Kangaroo

by D. H. Lawrence

  The seabirds were always wheeling: big, dark-backed birds like mollyhawks and albatrosses with a great spread of wings: and the white gleaming gannets, silvery as fish in the air. In they went, suddenly, like bombs into the wave, spitting back the water. Then they slipped out again, slipped out of the ocean with a sort of sly exultance.

  And ships walked on the wall-crest of the sea, shedding black smoke. A vast, hard, high sea, with tiny clouds like mirage islets away far, far back, beyond the edge.

  So Richard knew it, as he sat and worked on the verandah or sat at table in the room and watched through the open door. But it was usually in the afternoons he went down to it.

  It was his afternoon occupation to go down to the sea’s edge and wander slowly on the firm sand just at the foam-edge. Sometimes the great waves were turning like mill-wheels white all down the shore. Sometimes they were smaller, more confused, as the current shifted. Sometimes his eyes would be on the sand, watching the wrack, the big bladder-weed thrown up, the little sponges like short clubs rolling in the wind, and once, only, those fairy blue wind-bags like bags of rainbow with long blue strings.

  He knew all the places where the different shells were found, the white shells and the black and the red, the big rainbow scoops and the innumerable little black snails that lived on the flat rocks in the little pools. Flat rocks ran out near the coal jetty, and between them little creeks of black, round, crunchy coal-pebbles: sea-coal. Sometimes there would be a couple of lazy, beachcombing men picking the biggest pebbles and putting them into sacks.

  On the flat rocks were pools of clear water, that many a time he stepped into, because it was invisible. The coloured pebbles shone, the red anemones pursed themselves up. There were hideous stumpy little fish that darted swift as lightning—grey, with dark stripes. An urchin said they were called toads. ‘Yer can’t eat ’em. Kill yer if y’ do. Yer c’nt eat black fish. See me catch one o’ these toads!’ All this in a high shrill voice above the waves. Richard admired the elfish self-possession of the urchin, alone on the great shore all day, like a little wild creature himself. But so the boys were: such wonderful little self-possessed creatures. It was as if nobody was responsible for them, so they learned to be responsible for themselves, like young elf creatures, as soon as they were hatched. They liked Richard, and patronised him in a friendly, half-shy way. But it was they who were the responsible party, the grown-up they treated with a gentle, slightly off-handed indulgence. It always amused friend Richard to see these Australian children bearing the responsibility of their parents. ‘He’s only a poor old Dad, you know. Young fellow like me’s got to keep an eye on him, see he’s all right.’ That seemed to be the tone of the urchins of ten and eleven. They were charming: much nicer than the older youths, or the men.

  The jetty straddled its huge grey timbers, like a great bridge, across the sands and the flat rocks. Under the bridge it was rather dark, between the great trunk-timbers. But here Richard found the best of the flat, oval disc-shells with the whorl and the blue eye. By the bank hung curtains of yellowish creeper, and a big, crimson-pink convolvulus flowered in odd tones. An aloe sent up its tail spike, and died at its base. A little bare grassy headland came out, and the flat rocks ran out dark to sea, where the white waves prowled on three sides.

  Richard would drift out this way, right into the sea, on a sunny afternoon. On the flat rocks, all pocketed with limpid pools, the seabirds would sit with their backs to him, oblivious. Only an uneasy black bird with a long neck, squatting among the gulls, would wriggle his neck as the man approached. The gulls ran a few steps, and forgot him. They were mostly real gulls, big and pure as grey pearl, suave and still, with a mâte gleam, like eggs of the foam in the sun on the rocks. Slowly Richard strayed nearer. There were little browner birds huddled and further, one big, dark-backed bird. There they all remained, like opalescent whitish bubbles on the dark, flat, ragged wet-rock, in the sun, in the sea sleep. The black bird rose like a duck, flying with its neck outstretched, more timid than the rest. But it came back. Richard drew nearer and nearer, within six yards of the sea-things. Beyond, the everlasting low white wall of foam, rustling to the flat-rock. Only the sea.

  The black creature rose again, showing the white at his side, and flying with a stretched-out neck, frightened-looking, like a duck. His mate rose too. And then all the gulls, flying low in a sort of protest over the foam-tips. Richard had it all to himself—the ever-unfurling water, the ragged, flat, square-holed rocks, the fawn sands inland, the soft sandbank, the sere flat grass where ponies wandered, the low, red-painted bungalows squatting under coral trees, the ridge of tall wire-thin trees holding their plumes in tufts at the tips, the stalky cabbage palms beyond in the hollow, clustering, low, whitish zinc roofs of bungalows, at the edge of the dark trees—then the trees in darkness swooping up to the wall of the tors, that ran a waving skyline sagging southwards. Scattered, low, frail-looking bungalows with whitish roofs, and scattered dark trees among. A plume of smoke beyond, out of the scarp front of trees. Near the sky, dark, old, Aboriginal rocks. Then again all the yellowish forefront of the sea, yellow bare grass, the homestead with leafless coral trees, the ponies above the sands, the pale fawn foreshore, the sea, the floor of wet rock.

  He had it all to himself. And there, with his hands in his pockets, he drifted into indifference. The far-off, far-off, far-off indifference. The world revolved and revolved and disappeared. Like a stone that has fallen into the sea, his old life, the old meaning, fell, and rippled, and there was vacancy, with the sea and the Australian shore in it. Far-off, far-off, as if he had landed on another planet, as a man might land after death. Leaving behind the body of care. Even the body of desire. Shed. All that had meant so much to him, shed. All the old world and self of care, the beautiful care as well as the weary care, shed like a dead body. The landscape?—he cared not a thing about the landscape. Love?—he was absolved from love, as if by a great pardon. Humanity?—there was none. Thought?—fallen like a stone into the sea. The great, the glamorous past?—worn thin, frail, like a frail, translucent film of shell thrown up on the shore.

  To be alone, mindless and memory-less between the sea, under the sombre wall-front of Australia. To be alone with a long, wide shore and land, heartless, soulless. As alone and as absent and as present as an Aboriginal dark on the sand in the sun. The strange falling away of everything. The cabbage palms in the sea wind were sere like old mops. The jetty straddled motionless from the shore. A pony walked on the sand snuffing the seaweed.

  The past all gone so frail and thin. ‘What have I cared about, what have I cared for? There is nothing to care about.’ Absolved from it all. The soft, blue, humanless sky of Australia, the pale, white unwritten atmosphere of Australia. Tabula rasa. The world a new leaf. And on the new leaf, nothing. The white clarity of the Australian, fragile atmosphere. Without a mark, without a record.

  ‘Why have I cared? I don’t care. How strange it is here, to be soulless and alone.’

  That was the perpetual refrain at the back of his mind. To be soulless and alone, by the Southern Ocean, in Australia.

  ‘Why do I wrestle with my soul? I have no soul.’

  Clear as the air about him this truth possessed him.

  ‘Why do I talk of the soul? My soul is shed like a sheath. I am soulless and alone, soulless and alone. That which is soulless is perforce alone.’

  The sun was curving to the crest of the dark ridge. As soon as the sun went behind the ridge, shadow fell on the shore, and a cold wind came, he would go home. But he wanted the sun not to sink—he wanted the sun to stand still, for fear it might turn back to the soulful world where love is and the burden of bothering.

  He saw something clutch in a pool. Crouching, he saw a horror—a dark grey, brown-striped octopus thing with two smallish, white beaks or eyes living in a cranny of a rock in a pool. It stirred the denser viscous pool of itself and unfurled a long dark arm through the water, an arm studded with bright, orange-red studs or s
uckers. Then it curled the arm in again, cuddling close. Perhaps a sort of dark shore octopus, starfish coloured amid its darkness. It was watching him as he crouched. He dropped a snail shell near it. It huddled closer and one of the beak-like white things disappeared; or were they eyes? Heaven knows. It eased out again, and from its dense jelly mass another thick arm swayed out studded with the sea-orange studs. And he crouched and watched, while the white water hissed nearer to drive him away. Creatures of the sea! Creatures of the sea! The sea water was round his boots, he rose with his hands in his pockets, to wander away.

  The sun went behind the coal-dark hill, though the waves still glowed white-gold, and the sea was dark blue. But the shore had gone into shadow, and the cold wind came at once, like a creature that was lying in wait. The upper air seethed, seemed to hiss with light. But here was shadow, cold like the arm of the dark octopus. And the moon already in the sky.

  Home again. But what was home? The fish has the vast ocean for home. And man has timelessness and nowhere. ‘I won’t delude myself with the fallacy of home,’ he said to himself. ‘The four walls are a blanket I wrap around in, in timelessness and nowhere, to go to sleep.’

  Back to Harriet, to tea. Harriet? Another bird like himself. If only she wouldn’t speak, talk, feel. The weary habit of talking and having feelings. When a man has no soul he has no feelings to talk about. He wants to be still. And ‘meaning’ is the most meaningless of illusions. An outworn garment.

  Harriet and he? It was time they both agreed that nothing has any meaning. Meaning is a dead letter when a man has no soul. And speech is like a volley of dead leaves and dust, stifling the air. Human beings should learn to make weird, wordless cries, like animals, and cast off the clutter of words.

  Old dust and dirt of corpses: words and feelings. The decomposed body of the past whirling and choking us, language, love and meaning. When a man loses his soul he knows what a small, weary bit of clockwork it was. Who dare to be soulless finds the new dimension of life.

  Home, to tea. The clicking of the clock. Tic-tac! Tic-tac! The clock. Home to tea. Just for clockwork’s sake.

  No home, no tea. Insouciant soullessness. Eternal indifference. Perhaps it is only the great pause between carings. But it is only in this pause that one finds the meaninglessness of meanings—like old husks which speak dust. Only in this pause that one finds the meaninglessness of meanings, and the other dimension, the reality of timelessness and nowhere. Home to tea! Do you hear the clock tick? And yet there is timelessness and nowhere. And the clock means nothing with its ticking. And nothing is so meaningless as meanings.

  Yet Richard meandered home to tea. For the sun had set, the sea of evening light was going pale blue, fair as evening, faintly glazed with yellow: the eastern sky was a glow of rose and smoke blue, a band beyond the sea, while from the dark land-ridge under the western sky an electric fierceness still rushed up past a small but vehement evening star. Somewhere among it all the moon was lying.

  He received another summons to go to Kangaroo. He didn’t want to go. He didn’t want any more emotional stress, of any sort. He was sick of having a soul that suffered or responded. He didn’t want to respond any more, or to suffer any more. Saunter blindly and obstinately through the days.

  But he set off. The wattle-blooms—the whitish, mealy ones—were a flower in the bush, and at the top of huge poles of stems, big, blackish-crimson buds and flowers, flowers of some sort, shot up out of a clump of spear leaves. The bush was in flower. The sky above was a tender, virgin blue, the air was pale with clarity, the sun moved strong, yet with a soft and catlike motion through the heavens. It was spring. But still the bush kept its sombreness along all the pellucid ether: the eternally unlighted bush.

  What was the good of caring? What was the point of caring? As he looked at the silent, morning bush grey-still in the translucency of the day, a voice spoke quite aloud in him. What was the good of caring, of straining, of stressing? Not the slightest good. The vast lapse of time here—and white men thrown in like snow into dusky wine, to melt away and disappear, but to cool the fever of the dry continent. Afterwards—afterwards—in the far-off, far-off afterwards, a different sort of men might arise to a different sort of care. But as for now—like snow in Aboriginal wine one could float and deliciously melt down, to nothingness, having no choice.

  He knew that Kangaroo was worse. But he was startled to find him looking a dead man. A long, cadaverous-yellow face, exactly the face of a dead man, but with an animal’s dark eyes. He did not move. But he watched Richard come forward from the door. He did not give him his hand.

  ‘How are you?’ said Richard gently.

  ‘Dying.’ The one word from the discoloured lips.

  Somers was silent, because he knew it was only too true. Kangaroo’s dark eyebrows above his motionless dark eyes were exactly like an animal that sulks itself to death. His brow was just sulking to death, like an animal.

  Kangaroo glanced up at Somers with a rapid turn of the eyes. His body was perfectly motionless.

  ‘Did you know I was dying?’ he said.

  ‘I was afraid.’

  ‘Afraid! You weren’t afraid. You were glad. They’re all glad.’ The voice was weak, hissing in its sound. He seemed to speak to himself.

  ‘Nay, don’t say that.’

  Kangaroo took no notice of the expostulation. He lay silent.

  ‘They don’t want me,’ he said.

  ‘But why bother?’

  ‘I’m dying! I’m dying! I’m dying!’ suddenly shouted Kangaroo, with a breaking and bellowing voice that nearly startled Richard out of his skin. The nurse came running in, followed by Jack.

  ‘Mr Cooley! Whatever is it?’ said the nurse.

  He looked at her with long, slow, dark looks.

  ‘Statement of fact,’ he said, in his faint, husky voice.

  ‘Don’t excite yourself,’ pleaded the nurse. ‘You know it hurts you. Don’t think about it, don’t. Hadn’t you perhaps best be left alone?’

  ‘Yes, I’d better go,’ said Richard, rising.

  I want to say goodbye to you,’ said Kangaroo faintly, looking up at him with strange, beseeching eyes.

  Richard, very pale at the gills, sat down again in the chair. Jack watched them both, scowling.

  ‘Go out, nurse,’ whispered Kangaroo, touching her hand with his fingers, in a loving kind of motion. ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Cooley, don’t fret, don’t,’ she pleaded.

  He watched her with dark, subtle, equivocal eyes, then glanced at the door. She went, obedient, and Jack followed her.

  ‘Goodbye, Lovat!’ said Kangaroo in a whisper, turning his face to Somers and reaching out his hand. Richard took the clammy, feeble hand. He did not speak. His lips were closed firmly, his face pale and proud-looking. He looked back into Kangaroo’s eyes, unconscious of what he saw. He was only isolated again in endurance. Grief, torture, shame, seethed low down in him. But his breast and shoulders and face were hard as if turned to rock. He had no choice.

  ‘You’ve killed me. You’ve killed me, Lovat!’ whispered Kangaroo. ‘Say goodbye to me. Say you love me now you’ve done it, and I won’t hate you for it.’ The voice was weak and tense.

  ‘But I haven’t killed you, Kangaroo. I wouldn’t be here holding your hand if I had. I’m only so sorry some other villain did such a thing.’ Richard spoke very gently, like a woman.

  ‘Yes, you’ve killed me,’ whispered Kangaroo hoarsely.

  Richard’s face went colder, and he tried to disengage his hand. But the dying man clasped him with suddenly strong fingers.

  ‘No, no,’ he said fiercely. ‘Don’t leave me now. You must stay with me. I shan’t be long—and I need you to be there.’

  There ensued a long silence. The corpse—for such it seemed—lay immobile and obstinate. Yet it did not relax into death. And Richard could not go, for it held him. He sat with his wrist clasped by the clammy thin fingers, and he could not go.

  Th
en again the dark, mysterious, animal eyes turned up to his face.

  ‘Say you love me, Lovat,’ came the hoarse, penetrating whisper, seeming even more audible than a loud sound.

  And again Lovat’s face tightened with torture.

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ he said with his lips.

  ‘Say you love me.’ The pleading, penetrating whisper seemed to sound inside Somers’ brain. He opened his mouth to say it. The sound ‘I—’ came out. Then he turned his face aside and remained open-mouthed, blank.

  Kangaroo’s fingers were clutching his wrist, the corpse-face was eagerly upturned to his. Somers was brought to by a sudden convulsive gripping of the fingers around his wrist. He looked down. And when he saw the eager, alert face, yellow, long, Jewish, and somehow ghoulish, he knew he could not say it. He didn’t love Kangaroo.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t say it.’

  The sharpened face, that seemed to be leaping up to him, or leaping up at him, like some snake striking, now seemed to sink back and go indistinct. Only the eyes smouldered low down out of the vague yellow mass of the face. The fingers slackened, and Richard managed to withdraw his wrist. There was an eternity of grey silence. And for a long time Kangaroo’s yellow face seemed sunk half visible under a shadow, as a dusky cuttlefish under a pool, deep down. Then slowly, slowly it came to the surface again, and Richard braced his nerves.

  ‘You are a little man, a little man, to have come and killed me,’ came the terrible, pathetic whisper. But Richard was afraid of the face, so he turned aside. He thought in his mind: ‘I haven’t killed him at all.’