Kangaroo

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 fr...

“Your father was a working-man, was he? Is that really so? Well, that _is_ a surprise! And yet,” he changed his tone, “no, it isn’t. I might have known. Of course I might. How s...

“And why couldn’t we be happy in this wonderful new country, living to ourselves. We could have a cow, and chickens--and then the Pacific, and this marvellous new country. Surel...

And Jack Callcott’s rebuke stuck in his throat. Perhaps after all he was just a Pommy, prescribing things with overmuch emphasis, and wanting to feel God-Almighty in the face of...

The young man with the fine suit and the great legs put down his money, gently and shyly as a girl, beside the driver on the little window-ledge. Then he got out and strode off,...

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

But every club had its own committee, and this committee was composed of five or six of the best, surest members, sworn in to secrecy and to absolute obedience to any decision....

“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 dres...

There was a curious battle in silence going on between the two men. To Harriet, all this familiar shirt-sleeve business was just fun, the charades. In her most gushing genial mo...

The same with Kangaroo. If love was the all in all then the great range of love was complete as he put it: a man’s love for wife and children, his sheer, confessed love for his...

“It may be as you say, Mr Somers,” he replied. “Men may not be ready yet for any great change. That does not make the change less inevitable. It’s coming, and it’s got to come....

A strange country. A wonderful country. Who knows what future it may have? Can a great continent breed a people of this magic harmlessness without becoming a sacrifice of some o...

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...

So he lay down, and at length fell into a sort of semi-consciousness, still pressing his fists into his abdomen, and feeling as he imagined a woman might feel after her first ch...

“Oh yes, he’s a wonderful person. Perhaps a bit too much of a wonder. A hatchet doesn’t look anything like so spanking as a lawn-mower, does it now, but it’ll make a sight bigge...

A man culminates in intense moments. This was one of Somers’ white, deathlike moments, as he walked home from the tiny post-office in the hamlet, on the wintry morning, after he...

On the Monday morning he went down to say good-bye at the farm. It was a bitter moment, he was so much attached to them. And they to him. He could not bear to go. Only one was n...

But not yet! Oh, no, not yet. Not yet, not now, nor ever. Not while life was life, should they lay hold of him. Never again. Never would he be touched again. And because they ha...

The door opened swiftly and Jack, very stern-faced, entered. He looked at Somers in anger and contempt, then went to the bedside. The nurse hovered in the doorway with an anxiou...

And every _living_ human soul is a well-head to this darkness of the living unutterable. Into every living soul wells up the darkness, the unutterable. And then there is travail...

Harriet and Somers went back home on the Monday. On the Tuesday appeared Sharpe, the police had been and left him a summons to appear at the market town, charged under the Defen...

“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,...

“You think angels would fear to tread in such a delicate mess?” said Harriet, with a flash of mocking wit that sent a faint smile up Jack’s face, like a red flame. His nose, his...

“The old Fraser Island aboriginals told me that the deep blue lake, two miles from the White Cliffs, was once a level plateau, on which their fathers held fights and corroborees...

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...

“Yes, it is. If as you say Australia is like the poor prostitute, and the Australian just bullies her to get what he can out of her and then treats her like dirt.”

“I’ll probably repent whatever I do,” replied Somers, “so what’s the odds. I’ll probably repent bitterly going to America, going back to the world: when I want Australia. I want...

The road ended on the salt pool where the sea had ebbed in. Across was a state reserve--a bit of aboriginal Australia, with gum trees and empty spaces beyond the flat salt water...

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 strai...

Those bluebells! They were worse than the earlier songs. In 1915, autumn, Hampstead Heath, leaves burning in heaps, in the blue air, London still almost pre-war London: but by t...

They had another ferocious battle, Somers and Harriet; they stood opposite to one another in such fury one against the other that they nearly annihilated one another. He couldn’...

“Yes, I know, I’ve seen them,” he replied rather crossly, knowing that the neighbours would hear her. Harriet was so blithely unconscious of people on the other side of hedges....

“There’s something more,” replied Richard. “They don’t believe in our gods, in our ideals. They remember older gods, older ideals, different gods: before the Jews invented a men...

A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass of the park beside Macquarie Street, in the dinner hour. It was winter, the end of May, but the sun was warm, and they lay there in sh...

Now this is the state of the mass. It is driven, goaded mad at length by the pricking of the God-urge which it will not, cannot attend to or interpret. It is so goaded that it i...

Everybody had bought streamers, rolls of coloured paper ribbon, and now the passengers leaning over the rail of the lower and middle decks tossed the unwinding rolls to their fr...