Part 29

“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 mouth were curiously reddened. He liked Harriet’s attacks. He looked at her with dark, attentive eyes. Then he turned vaguely to Somers.

“What was it?” he asked.

“Nothing at all new,” said Somers. “You know he and I start to quarrel the moment we set eyes on one another.”

“They might be man and wife,” mocked Harriet, and again Jack turned to her a look of black, smiling, malicious recognition.

“Another quarrel?” he said quietly.

But Somers was almost _sure_ he knew all about it, and had only come like a spy to take soundings.

“Another quarrel,” he replied, smiling, fencing. “And once more shown the door.”

“I should think,” said Harriet, “you’d soon know that door when you see it.”

“Oh, yes,” said Richard. He had not told her the worst of the encounter. He never told her the worst, nor her nor anybody.

Jack was looking from one to the other to see how much each knew.

“Was it a specially bad blow-up?” he said, in his quiet voice, that had a lurking tone of watchfulness in it.

“Oh, yes, final,” laughed Richard. “I am even going to leave Australia.”

“When?”

“I think in six weeks.”

There was a silence for some moments.

“You’ve not booked your berths yet?” asked Jack.

“No. I must go up to Sydney.”

Again Jack waited before he spoke. Then he said:

“What’s made you settle on going?”

“I don’t know. I feel it’s my fate to go now.”

“Ha, your fate!” said Harriet. “It’s always your fate with you. If it was me it would be my foolish restlessness.”

Jack looked at her with another quick smile, and a curious glance of dark recognition in his eyes, almost like a caress. Strangely apart, too, as if he and she were in an inner dark circle, and Somers was away outside.

“Don’t you want to go, Mrs Somers?” he asked.

“Of course I don’t. I love Australia,” she protested.

“Then don’t you go,” said Jack. “You stop behind.”

When he lowered his voice it took on a faint, indescribable huskiness. It made Harriet a little uneasy. She watched Lovat. She did not like Jack’s new turn of husky intimacy. She wanted Richard to rescue her.

“Ha!” she said. “He’d never be able to get through the world without me.”

“Does it matter?” said Jack, grinning faintly at her and keeping the husky note in his voice. “He knows his own mind--or his fate. You stop here. We’ll look after you.”

But she watched Richard. He was hardly listening. He was thinking again that Jack was feeling malevolent towards him, wanting to destroy him, as in those early days when they used to play chess together.

“No,” said Harriet, watching Lovat’s face. “I suppose I shall have to trail myself along, poor woman, till I see the end of him.”

“He’ll lead you many a dance before that happens,” grinned Richard. He rather enjoyed Jack’s malevolence this time.

“Ha, you’ve led me all your dances that you know,” she retorted. “I know there’ll be nothing new, unfortunately.”

“Why don’t you stay in Australia?” Jack said to her, with the same quiet, husky note of intimacy, insistency, and the reddish light on his face.

She was somewhat startled and offended. Wasn’t the man sober, or what?

“Oh, he wouldn’t give me any money, and I haven’t a _sou_ of my own,” she said lightly, laughing it off.

“You wouldn’t be short of money,” said Jack. “Plenty of money.”

“You see I couldn’t just live on charity, could I?” she replied, delicately.

“It wouldn’t be charity.”

“What then?”

There was a very awkward pause. Then a wicked redness came into Jack’s face, and a flicker into his voice.

“Appreciation. You’d be appreciated.” He seemed to speak with muted lips. There was a cold silence. Harriet was offended now.

“I’ll just clear the table,” she said, rising briskly.

Jack sat rather slack in his chair, his long, malevolent body half sunk, and his chin dropped.

“What boat do you think you’ll catch?” he asked.

“The Manganui. Why?”

But Jack did not speak. He sat there with his head sunk on his chin, his body half-turgid, as if he were really not quite sober.

“You won’t be honouring Australia long with your presence,” he said ironically.

“Nor dishonouring it,” said Richard. He was like a creature that is going to escape. Some of the fear he had felt for Kangaroo he now felt for Jack. Jack was really very malevolent. There was hell in his reddened face, and in his black, inchoate eyes, and in his long, pent-up body. But he kept an air of quiescence, of resignation, as if he were still really benevolent.

“Oh, I don’t say that,” he remarked in answer to Richard’s last, but in a tone which said so plainly what he felt: an insulting tone.

Said Richard to himself: “I wouldn’t like to fall into your clutches, my friend, altogether: or to give your benevolence a chance to condemn me.”

Aloud, he said to Jack:

“If I can’t join in with what you’re doing here, heart and soul, I’d better take myself off, hadn’t I? You’ve all been good to me, and in a measure, trusted me. I shall always owe you a debt of gratitude, and keep your trust inviolable. You know that. But I am one of those who must stand and wait--though I don’t pretend that by so doing I also serve.”

“You take no risks,” said Jack quietly.

Another home-thrust.

“Why--I would take risks--if only I felt it was any good.”

“What does it matter about it’s being any good? You can’t tell what good a thing will be or won’t be. All you can do is to take a bet on it.”

“You see it isn’t my nature to bet.”

“Not a sporting nature, you mean?”

“No, not a sporting nature.”

“Like a woman--you like to feel safe all round,” said Jack, slowly raising his dark eyes to Somers in a faint smile of contempt and malevolence. And Richard had to acknowledge to himself that he _was_ cutting a poor figure: nosing in, like a Mr Nosy Parker, then drawing back quickly if he saw two sparks fly.

“Do you think I’ve let you down? I never pledged myself,” he said coldly.

“Oh, no, you never pledged yourself,” said Jack laconically.

“You see I don’t _believe_ in these things,” said Somers, flushing.

“What’s that you don’t believe in?”

And Jack watched him with two black, round eyes, with a spark dancing slowly in each, in a slow gaze putting forth all his power. But Somers now looked back into the two dark, malevolent pools.

“In revolutions--and public love and benevolence and feeling righteous,” he said.

“What love, what benevolence and righteousness?” asked Jack, vaguely, still watching with those black, sardonic eyes. “I never said anything about them.”

“You know you want to be the saviours of Australia,” said Richard.

“I didn’t know. But what’s wrong with it?”

“I’m no good at saving.”

“We don’t pretend to be saviours. We want to do our best for Australia, it being our own country. And the Pommies come out from England to try to upset us. But they won’t. They may as well stop in their dead-and-rotten old country.”

“I’m sorry it looks to you like that,” said Richard.

“Oh, don’t apologise,” said Jack, with a faint, but even more malevolent smile. “It’s pretty well always the same. You come out from the old countries very cocksure, with a lot of criticism to you. But when it comes to doing anything, you sort of fade out, you’re nowhere. We’re used to it, we don’t mind.”

There was a silence of hate.

“No, we don’t mind,” Jack continued. “It’s quite right, you haven’t let us down, because we haven’t given you a chance. That’s all. In so far as you’ve had any chance to, you’ve let us down, and we know it.”

Richard was silent. Perhaps it was true. And he hated such a truth.

“All right,” he said. “I’ve let you down. I suppose I shall have to admit it. I’m sorry--but I can’t help myself.”

Jack took not the slightest notice of this admission, sat as if he had not heard it.

“I’m sorry I’ve sort of fizzled out so quickly,” said Richard. “But you wouldn’t have me pretend, would you? I’d better be honest at the beginning.”

Jack looked at him slowly, with slow, inchoate eyes, and a look of contempt on his face. The contempt on Jack’s face, the contempt of the confident he-man for the shifty she-man, made Richard flush with anger, and drove him back on his deeper self once more.

“What do you call honest?” said Jack, sneering.

Richard became very silent, very still. He realised that Jack would like to give him a thrashing. The thought was horrible to Richard Lovat, who could never bear to be touched, physically. And the other man sitting there as if he were drunk was very repugnant to him. It was a bad moment.

“Why,” he replied, in answer to the question, while Jack’s eyes fixed him with a sort of jeering malevolence: “I can’t honestly say I feel at one with you, you and Kangaroo, so I say so, and stand aside.”

“You’ve found out all you wanted to know, I suppose?” said Jack.

“I didn’t _want_ to know anything. I didn’t come asking or seeking. It was you who chose to tell me.”

“You didn’t try drawing us out, in your own way?”

“Why, no, I don’t think so.”

Again Jack looked up at him with a faint contemptuous smile of derision.

“I should have said myself you did. And you got what you wanted, and now are clearing out with it. Exactly like a spy, in my opinion.”

Richard opened wide eyes, and went pale.

“A spy!” he exclaimed. “But it’s just absurd.”

Jack did not vouchsafe any answer, but sat there as if he had come for some definite purpose, something menacing, and was going to have it out with the other man.

“Kangaroo doesn’t think I came spying, does he?” asked Richard, aghast. “It’s too impossible.”

“I don’t know what he thinks,” said Jack. “But it isn’t ‘too impossible’ at all. It looks as if it had happened.”

Richard was now dumb. He realised the depths of the other man’s malevolence, and was aghast. Just aghast. Some fear too--and a certain horror, as if human beings had suddenly become horrible to him. Another gulf opened in front of him.

“Then what do you want of me now?” he asked, very coldly.

“Some sort of security, I suppose,” said Jack, looking away at the sea.

Richard was silent with rage and cold disgust, and a sort of police-fear.

“Pray what sort of security?” he replied, coldly.

“That’s for you to say, maybe. But we want some sort of security that you’ll keep quiet, before we let you leave Australia.”

Richard’s heart blazed in him with anger and disgust.

“You need not be afraid,” he said. “You’ve made it all too repulsive to me now, for me ever to want to open my mouth about it all. You can be quite assured: nothing will ever come out through me.”

Jack looked up with a faint, sneering smile.

“And you think we shall be satisfied with your bare word?” he said uglily.

But now Richard looked him square in the eyes.

“Either that or nothing,” he replied.

And unconscious of what he was doing, he sat looking direct down into the dark, shifting malice of Jack’s eyes. Till Jack turned aside. Richard was now so angry and insulted he felt only pure indignation.

“We’ll see,” said Jack.

Somers did not even heed him. He was too indignant to think of him any more. He only retreated into his own soul, and turned aside, invoking his own soul: “Oh, dark God, smite him over the mouth for insulting me. Be with me, gods of the other world, and strike down these liars.”

Harriet came out on to the verandah.

“What are you two men talking about?” she said. “I hear two very cross and snarling voices, though I can’t tell what they say.”

“I was just saying Mr Somers can’t expect to have it all his own way,” said Jack in his low, intense, slightly husky voice, that was now jeering viciously.

“He’ll try his best to,” said Harriet. “But whatever have you both got so furious about. Just look at Lovat, green with fury. It’s really shameful. Men are like impish children--you daren’t leave them together for a minute.”

“It was about time you came to throw cold water over us,” smiled Jack sardonically. Ah, how sardonic he could be: deep, deep and devilish. He too must have a very big devil in his soul. But he never let it out. Or did he? Harriet looked at him, and shuddered slightly. He scared her, she had a revulsion from him. He was a bit repulsive to her. And she knew he had always been so.

“Ah, well!” said Jack. “Cheery-o! We aren’t such fools as we seem. The milk’s spilt, we won’t sulk over it.”

“No, don’t,” cried Harriet. “I hate sulky people.”

“So do I, Mrs Somers, worse than water in my beer,” said Jack genially. “You and me, we’re not going to fall out, are we?”

“No,” said Harriet. “I don’t fall out with people--and I don’t let them fall out with me.”

“Quite right. Don’t give ’em a chance, eh? You’re right of it. You and me are pals, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” said Harriet easily, as if she were talking to some child she must soothe. “We’re pals. But why didn’t you bring your wife? I’m so fond of her.”

“Oh, Vicky’s all right. She’s A 1 stuff. She thinks the world of you, you know. By golly, she does; she thinks the world of you.”

“Then why didn’t you bring her to see me?”

“Eh? Why didn’t I? Oh--well--let me see--why, she’d got her married sister and so forth come to see her, so she couldn’t leave them. But she sent her love, and all that sort of sweet nothing, you know. I told her I should never have the face to repeat it, you know. I was to give you _heaps_ of love, ‘Heaps of love to Mrs Somers!’ Damn it, I said, how do I know she wants me dumping down heaps of love on her. But that was the message--heaps of love to Mrs Somers, and don’t you forget it. I’m not likely to forget it, by gee! There aren’t two Mrs Somers in the universe: I’m ready to bet all I’ve got on that. Ay, and a bit over. Now, look here, Mrs Somers, between you and me and the bed-post--”

“Do you mean Lovat is the bed-post?” put in Harriet. “He’s silent enough for one.”

Jack glanced at Somers, and also relapsed into silence.

CHAP: XVI. A ROW IN TOWN

The thing that Kangaroo had to reckon with, and would not reckon with, was the mass-spirit. A collection of men does not necessarily mean a mob. A collection of men--an accidental gathering--may be just a gathering, drawn by a moment’s curiosity, or it may be an audience drawn to hear something, or it may be a congregation, gathered together in some spirit of earnest desire: or it may be just a crowd, inspired by no one motive. The mass-spirit is complex. At its lowest it is a mob. And what is a mob?

To put it as briefly as possible, it is a collection of all the weak souls, sickeningly conscious of their weakness, into a heavy mob, that lusts to glut itself with blind destructive power. Not even vengeance. The spirit of vengeance belongs to a mass which is higher than a mob.

The study of collective psychology to-day is absurd in its inadequacy. Man is supposed to be an automaton working in certain automatic ways when you touch certain springs. These springs are all labelled: they form a keyboard to the human psyche, according to modern psychology. And the chief labels are herd instinct, collective interest, hunger, fear, collective prestige, and so on.

But the only way to make any study of collective psychology is to study the isolated individual. Upon your conception of the single individual, all your descriptions will be based, all your science established. For this reason, the human sciences, philosophy, ethics, psychology, politics, economics, can never be sciences at all. There can never be an exact science dealing with individual life. _L’anatomia presuppone il cadavere_: anatomy presupposes a corpse, says D’Annunzio. You can establish an exact science on a corpse, supposing you start with the corpse, and don’t try to derive it from a living creature. But upon life itself, or any instance of life, you cannot establish a science.

Because even science must start from definition, or from precise description. And you can never define or precisely describe any living creature. Iron must remain iron, or cease to exist. But a rabbit might evolve into something which is still rabbit, and yet different from that which a rabbit now is. So how can you define or precisely describe a rabbit? There is always the unstable _creative_ element present in life, and this science can never tackle. Science is cause-and-effect.

Before we can begin any of the so-called humane sciences we must take on trust a purely unscientific fact: namely, that every living creature has an individual soul, however trivial or rudimentary, which connects it individually with the source of all life, as man, in the religious terminology, is connected with God, and inseparable from God. So is every creature, even an ant or a louse, individually in contact with the great life-urge which we call God. To call this connection the will-to-live is not quite sufficient. It is more than a will-to-persist. It is a will-to-live in the further sense, a will-to-change, a will-to-evolve, a will towards further creation of the self. The urge towards evolution if you like. But it is more than evolution. There is no simple cause-and-effect sequence. The change from caterpillar to butterfly is not cause and effect. It is a new gesture in creation. Science can wriggle as hard as it likes, but the change from caterpillar to butterfly is utterly unscientific, illogical, and _unnatural_, if we take science’s definition of nature. It is an answer to the strange creative urge, the God-whisper, which is the one and only everlasting motive for everything.

So then man. He is said to be a creature of cause-and-effect, or a creature of free-will. The two are the same. Free-will means acting according to reasoned choice, which is a purest instance of cause-and-effect. Logic is the quintessence of cause-and-effect. And idealism, the ruling of life by the instrumentality of the idea, is precisely the mechanical, even automatic cause-and-effect process. The idea, or ideal, becomes a fixed principle, and life, like any other force, is driven into mechanical repetition of given motions--millions of times over and over again--according to the fixed ideal. So, the Christian-democratic world prescribes certain motions, and men proceed to repeat these motions, till they conceive that there _are_ no other motions but these. And that is pure automatism. When scientists describe savages, or ancient Egyptians, or Aztecs, they assume that these far-off peoples acted, but in a crude, clumsy way, from the same motives which move us. “Too much ego in his cosmos.” Men have had strange, inconceivable motives and impulses, which were just as “right” as ours are. And our “right” motives will cease to activate, even as the lost motives of the Assyrians have ceased. Our “right” and our righteousness will go pop, and there will be another sort of right and righteousness.

The mob, then. Now, the vast bulk of mankind has always been, and always will be, helpless. By which we mean, helpless to interpret the new prompting of the God-urge. The highest function of _mind_ is its function of messenger. The curious throbs and pulses of the God-urge in man would go on forever ignored, if it were not for some few exquisitely sensitive and fearless souls who struggle with all their might to make that strange translation of the low, dark throbbing into open act or speech. Like a wireless message the new suggestion enters the soul, throb-throb, throb-throb-throb. And it beats and beats for years, before the mind, frightened of this new knocking in the dark, can be brought to listen and attend.

For the mind is busy in a house of its own, which house it calls the universe. And how can there be anything outside the universe?

There is though. There is always something outside our universe. And it is always at the doors of the innermost, sentient soul. And there throb-throb, throb-throb-throb, throb-throb. It is like the almost inaudible beating of a wireless machine. Nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand hear nothing at all. Absolutely nothing. They racket away in their nice, complete, homely universe, running their trains and making their wars and saving the world for democracy. They hear not a thing. A tiny minority of sensitive souls feel the throb, and are frightened, and cry for more virtue, more goodness, more righteousness à la mode. But all the righteousness and goodness in all the world won’t answer the throb, or interpret the faint but painful thresh of the message.

There is no Morse-code. There never will be. Every new code supersedes the current code. Nowadays, when we feel the throb, vaguely, we cry: “More love, more peace, more charity, more freedom, more self-sacrifice.” Which makes matters all the worse, because the new throb interpreted mechanically according to the old code breeds madness and insanity. It may be that there is an insufficient activity of the thyroid glands, or the adrenalin cortex isn’t making its secretions, or the pituitary or the pineal body is not working adequately. But this is result, not cause, of our neurasthenia and complexes. The neurasthenia comes from the inattention to the suggestion, or from a false interpretation. The best souls in the world make some of the worst interpretations--like President Wilson--and this is the bitterest tragedy of righteousness. The heroic effort to carry out the old righteousness becomes at last sheer wrongeousness. Men in the past have chosen to be martyred for an unborn truth. But life itself inflicts something worse than martyrdom on them if they will persist too long in the old truth.

Alas, there is no Morse-code for interpreting the new life-prompting, the new God-urge. And there never will be. It needs a new term of speech invented each time. A whole new concept of the universe gradually born, shedding the old concept.

Well now. There is the dark god knocking afresh at the door. The vast mass hear nothing, but say: “We know all about the universe. Our job is to make a real smart place of it.” So they make more aeroplanes and old-age-pensions and are furious when Kaiser William interrupts them. The more sensitive hear something, feel a new urge and are uneasy. They cry: “We are not pure in heart. We are too selfish. Let us educate the poor. Let us remove the slums. Let us save the children. Let us spend all we have on the noble work of education.” So they spend a bit more than before, but by no means all they have, with the result that now everybody reads the newspapers and discusses world-politics and feels himself most one-sidedly a bit of the great Godhead of the sacred People.

And still the knocking goes on, on, on, till some soul that dares as well as can, listens, and struggles to interpret. Every new word is anathema--bound to be. Jargon, rant, mystical tosh, and so on. Evil, and anti-civilisation. Naturally. For the machine of the human psyche, once wound up to a certain ideal, doesn’t want to stop.

And still, all the time, even in the vulgar uneducated--perhaps more in them than in the hearty money-makers of the lower middle-classes--throb-throb-throb goes the godurge deep in their souls, driving them almost mad. They are quite stone-deaf to any new meaning. They would jeer an attempt at a new interpretation, jeer it to death. So there they are, between the rocky Scylla of the fixed, established ideal, and the whirling Charybdis of the conservative opposition to this ideal. Between these two perils they must pass. For behind them drives the unknown current of the god-urge, on, on through the straits.

They will never get through the straits. They do not know that there _is_ any getting through. Scylla must beat Charybdis, and Charybdis must beat Scylla. So the monster of humanity, with a Scylla of an ideal of equality for the head, and a Charybdis of industrialism and possessive conservatism for the tail, howls with frenzy, and lashes the straits till every boat goes down, that tries to make a passage.