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Title: Kangaroo
Author: D.H. Lawrence
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0200631.txt
Language:  English
Date first posted: September 2002
Date most recently updated: September 2002

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Title:      Kangaroo
Author:     D.H. Lawrence




CONTENTS.

1. TORESTIN.
2. NEIGHBOURS.
3. LARBOARD WATCH AHOY!
4. JACK AND JAZ.
5. COO-EE.
6. KANGAROO.
7. THE BATTLE OF TONGUES.
8. VOLCANIC EVIDENCE.
9. HARRIET AND LOVAT AT SEA IN MARRIAGE.
10. DIGGERS.
11. WILLIE STRUTHERS AND KANGAROO.
12. THE NIGHTMARE.
13. "REVENGE!" TIMOTHEUS CRIES.
14. BITS.
15. JACK SLAPS BACK.
16. A ROW IN TOWN.
17. KANGAROO IS KILLED.
18. ADIEU AUSTRALIA.




CHAPTER 1. TORESTIN.

A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass of the park beside Macquarie
Street, in the dinner hour. It was winter, the end of May, but the sun
was warm, and they lay there in shirt-sleeves, talking. Some were eating
food from paper packages. They were a mixed lot--taxi-drivers, a group
of builders who were putting a new inside into one of the big houses
opposite, and then two men in blue overalls, some sort of mechanics.
Squatting and lying on the grassy bank beside the broad tarred road
where taxis and hansom cabs passed continually, they had that air of
owning the city which belongs to a good Australian.

Sometimes, from the distance behind them, came the faintest squeal of
singing from out of the "fortified" Conservatorium of Music. Perhaps it
was one of these faintly wafted squeals that made a blue-overalled
fellow look round, lifting his thick eyebrows vacantly. His eyes
immediately rested on two figures approaching from the direction of the
conservatorium, across the grass-lawn. One was a mature, handsome,
fresh-faced woman, who might have been Russian. Her companion was a
smallish man, pale-faced, with a dark beard. Both were well-dressed, and
quiet, with that quiet self-possession which is almost unnatural
nowadays. They looked different from other people.

A smile flitted over the face of the man in the overalls--or rather a
grin. Seeing the strange, foreign-looking little man with the beard and
the absent air of self-possession walking unheeding over the grass, the
workman instinctively grinned. A comical-looking bloke! Perhaps a
Bolshy.

The foreign-looking little stranger turned his eyes and caught the
workman grinning. Half-sheepishly, the mechanic had eased round to nudge
his mate to look also at the comical-looking bloke. And the bloke caught
them both. They wiped the grin off their faces. Because the little bloke
looked at them quite straight, so observant, and so indifferent. He saw
that the mechanic had a fine face, and pleasant eyes, and that the grin
was hardly more than a city habit. The man in the blue overalls looked
into the distance, recovering his dignity after the encounter.

So the pair of strangers passed on, across the wide asphalt road to one
of the tall houses opposite. The workman looked at the house into which
they had entered.

"What d'you make of them, Dug?" asked the one in the overalls.

"Dunnow! Fritzies, most likely."

"They were talking English."

"Would be, naturally--what yer expect?"

"I don't think they were German."

"Don't yer, Jack? Mebbe they weren't then."

Dug was absolutely unconcerned. But Jack was piqued by the funny little
bloke.

Unconsciously he watched the house across the road. It was a
more-or-less expensive boarding-house. There appeared the foreign little
bloke dumping down a gladstone bag at the top of the steps that led from
the porch to the street, and the woman, the wife apparently, was coming
out and dumping down a black hat-box. Then the man made another
excursion into the house, and came out with another bag, which he
likewise dumped down at the top of the steps. Then he had a few words
with the wife, and scanned the street.

"Wants a taxi," said Jack to himself.

There were two taxis standing by the kerb near the open grassy slope of
the park, opposite the tall brown houses. The foreign-looking bloke came
down the steps and across the wide asphalt road to them. He looked into
one, and then into the other. Both were empty. The drivers were lying on
the grass smoking an after-luncheon cigar.

"Bloke wants a taxi," said Jack.

"Could ha' told YOU that," said the nearest driver. But nobody moved.

The stranger stood on the pavement beside the big, cream-coloured taxi,
and looked across at the group of men on the grass. He did not want to
address them.

"Want a taxi?" called Jack.

"Yes. Where are the drivers?" replied the stranger, in unmistakable
English: English of the old country.

"Where d'you want to go?" called the driver of the cream-coloured taxi,
without rising from the grass.

"Murdoch Street."

"Murdoch Street? What number?"

"Fifty-one."

"Neighbour of yours, Jack," said Dug, turning to his mate.

"Taking it furnished, four guineas a week," said Jack in a tone of
information.

"All right," said the driver of the cream-coloured taxi, rising at last
from the grass. "I'll take you."

"Go across to 120 first," said the little bloke, pointing to the house.
"There's my wife and the bags. But look!" he added quickly. "You're not
going to charge me a shilling each for the bags."

"What bags? Where are they?"

"There at the top of the steps."

"All right, I'll pull across and look at 'em."

The bloke walked across, and the taxi at length curved round after him.
The stranger had carried his bags to the foot of the steps: two
ordinary-sized gladstones, and one smallish square hat-box. There they
stood against the wall. The taxi-driver poked out his head to look at
them. He surveyed them steadily. The stranger stood at bay.

"Shilling apiece, them bags," said the driver laconically.

"Oh no. The tariff is three-pence," cried the stranger.

"Shilling apiece, them bags," repeated the driver. He was one of the
proletariat that has learnt the uselessness of argument.

"That's not just, the tariff is threepence."

"All right, if you don't want to pay the fare, don't engage the car,
that's all. Them bags is a shilling apiece."

"Very well, I don't want to pay so much."

"Oh, all right. If you don't, you won't. But they'll cost you a shilling
apiece on a taxi, an' there you are."

"Then I don't want a taxi."

"Then why don't you say so. There's no harm done. I don't want to charge
you for pulling across here to look at the bags. If you don't want a
taxi, you don't. I suppose you know your own mind."

Thus saying he pushed off the brakes and the taxi slowly curved round on
the road to resume its previous stand.

The strange little bloke and his wife stood at the foot of the steps
beside the bags, looking angry. And then a hansom-cab came
clock-clocking slowly along the road, also going to draw up for the
dinner hour at the quiet place opposite. But the driver spied the angry
couple.

"Want a cab, sir?"

"Yes, but I don't think you can get the bags on."

"How many bags?"

"Three. These three," and he kicked them with his toe, angrily.

The hansom-driver looked down from his Olympus. He was very red-faced,
and a little bit humble.

"Them three? Oh yes! Easy! Easy! Get 'em on easy. Get them on easy, no
trouble at all." And he clambered down from his perch, and resolved into
a little red-faced man, rather beery and henpecked-looking. He stood
gazing at the bags. On one was printed the name: "R.L. Somers."

"R.L. SOMERS! All right, you get in, sir and madam. You get in. Where
d'you want to go? Station?"

"No. Fifty-one Murdoch Street."

"All right, all right, I'll take you. Fairish long way, but we'll be
there under an hour."

Mr. Somers and his wife got into the cab. The cabby left the doors flung
wide open, and piled the three bags there like a tower in front of his
two fares. The hat-box was on top, almost touching the brown hairs of
the horse's tail, and perching gingerly.

"If you'll keep a hand on that, now, to steady it," said the cabby.

"All right," said Somers.

The man climbed to his perch, and the hansom and the extraneous tower
began to joggle away into the town. The group of workmen were still
lying on the grass. But Somers did not care about them. He was safely
jogging with his detested baggage to his destination.

"Aren't they VILE!" said Harriet, his wife.

"It's God's Own Country, as they always tell you," said Somers. "The
hansom-man was quite nice."

"But the taxi-drivers! And the man charged you eight shillings on
Saturday for what would be two shillings in London!"

"He rooked me. But there you are, in a free country, it's the man who
makes you pay who is free--free to charge you what he likes, and you're
forced to pay it. That's what freedom amounts to. They're free to
charge, and you are forced to pay."

In which state of mind they jogged through the city, catching a glimpse
from the top of a hill of the famous harbour spreading out with its many
arms and legs. Or at least they saw one bay with warships and steamers
lying between the houses and the wooded, bank-like shores, and they saw
the centre of the harbour, and the opposite squat cliffs--the whole low
wooded table-land reddened with suburbs and interrupted by the pale
spaces of the many-lobed harbour. The sky had gone grey, and the low
table-land into which the harbour intrudes squatted dark-looking and
monotonous and sad, as if lost on the face of the earth: the same
Australian atmosphere, even here within the area of huge, restless,
modern Sydney, whose million inhabitants seem to slip like fishes from
one side of the harbour to another.

Murdoch Street was an old sort of suburb, little squat bungalows with
corrugated iron roofs, painted red. Each little bungalow was set in its
own hand-breadth of ground, surrounded by a little wooden palisade
fence. And there went the long street, like a child's drawing, the
little square bungalows dot-dot-dot, close together and yet apart, like
modern democracy, each one fenced round with a square rail fence. The
street was wide, and strips of worn grass took the place of kerb-stones.
The stretch of macadam in the middle seemed as forsaken as a desert, as
the hansom clock-clocked along it.

Fifty-one had its name painted by the door. Somers had been watching
these names. He had passed "Elite" and "Tres Bon" and "The Angels'
Roost' and "The Better 'Ole'". He rather hoped for one of the Australian
names, Wallamby or Wagga-Wagga. When he had looked at the house and
agreed to take it for three months, it had been dusk, and he had not
noticed the name. He hoped it would not be U-An-Me, or even Stella
Maris.

"Forestin," he said, reading the flourishing T as an F. "What language
do you imagine that is?"

"It's T, not F," said Harriet.

"Torestin," he said, pronouncing it like Russian. "Must be a native
word."

"No," said Harriet. "It means 'To rest in'." She didn't even laugh at
him. He became painfully silent.

Harriet didn't mind very much. They had been on the move for four
months, and she felt if she could but come to anchor somewhere in a
corner of her own, she wouldn't much care where it was, or whether it
was called Torestin or Angels Roost or even Tres Bon.

It was, thank heaven, quite a clean little bungalow, with just
commonplace furniture, nothing very preposterous. Before Harriet had
even taken her hat off she removed four pictures from the wall, and the
red plush tablecloth from the table. Somers had disconsolately opened
the bags, so she fished out an Indian sarong of purplish shot colour, to
try how it would look across the table. But the walls were red, of an
awful deep bluey red, that looks so fearful with dark-oak fittings and
furniture: or dark-stained jarrah, which amounts to the same thing; and
Somers snapped, looking at the purple sarong--a lovely thing in itself:

"Not with red walls."

"No, I suppose not," said Harriet, disappointed. "We can easily
colour-wash them white--or cream."

"What, start colour-washing walls?"

"It would only take half a day."

"That's what we come to a new land for--to God's Own Country--to start
colour-washing walls in a beastly little suburban bungalow? That we've
hired for three months and mayn't live in three weeks!"

"Why not? You must have walls."

"I suppose you must," he said, going away to inspect the two little
bedrooms, and the kitchen, and the outside. There was a scrap of garden
at the back, with a path down the middle, and a fine Australian tree at
the end, a tree with pale bark and no leaves, but big tufts of red,
spikey flowers. He looked at the flowers in wonder. They were apparently
some sort of bean flower, in sharp tufts, like great red spikes of stiff
wisteria, curving upwards, not dangling. They looked handsome against
the blue sky: but again, extraneous. More like scarlet cockatoos perched
in the bare tree, than natural growing flowers. Queer burning red, and
hard red flowers! They call it coral tree.

There was a little round summer-house also, with a flat roof and steps
going up. Somers mounted, and found that from the lead-covered roof of
the little round place he could look down the middle harbour, and even
see the low gateway, the low headlands with the lighthouse, opening to
the full Pacific. There was the way out to the open Pacific, the white
surf breaking. A tramp steamer was just coming in, under her shaft of
black smoke.

But near at hand nothing but bungalows--street after street. This was
one of the old-fashioned bits of Sydney. A little further off the
streets of proper brick houses clustered. But here on this hill the
original streets of bungalow places remained almost untouched, still
hinting at the temporary shacks run up in the wilderness.

Somers felt a little uneasy because he could look down into the whole
range of his neighbours' gardens and back premises. He tried not to look
at them. But Harriet had come climbing after him to survey the world,
and she began:

"Isn't it lovely up here! Do you see the harbour?--and the way we came
in! Look, look, I remember looking out of the porthole and seeing that
lighthouse, just as we came in--and those little brown cliffs. Oh, but
it's a wonderful harbour. What it must have been when it was first
discovered. And now all these little dog-kennelly houses, and
everything. But this next garden is lovely; have you seen the--what are
they, the lovely flowers?"

"Dahlias."

"But did ever you see such dahlias! Are you sure they're dahlias?
They're like pink chrysanthemums--and like roses--oh, lovely! But all
these little dog-kennels--awful piggling suburban place--and sort of
lousy. Is this all men can do with a new country? Look at those tin
cans!"

"What do you expect them to do. Rome was not built in a day."

"Oh, but they might make it nice. Look at all the little backs: like
chicken houses with chicken runs. They call this making a new country,
do they?"

"Well, how would you start making a new country yourself?" asked Somers,
a little impatiently.

"I wouldn't have towns--and corrugated iron--and millions of little
fences--and empty tins."

"No, you'd have old chateaus and Tudor manors."

They went down, hearing a banging at the back door, and seeing a
tradesman with a basket on his arm. And for the rest of the day they
were kept busy going to the door to tell the inexhaustible tradespeople
that they were now fixed up with grocer and butcher and baker and all
the rest. Night came on, and Somers sat on his tub of a summer-house
looking at the lights glittering thick in swarms in the various hollows
down to the water, and the lighthouses flashing in the distance, and
ship lights on the water, and the dark places thinly sprinkled with
lights. It wasn't like a town, it was like a whole country, with towns
and bays and darknesses. And all lying mysteriously within the
Australian underdark, that peculiar lost, weary aloofness of Australia.
There was the vast town of Sydney. And it didn't seem to be real, it
seemed to be sprinkled on the surface of a darkness into which it never
penetrated.

Somers sighed and shivered and went down to the house. It was chilly.
Why had he come? Why, oh why? What was he looking for? Reflecting for a
moment, he imagined he knew what he had come for. But he wished he had
not come to Australia, for all that.

He was a man with an income of four hundred a year, and a writer of
poems and essays. In Europe, he had made up his mind that everything was
done for, played out, finished, and he must go to a new country. The
newest country: young Australia. Now he had tried Western Australia, and
had looked at Adelaide and Melbourne. And the vast, uninhabited land
frightened him. It seemed so hoary and lost, so unapproachable. The sky
was pure, crystal pure and blue, of a lovely pale blue colour: the air
was wonderful, new and unbreathed: and there were great distances. But
the bush, the grey, charred bush. It scared him. As a poet, he felt
himself entitled to all kinds of emotions and sensations which an
ordinary man would have repudiated. Therefore he let himself feel all
sorts of things about the bush. It was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with
its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by
bush fires: and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then
it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in
silence. Waiting, waiting--the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting. And he
could not penetrate into its secret. He couldn't get at it. Nobody could
get at it. What was it waiting for?

And then one night at the time of the full moon he walked alone into the
bush. A huge electric moon, huge, and the tree-trunks like naked pale
aborigines among the dark-soaked foliage, in the moonlight. And not a
sign of life--not a vestige.

Yet something. Something big and aware and hidden! He walked on, had
walked a mile or so into the bush, and had just come to a clump of tall,
nude, dead trees, shining almost phosphorescent with the moon, when the
terror of the bush overcame him. He had looked so long at the vivid
moon, without thinking. And now, there was something among the trees,
and his hair began to stir with terror, on his head. There was a
presence. He looked at the weird, white, dead trees, and into the hollow
distances of the bush. Nothing! Nothing at all. He turned to go home.
And then immediately the hair on his scalp stirred and went icy cold
with terror. What of? He knew quite well it was nothing. He knew quite
well. But with his spine cold like ice, and the roots of his hair
seeming to freeze, he walked on home, walked firmly and without haste.
For he told himself he refused to be afraid, though he admitted the icy
sensation of terror. But then to experience terror is not the same thing
as to admit fear into the conscious soul. Therefore he refused to be
afraid.

But the horrid thing in the bush! He schemed as to what it would be. It
must be the spirit of the place. Something fully evoked to-night,
perhaps provoked, by that unnatural West-Australian moon. Provoked by
the moon, the roused spirit of the bush. He felt it was watching, and
waiting. Following with certainty, just behind his back. It might have
reached a long black arm and gripped him. But no, it wanted to wait. It
was not tired of watching its victim. An alien people--a victim. It was
biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness, waiting for a
far-off end, watching the myriad intruding white men.

This was how Richard Lovat Somers figured it out to himself, when he got
back into safety in the scattered township in the clearing on the
hill-crest, and could see far off the fume of Perth and Fremantle on the
sea-shore, and the tiny sparkling of a farther-off lighthouse on an
island. A marvellous night, raving with moonlight--and somebody burning
off the bush in a ring of sultry red fire under the moon in the
distance, a slow ring of creeping red fire, like some ring of fireflies,
upon the far-off darkness of the land's body, under the white blaze of
the moon above.

It is always a question whether there is any sense in taking notice of a
poet's fine feelings. The poet himself has misgivings about them. Yet a
man ought to feel something, at night under such a moon.

Richard S. had never quite got over that glimpse of terror in the
Westralian bush. Pure foolishness, of course, but there's no telling
where a foolishness may nip you. And, now that night had settled over
Sydney, and the town and harbour were sparkling unevenly below, with
reddish-seeming sparkles, whilst overhead the marvellous Southern Milky
Way was tilting uncomfortably to the south, instead of crossing the
zenith; the vast myriads of swarming stars that cluster all along the
milky way, in the Southern sky, and the Milky Way itself leaning heavily
to the south, so that you feel all on one side if you look at it; the
Southern sky at night, with that swarming Milky Way all bushy with
stars, and yet with black gaps, holes in the white star-road, while
misty blotches of star-mist float detached, like cloud-vapours, in the
side darkness, away from the road; the wonderful Southern night-sky,
that makes a man feel so lonely, alien: with Orion standing on his head
in the west, and his sword-belt upside down, and his Dog-star prancing
in mid-heaven, high above him; and with the Southern Cross
insignificantly mixed in with the other stars, democratically
inconspicuous; well then, now that night had settled down over Sydney,
and all this was happening overhead, for R.L. Somers and a few more
people, our poet once more felt scared and anxious. Things seemed so
different. Perhaps everything WAS different from all he had known.
Perhaps if St. Paul and Hildebrand and Darwin had lived south of the
equator, we might have known the world all different, quite different.
But it is useless iffing. Sufficient that Somers went indoors into his
little bungalow, and found his wife setting the table for supper, with
cold meat and salad.

"The only thing that's really cheap," said Harriet, "is meat. That huge
piece cost two shillings. There's nothing to do but to become savage and
carnivorous--if you can."

"The kangaroo and the dingo are the largest fauna in Australia," said
Somers. "And the dingo is probably introduced."

"But it's very good meat," said Harriet.

"I know that," said he.

The hedge between number fifty-one and number fifty was a rather weary
hedge with a lot of dead branches in it, on the Somers' side. Yet it
grew thickly, with its dark green, slightly glossy leaves. And it had
little pinky-green flowers just coming out: sort of pink pea-flowers.
Harriet went nosing round for flowers. Their garden was just trodden
grass with the remains of some bushes and a pumpkin vine. So she went
picking sprigs from the intervening hedge, trying to smell a bit of
scent in them, but failing. At one place the hedge was really thin, and
so of course she stood to look through into the next patch.

"Oh, but these dahlias are really marvellous. You MUST come and look,"
she sang out to Somers.

"Yes, I know, I've seen them," he replied rather crossly, knowing that
the neighbours would hear her. Harriet was so blithely unconscious of
people on the other side of hedges. As far as she was concerned, they
ought not to be there: even if they were in their own garden.

"You must come and look, though. Lovely! Real plum colour, and the
loveliest velvet. You must come."

He left off sweeping the little yard, which was the job he had set
himself for the moment, and walked across the brown grass to where
Harriet stood peeping through the rift in the dead hedge, her head tied
in a yellow, red-spotted duster. And of course, as Somers was peeping
beside her, the neighbour who belonged to the garden must come backing
out of the shed and shoving a motor-cycle down the path, smoking a short
little pipe meanwhile. It was the man in blue overalls, the one named
Jack. Somers knew him at once, though there were now no blue overalls.
And the man was staring hard at the dead place in the hedge, where the
faces of Harriet and Richard were seen peeping. Somers then behaved as
usual on such occasions, just went stony and stared unseeing in another
direction; as if quite unaware that the dahlias had an owner with a
motor-cycle: any other owner than God, indeed. Harriet nodded a confused
and rather distant "Good morning." The man just touched his cap, very
cursory, and nodded, and said good morning across his pipe, with his
teeth clenched, and strode round the house with his machine.

"Why must you go yelling for other people to hear you?" said Somers to
Harriet.

"Why shouldn't they hear me!" retorted Harriet.

The day was Saturday. Early in the afternoon Harriet went to the little
front gate because she heard a band: or the rudiments of a band. Nothing
would have kept her indoors when she heard a trumpet, not six wild
Somerses. It was some very spanking Boy Scouts marching out. There were
only six of them, but the road was hardly big enough to hold them.
Harriet leaned on the gate in admiration of their dashing broad hats and
thick calves. As she stood there she heard a voice:

"Would you care for a few dahlias? I believe you like them."

She started and turned. Bold as she was in private, when anybody
addressed her in the open, any stranger, she wanted to bolt. But it was
the fifty neighbour, the female neighbour, a very good-looking young
woman, with loose brown hair and brown eyes and a warm complexion. The
brown eyes were now alert with question and with offering, and very
ready to be huffy, or even nasty, if the offering were refused. Harriet
was too well-bred.

"Oh, thank you very much," she said, "but isn't it a pity to cut them?"

"Oh, not at all. My husband will cut you some with pleasure.
Jack!--Jack!" she called.

"Hello!" came the masculine voice.

"Will you cut a few dahlias for Mrs--er--I don't know your name"--she
flashed a soft, warm, winning look at Harriet, and Harriet flushed
slightly. "For the people next door," concluded the offerer.

"Somers--S-O-M-E-R-S." Harriet spelled it out.

"Oh, Somers!" exclaimed the neighbour woman, with a gawky little jerk,
like a schoolgirl. "Mr. and Mrs. Somers," she reiterated, with a little
laugh.

"That's it," said Harriet.

"I saw you come yesterday, and I wondered--we hadn't heard the name of
who was coming." She was still rather gawky and schoolgirlish in her
manner, half shy, half brusque.

"No, I suppose not," said Harriet, wondering why the girl didn't tell
her own name now.

"That's your husband who has the motor-bike?" said Harriet.

"Yes, that's right. That's him. That's my husband, Jack, Mr. Callcott."

"Mr. Callcott, oh!" said Harriet, as if she were mentally abstracted
trying to spell the word.

Somers, in the little passage inside his house, heard all this with
inward curses. "That's done it!" he groaned to himself. He'd got
neighbours now.

And sure enough, in a few minutes came Harriet's gushing cries of joy
and admiration: "Oh, how lovely! how marvellous! but can they really be
dahlias? I've never seen such dahlias! they're really too beautiful! But
you shouldn't give them me, you shouldn't."

"Why not?" cried Mrs. Callcott in delight.

"So many. And isn't it a pity to cut them?" This, rather wistfully, to
the masculine silence of Jack.

"Oh no, they want cutting as they come, or the blooms get smaller," said
Jack, masculine and benevolent.

"And scent!--they have scent!" cried Harriet, sniffing at her velvety
bouquet.

"They have a little--not much though. Flowers don't have much scent in
Australia," deprecated Mrs. Callcott.

"Oh, I must show them to my husband," cried Harriet, half starting from
the fence. Then she lifted up her voice:

"Lovat!" she called. "Lovat! You MUST come. Come here! Come and see!
Lovat!"

"What?"

"Come. Come and see."

This dragged the bear out of his den: Mr. Somers, twisting sour smiles
of graciousness on his pale, bearded face, crossed the verandah and
advanced towards the division fence, on the other side of which stood
his Australian neighbour in shirt-sleeves, with a comely young wife very
near to him, whilst on this side stood Harriet with a bunch of pink and
purple ragged dahlias, and an expression of joyous friendliness, which
Somers knew to be false, upon her face.

"Look what Mrs. Callcott has given me! Aren't they exquisite?" cried
Harriet, rather exaggerated.

"Awfully nice," said Somers, bowing slightly to Mrs. Callcott, who
looked uneasy, and to Mr. Callcott--otherwise Jack.

"Got here all right in the hansom, then?" said Jack.

Somers laughed--and he could be charming when he laughed--as he met the
other man's eye.

"My wrist got tired, propping up the luggage all the way," he replied.

"Ay, there's not much waste ground in a hansom. You can't run up a spare
bed in the parlour, so to speak. But it saved you five bob."

"Oh, at least ten, between me and a Sydney taxi driver."

"Yes, they'll do you down if they can--that is, if you let 'em. I have a
motor-bike, so I can afford to let 'em get the wind up. Don't depend on
'em, you see. That's the point."

"It is, I'm afraid."

The two men looked at each other curiously. And Mrs. Callcott looked at
Somers with bright, brown, alert eyes, like a bird that has suddenly
caught sight of something. A new sort of bird to her was this little man
with a beard. He wasn't handsome and impressive like his wife. No, he
was odd. But then he had a touch of something, the magic of the old
world that she had never seen, the old culture, the old glamour. She
thought that, because he had a beard and wore a little green
house-jacket, he was probably a socialist.

The Somers now had neighbours: somewhat to the chagrin of Richard Lovat.
He had come to this new country, the youngest country on the globe, to
start a new life and flutter with a new hope. And he started with a
rabid desire not to see anything and not to speak one single word to any
single body--except Harriet, whom he snapped at hard enough. To be sure,
the mornings sometimes won him over. They were so blue and pure: the
blue harbour like a lake among the land, so pale blue and heavenly, with
its hidden and half-hidden lobes intruding among the low, dark-brown
cliffs, and among the dark-looking tree-covered shores, and up to the
bright red suburbs. But the land, the ever-dark bush that was allowed to
come to the shores of the harbour! It was strange that, with the finest
of new air dimming to a lovely pale blue in the distance, and with the
loveliest stretches of pale blue water, the tree-covered land should be
so gloomy and lightless. It is the sun-refusing leaves of the gum-trees
that are like dark, hardened flakes of rubber.

He was not happy, there was no pretending he was. He longed for Europe
with hungry longing: Florence, with Giotto's pale tower: or the Pincio
at Rome: or the woods in Berkshire--heavens, the English spring with
primroses under the bare hazel bushes, and thatched cottages among plum
blossom. He felt he would have given anything on earth to be in England.
It was May--end of May--almost bluebell time, and the green leaves
coming out on the hedges. Or the tall corn under the olives in Sicily.
Or London Bridge, with all the traffic on the river. Or Bavaria with
gentian and yellow globe flowers, and the Alps still icy. Oh God, to be
in Europe, lovely, lovely Europe that he had hated so thoroughly and
abused so vehemently, saying it was moribund and stale and finished. The
fool was himself. He had got out of temper, and so had called Europe
moribund: assuming that he himself, of course, was not moribund, but
sprightly and chirpy and too vital, as the Americans would say, for
Europe. Well, if a man wants to make a fool of himself, it is as well to
let him.

Somers wandered disconsolate through the streets of Sydney, forced to
admit that there were fine streets, like Birmingham for example; that
the parks and the Botanical Gardens were handsome and well-kept; that
the harbour, with all the two-decker brown ferry-boats sliding
continuously from the Circular Quay, was an extraordinary place. But oh,
what did he care about it all! In Martin Place he longed for
Westminster, in Sussex Street he almost wept for Covent Garden and St.
Martin's Lane, at the Circular Quay he pined for London Bridge. It was
all London without being London. Without any of the lovely old glamour
that invests London. This London of the Southern hemisphere was all, as
it were, made in five minutes, a substitute for the real thing. Just a
substitute--as margarine is a substitute for butter. And he went home to
the little bungalow bitterer than ever, pining for England.

But if he hated the town so much, why did he stay? Oh, he had a fanciful
notion that if he was really to get to know anything at all about a
country, he must live for a time in the principal city. So he had
condemned himself to three months at least. He told himself to comfort
himself that at the end of three months he would take the steamer across
the Pacific, homewards, towards Europe. He felt a long navel string
fastening him to Europe, and he wanted to go back, to go home. He would
stay three months. Three month's penalty for having forsworn Europe.
Three months in which to get used to this Land of the Southern Cross.
Cross indeed! A new crucifixion. And then away, homewards!

The only time he felt at all happy was when he had reassured himself
that by August, he would be taking his luggage on to a steamer. That
soothed him.

He understood now that the Romans had preferred death to exile. He could
sympathise now with Ovid on the Danube, hungering for Rome and blind to
the land around him, blind to the savages. So Somers felt blind to
Australia, and blind to the uncouth Australians. To him they were
barbarians. The most loutish Neapolitan loafer was nearer to him in
pulse than these British Australians with their aggressive familiarity.
He surveyed them from an immense distance, with a kind of horror.

Of course he was bound to admit that they ran their city very well, as
far as he could see. Everything was very easy, and there was no fuss.
Amazing how little fuss and bother there was--on the whole. Nobody
seemed to bother, there seemed to be no policemen and no authority, the
whole thing went by itself, loose and easy, without any bossing. No real
authority--no superior classes--hardly even any boss. And everything
rolling along as easily as a full river, to all appearances.

That's where it was. Like a full river of life, made up of drops of
water all alike. Europe is really established upon the aristocratic
principle. Remove the sense of class distinction, of higher and lower,
and you have anarchy in Europe. Only nihilists aim at the removal of all
class distinction, in Europe.

But in Australia, it seemed to Somers, the distinction was already gone.
There was really no class distinction. There was a difference of money
and of "smartness". But nobody felt BETTER than anybody else, or higher;
only better-off. And there is all the difference in the world between
feeling BETTER than your fellow man, and merely feeling BETTER-OFF.

Now Somers was English by blood and education, and though he had no
antecedents whatsoever, yet he felt himself to be one of the RESPONSIBLE
members of society, as contrasted with the innumerable IRRESPONSIBLE
members. In old, cultured, ethical England this distinction is radical
between the responsible members of society and the irresponsible. It is
even a categorical distinction. It is a caste distinction, a distinction
in the very being. It is the distinction between the proletariat and the
ruling classes.

But in Australia nobody is supposed to rule, and nobody does rule, so
the distinction falls to the ground. The proletariat appoints men to
administer the law, not to rule. These ministers are not really
responsible, any more than the housemaid is responsible. The proletariat
is all the time responsible, the only source of authority. The will of
the people. The ministers are merest instruments.

Somers for the first time felt himself immersed in real democracy--in
spite of all disparity in wealth. The instinct of the place was
absolutely and flatly democratic, a terre democratic. Demos was here his
own master, undisputed, and therefore quite calm about it. No need to
get the wind up at all over it; it was a granted condition of Australia,
that Demos was his own master.

And this was what Richard Lovat Somers could not stand. You may be the
most liberal Englishman, and yet you cannot fail to see the categorical
difference between the responsible and the irresponsible classes. You
cannot fail to admit the necessity for RULE. Either you admit yourself
an anarchist, or you admit the necessity for RULE--in England. The
working classes in England feel just the same about it as do the upper
classes. Any working man who sincerely feels himself a responsible
member of society feels it his duty to exercise authority in some way or
other. And the irresponsible working man likes to feel there is a strong
boss at the head, if only so that he can grumble at him satisfactorily.
Europe is established on the instinct of authority: "Thou shalt." The
only alternative is anarchy.

Somers was a true Englishman, with an Englishman's hatred of anarchy,
and an Englishman's instinct for authority. So he felt himself at a
discount in Australia. In Australia authority was a dead letter. There
was no giving of orders here; or, if orders were given, they would not
be received as such. A man in one position might make a suggestion to a
man in another position, and this latter might or might not accept the
suggestion, according to his disposition. Australia was not yet in a
state of anarchy. England had as yet at least nominal authority. But let
the authority be removed, and then! For it is notorious, when it comes
to constitutions, how much there is in a name.

Was all that stood between Australia and anarchy just a name?--the name
of England, Britain, Empire, Viceroy, or Governor General, or Governor?
The shadow of the old sceptre, the mere sounding of a name? Was it just
the hollow word "Authority", sounding across seven thousand miles of
sea, that kept Australia from Anarchy? Australia--Authority--Anarchy: a
multiplication of the alpha.

So Richard Lovat cogitated as he roamed about uneasily. Not that he knew
all about it. Nobody knows all about it. And those that fancy they know
ALMOST all about it are usually most wrong. A man must have SOME ideas
about the thing he's up against, otherwise he's a simple wash-out.

But Richard WAS wrong. Given a good temper and a genuinely tolerant
nature--both of which the Australians seem to have in a high degree--you
can get on for quite a long time without "rule". For quite a long time
the thing just goes by itself.

Is it merely running down, however, like a machine running on but
gradually running down?

Ah, questions!


CHAPTER 2. NEIGHBOURS.

THE Somers-Callcott acquaintance did not progress very rapidly, after
the affair of the dahlias. Mrs. Callcott asked Mrs. Somers across to
look at their cottage, and Mrs. Somers went. Then Mrs. Somers asked Mrs.
Callcott back again. But both times Mr. Somers managed to be out of the
way, and managed to cast an invisible frost over the rencontre. He was
not going to be dragged in, no, he was not. He very much wanted to
borrow a pair of pincers and a chopper for an hour, to pull out a few
nails, and to split his little chunks of kindling that the dealer had
sent too thick. And the Callcotts were very ready to lend anything, if
they were only asked for it. But no, Richard Lovat wasn't going to ask.
Neither would he buy a chopper, because the travelling expenses had
reduced him to very low water. He preferred to wrestle with the chunks
of jarrah every morning.

Mrs. Somers and Mrs. Callcott continued, however, to have a few friendly
words across the fence. Harriet learned that Jack was foreman in a
motor-works place, that he had been wounded in the jaw in the war, that
the surgeons had not been able to extract the bullet, because there was
nothing for it to "back up against"--and so he had carried the chunk of
lead in his gizzard for ten months, till suddenly it had rolled into his
throat and he had coughed it out. The jeweller had wanted Mrs. Callcott
to have it mounted in a brooch or a hatpin. It was a round ball of lead,
from a shell, as big as a marble, and weighing three or four ounces.
Mrs. Callcott had recoiled from this suggestion, so an elegant little
stand had been made, like a little lamp-post on a polished wood base,
and the black little globe of lead dangled by a fine chain like an
arc-lamp from the top of the toy lamp-post. It was now a mantelpiece
ornament.

All this Harriet related to the indignant Lovat, though she wisely
suppressed the fact that Mrs. Callcott had suggested that "perhaps Mr.
Somers might like to have a look at it."

Lovat was growing more used to Australia--or to the "cottage" in Murdoch
Road, and the view of the harbour from the tub-top of his summer-house.
You couldn't call that all "Australia"--but then one man can't bite off
a continent in a mouthful, and you must start to nibble somewhere. He
and Harriet took numerous trips in the ferry steamers to the many nooks
and corners of the harbour. One day their ferry steamer bumped into a
collier that was heading for the harbour outlet--or rather, their ferry
boat headed across the nose of the collier, so the collier bumped into
them and had his nose put out of joint. There was a considerable amount
of yelling, but the ferry boat slid flatly away towards Manly, and
Harriet's excitement subsided.

It was Sunday, and a lovely sunny day of Australian winter. Manly is the
bathing suburb of Sydney--one of them. You pass quite close to the wide
harbour gate, The Heads, on the ferry steamer. Then you land on the
wharf, and walk up the street, like a bit of Margate with sea-side shops
and restaurants, till you come out on a promenade at the end, and there
is the wide Pacific rolling in on the yellow sand: the wide fierce sea,
that makes all the built-over land dwindle into non-existence. At least
there was a heavy swell on, so the Pacific belied its name and crushed
the earth with its rollers. Perhaps the heavy, earth-despising swell is
part of its pacific nature.

Harriet, of course, was enraptured, and declared she could not be happy
till she had lived beside the Pacific. They bought food and ate it by
the sea. Then Harriet was chilled, so they went to a restaurant for a
cup of soup. When they were again in the street Harriet realized that
she hadn't got her yellow scarf: her big, silky yellow scarf that was so
warm and lovely. She declared she had left it in the eating-house, and
they went back at once for it. The girls in the eating-house--the
waitresses--said, in their cheeky Cockney Australian that they "hedn't
seen it", and that the "next people who kyme arfter must 'ev tyken it".

Anyhow, it was gone--and Harriet furious, feeling as if there had been a
thief in the night. In this unhappy state of affairs Somers suggested
they should sit on the tram-car and go somewhere. They sat on the
tram-car and ran for miles along a coast with ragged bush loused over
with thousands of small promiscuous bungalows, built of everything from
patchwork of kerosene tin up to fine red brick and stucco, like Margate.
Not far off the Pacific boomed. But fifty yards inland started these
bits of swamp, and endless promiscuity of "cottages".

The tram took them five or six miles, to the terminus. This was the end
of everywhere, with new "stores"--that is, flyblown shops with
corrugated iron roofs--and with a tramshelter, and little house-agents'
booths plastered with signs--and more "cottages"; that is, bungalows of
corrugated iron or brick--and bits of swamp or "lagoon" where the sea
had got in and couldn't get out. The happy couple had a drink of sticky
aerated waters in one of the "stores", then walked up a wide sand-road
dotted on either side with small bungalows, beyond the backs of which
lay a whole aura of rusty tin cans chucked over the back fence. They
came to the ridge of sand, and again the pure, long-rolling Pacific.

"I love the sea," said Harriet.

"I wish," said Lovat, "it would send a wave about fifty feet high round
the whole coast of Australia."

"You are so bad-tempered," said Harriet. "Why don't you see the lovely
things!"

"I do, by contrast."

So they sat on the sands, and he peeled pears and buried the peel in the
yellow sand. It was winter, and the shore was almost deserted. But the
sun was warm as an English May.

Harriet felt she absolutely must live by the sea, so they wandered along
a wide, rutted space of deep sand, looking at the "cottages" on either
side. They had impossible names. But in themselves, many of them were
really nice. Yet there they stood like so many forlorn chicken-houses,
each on its own oblong patch of land, with a fence between it and its
neighbour. There was something indescribably weary and dreary about it.
The very ground the houses stood on seemed weary and drabbled, almost
asking for rusty tin cans. And so many pleasant little bungalows set
there in an improvised road, wide and weary--and then the effort had
lapsed. The tin shacks were almost a relief. They did not call for
geraniums and lobelias, as did the pretty Hampstead Garden Suburb
"cottages". And these latter might call, but they called in vain. They
got bits of old paper and tins.

Yet Harriet absolutely wanted to live by the sea, so they stopped before
each bungalow that was to be let furnished. The estate agents went in
for abbreviations. On the boards at the corner of the fences it said
either "4 Sale" or "2 Let". Probably there was a colonial intention of
jocularity. But it was almost enough for Somers. He would have died
rather than have put himself into one of those cottages.

The road ended on the salt pool where the sea had ebbed in. Across was a
state reserve--a bit of aboriginal Australia, with gum trees and empty
spaces beyond the flat salt waters. Near at hand a man was working away,
silently loading a boat with beach-sand, upon the lagoon. To the right
the sea was rolling on the shore, and spurting high on some brown rocks.
Two men in bathing suits were running over the spit of sand from the
lagoon to the surf, where two women in "waders", those rubber
paddling-drawers into which we bundle our children at the seaside, were
paddling along the fringe of the foam. A blond young man wearing a
jacket over his bathing suit walked by with two girls. He had huge
massive legs, astonishing. And near at hand Somers saw another youth
lying on the warm sand-hill in the sun. He had rolled in the dry sand
while he was wet, so he was hardly distinguishable. But he lay like an
animal on his face in the sun, and again Somers wondered at the thick
legs. They seemed to run to leg, these people. Three boys, one a lad of
fifteen or so, came out of the warm lagoon in their bathing suits to
roll in the sand and play. The big lad crawled on all fours and the
little one rode on his back, and pitched off into the sand. They were
extraordinarily like real young animals, mindless as opossums, lunging
about.

This was Sunday afternoon. The sun was warm. The lonely man was just
pushing off his boat on the lagoon. It sat deep in the water, half full
of sand. Somers and Harriet lay on the sand-bank. Strange it was. And it
HAD a sort of fascination. Freedom! That's what they always say. "You
feel free in Australia." And so you do. There is a great relief in the
atmosphere, a relief from tension, from pressure. An absence of control
or will or form. The sky is open above you, and the air is open around
you. Not the old closing-in of Europe.

But what then? The VACANCY of this freedom is almost terrifying. In the
openness and the freedom this new chaos, this litter of bungalows and
tin cans scattered for miles and miles, this Englishness all crumbled
out into formlessness and chaos. Even the heart of Sydney itself--an
imitation of London and New York, without any core or pith of meaning.
Business going on full speed: but only because it is the other end of
English and American business.

The absence of any inner meaning: and at the same time the great sense
of vacant spaces. The sense of irresponsible freedom. The sense of
do-as-you-please liberty. And all utterly uninteresting. What is more
hopelessly uninteresting than accomplished liberty? Great swarming,
teeming Sydney flowing out into these myriads of bungalows, like shallow
waters spreading, undyked. And what then? Nothing. No inner life, no
high command, no interest in anything, finally.

Somers turned over and shut his eyes. New countries were more
problematic than old ones. One loved the sense of release from old
pressure and old tight control, from the old world of water-tight
compartments. This was Sunday afternoon, but with none of the surfeited
dreariness of English Sunday afternoons. It was still a raw loose world.
All Sydney would be out by the sea or in the bush, a roving, unbroken
world. They all rushed from where they were to somewhere else, on
holidays. And to-morrow they'd all be working away, with just as little
meaning, working without any meaning, playing without any meaning; and
yet quite strenuous at it all. It was just dazing. Even the rush for
money had no real pip in it. They really cared very little for the power
that money can give. And except for the sense of power, that had no real
significance here. When all is said and done, even money is not much
good where there is no genuine culture. Money is a means to rising to a
higher, subtler, fuller state of consciousness, or nothing. And when you
flatly don't want a fuller consciousness, what good is your money to
you? Just to chuck about and gamble with. Even money is a European
invention--European and American. It has no real magic in Australia.

Poor Richard Lovat wearied himself to death struggling with the problem
of himself, and calling it Australia. There was no actual need for him
to struggle with Australia: he must have done it in the hedonistic
sense, to please himself. But it wore him to rags.

Harriet sat up and began dusting the sand from her coat--Lovat did
likewise. Then they rose to be going back to the tram-car. There was a
motor-car standing on the sand of the road near the gate of the end
house. The end house was called St. Columb, and Somers' heart flew to
Cornwall. It was quite a nice little place, standing on a bluff of sand
sideways above the lagoon.

"I wouldn't mind that," said Harriet, looking up at St. Columb.

But Somers did not answer. He was shut against any of these humiliating
little bungalows. "Love's Harbour" he was just passing by, and it was "4
Sale". It would be. He ploughed grimly through the sand.
"Arcady"--"Stella Maris"--"Racketty-Coo."

"I say!" called a voice from behind.

It was Mrs. Callcott running unevenly over the sand after them, the
colour high in her cheeks. She wore a pale grey crepe de chine dress and
grey suede shoes. Some distance behind her Jack Callcott was following,
in his shirt-sleeves.

"Fancy you being here!" gasped Mrs. Callcott, and Harriet was so
flustered she could only cry:

"Oh, how do you do!"--and effusively shake hands, as if she were meeting
some former acquaintance on Piccadilly. The shaking hands quite put Mrs.
Callcott off her track. She felt it almost an affront, and went red. Her
husband sauntered up and put his hands in his pockets, to avoid
mistakes.

"Ha, what are YOU doing here," he said to the Somers pair. "Wouldn't you
like a cup of tea?"

Harriet glanced at Richard Lovat. He was smiling faintly.

"Oh, we should LOVE it," she replied to Mr. Callcott. "But where?--have
you got a house here?"

"My sister has the end house," said he.

"Oh, but--will she want us?" cried Harriet, backing out.

The Callcotts stood for a moment silent.

"Yes, if you like to come," said Jack. And it was evident he was aware
of Somers' desire to avoid contact.

"Well, I should be awfully grateful," said Harriet. "Wouldn't you,
Lovat?"

"Yes," he said, smiling to himself, feeling Jack's manly touch of
contempt for all this hedging.

So off they went to "St. Columb". The sister was a brown-eyed Australian
with a decided manner, kindly, but a little suspicious of the two
newcomers. Her husband was a young Cornishman, rather stout and short
and silent. He had his hair cut round at the back, in a slightly rounded
line above a smooth, sunburnt, reddened nape of the neck. Somers found
out later that this young Cornishman--his name was Trewhella--had
married his brother's widow. Mrs. Callcott supplied Harriet later on
with all the information concerning her sister-in-law. The first
Trewhella, Alfred John, had died two years ago, leaving his wife with a
neat sum of money and this house, "St. Columb", and also with a little
girl named Gladys, who came running in shaking her long brown hair just
after the Somers appeared. So the present Trewhellas were a
newly-married couple. The present husband, William James, went round in
a strange, silent fashion helping his wife Rose to prepare tea.

The bungalow was pleasant, a large room facing the sea, with verandahs
and other little rooms opening off. There were many family photographs,
and a framed medal and ribbon and letter praising the first Trewhella.
Mrs. Trewhella was alert and watchful, and decided to be genteel. So the
party sat around in the basket chairs and on the settles under the
windows, instead of sitting at table for tea. And William James silently
but willingly carried round the bread and butter and the cakes.

He was a queer young man, with an Irish-looking face, rather pale, an
odd kind of humour in his grey eye and in the corners of his pursed
mouth. But he spoke never a word. It was hard to decide his
age--probably about thirty--a little younger than his wife. He seemed
silently pleased about something--perhaps his marriage. Somers noticed
that the whites of his eyes were rather bloodshot. He had been in
Australia since he was a boy of fifteen--he had come with his
brother--from St. Columb, near Newquay--St. Columb Major. So much Somers
elicited.

"Well, how do you like Sydney?" came the inevitable question from Mrs.
Trewhella.

"The harbour, I think, is wonderful," came Somers' invariable answer.

"It is a fine harbour, isn't it. And Sydney is a fine town. Oh yes, I've
lived there all my life."

The conversation languished. Callcott was silent, and William James
seemed as if he were never anything else. Even the little girl fluttered
into a whisper and went still again. Everybody was a little embarrassed,
rather stiff: too genteel, or not genteel enough. And the men seemed
absolute logs.

"You don't think much of Australia, then?" said Jack to Somers.

"Why," answered the latter, "how am I to judge! I haven't even seen the
fringe of it."

"Oh, it's mostly fringe," said Jack. "But it hasn't made a good
impression on you?"

"I don't know yet. My feelings are mixed. The COUNTRY seems to me to
have a fascination--strange --."

"But you don't take to the Aussies, at first sight. Bit of a collision
between their aura and yours," smiled Jack.

"Maybe that's what it is," said Somers. "That's a useful way of putting
it. I can't help my aura colliding, can I?"

"Of course you can't. And if it's a tender sort of aura, of course it
feels the bump."

"Oh, don't talk about it," cried Harriet. "He must be just one big bump,
by the way he grumbles."

They all laughed--perhaps a trifle uneasily.

"I thought so," said Jack. "What made you come here? Thought you'd like
to write about it?"

"I thought I might like to live here--and write here," replied Somers
smiling.

"Write about the bushrangers and the heroine lost in the bush and
wandering into a camp of bullies?" said Jack.

"Maybe," said Somers.

"Do you mind if I ask you what sort of things you do write?" said Jack,
with some delicacy.

"Oh--poetry--essays."

"Essays about what?"

"Oh--rubbish mostly."

There was a moment's pause.

"Oh, Lovat, don't be so silly. You KNOW you don't think your essays
rubbish," put in Harriet. "They're about life, and democracy, and
equality, and all that sort of thing," Harriet explained.

"Oh, yes?" said Jack. "I'd like to read some."

"Well," hesitated Harriet, "He can lend you a volume--you've got some
with you, haven't you?" she added, turning to Somers.

"I've got one," admitted that individual, looking daggers at her.

"Well, you'll lend it to Mr. Callcott, won't you?"

"If he wants it. But it will only bore him."

"I might rise up to it, you know," said Jack laconically, "if I bring
all my mental weight to bear on it."

Somers flushed, and laughed at the contradiction in metaphor.

"It's not the loftiness," he said, rather amused. "It's that people just
don't care to hear some things."

"Well, let me try," said Jack. "We're a new country--and we're out to
learn."

"That's exactly what we're not," broke out William James, with a Cornish
accent and a blurt of a laugh. "We're out to show to everybody that we
know everything there is to be known."

"That's some of us," said Jack.

"And most of us," said William James.

"Have it your own way, boy. But let us speak for the minority. And
there's a minority that knows we've got to learn a big lesson--and
that's willing to learn it."

Again there was silence. The women seemed almost effaced.

"There's one thing," thought Somers to himself, "when these Colonials DO
speak seriously, they speak like men, not like babies." He looked up at
Jack.

"It's the world that's got to learn a lesson," he said. "Not only
Australia." His tone was acid and sinister. And he looked with his hard,
pale blue eyes at Callcott. Callcott's eyes, brown and less
concentrated, less hard, looked back curiously at the other man.

"Possibly it is," he said. "But my job is Australia."

Somers watched him. Callcott had a pale, clean-shaven, lean face with
close-shut lips. But his lips weren't bitten in until they just formed a
slit, as they so often are in Colonials. And his eyes had a touch of
mystery, of aboriginal darkness.

"Do you care very much for Australia?" said Somers, a little wistfully.

"I believe I do," said Jack. "But if I was out of a job like plenty of
other unlucky diggers, I suppose I should care more about getting a
job."

"But you care very much about your Australia?"

"My Australia? Yes, I own about seven acres of it, all told. I suppose I
care very much about that. I pay my taxes on it, all right."

"No, but the future of Australia."

"You'll never see me on a platform shouting about it."

The Lovats said they must be going.

"If you like to crowd in," said Jack, "we can take you in the car. We
can squeeze in Mr. Somers in front, and there'll be plenty of room for
the others at the back, if Gladys sits on her Dad's knee."

This time Somers accepted at once. He felt the halting refusals were
becoming ridiculous.

They left at sunset. The west, over the land, was a clear gush of light
up from the departed sun. The east, over the Pacific, was a tall concave
of rose-coloured clouds, a marvellous high apse. Now the bush had gone
dark and spectral again, on the right hand. You might still imagine
inhuman presences moving among the gum trees. And from time to time, on
the left hand, they caught sight of the long green rollers of the
Pacific, with the star-white foam, and behind that the dusk-green sea
glimmered over with smoky rose, reflected from the eastern horizon where
the bank of flesh-rose colour and pure smoke-blue lingered a long time,
like magic, as if the sky's rim were cooling down. It seemed to Somers
characteristic of Australia, this far-off flesh-rose bank of colour on
the sky's horizon, so tender and unvisited, topped with the smoky,
beautiful blueness. And then the thickness of the night's stars
overhead, and one star very brave in the last effulgence of sunset,
westward over the continent. As soon as night came, all the raggletaggle
of amorphous white settlements disappeared, and the continent of the
Kangaroo reassumed its strange, unvisited glamour, a kind of virgin
sensual aloofness.

Somers sat in front between Jack and Victoria Callcott, because he was
so slight. He made himself as small as he could, like the ham in the
sandwich. When he looked her way, he found Victoria watching him under
her lashes, and as she met his eyes, she flared into a smile that filled
him with wonder. She had such a charming, innocent look, like an
innocent girl, naive and a little gawky. Yet the strange exposed smile
she gave him in the dusk. It puzzled him to know what to make of it.
Like an offering--and yet innocent. Perhaps like the sacred prostitutes
of the temple: acknowledgement of the sacredness of the act. He chose
not to think of it, and stared away across the bonnet of the car at the
fading land.

Queer, thought Somers, this girl at once sees perhaps the most real me,
and most women take me for something I am not at all. Queer to be
recognized at once, as if one were of the same family.

He had to admit that he was flattered also. She seemed to see the wonder
in him. And she had none of the European women's desire to make a
conquest of him, none of that feminine rapacity which is so hateful in
the old world. She seemed like an old Greek girl bringing an offering to
the altar of the mystic Bacchus. The offering of herself.

Her husband sat steering the car and smoking his short pipe in silence.
He seemed to have something to think about. At least he had considerable
power of silence, a silence which made itself felt. Perhaps he knew his
wife much better than anyone else. At any rate he did not feel it
necessary to keep an eye on her. If she liked to look at Somers with a
strange, exposed smile, that was her affair. She could do as she liked
in that direction, so far as he, Jack Callcott, was concerned. She was
his wife: she knew it, and he knew it. And it was quite established and
final. So long as she did not betray what was between her and him, as
husband and wife, she could do as she liked with the rest of herself.
And he could, quite rightly, trust her to be faithful to that
undefinable relation which subsisted between them as man and wife. He
didn't pretend and didn't want to occupy the whole field of her
consciousness.

And in just the same way, that bond which connected himself with her, he
would always keep unbroken for his part. But that did not mean that he
was sworn body and soul to his wife. Oh no. There was a good deal of him
which did not come into the marriage bond, and with all this part of
himself he was free to make the best he could, according to his own
idea. He loved her, quite sincerely, for her naive sophisticated
innocence which allowed him to be unknown to her, except in so far as
they were truly and intimately related. It was the innocence which has
been through the fire, and knows its own limitations. In the same way he
quite consciously chose not to know anything more about her than just so
much as entered into the absolute relationship between them. He quite
definitely did not want to absorb her, or to occupy the whole field of
her nature. He would trust her to go her own way, only keeping her to
the pledge that was between them. What this pledge consisted in he did
not try to define. It was something indefinite: the field of contact
between their two personalities. Where their two personalities met and
joined, they were one, and pledged to permanent fidelity. But that part
in each of them which did not belong to the other was free from all
enquiry or even from knowledge. Each silently consented to leave the
other in large part unknown, unknown in word and deed and very being.
They didn't WANT to know--too much knowledge would be like shackles.

Such marriage is established on a very subtle sense of honour and of
individual integrity. It seems as if each race and continent has its own
marriage instinct. And the instinct that develops in Australia will
certainly not be the same as the instinct that develops in America. And
each people must follow its own instinct, if it is to live, not matter
whether the marriage law be universal or not.

The Callcotts had come to no agreement, verbally, as to their marriage.
They had not thought it out. They were Australians, of strongly,
subtly-developed desire for freedom, and with considerable indifference
to old formulae and the conventions based thereon. So they took their
stand instinctively and calmly. Jack had defined his stand as far as he
found necessary. If his wife was good to him and satisfied him in so far
as HE went, then he was pledged to trust her to do as she liked outside
his ken, outside his range. He would make a cage for nobody. This he
openly propounded to his mates: to William James, for example, and later
to Somers. William James said yes, but thought the more. Somers was
frankly disturbed, not liking the thought of applying the same
prescription to his own marriage.

They put down the Trewhellas at their house in North Sydney, and went on
to Murdoch Road over the ferry. Jack had still to take the car down to
the garage in town. Victoria said she would prepare the high tea which
takes the place of dinner and supper in Australia, against his return.
So Harriet boldly invited them to this high tea--a real substantial meal
in her own house. Victoria was to help her prepare it, and Jack was to
come straight back to Torestin. Victoria was as pleased as a lamb with
two tails over this arrangement, and went in to change her dress.

Somers knew why Harriet had launched this invitation. It was because she
had had a wonderfully successful cooking morning. Like plenty of other
women Harriet had learned to cook during war-time, and now she loved it,
once in a while. This had been one of the whiles. Somers had stoked the
excellent little stove, and peeled the apples and potatoes and onions
and pumpkin, and looked after the meat and the sauces, while Harriet had
lashed out in pies and tarts and little cakes and baked custard. She now
surveyed her prize Beeton shelf with love, and began to whisk up a
mayonnaise for potato salad.

Victoria appeared in a pale gauze dress of pale pink with little dabs of
gold--a sort of tea-party dress--and with her brown hair loosely knotted
behind, and with innocent sophistication pulled a bit untidy over her
womanly forehead, she looked winsome. Her colour was very warm, and she
was gawkily excited. Harriet put on an old yellow silk frock, and Somers
changed into a dark suit. For tea there was cold roast pork with
first-class brown crackling on it, and potato salad, beetroot, and
lettuce, and apple chutney; then a dressed lobster--or crayfish, very
good, pink and white; and then apple pie and custard-tarts and cakes and
a dish of apples and passion fruits and oranges, a pine-apple and some
bananas: and of course big cups of tea, breakfast-cups.

Victoria and Harriet were delighted, Somers juggled with colour-schemes
on the table, the one central room in the bungalow was brilliantly
lighted, and the kettle sang on the hearth. After months of India, with
all the Indian decorum and two silent men-servants waiting at table: and
after the old-fashioned gentility of the P. and O. steamer, Somers and
Harriet felt this show rather a come-down maybe, but still good fun.
Victoria felt it was almost "society". They waited for Jack.

Jack arrived bending forward rather in the doorway, a watchful look on
his pale, clean-shaven face, and that atmosphere of silence about him
which is characteristic of many Australians.

"Kept you waiting?" he asked.

"We were just ready for you," said Harriet.

Jack had to carve the meat, because Somers was so bad at it and didn't
like doing it. Harriet poured the great cups of tea. Callcott looked
with a quick eye round the table to see exactly what he wanted to eat,
and Victoria peeped through her lashes to see exactly how Harriet
behaved. As Harriet always behaved in the vaguest manner possible, and
ate her sweets with her fish-fork and her soup with her pudding spoon, a
study of her table manners was not particularly profitable.

To Somers it was like being back twenty-five years, back in an English
farm-house in the Midlands, at Sunday tea. He had gone a long way from
the English Midlands, and got out of the way of them. Only to find them
here again, with hardly a change. To Harriet it was all novel and fun.
But Richard Lovat felt vaguely depressed.

The pleasant heartiness of the life he had known as a boy now depressed
him. He hated the promiscuous mixing in of all the company, the lack of
reserve in manner. He had preferred India for that: the gulf between the
native servants and the whites kept up a sort of tone. He had learned to
be separate, to talk across a slight distance. And that was an immense
relief to him, because it was really more his nature. Now he found
himself soused again in the old familiar jolly and cosy, spirit of his
childhood and boyhood, and he was depressed.

Jack, of course, had a certain reserve. But of a different sort. Not a
physical reserve. He did keep his coat on, but he might as well have sat
there in his shirt-sleeves. His very silence was, so to speak, in its
shirt-sleeves.

There was a curious battle in silence going on between the two men. To
Harriet, all this familiar shirt-sleeve business was just fun, the
charades. In her most gushing genial moments she was still only
masquerading inside her class--the "upper" class of Europe. But Somers
was of the people himself, and he had that alert INSTINCT of the common
people, the instinctive knowledge of what his neighbour was wanting and
thinking, and the instinctive necessity to answer. With the other
classes, there is a certain definite breach between individual and
individual, and not much goes across except what is intended to go
across. But with the common people, and with most Australians, there is
no breach. The communication is silent and involuntary, the give and
take flows like waves from person to person, and each one knows: unless
he is foiled by speech. Each one knows in silence, reciprocates in
silence, and the talk as a rule just babbles on, on the surface. This is
the common people among themselves. But there is this difference in
Australia. Each individual seems to feel himself pledged to put himself
aside, to keep himself at least half out of count. The whole geniality
is based on a sort of code of "You put yourself aside, and I'll put
myself aside." This is done with a watchful will: a sort of duel. And
above this, a great geniality. But the continual holding most of himself
aside, out of count, makes a man go blank in his withheld self. And
that, too, is puzzling.

Probably this is more true of the men than of the women. Probably women
change less, from land to land, play fewer "code' tricks with
themselves. At any rate, Harriet and Victoria got on like a house on
fire, and as they were both beautiful women, and both looking well as
they talked, everything seemed splendid. But Victoria was really paying
just a wee bit of homage all the time, homage to the superior class.

As for the two men: Somers SEEMED a gentleman, and Jack didn't want to
be a gentleman. Somers SEEMED a real gentleman. And yet Jack recognized
in him at once the intuitive response which only subsists, normally,
between members of the same class: between the common people. Perhaps
the best of the upper classes have the same intuitive understanding of
their fellow-man: but there is always a certain reserve in the response,
a preference for the non-intuitive forms of communication, for
deliberate speech. What is not said is supposed not to exist: that is
almost code of honour with the other classes. With the true common
people, only that which is NOT said is of any vital significance.

Which brings us back to Jack and Somers. The one thing Somers had kept,
and which he possessed in a very high degree, was the power of intuitive
communication with others. Much as he wanted to be alone, to stand clear
from the weary business of unanimity with everybody, he had never chosen
really to suspend this power of intuitive response: not till he was
personally offended, and then it switched off and became a blank wall.
But the smallest act of real kindness would call it back to life again.

Jack had been generous, and Somers liked him. Therefore he could not
withhold his soul from responding to him, in a measure. And Jack, what
did he want? He saw this other little fellow, a gentleman, apparently,
and yet different, not exactly a gentleman. And he wanted to know him,
to talk to him. He wanted to get at the bottom of him. For there was
something about Somers--he might be a German, he might be a bolshevist,
he might be anything, and he MUST be something, because he was
different, a gentleman and not a gentleman. He was different because,
when he looked at you, he knew you more or less in your own terms, not
as an outsider. He looked at you as if he were one of your own sort. He
answered you intuitively as if he were one of your own sort. And yet he
had the speech and the clear definiteness of a gentleman. Neither one
thing nor the other. And he seemed to know a lot, Jack was sure that
Somers knew a lot, and could tell him a lot, if he would but let it out.

If he had been just a gentleman, of course, Jack would never have
thought of wanting him to open out. Because a gentleman has nothing to
open towards a man of the people. He can only talk, and the working man
can only listen across a distance. But seeing that this little fellow
was born a gentleman and not a gentleman; seeing he was just like one of
yourselves, and yet had all the other qualities of a gentleman: why, you
might just as well get the secret out of him.

Somers knew the attitude, and was not going to be drawn. He talked
freely and pleasantly enough--but never as Jack wanted. He knew well
enough what Jack wanted: which was that they should talk together as man
to man--as pals, you know, with a little difference. But Somers would
never be pals with any man. It wasn't in his nature. He talked
pleasantly and familiarly--fascinating to Victoria, who sat with her
brown eyes watching him, while she clung to Jack's arm on the sofa. When
Somers was talking and telling, it was fascinating, and his quick,
mobile face changed and seemed full of magic. Perhaps it was difficult
to locate any definite SOMERS, any one individual in all this ripple of
animation and communication. The man himself seemed lost in the bright
aura of his rapid consciousness. This fascinated Victoria: she of course
imagined some sort of God in the fiery bush. But Jack was mistrustful.
He mistrusted all this bright quickness. If there was an individual
inside the brightly-burning bush of consciousness, let him come out, man
to man. Even if it was a sort of God in the bush, let him come out, man
to man. Otherwise let him be considered a sort of mountebank, a
show-man, too clever by half.

Somers knew pretty well Jack's estimation of him. Jack, sitting there
smoking his little short pipe, with his lovely wife in her pink
georgette frock hanging on to his side, and the watchful look on his
face, was the manly man, the consciously manly man. And he had just a
bit of contempt for the brilliant little fellow opposite, and he felt
just a bit uneasy because the same little fellow laughed at his
"manliness", knowing it didn't go right through. It takes more than
"manliness" to make a man.

Somers' very brilliance had an overtone of contempt in it, for the other
man. The women, of course, not demanding any orthodox "manliness",
didn't mind the knock at Jack's particular sort. And to them Somers'
chief fascination lay in the fact that he was never "pals". They were
too deeply women to care for the sham of pals.

So Jack went home after a whisky and soda with his nose a little bit out
of joint. The little man was never going to be pals, that was the first
fact to be digested. And he couldn't be despised as a softy, he was too
keen; he just laughed at the other man's attempt at despising him. Yet
Jack did want to get at him, somehow or other.


CHAPTER 3. LARBOARD WATCH AHOY!

"What do you think of things in general?" Callcott asked of Somers one
evening, a fortnight or so after their first encounter. They were
getting used to one another: and they liked one another, in a separated
sort of way. When neither of them was on the warpath, they were quite
happy together. They played chess together now and then, a wild and
haphazard game. Somers invented quite brilliant attacks, and rushed in
recklessly, occasionally wiping Jack off the board in a quarter of an
hour. But he was very careless of his defence. The other man played at
this. To give Callcott justice, he was more accustomed to draughts than
to chess, and Somers had never played draughts, not to remember. So Jack
played a draughts game, aiming at seizing odd pieces. It wasn't Somers'
idea of chess, so he wouldn't take the trouble to defend himself. His
men fell to this ambush, and he lost the game. Because at the end, when
he had only one or two pieces to attack, Jack was very clever at
cornering, having the draughts moves off by heart.

"But it isn't chess," protested Somers.

"You've lost, haven't you?" said Jack.

"Yes. And I shall always lose that way. I can't piggle with those
draughtsmen dodges."

"Ah well, if I can win that way, I have to do it. I don't know the game
as well as you do," said Jack. And there was a quiet sense of victory,
"done you down", in his tones. Somers required all his dignity not to
become angry. But he shrugged his shoulders.

Sometimes, too, if he suggested a game, Callcott would object that he
had something he must do. Lovat took the slight rebuff without
troubling. Then an hour or an hour and a half later, Callcott would come
tapping at the door, and would enter saying:

"Well, if you are ready for a game."

And Lovat would unsuspectingly acquiesce. But on these occasions Jack
had been silently, secretly accumulating his forces; there was a
silence, almost a stealth in his game. And at the same time his bearing
was soft, as it were submissive, and Somers was put quite off his guard.
He began to play with his usual freedom. And then Jack wiped the floor
with his little neighbour: simply wiped the floor with him, and left him
gasping. One, two, three games--it was the same every time.

"But I can't see the board," cried Somers, startled. "I can hardly
distinguish black from white."

He was really distressed. It was true what he said. He was as if
stupefied, as if some drug had been injected straight into his brain.
For his life he could not gather his consciousness together--not till he
realised the state he was in. And then he refused to try. Jack gave a
quiet little laugh. There was on his face a subtle little smile of
satisfaction. He had done his high-flying opponent down. He was the
better man.

After the first evening that this had taken place, Somers was much more
wary of his neighbour, much less ready to open towards him than he had
been. HE NEVER AGAIN INVITED JACK TO A GAME OF CHESS. And when Callcott
suggested a game, Somers played, but coldly, without the recklessness
and the laughter which were the chief charm of his game. And Jack was
once more snubbed, put back into second place. Then once he was reduced,
Somers began to relent, and the old guerilla warfare started again.

The moment Somers heard this question of Jack's: "What do you think of
things in general?"--he went on his guard.

"The man is trying to draw me, to fool me," he said to himself. He knew
by a certain quiet, almost sly intention in Jack's voice, and a certain
deference in his bearing. It was this false deference he was most wary
of. This was the Judas approach.

"How in general?" he asked. "Do you mean the cosmos?"

"No," said Jack, foiled in his first move. He had been through the
Australian high-school course, and was accustomed to think for himself.
Over a great field he was quite indifferent to thought, and hostile to
consciousness. It seemed to him more manly to be unconscious, even
blank, to most of the great questions. But on his own subjects,
Australian politics, Japan, and machinery, he thought straight and manly
enough. And when he met a man whose being puzzled him, he wanted to get
at the bottom of that, too. He looked up at Somers with a searching,
penetrating, inimical look, that he tried to cover with an appearance of
false deference. For he was always aware of the big empty spaces of his
own consciousness; like his country, a vast empty "desert" at the centre
of him.

"No," he repeated. "I mean the world--economics and politics. The
welfare of the world."

"It's no good asking me," said Somers. "Since the war burst my bubble of
humanity I'm a pessimist, a black pessimist about the present human
world."

"You think it's going to the bad?" said Jack, still drawing him with the
same appearance of deference, of wanting to hear.

"Yes, I do. Faster or slower. Probably I shall never see any great
change in my lifetime, but the tendency is all downhill, in my opinion.
But then I'm a pessimist, so you needn't bother about my opinion."

Somers wanted to let it all go at that. But Callcott persisted.

"Do you think there'll be more wars? Do you think Germany will be in a
position to fight again very soon?"

"Bah, you bolster up an old bogey out here. Germany is the bogey of
yesterday, not of to-morrow."

"She frightened us out of our sleep before," said Jack, resentful.

"And now, for the time being, she's done. As a war-machine she's done,
and done for ever. So much scrap-iron, her iron fist."

"You think so?" said Jack, with all the animosity of a returned hero who
wants to think his old enemy the one and only bugbear, and who feels
quite injured if you tell him there's no more point in his old hate.

"That's my opinion. Of course I may be wrong."

"Yes, you may," said Jack.

"Sure," said Somers. And there was silence. This time Somers smiled a
little to himself.

"And what do you consider, then, is the bogey of to-morrow?" asked Jack
at length, in a rather small, unwilling voice.

"I don't really know. What should you say?"

"Me? I wanted to hear what you have to say."

"And I'd rather hear what you have to say," laughed Somers.

There was a pause. Jack seemed to be pondering. At last he came out with
his bluff, manly Australian self.

"If you ask me," he said, "I should say that Labour is the bogey you
speak of."

Again Somers knew that this was a draw. "He wants to find out if I'm
socialist or anti," he thought to himself.

"You think Labour is a menace to society?" he returned.

"Well," Jack hedged. "I won't say that Labour is the menace, exactly.
Perhaps the state of affairs forces Labour to be the menace."

"Oh, quite. But what's the state of affairs?"

"That's what nobody seems to know."

"So it's quite safe to lay the blame on," laughed Somers. He looked with
real dislike at the other man, who sat silent and piqued and rather
diminished: "Coming here just to draw me and get to know what's inside
me!" he said to himself angrily. And he would carry the conversation no
further. He would not even offer Jack a whisky and soda. "No," he
thought to himself. "If he trespasses on my hospitality, coming creeping
in here, into my house, just to draw me and get the better of me,
underhandedly, then I'll pour no drink for him. He can go back to where
he came from." But Somers was mistaken. He only didn't understand Jack's
way of leaving seven-tenths of himself out of any intercourse. Richard
wanted the whole man there, openly. And Jack wanted his own way, of
seven-tenths left out.

So that after a while Jack rose slowly, saying:

"Well, I'll be turning in. It's work to-morrow for some of us."

"If we're lucky enough to have jobs," laughed Somers.

"Or luckier still, to have the money so that we don't need a job,"
returned Jack.

"Think how bored most folks would be on a little money and no settled
occupation," said Somers.

"Yes, I might be myself," said Jack, honestly admitting it, and at the
same time slightly despising the man who had no job, and therefore no
significance in life.

"Why, of course."

When Callcott came over to Torestin, either Victoria came with him, or
she invited Harriet across to Wyewurk. Wyewurk was the name of Jack's
bungalow. It had been built by a man who had inherited from an aunt a
modest income, and who had written thus permanently his retort against
society on his door.

"Wyewurk?" said Jack. "Because you've jolly well got to."

The neighbours nearly always spoke of their respective homes by their
elegant names. "Won't Mrs. Somers go across to Wyewurk, Vicky said.
She's making a blouse or something, sewing some old bits of rag
together--or new bits--and I expect she'll need a pageful of advice
about it." This was what Jack had said. Harriet had gone with apparent
alacrity, but with real resentment. She had never in all her life had
"neighbours", and she didn't know what neighbouring really meant. She
didn't care for it, on trial. Not after she and Victoria had said and
heard most of the things they wanted to say and hear. But they liked
each other also. And though Victoria could be a terribly venomous little
cat, once she unsheathed her claws and became rather "common", still, so
long as her claws were sheathed her paws were quite velvety and pretty,
she was winsome and charming to Harriet, a bit deferential before her,
which flattered the other woman. And then, lastly, Victoria had quite a
decent piano, and played nicely, whereas Harriet had a good voice, and
played badly. So that often, as the two men played chess or had one of
their famous encounters, they would hear Harriet's strong, clear voice
singing Schubert or Schumann or French or English folk songs, whilst
Victoria played. And both women were happy, because though Victoria was
fond of music and had an instinct for it, her knowledge of songs was
slight, and to be learning these old English and old French melodies, as
well as the German and the Italian songs, was a real adventure and a
pleasure to her.

They were still singing when Jack returned.

"Still at it!" he said manfully, from the background chewing his little
pipe.

Harriet looked round. She was just finishing the joyous moan of Plaisir
d'amour, a song she loved because it tickled her so. "Dure toute la
vie--i- i--ie--i--e," she sang the concluding words at him, laughing in
his face.

"You're back early," she said.

"Felt a mental twilight coming on," he said, "so thought we'd better
close down for the night."

Harriet divined that, to use her expression, Somers had been
"disagreeable to him".

"Don't you sing?" she cried.

"Me! Have you ever heard a cow at a gate when she wants to come in and
be milked?"

"Oh, he does!" cried Victoria. "He sang a duet at the Harbour Lights
Concert."

"There!" cried Harriet. "How exciting! What duet did he sing?"

"Larboard Watch ahoy!"

"Oh! Oh! I know that," cried Harriet remembering a farmer friend of
Somers', who had initiated her into the thrilling harmony, down in
Cornwall.

"There wasn't a soul left in the hall, when we'd finished, except
Victoria and the other chap's wife," said Jack.

"Oh, what a fib. They applauded like anything, and made you give an
encore."

"Ay, and we didn't know another bally duet between us, so we had to sing
Larboard Watch over again. It was Larboard Alarum Clock by the time we
got to the end of it, it went off with such a rattle."

"Oh, do let us sing it," said Harriet. "You must help me when I go
wrong, because I don't know it well."

"What part do you want to sing?" said Jack.

"Oh, I sing the first part."

"Nay," said Jack. "I sing that part myself. I'm a high tenor, I am, once
I get the wind up."

"I couldn't possibly sing the alto," said Harriet.

"Oh, Jack, do sing the alto," said Victoria. "Go on, do! I'll help you."

"Oh well, if you'll go bail for me, I don't care what I do," said Jack.

And very shortly Somers heard a gorgeous uproar in Wyewurk. Harriet
breaking down occasionally and being picked up. She insisted on keeping
on till she had it perfect, and the other two banged and warbled away
with no signs of fatigue. So that they were still hailing the Larboard
Watch Ahoy when the clock struck eleven.

Then when silence did ensue for a moment, Mrs. Callcott came flying over
to Torestin.

"Oh, Mr. Somers, won't you come and have a drink with Jack? Mrs. Somers
is having a glass of hop bitters."

When Somers entered the living room of Wyewurk, Jack looked up at him
with a smile and a glow in his dark eyes, almost like love.

"Beer?" he said.

"What's the alternative?"

"Nothing but gas-water."

"Then beer."

Harriet and Victoria were still at the piano, excitedly talking songs.
Harriet was teaching Victoria to pronounce the words of a Schubert song:
for there was still one person in the world unacquainted with: "Du bist
wie eine Blume." And Victoria was singing it in a wavering, shy little
voice.

"Let's drink our beer by the kitchen fire," said Jack. "Then we shall be
able to hear ourselves speak, which is more than we can do in this
aviary."

Somers solemnly followed into the tiny kitchen, and they sat in front of
the still hot stove.

"The women will keep up the throat-stretching for quite a time yet,"
said Jack.

"If we let them. It's getting late."

"Oh, I've just started my second awakening--feel as sharp as a new
tin-tack."

"Talking about pessimism," he resumed after a pause. "There's some of us
here that feels things are pretty shaky, you know." He spoke in a
subdued, important sort of voice.

"What is shaky--Australian finance?"

"Ay, Australian everything."

"Well, it's pretty much the same in every country. Where there's such a
lot of black smoke there's not a very big fire. The world's been going
to the dogs ever since it started to toddle, apparently."

"Ay, I suppose it has. But it'll get there one day. At least Australia
will."

"What kind of dogs?"

"Maybe financial smash, and then hell to pay all round. Maybe, you know.
We've got to think about it."

Somers watched him for some moments with serious eyes. Jack seemed as if
he were a little bit drunk. Yet he had only drunk a glass of lager beer.
He wasn't drunk. But his face had changed, it had a kind of eagerness,
and his eyes glowed big. Strange, he seemed, as if in a slight ecstasy.

"It may be," said Somers slowly. "I am neither a financier nor a
politician. It seems as if the next thing to come a cropper were
capital: now there are no more kings to speak of. It may be the middle
classes are coming smash--which is the same thing as finance--as
capital. But also it may not be. I've given up trying to know."

"What will be will be, eh," said Jack with a smile.

"I suppose so, in this matter."

"Ay, but, look here, I believe it's right what you say. The middle
classes ARE coming down. What do they sit on?--they sit on money, on
capital. And this country is as good as bankrupt, so then what have they
left to stand on?"

"They say most countries are really bankrupt. But if they agree among
themselves to carry on, the word doesn't amount to much."

"Oh, but it does. It amounts to a hell of a lot, here in this country.
If it ever came to the push, and the state was bankrupt, there'd be no
holding New South Wales in."

"The state never will be bankrupt."

"Won't it? Won't there be a financial smash, a proper cave-in, before
we're much older? Won't there? We'll see. But look here, do you care if
there is?"

"I don't know what it means, so I can't say. Theoretically I don't mind
a bit if international finance goes bust: if it can go bust."

"Never mind about theoretically. You'd like to see the power of money,
the power of capital, BROKE. Would you or wouldn't you?"

Somers watched the excited, handsome face opposite him, and answered
slowly:

"Theoretically, yes. Actually, I really don't know."

"Oh to hell with your theoretically. Drown it. Speak like a man with
some feeling in your guts. You either would or wouldn't. Don't leave
your shirt-tail hanging out, with a theoretically. Would you or wouldn't
you?"

Somers laughed.

"Why, yes, I would," he said, "and be damned to everything."

"Shake," cried Jack, stretching over. And he took Somers' small hand
between both his own. "I knew," he said in a broken voice, "that we was
mates."

Somers was rather bewildered.

"But you know," he said, "I never take any part in politics at all. They
aren't my affair."

"They're not! They're not! You're quite right. You're quite right, you
are. You're a damned sight too good to be mixing up in any dirty
politics. But all I want is that your feelings should be the same as
mine, and they are, thank my stars, they are."

By this time Somers was almost scared.

"But why should you care?" he said, with some reserve. The other however
did not heed him.

"You're not with the middle classes, as you call them, the money-men, as
I call them, and I know you're not. And if you're not with them you're
against them."

"My father was a working-man. I come from the working people. My
sympathy is with them, when it's with anybody, I assure you."

Jack stared at Somers wide-eyed, a smile gathering round his mouth.

"Your father was a working-man, was he? Is that really so? Well, that IS
a surprise! And yet," he changed his tone, "no, it isn't. I might have
known. Of course I might. How should I have felt for you as I did, the
very first minute I saw you, if it hadn't been so. Of course you're one
of us: same flesh and blood, same clay. Only you've had the advantages
of a money-man. But you've stuck true to your flesh and blood, which is
what most of them don't do. They turn into so much dirt, like the
washings in the pan, a lot of dirt to a very little gold. Well, well,
and your father was a working man! And you now being as you are!
Wonderful what we may be, isn't it?"

"It is indeed," said Somers, who was infinitely more amazed at the
present Jack, than ever Jack could be at him.

"Well, well, that brings us a great deal nearer than ever, that does,"
said Callcott, looking at Somers with glowing, smiling eyes which the
other man could not quite understand, eyes with something desirous, and
something perhaps fanatical in them. Somers could not understand. As for
the being brought nearer to Callcott, that was apparently entirely a
matter of Jack's own feeling. Somers himself had never felt more alone
and far off. Yet he trembled at the other man's strange fervour. He
vibrated helplessly in some sort of troubled response.

The vibration from the two men had by this time quite penetrated into
the other room and into the consciousness of the two women. Harriet came
in all wondering and full of alert curiosity. She looked from one to the
other, saw the eyes of both men shining, saw the puzzled, slightly
scared look on her husband's face, and the glowing handsomeness on
Jack's, and she wondered more than ever.

"What are you two men talking about?" she asked pointedly. "You look
very much moved about something."

"Moved!" laughed Jack, "We're doing fifty miles an hour, and not turning
a hair."

"I'm glad I'm not going with you then," said Harriet. "It's much too
late at night for me for that sort of thing."

Victoria went over to her husband and stood close at his side, ruffling
up his brown, short, crisp, bright hair.

"Doesn't he talk nonsense, Mrs. Somers, doesn't he talk nonsense," the
young wife crooned, in her singing, contralto voice, as she looked down
at him.

Harriet started at the sudden revelation of palpitating intimacy. She
wanted to go away, quick. So did Somers. But neither Jack nor Victoria
wanted them to go.

Jack was looking up at Victoria with a curious smile, touched with a
leer. It gave his face, his rather long, clean-shaven face with the
thick eyebrows, most extraordinarily the look of an old mask. One of
those old Greek masks that give a fixed mockery to every feeling.
Leering up at his young wife with the hearty leer of a player masked as
a faun that is at home, on its own ground. Both Harriet and Somers felt
amazed, as if they had strayed into the wrong wood.

"You talk all the sense, don't you, kiddie?" he said, with a strong
Australian accent again. And as he spoke with his face upturned to her,
his Adam's apple moved in his strong white throat as if it chuckled.

"Of course I do," she crooned in her mocking, crooning contralto. "Of
course I do."

He put his arm round her hips. They continued to look into each other's
faces.

"It's awfully late. We shall have simply to fly to bed. I'm so sleepy
now. Good-night. Thank you so much for the singing. I enjoyed it
awfully. Good-night!"

Victoria looked up with a brightly-flushed face, entirely unashamed, her
eyes glowing like an animal's. Jack relaxed his grip of her, but did not
rise. He looked at the Somers pair with eyes gone dusky, as if unseeing,
and the mask-like smile lingering on his face like the reflection from
some fire, curiously natural, not even grotesque.

"Find your way across all right?" he said. "Good-night! Good-night!" But
he was as unaware of them, actually, as if they did not exist within his
ken.

"Well," said Harriet, as they closed the door of Torestin. "I think they
might have waited just TWO minutes before they started their love
making. After all, one doesn't want to be implicated, does one?"

"One emphatically doesn't," said Somers.

"Really, it was as if he'd got his arm round all the four of us!
Horrid!" said Harriet resentfully.

"He felt he had, I'm sure," said Somers.

It was a period when Sydney was again suffering from a bubonic plague
scare: a very mild scare, some fifteen cases to a million people,
according to the newspapers. But the town was placarded with notices
"Keep your town clean," and there was a stall in Martin Place where you
could write your name down and become a member of a cleanliness league,
or something to that effect.

The battle was against rats, fleas, and dirt. The plague affects rats
first, said the notices, then fleas, and then man. All citizens were
called upon to wage war with the vermin mentioned. Alas, there was no
need to call on Somers to wage the war. The first morning they had
awakened in Torestin, it was to a slight uneasy feeling of
uncleanliness. Harriet, who hated the thought of contamination, found
the apples gnawed, when she went to take one to eat before breakfast.
And rat dirts, she said, everywhere.

Then had started such a cleaning, such a scouring, such a stopping of
holes, as Torestin had never known. Somers sourly re-christened the
house Toscrubin. And after that, every night he had the joyful business
of setting two rat-traps, those traps with the powerful fly-back
springs. Which springs were a holy terror to him, for he knew his
fingers would break like pipe-stems if the spring flew back on them. And
almost every morning he had the nauseous satisfaction of finding a rat
pinned by its nose in the trap, its eyes bulging out, a blot of deep red
blood just near. Sometimes two rats. They were not really ugly, save for
their tails. Smallish rats, perhaps only half grown, and with black,
silky fur. Not like the brown rats he had known in the English country.

But big or little, ugly or not ugly, they were very objectionable to
him, and he hated to have to start the day by casting one or more
corpses gingerly, by the tip of the tail, into the garbage tin. He
railed against the practice of throwing cans and everything
promiscuously on to any bit of waste ground. It seemed to his embittered
fancy that Sydney harbour, and all the coast of New South Wales, was
moving with this pest. It reminded him of the land of Egypt, under the
hand of the Lord: plagues of mice and rats and rabbits and snails and
all manner of crawling things. And then he would say: "Perhaps it must
be so in a new country." For all that, the words "new country" had
become like acid between his teeth. He was always recalling what
Flinders Petrie says somewhere: "A colony is no younger than the parent
country." Perhaps it is even older, one step further gone.

This evening--or rather midnight--he went to the back kitchen to put
every scrap of any sort of food beyond rat-reach, and to bait the two
traps with bits of cheese-rind. Then he bent back the two murderous
springs, and the traps were ready. He washed his hands hard from the
contamination of them. Then he went into the garden, even climbed the
tub-like summer house, to have a last look at the world. There was a big
slip of very bright moon risen, and the harbour was faintly distinct.

Now that night had fallen, the wind was from the land, and cold. He
turned to go indoors. And as he did so he heard a motor-car run quickly
along the road, and saw the bright lights come to a stop at the gate of
Wyewurk. Wyewurk was in darkness already. But a man left the car and
came along the path to the house, giving a peculiar whistle as he did
so. He went round to the back door and knocked sharply, once, twice, in
a peculiar way. Then he whistled and knocked again. After which he must
have heard an answer, for he waited quietly.

In a few minutes more the lights switched on and the door opened; Jack
was there in his pyjamas.

"That you, Jaz boy?" he said in a quiet tone. "Why the blazes didn't you
come half an hour sooner, or half a minute later? You got me just as I'd
taken the jump, and I fell all over the bloomin' hedge. Come in. You'll
make a nervous wreck of me between you."

The figure entered. It was William James, the brother-in-law. Somers
heard him go again in about ten minutes. But Harriet did not notice.


CHAPTER 4. JACK AND JAZ.

The following evening Somers could feel waves of friendliness coming
across the hedge, from Victoria. And she kept going out to the gate to
look for Jack, who was late returning home. And as she went, she always
looked long towards the verandah of Torestin, to catch sight of the
Somers.

Somers felt the yearning and amicable advance in the atmosphere. For
some time he disregarded it. Then at last he went out to look at the
nightfall. It was early June. The sun had set beyond the land, casting a
premature shadow of night. But the eastern sky was very beautiful, full
of pure, pure light, the light of the southern seas, next the Antarctic.
There was a great massive cloud settling low, and it was all gleaming, a
golden, physical glow. Then across the upper sky trailed a thin line of
little dark clouds, like a line of porpoises swimming in the extremely
beautiful clarity.

"Isn't it a lovely evening again?" Victoria called to him as he stood on
the summer-house top.

"Very lovely. Australia never ceases to be a wonderland for me, at
nightfall," he answered.

"Aha!" she said. "You are fond of the evening?"

He had come down from his point of vantage, and they stood near together
by the fence.

"In Europe I always like morning best--much best. I can't say what it is
I find so magical in the evening here."

"No!" she replied, looking upwards round the sky. "It's going to rain."

"What makes you think so?" he asked.

"It looks like it--and it feels like it. I expect Jack will be here
before it comes on."

"He's late to-night, is he?"

"Yes. He said he might be. Is it six o'clock?"

"No, it's only a little after five."

"Is it? I needn't be expecting him yet, then. He won't be home till
quarter past six." She was silent for a while. "We shall soon have the
shortest day," she said. "I am glad when it has gone. I always miss Jack
so much when the evening comes, and he isn't home. You see I was used to
a big family, and it seems a bit lonely to me yet, all alone in the
cottage. That's why we're so glad to have you and Mrs. Somers next door.
We get on so well, don't we? Yes, it's surprising. I always felt nervous
of English people before. But I love Mrs. Somers. I think she's lovely."

"You haven't been married long?" asked Somers.

"Not quite a year. It seems a long time in some ways. I wouldn't be
without Jack, not for anything. But I do miss my family. We were six of
us all at home together, and it makes such a difference, being all
alone."

"Was your home in Sydney?"

"No, on the South Coast--dairy-farming. No, my father was a surveyor, so
was his father before him. Both in New South Wales. Then he gave it up
and started this farm down south. Oh yes, I liked it--I love home. I
love going down home. I've got a cottage down there that father gave me
when I got married. You must come down with us some time when the people
that are in it go. It's right on the sea. Do you think you and Mrs.
Somers would like it?"

"I'm sure we should."

"And will you come with us for a week-end? The people in it are leaving
next week. We let it furnished."

"We should like to very much indeed," said Somers, being polite over it
because he felt a little unsure still, whether he wanted to be so
intimate. But Victoria seemed so wistful.

"We feel so ourselves with you and Mrs. Somers," said Victoria. "And yet
you're so different from us, and yet we feel so much ourselves with
you."

"But we're not different," he protested.

"Yes, you are--coming from home. It's mother who always called England
home. She was English. She always spoke so prettily. She came from
Somerset. Yes, she died about five years ago. Then I was mother of the
family. Yes, I am the eldest, except Alfred. Yes, they're all at home.
Alfred is a mining engineer--there are coal mines down the South Coast.
He was with Jack in the war, on the same job. Jack was a Captain and
Alfred was a Lieutenant. But they drop all the army names now. That's
how I came to know Jack: through Alfred. Jack always calls him Fred."

"You didn't know him before the war?"

"No, not till he came home. Alfred used to talk about him in his
letters, but I never thought then I should marry him. They are great
friends yet, the two of them."

The rain that she had prophesied now began to fall--big straight drops,
that resounded on the tin roofs of the houses.

"Won't you come in and sit with us till Jack comes?" asked Somers.
"You'll feel dreary, I know."

"Oh, don't think I said it for that," said Victoria.

"Come round, though," said Somers. And they both ran indoors out of the
rain. Lightning had started to stab in the south-western sky, and clouds
were shoving slowly up.

Victoria came round and sat talking, telling of her home on the south
coast. It was only about fifty miles from Sydney, but it seemed another
world to her. She was so quiet and simple, now, that both the Somers
felt drawn to her, and glad that she was sitting with them.

They were talking still of Europe. Italy, Switzerland, England,
Paris--the wonderworld to Victoria, who had never been out of New South
Wales in her life, in spite of her name--which name her father had given
her to annoy all his neighbours, because he said the State of Victoria
was run like a paradise compared to New South Wales--although he too
never went a yard out of his home state, if he could help it; they were
talking still of Europe when they heard Jack's voice calling from the
opposite yard.

"Hello," cried Victoria, running out. "Are you there, Jack?" I was
listening for the motor-bike. I remember now, you went by tram."

Sometimes she seemed a little afraid of him--physically afraid--though
he was always perfectly good-humoured with her. And this evening she
sounded like that--as if she feared his coming home, and wanted the
Somers to shelter her.

"You've found a second home over there, apparently," said Jack,
advancing towards the fence. "Well, how's things?"

It was dark, so they could not see his face. But he sounded different.
There was something queer, unknown about him.

"I'll come over for a game of chess to-night, old man, if you'll say the
word," he said to Somers. "And the ladies can punish the piano again
meanwhile, if they feel like it. I bought something to sweeten the
melodies with, and give us a sort of breathing-space now and then: sort
of little ear-rest, you know."

"That means a pound of chocolates," said Victoria, like a greedy child.
"And Mrs. Somers will come and help me to eat them. Good!" And she ran
in home. Somers thought of a picture advertisement in the Bulletin.

"Madge: I can't think what you see in Jack. He is so unintellectual."

"Gladys: Oh, but he always brings a pound of Billyer's chocolates."

Or else: "Sweets to the Sweet. Give her Billyer's chocolates"; or else:
"Billyer's chocolates sweeten the home."

The game of chess was a very quiet one. Jack was pale and subdued,
silent, tired, thought Somers, after his long day and short night.
Somers too played without any zest. And yet they were satisfied, just
sitting there together, a curious peaceful ease in being together.
Somers wondered at it, the rich, full peace that there seemed to be
between him and the other man. It was something he was not used to. As
if one blood ran warm and rich between them. "Then shall thy peace be as
a river."

"There was nothing wrong at the Trewhellas', was there, that made
William James come so late?" asked Somers.

Jack looked up with a tinge of inquiry in his dark eyes at this
question: as if he suspected something behind it. Somers flushed
slightly.

"No, nothing wrong," said Jack.

"I beg your pardon for asking," said Somers hastily. "I heard a whistle
when I'd just done setting the rat-traps, and I looked out, and heard
you speak to him. That's how I knew who it was. I only wondered if
anything was wrong."

"No, nothing wrong," repeated Jack laconically.

"That's all right," said Somers. "It's your move. Mind your queen."

"Mind my queen, eh? She takes some minding, that lady does. I feel I
need a special eye at the end of my nose, to keep track of her. Come out
of it, old lady. I'm not very bright at handling royalty, that's a
fact."

Somers was now silent. He felt he had made a faux pas, and was rebuffed.
They played for some time, Jack talking to himself mostly in that
facetious strain which one just had to get used to in him, though Somers
occasionally found it tiring.

Then after a time Jack put his hands into his lap, and looked up at
Somers.

"You mustn't think I get the wind up, you know," he said, "if you ask me
a question. You can ask me what you like, you know. And when I can tell
you, I'll tell you. I know you'd never come shoving your nose in like a
rat from under the skirting board when nobody's looking."

"Even if I SEEM to," said Somers, ironically.

"No, no, you don't seem to. And when I CAN tell you, I'll do so. _I_
know I can trust you."

Somers looked up wondering, and met the meditative dark eyes of the
other man resting on his face.

"There's some of us chaps," said Jack, "who've been through the war and
had a lick at Paris and London, you know, who can tell a man by the
smell of him, so to speak. If we can't see the COLOUR of his aura, we
can jolly well size up the QUALITY of it. And that's what we go by. Call
it instinct or what you like. If I like a man, slap out, at the first
sight, I'd trust him into hell, I would."

"Fortunately you haven't anything VERY risky to trust him with," laughed
Somers.

"I don't know so much about that," said Jack. "When a man feels he likes
a chap, and trusts him, he's risking all he need, even by so doing.
Because none of us likes to be taken in, and to have our feelings thrown
back in our faces, as you may say, do we?"

"We don't," said Somers grimly.

"No, we don't. And you know what it means to HAVE them thrown back in
your face. And so do I. There's a lot of the people here that I wouldn't
trust with a thank-you, I wouldn't. But then there's some that I would.
And mind you, taking all for all, I'd rather trust an Aussie, I'd rather
trust an Australian than an Englishman, I would, and a lot rather. Yet
there's some of the rottenest people in Sydney that you'd find even if
you sifted hell over. Rotten--absolute yellow rotten. And many of them
in public positions, too. Simply white-anting society, that's what
they're doing. Talk about public affairs in Sydney, talk about
undercurrents of business in Sydney: the wickedest crew on God's earth,
bar none. All the underhanded tricks of a Chink, a blooming yellow
Chinaman, and all the barefaced fair talk of an Englishman. There you
are. And yet, I'm telling you, I'd rather trust even a Sydney man, and
he's a special sort of wombat, than an Englishman."

"So you've told me before: for my good, I suppose," laughed Somers, not
without irony.

"No, now don't you go running away with any wrong ideas," said Jack,
suddenly reaching out his hand and laying it on Somers' arm. "I'm not
hinting at anything. If I was I'd ask you to kick me out of your house.
I should deserve it. No, you're an Englishman. You're a European,
perhaps I ought to say, for you've lived about all over that old
continent, and you've studied it, and you've got tired of it. And you've
come to Australia. Your instinct brought you here, however much you may
rebel against rats and tin cans and a few other things like that. Your
instinct brought you here--and brought you straight up against me. Now
that I call fate."

He looked at Somers with dark, burning, questioning eyes.

"I suppose following one's deepest instinct IS one's fate," said Somers,
rather flatly.

"There--you know what I mean, you see. Well then, instinct brings us
together. I knew it the minute I set eyes on you when I saw you coming
across from the Botanical Gardens, and you wanted a taxi. And then when
I heard the address, 51 Murdoch Street, I said to myself, 'That chap is
coming into my life.' And it is so. I'm a believer in fate, absolute."

"Yes," said Somers, non-committal.

"It's fate that you left Europe and came to Australia, bit by bit, and
unwilling to come, as you say yourself. It's fate that brings you to
Sydney, and makes me see you that dinner-hour coming from the Botanical
Gardens. It's fate that brings you to this house. And it's fate that
sets you and me here at this minute playing chess."

"If you call it playing chess," laughed Somers.

Jack looked down at the board.

"I'm blest if I know whose move it is," he said. "But never mind. I say
that fate meant you and Mrs. Somers to come here: her as much as you. I
say fate meant me and you and Victoria and her to mean a lot to one
another. And when I feel my fate, I absolutely give myself up to it.
That's what I say. Do you think I'm right?"

His hand, which held Somers' arm lightly, now gripped the biceps of that
arm hard, while he looked into the other man's face.

"I should say so," said Somers, rather uncomfortably.

Jack hardly heeded the words. He was watching the face.

"You're a stranger here. You're from the old country. You're different
from us. But you're a man we want, and you're a man we've got to keep. I
know it. What? What do you say? I can trust you, can't I?"

"What with?" asked Somers.

"What with?" Jack hesitated. "Why everything!" he blurted. "Everything!
Body and soul and money and every blessed thing. I can trust you with
EVERYTHING! Isn't that right?"

Somers looked with troubled eyes into the dark, dilated glowing eyes of
the other man.

"But I don't know what it means," he stammered. "EVERYTHING! It means so
much, that it means nothing."

Jack nodded his head slowly.

"Oh yes it does," he reiterated. "Oh yes it does."

"Besides," said Somers, "why should you trust me with ANYTHING, let
alone everything. You've no occasion to trust me at all--except--as one
neighbour trusts another, in common honour."

"Common honour!" Jack just caught up the words, not heeding the sense.
"It's more than common honour. It's most uncommon honour. But look
here," he seemed to rouse himself. "Supposing I came to you, to ask you
things, and tell you things, you'd answer me man to man, wouldn't
you?--with common honour? You'd treat everything I say with common
honour, as between man and man?"

"Why, yes, I hope so."

"I know you would. But for the sake of saying it, say it. I can trust
you, can't I? Tell me now, can I trust you?"

Somers watched him. Was it any good making reservations and
qualifications? The man was in earnest. And according to standards of
commonplace honour, the so-called honour of man to man, Somers felt that
he would trust Callcott, and that Callcott might trust him. So he said
simply:

"Yes."

A light leaped into Jack's eyes.

"That means you trust me, of course?" he said.

"Yes," replied Somers.

"Done!" said Jack, rising to his feet and upsetting the chessmen. Somers
also pushed his chair, and rose to his feet, thinking they were going
across to the next house. But Jack came to him and flung an arm round
his shoulders and pressed him close, trembling slightly, and saying
nothing. Then he let go, and caught Somers by the hand.

"This is fate," he said, "and we'll follow it up." He seemed to cling to
the other man's hand. And on his face was a strange light of purpose and
of passion, a look at once exalted and dangerous.

"I'll soon bring the others to see it," he said.

"But you know I don't understand," said Somers, withdrawing his hand and
taking off his spectacles.

"I know," said Jack. "But I'll let you know everything in a day or two.
Perhaps you wouldn't mind if William James--if Jaz came here one
evening--or you wouldn't mind having a talk with him over in my shack."

"I don't mind talking to anybody," said the bewildered Somers.

"Right you are."

They still sat for some time by the fire, silent; Jack was pondering.
Then he looked up at Somers.

"You and me," he said in a quiet voice, "in a way we're mates and in a
way we're not. In a way--it's different."

With which cryptic remark he left it. And in a few minutes the women
came running in with the sweets, to see if the men didn't want a
macaroon.

On Sunday morning Jack asked Somers to walk with him across to the
Trewhellas. That is, they walked to one of the ferry stations, and took
the ferry steamer to Mosman's Bay. Jack was a late riser on Sunday
morning. The Somers, who were ordinary half-past seven people, rarely
saw any signs of life in Wyewurk before half-past ten on the
Sabbath--then it was Jack in trousers and shirt, with his shirt-sleeves
rolled up, having a look at his dahlias while Vicky prepared breakfast.

So the two men did not get a start till eleven o'clock. Jack rolled
along easily beside the smaller, quieter Somers. They were an odd
couple, ill-assorted. In a colonial way, Jack was handsome, well-built,
with strong, heavy limbs. He filled out his expensively tailored suit
and looked a man who might be worth anything from five hundred to five
thousand a year. The only lean, delicate part about him was his face.
See him from behind, his broad shoulders and loose erect carriage and
brown nape of the neck, and you expected a good square face to match. He
turned, and his long lean rather pallid face really didn't seem to
belong to his strongly animal body. For the face wasn't animal at all,
except perhaps in a certain slow, dark, lingering look of the eyes,
which reminded one of some animal or other, some patient, enduring
animal with an indomitable but naturally passive courage.

Somers, in a light suit of thin cloth, made by an Italian tailor, and an
Italian hat, just looked a foreign sort of little bloke--but a
gentleman. The chief difference was that he looked sensitive all over,
his body, even its clothing, and his feet, even his brown shoes, all
equally sensitive with his face. Whereas Jack seemed strong and
insensitive in the body, only his face vulnerable. His feet might have
been made of leather all the way through, tramping with an insentient
tread. Whereas Somers put down his feet delicately, as if they had a
life of their own, mindful of each step of contact with the earth. Jack
strode along: Somers seemed to hover along. There was decision in both
of them, but oh, of such different quality. And each had a certain
admiration of the other, and a very definite tolerance. Jack just barely
tolerated the quiet finesse of Somers, and Somers tolerated with
difficulty Jack's facetious familiarity and heartiness.

Callcott met quite a number of people he knew, and greeted them all
heartily. "Hello Bill, old man, how's things?" "New boots pinchin' yet,
Ant'ny? Hoppy sort of look about you this morning. Right 'o! So long,
Ant'ny!" "Different girl again, boy! go on, Sydney's full of yer
sisters. All right, goodbye, old chap." The same breezy intimacy with
all of them, and the moment they had passed by, they didn't exist for
him any more than the gull that had curved across in the air. They
seemed to appear like phantoms, and disappear in the same instant, like
phantoms. Like so many Flying Dutchmen the Australian's acquaintances
seemed to steer slap through his consciousness, and were gone on the
wind. What was the consecutive thread in the man's feelings? Not his
feeling for any particular human beings, that was evident. His friends,
even his loves, were just a series of disconnected, isolated moments in
his life. Somers always came again upon this gap in the other man's
continuity. He felt that if he knew Jack for twenty years, and then went
away, Jack would say: "Friend o' mine, Englishman, rum sort of bloke,
but not a bad sort. Dunno where he's hanging out just now. Somewhere on
the surface of the old humming-top, I suppose."

The only consecutive thing was that facetious attitude, which was the
attitude of taking things as they come, perfected. A sort of ironical
stoicism. Yet the man had a sort of passion, and a passionate identity.
But not what Somers called human. And threaded on this ironical
stoicism.

They found Trewhella dressed and expecting them. Trewhella was a coal
and wood merchant, on the north side. He lived quite near the wharf, had
his sheds at the side of the house, and in the front a bit of garden
running down to the practically tideless bay of the harbour. Across the
bit of blue water were many red houses, and new, wide streets of single
cottages, seaside-like, disappearing rather forlorn over the brow of the
low hill.

William James, or Jas, Jaz, as Jack called him, was as quiet as ever.
The three men sat on a bench just above the brown rocks of the water's
edge, in the lovely sunshine, and watched the big ferry steamer slip in
and discharge its stream of summer-dressed passengers, and embark
another stream: watched the shipping of the middle harbour away to the
right, and the boats loitering on the little bay in front. A motor-boat
was sweeping at a terrific speed, like some broom sweeping the water,
past the little round fort away in the open harbour, and two tall white
sailing boats, all wing and no body, were tacking across the pale blue
mouth of the bay. The inland sea of the harbour was all bustling with
Sunday morning animation: and yet there seemed space, and loneliness.
The low, coffee-brown cliffs opposite, too low for cliffs, looked as
silent and as aboriginal as if white men had never come.

The little girl Gladys came out shyly. Somers now noticed that she wore
spectacles.

"Hello kiddie!" said Jack, "Come here and make a footstool of your
uncle, and see what your Aunt Vicky's been thinking of. Come on then,
amble up this road."

He took her on his knee, and fished out of his pocket a fine sort of
hat-band that Victoria had contrived with ribbon and artificial flowers
and wooden beads. Gladys sat for a moment shyly on her uncle's knee, and
he held her there as if she were a big pillow he was scarcely conscious
of holding. Her stepfather sat exactly as if the child did not exist, or
were not present. It was neutrality brought to a remarkable pitch. Only
Somers seemed actually aware that the child was a little human
being--and to him she seemed so absent that he didn't know what to make
of her.

Rose came out bringing beer and sausage rolls, and the girl vanished
away again, seemed to evaporate. Somers felt uncomfortable, and wondered
what he had been brought for.

"You know Cornwall, do you?" said William James, the Cornish singsong
still evident in his Australian speech. He looked with his light-grey,
inscrutable eyes at Somers.

"I lived for a time near Padstow," said Somers.

"Padstow! Ay, I've been to Padstow," said William James. And they talked
for a while of the bleak, lonely northern coast of Cornwall, the black
huge cliffs, with the gulls flying away below, and the sea boiling, and
the wind blowing in huge volleys: and the black Cornish nights, with
nothing but the violent weather outside.

"Oh, I remember it, I remember it," said William James. "Though I was a
half-starved youngster on a bit of a farm out there, you know, for
everlasting chasing half a dozen heifers from the cliffs, where the
beggars wanted to fall over and kill themselves, and hunting for a dozen
sheep among the gorsebushes, and wading up to my knees in mud most part
of the year, and then in summer, in the dry times, having to haul water
for a mile over the rocks in a wagon, because the well had run dry. And
at the end of it my father gave me one new suit in two years, and
sixpence a week. Ay, that was a life for you. I suppose if I was there
still he'd be giving me my keep and five shillin' a week--if he could
open his heart as wide as two half-crowns, which I'm doubting very
much."

"You have money out here, at least," said Somers. "But there was a great
fascination for me, in Cornwall."

"Fascination! And where do you find the fascination? In a little
Wesleyan chapel of a Sunday night, and a girl with her father waiting
for her with a strap if she's not in by nine o'clock? Fascination, did
you say?"

"It had a great fascination for me--a magic--a magic in the atmosphere."

"All the fairy tales they'll tell you," said William James, looking at
the other man with a smile of slow ridicule. "Why ye didn't go and
believe them, did ye?"

"More or less. I could more easily have believed them there than
anywhere else I've been."

"Ay, no doubt. And that shows what sort of a place it be. Lot of damn
silly nonsense." He stirred on his seat impatiently.

"At any rate, you're well out of it. You're set up all right here," said
Somers, who was secretly amused. The other man did not answer for some
time.

"Maybe I am," he said at last, "I'm not pining to go back and work for
my father, I tell you, on a couple of pasties and a lot of abuse. No,
after that, I'd like you to tell me what's wrong with Australia."

"I'm sure I don't know," said Somers, "Probably nothing at all."

Again William James was silent. He was a short, thick man, with a l