unknowable. It _is_. And it is all the God and the gods.
And every _living_ human soul is a well-head to this darkness of the
living unutterable. Into every living soul wells up the darkness, the
unutterable. And then there is travail of the visible with the
invisible. Man is in travail with his own soul, while ever his soul
lives. Into his unconscious surges a new flood of the God-darkness, the
living unutterable. And this unutterable is like a germ, a fœtus with
which he must travail, bringing it at last into utterance, into action,
into _being_.
But in most people the soul is withered at the source, like a woman
whose ovaries withered before she became a woman, or a man whose
sex-glands died at the moment when they should have come into life. Like
unsexed people, the mass of mankind is soulless. Because to persist in
resistance of the sensitive influx of the dark gradually withers the
soul, makes it die, and leaves a human idealist and an automaton. Most
people are dead, and scurrying and talking in the sleep of death. Life
has its automatic side, sometimes in direct conflict with the
spontaneous soul. Then there is a fight. And the spontaneous soul must
extricate itself from the meshes of the _almost_ automatic white octopus
of the human ideal, the octopus of humanity. It must struggle clear,
knowing what it is doing: not waste itself in revenge. The revenge is
inevitable enough, for each denial of the spontaneous dark soul creates
the reflex of its own revenge. But the greatest revenge on the lie is to
get clear of the lie.
The long travail. The long gestation of the soul within a man, and the
final parturition, the birth of a new way of knowing, a new God-influx.
A new idea, true enough. But at the centre, the old anti-idea: the dark,
the unutterable God. This time not a God scribbling on tablets of stone
or bronze. No everlasting decalogues. No sermons on mounts, either. The
dark God, the forever unrevealed. The God who is many gods to many men:
all things to all men. The source of passions and strange motives. It is
a frightening thought, but very liberating.
“Ah, my soul,” said Richard to himself, “you have to look more ways than
one. First to the unutterable dark of God: first and foremost. Then to
the utterable and sometimes very loud dark of that woman Harriet. I must
admit that only the dark god in her fighting with my white idealism has
got me so clear: and that only the dark god in her answering the dark
god in me has got my soul heavy and fecund with a new sort of infant.
But even now I can’t bring it forth. I can’t bring it forth. I need
something else. Some other answer.”
Life makes no absolute statement: the true life makes no absolute
statement. “Thou shalt have no other God before me.” The very
commandment suggests that it is possible to have other gods, and to put
them before Jehovah. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” But,
oh deepest of perplexing questions, _how_ do I love myself? Am I to love
my neighbour as if he _were_ myself? But my very love makes me know that
he _isn’t_ myself, and that therein lies his lovableness, unless I am a
conceited prig. Am I to love my neighbour as _much_ as myself? And how
much do I love myself? It is a wildly problematic commandment. Supposing
I love my neighbour more than myself. That again is a catastrophe.
Since every man must love himself in a different way--unless he is a
materialist or a prig--he must love his neighbour in a different way. So
Christ’s commandment is as large as life, and its meaning can never be
fixed. I sometimes hate myself: and my neighbour as myself.
Life makes no absolute statement. It is all Call and Answer. As soon as
the Call ceases, the Answer is invalid. And till the Answer comes, a
Call is but a crying in the wilderness. And every Answer must wait until
it hears the Call. Till the Call comes, the Answer is but an unborn
fœtus.
And so it is. Life is so wonderful and complex, and _always_ relative. A
man’s soul is a perpetual call and answer. He can never be the call and
the answer in one: between the dark God and the incarnate man: between
the dark soul of woman, and the opposite dark soul of man: and finally,
between the souls of man and man, strangers to one another, but
answerers. So it is for ever, the eternal weaving of calls and answers,
and the fabric of life woven and perishing again. But the calls never
cease, and the answers never fail for long. And when the fabric becomes
grey and machine-made, some strange clarion-call makes men start to
smash it up. So it is.
_Blessed are the pure in heart._ That is absolute truth, a statement of
living relativity, because the pure in heart are those who quiver to the
dark God, to the call of woman, and to the call of men. The pure in
heart are the listeners and the answerers. But Rameses II. was no doubt
as pure in heart as John the Evangel. Indeed perhaps purer, since John
was an _insister_. To be pure in heart, man must listen to the dark gods
as well as to the white gods, to the call to blood-sacrifice as well as
to the eucharist.
_Blessed are the poor in spirit._ It depends. If it means _listening_.
Not if it means taking up a permanent attitude.
_Blessed are the peacemakers._ It depends. If it means _answering_. Not
if it means enforcing the peace, like policemen.
_Blessed are the meek._ It depends on the occasion.
_Blessed are they that mourn._ It depends altogether.
_Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness._ Ah,
yes, but the righteousness of the profound listener, and of the answerer
who will answer come what may. Not any other righteousness of the
commandment sort.
_Blessed are ye when men shall despise you._ Nay, nay, it is rather:
_unblessed_ are the despisers----
After all his terrific upheaval, Richard Lovat at last gave it up, and
went to sleep. A man must even know how to give up his own earnestness,
when its hour is over, and not to bother about anything any more, when
he’s bothered enough.
CHAP: XIV. BITS.
The following day Somers felt savage with himself again. “Fool that I
am, fool!” he said, mentally kicking himself. And he looked at the big
pink spread of his Sydney _Bulletin_ viciously. The _Bulletin_ was the
only periodical in the world that really amused him. The horrible
stuffiness of English newspapers he could not stand: they had the same
effect on him as fish-balls in a restaurant, loathsome stuffy fare.
English magazines were too piffling, too imbecile. But the “Bully,” even
if it was made up all of bits, and had neither head nor tail nor feet
nor wings, was still a lively creature. He liked its straightforwardness
and the kick in some of its tantrums. It beat no solemn drums. It had no
deadly earnestness. It was just stoical, and spitefully humorous. Yes,
at the moment he liked the _Bulletin_ better than any paper he knew,
though even the _Bulletin_ tried a dowdy bit of swagger sometimes,
especially on the pink page. But then the pink page was just “literary,”
and who cares?
Who cares, anyhow? Perhaps a bit sad, after all. But more fool you for
being sad.
So he rushed to read the “bits.” They would make Bishop Latimer forget
himself and his martyrdom at the stake.
“1085: The casual Digger of war-days has carried it into civvies.
Sighted one of the original Tenth at the Outer Harbour (Adelaide) wharf
last week fishing. His sinker was his 1914 Star.”
Yes, couldn’t Somers just see that forlorn Outer Harbour at Adelaide,
and the digger, like some rag of sea-weed dripping over the edge of the
wharf, fishing, and using his medal for a weight?
“Wilfrido: A recent advertisement for the Wellington (New Zealand) Art
Gallery attracted 72 applicants. Among them were two solicitors (one an
Oxford M.A.); five sheep-farmers, on whose lands the mortgagee had
foreclosed; and a multitude of clerks. The post is not exactly a
sinecure, either: it demands attendance on seven days a week at £150
p.a.”
Then a little cartoon of Ivan, the Russian workman, going for a
tram-drive, and taking huge bundles of money with him, sackfuls of
roubles, to pay the fare. The “Bully” was sardonic about Bolshevism.
“Ned Kelly: Hearing the deuce of a racket in the abo (aborigines) camp
near our place, we strolled over to see what was wrong, and saw a young
Binghi giving his gin a father of a hiding for making eyes at another
buck. Every respectable Binghi has the right to wallop his missis, but
this one laid it on so much that he knocked her senseless. This enraged
her relatives, and they went for him _en masse_, while two or three gins
applied restoratives to the battered wife. She soon came round, and,
seeing how things were, grabbed a waddy and went to the assistance of
her lord and master. In the end the twain routed the phalanxed
relations. Same old woman, whatever her line!”
Bits about bullock drivers and the biggest loads on record, about the
biggest piece of land ploughed by a man in a day, recipes for mange in
horses, twins, turnips, accidents to reverend clergymen, and so on.
“Pick: In the arid parts out back the wild birds infallibly indicate to
the wayfarer when the water in his bag must be vigorously conserved. If
in the early morning they descend in flocks to the plain, and there
collect the globules of dew among the dry stalks of grass, it means that
every tank, gilgal and puddle-hole within a bird’s drinking flight has
gone dry.”
“Cellu Lloyd: Before you close down on mangey horses here’s a cure I’ve
never known to fail. To one bullock’s gall add kerosene to make up a
full pint. Heat sufficiently to enable it to mix well, not forgetting,
of course, that half of it is kerosene. When well mixed add one
teaspoonful of chrysophanic acid. Bottle and shake well. Before applying
take a hard scrubbing brush and thoroughly scrub the part with carbolic
soap and hot water, and when applying the mixture use the brush again.
In one case I struck a pair of buggy ponies that had actually bitten
pieces from each other, and rubbed down a hundred yards or so of fence
in trying to allay the burning itch. Two months afterwards they were
growing hair and gaining condition, and not a trace of mange remained.
It is wonderful, however, how lightly some horse-owners treat the
matter. When a horse works hard all day, and spends the night rubbing a
fence flat in his itch frenzy, he at once loses condition and
usefulness; but in most cases the owner builds the fence stronger
instead of giving the unfortunate animal the necessary attention.”
This recipe brought many biting comments in later issues.
Somers liked the concise, laconic style. It seemed to him manly and
without trimmings. Put ship-shape in the office, no doubt. Sometimes the
drawings were good, and sometimes they weren’t.
“Lady (who has just opened door to country girl carrying suitcase): ‘I
am suited. A country girl has been engaged, and I’m getting her
to-morrow.’
“Girl: ‘I’m her; and you’re not. The ’ouse is too big’.”
There, thought Somers, you have the whole spirit of Australian labour.
“K. Sped: A week or two back a Mildura (Vic.) motorcyclist ran over a
tiger-snake while travelling at 35 m.p.h. Ten minutes later the leg
became itchy, and shortly afterwards, feeling giddy, he started back to
the local hospital. He made a wobbly passage and collapsed at the
hospital gates. He was bad for a week, and was told that if the reptile
had not struck him on the bone he would never have reached the ward. The
snake must have doubled up when the wheel struck it, and by the merest
fluke struck the rider’s leg in mid-air.”
“Fraoch: I knew another case of a white girl marrying an aboriginal
about 20 years ago on the Northern Rivers (N.S.W.). She was rather
pretty, a descendant of an English family. Binghi was a landed
proprietor, having acquired a very decent estate on the death of a
former spinster employer. (Binghi must have had ’a way wid ’im’). He
owned a large, well-furnished house, did himself well, and had a fair
education, and was a good rough-rider. But every year the ‘call of the
wild’ came to him, and he would leave his wife and kids (they had three)
and take himself to an old tumble-down hut in the bush, and there for a
month or two live in solitude on his natural tucker. Under the will of
the aforesaid spinster, upon Binghi’s demise the estate was to revert to
her relatives. With an optimism that was not without a pathos of its
own, they used to trot out every outlaw in the district for their dusky
friend to ride; but his neck was still intact when I left.”
“Sucre: Peering through her drawing-room window shortly before lunch,
the benevolent old suburban lady saw a shivering man in a ruined
overcoat. Not all the members of the capitalist classes are iron-souled
creatures bent on grinding the faces of the afflicted, yet virtuous
poor. Taking a ten shilling note from a heavily-beaded bag, she
scribbled on a piece of paper the words: _Cheer Up_, put both in an
envelope, and told the maid to give it to the outcast from her. While
the family was at dinner that evening a ring sounded at the front door.
Argument followed in the hall between a hoarse male voice and that of
the maid. ‘You can’t come in. They’re at dinner.’ ‘I’d _rather_ come in,
miss. Always like for to fix these things up in person.’ ‘You can’t
come.’ Another moment and the needy wayfarer was in the dining-room. He
carefully laid five filthy £1 notes on the table before his
benefactress. ‘There you are, mum,’ he said, with a rough salute. ‘Cheer
Up won all right. I’m mostly on the corner, race days, as your cook will
tell you; an’ I’d like to say that if any uv your _friends_--’”
Bits, bits, bits. Yet Richard Lovat read on. It was not mere anecdotage.
It was the sheer momentaneous life of the continent. There was no
consecutive thread. Only the laconic courage of experience.
All the better. He could have kicked himself for wanting to help
mankind, join in revolutions or reforms or any of that stuff. And he
kicked himself still harder thinking of his frantic struggles with the
“soul” and the “dark god” and the “listener” and the “answerer.”
Blarney--blarney--blarney! He was a preacher and a blatherer, and he
hated himself for it. Damn the “soul,” damn the “dark god,” damn the
“listener” and the “answerer,” and above all, damn his own interfering,
nosy self.
What right had he to go nosing round Kangaroo, and making up to Jaz or
to Jack? Why couldn’t he keep off it all? Let the whole show go its own
gay course to hell, without Mr Richard Lovat Somers trying to show it
the way it should go.
A very strong wind had got up from the west. It blew down from the dark
hills in a fury, and was cold as flat ice. It blew the sea back until
the great water looked like dark, ruffled mole-fur. It blew it back till
the waves got littler and littler, and could hardly uncurl the least
swish of a rat-tail of foam.
On such a day his restlessness had driven them on a trip along the coast
to Wolloona. They got to the lost little town just before mid-day, and
looked at the shops. The sales were on, and prices were “smashed to
bits,” “Prices Smashed to Bits,” in big labels. Harriet, of course,
fascinated in the Main Street, that ran towards the sea, with the steep
hills at the back. “Hitch your motor to a star.--Star Motor Company.”
“Your piano is the most important article of furniture in your
drawing-room. You will not be proud of your drawing-room unless your
piano has a HANDSOME APPEARANCE and a BEAUTIFUL TONE. Both these
requisites--”
It was a wonderful Main Street, and, thank heaven, out of the wind.
There were several large but rather scaring brown hotels, with balconies
all round: there was a yellow stucco church with a red-painted tin
steeple, like a weird toy: there were high roofs and low roofs, all
corrugated iron: and you came to an opening, and there, behold, were one
or two forlorn bungalows inside their wooden palings, and then the void.
The naked bush, sinking in a hollow to a sort of marsh, and then down
the coast some sort of “works,” brick-works or something, smoking. All
as if it had tumbled haphazard off the pantechnicon of civilisation as
it dragged round the edges of this wild land, and there lay, busy but
not rooted in. As if none of the houses had any foundations.
Bright the sun, the air of marvellous clarity, tall stalks of cabbage
palms rising in the hollow, and far off, tufted gum trees against a
perfectly new sky, the tufts at the end of wire branches. And farther
off, blue, blue hills. In the Main Street, large and expensive
motor-cars and women in fuzzy fur coats; long, quiescent Australian men
in tired-out-looking navy blue suits trotting on brown ponies, with a
carpet-bag in one hand, doing the shopping; girls in very much-made
hats, also flirtily shopping; three boys with big, magnificent bare
legs, lying in a sunny corner in the dust; a lonely white pony hitched
as if forever to a post at a street-corner.
“I like it,” said Harriet. “It doesn’t feel _finished_.”
“Not even begun,” he laughed.
But he liked it too: even the slummyness of some of the bungalows inside
their wooden palings, drab-wood, decrepit houses, old tins, broken pots,
a greeny-white pony reminding one of a mildewed old shoe, two half-naked
babies sitting like bits of live refuse in the dirt, but with bonny,
healthy bare legs: the awful place called “The Travellers’ Rest--Mrs
Coddy’s Boarding Home”--a sort of blind, squalid, corner-building made
of wood and tin, with flat pieces of old lace-curtain nailed inside the
windows, and the green blinds hermetically drawn. What must it have been
like inside? Then an open space, and coral-trees bristling with red
crest-flowers on their bare, cold boughs: and the hollow space of the
open country, and the marvellous blue hills of the distance.
The wind was cold enough to make you die. Harriet was disgusted at
having been dragged away from home. They trailed to the sea to try and
get out of it, for it blew from the land, and the sun was hot. On the
bay one lone man flinging a line into the water, on the edge of the
conch-shaped, sloping sands. Dark-blue water, ruffled like mole-fur, and
flicked all over with froth as with bits of feather-fluff. And many
white gannets turning in the air like a snow-storm and plunging down
into the water like bombs. And fish leaped in the furry water, as if the
wind had turned them upside-down. And the gannets dropping and exploding
into the wave, and disappearing. On the sea’s horizon, so perfectly
clear, a steamer like a beetle walking slowly along. Clear, with a
non-earthly clarity.
Harriet and Somers sat and ate sandwiches with a little sand, she dazed
but still expostulating. Then they went to walk on the sea’s edge, where
the sands might be firm. But the beach sloped too much, and they were
not firm. The lonely fisherman held up his thin silvery line for them to
pass under.
“Don’t bother,” said Somers.
“Right O!” said he.
He had a sad, beery moustache, a very cold-looking face, and, of course,
a little boy, his son, no doubt, for a satellite.
There were little, exquisite pink shells, like Venetian pink glass with
white veins or black veins round their sharp little steeples. Harriet
loved them, among her grumbles, and they began to gather them: “for
trimmings,” said Harriet. So, in the flat-icy wind, that no life had
ever softened and no god ever tempered, they crouched on the sea’s edge
picking these marvellous little shells.
Suddenly, with a cry, to find the water rushing round their ankles and
surging up their legs, they dragged their way wildly forward with the
wave, and out and up the sand. Where immediately a stronger blast seized
Lovat’s hat and sent it spinning to the sea again, and he after it like
a bird. He caught it as the water lifted it, and then the waste of
waters enveloped him. Above his knees swirled the green flood, there was
water all around him swaying, he looked down at it in amazement, reeling
and clutching his hat.
Then once more he clambered out. Harriet had fallen on her knees on the
sand in a paroxysm of laughter, and there she was doubled up like a
sack, shrieking between her gasps:
“His hat! His hat! He wouldn’t let it go”--shrieks, and her head like a
sand-bag flops to the sand--“no--not if he had to swim”--shrieks--“swim
to Samoa.”
He was looking at his wet legs and chuckling with his inward laughter.
Vivid, the blue sky: intensely clear, the dark sea, the yellow sands,
the swoop of the bay, the low headlands: clear like a miracle. And the
water bubbling in his shoes as he walked rolling up the sands.
At last she recovered enough to crawl after him. They sat in a
sand-hollow under a big bush with odd red berries, and he wrung out his
socks, and all he could of his underpants and trousers. Then he put on
his socks and shoes again, and they set off for the station.
“The Pacific water,” he said, “is so very seaey, it is almost warm.”
At which, looking at his wet legs and wet hat, she went off into shrieks
again. But she made him be quick, because there was a train they could
catch.
However in the Main Street they thought they would buy another pair of
socks. So he bought them, and changed in the shop. And they missed the
train, and Harriet expostulated louder.
They went home in a motor-bus and a cloud of dust, with the heaven bluer
than blue above, the hills dark and fascinating, and the land so remote
seeming. Everything so clear, so very distinct, and yet so marvellously
aloof.
All the miles alongside the road tin bungalows in their paling fences:
and a man on a pony, in a long black overcoat and a cold nose, driving
three happy, fleecy cows: long men in jerseys and white kerchiefs round
their necks, à la Buffalo Bill, riding nice slim horses; a woman riding
astride top speed on the roadside grass. A motor-car at the palings of
one of the bungalows. A few carts coming.
And the occupants of the ’bus bouncing and bobbing like a circus,
because of the very bumpy road.
“Shakes your dinner down,” said the old woman with the terribly
home-made hat--oh, such difficult, awful hats.
“It does, if you’ve had any,” laughed Harriet.
“Why, you’ve ’ad your dinner, ’aven’t you?”
As concerned as if Harriet was her own stomach, such a nice old woman.
And a lovely little boy with the bright, wide, gentle eyes of these
Australians. So alert and alive and with that lovableness that almost
hurts one. Absolute trust in the “niceness” of the world. A tall,
stalky, ginger man with the same bright eyes and a turned-up nose and
long stalky legs. An elderly man with bright, friendly, elderly eyes and
careless hair and careless clothing. He was Joe, and the other was Alf.
Real careless Australians, careless of their appearance, careless of
their speech, of their money, of everything--except of their
happy-go-lucky, democratic friendliness. Really nice, with bright,
quick, willing eyes. Then a young man, perhaps a commercial traveller,
with a suit-case. He was quite smartly dressed, and had fancy socks. He
was one of those with the big, heavy legs, heavy thighs and calves that
showed even in his trousers. And he was physically very self-conscious,
very self-conscious of Lovat and Harriet. The driver’s face was long and
deep red. He was absolutely laconic. And yet, absolutely willing, as if
life held no other possibility than that of being an absolutely willing
citizen. A fat man with a fat little girl waiting at one of the corners.
“Up she goes!” he said as he lifted her in.
A perpetual, unchanging willingness, and an absolute equality. The same
good-humoured, right-you-are approach from everybody to everybody.
“Right-you-are! Right-O!” Somers had been told so many hundreds of
times, Right-he-was, Right-O!, that he almost had dropped into the way
of it. It was like sleeping between blankets--so cosy. So cosy.
They were really awfully nice. There was a winsome charm about them.
They none of them seemed mean, or tight, or petty.
The young man with the fine suit and the great legs put down his money,
gently and shyly as a girl, beside the driver on the little
window-ledge. Then he got out and strode off, shy and quick, with his
suit-case.
“Hey!”
The young man turned at the driver’s summons, and came back.
“Did yer pay me?”
The question was put briskly, good-humouredly, with a touch even of
tenderness. The young man pointed to the money. The driver glanced round
and saw it.
“Oh! Right you are! Right-O!”