Thinks-himself-grand. I’ve got one thing to tell you. Without _me_ you’d
be nowhere, you’d be nothing, you’d not be _that_,” and she snapped her
fingers under his nose, a movement he particularly disliked.
“I agree,” he replied, “that without the nest the phœnix would be--would
be up a tree--would be in the air--would be nowhere, and couldn’t find a
stable spot to resurrect in. The nest is as the body to the soul: the
cup that holds the fire, and in which the ashes fall to take form again.
The cup is the container and the sustainer.”
“Yes, I’ve done enough containing and sustaining of you, my gentleman,
in the years I’ve known you. It’s almost time you left off wanting so
much mothering. You can’t live a moment without me.”
“I admit that the phœnix without a nest is a bird absolutely without a
perch, he must dissipate in the air. But--”
“Then I’ll make a cushion-cover of your flag, and you can rest on that.”
“No, I’m going to haul down the flag of perfect love.”
“Oh, are you! And sail without a flag? Just like you, destroy, destroy,
and nothing to put in its place.”
“Yes, I want to put in its place this crowned phœnix rising from the
nest in flames. I want to set fire to our bark, _Harriet and Lovat_, and
out of the ashes construct the frigate _Hermes_, which name still
contains the same reference, _her_ and _me_, but which has a higher
total significance.”
She looked at him speechless for some time. Then she merely said:
“You’re mad,” and left him with his flag in his hands.
Nevertheless he was a determined little devil, as she knew to her cost,
and once he’d got an idea into his head not heaven nor hell nor Harriet
would ever batter it out. And now he’d got into his head this idea of
being lord and master, and Harriet’s acknowledging him as such. Not just
verbally. No. Not under the flag of perfect love. No. Obstinate and
devilish as he was, he wanted to haul down the flag of perfect love, to
set fire to the bark _Harriet and Lovat_, to seat himself in glory on
the ashes, like a resurrected phœnix, with an imaginary crown on his
head. And she was to be a comfortable nest for his impertinence.
In short, he was to be the lord and master, and she the humble slave.
Thank you. Or at the very best, she was to be a sort of domestic Mrs
Gladstone, the Mrs Gladstone of that old chestnut--who, when a female
friend was lamenting over the terrible state of affairs, in Ireland or
somewhere, and winding up her lament with: “Terrible, terrible. But
there is One above”--replied: “Yes, he’s just changing his socks. He’ll
be down in a minute.” Mr Lovat was to be the One above, and she was to
be happy downstairs thinking that this lord, this master, this Hermes
_cum_ Dionysus wonder, was comfortably changing his socks. Thank you
again. The man was mad.
Yet he stuck to his guns. She was to submit to the mystic man and male
in him, with reverence, and even a little awe, like a woman before the
altar of the great Hermes. She might remember that he _was_ only human,
that he had to change his socks if he got his feet wet, and that he
would make a fool of himself nine times out of ten. But--and the but was
emphatic as a thunderbolt--there was in him also the mystery and
lordship of--of Hermes, if you like--but the mystery and the lordship of
the forward-seeking male. That she must emphatically realise and bow
down to. Yes, bow down to. You can’t have two masters of one ship:
neither can you have a ship without a master. The _Harriet and Lovat_
had been an experiment of ten years’ endurance. Now she was to be broken
up, or burnt, so he said, and the non-existent _Hermes_ was to take her
place.
You can’t have two masters to one ship. And if it _is_ a ship: that is,
if it has a voyage to sail, a port to make, even a far direction to
take, into the unknown, then a master it must have. Harriet said it
wasn’t a ship, it was a houseboat, and they could lie so perfectly here
by the Pacific for the rest of time--or be towed away to some other
lovely spot to house in. She could imagine no fairer existence. It was a
houseboat.
But he with his no, no, he almost drove her mad. The bark of their
marriage was a ship that must sail into uncharted seas, and he must be
the master, and she must be the crew, sworn on. She was to believe in
his adventure and deliver herself over to it; she was to believe in his
mystic vision of a land beyond this charted world, where new life rose
again.
And she just couldn’t. His land beyond the land men knew, where men were
more than they are now: she couldn’t believe in it. “Then believe in
_me_,” he said desperately. “I know you too well,” she replied. And so,
it was an impasse.
Him, a lord and master! Why, he was not really lord of his own bread and
butter; next year they might both be starving. And he was not even
master of himself, with his ungovernable furies and his uncritical
intimacies with people: even people like Jack Callcott, whom Harriet
quite liked, but whom she would never have taken seriously. Yet there
was Lovat pouring himself out to him. Pah--believe! How could one
believe in such a man! If he had been naturally a master of men, general
of an army, or manager of some great steel works, with thousands of men
under him--then, yes, she could have acknowledged the _master_ part of
the bargain, if not the lord. Whereas, as it was, he was the most
forlorn and isolated creature in the world, without even a dog to his
command. He was so isolated he was hardly a man at all, among men. He
had absolutely nothing but her. Among men he was like some unbelievable
creature--an emu, for example. Like an emu in the streets or in a
railway carriage. He might well say phœnix.
All he could do was to try and come it over her with this revolution
rubbish and a stunt of “male” activity. If it were even real!
He had nothing but her, absolutely. And that was why, presumably, he
wanted to establish this ascendancy over her, assume this arrogance. And
so that he could refute her, deny her, and imagine himself a unique
male. He _wanted_ to be male and unique, like a freak of a phœnix. And
then go prancing off into connections with men like Jack Callcott and
Kangaroo, and saving the world. She could _not_ stand these
world-saviours. And she, she must be safely there, as a nest for him,
when he came home with his feathers pecked. That was it. So that he
could imagine himself absolutely and arrogantly It, he would turn her
into a nest, and sit on her and overlook her, like the one and only
phœnix in the desert of the world, gurgling hymns of salvation.
Poor Harriet! No wonder she resented it. Such a man, such a man to be
tied to and tortured by!
And poor Richard! To be a man, and to have a man’s uneasy soul for his
bed-fellow.
But he kicked against the pricks. He did not yet submit to the fact
which he _half_ knew: that before mankind would accept any man for a
king, and before Harriet would ever accept him, Richard Lovat, as a lord
and master, he, this self-same Richard who was so strong on kingship,
must open the doors of his soul and let in a dark Lord and Master for
himself, the dark god he had sensed outside the door. Let him once truly
submit to the dark majesty, break open his doors to this fearful god who
is master, and enters us from below, the lower doors; let himself once
admit a Master, the unspeakable god: and the rest would happen.
“The fire began to burn the stick,
The stick began to beat the dog,
The dog began to bite the pig,
The pig began to go over the bridge,
And so the old woman got home that night....”
CHAP: X. DIGGERS
They had another ferocious battle, Somers and Harriet; they stood
opposite to one another in such fury one against the other that they
nearly annihilated one another. He couldn’t stay near her, so started
walking off into the country. It was winter, but sunny, and hot walking.
He climbed steadily up and up the highroad between the dense, damp
jungle that grew at the base and up the steep rise of the tor-face,
which he wanted to get to the top of. Strange birds made weird, metallic
noises. Tree-ferns rose on their notchy little trunks, and great mosses
tangled in with more ordinary bushes. Overhead rose the gum-trees,
sometimes with great stark, dead limbs thrown up, sometimes hands over
like pine-trees.
He sweated up the steep road till at last he came to the top. There, on
the farther side, the dip slope, the hills sank and ran in spurs, all
fairly densely wooded, but not like the scarp slope up which he had
toiled. The scarp slope was jungle, impenetrable, with tree-ferns and
bunchy cabbage-palms and mosses like bushes, a thick matted undergrowth
beneath the boles of the trees. But the dip slope was bush: gum trees
rather scattered, and a low undergrowth like heath. The same lonely,
unbreakable silence and loneliness that seemed to him the real bush.
Curiously unapproachable to him. The mystery of the bush seems to recede
from you as you advance, and then it is behind you if you look round.
Lonely, and weird, and hoary.
He went on till he could look over the tor’s edge at the land below.
There was the scalloped sea-shore, for miles, and the strip of flat
coast-land, sometimes a mile wide, sprinkled as far as the eye could
reach with the pale-grey zinc roofs of the bungalows: all scattered like
crystals in the loose cells of the dark tree-tissue of the shore. It was
suggestive of Japanese landscape, dark trees and little, single,
scattered toy houses. Then the bays of the shore, the coal-jetty, far
off rocks down the coast, and long white lines of breakers.
But he was looking mostly straight below him, at the massed foliage of
the cliff-slope. Down into the centre of the great, dull-green whorls of
the tree-ferns, and on to the shaggy mops of the cabbage palms. In one
place a long fall of creeper was yellowish with damp flowers. Gum-trees
came up in tufts. The previous world!--the world of the coal age. The
lonely, lonely world that had waited, it seemed, since the coal age.
These ancient flat-topped tree-ferns, these towsled palms like mops.
What was the good of trying to be an alert conscious man here? You
couldn’t. Drift, drift into a sort of obscurity, backwards into a
nameless past, hoary as the country is hoary. Strange old feelings wake
in the soul: old, non-human feelings. And an old, old indifference, like
a torpor, invades the spirit. An old, saurian torpor. Who wins? There
was the land sprinkled with dwellings as with granulated sugar. There
was a black smoke of steamers on the high pale sea, and a whiteness of
steam from a colliery among the dull trees. Was the land awake? Would
the people waken this ancient land, or would the land put them to sleep,
drift them back into the torpid semi-consciousness of the world of the
twilight.
Somers felt the torpor coming over him. He hung there on the parapet
looking down, and he didn’t care. How profoundly, darkly he didn’t care.
There are no problems for the soul in its darkened, wide-eyed torpor.
Neither Harriet nor Kangaroo nor Jaz, nor even the world. Worlds come,
and worlds go: even worlds. And when the old, old influence of the
fern-world comes over a man, how can he care? He breathes the fern seed
and drifts back, becomes darkly half vegetable, devoid of
pre-occupations. Even the never-slumbering urge of sex sinks down into
something darker, more monotonous, incapable of caring: like sex in
trees. The dark world before conscious responsibility was born.
A queer bird sat hunched on a bough a few yards away, just below; a bird
like a bunch of old rag, with a small rag of a dark tail, and a fluffy
pale top like an owl, and a sort of frill round his neck. He had a long,
sharp, dangerous beak. But he too was sunk in unutterable apathy. A
kukooburra! Some instinct made him know that Somers was watching, so he
just shuffled round on the bough and sat with his back to the man, and
became utterly oblivious. Somers watched and wondered. Then he
whistled. No change. Then he clapped his hands. The bird looked over its
shoulder in surprise. What! it seemed to say. Is there somebody alive?
Is that a live somebody? It had quite a handsome face, with the
exquisite long, dagger beak. It slowly took Somers in. Then he clapped
again. Making an effort the bird spread quite big wings and whirred in a
queer, flickering flight to a bough a dozen yards farther off. And there
it clotted again.
Ah well, thought Somers, life is so big, and has such huge ante-worlds
of grey twilight. How can one care about anything in particular!
He went home again, and had forgotten the quarrel and forgotten marriage
or revolutions or anything: drifted away into the grey pre-world where
men didn’t have emotions. Where men didn’t have emotions and personal
consciousness, but were shadowy like trees, and on the whole silent,
with numb brains and slow limbs and a great indifference.
But Harriet was waiting for him rather wistful, and loving him rather
quiveringly. And yet even in the quiver of her passion was some of this
indifference, this twilight indifference of the fern-world.
Jack and Victoria came for the week-end, and Somers and Callcott met in
a much nearer sympathy than they had ever known before. Victoria was
always thrilled and fascinated by both the Somers: they had an
inexhaustible fascination for her, the tones of their voices, their
manner, their way with each other. She could not understand the strange
sureness they had in themselves, the sureness of what they were saying
or going to say, the sureness of what they were feeling. For herself,
her words fluttered out of her without her direct control, and her
feelings fluttered in her the same. She was one perpetually agitated
dovecot of words and emotions, always trying consciously to find
_herself_ amid the whirl, and never quite succeeding. She thought
someone might _tell_ her. Whereas the Somers had an unconscious
sureness, something that seemed really royal to her. But she had in the
last issue the twilight indifference of the fern-world. Only she still
quivered for the light.
Poor Victoria! She clung to Jack’s arm vibrating, always needing to
vibrate outwards. And he seemed to become more Australian and apathetic
every week. The great indifference, the darkness of the fern-world, upon
his mind. Then spurts of energy, spurts of sudden violent desire, spurts
of gambling excitement. But the mind in a kind of twilight sleep.
He made no more appeals. He was just static, and quite gentle. Even at
table he was half oblivious of the presence of the other people. Then
Victoria would poke him with her elbow, poke him hard, into
consciousness, and bring back the lively Jack that the Somers had first
known. Strange that the torpor had come on him so completely of late.
Yet there was a queer light in his eyes, as if he might do something
dangerous. And when he was once talking, he was perfectly logical and
showed surprising calm common-sense. When he was discussing or
criticising, he seemed so unusually sane as to be peculiar. Like a man
in his sleep.
Just outside the station was the football field, and Mullumbimby was
playing Wollondindy, Mullumbimby in royal blue, and Wollondindy in
rather faded red. Along the roadside buggies and motor-cars were pulled
up, the ponies were taken out of harness and left to feed on the
roadside grass. Two riders sat on horseback to survey the scene. And
under the flowering coral-trees, with their sharp red cockatoo flowers,
stood men in their best clothes smoking pipes, or men in their best
clothes squatting on the fence, and lasses mingling in or strolling past
in white silk stockinette frocks, or pink crêpe de chine, or muslin.
Just like prostitutes, arm in arm, strolled the lasses, airing
themselves and their pronounced hips. And the men apathetically took no
notice, but watched the field.
This scene was too much for Jack Callcott. Somers or no Somers, he must
be there. So there he stood, in his best clothes and a cream velour hat
and a short pipe, staring with his long, naked, Australian face,
impassive. On the field the blues and the reds darted madly about, like
strange bird-creatures rather than men. They were mostly blond, with
hefty legs, and with prominent round buttocks that worked madly inside
the little white cotton shorts. And Jack, with his dark eyes, watched as
if it was doomsday. Occasionally the tail-end of a smile would cross
his face, occasionally he would take his pipe-stem from his mouth and
give a bright look into vacancy and say, “See that!” Heaven knows what
it was that he saw. The game, the skill? Yes. But more, the motion, the
wild combative motion. And most of all, fate. Fate had a fascination for
him. It was the only real point of curiosity left in him: how would
chance work things out. Chance! Now then, how would chance settle it?
Even the football field, with its wildly scurrying blues and bits of
red, was only a frenzied shuffling of fate, with men for the
instruments. The living instruments of fate! And how would it work out,
how would it work out? He could have stood there, static, with his
little pipe, till Doomsday, waiting for fate to settle it. The wild
scurrying motion, and the jumps in the air, of course made his heart
beat faster. Towards the close one of the chaps got a kick on the jaw,
and was knocked out. They couldn’t finish the game. Hard lines.
Jack was a queer sight to Somers, when he was in this brightly vacant
mood, not a man at all, but a chance thing, gazing spellbound on the
evolutions of chance. And in this state, this very Australian state, you
could hardly get a word out of him. Or, when he broke into a little
volley of speech, you listened with wonder to the noise of it, as if a
weird animal had suddenly given voice.
The indifference, the marvellous, bed-rock indifference. Not the static
fatalism of the east. But an indifference based on real recklessness, an
indifference with a deep flow of loose energy beneath it, ready to break
out like a geyser. Ready to break into a kind of frenzy, a berserk
frenzy, running amok in wild generosity, or still more wild smashing up.
The wild joy in letting loose, in a smash-up. But will he ever let
loose? Or will the static patience settle deeper, and the fern-twilight
altogether envelop him. The slow transmutation! What does to-day matter,
or this country? Time is so huge, and in Australia the next step back is
to the fern age.
The township looked its queerest as dusk fell. Then the odd electric
lights shone at rather wide intervals, the wide, unmade roads of rutted
earth seemed to belong again to the wild, in the semi-dark, and the low
bungalows with the doors open and the light showing seemed like shacks
in the wilderness, a settlement in the fierce gloom of the wilderness.
Then youths dashed fiercely on horseback down the soft roads, standing
in the stirrups and crouching over the neck of the thin, queer brown
racehorses that sprinted along like ghosts. And the young baker, in
emulation, dashed through the village on his cream pony. A collier who
had been staying somewhere cantered stiffly away into the dark on a pony
like a rocking horse. Young maidens in cotton dresses stood at the
little rail gates of their bungalow homes talking to young men in a
buggy, or to a young man on foot, or to the last tradesman’s cart, or to
youths who were strolling past. It was evening, and the intense dusk of
the far-off land, and white folks peering out of the dusk almost like
aborigines. The far-off land, just as far-off when you are in it: nay,
then furthest off.
The evening came very dark, with lightning playing pallid in the
south-east, over the sea. There was nothing to be done with Jack but to
play draughts with him. He wasn’t in a real sporting mood, so he let
himself be beaten even at draughts. When he was in a sporting mood he
could cast a spell of confusion over Somers, and win every time, with a
sort of gloating. But when he wasn’t in a sporting mood he would shove
up his men recklessly, and lose them. He didn’t care. He just leaned
back and stretched himself in that intense physical way which Somers
thought just a trifle less than human. The man was all body: a strong
body full of energy like a machine that has got steam up, but is
inactive. He had no mind, no spirit, no soul: just a tense, inactive
body, and an eye rather glazed and a trifle bloodshot. The old psyche
slowly disintegrating.
Meanwhile Victoria in a trill of nervous excitement and exaltation was
talking Europe with Harriet. Victoria was just the opposite of Jack: she
was all a quiver of excited consciousness, to know, to see, to realise.
She would almost have done anything, to be able to _look_ at life, look
at the inside of it, see it in its intimacy. She had had wild ideas of
being a stewardess on a boat, a chambermaid in an hotel, a waitress in a
good restaurant, a hospital nurse--anything, so that she could _see_ the
intimacies, touch the private mysteries. To travel seemed to her the
great desirable: to go to Europe and India, and _see_ it all. She loved
Australia, loved it far more quiveringly and excitedly than he. But it
wasn’t Australia that fascinated her: it was the secret intimacies of
life, and what _other folks felt_. That strange and aboriginal
indifference that was bottommost in him seemed like a dynamo in her. She
fluttered in the air like a loose live nerve, a nerve of the sympathetic
system. She was all sympathetic drive: and he was nearly all check. He
sat there apathetic, nothing but body and solid, steady, physical
indifference. He did not oppose her at all, or go counter to her. He was
just the heavy opposite pole of her energy. And of course she belonged
to him as one pole belongs to the other pole in a circuit.
And he, he would stretch his body continuously, but he would not go to
bed, though Somers suggested it. No, there he sat. So Somers joined in
the more exciting conversation of the women, and Jack sat solidly there.
Whether he listened or whether he didn’t, who knows? The aboriginal
_sympathetic_ apathy was upon him, he was like some creature that has
lost its soul, and simply stares.
The morning was one of the loveliest Australian mornings, perfectly
golden, all the air pure gold, the great gold effulgence to seaward, and
the pure, cold pale-blue inland, over the dark range. The wind was
blowing from inland, the sea was quiet as a purring cat with white paws,
becoming darkish green-blue flecked with innumerable white flecks like
rain-spots splashing the surface of a pool. The horizon was a clear and
hard and dark sea against an almost white sky, but from far behind the
horizon showed the mirage-magic tops of hazed, gold-white clouds, that
seemed as if they indicated the far Pacific isles.
Though it was cold, Jack was about sauntering in his shirt-sleeves with
his waistcoat open and his hands in his pockets: rather to the vexation
of Victoria. “Pull yourself together, Jack dear, do. Put your collar and
tie on,” she coaxed, fondling him.
“In a minute,” he said.
The indifference--the fern-dark indifference of this remote golden
Australia. Not to care--from the bottom of one’s soul, not to care.
Overpowered in the twilight of fern-odour. Just to keep enough grip to
run the machinery of the day: and beyond that, to let yourself drift,
not to think or strain or make any effort to consciousness whatsoever.
That was Jack, sauntering down there in his shirt-sleeves, with his
waistcoat open showing his white shirt, his strong neck bare: sauntering
with his hands in his pockets beside Somers, at the water’s edge. Somers
wore a dark flannel jacket, and his necktie hung dark and broke the
intimacy of the white shirt-breast.
The two women stood on the cliff, the low, bushy cliff, looking down.
Harriet was in a plain dress of dark-coloured purplish-and-brown
hand-woven stuff of cotton and silk mixture, with old silver lace round
the collar; Victoria in a pale-green knitted dress. So they stood in the
morning light, watching the men on the fawn-coloured sand by the
sea-fringe, waiting to wave when they looked up.
Jack looked up first. The two women _coo-eed_ and waved. He took his
pipe from his mouth and held it high in his hand, in answer. A strange
signal. The pale-green wisp of Victoria in the sky was part of his
landscape. But the darker figure of Harriet had for some reason a menace
to him, up there. He suddenly felt as if he were down below: he suddenly
realised a need to bethink himself. He turned to Somers, looking down
and saying in his peculiar Australian tone:
“Well, I suppose we’d better be going up.”