They were silent, and Kangaroo sat there with the rapt look on his face: a pondering, eternal look, like the eternity of the lamb of God grown into a sheep. This rather wicked idea came into Somers’ mind: the lamb of God grown into a sheep. So the man sat there, with his wide-eyed, rapt face sunk forward to his breast, very beautiful, and as eternal as if it were a dream: so absolute.

A wonderful thing for a sculptor. For Kangaroo was really ugly: his pendulous Jewish face, his forward shoulders, his round stomach in its expensively tailored waistcoat and dark grey, striped trousers, his very big thighs. And yet even his body had become beautiful, to Somers—one might love it intensely, every one of its contours, its roundnesses and downward-drooping heaviness. Almost a grotesque, like a Chinese Buddha. And yet not a grotesque. Beautiful, beautiful as some half-tropical, bulging flower from a tree.

Then Kangaroo looked with a teasing little smile at Somers.

“But you have your own idea of power, haven’t you?” he said, getting up suddenly, with quick power in his bulk, and gripping the other man’s shoulder.

“I thought I had,” said Somers.

“Oh, you have, you have.” There was a calm, easy tone in the voice, slightly fat, very agreeable. Somers thrilled to it as he had never thrilled.

“Why, the man is like a god, I love him,” he said to his astonished self. And Kangaroo was hanging forward his face and smiling heavily and ambiguously to himself, knowing that Somers was with him.

he quoted in a queer, sonorous voice, like a priest. “The lion of your might would be a tiger, wouldn’t it. The tiger and the unicorn were fighting for the crown. How about me for a unicorn?—if I tied a bayonet on my nose?” He rubbed his nose with a heavy playfulness.

“Is the tiger your principle of evil?”

“The tiger? Oh dear, no. The jackal, the hyæna, and dear, deadly humanity. No, no. The tiger stands on one side the shield, and the unicorn on the other, and they don’t fight for the crown at all. They keep it up between them. The pillars of the world! The tiger and the kangaroo!” he boomed this out in a mock heroic voice, strutting with heavy playfulness. Then he laughed, looking winsomely at Somers. Heaven, what a beauty he had!

“Tiger, tiger, burning bright,” he resumed, sing-song, abstracted. “I knew you’d come. Even since I read your first book of poems—how many years is it ago?—ten?—eleven? I knew you’d come.

Of course you had to come.”

“Well, here I am, anyhow,” said Somers.

“You are. You are!” shouted the other, and Somers was quite scared. Then Kangaroo laughed again. “Get up,” he said. “Stand up and let me look at you.”

The two men stood facing one another: Kangaroo large, with his full stomach and his face hulking down, and his queer, glaring eyes; Somers slight and aloof-looking. Cooley eyed him up and down.

“A little bit of a fellow—too delicate for rough me,” he said, then started quoting again:

I’ve got fat and bulky on all the poetry I never wrote. How do you do, Mr Somers? How do you like Australia, and its national animal, the kangaroo?” Again he smiled with the sudden glow of warmth in his dark eyes, startling and wonderful.

“Australia is a weird country, and it’s national animal is beyond me,” Somers said, smiling rather palely.

“Oh no, it isn’t. You’ll be patting it on the back as soon as you’ve taken your hands out of your pockets.”

He stood silent a long while, with feet apart, looking abstractedly at Somers through his pince nez.

“Ah, well,” he sighed at last. “We shall see. We shall see. But I’m very glad you came. You understand what I mean, I know, when I say we are birds of the same feather. Aren’t we?”

“In some ways I think we are.”

“Yes. In the feathery line. When shall I see you again?”

“We are going back to the South Coast on Saturday.”

“Then let me see you to-morrow. Let me call for you at your house—and bring you back into town for dinner in the evening. May I do that?”

“Thank you,” said Somers.

“What does ‘thank you’ mean? Danke! No, thank you.”

“Yes, thank you,” said Somers.

“Don’t thank me, man,” suddenly shouted the other. “I’m the one to do the thanking.”

Somers felt simple startled amazement at these sudden shouts—loud shouts, that you might almost hear in the street.

At last Jack and Somers left. Jack had felt it his business to keep quiet: he knew his chief. But now he opened his mouth.

“What do you think of Kangaroo?” he asked.

“I’m beyond thinking,” said Somers.

“I know, that’s how he leaves you when he makes a set at you. But he’s a rattling fine sort, he is. He puts a heart into you when your chest’s as hollow as an old mustard tin. He’s a wonder, is Kangaroo: and he keeps on being a wonder.”

“Yes, he’s certainly a wonder.”

“My, the brain the man has! I say, though, talking about tigers and kangaroos reminded me of a thing I once saw. It was up in the North. I was going along when I heard snarls out of some long buffalo grass that made my hair stand on end. I had to see what it was, though, so into the grass goes I. And there I saw a full-grown male kangaroo backed up against a tree, with the flesh of one leg torn clean from the bone. He was gasping, but he was still fighting. And the other was a great big cat, we call ’em tiger-cats, as big as a smallish leopard, a beauty—grey and black stripes, and straighter than a leopard. And before you could breathe, a streak of black and grey shot at that ’roo’s throat, seemed to twist in mid air—and the ’roo slipped down to the ground with his entrails ripped right out. I was so dumbfounded I took a step in the grass, and that great hulking cat stopped and lifted his face from his warm food that he’d started on without ever looking up. He stood over that ’roo for ten seconds staring me in the eyes. Then the skin wrinkled back from his snout, and the fangs were so white and clean as death itself, and a low growl came out of his ugly throat. ‘Come on, you swine,’ it said as plain as words. I didn’t you bet. I backed out of that beastly grass.

“The next one I saw was a dead one. And beside him lay the boss’ best staghound, that had been trained to tackling wild boars since he was a pup: dead as well. The cat had come fossicking round our camp on the Madden River.

“My gad, though, but the size of the brute, and muscle like you couldn’t find in any other beast. I looked at the claws on the pads. They’re as sharp as a lancet, and they’d tear the guts out of a man before he could squeak. It was good-bye ’roo, that time.

“They put that yarn in the Bulletin. And some chap wrote and said it was a stiff ’un, and the wild cat must be descended from escaped tame cats, because this country has no pussy aboriginal of any sort. Couldn’t say myself, except I saw that tiger-cat, and it didn’t look much like the son of a homely tissey, either. Wonder what put the thing in my head. Perhaps Kangaroo’s fat belly.”

“He’s not so very fat,” said Somers.

“No, he’s not got what you’d call a corporation and a whole urban council in front of him. Neither is he flat just there, like you and me.”

Kangaroo arrived the next day at Torestin with a large bunch of violets in his hand: pale, expensive, late winter violets. He took off his hat to Harriet and bowed quite deep, without shaking hands. He had been a student at Munich.

“Oh, how do you do!” cried Harriet. “Please don’t look at the horrid room, we leave in the morning.”

Kangaroo looked vacantly around. He was not interested, so he saw nothing: he might as well have been blind.

“It’s a very nice room,” he said. “May I give you the violets? The poet said you liked having them about.”

She took them in her two hands, smelling their very faint fragrance.

“They’re not like English violets—or those big dark fellows in Italy,” he said. “But still we persuade ourselves that they are violets.”

“They’re lovely. I feel I could warm my hands over them,” she said.

“And now they’re quite happy violets,” he replied, smiling his rare, sweet smile at her. “Why are you taking the poet away from Sydney?”

“Lovat? He wants to go.”

“Lovat! What a good name to call him by!” He turned to Somers, looking at him closely. “May I call you Lovat?”

“Better that than the poet,” said Somers, lifting his nose slightly with aversion.

The other man laughed, but softly and happily.

“His muse he’s not in love with,” he murmured to himself.

“No, he prefers his own name,” said Somers.

“But supposing now,” said Kangaroo, as if alert and interested, “your name was Cooley: Benjamin Cooley—Ben, for short. You’d prefer even Kangaroo to that.”

“In Australia the kangaroo is the king of beasts,” said Somers.

sang the big man, continuing: “Won’t you both come to dinner with the king of beasts? Won’t you come too, Mrs Somers?”

“You know you only want Lovat, to talk your man’s stuff.”

“I’m not a man, I’m a kangaroo. Besides, yesterday I hadn’t seen you. If I had known, my dear Somers, that your wife, who is at this moment in her room hastily changing her dress, was such a beautiful person—I don’t say woman merely—I’d have invited you for her sake, and not for your own.”

“Then I wouldn’t have come,” said Somers.

“Hear them, what a haughty pair of individuals! I suppose you expect the king of beasts to go down on his knees to you, like the rest of democratic kings to their constituents. Won’t you get ready, Mrs Somers?”

“You are quite sure you want me to come?” said Harriet suspiciously.

“Why, if you won’t come, I shall ask Lovat—dear Lovat, by the happiest fluke in the world not Lovelace—to let me stay here to tea, dinner, or supper—that is, to the next meal, whatever name it may bear.”

At this Harriet disappeared to put on a proper dress.

“We will go as soon as you are ready,” called Kangaroo. “We can all squeeze into that automobile at your gate.”

When Harriet reappeared the men rose. Kangaroo looked at her with admiration.

“What a remarkably beautiful person you are,” he said. “But mind, I don’t say woman. Dio liberi!” He scuttled hurriedly to the door.

They had a gay dinner. Kangaroo wasn’t really witty. But he had such an innocent charm, an extraordinary winsomeness, that it was much more delicious than wit. His presence was so warm. You felt you were cuddled cosily, like a child, on his breast, in the soft glow of his heart, and that your feet were nestling on his ample, beautiful “tummy.”

“I wonder you were never married,” said Harriet to him.

“I’ve been married several times,” he replied.

“Really!” she cried.

“First to Benny Cooley—then to immortal verse—after that to the law—once to a haughty lady—and now I’m wedded to my ideals. This time it is final. I don’t take another wife.”

“I don’t care about the rest. But were you ever married, really?”

“To a woman? A mere woman? Why, yes indeed. A young Baroness too. And after seven months she told me she couldn’t stand me for another minute, and went off with Von Rumpeldorf.”

“Is it true?”

“Quite true.”

“And is there still a Mrs Kangaroo?”

“Alas, no! Like the unicorn, the family knows no female.”

“But why couldn’t she stand you?” cried Harriet.

“Think of it now. Could any woman stand me?” he asked, with a slight shrug.

“I should have thought they’d have adored you,” she cried.

“Of course they do. They can’t stand me, though. And I thoroughly sympathise with them.”

Harriet looked at him thoughtfully.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “You’re too much like Abraham’s bosom. One would feel nowhere.”

Kangaroo threw down his napkin and pushed back his chair and roared with laughter—roared and roared with laughter. The Chinese man-servant stood back perturbed. Harriet went very red—the dinner waited. Then suddenly he became quiet, looking comically at Harriet, and still sitting back from table. Then he opened his arms and held them outstretched, his head on one side.

“The way to nowhere,” he said, ironically.

She did not say any more, and he turned to the man-servant.

“My glass is empty, John,” he said.

“Ah, well,” he sighed, “if you please one woman you can’t please all women.”

“And you must please all women,” said Harriet, thoughtfully. “Yes, perhaps you must. Perhaps it is your mission.”

“Mission! Good God! Now I’m a fat missionary. Dear Mrs Somers, eat my dinner, but don’t swallow me in a mouthful. Eating your host for hors d’œuvres. You’re a dangerous ogre, a Medusa with her hair under her hat. Let’s talk of Peach Melba. Where have you had the very best Peach Melba you ever tasted?”

After this he became quiet, and a little constrained, and when they had withdrawn for coffee, the talk went subduedly, with a little difficulty.

“I suppose your husband will have told you, Mrs Somers, of our heaven-inspired scheme of saving Australia from the thieves, dingoes, rabbits, rats and starlings, humanly speaking.”

“No, he hasn’t told me. He’s only told me there was some political business going on.”

“He may as well put it that way as any other. And you advised him not to have anything to do with it?”

“No,” said Harriet, “I let him do as he likes.”

“Wonderful woman! Even the wind bloweth where it listeth.”

“So does he.”

“With your permission.”

“The wind has permission too,” said Harriet. “Everything goes by permission of something else, in this world.” But she went rather red.

“Bravo, a Daniel come to judgment!” Then his voice changed, became gentle and winning again. It was as if he had remembered to love her, in his way of love. “It’s not quite a political thing,” he said. “We want to take away the strain, the nervous tension out of life, and let folks be happy again unconsciously, instead of unhappy consciously. You wouldn’t say that was wrong, would you?”

“No,” she replied, rather unwilling.

“And if I have to be a fat old Kangaroo with—not an Abraham’s bosom, but a pouch to carry young Australia in—why—do you really resent it?”

Harriet laughed, glancing involuntarily at his lowest waistcoat button. It seemed such a true figure.

“Why should I resent it? It’s not my business.”

“Let it be your business just a little bit. I want your sympathy.”

“You mean you want Lovat?”

“Poor Lovat. Richard Lovat Somers! I do indeed want him. But just as much I want your sympathy.”

Harriet smiled enigmatically. She was being her most annoying. A look of almost vicious anger came over the man’s face as he leaned back in his chair, seeming to make his brows narrower, and a convulsion seemed to go through his belly. Then he recovered his calm, and seemed to forget. For a long time he lay silent, with a strange, hypnotic stillness, as if he were thinking far away, quite far away. Both Harriet and Somers felt spellbound. Then from the distance came his small voice:

“Man that is born of woman is sick of himself. Man that is born of woman is tired of his day after day. And woman is like a mother with a tiresome child: what is she to do with him? What is she to do with him?—man, that is born of woman.

“But the men that are born like ants, out of the cold interval, and are womanless, they are not sick of themselves. They are full of cold energy, and they seethe with cold fire in the ant-hill, making new corridors, new chambers—they alone know what for. And they have cold, formic-acid females, as restless as themselves, and as active about the ant-hill, and as identical with the dried clay of the building. And the active, important, so-called females, and the active, cold-blooded, energetic males, they shift twig after twig, and lay crumb of earth upon crumb of earth, and the females deposit cold white eggs of young. This is the world, and the people of the world. And with their cold, active bodies the ant-men and the ant-women swarm over the face of the earth.

“And where then are the sons of men? Where are the sons of men, and man that is born of woman? Man that is born of woman is a slave in the cold, barren corridors of the ant-hill. Or if he goes out, the open spaces are but spaces between ant-hill and ant-hill. And as he goes he hears voices claiming him, saying: ‘Hello, here comes a brother ant.’ And they hail him as a brother ant. And from this there is no escape. None. Not even the lap of woman.

“But I am a son of man. I was once a man born of woman. And by the warm heart of the mother that bore me, even if fifty wives denied me, I would still go on fighting with a warm heart to break down the ant-hill. I can fight them with their own weapons: the hard mandibles and the acid sting of the cold ant. But that is not how I fight them. I fight them with the warm heart. Deep calls to deep, and fire calls out fire. And for warmth, for the fire of sympathy, to burn out the ant heap with the heat of fiery, living hearts: that is what I stand for.

“And if I can make no one single woman happy, I will make none unhappy either. But if I can let out the real fire of happiness from the heart and bowels of man that is born of woman and woman that is born of man.” Then suddenly he broke off: “And whether I can or not, I love them,” he shouted, in a voice suddenly become loud and passionate. “I love them. I love you, you woman born of man, I do, and I defy you to prevent me. Fiery you are, and fiery am I, and fire should be friends with fire. And when you make me angry, with your jealousy and mistrust like the ants, I remember, I remind myself: ‘But see the beauty of the fire in her! And think how the ants have tortured her and filled her with fear and with horror!’ And then the rage goes down again, and I know I love you, and I know that fire loves fire, and that therefore you love me. And I chalk up another mark against the ants, who have tortured you with their cold energy and their conscious formic-acid that stings like fire. And I love you because you’ve suffered from them as I have. And I love you because you and your husband cherish the fire between you, sacred, apart from the ants. A bas les fourmis.

“I have been like a man buried up into his neck in an ant-heap: so buried in the daily world, and stung and stung and stung again, because I wouldn’t change and grow cold, till now their poison is innocuous, and the formic acid of social man has no effect on me. And I’ve kept my warmth. And I will keep it, till I give it up to the unknown, out of my poor fat body. And it is my banner, and my wife and my children and my God—just the flicker that is in my heart like a fire, and that I live by. I can’t speculate about God. I can’t do it. It seems to me a cold, antish trick. But the fire that is in my heart is God, and I will not forswear it, no, not if you offer me all the world. And fire is full of seeds—full of seeds—and let them scatter. I won’t cherish it on a domestic hearth. I say I won’t. So don’t bring that up against me. I won’t cherish it on the domestic hearth. I will use it against the ants, while they swarm over everything. And I’ll call fire to my fire, and set the ant-heap at last in a blaze. Like kerosene poured in. It shall be so. It shall be so. Don’t oppose me. Believe the flame in your heart, once and for all, and don’t oppose me. Believe the flame of your own heart, and be with me. Remember I am with you against the ants. Remember that. And if I am Abraham’s bosom—isn’t it better than no bosom, in a world that simmers with busy ants? And would you leave every young, warm, naked thing on the ground for the ants to find. Would you?”

He looked at her searchingly. She was pale, and moved, but hostile. He swung round in his chair, swinging his heavy hips over and lying sideways.

“Shall I tell you a thing a man told me. He had it from the lady’s own lips. It was when the Prince of Wales was in India just now. There had been a show—and then a dinner given by the governor of the town—some capital or other. The Prince sat next to the governor’s lady, and he was glum, silent, tortured by them all a bit beyond bearance. And the governor’s lady felt she ought to make conversation, ought to say something to the poor devil, just for the show’s sake and the occasion. So she couldn’t think what to tell him that would interest him. Then she had a brilliant idea. ‘Do you know what happened to me last week?’ she said. ‘You’ve seen my adorable little Pekinese, Chu? She had puppies—four darling queer little things—tiny little creepy-crawlies. Of course we loved them. But in the night I thought I heard them crying—I wasn’t sure. But at last I went down. And what do you think! There was a swarm of white ants, and they were just eating up the last bits of them. Wasn’t it awful.’ The Prince went white as death. And just then an ant happened to come on the tablecloth. He took his glass and banged it over it, and never spoke another word all evening. Now that story was told by the woman herself. And this was what she did to a poor nerve-racked lad she was supposed to honour. Now I ask you, where was the living heart in her? She was an ant, a white ant too.”

He rolled over in his chair, bitterly, with massive bitterness, turning his back on Harriet. She sat with a pale, blenched face, and tears in her eyes.

“How cruel!” she said. “But she must have been a fool.”

“Vile! Vile! No fool! Quite brilliant ant-tactics. There was warmth in the lad’s heart, and she was out to do her bit of the quenching. Oh, she gave him her nip and sting. Ants, social ants. Social creatures! Cold—I’m as cold as they are when it comes to them. And as cunning, and quite as vicious. But that’s not what I care for. I want to collect together all the fire in all the burning hearts in Australia: that’s what I want. Collect the heart-fire, and the fire will be our fire. That’s what I do want; apart from all antics and ant-tricks. ‘We have lighted such a fire this day, Master Latimer.’ Yes, and we’ll light another. You needn’t be with me if you don’t want to—if you’re frightened of losing your monopoly over your precious husband. Take him home then—take him home.”

And he rolled his back on her more than ever, finishing in a sudden gust of anger and weariness. He lay there rolled in his chair, a big, queer, heavy figure, with his face almost buried in the soft leather, and his big hips sticking out. Her face was quivering, wanting to cry. Then suddenly she broke into a laugh, saying rather shakily, venomously:

“Well, anyhow, you needn’t turn the wrong end of you at me quite so undisguisedly.”

“How do you know it is the wrong end of me?” he said, sitting up suddenly and letting his head hang, scowling.

“Facon de parler,” she said, laughing rather stiffly.

Somers was silent, and kept silent till the end. He was thankful that Kangaroo was fighting the battle this time.

Their host sent them home in his motor-car. Neither of them had anything to say. Then, as Harriet shut the door of Torestin, and they were quite alone, she said:

“Yes, he’s right. I absolutely believe in him. I don’t care what he does with you.”

“I do, though,” said Somers.

The next day they went to Mullumbimby. And the day after that, each of them wrote a letter to Kangaroo.

“Dear Kaiser Kangaroo,” began Harriet, “I must thank you very much for the dinner and the violets, which are still quite fresh and blue in Coo-ee. I think you were very horrid to me, but also very nice, so I hope you don’t think the worst of me. I want to tell you that I do sympathise, and that I am awfully glad if I can be of any use to you in any way. I have a holy terror of ants since I heard you, but I know what you mean by the fire. Lovat will hand over my portion when he comes to see you. But I shall make myself into a Fire Brigade, because I am sure you will be kindling fires all over everywhere, under the table and in the clothes-cupboard, and I, poor domestic wretch, shall have to be rushing to put them out. Being only a poor domestic female, I really don’t feel safe with fires anywhere except in fire-places and in grates with hearths. But I do want you to know you have my sympathy—and my Lovat.” She then signed herself Harriet Somers, and felt even more fluttered than when she had signed the marriage register.

She received for answer:

“Dear Mrs Somers: I am much honoured and very grateful for the assurance of your sympathy. I have put a one-and-sixpenny government stamp under your signature, to make your letter a legal document, and have further forged the signatures of two witnesses to your deed of gift of Lovat, so I am afraid there is no court of law in New South Wales in which you could now substantiate a further claim over him. I am sorry to take this mean advantage over you, but we lawyers know no scruples.

“I should be more than delighted if I could have the honour of entertaining once more in Sydney—say next Thursday—a beautiful person and remarkable woman (one and the same individual) who tells me to my nose that I am a Jew and that my name, instead of Benjamin, should be Abraham. Do please come again and call me Abraham’s Bosom, but don’t fail to bring your husband, for the simple look of the thing.”

“The Kangaroo is a fighting beast, I believe,” said Somers, looking at Harriet and laughing. He was not sorry when for once some other person gave her a dig.

“I think he’s rather foolish,” she said briefly.

These days Somers, too, was filled with fury. As for loving mankind, or having a fire of love in his heart, it was all rot. He felt almost fierily cold. He liked the sea, the pale sea of green glass that fell in such cold foam. Ice-fiery, fish-burning. He went out on to the low flat rocks at low tide, skirting the deep pock-holes that were full of brilliantly clear water and delicately-coloured shells and tiny, crimson anemones. Strangely sea-scooped sharp sea-bitter rock-floor, all wet and sea-savage. And standing at the edge looking at the waves rather terrifying rolling at him, where he stood low and exposed, far out from the sand-banks, and as he watched the gannets gleaming white, then falling with a splash like white sky-arrows into the waves, he wished as he had never wished before that he could be cold, as sea-things are cold, and murderously fierce. To have oneself exultantly ice-cold, not one spark of this wretched warm flesh left, and to have all the terrific, icy energy of a fish. To surge with that cold exultance and passion of a sea thing! Now he understood the yearning in the seal-woman’s croon, as she went back to the sea, leaving her husband and her children of warm flesh. No more cloying warmth. No more of this horrible stuffy heat of human beings. To be an isolated swift fish in the big seas, that are bigger than the earth; fierce with cold, cold life, in the watery twilight before sympathy was created to clog us.

These were his feelings now. Mankind? Ha, he turned his face to the centre of the seas, away from any land. The noise of waters, and dumbness like a fish. The cold, lovely silence, before crying and calling were invented. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, as if it had relapsed away from speech altogether.

He did not care a straw what Kangaroo said or felt, or what anybody said or felt, even himself. He had no feelings, and speech had gone out of him. He wanted to be cold, cold, and alone like a single fish, with no feeling in his heart at all except a certain icy exultance and wild, fish-like rapacity. “Homo sum!” All right. Who sets a limit to what a man is? Man is also a fierce and fish-cold devil, in his hour, filled with cold fury of desire to get away from the cloy of human life altogether, not into death, but into that icily self-sufficient vigour of a fish.

CHAP: VII. THE BATTLE OF TONGUES

One of these afternoons when Somers was walking down on the sands, looking at the different shells, their sea-colours of pink and brown and rainbow and brilliant violet and shrimp-red, and when the boats were loading coal on the moderately quiet sea, he noticed the little engine standing steaming on the jetty, just overhead where he was going to pass under. Then his attention was drawn away to the men picking up the rounded, sea-smooth pebbles of coal in one little place where the beach was just a black slope of perfectly clean coal-pebbles: just like any other pebbles. There were usually some men, or women or children, picking here, putting the bigger pebbles of sea-coal into sacks. From the edge of the small waves Somers heard one man talking to another, and the English tones—unconsciously he expected a foreign language—and particularly the peculiar educated-artisan quality, almost a kind of uppishness that there is in the speech of Australian working men, struck him as incongruous with their picking up the coal-cobs from the shore. He watched them, in the chill of the shadow. Yes, they thought as much of themselves as anybody. But one was palpably a Welshman, and loved picking up something for nothing; and the other mixed his democratic uppishness with a queer lousy quality, like a bushranger. “They are ten times more foreign to me,” said Somers, “than Italian scoundrels, or even Indians. They are so foreign to me. And yet their manner of life, their ordinary way of living is almost exactly what I was used to as a boy. Why are they so foreign to me?”

They silently objected to his looking, so he went on. He had come to the huge, high timbers of the tall jetty. There stood the little engine still overhead: and in the gloom among the timbers underneath water was dripping down from her, which gave Somers a distaste for passing just then. He looked up. There was the engine-driver in his dirty shirt and dirty bare arms, talking to another man. The other man saluted—and to Somers’ surprise it was William James. He stood quite still, and a surprised smile of recognition greeted the other man, who saluted.

“Why, what are you doing here?” called Somers.

William James came to the edge of the jetty, but could not hear, because of the noise of the sea. His face had that small, subtle smile that was characteristic of him, and which Somers was never quite sure of, whether it was really jeering or in a cunning way friendly.

“Won’t you come up a minute?” roared William James.

So Somers scrambled round up the banks, on to the railway track.

“I couldn’t come down for the moment,” said William James. “I’ll have to see the manager, then I’m going off on this boat. We’re ready to go. You heard her blowing.”

“Where are you going? Back to Sydney.”

“Yes. I come down occasionally on this coal-business, and if I like I go back on the collier. The sea is quiet, and I needn’t wait for a train. Well, an’ how’re you gettin’ on, like? Pleased with it down here all by yourselves?”

“Very.”

“A bit lonely for you. I suppose you wouldn’t like to know the manager here—Mr Thomas? He’s a decent chap—from South Wales originally.”

“No. I like it best when I don’t know anybody.”

“That’s a compliment for some of us. However—I know what you mean. I know what you mean. Jack tells me you saw Kangaroo. Made quite a fuss of you, I hear. I knew he would. Oh, Kangaroo knew all about you: all he wanted to know, anyhow. I say, if ye think of stoppin’ down here, you might get in a ton of coal. It looks as if this strike might come off. That Arbitration Board’s a fine failure, what?”

“As far as I gather.”

“Oh, bound to be. Bound to be. They talk about scraps of paper, why, every agreement that’s ever come to in this country, you could wrap your next red herring in it, for all it’s worth.”

“I suppose it’s like Ireland, they don’t want to agree.”

“That’s about it. The Labour people want this revolution of theirs. What?”—and he looked at Somers with a long, smiling, sardonic leer, like a wink. “There’s a certain fact,” he continued, “as far as any electioneering success goes, they’re out of the running for a spell. What do you think of Trades Unions, one way and another?”

“I dislike them on the whole rather intensely. They’re just the nastiest profiteering side of the working man—they make a fool of him too, in my opinion.”

“Just my opinion. They make a fool of him. Wouldn’t it be nice to have them for bosses of the whole country? They very nearly are. But I doubt very much if they’ll ever cover the last lap—what?”

“Not if Kangaroo can help it,” said Somers.

“No!” William James flashed a quick look at him from his queer grey eyes. “What did you make of him then? Could you make him out?”

“Not quite. I never met anyone like him. The wonder to me is, he seems to have as much spare time for entertaining and amusing his guests, as if he had no work at all on hand.”

“Oh, that was just a special occasion. But he’s a funny sort of Saviour, isn’t he? Not much crown of thorns about him. Why, he’d look funny on a cross, what?”

“He’s no intention of being put on one, I think,” said Somers stiffly.

“Oh, I don’t know. If the wrong party got hold of him. There’s many mites in a pound of cheese, they say.”

“Then I’ll toast my cheese.”

“Ha-ha! Oh yes, I like a bit of toasted cheese myself—or a Welsh rabbit, as well as any man.”

“But you don’t think they’d ever let him down, do you?—these Australians?”

“No-o,” said William James. “I doubt if they’d ever let him down. But if he happened to fall down, you know, they’d soon forget him.”

“You don’t sound a very warm follower yourself.”

“Oh, warm isn’t my way, in anything. I like to see what I’m about. I can see that Kangaroo’s a wonder. Oh yes, he’s a world wonder. And I’d rather be in with him than anybody, if it was only for the sake of the spree, you know. Bound to be a spree some time—and before long, I should say, things going as they are. I wouldn’t like to be left out of the fun.”

“But you don’t feel any strong devotion to your leader?”

“Why, no; I won’t say it’s exactly strong devotion. But I think he’s a world wonder. He’s not quite the shape of a man that I should throw away my eyes for, that’s all I mean.” Again William James looked at Somers with that long, perhaps mocking little smile in his grey eyes.

“I thought even his shape beautiful, when he talked to me.”

“Oh yes, it’s wonderful what a spell he can cast over you. But I’m a stuggy fellow myself, maybe that’s how it is I can’t ever quite see him in the same light as the thin chaps do. But that’s just the looks of the thing. I can see there isn’t another man in the world like him, and I’d cross the seas to join in with him, if only for the fun of the thing.”

“But what about the end of the fun?” asked Somers.

“Oh, that I don’t know. And nobody does, for that matter.”

“But surely if one believes—”

“One believes a lot, and one believes very little, seems to me. Taking all in all, seems to me we live from hand to mouth, as far as beliefs go.”

“You never would believe,” said Somers, laughing.

“Not till I was made to,” replied Jaz, twisting his face in his enigmatic smile.

Somers looked at the thick, stocky, silent figure in the well-made dark clothes that didn’t in the least belong to him. There was something about him like a prisoner in prison uniform, in his town clothes—and something of that in his bearing. A stocky, silent, unconquerable prisoner. And in his imprisoned soul another kind of mystery, another sort of appeal.

The two men stood still in the cold wind that came up the sands to the south-west. To the left, as they faced the wind, went the black railway track on the pier, and the small engine stood dribbling. On the right the track ran curiously black past a little farm-place with a corrugated iron roof, and past a big field where the stubble of maize or beans stood ragged and sere, on into the little hollow of bush, where the mine was, beyond the stagnant creek. It was curious how intensely black, velvety and unnatural, the railway-track looked on this numb coast-front. The steamer hooted again.

“Cold it is up here,” said Somers.

“It is cold. He’s coming now, though,” replied William James.

They stood together still another minute, looking down the pale sands at the foam and the dark-blue sea, the sere grass scattered with bungalows.

It was a strange, different bond of sympathy united them, from that that subsisted between Somers and Jack, or Somers and Kangaroo. Hardly sympathy at all, but an ancient sort of root-knowledge.

“Well, good-bye,” said Somers, wanting to be gone before the manager came up with the papers. He shook hands with William James—but as usual, Jaz gave him a slack hand. Their eyes met—and the look, something like a taunt, in Trewhella’s secretive grey eye, made Somers stiffen his back, and a kind of haughtiness flew into his soul.

“Different men, different ways, Mr Trewhella,” he said.

William James did not answer, but smiled rather stubbornly. It seemed to Somers the man would be smiling that stubborn, taunting smile till the crack of doom.

“I told Mrs Somers what I think about it,” said Jaz, with a very Cornish accent. “I doubt if she’ll ever do much more believin’ than I shall.” And the taunt was forked this time.

“She says she believes entirely in Kangaroo.”

“Does she now? Who did she tell it to?”

“Me.”

Trewhella still stood with that faint grin on his face, short and stocky and erect like a little post left standing. Somers looked at him again, frowning, and turned abruptly down the bank. The smile left the face of the Cornishman, and he just looked obstinate, indifferent, and curiously alone, as if he stood there all alone in the world. He watched Somers emerge on the sands below, and go walking slowly among the sea-ragged flat shelves of the coast-bed rocks, his head dropping, looking in the pools, his hands in his pockets. And the obstinate light never changed in the eyes of the watcher, not even when he turned to the approaching manager.

Perhaps it was this meeting which made Somers want to see Kangaroo once more. Everything had suddenly become unreal to him. He went to Sydney and to Cooley’s rooms. But during the first half hour, the revulsion from the First persisted. Somers disliked his appearance, and the kangaroo look made him feel devilish. And then the queer, slow manner of approach. Kangaroo was not really ready for his visitor, and he seemed dense, heavy, absent, clownish. It was that kangarooish clownishness that made a vicious kind of hate spring into Somers’ face. He talked in a hard, cutting voice.

“Whom can you depend on, in this world,” he was saying. “Look at these Australians—they’re awfully nice, but they’ve got no inside to them. They’re hollow. How are you going to built on such hollow stalks. They may well call them corn-stalks. They’re marvellous and manly and independent and all that, outside. But inside, they are not. When they’re quite alone, they don’t exist.”

“Yet many of them have been alone a long time, in the bush,” said Kangaroo, watching his visitor with slow, dumb, unchanging eyes.

“Alone, what sort of alone. Physically alone. And they’ve just gone hollow. They’re never alone in spirit: quite, quite alone in spirit. And the people who have are the only people you can depend on.”

“Where shall I find them?”

“Not here. It seems to me, least of all here. The Colonies make for outwardness. Everything is outward—like hollow stalks of corn. The life makes this inevitable: all that struggle with bush and water and what-not, all the mad struggle with the material necessities and conveniences—the inside soul just withers and goes into the outside, and they’re all just lusty robust hollow stalks of people.”

“The corn-stalks bear the corn. I find them generous to recklessness—the greatest quality. The old world is cautious and forever bargaining about its soul. Here they don’t bother to bargain.”

“They’ve no soul to bargain about. But they’re even more full of conceit. What do you expect to do with such people. Build a straw castle?”

“You see I believe in them—perhaps I know them a little better than you do.”

“Perhaps you do. It’ll be cornstalk castle, for all that. What do you expect to build on?”

“They’re generous—generous to recklessness,” shouted Kangaroo. “And I love them. I love them. Don’t you come here carping to me about them. They are my children, I love them. If I’m not to believe in their generosity, am I to believe in your cautious, old-world carping, do you think. I won’t!” he shouted fiercely. “I won’t. Do you hear that!” And he sat hulked in his chair glowering like some queer dark god at bay. Somers paused, and his heart failed.

“Then make me believe in them and their generosity,” he said dryly. “They’re nice. But they haven’t got the last everlasting central bit of soul, solitary soul, that makes a man himself. The central bit of himself. They all merge to the outside, away from the centre. And what can you do, permanently, with such people? You can have a fine corn-stalk blaze. But as for anything permanent—”

“I tell you I hate permanency,” barked Kangaroo. “The phœnix rises out of the ashes.” He rolled over angrily in his chair.

“Let her! Like Rider Haggard’s She, I don’t feel like risking it a second time,” said Somers, like the venomous serpent he was.

“Generous, generous men!” Kangaroo muttered to himself. “At least you can get a blaze out of them. Not like European wet matches, that will never again strike alight—as you’ve said yourself.”

“But a blaze for what? What’s your blaze for?”

“I don’t care,” yelled Kangaroo, springing with sudden magnificent swiftness to his feet, and facing Somers, and seizing him by the shoulders and shaking him till his head nearly fell of, yelling all the time: “I don’t care, I tell you, I don’t care. Where there’s fire there’s change. And where the fire is love, there’s creation. Seeds of fire. That’s enough for me! Fire, and seeds of fire, and love. That’s all I care about. Don’t carp at me, I tell you. Don’t carp at me with your old, European, damp spirit. If you can’t take fire, we can. That’s all. Generous, passionate men—and you dare to carp at them. You. What have you to show?” And he went back to his chair like a great, sulky bear-god.

Somers sat rather stupefied than convinced. But he found himself again wanting to be convinced, wanting to be carried away. The desire hankered in his heart. Kangaroo had become again beautiful: huge and beautiful like some god that sways and seems clumsy, then suddenly flashes with all the agility of thunder and lightning. Huge and beautiful as he sat hulked in his chair. Somers did wish he would get up again and carry him quite away.

But where to? Where to? Where is one carried to when one is carried away? He had a bitter mistrust of seventh heavens and all heavens in general. But then the experience. If Kangaroo had got up at that moment Somers would have given him heart and soul and body, for the asking, and damn all consequences. He longed to do it. He knew that by just going over and laying a hand on the great figure of the sullen god he could achieve it. Kangaroo would leap like a thunder-cloud and catch him up—catch him up and away into a transport. A transport that should last for life. He knew it.

But alas, it was just too late. In some strange way Somers felt he had come to the end of transports: they had no more mystery for him; at least this kind: or perhaps no more charm. Some bubble or other had burst in his heart. All his body and fibres wanted to go over and touch the other great being into a storm of response. But his soul wouldn’t. The coloured bubble had burst.

Kangaroo sat up and adjusted his eyeglasses.

“Don’t you run away with the idea, though,” he said, “that I am just an emotional fool.” His voice was almost menacing, and with a strange cold, intellectual quality that Somers had never heard before.

“I believe in the one fire of love. I believe it is the one inspiration of all creative activity. I trust myself entirely to the fire of love. This I do with my reason also. I don’t discard my reason. I use it at the service of love, like a sharp weapon. I try to keep it very sharp—and very dangerous. Where I don’t love, I use only my will and my wits. Where I love, I trust to love alone.” The voice came cold and static.

Somers sat rather blank. The change frightened him almost as something obscene. This was the reverse to the passionate thunder-god.

“But is love the only inspiration of creative activity?” he asked, rather feebly.

“This is the first time I have heard it questioned. Do you know of any other?”

Somers thought he did, but he was not going to give himself away to that sharp weapon of a voice, so he did not answer.

“Is there any other inspirational force than the force of love?” continued Kangaroo. “There is no other. Love makes the trees flower and shed their seed, love makes the animals mate and birds put on their best feather, and sing their best songs. And all that man has ever created on the face of the earth, or ever will create—if you will allow me the use of the word create, with regard to man’s highest productive activities.”

“It’s the word I always use myself,” said Somers.

“Naturally, since you know how to think inspiredly. Well then, all that man ever has created or ever will create, while he remains man, has been created in the inspiration and by the force of love. And not only man—all the living creatures are swayed to creation, to new creation, to the creation of song and beauty and lovely gesture, by love. I will go further. I believe the sun’s attraction for the earth is a form of love.”

“Then why doesn’t the earth fly into the sun?” said Somers.

“For the same reason. Love is mutual. Each attracts the other. But in natural love each tries at the same time to withhold the other, to keep the other true to its own beloved nature. To any true lover, it would be the greatest disaster if the beloved broke down from her own nature and self and began to identify herself with him, with his nature and self. I say, to any genuine lover this is the greatest disaster, and he tries by every means in his power to prevent this. The earth and sun, on their plane, have discovered a perfect equilibrium. But man has not yet begun. His lesson is so much harder. His consciousness is at once so complicated and so cruelly limited. This is the lesson before us. Man has loved the beloved for the sake of love, so far, but rarely, rarely has he consciously known that he could only love her for her own separate, strange self: forever strange and a joyful mystery to him. Lovers henceforth have got to know one another. A terrible mistake, and a self delusion. True lovers only learn that as they know less, and less, and less of each other, the mystery of each grows more startling to the other. The tangible unknown: that is the magic, the mystery, and the grandeur of love, that it puts the tangible unknown in our arms, and against our breast: the beloved. We have made a fatal mistake. We have got to know so much about things, that we think we know the actuality, and contain it. The sun is as much outside us, and as eternally unknown, as ever it was. And the same with each man’s beloved: like the sun. What do the facts we know about a man amount to? Only two things we can know of him, and this by pure soul-intuition: we can know if he is true to the flame of life and love which is inside his heart, or if he is false to it. If he is true, he is friend. If he is wilfully false, and inimical to the fire of life and love in his own heart, then he is my enemy as well as his own.”

Somers listened. He seemed to see it all and hear it all with marvellous clarity. And he believed that it was all true.

“Yes,” he said, “I believe that is all true.”

“What is it then that you disbelieve?”

“I don’t quite believe that love is the one and only exclusive force or mystery of living inspiration. I don’t quite believe that. There is something else.”

Kangaroo looked at him for once overbearingly and with a sort of contempt.

“Tell me what it is,” he replied briefly.

“I am not very clear myself. And, you see, what I want to say, you don’t want to hear.”

“Yes, I do,” snapped Kangaroo.

“With your ears and your critical mind only.”

“Say it, anyhow, say it.”

Richard sat feeling very stupid. The communicative soul is like the ass, you can lead him to the water, but you can’t make him drink.

“Why,” he said, “it means an end of us and what we are, in the first place. And then a re-entry into us of the great God, who enters us from below, not from above.”

Kangaroo sat bunched up like some creature watching round-eyed out of a darker corner.

“How do you mean, enters us from below?” he barked.

“Not through the spirit. Enters us from the lower self, the dark self, the phallic self, if you like.”

“Enters us from the phallic self?” snapped Kangaroo sharply.

“Sacredly. The god you can never see or visualise, who stands dark on the threshold of the phallic me.”

“The phallic you, my dear young friend, what is that but love?”

Richard shook his head in silence.

“No,” he said, in a slow, remote voice. “I know your love, Kangaroo. Working everything from the spirit, from the head. You work the lower self as an instrument of the spirit. Now it is time for the spirit to leave us again; it is time for the Son of Man to depart, and leave us dark, in front of the unspoken God: who is just beyond the dark threshold of the lower self, my lower self. There is a great God on the threshold of my lower self, whom I fear while he is my glory. And the spirit goes out like a spent candle.”

Kangaroo watched with a heavy face like a mask.

“It is time for the spirit to leave us,” he murmured in a somnambulist voice. “Time for the spirit to leave us.”

Somers, who had dropped his face, hiding it as he spoke, watched the other man from under his brows. Kangaroo, who still sat impassive, like a frozen, antagonised Buddha, gave himself a jerk of recovery.

“Ah well!” he sighed, with a weary, impatient, condescending sigh. “I was never able to follow mysticism and metaphysics. One of my many limitations. I don’t know what you mean.”

“But what is your ‘love’ but a mystical thing?” asked Richard indignantly.

“My love? Why, that is something I feel, as plain as toothache.”

“Well, so do I feel the other: and love has become like cardboard to me,” said Richard, still indignant.

“Like cardboard? Well, I don’t quite see love like cardboard, dear boy. For you are a dear boy, in spite of yourself. Oh yes, you are. There’s some demon inside you makes you perverse, and won’t let you be the dear, beautiful thing you are. But I’m going to exorcise that demon.”

Somers gave a short laugh, the very voice of the demon speaking.

“Oh yes I am,” said Kangaroo, in a steely voice. “I’m going to exorcise that demon, and release your beautiful Andromeda soul.”

“Try,” ejaculated Richard dryly, turning aside his face in distaste.

Kangaroo leaped to his feet and stood towering over the little enemy as if he would stoop over him and smother him in violent warmth and drive out the demon in that way. But Richard sat cold and withheld, and Kangaroo had not the power to touch him.

“I’m going to try,” shouted the lawyer, in his slightly husky roar. “You’ve made it my prerogative by telling me to try. I’m going to love you, and you won’t get away from that. I’m the hound of heaven after you, my boy, and I’m fatal to the hell hound that’s leading you. Do you know I love you?—that I loved you long before I met you?”

Richard, curled narrow in his chair like a snake, glanced up at the big man projecting over him. A sort of magnetic effusion seemed to come out of Kangaroo’s body, and Richard’s hand was almost drawn in spite of himself to touch the other man’s body. He had deliberately to refrain from laying his hand on the near, generous stomach of the Kangaroo, because automatically his hand would have lifted and sought that rest. But he prevented himself, and the eyes of the two men met. Kangaroo searched Lovat’s eyes: but they seemed to be of cloudy blue like hell-smoke, impenetrable and devilish. Kangaroo watched a long time: but the other man was the unchangeable. Kangaroo turned aside suddenly.

“Ah well,” he said. “I can see there is a beast in the way. There is a beast in your eyes, Lovat, and if I can’t conquer him then—then woe-betide you, my dear. But I love you, you see.”

“Sounds like a threat,” laughed Somers.

Kangaroo leaned and laid his hand gently on Lovat’s shoulder.

“Don’t say that”; his voice was small now, and very gentle. “I loved you before I knew you. My soul cries for you. And you hurt me with the demon that is in you.”

Richard became very pale, and was silent for some moments. The hand sank heavier, nearer, on his shoulder.

“You see,” said Somers, trying hard to be fair, “what you call my demon is what I identify myself with. It’s my best me, and I stick to it. I think love, all this love of ours, is a devilish thing now: a slow poison. Really, I know the dark god at the lower threshold—even if I have to repeat it like a phrase. And in the sacred dark men meet and touch, and it is a great communion. But it isn’t this love. There’s no love in it. But something deeper. Love seems to me somehow trivial: and the spirit seems like something that belongs to paper. I can’t help it—I know another God.”

The pressure of the hand became inert.

“But aren’t you merely inventing other terms for the same thing that I mean, and that I call love?” said Kangaroo, in a strange, toneless voice, looking aside.

“Does it seem to you that I am?” asked Lovat, gently and dispassionately.

The strange, great passionate cloud of Kangaroo still hung there, hovering over the pale, sharp isolation of Somers, who lay looking up. And then it seemed as if the glow and vibration left Kangaroo’s body, the cloud became grey and heavy. He sighed, removed his hand, and turned away.

“Ah well!” he said. “Ah well!”

Somers rose, trembling now, and feeling frail.

“I’ll go,” he said.

“Yes, do go,” said Kangaroo.

And without another word Somers went, leaving the other man sunk in a great heap in his chair, as if defeated. Somers did not even pity him. His heart felt queer and cave-like and devoid of emotion.

He was spending the night at the Callcotts. Harriet, too, was there. But he was in no hurry to get back there. It was a clear and very starry night. He took the tram-car away from the centre of the town, then walked. As was always the case with him, in this country, the land and the world disappeared as night fell, as if the day had been an illusion, and the sky came bending down. There was the Milky Way, in clouds of star-fume, bending down right in front of him, right down till it seemed as if he would walk on to it, if he kept going. The pale, fumy drift of the Milky Way drooped down and seemed so near, straight in front, that it seemed the obvious road to take. And one would avoid the strange dark gaps, gulfs, in the way overhead. And one would look across to the floating isles of star-fume, to the south, across the gulfs where the sharp stars flashed like lighthouses, and one would be in a new way denizen of a new plane, walking by oneself. There would be a real new way to take. And the mechanical earth quite obliterated, sunk out.

Only he saw, on the sea’s high black horizon, the various reddish sore-looking lights of a ship. There they were—the signs of the ways of men—hot-looking and weary. He turned quickly away from the marks of the far-off ship, to look again at the downward slope of the great hill of the Milky Way. He wanted so much to get out of this lit-up cloy of humanity, and the exhaust of love, and the fretfulness of desire. Why not swing away into cold separation? Why should desire always be fretting, fretting like a tugged chain? Why not break the bond and be single, take a fierce stoop and a swing back, as when a gannet plunges like a white, metallic arrow into the sea, raising a burst of spray, disappearing, completing the downward curve of the parabola in the invisible underwater where it seizes the object of desire, then away, away with success upwards, back flashing into the air and white space? Why not? Why want to urge, urge, urge oneself down the causeways of desirous love, hard pavements of love? Even like Kangaroo. Why shouldn’t meeting be a stoop as a gannet stoops into the sea, or a hawk, or a kite, in a swift rapacious parabola downwards, to touch at the lowermost turn of the curve, then up again?

It is a world of slaves: all love-professing. Why unite with them? Why pander to them? Why go with them at all? Why not strike at communion out of the unseen, as the gannet strikes into the unseen underwater, or the kite from above at a mouse? One seizure, and away again, back away into isolation. A touch, and away. Always back, away into isolation. Why be cloyed and clogged down like billions of fish in water, or billions of mice on land? It is a world of slaves. Then why not gannets in the upper air, having two worlds? Why only one element? If I am to have a meeting it shall be down, down in the invisible, and the moment I re-emerge it shall be alone. In the visible world I am alone, an isolate instance. My meeting is in the underworld, the dark. Beneath every gannet that jumps from the water ten thousand fish are swimming still. But they are swimming in a shudder of silver fear. That is the magic of the ocean. Let them shudder the huge ocean aglimmer.

He arrived at Wyewurk at last, and found a little party. William James was there, and Victoria had made, by coincidence, a Welsh rarebit. The beer was on the table.

“Just in time,” said Jack. “As well you’re not half an hour later, or there might ’a been no booze. How did you come—tram?”

“Yes—and walked part of the way.”

“What kind of an evening did you have?” said Harriet.

He looked at her. A chill fell upon the little gathering, from his presence.

“We didn’t agree,” he replied.

“I knew you wouldn’t—not for long, anyhow,” she replied. “I don’t see you agreeing and playing second fiddle for long.”

“Do you see me as a fiddler at all?”

“I’ve seen you fiddling away hard enough many times,” retorted Harriet. “Why, what else do you do, all your life, but fiddle some tune or other?”

He did not reply, and there was a pause. His face was pale and very definite, as if it were some curious seashell.

“What did you get the wind up about, between you?” said Jack soothingly, pouring Somers a glass of beer.

“No wind. We’re only not the same pair of shoes.”

“I could have told you that before you went,” said Jaz with quiet elation in his tones.

Victoria looked at Somers with dark, bright eyes. She was quite fascinated by him, as an Australian bird by some adder.

“Isn’t Mr Somers queer?” she said. “He doesn’t seem to mind a bit.”

Somers looked at her quickly, a smile round his eyes, and a curious, smiling devil inside them, cold as ice.

“Oh yes, he minds. Don’t take any notice of his pretence. He’s only in a bad temper,” cried Harriet. “I know him by now. He’s been in a temper for days.”

“Oh, why?” cried Victoria. “I thought he was lovely this afternoon when he was here.”

“Yes,” said Harriet grimly. “Lovely! You should live with him.”

But again Victoria looked at his clear, fixed face, with the false smile round the eyes, and her fascination did not diminish.

“What an excellent Welsh rarebit,” he said. “If there were a little red pepper.”

“Red pepper!” cried Victoria. “There is!” And she sprang up to get it for him. As she handed it to him he looked into her dilated, dark bright eyes, and thanked her courteously. When he was in this state his voice and tone in speaking were very melodious. Of course it set Harriet on edge. But Victoria stood fluttering with her hands over the table, bewildered.

“What are you feeling for?” asked Jack.

She only gave a little blind laugh, and remembered that she was going to sit down. So she sat down, and then wondered what it was she was going to do after that.

“So you don’t cotton on to Kangaroo either?” said Jack easily.

“I have the greatest admiration for him.”

“You’re not alone there. But you don’t fall over yourself, loving him.”

“I only trip, and recover my balance for the moment.”

Jaz gave a loud laugh, across his cheese.

“That’s good!” he said.

“You trip, and recover your balance,” said Jack. “You’re a wary one. The rest of us falls right in, flop, and are never heard of again. And how did you part then?”

“We parted in mutual esteem. I said I would go, and he asked me please to do so as quickly as possible.”

Jack made round eyes, and even Jaz left off eating.