Kangaroo

by D. H. Lawrence

  ‘I won’t promise at this minute,’ said Richard, rising to escape. ‘I want to go now. I will tell you within a week. You might send me details of your scheme for the paper. Will you? And I’ll think about it hard.’

  Mr Struthers watched him as if he would read his soul. But Richard wasn’t going to have his soul read by force.

  ‘Very well. I’ll see you have the whole scheme of the proposal tomorrow. I don’t think you’ll be able to run away from it.’

  Richard was thankful to get out of Canberra Hall. It was like escaping from one of the medical examination rooms in the war. He and Jaz went in silence down the crowded, narrow pavement of George Street, towards the Circular Quay. Richard called at the General Post Office in Martin Place. As he came out again, and stood on the steps folding the stamps he had bought, seeing the sun down Pitt Street, the people hurrying, the flowers at the corner, the pink spread of Bulletins for sale at the corner of George Street, the hansom cabs and taxis standing peacefully in the morning shadow of the post office, suddenly the whole thing switched right away from him. He hailed a hansom.

  ‘Jaz,’ he said, ‘I want to drive round the Botanical Gardens and round the spit there—and I want to look at the peacocks and cockatoos.’

  Jaz climbed in with him. ‘Right-o!’ said the cabby, hearing the order, and they clock-clocked away up the hill to Macquarie Street.

  ‘You know, Jaz,’ said Richard, looking with joy at the blue harbour inlet, where the Australian ‘fleet’ lay rusting to bits, with a few gay flags; ‘you know, Jaz, I shan’t do it. I shan’t do anything. I just don’t care about it.’

  ‘You don’t?’ said Jaz, with a sudden winsome smile.

  ‘I try to kid myself that I care about mankind and its destiny. And I have fits of wistful love for the working men. But at the bottom I’m as hard as a mango nut. I don’t care about them all. I don’t really care about anything, no I don’t. I just don’t care, so what’s the good of fussing.’

  ‘Why no,’ said Jaz, again with a quick smile.

  ‘I feel neither good nor bad. I feel like a fox that has gnawed his tail off and so escaped out of a trap. It seems like a trap to me, all this social business and this saving mankind. Why can’t mankind save itself? It can if it wants to. I’m a fool. I neither want love nor power. I like the world. And I like to be alone in it, by myself. What do you want, Jaz?’

  Richard was like a child escaped from school, escaped from his necessity to be something and to do something. They had jogged past the palm trees and the grass of the gardens, and the blue wrens had cocked their preposterous tails. They jogged to the end of the promontory, under wild trees, and Richard looked at the two lobes of the harbour, blue water on either side, and another part of the town beyond.

  ‘Now take us back to the cockatoos,’ he said to the cabby.

  Richard loved the look of Australia, that marvellous soft flower-blue of the air, and the sombre grey of the earth, the foliage, the brown of the low rocks: like the dull pelts of kangaroos. It had a wonder and a far-awayness, even here in the heart of Sydney. All the shibboleths of mankind are so trumpery. Australia is outside everything.

  ‘I couldn’t exactly say,’ Jaz answered. ‘You’ve got a bit of an Australian look this morning about you,’ he added with a smile.

  ‘I feel Australian. I feel a new creature. But what’s the outcome?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll come back to caring, I should think: for the sake of having something to care about. That’s what most of them do. They want to turn bushrangers for six months, and then they get frightened of themselves, and come back and want to be good citizens.’

  ‘Bushranger? But Australia’s like an open door with the blue beyond. You just walk out of the world and into Australia. And it’s just somewhere else. All those nations left behind in their schoolrooms, fussing. Let them fuss. This is Australia, where one can’t care.’

  Jaz sat rather pale, and ten times more silent than ever.

  ‘I expect you’ve got yourself to reckon with, no matter where you are. That’s why most Australians have to fuss about something—politics, or horseracing, or football. Though a man can go empty in Australia, if he likes: as you’ve said yourself,’ replied he.

  ‘Then I’ll go empty,’ said Richard. ‘What makes you fuss with Kangaroo and Struthers, Jaz?’

  ‘Me?’ The smile was slow and pale. ‘Go into the middle of Australia and see how empty it is. You can’t face emptiness long. You have to come back and do something to keep from being frightened at your own emptiness, and everything else’s emptiness. It may be empty. But it’s wicked, and it’ll kill you if it can. Something comes out of the emptiness, to kill you. You have to come back and do things with mankind, to forget.’

  ‘It’s wonderful to be empty. It’s wonderful to feel this blue globe of emptiness of the Australian air. It shuts everything out,’ protested Richard.

  ‘You’ll be an Aussie yet,’ smiled Jaz slowly.

  ‘Shall I regret it?’ asked Richard.

  The eyes of the two men met. In the pale grey eyes of Jaz something lurking, like an old, experienced consciousness looking across at the childish consciousness of Somers, almost compassionately: and half in mockery.

  “You’ll change back before you regret it,’ he said.

  ‘Are you wise, Jaz? And am I childish?’ Richard’s look suddenly changed also to mockery. ‘If you’re wise, Jaz, why do you wander round like a lost soul? Because you do. And what takes you to Struthers, if you belong to Kangaroo?’

  ‘I’m secretary for the coal-and timber-merchants’ union,’ said Jaz quietly.

  They got out of the cab to look at the aviaries. Wonderful, brilliant-coloured little birds, the lovebirds self-consciously smirking. ‘Hello!’—pronounced pure Australian-Cockney: ‘Helleow! Hello! Hello! Hello Cocky! What yer want?’ This in a more-than-human voice from a fine sulphur-crested cockatoo. ‘Hello Cocky!’ His thick black tongue worked in his narrow mouth. So absolutely human the sound, and yet a bird’s. It was startling, and very funny. The two men talked to the cockatoos, fascinated and amused, for a quarter of an hour. The emu came prancing up, with his alert, large, sticking-out eyes and his whiskers. An alert gentleman, with the dark Australian eye. Very wide-awake, and yet far off in the past. And a remote, alert, sharp gentleness belonging to far past twilight ages, before enemies and iron weapons were perfected. A very remote, dirt-brown gentleman from the lost plains of time. The peacock rustling his blue fireworks seemed a sort of nouveauriche in comparison.

  Somers went in the evening of this memorable day to dine with Kangaroo. The other man was quiet, and seemed preoccupied.

  ‘I went to Willie Struthers this morning,’ Somers said.

  Kangaroo looked at him sharply through his pince-nez. On the subtle face of Somers a small, wicked smile hovered like a half visible flame. But it was his alive, beautiful face. And his whole person seemed magnetic.

  ‘Who took you there?’ asked Kangaroo sharply.

  ‘Jaz.’

  ‘Jaz is a meddlesome-Patty. Well, and what then?’

  ‘I think Willie is rather a terror. I wouldn’t like to have to spend my life with him. But he’s shrewd. Only I don’t like him physically—something thin and hairy and spiderish. I didn’t want to touch him. But he’s a force, he’s something.’

  Kangaroo looked puzzled, and his face took a heavy, stupid look.

  ‘He wouldn’t want you to touch him,’ he barked. ‘He didn’t offer to shake hands, did he?’

  ‘No, thank goodness,’ said Somers, thinking of the red, dry, thin-skinned hand.

  There was a hostile silence from Kangaroo. He knew that this subtle, attractive Somers with the faint glow about him, like an aura, was venomous. And yet he was helplessly attracted to him.

  ‘And what do you mean about his being something? Some more Trewhella?’

  ‘Perhaps. I couldn’t help feeling that Struthers was shrewder than you are—in a way baser—but for that reason
more likely to be effectual.’

  Kangaroo watched Richard for a long time in silence.

  ‘I know why Trewhella took you there,’ he said sulkily.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, I know why. And what have you decided?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  There was a long and obstinate silence. The two men were at loggerheads, and neither would make the first move.

  ‘You seem very thick with Trewhella,’ said Kangaroo at last.

  ‘Not thick,’ said Richard. ‘Celts—Cornish, Irish—they always interest me. What do you imagine is at the bottom of Jaz?’

  ‘Treachery.’

  ‘Oh, not only,’ laughed Somers.

  ‘Then why do you ask me, if you know better?’

  ‘Because I don’t really get to the bottom of him.’

  ‘There is no bottom to get to—he’s the instinctive traitor, as they all are.’

  ‘Oh, surely not only that.’

  ‘I see nothing else. They would like the white civilisation to be trampled underfoot piecemeal. And at the same time they live on us like parasites.’ Kangaroo glowered fiercely.

  ‘There’s something more,’ replied Richard. ‘They don’t believe in our gods, in our ideals. They remember older gods, older ideals, different gods: before the Jews invented a mental Jehovah, and a spiritual Christ. They are nearer the magic of the animal world.’

  ‘Magic of the animal world!’ roared Kangaroo. ‘What does that nonsense mean? Are you traitor to your own human intelligence?’

  ‘All too human,’ smiled Richard.

  Kangaroo sat up very straight, and looked at Somers. Somers still smiled faintly and luminously.

  ‘Why are you so easily influenced?’ said Kangaroo, with a certain cold reproof. ‘You are like a child. I know that is part of the charm of your nature, that you are naïve like a child, but sometimes you are childish rather than childlike. A perverse child.’

  ‘Let me be a perverse child then,’ laughed Somers, with a flash of attractive laughter at Kangaroo. It frightened the big man, this perverse mood. If only he could have got the wicked light out of Lovat’s face, and brought back the fire of earnestness. And yet, as an individual, he was attracted to the little fellow now, like a moth to a candle: a great lumbering moth to a small, but dangerous flame of a candle.

  ‘I’m sure it’s Struthers’ turn to set the world right, before it’s yours,’ Somers said.

  ‘Why are you sure?’

  ‘I don’t know. I thought so when I saw him. You’re too human.’

  Kangaroo was silent, and offended.

  ‘I don’t think that is a final reason,’ he replied.

  ‘For me it is. No, I want one of the olives that the man took away. You give one such good food, one forgets deep questions in your lovely salad. Why don’t you do as Jaz says, and back up the Reds for the time being. Play your pawns and your bishops.’

  ‘You know that a bite from a hyena means blood-poisoning,’ said Kangaroo.

  ‘Don’t be solemn. You mean Willie Struthers? Yes, I wouldn’t want to be bitten. But if you are so sure of love as an all-ruling influence, and so sure of the fidelity of the Diggers, through love, I should agree with Jaz. Push Struthers where he wants to go. Let him proclaim the rule of the People: let him nationalise all industries and resources, and confiscate property above a certain amount: and bring the world about his ears. Then you step in like a saviour. It’s much easier to point to a wrecked house, if you want to build something new, than to persuade people to pull the house down and build it up in a better style.’

  Kangaroo was deeply offended, mortified. Yet he listened.

  ‘You are hopelessly facile, Lovat,’ he said gently. ‘In the first place, the greatest danger to the world today is anarchy, not bolshevism. It is anarchy and unrule that are coming on us—and that is what I, as an order-loving Jew and one of the half-chosen people, do not want. I want one central principle in the world: the principle of love, the maximum of individual liberty, the minimum of human distress. Lovat, you know I am sincere, don’t you?’

  There was a certain dignity and pathos in the question.

  ‘I do,’ replied Somers sincerely. ‘But I am tired of one central principle in the world.’

  ‘Anything else means chaos.’

  ‘There has to be chaos occasionally. And then, Roo, if you do want a benevolent fatherly autocracy, I’m sure you’d better step in after there’s been a bit of chaos.’

  Kangaroo shook his head.

  ‘Like a wayward child! Like a wayward child!’ he murmured. ‘You are not such a fool, Lovat, that you can’t see that once you break the last restraints on humanity today, it is the end. It is the end. Once burst the floodgates, and you’ll never get the water back into control. Never.’

  ‘Then let it distil up to heaven. I really don’t care.’

  ‘But man, you are perverse. What’s the matter with you?’ suddenly bellowed Kangaroo.

  They had gone into the study for coffee. Kangaroo stood with his head dropped and his feet apart, his back to the fire. And suddenly he roared like a lion at Somers. Somers started, then laughed.

  ‘Even perversity has its points,’ he said.

  Kangaroo glowered like a massive cloud. Somers was standing staring at the Dürer etching of St Jerome: he loved Dürer. Suddenly, with a great massive movement, Kangaroo caught the other man to his breast.

  ‘Don’t Lovat,’ he said, in a much moved voice, pressing the slight body of the lesser man against his own big breast and body. ‘Don’t!’ he said, with a convulsive tightening of the arm.

  Somers, squeezed so that he could hardly breathe, kept his face from Kangaroo’s jacket and managed to ejaculate:

  ‘All right. Let me go and I won’t.’

  ‘Don’t thwart me,’ pleaded Kangaroo. ‘Don’t—or I shall have to break all connection with you, and I love you so. I love you so. Don’t be perverse, and put yourself against me.’

  He still kept Somers clasped against him, but not squeezed so hard. And Somers heard over his own head the voice speaking with a blind yearning. Not to himself. No. It was speaking over his head, to the void, to the infinite or something tiresome like that. Even the words: ‘I love you so. I love you so.’ They made the marrow in Lovat’s bones melt, but they made his heart flicker even more devilishly.

  ‘It is an impertinence, that he says he loves me,’ he thought to himself. But he did not speak, out of regard for Kangaroo’s emotion, which was massive and genuine, even if Somers felt it missed his own particular self completely.

  In those few moments when he was clasped to the warm, passionate body of Kangaroo, Somers’ mind flew with swift thought. ‘He doesn’t love me,’ he thought to himself. ‘He just turns a great general emotion on me, like a tap. I feel as cold as steel, in his clasp—and as separate. It is presumption, his loving me. If he was in any way really aware of me, he’d keep at the other end of the room, as if I was a dangerous little animal. He wouldn’t be hugging me if I were a scorpion. And I am a scorpion. So why doesn’t he know it. Damn his love. He wants to force me.’

  After a few minutes Kangaroo dropped his arm and turned his back. He stood there, a great, hulked, black back. Somers thought to himself: ‘If I were a kestrel I’d stoop and strike him straight in the back of the neck, and he’d die. He ought to die.’ Then he went and sat in his chair. Kangaroo left the room.

  He did not come back for some time, and Lovat began to grow uncomfortable. But the devilishness in his heart continued, broken by moments of tenderness or pity or self-doubt. The gentleness was winning, when Kangaroo came in again. And one look at the big, gloomy figure set the devil alert like a flame again in the other man’s heart.

  Kangaroo took his place before the fire again, but looked aside.

  ‘Of course you understand,’ he began in a muffled voice, ‘that it must be one thing or the other. Either you are with me, and I feel you with me: or you cease to exist for me.’

/>   Somers listened with wonder. He admired the man for his absoluteness, and his strange blind heroic obsession.

  ‘I’m not really against you, am I?’ said Somers. And his own heart answered, Yes you are!

  ‘You are not with me,’ said Kangaroo, bitterly.

  ‘No,’ said Somers slowly.

  ‘Then why have you deceived me, played with me,’ suddenly roared Kangaroo. ‘I could have killed you.’

  ‘Don’t do that,’ laughed Somers, rather coldly.

  But the other did not answer. He was like a black cloud.

  ‘I want to hear,’ said Kangaroo, ‘your case against me.’

  ‘It’s not a case, Kangaroo,’ said Richard, ‘it’s a sort of instinct.’

  ‘Against what?’

  ‘Why, against your ponderousness. And against your insistence. And against the whole sticky stream of love, and the hateful will-to-love. It’s the will-to-love that I hate, Kangaroo.’

  ‘In me?’

  ‘In us all. I just hate it. It’s a sort of syrup we have to stew in, and it’s loathsome. Don’t love me. Don’t want to save mankind. You’re so awfully general, and your love is so awfully general: as if one were only a cherry in the syrup. Don’t love me. Don’t want me to love you. Let’s be hard, separate men. Let’s understand one another deeper than love.’

  ‘Two human ants, in short,’ said Kangaroo, and his face was yellow.

  ‘No, no. Two men. Let us go to the understanding that is deeper than love.’

  ‘Is any understanding deeper than love?’ asked Kangaroo with a sneer.

  ‘Why, yes, you know it is. At least between men.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know it. I know the understanding that is much less than love. If you want me to have a merely commonplace acquaintance with you, I refuse. That’s all.’

  ‘We are neither of us capable of a quite commonplace acquaintance.’

  ‘Oh yes, I am,’ barked Kangaroo.

  ‘I’m not. But you’re such a Kangaroo, wanting to carry mankind in your belly-pouch, cosy, with its head and long ears peeping out. You sort of figure yourself a Kangaroo of Judah, instead of a Lion of Judah: Jehovah with a great heavy tail and a belly-pouch. Let’s get off it, and be men, with the gods beyond us. I don’t want to be godlike, Kangaroo. I like to know the gods beyond me. Let’s start as men, with the great gods beyond us.’