And with it all, toiling on with civilisation. But it felt like a clock that was running down. It had been wound up in Europe, and was running down, running right down, here in Australia. Men were mining, farming, making roads, shouting politics. But all with that basic indifference which dare not acknowledge how indifferent it is, lest it should drop everything and lapse into a blank. But a basic indifference, with a spurt of excitement over a horserace, and an occasional joy in a row.
It seemed strange to Somers that Labour should be so insistent in Australia—or that Kangaroo should have been so burning. But then he realised that these men were all the time yoked to some work, they were all the time in the collar. And the work kept them going a good deal more than they kept the work going. Nothing but the absolute drive of the world’s work kept them going. Without it they would have lapsed into the old bushranging recklessness, lapsed into the profound indifference which was basic in them.
But still, they were men, they were healthy, they were full of energy, even if they were indifferent to the aim in front. So they embraced one aim or another, out of need to be going somewhere, doing something more than just backing a horse. Something more than a mere day’s work and a gamble. Some smack at the old-established institution of life, that came from Europe.
There it is, laid all over the world, the heavy established European way of life. Like their huge ponderous cathedrals and factories and cities, enormous encumbrances of stone and steel and brick, weighing on the surface of the earth. They say Australia is free, and it is. Even the flimsy, foundationless bungalows. Richard railed at the scrappy amorphousness, till two nights he dreamed he was in Paris, and a third night it was in some other city, of Italy or France. Here he was staying in a big palazzo of a house—and he struggled to get out, and found himself in a high old provincial street with old gable houses and dark shadow and himself in the gulf between: and at the end of the street a huge, pale-grey bulk of a cathedral, an old Gothic cathedral, huge and massive and grey and beautiful.
But, suddenly, the mass of it made him sick, and the beauty was nauseous to him. So strong a feeling that he woke up. And since that day he had been thankful for the amorphous scrappy scattering of foundationless shacks and bungalows. Since then he had loved the Australian landscape, with the remote gum trees running their white nerves into the air, the random streets of flimsy bungalows, all loose from one another, and temporary-seeming, the bungalows perched precariously on the knolls, like Japanese paper-houses, below the ridge of wire-and-tuft trees.
He had now a horror of vast super-incumbent buildings. They were a nightmare. Even the cathedrals. Huge, huge bulks that are called beauty. Beauty seemed to him like some turgid tumour. Never again, he felt, did he want to look at London, the horrible weight of it: or at Rome with all the pressure on the hills. Horrible, inert, man-moulded weight. Heavy as death.
No, no, the flimsy hills of Australia were like a new world, and the frail inconspicuousness of the landscape, that was still so clear and clean, clean of all fogginess or confusion: but the frail, aloof, inconspicuous clarity of the landscape was like a sort of heaven—bungalows, shacks, corrugated iron and all. No wonder Australians love Australia. It is the land that as yet has made no great mistake, humanly. The horrible human mistakes of Europe. And, probably, the even worse human mistakes of America.
‘Then why am I going?’ he asked himself.
‘Wait! Wait!’ he answered himself. ‘You have got to go through the mistakes. You’ve got to go all round the world, and then halfway round again, till you get back. Go on, go on, the world is round, and it will bring you back. Draw your ring round the world, the ring of your consciousness. Draw it round until it is complete.’
So he prepared with a quiet heart to depart.
The only person that called at Coo-ee was Jaz.
‘You’re leaving us, then?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Rather suddenly at the end.’
‘Perhaps. But it’s as well I should go soon if I’m going.’
‘You think so? Taken against the place, have you?’
‘No—the contrary. If I stay much longer I shall stay altogether.’
‘Come quite to like it!’ Jaz smiled slowly.
‘Yes. I love it, Jaz. I don’t love people. But this place—it goes into my marrow, and makes me feel drunk. I love Australia.’
‘That’s why you leave it, eh?’
‘Yes. I’m frightened. What I want to do is to go a bit further back into the bush—near some little township—have a horse and a cow of my own—and—damn everything.’
‘I can quite understand the “damn everything” part of it,’ laughed Jaz. ‘You won’t do it, though.’
‘I never was so tempted in my life. Talk about Eve tempting man to a fall: Australia tempts me. Retro me—’
Jaz was silent for a few moments.
‘You’d repent it, though,’ he said quietly.
‘I’ll probably repent whatever I do,’ replied Somers, ‘so what’s the odds. I’ll probably repent bitterly going to America, going back to the world: when I want Australia. I want Australia as a man wants a woman. I fairly tremble with wanting it.’
‘Australia?’
‘Yes.’
Jaz looked at Somers with his curious, light-grey eyes.
‘Then why not stop?’ he said seductively.
‘Not now. Not now. Some cussedness inside me. I don’t want to give in, you see. Not yet, I don’t want to give in to the place. It’s too strong. It would lure me quite away from myself. It would be too easy. It’s too tempting. It’s too big a stride, Jaz.’
Jaz laughed, looking back at Richard’s intense eyes.
‘What a man you are, Mr Somers!’ he said. ‘Come and live in Sydney and you won’t find it such a big jump from anywhere else.’
‘No, I wouldn’t want to live in Sydney. I’d want to go back in the bush near one of the little townships. It’s like wanting a woman, Jaz. I want it.’
‘Then why not do it?’
‘I won’t give in, not yet. It’s like giving in to a woman; I won’t give in yet. I’ll come back later.’
Jaz suddenly looked at Richard and smiled maliciously.
‘You won’t give in, Mr Somers, will you? You won’t give in to the women, and Australia’s like a woman to you. You wouldn’t give in to Kangaroo, and he’s dead now. You won’t give in to Labour, or Socialism. Well, now, what will you do? Will you give in to America, do you think?’
‘Heaven preserve me—if I’m to speak beforehand.’
‘Why, Mr Somers!’ laughed Jaz, ‘seems to me you just go round the world looking for things you’re not going to give in to. You’re as bad as we folk.’
‘Maybe,’ said Richard. ‘But I’ll give in to the Lord Almighty, which is more than you’ll do—’
‘Oh, well, now—we’d give in to Him if we saw Him,’ said Jaz, smiling with an odd winsomeness he sometimes had.
‘All right. Well I prefer not to see, and yet to give in,’ said Richard.
Jaz glanced up at him suspiciously, from under his brows.
‘And another thing,’ said Richard. ‘I won’t give up the flag of our real civilised consciousness. I’ll give up the ideals. But not the aware, self-responsible, deep consciousness that we’ve gained. I won’t go back on that, Jaz, though Kangaroo did say I was the enemy of civilisation.’
‘You don’t consider you are, then?’ asked Jaz, pertinently.
‘The enemy of civilisation? Well, I’m the enemy of this machine-civilisation and this ideal civilisation. But I’m not the enemy of the deep, self-responsible consciousness in man, which is what I mean by civilisation. In that sense of civilisation I’d fight forever for the flag, and try to carry it on into deeper, darker places. It’s an adventure, Jaz, like any other. And when you realise what you’re doing, it’s perhaps the best adventure.’
Harriet brought the tea tray on to the verandah.
‘It’s quite
nice that somebody has come to see us,’ she said to Jaz. ‘There seems such a gap, now Kangaroo is gone, and all he stood for.’
‘You feel a gap, do you?’ asked Jaz.
‘Awful. As if the earth had opened. As for Lovat, he’s absolutely broken-hearted, and such a trial to live with.’
Jaz looked quickly and inquiringly at Somers.
‘Sort of metaphysical heart,’ Richard said, smiling wryly.
Jaz only looked puzzled.
‘Metaphysical!’ said Harriet. ‘You’d think to hear him he was nothing but a teapot brewing metaphysical tea. As a matter of fact Kangaroo went awfully deep with him, and now he’s heartbroken, and that’s why he’s rushing to America. He’s always breaking his heart over something—anything except me. To me he’s a nether millstone.’
‘Is that so!’ said Jaz.
‘But one feels awful, you know, Kangaroo dying like that. Lovat likes to show off and be so beastly high and mighty about things. But I know how miserable he is.’
They were silent for some time, and the talk drifted.
In the newspapers Somers read of a big cyclone off the coast of China, which had engulfed thousands of Chinese. This cyclone was now travelling south, lashing its tail over the New Hebrides, and swooping its paws down the thousands of miles of east coast of Australia. The monster was expected to have spent itself by the time it reached Sydney. But it hadn’t—not quite.
Down it came, in a great darkness. The sea began to have a strange yelling sound in its breakers, the black cloud came up like a wall from the sea, everywhere was dark. And the wind broke in volleys from the sea, and the rain poured as if the cyclone were a great bucket of water pouring itself endlessly down.
Richard and Harriet sat in the dark room at Coo-ee, with a big fire, and darkness raging in waters around. It was like the end of the world. The roaring snarl of the sea was of such volume, the volleying roar of the wind so great as to create almost a sense of silence in the room. The house was like a small cave under the water. Rain poured in waves over the dark room, and with a heaviness of spume. Though the roof came down so far and deep over the verandahs, yet the water swept in, and gurgled under the doors and in at the windows. Tiles were ripped off the verandah roof with a crash, and water splashed more heavily. For the first day there was nothing to do but to sit by the fire, and occasionally mop up the water at the seaward door. Through the long, low windows you saw only a yellow-livid fume, and over all the boom you heard the snarl of water.
They were quite cut off this day, alone, dark, in the devastation of water. The rain had an iciness, too, which seemed to make a shell round the house. The two beings, Harriet and Lovat, kept alone and silent in the shell of a house as in a submarine. They were black inside as out. Harriet particularly was full of a storm of black chagrin. She had expected so much of Australia. It had been as if all her life she had been waiting to come to Australia. To a new country, to a new, unspoiled country. Oh, she hated the old world so much. London, Paris, Berlin, Rome—they all seemed to her so old, so ponderous with ancient authority and ancient dirt. Ponderous, ancient authority especially, oh, how she hated it. Freed once, she wanted a new freedom, silvery and paradisical in the atmosphere. A land with a new atmosphere, untainted by authority. Silvery, untouched freedom.
And in the first months she had found this in Australia, in the silent, silvery-blue days, and the unbreathed air, and strange, remote forms of tree and creature. She had felt herself free, free, free, for the first time in her life. In the silvery pure air of this undominated continent she could swim like a fish that is just born, alone in a crystal ocean. Woman that she was she exulted, she delighted. She had loved Coo-ee. And she just could not understand that Richard was so tense, so resistant.
Then gradually, through the silver glisten of the new freedom came a dull, sinister vibration. Sometimes from the interior came a wind that seemed to her evil. Out of the silver paradisical freedom untamed, evil winds could come, cold, like a stone hatchet murdering you. The freedom, like everything else, had two sides to it. Sometimes a heavy, reptile-hostility came off the sombre land, something gruesome and infinitely repulsive. It frightened her as a reptile would frighten her if it wound its cold folds around her. For the past month now Australia had been giving her these horrors. It was as if the silvery freedom suddenly turned, and showed the scaly back of a reptile, and the horrible jaws.
Out of all her birdlike elation at this new-found freedom, freedom for her, the female, suddenly, without warning, dark revulsions struck her. Struck her, it would seem, in her deepest female self, almost in her womb. These revulsions sent her into a frenzy. She had sudden, mad loathings of Australia. And these made her all the more frenzied because of her former great, radiant hopes and her silvery realisations. What, must it all be taken back from her, all this glisten of paradise, this glisten of paradise, this silvery freedom like protoplasm of life? Was it to be revoked?
There was Richard, that hell-bird, preaching, preaching at her: ‘Don’t trust it. You can’t have this absolved sort of freedom. It’s an illusion. You can’t have this freedom absolved from control. It can’t be done. There is no stability. There will come a reaction and a devastation. Inevitable. You must have deep control from within. You must have a deep, dark weight of authority in your own soul. You must be most carefully, sternly controlled from within. You must be under the hand of the Lord. You can’t escape the dark hand of the Lord, not even in free Australia. You’ll get the devils turning on you if you try too much freedom. It can’t be done. Too much freedom means you absolve yourself from the hand of the Lord, and once you’re really absolved you fall a prey to devils, devils. You’ll see. All you white females raging for further freedom. Wait, wait till you’ve got it and see how the devils will bite you with unclean, reptile sort of mouths. Wait, you who love Australia and its freedom. Only let me leave you to the freedom, till it bites you with a sort of sewer-mouth, like all these rats. Only let me abandon you to this freedom. Only let me—’
So he had preached at her, like a dog barking, barking senselessly. And oh, how it had annoyed her.
Yet gradually, quite apart from him, it had begun to happen to her. These hateful revulsions, when Australia had turned as it were unclean to her, with an unclean sort of malevolence. And her revulsions had possessed her. Then the death of Kangaroo. And now this blackness, this slew of water, this noise of hellish elements.
To Richard it was like being caged in with a sick tiger, to be shut up with Harriet in this watery cave of gloom. Like a sullen, sick tiger, she could hardly get herself to move, the weight of her revulsion was so deep upon her. She loathed Australia, with wet, dark repulsion. She was black, sick with chagrin. And she hated that barking white dog of a Richard, with his yap-yap-yapping about control and authority and the hand of the Lord. She had left Europe with her teeth set in hatred of Europe’s ancient encumbrance of authority and of the withered, repulsive weight of the Hand of the Lord, that old Jew, upon it. Undying hostility to old Europe, undying hope of the new, free lands. Especially this far Australia.
And now—and now—was the freedom all going to turn into dirty water? All the uncontrolled gentleness and uncontaminated freedom of Australia, was it going to turn and bite her like the ghastly bite of some unclean-mouthed reptile, an iguana, a great newt? Had it already bitten her?
She was sick with revulsion, she wanted to get out, away to America which is not so sloppy and lovey, but hard and greedy and domineering, perhaps, but not mushey-lovey.
These three days of dark wetness, slew, and wind finished her. On the second morning there was an abatement, and Richard rushed to the post. The boys, barefoot, bare-legged in the icy water, were running to school under mackintosh capes. Down came the rain in a wind suddenly like a great hose-pipe, and Richard got home a running, streaming pillar of water. Home into the dark room and the sulky tiger of Harriet.
The storm went on, black, all day, all night, and the next day the same, in
side the house as well as out. Harriet sulked the more, like a frenzied sick tigress. The afternoon of the third day another abatement into light rain, so Richard pulled on thick boots and went out to the shore. His grass was a thin surface stream, and down the low cliffs, one cascade stream. The sea was enormous: wave after wave in immediate succession, raving yellow and crashing dull into the land. The yeast-spume was piled in hills against the cliffs, among the big rocks, and in swung the raving yellow water, in great dull blows under the land, hoarsely surging out of the dim yellow blank of the sea. Harriet looked at it for a few moments, shuddering and peering down like a sick tigress in a flood. Then she turned tail and rushed indoors.
Richard tried to walk under the cliffs. But the whole shore was ruined, changed: a whole mass of new rocks, a chaos of heaped boulders, a gurgle of rushing, clayey water, and heaps of collapsed earth.
On the fourth day the wind had sunk, the rain was only thin, the dark sky was breaking. Gradually the storm of the sky went down. But not the sea. Its great yellow fore-fringe was a snarl of wave after wave, unceasing. And the shore was a ruin. The beach seemed to have sunk or been swept away, the shore was a catastrophe of rocks and boulders. Richard scrambled along through the dank wetness to a bit of sand, where seaweed was piled like bushes, and he could more or less walk. But soon he came to a new obstacle. The creek, which formerly had sunk at the edge of the beach in a long pool, and left the sloping sand all free and beautiful, had now broken through, levelled the sand, and swept in a kind of snarling river to the snarling waves, across the cut-out sand. The freshwater met the waves with a snarl, and sometimes pushed on into the sea, sometimes was shoved back and heaped up with a rattle of angry protest. Waters against waters.
Kangaroo Page 45
