great albatross like a sign of the cross, sloping in the immense
heavens. A sea to themselves, the waters of perfect love. And the good
ship _Harriet and Lovat_, with white sails spread, sailing with never a
master, like the boat of Dionysus, which steered of its own accord
across the waters, in the right direction mark you, to the sound of the
music of the dolphins, while the mast of the ship put forth tendrils of
vine and purple bunches of grapes, and the grapes of themselves dripped
vinous down the throats of the true Dionysians. So sailed the fair ship
_Harriet and Lovat_ in the waters of perfect love.
I have not made up my mind whether she was a ship, or a bark, or a
schooner, technically speaking. Let us imagine her as any one of them.
Or perhaps she was a clipper, or a frigate, or a brig. All I insist is
that she was not a steam-boat with a funnel, as most vessels are
nowadays, sailing because they are stoked.
Fair weather and foul alternated. Sometimes the brig _Harriet and Lovat_
skimmed along the path of the moon like a phantom; sometimes she lay
becalmed, while sharks flicked her bottom: then she drove into the most
awful hurricanes, and spun round in a typhoon: and yet behold her
sailing out through the glowing arch of a rainbow into halcyon waters
again. And so for years, till she began to look rather worn, but always
attractive. Her paint had gone, so her timbers now were sea-silvery. Her
sails were thin, but very white. The mainsail also was slit, and the
stun-sails had been carried away in a blizzard. As for the flag of
perfect love, the flag of the red-and-white rose upon the cross of
thorns, all on a field of azure, it was woefully frayed and faded. The
azure field was nearly tattered away, and the rose was fading into
invisibility.
She had some awful weather, did the poor bark _Harriet and Lovat_. The
seas opened great jaws to swallow her, the treacherous seas of perfect
love, while cynical rocks gnashed their teeth at her, and unstable
heavens opened chasms of wind on her, and fierce, full-blooded lusty
bull-whales rushed at her and all but burst her timbers. Dazed and
battered, she wandered hither and thither on the seas of perfect love,
that she always had all to herself. Never another sail in sight, never
another ship in hail. Only sometimes the smoke of a steamer skirting the
horizon, making for one of the oceans.
And now the _Harriet and Lovat_ began to feel the pull of the two
opposing currents. It was as if she had a certain homesickness for one
or other of the populous oceans: she was weary of the lone and wasteful
waters of the sea of perfect love. Sometimes she drifted E.N.E. towards
the Atlantic of true companionship. And then Lovat, seeing the long
swell of that grey sea, and the funnels of ships like a city suburb, put
the helm hard aport, and turned the ship about, and beat against a
horrible sea and wind till they got into the opposite drift. Then things
went a little easier, till Harriet saw before her the awful void opening
of the other ocean, and the great, dark-blue, dominant swell of the
waters, and the loneliness and the vastness and the feeling of being
overwhelmed. She looked at the mast and saw the flag of perfect love
falling limp, the faded rose of all roses dying at last.
And in a moment when he was asleep, her almost lord-and-master, she
whipped the ship about and steered E.S.E. into the heart of the sea of
perfect love, hoping to get into the current E.N.E. and so out into the
open Atlantic. Then storms intolerable.
Then they took to cruising the far, lone, desert fringes of the sea of
perfect love, utterly lonely and near the ice, the fringe of the seas of
death. There they cruised, in the remote waters on the edge of
extinction. And then they looked at one another.
“We will be perfect companions: you know how I love you,” said Harriet,
of the good ship _Harriet and Lovat_.
“Never,” said Lovat, of the same ship. “I will be lord and master, but
ah, such a wonderful lord and master that it will be your bliss to
belong to me. Look, I have been sewing a new flag.”
She didn’t even look at the flag.
“You!” she exclaimed. “You a lord and master! Why, don’t you know that I
love you as no man ever was loved? You a lord and master! Ph! you look
it! Let me tell you I love you far, far more than ever you ought to be
loved, and you should acknowledge it.”
“I would rather,” said he, “that you deferred your loving of me for a
while, and considered the new proposition. We shall never sail any
straight course at all, until you realise that I am lord and master, and
you my blissful consort. Supposing, now, you had the real Hermes for a
husband, Trismegistus. Would you not hold your tongue for fear you lost
him, and change from being a lover, and be a worshipper? Well, I am not
Hermes or Dionysus, but I am a little nearer to it than you allow. And I
want you to yield to my mystery and my divination, and let me put my
flag of a phœnix rising from a nest in flames in place of that old rose
on a field azure. The gules are almost faded out.”
“It’s a _lovely_ design!” she cried, looking at the new flag. “I might
make a cushion-embroidery of it. But as a flag it’s absurd. Of course,
you lonely phœnix, you are the bird and the ashes and the flames all by
yourself! You would be. Nobody else enters in at all. I--I am just
nowhere--I don’t exist.”
“Yes,” he said, “you are the nest.”
“I’ll watch it!” she cried. “Then you shall sleep on thorns, Mister.”
“But consider,” he said.