Kangaroo Page 2

  So the pair of strangers passed on, across the wide asphalt road to one of the tall houses opposite. The workman looked at the house into which they had entered.

  ‘What d’you make of them, Dug?’ asked the one in the overalls.

  ‘Dunnow! Fritzies, most likely.’

  ‘They were talking English.’

  ‘Would be, naturally—what yer expect?’

  ‘I don’t think they were German.’

  ‘Don’t yer, Jack? Mebbe they weren’t then.’

  Dug was absolutely unconcerned. But Jack was piqued by the funny little bloke.

  Unconsciously he watched the house across the road. It was a more or less expensive boarding house. There appeared the foreign little bloke dumping down a gladstone bag at the top of the steps that led from the porch to the street, and the woman, the wife apparently, was coming out and dumping down a black hatbox. Then the man made another excursion into the house, and came out with another bag, which he likewise dumped down at the top of the steps. Then he had a few words with the wife, and scanned the street.

  ‘Wants a taxi,’ said Jack to himself.

  There were two taxis standing by the kerb near the open grassy slope of the park, opposite the tall brown houses. The foreign-looking bloke came down the steps and across the wide asphalt road to them. He looked into one, and then into the other. Both were empty. The drivers were lying on the grass smoking an after-luncheon cigar.

  ‘Bloke wants a taxi,’ said Jack.

  ‘Could ha’ told you that,’ said the nearest driver. But nobody moved.

  The stranger stood on the pavement beside the big, cream-coloured taxi, and looked across at the group of men on the grass. He did not want to address them.

  ‘Want a taxi?’ called Jack.

  ‘Yes. Where are the drivers?’ replied the stranger, in unmistakable English: English of the old country.

  ‘Where d’you want to go?’ called the driver of the cream-coloured taxi, without rising from the grass.

  ‘Murdoch Street.’

  ‘Murdoch Street? What number?’

  ‘Fifty-one.’

  ‘Neighbour of yours, Jack,’ said Dug, turning to his mate.

  ‘Taking it furnished, four guineas a week,’ said Jack in a tone of information.

  ‘All right,’ said the driver of the cream-coloured taxi, rising at last from the grass. ‘I’ll take you.’

  ‘Go across to 120 first,’ said the little bloke, pointing to the house. ‘There’s my wife and the bags. But look!’ he added quickly. ‘You’re not going to charge me a shilling each for the bags.’

  ‘What bags? Where are they?’

  ‘There at the top of the steps.’

  ‘All right, I’ll pull across and look at ’em.’

  The bloke walked across, and the taxi at length curved round after him. The stranger had carried his bags to the foot of the steps: two ordinary-sized gladstones, and one smallish square hatbox. There they stood against the wall. The taxi driver poked out his head to look at them. He surveyed them steadily. The stranger stood at bay.

  ‘Shilling apiece, them bags,’ said the driver laconically.

  ‘Oh no. The tariff is threepence,’ cried the stranger.

  ‘Shilling apiece, them bags,’ repeated the driver. He was one of the proletariat that has learnt the uselessness of argument.

  ‘That’s not just, the tariff is threepence.’

  ‘All right, if you don’t want to pay the fare, don’t engage the car, that’s all. Them bags is a shilling apiece.’

  ‘Very well, I don’t want to pay so much.’

  ‘Oh, all right. If you don’t, you won’t. But they’ll cost you a shilling apiece on a taxi, an’ there you are.’

  ‘Then I don’t want a taxi.’

  ‘Then why don’t you say so. There’s no harm done. I don’t want to charge you for pulling across here to look at the bags. If you don’t want a taxi, you don’t. I suppose you know your own mind.’

  Thus saying he pushed off the brakes and the taxi slowly curved round on the road to resume its previous stand.

  The strange little bloke and his wife stood at the foot of the steps beside the bags, looking angry. And then a hansom cab came clock-clocking slowly along the road, also going to draw up for the dinner hour at the quiet place opposite. But the driver spied the angry couple.

  ‘Want a cab, sir?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think you can get the bags on.’

  ‘How many bags?’

  ‘Three. These three,’ and he kicked them with his toe, angrily.

  The hansom driver looked down from his Olympus. He was very red-faced, and a little bit humble.

  ‘Them three? Oh yes! Easy! Easy! Get ’em on easy. Get them on easy, no trouble at all.’ And he clambered down from his perch, and resolved into a little red-faced man, rather beery and henpecked-looking. He stood gazing at the bags. On one was printed the name: ‘R. L. Somers’.

  ‘R. L. Somers! All right, you get in, sir and madam. You get in. Where d’you want to go? Station?’

  ‘No. Fifty-one Murdoch Street.’

  ‘All right, all right, I’ll take you. Fairish long way, but we’ll be there under an hour.’

  Mr Somers and his wife got into the cab. The cabby left the doors flung wide open, and piled the three bags there like a tower in front of his two fares. The hatbox was on top, almost touching the brown hairs of the horse’s tail, and perching gingerly.

  ‘If you’ll keep a hand on that, now, to steady it,’ said the cabby.

  ‘All right,’ said Somers.

  The man climbed to his perch, and the hansom and the extraneous tower began to joggle away into the town. The group of workmen were still lying on the grass. But Somers did not care about them. He was safely jogging with his detested baggage to his destination.

  ‘Aren’t they vile!’ said Harriet, his wife.

  ‘It’s God’s Own Country, as they always tell you,’ said Somers. ‘The hansom man was quite nice.’

  ‘But the taxi drivers! And the man charged you eight shillings on Saturday for what would be two shillings in London!’

  ‘He rooked me. But there you are, in a free country, it’s the man who makes you pay who is free—free to charge you what he likes, and you’re forced to pay it. That’s what freedom amounts to. They’re free to charge, and you are forced to pay.’

  In which state of mind they jogged through the city, catching a glimpse from the top of a hill of the famous harbour spreading out with its many arms and legs. Or at least they saw one bay with warships and steamers lying between the houses and the wooded, bank-like shores, and they saw the centre of the harbour, and the opposite squat cliffs—the whole low wooded tableland reddened with suburbs and interrupted by the pale spaces of the many-lobed harbour. The sky had gone grey, and the low tableland into which the harbour intrudes squatted dark-looking and monotonous and sad, as if lost on the face of the earth: the same Australian atmosphere, even here within the area of huge, restless, modern Sydney, whose million inhabitants seem to slip like fishes from one side of the harbour to another.

  Murdoch Street was an old sort of suburb, little squat bungalows with corrugated iron roofs, painted red. Each little bungalow was set in its own hand-breadth of ground, surrounded by a little wooden palisade fence. And there went the long street, like a child’s drawing, the little square bungalows dot-dot-dot, close together and yet apart, like modern democracy, each one fenced round with a square rail fence. The street was wide, and strips of worn grass took the place of kerb-stones. The stretch of macadam in the middle seemed as forsaken as a desert, as the hansom clock-clocked along it.

  Fifty-one had its name painted by the door. Somers had been watching these names. He had passed Elite and Très Bon and The Angels’ Roost and The Better ’Ole. He rather hoped for one of the Australian names, Wallamby or Wagga-Wagga. When he had looked at the house and agreed to take it for three months, it had been dusk, and he had not noticed the na
me. He hoped it would not be U-An-Me, or even Stella Maris.

  ‘Forestin,’ he said, reading the flourishing T as an F. ‘What language do you imagine that is?’

  ‘It’s T, not F,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Torestin,’ he said, pronouncing it like Russian. ‘Must be a native word.’

  ‘No,’ said Harriet. ‘It means To rest in.’ She didn’t even laugh at him. He became painfully silent.

  Harriet didn’t mind very much. They had been on the move for four months, and she felt if she could but come to anchor somewhere in a corner of her own, she wouldn’t much care where it was, or whether it was called Torestin or Angels’ Roost or even Très Bon.

  It was, thank heaven, quite a clean little bungalow, with just commonplace furniture, nothing very preposterous. Before Harriet had even taken her hat off she removed four pictures from the wall, and the red plush tablecloth from the table. Somers had disconsolately opened the bags, so she fished out an Indian sarong of purplish shot colour, to try how it would look across the table. But the walls were red, of an awful deep bluey red, that looks so fearful with dark-oak fittings and furniture: or dark-stained jarrah, which amounts to the same thing; and Somers snapped, looking at the purple sarong—a lovely thing in itself:

  ‘Not with red walls.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ said Harriet, disappointed. ‘We can easily colour-wash them white—or cream.’

  ‘What, start colour-washing walls?’

  ‘It would only take half a day.’

  ‘That’s what we come to a new land for—to God’s Own Country—to start colour-washing walls in a beastly little suburban bungalow? That we’ve hired for three months and mayn’t live in three weeks!’

  ‘Why not? You must have walls.’

  ‘I suppose you must,’ he said, going away to inspect the two little bedrooms, and the kitchen, and the outside. There was a scrap of garden at the back, with a path down the middle, and a fine Australian tree at the end, a tree with pale bark and no leaves, but big tufts of red, spiky flowers. He looked at the flowers in wonder. They were apparently some sort of bean flower, in sharp tufts, like great red spikes of stiff wisteria, curving upwards, not dangling. They looked handsome against the blue sky: but again, extraneous. More like scarlet cockatoos perched in the bare tree, than natural growing flowers. Queer burning red, and hard red flowers! They call it coral tree.

  There was a little round summerhouse also, with a flat roof and steps going up. Somers mounted, and found that from the lead-covered roof of the little round place he could look down the middle harbour, and even see the low gateway, the low headlands with the lighthouse, opening to the full Pacific. There was the way out to the open Pacific, the white surf breaking. A tramp steamer was just coming in, under her shaft of black smoke.

  But near at hand nothing but bungalows—street after street. This was one of the old-fashioned bits of Sydney. A little further off the streets of proper brick houses clustered. But here on this hill the original streets of bungalow places remained almost untouched, still hinting at the temporary shacks run up in the wilderness.

  Somers felt a little uneasy because he could look down into the whole range of his neighbours’ gardens and back premises. He tried not to look at them. But Harriet had come climbing after him to survey the world, and she began:

  ‘Isn’t it lovely up here! Do you see the harbour?—and the way we came in! Look, look, I remember looking out of the porthole and seeing that lighthouse, just as we came in—and those little brown cliffs. Oh, but it’s a wonderful harbour. What it must have been when it was first discovered. And now all these little dog-kennelly houses, and everything. But this next garden is lovely; have you seen the—what are they, the lovely flowers?’

  ‘Dahlias.’

  ‘But did ever you see such dahlias! Are you sure they’re dahlias? They’re like pink chrysanthemums—and like roses—oh, lovely! But all these little dog kennels—awful piggling suburban place—and sort of lousy. Is this all men can do with a new country? Look at those tin cans!’

  ‘What do you expect them to do? Rome was not built in a day.’

  ‘Oh, but they might make it nice. Look at all the little backs: like chicken houses with chicken runs. They call this making a new country, do they?’

  ‘Well, how would you start making a new country yourself?’ asked Somers, a little impatiently.

  ‘I wouldn’t have towns—and corrugated iron—and millions of little fences—and empty tins.’

  ‘No, you’d have old chateaus and Tudor manors.’

  They went down, hearing a banging at the back door, and seeing a tradesman with a basket on his arm. And for the rest of the day they were kept busy going to the door to tell the inexhaustible tradespeople that they were now fixed up with grocer and butcher and baker and all the rest. Night came on, and Somers sat on his tub of a summerhouse looking at the lights glittering thick in swarms in the various hollows down to the water, and the lighthouses flashing in the distance, and ship lights on the water, and the dark places thinly sprinkled with lights. It wasn’t like a town, it was like a whole country, with towns and bays and darknesses. And all lying mysteriously within the Australian underdark, that peculiar lost, weary aloofness of Australia. There was the vast town of Sydney. And it didn’t seem to be real, it seemed to be sprinkled on the surface of a darkness into which it never penetrated.

  Somers sighed and shivered and went down to the house. It was chilly. Why had he come? Why, oh why? What was he looking for? Reflecting for a moment, he imagined he knew what he had come for. But he wished he had not come to Australia, for all that.

  He was a man with an income of four hundred a year, and a writer of poems and essays. In Europe, he had made up his mind that everything was done for, played out, finished, and he must go to a new country. The newest country: young Australia. Now he had tried Western Australia, and had looked at Adelaide and Melbourne. And the vast, uninhabited land frightened him. It seemed so hoary and lost, so unapproachable. The sky was pure, crystal pure and blue, of a lovely pale blue colour: the air was wonderful, new and unbreathed: and there were great distances. But the bush, the grey, charred bush. It scared him. As a poet, he felt himself entitled to all kinds of emotions and sensations which an ordinary man would have repudiated. Therefore he let himself feel all sorts of things about the bush. It was so phantom-like, so ghostly, with its tall pale trees and many dead trees, like corpses, partly charred by bush fires: and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in silence. Waiting, waiting—the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting. And he could not penetrate into its secret. He couldn’t get at it. Nobody could get at it. What was it waiting for?

  And then one night at the time of the full moon he walked alone into the bush. A huge electric moon, huge, and the tree-trunks like naked pale Aborigines among the dark-soaked foliage, in the moonlight. And not a sign of life—not a vestige.

  Yet something. Something big and aware and hidden! He walked on, had walked a mile or so into the bush, and had just come to a clump of tall, nude, dead trees, shining almost phosphorescent with the moon, when the terror of the bush overcame him. He had looked so long at the vivid moon, without thinking. And now, there was something among the trees, and his hair began to stir with terror, on his head. There was a presence. He looked at the weird, white, dead trees, and into the hollow distances of the bush. Nothing! Nothing at all. He turned to go home. And then immediately the hair on his scalp stirred and went icy cold with terror. What of? He knew quite well it was nothing. He knew quite well. But with his spine cold like ice, and the roots of his hair seeming to freeze, he walked on home, walked firmly and without haste. For he told himself he refused to be afraid, though he admitted the icy sensation of terror. But then to experience terror is not the same thing as to admit fear into the conscious soul. Therefore he refused to be afraid.

  But the horrid thing in the bush! He schemed as
to what it would be. It must be the spirit of the place. Something fully evoked tonight, perhaps provoked, by that unnatural West Australian moon. Provoked by the moon, the roused spirit of the bush. He felt it was watching, and waiting. Following with certainty, just behind his back. It might have reached a long black arm and gripped him. But no, it wanted to wait. It was not tired of watching its victim. An alien people—a victim. It was biding its time with a terrible ageless watchfulness, waiting for a far-off end, watching the myriad intruding white men.

  This was how Richard Lovat Somers figured it out to himself, when he got back into safety in the scattered township in the clearing on the hill-crest, and could see far off the fume of Perth and Fremantle on the seashore, and the tiny sparkling of a farther-off lighthouse on an island. A marvellous night, raving with moonlight—and somebody burning off the bush in a ring of sultry red fire under the moon in the distance, a slow ring of creeping red fire, like some ring of fireflies, upon the far-off darkness of the land’s body, under the white blaze of the moon above.

  It is always a question whether there is any sense in taking notice of a poet’s fine feelings. The poet himself has misgivings about them. Yet a man ought to feel something, at night under such a moon.

  Richard S. had never quite got over that glimpse of terror in the Westralian bush. Pure foolishness, of course, but there’s no telling where a foolishness may nip you. And, now that night had settled over Sydney, and the town and harbour were sparkling unevenly below, with reddish-seeming sparkles, whilst overhead the marvellous southern Milky Way was tilting uncomfortably to the south, instead of crossing the zenith; the vast myriads of swarming stars that cluster all along the Milky Way, in the southern sky, and the Milky Way itself leaning heavily to the south, so that you feel all on one side if you look at it; the southern sky at night, with that swarming Milky Way all bushy with stars, and yet with black gaps, holes in the white star-road, while misty blotches of star-mist float detached, like cloud-vapours, in the side darkness, away from the road; the wonderful southern night sky, that makes a man feel so lonely, alien: with Orion standing on his head in the west, and his sword-belt upside down, and his Dog-star prancing in mid-heaven, high above him; and with the Southern Cross insignificantly mixed in with the other stars, democratically inconspicuous; well then, now that night had settled down over Sydney, and all this was happening overhead, for R. L. Somers and a few more people, our poet once more felt scared and anxious. Things seemed so different. Perhaps everything was different from all he had known. Perhaps if St Paul and Hildebrand and Darwin had lived south of the equator, we might have known the world all different, quite different. But it is useless iffing. Sufficient that Somers went indoors into his little bungalow, and found his wife setting the table for supper, with cold meat and salad.