Part 7

But he wouldn’t be happy--and he said so--and she knew it. She saw it like a doom on his brow.

“And why couldn’t we be happy in this wonderful new country, living to ourselves. We could have a cow, and chickens--and then the Pacific, and this marvellous new country. Surely that is enough for any man. Why must you have more?”

“Because I feel I _must_ fight out something with mankind yet. I haven’t finished with my fellow-men. I’ve got a struggle with them yet.”

“But what struggle? What’s the good? What’s the point of your struggle? And what’s your struggle for?”

“I don’t know. But it’s inside me, and I haven’t finished yet. To make some kind of an opening--some kind of a way for the afterwards.”

“Ha, the afterwards will make its own way, it won’t wait for you. It’s a kind of nervous obstinacy and self-importance in you. You _don’t_ like people. You always turn away from them and hate them. Yet like a dog to his vomit you always turn back. And it will be the same old game here again as everywhere else. What are these people after all? Quite nice, but just common and--and not in your line at all. But there you are. You stick your head into a bush like an ostrich, and think you’re doing wonders.”

“I intend to move with men and get men to move with me before I die,” he said. Then he added hastily: “Or at any rate I’ll try a bit longer yet. When I make up my mind that it’s really no good, I’ll go with you and we’ll live alone somewhere together, and forget the world. And in Australia too. Just like a business man retiring. I’ll retire away from the world, and forget it. But not yet. Not till I feel I’ve finished. I’ve got to struggle with men and the world of men for a time yet. When it’s over I’ll do as you say.”

“Ah, you and your men, men! What do these Callcotts and these little Trewhella people mean to you after all? Are they men? They are only something you delude yourself about. And then you’ll come a cropper, and fall back on me. Just as it always is. You fall back on me, and I’m expected to like it. I’m good enough to fall back on, when you’ve made a fool of yourself with a lot of tuppenny little people, imagining you’re doing something in the world of _men_. Much men there is about it. Common little street-people, that’s all.”

He was silent. He heard all she had to say: and he knew that as far as the past went, it was all quite true. He had started off on his fiery courses: always, as she said, to fall back rather the worse for the attempt, on her. She had no use at all for fiery courses and efforts with the world of men. Let all that rubbish go.

“Well,” he said. “It’s my need to make these tries, yet. Wait till I’ve exhausted the need, and we’ll have a little place of our own and forget the world, really. I know I can do it. I could almost do it now: and here in Australia. The country appeals to me that way: to lose oneself and have done with this side of life. But wait a bit longer.”

“Ah, I suppose I shall have to,” she said recklessly. “You’ll have to go one making a fool of yourself till you’re tired. Wives are _supposed_ to have to take their husbands back a little damaged and repentant from their _love affairs_ with other women. And I’m hanged if it wouldn’t be more fun than this business of seeing you come back once more fooled from your attempts with _men_--the world of men, as you call it. If they _were_ real men I wouldn’t mind. But look at your Jack Callcott. Really, and you’re supposed to have had some experience in life. ‘Clip in, old man!’” She imitated Jack’s voice and manner. “And you stand it all and think it’s wonderful! Nay, men are too foolish for me to understand them; I give them up.”

He laughed, realising that most of what she said was true.

“You see,” he said, “I have the roots of my life with you. But I want if possible to send out a new shoot in the life of mankind--the effort man makes forever, to grow into new forms.”

She looked at him. And somehow she wanted to cry, because he was so silly in refusing to be finally disappointed in his efforts with mankind, and yet his silliness was pathetic, in a way beautiful. But then it _was_ so silly--she wanted to shake him.

“Send out a new shoot then. Send it out. You do it in your writing already!” she cried. “But getting yourself mixed up with these impudent little people won’t send any shoots, don’t you think it. They’ll nip you in the bud again, as they always do.”

He pondered this also, stubbornly, and knew it was true. But he had set his will on something, and wasn’t going to give way.

“I want to do something with living people, somewhere, somehow, while I live on the earth. I write, but I write alone. And I live alone. Without any connection whatever with the rest of men.”

“Don’t swank, you don’t live alone. You’ve got _me_ there safe enough, to support you. Don’t swank to me about being alone, because it insults me, you see. I know how much alone you are, with me always there keeping you together.”

And again he sulked and swallowed it, and obstinately held out.

“None the less,” he retorted, “I do want to do something along with men. I _am_ alone and cut off. As a man among men, I just have no place. I have my life with you, I know: _et preterea nihil_.”

“_Et preterea nihil!_ And what more do you want? Besides, you liar, haven’t you your writing? Isn’t that all you want, isn’t that _doing_ all there is to be done? Men! Much _men_ there is about them! Bah, when it comes to that, I have to be even the only man as well as the only woman.”

“That’s the whole trouble,” said he bitingly.

“Bah, you creature, you ought to be grateful,” cried Harriet.

William James arrived one morning when the Callcotts were both out, and brought a little basket of persimmons and passion fruits for Harriet. As it happened, Somers also was out.

“I remember you said you like these date-plums, Mrs Somers. Over at our place we don’t care for them, so if you like to have them you’re welcome. And these are about the last of the passion fruit, seemingly.”

The persimmons were good big ones, of that lovely suave orange-red colour which is perhaps their chief attraction, and they were just beginning to go soft. Harriet of course was enchanted. William James came in and sat down for a few minutes, wondering what had become of Victoria. He looked round the room curiously. Harriet had, of course, arranged it to her own liking, taken away all the pictures and ornaments, hung a Tunis curtain behind the couch, stood two tall red lacquer candlesticks on the mantelpiece, and altogether given the room that air of pleasant distinction which a woman who knows how to do it finds so easy, especially if she has a few shawls and cushion-covers and bits of interesting brass or china. Harriet insisted on travelling with a few such things. She was prepared to camp in a furnished bungalow or cottage on any continent, but a few of her own things she must have about her. Also she wore a dress of Bavarian peasant stuff, very thin black woollen material, sprinkled all over with tiny pink roses with green leaves. And on her feet she had heelless sandals of plaited strips of leather, from Colombo. William James noticed every one of these things. They had a glamour like magic for him.

“This is quite a pleasant room you have here,” he said in his Cornish voice, with the alert, subtle, faintly smiling look of wonder on his face.

“It isn’t bad,” said Harriet. “But a bit poky.”

“Poky you call it? Do you remember the little stone holes they have for rooms in those old stone Cornish cottages?”

“Yes--but we had a lovely one. And the great thick granite walls and the low ceilings.”

“Walls always letting the damp in, can’t keep it out, because all the chinks and spaces are just stuffed with plain earth, and a bit of mortar smeared over the outside like butter scraped on bread. Don’t I remember it! I should think I do.”

“Cornwall had a great charm for me.”

“Well, I don’t know where you found it, I’m sure. But I suppose you’ve got a way of your own with a place, let it be Cornwall or where it may, to make it look well. It all depends where you’re born and where you come from.”

“Perhaps,” said Harriet.

“I’ve never seen an Australian cottage looking like this, now. And yet it isn’t the number of things you’ve put into it.”

“The number I’ve taken out,” laughed Harriet.

William James sat there with his quiet, slumberous-seeming body, watching her: watching the quick radiance of her fair face, and the charm of her bearing. There was something quick and sure and, as it were, beyond the ordinary clay, about her, that exercised a spell over him. She was his real Cornish idea of a lady: simple, living among people as if one of themselves, and yet not one of themselves: a sort of magic about her. He could almost see a glow in the air around her. And he could see that for her he was just a nice fellow who lived in another world and on another plane than herself, and that he could never come up or she come down. She was the queen that slumbers somewhere in every Cornish imagination, the queen ungrudged. And perhaps, in the true Celtic imagination slumbers the glamorous king as well. The Celt needs the mystic glow of real kingliness. Hence his loneliness in the democratic world of industry, and his social perversity.

“I don’t suppose Rose could ever learn to do this with a room, could she now?” he asked, making a slight gesture with his hand. He sat with his clear, queer, light grey eyes fixed on Harriet’s face.

“I think so,” cried Harriet; then she met the watchful eyes. “In her own way she could. Every woman has her own way, you know.”

“Yes, I do know,” he answered.

“And you see,” said Harriet, “we’re more or less lazy people who have no regular work in the world. If we had, perhaps we should live in a different way.”

William James shook his head.

“It’s what’s bred into you,” he said, “that comes out. Now if I was a really rich man, I think I could learn to carry it off with the best of them, out here. But when it comes to being the real thing, why, I know it would be beyond me, so there you are.”

“But can one be sure?” she cried.

“I think I can. I can see the difference between common and uncommon. I can do more than that. I can see the difference between gentlemen who haven’t got the gift, and those that have. Take Lord Washburn, for example. He’s a gentleman all right--he comes of an old family, they tell me. But I doubt very much if he’s any better than I am.”

“Why should he be?” cried Harriet.

“What I mean is,” said William James, “he hasn’t got the gift, you know.”

“The gift of what?” said Harriet, puzzled.

“How shall I put it? The gift that you’ve got, now: and that Mr Somers has as well: and that people out here don’t have.”

“But that may only be manner,” said Harriet.

“No, it’s more than manner. It’s the gift of being superior, there now: better than most folks. You understand me, I don’t mean swank and money. That’ll never give it you. Neither is it _thinking_ yourself superior. The people that are superior don’t think it, and don’t even seem to feel it, in a way. And yet in a way they know it. But there aren’t many of them out here. And what there are go away. This place is meant for all one dead level sort of people.”

He spoke with curious sarcasm.

“But,” said Harriet, “you are Australian yourself now, aren’t you? Or don’t you feel it?”

“Oh yes, I suppose I feel it,” he said, shifting uneasily on his seat. “I _am_ Australian. And I’m Australian partly because I know that in Australia there _won’t_ be anybody any better than me. There now.”

“But,” laughed Harriet, “aren’t you glad then?”

“Glad?” he said. “It’s not a matter for gladness. It’s a fact. But I’m not one of the fools who think there’s nobody any better than me in the world, I know there are.”

“How queer to hear you say so?”

“But this isn’t the place for them. Here in Australia we don’t want them. We want the new-fashioned sort of people who are all dead-level as good as one another. You’re going to Mullumbimby this week-end with Jack and Victoria, aren’t you?”

“Yes. And I thought if we liked it we might stay down there for a while--by the sea--away from the town.”

“You please yourselves, of course. Perhaps better there than here. But--it’s no business of mine, you know that”--he shrugged his shoulders. “But there’s something comes over me when I see Mr Somers thinking he can live out here, and work with the Australians. I think he’s wrong--I really do. They’ll drag him down to their level, and make what use they can of him--and--well, in my opinion you’d both be sorry for it.”

“How strange that you should say so, you who are one of them.”

“I am one of them, and I’m not. I’m not one of anybody. But I haven’t got only just the two eyes in my head that can tell the kettle from the teapot. I’ve got another set of eyes inside me somewhere that can tell real differences, when there are any. And that’s what these people don’t seem to have at all. They’ve only got the outside eyes.”

Harriet looked at him in wonder. And he looked at her--at her queer, rather large, but thin-skinned, soft hands.

“You need a thick skin to live out here,” he said.

But still she sat with her hands folded, lost in meditation.

“But Lovat wants so much to do something in the world, with other men,” she said at last. “It’s not _my_ urging, I assure you.”

“He’s making a mistake. He’s making a mistake to come out here, tell him from me. They’ll take him at their own level, not at his.”

“But perhaps he wants to be taken at their level,” said Harriet, rather bitterly, almost loving the short, thick man opposite for his quiet, Cornish voice and his uncanny grey eyes, and his warning.

“If he does he makes the mistake of his life, tell him from me.” And William James rose to his feet. “You’ll excuse me for stopping talking like this, over things that’s no business of mine,” he added.

“It’s awfully good of you,” said Harriet.

“Well, it’s not often I interfere with people’s doings. But there was just something about you and Mr Somers--”

“Awfully good of you.”

He had taken his little black felt hat. He had an almost Italian or Spanish look about him--from one of the big towns, Barcelona or even Palermo.

“I suppose I’ll have to be getting along,” he said.

She held out her hand to him to bid him good-bye. But he shook hands in a loose, slack way, and was gone, leaving Harriet uneasy as if she had received warning of a hidden danger.

She hastened to show Somers the persimmons when he came home, and to tell of her visitor.

“And he’s queer, Lovat, he’s awfully queer--nice too. He told me we were superior people, and that we made a mistake coming here, because they’d bring us down to their level.”

“Not if we don’t let them.”

“He says we can’t help it.”

“Why did he come to tell you that, I wonder.”

They were going down to Mullumbimby in two days’ time--and they had hardly seen anything of Jack and Victoria since the Sunday at Mosman’s Bay. But Victoria called across the fence, rather hesitatingly:

“You’re going with us on Saturday, aren’t you, Mrs Somers?”

“Oh yes, we’re looking forward to it immensely--if it really suits you.”

“I’m so glad. I thought perhaps you didn’t want to go.”

That same evening Jack and Victoria came across for a few minutes.

“Look at the lovely _cacchi_,” said Harriet, giving the persimmons their Italian name. “William James brought them me this morning.”

“William James brought them!” cried Victoria and Jack in a breath. “Why, whatever have you done to him?”

“Nothing,” laughed Harriet. “I hope not, I’m sure.”

“You must have given him a glad eye,” said Jack. “Did he come in?”

“Yes, he came in and talked to me quite a long time. He said he would see you to-morrow in town.”

“Wonders never cease! I tell you, you’ve done it on him. What did he talk to you about, then?”

“Oh, Australia. He said he didn’t think we should really like it.”

“He did, did he! Wanted to warn you off, so to speak.”

“Perhaps,” laughed Harriet.

“The little mingo. He’s as deep as a five hundred feet boring, and I’ve never got down to sweet water in him yet.”

“Don’t you trust him?” said Harriet.

“Trust him? Oh yes, he’d never pick my pocket.”

“I didn’t mean that.”

“That’s the only way I have of trusting folks,” said Jack.

“Then you don’t trust them far,” mocked Harriet.

“Perhaps I don’t. And perhaps I’m wise of it.”

CHAP: V. COO-EE

They went to Mullumbimby by the two o’clock train from Sydney on the Friday afternoon, Jack having managed to get a day off for the occasion. He was a sort of partner in the motor-works place where he was employed, so it was not so difficult. And work was slack.

Harriet and Victoria were both quite excited. The Somers had insisted on packing one basket of food for the house, and Victoria had brought some dainties as well. There were few people in the train, so they settled themselves right at the front, in one of those long open second-class coaches with many cane seats and a passage down the middle.

“This is really for the coal miners,” said Victoria. “You’ll see they’ll get in when we get further down.”

She was rather wistful, after the vague coolness that had subsisted between the two households. She was so happy that Somers and Harriet were coming with her and Jack. They made her feel--she could hardly describe it--but so safe, so happy and safe. Whereas often enough, in spite of the stalwart Jack, she felt like some piece of fluff blown about on the air, now that she was taken from her own home. With Somers and Harriet she felt like a child that is with its parents, so lovely and secure, without any need ever to look round. Jack was a man, and everything a man should be, in her eyes. But he was also like a piece of driftwood drifting on the strange unknown currents in an unexplored nowhere, without any place to arrive at. Whereas, to Victoria, Harriet seemed to be rooted right in the centre of everything, at last she could come to perfect rest in her, like a bird in a tree that remains still firm when the floods are washing everything else about.

If only Somers would let her rest in Harriet and him. But he seemed to have a strange vindictiveness somewhere in his nature, that turned round on her and terrified her worse than before. If he would only be fond of her, that was what she wanted. If he would only be fond of her, and not ever really leave her. Not love. When she thought of lovers, she thought of something quite different. Something rather vulgar, rather common, more or less naughty. Ah no, he wasn’t like that. And yet--since all men are potential lovers to every woman--wouldn’t it be terrible if he asked for love. Terrible--but wonderful. Not a bit like Jack--not a bit. Would Harriet mind? Victoria looked at Harriet with her quick, bright, shy brown eyes. Harriet looked so handsome and distant: she was a little afraid of her. Not as she was afraid of Somers. Afraid as one woman is of another fierce woman. Harriet was fierce, Victoria decided. Somers was demonish, but could be gentle and kind.

It came on to rain, streaming down the carriage windows. Jack lit a cigarette, and offered one to Harriet. She, though she knew Somers disliked it intensely when she smoked, particularly in a public place like this long, open railway carriage, accepted, and sat by the closed window smoking.

The train ran for a long time through Sydney, or the endless outsides of Sydney. The town took almost as much leaving as London does. But it was different. Instead of solid rows of houses, solid streets like London, it was mostly innumerable detached bungalows and cottages, spreading for great distances, scattering over hills, low hills and shallow inclines. And then waste marshy places, and old iron, and abortive corrugated iron “works”--all like the Last Day of creation, instead of a new country. Away to the left they saw the shallow waters of the big opening where Botany Bay is: the sandy shores, the factory chimneys, the lonely places where it is still Bush. And the weary half established straggling of more suburb.

“Como,” said the station sign. And they ran on bridges over two arms of water from the sea, and they saw what looked like a long lake with wooded shores and bungalows: a bit like Lake Como, but oh, so unlike. That curious sombreness of Australia, the sense of oldness, with the forms all worn down low and blunt, squat. The squat-seeming earth. And then they ran at last into real country rather rocky, dark old rocks, and sombre bush with its different pale-stemmed dull-leaved gum-trees standing graceful, and various healthy looking undergrowth, and great spikey things like zuccas. As they turned south they saw tree-ferns standing on one knobbly leg among the gums, and among the rocks ordinary ferns and small bushes spreading in glades and up sharp hill-slopes. It was virgin bush, and as if unvisited, lost, sombre, with plenty of space, yet spreading grey for miles and miles, in a hollow towards the west. Far in the west, the sky having suddenly cleared, they saw the magical range of the Blue Mountains. And all this hoary space of bush between. The strange, as it were, _invisible_ beauty of Australia, which is undeniably there, but which seems to lurk just beyond the range of our white vision. You feel you can’t _see_--as if your eyes hadn’t the vision in them to correspond with the outside landscape. For the landscape is so unimpressive, like a face with little or no features, a dark face. It is so aboriginal, out of our ken, and it hangs back so aloof. Somers always felt he looked at it through a cleft in the atmosphere; as one looks at one of the ugly-faced, distorted aborigines with his wonderful dark eyes that have such a incomprehensible ancient shine in them, across gulfs of unbridged centuries. And yet, when you don’t have the feeling of ugliness or monotony, in landscape or in nigger, you get a sense of subtle, remote, _formless_ beauty more poignant than anything ever experienced before.

“Your wonderful Australia!” said Harriet to Jack. “I can’t tell you how it moves me. It feels as if no one had ever loved it. Do you know what I mean? England and Germany and Italy and Egypt and India--they’ve all been loved so passionately. But Australia feels as if it had never been loved, and never come out into the open. As if man had never loved it, and made it a happy country, a bride country--or a mother country.”

“I don’t suppose they ever have,” said Jack.

“But they will?” asked Harriet. “Surely they will. I feel that if I were Australian, I should love the very earth of it--the very sand and dryness of it--more than anything.”

“Where should we poor Australian wives be?” put in Victoria, leaning forward her delicate, frail face--that reminded one of a flickering butterfly in its wavering.

“Yes,” said Harriet meditatively, as if they had to be considered, but were not as important as the other question.

“I’m afraid most Australians come to hate the Australian earth a good bit before they’re done with it,” said Jack. “If you call the land a bride, she’s the sort of bride not many of us are willing to tackle. She drinks your sweat and your blood, and then as often as not lets you down, does you in.”

“Of course,” said Harriet, “it will take time. And of course a _lot_ of love. A lot of fierce love, too.”

“Let’s hope she gets it,” said Jack. “They treat the country more like a woman they pick up on the streets than a bride, to my thinking.”

“I feel I could _love_ Australia,” declared Harriet.

“Do you feel you could love an Australian?” asked Jack, very much to the point.

“Well,” said Harriet, arching her eyes at him, “that’s another matter. From what I see of them I rather doubt it,” she laughed, teasing him.

“I should say you would. But it’s no good loving Australia if you can’t love the Australian.”