Part 21

“And what do you mean about his being something? Some more Trewhella?”

“Perhaps. I couldn’t help feeling that Struthers was shrewder than you are--in a way baser--but for that reason more likely to be effectual.”

Kangaroo watched Richard for a long time in silence.

“I know why Trewhella took you there,” he said sulkily.

“Why?”

“Oh, I know why. And what have you decided?”

“Nothing.”

There was a long and obstinate silence. The two men were at loggerheads, and neither would make the first move.

“You seem very thick with Trewhella,” said Kangaroo at last.

“Not thick,” said Richard, “Celts--Cornish, Irish--they always interest me. What do you imagine is at the bottom of Jaz?”

“Treachery.”

“Oh, not only,” laughed Somers.

“Then why do you ask me, if you know better?”

“Because I don’t really get to the bottom of him.”

“There is no bottom to get to--he’s the instinctive traitor, as they all are.”

“Oh, surely not only that.”

“I see nothing else. They would like the white civilisation to be trampled underfoot piecemeal. And at the same time they live on us like parasites.” Kangaroo glowered fiercely.

“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 mental Jehovah, and a spiritual Christ. They are nearer the magic of the animal world.”

“Magic of the animal world!” roared Kangaroo. “What does that nonsense mean? Are you traitor to your own human intelligence?”

“All too human,” smiled Richard.

Kangaroo sat up very straight, and looked at Somers. Somers still smiled faintly and luminously.

“Why are you so easily influenced?” said Kangaroo, with a certain cold reproof. “You are like a child. I know that is part of the charm of your nature, that you are naive like a child, but sometimes you are childish rather than childlike. A perverse child.”

“Let me be a perverse child then,” laughed Somers, with a flash of attractive laughter at Kangaroo. It frightened the big man, this perverse mood. If only he could have got the wicked light out of Lovat’s face, and brought back the fire of earnestness. And yet, as an individual, he was attracted to the little fellow now, like a moth to a candle: a great lumbering moth to a small, but dangerous flame of a candle.

“I’m sure it’s Struthers’ turn to set the world right, before it’s yours,” Somers said.

“Why are you sure?”

“I don’t know. I thought so when I saw him. You’re too human.”

Kangaroo was silent, and offended.

“I don’t think that is a final reason,” he replied.

“For me it is. No, I want one of the olives that the man took away. You give one such good food, one forgets deep questions in your lovely salad. Why don’t you do as Jaz says, and back up the Reds for the time being. Play your pawns and your bishops.”

“You know that a bite from a hyæna means blood-poisoning,” said Kangaroo.

“Don’t be solemn. You mean Willie Struthers? Yes, I wouldn’t want to be bitten. But if you are so sure of love as an all-ruling influence, and so sure of the fidelity of the Diggers, through love, I should agree with Jaz. Push Struthers where he wants to go. Let him proclaim the rule of the People: let him nationalise all industries and resources, and confiscate property above a certain amount: and bring the world about his ears. Then you step in like a saviour. It’s much easier to point to a wrecked house, if you want to build something new, than to persuade people to pull the house down and build it up in a better style.”

Kangaroo was deeply offended, mortified. Yet he listened.

“You are hopelessly facile, Lovat,” he said gently. “In the first place, the greatest danger to the world to-day is anarchy, not bolshevism. It is anarchy and unrule that are coming on us--and that is what I, as an order-loving Jew and one of the half-chosen people, do not want. I want one central principle in the world: the principle of love, the maximum of individual liberty, the minimum of human distress. Lovat, you know I am sincere, don’t you?”

There was a certain dignity and pathos in the question.

“I do,” replied Somers sincerely. “But I am tired of one central principle in the world.”

“Anything else means chaos.”

“There has to be chaos occasionally. And then, Roo, if you _do_ want a benevolent fatherly autocracy, I’m sure you’d better step in after there’s been a bit of chaos.”

Kangaroo shook his head.

“Like a wayward child! Like a wayward child!” he murmured. “You are not such a fool, Lovat, that you can’t see that once you break the last restraints on humanity to-day, it is the end. It is the end. Once burst the flood-gates, and you’ll never get the water back into control. Never.”

“Then let it distil up to heaven. I really don’t care.”

“But man, you are _perverse_. What’s the matter with you?” suddenly bellowed Kangaroo.

They had gone into the study for coffee. Kangaroo stood with his head dropped and his feet apart, his back to the fire. And suddenly he roared like a lion at Somers. Somers started, then laughed.

“Even perversity has its points,” he said.

Kangaroo glowered like a massive cloud. Somers was standing staring at the Dürer etching of St Jerome: he loved Dürer. Suddenly, with a great massive movement, Kangaroo caught the other man to his breast.

“Don’t, Lovat,” he said, in a much moved voice, pressing the slight body of the lesser man against his own big breast and body. “Don’t!” he said, with a convulsive tightening of the arm.

Somers, squeezed so that he could hardly breathe, kept his face from Kangaroo’s jacket and managed to ejaculate:

“All right. Let me go and I won’t.”

“Don’t thwart me,” pleaded Kangaroo. “Don’t--or I shall have to break all connection with you, and I love you so. I love you so. Don’t be perverse, and put yourself against me.”

He still kept Somers clasped against him, but not squeezed so hard. And Somers heard over his own head the voice speaking with a blind yearning. Not to himself. No. It was speaking over his head, to the void, to the infinite or something tiresome like that. Even the words: “I love you so. I love you so.” They made the marrow in Lovat’s bones melt, but they made his heart flicker even more devilishly.

“It is an impertinence, that he says he loves me,” he thought to himself. But he did not speak, out of regard for Kangaroo’s emotion, which was massive and genuine, even if Somers felt it missed his own particular self completely.

In those few moments when he was clasped to the warm, passionate body of Kangaroo, Somers’ mind flew with swift thought. “He doesn’t love _me_,” he thought to himself. “He just turns a great general emotion on me, like a tap. I feel as cold as steel, in his clasp--and as separate. It is presumption, his loving me. If he was in any way really _aware_ of me, he’d keep at the other end of the room, as if I was a dangerous little animal. He wouldn’t be hugging me if I were a scorpion. And I _am_ a scorpion. So why doesn’t he know it. Damn his love. He wants to _force_ me.”

After a few minutes Kangaroo dropped his arm and turned his back. He stood there, a great, hulked, black back. Somers thought to himself: “If I were a kestrel I’d stoop and strike him straight in the back of the neck, and he’d die. He ought to die.” Then he went and sat in his chair. Kangaroo left the room.

He did not come back for some time, and Lovat began to grow uncomfortable. But the devilishness in his heart continued, broken by moments of tenderness or pity or self-doubt. The gentleness was winning, when Kangaroo came in again. And one look at the big, gloomy figure set the devil alert like a flame again in the other man’s heart.

Kangaroo took his place before the fire again, but looked aside.

“Of course you understand,” he began in a muffled voice, “that it must be one thing or the other. Either you are with me, and I _feel_ you with me: or you cease to exist for me.”

Somers listened with wonder. He admired the man for his absoluteness, and his strange blind heroic obsession.

“I’m not really against you, am I?” said Somers. And his own heart answered, _Yes you are!_

“You are not _with_ me,” said Kangaroo, bitterly.

“No,” said Somers slowly.

“Then why have you deceived me, played with me,” suddenly roared Kangaroo. “I could have killed you.”

“Don’t do that,” laughed Somers, rather coldly.

But the other did not answer. He was like a black cloud.

“I want to hear,” said Kangaroo, “your case against me.”

“It’s not a case, Kangaroo,” said Richard, “it’s a sort of instinct.”

“Against what?”

“Why, against your ponderousness. And against your insistence. And against the whole sticky stream of love, and the hateful will-to-love. It’s the will-to-love that I hate, Kangaroo.”

“In me?”

“In us all. I just hate it. It’s a sort of syrup we _have_ to stew in, and it’s loathsome. Don’t love me. Don’t want to save mankind. You’re so awfully _general_, and your love is so awfully general: as if one were only a cherry in the syrup. Don’t love me. Don’t want me to love you. Let’s be hard, separate men. Let’s understand one another deeper than love.”

“Two human ants, in short,” said Kangaroo, and his face was yellow.

“No, no. Two men. Let us go to the understanding that is deeper than love.”

“Is any understanding deeper than love?” asked Kangaroo with a sneer.

“Why, yes, you know it is. At least between men.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know it. I know the understanding that is much _less_ than love. If you want me to have a merely commonplace acquaintance with you, I refuse. That’s all.”

“We are neither of us capable of a quite commonplace acquaintance.”

“Oh yes, I am,” barked Kangaroo.

“I’m not. But you’re such a Kangaroo, wanting to carry mankind in your belly-pouch, cosy, with its head and long ears peeping out. You sort of figure yourself a Kangaroo of Judah, instead of Lion of Judah: Jehovah with a great heavy tail and a belly-pouch. Let’s get off it, and be men, with the gods beyond us. I _don’t_ want to be godlike, Kangaroo. I like to know the gods beyond me. Let’s start as men, with the great gods beyond us.”

He looked up with a beautiful candour in his face, and a diabolic bit of mockery in his soul. For Kangaroo’s face had gone like an angry wax mask, with mortification. An angry wax mask of mortification, haughty with a stiff, wooden haughtiness, and two little near-set holes for eyes, behind glass pince-nez. Richard had a moment of pure hate for him, in the silence. For Kangaroo refused to answer.

“What’s the good, men trying to be gods?” said Richard. “You’re a Jew, and you must be Jehovah or nothing. We’re Christians, all little Christs walking without our crucifixes. Jaz is quite right to play us one against the other. Struthers is the anti-christ, preaching love alone. I’m tired, tired. I want to be a man, with the gods beyond me, greater than me. I want the great gods, and my own mere manliness.”

“It’s that treacherous Trewhella,” Kangaroo murmured to himself. Then he seemed to be thinking hard.

And then at last he lifted his head and looked at Somers. And now Somers openly hated him. His face was arrogant, insolent, righteous.

“I am sorry I have made a mistake in you,” he said. “But we had better settle the matter finally here. I think the best thing you can do is to leave Australia. I don’t think you can do me any serious damage with your talk. I would ask you--before I warn you--not to try. That is all. I should prefer now to be alone.”

He had become again hideous, with a long yellowish face and black eyes close together, and a cold, mindless, dangerous hulk to his shoulders. For a moment Somers was afraid of him, as of some great ugly idol that might strike. He felt the intense hatred of the man coming at him in cold waves. He stood up in a kind of horror, in front of the great, close-eyed, horrible thing that was now Kangaroo. Yes, a thing, not a whole man. A great Thing, a horror.

“I am sorry if I have been foolish,” he said, backing away from the Thing. And as he went out of the door he made a quick movement, and his heart melted in horror lest the Thing Kangaroo should suddenly lurch forward and clutch him. If that happened, Kangaroo would have blood on his hands. But Somers kept all his wits about him, and quickly, quietly got his hat and walked to the hall door. It seemed like a dream, as if it were miles to the outer door, as if his heart would burst before he got there, as if he would never be able to undo the fastening of the door.

But he kept all his wits about him, and as by inspiration managed the three separate locks of the strong door. Kangaroo had followed slowly, awfully, behind, like a madman. If he came near enough to touch!

Somers had the door opened, and looked round. The huge figure, the white face with the two eyes close together, like a spider, approaching with awful stillness. If the stillness suddenly broke, and he struck out!

“Good-night!” said Somers, at the blind, horrible-looking face. And he moved quickly down the stairs, though still not apparently in flight, but going in that quick, controlled way that acts as a check on an onlooker.

He was thankful for the streets, for the people. But by bad luck, it was Saturday night, when Sydney is all shut up, and the big streets seem dark and dreary, though thronging with people. Dark streets, dark, streaming people. And fear. One could feel such fear, in Australia.

CHAP: XII. THE NIGHTMARE

He had known such different deep fears. In Sicily, a sudden fear, in the night of some single murderer, some single thing hovering as it were out of the violent past, with the intent of murder. Out of the old Greek past, that had been so vivid, sometimes an unappeased spirit of murderous-hate against the usurping moderns. A sudden presence of murder in the air, because of something which the modern psyche had excluded, some old and vital thing which Christianity has cut out. An old spirit, waiting for vengeance. But in England, during the later years of the war, a true and deadly fear of the criminal _living_ spirit which arose in all the stay-at-home bullies who governed the country during those years. From 1916 to 1919 a wave of criminal lust rose and possessed England, there was a reign of terror, under a set of indecent bullies like Bottomley of _John Bull_ and other bottom-dog members of the House of Commons. Then Somers had known what it was to live in a perpetual state of semi-fear: the fear of the criminal public and the criminal government. The torture was steadily applied, during those years after Asquith fell, to break the independent soul in any man who would not hunt with the criminal mob. A man must identify himself with the criminal mob, sink his sense of truth, of justice, and of human honour, and bay like some horrible unclean hound, bay with a loud sound, from slavering, unclean jaws.

This Richard Lovat Somers had steadily refused to do. The deepest part of a man is his sense of essential truth, essential honour, essential justice. This deepest self makes him abide by his own feelings, come what may. It is not sentimentalism. It is just the male human creature, the thought-adventurer, driven to earth. Will he give in or won’t he?

Many men, carried on a wave of patriotism and true belief in democracy, entered the war. Many men were driven in out of belief that it was necessary to save their property. Vast numbers of men were just bullied into the army. A few remained. Of these, many became conscientious objectors.

Somers tiresomely belonged to no group. He would not enter the army, because his profoundest instinct was against it. Yet he had no conscientious objection to war. It was the whole spirit of the war, the vast mob-spirit, which he could never acquiesce in. The terrible, terrible war, made so fearful because in every country practically every man lost his head, and lost his own centrality, his own manly isolation in his own integrity, which alone keeps life real. Practically every man being caught away from himself, as in some horrible flood, and swept away with the ghastly masses of other men, utterly unable to speak, or feel for himself, or to stand on his own feet, delivered over and swirling in the current, suffocated for the time being. Some of them to die for ever. Most to come back home victorious in circumstance, but with their inner pride gone: inwardly lost. To come back home, many of them, to wives who had egged them on to this downfall in themselves: black bitterness. Others to return to a bewildered wife who had in vain tried to keep her man true to himself, tried and tried, only to see him at last swept away. And oh, when he was swept away, how she loved him. But when he came back, when he crawled out like a dog out of a dirty stream, a stream that had suddenly gone slack and turbid: when he came back covered with outward glory and inward shame, then there was the price to pay.

And there _is_ this bitter and sordid after-war price to pay because men lost their heads, and worse, lost their inward, individual integrity. And when a man loses his inward, isolated, manly integrity, it is a bad day for that man’s true wife. A true man should not lose his head. The greater the crisis, the more intense should be his isolated reckoning with his own soul. And _then_ let him act, of his own whole self. Not fling himself away: or much worse, let himself be _dragged_ away, bit by bit.

Awful years--’16, ’17, ’18, ’19--the years when the damage was done. The years when the world lost its real manhood. Not for lack of courage to face death. Plenty of superb courage to face death. But no courage in any man to face his own isolated soul, and abide by its decision. Easier to sacrifice oneself. So much easier!

Richard Lovat was one of those utterly unsatisfactory creatures who just would not. He had no conscientious objections. He knew that men _must_ fight, some time in some way or other. He was no Quaker, to believe in perpetual peace. He had been in Germany times enough to know _how_ much he detested the German military creatures: mechanical bullies they were. They had once threatened to arrest him as a spy, and had insulted him more than once. Oh, he would never forgive _them_, in his inward soul. But then the industrialism and commercialism of England, with which patriotism and democracy became identified: did not these insult a man and hit him pleasantly across the mouth? How much humiliation had Richard suffered, trying to earn his living! How had they tried, with their beastly industrial self-righteousness, to humiliate him as a separate, single man? They wanted to bring him to heel even more than the German militarist did. And if a man is to be brought to any heel, better a spurred heel than the heel of a Jewish financier. So Richard decided later, when the years let him think things over, and see where he was.

Therefore when the war came, his instinct was against it. When the Asquith government so softly foundered, he began to suffer agonies. But when the Asquith government went right under, and in its place came that _John Bull_ government of ’16, ’17, ’18, then agonies gave way to tortures. He was summoned to join the army: and went. Spent a night in barracks with forty other men, and not one of these other men but felt like a criminal condemned, bitter in dejection and humiliation. Was medically examined in the morning by two doctors, both gentlemen, who knew the sacredness of another naked man: and was rejected.

So, that was over. He went back home. And he made up his mind what he would do. He would never voluntarily make a martyr of himself. His feeling was private to himself, he didn’t want to force it on any other man. He would just act alone. For the moment, he was rejected as medically unfit. If he was called up again, he would go again. But he would never serve.

“Once,” he said to Harriet, “that they have really conscripted me, I will never obey another order, if they kill me.”

Poor Harriet felt scared, and didn’t know what else to say.

“If ever,” he said, looking up from his own knees in their old grey flannel trousers, as he sat by the fire, “if ever I see my legs in khaki, I shall die. But they shall never put my legs into khaki.”

That first time, at the barracks in the country town in the west, they had treated him with that instinctive regard and gentleness which he usually got from men who were not German militarist bullies, or worse, British commercial bullies. For instance, in the morning in that prison barracks room, these unexamined recruits were ordered to make their beds and sweep the room. In obedience, so far, Richard Lovat took one of the heavy brooms. He was pale, silent, isolated: a queer figure, a young man with a beard. The other soldiers--or must-be soldiers--had looked at him as a queer fish, but that he was used to.

“Say, Dad,” said a fattish young fellow older than himself, the only blatherer, a loose fellow who had come from Canada to join up and was already cursing: he was a good deal older than Somers.

“Say, Dad,” said this fellow, as they sat in the train coming up, “all that’ll come off to-morrow--Qck, Qck!”--and he made two noises, and gave two long swipes with his finger round his chin, to intimate that Richard’s beard would be cut off to-morrow.

“We’ll see,” said Richard, smiling with pale lips.

He said in his heart, the day his beard was shaven he was beaten, lost. He identified it with his isolate manhood. He never forgot that journey up to Bodmin, with the other men who were called up. They were all bitterly, desperately miserable, but still manly: mostly very quiet, yet neither sloppy nor frightened. Only the fat, loose fellow who had given up a damned good job in Canada to come and serve this bloody country, etc., etc., was a ranter and a bragger. Somers saw him afterwards naked: strange, fat, soft, like a woman. But in another carriage the men sang all the time, or howled like dogs in the night:

“I’ll be your sweetheart, if you will be mine, All my life I’ll be you-o-o-ur Valentine. Bluebells I’ll gather, take them and be true, When I’m a man, my plan will be to marry you.”

Wailing down the lost corridors of hell, surely, those ghastly melancholy notes--

“All my li-i-i-ife--I’ll be you-u-r Valentine.”

Somers could never recall it without writhing. It is not death that matters, but the loss of the integral soul. And these men howled as if they were going to their doom, helplessly, ghastly. It was not the death in front. It was the surrender of all their old beliefs, and all their sacred liberty.