The land untouched by man. The call of the mysterious, vast, unoccupied land. The strange inaudible calling, like the far-off call of a kangaroo. The strange, still, pure air. The strange shadows. The strange scent of wild, brown, aboriginal honey.
Being early for the boat, the boys camped for twenty-four hours in a perfectly lonely place. And in the utterly lonely evening Jack began craving again: for Monica, for a woman, for some object for his passion to settle on. And he knew again, as he had always known, that nowhere is free, so long as man is passionate, desirous, yearning. His only freedom is to find the object of his passion, and fulfil his desires and satisfy his yearning, as far as his life can succeed. Or else, which is more difficult, to harden himself away from all desire and craving, to harden himself into pride, and refer himself to that other god.
Yes, in the wild bush, God seemed another god. God seemed absolutely another god, vaster, more calm and more deeply, sensually potent. And this was a profound satisfaction. To find another, more terrible, but also more deeply-fulfilling god stirring subtly in the uncontaminated air about one. A dread god. But a great god, greater than any known. The sense of greatness, vastness, and newness, in the air. And the strange, dusky, gray eucalyptus-smelling sense of depth, strange depth in the air, as of a great deep well of potency, which life had not yet tapped. Something which lay in a man’s blood as well — and in a woman’s blood — in Monica’s — in Mary’s — in the Australian blood. A strange, dusky, gun-smelling depth of potency that had never been tapped by experience. As if life still held great wells of reserve vitality, strange unknown wells of secret life-source, dusky, of a strange, dim, aromatic sap which had never stirred in the veins of man, to consciousness and effect. And if he could take Monica and set the dusky, secret, unknown sap flowing in himself and her, to some unopened life consciousness — that was what he wanted. Dimly, uneasily, painfully he realised it.
And then the bush began to frighten him, as if it would kill him, as it had killed so much man-life before, killed it before the life in man had had time to come to realisation.
He was glad when the road came down to the sea. There, the great, pale-blue, strange, empty sea, on new shores with new strange sea-birds flying, and strange rocks sticking up, and strange blue distances up the bending coast. The sea that is always the same, always a relief, a vastness and a soothing. Coming out of the bush, and being a little afraid of the bush, he loved the sea with an English passion. It made him feel at home in the same known infinite of space.
Especially on a windy day, when the track would curve down to a greeny-grey opalescent sea that beat slowly on the red sands, like a dying grey bird with white wing-feathers. And the reddish cliffs with sage-green growth of herbs, stood almost like flesh.
Then the road went inland again, through a swamp, and to the bush. To emerge next morning in the sun, upon a massive deep indigo ocean, infinite, with pearl-clear horizon; and in the nearness, emerald-green and white flashing unspeakably bright on a pinkish shore, perfectly world-new.
They were nearing the journey’s end. Nearing the little port, and the ship, and the world of men.
CHAPTER XVII
AFTER TWO YEARS
I
A sky with clouds of white and grey, and patches of blue. A green sea flecked with white, and shadowed golden brown. On the horizon, the sense of a great open void, like an open valve, as if the bivalve oyster of the world, sea and sky, were open away westward, open into another infinity, and the people on land, inside the oyster of the world, could look far out to the opening.
They could see the bulk of near islands. Further off, a tiny white sail coming down fast on the fresh great sea-wind, emanating out of the north-west. She seemed to be coming from the beyond, slipping into the slightly-open, living oysters of our world.
The men on the wharf at Fremantle, watching her black hull emerge from the flecked sea, as she sailed magically nearer, knew she would be a cattle-boat coming in from the great Nor’-West. They watched her none the less.
As she hesitated, turning to the harbour, she was recognised as the old fore-and-aft schooner “Venus”; though if Venus ever smelled like that, we pity her lovers. Smell or not, she balanced nicely, and with a bit of manoeuvring ebbed her delicate way up the wharf.
There they are! There they are, Tom and Jack, though their own mothers wouldn’t know them! Looking terribly like their fellow-passengers: stubby beards, long hair, greasy dirty dungarees, and a general air of disreputable outcasts. But, no doubt, with cheques of some sort in their pockets.
Two years, nearer three years have gone by, since they set out from Wandoo. It is more than three years since Jack landed fresh from England, in this very Fremantle. And he is so changed, he doesn’t even trouble to remember.
They don’t trouble to remember anything: not yet. Back in the Never-Never, one by one the ties break, the emotional connections snap, memory gives out, and you come undone. Then, when you have come undone from the great past, you drift in an unkempt nonchalance here and there, great distances across the great hinterland country, and there is nothing but the moment, the instantaneous moment. If you are working your guts out, you are working your guts out. If you are rolling across for a drink, you are rolling across for a drink. If you are just getting into a fight with some lump of a brute, you are just getting into a fight with some lump of a brute. If you are going to sleep in some low hole, you are going to sleep in some low hole. And if you wake feeling dry and hot and hellish, why, you feel dry and hot and hellish till you leave off feeling dry and hot and hellish. There’s no more to it. The same if you’re sick. You’re just sick, and stubborn as hell, till your stubbornness gets the better of your sickness.
There are words like home, Wandoo, England, mother, father, sister, but they don’t carry very well. It’s like a radio message that’s so faint, so far off, it makes no impression on you; even if you can hear it in a shadowy way. Such a faint, unreal thing in the broadcast air.
You have moved outside the pale, the pale of civilisation, the pale of the general human consciousness. The human consciousness is a definitely limited thing, even on the face of the earth. You can move into regions outside of it. As in Australia. The broadcasting of the vast human consciousness can’t get you. You are beyond. And since the call can’t get you, the answer begins to die down inside yourself, you don’t respond any more. You don’t respond, and you don’t correspond.
There is no past: or if there is, it is so remote and ineffectual it can’t work on you at all. And there is no future. Why saddle yourself with such a spectre as the future? There is the moment. You sweat, you rest, the bugs bite you, you thirst, you drink, you think you’re going to die, you don’t care, and you know you won’t die, because a certain stubbornness inside you keeps the upper hand.
So you go on. If you’ve got no work, you either get a horse or you tramp it off somewhere else. You keep your eyes open that you don’t get lost, or stranded for water. When you’re damned, infernally and absolutely sick of everything, you go to sleep. And then if the bugs bite you, you are beyond that too.
But at the bottom of yourself, somewhere, like a tiny seed, lies the knowledge that you’re going back in a while. That all the unreal will become real again, and this real will become unreal. That all that stuff, home, mother, responsibility, family, duty, etc., it all will loom up again into actuality, and this, this heat, this parchedness, this dirt, this mutton, these dying sheep, these roving cattle that take the flies by the million, these burning tin gold-camps — all this will recede into the unreal, it will cease to be actual.
Some men decide never to go back, and they are the derelicts, the scarecrows and the warning. “Going back” was a problem in Jack’s soul. He didn’t really want to go back. All that which lay behind, society, homes, families, he felt a deep hostility towards. He didn’t want to go back. He was like an enemy, lurking outside the great camp of civilisation. And he didn’t want to go into camp again.
No, in the end he would go back to civilisation. But the thought of becoming a part of the civilised outfit was deeply repugnant to him. Some other queer hard resolve had formed in his soul. Something gradually went hard in the centre of him. He couldn’t yield himself any more. The hard core remained impregnable.
They had dutifully spent their year on the sheep-run Mr. George had sent them to. But after that, it was shift for yourself. They had stuck at nothing. Only they had stuck together.
They had cashed their cheques in many a well-known wooden “hotel” of the far-away coast. Oh, those wooden hotels with their uneasy verandahs, flies, flies, flies, flies, flies, their rum or whiskey, their dirty glasses, their flimsy partitions, their foul language, their bugs and dirt and desolation. The brutal foul-mouthed desolation of them, with the horses switching their tails at the hitching posts, the riders slowly soaking, staring at the blue heat and the silent world of dust, too far gone even to speak. Gone under the heat, the drought, the Never-Neverness of it, the unspeakable hot desolation. And evening coming, with men already drunk, already ripe for brawling, obscenity, and swindling gambling.
They had gone away chequeless, mourning their chequelessness, back on their horses to the cable station. Then following the droves miles and miles through the tropical, or semitropical bush, and over the open country, camping by water for a week at a time, and going on.
Then they had chucked cattle, wasted their cheques, footed it for weary, weary miles, like the swaggies they had so despised. Clothes in rags, boots in holes, another job; away in out-back camps with horsemen prospectors, with well-contractors; shepherding again, with utter wastrels of shepherds camping along with them, chucking the job, chucking the blasted rich aristocratic squatters, with all their millions of acres and sheep and fence and blasted outfit, all so dead bent on making money as quick as possible, all the machinery of civilisation, as far as possible, starting to grind and squeak there in the beyond. They had gone off with well-sinkers, and laboured like navvies. Chucked that, taken the road, spent the night at mission stations, watched the blacks being saved, and got to the mining camps.
Poor old Tom had got into deep waters. Even now he more than thought that he was legally married to a barmaid, far away back in the sublimest town you can imagine, back there in the blasting heat which so often burns a man’s soul away even before it burns up his body. It had burned a hole in Tom’s soul, in that town away back in the blasting heat, a town consisting of a score or so of ready-made tin houses got up from the coast in pieces, and put together by anybody that liked to try. There they stood or staggered, the tin ovens that men and women lived in; houses leaning like drunken men against stark tree-trunks, others looking strange and forlorn with some of their parts missing, said parts being under the seas, or elsewhere mislaid. But the absence of one section of a wall did not spoil the house for habitation. It merely gave you a better view of the inside happenings. Many of the tin shacks were windowless, and even shutterless: square holes in the raw corrugated erection. One was entirely wallless, and this was the pub. It was just a tin roof reared on saplings against an old tree, with a sacking screen round the bar, through which sacking screen you saw the ghost of the landlady and her clients, if you approached from the back. The front view was open.
Here sat the motionless landlady, in her cooking hot shade, dispensing her indispensable grog, while her boss or husband rolled the barrels in. He had a team with which he hauled up the indispensable from the coast.
The nice-mannered Miss Snook took turn with her mama in this palace of Circe. She was extremely “nice” in her manners, for the “boss” owned the team, the pub, and the boarding-house at which you stayed so long as you could pay the outrageous prices. So Miss Snook, never familiarised into Lucy, for she wouldn’t allow it, oscillated between the closed oven of the boarding-house and the open oven of the pub.
Father — or the “boss” — had been a barber in Sydney. Now he cooked in the boarding-house, and drove the team. “Mother” had been the high-born daughter of a chemist; she had ruined all her prospects of continuing in the eastern “swim” by running away with the barber, now called “boss.” However, she took her decline in the social scale with dignity, and allowed no familiarities. Her previous station helped her to keep up her prices.
“We’re not, y’understand, Mr. Grant, a Provident concern, as some foot-sloggers seem to think us. We’re doing our best to provide for Lucy, against she wants to get married, or in case she doesn’t.”
She and Lucy did the washing and cleaning between them, but their efforts were nominal. Boss’ cooking left everything to be desired. The place was a perfect Paradise.
“We know a gentleman when we see one, Mr. Grant, and we’re not going to throw our only child away on a penniless waster.”
Jack wanted loudly to proclaim himself a penniless waster. But Tom and he had a pact, not to say anything about themselves, or where they came from. They were just “looking round.”
And in that heat, the plump, perspiring, cotton-clad Lucy thought that Tom seemed more amenable than Jack. Poor Tom seemed to fall for it, and Jack had to look on in silent disgust.
There was even a ghastly, gruesome wedding. Neither of the boys could bear to think of it. Even in the stupefaction of that heat, when the brain seems to melt, and the will degenerates, and nothing but the most rudimentary functions of the organism called man, continue to function, even then a sense of shame overpowered them. But Tom was in a trance, pig-headed as any of Circe’s swine. He continued in the trance for about a week after his so-called marriage. Then he woke up from the welter of perspiration, rum, and Lucy in an amazed horror, and the boys escaped.
The nightmare of this town — it was called “Honeysuckle” — was able to penetrate Tom’s most nonchalant mood, even when he was hundreds of trackless miles away. The young men covered their tracks carefully. The Snooks knew nothing but their names. But a name, alas, is a potent entity in the wilds.
They covered their tracks and disappeared again. But even so, an ancient letter from Wandoo followed them to a well-digging camp. It was from Monica to Tom, but it didn’t seem to mean much to either boy.
For almost a year Tom and Jack had never written home. There didn’t seem any reason. In his last letter Tom, suddenly having some sort of qualms, had sent his cheque to his maiden Aunts in York, because he knew, now Gran and Dad were gone, they’d be in shallow water. This off his conscience, he let Wandoo go out of his mind and spirit.
But now wandered in a letter from Aunt Lucy — dreaded name! It was a “thank you, my dear nephew,” and went on to say that though she would be the last to repeat things she hoped trouble was not hanging over Mrs. Ellis’ head.
Tom looked at Jack — —
“We’d best go back,” said Jack, reading his eyes.
“Seems like it.”
So — the time had come. The “freedom” was over. They were going back. — They caught the old ship “Venus,” going south with cattle.
To come back in body is not always to come back in mind and spirit. When Jack saw the white buildings of Fremantle he knew his soul was far from Fremantle. But nothing to be done. The old ship bumped against the wharf, and was tied up. Nothing to do but to step ashore.
They loafed off that ship with a gang of similar unkempt, unshaved, greasy, scoundrelly returners.
“Come an’ ‘ave a spot!”
“What about it, Tom?”
“Y’know I haven’t a bean above the couple o’ dollars to take me to Perth.”
“Oh, dry it up,” cried the mate. “What y’come ashore for? You’re not goin’ without a spot. It’s on me. My shout.”
“Shout it back in Perth, then.”
“Wot’ll y’ave?”
And through the swing doors they went.
“Best an’ bitter’s mine.”
II
Jack had not let himself be cleaned out entirely, as Tom had. Tom seemed to want to be absolutely stumped. But Jack with deeper sense of the world’s nnmity, and his own need to hold his own against it, had posted a couple of cheques to Lennie to hold for him. Save for this he too was cleaned out.
The same little engine of the same little train of four years ago shrieked her whistle. The North-West crowd drifted noisily out of the Hotel and down the platform, packing into the third class compartment, in such positions as happily to negotiate the spittoons.
“Let’s go forward,” said Jack. “We might as well have cushions, if we’re not smoking.”
And he drew Tom forward along the train. They were going to get into another compartment, but seeing the looks of terror on the face of the woman and little girl already there, they refrained and went further.
Aggressively they entered another smoking compartment. A couple of fat tradesmen and a clergyman glowered at them. One of the tradesmen pulled out a handkerchief, shook it, and pretended to wipe his nose. There was perfume in the air.
“Oh my aunt!” said Tom, putting his hand on his stomach. “Turns me right over.”
“What?” asked Jack.
“All this smell o’ scent.”
Jack grinned to himself. But he was back in civilisation, and he involuntarily stiffened.
“Hello! There’s Sam Ellis!” Tom leaned out of the door. “Hello, Sam! How’s things, eh?”
The young fellow addressed looked at Tom, grinned sicklily, and turned away. He didn’t know Tom from Adam.
“Let’s have another drink!” said Tom, flabbergasted, getting out of the train.
Jack followed, and they started down the platform, when the train jogged, jerked, and began to pull away. Instantly they ran for it, caught the rail of the guard’s van, and swung themselves in. The interior was empty, so they sat down on the little boxes let in at the side. Then the two eyed each other self-consciously, uncomfortably. They felt uncomfortable and aware of themselves all at once.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 410
