turned again. And the driver bustled to carry out some goods. The way he
stooped to pick up the heavy wooden box in his arms; so _willing_ to
stoop to burdens. So long, of course, as his Rights of Man were fully
recognised. You musn’t try any superior tricks with him.
Well, it was really awfully nice. It was touching. And it made life so
easy, so easy.
Of course these were not government servants. Government servants have
another sort of feeling. They feel their office, even in N.S.W.--even a
railway-clerk. Oh, yes.
So nice, so nice, so gentle. The strange, bright-eyed gentleness. Of
course, really rub him the wrong way, and you’ve got a Tartar. But not
before you’ve asked for one. Gentle as a Kangaroo, or a wallaby, with
that wide-eyed, bright-eyed, alert, _responsible_ gentleness Somers had
never known in Europe. It had a great beauty. And at the same time it
made his spirits sink.
It made him feel so sad underneath, or uneasy, like an impending
disaster. Such a charm. He was so tempted to commit himself to this
strange continent and its strange people. It was so fascinating. It
seemed so free, an absence of any form of stress whatsoever. No strain
in any way, once you could accept it.
He was so tempted, save for a sense of impending disaster at the bottom
of his soul. And there a voice kept saying: “No, no. No, no. It won’t
do. You’ve got to have a reversion. You can’t carry this mode any
further. You’ve got to have a recognition of the innate, sacred
separateness.”
So when they were walking home in a whirl of the coldest, most
flat-edged wind they had ever known, he stopped in front of her to
remark:
“Of course you can’t go on with a soft, oh-so-friendly life like this
here. You’ve got to have an awakening of the old recognition of the
aristocratic principle, the _innate_ difference between people.”
“Aristocratic principle!” she shrieked on the wind. “You should have
seen yourself, flying like a feather into the sea after your hat.
Aristocratic _principle_!” She shrieked again with laughter.
“There you are, you see,” he said to himself. “I’m at it again.” And he
laughed too.
The wind blew them home. He made a big fire, and changed, and they drank
coffee made with milk, and ate buns.
“Thank heaven for a home,” he said, as they sat in the dark, big rooms
at Coo-ee, and ate their buns, and looked out of the windows and saw
here as well a whirl of gannets like a snowstorm, and a dark sea
littered with white fluffs. The wind roared in the chimney, and for the
first time the sea was inaudible.
“You see,” she said, “how thankful you are for a home.”
“Chilled to the bone!” she said. “I’m chilled to the bone with my day’s
pleasure-outing.”
So they drew up the couch before the fire, and he piled rugs on her and
jarrah chunks on the fire, and at last it was toastingly warm. He sat on
a little barrel which he had discovered in the shed, and in which he
kept the coal for the fire. He had been at a loss for a lid to this
barrel, till he had found a big tin-lid thrown out on the waste lot. And
now the wee barrel with the slightly rusty tin lid was his perch when
he wanted to get quite near the fire. Harriet hated it, and had moments
when she even carried the lid to the cliff to throw it in the sea. But
she brought it back, because she knew he would be so indignant. She
reviled him however.
“Shameful! Hideous! Old tin lids! How you can _sit_ on it. How you can
bring yourself to sit on such a thing, and not feel humiliated. Is that
your aristocratic principle?”
“I put a cushion on it,” he said.
As he squatted on his tub this evening in the fire-corner, she suddenly
turned from her book and cried:
“There he is, on his throne! Sitting on his aristocratic principle!” And
again she roared with laughter.
He, however, shook some coal out of the little tub on to the fire,
replaced the tin lid and the cushion, and resumed his thoughts. The fire
was very warm. She lay stretched in front of it on the sofa, covered
with an eider-down, and reading a Nat Gould novel, to get the real tang
of Australia.
“Of course,” he said, “this land always gives me the feeling that it
doesn’t _want_ to be touched, it doesn’t _want_ men to get hold of it.”
She looked up from her Nat Gould.
“Yes,” she admitted slowly. “And my ideal has always been a farm. But I
know now. The farms don’t really belong to the land. They only scratch
it and irritate it, and are never at one with it.”
Whereupon she returned to her Nat Gould, and there was silence save for
the hollow of the wind. When she had finished her paper-backed book she
said:
“It’s just like them--just like they _think_ they are.”
“Yes,” he said vaguely.
“But, bah!” she added, “they make me sick. So absolutely dull--worse
than an ‘At Home’ in the middle classes.”
And after a silence, another shriek of laughter suddenly.
“Like a flying-fish! Like a flying-fish dashing into the waves! Dashing
into the waves after his hat--”
He giggled on his tub.
“Fancy, that I’m here in Coo-ee after my day’s outing! I can’t believe
it. I shall call you the flying-fish. It’s hard to believe that one was
so many things in one day. Suddenly the water! Won’t you go now and do
the tailor? Twenty to eight! The bold buccaneer!”
The tailor was a fish that had cost a shilling, and which he was to
prepare for supper.
“Globe: There can’t be much telepathy about bullocks, anyhow. In
Gippsland (Vic.) last season a score of them were put into a strange
paddock, and the whole 20 were found drowned in a hole next morning.
Tracks showed that they had gone each on his own along a path,
overbalanced one after the other, and were unable to clamber up the
rocky banks.”
That, thought Richard at the close of the day, is a sufficient comment
on herd-unity, equality, domestication, and civilisation. He felt he
would have liked to climb down into that hole in which the bullocks were
drowning and beat them all hard before they expired, for being such
mechanical logs of life.
Telepathy! Think of the marvellous vivid communication of the huge sperm
whales. Huge, grand, phallic beasts! Bullocks! Geldings! Men! R. L.
wished he could take to the sea and be a whale, a great surge of living
blood: away from these all-too-white people, who ought _all_ to be
called Cellu Lloyd, not only the horse-mange man.
Man is a thought-adventurer. Man is more, he is a life-adventurer. Which
means he is a thought-adventurer, an emotion-adventurer, and a
discoverer of himself and of the outer universe. A discoverer.
“I am a fool,” said Richard Lovat, which was the most frequent discovery
he made. It came, moreover, every time with a new shock of surprise and
chagrin. Every time he climbed a new mountain range and looked over, he
saw, not only a new world, but a big anticipatory fool on this side of
it, namely, himself.
Now a novel is supposed to be a mere record of emotion-adventures,
flounderings in feelings. We insist that a novel is, or should be, also
a thought-adventure, if it is to be anything at all complete.
“I am a fool,” thought Richard to himself, “to imagine that I can
flounder in a sympathetic universe like a fly in the ointment.” We think
of ourselves, we think of the ointment, but we do not consider the fly.
It fell into the ointment, crying: “Ah, here is a pure and balmy
element in which all is unalloyed goodness. Here is attar of roses
without a thorn.” Hence the fly in the ointment: embalmed in balm. And
our repugnance.
“I am a fool,” said Richard to himself, “to be floundering round in this
easy, cosy, all-so-friendly world. I feel like a fly in the ointment.
For heaven’s sake let me get out. I suffocate.”
Where to? If you’re going to get out you must have something to get out
on to. Stifling in unctuous sympathy of a harmless humanity.
“Oh,” cried the stifling R. “Where is my Rock of Ages?”
He knew well enough. It was where it always has been: in the middle of
him.
“Let me get back to my own self,” he panted, “hard and central in the
centre of myself. I am drowning in this merge of harmlessness, this
sympathetic humanity. Oh, for heaven’s sake let me crawl out of the
sympathetic smear, and get myself clean again.”
Back to his own centre--back--back. The inevitable recoil.
“Everything,” said R. to himself, in one of those endless conversations
with himself which were his chief delight, “everything is relative.”
And flop he went into the pot of spikenard.
“Not quite,” he gasped, as he crawled out. “Let me drag my isolate and
absolute individual self out of this mess.”
Which is the history of relativity in man. All is relative as we go flop
into the ointment: or the treacle or the flame. But as we crawl out, or
flutter out with a smell of burning, the _absolute_ holds us spellbound.
Oh to be isolate and absolute, and breathe clear.
So that even relativity is only relative. Relative to the absolute.
I am sorry to have to stand, a sorry sight, preening my wings on the
brink of the ointment-pot, thought Richard. But from this vantage ground
let me preach to myself. He preached, and the record was taken down for
this gramophone of a novel.
No, the self is absolute. It may be relative to everything else in the
universe. But to itself it is an absolute.
Back to the central self, the isolate, absolute self.
“Now,” thought Richard to himself, waving his front paws with
gratification: “I must sound the muezzin and summon all men back to
their central, isolate selves.”
So he drew himself up, when--_urch_!! He was sluthering over the brim of
the ointment pot into the balm of humanity once more.
“Oh, Lord, I nearly did it again,” he thought as he clambered out with a
sick heart. “I shall do it once too often. The bulk of mankind haven’t
got any central selves: haven’t got any. They’re all bits.”
Nothing but his fright would have struck this truth out of him. So he
crouched still, like a fly very tired with crawling out of the ointment,
to think about it.
“The bulk of people haven’t got any central selves. They’re all bits.”
He knew it was true, and he felt rather sick of the sweet odour of the
balm of human beatitudes, in which he had been so nearly lost.
“It takes how many thousand facets to make the eye of a fly--or a
spider?” he asked himself, being rather hazy scientifically. “Well, all
these people are just facets: just bits, that fitted together make a
whole. But you can fit the bits together time after time, yet it won’t
bring the bug to life.”
The people of this terrestial sphere are all bits. Isolate one of them,
and he is still only a bit. Isolate your man in the street, and he is
just a rudimentary fragment. Supposing you have the misfortune to have
your little toe cut off. That little toe won’t at once rear on its hind
legs and begin to announce: “I’m an isolated individual with an immortal
soul.” It won’t. But your man in the street will. And he is a liar. He’s
only a bit, and he’s only got a minute share of the collective soul.
Soul of his own he has none: and never will have. Just a share in the
collective soul, no more. Never a thing by himself.
Damn the man in the street, said Richard to himself. Damn the collective
soul, it’s a dead rat in a hole. Let humanity scratch its own lice.
Now I’ll sound my muezzin again. _The man by himself._ “Allah bismallah!
God is God and man is man and has a soul of his own. Each man to
himself! Each man back to his own soul! Alone, alone, with his own soul
alone. God is God and man is man and the man in the street is a louse.”
Whatever your relativity, that’s the starting point and the finishing
point: a man alone with his own soul: and the dark God beyond him.
A man by himself.
Begin then.
Let the men in the street--ugh, horrid millions, crawl the face of the
earth like lice or ants or some other ignominy.
The man by himself.
That was one of the names of Erasmus of Rotterdam.
The man by himself.
That is the beginning and end, the alpha and the omega, the one
absolute: the man alone by himself, alone with his own soul, alone with
his eyes on the darkness which is the dark god of life. Alone like a
pythoness on her tripod, like the oracle alone above the fissure into
the unknown. The oracle, the fissure down into the unknown, the strange
exhalations from the dark, the strange words that the oracle must utter.
Strange, cruel, pregnant words: the new term of consciousness.
This is the innermost symbol of man: alone in the darkness of the cavern
of himself, listening to soundlessness of inflowing fate. Inflowing
fate, inflowing doom, what does it matter? The man by himself--that is
the absolute--listening--that is the relativity--for the influx of his
fate, or doom.
The man by himself. The listener.
But most men can’t listen any more. The fissure is closed up. There is
no soundless voice. They are deaf and dumb, ants, scurrying ants.
That is their doom. It is a new kind of absolute. Like riff-raff, which
has fallen out of living relativity, on to the teeming absolute of the
dust-heap, or the ant-heap. Sometimes the dust-heap becomes huge, huge,
huge, and covers nearly all the world. Then it turns into a volcano, and
all starts again.
“It has nothing to do with me,” said Richard to himself. I hope, dear
reader, you like plenty of _conversation_ in a novel: it makes it so
much lighter and brisker.
“It has nothing to do with me,” said Richard to himself. “They do as
they like. But since, after all, I _am_ a kind-hearted dear creature, I
will just climb the minaret of myself and sound my muezzin.”
So behold the poor dear on his pinnacle lifting his hands.
“God is God and man is man; and every man by himself. Every man by
himself, alone with his own soul. Alone as if he were dead. Dead to
himself. He is dead and alone. He is dead; alone. His soul is alone.
Alone with God, with the dark God. God is God.”
But if he likes to shout muezzins, instead of hawking fried fish or
newspapers or lottery tickets, let him.
Poor dear, it was rather an anomalous call: “Listen to me, and be
alone.” Yet he felt called upon to call it.
To be alone, to be alone, and to rest on the unknown God alone.
The God must be unknown. Once you have defined him or described him, he
is the most chummy of pals, as you’ll know if you listen to preachers.
And once you’ve chummed up with your God, you’ll never be alone again,
poor you. For that’s the end of you. You and your God chumming it
through time and eternity.
Poor Richard saw himself in funny situations.
“My dear young lady, let me entreat you, be alone, only be alone.”
“Oh, Mr Somers, I should love to, if you’d hold my hand.”
“There is a gulf,” growing sterner, “surrounds each solitary soul. A
gulf surrounds you--a gulf surrounds me--”
“_I’m falling!_” shrieks and flings her arms around his neck. Or
Kangaroo.
“Why am I so beastly to Kangaroo?” said Richard to himself. “For beastly
I am. I am a detestable little brat to them all round.”
A detestable little brat he felt.
But Kangaroo wanted to be queen-bee of another hive, with all the other
bees clustering on him like some huge mulberry. Sickening! Why couldn’t
he be alone? At least for _once_. For once withdraw entirely.
And a queen-bee buzzing with beatitudes. Beatitudes, beatitudes. Bee
attitudes or any other attitudes, it made Richard feel tired. More
benevolence, more nauseating benevolence. “Charity suffereth long.”
Yet one cannot live a life of entire loneliness, like a monkey on a
stick, up and down one’s own obstacle. There’s got to be meeting: even
communion. Well, then, let us have the other communion. “This is thy
body which I take from thee and eat” as the priest, also the God, says
in the ritual of blood sacrifice. The ritual of supreme responsibility,
and offering. Sacrifice to the dark God, and to the men in whom the dark
God is manifest. Sacrifice to the strong, not to the weak. In awe, not
in dribbling love. The communion in power, the assumption into glory.
_La gloire._
CHAP: XV. JACK SLAPS BACK
Chapter follows chapter, and nothing doing. But man is a
thought-adventurer, and his falls into the Charybdis of ointment, and
his shipwrecks on the rocks of ages, and his kisses across chasms, and
his silhouette on a minaret: surely these are as thrilling as most
things.
To be brief, there was a Harriet, a Kangaroo, a Jack and a Jaz and a
Vicky, let alone a number of mere Australians. But you know as well as I
do that Harriet is quite happy rubbing her hair with hair-wash and
brushing it over her forehead in the sun and looking at the threads of
gold and gun-metal, and the few threads, alas, of silver and tin, with
admiration. And Kangaroo has just got a very serious brief, with
thousands and thousands of pounds at stake in it. Of course he is fully
occupied keeping them at stake, till some of them wander into his
pocket. And Jack and Vicky have gone down to her father’s for the
week-end, and he’s out fishing, and has already landed a rock-cod, a
leather-jacket, a large schnapper, a rainbow-fish, seven black-fish, and
a cuttle fish. So what’s wrong with him? While she is trotting over on a
pony to have a look at an old sweetheart who is much too young to be
neglected. And Jaz is arguing with a man about the freight-rates. And
all the scattered Australians are just having a bet on something or
other. So what’s wrong with Richard’s climbing a mental minaret or two
in the interim? Of course there isn’t any interim. But you _know_ that
Harriet is brushing her hair in the sun, and Kangaroo looking at huge
sums of money on paper, and Jack fishing, and Vicky flirting, and Jaz
bargaining, so what more do you want to know? We can’t be at a stretch
of tension _all_ the time, like the E string on a fiddle. If you don’t
like the novel, don’t read it. If the pudding doesn’t please you, leave
it, leave it. _I_ don’t mind your saucy plate. I know too well that you
can bring an ass to water, etc.
As for gods, thought Richard, there are gods of vengeance. “For I, the
Lord thy God, am a jealous God.” So true. A jealous God, and a
vengeful--“Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the
third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” Of course. The
fathers get off. You don’t begin to pay the penalty till the second and
third generation. That is something for _us_ to put in our pipes and
smoke. Because _we_ are the second generation, and it was our fathers
who had a nice rosy time among the flesh-pots, cooking themselves the
tit-bits of this newly-gutted globe of ours. They cooked the tit-bits,
we are left with the carrion.
“The Lord thy God am a jealous God.”
So he is. The Lord thy God is the invisible stranger at the gate in the
night, knocking. He is the mysterious life-suggestion, tapping for
admission. And the wondrous Victorian Age managed to fasten the door so
tight, and light up the compound so brilliantly with electric light,
that really, there _was_ no outside, it was all in. The unknown became a
joke: is still a joke.
Yet there it is, outside the gate, getting angry. “Behold I stand at the
gate and knock.” “Knock away,” said complacent, benevolent humanity,
which had just discovered its own monkey origin to account for its own
monkey tricks. “Knock away, nobody will hinder you from knocking.”
And Holman Hunt paints a pretty picture of a man with a
Stars-and-Stripes lantern and a red beard, knocking. But whoever it is
that’s knocking had been knocking for three generations now, and he’s
got sick of it. He’ll be kicking the door in just now.
“For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”
It is not that He is jealous of Thor or Zeus or Bacchus or Venus. The
great dark God outside the gate is all these gods. You open the gate,
and sometimes in rushes Thor and gives you a bang on the head with a
hammer; or Bacchus comes mysteriously through, and your mind goes dark
and your knees and thighs begin to glow; or it is Venus, and you close
your eyes and open your nostrils to a perfume, like a bull. All the
gods. When they come through the gate they are personified. But outside
the gate it is one dark God, the Unknown. And the Unknown is a terribly
jealous God, and vengeful. A fearfully vengeful god: Moloch, Astarte,
Ashtaroth, and Baal. That is why we dare not open now. It would be a
hell-god, and we know it. We are the second generation. Our children are
the third. And our children’s children are the fourth. Eheu! Eheu! Who
knocks?
Jack trotted over to Coo-ee on the Sunday afternoon, when he was staying
with his wife’s people. He knew Richard and Harriet would most probably
be at home: they didn’t like going out on Sundays, when all the world
and his wife, in their exceedingly Sunday clothes, swarmed on the face
of the earth.
Yes, they were at home: sitting on the verandah, a bit of rain spitting
from the grey sky, and the sea gone colourless and small. Suddenly,
there stood Jack. He had come round the corner on to the grass. Somers
started as if an enemy were upon him. Jack looked very tall and wiry, in
an old grey suit. He hesitated before coming forward, as if measuring
the pair of unsuspecting turtle doves on the loggia, and on his face was
a faint grin. His eyes were dark and grinning too, as he hung back
there. Somers watched him quickly. Harriet looked over her shoulder.
“Oh, Mr Callcott--why--how do you do?” And she got up, startled, and
went across the loggia holding out her hand, to shake hands. So Jack had
to come forward. Richard, very silent, shook hands also, and went
indoors to fetch a chair and a cup and a plate, while Jack made his
explanation to Harriet. He was quite friendly with her.
“Such a long time since we saw you,” she was saying. “Why didn’t Mrs
Callcott come, I should have liked so much to see her?”
“Ah--you see I came over on the pony. Doesn’t look very promising
weather.” And he looked away across the sea, averting his face.
“No--and the _terrible_ cold winds! I’m so glad if it will rain. I
simply love the smell of rain in the air: especially here in Australia.
It makes the air seem so much _kinder_, not so dry and savage--”
“Ah--yes--it does,” he said vaguely, still averting his face from her.
He seemed strange to her. And his face looked different--as if he had
been drinking, or as if he had indigestion.
The two men were aloof like two strange tom-cats.
“Were you disgusted with Lovat when he didn’t turn up the other
Saturday?” said Harriet. “I do hope you weren’t sitting waiting for
him.”
“Well--er--yes, we did wait up a while for him.”
“Oh, but what a shame! But you know by now he’s the most undependable
creature on earth. I wish you’d be angry with him. It’s no good what _I_
say.”
“No,” said he--the peculiar slow Cockney no--“I’m not angry with him.”
“But you should be,” cried Harriet. “It would be good for him.”
“Would it?” smiled Jack. His eyes were dark and inchoate, and there
seemed a devil in his long, wiry body. He did not look at Somers.
“You know of course what happened?” said Harriet.
“Er--when?”
“When Lovat went to see Mr Cooley.”
“Er--no.”
Again that peculiar Australian no, like a scorpion that stings with its
tail.
“Didn’t Mr Cooley tell you?” cried Harriet.
“No.” There was indescribable malice in the monosyllable.
“Didn’t he--!” cried Harriet, and she hesitated.
“You be quiet,” said Lovat crossly, to her. “Of course _you’d_ have to
rush in.”
“You think angels would fear to tread in such a delicate mess?” said
Harriet, with a flash of mocking wit that sent a faint smile up Jack’s
face, like a red flame. His nose, his mouth were curiously reddened. He
liked Harriet’s attacks. He looked at her with dark, attentive eyes.
Then he turned vaguely to Somers.
“What was it?” he asked.
“Nothing at all new,” said Somers. “You know he and I start to quarrel
the moment we set eyes on one another.”
“They might be man and wife,” mocked Harriet, and again Jack turned to
her a look of black, smiling, malicious recognition.
“Another quarrel?” he said quietly.
But Somers was almost _sure_ he knew all about it, and had only come
like a spy to take soundings.
“Another quarrel,” he replied, smiling, fencing. “And once more shown
the door.”
“I should think,” said Harriet, “you’d soon know that door when you see
it.”
“Oh, yes,” said Richard. He had not told her the worst of the encounter.
He never told her the worst, nor her nor anybody.
Jack was looking from one to the other to see how much each knew.
“Was it a specially bad blow-up?” he said, in his quiet voice, that had
a lurking tone of watchfulness in it.
“Oh, yes, final,” laughed Richard. “I am even going to leave Australia.”
“When?”
“I think in six weeks.”