Victoria made him put on coat and collar and tie for breakfast.
“Yes, dear, come on. I’ll tie your tie for you.”
“I suppose a man was born to give in,” said he, with laconic good humour
and obstinacy. But he was a little uneasy. He realised the need to
gather himself together.
“You get like the rest of them,” Victoria scolded him in a coaxing tone.
“You used to be so smart. And you promised me you’d never go slack like
they all are. Didn’t you, you bad boy?”
“I forget,” said he. But nevertheless the constraint of breakfast pulled
him up. Because Harriet _really_ disapproved, and he didn’t know what
was inside that rose-and-brown-purple cloud of her. The ancient judgment
of the Old World. So he gathered himself somewhat together. But he was
so far, fern-lost, from the old world.
“My God!” thought Somers. “These are the men Kangaroo wants to build up
a new state with.”
After breakfast Somers got Jack to talk about Kangaroo and his plans. He
heard again all about the Diggers’ Clubs: nearly all soldiers and
sailors who had been in the war, but not restricted to these. They had
started like any other social club: games, athletics, lectures,
readings, discussions, debates. No gambling, no drink, no class or party
distinction. The clubs were still chiefly athletics, but not _sporting_.
They went in for boxing, wrestling, fencing, and knife-throwing, and
revolver practice. But they had swimming and rowing squads, and
rifle-ranges for rifle practice, and they had regular military training.
The colonel who planned out the military training was a clever chap. The
men were grouped in little squads of twenty, each with sergeant and
corporal. Each of these twenty was trained to act like a scout,
independently, though the squad worked in absolute unison among
themselves, and were pledged to absolute obedience of higher commands.
These commands, however, left most of the devising and method of
execution of the job in hand to the squad itself. In New South Wales the
Maggies, as these private squads were called, numbered already about
fourteen hundred, all perfectly trained and equipped. They had a
distinctive badge of their own: a white, broad-brimmed felt hat, like
the ordinary khaki military hat, but white, and with a tuft of white
feathers. “Because,” said Ennis, the colonel, “we’re the only ones that
can afford to show the white feather.”
These Maggies, probably from Magpies, because Colonel Ennis used to wear
white riding-breeches and black gaiters, and a black jacket and a white
stock, with his white hat--were the core and heart of the Digger
Movement. But Kangaroo had slaved at the other half of the business, the
mental side. He _did_ want his men to grip on to the problem of the
future of Australia. He had insisted on attendance at debates and
discussions: Australia and the World, Australia and the Future, White
Australia, Australia and the Reds, Class Feeling in Australia, Politics
and Australia, Australians and Work, What is Democracy? What is an
Australian? What do our Politicians do for Australia? What our State
Parliament does for us, What our Federal Parliament does for us, What
side of the Australian does Parliament represent? Is Parliament
necessary to Democracy? What is wrong with Soviet rule? Do we want a
Statesman, or do we want a Leader? What kind of Leader do we want? What
aim have we in view? Are we Australians? Are we Democratic? Do we
believe in Ourselves?
So the debates had been going on, for a year and a half now. These
debates were for club members only. And each club numbered only fifty
members. Every member was asked to take part in the debates, and a
memorandum was kept of each meeting. Then there were monthly united
gatherings, of five or six or more clubs together. And occasionally a
mass-meeting, at which Kangaroo spoke.
All this went on in the open, and roused some comment in the press: at
first a great deal of praise, later some suspicion and considerable
antagonism, both from Conservatives and Labour. Ben Cooley was supposed
to be working himself in as a future Prime Minister, with a party behind
him that would make him absolute, a Dictator. As soon as one paper came
out with this alarm, an opponent sneered and pooh-poohed, and spoke of
the Reds lounging about, a fearful menace, in Sydney, and recalled the
Reigns of Terror in Paris and in Petrograd. Was another Reign of Terror
preparing for Sydney? Was a bloodthirsty Robespierre or a ruthless Lenin
awaiting his moment? Would responsible citizens be lynched in Martin
Place, and dauntless citizenesses thrown into the harbour, when the
fatal hour struck? Whereupon a loud burst from the press: were we to be
alarmed by the knock-kneed, loutish socialist gang that hung round
Canberra House? These gentry could hardly kill the vermin in their own
clothing, not to speak of lynching in Martin Place. Whereas the Maggies
were a set of efficient, well-armed, and no doubt unscrupulous tools of
still more designing and unscrupulous masters. If we had to choose
between Napoleon, in the shape of Ben Cooley, or Lenin, in the
lack-of-shape of Willie Struthers, we should be hard put to it to know
which was worse. Whereupon a fierce blast about our returned heroes and
the white-livered skulkers who had got themselves soft jobs as
coast-watchers, watching that the sharks didn’t nibble the rocks, and
now dared lift their dishonourable croaks against the revered name of
Digger. And a ferocious rush-in from Labour, which didn’t see much
Napoleon in Ben Cooley, except the belly and the knack of filling his
pockets. Napoleon, though but a Dago and not a Jew, had filled one of
the longest pockets Europe had ever emptied herself into, so where would
poor little Australia be when the sham Kangaroo, with the help of the
Magpies, which were indeed strictly Butcher Birds, started to coin her
into shekels?
Then the boom died down, but the Digger Clubs had grown immensely on the
strength of it. There were now more than a hundred clubs in New South
Wales, and nearly as many in Victoria. The chief in Victoria was a smart
chap, a mining expert. They called him the Emu, to match Kangaroo on the
Australian coat of arms. He would be the Trotsky to the new Lenin, for
he was a born handler of men. He had been a lieutenant-colonel in the
war, a very smart soldier, and there had been a great cry to keep him
on, for the Defence Force. But he had got the shove from Government, so
he cleared out and went back to his mining.
But every club had its own committee, and this committee was composed of
five or six of the best, surest members, sworn in to secrecy and to
absolute obedience to any decision. Each club committee handled every
question of development, and the master and the teller went to
section-meetings. A section consisted of ten clubs. A decision at a
section meeting was carried to the state meeting, where the chief of the
state always had the ruling vote. Once a decision was passed, it became
a law for all members, embodied in the person of the chief, and
interpreted by him unquestioned save by his lieutenant, the chief of all
the secretaries, or tellers.
The public members of the clubs were initiated into no secrets. The most
important questions were discussed only among the chiefs. More general
secrets were debated at the section meetings. That is, the great bulk of
the members gave only their allegiance and their spirit of sympathy. The
masters and chiefs carefully watched the response to all propositions at
all open discussions. They carefully fostered the feeling they wished
for, or which they were instructed to encourage. When the right feeling
was arrived at, presumably, then the secret members started the
discussion of propositions proposed from above. A secret member was
allowed to make a proposition also, and the list was read over at the
section meetings. But the Jack, the chief of the tellers, had right of
absolute veto.
Somers could not get it very clear, from Jack Callcott’s description.
But it seemed to him as if all the principal ideas originated with the
chief, went round the circuit of the clubs, disguised as general topics
for debate, and returned as confirmed principles, via the section
meetings and the state meetings. All the debates had been a slow,
deliberate crystallising of a few dominant ideas in all the members. In
the actual putting into practice of any principle, the chief was an
autocrat, though he might, if he chose, send his propositions through
the section meetings and the state meetings for criticism and amendment.
“What I feel,” said Somers to Jack, “is that the bulk of you just don’t
care what the chief does, so long as he does something.”
“Oh, we don’t lose our sleep at nights. If he likes to be the boss, let
him do the thinking. We know he’s our man, and so we’ll follow him. We
can’t all be Peter and Paul and know all about it.”
“You just feel he’s your man?”
“Oh, we do.”
“But supposing you go in and win--and he is the boss of Australia. Shall
you still leave things to him?”
Jack thought lazily for a time.
“I should think so,” he replied, with a queer, mistrustful tone.
And Somers felt again so distinctly they were doing it all just in order
to have something to do, to put a spoke in the wheel of the present
bosses, to make a change. Just temporary. There would be a change, and
that was what they wanted. There was all the time the excitement. Damn
the consequences.
“You don’t think it would be as well to _have_ a Soviet and Willie
Struthers?”
“No, I don’t,” said Jack, in a thin, sharp voice. “I don’t want to be
bullied by any damned Red International Labour. I don’t want to be
kissing and hugging a lot of foreign labour tripe: niggers and what the
hell. I’d rather have the British Empire ten thousand times over, and
that bed’s a bit too wide, and too many in it, for me. I don’t like
sleeping with a lot of neighbours. But when it comes to going to bed
with a crowd of niggers and dagoes, in an International Labour Combine,
with a pair of red sheets so that the dirt won’t show, I’m absolutely
sure I won’t have it. That’s why I like Kangaroo. We shall be just cosy
and Australian, with a boss like a father who gets up first in the
morning, and locks up at night before you go to bed.”
“And who will stop in the Empire?”
“Oh, I suppose so. But he won’t be asking even the British to go to bed
with him. He knows the difference between Australia, and the rest of the
Empire. The Empire’s like a lot of lock-up shops that you do your trade
in. But I know Kangaroo well enough to know he’s not mixing his family
in. He’ll keep Australia close and cosy. That’s what I want. And that’s
what we all want, when we’re in our senses and aren’t bitten into spots
by the Red International bug.”
Somers then mentioned Jaz’s proposition, of a red revolution first.
“I know,” said Jack. “It may be so. He’s one of your sly, crawling
devils, Jaz is, and that seems to be the road nowadays. I wouldn’t mind
egging the Reds in, and then slapping them clean out into nowhere. I
wouldn’t mind at all. But I’m bound to follow Kangaroo’s orders, so I’m
not bothering my chump over Jaz’s boodle.”
“You don’t care which way it happens?”
Jack looked at him sideways, like the funny bird.
“No,” he said, with an Australian drawl. “So long as it does happen. I
don’t like things as they are, and I don’t feel safe about them. I don’t
mean I want to feel safe as if nothing would ever happen. There’s some
sorts of sport and risk that you enjoy, and there’s others you hate the
thought of. Now I hate the thought of being bossed and messed about by
the Old Country, or by Jew capitalists and bankers, or by a lot of
labour bullies, or a Soviet. There’s no fun in that sort of sport, to
me, unless you can jolly well wipe the bleeders out afterwards. And I
don’t altogether want the mills of the British Empire to go grinding
slowly on, and yourself compelled to do nothing but grind slowly with
’em. It’s too much of a sameness altogether, and not as much sport as a
tin Lizzie. We’re too much mixed up with other folk’s business, what’s
absolutely no fun for us. No, what I want is a cosy, lively little
Australia away from all this blooming world-boost. I’ve no use for a lot
of people across a lot of miles of sea nudging me while I handle my
knife and fork. Leave us Australians to ourselves, we shall manage.”
They were interrupted by Harriet calling for Somers to come and rescue
the tea-towel from the horns of a cow who had calmly scrambled through
the fence on to their grass. Somers was used to the cow: she had
scrambled through the Coo-ee fence long before the Somers had ever
walked through the gate, so she looked on them as mild intruders. He was
quite friendly with her, she ate the pumpkin rind and apple parings from
his hand. Now she looked at him half guiltily out of one eye, the
kitchen towel hanging over the other eye. She took it quite calmly, but
had a disreputable appearance.
“Come here,” said he. “Come here and have it taken off. Of course you
had to poke your head into the bush if you thought there was a towel on
it.”
She came mildly up and held her head while he disentangled the towel
from her horns. Then she went calmly on, snuffing at the short, bitten
grass for another mouthful, and twitching leaves off the stunted bushes.
So they were, the cows, so unafraid. In Cornwall, Harriet said, the cows
had always sniffed in when she came near, and then breathed out heavily,
nnh! nnh! as if they did not like the smell of human beings, breathing
out against her, and backing. And that had scared her. But these cows
didn’t do that. They seemed so calm. They fed over all the bush, the
unoccupied grassy lots above the sea, among the unbuilt streets. And
they pushed in among the trees and bushes where the creek came in. And
then at dusk a boy would come on a cream-coloured pony riding round and
driving them in, scaring a sort of crane or heron bird from the still
waters of the marshy creek-edge. Then the cows walked or trotted
placidly home: so unconcerned. And the bird with the great, arched grey
wings flapped in a low circle round, then settled again a yard or two
from where she was before.
So unconcerned. Somers had noticed a pair of fishing birds by the creek,
queer objects nearly as big as ducks, perched at the extremity of a dead
gum-tree, above the water. They flew away at his coming, but while he
stood looking, they circled with their longish necks stretched out and
their wings sharply flicking in the high air, then one returned and sat
again on the tree, and the other perched on another dead tree. The near
one looked sideways at him.
“Yes, I’m here,” said he aloud.
Whereupon she did the inevitable, turned her back on him and he no
longer existed for her. These ostriches needed no sand. She so far
forgot him as to turn sideways to him again, so he had her in profile,
clutched grey like an old knot at the tip of the stark, dead grey tree.
And there she performed queer corkscrew exercises with her neck in the
air. Whether it was she was getting down a last fishbone in her gizzard,
or whether she was merely asserting herself in the upper air, he could
not tell.
“What a fool you look,” he said aloud to her.
Then away the birds rose. And he saw a seedy, elderly man in black, in a
long-skirted black coat like a cast-off Methodist parson, spying at him
furtively from behind the bushes on the other side of the creek. This
parson-looking weed carried a gun, and was shooting heaven knows what.
He thought Richard Lovat a very suspicious bird, and Richard Lovat
thought him the last word in human weeds. So our young man turned away
to the sands, where the afternoon sea had gone a very dark blue. Another
human weed with a very thin neck and a very red face sat on the sand
ridge up which the foam-edge swished, his feet wide apart, facing the
ocean, and tending a line which he had in some way managed to cast out
into the low surf. An urchin, barefoot, was pottering round in silence,
like a sandpiper. The elderly one made unintelligible noises as Somers
approached. The latter realised it meant he was not to catch with his
foot the line, which reached out behind the thin fisherman, covered with
sand. So he stepped over it. The brown, barefoot urchin pottered round
unheeding. He did not even look up when the elder made more
unintelligible sounds to him.
“My father is a fisherman,
Oh a fisherman! Yes a fisherman!
He catches all the fish-e-can.”
Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays were the library nights. When you had
crossed the iron foot-bridge over the railway, you came to a big wooden
building with a corrugated iron roof, standing forlorn at an unmade
corner, like the fag-end of the village. But the village was an
agglomeration of fag ends. This building might have been a temporary
chapel, as you came at it from the back. But in front it was labelled
“Pictoria,” so it was the cinema. But there was also a black board with
gilt letters, like a chapel notice-board, which said “School of Arts
Library.” And the Pictoria had a sort of little wing, all wood, like a
little school-room. And in one section of this wing was the School of
Arts Library, which the Somers had joined. Four rows of novels: the top
now a hundred or more thin books, all Nat Gould or Zane Grey. The young
women came for Zane Grey. “Oh, _The Maid of Mudgee_ is a lovely thing,
lovely”--a young woman was pronouncing from the top of the broken chair
which served as stool to give access to this top row. “Y’aven’ got a new
Zaine Greye, have yer?” She spoke in these tones of unmitigated intimacy
to the white moustached librarian. One would have thought he was her
dear old dad. Then came a young railway man who had heard there was a
new Nat Gould.
“But,” said Somers, as he and Harriet went off with a Mary E. Mann and a
George A. Birmingham, “I don’t wonder they can’t read English books, or
only want Nat Gould. All the scruples and the emotions and the regrets
in English novels do seem waste of time out here.”
“I suppose,” said Harriet, “if you don’t have any inside life of your
own it must seem a waste of time. But look at it--look!”
The object she bade him look at was a bone of contention between them.
She wanted to give five pounds to have four posts and an iron chain put
round it, and perhaps a bit of grass sowed inside the enclosure. He
declared that they’d probably charge ten pounds for the chain alone,
since it was Australia. And let it alone. It was of a piece with the
rest. But Harriet said she couldn’t leave the place till she’d had
something done to it. He said she was an interfering female.
The object was the memorial to the fallen soldiers. It was really a
quite attractive little monument: a statue in pale, fawnish stone, of a
Tommy standing at ease, with his gun down at his side, wearing his
puttees and his turned-up felt hat. The statue itself was about life
size, but standing just overhead on a tall pedestal it looked small and
stiff and rather touching. The pedestal was in very nice proportion, and
had at eye level white inlet slabs between little columns of grey
granite, bearing the names of the fallen on one slab, in small black
letters, and on the other slabs the names of all the men who served:
“God Bless Them.” The fallen had “Lest we forget,” for a motto. Carved
on the bottom step it said, “Unveiled by Grannie Rhys.” A real township
monument, bearing the names of everybody possible: the fallen, all those
who donned khaki, the people who presented it, and Grannie Rhys.
Wonderfully in keeping with the place and its people, naive but quite
attractive, with the stiff, pallid, delicate fawn-coloured soldier
standing forever stiff and pathetic.
But there it stood, a few yards from the corner of the corrugated
Pictoria, at the corner of the fag-end road to the station, like an old
milk-can someone had set down and forgotten: or a bran new milk-can. Old
rags of paper littered the ground at the base, with an old tin or two. A
little further back was a German machine gun, also looking as if it had
been scrapped and forgotten. Standing there, with its big metal
screen-flap, it looked exotic, a thing of some higher culture, demoniac
and fallen.
Harriet was dying to rescue the forlorn monument that seemed as if it
had been left there in the bustle of removal. She wanted to enclose it.
But he said: “Leave it. Leave it. They don’t like things enclosed.”
She still had in her mind’s eye an Australia with beautiful manorial
farm-houses and dainty, perfect villages. She never acquiesced in the
_uncreatedness_ of the new country, the rawness, the slovenliness. It
seemed to her comical, for instance, that no woman in Australia would
carry a basket. Harriet went shopping as usual with her pretty straw
basket in the village. But she felt that the women remarked on it. Only
then did she notice that everybody carried a suit-case in this discreet
country. The fat old woman who came to the door with a suit-case must,
she thought, be a visitor coming to the wrong house. But no. “Did you
want a cabbage?” In the suit-case two cabbages and half a pumpkin. A
little girl goes to the dairy for six eggs and half a pound of butter
with a small, elegant suit-case. Nay, a child of three toddled with a
little six-inch suit-case, containing, as Harriet had occasion to see,
two buns, because the suit-case flew open and the two buns rolled out.
Australian suit-cases were always flying open, and discharging groceries
or a skinned rabbit or three bottles of beer. One had the impression
that everybody was perpetually going away for the week-end: with a
suit-case. Not so at all. Just a new-country bit of convention.
Ah, a new country! The cabbage, for example, cost tenpence in the normal
course of things, and a cauliflower a shilling. And the tradesmen’s
carts flew round in the wilderness, delivering goods. There isn’t much
newness in _man_, whatever the country.
That old aeroplane that had lain broken-down in a field. It was nowadays
always staggering in the low air just above the surf, past the front of
Coo-ee, and lurching down on to the sands of the town “beach.” There, in
the cold wind, a forlorn group of men and boys round the aeroplane, the
sea washing near, the marsh of the creek desolate behind. Then a
“passenger” mounted, and men shoving the great insect of a thing along
the sand to get it started. It buzzed venomously into the air, looking
very unsafe and wanting to fall in the sea.
“Yes, he’s carrying passengers. Oh, quite a fair trade. Thirty-five
shillings a time. Yes, it seems a lot, but he has to make his money
while he can. No, I’ve not been up myself, but my boy has. No, you see,
there was four boys, and they had a sweepstake: eight-and-six apiece,
and my boy won. He’s just eleven. Yes, he liked it. But they was only up
about four minutes: I timed them myself. Well, you know, it’s hardly
worth it. But he gets plenty to go. I heard he made over forty pound on
Whit Monday, here on this beach. It seems to me, though, he favours some
more than others. There’s some he flies round with for ten minutes, and
that last chap now, I’m sure he wasn’t up a second more than three
minutes. No, not quite fair. Yes, he’s a man from Bulli: was a
flying-man all through the war. Now he’s got this machine of his own,
he’s quite right to make something for himself if he can. No, I don’t
know that he has any licence or anything. But a chap like that, who went
through the war--why, who’s going to interfere with his doing the best
for himself?”
CHAP: XI. WILLIE STRUTHERS AND KANGAROO
Jaz took Somers to the famous Canberra House, in Sydney, where the
Socialists and Labour people had their premises: offices, meeting-rooms,
club-rooms, quite an establishment. There was a lively feeling about the
place, in spite of various down-at-heel malcontents who stood about in
the passage and outside on the pavement. A business-like air.