Chapter XVIII: Adieu Australia 383 (8)

It is their problem. They must go their way. But some men, some women must stay by their own inmost being, in peace, and without envy. And there in the stillness listen, listen, and try to know, and try to obey. From the innermost, not from the outside. It is so lovely, the peace. But poor dear Richard, he was only resting and basking in the old sunshine just now, after his fray. The fight would come again, and only in the fight would his soul burn its way once more to the knowledge, the intense knowledge of his “dark god.” The other was so much sweeter and easier, while it lasted.

At tea-time it began to rain again. Somers sat on the verandah looking at the dark green sea, with its films of floating yellow light between the ruffled waves. Far back, in the east, was a cloud that was a rainbow. It was a piece of rainbow, but not sharp, in a band; it was a tall fume far back among the clouds of the sea-wall.

“Who is there that you feel you are with, besides me--or who feel themselves with you?” Harriet was asking. “No one,” he replied. And at the same moment he looked up and saw the rainbow fume beyond the sea. But it was on a dark background, like a coloured darkness. The rainbow was always a symbol to him--a good symbol: of this peace. A pledge of unbroken faith, between the universe and the innermost. And the very moment he said “No one,” he saw the rainbow for an answer.

Many times in his life he had seen a rainbow. The last had been on his arrival in Sydney. For some reason he felt absolutely wretched and dismal on that Saturday morning when the ship came into Sydney harbour. He had an unspeakable desire not to get out of the ship, not to go down on to the quay and into that town. The having to do it was a violation of himself. When he came on deck after breakfast and the ship had stopped, it was pouring with rain, the P. and O. wharf looked black and dismal, empty. It might almost have been an abandoned city. He walked round to the starboard side, to look towards the unimposing hillock of the city and the Circular Quay. Black, all black and unutterably dismal in the pouring rain, even the green grass of the Botanical Gardens, and the bits of battlement of the Conservatorium. Unspeakably forlorn. Yet over it all, spanning the harbour, the most magnificent great rainbow. His mood was so miserable he didn’t want to see it. But it was unavoidable. A huge, brilliant, supernatural rainbow, spanning all Sydney.

He was thinking of this, and still watching the dark-green, yellow-reflecting sea, that was like a northern sea, a Whitby sea, and watching the far-off fume of a dark rainbow apparition, when Harriet heard somebody at the door. It was William James, who had an hour to wait for his train, and thought they wouldn’t mind if he looked in. They were pleased, and Harriet brought him a cup and plate.

Thank goodness he, too, came in a certain stillness of spirit, saying very little, but being a quiet, grateful presence. When the tea was finished he and Somers sat back on the verandah out of the wind, and watched the yellow, cloudy evening sink. They hardly spoke, but lay lying back in the deck-chairs.

“I was wondering,” said Somers, “whom Kangaroo depends on mostly for his following.”

William James looked back at him, with quiet, steady eyes.

“On the diggers--the returned soldiers chiefly: and the sailors.”

“Of what class?”

“Of any class. But there aren’t many rich ones. Mostly like me and Jack, not quite simple working men. A few doctors and architects and that sort.”

“And do you think it means much to them?”

Jaz shifted his thick body uneasily in his chair.

“You never can tell,” he said.

“That’s true,” said Somers. “I don’t really know how much Jack Callcott cares. I really can’t make out.”

“He cares as much as about anything,” said Jaz. “Perhaps a bit more. It’s more exciting.”

“Do you think it _is_ the excitement they care about chiefly?”

“I should say so. You can die in Australia if you don’t get a bit of excitement.” There was silence for a minute or two.

“In my opinion,” said Somers, “it has to go deeper than excitement.” Again Jaz shifted uneasily in his chair.

“Oh, well--they don’t set much store on deepness over here. It’s easy come, easy go, as a rule. Yet they’re staunch chaps while the job lasts, you know. They are true to their mates, as a rule.”

“I believe they are. It’s the afterwards.”

“Oh, well--afterwards is afterwards, as Jack always says.” Again the two men were silent.

“If they cared deeply--” Somers began slowly--but he did not continue, it seemed fatuous. Jaz did not answer for some time.

“You see, it hasn’t come to that with them,” he said. “It might, perhaps, once they’d actually done the thing. It might come home to them then; they might _have_ to care. It might be a force-put. _Then_ they’d need a man.”

“They’ve got Kangaroo,” said Somers.

“You think Kangaroo would get them over the fence?” said Jaz carefully, looking up at Somers.

“He seems as if he would. He’s a wonderful person. And there seems no alternative to him.”

“Oh yes, he’s a wonderful person. Perhaps a bit too much of a wonder. A hatchet doesn’t look anything like so spanking as a lawn-mower, does it now, but it’ll make a sight bigger clearing.”

“That’s true,” said Somers, laughing. “But Kangaroo isn’t a lawn-mower.”

“Oh, I don’t say so,” smiled Jaz, fidgetting on his chair. “I should like to hear your rock-bottom opinion of him though.”

“I should like to hear yours,” said Somers. “You know him much better than I do. I haven’t got a rock-bottom opinion of him yet.”

“It’s not a matter of the time you’ve known him,” said Jaz. He was manifestly hedging, and trying to get at something. “You know I belong to his gang, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Somers, wondering at the word ‘gang.’

“And for that reason I oughtn’t to criticise him, ought I?”

Somers reflected for some moments.

“There’s no oughts, if you _feel_ critical,” he answered.

“I think you feel critical of him yourself at times,” said Jaz, looking up with a slow, subtle smile of cunning: like a woman’s disconcerting intuitive knowledge. It laid Somers’ soul bare for the moment. He reflected. He had pledged no allegiance to Kangaroo.

“Yet,” he said aloud to Jaz, “if I _had_ joined him I wouldn’t want to hinder him.”

“No, we don’t want to hinder him. But we need to know where we are. Supposing you were in my position--and you _didn’t_ feel sure of things! A man has to look things in the face. You yourself, now--you’re holding back, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am,” said Richard. “But then I hold back from everything.”

Jaz looked at him searchingly.

“You don’t like to commit yourself?” he said, with a sly smile.

“Not altogether that. I’d commit myself, if I could. It’s just something inside me shakes its head and holds back.”

Jaz studied his knuckles for some time.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “Perhaps you can afford to stand out. You’ve got your life in other things. Some of us feel we haven’t got any life if we’re not--if we’re not mixed up in something.” He paused, and Richard waited. “But the point is this--” Jaz looked up again with his light-grey, serpent’s eyes. “Do you yourself see Kangaroo pulling it off?” There was a subtle mockery in the question.

“What?”

“Why--you know. This revolution, and this new Australia. Do you see him figuring on the Australian postage stamps--and running the country like a new Jerusalem?”

The eyes watched Richard fixedly.

“If he’s got a proper backing, why not?” Somers answered.

“I don’t say why not. I ask you, _will he_? Won’t you say how you feel?”

Richard sat quite still, not even thinking, but suspending himself. And in the suspense his heart went sad, oh so empty, inside him. He looked at Jaz, and the two men read the meaning in each other’s eyes.

“You think he won’t?” said Jaz, triumphing.

“No, I think he won’t,” said Richard.

“There now. I knew you felt like that.”

“And yet,” said Richard, “if men were men still--if they had any of that belief in love they pretend to have--if they were _fit_ to follow Kangaroo,” he added fiercely, feeling grief in his heart.

Jaz dropped his head and studied his knuckles, a queer, blank smile setting round his mouth.

“You have to take things as they are,” he said in a small voice.

Richard sat silent, his heart for the moment broken again.

“And,” added Jaz, looking up with a slow, subtle smile, “if men aren’t what Kangaroo wants them to be, why should they be? If they don’t want a new Jerusalem, why should they have it? It’s another catch. They like to hear Kangaroo’s sweet talk--and they’ll probably follow him if he’ll bring off a good big row, and they think he can make it all pretty afterwards.” Again he smiled, but bitterly, mockingly. “I don’t know why I say these things to you, I’m sure. But it’s as well for a man to get to the bottom of what he thinks, isn’t it? And I feel, you know, that you and me think alike, if we allow ourselves to think.”

Richard looked at him, but never answered. He felt somehow treacherous.

“Kangaroo’s clever,” resumed Jaz. “He’s a Jew, and he’s damn clever. Maybe he’s the cleverest. I’ll tell you why. You’re not offended now at what I say, are you?”

“What’s the good of being offended by anything, if it’s a genuine opinion.”

“Well now, that’s what I mean. And I say Kangaroo is cleverer than the Red people, because he can make it look as if it would be all rosy afterwards, you know, everything as good as apple pie. I tell you what. All these Reds and I.W.W.’s and all, why don’t they make their revolution? Because they’re frightened of it when they’ve made it. They’re not frightened of hanging all the capitalists and such. But they’re frightened to death of having to keep things going afterwards. They’re frightened to death.” Jaz smiled to himself with a chuckle. “Nothing frightens them so much as the thought of having to look after things when their revolution is made. It frightens them to death. And that’s why they won’t make their grand revolution. Never. Unless somebody shoves them into it. That’s why they’ve got this new cry: Make the revolution by degrees, through winning in politics. But that’s no revolution, you know. It’s the same old thing with a bit of difference, such a small bit of difference that you’d never notice it if you weren’t made to.”

“I think that’s true,” said Richard. “Nobody’s more frightened of a Red revolution than the Reds themselves. They just absolutely funk it.”

“There now--that’s the word--they funk it. Yet, you know, they’re all ready for it. And if you got them started, if you could, they’d make a clearance, like they did in Russia. And we could do with that, don’t you think?”

“I do,” said Richard, sighing savagely.

“Well now, my idea’s this. Couldn’t we get Kangaroo to join the Reds--the I.W.W.’s and all? Couldn’t we get him to use all his men to back Red Labour in this country, and blow a cleavage through the old system. Because, you know he’s got the trump cards in his hands. These Diggers’ Clubs, they’ve got all the army men, dying for another scrap. And then a sort of secret organisation has ten times the hold over men than just a Labour Party, or a Trades Union. He’s damned clever, he’s got a wonderful scheme ready. But he’ll spoil it, because he’ll want it all to happen without hurting anybody. Won’t he now?”

“Except a very few.”

“Oh yes--maybe four of his enemies. But he wants to blow the house up without breaking the windows. He thinks he can turn the country upside-down without spilling milk, let alone blood. Now the Reds, let them loose, would make a hole in things. Only they’ll never move on their own responsibility. They haven’t got the guts, the stomach, the backbone.”

“You’re so clever, Jaz. I wonder you’re not a leader yourself.”

“Me?” A slow ironical smile wreathed his face. “You’re being sarcastic with me, Mr Somers.”

“Not at all. I think you’re amazing.”

Jaz only smiled sceptically still.

“You take what I mean, though, do you?”

“I do.”

“And what do you think of it?”

“Very clever.”

“But isn’t it feasible? You get Kangaroo, with his Diggers--the cleverest idea in the country, really--to quietly come in with the Reds, and explode a revolution over here. You could soon do it, in the cities: and the country couldn’t help itself. You let the Reds appear in the front, and take all the shine. You keep a bit of a brake on them. You let them call a Soviet, or whatever they want, and get into a real mess over it. And then Kangaroo steps in with the balm of Gilead and the New Jerusalem. But let them play Old Tommy Jenkins first with Capital and State Industries and the free press and religious sects. And then Kangaroo steps in like a redeeming angel, and reminds us that it’s God’s Own Country, so we’re God’s Own People, and makes us feel good again. Like Solomon, when David has done the dirty work.”

“The only point,” said Somers smiling, “is that an Australian Lenin and an Australian Trotsky might pop up in the scrimmage, and then Kangaroo could take to the bush again.”

Jaz shook his head.

“They wouldn’t,” he said. “There’s nobody with any grip. And you’d see, in this country, people would soon want to be good again, because it costs them least effort.”

“Perhaps Kangaroo is right, and they don’t want to be anything _but_ good.”

Jaz shook his head.

“It’s not goodness they’re after just now,” he said. “They want to rip things up, or they want nothing. They aren’t ready to come under Kangaroo’s loving wing just yet. They’d as leave be under King George’s thumb, they can peep out easier. It seems to me, it’s _spite_ that’s at the bottom, with most men. And they’ve got to let it out before anything’s any good.”

Somers began to feel tired now.

“But after all, Jaz,” he said, “what have I got to do with it?”

“You can put it to Kangaroo. You can make him see it. And you can keep him to it, if you promise him you’ll stick to him.”

“Me a power behind the throne?” protested the truly sceptical Richard.

“I take it you don’t want to sit on the throne yourself,” smiled Jaz. “And Kangaroo’s got more the figure. But what do you think of it?”

Somers was silent. He now was smiling subtly and ironically, and Jaz was watching him sharply, like a man who wants something. Jaz waited.

“I’m afraid, Jaz,” said Somers, “that, like Nietzsche, I no longer believe in great events. The war was a great event--and it made everything more pretty. I doubt if I care about the mass of mankind, Jaz. You make them more than ever distasteful to me.”

“Oh, you know, you needn’t commit yourself. You’ve only to be friendly with Kangaroo, and work him into it. You know you said yourself you’d give anything to have a clearance made, in the world.”

“I know. Sometimes I feel I’d give anything, soul and body, for a smash up in this social-industrial world we’re in. And I would. And then when I realise people--just people--the same people after it as before--why, Jaz, then I don’t care any more, and feel it’s time to turn to the gods.”

“You feel there’s any gods to turn to, do you?” asked Jaz, with the sarcasm of disappointment.

“I feel it would probably be like Messina before and after the earthquake. Before the earthquake it was what is called a fine town, but commercial, low, and hateful. You felt you’d be glad if it was wiped out. After the earthquake it was horrible heaps of mortar and rubble, and now it’s rows and rows of wood and tin shanties, streets of them, and more commercial, lower than ever, and infinitely more ugly. That would probably be the world after your revolution. No, Jaz, I leave mankind to its own contrivances, and turn to the gods.”

“But you’ll say a word to Kangaroo?” said Jaz, persistent.

“Yes, if I feel like it,” said Richard.

Darkness had almost fallen, and Somers shivered as he rose to go indoors.

Next morning, when Somers had made the coffee, he and Harriet sat on the loggia at breakfast. It had rained in the night, and the sea was whitish, sluggish, with soft, furry waves that had no plunge. The last thin flush of foam behaved queerly, running along with a straight, swift splash, just as when a steel rope rips out of water, as a tug hauls suddenly, jerking up a white splash that runs along its length.

“What had William James so much to say about?” asked Harriet, on the warpath.

“Why don’t you have the strength of mind not to ask?” he replied. “You know it’s better you left it alone: that I’m not supposed to blab.”

She gave him one fierce look, then went pale with anger. She was silent for some time. Then she burst out:

“Pah, as if I cared to know! What is all their revolution bosh to me! There have been revolutions enough, in my opinion, and each one more foolish than the last. And this will be the most foolish of the lot. And what have _you_ got to do with revolutions, you petty and conceited creature? You and revolutions! You’re not big enough, not grateful enough to do anything real. I give you my energy and my life, and you want to put me aside as if I was a charwoman. Acknowledge _me_ first, before you can be any good.” With which she swallowed her coffee and rose from the table.

He finished too, and got up to carry in the cups and do the few chores that remained for his share. He always got up in the morning, made the fire, swept the room, and tidied roughly. Then he brought in coal and wood, made the breakfast, and did any little out-door job. After breakfast he helped to wash up, and settled the fire. Then he considered himself free to his own devices. Harriet could see to the rest.

His devices were not very many. He tried to write, that being his job. But usually, nowadays, when he tapped his unconscious, he found himself in a seethe of steady fury, general rage. He didn’t hate anybody in particular, nor even any class or body of men. He loathed politicians, and the well-bred darling young men of the well-to-do middle classes made his bile stir. But he didn’t fret himself about them specially. The off-hand self-assertive working people of Australia made him feel diabolic on their score sometimes. But as a rule the particulars were not in evidence, all the rocks were submerged, and his bile just swirled diabolically for no particular reason at all. He just felt generally diabolical, and tried merely to keep enough good sense not to turn his temper in any particular direction.

“You think that nothing but goodness and virtue and wonderfulness comes out of you,” was one of Harriet’s accusations against him. “You don’t know how small and mean and ugly you are to other people.”

“Which means I am small and ugly and mean in her eyes,” he thought to himself. “All because of this precious gratitude which I am supposed to feel towards her, I suppose. Damn her and her gratitude. When she thwarts me and puts me in a temper I _don’t_ feel anything but spite. Damn her impudent gratitude.”

But Harriet was not going to be ignored: no, she was not. She was not going to sink herself to the level of a convenience. She didn’t really want protestations of gratitude or love. They only puzzled her and confused her. But she wanted him _inwardly_ to keep a connection with her. Silently, he must maintain the flow between him and her, and safeguard it carefully. It is a thing which a man cannot do with his head: it isn’t _remembering_. And it is a thing which a woman cannot explain or understand, because it is quite irrational. But it is one of the deepest realities in life. When a man and woman truly come together, when there is a marriage, then an unconscious, vital connection is established between them, like a throbbing blood-circuit. A man may forget a woman entirely with his head, and fling himself with energy and fervour into whatever job he is tackling, and all is well, all is good, if he does not break that inner vital connection which is the mystery of marriage. But let him once get out of unison, out of conjunction, let him inwardly break loose and come apart, let him fall into that worst of male vices, the vice of abstraction and mechanisation, and have a concert of working _alone_ and of himself, then he commits the breach. He hurts the woman and he hurts himself, though neither may know why. The greatest hero that ever existed was heroic only whilst he kept the throbbing inner union with something, God, or Fatherland, or woman. The most immediate is woman, the wife. But the most grovelling wife-worshippers are the foulest of traitors and renegades to the inner unison. A man must strive onward, but from the root of marriage, marriage with God, with wife, with mankind. Like a tree that is rooted, always growing and flowering away from its root, so is a vitally active man. But let him take some false direction, and there is torture through the whole organism, roots and all. The woman suffers blindly from the man’s mistaken direction, and reacts blindly.

Now in this revolution stunt, and his insistence on “male” activity, Somers had upturned the root flow, and Harriet was a devil to him--quite rightly--for he knew that inside himself he was devilish. She tried to keep her kindness and happiness. But no, it was false when the inner connection was betrayed. So her silent rage accumulated, and it was no good playing mental tricks of suppression with it. As for him, he was forced to recognise the devil in his own belly. He just felt devilish. While Harriet went about trying to be fair and happy, he realised that it was awful for him to be there, as black inside as an ink-bottle; however, he practised being nice. Theoretically he was grateful to her, and all that. But nothing conjured away that bellyful of black devilishness with which he was _enceinte_. He really felt like a woman who is with child by a corrosive fiend. In his lower man, just girning and demoniacal. No good pretending otherwise. No good playing tricks of being nice. Seven thousand devils!

When he saw a motor-car parked in the waste lot next to Coo-ee, and saw two women in twelve-guinea black coats and skirts hobbling across the grass to the bungalow farther down, perhaps wanting to hire it: then the devil came and sat black and naked in his eyes. They hobbled along the uneven place so commonly, they looked so crassly common in spite of their tailors’ bills, so _low_, in spite of their motor-car, that the devil in him fairly lashed its tail like a cat. And yet, he knew, they were probably just two nice, kindly women, as the world goes. And truly, even the devil in him did not want to do them any _personal_ harm. If they had fallen, or got into difficulty, he would have gone out at once to help them all he could. And yet, at the sight of their backs in their tailored “costumes” hobbling past the bushes, the devil in him lashed its tail till he writhed.

So there you are. Or rather, there was Richard Lovat Somers. He tried to square accounts with himself. Surely, he said to himself, I am not just merely a sort of human bomb, all black inside, waiting to explode I don’t know when or how or where. That’s what I seem like to myself, nowadays. Yet surely it is not the only truth about me. When I feel at peace with myself, and, as it were, so quietly at the _centre_ of things--like last evening, for example--surely that is also me. Harriet seems fairly to detest me for having this nice feeling all to myself. Well, it wasn’t my fault if I had it. I did have it. What does she want? She won’t leave a fellow alone. I felt fairly beatific last evening--I felt I could swim Australia into a future, and that Jaz was wonderful, and I was a sort of central angel. So now I must admit I am flabbergasted at finding my devil coiled up exultant like a black cat in my belly this morning, purring all the more loudly because of my “goodness” of last evening, and lashing his tail so venomously at the sight of the two women in the black “costumes.” Is this devil after all my god? Do I stand with the debbil-debbil worshippers, in spite of all my efforts and protestations?

This morning I do, and I admit it. I can’t help it: it is so, then let it be so. I shall change again, I know. I shall feel white again, and like a pearl, suave and quiet within the oyster of time. I shall feel again that, given but the _answer_, the black poisonous bud will burst into a lovely new, unknown flower in me. The bud is deadly poison: the flower will be the flower of the tree of life. If Harriet let me alone, and people like Jaz really believed in me! Because they have a right to believe in me when I am at my best. Or perhaps he believes in me when I am my worst, and Kangaroo likes me when I am good. Yet I don’t really like Kangaroo. The devil in me fairly hates him. Him and everybody. Well, all right then, if I _am_ finally a sort of human bomb, black inside, and primed; I hope the hour and the place will come for my going off: for my exploding with the maximum amount of havoc. _Some_ men have to be bombs, to explode and make breaches in the walls that shut life in. Blind, havoc-working bombs too. Then so be it.

That morning as luck would have it Somers read an article by A. Meston in an old _Sydney Daily Telegraph_, headed:

EARTHQUAKES.

IS AUSTRALIA SAFE?

SLEEPING VOLCANOES.

“The fact that Australia so far has had no trouble with volcanoes
or earthquakes, and appears to be the most immune country in the
world, accounts for our entire indifference to the whole subject.
But there are phases of this problem entitled to some serious
consideration by those in whom the thinking and observant faculties
are not altogether dormant, and who have not a calm, cool disregard
of very ominous inexorable facts. Australia is a very peaceful
reposeful area, with the serious volcanoes of New Zealand on one
side, and the still more serious volcanoes of Java on the other. We
live in a soft flowery meadow between two jungles, a lion in one
and a tiger in the other, but as neither animal has chased or
bitten us, up to the present time, we go calmly to sleep quite
satisfied they are harmless.

“Now the line of volcanic action on the east coast of Australia is
very clearly defined, from the basalt of Illawarra, north to the
basalt within three miles of Cape York. The chief areas over all
that distance are the Big Scrup on the Richmond River, the Darling
Downs, and the Atherton Tableland, behind Cairns.

“These are the largest basalt areas in Australia, the Darling Downs
and Atherton containing each about 2,000,000 acres of basalt, the
one chiefly black, and the other all red. The other conspicuous
areas are the red basalt Isis and Woongarra scrubs, and north of
Atherton the next basalt area is on the M‘Ivor and Morgan Rivers,
40 miles north of Cooktown. From there I saw no basalt on the coast
of the Peninsula, until somewhat surprised to find great piles of
black basaltic stone, like artificial quarry heaps, in the dense
Seaforthia palm scrubs ten miles west of Somerset.

VOLCANIC EVIDENCE.

“Here, then, is a clearly defined but very intermittent line of
volcanic action along our entire east coast for over two thousand
miles. Yet to-day there is not only not one active volcano on the
whole of that area, but not even one clearly authentic dead one.
There is nothing to show whence came the basalt of the Darling
Downs, the Big Scrup, or the Atherton Tableland, unless in the last
case the two deep freshwater lakes, Barrine and Eacham, the Barrang
and Zeetcham of the aboriginals, represent the craters of extinct
volcanoes.

“Whence, then, came the basalt spread along a narrow line of our
east coast for two thousand miles, and all of it east of the
Dividing Range? There is a lot of room for theories....

“When the late Captain Audley Coote was laying the cable from New
Caledonia to Sandy Cape, at the north end of Fraser Island, on the
South Queensland coast, he passed a submerged mountain 6000 feet in
height, and found a tremendous chasm, so deep that they could find
no bottom, and had to work the cable round the edge. When he
reached the coast of Fraser Island he got the same soundings as
Cook and Flinders and the Admiralty survey in the ’sixties, six to
eight fathoms, but there came a break in the cable in after years,
located in that six and eight fathom area, and they found the
broken cable hanging over a submarine precipice of eight hundred
feet!

“That I read in Captain Coote’s own manuscript journal, and it was
confirmed by Captain John Mackay, the Brisbane harbourmaster, who
assured me that an 800 feet chasm had suddenly formed there in the
bottom of the ocean.

“On the coast of Japan, the ocean bottoms sank in one place
suddenly from four or five fathoms to 4,000 feet.

“The old Fraser Island aboriginals told me that the deep blue lake,
two miles from the White Cliffs, was once a level plateau, on which
their fathers held fights and corroborees, and that it sank in one
night. On the North Queensland coast, there is fairly shallow water
from the seashore out to the edge of the Barrier, and then the
ocean goes down to depths up to two and three thousand feet, so if
the sea were removed you would look down from the outer Barrier
into a tremendous valley with a wall of granite cliffs.

“When the town of Port Royal in Jamaica was destroyed by an
earthquake on June 7, 1692, the houses all disappeared into an
ocean chasm 300 feet in depth; and in the terrible earthquake at
Lisbon, 1755, destroying 2,000 houses and 5,000 people, the wharves
and piers, and even the vessels lying beside them, disappeared into
some tremendous gulf, leaving no trace whatever.

“It is a singular fact that the heights of the loftiest mountains
correspond with the depths of the deepest seas, and that the 29,000
feet of Mount Everest is equal with what is known as the ‘Tuscarora
Deep,’ fathomed by the U.S.A. vessel Tuscarora.

ISLANDS THAT VANISHED.

“From the days of Seneca there are records of islands suddenly
appearing before astonished mariners, and others disappearing
suddenly before mariners equally astonished. In the dreadful
volcanic explosion of Krakatoa in August, 1883, one mountain peak
was blown to pieces, while others were thrown up from the ocean.
The tidal wave created by Krakatoa destroyed 40,000 people, and the
air wave from the concussion pulsated three times round the world.
And Krakatoa and the Javanese volcanoes are only a short distance
from the coast of Australia!

“Doubtless many of the ships that have mysteriously disappeared,
leaving no trace, have gone down in the vortex of a submarine
earthquake, or a chasm created by a sudden shrinkage in the bottom
of the ocean. From the facts above available it is reasonable to
believe that the present continent of Australia is only a portion
of the original, and that in some remote period it extended
hundreds or thousands of miles to the eastward, probably including
Lord Howe and Norfolk Islands and New Zealand, possibly New
Caledonia. How came the ancient Cretaceous Ocean, which once
covered all Central Australia, from the gulf to the Bight, to
withdraw from the land, leaving nothing but marine fossils in the
desert sandstone?

“Was the Cretaceous Ocean shallow all round this continent, and did
it suddenly subside to fill some tremendous chasm caused by a
sudden submarine shrinkage of the earth’s crust, followed by the
inland sea, which naturally rushed out into the vacancy?

“What seems the only real danger to Australia lies not in the
eruptions of some suddenly created new volcano, or any ordinary
earthquake, but in just such shrinkages in the sea bottom as
occurred on the coast of Japan, off Fraser Island, and many other
localities, including Lisbon and Port Royal.

“If such a subsidence were to come under Sydney, Melbourne,
Adelaide or Brisbane, it might be of such a magnitude that the
whole city would disappear into the gulf.

“We know nothing whatever of the awful forces at work beneath the
crust of the earth, and nothing of the internal fires, or that
awful subterranean abode where Shelley said ‘the old earthquake
Demon nurses her young Ruin.’ The history of volcanoes and
earthquakes is an appalling record of lost countless millions of
lives and awful destruction.

“One Pekin earthquake destroyed 300,000 people, one in Naples
70,000, another at Naples 40,000; and we are not far from July,
1902, when the volcano of Mount Pelee, in the island of Martinique,
wiped out the town of St Pierre and 30,000 inhabitants.

“Still nearer is that 18th April, 1906, when the San Francisco
earthquake killed over a thousand people, and did damage to the
extent of sixty millions.

“And so far in Australian history we have not had an earthquake
that would capsize a tumbler of hot punch.”

Why hot punch, thought Somers, why not hop bitters or ice-cream soda, which are much more Austral and to the point? But he had read this almost thrilling bit of journalism with satisfaction. If the mother earth herself is so unstable, and upsets the applecart without caring a straw, why, what can a man say to himself if he _does_ happen to have a devil in his belly!

And he looked at the ocean uneasily moving, and wondered when next it would thrust an angry shoulder out of the watery bed-covering, to give things a little jog. Or when his own devil would get a leg up into affairs.

CHAP: IX.

HARRIET AND LOVAT AT SEA IN MARRIAGE

When a sincere man marries a wife, he has one or two courses open to him, which he can pursue with that wife. He can propose to himself to be (_a_) the lord and master who is honoured and obeyed, (_b_) the perfect lover, (_c_) the true friend and companion. Of these (_a_) is now rather out of date. The lord and master has been proved, by most women quite satisfactorily, to be no more than a grown-up child, and his arrogance is to be tolerated just as a little boy’s arrogance is tolerated, because it is rather amusing, and up to a certain point becoming. The case of (_b_), the perfect lover, is the crux of all ideal marriage to-day. But alas, not even the lord and master turns out such a fiasco as does the perfect lover, ninety-nine times out of a hundred. The perfect-lover marriage ends usually in a quite ghastly anti-climax, divorce and horrors and the basest vituperation. Alas for the fact, as compared with the ideal. A marriage of the perfect-lover type is bound either to end in catastrophe, or to slide away towards (_a_) or (_c_). It must either revert to a mild form of the lord-and-master marriage, and a wise woman, who knows the sickeningness of catastrophes and the ridiculous futility of second shots at the perfect-love paradise, often wisely pushes the marriage back gradually into one of the little bays or creeks of this Pacific ocean of marriage, lord-and-masterdom. Not that either party really believes in the lordship of man. But you’ve got to get into still water some time or other. The perfect-love business inevitably turns out to be a wildly stormy strait, like the Straits of Magellan, where two fierce and opposing currents meet and there is the devil of a business trying to keep the bark of marriage, with the flag of perfect-love at the mast, from dashing on a rock or foundering in the heavy seas. Two fierce and opposing currents meet in the narrows of perfect love. They may meet in blue and perfect weather, when the albatross hovers in the great sky like a permanent benediction, and the sea shimmers a second heaven. But you needn’t wait long. The seas will soon begin to rise, the ship to roll. And the waters of perfect love--when once this love is consummated in marriage--become inevitably a perfect hell of storms and furies.

Then, as I say, the hymeneal bark either founders, or dashes on a rock, or more wisely gets out of the clash of meeting oceans and takes one tide or the other, where the flood has things all its own way. The woman, being to-day the captain of the marriage bark, either steers into the vast Pacific waters of lord-and-masterdom, though never, of course, hauling down the flag of perfect love; or else, much more frequently these latter days, she steers into the rather grey Atlantic of true friendship and companionship, still keeping the flag of perfect love bravely afloat.

And now the bark is fairly safe. In the great Pacific, the woman can take the ease and warm repose of her new dependence, but she is usually laughing up her sleeve. She lets the lord and master manage the ship, but woe betide him if he seeks to haul down the flag of perfect love. There is mutiny in a moment. And his chief officers and his crew, namely, his children and his household servants, are up and ready to put him in irons at once, at a word from that wondrous goddess of the bark, the wife of his bosom. It is Aphrodite, mistress of the seas, in her grand capacity of motherhood and attendant wifehood. None the less, with a bit of managing the hymeneal bark sails on across the great waters into port. A lord and master is not much more than an upper servant while the flag of perfect love is flying and the sea-mother is on board. But a servant with the name of captain, and the pleasant job of sailing the ship and giving the necessary orders. He feels it is quite all right. He is supreme servant-in-command, while the mistress of mistresses smiles as she suckles his children. She is suckling him too.

Nevertheless, this is the course I would recommend young married women to _drift into_, after the first two years of “perfect love.”

They won’t often take my advice, I know that. Ha-ha! they will say. We see through your lord-and-master tricks. Course East-North-East, helmsman, into the safer and more populous waters of perfect companionship. If we can’t have one thing perfect we’ll have another. If it isn’t exactly perfect love, it is perfect companionship, and the two are pretty nearly one and the same.

For woman, even more than man, when once she gets an idea into her head, or worse, when once she gets _herself_ into her head, will have nothing short of perfection. She simply will tolerate nothing short of perfection. E.N.E., then, into the democratic Atlantic of _perfect_ companionship.

Well, they are grey waters, and the perfect companionship usually resolves, subtly, and always under the perfect love flag, into a very nearly perfect limited liability company, the bark steering nicely according to profit and loss, and usually “getting on” fabulously. The Golden Vanity. If this perfect love flag is a vanity, the perfect-companionship management is certainly Golden. I would recommend perfect-companionship to all those married couples who truly and sincerely want _to get on_.

Now the good bark _Harriet and Lovat_ had risen from the waves, like Aphrodite’s shell as well as Aphrodite, in the extremest waters of perfect love. Love and love alone! Wide, wild, lonely waters, with the great albatross like a sign of the cross, sloping in the immense heavens. A sea to themselves, the waters of perfect love. And the good ship _Harriet and Lovat_, with white sails spread, sailing with never a master, like the boat of Dionysus, which steered of its own accord across the waters, in the right direction mark you, to the sound of the music of the dolphins, while the mast of the ship put forth tendrils of vine and purple bunches of grapes, and the grapes of themselves dripped vinous down the throats of the true Dionysians. So sailed the fair ship _Harriet and Lovat_ in the waters of perfect love.

I have not made up my mind whether she was a ship, or a bark, or a schooner, technically speaking. Let us imagine her as any one of them. Or perhaps she was a clipper, or a frigate, or a brig. All I insist is that she was not a steam-boat with a funnel, as most vessels are nowadays, sailing because they are stoked.

Fair weather and foul alternated. Sometimes the brig _Harriet and Lovat_ skimmed along the path of the moon like a phantom; sometimes she lay becalmed, while sharks flicked her bottom: then she drove into the most awful hurricanes, and spun round in a typhoon: and yet behold her sailing out through the glowing arch of a rainbow into halcyon waters again. And so for years, till she began to look rather worn, but always attractive. Her paint had gone, so her timbers now were sea-silvery. Her sails were thin, but very white. The mainsail also was slit, and the stun-sails had been carried away in a blizzard. As for the flag of perfect love, the flag of the red-and-white rose upon the cross of thorns, all on a field of azure, it was woefully frayed and faded. The azure field was nearly tattered away, and the rose was fading into invisibility.

She had some awful weather, did the poor bark _Harriet and Lovat_. The seas opened great jaws to swallow her, the treacherous seas of perfect love, while cynical rocks gnashed their teeth at her, and unstable heavens opened chasms of wind on her, and fierce, full-blooded lusty bull-whales rushed at her and all but burst her timbers. Dazed and battered, she wandered hither and thither on the seas of perfect love, that she always had all to herself. Never another sail in sight, never another ship in hail. Only sometimes the smoke of a steamer skirting the horizon, making for one of the oceans.

And now the _Harriet and Lovat_ began to feel the pull of the two opposing currents. It was as if she had a certain homesickness for one or other of the populous oceans: she was weary of the lone and wasteful waters of the sea of perfect love. Sometimes she drifted E.N.E. towards the Atlantic of true companionship. And then Lovat, seeing the long swell of that grey sea, and the funnels of ships like a city suburb, put the helm hard aport, and turned the ship about, and beat against a horrible sea and wind till they got into the opposite drift. Then things went a little easier, till Harriet saw before her the awful void opening of the other ocean, and the great, dark-blue, dominant swell of the waters, and the loneliness and the vastness and the feeling of being overwhelmed. She looked at the mast and saw the flag of perfect love falling limp, the faded rose of all roses dying at last.

And in a moment when he was asleep, her almost lord-and-master, she whipped the ship about and steered E.S.E. into the heart of the sea of perfect love, hoping to get into the current E.N.E. and so out into the open Atlantic. Then storms intolerable.

Then they took to cruising the far, lone, desert fringes of the sea of perfect love, utterly lonely and near the ice, the fringe of the seas of death. There they cruised, in the remote waters on the edge of extinction. And then they looked at one another.

“We will be perfect companions: you know how I love you,” said Harriet, of the good ship _Harriet and Lovat_.

“Never,” said Lovat, of the same ship. “I will be lord and master, but ah, such a wonderful lord and master that it will be your bliss to belong to me. Look, I have been sewing a new flag.”

She didn’t even look at the flag.

“You!” she exclaimed. “You a lord and master! Why, don’t you know that I love you as no man ever was loved? You a lord and master! Ph! you look it! Let me tell you I love you far, far more than ever you ought to be loved, and you should acknowledge it.”

“I would rather,” said he, “that you deferred your loving of me for a while, and considered the new proposition. We shall never sail any straight course at all, until you realise that I am lord and master, and you my blissful consort. Supposing, now, you had the real Hermes for a husband, Trismegistus. Would you not hold your tongue for fear you lost him, and change from being a lover, and be a worshipper? Well, I am not Hermes or Dionysus, but I am a little nearer to it than you allow. And I want you to yield to my mystery and my divination, and let me put my flag of a phœnix rising from a nest in flames in place of that old rose on a field azure. The gules are almost faded out.”

“It’s a _lovely_ design!” she cried, looking at the new flag. “I might make a cushion-embroidery of it. But as a flag it’s absurd. Of course, you lonely phœnix, you are the bird and the ashes and the flames all by yourself! You would be. Nobody else enters in at all. I--I am just nowhere--I don’t exist.”

“Yes,” he said, “you are the nest.”

“I’ll watch it!” she cried. “Then you shall sleep on thorns, Mister.”

“But consider,” he said.

“That’s what I am doing,” she replied. “Mr Dionysus and Mr Hermes and Mr Thinks-himself-grand. I’ve got one thing to tell you. Without _me_ you’d be nowhere, you’d be nothing, you’d not be _that_,” and she snapped her fingers under his nose, a movement he particularly disliked.

“I agree,” he replied, “that without the nest the phœnix would be--would be up a tree--would be in the air--would be nowhere, and couldn’t find a stable spot to resurrect in. The nest is as the body to the soul: the cup that holds the fire, and in which the ashes fall to take form again. The cup is the container and the sustainer.”

“Yes, I’ve done enough containing and sustaining of you, my gentleman, in the years I’ve known you. It’s almost time you left off wanting so much mothering. You can’t live a moment without me.”

“I admit that the phœnix without a nest is a bird absolutely without a perch, he must dissipate in the air. But--”

“Then I’ll make a cushion-cover of your flag, and you can rest on that.”

“No, I’m going to haul down the flag of perfect love.”

“Oh, are you! And sail without a flag? Just like you, destroy, destroy, and nothing to put in its place.”

“Yes, I want to put in its place this crowned phœnix rising from the nest in flames. I want to set fire to our bark, _Harriet and Lovat_, and out of the ashes construct the frigate _Hermes_, which name still contains the same reference, _her_ and _me_, but which has a higher total significance.”

She looked at him speechless for some time. Then she merely said:

“You’re mad,” and left him with his flag in his hands.

Nevertheless he was a determined little devil, as she knew to her cost, and once he’d got an idea into his head not heaven nor hell nor Harriet would ever batter it out. And now he’d got into his head this idea of being lord and master, and Harriet’s acknowledging him as such. Not just verbally. No. Not under the flag of perfect love. No. Obstinate and devilish as he was, he wanted to haul down the flag of perfect love, to set fire to the bark _Harriet and Lovat_, to seat himself in glory on the ashes, like a resurrected phœnix, with an imaginary crown on his head. And she was to be a comfortable nest for his impertinence.

In short, he was to be the lord and master, and she the humble slave. Thank you. Or at the very best, she was to be a sort of domestic Mrs Gladstone, the Mrs Gladstone of that old chestnut--who, when a female friend was lamenting over the terrible state of affairs, in Ireland or somewhere, and winding up her lament with: “Terrible, terrible. But there is One above”--replied: “Yes, he’s just changing his socks. He’ll be down in a minute.” Mr Lovat was to be the One above, and she was to be happy downstairs thinking that this lord, this master, this Hermes _cum_ Dionysus wonder, was comfortably changing his socks. Thank you again. The man was mad.

Yet he stuck to his guns. She was to submit to the mystic man and male in him, with reverence, and even a little awe, like a woman before the altar of the great Hermes. She might remember that he _was_ only human, that he had to change his socks if he got his feet wet, and that he would make a fool of himself nine times out of ten. But--and the but was emphatic as a thunderbolt--there was in him also the mystery and lordship of--of Hermes, if you like--but the mystery and the lordship of the forward-seeking male. That she must emphatically realise and bow down to. Yes, bow down to. You can’t have two masters of one ship: neither can you have a ship without a master. The _Harriet and Lovat_ had been an experiment of ten years’ endurance. Now she was to be broken up, or burnt, so he said, and the non-existent _Hermes_ was to take her place.

You can’t have two masters to one ship. And if it _is_ a ship: that is, if it has a voyage to sail, a port to make, even a far direction to take, into the unknown, then a master it must have. Harriet said it wasn’t a ship, it was a houseboat, and they could lie so perfectly here by the Pacific for the rest of time--or be towed away to some other lovely spot to house in. She could imagine no fairer existence. It was a houseboat.

But he with his no, no, he almost drove her mad. The bark of their marriage was a ship that must sail into uncharted seas, and he must be the master, and she must be the crew, sworn on. She was to believe in his adventure and deliver herself over to it; she was to believe in his mystic vision of a land beyond this charted world, where new life rose again.

And she just couldn’t. His land beyond the land men knew, where men were more than they are now: she couldn’t believe in it. “Then believe in _me_,” he said desperately. “I know you too well,” she replied. And so, it was an impasse.