Kangaroo

by D. H. Lawrence

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Somers.

  ‘Right-o!’ said he.

  He had a sad, beery moustache, a very cold-looking face, and, of course, a little boy, his son no doubt, for a satellite.

  There were little, exquisite pink shells, like Venetian pink glass with white veins or black veins round their sharp little steeples. Harriet loved them, among her grumbles, and they began to gather them: ‘for trimmings’, said Harriet. So, in the flat-icy wind, that no life had ever softened and no god ever tempered, they crouched on the sea’s edge picking these marvellous little shells.

  Suddenly, with a cry, to find the water rushing round their ankles and surging up their legs, they dragged their way wildly forward with the wave, and out and up the sand. Where immediately a stronger blast seized Lovat’s hat and sent it spinning to the sea again, and he after it like a bird. He caught it as the water lifted it, and then the waste of waters enveloped him. Above his knees swirled the green flood, there was water all around him swaying, he looked down at it in amazement, reeling and clutching his hat.

  Then once more he clambered out. Harriet had fallen on her knees on the sand in a paroxysm of laughter, and there she was doubled up like a sack, shrieking between her gasps:

  ‘His hat! His hat! He wouldn’t let it go’—shrieks, and her head like a sandbag flops to the sand—‘no—not if he had to swim’—shrieks—‘swim to Samoa.’

  He was looking at his wet legs and chuckling with his inward laughter. Vivid, the blue sky: intensely clear, the dark sea, the yellow sands, the swoop of the bay, the low headlands: clear like a miracle. And the water bubbling in his shoes as he walked rolling up the sands.

  At last she recovered enough to crawl after him. They sat in a sand-hollow under a big bush with odd red berries, and he wrung out his socks, and all he could of his underpants and trousers. Then he put on his socks and shoes again, and they set off for the station.

  ‘The Pacific water,’ he said, ‘is so very seaey, it is almost warm.’

  At which, looking at his wet legs and wet hat, she went off into shrieks again. But she made him be quick, because there was a train they could catch.

  However in the Main Street they thought they would buy another pair of socks. So he bought them, and changed in the shop. And they missed the train, and Harriet expostulated louder.

  They went home in a motor-bus and a cloud of dust, with the heaven bluer than blue above, the hills dark and fascinating, and the land so remote-seeming. Everything so clear, so very distinct, and yet so marvellously aloof.

  All the miles alongside the road tin bungalows in their paling fences: and a man on a pony, in a long black overcoat and a cold nose, driving three happy, fleecy cows, long men in jerseys and white kerchiefs round their necks, a la Buffalo Bill, riding nice slim horses; a woman riding astride top speed on the roadside grass. A motor car at the palings of one of the bungalows. A few carts coming.

  And the occupants of the bus bouncing and bobbing like a circus, because of the very bumpy road.

  ‘Shakes your dinner down,’ said the old woman with the terribly homemade hat—oh, such difficult, awful hats.

  ‘It does, if you’ve had any,’ laughed Harriet.

  ‘Why, you’ve ’ad your dinner, ’aven’t you?’

  As concerned as if Harriet was her own stomach, such a nice old woman. And a lovely little boy with the bright, wide, gentle eyes of these Australians. So alert and alive and with that lovableness that almost hurts one. Absolute trust in the ‘niceness’ of the world. A tall, stalky, ginger man with the same bright eyes and a turned-up nose and long stalky legs. An elderly man with bright, friendly, elderly eyes and careless hair and careless clothing. He was Joe, and the other was Alf. Real careless Australians, careless of their appearance, careless of their speech, of their money, of everything—except of their happy-go-lucky, democratic friendliness. Really nice, with bright, quick, willing eyes. Then a young man, perhaps a commercial traveller, with a suitcase. He was quite smartly dressed, and had fancy socks. He was one of those with the big, heavy legs, heavy thighs and calves that showed even in his trousers. And he was physically very self-conscious, very self-conscious of Lovat and Harriet. The driver’s face was long and deep red. He was absolutely laconic. And yet, absolutely willing, as if life held no other possibility than that of being an absolutely willing citizen. A fat man with a fat little girl waiting at one of the corners.

  ‘Up she goes!’ he said as he lifted her in.

  A perpetual, unchanging willingness, and an absolute equality. The same good-humoured, right-you-are approach from everybody to everybody. ‘Right-you-are! Right-o!’ Somers had been told so many hundreds of times, Right-he-was, Right-o!, that he almost had dropped into the way of it. It was like sleeping between blankets—so cosy. So cosy.

  They were really awfully nice. There was a winsome charm about them. They none of them seemed mean, or tight, or petty.

  The young man with the fine suit and the great legs put down his money, gently and shyly as a girl, beside the driver on the little window ledge. Then he got out and strode off, shy and quick, with his suitcase.

  ‘Hey!’

  The young man turned at the driver’s summons, and came back.

  ‘Did yer pay me?’

  The question was put briskly, good-humouredly, with a touch even of tenderness. The young man pointed to the money. The driver glanced round and saw it.

  ‘Oh! Right you are! Right-o!’

  A faint little smile of almost tender understanding, and the young man turned again. And the driver bustled to carry out some goods. The way he stooped to pick up the heavy wooden box in his arms; so willing to stoop to burdens. So long, of course, as his Rights of Man were fully recognised. You mustn’t try any superior tricks with him.

  Well, it was really awfully nice. It was touching. And it made life so easy, so easy.

  Of course these were not government servants. Government servants have another sort of feeling. They feel their office, even in NSW—even a railway clerk. Oh, yes.

  So nice, so nice, so gentle. The strange, bright-eyed gentleness. Of course, really rub him the wrong way, and you’ve got a Tartar. But not before you’ve asked for one. Gentle as a Kangaroo, or a wallaby, with that wide-eyed, bright-eyed alert, responsible gentleness Somers had never known in Europe. It had a great beauty. And at the same time it made his spirits sink.

  It made him feel so sad underneath, or uneasy, like an impending disaster. Such a charm. He was so tempted to commit himself to this strange continent and its strange people. It was so fascinating. It seemed so free, an absence of any form of stress whatsoever. No strain in any way, once you could accept it.

  He was so tempted, save for a sense of impending disaster at the bottom of his soul. And there a voice kept saying: ‘No, no. No, no. It won’t do. You’ve got to have a reversion. You can’t carry this mode any further. You’ve got to have a recognition of the innate, sacred separateness.’

  So when they were walking home in a whirl of the coldest, most flat-edged wind they had ever known, he stopped in front of her to remark:

  ‘Of course you can’t go on with a soft, oh-so-friendly life like this here. You’ve got to have an awakening of the old recognition of the aristocratic principle, the innate difference between people.’

  ‘Aristocratic principle!’ she shrieked on the wind. ‘You should have seen yourself, flying like a feather into the sea after your hat. Aristocratic principle!’ She shrieked with laughter.

  ‘There you are, you see,’ he said to himself. ‘I’m at it again’. And he laughed too.

  The wind blew them home. He made a big fire, and changed, and they drank coffee made with milk, and ate buns.

  ‘Thank heaven for a home,’ he said, as they sat in the dark, big rooms at Coo-ee, and ate their buns, and looked out of the windows and saw here as well a whirl of gannets like a snowstorm, and a dark sea littered with white fluffs. The wind roared in the chimney, and for the first ti
me the sea was inaudible.

  ‘You see,’ she said, ‘how thankful you are for a home.’

  ‘Chilled to the bone!’ he said. ‘I’m chilled to the bone with my day’s pleasure outing.’

  So they drew up the couch before the fire, and he piled rugs on her and jarrah chunks on the fire, and at last it was toastingly warm. He sat on a little barrel which he had discovered in the shed, and in which he kept the coal for the fire. He had been at a loss for a lid to this barrel, till he had found a big tin lid thrown out on the waste lot. And now the wee barrel with the slightly rusty tin lid was his perch when he wanted to get quite near the fire. Harriet hated it, and had moments when she even carried the lid to the cliff to throw it in the sea. But she brought it back, because she knew he would be so indignant. She reviled him, however.

  ‘Shameful! Hideous! Old tin lids! How can you sit on it? How you can bring yourself to sit on such a thing, and not feel humiliated. Is that your aristocratic principle?’

  ‘I put a cushion on it,’ he said.

  As he squatted on his tub this evening in the fire-corner, she suddenly turned from her book and cried:

  ‘There he is, on his throne! Sitting on his aristocratic principle!’ And again she roared with laughter.

  He, however, shook some coal out of the little tub on to the fire, replaced the tin lid and the cushion, and resumed his thoughts. The fire was very warm. She lay stretched in front of it on the sofa, covered with an eiderdown, and reading a Nat Gould novel, to get the real tang of Australia.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘this land always gives me the feeling that it doesn’t want to be touched, it doesn’t want men to get hold of it.’

  She looked up from her Nat Gould.

  ‘Yes,’ she admitted slowly. ‘And my ideal has always been a farm. But I know now. The farms don’t really belong to the land. They only scratch it and irritate it, and are never at one with it.’

  Whereupon she returned to her Nat Gould, and there was silence save for the hollow of the wind. When she had finished her paperbacked book she said:

  ‘It’s just like them—just like they think they are.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘But, bah!’ she added, ‘they make me sick. So absolutely dull—worse than an “At Home” in the middle classes.’

  And after a silence, another shriek of laughter suddenly.

  ‘Like a flying fish! Like a flying fish dashing into the waves! Dashing into the waves after his hat—’

  He giggled on his tub.

  ‘Fancy, that I’m here in Coo-ee after my day’s outing! I can’t believe it. I shall call you the flying fish. It’s hard to believe that one was so many things in one day. Suddenly the water! Won’t you go now and do the tailor? Twenty to eight! The bold buccaneer!’

  The tailor was a fish that had cost a shilling, and which he was to prepare for supper.

  Globe: There can’t be much telepathy about bullocks, anyhow. In Gippsland (Vic.) last season a score of them were put into a strange paddock, and the whole twenty were found drowned in a hole next morning. Tracks showed that they had gone each on his own along a path, overbalanced one after the other, and were unable to clamber up the rocky banks.

  That, thought Richard at the close of the day, is a sufficient comment on herd unity, equality, domestication, and civilisation. He felt he would have liked to climb down into that hole in which the bullocks were drowning and beat them all hard before they expired, for being such mechanical logs of life.

  Telepathy! Think of the marvellous vivid communication of the huge sperm whales. Huge, grand, phallic beasts! Bullocks! Geldings! Men! R. L. wished he could take to the sea and be a whale, a great surge of living blood: away from these all-too-white people, who ought all to be called Cellu Lloyd, not only the horse-mange man.

  Man is a thought-adventurer. Man is more, he is a life-adventurer. Which means he is a thought-adventurer, an emotion-adventurer, and a discoverer of himself and of the outer universe. A discoverer.

  ‘I am a fool,’ said Richard Lovat, which was the most frequent discovery he made. It came, moreover, every time with a new shock of surprise and chagrin. Every time he climbed a new mountain range and looked over, he saw, not only a new world, but a big anticipatory fool on this side of it, namely, himself.

  Now a novel is supposed to be a mere record of emotion-adventures, flounderings in feelings. We insist that a novel is, or should be, also a thought-adventure, if it is to be anything at all complete.

  ‘I am a fool,’ thought Richard to himself, ‘to imagine that I can flounder in a sympathetic universe like a fly in the ointment.’ We think of ourselves, we think of the ointment, but we do not consider the fly. It fell into the ointment, crying: ‘Ah, here is a pure and balmy element in which all is unalloyed goodness. Here is attar of roses without a thorn.’ Hence the fly in the ointment: embalmed in balm. And our repugnance.

  ‘I am a fool,’ said Richard to himself, ‘to be floundering round in this easy, cosy, all-so-friendly world. I feel like a fly in the ointment. For heaven’s sake let me get out. I suffocate.’

  Where to? If you’re going to get out you must have something to get out on to. Stifling in unctuous sympathy of a harmless humanity.

  ‘Oh,’ cried the stifling R. ‘Where is my Rock of Ages?’

  He knew well enough. It was where it always has been: in the middle of him.

  ‘Let me get back to my own self,’ he panted, ‘hard and central in the centre of myself. I am drowning in this merge of harmlessness, this sympathetic humanity. Oh, for heaven’s sake let me crawl out of the sympathetic smear, and get myself clean again.’

  Back to his own centre—back—back. The inevitable recoil. ‘Everything,’ said R. to himself, in one of those endless conversations with himself which were his chief delight, ‘everything is relative.’

  And flop he went into the pot of spikenard.

  ‘Not quite,’ he gasped, as he crawled out. ‘Let me drag my isolate and absolute individual self out of this mess.’

  Which is the history of relativity in man. All is relative as we go flop into the ointment: or the treacle or the flame. But as we crawl out, or flutter out with a smell of burning, the absolute holds us spellbound. Oh to be isolate and absolute, and breathe clear.

  So that even relativity is only relative. Relative to the absolute.

  I am sorry to have to stand, a sorry sight, preening my wings on the brink of the ointment pot, thought Richard. But from this vantage ground let me preach to myself. He preached, and the record was taken down for this gramophone of a novel.

  No, the self is absolute. It may be relative to everything else in the universe. But to itself it is an absolute.

  Back to the central self, the isolate, absolute self.

  ‘Now,’ thought Richard to himself, waving his front paws with gratification: ‘I must sound the muezzin and summon all men back to their central, isolate selves.’

  So he drew himself up, when—urch!! He was sluthering over the brim of the ointment pot into the balm of humanity once more.

  ‘Oh, Lord, I nearly did it again,’ he thought as he clambered out with a sick heart. ‘I shall do it once too often. The bulk of mankind haven’t got any central selves: haven’t got any. They’re all bits.’

  Nothing but his fright would have struck this truth out of him. So he crouched still, like a fly very tired with crawling out of the ointment, to think about it.

  ‘The bulk of people haven’t got any central selves. They’re all bits.’

  He knew it was true, and he felt rather sick of the sweet odour of the balm of human beatitudes, in which he had been so nearly lost.

  ‘It takes how many thousand facets to make the eye of a fly—or a spider?’ he asked himself, being rather hazy scientifically. ‘Well, all these people are just facets: just bits, that fitted together make a whole. But you can fit the bits together time after time, yet it won’t bring the bug to life.’

  The people
of this terrestrial sphere are all bits. Isolate one of them, and he is still only a bit. Isolate your man in the street, and he is just a rudimentary fragment. Supposing you have the misfortune to have your little toe cut off. That little toe won’t at once rear on its hind legs and begin to announce: ‘I’m an isolated individual with an immortal soul.’ It won’t. But your man in the street will. And he is a liar. He’s only a bit, and he’s only got a minute share of the collective soul. Soul of his own he has none: and never will have. Just a share in the collective soul, no more. Never a thing by himself.

  Damn the man in the street, said Richard to himself. Damn the collective soul, it’s a dead rat in a hole. Let humanity scratch its own lice.

  Now I’ll sound my muezzin again. The man by himself. ‘Allah bismallah! God is God and man is man and has a soul of his own. Each man to himself! Each man back to his own soul! Alone, alone, with his own soul alone. God is God and man is man and the man in the street is a louse.’

  Whatever your relativity, that’s the starting point and the finishing point: a man alone with his own soul: and the dark God beyond him.

  A man by himself.

  Begin then.

  Let the men in the street—ugh, horrid millions, crawl the face of the earth like lice or ants or some other ignominy.

  The man by himself.

  That was one of the names of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

  The man by himself.

  That is the beginning and end, the alpha and the omega, the one absolute: the man alone by himself, alone with his own soul, alone with his eyes on the darkness which is the dark god of life. Alone like a pythoness on her tripod, like the oracle alone above the fissure into the unknown. The oracle, the fissure down into the unknown, the strange exhalations from the dark, the strange words that the oracle must utter. Strange, cruel, pregnant words: the new term of consciousness.

  This is the innermost symbol of man: alone in the darkness of the cavern of himself, listening to soundlessness of inflowing fate. Inflowing fate, inflowing doom, what does it matter? The man by himself—that is the absolute—listening—that is the relativity—for the influx of his fate, or doom.