‘What d’yer think of it?’ said Jack.
‘Good idea,’ said Somers.
‘I know that—if we can bite on to it. Feel like joining in, d’yer think?’
Somers was silent. He was thinking of Jack even more than of the venture. Jack was trying to put something over him—in some way, to get a hold over him. He felt like an animal that is being lassoed. Yet here was his chance, if he wanted to be a leader of men. He had only to give himself, give himself up to it and to the men.
‘Let me think about it a bit, will you?’ he replied, ‘and I’ll tell you when I come up to Sydney.’
‘Right-o!’ said Jack, a twinge of disappointment in his acquiescence. ‘Look before you leap, you know.’
‘Yes—for both sides. You wouldn’t want me to jump in, and then squirm because I didn’t like it.’
‘Right you are, old man. You take your own time—I know you won’t be wagging your jaw to anybody.’
‘No. Not even to Harriet.’
‘Oh, bless you, no. We’re not having the women in, if we can help it. Don’t believe in it, do you?’
‘Not in real politics, I don’t.’
They stood a moment longer by the sea. Then Jack let go Somers’ arm.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’d rather die in a forlorn hope than drag my days out in a forlorn mope. Besides, damn it, I do want to have a shot at something, I do. These politicians absolutely get my wind up, running the country. If I can’t do better than that, then let me be shot, and welcome.’
‘I agree,’ said Somers.
Jack put his hand on his shoulder, and pressed it hard.
‘I knew you would,’ he said, in moved tones. ‘We want a man like you, you know—like a sort of queen bee to a hive.’
Somers laughed, rather startled by the metaphor. He had thought of himself as many things, but never as a queen bee to a hive of would-be revolutionaries. The two men went up to the house.
‘Wherever have you been?’ said Victoria.
‘Talking politics and red-hot treason,’ said Jack, rubbing his hands.
‘Till you’re almost frozen, I’m sure,’ said Victoria.
Harriet looked at the two men in curiosity and suspicion, but she said nothing. Only next morning when the Callcotts had gone she said to Lovat:
‘What were you and Mr Callcott talking about, really?’
‘As he said, politics and hot treason. An idea that some of them have got for making a change in the constitution.’
‘What sort of change?’ asked Harriet.
‘Why—don’t bother me yet. I don’t know myself.’
‘Is it so important you mustn’t tell me?’ she asked sarcastically.
‘Or else so vague,’ he answered.
But she saw by the shut look on his face that he was not going to tell her: that this was something he intended to keep apart from her: forever apart. A part of himself which he was not going to share with her. It seemed to her unnecessary, and a breach of faith on his part, wounding her. If their marriage was a real thing, then anything very serious was her matter as much as his, surely. Either her marriage with him was not very important, or else this Jack Callcott stuff wasn’t very important. Which probably it wasn’t. Yet she hated the hoity-toity way she was shut out.
‘Pah!’ she said. ‘A bit of little boys’ silly showing off.’
But he had this other cold side to his nature, that could keep a secret cold and isolated till Doomsday. And for two or three years now, since the war, he had talked like this about doing some work with men alone, sharing some activity with men. Turning away from the personal life to the hateful male impersonal activity, and shutting her out from this.
She continued bright through the day. Then at evening he found her sitting on her bed with tears in her eyes and her hands in her lap. At once his heart became very troubled: because after all she was all he had in the world, and he couldn’t bear her to be really disappointed or wounded. He wanted to ask her what was the matter, and to try to comfort her. But he knew it would be false. He knew that her greatest grief was when he turned away from their personal human life of intimacy to this impersonal business of male activity for which he was always craving. So he felt miserable, but went away without saying anything. Because he was determined, if possible, to go forward in this matter with Jack. He was also determined that it was not a woman’s matter. As soon as he could he would tell her about it: as much as it was necessary for her to know. But, once he had slowly and carefully weighed a course of action, he would not hold it subject to Harriet’s approval or disapproval. It would be out of her sphere, outside the personal sphere of their two lives, and he would keep it there. She emphatically opposed this principle of her externality. She agreed with the necessity for impersonal activity, but oh, she insisted on being identified with the activity, impersonal or not. And he insisted that it could not and should not be: that the pure male activity should be womanless, beyond woman. No man was beyond woman. But in his one quality of ultimate maker and breaker, he was womanless. Harriet denied this, bitterly. She wanted to share, to join in, not to be left out lonely. He looked at her in distress, and did not answer. It is a knot that can never be untied; it can only, like a navel string, be broken or cut.
For the moment, however, he said nothing. But Somers knew from his dreams what she was feeling: his dreams of a woman, a woman he loved, something like Harriet, something like his mother, and yet unlike either, a woman sullen and obstinate against him, repudiating him. Bitter the woman was, grieved beyond words, grieved till her face was swollen and puffy and almost mad or imbecile, because she had loved him so much, and now she must see him betray her love. That was how the dream woman put it: he had betrayed her great love, and she must go down desolate into an everlasting hell, denied, and denying him absolutely in return, a sullen, awful soul. The face reminded him of Harriet, and of his mother, and of his sister, and of girls he had known when he was younger—strange glimpses of all of them, each glimpse excluding the last. And at the same time in the terrible face some of the look of that bloated face of a madwoman which hung over Jane Eyre in the night in Mr Rochester’s house.
The Somers of the dream was terribly upset. He cried tears from his very bowels, and laid his hand on the woman’s arm saying:
‘But I love you. Don’t you believe in me? Don’t you believe in me?’ But the woman, she seemed almost old now—only shed a few bitter tears, bitter as vitriol, from her distorted face, and bitterly, hideously turned away, dragging her arm from the touch of his fingers; turned, as it seemed to the dream-Somers, away to the sullen and dreary, everlasting hell of repudiation.
He woke at this, and listened to the thunder of the sea with horror. With horror. Two women in his life he had loved down to the quick of life and death: his mother and Harriet. And the woman in the dream was so awfully his mother, risen from the dead, and at the same time Harriet, as it were, departing from this life, that he stared at the night-paleness between the window curtains in horror.
‘They neither of them believed in me,’ he said to himself. Still in the spell of the dream, he put it in the past tense, though Harriet lay sleeping in the next bed. He could not get over it.
Then he tried to come right awake. In his full consciousness, he was a great enemy of dreams. For his own private life, he found his dreams were like devils. When he was asleep and off his guard, then his own weaknesses, especially his old weaknesses that he had overcome in his full, day-waking self, rose up again maliciously to take some picturesque form and torment and overcome his sleeping self. He always considered dreams as a kind of revenge which old weaknesses took on the victorious healthy consciousness, like past diseases come back for a phantom triumph. So he said to himself: ‘The dream is one of these larvae of my past emotions. It means that the danger is passed, the evil is overcome, so it has to resort to dreams to terrify me. In dreams the diseases and evil weaknesses of the soul—and of our relations with other souls—take for
m to triumph falsely over the living, healthy, onward-struggling spirit. This dream means that the actual danger is gone.’ So he strengthened his spirit, and in the morning when he got up, and remembered, he was no longer afraid. A little uneasy still, maybe, especially as to what Harriet would do. But surely his mother was not hostile in death! And if she were a little bit hostile at this forsaking, it was not permanent, it was only the remains of a weakness, an unbelief which haunted the soul in life.
So he reasoned with himself. For he had an ingrained instinct or habit of thought which made him feel that he could never take the move into activity unless Harriet and his dead mother believed in him. They both loved him: that he knew. They both believed in him terribly, in personal being. In the individual man he was, and the son of man, they believed with all the intensity of undivided love. But in the impersonal man, the man that would go beyond them, with his back to them, away from them into an activity that excluded them, in this man they did not find it so easy to believe.
Harriet, however, said nothing for two days. She was happy in her new house, delighted with the sea and the being alone, she loved her Coo-ee bungalow, and loved making it look nice. She loved having Lovat alone with her, and all her desires, as it were, in the hollow of her hand. She was bright and affectionate with him. But underneath lurked this chagrin of his wanting to go away from her, for his activity.
‘You don’t take Callcott and his politics seriously, do you?’ she said to him at evening.
‘Yes,’ he said, rather hesitatingly.
‘But what does he want?’
‘To have another sort of government for the Commonwealth—with a sort of Dictator: not the democratic vote-cadging sort.’
‘But what does that matter to you?’
‘It does matter. If you can start a new life form.’
‘You know quite well you say yourself life doesn’t start with a form. It starts with a new feeling, and ends with a form.’
‘I know. But I think there is a new feeling.’
‘In Callcott?’ She had a very sceptical intonation.
‘Yes.’
‘I very much doubt it. He’s a returned war hero, and he wants a chance of keeping on being a hero—or something like that.’
‘But even that is a new feeling,’ he persisted.
‘Yah!’ she said, rather wearily sceptical. ‘I’d rather even believe in William James. There seems to me more real feeling even in him: deeper, at any rate. Your Jack’s are shallow really.’
‘Nay, he seemed a man to me.’
‘I don’t know what you mean by your men. Really, I give it up, I don’t know what you do want. You change so. You’ve always said you despise politics, and yet here you are.’ She tailed off as if it were hopeless.
‘It’s not the politics. But it is a new life form, a new social form. We’re pot-bound inside democracy and the democratic feeling.’
‘But you know what you’ve said yourself. You didn’t change the Roman Empire with a revolution. Christianity grew up for centuries without having anything at all to do with politics—just a feeling, and a belief.’
This was indeed what he had said himself, often enough: that a new religious inspiration, and a new religious idea must gradually spring up and ripen before there could be any constructive change. And yet he felt that preaching and teaching were both no good, at the world’s present juncture. There must be action, brave, faithful action: and in the action the new spirit would arise.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘Christianity is a religion which preaches the despising of the material world. And I don’t believe in that part of it, at least, any longer. I believe that the men with the real passion for life, for truth, for living and not for having, I feel they now must seize control of the material possessions, just to safeguard the world from all the masses who want to seize material possessions for themselves, blindly, and nothing else. The men with soul and with passionate truth in them must control the world’s material riches and supplies: absolutely put possessions out of the reach of the mass of mankind, and let life begin to live again, in place of this struggle for existence, or struggle for wealth.’
‘Yah, I don’t believe it’s so all-important who controls the world’s material riches and supplies. That’ll always be the same.’
‘It won’t.’
‘It will. Conservatives or bolshevists or Labour Party—they’re all alike: they all want to grab and have things in their clutches, and they’re devilish with jealousy if they haven’t got them. That’s politics. You’ve said thousands of times that politics are a game for the base people with no human soul in them. Thousands of times you’ve said it. And yet now—’
He was silent for a while.
‘Now,’ he said slowly. ‘Now I see that you don’t have only to give all your possessions to the poor. You’ve got to have no poor that can be saved just by possessions. You’ve got to put the control of all supplies into the hands of sincere, sensible men who are still men enough to know that manhood isn’t the same thing as goods. We don’t want possessions. Nobody wants possessions—more than just the immediate things: as you say yourself, one trunk for you, one for me, and one for the household goods. That’s about all. We don’t want anything else. And the world is ours—Australia or India, Coo-ee or Ardnaree, or where you like. You have got to teach people that, by withholding possessions and stopping the mere frenzy for possession which runs the world today. You’ve got to do that first, not last.’
‘And you think Jack Callcott will do it?’
‘I did think so, as he talked to me.’
‘Well, then let him. Why do you want to interfere? In my opinion he’s chiefly jealous because other people run the show, and he doesn’t have a look-in. Having once been a captain with some power, he wants the same again, and more. I’d rather trust William James to be disinterested.’
‘Nay, Jack Callcott is generous by nature, and I believe he’d be disinterested.’
‘In his way, he’s generous. But that isn’t the same as being disinterested, for all that. He wants to have his finger in the pie, that’s what he wants.’
‘To pull out plums? That’s not true.’
‘Perhaps not to pull out money plums. But to be bossy. To be a captain once more, feeling his feet and being a boss over something.’
‘Why shouldn’t he be?’
‘Why not? I don’t care if he bosses all Australia and New Zealand and all the lot. But I don’t see why you should call it disinterested. Because it isn’t.’
He paused, struck.
‘Am I disinterested?’ he asked.
‘Not’—she hesitated—‘not when you want just power.’
‘But I don’t want just power. I only see that somebody must have power, so those should have it who don’t want it selfishly, and who have some natural gift for it, and some reverence for the sacredness of it.’
‘Ha!—power! power! What does it all mean, after all! And especially in people like Jack Callcott. Where does he see any sacredness. He’s a sentimentalist, and as you say yourself, nothing is sacred then.’
This discussion ended in a draw. Harriet had struck home once or twice, and she knew it. That appeased her for the moment. But he stuck to his essential position, though he was not so sure of the circumstantial standing.
Harriet loved Coo-ee, and was determined to be happy there. She had at last gradually realised that Lovat was no longer lover to her or anybody, or even anything: and amidst the chagrin was a real relief. Because he was her husband, that was undeniable. And if, as her husband, he had to go on to other things, outside of marriage: well, that was his affair. It only angered her when he thought these other things—revolutions or governments or what not—higher than their essential marriage. But then he would come to himself and acknowledge that his marriage was the centre of his life, the core, the root, however he liked to put it: and this other business was the inevitable excursion into his future, into the unknown, onwards, which man
by his nature was condemned to make, even if he lost his life a dozen times in it. Well, so be it. Let him make the excursion: even without her. But she was not, if she could help it, going to have him setting off on a trip that led nowhere. No, if he was to excurse ahead, it must be ahead, and her instinct must be convinced as the needle of a mariner’s compass is convinced. And regarding this Australian business of Callcott’s, she had her doubts.
However, she had for the moment a home, where she felt for the moment as rooted, as central as the tree of life itself. She wasn’t a bit of flotsam, and she wasn’t a dog chained to a dog kennel. Coo-ee might be absurd—and she knew it was only a camp. But then where she camped with Lovat Somers was now the world’s centre to her, and that was enough.
She loved to wake in the morning and open the bedroom door—they had the north bedroom, on the verandah, the room that had the sun all day long; then she liked to lie luxuriously in bed and watch the lovely, broken colours of the Australian dawn: always strange, mixed colours, never the primary reds and yellows. The sun rose on the north-east—she could hardly see it. But she watched the first yellow of morning, and then the strange, strong smoky red-purple of floating pieces of cloud: then the rose and mist blue of the horizon, and the sea all reddish, smoky flesh-colour, moving under a film of gold like a glaze; then the sea gradually going yellow, going primrose, with the foam breaking blue as forget-me-nots or frost, in front. And on the near swing of the bluey primrose, sticking up through the marvellous liquid pale yellow glaze, the black fins of sharks. The triangular, black fins of sharks, like small, hard sails of hell-boats, amid the swimming luminousness. Then she would run out on the verandah. Sharks! Four or five sharks, skulking in the morning glow, and so near, she could almost have thrown bread to them. Sharks, slinking along quite near the coast, as if they were walking on the land. She saw one caught in the heave of a breaker, and lifted. And then she saw him start, saw the quick flurry of his tail as he flung himself back. The land to him was horror—as to her the sea, beyond that wall of ice-blue foam. She made Lovat come to look. He watched them slowly, holding the brush in his hand. He had made the fire, and was sweeping the hearth. Coffee was ready by the time Harriet was dressed: and he was crouching making toast. They had breakfast together on the front verandah, facing the sea, eastwards. And the much-washed red-and-white tablecloth that had been in so many lands with them and that they used outdoors, looked almost too strongly coloured in the tender-seeming atmosphere. The coffee had a lot of chicory in it, but the butter and milk were good, and the brownish honey, that also, like the landscape, tasted queer, as if touched with unkindled smoke. It seemed to Somers as if the people of Australia ought to be dusky. Think of Sicilian honey—like the sound of birds singing: and now this with a dusky undertone to it. But good too—so good!
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