Kangaroo

He lingered behind the rest, they were nearly home. They were at the wide sandy place where the creek left off. Its still, brackish waters just sank into the sands, without ever running to meet the waves. And beyond the sands was a sort of marsh, bushes and tall stark dead gum-trees, and a few thin-tufted trees. Half wild ponies walked heavily from the bush to the sands, and across to the slope where the low cliff rose again. In the depths of the marsh-like level was the low chimney of the mine, and tips of roofs: and beyond, a long range of wire-like trees holding up tufts of foliage in handfuls, in front of the pale blue, diminishing range of the hills in the distance. It was a weird scene, full of definite detail, fascinating detail, yet all in the funeral-grey monotony of the bush.

Somers turned to the piled-up, white-fronted sea again. On the tip of a rock above him sat a little bird with hunched up shoulders and a long beak: an absurd silhouette. He went towards it, talking to it. It seemed to listen to him: really to listen. That is another of the charms of Australia: the birds are not really afraid, and one can really communicate with them. In West Australia Somers could sit in the bush and talk to the flocks of big, handsome, black-and-white birds that they call magpies, but which are a sort of butcher bird, apparently. And they would gurgle little answers in their throats, and cock their heads on one side. Handsome birds they were, some with mottled grey breasts like fish. And the boldest would even come and take pieces of bread from his hands. Yet they were quite wild. Only they seemed to have a strange power of understanding the human psyche.

Now this little kingfisher by the sea. It sat and looked at Somers, and cocked its head and listened. It liked to be talked to. When he came quite near, it sped with the straight low flight of kingfishers to another boulder, and waited for him. It was beautiful too: with a sheeny sea-green back and a pale breast touched with burnt yellow. A beautiful, dandy little fellow. And there he waited for Somers like a little penguin perching on a brown boulder. And Somers came softly near, talking quietly. Till he could almost touch the bird. Then away it sped a few yards, and waited. Sheeny greyish green, like the gum-leaves become vivid: and yellowish breast, like the suave gum-tree trunks. And listening, and waiting, and wanting to be talked to. Wanting the contact.

The other three had disappeared from the sea-side. Somers walked slowly on. Then suddenly he saw Jack running across the sand in a bathing suit, and entering the shallow rim of a long, swift upwash. He went in gingerly—then threw himself into a little swell, and rolled in the water for a minute. Then he was rushing back, before the next big wave broke. He had gone again by the time Somers came to climb the cliff-bank to the house.

They had a cup of tea on the wooden verandah. The air had begun to waft icily from the inland, but in the sheltered place facing the sea it was still warm. This was only four o’clock—or to-day, five o’clock tea. Proper tea was at six or half-past, with meat and pies and fruit salad.

The women went indoors with the cups. Jack was smoking his pipe. There was something unnatural about his stillness.

“You had a dip after all,” said Somers.

“Yes. A dip in and out.”

Then silence again. Somers’ thoughts wandered out to the gently darkening sea, and the bird, and the whole of vast Australia lying behind him flat and open to the sky.

“You like it down here?” said Jack.

“I do indeed.”

“Let’s go down to the rocks again, I like to be near the waves.”

Somers rose and followed him. The house was already lit up. The sea was bluey. They went down the steps cut in the earth of the bank top, and between the bushes to the sand. The tide was full, and swishing against a flat ledge of rocks. Jack went to the edge of this ledge, looking in at the surging water, white, hissing, heavy. Somers followed again. Jack turned his face to him.

“Funny thing it should go on doing this all the time, for no purpose,” said Jack, amid all the noise.

“Yes.”

Again they watched the heavy waves unfurl and fling the white challenge of foam on the shore.

“I say,” Jack turned his face. “I shan’t be making a mistake if I tell you a few things in confidence, shall I?”

“I hope not. But judge for yourself.”

“Well, it’s like this,” shouted Jack—they had to shout at one another in unnaturally lifted voices, because of the huge noise of the sea. “There’s a good many of us chaps as has been in France, you know—and been through it all—in the army—we jolly well know you can’t keep a country going on the vote-catching system—as you said the other day. We know it can’t be done.”

“It can’t,” said Somers, with a shout, “for ever.”

“If you’ve got to command, you don’t have to ask your men first if it’s right, before you give the command.”

“Of course not,” yelled Somers.

But Jack was musing for the moment.

“What?” he shouted, as he woke up.

“No,” yelled Somers.

A further muse, amid the roar of the waves.

“Do the men know better than the officers, or do the officers know better than the men?” he barked.

“Of course,” said Somers.

“These damned politicians—they invent a cry—and they wait to see if the public will take it up. And if it won’t, they drop it. And if it will, they make a mountain of it, if it’s only an old flower-pot.”

“They do,” yelled Somers.

They stood close side by side, like two mariners in a storm, amid the breathing spume of the foreshore, while darkness slowly sank. Right at the tip of the flat, low rocks they stood, like pilots.

“It’s no good,” barked Jack, with his hands in his pockets.

“Not a bit.”

“If you’re an officer, you study what is best, for the cause and for the men. You study your men. But you don’t ask them what to do. If you do you’re a wash-out.”

“Quite.”

“And that’s where it is in politics. You see the papers howling and blubbering for a statesman. Why, if they’d got the finest statesman the world ever saw, they’d chuck him on to the scrap heap the moment he really wanted his own way, doing what he saw was the best. That’s where they’ve got anybody who’s any good—on the scrap-heap.”

“Same the world over.”

“It’s got to alter somewhere.”

“It has.”

“When you’ve been through the army, you know that what you depend on is a general, and on discipline, and on obedience. And nothing else is the slightest bit of good.”

“But they say the civil world is not an army: it’s the will of the people,” cried Somers.

“Will of my grandmother’s old tom-cat. They’ve got no will, except to stop anybody else from having any.”

“I know.”

“Look at Australia. Absolutely fermenting rotten with politicians and the will of the people. Look at the country—going rottener every day, like an old pear.”

“All the democratic world the same.”

“Of course it’s the same. And you may well say Australian soil is waiting to be watered with blood. It’s waiting to be watered with our blood, once England’s got too soft to help herself, let alone us, and the Japs come down this way. They’d squash us like a soft pear.”

“I think it’s quite likely.”

“What?”

“Likely.”

“It’s pretty well a certainty. And would you blame them? If you was thirsty, wouldn’t you pick a ripe pear if it hung on nobody’s tree? Why, of course you would. And who’d blame you.”

“Blame myself if I didn’t,” said Somers.

“And then their coloured labour. I tell you, this country’s too far from Europe to risk it. They’ll swallow us. As sure as guns is guns, if we let in coloured labour, they’ll swallow us. They hate us. All the other colours hate the white. And they’re only waiting till we haven’t got the pull over them. They’re only waiting. And then what about poor little Australia?”

“Heaven knows.”

“There’ll be the Labour Party, the Socialists, uniting with the workers of the world. They’ll be the workers, if ever it comes to it. Those black and yellow people’ll make ’em work—not half. It isn’t one side only that can keep slaves. Why, the fools, the coloured races don’t have any feeling for liberty. They only think you’re a fool when you give it to them, and if they got a chance, they’d drive you out to work in gangs, and fairly laugh at you. All this world’s-worker business is simply playing their game.”

“Of course,” said Somers. “What is Indian Nationalism but a strong bid for power—for tyranny. The Brahmins want their old absolute caste-power—the most absolute tyranny—back again, and the Mahommedans want their military tyranny. That’s what they are lusting for—to wield the rod again. Slavery for millions. Japan the same. And China, in part, the same. The niggers the same. The real sense of liberty only goes with white blood. And the ideal of democratic liberty is an exploded ideal. You’ve got to have wisdom and authority somewhere, and you can’t get it out of any further democracy.”

“There!” said Jack. “That’s what I mean. We s’ll be wiped out, wiped out. And we know it. Look here, as man to man, you and me here: if you were an Australian, wouldn’t you do something if you could do something?”

“I would.”

“Whether you got shot or whether you didn’t! We went to France to get ourselves shot, for something that didn’t touch us very close either. Then why shouldn’t we run a bit of risk for what does touch us very close. Why, you know, with things as they are, I don’t want Victoria and me to have any children. I’d a jolly sight rather not—and I’ll watch it too.”

“Same with me,” yelled Somers.

Jack had come closer to him, and was now holding him by the arm.

“What’s a man’s life for, anyhow? Is it just to save up like rotten pears on a shelf, in the hopes that one day it’ll rot into a pink canary or something of that?”

“No,” said Somers.

“What we want in Australia,” said Jack, “isn’t a statesman, not yet. It’s a set of chaps with some guts in them, who’ll obey orders when they find a man who’ll give the orders.”

“Yes.”

“And we’ve got such men—we’ve got them. But we want to see our way clear. We don’t never feel quite sure enough over here. That’s where it is. We sound as sure as a gas-explosion. But it’s all bang and no bump. We s’ll never raise no lids. We shall only raise the roof—or our politicians will—with shouting. Because we’re never quite sure. We know it when we meet you English people. You’re a lot surer than we are. But you’re mostly bigger fools as well. It takes a fool to be sure of himself, sometimes.”

“Fact.”

“And there’s where it is. Most Englishmen are too big cocked-up fools for us. And there you are. Their sureness may help them along to the end of the road, but they haven’t the wit to turn a corner: not a proper corner. And we can see it. They can only go back on themselves.”

“Yes.”

“You’re the only man I’ve met who seems to me sure of himself and what he means. I may be mistaken, but that’s how it seems to me. And William James knows it too. But it’s my belief William James doesn’t want you to come in, because it would spoil his little game.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I know you don’t. Now, look here. This is absolutely between ourselves, now, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Certain?”

“Yes.”

Jack was silent for a time. Then he looked round the almost dark shore. The stars were shining overhead.

“Give me your hand then,” said Jack.

Somers gave him his hand, and Jack clasped it fast, drawing the smaller man to him and putting his arm round his shoulders and holding him near to him. It was a tense moment for Richard Lovat. He looked at the dark sea, and thought of his own everlasting gods, and felt the other man’s body next to his.

“Well now,” he said in Somers’ ear, in a soothed tone. “There’s quite a number of us in Sydney—and in the other towns as well—we’re mostly diggers back from the war—we’ve joined up into a kind of club—and we’re sworn in—and we’re sworn to obey the leaders, no matter what the command, when the time is ready—and we’re sworn to keep silent till then. We don’t let out much, nothing of any consequence, to the general run of the members.”

Richard listened with his soul. Jack’s eager, conspirator voice seemed very close to his ear, and it had a kind of caress, a sort of embrace. Richard was absolutely motionless.

“But who are your leaders?” he asked, thinking of course that it was his own high destiny to be a leader.

“Why, the first club got fifty members to start with. Then we chose a leader and talked things over. And then we chose a secretary and a lieutenant. And every member quietly brought in more chaps. And as soon as we felt we could afford it, we separated, making the next thirty or so into a second club, with the lieutenant for a leader. Then we chose a new lieutenant—and the new club chose a secretary and a lieutenant.”

Richard didn’t follow all this lieutenant and club business very well. He was thinking of himself entering in with these men in a dangerous, desperate cause. It seemed unreal. Yet there he was, with Jack’s arm round him. Jack would want him to be his “mate.” Could he? His cobber. Could he ever be mate to any man?

“You sort of have a lot of leaders. What if one of them let you down?” he asked.

“None of them have yet. But we’ve arranged for that.”

“How?”

“I’ll tell you later. But you get a bit of the hang of the thing, do you?”

“I think so. But what do you call yourselves? How do you appear to the public?”

“We call ourselves the diggers clubs, and we go in chiefly for athletics. And we do spend most of the time in athletics. But those that aren’t diggers can join, if a pal brings them in and vouches for them.”

Richard was now feeling rather out of it. Returned soldiers, and clubs, and athletics—all unnatural things to him. Was he going to join in with this? How could he? He was so different from it all.

“And how do you work—I mean together?” he faltered.

“We have a special lodge of the leaders and lieutenants and secretaries from all the clubs, and again in every lodge they choose a master, that’s the highest; and then a Jack, he’s like a lieutenant; and a Teller, he’s the sort of secretary and president. We have lodges in all the biggish places. And then all the masters of the lodges of the five states of Australia keep in touch, and they choose five masters who are called the Five, and these five agree among themselves which order shall stand in: first, second, third, fourth, and fifth. When once they’ve chosen the first, then he has two votes towards the placing of the other four. And so they settle it. And then they grade the five Jacks and the five Tellers. I tell it you just in rough, you know.”

“Yes. And what are you?”

“I’m a master.”

Richard was still trying to see himself in connection with it all. He tried to piece together all that Jack had been letting off at him. Returned soldiers’ clubs, chiefly athletics, with a more or less secret core to each club, and all the secret cores working together secretly in all the state under one chief head, and apparently with military penalties for any transgression. It was not a bad idea. And the aim, apparently, a sort of revolution and a seizing of political power.

“How long have you been started?” he asked.

“About eighteen months—nearly two years altogether.”

Somers was silent, very much impressed, though his heart felt heavy. Why did his heart feel so heavy? Politics—conspiracy—political power: it was all so alien to him. Somehow, in his soul he always meant something quite different, when he thought of action along with other men. Yet Australia, the wonderful, lonely Australia, with her seven million people only—it might begin here. And the Australians, so queer, so absent, as it were, leaving themselves out all the time—they might be capable of a beautiful unselfishness and steadfastness of purpose. Only—his heart refused to respond.

“What is your aim, though? What do you want, finally?” he asked rather lamely.

Jack hesitated, and his grip on the other man’s arm tightened.

“Well,” he said. “It’s like this. We don’t talk a lot about what we intend: we fix nothing. But we start certain talks, and we listen, so we know more or less what most of the ordinary members feel like. Why, the plan is more or less this. The Labour people, the reds, are always talking about a revolution, and the Conservatives are always talking about a disaster. Well, we keep ourselves fit and ready for as soon as the revolution comes—or the disaster. Then we step in, you see, and we are the revolution. We’ve got most of the trained fighting men behind us, and we can make the will of the people, don’t you see: if the members stand steady. We shall have ‘Australia’ for the word. We stand for Australia, not for any of your parties.”

Somers at once felt the idea was a good one. Australia is not too big—seven millions or so, and the biggest part of the seven concentrated in the five or six cities. Get hold of your cities and you’ve got hold of Australia. The only thing he mistrusted was the dryness in Jack’s voice: a sort of that’s-how-it’s-got-to-be dryness, sharp and authoritative.

“What d’yer think of it?” said Jack.

“Good idea,” said Somers.

“I know that—if we can bite on to it. Feel like joining in, d’yer think?”

Somers was silent. He was thinking of Jack even more than of the venture. Jack was trying to put something over him—in some way, to get a hold over him. He felt like a animal that is being lassoed. Yet here was his chance, if he wanted to be a leader of men. He had only to give himself, give himself up to it and to the men.

“Let me think about it a bit, will you?” he replied, “and I’ll tell you when I come up to Sydney.”

“Right O!” said Jack, a twinge of disappointment in his acquiescence. “Look before you leap, you know.”

“Yes—for both sides. You wouldn’t want me to jump in, and then squirm because I didn’t like it.”

“Right you are, old man. You take your own time—I know you won’t be wagging your jaw to anybody.”

“No. Not even to Harriet.”

“Oh, bless you, no. We’re not having the women in, if we can help it. Don’t believe in it, do you?”

“Not in real politics, I don’t.”

They stood a moment longer by the sea. Then Jack let go Somers’ arm.

“Well,” he said, “I’d rather die in a forlorn hope than drag my days out in a forlorn mope. Besides, damn it, I do want to have a shot at something, I do. These politicians absolutely get my wind up, running the country. If I can’t do better than that, then let me be shot, and welcome.”

“I agree,” said Somers.

Jack put his hand on his shoulder, and pressed it hard.

“I knew you would,” he said, in moved tones. “We want a man like you, you know—like a sort of queen bee to a hive.”

Somers laughed, rather startled by the metaphor. He had thought of himself as many things, but never as a queen bee to a hive of would-be revolutionaries. The two men went up to the house.

“Wherever have you been?” said Victoria.

“Talking politics and red-hot treason,” said Jack, rubbing his hands.

“Till you’re almost frozen, I’m sure,” said Victoria.

Harriet looked at the two men in curiosity and suspicion, but she said nothing. Only next morning when the Callcotts had gone she said to Lovat:

“What were you and Mr Callcott talking about, really?”

“As he said, politics and hot treason. An idea that some of them have got for making a change in the constitution.”

“What sort of change?” asked Harriet.

“Why—don’t bother me yet. I don’t know myself.”

“Is it so important you mustn’t tell me?” she asked sarcastically.

“Or else so vague,” he answered.

But she saw by the shut look on his face that he was not going to tell her: that this was something he intended to keep apart from her: forever apart. A part of himself which he was not going to share with her. It seemed to her unnecessary, and a breach of faith on his part, wounding her. If their marriage was a real thing, then anything very serious was her matter as much as his, surely. Either her marriage with him was not very important, or else this Jack Callcott stuff wasn’t very important. Which probably it wasn’t. Yet she hated the hoity-toity way she was shut out.

“Pah!” she said. “A bit of little boy’s silly showing off.”

But he had this other cold side to his nature, that could keep a secret cold and isolated till Doomsday. And for two or three years now, since the war, he had talked like this about doing some work with men alone, sharing some activity with men. Turning away from the personal life to the hateful male impersonal activity, and shutting her out from this.

She continued bright through the day. Then at evening he found her sitting on her bed with tears in her eyes and her hands in her lap. At once his heart became very troubled: because after all she was all he had in the world, and he couldn’t bear her to be really disappointed or wounded. He wanted to ask her what was the matter, and to try to comfort her. But he knew it would be false. He knew that her greatest grief was when he turned away from their personal human life of intimacy to this impersonal business of male activity for which he was always craving. So he felt miserable, but went away without saying anything. Because he was determined, if possible, to go forward in this matter with Jack. He was also determined that it was not a woman’s matter. As soon as he could he would tell her about it: as much as it was necessary for her to know. But, once he had slowly and carefully weighed a course of action, he would not hold it subject to Harriet’s approval or disapproval. It would be out of her sphere, outside the personal sphere of their two lives, and he would keep it there. She emphatically opposed this principle of her externality. She agreed with the necessity for impersonal activity, but oh, she insisted on being identified with the activity, impersonal or not. And he insisted that it could not and should not be: that the pure male activity should be womanless, beyond woman. No man was beyond woman. But in his one quality of ultimate maker and breaker, he was womanless. Harriet denied this, bitterly. She wanted to share, to join in, not to be left out lonely. He looked at her in distress, and did not answer. It is a knot that can never be untied; it can only, like a navel string, be broken or cut.

For the moment, however, he said nothing. But Somers knew from his dreams what she was feeling: his dreams of a woman, a woman he loved, something like Harriet, something like his mother, and yet unlike either, a woman sullen and obstinate against him, repudiating him. Bitter the woman was grieved beyond words, grieved till her face was swollen and puffy and almost mad or imbecile, because she had loved him so much, and now she must see him betray her love. That was how the dream woman put it: he had betrayed her great love, and she must go down desolate into an everlasting hell, denied, and denying him absolutely in return, a sullen, awful soul. The face reminded him of Harriet, and of his mother, and of his sister, and of girls he had known when he was younger—strange glimpses of all of them, each glimpse excluding the last. And at the same time in the terrible face some of the look of that bloated face of a madwoman which hung over Jane Eyre in the night in Mr Rochester’s house.

The Somers of the dream was terribly upset. He cried tears from his very bowels, and laid his hand on the woman’s arm saying:

“But I love you. Don’t you believe in me? Don’t you believe in me?” But the woman, she seemed almost old now—only shed a few bitter tears, bitter as vitriol, from her distorted face, and bitterly, hideously turned away, dragging her arm from the touch of his fingers; turned, as it seemed to the dream-Somers, away to the sullen and dreary, everlasting hell of repudiation.

He woke at this, and listened to the thunder of the sea with horror. With horror. Two women in his life he had loved down to the quick of life and death: his mother and Harriet. And the woman in the dream was so awfully his mother, risen from the dead, and at the same time Harriet, as it were, departing from this life, that he stared at the night-paleness between the window-curtains in horror.

“They neither of them believed in me,” he said to himself. Still in the spell of the dream, he put it in the past tense, though Harriet lay sleeping in the next bed. He could not get over it.

Then he tried to come right awake. In his full consciousness, he was a great enemy of dreams. For his own private life, he found his dreams were like devils. When he was asleep and off his guard, then his own weaknesses, especially his old weaknesses that he had overcome in his full, day-waking self, rose up again maliciously to take some picturesque form and torment and overcome his sleeping self. He always considered dreams as a kind of revenge which old weaknesses took on the victorious healthy consciousness, like past diseases come back for a phantom triumph. So he said to himself: “The dream is one of these larvæ of my past emotions. It means that the danger is passed, the evil is overcome, so it has to resort to dreams to terrify me. In dreams the diseases and evil weaknesses of the soul—and of our relations with other souls—take form to triumph falsely over the living, healthy, onward-struggling spirit. This dream means that the actual danger is gone.” So he strengthened his spirit, and in the morning when he got up, and remembered, he was no longer afraid. A little uneasy still, maybe, especially as to what Harriet would do. But surely his mother was not hostile in death! And if she were a little bit hostile at this forsaking, it was not permanent, it was only the remains of a weakness, an unbelief which haunted the soul in life.

So he reasoned with himself. For he had an ingrained instinct or habit of thought which made him feel that he could never take the move into activity unless Harriet and his dead mother believed in him. They both loved him: that he knew. They both believed in him terribly, in personal being. In the individual man he was, and the son of man, they believed with all the intensity of undivided love. But in the impersonal man, the man that would go beyond them, with his back to them, away from them into an activity that excluded them, in this man they did not find it so easy to believe.

Harriet, however, said nothing for two days. She was happy in her new house, delighted with the sea and the being alone, she loved her Coo-ee bungalow, and loved making it look nice. She loved having Lovat alone with her, and all her desires, as it were, in the hollow of her hand. She was bright and affectionate with him. But underneath lurked this chagrin of his wanting to go away from her, for his activity.

“You don’t take Callcott and his politics seriously, do you?” she said to him at evening.

“Yes,” he said, rather hesitatingly.

“But what does he want?”

“To have another sort of government for the Commonwealth—with a sort of Dictator: not the democratic vote-cadging sort.”

“But what does that matter to you?”

“It does matter. If you can start a new life-form.”

“You know quite well you say yourself life doesn’t start with a form. It starts with a new feeling, and ends with a form.”

“I know. But I think there is a new feeling.”

“In Callcott?” She had a very sceptical intonation.

“Yes.”

“I very much doubt it. He’s a returned war hero, and he wants a chance of keeping on being a hero—or something like that.”

“But even that is a new feeling,” he persisted.

“Yah!” she said, rather wearily sceptical. “I’d rather even believe in William James. There seems to me more real feeling even in him: deeper, at any rate. Your Jacks are shallow really.”

“Nay, he seemed a man to me.”

“I don’t know what you mean by your men. Really, I give it up, I don’t know what you do want. You change so. You’ve always said you despise politics, and yet here you are.” She tailed off as if it were hopeless.

“It’s not the politics. But it is a new life-form, a new social form. We’re pot-bound inside democracy and the democratic feeling.”

“But you know what you’ve said yourself. You didn’t change the Roman Empire with a revolution. Christianity grew up for centuries without having anything at all to do with politics—just a feeling, and a belief.”

This was indeed what he had said himself, often enough: that a new religious inspiration, and a new religious idea must gradually spring up and ripen before there could be any constructive change. And yet he felt that preaching and teaching were both no good, at the world’s present juncture. There must be action, brave, faithful action: and in the action the new spirit would arise.

“You see,” he said, “Christianity is a religion which preaches the despising of the material world. And I don’t believe in that part of it, at least, any longer. I believe that the men with the real passion for life, for truth, for living and not for having, I feel they now must seize control of the material possessions, just to safeguard the world from all the masses who want to seize material possessions for themselves, blindly, and nothing else. The men with soul and with passionate truth in them must control the world’s material riches and supplies: absolutely put possessions out of the reach of the mass of mankind, and let life begin to live again, in place of this struggle for existence, or struggle for wealth.”

“Yah, I don’t believe it’s so all-important who controls the world’s material riches and supplies. That’ll always be the same.”

“It won’t.”

“It will. Conservatives or bolshevists or Labour Party—they’re all alike: they all want to grab and have things in their clutches, and they’re devilish with jealousy if they haven’t got them. That’s politics. You’ve said thousands of times that politics are a game for the base people with no human soul in them. Thousands of times you’ve said it. And yet now—”

He was silent for a while.

“Now,” he said slowly. “Now I see that you don’t have only to give all your possessions to the poor. You’ve got to have no poor that can be saved just by possessions. You’ve got to put the control of all supplies into the hands of sincere, sensible men who are still men enough to know that manhood isn’t the same thing as goods. We don’t want possessions. Nobody wants possessions—more than just the immediate things: as you say yourself, one trunk for you, one for me, and one for the household goods. That’s about all. We don’t want anything else. And the world is ours—Australia or India, Coo-ee or Ardnaree, or where you like. You have got to teach people that, by withholding possessions and stopping the mere frenzy for possession which runs the world to-day. You’ve got to do that first, not last.”

“And you think Jack Callcott will do it?”

“I did think so, as he talked to me.”

“Well, then let him. Why do you want to interfere. In my opinion he’s chiefly jealous because other people run the show, and he doesn’t have a look-in. Having once been a Captain with some power, he wants the same again, and more. I’d rather trust William James to be disinterested.”

“Nay, Jack Callcott is generous by nature, and I believe he’d be disinterested.”

“In his way, he’s generous. But that isn’t the same as being disinterested, for all that. He wants to have his finger in the pie, that’s what he wants.”

“To pull out plums? That’s not true.”

“Perhaps not to pull out money plums. But to be bossy. To be a Captain once more, feeling his feet and being a boss over something.”

“Why shouldn’t he be?”

“Why not? I don’t care if he bosses all Australia and New Zealand and all the lot. But I don’t see why you should call it disinterested. Because it isn’t.”

He paused, struck.

“Am I disinterested?” he asked.

“Not”—she hesitated—“not when you want just power.”

“But I don’t want just power. I only see that somebody must have power, so those should have it who don’t want it selfishly, and who have some natural gift for it, and some reverence for the sacredness of it.”

“Ha!—power! power! What does it all mean, after all! And especially in people like Jack Callcott. Where does he see any sacredness. He’s a sentimentalist, and as you say yourself, nothing is sacred then.”

This discussion ended in a draw. Harriet had struck home once or twice, and she knew it. That appeased her for the moment. But he stuck to his essential position, though he was not so sure of the circumstantial standing.

Harriet loved Coo-ee, and was determined to be happy there. She had at last gradually realised that Lovat was no longer lover to her or anybody, or even anything: and amidst the chagrin was a real relief. Because he was her husband, that was undeniable. And if, as her husband, he had to go on to other things, outside of marriage: well, that was his affair. It only angered her when he thought these other things—revolutions or governments or whatnot—higher than their essential marriage. But then he would come to himself and acknowledge that his marriage was the centre of his life, the core, the root, however he liked to put it: and this other business was the inevitable excursion into his future, into the unknown, onwards, which man by his nature was condemned to make, even if he lost his life a dozen times in it. Well, so be it. Let him make the excursion: even without her. But she was not, if she could help it, going to have him setting off on a trip that led nowhere. No, if he was to excurse ahead, it must be ahead, and her instinct must be convinced as the needle of a mariner’s compass is convinced. And regarding this Australian business of Callcott’s, she had her doubts.

However, she had for the moment a home, where she felt for the moment as rooted, as central as the tree of life itself. She wasn’t a bit of flotsam, and she wasn’t a dog chained to a dog-kennel. Coo-ee might be absurd—and she knew it was only a camp. But then where she camped with Lovat Somers was now the world’s centre to her, and that was enough.

She loved to wake in the morning and open the bedroom door—they had the north bedroom, on the verandah, the room that had the sun all day long; then she liked to lie luxuriously in bed and watch the lovely, broken colours of the Australian dawn: always strange, mixed colours, never the primary reds and yellows. The sun rose on the north-east—she could hardly see it. But she watched the first yellow of morning, and then the strange, strong, smoky red-purple of floating pieces of cloud: then the rose and mist blue of the horizon, and the sea all reddish, smoky flesh-colour, moving under a film of gold like a glaze; then the sea gradually going yellow, going primrose, with the foam breaking blue as forget-me-nots or frost, in front. And on the near swing of the bluey primrose, sticking up through the marvellous liquid pale yellow glaze, the black fins of sharks. The triangular, black fins of sharks, like small, hard sails of hell-boats, amid the swimming luminousness. Then she would run out on the verandah. Sharks! Four or five sharks, skulking in the morning glow, and so near, she could almost have thrown bread to them. Sharks, slinking along quite near the coast, as if they were walking on the land. She saw one caught in the heave of a breaker, and lifted. And then she saw him start, saw the quick flurry of his tail as he flung himself back. The land to him was horror—as to her the sea, beyond that wall of ice-blue foam. She made Lovat come to look. He watched them slowly, holding the brush in his hand. He had made the fire, and was sweeping the hearth. Coffee was ready by the time Harriet was dressed: and he was crouching making toast. They had breakfast together on the front verandah, facing the sea, eastwards. And the sun slanted warm, though it was mid-winter, and the much-washed red-and-white tablecloth that had been in so many lands with them and that they used out-doors, looked almost too strongly coloured in the tender seeming atmosphere. The coffee had a lot of chickory in it, but the butter and milk were good, and the brownish honey, that also, like the landscape, tasted queer, as if touched with unkindled smoke. It seemed to Somers as if the people of Australia ought to be dusky. Think of Sicilian honey—like the sound of birds singing: and now this with a dusky undertone to it. But good too—so good!

CHAP: VI. KANGAROO

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 phœnix 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 eyeglasses, 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-glases, red and white wine in Venetian wine-jugs, a Chinaman waiting at table, offering first a silver dish of hors d’œuvres 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 cœur about the mother of the people, the poor elderly woman in a battered black bonnet and a shawl, going out with six-pence 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 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 have 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 recognise 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, a man is almost invincible. I have found it so.”

“I believe it also,” said Somers.