Part 3

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 waters. Near at hand a man was working away, silently loading a boat with beach-sand, upon the lagoon. To the right the sea was rolling on the shore, and spurting high on some brown rocks. Two men in bathing suits were running over the spit of sand from the lagoon to the surf, where two women in “waders,” those rubber paddling-drawers into which we bundle our children at the seaside, were paddling along the fringe of the foam. A blond young man wearing a jacket over his bathing suit walked by with two girls. He had huge massive legs, astonishing. And near at hand Somers saw another youth lying on the warm sand-hill in the sun. He had rolled in the dry sand while he was wet, so he was hardly distinguishable. But he lay like an animal on his face in the sun, and again Somers wondered at the thick legs. They seemed to run to leg, these people. Three boys, one a lad of fifteen or so, came out of the warm lagoon in their bathing suits to roll in the sand and play. The big lad crawled on all fours and the little one rode on his back, and pitched off into the sand. They were extraordinarily like real young animals, mindless as opossums, lunging about.

This was Sunday afternoon. The sun was warm. The lonely man was just pushing off his boat on the lagoon. It sat deep in the water, half full of sand. Somers and Harriet lay on the sand-bank. Strange it was. And it _had_ a sort of fascination. Freedom! That’s what they always say. “You feel free in Australia.” And so you do. There is a great relief in the atmosphere, a relief from tension, from pressure. An absence of control or will or form. The sky is open above you, and the air is open around you. Not the old closing-in of Europe.

But what then? The _vacancy_ of this freedom is almost terrifying. In the openness and the freedom this new chaos, this litter of bungalows and tin cans scattered for miles and miles, this Englishness all crumbled out into formlessness and chaos. Even the heart of Sydney itself--an imitation of London and New York, without any core or pith of meaning. Business going on full speed: but only because it is the other end of English and American business.

The absence of any inner meaning: and at the same time the great sense of vacant spaces. The sense of irresponsible freedom. The sense of do-as-you-please liberty. And all utterly uninteresting. What is more hopelessly uninteresting than accomplished liberty? Great swarming, teeming Sydney flowing out into these myriads of bungalows, like shallow waters spreading, undyked. And what then? Nothing. No inner life, no high command, no interest in anything, finally.

Somers turned over and shut his eyes. New countries were more problematic than old ones. One loved the sense of release from old pressure and old tight control, from the old world of water-tight compartments. This was Sunday afternoon, but with none of the surfeited dreariness of English Sunday afternoons. It was still a raw loose world. All Sydney would be out by the sea or in the bush, a roving, unbroken world. They all rushed from where they were to somewhere else, on holidays. And to-morrow they’d all be working away, with just as little meaning, working without any meaning, playing without any meaning; and yet quite strenuous at it all. It was just dazing. Even the rush for money had no real pip in it. They really cared very little for the power that money can give. And except for the sense of power, that had no real significance here. When all is said and done, even money is not much good where there is no genuine culture. Money is a means to rising to a higher, subtler, fuller state of consciousness, or nothing. And when you flatly don’t want a fuller consciousness, what good is your money to you? Just to chuck about and gamble with. Even money is a European invention--European and American. It has no real magic in Australia.

Poor Richard Lovat wearied himself to death struggling with the problem of himself, and calling it Australia. There was no actual need for him to struggle with Australia: he must have done it in the hedonistic sense, to please himself. But it wore him to rags.

Harriet sat up and began dusting the sand from her coat--Lovat did likewise. Then they rose to be going back to the tram-car. There was a motor-car standing on the sand of the road near the gate of the end house. The end house was called St Columb, and Somers’ heart flew to Cornwall. It was quite a nice little place, standing on a bluff of sand sideways above the lagoon.

“I wouldn’t mind that,” said Harriet, looking up at St Columb.

But Somers did not answer. He was shut against any of these humiliating little bungalows. “Love’s Harbour” he was just passing by, and it was “4 Sale.” It would be. He ploughed grimly through the sand. “Arcady”--“Stella Maris”--“Racketty-Coo.”

“I say!” called a voice from behind.

It was Mrs Callcott running unevenly over the sand after them, the colour high in her cheeks. She wore a pale grey crêpe de chine dress and grey suède shoes. Some distance behind her Jack Callcott was following, in his shirt-sleeves.

“Fancy you being here!” gasped Mrs Callcott, and Harriet was so flustered she could only cry:

“Oh, how do you do!”--and effusively shake hands, as if she were meeting some former acquaintance on Piccadilly. The shaking hands quite put Mrs Callcott off her track. She felt it almost an affront, and went red. Her husband sauntered up and put his hands in his pockets, to avoid mistakes.

“Ha, what are _you_ doing here,” he said to the Somers pair. “Wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?”

Harriet glanced at Richard Lovat. He was smiling faintly.

“Oh, we should _love_ it,” she replied to Mr Callcott. “But where?--have you got a house here?”

“My sister has the end house,” said he.

“Oh, but--will she want us?” cried Harriet, backing out.

The Callcotts stood for a moment silent.

“Yes, if you like to come,” said Jack. And it was evident he was aware of Somers’ desire to avoid contact.

“Well, I should be awfully grateful,” said Harriet. “Wouldn’ you, Lovat?”

“Yes,” he said, smiling to himself, feeling Jack’s manly touch of contempt for all this hedging.

So off they went to “St Columb.” The sister was a brown-eyed Australian with a decided manner, kindly, but a little suspicious of the two newcomers. Her husband was a young Cornishman, rather stout and short and silent. He had his hair cut round at the back, in a slightly rounded line above a smooth, sunburnt, reddened nape of the neck. Somers found out later that this young Cornishman--his name was Trewhella--had married his brother’s widow. Mrs Callcott supplied Harriet later on with all the information concerning her sister-in-law. The first Trewhella, Alfred John, had died two years ago, leaving his wife with a neat sum of money and this house, “St Columb,” and also with a little girl named Gladys, who came running in shaking her long brown hair just after the Somers appeared. So the present Trewhellas were a newly-married couple. The present husband, William James, went round in a strange, silent fashion helping his wife Rose to prepare tea.

The bungalow was pleasant, a large room facing the sea, with verandahs and other little rooms opening off. There were many family photographs, and a framed medal and ribbon and letter praising the first Trewhella. Mrs Trewhella was alert and watchful, and decided to be genteel. So the party sat around in the basket chairs and on the settles under the windows, instead of sitting at table for tea. And William James silently but willingly carried round the bread and butter and the cakes.

He was a queer young man, with an Irish-looking face, rather pale, an odd kind of humour in his grey eye and in the corners of his pursed mouth. But he spoke never a word. It was hard to decide his age--probably about thirty--a little younger than his wife. He seemed silently pleased about something--perhaps his marriage. Somers noticed that the whites of his eyes were rather bloodshot. He had been in Australia since he was a boy of fifteen--he had come with his brother--from St Columb, near Newquay--St Columb Major. So much Somers elicited.

“Well, how do you like Sydney?” came the inevitable question from Mrs Trewhella.

“The harbour, I think, is wonderful,” came Somers’ invariable answer.

“It is a fine harbour, isn’t it. And Sydney is a fine town. Oh yes, I’ve lived there all my life.”

The conversation languished. Callcott was silent, and William James seemed as if he were never anything else. Even the little girl only fluttered into a whisper and went still again. Everybody was a little embarrassed, rather stiff: too genteel, or not genteel enough. And the men seemed absolute logs.

“You don’t think much of Australia, then?” said Jack to Somers.

“Why,” answered the latter, “how am I to judge! I haven’t even seen the fringe of it.”

“Oh, it’s mostly fringe,” said Jack. “But it hasn’t made a good impression on you?”

“I don’t know yet. My feelings are mixed. The _country_ seems to me to have a fascination--strange--”

“But you don’t take to the Aussies, at first sight. Bit of a collision between their aura and yours,” smiled Jack.

“Maybe that’s what it is,” said Somers. “That’s a useful way of putting it. I can’t help my aura colliding, can I?”

“Of course you can’t. And if it’s a tender sort of aura, of course it feels the bump.”

“Oh, don’t talk about it,” cried Harriet. “He must be just one big bump, by the way he grumbles.”

They all laughed--perhaps a trifle uneasily.

“I thought so,” said Jack. “What made you come here? Thought you’d like to write about it?”

“I thought I might like to live here--and write here,” replied Somers smiling.

“Write about the bushrangers and the heroine lost in the bush and wandering into a camp of bullies?” said Jack.

“Maybe,” said Somers.

“Do you mind if I ask you what sort of things you do write?” said Jack, with some delicacy.

“Oh--poetry--essays.”

“Essays about what?”

“Oh--rubbish mostly.”

There was a moment’s pause.

“Oh, Lovat, don’t be so silly. You _know_ do speakyou don’t think your essays rubbish,” put in Harriet. “They’re about life, and democracy, and equality, and all that sort of thing,” Harriet explained.

“Oh, yes?” said Jack. “I’d like to read some.”

“Well,” hesitated Harriet. “He can lend you a volume--you’ve got some with you, haven’t you?” she added, turning to Somers.

“I’ve got one,” admitted that individual, looking daggers at her.

“Well, you’ll lend it to Mr Callcott, won’t you?”

“If he wants it. But it will only bore him.”

“I might rise up to it, you know,” said Jack laconically, “if I bring all my mental weight to bear on it.”

Somers flushed, and laughed at the contradiction in metaphor.

“It’s not the loftiness,” he said, rather amused. “It’s that people just don’t care to hear some things.”

“Well, let me try,” said Jack. “We’re a new country--and we’re out to learn.”

“That’s exactly what we’re not,” broke out William James, with a Cornish accent and a blurt of a laugh. “We’re out to show to everybody that we know everything there is to be known.”

“That’s some of us,” said Jack.

“And most of us,” said William James.

“Have it your own way, boy. But let us speak for the minority. And there’s a minority that knows we’ve got to learn a big lesson--and that’s willing to learn it.”

Again there was silence. The women seemed almost effaced.

“There’s one thing,” thought Somers to himself, “when these Colonials _do_ speak seriously, they speak like men, not like babies.” He looked up at Jack.

“It’s the world that’s got to learn a lesson,” he said. “Not only Australia.” His tone was acid and sinister. And he looked with his hard, pale blue eyes at Callcott. Callcott’s eyes, brown and less concentrated, less hard, looked back curiously at the other man.

“Possibly it is,” he said. “But my job is Australia.”

Somers watched him. Callcott had a pale, clean-shaven, lean face with close-shut lips. But his lips weren’t bitten in until they just formed a slit, as they so often are in Colonials. And his eyes had a touch of mystery, of aboriginal darkness.

“Do you care very much for Australia?” said Somers, a little wistfully.

“I believe I do,” said Jack. “But if I was out of a job like plenty of other unlucky diggers, I suppose I should care more about getting a job.”

“But you care very much about your Australia?”

“My Australia? Yes, I own about seven acres of it, all told. I suppose I care very much about that. I pay my taxes on it, all right.”

“No, but the future of Australia.”

“You’ll never see me on a platform shouting about it.”

The Lovats said they must be going.

“If you like to crowd in,” said Jack, “we can take you in the car. We can squeeze in Mr Somers in front, and there’ll be plenty of room for the others at the back, if Gladys sits on her Dad’s knee.”

This time Somers accepted at once. He felt the halting refusals were becoming ridiculous.

They left at sunset. The west, over the land, was a clear gush of light up from the departed sun. The east, over the Pacific, was a tall concave of rose-coloured clouds, a marvellous high apse. Now the bush had gone dark and spectral again, on the right hand. You might still imagine inhuman presences moving among the gum trees. And from time to time, on the left hand, they caught sight of the long green rollers of the Pacific, with the star-white foam, and behind that the dusk-green sea glimmered over with smoky rose, reflected from the eastern horizon where the bank of flesh-rose colour and pure smoke-blue lingered a long time, like magic, as if the sky’s rim were cooling down. It seemed to Somers characteristic of Australia, this far-off flesh-rose bank of colour on the sky’s horizon, so tender and unvisited, topped with the smoky, beautiful blueness. And then the thickness of the night’s stars overhead, and one star very brave in the last effulgence of sunset, westward over the continent. As soon as night came, all the raggle-taggle of amorphous white settlements disappeared, and the continent of the Kangaroo reassumed its strange, unvisited glamour, a kind of virgin sensual aloofness.

Somers sat in front between Jack and Victoria Callcott, because he was so slight. He made himself as small as he could, like the ham in the sandwich. When he looked her way, he found Victoria watching him under her lashes, and as she met his eyes, she flared into smile that filled him with wonder. She had such a charming, innocent look, like an innocent girl, naive and a little gawky. Yet the strange exposed smile she gave him in the dusk. It puzzled him to know what to make of it. Like an offering--and yet innocent. Perhaps like the sacred prostitutes of the temple: acknowledgment of the sacredness of the act. He chose not to think of it, and stared away across the bonnet of the car at the fading land.

Queer, thought Somers, this girl at once sees perhaps the most real me, and most women take me for something I am not at all. Queer to be recognised at once, as if one were of the same family.

He had to admit that he was flattered also. She seemed to see the wonder in him. And she had none of the European women’s desire to make a conquest of him, none of that feminine rapacity which is so hateful in the old world. She seemed like an old Greek girl just bringing an offering to the altar of the mystic Bacchus. The offering of herself.

Her husband sat steering the car and smoking his short pipe in silence. He seemed to have something to think about. At least he had considerable power of silence, a silence which made itself felt. Perhaps he knew his wife much better than anyone else. At any rate he did not feel it necessary to keep an eye on her. If she liked to look at Somers with a strange, exposed smile, that was her affair. She could do as she liked in that direction, so far as he, Jack Callcott, was concerned. She was his wife: she knew it, and he knew it. And it was quite established and final. So long as she did not betray what was between her and him, as husband and wife, she could do as she liked with the rest of herself. And he could, quite rightly, trust her to be faithful to that undefinable relation which subsisted between them as man and wife. He didn’t pretend and didn’t want to occupy the whole field of her consciousness.

And in just the same way, that bond which connected himself with her, he would always keep unbroken for his part. But that did not mean that he was sworn body and soul to his wife. Oh no. There was a good deal of him which did not come into the marriage bond, and with all this part of himself he was free to make the best he could, according to his own idea. He loved her, quite sincerely, for her naive sophisticated innocence which allowed him to be unknown to her, except in so far as they were truly and intimately related. It was the innocence which has been through the fire, and knows its own limitations. In the same way he quite consciously chose not to know anything more about her than just so much as entered into the absolute relationship between them. He quite definitely did not want to absorb her, or to occupy the whole field of her nature. He would trust her to go her own way, only keeping her to the pledge that was between them. What this pledge consisted in he did not try to define. It was something indefinite: the field of contact between their two personalities. Where their two personalities met and joined, they were one, and pledged to permanent fidelity. But that part in each of them which did not belong to the other was free from all enquiry or even from knowledge. Each silently consented to leave the other in large part unknown, unknown in word and deed and very being. They didn’t _want_ to know--too much knowledge would be like shackles.

Such marriage is established on a very subtle sense of honour and of individual integrity. It seems as if each race and each continent has its own marriage instinct. And the instinct that develops in Australia will certainly not be the same as the instinct that develops in America. And each people must follow its own instinct, if it is to live, no matter whether the marriage law be universal or not.

The Callcotts had come to no agreement, verbally, as to their marriage. They had not thought it out. They were Australians, of strongly, subtly-developed desire for freedom, and with considerable indifference to old formulæ and the conventions based thereon. So they took their stand instinctively and calmly. Jack had defined his stand as far as he found necessary. If his wife was good to him and satisfied him in so far as _he_ went, then he was pledged to trust her to do as she liked outside his ken, outside his range. He would make a cage for nobody. This he openly propounded to his mates: to William James, for example, and later to Somers. William James said yes, but thought the more. Somers was frankly disturbed, not liking the thought of applying the same prescription to his own marriage.

They put down the Trewhellas at their house in North Sydney, and went on to Murdoch Road over the ferry. Jack had still to take the car down to the garage in town. Victoria said she would prepare the high tea which takes the place of dinner and supper in Australia, against his return. So Harriet boldly invited them to this high tea--a real substantial meal--in her own house. Victoria was to help her prepare it, and Jack was to come straight back to Torestin. Victoria was as pleased as a lamb with two tails over this arrangement, and went in to change her dress.

Somers knew why Harriet had launched this invitation. It was because she had had a wonderfully successful cooking morning. Like plenty of other women Harriet had learned to cook during war-time, and now she loved it, once in a while. This had been one of the whiles. Somers had stoked the excellent little stove, and peeled the apples and potatoes and onions and pumpkin, and looked after the meat and the sauces, while Harriet had lashed out in pies and tarts and little cakes and baked custard. She now surveyed her prize Beeton shelf with love, and began to whisk up a mayonnaise for potato salad.

Victoria appeared in a pale gauze dress of pale pink with little dabs of gold--a sort of tea-party dress--and with her brown hair loosely knotted behind, and with innocent sophistication pulled a bit untidy over her womanly forehead, she looked winsome. Her colour was very warm, and she was gawkily excited. Harriet put on an old yellow silk frock, and Somers changed into a dark suit. For tea there was cold roast pork with first-class brown crackling on it, and potato salad, beetroot, and lettuce, and apple chutney; then a dressed lobster--or crayfish, very good, pink and white; and then apple pie and custard-tarts and cakes and a dish of apples and passion fruits and oranges, a pine-apple and some bananas: and of course big cups of tea, breakfast-cups.

Victoria and Harriet were delighted, Somers juggled with colour-schemes on the table, the one central room in the bungalow was brilliantly lighted, and the kettle sang on the hearth. After months of India, with all the Indian decorum and two silent men-servants waiting at table: and after the old-fashioned gentility of the P. and O. steamer, Somers and Harriet felt this show rather a come-down maybe, but still good fun. Victoria felt it was almost “society.” They waited for Jack.

Jack arrived bending forward rather in the doorway, a watchful look on his pale, clean-shaven face, and that atmosphere of silence about him which is characteristic of many Australians.

“Kept you waiting?” he asked.

“We were just ready for you,” said Harriet.

Jack had to carve the meat, because Somers was so bad at it and didn’t like doing it. Harriet poured the great cups of tea. Callcott looked with a quick eye round the table to see exactly what he wanted to eat, and Victoria peeped through her lashes to see exactly how Harriet behaved. As Harriet always behaved in the vaguest manner possible, and ate her sweets with her fish-fork and her soup with her pudding spoon, a study of her table manners was not particularly profitable.

To Somers it was like being back twenty-five years, back in an English farm-house in the Midlands, at Sunday tea. He had gone a long way from the English Midlands, and got out of the way of them. Only to find them here again, with hardly a change. To Harriet it was all novel and fun. But Richard Lovat felt vaguely depressed.

The pleasant heartiness of the life he had known as a boy now depressed him. He hated the promiscuous mixing in of all the company, the lack of reserve in manner. He had preferred India for that: the gulf between the native servants and the whites kept up a sort of tone. He had learned to be separate, to talk across a slight distance. And that was an immense relief to him, because it was really more his nature. Now he found himself soused again in the old familiar “jolly and cosy” spirit of his childhood and boyhood, and he was depressed.

Jack, of course, had a certain reserve. But of a different sort. Not a physical reserve. He did keep his coat on, but he might as well have sat there in his shirt-sleeves. His very silence was, so to speak, in its shirt-sleeves.