Kangaroo Read online

  ‘He gave me a very sketchy outline.’

  ‘It interested you?’

  ‘Exceedingly.’

  ‘I read your series of articles on Democracy,’ said Kangaroo. ‘In fact they helped me to this attempt now.’

  ‘I thought not a soul read them,’ said Somers, ‘in that absurd international paper published at the Hague, that they said was run absolutely by spies and shady people.’

  ‘It may have been. But I was a subscriber, and I read your essays here in Sydney. There was another man, too, writing on a new aristocracy. But it seemed to me there was too much fraternising in his scheme, too much reverence for the upper classes and passionate pity for the working classes. He wanted them all to be kind to one another, aristocrats of the spirit.’ Kangaroo smiled slowly. And when he smiled like that, there came an exceedingly sweet charm into his face, for a moment his face was like a flower. Yet he was quite ugly. And surely, thought Somers, it is Jewish blood. The very best that is in the Jewish blood: a faculty for pure disinterestedness, and warm, physically warm love, that seems to make the corpuscles of the blood glow. And after the smile his face went stupid and kangaroo-like, pendulous, with the eyes close together above the long, drooping nose. But the shape of the head was very beautiful, small, light, and fine. The man had surely Jewish blood. And he was almost purely kind, essential kindliness, embodied in an ancient, unscrupulous shrewdness. He was so shrewd, so clever. And with a rogue or a mean man, absolutely unscrupulous. But for any human being who showed himself sincere and vulnerable, his heart was pure in kindness. An extraordinary man. This pure kindliness had something Jehovah-like in it. And in every difficulty and every stress, he would remember it, his kindly love for real, vulnerable human beings. It had given his soul an absolute direction, whatever he said about relativity. Yet once he felt any man or woman was cold, mean, barren of this warmth which was in him, then he became at once utterly unscrupulous in defeating the creature. He was not angry or indignant. He was more like a real Jehovah. He had only to turn on all the levers and forces of his clever, almost fiendishly subtle will, and he could triumph. And he knew it. Somers had once had a Jewish friend with this wonderful, Jehovah-like kindliness, but also, without the shrewd fiendish subtlety of will. But it helped him to understand Cooley.

  ‘Yes—I think the man sent me his book,’ said Somers. ‘I forget his name. I only remember there was a feverish adulation of Lord Something-or-other, and a terrible cri du coeur about the mother of the people, the poor elderly woman in a battered black bonnet and a shawl, going out with sixpence ha’-penny to buy a shillings-worth of necessaries for the home.’

  ‘Just so,’ said Kangaroo, smiling again. ‘No doubt her husband drank. If he did, who can wonder.’

  ‘The very sight of her makes one want to shove her out of the house—or out of the world, for that matter,’ said Somers.

  ‘Nay,’ said Jack. ‘She’s enjoying her misery, dear old soul. Don’t envy her bits of pleasures.’

  ‘Not envy,’ laughed Somers. ‘But I begrudge them her.’

  ‘What would you do with her?’ asked Kangaroo.

  ‘I wouldn’t do anything. She mostly creeps in the East End where one needn’t bother about her. And she’s as much at home there as an opossum is in the bush. So don’t bother me about her.’

  ‘Just so,’ smiled Kangaroo. ‘I’d like to provide public kitchens where the children can get properly fed—and make the husband do a certain amount of state labour to pay for it. And for the rest, leave them to go their own way.’

  ‘But their minds, their souls, their spirits?’ said Somers.

  ‘They must more or less look after them themselves. I want to keep order. I want to remove physical misery as far as possible. That I am sure of. And that you can only do by exerting strong, just power from above. There I agree with you.’

  ‘You don’t believe in education?’

  ‘Not much. That is to say, in ninety per cent of the people it is useless. But I do want those ninety per cent none the less to have full, substantial lives: as even slaves had under certain masters, and as our people hardly have at all. That again, I think, is one of your ideas.’

  ‘It is,’ said Somers. But his heart sank. ‘You want a kind of benevolent tyranny, then?’

  ‘Not exactly. You see my tyrant would be so much circumscribed by the constitution I should establish. But in a sense, he would be a tyrant. Perhaps it would be nearer to say he would be a patriarch, or a pope: representing as near as possible the wise, subtle spirit of life. I should try to establish my state of Australia as a kind of Church, with the profound reverence for life, for life’s deepest urges, as the motive power. Dostoevsky suggests this: and I believe it can be done.’

  ‘Perhaps it might be done here,’ blurted Somers. ‘Every continent has its own way, and its own needs.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Kangaroo. ‘I have the greatest admiration for the Roman Catholic Church, as an institution. But the creed and the theology are not natural to me, quite. Not quite. I think we need something more flexible, and a power less formal and dogmatic; more generous, shall I say. A generous power, that sees all the issue here, not in the afterlife, and that does not concern itself with sin and repentance and redemption. I should try to teach my people what it is truly to be a man, and a woman. The salvation of souls seems too speculative a job. I think if a man is truly a man, true to his own being, his soul saves itself in that way. But no two people can save their souls alive, in the same way. As far as possible, we must leave it to them. Fata volentem ducunt, nolentem trahunt.’

  ‘I believe that too.’

  ‘Yet there must be law, and there must be authority. But law more human, and authority much wiser. If a man loves life, and feels the sacredness and the mystery of life, then he knows that life is full of strange and subtle and even conflicting imperatives. And a wise man learns to recognise the imperatives as they arise—or nearly so—and to obey. But most men bruise themselves to death trying to fight and overcome their own new, life-born needs, life’s ever-strange new imperatives. The secret of all life is in obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us on to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations. It is a subtle and conflicting urge away from the thing we are. And there lies the pain. Because man builds himself in to his old house of life, builds his own blood into the roads he lays down, and to break from the old way, and to change his house of life, is almost like tearing him to pieces: a sacrilege. Life is cruel—and above all things man needs to be reassured and suggested into his new issues. And he needs to be relieved from this terrible responsibility of governing himself when he doesn’t know what he wants, and has no aim towards which to govern himself. Man again needs a father—not a friend or a brother sufferer, a suffering Saviour. Man needs a quiet, gentle father who uses his authority in the name of living life, and who is absolutely stern against anti-life. I offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life, and to shelter mankind from the madness and the evil of anti-life.’

  ‘You believe in evil?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones round our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers—look at those hibiscus—they don’t want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned into stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy. But they won’t. They will quietly, gently wither. And I love them for it. And so should all creeds, all gods, quietly and gently curl
up and wither as their evening approaches. That is the only way of true holiness, in my opinion.’

  The man had a beautiful voice, when he was really talking. It was like a flute, a wood-instrument. And his face, with that odd look of a sheep or a kangaroo, took on an extraordinary beauty of its own, a glow as if it were suffused with light. And the eyes shone with a queer, holy light, behind the eyeglasses. And yet it was still the kangaroo face.

  Somers watched the face, and dropped his head. He sat feeling rebuked. He was so impatient and outrageous himself. And the steady loveliness of this man’s warm, wise heart was too much for him. He was abashed before it.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Kangaroo re-echoed. ‘There is a principle of evil. The principle of resistance. Malignant resistance to the life principle. And it uses the very life force itself against life, and sometimes seems as if it were absolutely winning. Not only Jesus rose from the dead. Judas rose as well, and propagated himself on the face of the earth. He has many children now. The life opposers. The life resisters. The life enemies. But we will see who wins. We will see. In the name of life, and the love of life, as man is almost invincible. I have found it so.’

  ‘I believe it also,’ said Somers.

  They were silent, and Kangaroo sat there with the rapt look on his face: a pondering, eternal look, like the eternity of the lamb of God grown into a sheep. This rather wicked idea came into Somers’ mind: the lamb of God grown into a sheep. So the man sat there, with his wide-eyed, rapt face sunk forward to his breast, very beautiful, and as eternal as if it were a dream: so absolute.

  A wonderful thing for a sculptor. For Kangaroo was really ugly: his pendulous Jewish face, his forward shoulders, his round stomach in its expensively tailored waistcoat and dark grey, striped trousers, his very big thighs. And yet even his body had become beautiful, to Somers—one might love it intensely, every one of its contours, its roundnesses and downward-drooping heaviness. Almost a grotesque, like a Chinese Buddha. And yet not a grotesque. Beautiful, beautiful as some half-tropical, bulging flower from a tree.

  Then Kangaroo looked with a teasing little smile at Somers.

  ‘But you have your own idea of power, haven’t you?’ he said, getting up suddenly, with quick power in his bulk, and gripping the other man’s shoulder.

  ‘I thought I had,’ said Somers.

  ‘Oh, you have, you have.’ There was a calm, easy tone in the voice, slightly fat, very agreeable. Somers thrilled to it as he had never thrilled.

  ‘Why, the man is like a god, I love him,’ he said to his astonished self. And Kangaroo was hanging forward his face and smiling heavily and ambiguously to himself, knowing that Somers was with him.

  Tiger, tiger, burning bright

  In the forests of the night

  he quoted in a queer, sonorous voice, like a priest. ‘The lion of your might would be a tiger, wouldn’t it. The tiger and the unicorn were fighting for the crown. How about me for a unicorn?—if I tied a bayonet on my nose?’ He rubbed his nose with a heavy playfulness.

  ‘Is the tiger your principle of evil?’

  ‘The tiger? Oh dear, no. The jackal, the hyena, and dear, deadly humanity. No, no. The tiger stands on one side of the shield, and the unicorn on the other, and they don’t fight for the crown at all. They keep it up between them. The pillars of the world! The tiger and the kangaroo!’ he boomed this out in a mock heroic voice, strutting with heavy playfulness. Then he laughed, looking winsomely at Somers. Heaven, what a beauty he had!

  ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright,’ he resumed, sing-song, abstracted. ‘I knew you’d come. Even since I read your first book of poems—how many years is it ago?—ten?—eleven? I knew you’d come.

  Your hands are five-branded flames—

  Noli me tangere.

  Of course you had to come.’

  ‘Well, here I am, anyhow,’ said Somers.

  ‘You are. You are!’ shouted the other, and Somers was quite scared. Then Kangaroo laughed again. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Stand up and let me look at you.’

  The two men stood facing one another: Kangaroo large, with his full stomach and his face hulking down, and his queer, glaring eyes: Somers slight and aloof-looking. Cooley eyed him up and down.

  ‘A little bit of a fellow—too delicate for rough me,’ he said, then started quoting again:

  Your hands are five-branded flames—

  Noli me tangere.

  I’ve got fat and bulky on all the poetry I never wrote. How do you do, Mr Somers? How do you like Australia, and its national animal, the kangaroo?’ Again he smiled with the sudden glow of warmth in his dark eyes, startling and wonderful.

  ‘Australia is a weird country, and its national animal is beyond me,’ Somers said, smiling rather palely.

  ‘Oh no, it isn’t. You’ll be patting it on the back as soon as you’ve taken your hands out of your pockets.’

  He stood silent a long while, with feet apart, looking abstractedly at Somers through his pince-nez.

  ‘Ah, well,’ he sighed at last. ‘We shall see. We shall see. But I’m very glad you came. You understand what I mean, I know, when I say we are birds of the same feather. Aren’t we?’

  ‘In some ways I think we are.’

  ‘Yes. In the feathery line. When shall I see you again?’

  ‘We are going back to the South Coast on Saturday.’

  ‘Then let me see you tomorrow. Let me call for you at your house—and bring you back into town for dinner in the evening. May I do that?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Somers.

  ‘What does “thank you” mean? Danke! No, thank you.’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Somers.

  ‘Don’t thank me, man,’ suddenly shouted the other. ‘I’m the one to do the thanking.’

  Somers felt simple startled amazement at these sudden shouts—loud shouts, that you might almost hear in the street.

  At last Jack and Somers left. Jack had felt it his business to keep quiet: he knew his chief. But now he opened his mouth.

  ‘What do you think of Kangaroo?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m beyond thinking,’ said Somers.

  ‘I know, that’s how he leaves you when he makes a set at you. But he’s a rattling fine sort, he is. He puts a heart into you when your chest’s as hollow as an old mustard tin. He’s a wonder, is Kangaroo: and he keeps on being a wonder.’

  ‘Yes, he’s certainly a wonder.’

  ‘My, the brain the man has! I say, though, talking about tigers and kangaroos reminded me of a thing I once saw. It was up in the North. I was going along when I heard snarls out of some long buffalo grass that made my hair stand on end. I had to see what it was, though, so into the grass goes I. And there I saw a full-grown male kangaroo backed up against a tree, with the flesh of one leg torn clean from the bone. He was gasping, but he was still fighting. And the other was a great big cat, we call ’em tiger-cats, as big as a smallish leopard, a beauty—grey and black stripes, and straighter than a leopard. And before you could breathe, a streak of black and grey shot at the ’roo’s throat, seemed to twist in mid air—and the ’roo slipped down to the ground with his entrails ripped right out. I was so dumbfounded I took a step in the grass, and that great hulking cat stopped and lifted his face from his warm food that he’d started on without ever looking up. He stood over the ’roo for ten seconds staring me in the eyes. Then the skin wrinkled back from his snout, and the fangs were so white and clean as death itself, and a low growl came out of his ugly throat. “Come on, you swine,” it said as plain as words. I didn’t, you bet. I backed out of that beastly grass.

  ‘The next one I saw was a dead one. And beside him lay the boss’ best staghound, that had been trained to tackling wild boars since he was a pup: dead as well. The cat had come fossicking round our camp on the Madden River.

  ‘My gad, though, but the size of the brute, and muscle like you couldn’t find in any other beast. I looked at the claws on the pads. They’re as sharp as a lancet, and they’d tear th
e guts out of a man before he could squeak. It was goodbye ’roo, that time.

  ‘They put that yarn in the Bulletin. And some chap wrote and said it was a stiff ’un, and the wild cat must be descended from escaped tame cats, because this country has no pussy Aboriginal of any sort. Couldn’t say myself, except I saw that tiger-cat, and it didn’t look much like the son of a homely tissey, either. Wonder what put the thing in my head. Perhaps Kangaroo’s fat belly.’

  ‘He’s not so very fat,’ said Somers.

  ‘No, he’s not got what you’d call a corporation and a whole urban council in front of him. Neither is he flat just there, like you and me.’

  Kangaroo arrived the next day at Torestin with a large bunch of violets in his hand: pale, expensive, late winter violets. He took off his hat to Harriet and bowed quite deep, without shaking hands. He had been a student at Munich.

  ‘Oh, how do you do!’ cried Harriet. ‘Please don’t look at the horrid room, we leave in the morning.’

  Kangaroo looked vacantly around. He was not interested, so he saw nothing: he might as well have been blind.

  ‘It’s a very nice room,’ he said. ‘May I give you the violets? The poet said you liked having them about.’

  She took them in her two hands, smelling their very faint fragrance.

  ‘They’re not like English violets—or those big dark fellows in Italy,’ he said. ‘But still we persuade ourselves that they are violets.’

  ‘They’re lovely. I feel I could warm my hands over them,’ she said.

  ‘And now they’re quite happy violets,’ he replied, smiling his rare, sweet smile at her. ‘Why are you taking the poet away from Sydney?’

  ‘Lovat? He wants to go.’

  ‘Lovat! What a good name to call him by!’ He turned to Somers, looking at him closely. ‘May I call you Lovat?’

  ‘Better that than the poet,’ said Somers, lifting his nose slightly with aversion.

  The other man laughed, but softly and happily.

  ‘His muse he’s not in love with,’ he murmured to himself.