Kangaroo

by D. H. Lawrence

  The man by himself. The listener.

  But most men can’t listen any more. The fissure is closed up.

  There is no soundless voice. They are deaf and dumb, ants, scurrying ants.

  That is their doom. It is a new kind of absolute. Like riffraff, which has fallen out of living relativity, on to the teeming absolute of the dust heap, or the ant heap. Sometimes the dust heap becomes huge, huge, huge, and covers nearly all the world. Then it turns into a volcano, and all starts again.

  ‘It has nothing to do with me,’ said Richard to himself. I hope, dear reader, you like plenty of conversation in a novel: it makes it so much lighter and brisker.

  ‘It has nothing to do with me,’ said Richard to himself. ‘They do as they like. But since, after all, I am a kind-hearted dear creature, I will just climb the minaret of myself and sound my muezzin.’

  So behold the poor dear on his pinnacle lifting his hands.

  ‘God is God and man is man; and every man by himself. Every man by himself, alone with his own soul. Alone as if he were dead. Dead to himself. He is dead and alone. He is dead; alone. His soul is alone. Alone with God, with the dark God. God is God.’

  But if he likes to shout muezzins, instead of hawking fried fish or newspapers or lottery tickets, let him.

  Poor dear, it was rather an anomalous call: ‘Listen to me, and be alone.’ Yet he felt called upon to call it.

  To be alone, to be alone, and to rest on the unknown God alone.

  The God must be unknown. Once you have defined him or described him, he is the most chummy of pals, as you’ll know if you listen to preachers. And once you’ve chummed up with your God, you’ll never be alone again, poor you. For that’s the end of you. You and your God chumming it through time and eternity.

  Poor Richard saw himself in funny situations.

  ‘My dear young lady, let me entreat you, be alone, only be alone.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Somers, I should love to, if you’d hold my hand.’

  ‘There is a gulf,’ growing sterner, ‘surrounds each solitary soul. A gulf surrounds you—a gulf surrounds me—’

  ‘I’m falling!’ shrieks and flings her arms around his neck. Or Kangaroo.

  ‘Why am I so beastly to Kangaroo?’ said Richard to himself. ‘For beastly I am. I am a detestable little brat to them all round.’

  A detestable little brat he felt.

  But Kangaroo wanted to be a queen bee of another hive, with all the other bees clustering on him like some huge mulberry. Sickening! Why couldn’t he be alone? At least for once. For once withdraw entirely.

  And a queen bee buzzing with beatitudes. Beatitudes, beatitudes. Bee attitudes or any other attitudes, it made Richard feel tired. More benevolence, more nauseating benevolence. ‘Charity suffereth long.’

  Yet one cannot live a life of entire loneliness, like a monkey on a stick, up and down one’s own obstacle. There’s got to be meeting: even communion. Well, then, let us have the other communion. ‘This is thy body which I take from thee and eat’ as the priest, also the God, says in the ritual of blood sacrifice. The ritual of supreme responsibility, and offering. Sacrifice to the dark God, and to the men in whom the dark God is manifest. Sacrifice to the strong, not to the weak. In awe, not in dribbling love. The communion in power, the assumption into glory. La gloire.

  CHAPTER XV

  JACK SLAPS BACK

  CHAPTER follows chapter, and nothing doing. But man is a thought-adventurer, and his falls into the Charybdis of ointment, and his shipwrecks on the rock of ages, and his kisses across chasms, and his silhouette on a minaret: surely these are as thrilling as most things.

  To be brief, there was a Harriet, a Kangaroo, a Jack and a Jaz and a Vicky, let alone a number of mere Australians. But you know as well as I do that Harriet is quite happy rubbing her hair with hair-wash and brushing it over her forehead in the sun and looking at the threads of gold and gun metal, and the few threads, alas, of silver and tin, with admiration. And Kangaroo has just got a very serious brief, with thousands and thousands of pounds at stake in it. Of course he is fully occupied keeping them at stake, till some of them wander into his pocket. And Jack and Vicky have gone down to her father’s for the weekend, and he’s out fishing, and has already landed a rock cod, a leatherjacket, a large schnapper, a rainbow fish, seven blackfish, and a cuttlefish. So what’s wrong with him? While she is trotting over on a pony to have a look at an old sweetheart who is much too young to be neglected. And Jaz is arguing with a man about the freight rates. And all the scattered Australians are just having a bet on something or other. So what’s wrong with Richard’s climbing a mental minaret or two in the interim? Of course there isn’t any interim. But you know that Harriet is brushing her hair in the sun, and Kangaroo looking at huge sums of money on paper, and Jack fishing, and Vicky flirting and Jaz bargaining, so what more do you want to know? We can’t be at a stretch of tension all the time, like the E string on a fiddle. If you don’t like the novel, don’t read it. If the pudding doesn’t please you, leave it, leave it, I don’t mind your saucy plate. I know too well that you can bring an ass to water, etc.

  As for gods, thought Richard, there are gods of vengeance. ‘For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God.’ So true. A jealous God, and a vengeful—‘Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children, unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.’ Of course. The fathers get off. You don’t begin to pay the penalty till the second and third generation. That is something for us to put in our pipes and smoke. Because we are the second generation, and it was our fathers who had a nice rosy time among the fleshpots, cooking themselves the titbits of this newly-gutted globe of ours. They cooked the titbits, we are left with the carrion.

  ‘The Lord thy God am a jealous God.’

  So he is. The Lord thy God is the invisible stranger at the gate in the night, knocking. He is the mysterious life-suggestion, tapping for admission. And the wondrous Victorian Age managed to fasten the door so tight, and light up the compound so brilliantly with electric light, that really, there was no outside, it was all in. The unknown became a joke: is still a joke.

  Yet there it is, outside the gate, getting angry. ‘Behold I stand at the gate and knock.’ ‘Knock away,’ said complacent, benevolent humanity, which had just discovered its own monkey origin to account for its own monkey tricks. ‘Knock away, nobody will hinder you from knocking.’

  And Holman Hunt paints a pretty picture of a man with a Stars-and-Stripes lantern and a red beard, knocking. But whoever it is that’s knocking had been knocking for three generations now, and he’s got sick of it. He’ll be kicking the door in just now.

  ‘For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.’

  It is not that He is jealous of Thor or Zeus or Bacchus or Venus. The great dark God outside the gate is all these gods. You open the gate, and sometimes in rushes Thor and gives you a bang on the head with a hammer; or Bacchus comes mysteriously through, and your mind goes dark and your knees and thighs begin to glow; or it is Venus, and you close your eyes and open your nostrils to a perfume, like a bull. All the gods. When they come through the gate they are personified. But outside the gate it is one dark God, the Unknown. And the Unknown is a terribly jealous God, and vengeful. A fearfully vengeful god: Moloch, Astarte, Ashtaroth, and Baal. That is why we dare not open now. It would be a hell-god, and we know it. We are the second generation. Our children are the third. And our children’s children are the fourth. Eheu! Eheu! Who knocks?

  Jack trotted over to Coo-ee on the Sunday afternoon, when he was staying with his wife’s people. He knew Richard and Harriet would most probably be at home: they didn’t like going out on Sundays, when all the world and his wife in their exceedingly Sunday clothes, swarmed on the face of the earth.

  Yes, they were at home: sitting on the verandah, a bit of rain spitting from the grey sky, and the sea gone colourless and small. Suddenly, there stood Jack. He had come round the corner on to the grass. Somers started as if an ene
my were upon him. Jack looked very tall and wiry, in an old grey suit. He hesitated before coming forward, as if measuring the pair of unsuspecting turtle doves on the loggia, and on his face was a faint grin. His eyes were dark and grinning too, as he hung back there. Somers watched him quickly. Harriet looked over her shoulder.

  ‘Oh, Mr Callcott—why—how do you do?’ And she got up, startled, and went across the loggia holding out her hand, to shake hands. So Jack had to come forward. Richard, very silent, shook hands also, and went indoors to fetch a chair and a cup and a plate, while Jack made his explanation to Harriet. He was quite friendly with her.

  ‘Such a long time since we saw you,’ she was saying. ‘Why didn’t Mrs Callcott come, I should have liked so much to see her?’

  ‘Ah—you see I came over on the pony. Doesn’t look very promising weather.’ And he looked away across the sea, averting his face.

  ‘No—and the terrible cold winds! I’m so glad if it will rain. I simply love the smell of rain in the air: especially here in Australia. It makes the air seem so much kinder, not so dry and savage—’

  ‘Ah—yes—it does,’ he said vaguely, still averting his face from her. He seemed strange to her. And his face looked different—as if he had been drinking, or as if he had indigestion.

  The two men were aloof like two strange tomcats.

  ‘Were you disgusted with Lovat when he didn’t, turn up the other Saturday?’ said Harriet. ‘I do hope you weren’t sitting waiting for him.’

  ‘Well—er—yes, we did wait up a while for him.’

  ‘Oh, but what a shame! But you know by now he’s the most undependable creature on earth. I wish you’d be angry with him. It’s no good what I say.’

  ‘No,’ said he—the peculiar slow Cockney no—‘I’m not angry with him.’

  ‘But you should be,’ cried Harriet. ‘It would be good for him.’

  ‘Would it?’ smiled Jack. His eyes were dark and inchoate, and there seemed a devil in his long, wiry body. He did not look at Somers.

  ‘You know of course what happened?’

  ‘Er—when?’

  ‘When Lovat went to see Mr Cooley.’

  ‘Er—no.’

  Again that peculiar Australian no, like a scorpion that stings with its tail.

  ‘Didn’t Mr Cooley tell you?’ cried Harriet.

  ‘No.’ There was indescribable malice in the monosyllable.

  ‘Didn’t he—!’ cried Harriet, and she hesitated.

  ‘You be quiet,’ said Lovat crossly to her, ‘Of course you’d have to rush in.’

  ‘You think angels would fear to tread in such a delicate mess?’ said Harriet, with a flash of mocking wit that sent a faint smile up Jack’s face, like a red flame. His nose, his mouth were curiously reddened. He liked Harriet’s attacks. He looked at her with dark, attentive eyes. Then he turned vaguely to Somers.

  ‘What was it?’ he asked

  ‘Nothing at all new,’ said Somers. ‘You know he and I start to quarrel the moment we set eyes on one another.’

  ‘They might be man and wife,’ mocked Harriet, and again Jack turned to her a look of black, smiling, malicious recognition.

  ‘Another quarrel?’ he said quietly.

  But Somers was almost sure he knew all about it, and had only come like a spy to take soundings.

  ‘Another quarrel,’ he replied, smiling, fencing. ‘And once more shown the door.’

  ‘I should think,’ said Harriet, ‘you’d soon know that door when you see it.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Richard. He had not told her the worst of the encounter. He never told her the worst, nor her nor anybody.

  Jack was looking from one to the other to see how much each knew.

  ‘Was it a specially bad blow-up?’ he said, in his quiet voice, that had a lurking tone of watchfulness in it.

  ‘Oh, yes, final,’ laughed Richard. ‘I am even going to leave Australia.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘I think in six weeks.’

  There was silence for some moments.

  ‘You’ve not booked your berths yet?’ asked Jack.

  ‘No. I must go up to Sydney.’

  Again Jack waited before he spoke. Then he said:

  ‘What’s made you settle on going?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel it’s my fate to go now.’

  ‘Ha, your fate!’ said Harriet. ‘It’s always your fate with you. If it was me it would be my foolish restlessness.’

  Jack looked at her with another quick smile, and a curious glance of dark recognition in his eyes, almost like a caress. Strangely apart, too, as if he and she were in an inner dark circle, and Somers was away outside.

  ‘Don’t you want to go, Mrs Somers?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course I don’t. I love Australia,’ she protested.

  ‘Then don’t you go,’ said Jack. ‘You stop behind.’

  When he lowered his voice it took on a faint, indescribable huskiness. It made Harriet a little uneasy. She watched Lovat. She did not like Jack’s new turn of husky intimacy. She wanted Richard to rescue her.

  ‘Ha!’ she said. ‘He’d never be able to get through the world without me.’

  ‘Does it matter?’ said Jack, grinning faintly at her and keeping the husky note in his voice. ‘He knows his own mind—or his fate. You stop here. We’ll look after you.’

  But she watched Richard. He was hardly listening. He was thinking again that Jack was feeling malevolent towards him, wanting to destroy him, as in those early days when they used to play chess together.

  ‘No,’ said Harriet, watching Lovat’s face. ‘I suppose I shall have to trail myself along, poor woman, till I see the end of him.’

  ‘He’ll lead you many a dance before that happens,’ grinned Richard. He rather enjoyed Jack’s malevolence this time.

  ‘Ha, you’ve led me all your dances that you know,’ she retorted. ‘I know there’ll be nothing new, unfortunately.’

  ‘Why don’t you stay in Australia?’ Jack said to her, with the same quiet, husky note of intimacy, insistency, and the reddish light on his face.

  She was somewhat startled and offended. Wasn’t the man sober, or what?

  ‘Oh, he wouldn’t give me any money, and I haven’t a sou of my own,’ she said lightly, laughing it off.

  ‘You wouldn’t be short of money,’ said Jack. ‘Plenty of money.’

  ‘You see I couldn’t just live on charity, could I?’ she replied, delicately.

  ‘It wouldn’t be charity.’

  ‘What then?’

  There was a very awkward pause. Then a wicked redness came into Jack’s face, and a flicker into his voice.

  ‘Appreciation. You’d be appreciated.’ He seemed to speak with muted lips. There was a cold silence. Harriet was offended now.

  ‘I’ll just clear the table,’ she said, rising briskly.

  Jack sat rather slack in his chair, his long, malevolent body half sunk, and his chin dropped.

  ‘What boat do you think you’ll catch?’ he asked.

  ‘The Manganui. Why?’

  But Jack did not speak. He sat there with his head sunk on his chin, his body half-turgid, as if he were really not quite sober.

  ‘You won’t be honouring Australia long with your presence,’ he said ironically.

  ‘Nor dishonouring it,’ said Richard. He was like a creature that is going to escape. Some of the fear he had felt for Kangaroo he now felt for Jack. Jack was really very malevolent. There was hell in his reddened face, and in his black, inchoate eyes, and in his long, pent-up body. But he kept an air of quiescence, of resignation, as if he were still really benevolent.

  ‘Oh, I don’t say that,’ he remarked in answer to Richard’s last, but in a tone which said so plainly what he felt: an insulting tone.

  Said Richard to himself: ‘I wouldn’t like to fall into your clutches, my friend, altogether: or to give your benevolence a chance to condemn me.’

  Aloud, he said to Jack:

 
; ‘If I can’t join in with what you’re doing here, heart and soul, I’d better take myself off, hadn’t I? You’ve all been good to me, and in a measure, trusted me. I shall always owe you a debt of gratitude, and keep your trust inviolable. You know that. But I am one of those who must stand and wait—though I don’t pretend that by so doing I also serve.’

  ‘You take no risks,’ said Jack quietly.

  Another home thrust.

  ‘Why—I would take risks—if only I felt it was any good.’

  ‘What does it matter about its being any good? You can’t tell what good a thing will be or won’t be. All you can do is to take a bet on it.’

  ‘You see it isn’t my nature to bet.’

  ‘Not a sporting nature, you mean?’

  ‘No, not a sporting nature.’

  ‘Like a woman—you like to feel safe all round,’ said Jack, slowly raising his dark eyes to Somers in a faint smile of contempt and malevolence. And Richard had to acknowledge to himself that he was cutting a poor figure: nosing in, like a Mr Nosy Parker, then drawing back quickly if he saw two sparks fly.

  ‘Do you think I’ve let you down? I never pledged myself,’ he said coldly.

  ‘Oh, no, you never pledged yourself,’ said Jack laconically.

  ‘You see I don’t believe in these things,’ said Somers, flushing.

  ‘What’s that you don’t believe in?’

  And Jack watched him with two black round eyes, with a spark dancing slowly in each, in a slow gaze putting forth all his power. But Somers now looked back into the two dark, malevolent pools.

  ‘In revolutions—and public love and benevolence and feeling righteous,’ he said.

  ‘What love, what benevolence and righteousness?’ asked Jack, vaguely, still watching with those black, sardonic eyes. ‘I never said anything about them.’

  ‘You know you want to be the saviours of Australia,’ said Richard.

  ‘I didn’t know. But what’s wrong with it?’