These were his feelings now. Mankind? Ha, he turned his face to the centre of the seas, away from any land. The noise of waters, and dumbness like a fish. The cold, lovely silence, before crying and calling were invented. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, as if it had relapsed away from speech altogether.
He did not care a straw what Kangaroo said or felt, or what anybody said or felt, even himself. He had no feelings, and speech had gone out of him. He wanted to be cold, cold, and alone like a single fish, with no feeling in his heart at all except a certain icy exultance and wild, fish-like rapacity. ‘Homo sum!’ All right. Who sets a limit to what a man is? Man is also a fierce and fish-cold devil, in his hour, filled with cold fury of desire to get away from the cloy of human life altogether, not into death, but into that icily self-sufficient vigour of a fish.
CHAPTER VII
THE BATTLE OF TONGUES
AS a rule the jetty on its poles straddling a little way into the sea was as deserted as if it were some relic left by an old invader. Then it had spurts of activity, when steamer after steamer came blorting and hanging miserably round, like cows to the cowshed on a winter afternoon. Then a little engine would chuff along the pier, shoving a string of tip-up trucks, and little men would saunter across the skyline, and there would be a fine dimness of black dust round the low, red ship and the end of the jetty. Lucidly it was far enough away, so that Harriet need not fear for her beautiful white washing. She washed her linen herself for the sheer joy of it, and loved nothing so much as thinking of it getting whiter and whiter, like the Spenserian maid, in the sun and sea, and visiting it on the grass every five minutes, and finding it every time really whiter, till Somers said it would reach a point of whiteness where the colours would break up, and she’d go out and find pieces of rainbow on the grass and bushes, instead of towels and shirts.
‘Shouldn’t I be startled!’ she said, accepting it as quite a possible contingency, and adding thoughtfully: ‘No, not really.’
One of these afternoons when Somers was walking down on the sands, looking at the different shells, their sea-colours of pink and brown and rainbow and brilliant violet and shrimp-red, and when the boats were loading coal on the moderately quiet sea, he noticed the little engine standing steaming on the jetty, just overhead where he was going to pass under. Then his attention was drawn away to the men picking up the rounded, sea-smooth pebbles of coal in one little place where the beach was just a black slope of perfectly clean coal-pebbles: just like any other pebbles. There were usually some men, or women or children, picking here, putting the bigger pebbles of sea-coal into sacks. From the edge of the small waves Somers heard one man talking to another, and the English tones—unconsciously he expected a foreign language—and particularly the peculiar educated-artisan quality, almost a kind of uppishness that there is in the speech of Australian working men, struck him as incongruous with their picking up the coal-cobs from the shore. He watched them, in the chill of the shadow. Yes, they thought as much of themselves as anybody. But one was palpably a Welshman, and loved picking up something for nothing; and the other mixed his democratic uppishness with a queer lousy quality, like a bushranger. ‘They are ten times more foreign to me,’ said Somers, ‘than Italian scoundrels, or even Indians. They are so foreign to me. And yet their manner of life, their ordinary way of living is almost exactly what I was used to as a boy. Why are they so foreign to me?’
They silently objected to his looking, so he went on. He had come to the huge, high timbers of the tall jetty. There stood the little engine still overhead: and in the gloom among the timbers underneath water was dripping down from her, which gave Somers a distaste for passing just then. He looked up. There was the engine-driver in his dirty shirt and dirty bare arms, talking to another man. The other man saluted—and to Somers’ surprise it was William James. He stood quite still, and a surprised smile of recognition greeted the other man, who saluted.
‘Why, what are you doing here?’ called Somers.
William James came to the edge of the jetty, but could not hear, because of the noise of the sea. His face had that small, subtle smile that was characteristic of him, and which Somers was never quite sure of, whether it was really jeering or in a cunning way friendly.
‘Won’t you come up a minute?’ roared William James.
So Somers scrambled round up the banks, on to the railway track.
‘I couldn’t come down for the moment,’ said William James. ‘I’ll have to see the manager, then I’m off on this boat. We’re ready to go. You heard her blowing.’
‘Where are you going? Back to Sydney.’
‘Yes. I come down occasionally on this coal-business, and if I like I go back on the collier. The sea is quiet, and I needn’t wait for a train. Well, an’ how’re you gettin’ on, like? Pleased with it down here all by yourselves?’
‘Very.’
‘A bit lonely for you. I suppose you wouldn’t like to know the manager here—Mr Thomas? He’s a decent chap—from South Wales originally.’
‘No. I like it best when I don’t know anybody.’
‘That’s a compliment for some of us. However—I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Jack tells me you saw Kangaroo. Made quite a fuss of you, I hear. I knew he would. Oh, Kangaroo knew all about you: all he wanted to know, anyhow. I say, if ye think of stoppin’ down here, you might get in a ton of coal. It looks as if this strike might come off. That Arbitration Board’s a fine failure, what?’
‘As far as I can gather.’
‘Oh, bound to be. Bound to be. They talk about scraps of paper, why, every agreement that’s ever come to in this country, you could wrap your next red herring in it, for all it’s worth.’
‘I suppose it’s like Ireland, they don’t want to agree.’
‘That’s about it. The Labour people want this revolution of theirs. What?’—and he looked at Somers with a long, smiling, sardonic leer, like a wink. ‘There’s a certain fact,’ he continued, ‘as far as any electioneering success goes, they’re out of the running for a spell. What do you think of Trades Unions, one way and another?’
‘I dislike them on the whole rather intensely. They’re just the nastiest profiteering side of the working man—they make a fool of him too, in my opinion.’
‘Just my opinion. They make a fool of him. Wouldn’t it be nice to have them for bosses of the whole country? They very nearly are. But I doubt very much if they’ll ever cover the last lap—what?’
‘Not if Kangaroo can help it,’ said Somers.
‘No!’ William James flashed a quick look at him from his queer grey eyes. ‘What did you make of him then? Could you make him out?’
‘Not quite. I never met anyone like him. The wonder to me is, he seems to have as much spare time for entertaining and amusing his guests, as if he had no work at all on hand.’
‘Oh, that was just a special occasion. But he’s a funny sort of Saviour, isn’t he? Not much crown of thorns about him. Why, he’d look funny on a cross, what?’
‘He’s no intention of being on one, I think,’ said Somers stiffly.
‘Oh, I don’t know. If the wrong party got hold of him. There’s many mites in a pound of cheese, they say.’
‘Then I’ll toast my cheese.’
‘Ha-ha! Oh yes, I like a bit of toasted cheese myself—or a Welsh rabbit, as well as any man.’
‘But you don’t think they’d ever let him down, do you?—these Australians?’
‘No-o,’ said William James. ‘I doubt if they’d ever let him down. But if he happened to fall down, you know, they’d soon forget him.’
‘You don’t sound a very warm follower yourself.’
‘Oh, warm isn’t my way, in anything. I like to see what I’m about. I can see that Kangaroo’s a wonder. Oh yes, he’s a world wonder. And I’d rather be in with him than anybody, if it was only for the sake of the spree, you know. Bound to be a spree some time—and before long, I should say, things going as they are. I wouldn’t l
ike to be left out of the fun.’
‘But you don’t feel any strong devotion to your leader?’
‘Why, no; I won’t say it’s exactly strong devotion. But I think he’s a world wonder. He’s not quite the shape of a man that I should throw away my eyes for, that’s all I mean.’ Again William James looked at Somers with that long, perhaps mocking little smile in his grey eyes.
‘I thought even his shape beautiful, when he talked to me.’
‘Oh yes, it’s wonderful what a spell he can cast over you. But I’m a stuggy fellow myself, maybe that’s how it is I can’t ever quite see him in the same light as the thin chaps do. But that’s just the looks of the thing. I can see there isn’t another man in the world like him, and I’d cross the seas to join in with him, if only for the fun of the thing!’
‘But what about the end of the fun?’ asked Somers.
‘Oh, that I don’t know. And nobody does, for that matter.’
‘But surely if one believes—’
‘One believes a lot, and one believes very little, seems to me. Taking all in all, seems to me we live from hand to mouth, as far as beliefs go.’
‘You never would believe,’ said Somers, laughing.
‘Not till I was made to,’ replied Jaz, twisting his face in his enigmatic smile.
Somers looked at the thick, stocky, silent figure in the well-made dark clothes that didn’t in the least belong to him. There was something about him like a prisoner in prison uniform, in his town clothes—and something of that in his bearing. A stocky, silent, unconquerable prisoner. And in his imprisoned soul another kind of mystery, another sort of appeal.
The two men stood still in the cold wind that came up the sands to the south-west. To the left, as they faced the wind, went the black railway track on the pier, and the small engine stood dribbling. On the right the track ran curiously black past a little farm-place with a corrugated iron roof, and past a big field where the stubble of maize or beans stood ragged and sere, on into the little hollow of bush, where the mine was, beyond the stagnant creek. It was curious how intensely black, velvety and unnatural, the railway track looked on this numb coast-front. The steamer hooted again.
‘Cold it is up here,’ said Somers.
‘It is cold. He’s coming now, though,’ replied William James.
They stood together still another minute, looking down the pale sands at the foam and the dark-blue sea, the sere grass scattered with bungalows.
It was a strange, different bond of sympathy united them, from that that subsisted between Somers and Jack, or Somers and Kangaroo. Hardly sympathy at all, but an ancient sort of root-knowledge.
‘Well, goodbye,’ said Somers, wanting to be gone before the manager came up with the papers. He shook hands with William James—but as usual, Jaz gave him a slack hand. Their eyes met—and the look, something like a taunt, in Trewhella’s secretive grey eye, made Somers stiffen his back, and a kind of haughtiness flew into his soul.
‘Different men, different ways, Mr Trewhella,’ he said.
William James did not answer, but smiled rather stubbornly. It seemed to Somers the man would be smiling that stubborn, taunting smile till the crack of doom.
‘I told Mrs Somers what I think about it,’ said Jaz, with a very Cornish accent. ‘I doubt if she’ll ever do much more believin’ than I shall.’ And the taunt was forked this time.
‘She says she believes entirely in Kangaroo.’
‘Does she now? Who did she tell it to?’
‘Me.’
Trewhella still stood with that faint grin on his face, short and stocky and erect like a little post left standing. Somers looked at him again, frowning, and turned abruptly down the bank. The smile left the face of the Cornishman, and he just looked obstinate, indifferent, and curiously alone, as if he stood there all alone in the world. He watched Somers emerge on the sands below, and go walking slowly among the sea-ragged flat shelves of the coast-bed rocks, his head dropping, looking in the pools, his hands in his pockets. And the obstinate light never changed in the eyes of the watcher, not even when he turned to the approaching manager.
Perhaps it was this meeting which made Somers want to see Kangaroo once more. Everything had suddenly become unreal to him. He went to Sydney and to Cooley’s rooms. But during the first half hour, the revulsion from the First persisted. Somers disliked his appearance, and the kangaroo look made him feel devilish. And then the queer, slow manner of approach. Kangaroo was not really ready for his visitor, and he seemed dense, heavy, absent, clownish. It was that kangarooish clownishness that made a vicious kind of hate spring into Somers’ face. He talked in a hard, cutting voice.
‘Whom can you depend on, in this world?’ he was saying. ‘Look at these Australians—they’re awfully nice, but they’ve got no inside to them. They’re hollow. How are you going to build on such hollow stalks? They may well call them cornstalks. They’re marvellous and manly and independent and all that, outside. But inside, they are not. When they’re quite alone, they don’t exist.’
‘Yet many of them have been alone a long time, in the bush,’ said Kangaroo, watching his visitor with slow, dumb, unchanging eyes.
‘Alone, what sort of alone? Physically alone. And they’ve just gone hollow. They’re never alone in spirit: quite, quite alone in spirit. And the people who are, are the only people you can depend on.’
‘Where shall I find them?’
‘Not here. It seems to me, least of all here. The Colonies make for outwardness. Everything is outward—like hollow stalks of corn. The life makes this inevitable: all that struggle with bush and water and what not, all the mad struggle with the material necessities and conveniences—the inside soul just withers and goes into the outside, and they’re all just lusty robust stalks of people.’
‘The cornstalks bear the corn. I find them generous to recklessness—the greatest quality. The old world is cautious and forever bargaining about its soul. Here they don’t bother to bargain.’
‘They’ve no soul to bargain about. But they’re even more full of conceit. What do you expect to do with such people. Build a straw castle?’
‘You see I believe in them—perhaps I know them a little better than you do.’
‘Perhaps you do. It’ll be cornstalk castle, for all that. What do you expect to build on?’
‘They’re generous—generous to recklessness,’ shouted Kangaroo. ‘And I love them. I love them. Don’t you come here carping to me about them. They are my children, I love them. If I’m not to believe in their generosity, am I to believe in your cautious, old-world carping, do you think, I won’t!’ he shouted fiercely. ‘I won’t. Do you hear that!’ And he sat hulked in his chair glowering like some queer dark god at bay. Somers paused, and his heart failed.
‘Then make me believe in them and their generosity,’ he said dryly. ‘They’re nice. But they haven’t got the last everlasting central bit of soul, solitary soul, that makes a man himself. The central bit of himself. They all merge to the outside, away from the centre. And what can you do, permanently, with such people? You can have a fine cornstalk blaze. But as for anything permanent—’
‘I tell you I hate permanency,’ barked Kangaroo. ‘The phoenix rises out of the ashes.’ He rolled over angrily in his chair.
‘Let her! Like Rider Haggard’s She, I don’t feel like risking it a second time,’ said Somers, like the venomous serpent he was.
‘Generous, generous men!’ Kangaroo muttered to himself. ‘At least you can get a blaze out of them. Not like European wet matches, that will never again strike alight—as you’ve said yourself.’
‘But a blaze for what? What’s your blaze for?’
‘I don’t care,’ yelled Kangaroo, springing with sudden magnificent swiftness to his feet, and facing Somers, and seizing him by the shoulders and shaking him till his head nearly fell off, yelling all the time: ‘I don’t care, I tell you, I don’t care. Where there’s fire there’s change. And where the fire is love
, there’s creation. Seeds of fire. That’s enough for me! Fire, and seeds of fire, and love. That’s all I care about. Don’t carp at me, I tell you. Don’t carp at me with your old, European, damp spirit. If you can’t take fire, we can. That’s all. Generous, passionate men—and you dare to carp at them. You. What have you to show?’ And he went back to his chair like a great, sulky bear-god.
Somers sat rather stupefied than convinced. But he found himself again wanting to be convinced, wanting to be carried away. The desire hankered in his heart. Kangaroo had become again beautiful: huge and beautiful like some god that sways and seems clumsy, then suddenly flashes with all the agility of thunder and lightning. Huge and beautiful as he sat hulked in his chair. Somers did wish he would get up again, and carry him quite away.
But where to? Where to? Where is one carried to when one is carried away? He had a bitter mistrust of seventh heavens and all heavens in general. But then the experience. If Kangaroo had got up at that moment Somers would have given him heart and soul and body, for the asking, and damn all consequences. He longed to do it. He knew that by just going over and laying a hand on the great figure of the sullen god he could achieve it. Kangaroo would leap like a thunder-cloud and catch him up—catch him up and away into a transport. A transport that should last for life. He knew it.
But alas, it was just too late. In some strange way Somers felt he had come to the end of transports: they had no more mystery for him; at least this kind: or perhaps no more charm. Some bubble or other had burst in his heart. All his body and fibres wanted to go over and touch the other great being into a storm of response. But his soul wouldn’t. The coloured bubble had burst.
Kangaroo sat up and adjusted his eyeglasses.
‘Don’t you run away with the idea, though,’ he said, ‘that I am just an emotional fool.’ His voice was almost menacing, and with a strange cold, intellectual quality that Somers had never heard before.
‘I believe in the one fire of love. I believe it is the one inspiration of all creative activity. I trust myself entirely to the fire of love. This I do with my reason also. I don’t discard my reason. I use it at the service of love, like a sharp weapon. I try to keep it very sharp—and very dangerous. Where I don’t love, I use only my will and my wits. Where I love, I trust to love alone.’ The voice came cold and static.
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