American Consulate with his passport, and visiting the shipping office
to get a plan of the boat. He went swiftly from place to place. There
were no difficulties: only both the Customs House and the Consulate
wanted photographs and Harriet’s own signature. She would have to come
up personally.
He wanted to go now. He wanted to go quickly. But it was no good, he
could not get off for another month, so he must preserve his soul in
patience.
“No,” said Richard to himself, thinking of Kangaroo. “I don’t love
him--I detest him. He can die. I’m glad he is dying. And I don’t like
Jack either. Not a bit. In fact I like nobody. I love nobody and I like
nobody, and there’s the end of it, as far as I’m concerned. And if I go
round ‘loving’ anybody else, or even ‘liking’ them, I deserve a kick in
the guts like Kangaroo.”
And yet, when he went over to the Zoo, on the other side of the
harbour--and the warm sun shone on the rocks and the mimosa bloom, and
he saw the animals, the tenderness came back. A girl he had met, a
steamer-acquaintance, had given him a packet of little white
extra-strong peppermint sweets. The animals liked them. The grizzly bear
caught them and ate them with excitement, panting after the hotness of
the strong peppermint, and opening his mouth wide, wide, for more. And
one golden brown old-man kangaroo, with his great earth-cleaving tail
and his little hanging hands, hopped up to the fence and lifted his
sensitive nose quivering, and gently nibbled the sweet between
Richard’s finger. So gently, so determinedly nibbled the sweet, but
never hurting the fingers that held it. And looking up with the big,
dark, prominent Australian eyes, so aged in consciousness, with a
fathomless, dark, fern-age gentleness and gloom. The female wouldn’t
come near to eat. She only sat up and watched, and her little one hung
its tiny fawn’s head and one long ear and one fore-leg out of her pouch,
in the middle of her soft, big, grey belly.
Such a married couple! Two kangaroos. And the blood in Richard’s veins
all gone dark with a sort of sad tenderness. The gentle kangaroos, with
their weight in heavy blood on the ground, in their great tail! It
wasn’t love he felt for them, but a dark, animal tenderness, and another
sort of consciousness, deeper than human.
It was a time of full moon. The moon rose about eight. She was so
strong, so exciting, that Richard went out at nine o’clock down to the
shore. The night was full of moonlight as a mother-of-pearl. He imagined
it had a warmth in it towards the moon, a moon-heat. The light on the
waves was like liquid radium swinging and slipping. Like radium, the
mystic virtue of vivid decomposition, liquid-gushing lucidity.
The sea too was very full. It was nearly high tide, the waves were
rolling very tall, with light like a menace on the nape of their necks
as they bent, so brilliant. Then, when they fell, the fore-flush rushed
in a great soft swing with incredible speed up the shore, on the
darkness soft-lighted with moon, like a rush of white serpents, then
slipping back with a hiss that fell into silence for a second, leaving
the sand of granulated silver.
It was the huge rocking of this flat, hollow-foreflush moon--dim in its
hollow, that was the night to Richard. “This is the night and the moon,”
he said to himself. Incredibly swift and far the flat rush flew at him,
with foam like the hissing, open mouths of snakes. In the nearness a
wave broke white and high. Then, ugh! across the intervening gulf the
great lurch and swish, as the snakes rushed forward, in a hollow frost
hissing at his boots. Then failed to bite, fell back hissing softly,
leaving the belly of the sands granulated silver.
A huge but a cold passion swinging back and forth. Great waves of
radium swooping with a down-curve and rushing up the shore. Then calling
themselves back again, retreating to the mass. Then rushing with
venomous radium-burning speed into the body of the land. Then recoiling
with a low swish, leaving the flushed sand naked.
That was the night. Rocking with cold, radium-burning passion, swinging
and flinging itself with venomous desire. That was Richard, too, a bit
of human wispiness in thin overcoat and thick boots. The shore was
deserted all the way. Only, when he came past the creek on the sands,
rough, wild ponies looking at him, dark figures in the moonlight lifting
their heads from the invisible grass of the sand, and waiting for him to
come near. When he came and talked to them they were reassured, and put
their noses down to the grass to eat a bit more in the moon-dusk, glad a
man was there.
Richard rocking with the radium-urgent passion of the night: the huge,
desirous swing, the call clamour, the low hiss of retreat. The call,
call! And the answerer. Where was his answerer? There was no living
answerer. No dark-bodied, warm-bodied answerer. He knew that when he had
spoken a word to the night-half-hidden ponies with their fluffy legs. No
animate answer this time. The radium-rocking, wave-knocking night his
call and his answer both. This God without feet or knees or face. This
sluicing, knocking, urging night, heaving like a woman with unspeakable
desire, but no woman, no thighs or breast, no body. The moon, the
concave mother-of-pearl of night, the great radium-swinging, and his
little self. The call and the answer, without intermediary. Non-human
gods, non-human human being.
CHAP: XVIII. ADIEU AUSTRALIA
Kangaroo died and had a great funeral, but Richard did not go up. He had
fixed his berths on the Manganui, and would sail away in twenty days. To
America--the United States, a country that did not attract him at all,
but which seemed to lie next in his line of destiny.
Meanwhile he wandered round in the Australian spring. Already he loved
it. He loved the country he had railed at so loudly a few months ago.
While he “cared” he had to rail at it. But the care once broken inside
him it had a deep mystery for him, and a dusky, far-off call that he
knew would go on calling for long ages before it got any adequate
response, in human beings. From far off, from down long fern-dark
avenues there seemed to be the voice of Australia, calling low.
He loved to wander in the bush at evening, when night fell so delicately
yet with such soft mystery. Then the sky behind the trees was all soft,
rose pink, and the great gum-trees ran up their white limbs into the air
like quicksilver, plumed at the tips with dark tufts. Like rivulets the
white boughs ran up from the white trunk: or like great nerves, with
nerve-like articulations, branching into the dusk. Then he would stand
under a tall fern-tree, and look up through the whorl of lace above his
head, listening to the birds calling in the evening stillness, the
parrots making a chinking noise.
Sitting at the edge of the bush he looked at the settlement and the sea
beyond. He had quite forgotten how he used to grumble at the haphazard
throwing of bungalows here and there and anywhere: how he used to hate
the tin roofs, and the untidiness. It recalled to him the young
Australian captain: “Oh, how I liked the rain on the tin roofs of the
huts at the war. It reminded me of Australia.”
“And now,” thought Richard to himself, “tin roofs and scattered shanties
will always remind me of Australia. They seem to me beautiful, though
it’s a fact they have nothing to do with beauty.”
But, oh, the deep mystery of joy it was to him to sit at the edge of the
bush as twilight fell, and look down at the township. The bungalows
were built mostly on the sides of the slopes. They had no foundations,
but stood on brickwork props, which brought them up to the level. There
they stood on the hillsides, on their short legs, with darkness under
their floors, the little bungalows, looking as if they weighed nothing.
Looking flimsy, made of wood with corrugated zinc roofs. Some of them
were painted dark red, roofs and all, some were painted grey, some were
wooden simply. Many had the white-grey zinc roofs, pale and delicate. At
the back was always one big water-butt of corrugated iron, a big round
tank painted dark-red, the corrugation ribs running round, and a jerky,
red-painted pipe coming down from the eaves. Sometimes there were two of
these tanks: and a thin, not very tidy woman in a big straw hat stooping
to the tap at the bottom of the tank. The roof came down low, making a
long shade over the wooden verandahs. Nearly always a little loggia at
the back, from which the house-door opened. And this little verandah was
the woman’s kitchen; there she had a little table with her dirty dishes,
which she was going to wash up. And a cat would be trotting around, as
if it had not an enemy in the world, while from the verandah a parrot
called.
The bungalows near the bush edge had odd bits of garden nipped out of
the paddocks and carefully railed in: then another little enclosure for
the calf. At the back the earth was scratched, there was a rubbish heap
of ashes and tins slipping into the brambles, and very white fowls
clustering for bed-time. In front of the house, in another bit of garden
with wooden palings, two camellia trees full of flowers, one white and
one red, like artificial things, but a bit seared by the wind. And at
the gate the branching coral trees still flowering flame from their
dark, strong-thrusting, up-curving buds.
So, with evening falling. There were green roads laid out in the wild,
with but one lost bungalow to justify them. And a lost horse wildly
galloping round the corner of this blind road, to quiet down and look
around. A belated collier galloping stiffly on his pony, out of the
township, and a woman in a white blouse and black skirt, with two little
girls beside her, driving a ramshackle little buggy with a quick-legged
little pony, homewards through the trees.
Lights were beginning to glint out: the township was deciding it was
night. The bungalows scattered far and wide, on the lower levels. There
was a net-work of wide roads, or beginnings of roads. The heart of the
township was one tiny bit of street a hundred yards long: Main Street.
You knew where it was, as you looked down on the reddish earth and grass
and bush, by the rather big roof of pale zinc and a sandy-coloured round
gable of the hotel--the biggest building in the place. For the rest, it
looked, from above, like an inch of street with tin roofs on either
side, fizzling out at once into a wide grass-road with a few bungalows
and then the bush. But there was the dark railway, and the little
station. And then again the big paddocks rising to the sea, with a ridge
of coral-trees and a farm-place. Richard could see Coo-ee with its low,
red roof, right on the sea. Behind it the rail-fences of the paddocks,
and the open grass, and the streets cut out and going nowhere, with an
odd bungalow here and there.
So it was all round--a far and wide scattering of pale-roofed bungalows
at random among grassy, cut-out streets, all along the levels above the
sea, but keeping back from the sea, as if there were no sea. Ignoring
the great Pacific. There were knolls and pieces of blue creek-hollow,
blue of fresh-water in lagoons on the yellow sands. Up the knolls
perched more bungalows, on very long front legs and no back legs, caves
of dark underneath. And on the sky-line, a ridge of wiry trees with dark
plume-tufts at the ends of the wires, and these little loose crystals of
different-coloured, sharp-angled bungalows cropping out beneath. All in
a pale, clear air, clear and yet far off, as it were visionary.
So the land swooped in grassy swoops, past the railway, steep up to the
bush: here and there thick-headed palm trees left behind by the flood of
time and the flood of civilisation both: bungalows with flame-trees:
bare bungalows like packing-cases: an occasional wind-fan for raising
water: a round well-pool, perfectly round: then the bush, and a little
colliery steaming among the trees. And so the great tree-covered swoop
upwards of the tor, to the red fume of clouds, red like the
flame-flowers, of sunset. In the darkness of trees the strange birds
clinking and trilling: the tree-ferns with their knob-scaly trunks
spreading their marvellous circle of lace overhead against the glow,
the gum-trees like white, naked nerves running up their limbs, and the
inevitable dead gum-trees poking stark grey limbs into the air. And the
thick aboriginal dusk settling down.
Richard wandered through the village, homewards. Horses stood motionless
in the middle of the road, like ghosts, listening. Or a cow stood as if
asleep on the dark footpath. Then she too wandered off. At night-time
always these creatures roaming the dark and semi-dark roads, eating the
wayside grass. The motor-cars rushing up the coast road must watch for
them. But the night straying cattle were not troubled. They dragged
slowly out of the way.
The night in the township was full of the sound of frogs, rattling,
screeching, whirring, raving like a whole fairy factory going at full
speed in the marshy creek-bottom. A great grey bird, a crane, came down
on wide soft wings softly in the marshy place. A cream coloured pony,
with a snake-like head stretched out, came cropping up the road,
cropping unmoved, though Richard’s feet passed within a few yards of his
nose. Richard thought of the snaky Praxiteles horses outside the
Quiriline in Rome. Very, very nearly those old, snaky horses were born
again here in Australia: or the same vision come back.
People mattered so little. People hardly matter at all. They were there,
they were friendly. But they never entered inside one. It is said that
man is the chief environment of man. That, for Richard, was not true in
Australia. Man was there, but unnoticeable. You said a few words to a
neighbour or an acquaintance, but it was merely for the sake of making a
sound of some sort. Just a sound. There was nothing really to be said.
The vast continent is really void of speech. Only man makes noises to
man, from habit. Richard found he never wanted to talk to anybody, never
wanted to be with anybody. He had fallen apart out of the human
association. And the rest of the people either were the same, or they
herded together in a promiscuous fashion. But this speechless, aimless
solitariness was in the air. It was natural to the country. The people
left you alone. They didn’t follow you with their curiosity and their
inquisitiveness and their human fellowship. You passed, and they forgot
you. You came again, and they hardly saw you. You spoke, and they were
friendly. But they never asked any questions, and they never encroached.
They didn’t care. The profound Australian indifference, which still is
not really apathy. The disintegration of the social mankind back to its
elements. Rudimentary individuals with no desire of communication.
Speeches, just noises. A herding together like dumb cattle, a
promiscuity like slovenly animals. Yet the basic indifference under
everything.
And with it all, toiling on with civilisation. But it felt like a clock
that was running down. It had been wound up in Europe, and was running
down, running right down, here in Australia. Men were mining, farming,
making roads, shouting politics. But all with that basic indifference
which dare not acknowledge _how_ indifferent it is, lest it should drop
everything and lapse into a blank. But a basic indifference, with a
spurt of excitement over a horse-race, and an occasional joy in a row.
It seemed strange to Somers that Labour should be so insistent in
Australia--or that Kangaroo should have been so burning. But then he
realised that these men were all the time yoked to some work, they were
all the time in the collar. And the work kept them going a good deal
more than they kept the work going. Nothing but the absolute drive of
the world’s work kept them going. Without it they would have lapsed into
the old bushranging recklessness, lapsed into the profound indifference
which was basic in them.
But still, they were men, they were healthy, they were full of energy,
even if they were indifferent to the aim in front. So they embraced one
aim or another, out of need to be going somewhere, doing something more
than just backing a horse. Something more than a mere day’s work and a
gamble. Some smack at the old established institution of life, that came
from Europe.
There it is, laid all over the world, the heavy established European way
of life. Like their huge ponderous cathedrals and factories and cities,
enormous encumbrances of stone and steel and brick, weighing on the
surface of the earth. They say Australia is free, and it is. Even the
flimsy, foundationless bungalows. Richard railed at the scrappy
amorphousness, till two nights he dreamed he was in Paris, and a third
night it was in some other city, of Italy or France. Here he was
staying in a big palazzo of a house--and he struggled to get out, and
found himself in a high old provincial street with old gable houses and
dark shadow and himself in the gulf between: and at the end of the
street a huge, pale-grey bulk of a cathedral, an old Gothic cathedral,
huge and massive and grey and beautiful.
But, suddenly, the mass of it made him sick, and the beauty was nauseous
to him. So strong a feeling that he woke up. And since that day he had
been thankful for the amorphous scrappy scattering of foundationless
shacks and bungalows. Since then he had loved the Australian landscape,
with the remote gum-trees running their white nerves into the air, the
random streets of flimsy bungalows, all loose from one another, and
temporary seeming, the bungalows perched precariously on the knolls,
like Japanese paper-houses, below the ridge of wire-and-tuft trees.
He had now a horror of vast super-incumbent buildings. They were a
nightmare. Even the cathedrals. Huge, huge bulks that are called beauty.
Beauty seemed to him like some turgid tumour. Never again, he felt, did
he want to look at London, the horrible _weight_ of it: or at Rome with
all the pressure on the hills. Horrible, inert, man-moulded weight.
Heavy as death.
No, no, the flimsy hills of Australia were like a new world, and the
frail _inconspicuousness_ of the landscape, that was still so clear and
clean, clean of all fogginess or confusion: but the frail, aloof,
inconspicuous clarity of the landscape was like a sort of
heaven--bungalows, shacks, corrugated iron and all. No wonder
Australians love Australia. It is the land that as yet has made no great
mistake, humanly. The horrible human mistakes of Europe. And, probably,
the even worse human mistakes of America.
“Then why am I going?” he asked himself.
“Wait! Wait!” he answered himself. “You have got to go through the
mistakes. You’ve got to go all round the world, and then half way round
again, till you get back. Go on, go on, the world is round, and it will
bring you back. Draw your ring round the world, the ring of your
consciousness. Draw it round until it is complete.”
So he prepared with a quiet heart to depart.
The only person that called at Coo-ee was Jaz.
“You’re leaving us, then?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Rather suddenly at the end.”
“Perhaps. But it’s as well I should go soon if I’m going.”
“You think so? Taken against the place, have you?”
“No--the contrary. If I stay much longer I shall stay altogether.”
“Come quite to like it!” Jaz smiled slowly.
“Yes. I love it, Jaz. I don’t love people. But this place--it goes into
my marrow, and makes me feel drunk. I love Australia.”
“That’s why you leave it, eh?”
“Yes. I’m frightened. What I want to do is to go a bit further back into
the bush--near some little township--have a horse and a cow of my
own--and--damn everything.”
“I can quite understand the ‘damn everything’ part of it,” laughed Jaz.
“You won’t do it, though.”
“I never was so tempted in my life. Talk about Eve tempting man to a
fall: Australia tempts me. _Retro me_--”
Jaz was silent for a few moments.
“You’d repent it, though,” he said quietly.
“I’ll probably repent whatever I do,” replied Somers, “so what’s the
odds. I’ll probably repent bitterly going to America, going back to the
world: when I want Australia. I want Australia as a man wants a woman. I
fairly tremble with wanting it.”
“Australia?”
“Yes.”
Jaz looked at Somers with his curious, light-grey eyes.
“Then why not stop?” he said seductively.
“Not now. Not now. Some cussedness inside me. I don’t want to give in,
you see. Not yet. I don’t want to give in to the place. It’s too strong.
It would lure me quite away from myself. It would be too easy. It’s
_too_ tempting. It’s too big a stride, Jaz.”
Jaz laughed, looking back at Richard’s intense eyes.
“What a man you are, Mr Somers!” he said. “Come and live in Sydney and
you won’t find it such a big jump from anywhere else.”
“No, I wouldn’t want to live in Sydney. I’d want to go back in the bush
near one of the little townships. It’s like wanting a woman, Jaz. I want
it.”
“Then why not do it?”
“I won’t give in, not yet. It’s like giving in to a woman; I won’t give
in yet. I’ll come back later.”
Jaz suddenly looked at Richard and smiled maliciously.
“You won’t give in, Mr Somers, will you? You won’t give in to the women,
and Australia’s like a woman to you. You wouldn’t give in to Kangaroo,
and he’s dead now. You won’t give in to Labour, or Socialism. Well, now,
what will you do? Will you give in to America, do you think?”
“Heaven preserve me--if I’m to speak beforehand.”
“Why, Mr Somers!” laughed Jaz, “seems to me you just go round the world
looking for things you’re not going to give in to. You’re as bad as we
folk.”
“Maybe,” said Richard. “But I’ll give in to the Lord Almighty, which is
more than you’ll do--”
“Oh, well, now--we’d give in to Him if we saw Him,” said Jaz, smiling
with an odd winsomeness he sometimes had.
“All right. Well I prefer not to see, and yet to give in,” said Richard.
Jaz glanced up at him suspiciously, from under his brows.
“And another thing,” said Richard. “I won’t give up the flag of our real
civilised consciousness. I’ll give up the ideals. But not the aware,
self-responsible, deep consciousness that we’ve gained. I won’t go back
on that, Jaz, though Kangaroo did say I was the enemy of civilisation.”
“You don’t consider you are, then?” asked Jaz, pertinently.
“The enemy of civilisation? Well, I’m the enemy of this
machine-civilisation and this ideal civilisation. But I’m not the enemy
of the deep, self-responsible consciousness in man, which is what _I_
mean by civilisation. In that sense of civilisation, I’d fight forever
for the flag, and try to carry it on into deeper, darker places. It’s an
adventure, Jaz, like any other. And when you realise what you’re doing,
it’s perhaps the best adventure.”
Harriet brought the tea-tray on to the verandah.
“It’s quite nice that somebody has come to see us,” she said to Jaz.
“There seems such a gap, now Kangaroo is gone, and all he stood for.”
“You feel a gap, do you?” asked Jaz.
“Awful. As if the earth had opened. As for Lovat, he’s absolutely
broken-hearted, and such a trial to live with.”
Jaz looked quickly and inquiringly at Somers.
“Sort of metaphysical heart,” Richard said, smiling wryly.
Jaz only looked puzzled.
“Metaphysical!” said Harriet. “You’d think to hear him he was nothing
but a tea-pot brewing metaphysical tea. As a matter of fact Kangaroo
went awfully deep with him, and now he’s heart-broken, and that’s why
he’s rushing to America. He’s always breaking his heart over
something--anything except me. To me he’s a nether millstone.”
“Is that so!” said Jaz.
“But one feels awful, you know, Kangaroo dying like that. Lovat likes to
show off and be so beastly high and mighty about things. But I know how
miserable he is.”
They were silent for some time, and the talk drifted.
In the newspapers Somers read of a big cyclone off the coast of China,
which had engulfed thousands of Chinese. This cyclone was now travelling
south, lashing its tail over the New Hebrides, and swooping its paws
down the thousands of miles of east coast of Australia. The monster was
expected to have spent itself by the time it reached Sydney. But it
hadn’t--not quite.