Kangaroo Page 14

  CHAPTER VI

  KANGAROO

  THEY went back to Sydney on the Thursday, for two days, to pack up and return to Coo-ee. All the time, they could hear the sea. It seemed strange that they felt the sea so far away, in Sydney. In Sydney itself, there is no sea. It might be Birmingham. Even in Mullumbimby, a queer raw little place, when Somers lifted his head and looked down Main Street and saw, a mile away, the high level of the solid sea, it was almost a shock to him. Half a mile inland, the influence of the sea has disappeared, and the land-sense is so heavy, buried, that it is hard to believe that the dull rumble in the air is the ocean. It sounds like a coalmine or something.

  ‘You’ll let Mr Somers and me have a little chat to ourselves, Mrs Somers, won’t you?’ said Jack, appearing after tea.

  ‘Willingly. I assure you I don’t want to be bothered with your important affairs,’ said Harriet. None the less she went over rather resentfully to Victoria, turned out of her own house. It wasn’t that she wanted to listen. She would really have hated to attend to all their high-and-mighty revolution stuff. She didn’t believe in revolutions—they were vieux jeu, out of date.

  ‘Well,’ said Jack, settling down in a wooden armchair and starting his pipe. “You’ve thought it over, have you?’

  ‘Over and over,’ laughed Somers.

  ‘I knew you would.’

  He sucked his pipe and thought for a time.

  ‘I’ve had a long talk with Kangaroo about you today,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s Kangaroo?’

  ‘He’s the First,’ replied Jack slowly. And again there was silence. Somers kept himself well in hand, and said nothing.

  ‘A lawyer—well up—I knew him in the army, though. He was one of my lieutenants.’

  Still Somers waited, without speaking.

  ‘He’d like to see you. Should you care to have lunch with him and me in town tomorrow?’

  ‘Have you told him you’ve talked to me?’

  ‘Oh yes—told him before I did it. He knows your writings—read all you’ve written, apparently. He’d heard about you too from a chap on the Naldera. That’s the boat you came by, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Somers.

  ‘Yes,’ echoed Jack. ‘He was all over me when I mentioned your name. You’d like Kangaroo. He’s a great chap.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Cooley—Ben—Benjamin Cooley.’

  ‘They like him on the Bulletin, don’t they? Didn’t I see something about Ben Cooley and his straight talk?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, he can talk straight enough—and crooked enough as well, if it comes to that. You’ll come to lunch then? We lunch in his chambers.’

  Somers agreed. Jack was silent, as if he had not much more to say. After a while he added reflectively:

  ‘Yes, I’m glad to have brought you and Kangaroo together.’

  ‘Why do they call him Kangaroo?’

  ‘Looks like one.’

  Again there was a silence, each man thinking his own thoughts.

  ‘You and Kangaroo will catch on like wax, as far as ideas go,’ Jack prognosticated. ‘But he’s an unfeeling beggar, really. And that’s where you won’t cotton on to him. That’s where I come in.’

  He looked at Somers with a faint smile.

  ‘Come in to what?’ laughed Somers.

  Jack took his pipe from his mouth with a little flourish.

  ‘In a job like this,’ he said, ‘a man wants a mate—yes, a mate—that he can say anything to, and be absolutely himself with. Must have it. And as far as I go—for me—you don’t mind if I say it, do you?—Kangaroo could never have a mate. He’s as odd as any phoenix bird I’ve ever heard tell of. You couldn’t mate him to anything in the heavens above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. No, there’s no female kangaroo of his species. Fine chap, for all that. But as lonely as a nail in a post.’

  ‘Sounds something fatal and fixed,’ laughed Somers.

  ‘It does. And he is fatal and fixed. Those eyeglasses of his, you know—they alone make a man into a sort of eye of God, rather glassy. But my idea is, in a job like this, every man should have a mate—like most of us had in the war. Mine was Victoria’s brother—and still is, in a way. But he got some sort of a sickness that seems to have taken all the fight out of him. Fooling about with the wrong sort of women. Can’t get his pecker up again now, the fool. Poor devil an’ all.’

  Jack sighed and resumed his pipe.

  ‘Men fight better when they’ve got a mate. They’ll stand anything when they’ve got a mate,’ he went on again after a while. ‘But a mate’s not all that easy to strike. We’re a lot of decent chaps, stick at nothing once they wanted to put a thing through, in our lodge—and in my club. But there’s not one of them I feel’s quite up to me—if you know what I mean. Rattling good fellows—but nary one of ’em quite my cut.’

  ‘That’s usually so,’ laughed Somers.

  ‘It is,’ said Jack. Then he narrowed and diminished his voice. ‘Now I feel,’ he said cautiously and intensely, ‘that if you and me was mates, we could put any damn mortal thing through, if we had to knock the bottom out of the blanky show to do it.’

  Somers dropped his head. He liked the man. But what about the cause? What about the mistrust and reluctance he felt? And at the same time, the thrill of desire. What was offered? He wanted so much. To be mates with Jack in this cause. Life and death mates. And yet he felt he couldn’t. Not quite. Something stopped him.

  He looked up at Callcott. The other man’s face was alert and waiting: curiously naked a face too. Somers wished it had had even a moustache, anything rather than this clean, all-clean bare flesh. If Jack had only had a beard too—like a man—and not one of these clean-shaven too-much-exposed faces. Alert, waiting face—almost lurking, waiting for an answer.

  ‘Could we ever be quite mates?’ Somers asked gently.

  Jack’s dark eyes watched the other man fixedly. Jack himself wasn’t unlike a kangaroo, thought Somers: a long-faced, smooth-faced, strangely watchful kangaroo with powerful hindquarters.

  ‘Perhaps not as me and Fred Wilmot was. In a way you’re higher up than I am. But that’s what I like, you know—a mate that’s better than I am, a mate who I feel is better than I am. That’s what I feel about you: and that’s what makes me feel, if we was mates, I’d stick to you through hellfire and back, and we’d clear some land between us. I know if you and me was mates, we could put any blooming thing through. There’d be nothing to stop us.’

  ‘Not even Kangaroo?’

  ‘Oh, he’d be our way, and we’d be his. He’s a sensible chap.’

  Somers was tempted to give Jack his hand there and then, and pledge himself to a friendship, or a comradeship, that nothing should ever alter. He wanted to do it. Yet something withheld him as if an invisible hand were upon him, preventing him.

  ‘I’m not sure that I’m a mating man, either,’ he said slowly.

  ‘You?’ Jack eyed him. ‘You are and you aren’t. If you’d once come over—why man, do you think I wouldn’t lay my life down for you?’

  Somers went pale. He didn’t want anybody laying down their lives for him. ‘Greater love than this—’ But he didn’t want this great love. He didn’t believe in it: in that way of love.

  ‘Let’s leave it, Jack,’ he replied, laughing slowly and rising, giving his hand to the other man. ‘Don’t let us make any pledges yet. We’re friends, whatever else we are. As for being mates—wait till I feel sure. Wait till I’ve seen Kangaroo. Wait till I see my way clear. I feel I’m only six strides down the way yet, and you ask me to be at the end.’

  ‘At the start you mean,’ said Jack, gripping the other man’s hand, and rising too. ‘But take your time, old man.’ He laid his hand on Somers’ shoulder. ‘If you’re slow and backward like a woman, it’s because it’s your nature. Not like me, I go at it in jumps like a kangaroo. I feel I could jump clean through the blooming tent-canvas sometimes.’ As he spoke he was
pale and tense with emotion, and his eyes were like black holes, almost wounds in the pallor of his face.

  Somers was in a dilemma. Did he want to mix and make with this man? One part of him perhaps did. But not a very big part, since for his life he could not help resenting it when Jack put his hand on his shoulder, or called him ‘old man’. It wasn’t the commonness either. Jack’s ‘common’ speech and manner was largely assumed—part of the colonial bluff. He could be accurate enough if he chose—as Somers knew already, and would soon know more emphatically. No, it was not the commonness, the vulgar touch in the approach. Jack was sensitive enough, really. And the quiet, well-bred appeal of upper-class young Englishmen, who have the same yearning for intimate comradeship, combined with a sensitive delicacy really finer than a woman’s, this made Somers shrink just the same. He half wanted to commit himself to this whole affection with a friend, a comrade, a mate. And then, in the last issue, he didn’t want it at all. The affection would be deep and genuine enough: that he knew. But—when it came to the point, he didn’t want any more affection. All his life he had cherished a beloved ideal of friendship—David and Jonathan. And now, when true and good friends offered, he found he simply could not commit himself, even to simple friendship. The whole trend of this affection, this mingling, this intimacy, this truly beautiful love, he found his soul just set against it. He couldn’t go along with it. He didn’t want a friend, he didn’t want loving affection, he didn’t want comradeship. No, his soul trembled when he tried to drive it along the way, trembled and stood still, like Balaam’s Ass. It did not want friendship or comradeship, great or small, deep or shallow.

  It took Lovat Somers some time before he would really admit and accept this new fact. Not till he had striven hard with his soul did he come to see the angel in the way; not till his soul, like Balaam’s Ass, had spoken more than once. And then, when forced to admit, it was a revolution in his mind. He had all his life had this craving for an absolute friend, a David to his Jonathan, Pylades to his Orestes: a blood brother. All his life he had secretly grieved over his friendlessness. And now at last, when it really offered—and it had offered twice before, since he had left Europe—he didn’t want it, and he realised that in his innermost soul he had never wanted it.

  Yet he wanted some living fellowship with other men; as it was he was just isolated. Maybe a living fellowship!—but not affection, not love, not comradeship. Not mates and equality and mingling. Not blood brotherhood. None of that.

  What else? He didn’t know. He only knew he was never destined to be mate or comrade or even friend with any man. Some other living relationship. But what? He did not know. Perhaps the thing that the dark races know: that one can still feel in India: the mystery of lordship. That which white men have struggled so long against, and which is the clue to the life of the Hindu. The mystery of lordship. The mystery of innate, natural, sacred priority. The other mystic relationship between men, which democracy and equality try to deny and obliterate. Not any arbitrary caste or birth aristocracy. But the mystic recognition of difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred responsibility of authority.

  Before Somers went down to George Street to find Jack and to be taken by him to luncheon with the Kangaroo, he had come to the decision, or to the knowledge that mating or comradeship were contrary to his destiny. He would never pledge himself to Jack, nor to this venture in which Jack was concerned.

  They arrived at Mr Cooley’s chambers punctually. It was a handsome apartment with handsome jarrah furniture, dark and suave, and some very beautiful rugs. Mr Cooley came at once: and he was a kangaroo. His face was long and lean and pendulous, with eyes set close together behind his pince-nez: and his body was stout but firm. He was a man of forty or so, hard to tell, swarthy, with short-cropped dark hair and a smallish head carried rather forward on his large but sensitive, almost shy body. He leaned forward in his walk, and seemed as if his hands didn’t quite belong to him. But he shook hands with a firm grip. He was really tall, but his way of dropping his head, and his sloping shoulders, took away from his height. He seemed not much taller than Somers, towards whom he seemed to lean the sensitive tip of his long nose, hanging over him as he scrutinised him sharply through his eye-glasses, and approaching him with the front of his stomach.

  ‘Very glad to see you,’ he said, in a voice half Australian, half official.

  The luncheon was almost impressive: a round table with a huge bunch of violets in a queer old copper bowl, Queen Anne silver, a tablecloth with heavy point edging, Venetian wineglasses, red and white wine in Venetian wine jugs, a Chinaman waiting at table, offering first a silver dish of hors d’oeuvres and a handsome crayfish with mayonnaise.

  ‘Why,’ said Somers, equivocally, ‘I might be anywhere.’

  Kangaroo looked at him sharply. Somers noticed that when he sat down, his thighs in his dark grey, striped trousers were very thick, making his shoulders seem almost slender; but though his stomach was stout, it was firm.

  ‘Then I hope you feel at home,’ said Kangaroo. ‘Because I am sure you are at home anywhere.’ And he helped himself to olives, putting one in his queer, pursed, thick-lipped mouth.

  ‘For which reason I’m never at home, presumably.’

  ‘That may easily be the case. Will you take red or white wine?’

  ‘White,’ said Somers, oblivious of the poised Chinaman.

  ‘You have come to a homely country,’ said the Kangaroo, without the ghost of a smile.

  ‘Certainly to a very hospitable one.’

  ‘We rarely lock our doors,’ said Kangaroo.

  ‘Or anything else,’ said Jack. ‘Though of course we may slay you in the scullery if you say a word against us.’

  ‘I’m not going to be so indiscreet,’ said Somers.

  ‘Leave the indiscretion to us. We believe in it. Indiscretion is the better part of valour. You agree, Kangaroo?’ said Jack, smiling over his plate directly at his host.

  ‘I don’t think I’d care to see you turn discreet, boy,’ returned the other. ‘Though your quotation isn’t new.’

  ‘Even a crystal-gazer can’t gaze to the bottom of a deep well, eh? Never mind, I’m as shallow as a pie dish, and proud of it. Red, please.’ This to the Chink.

  ‘That’s why it’s so nice knowing you,’ said Kangaroo.

  ‘And you, of course, are a glass finger-bowl with a violet floating on it, you’re so transparent,’ said Jack.

  ‘I think that describes me beautifully. Mr Somers, help yourself to wine, that’s the most comfortable. I hope you are going to write something for us. Australia is waiting for her Homer—or her Theocritus.’

  ‘Or even her Ally Sloper,’ said Jack, ‘if I may be permitted to be so old-fashioned.’

  ‘If I were but blind,’ said Somers, ‘I might have a shot at Australian Homerics.’

  ‘His eyes hurt him still, with looking at Sydney,’ said Jack.

  ‘There certainly is enough of it to look at,’ said Kangaroo.

  ‘In acreage,’ said Jack.

  ‘Pity it spreads over so much ground,’ said Somers.

  ‘Oh, every man his little lot, and an extended tram-service.’

  ‘In Rome,’ said Somers, ‘they piled up huge houses, vast, and stowed them away like grubs in a honeycomb.’

  ‘Who did the stowing?’ asked Jack sarcastically.

  ‘We don’t like to have anybody overhead here,’ said Kangaroo. ‘We don’t even care to go upstairs, because we are then one storey higher than our true, ground-floor selves.’

  ‘Prop us up on a dozen stumps, and we’re cosy,’ said Jack. ‘Just a little above the earth level, and no higher, you know. Australians in their heart of hearts hate anything but a bungalow. They feel it’s rock bottom, don’t you see. None of your stair-climbing shams and upstairs importance.’

  ‘Good honest fellows,’ said Kangaroo, and it was impossible to know if he were joking or not.

  ‘Till it comes to business,’ s
aid Jack.

  Kangaroo then started a discussion of the much-mooted and at the moment fashionable Theory of Relativity.

  ‘Of course it’s popular,’ said Jack. ‘It absolutely takes the wind out of anybody’s sails who wants to say “I’m It.” Even the Lord Almighty is only relatively so and as it were.’

  ‘How nice for us all,’ laughed Somers. ‘It needed a Jew to lead us this last step in liberty.’

  ‘Now we’re all little Its, chirping like so many molecules one with another,’ said Jack, eyeing the roast duck with a shrewd gaze.

  The luncheon passed frivolously. Somers was bored, but he had a shrewd suspicion that the other two men really enjoyed it. They sauntered into the study for coffee. It was a smallish room, with big, deep leather chairs of a delicate brown colour, and a thick, bluey oriental carpet. The walls even had an upper panelling of old embossed cordovan leather, a bluish colouring with gilt, old and tarnished away. It was evident that law pays, even in a new country.

  Everybody waited for everybody to speak. Somers, of course, knew it was not his business to begin.

  ‘The indiscreet Callcott told you about our Kangaroo clubs,’ said the host, smiling faintly. Somers thought that surely he had Jewish blood in him. He stirred his little gold coffee-cup slowly.