they had got their knife into him. They would have his beard off, too!
But would they! He stood there with his ridiculous thin legs, in his
ridiculous jacket, but he did not feel a fool. Oh, God, no. The white
composure of his face, the slight lifting of his nose, like a dog’s
disgust, the heavy, unshakeable watchfulness of his eyes brought even
the judgment-table to silence: even the puppy doctors. It was not till
he was walking out of the room, with his jacket about his thin legs, and
his beard in front of him, that they lifted their heads for a final
jeer.
He dressed and waited for his card. It was Saturday morning, and he was
almost the last man to be examined. He wondered what instructions they
had had about him. Oh, foul dogs. But they were very close on him now,
very close. They were grinning very close behind him, like hyænas just
going to bite. Yes, they were running him to earth. They had exposed all
his nakedness to gibes. And they were pining, almost whimpering to give
the last grab at him, and haul him to earth, a victim. Finished!
But not yet! Oh, no, not yet. Not yet, not now, nor ever. Not while life
was life, should they lay hold of him. Never again. Never would he be
touched again. And because they had handled his private parts, and
looked into them, their eyes should burst and their hands should wither
and their hearts should rot. So he cursed them in his blood, with an
unremitting curse, as he waited.
They gave him his card: C 2. Fit for non-military service. He knew what
they would like to make him do. They would like to seize him and compel
him to empty latrines in some camp. They had that in mind for him. But
he had other things in mind.
He went out into accursed Derby, to Harriet. She was reassured again.
But he was not. He hated the Midlands now, he hated the North. They were
viler than the South, even than Cornwall. They had a universal desire to
take life and down it: these horrible machine people, these iron and
coal people. They wanted to set their foot absolutely on life, grind it
down, and be master. Masters, as they were of their foul machines.
Masters of life, as they were masters of steam-power and electric-power
and above all, of money-power. Masters of money-power, with an obscene
hatred of life, true spontaneous life.
Another flight. He was determined not to stop in the Derby Military
Area. He would move one stage out of their grip, at least. So he and
Harriet prepared to go back with their trunks to the Oxfordshire
cottage, which they loved. He would not report, nor give any sign of
himself. Fortunately in the village everybody was slack and friendly.
Derby had been a crisis. He would obey no more: not one more stride. If
they summoned him he would disappear: or find some means of fighting
them. But no more obedience: no more presenting himself when called up.
By God, no! Never while he lived, again, would he be at the disposal of
society.
So they moved south--to be one step removed. They had been living in
this remote cottage in the Derbyshire hills: and they must leave at
half-past seven in the morning, to complete their journey in a day. It
was a black morning, with a slow dawn. Somers had the trunks ready. He
stood looking at the dark gulf of the valley below. Meanwhile heavy
clouds sank over the bare, Derbyshire hills, and the dawn was blotted
out before it came. Then broke a terrific thunderstorm, and hail lashed
down with a noise like insanity. He stood at the big window over the
valley, and watched. Come hail, come rain, he would go: forever.
This was his home district--but from the deepest soul he now hated it,
mistrusted it even more than he hated it. As far as _life_ went, he
mistrusted it utterly, with a black soul. Mistrusted it and hated it,
with its smoke and its money-power and its squirming millions who aren’t
human any more.
Ah, how lovely the South-west seemed, after it all. There was hardly any
food, but neither he nor Harriet minded. They could pick up and be
wonderfully happy again, gathering the little chestnuts in the woods,
and the few last bilberries. Men were working harder than ever felling
trees for trench-timber, denuding the land. But their brush fires were
burning in the woods, and when they had gone, in the cold dusk, Somers
went with a sack to pick up the unburnt faggots and the great chips of
wood the axes had left golden against the felled logs. Flakes of sweet,
pale gold oak. He gathered them in the dusk, in a sack, along with the
other poor villagers. For he was poorer even than they. Still, it made
him very happy to do these things--to see a big, glowing pile of
wood-flakes in his shed--and to dig the garden, and set the rubbish
burning in the late, wistful autumn--or to wander through the hazel
copses, away to the real old English hamlets, that are still like
Shakespeare--and like Hardy’s _Woodlanders_.
Then, in November, the Armistice. It was almost too much to believe. The
war was over! It _was_ too much to believe. He and Harriet sat and sang
German songs, in the cottage, that strange night of the Armistice, away
there in the country: and she cried--and he wondered what now, now the
walls would come no nearer. It had been like Edgar Allen Poe’s story of
the Pit and the Pendulum--where the walls come in, in, in, till the
prisoner is almost squeezed. So the black walls of the war--and he had
been trapped, and very nearly squeezed into the pit where the rats were.
So nearly! So very nearly. And now the black walls had stopped, and he
was _not_ pushed into the pit, and the rats. And he knew it in his soul.
What next then?
He insisted on going back to Derbyshire. Harriet, who hated him for the
move, refused to go. So he went alone: back to his sisters, and to
finish the year in the house which they had paid for him. Harriet
refused to go. She stayed with Hattie in London.
At St. Pancras, as Somers left the taxi and went across the pavement to
the station, he fell down: fell smack down on the pavement. He did not
hurt himself. But he got up rather dazed, saying to himself, “Is that a
bad omen? Ought I not to be going back?” But again he thought of Scipio
Africanus, and went on.
The cold, black December days, alone in the cottage on the cold
hills--Adam Bede country, Snowfields, Dinah Morris’ home. Such heavy,
cold, savage, frustrated blackness. He had known it when he was a boy.
Then Harriet came--and they spent Christmas with his sister. And when
January came he fell ill with the influenza, and was ill for a long
time. In March the snow was up to the window-sills of their house.
“Will the winter never end?” he asked his soul.
May brought the year’s house-rent of the Derbyshire cottage to an end:
and back they went to Oxfordshire. But now the place seemed weary to
him, tame, after the black iron of the North. The walls had gone--and
now he felt nowhere.
So they applied for passports--Harriet to go to Germany, himself to
Italy. A lovely summer went by, a lovely autumn came. But the meaning
had gone out of everything for him. He had lost his meaning. England had
lost its meaning for him. The free England had died, this England of the
peace was like a corpse. It was the corpse of a country to him.
In October came the passports. He saw Harriet off to Germany--said
good-bye at the Great Eastern Station, while she sat in the Harwich-Hook
of Holland express. She had a look of almost vindictive triumph, and
almost malignant love, as the train drew out. So he went back to his
meaninglessness at the cottage.
Then, finding the meaninglessness too much, he gathered his few pounds
together and in November left for Italy. Left England, England which he
had loved so bitterly, bitterly--and now was leaving, alone, and with a
feeling of expressionlessness in his soul. It was a cold day. There was
snow on the Downs like a shroud. And as he looked back from the boat,
when they had left Folkestone behind and only England was there, England
looked like a grey, dreary-grey coffin sinking in the sea behind, with
her dead grey cliffs and the white, worn-out cloth of snow above.
Memory of all this came on him so violently, now in the Australian
night, that he trembled helplessly under the shock of it. He ought to
have gone up to Jack’s place for the night. But no, he could not speak
to anybody. Of all the black throng in the dark Sydney streets, he was
the most remote. He strayed round in a torture of fear, and then at last
suddenly went to the Carlton Hotel, got a room, and went to bed, to be
alone and think.
Detail for detail he thought out his experiences with the authorities,
during the war, lying perfectly still and tense. Till now, he had always
kept the memory at bay, afraid of it. Now it all came back, in a rush.
It was like a volcanic eruption in his consciousness. For some weeks he
had felt the great uneasiness in his unconscious. For some time he had
known spasms of that same fear that he had known during the war: the
fear of the base and malignant power of the mob-like authorities. Since
he had been in Italy the fear had left him entirely. He had not even
remembered it, in India. Only in the quiet of Coo-ee, strangely enough,
it had come back in spasms: the dread, almost the horror, of democratic
society, the mob. Harriet had been feeling it too. Why? Why, in this
free Australia? Why? Why should they both have been feeling this same
terror and pressure that they had known during the war, why should it
have come on again in Mullumbimby? Perhaps in Mullumbimby they were
suspect again, two strangers, so much alone. Perhaps the secret service
was making investigations about them. Ah, _canaille_!
Richard faced out all his memories like a nightmare in the night, and
cut clear. He felt broken off from his fellow-men. He felt broken off
from the England he had belonged to. The ties were gone. He was loose
like a single timber of some wrecked ship, drifting over the face of the
earth. Without a people, without a land. So be it. He was broken apart,
apart he would remain.
CHAP: XIII. “REVENGE!” TIMOTHEUS CRIES
At last he had it all out with himself, right to the bitter end. And
then he realised that all the time, since the year 1918, whether he was
in Sicily or Switzerland or Venice or Germany or in the Austrian Tyrol,
deep in his unconsciousness had lain this accumulation of black fury and
fear, like frenzied lava quiescent in his soul. And now it had burst up:
the fear, then the acute remembrance. So he faced it out, trembling with
shock and bitterness, every detail. And then he tried to reckon it all
up.
But first, why had it all come back on him? It had seemed so past, so
gone. Why should it suddenly erupt like white hot lava, to set in hot
black rock round the wound of his soul? Who knows? Perhaps there is a
periodicity even in volcanic eruption. Or perhaps it was this contact
with Kangaroo and Willie Struthers, contact with the accumulating forces
of social violence. Or perhaps it was being again in a purely
English-speaking country, and feeling again that queer revulsion from
the English form of democracy. He realised that the oh-so-pleasant
democracy of the English lower classes frightened him, always had
frightened him. Yet everybody was so very pleasant and easy-going down
in Mullumbimby. It _really_ seemed so free.
Free! Free! What did it mean? It was this very ultra-freedom that
frightened him, like a still pause before a thunderstorm. “Let him that
thinketh he stand take heed lest he fall.”
Or perhaps it was just the inversion of the season, the climate. His
blood, his whole corporeal being, expected summer, and long days and
short nights. And here he had wilfully come into the Southern
hemisphere, with long starry nights of winter, and the late sun rising
north-east behind the sea, and travelling northwards up the sky, as if
running away, and setting in a cold glare north-west, behind the
bluey-black range. It should have been bird-nesting time, and leaves and
flowers and tall corn and full summer with cherry blossom fallen and
cherries beginning to change colour. Whereas the grass was sere and
brown, the earth had gone winter-numb, the few deciduous trees were
bare, and only the uncanny coral tree flared its flowers of red-hot
iron.
Perhaps it was just this: the inversion of the seasons, the shock to his
blood and his system. For, of course, the body has its own rhythm, with
the sun and with the moon. The great nerve ganglia and the subtle glands
have their regular times and motions, in correspondence with the outer
universe. And these times and motions had suddenly received a check from
the outer universe: a distinct check. He had had an inkling of what it
would be when, from the ship in the Indian Ocean he had seen the great
and beloved constellation Orion standing on its head as if pitching head
foremost into the sea, and the bright dog Sirius coursing high above his
heels in the outer air. Then he had realised the inversion in the
heavens.
And perhaps it was this inversion which had brought up all that
corrosive and bitter fire from the bowels of his unconscious, up again
into his full consciousness. If so, then let it be so.
One thing he realised, however: that if the fire had suddenly erupted in
his own belly, it would erupt one day in the bellies of all men. Because
there it had accumulated, like a great horrible lava pool, deep in the
unconscious bowels of all men. All who were not dead. And even the dead
were many of them raging in the invisible, with gnashing of teeth. But
the living dead, these he could not reckon with: they with poisonous
teeth like hyænas.
Rage! Rage! Rage! The awful accumulations that lie quiescent and
pregnant in the bowels of men. He thought of the big gaunt collier with
the blunt, seal-like face shorn of its intelligence, squatting naked and
ghastly on his heels. It passes, it passes for the time being. But in
those moments there is an inward disruption, and the death-hot lava
pours loose into the deepest reservoirs of the soul. One day to erupt:
or else to go hard and rocky, dead.
Even the athletic young man who wanted to be approved of. Even he. He
had not much true spunk. But what was he feeling now? Unless, of course,
he had got into business and was successfully coining money. That seemed
to be the only safety-valve: success in money-making. But how many men
were successful, now?
Of course it was all necessary, the conscription, the medical
examinations. Of course, of course. We all know it. But when it comes to
the deepest things, men are as entirely irrational as women. You can
reason with a sex-angry woman till you are black in the face. And if for
a time you _do_ overcome her with reason, the sex-anger only arises more
hideously and furiously, later. Perhaps in another guise.
There is no arguing with the instinctive passional self. Not the least
use in the world. Yes, you are quite right, quite right in all your
contentions. _But!_ And the _But_ just explodes everything like a bomb.
The conscription, all the whole performance of the war was absolutely
circumstantially necessary. It was necessary to investigate even the
secret parts of a man. Agreed! Agreed! _But_--
It was _necessary_ to put Richard Lovat and the ugly collier through
that business at Derby. Many men were put through things a thousand
times worse. Agreed! Oh, entirely agreed! The war couldn’t be lost, at
that hour. Quite, quite, quite! Even Richard, even now, agreed fully to
all these contentions. _But_--!
And there you are. _But_--. He was full of a lava fire of rage and hate,
at the bottom of his soul. And he knew it was the same with most men. He
felt desecrated. And he knew it was the same with most men. He felt
sold. And he knew most men felt the same.
He cared for nothing now, but to let loose the hell-rage that was in
him. Get rid of it by letting it out. For there was no digesting it. He
had been trying that for three years, and roaming the face of the earth
trying to soothe himself with the sops of travel and new experience and
scenery. He knew now the worth of all sops. Once that disruption had
taken place in a man’s soul, and in a stress of humiliation, under the
presence of _compulsion_, something has broken in his tissue and the
liquid fire has run out loose into his blood, then no sops will be of
any avail. The lava-fire at the bottom of a man’s belly breeds more lava
fire, and more, and more--till there is an eruption. As the lava fire
accumulates, the man becomes more and more reckless. Till he reaches a
pitch of dehumanised recklessness, and then the lid is blown off, as
the top is blown off a hill to make a new volcano. Or else it all sets
into rocky deadness.
Richard felt himself reaching the volcanic pitch. He had as good as
reached it. And he realised that the Russians must have reached it
during the war: that the Irish had got there: that the Indians in India
were approaching the point: that the whole world was gradually working
up to the pitch. The whole world. It was as inevitable as the coming of
summer. It might be soon--it might be slow. But inevitable it was. Or
else the alternative, the dead-rock barrenness.
But why? Why, oh why? Is human life just opposed to human reason? The
Allies _did_ have to win the war. For it would certainly not have been
any better letting Germany win. Unless a very great disaster might have
shocked men to their deeper senses. But doubtful. Things _had_ to go as
they went.
So, it was just Thomas Hardy’s Blind Fate? No, said Lovat to himself,
no. _Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt._ The Fates lead on the
willing man, the unwilling man they drag.
The Fates? What Fates? It takes a willing man to answer. Man is not a
creature of circumstance, neither is he the result of cause-and-effect
throughout the ages, neither is he a product of evolution, neither is he
a living _Mind_, part of the Universal Mind. Neither is he a complicated
make-up of forces and chemicals and organs. Neither is he a term of
love. Neither is he the mere instrument of God’s will. None of these
things.
Man lives according to his own idea of himself. When circumstances begin
really to run counter to his idea of himself, he damns circumstances.
When the running-counter persists, he damns the nature of things. And
when it _still_ persists, he becomes a fatalist. A fatalist or an
opportunist--anything of that sort.
Whose fault is it? Fate’s? Not at all. It is man’s fault for persisting
in some fixed idea of himself.
Yet, being an animal saddled with a mental consciousness, which means
ideas, man _must_ have some idea of himself. He just must, and those
that deny it have got a more fixed idea than anybody.
Man must have some idea of himself. He must live _hard_, _hard_, up to
this idea of himself.
But the idea is perishable. Say what you like, every idea is perishable:
even the idea of God or Love or Humanity or Liberty--even the greatest
idea has its day and perishes. Each formulated religion is in the end
only a great idea. Once the idea becomes explicit, it is dead. Yet we
must _have_ ideas.
When a man follows the true inspiration of a new, living idea, he then
is the willing man whom the Fates lead onwards: like St. Paul or Pope
Hildebrand or Martin Luther or Cromwell or Abraham Lincoln. But when the
idea is really dead, and _still_ man persists in following it, then he
is the unwilling man whom the Fates destroy, like Kaiser Wilhelm or
President Wilson, or, to-day, the world at large.
For the idea, or ideal of Love, Self-sacrifice, Humanity united in love,
in brotherhood, in peace--all this is dead. There is no arguing about
it. It is dead. The great ideal is dead.
How do we know? By putting off our conscious conceit and listening to
our own soul.
So then, why will men not forgive the war, and their humiliations at the
hands of these war-like authorities? Because men were _compelled_ into
the service of a dead ideal. And perhaps nothing but this compulsion
made them realise it _was_ a dead ideal. But all those filthy little
stay-at-home officers and coast-watchers and dirty-minded doctors who
tortured men during the _first_ stages of the torture, did these men _in
their souls_ believe in what they were doing? They didn’t. They _had_ no
souls. They had only their beastly little _wills_, which they used to
bully all men with. With their wills they determined to fight for a dead
ideal, and to bully every other man into compliance. The inspiring
motive was the bullying. And every other man complied. Or else, by
admitting a conscientious objection to war, he admitted the dead ideal,
but took refuge in one of its side-tracks.
All men alike, and all women, admitted and still admit the face value of
the ideal of Love, Self-sacrifice, and Humanity united in love,
brotherhood, and peace. So, they persist in the dead ideal. _Fata
nolunt._ Fata nolunt. Then see how the fates betray them. In their
service of the defunct ideal they find themselves utterly humiliated,
_sold_. In England, Italy, Germany, India, Australia, that had been the
one word men had used to describe their feeling. They had been sold. But
not before they had sold themselves. Now then. The moment a man feels he
has been sold, sold in the deepest things, something goes wrong with his
whole mechanism. Something breaks, in his tissue, and the black poison
is emitted into his blood. And then he follows a natural course, and
becomes a creature of slow, or of quick, revenge. Revenge on all that
the old ideal is and stands for. Revenge on the whole system. Just
revenge. Even further revenge on himself.
Men revenged themselves on Athens, when they felt sold. When Rome,
persisting in an old, defunct ideal, gradually made her subjects feel
sold, they were revenged on her, no matter how. Constantinople and the
Byzantine Empire the same. And now our turn. “Revenge,” Timotheus cries.
And Timotheus is just everybody, except those that have got hold of the
money or the power.
There is nothing for it but revenge. If you sow the dragon’s teeth, you
mustn’t expect lilies of the valley to spring up in sweet meekness.
And Kangaroo? Kangaroo insisted on the old idea as hard as ever, though
on the Power of Love rather than on the Submission and Sacrifice of
Love. He wanted to take his revenge in an odour of sanctification and
Lily of the Valley essence. But he was the mob, really. See his face in
a rage. He was the mob: the _vengeful_ mob. Oh, God, the most terrifying
of all things.
And Willie Struthers? The vengeful mob also. But if the old ideal had
still a logical leaf to put forth, it was this last leaf of
communism--before the lily-tree of humanity rooted in love died its
final death. Perhaps better Struthers than Kangaroo.
“But what about myself?” said Richard Lovat to himself, as he lay in the
darkness of Sydney, his brain afire. For the horrible bitter fire seemed
really to have got into his brain, burst up from his deepest bowels.
“What about me? Am I too Timotheus crying _Revenge_?”
Oh, revenge, yes, he wanted to be avenged. He wanted to be avenged.
Especially when he felt tangled up in the horrible human affair, the
ideal become like an octopus with a ghastly eye in the centre, and white
arms enwreathing the world. Oh, then he wanted to be avenged.
But now, for the moment he felt he had cut himself clear. He was
exhausted and almost wrecked--but he felt clear again. If no other
ghastly arm of the octopus should flash out and encircle him.
For the moment he felt himself lying inert, but clear, the dragon dead.
The ever-renewed dragon of a great old ideal, with its foul
poison-breath. It seemed as if, for himself, he had killed it.
That was now all he wanted: to get clear. Not to save humanity or to
help humanity or to have anything to do with humanity. No--no. Kangaroo
had been his last embrace with humanity. Now, all he wanted was to cut
himself clear. To be clear of humanity altogether, to be alone. To be
clear of love, and pity, and hate. To be alone from it all. To cut
himself finally clear from the last encircling arm of the octopus
humanity. To turn to the old dark gods, who had waited so long in the
outer dark.
Humanity could do as it liked: he did not care. So long as he could get
his own soul clear. For he believed in the inward soul, in the profound
unconscious of man. Not an ideal God. The ideal God is a proposition of
the mental consciousness, all-too-limitedly human. “No,” he said to
himself. “There _is_ God. But forever dark, forever unrealisable:
forever and forever. The unutterable name, because it can never have a
name. The great living darkness which we represent by the glyph, God.”