Chapter XVIII: Adieu Australia 383 (7)

Richard sat feeling very stupid. The communicative soul is like the ass, you can lead him to the water, but you can’t make him drink.

“Why,” he said, “it means an end of us and what we are, in the first place. And then a re-entry into us of the great God, who enters us from below, not from above.”

Kangaroo sat bunched up like some creature watching round-eyed out of a darker corner.

“How do you mean, enters us from below?” he barked.

“Not through the spirit. Enters us from the lower self, the dark self, the phallic self, if you like.”

“Enters us from the phallic self?” snapped Kangaroo sharply.

“Sacredly. The god you can never see or visualise, who stands dark on the threshold of the phallic me.”

“The phallic you, my dear young friend, what is that but love?”

Richard shook his head in silence.

“No,” he said, in a slow, remote voice. “I know your love, Kangaroo. Working everything from the spirit, from the head. You work the lower self as an instrument of the spirit. Now it is time for the spirit to leave us again; it is time for the Son of Man to depart, and leave us dark, in front of the unspoken God: who is just beyond the dark threshold of the lower self, my lower self. There is a great God on the threshold of my lower self, whom I fear while he is my glory. And the spirit goes out like a spent candle.”

Kangaroo watched with a heavy face like a mask.

“It is time for the spirit to leave us,” he murmured in a somnambulist voice. “Time for the spirit to leave us.”

Somers, who had dropped his face, hiding it as he spoke, watched the other man from under his brows. Kangaroo, who still sat impassive, like a frozen, antagonised Buddha, gave himself a jerk of recovery.

“Ah well!” he sighed, with a weary, impatient, condescending sigh. “I was never able to follow mysticism and metaphysics. One of my many limitations. I don’t know what you mean.”

“But what is your ‘love’ but a mystical thing?” asked Richard indignantly.

“My love? Why, that is something I _feel_, as plain as toothache.”

“Well, so do I feel the other: and love has become like cardboard to me,” said Richard, still indignant.

“Like cardboard? Well, I don’t quite see love like cardboard, dear boy. For you _are_ a dear boy, in spite of yourself. Oh yes, you are. There’s some demon inside you makes you perverse, and won’t let you be the dear, beautiful thing you are. But I’m going to exorcise that demon.”

Somers gave a short laugh, the very voice of the demon speaking.

“Oh yes I am,” said Kangaroo, in a steely voice. “I’m going to exorcise that demon, and release your beautiful Andromeda soul.”

“Try,” ejaculated Richard dryly, turning aside his face in distaste.

Kangaroo leaped to his feet and stood towering over the little enemy as if he would stoop over him and smother him in violent warmth and drive out the demon in that way. But Richard sat cold and withheld, and Kangaroo had not the power to touch him.

“I’m going to try,” shouted the lawyer, in his slightly husky roar. “You’ve made it my prerogative by telling me to try. I’m going to love you, and you won’t get away from that. I’m the hound of heaven after you, my boy, and I’m fatal to the hell hound that’s leading you. Do you know I love you?--that I loved you long before I met you?”

Richard, curled narrow in his chair like a snake, glanced up at the big man projecting over him. A sort of magnetic effusion seemed to come out of Kangaroo’s body, and Richard’s hand was almost drawn in spite of himself to touch the other man’s body. He had deliberately to refrain from laying his hand on the near, generous stomach of the Kangaroo, because automatically his hand would have lifted and sought that rest. But he prevented himself, and the eyes of the two men met. Kangaroo searched Lovat’s eyes: but they seemed to be of cloudy blue like hell-smoke, impenetrable and devilish. Kangaroo watched a long time: but the other man was the unchangeable. Kangaroo turned aside suddenly.

“Ah well,” he said. “I can see there is a beast in the way. There is a beast in your eyes, Lovat, and if I can’t conquer him then--then woe-betide you, my dear. But I love you, you see.”

“Sounds like a threat,” laughed Somers.

Kangaroo leaned and laid his hand gently on Lovat’s shoulder.

“Don’t say that”; his voice was small now, and very gentle. “I loved you before I knew you. My soul cries for you. And you hurt me with the demon that is in you.”

Richard became very pale, and was silent for some moments. The hand sank heavier, nearer, on his shoulder.

“You see,” said Somers, trying hard to be fair, “what you call my demon is what I identify myself with. It’s my best me, and I stick to it. I think love, all this love of ours, is a devilish thing now: a slow poison. Really, I know the dark god at the lower threshold--even if I have to repeat it like a phrase. And in the sacred dark men meet and touch, and it is a great communion. But it isn’t this love. There’s no love in it. But something deeper. Love seems to me somehow trivial: and the spirit seems like something that belongs to paper. I can’t help it--I know another God.”

The pressure of the hand became inert.

“But aren’t you merely inventing other terms for the same thing that I mean, and that I call love?” said Kangaroo, in a strange, toneless voice, looking aside.

“Does it seem to you that I am?” asked Lovat, gently and dispassionately.

The strange, great passionate cloud of Kangaroo still hung there, hovering over the pale, sharp isolation of Somers, who lay looking up. And then it seemed as if the glow and vibration left Kangaroo’s body, the cloud became grey and heavy. He sighed, removed his hand, and turned away.

“Ah well!” he said. “Ah well!”

Somers rose, trembling now, and feeling frail.

“I’ll go,” he said.

“Yes, do go,” said Kangaroo.

And without another word Somers went, leaving the other man sunk in a great heap in his chair, as if defeated. Somers did not even pity him. His heart felt queer and cave-like and devoid of emotion.

He was spending the night at the Callcotts. Harriet, too, was there. But he was in no hurry to get back there. It was a clear and very starry night. He took the tram-car away from the centre of the town, then walked. As was always the case with him, in this country, the land and the world disappeared as night fell, as if the day had been an illusion, and the sky came bending down. There was the Milky Way, in clouds of star-fume, bending down right in front of him, right down till it seemed as if he would walk on to it, if he kept going. The pale, fumy drift of the Milky Way drooped down and seemed so near, straight in front, that it seemed the obvious road to take. And one would avoid the strange dark gaps, gulfs, in the way overhead. And one would look across to the floating isles of star-fume, to the south, across the gulfs where the sharp stars flashed like lighthouses, and one would be in a new way denizen of a new plane, walking by oneself. There would be a real new way to take. And the mechanical earth quite obliterated, sunk out.

Only he saw, on the sea’s high black horizon, the various reddish sore-looking lights of a ship. There they were--the signs of the ways of men--hot-looking and weary. He turned quickly away from the marks of the far-off ship, to look again at the downward slope of the great hill of the Milky Way. He wanted so much to get out of this lit-up cloy of humanity, and the exhaust of love, and the fretfulness of desire. Why not swing away into cold separation? Why should desire always be fretting, fretting like a tugged chain? Why not break the bond and be single, take a fierce stoop and a swing back, as when a gannet plunges like a white, metallic arrow into the sea, raising a burst of spray, disappearing, completing the downward curve of the parabola in the invisible underwater where it seizes the object of desire, then away, away with success upwards, back flashing into the air and white space? Why not? Why want to urge, urge, urge oneself down the causeways of desirous love, hard pavements of love? Even like Kangaroo. Why shouldn’t meeting be a stoop as a gannet stoops into the sea, or a hawk, or a kite, in a swift rapacious parabola downwards, to touch at the lowermost turn of the curve, then up again?

It is a world of slaves: all love-professing. Why unite with them? Why pander to them? Why go with them at all? Why not strike at communion out of the unseen, as the gannet strikes into the unseen underwater, or the kite from above at a mouse? One seizure, and away again, back away into isolation. A touch, and away. Always back, away into isolation. Why be cloyed and clogged down like billions of fish in water, or billions of mice on land? It is a world of slaves. Then why not gannets in the upper air, having two worlds? Why only one element? If I am to have a meeting it shall be down, down in the invisible, and the moment I re-emerge it shall be alone. In the visible world I am alone, an isolate instance. My meeting is in the underworld, the dark. Beneath every gannet that jumps from the water ten thousand fish are swimming still. But they are swimming in a shudder of silver fear. That is the magic of the ocean. Let them shudder the huge ocean aglimmer.

He arrived at Wyewurk at last, and found a little party. William James was there, and Victoria had made, by coincidence, a Welsh rarebit. The beer was on the table.

“Just in time,” said Jack. “As well you’re not half an hour later, or there might ’a been no booze. How did you come--tram?”

“Yes--and walked part of the way.”

“What kind of an evening did you have?” said Harriet.

He looked at her. A chill fell upon the little gathering, from his presence.

“We didn’t agree,” he replied.

“I knew you wouldn’t--not for long, anyhow,” she replied. “I don’t see you agreeing and playing second fiddle for long.”

“Do you see me as a fiddler at all?”

“I’ve seen you fiddling away hard enough many times,” retorted Harriet. “Why, what else do you do, all your life, but fiddle some tune or other?”

He did not reply, and there was a pause. His face was pale and very definite, as if it were some curious seashell.

“What did you get the wind up about, between you?” said Jack soothingly, pouring Somers a glass of beer.

“No wind. We’re only not the same pair of shoes.”

“I could have told you that before you went,” said Jaz with quiet elation in his tones.

Victoria looked at Somers with dark, bright eyes. She was quite fascinated by him, as an Australian bird by some adder.

“Isn’t Mr Somers queer?” she said. “He doesn’t seem to mind a bit.”

Somers looked at her quickly, a smile round his eyes, and a curious, smiling devil inside them, cold as ice.

“Oh yes, he minds. Don’t take any notice of his pretence. He’s only in a bad temper,” cried Harriet. “I know him by now. He’s been in a temper for days.”

“Oh, why?” cried Victoria. “I thought he was lovely this afternoon when he was here.”

“Yes,” said Harriet grimly. “Lovely! You should live with him.”

But again Victoria looked at his clear, fixed face, with the false smile round the eyes, and her fascination did not diminish.

“What an excellent Welsh rarebit,” he said. “If there were a little red pepper.”

“Red pepper!” cried Victoria. “There is!” And she sprang up to get it for him. As she handed it to him he looked into her dilated, dark bright eyes, and thanked her courteously. When he was in this state his voice and tone in speaking were very melodious. Of course it set Harriet on edge. But Victoria stood fluttering with her hands over the table, bewildered.

“What are you feeling for?” asked Jack.

She only gave a little blind laugh, and remembered that she was going to sit down. So she sat down, and then wondered what it was she was going to do after that.

“So you don’t cotton on to Kangaroo either?” said Jack easily.

“I have the greatest admiration for him.”

“You’re not alone there. But you don’t fall over yourself, loving him.”

“I only trip, and recover my balance for the moment.”

Jaz gave a loud laugh, across his cheese.

“That’s good!” he said.

“You trip, and recover your balance,” said Jack. “You’re a wary one. The rest of us falls right in, flop, and are never heard of again. And how did you part then?”

“We parted in mutual esteem. I said I would go, and he asked me please to do so as quickly as possible.”

Jack made round eyes, and even Jaz left off eating.

“Did you _quarrel_?” cried Harriet.

“Oh yes, violently. But of course, not vulgarly. We parted, as I said, in mutual esteem, bowing each other out.”

“You _are_ awful. You only went on purpose to upset him. I knew that all along. Why must you be so spiteful?” said Harriet. “You’re never happy unless you’re upsetting somebody’s apple-cart.”

“Am I doomed to agree with everybody, then?”

“No. But you needn’t _set out_ to be disagreeable. And to Mr Cooley especially, who likes you and is such a warm, big man. You ought to be flattered that he _cares_ what you think. No, you have to go and try and undermine him. Ah--why was I ever pestered with such a viperish husband as you!” said Harriet.

Victoria made alert, frightened eyes. But Somers sat on with the same little smile and courteous bearing.

“I am, of course, immensely flattered at his noticing me,” he replied. “Otherwise, naturally, I should have resented being told to leave. As it was I didn’t resent it a bit.”

“Didn’t you!” cried Harriet. “I know you and your pretences. That is what has put you in such a temper.”

“But you remember I’ve been in a temper for days,” he replied calmly and gravely. “Therefore there could be no putting.”

“Oh, it only made you worse. I’m tired of your temper, really.”

“But Mr Somers isn’t in a temper at all!” cried Victoria. “He’s nicer than any of us, really. Jack would be as angry as anything if I said all those things to him. Shouldn’t you, Jack?” And she cuddled his arm.

“You’d be shut up in the coal-shed for the night before you got half way through with it, if ever you started trying it on,” he replied, with marital humour.

“No, I shouldn’t, either: or it would be the last door you’d shut on _me_, so there. But anyhow you’d be in a waxy old temper.”

And she smiled at Somers as she cuddled her husband’s arm.

“If my hostess says I’m nice,” said Somers, “I am not going to feel guilty, whatever my _wife_ may say.”

“Oh yes, you do feel guilty,” said Harriet.

“Your hostess doesn’t find any fault with you at all,” cried Victoria. She was looking very pretty, in a brown chiffon dress. “She thinks you’re the nicest of anybody here, there.”

“What?” cried Jack. “When I’m here as well?”

“Whether you’re here or not. You’re not very nice to me to-night, and William James never is. But Mr Somers is _awfully_ nice.” She blushed suddenly quite vividly, looking under her long lashes at him. He smiled a little more intensely to himself.

“I tell you what, Mrs Somers,” said Jack. “We’d better make a swap of it, till they alter their opinion. You and me had better strike up a match, and let them two elope with one another for a bit.”

“And what about William James?” cried Victoria, with hurried, vivid excitement.

“Oh nobody need trouble themselves about William James,” replied that individual. “It’s about time he was rolling home.”

“No,” said Harriet, in answer to Jack. “I’m striking off no more matches, thank you. The game’s not worth the candle.”

“Why, maybe you’ve only struck on the rough side, you know,” said Jack. “You might strike on the smooth next time.”

“No,” said Harriet. “I’m going to bed, and leave you all to your striking and your bad tempers. Good-night!”

She rose roughly. Victoria jumped up to accompany her to her room. The Somers had had a room each in Torestin, so Victoria had put them each separately into a nice little room in her house.

“Is it right,” said Jack, “that you got the wind up to-night?”

“No,” said Somers. “At least we only quite lovingly agreed to differ. Nothing else.”

“I thought it would be like that,” said Jack. “He thinks the world of you, I can see that.”

William James stood ready to leave. He looked at Somers cunningly, as if reading into him with his light-grey, sceptical eyes.

“Mr Somers doesn’t care to commit himself so easily,” he said.

“No,” said Jack. “You blighters from the old country are so mighty careful of risking yourselves. That’s what I’m not. When I feel a thing I jump up and go for it, and damn the consequences. There’s always plenty of time to think about a thing after you’ve done it. And then if you’re fool enough to wish you hadn’t done it, why, that shows you _shouldn’t_ have. I don’t go in for regrets, myself. I do what I want. And if I wanted to do a thing, then it’s _all right_ when it’s done. All a man’s got to do is to keep his mouth shut and his fist ready, and go down on his knees to _nothing_. Then he can damn well do as he pleases. And all he asks is that other folks shall do as they please, men or women. Damn all this careful stunt. I’ll step along as far as the tram with you, Jaz, I feel like walking the Welsh rabbit down into his burrow. Vicky prefers Mr Somers to me _pro tem._--and I don’t begrudge it her. Why should I?”

Victoria was putting away the dishes, and seemed not to hear. The two men went. Somers still sat in his chair. He was truly in a devil of a temper, with everybody and everything: a wicked, fiendish mood that made him _look_ quite handsome, as fate would have it. He had heard Jack’s hint. He knew Victoria was attracted to him: that she imagined no nonsense about love, she was too remote from the old world, and too momentary for that. The moment--that was all her feelings were to her. And at this moment she was fascinated, and when she said, in her slightly contralto voice:

“You’re not in a temper with _me_, though, are you Mr Somers?” she was so comely, like a maiden just ready for love, and like a comely, desirous virgin offering herself to the wayfarer, in the name of the god of bright desire, that Somers stretched out his hand and stroked her hot cheek very delicately with the tips of his fingers, replying:

“I could never be angry with you. You’re much too winsome.”

She looked at him with her dark eyes dilated into a glow, a glow of offering. He smiled faintly, rising to his feet, and desire in all his limbs like a power. The moment--and the power of the moment. Again he felt his limbs full of desire, like a power. And his days of anger seemed to culminate now in this moment, like bitter smouldering that at last leaps into flame. Not love--just weapon-like desire. He knew it. The god Bacchus. Iacchos! Iacchos! Bacchanals with weapon hands. She had the sacred glow in her eyes. Bacchus, the true Bacchus. Jack would not begrudge the god. And the fire was very clean and steely, after the smoke. And he felt the velvety fire from her face in his finger-tips.

And still his old stubborn self intervened. He decided almost involuntarily. Perhaps it was fear.

“Good-night,” he said to her. “Jack will be back in a moment. You look bonnie to-night.”

And he went to his room. When he had shut the door, he wondered if it was merely a sort of cowardice. Honour? No need as far as Jack was concerned, apparently. And Harriet? She was too honest a female. She would know that the dishonour, as far as she felt it, lay in the desire, not in the act. For her, too, honour did not consist in a pledged word kept according to pledge, but in a genuine feeling faithfully followed. He had not to reckon with honour here.

What then? Why not follow the flame, the moment sacred to Bacchus? Why not, if it was the way of life? He did not know why not. Perhaps only old moral habit, or fear, as Jack said, of committing himself. Perhaps only that. It was Victoria’s high moment; all her high moments would have this Bacchic, weapon-like momentaneity: since Victoria was Victoria. Why then deny it?

The pagan way, the many gods, the different service, the sacred moments of Bacchus. Other sacred moments: Zeus and Hera, for examples, Ares and Aphrodite, all the great moments of the gods. Why not know them all, all the great moments of the gods, from the major moment with Hera to the swift short moments of Io or Leda or Ganymede? Should not a man know the whole range? And especially the bright, swift, weapon-like Bacchic occasion, should not any man seize it when it offered?

But his heart of hearts was stubbornly puritanical. And his innermost soul was dark and sullen, black with a sort of scorn. These moments bred in the head and born in the eye: he had enough of them. These flashes of desire for a visual object would no longer carry him into action. He had no use for them. There was a downslope into Orcus, and a vast, phallic, sacred darkness, where one was enveloped into the greater god as in an Egyptian darkness. He would meet there or nowhere. To the visual travesty he would lend himself no more.

Pondering and turning recklessly he heard Jack come back. Then he began to doze. He did not sleep well in Australia, it seemed as if the aboriginal daimon entered his body as he slept, to destroy its old constitution. Sleep was almost pain, and too full of dreams. This night he woke almost at once from a vivid little dream. The fact of the soonness troubled him too, for at home he never dreamed till morning.

But the dream had been just this. He was standing in the living-room at Coo-ee, bending forward doing some little thing by the couch, perhaps folding the newspaper, making the room tidy at the last moment before going to bed, when suddenly a violent darkness came over him, he felt his arms pinned, and he heard a man’s voice speaking mockingly behind him, with a laugh. It was as if he saw the man’s face too--a stranger, a rough, strong sort of Australian. And he realised with horror: “Now they have put a sack over my head, and fastened my arms, and I am in the dark, and they are going to steal my little brown handbag from the bedroom, which contains all the money we have.” The shock of intense reality made him fight his way out of the depths of the first sleep, but it was some time before he could really lay hold of facts, like: “I am not at Coo-ee. I am not at Mullumbimby. I am in Sydney at Wyewurk, and the Callcotts are in the next room.” So he came really awake. But if the thing had really happened, it could hardly have happened to him more than in this dream.

In the morning they were returning to the South Coast. But Jack said to Somers, a little sarcastically:

“You aren’t altogether pleased with us, then?”

Somers hesitated before replying:

“I’m not altogether pleased with myself, am I?”

“You don’t have to be so particular, in this life,” said Jack.

“I may have to be.”

“You can’t have it all perfect beforehand, you know. You’ve got to sink a few times before you can swim.”

“Sink in what?”

“Why, it seems to me you want to have a thing all ready in your hand, know all about it, before you’ll try it. And there’s some things you can’t do that with. You’ve just got to flop into them, like when you chuck a dog into water.”

Somers received this rebuke rather sourly. This was the first wintry day they had really had. There was a cold fog in Sydney in the morning, and rain in the fog. In the hills it would be snow--away in the Blue Mountains. But the fog lifted, and the rain held off, and there was a wash of yellowish sunshine.

Harriet of course had to talk to a fellow-passenger in the train, because Lovat was his glummest. It was a red-moustached Welshman with a slightly injured look in his pale blue eyes, as if everything hadn’t been as good to him as he thought it ought, considering his merit. He said his name was Evans, and he kept a store. He had been sixteen years in the country.

“And is it _very_ hot in the summer?” said Harriet. “I suppose it is.”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s very hot. I’ve known the days when I’ve had to lie down at two o’clock in the afternoon, and not been able to move. Overpowered, that’s what it is, overpowered.”

Harriet was suitably impressed, having tried heat in India.

“And do you think it takes one long to get used to this country?” she asked after a while.

“Well, I should say it takes about four or five years for your blood properly to thin down. You can’t say you’ve begun, under two years.”

“Four or five years!” re-echoed Harriet. But what she was really turning over in her mind was this phrase: “For your blood to thin down.” To thin down! how queer! Lovat also heard the sentence, and realised that his blood took this thinning very badly, and still about four years of simmering ahead, apparently, if he stayed in this country. And when the blood had finished its thinning, what then? He looked at Mr Evans, with the sharp pale nose and the reddish hair and the injured look in his pale-blue eyes. Mr Evans seemed to find it sweet still to talk to people from the “old country.” “You’re from the old country?”--the inevitable question. The thinning down had left him looking as if he felt he lacked something. Yet he wouldn’t go back to South Wales. Oh no, he wouldn’t go back.

“The blood is thinner out here than in the old country.” The Australians seemed to accept this as a scientific fact. Richard felt he didn’t want his blood thinned down to the Australian constituency. Yet no doubt in the night, in his sleep, the metabolic change was taking place fast and furious.

It was raining a little in the late afternoon when Somers and Harriet got back to Coo-ee. With infinite relief she stepped across her own threshold.

“Ah!” she said, taking a long breath. “Thank God to be back.” She looked round, and went to rearrange on the sofa the cushions that they had whacked so hard to get the dust out.

Somers went to the edge of the grass to be near the sea. It was raving in long, rasping lines of hissing breakers--not very high ones, but very long. The sky hung grey, with veils of dark rain out to sea, and in the south a blackness of much rain blowing nearer in the wind. At the end of the jetty, in the mist of the sea-wind’s spray, a long, heavy coal-steamer was slowly toiling to cast loose and get away. The waves were so long and the current so strong, they would hardly let her turn and get clear of the misty-black jetty.

Under the dark-grey sky the sea looked bright, but coldly bright, with its yellow-green waves and its ramparts of white foam. There were usually three white ramparts, one behind the other, of rasping surf: and sometimes four. Then the long swish and surge of the shoreward wash. The coast was quite deserted: the steep sand wet as the backwash slid away: the rocks wet with rain: the low, long black steamer still laboured in the fume of the wind, indistinctly.

Somers turned indoors, and suddenly began taking off his clothes. In a minute he was running naked in the rain which fell with lovely freshness on his skin. Ah, he felt so stuffy after that sort of emotional heat in town. Harriet in amazement saw him whitely disappearing over the edge of the low cliff-bank, and came to the edge to look.

He ran quickly over the sands, where the wind blew cold but velvety, and the raindrops fell loosely. He walked straight into the fore-wash, and fell into an advancing ripple. At least it looked a ripple, but was enough to roll him over so that he went under and got a little taste of the Pacific. Ah, the fresh cold wetness!--the fresh cold wetness! The water rushed in the back-wash and the sand melted under him, leaving him stranded like a fish. He turned again to the water. The walls of surf were some distance off, but near enough to look rather awful as they raced in high white walls shattering towards him. And above the ridge of the raving whiteness the dimness of the labouring steamer, as if it were perched on a bough.

Of course he did not go near the surf. No, the last green ripples of the broken swell were enough to catch him by the scruff of the neck and tumble him rudely up the beach, in a pell-mell. But even the blow did one good, as the sea struck one heavily on the back, if one were fleeing; full on the chest, if one were advancing.

It was raining quite heavily as he walked out, and the skies hung low over the sea, dark over the green and white vigour of the ocean. The shore was so foam-white it almost suggested sun. The rain felt almost warm.

Harriet came walking across the grass with a towel.

“What a good idea!” she said. “If I’d known I’d have come. I wish I had.”

But he ignored the towel, and went into the little wash-place and under the shower, to wash off the sticky, strong Pacific. Harriet came along with the towel, and he put his hand to her face and nodded to her. She knew what he meant, and went wondering, and when he had rubbed the wet off himself he came to her.

To the end she was more wondering than anything. But when it was the end, and the night was falling outside, she laughed and said to him:

“That was done in style. That was _chic_. Straight from the sea, like another creature.”

Style and _chic_ seemed to him somewhat ill suited to the occasion, but he brought her a bowl of warm water and went and made the tea. The wind was getting noisier, and the sea was shut out but still calling outside the house. They had tea and toast and quince jam, and one of the seven brown teapots with a bit off the spout shone quite nicely and brightly at a corner of the little red-and-white check tea-cloth, which itself occupied a corner of the big, polished jarrah table. But, thank God, he felt cool and fresh and detached, not cosy and domestic. He was so thankful not to be feeling cosy and “homely.” The room felt as penetrable to the outside influence as if it were a seashell lying on the beach, cool with the freshness and insistence of the sea, not a snug, cosy box to be secured inside.

And Jack Callcott’s rebuke stuck in his throat. Perhaps after all he was just a Pommy, prescribing things with overmuch emphasis, and wanting to feel God-Almighty in the face of unborn events. A Pommy is a newcomer in Australia, from the Old Country.

Teacher: Why did you hit him, Georgie?

Georgie: Please, miss, he called me a Pommy.

Aussie (with a discoloured eye): Well, you’re one, ain’cher? Can I help it that ch’are one?

Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country. Furthermore, immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood “thins down,” by their round and ruddy cheeks. So we are told. Hence again, pomegranate, and hence Pommy. Let etymologists be appeased: it is the authorised derivation.

Perhaps, said Somers to himself, I am just a Pommy and a fool. If my blood had thinned down, I shouldn’t make all this fuss over sharing in with Kangaroo or being mates with Jack Callcott. If I am not a ruddy Pommy, I am a green one. Of course they take the thing as it comes to them, and they expect me to do the same. Yet there I am hopping and hissing like a fish in a frying-pan. Putting too much “soul” into it. Far too much. When your blood has thinned down, out here, there’s nothing but the merest sediment of a soul left, and your wits and your feelings are clear of it. You take things as they come, as Jack says. Isn’t that the sanest way to take them, instead of trying to drive them through the exact hole in the hedge that you’ve managed to poke your head through? Oh, you unlearn a lot as your blood thins down. But there’s an awful lot to be unlearnt. And when you’ve unlearnt it, you never say so. In the first place, because it’s dead against the sane old British tradition. And in the second place, because you don’t really care about telling what you feel, once your blood has thinned down and is clear of soul.

“Thin, you Australian burgundy,” said Somers to his own body, when he caught a glimpse of it unawares, reflected in the glass as he was going to bed. “You’re thin enough as a bottle, but the wine needs a lot of maturing. I’ve made a fool of myself latterly.”

Yet he said to himself: “Do I want my blood to thin down like theirs?--that peculiar emptiness that is in them, because of the thinning that’s gone out of them? Do I want this curious transparent blood of the antipodes, with its momentaneous feelings, and its sort of _absentness_? But of course till my blood has thinned down I shan’t see with their eyes. And how in the name of heaven is this world-brotherhood mankind going to see with one eye, eye to eye, when the very blood is of different thickness on different continents, and with the difference in blood, the inevitable psychic difference? Different vision!”

CHAP: VIII. VOLCANIC EVIDENCE

Richard Lovat Somers registered a new vow: not to take things with too overwhelming an amount of emotional seriousness, but to accept everything that came along with a certain _sang froid_, and not to sit frenziedly in judgment before he had heard the case. He had come to the end of his own tether, so why should he go off into tantrums if other folks strayed about with the broken bits of their tethers trailing from their ankles. Is it better to be savagely tugging at the end of your rope, or to wander at random tetherless? Matter of choice!

But the day of the absolute is over, and we’re in for the strange gods once more. “But when you get to the end of your tether you’ve nothing to do but die”--so sings an out-of-date vulgar song. But is it so? Why not all? When you come to the end of your tether you break the rope. When you come to the end of the lane you straggle on into the bush and beat about till you find a new way through, and no matter if you raise vipers or goannas or wallabies, or even only a stink. And if you see a man beating about for a new track you don’t immediately shout, “Perverted wretch!” or “Villain!” or “Vicious creature!” or even merely “The fool,” or mildly: “Poor dear!” You have to let him try. Anything is better than stewing in your own juice, or grinding at the end of your tether, or tread-milling away at a career. Better a “wicked creature” any day, than a mechanical tread-miller of a careerist. Better anything on earth than the millions of human ants.

In this way Mr Somers had to take himself to task, for his Pommy stupidity and his pommigrant superiority, and kick himself rather severely, looking at the ends of the tether he presumed he had just broken. Why should people who are tethered to a post be so God-Almighty puffed up about their posts? It seems queer. Yet there they are, going round and round at the ends of their tethers, and being immensely sniffy about the people who stray loose trailing the broken end of their old rope, and looking for a new way through the bush. Yet so men are. They will set up inquisitions and every manner of torture chamber to _compel_ people to refrain from breaking their tethers. But once man has broken any old particular hobble-line, not God Himself can safely knot it together again.

Somers now left off standing on his head in front of the word love, and looking at it calmly, decided he didn’t care vastly either way. Harriet had on her dressing-table tray a painted wooden heart, painted red with dots round it, a Black Forest trifle which she had bought in Baden-Baden for a penny. On it was the motto:

“Dem Mutigen gehört die Welt.”

That was the motto to have on one’s red heart: not Love or Hope or any of those aspiring emotions: “The world belongs to the courageous.” To be sure, it was a rather two-edged motto just now for Germany. And Somers was not quite sure that it was the “world” that he wanted.

Yes, it was. Not the tuppenny social world of present mankind: but the genuine world, full of life and eternal creative surprises, including of course destructive surprises: since destruction is part of creation. Somers did want the world. He did want to take it away from all the teeming human ants, human slaves, and all the successful, empty careerists. He wanted little that the present society can give. But the lovely other world that is in spite of the social man of to-day: that he wanted, to clear it, to free it. Freedom! Not for this subnormal slavish humanity of democratic antics. But for the world itself, and the _Mutigen_.

_Mut!_ _Muth!_ A good word. Better even than _courage_. Virtue, _virtus_, manliness. _Mut_--manliness. Not braggadaccio or insolence. _De l’audace, et de l’audace, et encore de l’audace!_ Danton’s word. But it was more than daring. It was _Mut_, profound manliness, that is not afraid of anything except of being cowardly or barren.

“Dem Mutigen gehört die Welt.”
“To the manly brave belongs the world.”

Somers wrote to Kangaroo, and enclosed the red wooden heart, which had a little loop of ribbon so that it could be hung on the wall.

“Dear Kangaroo--I send you my red heart (never mind that it is wood, the wood once lived and was the tree of life) with its motto. I hope you will accept it, after all my annoying behaviour. It is not the love, but the _Mut_ that I believe in, and join you in. Love may be an ingredient in _Muth_, so you have it all your own way. Anyhow, I send you my red motto-heart, and if you don’t want it you can send it back--I will be your follower, in reverence for your virtue--_Virtus_. And you may command me.”

The following day came the answer, in Kangaroo’s difficult scrawl:

“Dear Lovat--Love is in your name, notwithstanding. I accept the red heart gladly, and when I win, I will wear it for my Order of Merit, pinned on my swelling chest.

“But you are the one person in the world I can never command. I knew it would be so. Yet I am unspeakably glad to have your approval, and perhaps your allegiance.

“Come and see me as soon as it is your wish to do so: I won’t invite you, lest worse befall me. For you are either a terrible disappointment to me, or a great blessing in store. I wait for you.”

Somers also wrote to Jack, to ask him to come down with Victoria for the week-end. But Jack replied that he couldn’t get away this week-end, there was so much doing. Somers then invited him for the following one.

The newspapers were at this time full of the pending strike of coal-miners and shearers: that is, the Australian papers. The European papers were in a terrific stew about finance, and the German debt, and the more imposing Allied debt to America. Bolshevism, Communism, Labour, had all sunk into a sort of insignificance. The voice of mankind was against them for the time being, not now in hate and fear, as previously, but in a kind of bitter contempt: the kind of feeling one has when one has accepted a glib individual as a serious and remarkable man, only to find that he is a stupid vulgarian. Communism was a bubble that would never even float free and iridescent from the nasty pipe of the theorist.

What then? Nothing evident. There came dreary and fatuous letters from friends in England, refined young men of the upper middle-class writing with a guarded kind of friendliness, gentle and sweet, of course, but as dozy as ripe pears in their _laisser aller_ heaviness. That was what it amounted to: they were over-ripe, they had been in the sun of prosperity too long, and all their tissues were soft and sweetish. How could they react with any sharpness to any appeal on earth? They wanted just to hang against the warmest wall they could find, as long as ever they could, till some last wind of death or disturbance shook them down into earth, mushy and over-ripe. A sardonic letter from a Jewish friend in London, amusing but a bit dreadful. Letters from women in London, friendly but irritable. “I have decided I am a comfort-loving conventional person, with just a dash of the other thing to keep me fidgetty”--then accounts of buying old furniture, and gossip about everybody: “Verden Grenfel in a restaurant with _two_ bottles of champagne, so he must be affluent just now.” A girl taking her honeymoon trip to Naples by one of the Orient boats, third class: “There are 800 people on board, but room for another 400, so that on account of the missing 400 we have a six-berth cabin to ourselves. It is a bit noisy and not luxurious, but clean and comfortable, and you can imagine what it is to me, to be on the glorious sea, and to go ashore at wonderful Gibraltar, and to see the blue hills of Spain in the distance. Frederick is struggling with a mass of Italian irregular verbs at the moment.” And in spite of all Somers’ love of the Mediterranean, the thought of sitting on a third class deck with eight hundred emigrants, including babies, made him almost sick. “The glorious sea--wonderful Gibraltar.” It takes quite a good eyesight even to _see_ the sea from the deck of a liner, let alone out of the piled mass of humanity on the third-class deck. A letter from Germany, about a wedding and a pending journey into Austria and friends, written with a touch of philosophy that comes to a man when he’s fallen down and bumped himself, and strokes the bruise. A cheque for fifteen pounds seventeen shillings and fourpence, from a publisher: “Kindly acknowledge.” A letter from a farming friend who had changed places: “A Major Ashworth has got the farm, and has spent about £600 putting it into order. He has started as a poultry-farm, but has had bad luck in losing 400 chicks straight away, with the cold weather. I hope our spell of bad luck doesn’t still hang over the place. I wish you would come back to England for the summer. Viv. talks of getting a caravan, and then we might get two. Cold and wet weather for weeks. All work and no play, not good enough.” A letter from Paris, artist friends: “I have sold one of the three pictures that are in the last Salon.” A letter from Somers’ sister: “Louis has been looking round everywhere to buy a little farm, but there doesn’t seem to be a bit of land to be got anywhere. What do you think of our coming to Australia? I wish you would look for something for us, for we are terribly fed up with this place, nothing doing at all.” A letter from Sicily: “I have had my father and stepmother over from New York. I had got them rooms here, but when I said so, the face of Anna, my stepmother, was a sight. She took me aside and told me that father was spoiling the trip entirely by his economies, and that she had set her heart on the Villa Igeia. Then Dad took me aside and said that he didn’t wish to be reckless, but he didn’t want to thwart Anna’s wishes entirely, and was there nothing in the way of compromise? It ended by their staying two days here, and Anna said she thought it was very nice _for me_. Then they went to the Palmes, which is entirely up to Anna’s ideas of luxury, and she is delighted.”

Somers had fourteen letters by this mail. He read them with a sort of loathing, one after the other, piling them up on his left hand for Harriet, and throwing the envelopes in the fire. By the time he had done he wished that every mail-boat would go down that was bringing any letter to him, that a flood would rise and cover Europe entirely, that he could have a little operation performed that would remove from him for ever his memory of Europe and everything in it--and so on. Then he went out and looked at the Pacific. He hadn’t even the heart to bathe, and he felt so trite, with all those letters; he felt quite capable of saying “Good dog” to the sea: to quote one of the quips from the _Bulletin_. The sea that had been so full of potency, before the postman rode up on his pony and whistled with his policeman’s whistle for Somers to come to the gate for that mass of letters. Never had Richard Lovat Somers felt so filled with spite against everybody he had ever known in the old life, as now.

“And there was I, knave, fool, and ninny, whining to go back to Europe, and abusing Australia for not being like it. That horrible, horrible staleness of Europe, and all their trite consciousness, and their dreariness. The dreariness! The sterility of their feelings! And here was I carping at Kangaroo and at Jack Callcott, who are golden wonders compared with anything I have known in the old world. Australia has got some real, positive indifference to ‘questions,’ but Europe is one big wriggling question and nothing else. A tangle of quibbles. I’d rather be shot here next week, than quibble the rest of my life away in over-upholstered Europe.”

He left off kicking himself, and went down to the shore to get away from himself. After all, he knew the endless water would soon make him forget. It had a language which spoke utterly without concern of him, and this utter unconcern gradually soothed him of himself and his world. He began to forget.

There had been a squall in the night. At the tip of the rock-shelves above the waves men and youths, with bare, reddish legs, were fishing with lines for blackfish. They looked like animal creatures perching there, and like creatures they were passive or darting in their movements. A big albatross swung slowly down the surf: albatross or mollyhawk, with wide, waving wings.

The sea had thrown up, all along the surf-line, queer glittery creatures that looked like thin blown glass. They were bright transparent bladders of the most delicate ink-blue, with a long crest of deeper blue, and blind ends of translucent purple. And they had bunches of blue, blue strings, and one long blue string that trailed almost a yard across the sand, straight and blue and translucent. They must have been some sort of little octopus, with the bright glass bladder, big as smallish narrow pears, with a blue frill along the top to float them, and the strings to feel with--and perhaps the long string to anchor by. Who knows? Yet there they were, soft, brilliant, like pouches of frailest sea-glass. It reminded Somers of the glass they blow at Burano, at Venice. But there they never get the lovely soft texture and the colour.

The sky was tufted with cloud, and in the afternoon veils of rain swept here and there across the sea, in a changing wind. But then it cleared again, and Somers and Harriet walked along the sands, watching the blue sky mirror purple and the white clouds mirror warm on the wet sand. The sea talked and talked all the time, in its disintegrative, elemental language. And at last it talked its way into Somers’ soul, and he forgot the world again, the babel. The simplicity came back, and with it the inward peace. The world had left him again. He had been thinking, in his anger of the morning, that he would get Jack to teach him to shoot with a rifle and a revolver, so that he might take his part. He had never shot with a gun in his life, so he had thought it was high time to begin. But now he went back on his thoughts. What did he want with guns or revolvers? Nothing. He had nothing to do with them, as he had nothing to do with so much that is in the world of man. When he was truly himself he had a quiet stillness in his soul, an inward trust. Faith, undefined and undefinable. Then he was at peace with himself. Not content, but peace like a river, something flowing and full. A stillness at the very core.

But faith in what? In himself, in mankind, in the destiny of mankind? No, no. In Providence, in Almighty God? No, not even that. He tried to think of the dark God he declared he served. But he didn’t want to. He shrank away from the effort. The fair morning seaward world, full of bubbles of life.

So again came back to him the ever-recurring warning that _some_ men must of their own choice and will listen only to the living life that is a rising tide in their own being, and listen, listen, listen for the injunctions, and give heed and know and speak and obey all they can. Some men must live by this unremitting inwardness, no matter what the rest of the world does. They must not let the rush of the world’s “outwardness” sweep them away: or if they are swept away, they must struggle back. Somers realised that he had had a fright against being swept away, because he half wanted to be swept away: but that now, thank God, he was flowing back. Not like the poor, weird “ink-bubbles,” left high and dry on the sands.

Now he could remember the frenzied outward rushing of the vast masses of people, away from themselves, without being driven mad by it. But it seemed strange to him that they should rush like this in their vast herds, outwards, outwards, always frenziedly outwards, like souls with hydrophobia rushing away from the pool of water. He himself, when he was caught up in the rush, felt tortured and maddened, it was an agony of irritation to him till he could feel himself drifting back again like a creature into the sea. The sea of his own inward soul, his own unconscious faith, over which his will had no exercise. Why did the mass of people not want this stillness and this peace with their own being? Why did they want cinemas and excitements? Excitements are as nauseous as sea-sickness. Why does the world want them?