Part 6

“I’ll soon bring the others to see it,” he said.

“But you know I don’t understand,” said Somers, withdrawing his hand and taking off his spectacles.

“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 talk with him over in my shack.”

“I don’t mind talking to anybody,” said the bewildered Somers.

“Right you are.”

They still sat for some time by the fire, silent; Jack was pondering. Then he looked up at Somers.

“You and me,” he said in a quiet voice, “in a way we’re mates and in a way we’re not. In a way--it’s different.”

With which cryptic remark he left it. And in a few minutes the women came running in with the sweets, to see if the men didn’t want a macaroon.

On Sunday morning Jack asked Somers to walk with him across to the Trewhellas. That is, they walked to one of the ferry stations, and took the ferry steamer to Mosman’s Bay. Jack was a late riser on Sunday morning. The Somers, who were ordinary half-past seven people, rarely saw any signs of life in Wyewurk before half-past ten on the Sabbath--then it was Jack in trousers and shirt, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, having a look at his dahlias while Vicky prepared breakfast.

So the two men did not get a start till eleven o’clock. Jack rolled along easily beside the smaller, quieter Somers. They were an odd couple, ill-assorted. In a colonial way, Jack was handsome, well-built, with strong, heavy limbs. He filled out his expensively tailored suit and looked a man who might be worth anything from five hundred to five thousand a year. The only lean, delicate part about him was his face. See him from behind, his broad shoulders and loose erect carriage and brown nape of the neck, and you expected a good square face to match. He turned, and his long lean, rather pallid face really didn’t seem to belong to his strongly animal body. For the face wasn’t animal at all, except perhaps in a certain slow, dark, lingering look of the eyes, which reminded one of some animal or other, some patient, enduring animal with an indomitable but naturally passive courage.

Somers, in a light suit of thin cloth, made by an Italian tailor, and an Italian hat, just looked a foreign sort of little bloke--but a gentleman. The chief difference was that he looked sensitive all over, his body, even its clothing, and his feet, even his brown shoes, all equally sensitive with his face. Whereas Jack seemed strong and insensitive in the body, only his face vulnerable. His feet might have been made of leather all the way through, tramping with an insentient tread. Whereas Somers put down his feet delicately, as if they had a life of their own, mindful of each step of contact with the earth. Jack strode along: Somers seemed to hover along. There was decision in both of them, but oh, of such different quality. And each had a certain admiration of the other, and a very definite tolerance. Jack just barely tolerated the quiet finesse of Somers, and Somers tolerated with difficulty Jack’s facetious familiarity and heartiness.

Callcott met quite a number of people he knew, and greeted them all heartily. “Hello Bill, old man, how’s things?” “New boots pinchin’ yet, Ant’ny? Hoppy sort of look about you this morning. Right ’o! So long, Ant’ny!” “Different girl again, boy! go on, Sydney’s full of yer sisters. All right, good-bye, old chap.” The same breezy intimacy with all of them, and the moment they had passed by, they didn’t exist for him any more than the gull that had curved across in the air. They seemed to appear like phantoms, and disappear in the same instant, like phantoms. Like so many Flying Dutchmen the Australian’s acquaintances seemed to steer slap through his consciousness, and were gone on the wind. What was the consecutive thread in the man’s feelings? Not his feeling for any particular human beings, that was evident. His friends, even his loves, were just a series of disconnected, isolated moments in his life. Somers always came again upon this gap in the other man’s continuity. He felt that if he knew Jack for twenty years, and then went away, Jack would say: “Friend o’ mine, Englishman, rum sort of bloke, but not a bad sort. Dunno where he’s hanging out just now. Somewhere on the surface of the old humming-top, I suppose.”

The only consecutive thing was that facetious attitude, which was the attitude of taking things as they come, perfected. A sort of ironical stoicism. Yet the man had a sort of passion, and a passionate identity. But not what Somers called human. And threaded on this ironical stoicism.

They found Trewhella dressed and expecting them. Trewhella was a coal and wood merchant, on the north side. He lived quite near the wharf, had his sheds at the side of the house, and in the front a bit of garden running down to the practically tideless bay of the harbour. Across the bit of blue water were many red houses, and new, wide streets of single cottages, seaside-like, disappearing rather forlorn over the brow of the low hill.

William James, or Jas, Jaz, as Jack called him, was as quiet as ever. The three men sat on a bench just above the brown rocks of the water’s edge, in the lovely sunshine, and watched the big ferry steamer slip in and discharge its stream of summer-dressed passengers, and embark another stream: watched the shipping of the middle harbour away to the right, and the boats loitering on the little bay in front. A motor-boat was sweeping at a terrific speed, like some broom sweeping the water, past the little round fort away in the open harbour, and two tall white sailing boats, all wing and no body, were tacking across the pale blue mouth of the bay. The inland sea of the harbour was all bustling with Sunday morning animation: and yet there seemed space, and loneliness. The low, coffee-brown cliffs opposite, too low for cliffs, looked as silent and as aboriginal as if white men had never come.

The little girl Gladys came out shyly. Somers now noticed that she wore spectacles.

“Hello kiddie!” said Jack. “Come here and make a footstool of your uncle, and see what your Aunt Vicky’s been thinking of. Come on then, amble up this road.”

He took her on his knee, and fished out of his pocket a fine sort of hat-band that Victoria had contrived with ribbon and artificial flowers and wooden beads. Gladys sat for a moment or two shyly on her uncle’s knee, and he held her there as if she were a big pillow he was scarcely conscious of holding. Her stepfather sat exactly as if the child did not exist, or were not present. It was neutrality brought to a remarkable pitch. Only Somers seemed actually aware that the child was a little human being--and to him she seemed so absent that he didn’t know what to make of her.

Rose came out bringing beer and sausage rolls, and the girl vanished away again, seemed to evaporate. Somers felt uncomfortable, and wondered what he had been brought for.

“You know Cornwall, do you?” said William James, the Cornish singsong still evident in his Australian speech. He looked with his light-grey, inscrutable eyes at Somers.

“I lived for a time near Padstow,” said Somers.

“Padstow! Ay, I’ve been to Padstow,” said William James. And they talked for a while of the bleak, lonely northern coast of Cornwall, the black huge cliffs with the gulls flying away below, and the sea boiling, and the wind blowing in huge volleys: and the black Cornish nights, with nothing but the violent weather outside.

“Oh, I remember it, I remember it,” said William James. “Though I was a half-starved youngster on a bit of a farm out there, you know, for everlasting chasing half a dozen heifers from the cliffs, where the beggars wanted to fall over and kill themselves, and hunting for a dozen sheep among the gorse-bushes, and wading up to my knees in mud most part of the year, and then in summer, in the dry times, having to haul water for a mile over the rocks in a wagon, because the well had run dry. And at the end of it my father gave me one new suit in two years, and sixpence a week. Ay, that was a life for you. I suppose if I was there still he’d be giving me my keep and five shillin’ a week--if he could open his heart as wide as two half-crowns, which I’m doubting very much.”

“You have money out here, at least,” said Somers. “But there was a great fascination for me, in Cornwall.”

“Fascination! And where do you find the fascination? In a little Wesleyan chapel of a Sunday night, and a girl with her father waiting for her with a strap if she’s not in by nine o’clock? Fascination, did you say?”

“It had a great fascination for me--magic--a magic in the atmosphere.”

“All the fairy tales they’ll tell you?” said William James, looking at the other man with a smile of slow ridicule. “Why ye didn’t go and believe them, did ye?”

“More or less. I could more easily have believed them there than anywhere else I’ve been.”

“Ay, no doubt. And that shows what sort of a place it be. Lot of dum silly nonsense.” He stirred on his seat impatiently.

“At any rate, you’re well out of it. You’re set up all right here,” said Somers, who was secretly amused. The other man did not answer for some time.

“Maybe I am,” he said at last. “I’m not pining to go back and work for my father, I tell you, on a couple of pasties and a lot of abuse. No, after that, I’d like you to tell me what’s wrong with Australia.”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Somers. “Probably nothing at all.”

Again William James was silent. He was a short, thick man, with a little felt hat that sat over his brow with a half humorous flap. He had his knees wide apart, and his hands clasped between them. And he looked for the most part down at the ground. When he did cock up his eye at Somers, it was with a look of suspicion marked with humour and troubled with a certain desire. The man was restless, desirous, craving something--heaven knows what.

“You thinking of settling out here then, are you?” he asked.

“No,” said Somers. “But I don’t say I won’t. It depends.”

William James fidgetted, tapping his feet rapidly on the ground, though his body was silent. He was not like Jack. He, too, was sensitive all over, though his body looked so thick it was silently alive, and his feet were still uneasy. He was young too, with a youth that troubled him. And his nature was secretive, maybe treacherous. It was evident Jack only half liked him.

“You’ve got the money, you can live where you like and go where you like,” said William James, looking up at Somers. “Well, I might do the same. If I cared to do it, I could live quietly on what I’ve got, whether here or in England.” Somers recognised the Cornishman in this.

“You could very easily have as much as I’ve got,” he said laughing.

“The thing is, what’s the good of a life of idleness?” said William James.

“What’s the good of a life of work?” laughed Somers.

Shrewdly, with quick grey eye, Trewhella looked at the other man to see if he were laughing at him.

“Yet I expect you’ve got some purpose in coming to Australia,” said William James, a trifle challenging.

“Maybe I had--or have--maybe it was just whim.”

Again the other man looked shrewdly, to see if it were the truth.

“You aren’t investing money out here, are you?”

“No, I’ve none to invest.”

“Because if you was, I’d advise you not to.” And he spat into the distance, and kept his hands clasped tight.

All this time Jack sat silent and as if unconcerned, but listening attentively.

“Australians have always been croakers,” he said now.

“What do you think of this Irish business?” asked William James.

“I? I really don’t think much at all. I don’t feel Ireland is my job, personally. If I had to say, off-hand, what I’d do myself, why, if I could I’d just leave the Irish to themselves, as they want, and let them wipe each other out or kiss and make friends as they please. They bore me rather.”

“And what about the Empire?”

“That again isn’t my job. I’m only one man, and I know it. But personally, I’d say to India and Australia and all of them the same--if you want to stay in the Empire, stay; if you want to go out, go.”

“And suppose they went out?”

“That’s their affair.”

“Supposing Australia said she was coming out of the Empire and governing herself, and only keeping a sort of entente with Britain. What do you think she’d make of it?”

“By the looks of things, I think she’d make a howling mess of it. Yet it might do her good if she were thrown entirely on her own resources. You’ve got to have something to keep you steady. England has really kept the world steady so far--as steady as it’s been. That’s my opinion. Now she’s not keeping it very steady, and the world’s sick of being bossed, anyhow. Seems to me you may as well sink or swim on your own resources.”

“Perhaps we’re too likely to find ourselves sinking.”

“Then you’ll come to your senses, after you’ve sunk for the third time.”

“What, about England? Cling to England again, you mean?”

“No, I don’t. I mean you can’t put the brotherhood of man on a wage basis.”

“That’s what a good many people say here,” put in Jack.

“You don’t trust socialism then?” said Jaz, in a quiet voice.

“What sort of socialism? Trades unionism? Soviet?”

“Yes, any.”

“I really don’t care about politics. Politics is no more than your country’s housekeeping. If I had to swallow my whole life up in housekeeping, I wouldn’t keep house at all; I’d sleep under a hedge. Same with a country and politics. I’d rather have no country than be gulfed in politics and social stuff. I’d rather have the moon for a motherland.”

Jaz was silent for a time, contemplating his knuckles.

“And that,” he said, “is how the big majority of Australians feel, and that’s why they care nothing about Australia. It’s cruel to the country.”

“Anyhow, no sort of _politics_ will help the country,” said Somers.

“If it won’t, then nothing will,” retorted Jaz.

“So you’d advise us all to be like seven-tenths of us here, not care a blooming hang about anything except your dinner and which horse gets in?” asked Jack, not without sarcasm.

Now Richard was silent, driven into a corner.

“Why,” he said, “there’s just this difference. The bulk of Australians don’t care about Australia--that is, you say they don’t. And why don’t they? Because they care about nothing at all, neither in earth below or heaven above. They just blankly don’t care about anything, and they live in defiance, a sort of slovenly defiance of care of any sort, human or inhuman, good or bad. If they’ve got one belief left, now the war’s safely over, it’s a dull, rock-bottom belief in obstinately not caring, not caring about anything. It seems to me they think it manly, the only manliness, not to care, not to think, not to attend to life at all, but just to tramp blankly on from moment to moment, and over the edge of death without caring a straw. The final manliness.”

The other two men listened in silence, the distant, colonial silence that hears the voice of the old country passionately speaking against them.

“But if they’re not to care about politics, what are they to care about?” asked Jaz, in his small, insinuating voice.

There was a moment’s pause. Then Jack added his question:

“Do you yourself really care about anything, Mr Somers?”

Richard turned and looked him for a moment in the eyes. And then, knowing the two men were trying to corner him, he said coolly:

“Why, yes. I care supremely.”

“About what?” Jack’s question was soft as a drop of water falling into water, and Richard sat struggling with himself.

“That,” he answered, “you either know or don’t know. And if you don’t know, it would only be words my trying to tell.”

There was a silence of check-mate.

“I’m afraid, for myself, I don’t know,” said Jack.

But Somers did not answer, and the talk, rather lamely, was turned off to other things.

The two men went back to Murdoch Street rather silent, thinking their own thoughts. Jack only blurted once:

“What do you make of Jaz, then?”

“I like him. He lives by himself and keeps himself pretty dark--which is his nature.”

“He’s a cleverer man than you’d take him for--figures things out in a way that surprises me. And he’s better than a detective for getting to know things. He’s got one or two Cornish pals down town, you see--and they tip one another the wink. They’re like the Irish in many ways. And they’re not uncommonly unlike a Chink. I always feel as if Jaz had got a bit of Chinese blood in him. That’s what makes the women like him, I suppose.”

“But do the women like him?”

“Rose does. I believe he’d make any woman like him, if he laid himself out to do it. Got that quiet way with him, you know, and a sly sort of touch-the-harp-gently, that’s what they like on the quiet. But he’s the sort of chap I don’t exactly fancy mixing my broth with, and drinking of the same can with.”

Somers laughed at the avowal of antipathy between the two men.

They were not home till two o’clock. Somers found Harriet looking rather plaintive.

“You’ve been a long time,” she said. “What did you do?”

“Just talked.”

“What about?”

“Politics.”

“And did you like them?”

“Yes, quite well.”

“And have you promised to see them again to-day?”

“Who?”

“Why, any of them--the Callcotts.”

“No.”

“Oh. They’re becoming rather an institution.”

“You like them too?”

“Yes, they’re all right. But I don’t want to spend my life with them. After all, that sort of people isn’t exactly my sort--and I thought you used to pretend it wasn’t yours.”

“It isn’t. But then no sort of people is my sort.”

“Yes, it is. Any sort of people, so long as they make a fuss of you.”

“Surely they make an even greater fuss of you.”

“Do they! It’s you they want, not me. And you go as usual, like a lamb to the slaughter.”

“Baa!” he said.

“Yes, baa! You should hear yourself bleat.”

“I’ll listen,” he said.

But Harriet was becoming discontented. They had been in their house only six weeks: and she had had enough of it. Yet it was paid for for three months: at four guineas a week. And they were pretty short of money, and would be for the rest of the year. He had already overdrawn.

Yet she began to suggest going away: away from Sydney. She felt humiliated in that beastly little Murdoch Street.

“What did I tell you?” he retorted. “The very look of it humiliated me. Yet you wanted it, and you said you liked it.”

“I did like it--for the fun of it. But now there’s all this intimacy and neighbouring. I just can’t stand it. I just can’t.”

“But you began it.”

“No, I didn’t; you began it. And your beastly sweetness and gentleness with such people. I wish you kept a bit of it for me.”

He went away in silence, knowing the uselessness of argument. And to tell the truth he was feeling also a revulsion from all this neighbouring, as Harriet called it, and all this talk. It was usually the same. He started by holding himself aloof, then gradually he let himself get mixed in, and then he had revulsions. And to-day was one of his revulsions. Coming home from Mosman’s Bay, he had felt himself dwindle to a cipher in Jack’s consciousness. Then, last evening, there had been all this fervour and protestation. And this morning all the cross-examination by Trewhella. And he, Somers, had plainly said all he thought. And now, as he walked home with Jack, Jack had no more use for him than for the stump of cigar which he chewed between his lips merely because he forgot to spit it away. Which state of affairs did not go at all well with _our_ friend’s sense of self-importance.

Therefore, when he got home, his eyes opened once more to the delicacy of Harriet’s real beauty, which he knew as none else knew it, after twelve years of marriage. And once more he realised her gay, undying courage, her wonderful fresh zest in front of life. And all these other little people seemed so common in comparison, so common. He stood still with astonishment, wondering how he could have come to betray the essential reality of his life and Harriet’s to the common use of these other people with their watchful, vulgar wills. That scene of last evening: what right had a fellow like Callcott to be saying these things to him? What right had he to put his arm round his, Richard’s shoulder, and give him a tight hug? Somers winced to think of it. And now Callcott had gone off with his Victoria in Sunday clothes to some other outing. Anything was as good as anything else; why not!

A gulf there was between them, really, between the Somers and the Callcotts. And yet the easy way Callcott flung a flimsy rope of intimacy across the gulf, and was embracing the pair of his neighbours in mid-air, as it were, without a grain of common foothold. And Somers let himself be embraced. So he sat pale and silent and mortified in the kitchen that evening thinking of it all, and wishing himself far away, in Europe.

“Oh, how I detest this treacly democratic Australia,” he said. “It swamps one with a sort of common emotion like treacle, and before one knows where one is, one is caught like a fly on a flypaper, in one mess with all the other buzzers. How I hate it! I want to go away.”

“It isn’t Australia,” said Harriet. “Australia’s lonely. It’s just the people. And it isn’t even the people--if you would only keep your proper distance, and not make yourself cheap to them and get into messes.”

“No, it’s the country. It’s in the air, I want to leave it.”

But he was not very emphatic. Harriet wanted to go down to the South Coast, of which she had heard from Victoria.

“Think,” she said, “it must be lovely there--with the mountain behind, and steep hills, and blackberries, and lovely little bays with sand.”

“There’ll be no blackberries. It’s end of June--which is their mid-winter.”

“But there’ll be the other things. Let’s do that, and never mind the beastly money for this pokey Torestin.”

“They’ve asked us to go with them to Mullumbimby in a fortnight. Shall we wait till then and look?”

Harriet sat in silence for some moments.

“We might,” she said reluctantly. She didn’t want to wait. But what Victoria had told her of Mullumbimby, the township on the South Coast, so appealed to her that she decided to abide by her opportunity.

And then curiously enough, for the next week the neighbours hardly saw one another. It was as if the same wave of revulsion had passed over both sides of the fence. They had fleeting glimpses of Victoria as she went about the house. And when he could, Jack put in an hour at his garden in the evening, tidying it up finally for the winter. But the weather was bad, it rained a good deal; there were fogs in the morning, and foghorns on the harbour; and the Somers kept their doors continually blank and shut.

Somers went round to the shipping agents and found out about boats to San Francisco, and talked of sailing in July, and of stopping at Tahiti or at Fiji on the way, and of cabling for money for the fares. He figured it all out. And Harriet mildly agreed. Her revulsion from Australia had passed quicker than his, now that she saw herself escaping from town and from neighbours to the quiet of a house by the sea, alone with him. Still she let him talk. Verbal agreement and silent opposition is perhaps the best weapon on such occasions.

Harriet would look at him sometimes wistfully, as he sat with his brow clouded. She had a real instinctive mistrust of other people--all other people. In her heart of hearts she said she wanted to live alone with Somers, and know nobody, all the rest of her life. In Australia, where one can be lonely, and where the land almost calls to one to be lonely--and then drives one back again on one’s fellow-men in a kind of frenzy. Harriet would be quite happy, by the sea, with a house and a little garden and as much space to herself as possible, knowing nobody, but having Lovat always there. And he could write, and it would be perfect.