off and so escaped out of a trap. It seems like a trap to me, all this
social business and this saving mankind. Why can’t mankind save itself?
It can if it wants to. I’m a fool. I neither want love nor power. I like
the world. And I like to be alone in it, by myself. What do you want,
Jaz?”
Richard was like a child escaped from school, escaped from his necessity
to _be_ something and to _do_ something. They had jogged past the palm
trees and the grass of the gardens, and the blue wrens had cocked their
preposterous tails. They jogged to the end of the promontory, under wild
trees, and Richard looked at the two lobes of the harbour, blue water on
either side, and another part of the town beyond.
“Now take us back to the cockatoos,” he said to the cabby.
Richard loved the look of Australia, that marvellous soft flower-blue of
the air, and the sombre grey of the earth, the foliage, the brown of the
low rocks: like the dull pelts of kangaroos. It had a wonder and a
far-awayness, even here in the heart of Sydney. All the shibboleths of
mankind are so trumpery. Australia is outside everything.
“I couldn’t exactly say,” Jaz answered. “You’ve got a bit of an
Australian look this morning about you,” he added with a smile.
“I feel Australian. I feel a new creature. But what’s the outcome?”
“Oh, you’ll come back to caring, I should think: for the sake of having
something to care about. That’s what most of them do. They want to turn
bushrangers for six months, and then they get frightened of themselves,
and come back and want to be good citizens.”
“Bushranger? But Australia’s like an open door with the blue beyond. You
just walk out of the world and into Australia. And it’s just somewhere
else. All those nations left behind in their schoolrooms, fussing. Let
them fuss. This is Australia, where one can’t care.”
Jaz sat rather pale, and ten times more silent than ever.
“I expect you’ve got yourself to reckon with, no matter where you are.
That’s why most Australians have to fuss about something--politics, or
horse-racing, or football. Though a man can go empty in Australia, if he
likes: as you’ve said yourself,” replied he.
“Then I’ll go empty,” said Richard. “What makes _you_ fuss with Kangaroo
and Struthers, Jaz?”
“Me?” The smile was slow and pale. “Go into the middle of Australia and
see how empty it is. You can’t face emptiness long. You have to come
back and do something to keep from being frightened at your own
emptiness, and everything else’s emptiness. It may be empty. But it’s
wicked, and it’ll kill you if it can. Something comes out of the
emptiness, to kill you. You have to come back and do things with
mankind, to forget.”
“It’s wonderful to be empty. It’s wonderful to feel this blue globe of
emptiness of the Australian air. It shuts everything out,” protested
Richard.
“You’ll be an Aussie yet,” smiled Jaz slowly.
“Shall I regret it?” asked Richard.
The eyes of the two men met. In the pale grey eyes of Jaz something
lurking, like an old, experienced consciousness looking across at the
childish consciousness of Somers, almost compassionately: and half in
mockery.
“You’ll change back before you regret it,” he said.
“Are you wise, Jaz? And am I childish?” Richard’s look suddenly changed
also to mockery. “If you’re wise, Jaz, why do you wander round like a
lost soul? Because you do. And what takes you to Struthers, if you
belong to Kangaroo?”
“I’m secretary for the coal- and timber-merchants’ union,” said Jaz
quietly.
They got out of the cab to look at the aviaries. Wonderful,
brilliant-coloured little birds, the love-birds self-consciously
smirking. “Hello!”--pronounced pure Australian-cockney: “Helleow!”
“Hello! Hello!” “Hello Cocky! What yer want?” This in a more-than-human
voice from a fine sulphur-crested cockatoo. “Hello Cocky!” His thick
black tongue worked in his narrow mouth. So absolutely human the sound,
and yet a bird’s. It was startling, and very funny. The two men talked
to the cockatoos, fascinated and amused, for a quarter of an hour. The
emu came prancing up, with his alert, large, sticking-out eyes and his
whiskers. An alert gentleman, with the dark Australian eye. Very
wide-awake, and yet far off in the past. And a remote, alert, sharp
gentleness belonging to far past twilight ages, before enemies and iron
weapons were perfected. A very remote, dirt-brown gentleman from the
lost plains of time. The peacock rustling his blue fireworks seemed a
sort of nouveau-riche in comparison.
Somers went in the evening of this memorable day to dine with Kangaroo.
The other man was quiet, and seemed preoccupied.
“I went to Willie Struthers this morning,” Somers said.
Kangaroo looked at him sharply through his pince-nez. On the subtle face
of Somers a small, wicked smile hovered like a half visible flame. But
it was his alive, beautiful face. And his whole person seemed magnetic.
“Who took you there?” asked Kangaroo sharply.
“Jaz.”
“Jaz is a meddlesome-Patty. Well, and what then?”
“I think Willie is rather a terror. I wouldn’t like to have to spend my
life with him. But he’s shrewd. Only I don’t like him
physically--something thin and hairy and spiderish. I didn’t want to
touch him. But he’s a force, he’s _something_.”
Kangaroo looked puzzled, and his face took a heavy, stupid look.
“He wouldn’t want you to touch him,” he barked. “He didn’t offer to
shake hands, did he?”
“No, thank goodness,” said Somers, thinking of the red, dry,
thin-skinned hand.
There was a hostile silence from Kangaroo. He knew that this subtle,
attractive Somers with the faint glow about him, like an aura, was
venomous. And yet he was helplessly attracted to him.
“And what do you mean about his being something? Some more Trewhella?”
“Perhaps. I couldn’t help feeling that Struthers was shrewder than you
are--in a way baser--but for that reason more likely to be effectual.”
Kangaroo watched Richard for a long time in silence.
“I know why Trewhella took you there,” he said sulkily.
“Why?”
“Oh, I know why. And what have you decided?”
“Nothing.”
There was a long and obstinate silence. The two men were at loggerheads,
and neither would make the first move.
“You seem very thick with Trewhella,” said Kangaroo at last.
“Not thick,” said Richard, “Celts--Cornish, Irish--they always interest
me. What do you imagine is at the bottom of Jaz?”
“Treachery.”
“Oh, not only,” laughed Somers.
“Then why do you ask me, if you know better?”
“Because I don’t really get to the bottom of him.”
“There is no bottom to get to--he’s the instinctive traitor, as they all
are.”
“Oh, surely not only that.”
“I see nothing else. They would like the white civilisation to be
trampled underfoot piecemeal. And at the same time they live on us like
parasites.” Kangaroo glowered fiercely.
“There’s something more,” replied Richard. “They don’t believe in our
gods, in our ideals. They remember older gods, older ideals, different
gods: before the Jews invented a mental Jehovah, and a spiritual Christ.
They are nearer the magic of the animal world.”
“Magic of the animal world!” roared Kangaroo. “What does that nonsense
mean? Are you traitor to your own human intelligence?”
“All too human,” smiled Richard.
Kangaroo sat up very straight, and looked at Somers. Somers still smiled
faintly and luminously.
“Why are you so easily influenced?” said Kangaroo, with a certain cold
reproof. “You are like a child. I know that is part of the charm of your
nature, that you are naive like a child, but sometimes you are childish
rather than childlike. A perverse child.”
“Let me be a perverse child then,” laughed Somers, with a flash of
attractive laughter at Kangaroo. It frightened the big man, this
perverse mood. If only he could have got the wicked light out of Lovat’s
face, and brought back the fire of earnestness. And yet, as an
individual, he was attracted to the little fellow now, like a moth to a
candle: a great lumbering moth to a small, but dangerous flame of a
candle.
“I’m sure it’s Struthers’ turn to set the world right, before it’s
yours,” Somers said.
“Why are you sure?”
“I don’t know. I thought so when I saw him. You’re too human.”
Kangaroo was silent, and offended.
“I don’t think that is a final reason,” he replied.
“For me it is. No, I want one of the olives that the man took away. You
give one such good food, one forgets deep questions in your lovely
salad. Why don’t you do as Jaz says, and back up the Reds for the time
being. Play your pawns and your bishops.”
“You know that a bite from a hyæna means blood-poisoning,” said
Kangaroo.
“Don’t be solemn. You mean Willie Struthers? Yes, I wouldn’t want to be
bitten. But if you are so sure of love as an all-ruling influence, and
so sure of the fidelity of the Diggers, through love, I should agree
with Jaz. Push Struthers where he wants to go. Let him proclaim the rule
of the People: let him nationalise all industries and resources, and
confiscate property above a certain amount: and bring the world about
his ears. Then you step in like a saviour. It’s much easier to point to
a wrecked house, if you want to build something new, than to persuade
people to pull the house down and build it up in a better style.”
Kangaroo was deeply offended, mortified. Yet he listened.
“You are hopelessly facile, Lovat,” he said gently. “In the first place,
the greatest danger to the world to-day is anarchy, not bolshevism. It
is anarchy and unrule that are coming on us--and that is what I, as an
order-loving Jew and one of the half-chosen people, do not want. I want
one central principle in the world: the principle of love, the maximum
of individual liberty, the minimum of human distress. Lovat, you know I
am sincere, don’t you?”
There was a certain dignity and pathos in the question.
“I do,” replied Somers sincerely. “But I am tired of one central
principle in the world.”
“Anything else means chaos.”
“There has to be chaos occasionally. And then, Roo, if you _do_ want a
benevolent fatherly autocracy, I’m sure you’d better step in after
there’s been a bit of chaos.”
Kangaroo shook his head.
“Like a wayward child! Like a wayward child!” he murmured. “You are not
such a fool, Lovat, that you can’t see that once you break the last
restraints on humanity to-day, it is the end. It is the end. Once burst
the flood-gates, and you’ll never get the water back into control.
Never.”
“Then let it distil up to heaven. I really don’t care.”
“But man, you are _perverse_. What’s the matter with you?” suddenly
bellowed Kangaroo.
They had gone into the study for coffee. Kangaroo stood with his head
dropped and his feet apart, his back to the fire. And suddenly he roared
like a lion at Somers. Somers started, then laughed.
“Even perversity has its points,” he said.
Kangaroo glowered like a massive cloud. Somers was standing staring at
the Dürer etching of St Jerome: he loved Dürer. Suddenly, with a great
massive movement, Kangaroo caught the other man to his breast.
“Don’t, Lovat,” he said, in a much moved voice, pressing the slight body
of the lesser man against his own big breast and body. “Don’t!” he said,
with a convulsive tightening of the arm.
Somers, squeezed so that he could hardly breathe, kept his face from
Kangaroo’s jacket and managed to ejaculate:
“All right. Let me go and I won’t.”
“Don’t thwart me,” pleaded Kangaroo. “Don’t--or I shall have to break
all connection with you, and I love you so. I love you so. Don’t be
perverse, and put yourself against me.”
He still kept Somers clasped against him, but not squeezed so hard. And
Somers heard over his own head the voice speaking with a blind yearning.
Not to himself. No. It was speaking over his head, to the void, to the
infinite or something tiresome like that. Even the words: “I love you
so. I love you so.” They made the marrow in Lovat’s bones melt, but they
made his heart flicker even more devilishly.
“It is an impertinence, that he says he loves me,” he thought to
himself. But he did not speak, out of regard for Kangaroo’s emotion,
which was massive and genuine, even if Somers felt it missed his own
particular self completely.
In those few moments when he was clasped to the warm, passionate body of
Kangaroo, Somers’ mind flew with swift thought. “He doesn’t love _me_,”
he thought to himself. “He just turns a great general emotion on me,
like a tap. I feel as cold as steel, in his clasp--and as separate. It
is presumption, his loving me. If he was in any way really _aware_ of
me, he’d keep at the other end of the room, as if I was a dangerous
little animal. He wouldn’t be hugging me if I were a scorpion. And I
_am_ a scorpion. So why doesn’t he know it. Damn his love. He wants to
_force_ me.”
After a few minutes Kangaroo dropped his arm and turned his back. He
stood there, a great, hulked, black back. Somers thought to himself: “If
I were a kestrel I’d stoop and strike him straight in the back of the
neck, and he’d die. He ought to die.” Then he went and sat in his chair.
Kangaroo left the room.
He did not come back for some time, and Lovat began to grow
uncomfortable. But the devilishness in his heart continued, broken by
moments of tenderness or pity or self-doubt. The gentleness was winning,
when Kangaroo came in again. And one look at the big, gloomy figure set
the devil alert like a flame again in the other man’s heart.
Kangaroo took his place before the fire again, but looked aside.
“Of course you understand,” he began in a muffled voice, “that it must
be one thing or the other. Either you are with me, and I _feel_ you with
me: or you cease to exist for me.”
Somers listened with wonder. He admired the man for his absoluteness,
and his strange blind heroic obsession.
“I’m not really against you, am I?” said Somers. And his own heart
answered, _Yes you are!_
“You are not _with_ me,” said Kangaroo, bitterly.
“No,” said Somers slowly.
“Then why have you deceived me, played with me,” suddenly roared
Kangaroo. “I could have killed you.”
“Don’t do that,” laughed Somers, rather coldly.
But the other did not answer. He was like a black cloud.
“I want to hear,” said Kangaroo, “your case against me.”
“It’s not a case, Kangaroo,” said Richard, “it’s a sort of instinct.”
“Against what?”
“Why, against your ponderousness. And against your insistence. And
against the whole sticky stream of love, and the hateful will-to-love.
It’s the will-to-love that I hate, Kangaroo.”
“In me?”
“In us all. I just hate it. It’s a sort of syrup we _have_ to stew in,
and it’s loathsome. Don’t love me. Don’t want to save mankind. You’re so
awfully _general_, and your love is so awfully general: as if one were
only a cherry in the syrup. Don’t love me. Don’t want me to love you.
Let’s be hard, separate men. Let’s understand one another deeper than
love.”
“Two human ants, in short,” said Kangaroo, and his face was yellow.
“No, no. Two men. Let us go to the understanding that is deeper than
love.”
“Is any understanding deeper than love?” asked Kangaroo with a sneer.
“Why, yes, you know it is. At least between men.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know it. I know the understanding that is much
_less_ than love. If you want me to have a merely commonplace
acquaintance with you, I refuse. That’s all.”
“We are neither of us capable of a quite commonplace acquaintance.”
“Oh yes, I am,” barked Kangaroo.
“I’m not. But you’re such a Kangaroo, wanting to carry mankind in your
belly-pouch, cosy, with its head and long ears peeping out. You sort of
figure yourself a Kangaroo of Judah, instead of Lion of Judah: Jehovah
with a great heavy tail and a belly-pouch. Let’s get off it, and be men,
with the gods beyond us. I _don’t_ want to be godlike, Kangaroo. I like
to know the gods beyond me. Let’s start as men, with the great gods
beyond us.”
He looked up with a beautiful candour in his face, and a diabolic bit of
mockery in his soul. For Kangaroo’s face had gone like an angry wax
mask, with mortification. An angry wax mask of mortification, haughty
with a stiff, wooden haughtiness, and two little near-set holes for
eyes, behind glass pince-nez. Richard had a moment of pure hate for
him, in the silence. For Kangaroo refused to answer.
“What’s the good, men trying to be gods?” said Richard. “You’re a Jew,
and you must be Jehovah or nothing. We’re Christians, all little Christs
walking without our crucifixes. Jaz is quite right to play us one
against the other. Struthers is the anti-christ, preaching love alone.
I’m tired, tired. I want to be a man, with the gods beyond me, greater
than me. I want the great gods, and my own mere manliness.”
“It’s that treacherous Trewhella,” Kangaroo murmured to himself. Then he
seemed to be thinking hard.
And then at last he lifted his head and looked at Somers. And now Somers
openly hated him. His face was arrogant, insolent, righteous.
“I am sorry I have made a mistake in you,” he said. “But we had better
settle the matter finally here. I think the best thing you can do is to
leave Australia. I don’t think you can do me any serious damage with
your talk. I would ask you--before I warn you--not to try. That is all.
I should prefer now to be alone.”
He had become again hideous, with a long yellowish face and black eyes
close together, and a cold, mindless, dangerous hulk to his shoulders.
For a moment Somers was afraid of him, as of some great ugly idol that
might strike. He felt the intense hatred of the man coming at him in
cold waves. He stood up in a kind of horror, in front of the great,
close-eyed, horrible thing that was now Kangaroo. Yes, a thing, not a
whole man. A great Thing, a horror.
“I am sorry if I have been foolish,” he said, backing away from the
Thing. And as he went out of the door he made a quick movement, and his
heart melted in horror lest the Thing Kangaroo should suddenly lurch
forward and clutch him. If that happened, Kangaroo would have blood on
his hands. But Somers kept all his wits about him, and quickly, quietly
got his hat and walked to the hall door. It seemed like a dream, as if
it were miles to the outer door, as if his heart would burst before he
got there, as if he would never be able to undo the fastening of the
door.
But he kept all his wits about him, and as by inspiration managed the
three separate locks of the strong door. Kangaroo had followed slowly,
awfully, behind, like a madman. If he came near enough to touch!
Somers had the door opened, and looked round. The huge figure, the white
face with the two eyes close together, like a spider, approaching with
awful stillness. If the stillness suddenly broke, and he struck out!
“Good-night!” said Somers, at the blind, horrible-looking face. And he
moved quickly down the stairs, though still not apparently in flight,
but going in that quick, controlled way that acts as a check on an
onlooker.
He was thankful for the streets, for the people. But by bad luck, it was
Saturday night, when Sydney is all shut up, and the big streets seem
dark and dreary, though thronging with people. Dark streets, dark,
streaming people. And fear. One could feel such fear, in Australia.
CHAP: XII. THE NIGHTMARE
He had known such different deep fears. In Sicily, a sudden fear, in the
night of some single murderer, some single thing hovering as it were out
of the violent past, with the intent of murder. Out of the old Greek
past, that had been so vivid, sometimes an unappeased spirit of
murderous-hate against the usurping moderns. A sudden presence of murder
in the air, because of something which the modern psyche had excluded,
some old and vital thing which Christianity has cut out. An old spirit,
waiting for vengeance. But in England, during the later years of the
war, a true and deadly fear of the criminal _living_ spirit which arose
in all the stay-at-home bullies who governed the country during those
years. From 1916 to 1919 a wave of criminal lust rose and possessed
England, there was a reign of terror, under a set of indecent bullies
like Bottomley of _John Bull_ and other bottom-dog members of the House
of Commons. Then Somers had known what it was to live in a perpetual
state of semi-fear: the fear of the criminal public and the criminal
government. The torture was steadily applied, during those years after
Asquith fell, to break the independent soul in any man who would not
hunt with the criminal mob. A man must identify himself with the
criminal mob, sink his sense of truth, of justice, and of human honour,
and bay like some horrible unclean hound, bay with a loud sound, from
slavering, unclean jaws.
This Richard Lovat Somers had steadily refused to do. The deepest part
of a man is his sense of essential truth, essential honour, essential
justice. This deepest self makes him abide by his own feelings, come
what may. It is not sentimentalism. It is just the male human creature,
the thought-adventurer, driven to earth. Will he give in or won’t he?
Many men, carried on a wave of patriotism and true belief in democracy,
entered the war. Many men were driven in out of belief that it was
necessary to save their property. Vast numbers of men were just bullied
into the army. A few remained. Of these, many became conscientious
objectors.
Somers tiresomely belonged to no group. He would not enter the army,
because his profoundest instinct was against it. Yet he had no
conscientious objection to war. It was the whole spirit of the war, the
vast mob-spirit, which he could never acquiesce in. The terrible,
terrible war, made so fearful because in every country practically every
man lost his head, and lost his own centrality, his own manly isolation
in his own integrity, which alone keeps life real. Practically every man
being caught away from himself, as in some horrible flood, and swept
away with the ghastly masses of other men, utterly unable to speak, or
feel for himself, or to stand on his own feet, delivered over and
swirling in the current, suffocated for the time being. Some of them to
die for ever. Most to come back home victorious in circumstance, but
with their inner pride gone: inwardly lost. To come back home, many of
them, to wives who had egged them on to this downfall in themselves:
black bitterness. Others to return to a bewildered wife who had in vain
tried to keep her man true to himself, tried and tried, only to see him
at last swept away. And oh, when he was swept away, how she loved him.
But when he came back, when he crawled out like a dog out of a dirty
stream, a stream that had suddenly gone slack and turbid: when he came
back covered with outward glory and inward shame, then there was the
price to pay.
And there _is_ this bitter and sordid after-war price to pay because men
lost their heads, and worse, lost their inward, individual integrity.
And when a man loses his inward, isolated, manly integrity, it is a bad
day for that man’s true wife. A true man should not lose his head. The
greater the crisis, the more intense should be his isolated reckoning
with his own soul. And _then_ let him act, of his own whole self. Not
fling himself away: or much worse, let himself be _dragged_ away, bit by
bit.
Awful years--’16, ’17, ’18, ’19--the years when the damage was done. The
years when the world lost its real manhood. Not for lack of courage to
face death. Plenty of superb courage to face death. But no courage in
any man to face his own isolated soul, and abide by its decision.
Easier to sacrifice oneself. So much easier!
Richard Lovat was one of those utterly unsatisfactory creatures who just
would not. He had no conscientious objections. He knew that men _must_
fight, some time in some way or other. He was no Quaker, to believe in
perpetual peace. He had been in Germany times enough to know _how_ much
he detested the German military creatures: mechanical bullies they were.
They had once threatened to arrest him as a spy, and had insulted him
more than once. Oh, he would never forgive _them_, in his inward soul.
But then the industrialism and commercialism of England, with which
patriotism and democracy became identified: did not these insult a man
and hit him pleasantly across the mouth? How much humiliation had
Richard suffered, trying to earn his living! How had they tried, with
their beastly industrial self-righteousness, to humiliate him as a
separate, single man? They wanted to bring him to heel even more than
the German militarist did. And if a man is to be brought to any heel,
better a spurred heel than the heel of a Jewish financier. So Richard
decided later, when the years let him think things over, and see where
he was.