Chapter 6
They went back to Sydney on the Thursday, for two days, to pack up and return to Coo–ee. All the time, they could hear the sea. It seemed strange that they felt the sea so far away, in Sydney. In Sydney itself, there is no sea. It might be Birmingham. Even in Mullumbimby, a queer raw little place, when Somers lifted his head and looked down Main Street and saw, a mile away, the high level of the solid sea, it was almost a shock to him. Half a mile inland, the influence of the sea has disappeared, and the land–sense is so heavy, buried, that it is hard to believe that the dull rumble in the air is the ocean. It sounds like a coal–mine or something.
"You'll let Mr. Somers and me have a little chat to ourselves, Mrs. Somers, won't you?" said Jack, appearing after tea.
"Willingly. I assure you I don't want to be bothered with your important affairs," said Harriet. None the less she went over rather resentfully to Victoria, turned out of her own house. It wasn't that she wanted to listen. She would really have hated to attend to all their high–and–mighty revolution stuff. She didn't believe in revolutions—they were vieux jeu, out of date.
"Well," said Jack, settling down in a wooden arm–chair and starting his pipe. "You've thought it over, have you?"
"Over and over," laughed Somers.
"I knew you would."
He sucked his pipe and thought for a time.
"I've had a long talk with Kangaroo about you to–day," he said.
"Who's Kangaroo?"
"He's the First," replied Jack slowly. And again there was silence. Somers kept himself well in hand, and said nothing.
"A lawyer—well up—I knew him in the army, though. He was one of my lieutenants."
Still Somers waited, without speaking.
"He'd like to see you. Should you care to have lunch with him and me in town to–morrow?"
"Have you told him you've talked to me?"
"Oh yes—told him before I did it. He knows your writings—read all you've written, apparently. He'd heard about you too from a chap on the Naldera. That's the boat you came by, isn't it?"
"Yes," said Somers.
"Yes," echoed Jack. "He was all over me when I mentioned your name. You'd like Kangaroo. He's a great chap."
"What's his name?"
"Cooley—Ben—Benjamin Cooley."
"They like him on the Bulletin, don't they? Didn't I see something about Ben Cooley and his straight talk?"
"Yes. Oh, he can talk straight enough—and crooked enough as well, if it comes to that. You'll come to lunch then? We lunch in his chambers."
Somers agreed. Jack was silent, as if he had not much more to say. After a while he added reflectively:
"Yes, I'm glad to have brought you and Kangaroo together."
"Why do they call him Kangaroo?"
"Looks like one."
Again there was a silence, each man thinking his own thoughts.
"You and Kangaroo will catch on like wax, as far as ideas go," Jack prognosticated. "But he's an unfeeling beggar, really. And that's where you WON'T cotton on to him. That's where I come in."
He looked at Somers with a faint smile.
"Come in to what?" laughed Somers.
Jack took his pipe from his mouth with a little flourish.
"In a job like this," he said, "a man wants a mate—yes, a mate—that he can say ANYTHING to, and be absolutely himself with. Must have it. And as far as I go—for me—you don't mind if I say it, do you?—Kangaroo could never have a mate. He's as odd as any phoenix bird I've ever heard tell of. You couldn't mate him to anything in the heavens above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. No, there's no female kangaroo of his species. Fine chap, for all that. But as lonely as a nail in a post."
"Sounds something fatal and fixed," laughed Somers.
"It does. And he IS fatal and fixed. Those eyeglasses of his, you know—they alone make a man into a sort of eye of God, rather glassy. But my idea is, in a job like this, every man should have a mate—like most of us had in the war. Mine was Victoria's brother—and still is, in a way. But he got some sort of a sickness that seems to have taken all the fight out of him. Fooling about with the wrong sort of women. Can't get his pecker up again now, the fool. Poor devil an' all."
Jack sighed and resumed his pipe.
"Men fight better when they've got a mate. They'll stand anything when they've got a mate," he went on again after a while. "But a mate's not all that easy to strike. We're a lot of decent chaps, stick at nothing once they wanted to put a thing through, in our lodge—and in my club. But there's not one of them I feel's quite up to me—if you know what I mean. Rattling good fellows—but nary one of 'em quite my cut."
"That's usually so," laughed Somers.
"It is," said Jack. Then he narrowed and diminished his voice. "Now I feel," he said cautiously and intensely, "that if you and me was mates, we could put any damn mortal thing through, if we had to knock the bottom out of the blanky show to do it."
Somers dropped his head. He liked the man. But what about the cause? What about the mistrust and reluctancy he felt? And at the same time, the thrill of desire. What was offered? He wanted so much. To be mates with Jack in this cause. Life and death mates. And yet he felt he couldn't. Not quite. Something stopped him.
He looked up at Callcott. The other man's face was alert and waiting: curiously naked a face too. Somers wished it had had even a moustache, anything rather than this clean, all–clean bare flesh. If Jack had only had a beard too—like a man—and not one of these clean–shaven too–much–exposed faces. Alert, waiting face—almost lurking, waiting for an answer.
"Could we ever be QUITE mates?" Somers asked gently.
Jack's dark eyes watched the other man fixedly. Jack himself wasn't unlike a kangaroo, thought Somers: a long–faced, smooth–faced, strangely watchful kangaroo with powerful hindquarters.
"Perhaps not as me and Fred Wilmot was. In a way you're higher up than I am. But that's what I like, you know—a mate that's better than I am, a mate who I FEEL is better than I am. That's what I feel about you: and that's what makes me feel, if we was mates, I'd stick to you through hell fire and back, and we'd clear some land between us. I KNOW if you and me was mates, we could put any blooming thing through. There'd be nothing to stop us."
"Not even Kangaroo?"
"Oh, he'd be our way, and we'd be his. He's a sensible chap." Somers was tempted to give Jack his hand there and then, and pledge himself to a friendship, or a comradeship, that nothing should ever alter. He wanted to do it. Yet something withheld him as if an invisible hand were upon him, preventing him.
"I'm not sure that I'm a mating man, either," he said slowly.
"You?" Jack eyed him. "You are and you aren't. If you'd once come over—why man, do you think I wouldn't lay my life down for you?"
Somers went pale. He didn't want anybody laying down their lives for him. "Greater love than this—." But he didn't want this great love. He didn't BELIEVE in it: in that way of love.
"Let's leave it, Jack," he replied, laughing slowly and rising, giving his hand to the other man. "Don't let us make any pledges yet. We're friends, whatever else we are. As for being mates—wait till I feel sure. Wait till I've seen Kangaroo. Wait till I see my way clear. I feel I'm only six strides down the way yet, and you ask me to be at the end."
"At the start you mean," said Jack, gripping the other man's hand, and rising too. "But take your time, old man." He laid his hand on Somers' shoulder. "If you're slow and backward like a woman, it's because it's your nature. Not like me, I go at it in jumps like a kangaroo. I feel I could jump clean through the blooming tent–canvas sometimes." As he spoke he was pale and tense with emotion, and his eyes were like black holes, almost wounds in the pallor of his face.
Somers was in a dilemma. Did he want to mix and make with this man? One part of him perhaps did. But not a very big part, since for his life he could not help resenting it when Jack put his hand on his shoulder, or called him "old man". It wasn't the commonness either. Jack's "common" speech and manner was largely assumed—part of the colonial bluff. He could be accurate enough if he chose—as Somers knew already, and would soon know more emphatically. No, it was not the commonness, the vulgar touch in the approach. Jack was sensitive enough, really. And the quiet, well–bred appeal of upper–class young Englishmen, who have the same yearning for intimate comradeship, combined with a sensitive delicacy really finer than a woman's, this made Somers shrink just the same. He half wanted to commit himself to this whole affection with a friend, a comrade, a mate. And then, in the last issue, he didn't want it at all. The affection would be deep and genuine enough: that he knew. But—when it came to the point, he didn't want any more affection. All his life he had cherished a beloved ideal of friendship—David and Jonathan. And now, when true and good friends offered, he found he simply could not commit himself, even to simple friendship. The whole trend of this affection, this mingling, this intimacy, this truly beautiful love, he found his soul just set against it. He couldn't go along with it. He didn't want a friend, he didn't want loving affection, he didn't want comradeship. No, his soul trembled when he tried to drive it along the way, trembled and stood still, like Balaam's Ass. It did not want friendship or comradeship, great or small, deep or shallow.
It took Lovat Somers some time before he would really admit and accept this new fact. Not till he had striven hard with his soul did he come to see the angel in the way; not till his soul, like Balaam's Ass, had spoken more than once. And then, when forced to admit, it was a revolution in his mind. He had all his life had this craving for an absolute friend, a David to his Jonathan, Pylades to his Orestes: a blood–brother. All his life he had secretly grieved over his friendlessness. And now at last, when it really offered—and it had offered twice before, since he had left Europe—he didn't want it, and he realised that in his innermost soul he had never wanted it.
Yet he wanted SOME living fellowship with other men; as it was he was just isolated. Maybe a living fellowship!—but not affection, not love, not comradeship. Not mates and equality and mingling. Not blood–brotherhood. None of that.
What else? He didn't know. He only knew he was never destined to be mate or comrade or even friend with any man. Some other living relationship. But what? He did not know. Perhaps the thing that the dark races know: that one can still feel in India: the mystery of lordship. That which white men have struggled so long against, and which is the clue to the life of the Hindu. The mystery of lordship. The mystery of innate, natural, sacred priority. The other mystic relationship between men, which democracy and equality try to deny and obliterate. Not any arbitrary caste or birth aristocracy. But the mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.
Before Somers went down to George Street to find Jack and to be taken by him to luncheon with the Kangaroo, he had come to the decision, or to the knowledge that mating or comradeship were contrary to his destiny. He would never pledge himself to Jack, nor to this venture in which Jack was concerned.
They arrived at Mr. Cooley's chambers punctually. It was a handsome apartment with handsome jarrah furniture, dark and suave, and some very beautiful rugs. Mr. Cooley came at once: and he WAS a kangaroo. His face was long and lean and pendulous, with eyes set close together behind his pince–nez: and his body was stout but firm. He was a man of forty or so, hard to tell, swarthy, with short–cropped dark hair and a smallish head carried rather forward on his large but sensitive, almost shy body. He leaned forward in his walk, and seemed as if his hands didn't quite belong to him. But he shook hands with a firm grip. He was really tall, but his way of dropping his head, and his sloping shoulders, took away from his height. He seemed not much taller than Somers, towards whom he seemed to lean the sensitive tip of his long nose, hanging over him as he scrutinised him sharply through his eye–glasses, and approaching him with the front of his stomach.
"Very glad to see you," he said, in a voice half Australian, half official.
The luncheon was almost impressive: a round table with a huge bunch of violets in a queer old copper bowl, Queen Anne silver, a tablecloth with heavy point edging, Venetian wine–glasses, red and white wine in Venetian wine–jugs, a Chinaman waiting at table, offering first a silver dish of hors d'oeuvres and a handsome crayfish with mayonnaise.
"Why," said Somers, equivocally, "I might be anywhere."
Kangaroo looked at him sharply. Somers noticed that when he sat down, his thighs in his dark grey, striped trousers were very thick, making his shoulders seem almost slender; but though his stomach was stout, it was firm.
"Then I hope you feel at home," said Kangaroo. "Because I am sure you are at home anywhere." And he helped himself to olives, putting one in his queer, pursed, thick–lipped mouth.
"For which reason I'm never at home, presumably."
"That may easily be the case. Will you take red or white wine?"
"White," said Somers, oblivious of the poised Chinaman.
"You have come to a homely country," said the Kangaroo, without the ghost of a smile.
"Certainly to a very hospitable one."
"We rarely lock our doors," said Kangaroo.
"Or anything else," said Jack. "Though of course we may slay you in the scullery if you say a word against us."
"I'm not going to be so indiscreet," said Somers.
"Leave the indiscretion to us. We believe in it. Indiscretion is the better part of valour. You agree, Kangaroo?" said Jack, smiling over his plate directly at his host.
"I don't think I'd care to see you turn discreet, boy," returned the other. "Though your quotation isn't new."
"Even a crystal–gazer can't gaze to the bottom of a deep well, eh? Never mind, I'm as shallow as a pie–dish, and proud of it. Red, please." This to the Chink.
"That's why it's so nice knowing you," said Kangaroo.
"And you, of course, are a glass finger–bowl with a violet floating on it, you're so transparent," said Jack.
"I think that describes me beautifully. Mr. Somers, help yourself to wine, that's the most comfortable. I hope you are going to write something for us. Australia is waiting for her Homer—or her Theocritus."
"Or even her Ally Sloper," said Jack, "if I may be permitted to be so old–fashioned."
"If I were but blind," said Somers, "I might have a shot at Australian Homerics."
"His eyes hurt him still, with looking at Sydney," said Jack.
There certainly is enough of it to look at," said Kangaroo.
"In acreage," said Jack.
"Pity it spreads over so much ground," said Somers.
"Oh, every man his little lot, and an extended tram–service.
"In Rome," said Somers, "they piled up huge houses, vast, and stowed them away like grubs in a honeycomb."
"Who did the stowing?" asked Jack sarcastically.
"We don't like to have anybody overhead here," said Kangaroo. "We don't even care to go upstairs, because we are then one storey higher than our true, ground–floor selves."
"Prop us up on a dozen stumps, and we're cosy," said Jack. "Just a little above the earth level, and no higher, you know. Australians in their heart of hearts hate anything but a bungalow. They feel it's rock bottom, don't you see. None of your stair–climbing shams and upstairs importance."
"Good honest fellows," said Kangaroo, and it was impossible to know if he were joking or not.
"Till it comes to business," said Jack.
Kangaroo then started a discussion of the much–mooted and at the moment fashionable Theory of Relativity.
"Of course it's popular," said Jack. "It absolutely takes the wind out of anybody's sails who wants to say "I'm IT." Even the Lord Almighty is only relatively so and as it were."
"How nice for us all," laughed Somers. "It needed a Jew to lead us this last step in liberty."
"Now we're all little ITS, chirping like so many molecules one with another," said Jack, eyeing the roast duck with a shrewd gaze.
The luncheon passed frivolously. Somers was bored, but he had a shrewd suspicion that the other two men really enjoyed it. They sauntered into the study for coffee. It was a smallish room, with big, deep leather chairs of a delicate brown colour, and a thick, bluey oriental carpet. The walls even had an upper panelling of old embossed cordovan leather, a bluish colouring with gilt, old and tarnished away. It was evident that law pays, even in a new country.
Everybody waited for everybody to speak. Somers, of course, knew it was not his business to begin.
"The indiscreet Callcott told you about our Kangaroo clubs," said the host, smiling faintly. Somers thought that surely he had Jewish blood in him. He stirred his little gold coffee–cup slowly.
"He gave me a very sketchy outline."
"It interested you?"
"Exceedingly."
"I read your series of articles on Democracy," said Kangaroo. "In fact they helped me to this attempt now."
"I thought not a soul read them," said Somers, "in that absurd international paper published at the Hague, that they said was run absolutely by spies and shady people."
"It may have been. But I was a subscriber, and I read your essays here in Sydney. There was another man, too, writing on a new aristocracy. But it seemed to me there was too much fraternising in his scheme, too much reverence for the upper classes and passionate pity for the working classes. He wanted them all to be kind to one another, aristocrats of the spirit." Kangaroo smiled slowly. And when he smiled like that, there came an exceedingly sweet charm into his face, for a moment his face was like a flower. Yet he was quite ugly. And surely, thought Somers, it is Jewish blood. The very best that is in the Jewish blood: a faculty for pure disinterestedness, and warm, physically warm love, that seems to make the corpuscles of the blood glow. And after the smile his face went stupid and kangaroo–like, pendulous, with the eyes close together above the long, drooping nose. But the shape of the head was very beautiful, small, light, and fine. The man had surely Jewish blood. And he was almost purely KIND, essential kindliness, embodied in an ancient, unscrupulous shrewdness. He was so shrewd, so clever. And with a rogue or a mean man, absolutely unscrupulous. But for any human being who showed himself sincere and vulnerable, his heart was pure in kindness. An extraordinary man. This pure kindliness had something Jehovah–like in it. And in every difficulty and every stress, he would remember it, his kindly love for real, vulnerable human beings. It had given his soul an absolute direction, whatever he said about relativity. Yet once he felt any man or woman was cold, mean, barren of this warmth which was in him, then he became at once utterly unscrupulous in defeating the creature. He was not angry or indignant. He was more like a real Jehovah. He had only to turn on all the levers and forces of his clever, almost fiendishly subtle will, and he could triumph. And he knew it. Somers had once had a Jewish friend with this wonderful, Jehovah–like kindliness, but also, without the shrewd fiendish subtlety of will. But it helped him to understand Cooley.
"Yes—I think the man sent me his book," said Somers. "I forget his name. I only remember there was a feverish adulation of Lord Something–or–other, and a terrible cri du coeur about the mother of the people, the poor elderly woman in a battered black bonnet and a shawl, going out with sixpence ha'penny to buy a shillings–worth of necessaries for the home."
"Just so," said Kangaroo, smiling again. "No doubt her husband drank. If he did, who can wonder."
"The very sight of her makes one want to shove her out of the house—or out of the world, for that matter," said Somers.
"Nay," said Jack. "She's enjoying her misery, dear old soul. Don't envy her bits of pleasures.
"Not envy," laughed Somers. "But I begrudge them her."
"What would you do with her?" asked Kangaroo.
"I wouldn't do anything. She mostly creeps in the East End. where one needn't bother about her. And she's as much at home there as an opossum is in the bush. So don't bother me about her."
"Just so," smiled Kangaroo. "I'd like to provide public kitchens where the children can get properly fed—and make the husband do a certain amount of state labour to pay for it. And for the rest, leave them to go their own way."
"But their minds, their souls, their spirits?" said Somers.
"They must more or less look after them themselves. I want to keep ORDER. I want to remove physical misery as far as possible. That I am sure of. And that you can only do by exerting strong, just POWER from above. There I agree with you."
"You don't believe in education?"
"Not much. That is to say, in ninety per cent of the people it is useless. But I do want those ninety per cent none the less to have full, substantial lives: as even slaves had under certain masters and as our people hardly have at all. That again, I think, is one of your ideas."
"It is," said Somers. But his heart sank. "You want a kind of benevolent tyranny, then?"
"Not exactly. You see my tyrant would be so much circumscribed by the constitution I should establish. But in a sense, he would be a tyrant. Perhaps it would be nearer to say he would be a patriarch, or a pope: representing as near as possible the wise, subtle spirit of life. I should try to establish my state of Australia as a kind of Church, with the profound reverence for life, for life's deepest urges, as the motive power. Dostoevsky suggests this: and I believe it can be done."
"Perhaps it might be done here," blurted Somers. "Every continent has its own way, and its own needs."
"I agree," said Kangaroo. "I have the greatest admiration for the Roman Catholic Church, as an institution. But the creed and the theology are not natural to me, quite. Not quite. I think we need something more flexible, and a power less formal and dogmatic; more generous, shall I say. A GENEROUS power, that sees all the issue here, not in the after–life, and that does not concern itself with sin and repentance and redemption. I should try to teach my people what it is truly to be a MAN, and a woman. The salvation of souls seems too speculative a job. I think if a man is truly a man, true to his own being, his soul saves itself in that way. But no two people can save their souls alive, in the same way. As far as possible, we must leave it to them. Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt."
"I believe that too."
"Yet there must be law, and there must be authority. But law more human, and authority much wiser. If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and the mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognize the imperatives as they arise—or nearly so—and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own new, life–born needs, life's ever–strange new imperatives. The secret of all life is in obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us on to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations. It is a subtle and conflicting urge away from the thing we are. And there lies the pain. Because man builds himself in to his old house of life, builds his own blood into the roads he lays down, and to break from the old way, and to change his house of life, is almost like tearing him to pieces: a sacrilege. Life is cruel—and above all things man needs to be reassured and suggested into his new issues. And he needs to be relieved from this terrible responsibility of governing himself when he doesn't know what he wants, and has no aim towards which to govern himself. Man again needs a father—not a friend or a brother sufferer, a suffering Saviour. Man needs a quiet, gentle father who uses his authority in the name of living life, and who is absolutely stern against anti–life. I offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life, and to shelter mankind from the madness and the evil of anti–life."
"You believe in evil?"
"Ah, yes. Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones round our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers—look at those hibiscus—they don't want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned into stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy. But they won't. They will quietly, gently wither. And I love them for it. And so should all creeds, all gods, quietly and gently curl up and wither as their evening approaches. That is the only way of true holiness, in my opinion."
The man had a beautiful voice, when he was really talking. It was like a flute, a wood–instrument. And his face, with that odd look of a sheep or a kangaroo, took on an extraordinary beauty of its own, a glow as if it were suffused with light. And the eyes shone with a queer, holy light, behind the eyeglasses. And yet it was still the kangaroo face.
Somers watched the face, and dropped his head. He sat feeling rebuked. He was so impatient and outrageous himself. And the steady loveliness of this man's warm, wise heart was too much for him. He was abashed before it.
"Ah, yes," Kangaroo re–echoed. "There is a principle of evil. The principle of resistance. Malignant resistance to the life principle. And it uses the very life–force itself against life, and sometimes seems as if it were absolutely winning. Not only Jesus rose from the dead. Judas rose as well, and propagated himself on the face of the earth. He has many children now. The life opposers. The life–resisters. The life–enemies. But we will see who wins. We will see. In the name of life, and the love of life, as man is almost invincible. I have found it so."
"I believe it also," said Somers.
They were silent, and Kangaroo sat there with the rapt look on his face: a pondering, eternal look, like the eternity of the lamb of God grown into a sheep. This rather wicked idea came into Somers' mind: the lamb of God grown into a sheep. So the man sat there, with his wide–eyed, rapt face sunk forward to his breast, very beautiful, and as eternal as if it were a dream: so absolute.
A wonderful thing for a sculptor. For Kangaroo was really ugly: his pendulous Jewish face, his forward shoulders, his round stomach in its expensively tailored waistcoat and dark grey, striped trousers, his very big thighs. And yet even his body had become beautiful, to Somers—one might love it intensely, every one of its contours, its roundnesses and downward–drooping heaviness. Almost a grotesque, like a Chinese Buddha. And yet not a grotesque. Beautiful, beautiful as some half–tropical, bulging flower from a tree.
Then Kangaroo looked with a teasing little smile at Somers.
"But you have your OWN idea of power, haven't you?" he said, getting up suddenly, with quick power in his bulk, and gripping the other man's shoulder.
"I thought I had," said Somers.
"Oh, you have, you have." There was a calm, easy tone in the voice, slightly fat, very agreeable. Somers thrilled to it as he had never thrilled.
"Why, the man is like a god, I love him," he said to his astonished self. And Kangaroo was hanging forward his face and smiling heavily and ambiguously to himself, knowing that Somers was with him.
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night"
he quoted in a queer, sonorous voice, like a priest. "The lion of your might would be a tiger, wouldn't it. The tiger and the unicorn were fighting for the crown. How about me for a unicorn?—if I tied a bayonet on my nose?" He rubbed his nose with a heavy playfulness.
"Is the tiger your principle of evil?"
"The tiger? Oh dear, no. The jackal, the hyaena, and dear, deadly humanity. No, no. The tiger stands on one side of the shield, and the unicorn on the other, and they don't fight for the crown at all. They keep it up between them. The pillars of the world! The tiger and the kangaroo!" he boomed this out in a mock heroic voice, strutting with heavy playfulness. Then he laughed, looking winsomely at Somers. Heaven, what a beauty he had!
"Tiger, tiger, burning bright," he resumed, sing–song, abstracted. "I knew you'd come. Ever since I read your first book of poems—how many years is it ago?—ten?—eleven? I knew you'd come.
'Your hands are five–branded flames— Noli me tangere.'