Chapter XVIII: Adieu Australia 383 (13)

Richard faced out all his memories like a nightmare in the night, and cut clear. He felt broken off from his fellow-men. He felt broken off from the England he had belonged to. The ties were gone. He was loose like a single timber of some wrecked ship, drifting over the face of the earth. Without a people, without a land. So be it. He was broken apart, apart he would remain.

CHAP: XIII. “REVENGE!” TIMOTHEUS CRIES

At last he had it all out with himself, right to the bitter end. And then he realised that all the time, since the year 1918, whether he was in Sicily or Switzerland or Venice or Germany or in the Austrian Tyrol, deep in his unconsciousness had lain this accumulation of black fury and fear, like frenzied lava quiescent in his soul. And now it had burst up: the fear, then the acute remembrance. So he faced it out, trembling with shock and bitterness, every detail. And then he tried to reckon it all up.

But first, why had it all come back on him? It had seemed so past, so gone. Why should it suddenly erupt like white hot lava, to set in hot black rock round the wound of his soul? Who knows? Perhaps there is a periodicity even in volcanic eruption. Or perhaps it was this contact with Kangaroo and Willie Struthers, contact with the accumulating forces of social violence. Or perhaps it was being again in a purely English-speaking country, and feeling again that queer revulsion from the English form of democracy. He realised that the oh-so-pleasant democracy of the English lower classes frightened him, always had frightened him. Yet everybody was so very pleasant and easy-going down in Mullumbimby. It _really_ seemed so free.

Free! Free! What did it mean? It was this very ultra-freedom that frightened him, like a still pause before a thunderstorm. “Let him that thinketh he stand take heed lest he fall.”

Or perhaps it was just the inversion of the season, the climate. His blood, his whole corporeal being, expected summer, and long days and short nights. And here he had wilfully come into the Southern hemisphere, with long starry nights of winter, and the late sun rising north-east behind the sea, and travelling northwards up the sky, as if running away, and setting in a cold glare north-west, behind the bluey-black range. It should have been bird-nesting time, and leaves and flowers and tall corn and full summer with cherry blossom fallen and cherries beginning to change colour. Whereas the grass was sere and brown, the earth had gone winter-numb, the few deciduous trees were bare, and only the uncanny coral tree flared its flowers of red-hot iron.

Perhaps it was just this: the inversion of the seasons, the shock to his blood and his system. For, of course, the body has its own rhythm, with the sun and with the moon. The great nerve ganglia and the subtle glands have their regular times and motions, in correspondence with the outer universe. And these times and motions had suddenly received a check from the outer universe: a distinct check. He had had an inkling of what it would be when, from the ship in the Indian Ocean he had seen the great and beloved constellation Orion standing on its head as if pitching head foremost into the sea, and the bright dog Sirius coursing high above his heels in the outer air. Then he had realised the inversion in the heavens.

And perhaps it was this inversion which had brought up all that corrosive and bitter fire from the bowels of his unconscious, up again into his full consciousness. If so, then let it be so.

One thing he realised, however: that if the fire had suddenly erupted in his own belly, it would erupt one day in the bellies of all men. Because there it had accumulated, like a great horrible lava pool, deep in the unconscious bowels of all men. All who were not dead. And even the dead were many of them raging in the invisible, with gnashing of teeth. But the living dead, these he could not reckon with: they with poisonous teeth like hyænas.

Rage! Rage! Rage! The awful accumulations that lie quiescent and pregnant in the bowels of men. He thought of the big gaunt collier with the blunt, seal-like face shorn of its intelligence, squatting naked and ghastly on his heels. It passes, it passes for the time being. But in those moments there is an inward disruption, and the death-hot lava pours loose into the deepest reservoirs of the soul. One day to erupt: or else to go hard and rocky, dead.

Even the athletic young man who wanted to be approved of. Even he. He had not much true spunk. But what was he feeling now? Unless, of course, he had got into business and was successfully coining money. That seemed to be the only safety-valve: success in money-making. But how many men were successful, now?

Of course it was all necessary, the conscription, the medical examinations. Of course, of course. We all know it. But when it comes to the deepest things, men are as entirely irrational as women. You can reason with a sex-angry woman till you are black in the face. And if for a time you _do_ overcome her with reason, the sex-anger only arises more hideously and furiously, later. Perhaps in another guise.

There is no arguing with the instinctive passional self. Not the least use in the world. Yes, you are quite right, quite right in all your contentions. _But!_ And the _But_ just explodes everything like a bomb.

The conscription, all the whole performance of the war was absolutely circumstantially necessary. It was necessary to investigate even the secret parts of a man. Agreed! Agreed! _But_--

It was _necessary_ to put Richard Lovat and the ugly collier through that business at Derby. Many men were put through things a thousand times worse. Agreed! Oh, entirely agreed! The war couldn’t be lost, at that hour. Quite, quite, quite! Even Richard, even now, agreed fully to all these contentions. _But_--!

And there you are. _But_--. He was full of a lava fire of rage and hate, at the bottom of his soul. And he knew it was the same with most men. He felt desecrated. And he knew it was the same with most men. He felt sold. And he knew most men felt the same.

He cared for nothing now, but to let loose the hell-rage that was in him. Get rid of it by letting it out. For there was no digesting it. He had been trying that for three years, and roaming the face of the earth trying to soothe himself with the sops of travel and new experience and scenery. He knew now the worth of all sops. Once that disruption had taken place in a man’s soul, and in a stress of humiliation, under the presence of _compulsion_, something has broken in his tissue and the liquid fire has run out loose into his blood, then no sops will be of any avail. The lava-fire at the bottom of a man’s belly breeds more lava fire, and more, and more--till there is an eruption. As the lava fire accumulates, the man becomes more and more reckless. Till he reaches a pitch of dehumanised recklessness, and then the lid is blown off, as the top is blown off a hill to make a new volcano. Or else it all sets into rocky deadness.

Richard felt himself reaching the volcanic pitch. He had as good as reached it. And he realised that the Russians must have reached it during the war: that the Irish had got there: that the Indians in India were approaching the point: that the whole world was gradually working up to the pitch. The whole world. It was as inevitable as the coming of summer. It might be soon--it might be slow. But inevitable it was. Or else the alternative, the dead-rock barrenness.

But why? Why, oh why? Is human life just opposed to human reason? The Allies _did_ have to win the war. For it would certainly not have been any better letting Germany win. Unless a very great disaster might have shocked men to their deeper senses. But doubtful. Things _had_ to go as they went.

So, it was just Thomas Hardy’s Blind Fate? No, said Lovat to himself, no. _Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt._ The Fates lead on the willing man, the unwilling man they drag.

The Fates? What Fates? It takes a willing man to answer. Man is not a creature of circumstance, neither is he the result of cause-and-effect throughout the ages, neither is he a product of evolution, neither is he a living _Mind_, part of the Universal Mind. Neither is he a complicated make-up of forces and chemicals and organs. Neither is he a term of love. Neither is he the mere instrument of God’s will. None of these things.

Man lives according to his own idea of himself. When circumstances begin really to run counter to his idea of himself, he damns circumstances. When the running-counter persists, he damns the nature of things. And when it _still_ persists, he becomes a fatalist. A fatalist or an opportunist--anything of that sort.

Whose fault is it? Fate’s? Not at all. It is man’s fault for persisting in some fixed idea of himself.

Yet, being an animal saddled with a mental consciousness, which means ideas, man _must_ have some idea of himself. He just must, and those that deny it have got a more fixed idea than anybody.

Man must have some idea of himself. He must live _hard_, _hard_, up to this idea of himself.

But the idea is perishable. Say what you like, every idea is perishable: even the idea of God or Love or Humanity or Liberty--even the greatest idea has its day and perishes. Each formulated religion is in the end only a great idea. Once the idea becomes explicit, it is dead. Yet we must _have_ ideas.

When a man follows the true inspiration of a new, living idea, he then is the willing man whom the Fates lead onwards: like St. Paul or Pope Hildebrand or Martin Luther or Cromwell or Abraham Lincoln. But when the idea is really dead, and _still_ man persists in following it, then he is the unwilling man whom the Fates destroy, like Kaiser Wilhelm or President Wilson, or, to-day, the world at large.

For the idea, or ideal of Love, Self-sacrifice, Humanity united in love, in brotherhood, in peace--all this is dead. There is no arguing about it. It is dead. The great ideal is dead.

How do we know? By putting off our conscious conceit and listening to our own soul.

So then, why will men not forgive the war, and their humiliations at the hands of these war-like authorities? Because men were _compelled_ into the service of a dead ideal. And perhaps nothing but this compulsion made them realise it _was_ a dead ideal. But all those filthy little stay-at-home officers and coast-watchers and dirty-minded doctors who tortured men during the _first_ stages of the torture, did these men _in their souls_ believe in what they were doing? They didn’t. They _had_ no souls. They had only their beastly little _wills_, which they used to bully all men with. With their wills they determined to fight for a dead ideal, and to bully every other man into compliance. The inspiring motive was the bullying. And every other man complied. Or else, by admitting a conscientious objection to war, he admitted the dead ideal, but took refuge in one of its side-tracks.

All men alike, and all women, admitted and still admit the face value of the ideal of Love, Self-sacrifice, and Humanity united in love, brotherhood, and peace. So, they persist in the dead ideal. _Fata nolunt._ Fata nolunt. Then see how the fates betray them. In their service of the defunct ideal they find themselves utterly humiliated, _sold_. In England, Italy, Germany, India, Australia, that had been the one word men had used to describe their feeling. They had been sold. But not before they had sold themselves. Now then. The moment a man feels he has been sold, sold in the deepest things, something goes wrong with his whole mechanism. Something breaks, in his tissue, and the black poison is emitted into his blood. And then he follows a natural course, and becomes a creature of slow, or of quick, revenge. Revenge on all that the old ideal is and stands for. Revenge on the whole system. Just revenge. Even further revenge on himself.

Men revenged themselves on Athens, when they felt sold. When Rome, persisting in an old, defunct ideal, gradually made her subjects feel sold, they were revenged on her, no matter how. Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire the same. And now our turn. “Revenge,” Timotheus cries. And Timotheus is just everybody, except those that have got hold of the money or the power.

There is nothing for it but revenge. If you sow the dragon’s teeth, you mustn’t expect lilies of the valley to spring up in sweet meekness.

And Kangaroo? Kangaroo insisted on the old idea as hard as ever, though on the Power of Love rather than on the Submission and Sacrifice of Love. He wanted to take his revenge in an odour of sanctification and Lily of the Valley essence. But he was the mob, really. See his face in a rage. He was the mob: the _vengeful_ mob. Oh, God, the most terrifying of all things.

And Willie Struthers? The vengeful mob also. But if the old ideal had still a logical leaf to put forth, it was this last leaf of communism--before the lily-tree of humanity rooted in love died its final death. Perhaps better Struthers than Kangaroo.

“But what about myself?” said Richard Lovat to himself, as he lay in the darkness of Sydney, his brain afire. For the horrible bitter fire seemed really to have got into his brain, burst up from his deepest bowels. “What about me? Am I too Timotheus crying _Revenge_?”

Oh, revenge, yes, he wanted to be avenged. He wanted to be avenged. Especially when he felt tangled up in the horrible human affair, the ideal become like an octopus with a ghastly eye in the centre, and white arms enwreathing the world. Oh, then he wanted to be avenged.

But now, for the moment he felt he had cut himself clear. He was exhausted and almost wrecked--but he felt clear again. If no other ghastly arm of the octopus should flash out and encircle him.

For the moment he felt himself lying inert, but clear, the dragon dead. The ever-renewed dragon of a great old ideal, with its foul poison-breath. It seemed as if, for himself, he had killed it.

That was now all he wanted: to get clear. Not to save humanity or to help humanity or to have anything to do with humanity. No--no. Kangaroo had been his last embrace with humanity. Now, all he wanted was to cut himself clear. To be clear of humanity altogether, to be alone. To be clear of love, and pity, and hate. To be alone from it all. To cut himself finally clear from the last encircling arm of the octopus humanity. To turn to the old dark gods, who had waited so long in the outer dark.

Humanity could do as it liked: he did not care. So long as he could get his own soul clear. For he believed in the inward soul, in the profound unconscious of man. Not an ideal God. The ideal God is a proposition of the mental consciousness, all-too-limitedly human. “No,” he said to himself. “There _is_ God. But forever dark, forever unrealisable: forever and forever. The unutterable name, because it can never have a name. The great living darkness which we represent by the glyph, God.”

There is this ever-present, living darkness inexhaustible and unknowable. It _is_. And it is all the God and the gods.

And every _living_ human soul is a well-head to this darkness of the living unutterable. Into every living soul wells up the darkness, the unutterable. And then there is travail of the visible with the invisible. Man is in travail with his own soul, while ever his soul lives. Into his unconscious surges a new flood of the God-darkness, the living unutterable. And this unutterable is like a germ, a fœtus with which he must travail, bringing it at last into utterance, into action, into _being_.

But in most people the soul is withered at the source, like a woman whose ovaries withered before she became a woman, or a man whose sex-glands died at the moment when they should have come into life. Like unsexed people, the mass of mankind is soulless. Because to persist in resistance of the sensitive influx of the dark gradually withers the soul, makes it die, and leaves a human idealist and an automaton. Most people are dead, and scurrying and talking in the sleep of death. Life has its automatic side, sometimes in direct conflict with the spontaneous soul. Then there is a fight. And the spontaneous soul must extricate itself from the meshes of the _almost_ automatic white octopus of the human ideal, the octopus of humanity. It must struggle clear, knowing what it is doing: not waste itself in revenge. The revenge is inevitable enough, for each denial of the spontaneous dark soul creates the reflex of its own revenge. But the greatest revenge on the lie is to get clear of the lie.

The long travail. The long gestation of the soul within a man, and the final parturition, the birth of a new way of knowing, a new God-influx. A new idea, true enough. But at the centre, the old anti-idea: the dark, the unutterable God. This time not a God scribbling on tablets of stone or bronze. No everlasting decalogues. No sermons on mounts, either. The dark God, the forever unrevealed. The God who is many gods to many men: all things to all men. The source of passions and strange motives. It is a frightening thought, but very liberating.

“Ah, my soul,” said Richard to himself, “you have to look more ways than one. First to the unutterable dark of God: first and foremost. Then to the utterable and sometimes very loud dark of that woman Harriet. I must admit that only the dark god in her fighting with my white idealism has got me so clear: and that only the dark god in her answering the dark god in me has got my soul heavy and fecund with a new sort of infant. But even now I can’t bring it forth. I can’t bring it forth. I need something else. Some other answer.”

Life makes no absolute statement: the true life makes no absolute statement. “Thou shalt have no other God before me.” The very commandment suggests that it is possible to have other gods, and to put them before Jehovah. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” But, oh deepest of perplexing questions, _how_ do I love myself? Am I to love my neighbour as if he _were_ myself? But my very love makes me know that he _isn’t_ myself, and that therein lies his lovableness, unless I am a conceited prig. Am I to love my neighbour as _much_ as myself? And how much do I love myself? It is a wildly problematic commandment. Supposing I love my neighbour more than myself. That again is a catastrophe.

Since every man must love himself in a different way--unless he is a materialist or a prig--he must love his neighbour in a different way. So Christ’s commandment is as large as life, and its meaning can never be fixed. I sometimes hate myself: and my neighbour as myself.

Life makes no absolute statement. It is all Call and Answer. As soon as the Call ceases, the Answer is invalid. And till the Answer comes, a Call is but a crying in the wilderness. And every Answer must wait until it hears the Call. Till the Call comes, the Answer is but an unborn fœtus.

And so it is. Life is so wonderful and complex, and _always_ relative. A man’s soul is a perpetual call and answer. He can never be the call and the answer in one: between the dark God and the incarnate man: between the dark soul of woman, and the opposite dark soul of man: and finally, between the souls of man and man, strangers to one another, but answerers. So it is for ever, the eternal weaving of calls and answers, and the fabric of life woven and perishing again. But the calls never cease, and the answers never fail for long. And when the fabric becomes grey and machine-made, some strange clarion-call makes men start to smash it up. So it is.

_Blessed are the pure in heart._ That is absolute truth, a statement of living relativity, because the pure in heart are those who quiver to the dark God, to the call of woman, and to the call of men. The pure in heart are the listeners and the answerers. But Rameses II. was no doubt as pure in heart as John the Evangel. Indeed perhaps purer, since John was an _insister_. To be pure in heart, man must listen to the dark gods as well as to the white gods, to the call to blood-sacrifice as well as to the eucharist.

_Blessed are the poor in spirit._ It depends. If it means _listening_. Not if it means taking up a permanent attitude.

_Blessed are the peacemakers._ It depends. If it means _answering_. Not if it means enforcing the peace, like policemen.

_Blessed are the meek._ It depends on the occasion.

_Blessed are they that mourn._ It depends altogether.

_Blessed are they that do hunger and thirst after righteousness._ Ah, yes, but the righteousness of the profound listener, and of the answerer who will answer come what may. Not any other righteousness of the commandment sort.

_Blessed are ye when men shall despise you._ Nay, nay, it is rather: _unblessed_ are the despisers----

After all his terrific upheaval, Richard Lovat at last gave it up, and went to sleep. A man must even know how to give up his own earnestness, when its hour is over, and not to bother about anything any more, when he’s bothered enough.

CHAP: XIV. BITS.

The following day Somers felt savage with himself again. “Fool that I am, fool!” he said, mentally kicking himself. And he looked at the big pink spread of his Sydney _Bulletin_ viciously. The _Bulletin_ was the only periodical in the world that really amused him. The horrible stuffiness of English newspapers he could not stand: they had the same effect on him as fish-balls in a restaurant, loathsome stuffy fare. English magazines were too piffling, too imbecile. But the “Bully,” even if it was made up all of bits, and had neither head nor tail nor feet nor wings, was still a lively creature. He liked its straightforwardness and the kick in some of its tantrums. It beat no solemn drums. It had no deadly earnestness. It was just stoical, and spitefully humorous. Yes, at the moment he liked the _Bulletin_ better than any paper he knew, though even the _Bulletin_ tried a dowdy bit of swagger sometimes, especially on the pink page. But then the pink page was just “literary,” and who cares?

Who cares, anyhow? Perhaps a bit sad, after all. But more fool you for being sad.

So he rushed to read the “bits.” They would make Bishop Latimer forget himself and his martyrdom at the stake.

“1085: The casual Digger of war-days has carried it into civvies. Sighted one of the original Tenth at the Outer Harbour (Adelaide) wharf last week fishing. His sinker was his 1914 Star.”

Yes, couldn’t Somers just see that forlorn Outer Harbour at Adelaide, and the digger, like some rag of sea-weed dripping over the edge of the wharf, fishing, and using his medal for a weight?

“Wilfrido: A recent advertisement for the Wellington (New Zealand) Art Gallery attracted 72 applicants. Among them were two solicitors (one an Oxford M.A.); five sheep-farmers, on whose lands the mortgagee had foreclosed; and a multitude of clerks. The post is not exactly a sinecure, either: it demands attendance on seven days a week at £150 p.a.”

Then a little cartoon of Ivan, the Russian workman, going for a tram-drive, and taking huge bundles of money with him, sackfuls of roubles, to pay the fare. The “Bully” was sardonic about Bolshevism.

“Ned Kelly: Hearing the deuce of a racket in the abo (aborigines) camp near our place, we strolled over to see what was wrong, and saw a young Binghi giving his gin a father of a hiding for making eyes at another buck. Every respectable Binghi has the right to wallop his missis, but this one laid it on so much that he knocked her senseless. This enraged her relatives, and they went for him _en masse_, while two or three gins applied restoratives to the battered wife. She soon came round, and, seeing how things were, grabbed a waddy and went to the assistance of her lord and master. In the end the twain routed the phalanxed relations. Same old woman, whatever her line!”

Bits about bullock drivers and the biggest loads on record, about the biggest piece of land ploughed by a man in a day, recipes for mange in horses, twins, turnips, accidents to reverend clergymen, and so on.

“Pick: In the arid parts out back the wild birds infallibly indicate to the wayfarer when the water in his bag must be vigorously conserved. If in the early morning they descend in flocks to the plain, and there collect the globules of dew among the dry stalks of grass, it means that every tank, gilgal and puddle-hole within a bird’s drinking flight has gone dry.”

“Cellu Lloyd: Before you close down on mangey horses here’s a cure I’ve never known to fail. To one bullock’s gall add kerosene to make up a full pint. Heat sufficiently to enable it to mix well, not forgetting, of course, that half of it is kerosene. When well mixed add one teaspoonful of chrysophanic acid. Bottle and shake well. Before applying take a hard scrubbing brush and thoroughly scrub the part with carbolic soap and hot water, and when applying the mixture use the brush again. In one case I struck a pair of buggy ponies that had actually bitten pieces from each other, and rubbed down a hundred yards or so of fence in trying to allay the burning itch. Two months afterwards they were growing hair and gaining condition, and not a trace of mange remained. It is wonderful, however, how lightly some horse-owners treat the matter. When a horse works hard all day, and spends the night rubbing a fence flat in his itch frenzy, he at once loses condition and usefulness; but in most cases the owner builds the fence stronger instead of giving the unfortunate animal the necessary attention.”

This recipe brought many biting comments in later issues.

Somers liked the concise, laconic style. It seemed to him manly and without trimmings. Put ship-shape in the office, no doubt. Sometimes the drawings were good, and sometimes they weren’t.

“Lady (who has just opened door to country girl carrying suitcase): ‘I am suited. A country girl has been engaged, and I’m getting her to-morrow.’

“Girl: ‘I’m her; and you’re not. The ’ouse is too big’.”

There, thought Somers, you have the whole spirit of Australian labour.

“K. Sped: A week or two back a Mildura (Vic.) motorcyclist ran over a tiger-snake while travelling at 35 m.p.h. Ten minutes later the leg became itchy, and shortly afterwards, feeling giddy, he started back to the local hospital. He made a wobbly passage and collapsed at the hospital gates. He was bad for a week, and was told that if the reptile had not struck him on the bone he would never have reached the ward. The snake must have doubled up when the wheel struck it, and by the merest fluke struck the rider’s leg in mid-air.”

“Fraoch: I knew another case of a white girl marrying an aboriginal about 20 years ago on the Northern Rivers (N.S.W.). She was rather pretty, a descendant of an English family. Binghi was a landed proprietor, having acquired a very decent estate on the death of a former spinster employer. (Binghi must have had ’a way wid ’im’). He owned a large, well-furnished house, did himself well, and had a fair education, and was a good rough-rider. But every year the ‘call of the wild’ came to him, and he would leave his wife and kids (they had three) and take himself to an old tumble-down hut in the bush, and there for a month or two live in solitude on his natural tucker. Under the will of the aforesaid spinster, upon Binghi’s demise the estate was to revert to her relatives. With an optimism that was not without a pathos of its own, they used to trot out every outlaw in the district for their dusky friend to ride; but his neck was still intact when I left.”

“Sucre: Peering through her drawing-room window shortly before lunch, the benevolent old suburban lady saw a shivering man in a ruined overcoat. Not all the members of the capitalist classes are iron-souled creatures bent on grinding the faces of the afflicted, yet virtuous poor. Taking a ten shilling note from a heavily-beaded bag, she scribbled on a piece of paper the words: _Cheer Up_, put both in an envelope, and told the maid to give it to the outcast from her. While the family was at dinner that evening a ring sounded at the front door. Argument followed in the hall between a hoarse male voice and that of the maid. ‘You can’t come in. They’re at dinner.’ ‘I’d _rather_ come in, miss. Always like for to fix these things up in person.’ ‘You can’t come.’ Another moment and the needy wayfarer was in the dining-room. He carefully laid five filthy £1 notes on the table before his benefactress. ‘There you are, mum,’ he said, with a rough salute. ‘Cheer Up won all right. I’m mostly on the corner, race days, as your cook will tell you; an’ I’d like to say that if any uv your _friends_--’”

Bits, bits, bits. Yet Richard Lovat read on. It was not mere anecdotage. It was the sheer momentaneous life of the continent. There was no consecutive thread. Only the laconic courage of experience.

All the better. He could have kicked himself for wanting to help mankind, join in revolutions or reforms or any of that stuff. And he kicked himself still harder thinking of his frantic struggles with the “soul” and the “dark god” and the “listener” and the “answerer.” Blarney--blarney--blarney! He was a preacher and a blatherer, and he hated himself for it. Damn the “soul,” damn the “dark god,” damn the “listener” and the “answerer,” and above all, damn his own interfering, nosy self.

What right had he to go nosing round Kangaroo, and making up to Jaz or to Jack? Why couldn’t he keep off it all? Let the whole show go its own gay course to hell, without Mr Richard Lovat Somers trying to show it the way it should go.

A very strong wind had got up from the west. It blew down from the dark hills in a fury, and was cold as flat ice. It blew the sea back until the great water looked like dark, ruffled mole-fur. It blew it back till the waves got littler and littler, and could hardly uncurl the least swish of a rat-tail of foam.

On such a day his restlessness had driven them on a trip along the coast to Wolloona. They got to the lost little town just before mid-day, and looked at the shops. The sales were on, and prices were “smashed to bits,” “Prices Smashed to Bits,” in big labels. Harriet, of course, fascinated in the Main Street, that ran towards the sea, with the steep hills at the back. “Hitch your motor to a star.--Star Motor Company.” “Your piano is the most important article of furniture in your drawing-room. You will not be proud of your drawing-room unless your piano has a HANDSOME APPEARANCE and a BEAUTIFUL TONE. Both these requisites--”

It was a wonderful Main Street, and, thank heaven, out of the wind. There were several large but rather scaring brown hotels, with balconies all round: there was a yellow stucco church with a red-painted tin steeple, like a weird toy: there were high roofs and low roofs, all corrugated iron: and you came to an opening, and there, behold, were one or two forlorn bungalows inside their wooden palings, and then the void. The naked bush, sinking in a hollow to a sort of marsh, and then down the coast some sort of “works,” brick-works or something, smoking. All as if it had tumbled haphazard off the pantechnicon of civilisation as it dragged round the edges of this wild land, and there lay, busy but not rooted in. As if none of the houses had any foundations.

Bright the sun, the air of marvellous clarity, tall stalks of cabbage palms rising in the hollow, and far off, tufted gum trees against a perfectly new sky, the tufts at the end of wire branches. And farther off, blue, blue hills. In the Main Street, large and expensive motor-cars and women in fuzzy fur coats; long, quiescent Australian men in tired-out-looking navy blue suits trotting on brown ponies, with a carpet-bag in one hand, doing the shopping; girls in very much-made hats, also flirtily shopping; three boys with big, magnificent bare legs, lying in a sunny corner in the dust; a lonely white pony hitched as if forever to a post at a street-corner.

“I like it,” said Harriet. “It doesn’t feel _finished_.”

“Not even begun,” he laughed.

But he liked it too: even the slummyness of some of the bungalows inside their wooden palings, drab-wood, decrepit houses, old tins, broken pots, a greeny-white pony reminding one of a mildewed old shoe, two half-naked babies sitting like bits of live refuse in the dirt, but with bonny, healthy bare legs: the awful place called “The Travellers’ Rest--Mrs Coddy’s Boarding Home”--a sort of blind, squalid, corner-building made of wood and tin, with flat pieces of old lace-curtain nailed inside the windows, and the green blinds hermetically drawn. What must it have been like inside? Then an open space, and coral-trees bristling with red crest-flowers on their bare, cold boughs: and the hollow space of the open country, and the marvellous blue hills of the distance.

The wind was cold enough to make you die. Harriet was disgusted at having been dragged away from home. They trailed to the sea to try and get out of it, for it blew from the land, and the sun was hot. On the bay one lone man flinging a line into the water, on the edge of the conch-shaped, sloping sands. Dark-blue water, ruffled like mole-fur, and flicked all over with froth as with bits of feather-fluff. And many white gannets turning in the air like a snow-storm and plunging down into the water like bombs. And fish leaped in the furry water, as if the wind had turned them upside-down. And the gannets dropping and exploding into the wave, and disappearing. On the sea’s horizon, so perfectly clear, a steamer like a beetle walking slowly along. Clear, with a non-earthly clarity.

Harriet and Somers sat and ate sandwiches with a little sand, she dazed but still expostulating. Then they went to walk on the sea’s edge, where the sands might be firm. But the beach sloped too much, and they were not firm. The lonely fisherman held up his thin silvery line for them to pass under.

“Don’t bother,” said Somers.

“Right O!” said he.

He had a sad, beery moustache, a very cold-looking face, and, of course, a little boy, his son, no doubt, for a satellite.

There were little, exquisite pink shells, like Venetian pink glass with white veins or black veins round their sharp little steeples. Harriet loved them, among her grumbles, and they began to gather them: “for trimmings,” said Harriet. So, in the flat-icy wind, that no life had ever softened and no god ever tempered, they crouched on the sea’s edge picking these marvellous little shells.

Suddenly, with a cry, to find the water rushing round their ankles and surging up their legs, they dragged their way wildly forward with the wave, and out and up the sand. Where immediately a stronger blast seized Lovat’s hat and sent it spinning to the sea again, and he after it like a bird. He caught it as the water lifted it, and then the waste of waters enveloped him. Above his knees swirled the green flood, there was water all around him swaying, he looked down at it in amazement, reeling and clutching his hat.

Then once more he clambered out. Harriet had fallen on her knees on the sand in a paroxysm of laughter, and there she was doubled up like a sack, shrieking between her gasps:

“His hat! His hat! He wouldn’t let it go”--shrieks, and her head like a sand-bag flops to the sand--“no--not if he had to swim”--shrieks--“swim to Samoa.”

He was looking at his wet legs and chuckling with his inward laughter. Vivid, the blue sky: intensely clear, the dark sea, the yellow sands, the swoop of the bay, the low headlands: clear like a miracle. And the water bubbling in his shoes as he walked rolling up the sands.

At last she recovered enough to crawl after him. They sat in a sand-hollow under a big bush with odd red berries, and he wrung out his socks, and all he could of his underpants and trousers. Then he put on his socks and shoes again, and they set off for the station.

“The Pacific water,” he said, “is so very seaey, it is almost warm.”

At which, looking at his wet legs and wet hat, she went off into shrieks again. But she made him be quick, because there was a train they could catch.

However in the Main Street they thought they would buy another pair of socks. So he bought them, and changed in the shop. And they missed the train, and Harriet expostulated louder.

They went home in a motor-bus and a cloud of dust, with the heaven bluer than blue above, the hills dark and fascinating, and the land so remote seeming. Everything so clear, so very distinct, and yet so marvellously aloof.

All the miles alongside the road tin bungalows in their paling fences: and a man on a pony, in a long black overcoat and a cold nose, driving three happy, fleecy cows: long men in jerseys and white kerchiefs round their necks, à la Buffalo Bill, riding nice slim horses; a woman riding astride top speed on the roadside grass. A motor-car at the palings of one of the bungalows. A few carts coming.

And the occupants of the ’bus bouncing and bobbing like a circus, because of the very bumpy road.

“Shakes your dinner down,” said the old woman with the terribly home-made hat--oh, such difficult, awful hats.

“It does, if you’ve had any,” laughed Harriet.

“Why, you’ve ’ad your dinner, ’aven’t you?”

As concerned as if Harriet was her own stomach, such a nice old woman. And a lovely little boy with the bright, wide, gentle eyes of these Australians. So alert and alive and with that lovableness that almost hurts one. Absolute trust in the “niceness” of the world. A tall, stalky, ginger man with the same bright eyes and a turned-up nose and long stalky legs. An elderly man with bright, friendly, elderly eyes and careless hair and careless clothing. He was Joe, and the other was Alf. Real careless Australians, careless of their appearance, careless of their speech, of their money, of everything--except of their happy-go-lucky, democratic friendliness. Really nice, with bright, quick, willing eyes. Then a young man, perhaps a commercial traveller, with a suit-case. He was quite smartly dressed, and had fancy socks. He was one of those with the big, heavy legs, heavy thighs and calves that showed even in his trousers. And he was physically very self-conscious, very self-conscious of Lovat and Harriet. The driver’s face was long and deep red. He was absolutely laconic. And yet, absolutely willing, as if life held no other possibility than that of being an absolutely willing citizen. A fat man with a fat little girl waiting at one of the corners.

“Up she goes!” he said as he lifted her in.

A perpetual, unchanging willingness, and an absolute equality. The same good-humoured, right-you-are approach from everybody to everybody. “Right-you-are! Right-O!” Somers had been told so many hundreds of times, Right-he-was, Right-O!, that he almost had dropped into the way of it. It was like sleeping between blankets--so cosy. So cosy.

They were really awfully nice. There was a winsome charm about them. They none of them seemed mean, or tight, or petty.

The young man with the fine suit and the great legs put down his money, gently and shyly as a girl, beside the driver on the little window-ledge. Then he got out and strode off, shy and quick, with his suit-case.

“Hey!”

The young man turned at the driver’s summons, and came back.

“Did yer pay me?”

The question was put briskly, good-humouredly, with a touch even of tenderness. The young man pointed to the money. The driver glanced round and saw it.

“Oh! Right you are! Right-O!”

A faint little smile of almost tender understanding, and the young man turned again. And the driver bustled to carry out some goods. The way he stooped to pick up the heavy wooden box in his arms; so _willing_ to stoop to burdens. So long, of course, as his Rights of Man were fully recognised. You musn’t try any superior tricks with him.

Well, it was really awfully nice. It was touching. And it made life so easy, so easy.

Of course these were not government servants. Government servants have another sort of feeling. They feel their office, even in N.S.W.--even a railway-clerk. Oh, yes.

So nice, so nice, so gentle. The strange, bright-eyed gentleness. Of course, really rub him the wrong way, and you’ve got a Tartar. But not before you’ve asked for one. Gentle as a Kangaroo, or a wallaby, with that wide-eyed, bright-eyed, alert, _responsible_ gentleness Somers had never known in Europe. It had a great beauty. And at the same time it made his spirits sink.

It made him feel so sad underneath, or uneasy, like an impending disaster. Such a charm. He was so tempted to commit himself to this strange continent and its strange people. It was so fascinating. It seemed so free, an absence of any form of stress whatsoever. No strain in any way, once you could accept it.

He was so tempted, save for a sense of impending disaster at the bottom of his soul. And there a voice kept saying: “No, no. No, no. It won’t do. You’ve got to have a reversion. You can’t carry this mode any further. You’ve got to have a recognition of the innate, sacred separateness.”

So when they were walking home in a whirl of the coldest, most flat-edged wind they had ever known, he stopped in front of her to remark:

“Of course you can’t go on with a soft, oh-so-friendly life like this here. You’ve got to have an awakening of the old recognition of the aristocratic principle, the _innate_ difference between people.”

“Aristocratic principle!” she shrieked on the wind. “You should have seen yourself, flying like a feather into the sea after your hat. Aristocratic _principle_!” She shrieked again with laughter.

“There you are, you see,” he said to himself. “I’m at it again.” And he laughed too.

The wind blew them home. He made a big fire, and changed, and they drank coffee made with milk, and ate buns.

“Thank heaven for a home,” he said, as they sat in the dark, big rooms at Coo-ee, and ate their buns, and looked out of the windows and saw here as well a whirl of gannets like a snowstorm, and a dark sea littered with white fluffs. The wind roared in the chimney, and for the first time the sea was inaudible.

“You see,” she said, “how thankful you are for a home.”

“Chilled to the bone!” she said. “I’m chilled to the bone with my day’s pleasure-outing.”

So they drew up the couch before the fire, and he piled rugs on her and jarrah chunks on the fire, and at last it was toastingly warm. He sat on a little barrel which he had discovered in the shed, and in which he kept the coal for the fire. He had been at a loss for a lid to this barrel, till he had found a big tin-lid thrown out on the waste lot. And now the wee barrel with the slightly rusty tin lid was his perch when he wanted to get quite near the fire. Harriet hated it, and had moments when she even carried the lid to the cliff to throw it in the sea. But she brought it back, because she knew he would be so indignant. She reviled him however.

“Shameful! Hideous! Old tin lids! How you can _sit_ on it. How you can bring yourself to sit on such a thing, and not feel humiliated. Is that your aristocratic principle?”

“I put a cushion on it,” he said.

As he squatted on his tub this evening in the fire-corner, she suddenly turned from her book and cried:

“There he is, on his throne! Sitting on his aristocratic principle!” And again she roared with laughter.

He, however, shook some coal out of the little tub on to the fire, replaced the tin lid and the cushion, and resumed his thoughts. The fire was very warm. She lay stretched in front of it on the sofa, covered with an eider-down, and reading a Nat Gould novel, to get the real tang of Australia.

“Of course,” he said, “this land always gives me the feeling that it doesn’t _want_ to be touched, it doesn’t _want_ men to get hold of it.”

She looked up from her Nat Gould.

“Yes,” she admitted slowly. “And my ideal has always been a farm. But I know now. The farms don’t really belong to the land. They only scratch it and irritate it, and are never at one with it.”

Whereupon she returned to her Nat Gould, and there was silence save for the hollow of the wind. When she had finished her paper-backed book she said:

“It’s just like them--just like they _think_ they are.”

“Yes,” he said vaguely.

“But, bah!” she added, “they make me sick. So absolutely dull--worse than an ‘At Home’ in the middle classes.”

And after a silence, another shriek of laughter suddenly.

“Like a flying-fish! Like a flying-fish dashing into the waves! Dashing into the waves after his hat--”

He giggled on his tub.

“Fancy, that I’m here in Coo-ee after my day’s outing! I can’t believe it. I shall call you the flying-fish. It’s hard to believe that one was so many things in one day. Suddenly the water! Won’t you go now and do the tailor? Twenty to eight! The bold buccaneer!”

The tailor was a fish that had cost a shilling, and which he was to prepare for supper.

“Globe: There can’t be much telepathy about bullocks, anyhow. In Gippsland (Vic.) last season a score of them were put into a strange paddock, and the whole 20 were found drowned in a hole next morning. Tracks showed that they had gone each on his own along a path, overbalanced one after the other, and were unable to clamber up the rocky banks.”

That, thought Richard at the close of the day, is a sufficient comment on herd-unity, equality, domestication, and civilisation. He felt he would have liked to climb down into that hole in which the bullocks were drowning and beat them all hard before they expired, for being such mechanical logs of life.

Telepathy! Think of the marvellous vivid communication of the huge sperm whales. Huge, grand, phallic beasts! Bullocks! Geldings! Men! R. L. wished he could take to the sea and be a whale, a great surge of living blood: away from these all-too-white people, who ought _all_ to be called Cellu Lloyd, not only the horse-mange man.

Man is a thought-adventurer. Man is more, he is a life-adventurer. Which means he is a thought-adventurer, an emotion-adventurer, and a discoverer of himself and of the outer universe. A discoverer.

“I am a fool,” said Richard Lovat, which was the most frequent discovery he made. It came, moreover, every time with a new shock of surprise and chagrin. Every time he climbed a new mountain range and looked over, he saw, not only a new world, but a big anticipatory fool on this side of it, namely, himself.

Now a novel is supposed to be a mere record of emotion-adventures, flounderings in feelings. We insist that a novel is, or should be, also a thought-adventure, if it is to be anything at all complete.

“I am a fool,” thought Richard to himself, “to imagine that I can flounder in a sympathetic universe like a fly in the ointment.” We think of ourselves, we think of the ointment, but we do not consider the fly. It fell into the ointment, crying: “Ah, here is a pure and balmy element in which all is unalloyed goodness. Here is attar of roses without a thorn.” Hence the fly in the ointment: embalmed in balm. And our repugnance.

“I am a fool,” said Richard to himself, “to be floundering round in this easy, cosy, all-so-friendly world. I feel like a fly in the ointment. For heaven’s sake let me get out. I suffocate.”

Where to? If you’re going to get out you must have something to get out on to. Stifling in unctuous sympathy of a harmless humanity.

“Oh,” cried the stifling R. “Where is my Rock of Ages?”

He knew well enough. It was where it always has been: in the middle of him.

“Let me get back to my own self,” he panted, “hard and central in the centre of myself. I am drowning in this merge of harmlessness, this sympathetic humanity. Oh, for heaven’s sake let me crawl out of the sympathetic smear, and get myself clean again.”

Back to his own centre--back--back. The inevitable recoil.

“Everything,” said R. to himself, in one of those endless conversations with himself which were his chief delight, “everything is relative.”

And flop he went into the pot of spikenard.

“Not quite,” he gasped, as he crawled out. “Let me drag my isolate and absolute individual self out of this mess.”

Which is the history of relativity in man. All is relative as we go flop into the ointment: or the treacle or the flame. But as we crawl out, or flutter out with a smell of burning, the _absolute_ holds us spellbound. Oh to be isolate and absolute, and breathe clear.

So that even relativity is only relative. Relative to the absolute.

I am sorry to have to stand, a sorry sight, preening my wings on the brink of the ointment-pot, thought Richard. But from this vantage ground let me preach to myself. He preached, and the record was taken down for this gramophone of a novel.

No, the self is absolute. It may be relative to everything else in the universe. But to itself it is an absolute.

Back to the central self, the isolate, absolute self.

“Now,” thought Richard to himself, waving his front paws with gratification: “I must sound the muezzin and summon all men back to their central, isolate selves.”

So he drew himself up, when--_urch_!! He was sluthering over the brim of the ointment pot into the balm of humanity once more.

“Oh, Lord, I nearly did it again,” he thought as he clambered out with a sick heart. “I shall do it once too often. The bulk of mankind haven’t got any central selves: haven’t got any. They’re all bits.”

Nothing but his fright would have struck this truth out of him. So he crouched still, like a fly very tired with crawling out of the ointment, to think about it.

“The bulk of people haven’t got any central selves. They’re all bits.”

He knew it was true, and he felt rather sick of the sweet odour of the balm of human beatitudes, in which he had been so nearly lost.

“It takes how many thousand facets to make the eye of a fly--or a spider?” he asked himself, being rather hazy scientifically. “Well, all these people are just facets: just bits, that fitted together make a whole. But you can fit the bits together time after time, yet it won’t bring the bug to life.”