Kangaroo

This time Somers accepted at once. He felt the halting refusals were becoming ridiculous.

They left at sunset. The west, over the land, was a clear gush of light up from the departed sun. The east, over the Pacific, was a tall concave of rose-coloured clouds, a marvellous high apse. Now the bush had gone dark and spectral again, on the right hand. You might still imagine inhuman presences moving among the gum trees. And from time to time, on the left hand, they caught sight of the long green rollers of the Pacific, with the star-white foam, and behind that the dusk-green sea glimmered over with smoky rose, reflected from the eastern horizon where the bank of flesh-rose colour and pure smoke-blue lingered a long time, like magic, as if the sky’s rim were cooling down. It seemed to Somers characteristic of Australia, this far-off flesh-rose bank of colour on the sky’s horizon, so tender and unvisited, topped with the smoky, beautiful blueness. And then the thickness of the night’s stars overhead, and one star very brave in the last effulgence of sunset, westward over the continent. As soon as night came, all the raggle-taggle of amorphous white settlements disappeared, and the continent of the Kangaroo reassumed its strange, unvisited glamour, a kind of virgin sensual aloofness.

Somers sat in front between Jack and Victoria Callcott, because he was so slight. He made himself as small as he could, like the ham in the sandwich. When he looked her way, he found Victoria watching him under her lashes, and as she met his eyes, she flared into smile that filled him with wonder. She had such a charming, innocent look, like an innocent girl, naive and a little gawky. Yet the strange exposed smile she gave him in the dusk. It puzzled him to know what to make of it. Like an offering—and yet innocent. Perhaps like the sacred prostitutes of the temple: acknowledgment of the sacredness of the act. He chose not to think of it, and stared away across the bonnet of the car at the fading land.

Queer, thought Somers, this girl at once sees perhaps the most real me, and most women take me for something I am not at all. Queer to be recognised at once, as if one were of the same family.

He had to admit that he was flattered also. She seemed to see the wonder in him. And she had none of the European women’s desire to make a conquest of him, none of that feminine rapacity which is so hateful in the old world. She seemed like an old Greek girl just bringing an offering to the altar of the mystic Bacchus. The offering of herself.

Her husband sat steering the car and smoking his short pipe in silence. He seemed to have something to think about. At least he had considerable power of silence, a silence which made itself felt. Perhaps he knew his wife much better than anyone else. At any rate he did not feel it necessary to keep an eye on her. If she liked to look at Somers with a strange, exposed smile, that was her affair. She could do as she liked in that direction, so far as he, Jack Callcott, was concerned. She was his wife: she knew it, and he knew it. And it was quite established and final. So long as she did not betray what was between her and him, as husband and wife, she could do as she liked with the rest of herself. And he could, quite rightly, trust her to be faithful to that undefinable relation which subsisted between them as man and wife. He didn’t pretend and didn’t want to occupy the whole field of her consciousness.

And in just the same way, that bond which connected himself with her, he would always keep unbroken for his part. But that did not mean that he was sworn body and soul to his wife. Oh no. There was a good deal of him which did not come into the marriage bond, and with all this part of himself he was free to make the best he could, according to his own idea. He loved her, quite sincerely, for her naive sophisticated innocence which allowed him to be unknown to her, except in so far as they were truly and intimately related. It was the innocence which has been through the fire, and knows its own limitations. In the same way he quite consciously chose not to know anything more about her than just so much as entered into the absolute relationship between them. He quite definitely did not want to absorb her, or to occupy the whole field of her nature. He would trust her to go her own way, only keeping her to the pledge that was between them. What this pledge consisted in he did not try to define. It was something indefinite: the field of contact between their two personalities. Where their two personalities met and joined, they were one, and pledged to permanent fidelity. But that part in each of them which did not belong to the other was free from all enquiry or even from knowledge. Each silently consented to leave the other in large part unknown, unknown in word and deed and very being. They didn’t want to know—too much knowledge would be like shackles.

Such marriage is established on a very subtle sense of honour and of individual integrity. It seems as if each race and each continent has its own marriage instinct. And the instinct that develops in Australia will certainly not be the same as the instinct that develops in America. And each people must follow its own instinct, if it is to live, no matter whether the marriage law be universal or not.

The Callcotts had come to no agreement, verbally, as to their marriage. They had not thought it out. They were Australians, of strongly, subtly-developed desire for freedom, and with considerable indifference to old formulæ and the conventions based thereon. So they took their stand instinctively and calmly. Jack had defined his stand as far as he found necessary. If his wife was good to him and satisfied him in so far as he went, then he was pledged to trust her to do as she liked outside his ken, outside his range. He would make a cage for nobody. This he openly propounded to his mates: to William James, for example, and later to Somers. William James said yes, but thought the more. Somers was frankly disturbed, not liking the thought of applying the same prescription to his own marriage.

They put down the Trewhellas at their house in North Sydney, and went on to Murdoch Road over the ferry. Jack had still to take the car down to the garage in town. Victoria said she would prepare the high tea which takes the place of dinner and supper in Australia, against his return. So Harriet boldly invited them to this high tea—a real substantial meal—in her own house. Victoria was to help her prepare it, and Jack was to come straight back to Torestin. Victoria was as pleased as a lamb with two tails over this arrangement, and went in to change her dress.

Somers knew why Harriet had launched this invitation. It was because she had had a wonderfully successful cooking morning. Like plenty of other women Harriet had learned to cook during war-time, and now she loved it, once in a while. This had been one of the whiles. Somers had stoked the excellent little stove, and peeled the apples and potatoes and onions and pumpkin, and looked after the meat and the sauces, while Harriet had lashed out in pies and tarts and little cakes and baked custard. She now surveyed her prize Beeton shelf with love, and began to whisk up a mayonnaise for potato salad.

Victoria appeared in a pale gauze dress of pale pink with little dabs of gold—a sort of tea-party dress—and with her brown hair loosely knotted behind, and with innocent sophistication pulled a bit untidy over her womanly forehead, she looked winsome. Her colour was very warm, and she was gawkily excited. Harriet put on an old yellow silk frock, and Somers changed into a dark suit. For tea there was cold roast pork with first-class brown crackling on it, and potato salad, beetroot, and lettuce, and apple chutney; then a dressed lobster—or crayfish, very good, pink and white; and then apple pie and custard-tarts and cakes and a dish of apples and passion fruits and oranges, a pine-apple and some bananas: and of course big cups of tea, breakfast-cups.

Victoria and Harriet were delighted, Somers juggled with colour-schemes on the table, the one central room in the bungalow was brilliantly lighted, and the kettle sang on the hearth. After months of India, with all the Indian decorum and two silent men-servants waiting at table: and after the old-fashioned gentility of the P. and O. steamer, Somers and Harriet felt this show rather a come-down maybe, but still good fun. Victoria felt it was almost “society.” They waited for Jack.

Jack arrived bending forward rather in the doorway, a watchful look on his pale, clean-shaven face, and that atmosphere of silence about him which is characteristic of many Australians.

“Kept you waiting?” he asked.

“We were just ready for you,” said Harriet.

Jack had to carve the meat, because Somers was so bad at it and didn’t like doing it. Harriet poured the great cups of tea. Callcott looked with a quick eye round the table to see exactly what he wanted to eat, and Victoria peeped through her lashes to see exactly how Harriet behaved. As Harriet always behaved in the vaguest manner possible, and ate her sweets with her fish-fork and her soup with her pudding spoon, a study of her table manners was not particularly profitable.

To Somers it was like being back twenty-five years, back in an English farm-house in the Midlands, at Sunday tea. He had gone a long way from the English Midlands, and got out of the way of them. Only to find them here again, with hardly a change. To Harriet it was all novel and fun. But Richard Lovat felt vaguely depressed.

The pleasant heartiness of the life he had known as a boy now depressed him. He hated the promiscuous mixing in of all the company, the lack of reserve in manner. He had preferred India for that: the gulf between the native servants and the whites kept up a sort of tone. He had learned to be separate, to talk across a slight distance. And that was an immense relief to him, because it was really more his nature. Now he found himself soused again in the old familiar “jolly and cosy” spirit of his childhood and boyhood, and he was depressed.

Jack, of course, had a certain reserve. But of a different sort. Not a physical reserve. He did keep his coat on, but he might as well have sat there in his shirt-sleeves. His very silence was, so to speak, in its shirt-sleeves.

There was a curious battle in silence going on between the two men. To Harriet, all this familiar shirt-sleeve business was just fun, the charades. In her most gushing genial moments she was still only masquerading inside her class—the “upper” class of Europe. But Somers was of the people himself, and he had that alert instinct of the common people, the instinctive knowledge of what his neighbour was wanting and thinking, and the instinctive necessity to answer. With the other classes, there is a certain definite breach between individual and individual, and not much goes across except what is intended to go across. But with the common people, and with most Australians, there is no breach. The communication is silent and involuntary, the give and take flows like waves from person to person, and each one knows: unless he is foiled by speech. Each one knows in silence, reciprocates in silence, and the talk as a rule just babbles on, on the surface. This is the common people among themselves. But there is this difference in Australia. Each individual seems to feel himself pledged to put himself aside, to keep himself at least half out of count. The whole geniality is based on a sort of code of “You put yourself aside, and I’ll put myself aside.” This is done with a watchful will: a sort of duel. And above this, a great geniality. But the continual holding most of himself aside, out of count, makes a man go blank in his withheld self. And that, too, is puzzling.

Probably this is more true of the men than of the women. Probably women change less, from land to land, play fewer “code” tricks with themselves. At any rate, Harriet and Victoria got on like a house on fire, and as they were both beautiful women, and both looking well as they talked, everything seemed splendid. But Victoria was really paying just a wee bit of homage all the time, homage to the superior class.

As for the two men: Somers seemed a gentleman, and Jack didn’t want to be a gentleman. Somers seemed a real gentleman. And yet Jack recognised in him at once the intuitive response which only subsists, normally, between members of the same class: between the common people. Perhaps the best of the upper classes have the same intuitive understanding of their fellow-man: but there is always a certain reserve in the response, a preference for the non-intuitive forms of communication, for deliberate speech. What is not said is supposed not to exist: that is almost code of honour with the other classes. With the true common people, only that which is not said is of any vital significance.

Which brings us back to Jack and Somers. The one thing Somers had kept, and which he possessed in a very high degree, was the power of intuitive communication with others. Much as he wanted to be alone, to stand clear from the weary business of unanimity with everybody, he had never chosen really to suspend this power of intuitive response: not till he was personally offended, and then it switched off and became a blank wall. But the smallest act of real kindness would call it back into life again.

Jack had been generous, and Somers liked him. Therefore he could not withhold his soul from responding to him, in a measure. And Jack, what did he want? He saw this other little fellow, a gentleman, apparently, and yet different, not exactly a gentleman. And he wanted to know him, to talk to him. He wanted to get at the bottom of him. For there was something about Somers—he might be a German, he might be a bolshevist, he might be anything, and he must be something, because he was different, a gentleman and not a gentleman. He was different because, when he looked at you, he knew you more or less in your own terms, not as an outsider. He looked at you as if he were one of your own sort. He answered you intuitively as if he were one of your own sort. And yet he had the speech and the clear definiteness of a gentleman. Neither one thing nor the other. And he seemed to know a lot. Jack was sure that Somers knew a lot, and could tell him a lot, if he would but let it out.

If he had been just a gentleman, of course, Jack would never have thought of wanting him to open out. Because a gentleman has nothing to open towards a man of the people. He can only talk, and the working man can only listen across a distance. But seeing that this little fellow was both a gentleman and not a gentleman; seeing he was just like one of yourselves, and yet had all the other qualities of a gentleman: why, you might just as well get the secret out of him.

Somers knew the attitude, and was not going to be drawn. He talked freely and pleasantly enough—but never as Jack wanted. He knew well enough what Jack wanted: which was that they should talk together as man to man—as pals, you know, with a little difference. But Somers would never be pals with any man. It wasn’t in his nature. He talked pleasantly and familiarly—fascinating to Victoria, who sat with her brown eyes watching him, while she clung to Jack’s arm on the sofa. When Somers was talking and telling, it was fascinating, and his quick, mobile face changed and seemed full of magic. Perhaps it was difficult to locate any definite Somers, any one individual in all this ripple of animation and communication. The man himself seemed lost in the bright aura of his rapid consciousness. This fascinated Victoria: she of course imagined some sort of God in the fiery bush. But Jack was mistrustful. He mistrusted all this bright quickness. If there was an individual inside the brightly-burning bush of consciousness, let him come out, man to man. Even if it was a sort of God in the bush, let him come out, man to man. Otherwise let him be considered a sort of mountebank, a show-man, too clever by half.

Somers knew pretty well Jack’s estimation of him. Jack, sitting there smoking his little short pipe, with his lovely wife in her pink georgette frock hanging on to his side, and the watchful look on his face, was the manly man, the consciously manly man. And he had just a bit of contempt for the brilliant little fellow opposite, and he felt just a bit uneasy because the same little fellow laughed at his “manliness,” knowing it didn’t go right through. It takes more than “manliness” to make a man.

Somers’ very brilliance had an overtone of contempt in it, for the other man. The women, of course, not demanding any orthodox “manliness,” didn’t mind the knock at Jack’s particular sort. And to them Somers’ chief fascination lay in the fact that he was never “pals.” They were too deeply women to care for the sham of pals.

So Jack went home after a whisky and soda with his nose a little bit out of joint. The little man was never going to be pals, that was the first fact to be digested. And he couldn’t be despised as a softy, he was too keen; he just laughed at the other man’s attempt at despising him. Yet Jack did want to get at him, somehow or other.

CHAP: III. LARBOARD WATCH AHOY!

And Lovat would unsuspectingly acquiesce. But on these occasions Jack had been silently, secretly accumulating his forces; there was a silence, almost a stealth in his game. And at the same time his bearing was soft as it were submissive, and Somers was put quite off his guard. He began to play with his usual freedom. And then Jack wiped the floor with his little neighbour: simply wiped the floor with him, and left him gasping. One, two, three games—it was the same every time.

“But I can’t see the board,” cried Somers, startled. “I can hardly distinguish black from white.”

He was really distressed. It was true what he said. He was as if stupefied, as if some drug had been injected straight into his brain. For his life he could not gather his consciousness together—not till he realised the state he was in. And then he refused to try. Jack gave a quiet little laugh. There was on his face a subtle little smile of satisfaction. He had done his high-flying opponent down. He was the better man.

After the first evening that this had taken place, Somers was much more wary of his neighbour, much less ready to open towards him than he had been. He never again invited Jack to a game of chess. And when Callcott suggested a game, Somers played, but coldly, without the recklessness and the laughter which were the chief charm of his game. And Jack was once more snubbed, put back into second place. Then once he was reduced, Somers began to relent, and the old guerilla warfare started again.

The moment Somers heard this question of Jack’s: “What do you think of things in general?”—he went on his guard.

“The man is trying to draw me, to fool me,” he said to himself. He knew by a certain quiet, almost sly intention in Jack’s voice, and a certain false deference in his bearing. It was this false deference he was most wary of. This was the Judas approach.

“How in general?” he asked. “Do you mean the cosmos?”

“No,” said Jack, foiled in his first move. He had been through the Australian high-school course, and was accustomed to think for himself. Over a great field he was quite indifferent to thought, and hostile to consciousness. It seemed to him more manly to be unconscious, even blank, to most of the great questions. But on his own subjects, Australian politics, Japan, and machinery, he thought straight and manly enough. And when he met a man whose being puzzled him, he wanted to get at the bottom of that, too. He looked up at Somers with a searching, penetrating, inimical look, that he tried to cover with an appearance of false deference. For he was always aware of the big empty spaces of his own consciousness; like his country, a vast empty “desert” at the centre of him.

“No,” he repeated. “I mean the world—economics and politics. The welfare of the world.”

“It’s no good asking me,” said Somers. “Since the war burst my bubble of humanity I’m a pessimist, a black pessimist about the present human world.”

“You think it’s going to the bad?” said Jack, still drawing him with the same appearance of deference, of wanting to hear.

“Yes, I do. Faster or slower. Probably I shall never see any great change in my lifetime, but the tendency is all downhill, in my opinion. But then I’m a pessimist, so you needn’t bother about my opinion.”

Somers wanted to let it all go at that. But Callcott persisted.

“Do you think there’ll be more wars? Do you think Germany will be in a position to fight again very soon?”

“Bah, you bolster up an old bogey out here. Germany is the bogey of yesterday, not of to-morrow.”

“She frightened us out of our sleep before,” said Jack, resentful.

“And now, for the time being, she’s done. As a war-machine she’s done, and done for ever. So much scrap-iron, her iron fist.”

“You think so?” said Jack, with all the animosity of a returned hero who wants to think his old enemy the one and only bugbear, and who feels quite injured if you tell him there’s no more point in his old hate.

“That’s my opinion. Of course I may be wrong.”

“Yes, you may,” said Jack.

“Sure,” said Somers. And there was silence. This time Somers smiled a little to himself.

“And what do you consider, then, is the bogey of to-morrow?” asked Jack at length, in a rather small, unwilling voice.

“I don’t really know. What should you say?”

“Me? I wanted to hear what you have to say.”

“And I’d rather hear what you have to say,” laughed Somers.

There was a pause. Jack seemed to be pondering. At last he came out with his bluff, manly Australian self.

“If you ask me,” he said, “I should say that Labour is the bogey you speak of.”

Again Somers knew that this was a draw. “He wants to find out if I’m socialist or anti,” he thought to himself.

“You think Labour is a menace to society?” he returned.

“Well,” Jack hedged. “I won’t say that Labour is the menace, exactly. Perhaps the state of affairs forces Labour to be the menace.”

“Oh, quite. But what’s the state of affairs?”

“That’s what nobody seems to know.”

“So it’s quite safe to lay the blame on,” laughed Somers. He looked with real dislike at the other man, who sat silent and piqued and rather diminished: “Coming here just to draw me and get to know what’s inside me!” he said to himself angrily. And he would carry the conversation no further. He would not even offer Jack a whisky and soda. “No,” he thought to himself. “If he trespasses on my hospitality, coming creeping in here, into my house, just to draw me and get the better of me, underhandedly, then I’ll pour no drink for him. He can go back to where he came from.” But Somers was mistaken. He only didn’t understand Jack’s way of leaving seven-tenths of himself out of any intercourse. Richard wanted the whole man there, openly. And Jack wanted his own way, of seven-tenths left out.

So that after a while Jack rose slowly, saying:

“Well, I’ll be turning in. It’s work to-morrow for some of us.”

“If we’re lucky enough to have jobs,” laughed Somers.

“Or luckier still, to have the money so that we don’t need a job,” returned Jack.

“Think how bored most folks would be on a little money and no settled occupation,” said Somers.

“Yes, I might be myself,” said Jack, honestly admitting it, and at the same time slightly despising the man who had no job, and therefore no significance in life.

“Why, of course.”

When Callcott came over to Torestin, either Victoria came with him, or she invited Harriet across to Wyewurk. Wyewurk was the name of Jack’s bungalow. It had been built by a man who had inherited from an aunt a modest income, and who had written thus permanently his retort against society on his door.

“Wyewurk?” said Jack. “Because you’ve jolly well got to.”

The neighbours nearly always spoke of their respective homes by their elegant names. “Won’t Mrs Somers go across to Wyewurk, Vicky says. She’s making a blouse or something, sewing some old bits of rag together—or new bits—and I expect she’ll need a pageful of advice about it.” This was what Jack had said. Harriet had gone with apparent alacrity, but with real resentment. She had never in all her life had “neighbours,” and she didn’t know what neighbouring really meant. She didn’t care for it, on trial. Not after she and Victoria had said and heard most of the things they wanted to say and hear. But they liked each other also. And though Victoria could be a terribly venomous little cat, once she unsheathed her claws and became rather “common,” still, so long as her claws were sheathed her paws were quite velvety and pretty, she was winsome and charming to Harriet, a bit deferential before her, which flattered the other woman. And then, lastly, Victoria had quite a decent piano, and played nicely, whereas Harriet had a good voice, and played badly. So that often, as the two men played chess or had one of their famous encounters, they would hear Harriet’s strong, clear voice singing Schubert or Schumann or French or English folk songs, whilst Victoria played. And both women were happy, because though Victoria was fond of music and had an instinct for it, her knowledge of songs was slight, and to be learning these old English and old French melodies, as well as the German and the Italian songs, was a real adventure and a pleasure to her.

They were still singing when Jack returned.

“Still at it!” he said manfully, from the background, chewing his little pipe.

Harriet looked round. She was just finishing the joyous moan of Plaisir d’amour, a song she loved because it tickled her so. “Dure toute la vie—i—i—ie—i—e,” she sang the concluding words at him, laughing in his face.

“You’re back early,” she said.

“Felt a mental twilight coming on,” he said, “so thought we’d better close down for the night.”

Harriet divined that, to use her expression, Somers had been “disagreeable to him.”

“Don’t you sing?” she cried.

“Me! Have you ever heard a cow at a gate when she wants to come in and be milked?”

“Oh, he does!” cried Victoria. “He sang a duet at the Harbour Lights Concert.”

“There!” cried Harriet. “How exciting! What duet did he sing?”

“Larboard Watch Ahoy!”

“Oh! Oh! I know that,” cried Harriet, remembering a farmer friend of Somers’, who had initiated her into the thrilling harmony, down in Cornwall.

“There wasn’t a soul left in the hall, when we’d finished, except Victoria and the other chap’s wife,” said Jack.

“Oh, what a fib. They applauded like anything, and made you give an encore.”

“Ay, and we didn’t know another bally duet between us, so we had to sing Larboard Watch over again. It was Larboard Alarum Clock by the time we got to the end of it, it went off with such a rattle.”

“Oh, do let us sing it,” said Harriet. “You must help me when I go wrong, because I don’t know it well.”

“What part do you want to sing?” said Jack.

“Oh, I sing the first part.”

“Nay,” said Jack. “I sing that part myself. I’m a high tenor, I am, once I get the wind up.”

“I couldn’t possibly sing the alto,” said Harriet.

“Oh, Jack, do sing the alto,” said Victoria. “Go on, do! I’ll help you.”

“Oh well, if you’ll go bail for me, I don’t care what I do,” said Jack.

And very shortly Somers heard a gorgeous uproar in Wyewurk. Harriet breaking down occasionally, and being picked up. She insisted on keeping on till she had it perfect, and the other two banged and warbled away with no signs of fatigue. So that they were still hailing the Larboard Watch Ahoy when the clock struck eleven.

Then when silence did ensue for a moment, Mrs Callcott came flying over to Torestin.

“Oh, Mr Somers, won’t you come and have a drink with Jack? Mrs Somers is having a glass of hop bitters.”

When Somers entered the living room of Wyewurk, Jack looked up at him with a smile and a glow in his dark eyes, almost like love.

“Beer?” he said.

“What’s the alternative?”

“Nothing but gas-water.”

“Then beer.”

Harriet and Victoria were still at the piano, excitedly talking songs. Harriet was teaching Victoria to pronounce the words of a Schubert song: for there was still one person in the world unacquainted with: “Du bist wie eine Blume.” And Victoria was singing it in a wavering, shy little voice.

“Let’s drink our beer by the kitchen fire,” said Jack. “Then we shall be able to hear ourselves speak, which is more than we can do in this aviary.”

Somers solemnly followed into the tiny kitchen, and they sat in front of the still hot stove.

“The women will keep up the throat-stretching for quite a time yet,” said Jack.

“If we let them. It’s getting late.”

“Oh, I’ve just started my second awakening—feel as sharp as a new tin-tack.”

“Talking about pessimism,” he resumed after a pause. “There’s some of us here that feels things are pretty shaky, you know.” He spoke in a subdued, important sort of voice.

“What is shaky—Australian finance?”

“Ay, Australian everything.”

“Well, it’s pretty much the same in every country. Where there’s such a lot of black smoke there’s not a very big fire. The world’s been going to the dogs ever since it started to toddle, apparently.”

“Ay, I suppose it has. But it’ll get there one day. At least Australia will.”

“What kind of dogs?”

“Maybe financial smash, and then hell to pay all round. Maybe, you know. We’ve got to think about it.”

Somers watched him for some moments with serious eyes. Jack seemed as if he were a little bit drunk. Yet he had only drunk a glass of lager beer. He wasn’t drunk. But his face had changed, it had a kind of eagerness, and his eyes glowed big. Strange, he seemed, as if in a slight ecstasy.

“It may be,” said Somers slowly. “I am neither a financier nor a politician. It seems as if the next thing to come a cropper were capital: now there are no more kings to speak of. It may be the middle classes are coming smash—which is the same thing as finance—as capital. But also it may not be. I’ve given up trying to know.”

“What will be will be, eh,” said Jack with a smile.

“I suppose so, in this matter.”

“Ay, but, look here, I believe it’s right what you say. The middle classes are coming down. What do they sit on?—they sit on money, on capital. And this country is as good as bankrupt, so then what have they left to stand on?”

“They say most countries are really bankrupt. But if they agree among themselves to carry on, the word doesn’t amount to much.”

“Oh, but it does. It amounts to a hull of a lot, here in this country. If it ever came to the push, and the state was bankrupt, there’d be no holding New South Wales in.”

“The state never will be bankrupt.”

“Won’t it? Won’t there be a financial smash, a proper cave in, before we’re much older? Won’t there? We’ll see. But look here, do you care if there is?”

“I don’t know what it means, so I can’t say. Theoretically I don’t mind a bit if international finance goes bust: if it can go bust.”

“Never mind about theoretically. You’d like to see the power of money, the power of capital, broke. Would you or wouldn’t you?”

Somers watched the excited, handsome face opposite him, and answered slowly:

“Theoretically, yes. Actually, I really don’t know.”

“Oh to hell with your theoretically. Drown it. Speak like a man with some feeling in your guts. You either would or wouldn’t. Don’t leave your shirt-tail hanging out, with a theoretically. Would you or wouldn’t you.”

Somers laughed.

“Why, yes, I would,” he said, “and be damned to everything.”

“Shake,” cried Jack, stretching over. And he took Somers’ small hand between both his own. “I knew,” he said in a broken voice, “that we was mates.”

Somers was rather bewildered.

“But you know,” he said, “I never take any part in politics at all. They aren’t my affair.”

“They’re not! They’re not! You’re quite right. You’re quite right, you are. You’re a damned sight too good to be mixing up in any dirty politics. But all I want is that your feelings should be the same as mine, and they are, thank my stars, they are.”

By this time Somers was almost scared.

“But why should you care?” he said, with some reserve. The other however did not heed him.

“You’re not with the middle classes, as you call them, the money-men, as I call them, and I know you’re not. And if you’re not with them you’re against them.”

“My father was a working-man. I come from the working people. My sympathy is with them, when it’s with anybody, I assure you.”

Jack stared at Somers wide-eyed, a smile gathering round his mouth.

“Your father was a working-man, was he? Is that really so? Well, that is a surprise! And yet,” he changed his tone, “no, it isn’t. I might have known. Of course I might. How should I have felt for you as I did, the very first minute I saw you, if it hadn’t been so. Of course you’re one of us: same flesh and blood, same clay. Only you’ve had the advantages of a money-man. But you’ve stuck true to your flesh and blood, which is what most of them don’t do. They turn into so much dirt, like the washings in the pan, a lot of dirt to a very little gold. Well, well, and your father was a working man! And you now being as you are! Wonderful what we may be, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed,” said Somers, who was infinitely more amazed at the present Jack, than ever Jack could be at him.

“Well, well, that brings us a great deal nearer than ever, that does,” said Callcott, looking at Somers with glowing, smiling eyes which the other man could not quite understand, eyes with something desirous, and something perhaps fanatical in them. Somers could not understand. As for the being brought nearer to Callcott, that was apparently entirely a matter of Jack’s own feeling. Somers himself had never felt more alone and far off. Yet he trembled at the other man’s strange fervour. He vibrated helplessly in some sort of troubled response.

The vibration from the two men had by this time quite penetrated into the other room and into the consciousness of the two women. Harriet came in all wondering and full of alert curiosity. She looked from one to the other, saw the eyes of both men shining, saw the puzzled, slightly scared look on her husband’s face, and the glowing handsomeness on Jack’s, and she wondered more than ever.

“What are you two men talking about?” she asked pointedly. “You look very much moved about something.”

“Moved!” laughed Jack. “We’re doing fifty miles an hour, and not turning a hair.”

“I’m glad I’m not going with you then,” said Harriet. “It’s much too late at night for me for that sort of thing.”

Victoria went over to her husband and stood close at his side ruffling up his brown, short, crisp, bright hair.

“Doesn’t he talk nonsense, Mrs Somers, doesn’t he talk nonsense,” the young wife crooned, in her singing, contralto voice, as she looked down at him.

Harriet started at the sudden revelation of palpitating intimacy. She wanted to go away, quick. So did Somers. But neither Jack nor Victoria wanted them to go.

Jack was looking up at Victoria with a curious smile, touched with a leer. It gave his face, his rather long, clean-shaven face with the thick eyebrows, most extraordinarily the look of an old mask. One of those old Greek masks that give a fixed mockery to every feeling. Leering up at his young wife with the hearty leer of a player masked as a faun that is at home, on its own ground. Both Harriet and Somers felt amazed, as if they had strayed into the wrong wood.

“You talk all the sense, don’t you, kiddie?” he said, with a strong Australian accent again. And as he spoke with his face upturned to her, his Adam’s apple moved in his strong white throat as if it chuckled.

“Of course I do,” she crooned in her mocking, crooning contralto. “Of course I do.”

He put his arm round her hips. They continued to look into each other’s faces.

“It’s awfully late. We shall have simply to fly to bed. I’m so sleepy now. Good-night. Thank you so much for the singing. I enjoyed it awfully. Good-night!”

Victoria looked up with a brightly-flushed face, entirely unashamed, her eyes glowing like an animal’s. Jack relaxed his grip of her, but did not rise. He looked at the Somers pair with eyes gone dusky, as if unseeing, and the mask-like smile lingering on his face like the reflection from some fire, curiously natural, not even grotesque.

“Find your way across all right?” he said. “Good-night! Good-night!” But he was as unaware of them, actually, as if they did not exist within his ken.

“Well,” said Harriet, as they closed the door of Torestin. “I think they might have waited just two minutes before they started their love making. After all, one doesn’t want to be implicated, does one?”

“One emphatically doesn’t,” said Somers.

“Really, it was as if he’d got his arm round all the four of us! Horrid!” said Harriet resentfully.

“He felt he had, I’m sure,” said Somers.

It was a period when Sydney was again suffering from a bubonic plague scare: a very mild scare, some fifteen cases to a million people, according to the newspapers. But the town was placarded with notices “Keep your town clean,” and there was a stall in Martin Place where you could write your name down and become a member of a cleanliness league, or something to that effect.

The battle was against rats, fleas, and dirt. The plague affects rats first, said the notices, then fleas, and then man. All citizens were called upon to wage war with the vermin mentioned. Alas, there was no need to call on Somers to wage the war. The first morning they had awakened in Torestin, it was to a slight uneasy feeling of uncleanliness. Harriet, who hated the thought of contamination, found the apples gnawed, when she went to take one to eat before breakfast. And rat dirts, she said, everywhere.

Then had started such a cleaning, such a scouring, such a stopping of holes, as Torestin had never known. Somers sourly re-christened the house Toscrubin. And after that, every night he had the joyful business of setting two rat-traps, those traps with the powerful fly-back springs. Which springs were a holy terror to him, for he knew his fingers would break like pipe-stems if the spring flew back on them. And almost every morning he had the nauseous satisfaction of finding a rat pinned by its nose in the trap, its eyes bulging out, a blot of deep red blood just near. Sometimes two rats. They were not really ugly, save for their tails. Smallish rats, perhaps only half grown, and with black, silky fur. Not like the brown rats he had known in the English country.

But big or little, ugly or not ugly, they were very objectionable to him, and he hated to have to start the day by casting one or more corpses gingerly, by the tip of the tail, into the garbage tin. He railed against the practice of throwing cans and everything promiscuously on to any bit of waste ground. It seemed to his embittered fancy that Sydney harbour, and all the coast of New South Wales, was moving with this pest. It reminded him of the land of Egypt, under the hand of the Lord: plagues of mice and rats and rabbits and snails and all manner of crawling things. And then he would say: “Perhaps it must be so in a new country.” For all that, the words “new country” had become like acid between his teeth. He was always recalling what Flinders Petrie says somewhere: “A colony is no younger than the parent country.” Perhaps it is even older, one step further gone.

This evening—or rather midnight—he went to the back kitchen to put every scrap of any sort of food beyond rat-reach, and to bait the two traps with bits of cheese-rind. Then he bent back the two murderous springs, and the traps were ready. He washed his hands hard from the contamination of them. Then he went into the garden, even climbed the tub-like summer-house, to have a last look at the world. There was a big slip of very bright moon risen, and the harbour was faintly distinct.

Now that night had fallen, the wind was from the land, and cold. He turned to go indoors. And as he did so he heard a motor-car run quickly along the road, and saw the bright lights come to a stop at the gate of Wyewurk. Wyewurk was in darkness already. But a man left the car and came along the path to the house, giving a peculiar whistle as he did so. He went round to the back door and knocked sharply, once, twice, in a peculiar way. Then he whistled and knocked again. After which he must have heard an answer, for he waited quietly.

In a few minutes more the lights switched on and the door opened; Jack was there in his pyjamas.

“That you, Jaz boy?” he said in a quiet tone. “Why the blazes didn’t you come half an hour sooner, or half a minute later? You got me just as I’d taken the jump, and I fell all over the bloomin’ hedge. Come in. You’ll make a nervous wreck of me between you.”

The figure entered. It was William James, the brother-in-law. Somers heard him go again in about ten minutes. But Harriet did not notice.

CHAP: IV. JACK AND JAZ

“Is it? I needn’t be expecting him yet, then. He won’t be home till quarter past six.” She was silent for a while. “We shall soon have the shortest day,” she said. “I am glad when it has gone. I always miss Jack so much when the evening comes, and he isn’t home. You see I was used to a big family, and it seems a bit lonely to me yet, all alone in the cottage. That’s why we’re so glad to have you and Mrs Somers next door. We get on so well, don’t we? Yes, it’s surprising. I always felt nervous of English people before. But I love Mrs Somers. I think she’s lovely.”

“You haven’t been married long?” asked Somers.

“Not quite a year. It seems a long time in some ways. I wouldn’t not be with Jack, not for anything. But I do miss my family. We were six of us all at home together, and it makes such a difference, being all alone.”

“Was your home in Sydney?”

“No, on the South Coast—dairy-farming. No, my father was a surveyor, so was his father before him. Both in New South Wales. Then he gave it up and started this farm down south. Oh yes, I liked it—I love home. I love going down home. I’ve got a cottage down there that father gave me when I got married. You must come down with us some time when the people that are in it go. It’s right on the sea. Do you think you and Mrs Somers would like it?”

“I’m sure we should.”

“And will you come with us for a week-end? The people in it are leaving next week. We let it furnished.”

“We should like to very much indeed,” said Somers, being polite over it because he felt a little unsure still, whether he wanted to be so intimate. But Victoria seemed so wistful.

“We feel so ourselves with you and Mrs Somers,” said Victoria. “And yet you’re so different from us, and yet we feel so much ourselves with you.”

“But we’re not different,” he protested.

“Yes, you are—coming from home. It’s mother who always called England home. She was English. She always spoke so prettily. She came from Somerset. Yes, she died about five years ago. Then I was mother of the family. Yes, I am the eldest, except Alfred. Yes, they’re all at home. Alfred is a mining engineer—there are coal mines down the South Coast. He was with Jack in the war, on the same job. Jack was a Captain and Alfred was a Lieutenant. But they drop all the army names now. That’s how I came to know Jack: through Alfred. Jack always calls him Fred.”

“You didn’t know him before the war?”

“No, not till he came home. Alfred used to talk about him in his letters, but I never thought then I should marry him. They are great friends yet, the two of them.”

The rain that she had prophesied now began to fall—big straight drops, that resounded on the tin roofs of the houses.

“Won’t you come in and sit with us till Jack comes?” asked Somers. “You’ll feel dreary, I know.”

“Oh, don’t think I said it for that,” said Victoria.

“Come round, though,” said Somers. And they both ran indoors out of the rain. Lightning had started to stab in the south-western sky, and clouds were shoving slowly up.

Victoria came round and sat talking, telling of her home on the south coast. It was only about fifty miles from Sydney, but it seemed another world to her. She was so quiet and simple, now, that both the Somers felt drawn to her, and glad that she was sitting with them.

They were talking still of Europe, Italy, Switzerland, England, Paris—the wonderworld to Victoria, who had never been out of New South Wales in her life, in spite of her name—which name her father had given her to annoy all his neighbours, because he said the State of Victoria was run like a paradise compared to New South Wales—although he too never went a yard out of his home state, if he could help it; they were talking still of Europe when they heard Jack’s voice calling from the opposite yard.

“Hello,” cried Victoria, running out. “Are you there, Jack? I was listening for the motor-bike. I remember now, you went by tram.”

Sometimes she seemed a little afraid of him—physically afraid—though he was always perfectly good-humoured with her. And this evening she sounded like that—as if she feared his coming home, and wanted the Somers to shelter her.

“You’ve found a second home over there, apparently,” said Jack, advancing towards the fence. “Well, how’s things?”

It was dark, so they could not see his face. But he sounded different. There was something queer, unknown about him.

“I’ll come over for a game of chess to-night, old man, if you’ll say the word,” he said to Somers. “And the ladies can punish the piano again meanwhile, if they feel like it. I bought something to sweeten the melodies with, and give us a sort of breathing-space now and then: sort of little ear-rest, you know.”

“That means a pound of chocolates,” said Victoria, like a greedy child. “And Mrs Somers will come and help me to eat them. Good!” And she ran in home. Somers thought of a picture advertisement in the Bulletin:

“Madge: I can’t think what you see in Jack. He is so unintellectual.”

“Gladys: Oh, but he always brings a pound of Billyer’s chocolates.”

Or else: “Sweets to the Sweet. Give Her Billyer’s chocolates”; or else: “Billyer’s chocolates sweeten the home.”

The game of chess was a very quiet one. Jack was pale and subdued, silent, tired, thought Somers, after his long day and short night. Somers too played without any zest. And yet they were satisfied, just sitting there together, a curious peaceful ease in being together. Somers wondered at it, the rich, full peace that there seemed to be between him and the other man. It was something he was not used to. As if one blood ran warm and rich between them. “Then shall thy peace be as a river.”

“There was nothing wrong at the Trewhella’s, was there, that made William James come so late?” asked Somers.

Jack looked up with a tinge of inquiry in his dark eyes at this question: as if he suspected something behind it. Somers flushed slightly.

“No, nothing wrong,” said Jack.

“I beg your pardon for asking,” said Somers hastily. “I heard a whistle when I’d just done setting the rat-traps, and I looked out, and heard you speak to him. That’s how I knew who it was. I only wondered if anything was wrong.”

“No, nothing wrong,” repeated Jack laconically.

“That’s all right,” said Somers. “It’s your move. Mind your queen.”

“Mind my queen, eh? She takes some minding, that lady does. I feel I need a special eye at the end of my nose, to keep track of her. Come out of it, old lady. I’m not very bright at handling royalty, that’s a fact.”

Somers was now silent. He felt he had made a faux pas, and was rebuffed. They played for some time, Jack talking to himself mostly in that facetious strain which one just had to get used to in him, though Somers occasionally found it tiring.

Then after a time Jack put his hands into his lap, and looked up at Somers.

“You mustn’t think I get the wind up, you know,” he said, “if you ask me a question. You can ask me what you like, you know. And when I can tell you, I’ll tell you. I know you’d never come shoving your nose in like a rat from under the skirting board when nobody’s looking.”

“Even if I seem to,” said Somers, ironically.

“No, no, you don’t seem to. And when I can tell you, I’ll do so. I know I can trust you.”

Somers looked up wondering, and met the meditative dark eyes of the other man resting on his face.

“There’s some of us chaps,” said Jack, “who’ve been through the war and had a lick at Paris and London, you know, who can tell a man by the smell of him, so to speak. If we can’t see the colour of his aura, we can jolly well size up the quality of it. And that’s what we go by. Call it instinct or what you like. If I like a man, slap out, at the first sight, I’d trust him into hell, I would.”

“Fortunately you haven’t anything very risky to trust him with,” laughed Somers.

“I don’t know so much about that,” said Jack. “When a man feels he likes a chap, and trusts him, he’s risking all he need, even by so doing. Because none of us likes to be taken in, and to have our feelings thrown back in our faces, as you may say, do we?”

“We don’t,” said Somers grimly.

“No, we don’t. And you know what it means to have them thrown back in your face. And so do I. There’s a lot of the people here that I wouldn’t trust with a thank-you, I wouldn’t. But then there’s some that I would. And mind you, taking all for all, I’d rather trust an Aussie, I’d rather trust an Australian than an Englishman, I would, and a lot rather. Yet there’s some of the rottenest people in Sydney that you’d find even if you sifted hell over. Rotten—absolute yellow rotten. And many of them in public positions, too. Simply white-anting society, that’s what they’re doing. Talk about public affairs in Sydney, talk about undercurrents of business in Sydney: the wickedest crew on God’s earth, bar none. All the underhanded tricks of a Chink, a blooming yellow Chinaman, and all the barefaced fair talk of an Englishman. There you are. And yet, I’m telling you, I’d rather trust even a Sydney man, and he’s a special sort of wombat, than an Englishman.”

“So you’ve told me before: for my good, I suppose,” laughed Somers, not without irony.

“No, now don’t you go running away with any wrong ideas,” said Jack, suddenly reaching out his hand and laying it on Somers’ arm. “I’m not hinting at anything. If I was I’d ask you to kick me out of your house. I should deserve it. No, you’re an Englishman. You’re a European, perhaps I ought to say, for you’ve lived about all over that old continent, and you’ve studied it, and you’ve got tired of it. And you’ve come to Australia. Your instinct brought you here, however much you may rebel against rats and tin cans and a few other things like that. Your instinct brought you here—and brought you straight up against me. Now that I call fate.”

He looked at Somers with dark, burning questioning eyes.

“I suppose following one’s deepest instinct is one’s fate,” said Somers, rather flatly.

“There—you know what I mean, you see. Well then, instinct brings us together. I knew it the minute I set eyes on you when I saw you coming across from the Botanical Gardens, and you wanted a taxi. And then when I heard the address, 51 Murdoch Street, I said to myself, ‘That chap is coming into my life.’ And it is so. I’m a believer in fate, absolute.”

“Yes,” said Somers, non-committal.

“It’s fate that you left Europe and came to Australia, bit by bit, and unwilling to come, as you say yourself. It’s fate that brings you to Sydney, and makes me see you that dinner-hour coming from the Botanical Gardens. It’s fate that brings you to this house. And it’s fate that sets you and me here at this minute playing chess.”

“If you call it playing chess,” laughed Somers.

Jack looked down at the board.

“I’m blest if I know whose move it is,” he said. “But never mind. I say that fate meant you and Mrs Somers to come here: her as much as you. I say fate meant me and you and Victoria and her to mean a lot to one another. And when I feel my fate, I absolutely give myself up to it. That’s what I say. Do you think I’m right?”

His hand, which held Somers’ arm lightly, now gripped the biceps of that arm hard, while he looked into the other man’s face.

“I should say so,” said Somers, rather uncomfortably.

Jack hardly heeded the words. He was watching the face.

“You’re a stranger here. You’re from the old country. You’re different from us. But you’re a man we want, and you’re a man we’ve got to keep. I know it. What? What do you say? I cant trust you, can’t I?”

“What with?” asked Somers.

“What with?” Jack hesitated. “Why everything!” he blurted. “Everything! Body and soul and money and every blessed thing. I can trust you with everything! Isn’t that right?”

Somers looked with troubled eyes into the dark, dilated, glowing eyes of the other man.

“But I don’t know what it means,” he stammered. “Everything! It means so much, that it means nothing.”

Jack nodded his head slowly.

“Oh yes it does,” he reiterated. “Oh yes it does.”

“Besides,” said Somers, “why should you trust me with anything, let alone everything. You’ve no occasion to trust me at all—except—except as one neighbour trusts another, in common honour.”

“Common honour!” Jack just caught up the words, not heeding the sense. “It’s more than common honour. It’s most uncommon honour. But look here,” he seemed to rouse himself. “Supposing I came to you, to ask you things, and tell you things, you’d answer me man to man, wouldn’t you?—with common honour? You’d treat everything I say with common honour, as between man and man?”

“Why, yes, I hope so.”

“I know you would. But for the sake of saying it, say it. I can trust you, can’t I? Tell me now, can I trust you?”

Somers watched him. Was it any good making reservations and qualifications? The man was in earnest. And according to standards of commonplace honour, the so-called honour of man to man, Somers felt that he would trust Callcott, and that Callcott might trust him. So he said simply:

“Yes.”

A light leaped into Jack’s eyes.

“That means you trust me, of course?” he said.

“Yes,” replied Somers.

“Done!” said Jack, rising to his feet and upsetting the chessmen. Somers also pushed his chair, and rose to his feet, thinking they were going across to the next house. But Jack came to him and flung an arm round his shoulder and pressed him close, trembling slightly, and saying nothing. Then he let go, and caught Somers by the hand.

“This is fate,” he said, “and we’ll follow it up.” He seemed to cling to the other man’s hand. And on his face was a strange light of purpose and of passion, a look at once exalted and dangerous.

“I’ll soon bring the others to see it,” he said.

“But you know I don’t understand,” said Somers, withdrawing his hand and taking off his spectacles.

“I know,” said Jack. “But I’ll let you know everything in a day or two. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind if William James—if Jaz came here one evening—or you wouldn’t mind having a talk with him over in my shack.”

“I don’t mind talking to anybody,” said the bewildered Somers.

“Right you are.”

They still sat for some time by the fire, silent; Jack was pondering. Then he looked up at Somers.

“You and me,” he said in a quiet voice, “in a way we’re mates and in a way we’re not. In a way—it’s different.”

With which cryptic remark he left it. And in a few minutes the women came running in with the sweets, to see if the men didn’t want a macaroon.

On Sunday morning Jack asked Somers to walk with him across to the Trewhellas. That is, they walked to one of the ferry stations, and took the ferry steamer to Mosman’s Bay. Jack was a late riser on Sunday morning. The Somers, who were ordinary half-past seven people, rarely saw any signs of life in Wyewurk before half-past ten on the Sabbath—then it was Jack in trousers and shirt, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, having a look at his dahlias while Vicky prepared breakfast.

So the two men did not get a start till eleven o’clock. Jack rolled along easily beside the smaller, quieter Somers. They were an odd couple, ill-assorted. In a colonial way, Jack was handsome, well-built, with strong, heavy limbs. He filled out his expensively tailored suit and looked a man who might be worth anything from five hundred to five thousand a year. The only lean, delicate part about him was his face. See him from behind, his broad shoulders and loose erect carriage and brown nape of the neck, and you expected a good square face to match. He turned, and his long lean, rather pallid face really didn’t seem to belong to his strongly animal body. For the face wasn’t animal at all, except perhaps in a certain slow, dark, lingering look of the eyes, which reminded one of some animal or other, some patient, enduring animal with an indomitable but naturally passive courage.

Somers, in a light suit of thin cloth, made by an Italian tailor, and an Italian hat, just looked a foreign sort of little bloke—but a gentleman. The chief difference was that he looked sensitive all over, his body, even its clothing, and his feet, even his brown shoes, all equally sensitive with his face. Whereas Jack seemed strong and insensitive in the body, only his face vulnerable. His feet might have been made of leather all the way through, tramping with an insentient tread. Whereas Somers put down his feet delicately, as if they had a life of their own, mindful of each step of contact with the earth. Jack strode along: Somers seemed to hover along. There was decision in both of them, but oh, of such different quality. And each had a certain admiration of the other, and a very definite tolerance. Jack just barely tolerated the quiet finesse of Somers, and Somers tolerated with difficulty Jack’s facetious familiarity and heartiness.

Callcott met quite a number of people he knew, and greeted them all heartily. “Hello Bill, old man, how’s things?” “New boots pinchin’ yet, Ant’ny? Hoppy sort of look about you this morning. Right ’o! So long, Ant’ny!” “Different girl again, boy! go on, Sydney’s full of yer sisters. All right, good-bye, old chap.” The same breezy intimacy with all of them, and the moment they had passed by, they didn’t exist for him any more than the gull that had curved across in the air. They seemed to appear like phantoms, and disappear in the same instant, like phantoms. Like so many Flying Dutchmen the Australian’s acquaintances seemed to steer slap through his consciousness, and were gone on the wind. What was the consecutive thread in the man’s feelings? Not his feeling for any particular human beings, that was evident. His friends, even his loves, were just a series of disconnected, isolated moments in his life. Somers always came again upon this gap in the other man’s continuity. He felt that if he knew Jack for twenty years, and then went away, Jack would say: “Friend o’ mine, Englishman, rum sort of bloke, but not a bad sort. Dunno where he’s hanging out just now. Somewhere on the surface of the old humming-top, I suppose.”

The only consecutive thing was that facetious attitude, which was the attitude of taking things as they come, perfected. A sort of ironical stoicism. Yet the man had a sort of passion, and a passionate identity. But not what Somers called human. And threaded on this ironical stoicism.

They found Trewhella dressed and expecting them. Trewhella was a coal and wood merchant, on the north side. He lived quite near the wharf, had his sheds at the side of the house, and in the front a bit of garden running down to the practically tideless bay of the harbour. Across the bit of blue water were many red houses, and new, wide streets of single cottages, seaside-like, disappearing rather forlorn over the brow of the low hill.

William James, or Jas, Jaz, as Jack called him, was as quiet as ever. The three men sat on a bench just above the brown rocks of the water’s edge, in the lovely sunshine, and watched the big ferry steamer slip in and discharge its stream of summer-dressed passengers, and embark another stream: watched the shipping of the middle harbour away to the right, and the boats loitering on the little bay in front. A motor-boat was sweeping at a terrific speed, like some broom sweeping the water, past the little round fort away in the open harbour, and two tall white sailing boats, all wing and no body, were tacking across the pale blue mouth of the bay. The inland sea of the harbour was all bustling with Sunday morning animation: and yet there seemed space, and loneliness. The low, coffee-brown cliffs opposite, too low for cliffs, looked as silent and as aboriginal as if white men had never come.