Chapter XVIII: Adieu Australia 383 (14)

The people of this terrestial sphere are all bits. Isolate one of them, and he is still only a bit. Isolate your man in the street, and he is just a rudimentary fragment. Supposing you have the misfortune to have your little toe cut off. That little toe won’t at once rear on its hind legs and begin to announce: “I’m an isolated individual with an immortal soul.” It won’t. But your man in the street will. And he is a liar. He’s only a bit, and he’s only got a minute share of the collective soul. Soul of his own he has none: and never will have. Just a share in the collective soul, no more. Never a thing by himself.

Damn the man in the street, said Richard to himself. Damn the collective soul, it’s a dead rat in a hole. Let humanity scratch its own lice.

Now I’ll sound my muezzin again. _The man by himself._ “Allah bismallah! God is God and man is man and has a soul of his own. Each man to himself! Each man back to his own soul! Alone, alone, with his own soul alone. God is God and man is man and the man in the street is a louse.”

Whatever your relativity, that’s the starting point and the finishing point: a man alone with his own soul: and the dark God beyond him.

A man by himself.

Begin then.

Let the men in the street--ugh, horrid millions, crawl the face of the earth like lice or ants or some other ignominy.

The man by himself.

That was one of the names of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

The man by himself.

That is the beginning and end, the alpha and the omega, the one absolute: the man alone by himself, alone with his own soul, alone with his eyes on the darkness which is the dark god of life. Alone like a pythoness on her tripod, like the oracle alone above the fissure into the unknown. The oracle, the fissure down into the unknown, the strange exhalations from the dark, the strange words that the oracle must utter. Strange, cruel, pregnant words: the new term of consciousness.

This is the innermost symbol of man: alone in the darkness of the cavern of himself, listening to soundlessness of inflowing fate. Inflowing fate, inflowing doom, what does it matter? The man by himself--that is the absolute--listening--that is the relativity--for the influx of his fate, or doom.

The man by himself. The listener.

But most men can’t listen any more. The fissure is closed up. There is no soundless voice. They are deaf and dumb, ants, scurrying ants.

That is their doom. It is a new kind of absolute. Like riff-raff, which has fallen out of living relativity, on to the teeming absolute of the dust-heap, or the ant-heap. Sometimes the dust-heap becomes huge, huge, huge, and covers nearly all the world. Then it turns into a volcano, and all starts again.

“It has nothing to do with me,” said Richard to himself. I hope, dear reader, you like plenty of _conversation_ in a novel: it makes it so much lighter and brisker.

“It has nothing to do with me,” said Richard to himself. “They do as they like. But since, after all, I _am_ a kind-hearted dear creature, I will just climb the minaret of myself and sound my muezzin.”

So behold the poor dear on his pinnacle lifting his hands.

“God is God and man is man; and every man by himself. Every man by himself, alone with his own soul. Alone as if he were dead. Dead to himself. He is dead and alone. He is dead; alone. His soul is alone. Alone with God, with the dark God. God is God.”

But if he likes to shout muezzins, instead of hawking fried fish or newspapers or lottery tickets, let him.

Poor dear, it was rather an anomalous call: “Listen to me, and be alone.” Yet he felt called upon to call it.

To be alone, to be alone, and to rest on the unknown God alone.

The God must be unknown. Once you have defined him or described him, he is the most chummy of pals, as you’ll know if you listen to preachers. And once you’ve chummed up with your God, you’ll never be alone again, poor you. For that’s the end of you. You and your God chumming it through time and eternity.

Poor Richard saw himself in funny situations.

“My dear young lady, let me entreat you, be alone, only be alone.”

“Oh, Mr Somers, I should love to, if you’d hold my hand.”

“There is a gulf,” growing sterner, “surrounds each solitary soul. A gulf surrounds you--a gulf surrounds me--”

“_I’m falling!_” shrieks and flings her arms around his neck. Or Kangaroo.

“Why am I so beastly to Kangaroo?” said Richard to himself. “For beastly I am. I am a detestable little brat to them all round.”

A detestable little brat he felt.

But Kangaroo wanted to be queen-bee of another hive, with all the other bees clustering on him like some huge mulberry. Sickening! Why couldn’t he be alone? At least for _once_. For once withdraw entirely.

And a queen-bee buzzing with beatitudes. Beatitudes, beatitudes. Bee attitudes or any other attitudes, it made Richard feel tired. More benevolence, more nauseating benevolence. “Charity suffereth long.”

Yet one cannot live a life of entire loneliness, like a monkey on a stick, up and down one’s own obstacle. There’s got to be meeting: even communion. Well, then, let us have the other communion. “This is thy body which I take from thee and eat” as the priest, also the God, says in the ritual of blood sacrifice. The ritual of supreme responsibility, and offering. Sacrifice to the dark God, and to the men in whom the dark God is manifest. Sacrifice to the strong, not to the weak. In awe, not in dribbling love. The communion in power, the assumption into glory. _La gloire._

CHAP: XV. JACK SLAPS BACK

Chapter follows chapter, and nothing doing. But man is a thought-adventurer, and his falls into the Charybdis of ointment, and his shipwrecks on the rocks of ages, and his kisses across chasms, and his silhouette on a minaret: surely these are as thrilling as most things.

To be brief, there was a Harriet, a Kangaroo, a Jack and a Jaz and a Vicky, let alone a number of mere Australians. But you know as well as I do that Harriet is quite happy rubbing her hair with hair-wash and brushing it over her forehead in the sun and looking at the threads of gold and gun-metal, and the few threads, alas, of silver and tin, with admiration. And Kangaroo has just got a very serious brief, with thousands and thousands of pounds at stake in it. Of course he is fully occupied keeping them at stake, till some of them wander into his pocket. And Jack and Vicky have gone down to her father’s for the week-end, and he’s out fishing, and has already landed a rock-cod, a leather-jacket, a large schnapper, a rainbow-fish, seven black-fish, and a cuttle fish. So what’s wrong with him? While she is trotting over on a pony to have a look at an old sweetheart who is much too young to be neglected. And Jaz is arguing with a man about the freight-rates. And all the scattered Australians are just having a bet on something or other. So what’s wrong with Richard’s climbing a mental minaret or two in the interim? Of course there isn’t any interim. But you _know_ that Harriet is brushing her hair in the sun, and Kangaroo looking at huge sums of money on paper, and Jack fishing, and Vicky flirting, and Jaz bargaining, so what more do you want to know? We can’t be at a stretch of tension _all_ the time, like the E string on a fiddle. If you don’t like the novel, don’t read it. If the pudding doesn’t please you, leave it, leave it. _I_ don’t mind your saucy plate. I know too well that you can bring an ass to water, etc.

As for gods, thought Richard, there are gods of vengeance. “For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God.” So true. A jealous God, and a vengeful--“Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” Of course. The fathers get off. You don’t begin to pay the penalty till the second and third generation. That is something for _us_ to put in our pipes and smoke. Because _we_ are the second generation, and it was our fathers who had a nice rosy time among the flesh-pots, cooking themselves the tit-bits of this newly-gutted globe of ours. They cooked the tit-bits, we are left with the carrion.

“The Lord thy God am a jealous God.”

So he is. The Lord thy God is the invisible stranger at the gate in the night, knocking. He is the mysterious life-suggestion, tapping for admission. And the wondrous Victorian Age managed to fasten the door so tight, and light up the compound so brilliantly with electric light, that really, there _was_ no outside, it was all in. The unknown became a joke: is still a joke.

Yet there it is, outside the gate, getting angry. “Behold I stand at the gate and knock.” “Knock away,” said complacent, benevolent humanity, which had just discovered its own monkey origin to account for its own monkey tricks. “Knock away, nobody will hinder you from knocking.”

And Holman Hunt paints a pretty picture of a man with a Stars-and-Stripes lantern and a red beard, knocking. But whoever it is that’s knocking had been knocking for three generations now, and he’s got sick of it. He’ll be kicking the door in just now.

“For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”

It is not that He is jealous of Thor or Zeus or Bacchus or Venus. The great dark God outside the gate is all these gods. You open the gate, and sometimes in rushes Thor and gives you a bang on the head with a hammer; or Bacchus comes mysteriously through, and your mind goes dark and your knees and thighs begin to glow; or it is Venus, and you close your eyes and open your nostrils to a perfume, like a bull. All the gods. When they come through the gate they are personified. But outside the gate it is one dark God, the Unknown. And the Unknown is a terribly jealous God, and vengeful. A fearfully vengeful god: Moloch, Astarte, Ashtaroth, and Baal. That is why we dare not open now. It would be a hell-god, and we know it. We are the second generation. Our children are the third. And our children’s children are the fourth. Eheu! Eheu! Who knocks?

Jack trotted over to Coo-ee on the Sunday afternoon, when he was staying with his wife’s people. He knew Richard and Harriet would most probably be at home: they didn’t like going out on Sundays, when all the world and his wife, in their exceedingly Sunday clothes, swarmed on the face of the earth.

Yes, they were at home: sitting on the verandah, a bit of rain spitting from the grey sky, and the sea gone colourless and small. Suddenly, there stood Jack. He had come round the corner on to the grass. Somers started as if an enemy were upon him. Jack looked very tall and wiry, in an old grey suit. He hesitated before coming forward, as if measuring the pair of unsuspecting turtle doves on the loggia, and on his face was a faint grin. His eyes were dark and grinning too, as he hung back there. Somers watched him quickly. Harriet looked over her shoulder.

“Oh, Mr Callcott--why--how do you do?” And she got up, startled, and went across the loggia holding out her hand, to shake hands. So Jack had to come forward. Richard, very silent, shook hands also, and went indoors to fetch a chair and a cup and a plate, while Jack made his explanation to Harriet. He was quite friendly with her.

“Such a long time since we saw you,” she was saying. “Why didn’t Mrs Callcott come, I should have liked so much to see her?”

“Ah--you see I came over on the pony. Doesn’t look very promising weather.” And he looked away across the sea, averting his face.

“No--and the _terrible_ cold winds! I’m so glad if it will rain. I simply love the smell of rain in the air: especially here in Australia. It makes the air seem so much _kinder_, not so dry and savage--”

“Ah--yes--it does,” he said vaguely, still averting his face from her. He seemed strange to her. And his face looked different--as if he had been drinking, or as if he had indigestion.

The two men were aloof like two strange tom-cats.

“Were you disgusted with Lovat when he didn’t turn up the other Saturday?” said Harriet. “I do hope you weren’t sitting waiting for him.”

“Well--er--yes, we did wait up a while for him.”

“Oh, but what a shame! But you know by now he’s the most undependable creature on earth. I wish you’d be angry with him. It’s no good what _I_ say.”

“No,” said he--the peculiar slow Cockney no--“I’m not angry with him.”

“But you should be,” cried Harriet. “It would be good for him.”

“Would it?” smiled Jack. His eyes were dark and inchoate, and there seemed a devil in his long, wiry body. He did not look at Somers.

“You know of course what happened?” said Harriet.

“Er--when?”

“When Lovat went to see Mr Cooley.”

“Er--no.”

Again that peculiar Australian no, like a scorpion that stings with its tail.

“Didn’t Mr Cooley tell you?” cried Harriet.

“No.” There was indescribable malice in the monosyllable.

“Didn’t he--!” cried Harriet, and she hesitated.

“You be quiet,” said Lovat crossly, to her. “Of course _you’d_ have to rush in.”

“You think angels would fear to tread in such a delicate mess?” said Harriet, with a flash of mocking wit that sent a faint smile up Jack’s face, like a red flame. His nose, his mouth were curiously reddened. He liked Harriet’s attacks. He looked at her with dark, attentive eyes. Then he turned vaguely to Somers.

“What was it?” he asked.

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

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

“Another quarrel?” he said quietly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“When?”

“I think in six weeks.”

There was a silence for some moments.

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

“No. I must go up to Sydney.”

Again Jack waited before he spoke. Then he said:

“What’s made you settle on going?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It wouldn’t be charity.”

“What then?”

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

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

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

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

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

“The Manganui. Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

Aloud, he said to Jack:

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

“You take no risks,” said Jack quietly.

Another home-thrust.

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

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

“You see it isn’t my nature to bet.”

“Not a sporting nature, you mean?”

“No, not a sporting nature.”

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

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

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

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

“What’s that you don’t believe in?”

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m no good at saving.”

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

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

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

There was a silence of hate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, no, I don’t think so.”

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

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

Richard opened wide eyes, and went pale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack looked up with a faint, sneering smile.

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

But now Richard looked him square in the eyes.

“Either that or nothing,” he replied.

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

“We’ll see,” said Jack.

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

Harriet came out on to the verandah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack glanced at Somers, and also relapsed into silence.

CHAP: XVI. A ROW IN TOWN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, Scylla must have it out with Charybdis, that’s all, and we must wait outside the straits till the storm is over.

It won’t be over yet, though.

Now this is the state of the mass. It is driven, goaded mad at length by the pricking of the God-urge which it will not, cannot attend to or interpret. It is so goaded that it is mad with its own wrongs. It is wronged, so wronged that it is mad.

And what is the wrong, pray? The mass doesn’t know. There is no connection at all between the burning, throbbing unconscious soul and the clear-as-daylight conscious mind. The whole of Labour, to-day, sees the situation clear as daylight. So does the whole of Capital. And yet the whole of the daylight situation has really nothing to do with it. It is the god-urge which drives them mad, the unacknowledged, unadmitted, non-existent god-urge.

They may become a mob. A mob is like a mass of bullocks driven to frenzy by some bott-fly, and charging frantically against the tents of some herdsman, imagining that all the evil comes out of these tents. There is a gulf between the quivering hurt in the unconscious soul, and the round, flat world of the visible existence. A sense of weakness and injury, at last an intolerable sense of wrong, turning to a fiendish madness. A mad necessity to wreck something, cost what it may. For only the flat, round, visible world exists.

And yet it is the bott-fly of the Holy Ghost, unlistened to, that is the real cause of everything.

But the mob has no direction even in its destructive lust. The vengeful masses _have_ direction. And it is no good trying to reason with them. The mass does not act by reason. A mass is not even formed by reason. The more intense or extended the _collective_ consciousness, the more does the truly reasonable, individual consciousness sink into abeyance.

The herd instinct, for example, is of many sorts. It has two main divisions, the fear-instinct, and the aggressive instinct. But the vengeance instinct is not part of the herd instinct.

But consider the mode of communication of herd instinct. The communication between the individuals in a herd is not through the _mind_. It is not through anything said or known. It is sub-mental. It is telepathic.

Why does a flock of birds rise suddenly from the treetops, all at once, in one spring, and swirl round in one cloud towards the water? There was no visible sign or communication given. It was a telepathic communication. They sat and waited, and waited, and let the individual mind merge into a kind of collective trance. Then click!--the unison was complete, the knowledge or suggestion was one suggestion all through, the action was one action.

This so-called telepathy is the clue to all herd instinct. It is not instinct. It is a vertebral-telegraphy, like radio-telegraphy. It is a complex interplay of vibrations from the big nerve-centres of the vertebral system in all the individuals of the flock, till, click!--there is a unanimity. They have one mind. And this one-mindedness of the many-in-one will last while ever the peculiar pitch of vertebral nerve-vibrations continues unbroken through them all. As the vibration slacks off, the flock falls apart.

This vertebral telepathy is the true means of communication between animals. It is perhaps most highly developed where the brain, the mental consciousness, is smallest. Indeed the two forms of consciousness, mental and vertebral, are mutually exclusive. The highest form of vertebral telepathy seems to exist in the great sperm whales. Communication between these herds of roving monsters is of marvellous rapidity and perfection. They are lounging, feeding lazily, individually, in mid-ocean, with no cohesion. Suddenly, a quick thought-wave from the leader-bull, and as quick as answering thoughts the cows and young bulls are ranged, the herd is taking its direction with a precision little short of miraculous. Perhaps water acts as a most perfect transmitter of vertebral telepathy.

This is the famous wisdom of the serpent, this vertebral consciousness and telepathy. This is what makes the magic of a leader like Napoleon--his powers of sending out intense vibrations, messages to his men, without the exact intermediation of mental correspondence. It is not brain-power. In fact, it is, in some ways, the very _reverse_ of brain-power: it might be called the acme of stupidity. It is the stupendous wits of brainless intelligence. A marvellous reversion to the pre-mental form of consciousness.

This pre-mental form of consciousness seems most perfect in the great whales: more even in them than in the flocks of migrating birds. After the whales, the herds of wolves and deer and buffaloes. But it is most _absolute_ in the cold fishes and serpents, reptiles. The fishes have no other correspondence save this cold, vertebral vibration. And this is, as it were, blind. The fish is absolutely stone-wall limited in its consciousness, to itself. It knows none other. Stony, abstract, cold, alone, the fish has still the power of radio-communication. It is a form of telepathy, like a radium-effluence, vibrating fear principally. Fear is the first of the actuating gods.

Then come the reptiles. They have sex, and dimly, darkly discern the bulk of the answerer. They are drawn to contact. It is the new motive. The fishes are never drawn to contact. Only food and fear. So in the reptiles the second telepathic vibration, the sympathetic, is set up. The primary consciousness is cold, the wisdom is isolated, cold, moon-like, knowing none other: the self alone in knowledge, utterly subtle. But then sex comes upon them, and the isolation is broken. Another flow sets up. They must seek the answerer. It is love.

So, telepathy, communication in the vertebrates. Ants and bees too have a one-conscious vibration. Even they have perfect ganglia-communication. But it is enough to consider the vertebrates.

In the sperm whale, intense is the passion of amorous love, intense is the cold exultance in power, isolate kingship. With the most intense enveloping vibration of possessive and protective love, the great bull encloses his herd into a oneness. And with the intensest vibration of power he keeps it subdued in awe in fear. These are the two great telepathic vibrations which rule all the vertebrates, man as well as beast. Man, whether in a savage tribe or in a complex modern society, is held in unison by these two great vibrations emitted unconsciously from the leader, the leaders, the governing classes, the authorities. First, the great influence of shadow of power, causing trust, fear and obedience: second, the great influence of protective love, causing productivity and the sense of safety. Those two powerful influences are emitted by men like Gladstone or Abraham Lincoln, against their knowledge, but none the less emitted. Only Gladstone and Lincoln justify themselves in speech. And both insist on the single influence of love, and denounce the influence of fear.

A mob occurs when men turn upon _all_ leadership. For true, living activity the mental and the vertebral consciousness should be in harmony. In Cæsar and Napoleon the vertebral influence of power prevailed--and there was a break of balance, and a fall. In Lincoln and President Wilson the vertebral influence of love got out of balance, and there was a fall. There was no balance between the two modes of influence: the mind ran on, as it were, without a brake, towards absurdity. So it ran to absurdity in Napoleon.

Break the balance of the two great controlling influences, and you get, not a simple preponderance of the one influence, but a third state, the mob-state. This is the state when the society tribe or herd degenerates into a mob. In man, the mind runs on with a sort of terrible automatism, which has no true connection with the _vertebral_ consciousness. The vertebral inter-communication gradually gathers force, apart from all mental expression. Its vibration steadily increases till there comes a sudden click! And then you have the strange phenomenon of revolution, like the Russian and the French revolutions. It is a great disruptive outburst. It is a great eruption against the classes in authority. And it is, finally, a passionate, mindless vengeance taken by the collective, vertebral psyche upon the authority of orthodox _mind_. In the Russian revolution it was the _educated_ classes that were the enemy really: the deepest inspiration the hatred of the conscious classes. But revolution is not a mob-movement. Revolution has direction, and leadership, however temporary. There is point to its destructive frenzy.

In the end, it is a question with us to-day whether the masses will degenerate into mobs, or whether they will still keep a spark of direction. All great mass uprisings are really acts of vengeance against the dominant consciousness of the day. It is the dynamic, vertebral consciousness in man bursting up and smashing through the fixed, superimposed mental consciousness of mankind, which mental consciousness has degenerated and become automatic.

The masses are always, strictly, non-mental. Their consciousness is preponderantly vertebral. And from time to time, as some great life-idea cools down and sets upon them like a cold crust of lava, the vertebral powers will work below the crust, apart from the mental consciousness, till they have come to such a heat of unison and unanimity, such a pitch of vibration that men are reduced to a great, non-mental oneness as in the hot-blooded whales, and then, like whales which suddenly charge upon the ship which tortures them, so they burst upon the vessel of civilisation. Or like whales that burst up through the ice that suffocates them, so they will burst up through the fixed consciousness, the congealed idea which they can now only blindly react against. At the right moment, a certain cry, like a war-cry, a catchword, suddenly sounds, and the movement begins.

The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.

This lesson, however, puts us in danger of conceit, especially spiritual conceit.

In his supreme being, man is alone, isolate, nakedly himself, in contact only with the unknown God.

This is our way of expressing Nirvana.

But just as a tree is only perfect in blossom because it has groping roots, so is man only perfected in his individual being by his groping, pulsing unison with mankind. The unknown God is within, at the quick. But this quick must send down roots into the great flesh of mankind.

In short, the “spirit” has got a lesson to learn: the lesson of its own limitation. This is for the individual. And the infinite, which is Man writ large, or Humanity, has a still bitterer lesson to learn. It is the individual alone who can save humanity alive. But the greatest of great individuals must have deep, throbbing roots down in the dark red soil of the living flesh of humanity. Which is the bitter pill which Buddhists and all advocates of pure _Spirit_ must swallow.

In short, man, even the greatest man, does not live only by his spirit and his pure contact with the Godhead--for example, Nirvana. Blessed are the pure in heart, Blessed are the poor in spirit. He is _forced_ to live in vivid rapport with the mass of men. If he denies this, he cuts his roots. He intermingles as the roots of a tree interpenetrate the fat, rock-ribbed earth.

How? In this same vertebral correspondence. The mystic may stare at his own navel and try to abstract himself for ever towards Nirvana: it is half at least illusion. There is all the time a powerful, unconscious interplay going on between the vertebral centres of consciousness in all men, a deep, mindless current flashing and quivering through the family, the community, the nation, the continent, and even the world. No man can _really_ isolate himself. And this vertebral interplay is the root of our living: must always be so.

And this vertebral interplay is subject to the laws of polarity, since it is an intercommunion of active, polarised conscience-force. There is a dual polarity, and a dual direction. There is the outward, or downward pulse, in the great motion of sympathy or love, the love that goes out to the weaker, to the poor, to the humble. The vast, prostrate mass now becomes the positive pole of attraction: woman, the working-classes.

The whole of the great current of vertebral consciousness in mankind is supposed, now, to run in this direction. But the whole movement is but a polarised circuit. Insist on one direction overmuch, derange the circuit, and you have a terrible débâcle. Which brings us to another aspect of relativity: relativity in dynamic living.

When the flow is sympathetic, or love, then the weak, the woman, the masses, assume the positivity. But the balance even is only kept by stern _authority_, the unflinching obstinacy of the return-force, of power.

When the flow is power, might, majesty, glory, then it is a culminating flow towards one individual, through circles of aristocracy towards one grand centre. Emperor, Pope, Tyrant, King: whatever may be. It is the grand obeisance before a master.

In the balance of these two flows lies the secret of human stability. In the absolute triumph of either flow lies the immediate surety of collapse.

We have gone very far in the first direction. Democracy has _almost_ triumphed. The only real master left is the boss in industry. And he is to be dethroned. Labour is to wear the absolute crown of the everyday hat. Even the top hat is doomed. Labour shall be its own boss, and possess its own means and ends. The serpent shall swallow itself in a last gulp.

Mastership is based on possessions. To kill mastership you must have communal ownership. Then have it, for this superiority based on possession of money is worse than any of the pretensions of Labour or Bolshevism, strictly. Let the serpent swallow itself. Then we can have a new snake.

The moment Labour takes upon itself to be its own boss, the whole show is up, the end has begun. While ever the existing boss succeeds in hanging on to his money-capital, we get the present conditions of nullity and nagging. We’re between the devil and a deep sea.