The other emotions seemed to abandon him. So suddenly, and so
completely, to abandon him. So it was when he got back from Sydney and,
in the night of moonlight, went down the low cliff to the sand.
Immediately the great rhythm and ringing of the breakers obliterated
every other feeling in his breast, and his soul was a moonlit hollow
with the waves striding home. Nothing else.
And in the morning the yellow sea faintly crinkled by the inrushing wind
from the land, and long, straight lines on the lacquered meadow, long,
straight lines that reared at last in green glass, then broke in snow,
and slushed softly up the sand. Sometimes the black, skulking fin of a
shark. The water was very clear, very green, like bright green glass.
Another big fish with humpy sort of fins sticking up, and horror, in the
green water a big red mouth wide open. One day the fins of dolphins
near, near, it seemed almost over the sea edge. And then, suddenly, oh
wonder, they were caught up in the green wall of the rising water, and
there for a second they hung in the watery, bright green pane of the
wave, five big dark dolphins, a little crowd, with their sharp fins and
blunt heads, a little sea-crowd in the thin, upreared sea. They flashed
with a sharp black motion as the great wave curled to break. They
flashed in-sea, flashed from the foamy horror of the land. And there
they were, black little school, away in the lacquered water, panting,
Richard imagined, with the excitement of the escape. Then one of the
bold bucks came back to try again, and he jumped clean out of the water,
above a wave, and kicked his heels as he dived in again.
The sea-birds were always wheeling: big, dark-backed birds like
mollyhawks and albatrosses with a great spread of wings: and the white
gleaming gannets, silvery as fish in the air. In they went, suddenly,
like bombs into the wave, spitting back the water. Then they slipped out
again, slipped out of the ocean with a sort of sly exultance.
And ships walked on the wall-crest of the sea, shedding black smoke. A
vast, hard, high sea, with tiny clouds like mirage islets away far, far
back, beyond the edge.
So Richard knew it, as he sat and worked on the verandah or sat at table
in the room and watched through the open door. But it was usually in the
afternoons he went down to it.
It was his afternoon occupation to go down to the sea’s edge and wander
slowly on the firm sand just at the foam-edge. Sometimes the great waves
were turning like mill-wheels white all down the shore. Sometimes they
were smaller, more confused, as the current shifted. Sometimes his eyes
would be on the sand, watching the wrack, the big bladder-weed thrown
up, the little sponges like short clubs rolling in the wind, and once,
only, those fairy blue wind-bags like bags of rainbow with long blue
strings.
He knew all the places where the different shells were found, the white
shells and the black and the red, the big rainbow scoops and the
innumerable little black snails that lived on the flat rocks in the
little pools. Flat rocks ran out near the coal jetty, and between them
little creeks of black, round, crunchy coal-pebbles: sea-coal. Sometimes
there would be a couple of lazy, beach-combing men picking the biggest
pebbles and putting them into sacks.
On the flat rocks were pools of clear water, that many a time he stepped
into, because it was invisible. The coloured pebbles shone, the red
anemones pursed themselves up. There were hideous stumpy little fish
that darted swift as lightning--grey, with dark stripes. An urchin said
they were called toads. “Yer can’t eat ’em. Kill yer if y’ do. Yer c’nt
eat black fish. See me catch one o’ these toads!” All this in a high
shrill voice above the waves. Richard admired the elfish self-possession
of the urchin, alone on the great shore all day, like a little wild
creature himself. But so the boys were: such wonderful little
self-possessed creatures. It was as if nobody was responsible for them,
so they learned to be responsible for themselves, like young elf
creatures, as soon as they were hatched. They liked Richard, and
patronised him in a friendly, half-shy way. But it was they who were the
responsible party, the grown-up they treated with a gentle, slightly
off-handed indulgence. It always amused friend Richard to see these
Australian children bearing the responsibility of their parents. “He’s
only a poor old Dad, you know. Young fellow like me’s got to keep an eye
on him, see he’s all right.” That seemed to be the tone of the urchins
of ten and eleven. They were charming: much nicer than the older youths,
or the men.
The jetty straddled its huge grey timbers, like a great bridge, across
the sands and the flat rocks. Under the bridge it was rather dark,
between the great trunk-timbers. But here Richard found the best of the
flat, oval disc-shells with the whorl and the blue eye. By the bank hung
curtains of yellowish creeper, and a big, crimson-pink convolvulus
flowered in odd tones. An aloe sent up its tall spike, and died at its
base. A little bare grassy headland came out, and the flat rocks ran
out dark to sea, where the white waves prowled on three sides.
Richard would drift out this way, right into the sea, on a sunny
afternoon. On the flat rocks, all pocketed with limpid pools, the
sea-birds would sit with their backs to him, oblivious. Only an uneasy
black bird with a long neck, squatting among the gulls, would wriggle
his neck as the man approached. The gulls ran a few steps, and forgot
him. They were mostly real gulls, big and pure as grey pearl, suave and
still, with a _mâte_ gleam, like eggs of the foam in the sun on the
rocks. Slowly Richard strayed nearer. There were little browner birds
huddled, and further, one big, dark-backed bird. There they all
remained, like opalescent whitish bubbles on the dark, flat, ragged
wet-rock, in the sun, in the sea sleep. The black bird rose like a duck,
flying with its neck outstretched, more timid than the rest. But it came
back. Richard drew nearer and nearer, within six yards of the
sea-things. Beyond, the everlasting low white wall of foam, rustling to
the flat-rock. Only the sea.
The black creature rose again, showing the white at his side, and flying
with a stretched-out neck, frightened-looking, like a duck. His mate
rose too. And then all the gulls, flying low in a sort of protest over
the foam-tips. Richard had it all to himself--the ever-unfurling water,
the ragged, flat, square-holed rocks, the fawn sands inland, the soft
sand-bank, the sere flat grass where ponies wandered, the low,
red-painted bungalows squatting under coral trees, the ridge of tall
wire-thin trees holding their plumes in tufts at the tips, the stalky
cabbage-palms beyond in the hollow, clustering, low, whitish zinc roofs
of bungalows, at the edge of the dark trees--then the trees in darkness
swooping up to the wall of the tors, that ran a waving skyline sagging
southwards. Scattered, low, frail-looking bungalows with whitish roofs
and scattered dark trees among. A plume of smoke beyond, out of the
scarp front of trees. Near the sky, dark, old, aboriginal rocks. Then
again all the yellowish fore-front of the sea, yellow bare grass, the
homestead with leafless coral trees, the ponies above the sands, the
pale fawn foreshore, the sea, the floor of wet rock.
He had it all to himself. And there, with his hands in his pockets, he
drifted into indifference. The far-off, far-off, far-off indifference.
The world revolved and revolved and disappeared. Like a stone that has
fallen into the sea, his old life, the old meaning, fell, and rippled,
and there was vacancy, with the sea and the Australian shore in it.
Far-off, far-off, as if he had landed on another planet, as a man might
land after death. Leaving behind the body of care. Even the body of
desire. Shed. All that had meant so much to him, shed. All the old world
and self of care, the beautiful care as well as the weary care, shed
like a dead body. The landscape?--he cared not a thing about the
landscape. Love?--he was absolved from love, as if by a great pardon.
Humanity?--there was none. Thought?--fallen like a stone into the sea.
The great, the glamorous past?--worn thin, frail, like a frail,
translucent film of shell thrown up on the shore.
To be alone, mindless and memoryless between the sea, under the sombre
wall-front of Australia. To be alone with a long, wide shore and land,
heartless, soulless. As alone and as absent and as present as an
aboriginal dark on the sand in the sun. The strange falling-away of
everything. The cabbage-palms in the sea-wind were sere like old mops.
The jetty straddled motionless from the shore. A pony walked on the sand
snuffing the sea-weed.
The past all gone so frail and thin. “What have I cared about, what have
I cared for? There is nothing to care about.” Absolved from it all. The
soft, blue, humanless sky of Australia, the pale, white unwritten
atmosphere of Australia. Tabula rasa. The world a new leaf. And on the
new leaf, nothing. The white clarity of the Australian, fragile
atmosphere. Without a mark, without a record.
“Why have I cared? I don’t care. How strange it is here, to be soul-less
and alone.”
That was the perpetual refrain at the back of his mind. To be soulless
and alone, by the Southern Ocean, in Australia.
“Why do I wrestle with my soul? I have no soul.”
Clear as the air about him this truth possessed him.
“Why do I talk of the soul? My soul is shed like a sheath. I am soulless
and alone, soulless and alone. That which is soulless is perforce
alone.”
The sun was curving to the crest of the dark ridge. As soon as the sun
went behind the ridge, shadow fell on the shore, and a cold wind came,
he would go home. But he wanted the sun not to sink--he wanted the sun
to stand still, for fear it might turn back to the soulful world where
love is and the burden of bothering.
He saw something clutch in a pool. Crouching, he saw a horror--a
dark-grey, brown-striped octopus thing with two smallish, white beaks or
eyes, living in a cranny of a rock in a pool. It stirred the denser,
viscous pool of itself and unfurled a long dark arm through the water,
an arm studded with bright, orange-red studs or suckers. Then it curled
the arm in again, cuddling close. Perhaps a sort of dark shore octopus,
star-fish coloured amid its darkness. It was watching him as he
crouched. He dropped a snail-shell near it. It huddled closer, and one
of the beak-like white things disappeared; or were they eyes? Heaven
knows. It eased out again, and from its dense jelly mass another thick
dark arm swayed out, studded with the sea-orange studs. And he crouched
and watched, while the white water hissed nearer to drive him away.
Creatures of the sea! Creatures of the sea! The sea-water was round his
boots, he rose with his hands in his pockets, to wander away.
The sun went behind the coal-dark hill, though the waves still glowed
white-gold, and the sea was dark blue. But the shore had gone into
shadow, and the cold wind came at once, like a creature that was lying
in wait. The upper air seethed, seemed to hiss with light. But here was
shadow, cold like the arm of the dark octopus. And the moon already in
the sky.
Home again. But what was home? The fish has the vast ocean for home. And
man has timelessness and nowhere. “I won’t delude myself with the
fallacy of home,” he said to himself. “The four walls are a blanket I
wrap around in, in timelessness and nowhere, to go to sleep.”
Back to Harriet, to tea. Harriet? Another bird like himself. If only she
wouldn’t speak, talk, feel. The weary habit of talking and having
feelings. When a man has no soul he has no feelings to talk about. He
wants to be still. And “meaning” is the most meaningless of illusions.
An outworn garment.
Harriet and he? It was time they both agreed that nothing has any
meaning. Meaning is a dead letter when a man has no soul. And speech is
like a volley of dead leaves and dust, stifling the air. Human beings
should learn to make weird, wordless cries, like the animals, and cast
off the clutter of words.
Old dust and dirt of corpses: words and feelings. The decomposed body of
the past whirling and choking us, language, love, and meaning. When a
man loses his soul he knows what a small, weary bit of clock-work it
was. Who dares to be soulless finds the new dimension of life.
Home, to tea. The clicking of the clock. Tic-tac! Tic-tac! The clock.
Home to tea. Just for clockwork’s sake.
No home, no tea. Insouciant soullessness. Eternal indifference. Perhaps
it is only the great pause between carings. But it is only in this pause
that one finds the meaninglessness of meanings--like old husks which
speak dust. Only in this pause that one finds the meaninglessness of
meanings, and the other dimension, the reality of timelessness and
nowhere. Home to tea! Do you hear the clock tick? And yet there is
timelessness and nowhere. And the clock means nothing with its ticking.
And nothing is so meaningless as meanings.
Yet Richard meandered home to tea. For the sun had set, the sea of
evening light was going pale blue, fair as evening, faintly glazed with
yellow: the eastern sky was a glow of rose and smoke blue, a band beyond
the sea, while from the dark land-ridge under the western sky an
electric fierceness still rushed up past a small but vehement evening
star. Somewhere among it all the moon was lying.
He received another summons to go to Kangaroo. He didn’t want to go. He
didn’t want any more emotional stress, of any sort. He was sick of
having a soul that suffered or responded. He didn’t want to respond any
more, or to suffer any more. Saunter blindly and obstinately through the
days.
But he set off. The wattle-bloom--the whitish, mealy ones--were aflower
in the bush, and at the top of huge poles of stems, big,
blackish-crimson buds and flowers, flowers of some sort, shot up out of
a clump of spear-leaves. The bush was in flower. The sky above was a
tender, virgin blue, the air was pale with clarity, the sun moved
strong, yet with a soft and cat-like motion through the heavens. It was
spring. But still the bush kept its sombreness along all the pellucid
ether: the eternally unlighted bush.
What was the good of caring? What was the point of caring? As he looked
at the silent, morning bush grey-still in the translucency of the day, a
voice spoke quite aloud in him. What was the good of caring, of
straining, of stressing? Not the slightest good. The vast lapse of time
here--and white men thrown in like snow into dusky wine, to melt away
and disappear, but to cool the fever of the dry continent.
Afterwards--afterwards--in the far-off, far-off afterwards, a different
sort of men might arise to a different sort of care. But as for
now--like snow in aboriginal wine one could float and deliciously melt
down, to nothingness, having no choice.
He knew that Kangaroo was worse. But he was startled to find him looking
a dead man. A long, cadaverous yellow-face, exactly the face of a dead
man, but with an animal’s dark eyes. He did not move. But he watched
Richard come forward from the door. He did not give him his hand.
“How are you?” said Richard gently.
“Dying.” The one word from the discoloured lips.
Somers was silent, because he knew it was only too true. Kangaroo’s dark
eyebrows above his motionless dark eyes were exactly like an animal that
sulks itself to death. His brow was just sulking to death, like an
animal.
Kangaroo glanced up at Somers with a rapid turn of the eyes. His body
was perfectly motionless.
“Did you know I was dying?” he asked.
“I was afraid.”
“Afraid! You weren’t afraid. You were glad. They’re all glad.” The voice
was weak, hissing in its sound. He seemed to speak to himself.
“Nay, don’t say that.”
Kangaroo took no notice of the expostulation. He lay silent.
“They don’t want me,” he said.
“But why bother?”
“I’m dying! I’m dying! I’m dying!” suddenly shouted Kangaroo, with a
breaking and bellowing voice that nearly startled Richard out of his
skin. The nurse came running in, followed by Jack.
“Mr Cooley! Whatever it is?” said the nurse.
He looked at her with long, slow, dark looks.
“Statement of fact,” he said, in his faint, husky voice.
“_Don’t_ excite yourself,” pleaded the nurse. “You _know_ it hurts you.
Don’t think about it, don’t. Hadn’t you perhaps best be left alone?”
“Yes, I’d better go,” said Richard, rising.
“I want to say good-bye to you,” said Kangaroo faintly, looking up at
him with strange, beseeching eyes.
Richard, very pale at the gills, sat down again in the chair. Jack
watched them both, scowling.
“Go out, nurse,” whispered Kangaroo, touching her hand with his fingers,
in a loving kind of motion. “I’m all right.”
“Oh, Mr Cooley, _don’t_ fret, _don’t_,” she pleaded.
He watched her with dark, subtle, equivocal eyes, then glanced at the
door. She went, obedient, and Jack followed her.
“Good-bye, Lovat!” said Kangaroo in a whisper, turning his face to
Somers and reaching out his hand. Richard took the clammy, feeble hand.
He did not speak. His lips were closed firmly, his face pale and proud
looking. He looked back into Kangaroo’s eyes, unconscious of what he
saw. He was only isolated again in endurance. Grief, torture, shame,
seethed low down in him. But his breast and shoulders and face were hard
as if turned to rock. He had no choice.
“You’ve killed me. You’ve killed me, Lovat!” whispered Kangaroo. “Say
good-bye to me. Say you love me now you’ve done it, and I won’t hate you
for it.” The voice was weak and tense.
“But _I_ haven’t killed you, Kangaroo. I wouldn’t be here holding your
hand if I had. I’m only so sorry some other villain did such a thing.”
Richard spoke very gently, like a woman.
“Yes, you’ve killed me,” whispered Kangaroo hoarsely.
Richard’s face went colder, and he tried to disengage his hand. But the
dying man clasped him with suddenly strong fingers.
“No, no,” he said fiercely. “Don’t leave me now. You must stay with me.
I shan’t be long--and I need you to be there.”
There ensued a long silence. The corpse--for such it seemed--lay
immobile and obstinate. Yet it did not relax into death. And Richard
could not go, for it held him. He sat with his wrist clasped by the
clammy thin fingers, and he could not go.
Then again the dark, mysterious, animal eyes turned up to his face.
“Say you love me, Lovat,” came the hoarse, penetrating whisper, seeming
even more audible than a loud sound.
And again Lovat’s face tightened with torture.
“I don’t understand what you mean,” he said with his lips.
“Say you love me.” The pleading, penetrating whisper seemed to sound
inside Somers’ brain. He opened his mouth to say it. The sound “I--”
came out. Then he turned his face aside and remained open-mouthed,
blank.
Kangaroo’s fingers were clutching his wrist, the corpse-face was eagerly
upturned to his. Somers was brought to by a sudden convulsive gripping
of the fingers around his wrist. He looked down. And when he saw the
eager, alert face, yellow, long, Jewish, and somehow ghoulish, he knew
he could not say it. He didn’t love Kangaroo.
“No,” he said, “I can’t say it.”
The sharpened face, that seemed to be leaping up to him, or leaping up
at him, like some snake striking, now seemed to sink back and go
indistinct. Only the eyes smouldered low down out of the vague yellow
mass of the face. The fingers slackened, and Richard managed to withdraw
his wrist. There was an eternity of grey silence. And for a long time
Kangaroo’s yellow face seemed sunk half visible under a shadow, as a
dusky cuttle-fish under a pool, deep down. Then slowly, slowly it came
to the surface again, and Richard braced his nerves.
“You are a little man, a little man, to have come and killed me,” came
the terrible, pathetic whisper. But Richard was afraid of the face, so
he turned aside. He thought in his mind: “I haven’t killed him at all.”
“What shall you do next?” came the whisper. And slowly, like a dying
snake rearing itself, the face reared itself from the bed to look at
Somers, who sat with his face averted.
“I am going away. I am leaving Australia.”
“When?”
“Next month.”
“Where are you going?”
“To San Francisco.”
“America! America!” came the hissing whisper. “They’ll kill you in
America.” And the head sank back on the pillow.
There was a long silence.
“Going to America! Going to America! After he’s killed me here,” came
the whispered moan.
“No, I haven’t killed you. I’m only awfully sorry--”
“You have! You have!” shouted Kangaroo, in the loud, bellowing voice
that frightened Richard nearly out of the window. “Don’t lie, you
have--”
The door opened swiftly and Jack, very stern-faced, entered. He looked
at Somers in anger and contempt, then went to the bedside. The nurse
hovered in the doorway with an anxious face.
“What is it, ’Roo?” said Jack, in a voice of infinite tenderness, that
made Somers shiver inside his skin.
“What’s wrong, Chief, what’s wrong, dear old man?”
Kangaroo turned his face and looked at Somers vindictively.
“That man’s killed me,” he said in a distinct voice.
“No, I think you’re wrong there, old man,” said Jack. “Mr Somers has
never done anything like that. Let me give you a morphia injection, to
ease you, won’t you?”
“Leave me alone.” Then, in a fretful, vague voice: “I wanted him to love
me.”
“I’m sure he loves you, ’Roo--sure he does.”
“Ask him.”
Jack looked at Richard and made him a sharp, angry sign with his brows,
as if bidding him comply.
“You love our one-and-only Kangaroo all right, don’t you, Mr Somers?” he
said in a manly, take-it-for-granted voice.
“I have an immense regard for him,” muttered Richard.
“Regard! I should think so. We’ve got more than regard. I love the
man--love him--love him I do. Don’t I, ’Roo?”
But Kangaroo had sunk down, and his face had gone small, he was
oblivious again.
“I want nurse,” he whispered.
“Yes, all right,” said Jack, rising from bending over the sick man.
Somers had already gone to the door. The nurse entered, and the two men
found themselves in the dark passage.
“I shall have to be coming along, Mr Somers, if you’ll wait a minute,”
said Jack.
“I’ll wait outside,” said Somers. And he went out and down to the
street, into the sun, where people were moving about. They were like
pasteboard figures shifting on a flat light.
After a few minutes Jack joined him.
“Poor ’Roo, it’s a question of days now,” said Jack.
“Yes.”
“Hard lines, you know, when a man’s in his prime and just ready to enter
into his own. Bitter hard lines.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why I think you were a bit hard on him. I _do_ love him myself,
so I can say so without exaggerating the fact. But if I hated the poor
man like hell, and saw him lying there in that state--why, I’d swear on
red-hot iron I loved him, I would. A man like that--a big, grand man, as
great a hero as ever lived. If a man can’t speak two words out of pity
for a man in his state, why, I think there’s something wrong with that
man. Sorry to have say it. But if Old Harry himself had lain there like
that and asked me to say I loved him I’d have done it. Heart-breaking,
it was. But I suppose some folks is stingy about sixpence, and others is
stingy about saying two words that would give another poor devil his
peace of mind.”
Richard walked on in angry silence. He hated being condemned in this
free-and-easy, rough-and-ready fashion.
“But I suppose chaps from the old country are more careful of what they
say--might give themselves away or something of that. We’re different
over here. Kick yourself over the cliff like an old can if a mate’s in
trouble and needs a helping hand, or a bit of sympathy. That’s us. But I
suppose being brought up in the old country, where everybody’s
frightened that somebody else is going to take advantage of him, makes
you more careful. So you’re leaving Australia, are you? Mrs Somers want
to go?”
“I think so. Not very emphatically, perhaps.”
“Wouldn’t want to if you didn’t, so to speak? Oh, Mrs Somers is all
right. She’s a fine woman, she is. I suppose I ought to say lady, but I
prefer a woman, myself, to a lady, any day. And Mrs Somers is a woman
all over--she is that. I’m sorry for my own sake and Vicky’s sake that
she’s going. I’m sorry for Australia’s sake. A woman like that ought to
stop in a new country like this and breed sons for us. That’s what we
want.”
“I suppose if she wanted to stop and breed sons she would,” said Richard
coldly.
“They’d have to be your sons, that’s the trouble, old man. And how’s she
going to manage that if you’re giving us the go-by?”