“No,” said Harriet, in answer to Jack. “I’m striking off no more matches, thank you. The game’s not worth the candle.”
“Why, maybe you’ve only struck on the rough side, you know,” said Jack. “You might strike on the smooth next time.”
“No,” said Harriet. “I’m going to bed, and leave you all to your striking and your bad tempers. Good-night!”
She rose roughly. Victoria jumped up to accompany her to her room. The Somers had had a room each in Torestin, so Victoria had put them each separately into a nice little room in her house.
“Is it right,” said Jack, “that you got the wind up to-night?”
“No,” said Somers. “At least we only quite lovingly agreed to differ. Nothing else.”
“I thought it would be like that,” said Jack. “He thinks the world of you, I can see that.”
William James stood ready to leave. He looked at Somers cunningly, as if reading into him with his light-grey, sceptical eyes.
“Mr. Somers doesn’t care to commit himself so easily,” he said.
“No,” said Jack. “You blighters from the old country are so mighty careful of risking yourselves. That’s what I’m not. When I feel a thing I jump up and go for it, and damn the consequences. There’s always plenty of time to think about a thing after you’ve done it. And then if you’re fool enough to wish you hadn’t done it, why, that shows you SHOULDN’T have. I don’t go in for regrets, myself. I do what I want. And if I wanted to do a thing, then it’s ALL RIGHT when it’s done. All a man’s got to do is to keep his mouth shut and his fist ready, and go down on his knees to NOTHING. Then he can damn well do as he pleases. And all he asks is that other folks shall do as they please, men or women. Damn all this careful stunt. I’ll step along as far as the tram with you, Jaz, I feel like walking the Welsh rabbit down into his burrow. Vicky prefers Mr. Somers to me pro tem. — and I don’t begrudge it her. Why should I?”
Victoria was putting away the dishes, and seemed not to hear. The two men went. Somers still sat in his chair. He was truly in a devil of a temper, with everybody and everything: a wicked, fiendish mood that made him LOOK quite handsome, as fate would have it. He had heard Jack’s hint. He knew Victoria was attracted to him: that she imagined no nonsense about love, she was too remote from the old world, and too momentary for that. The moment — that was all her feelings were to her. And at this moment she was fascinated, and when she said, in her slightly contralto voice:
“You’re not in a temper with ME, though, are you Mr. Somers?” she was so comely, like a maiden just ready for love, and like a comely, desirous virgin offering herself to the wayfarer, in the name of the god of bright desire, that Somers stretched out his hand and stroked her hot cheek very delicately with the tips of his fingers, replying:
“I could never be angry with you. You’re much too winsome.”
She looked at him with her dark eyes dilated into a glow, a glow of offering. He smiled faintly, rising to his feet, and desire in all his limbs like a power. The moment — and the power of the moment. Again he felt his limbs full of desire, like a power. And his days of anger seemed to culminate now in this moment, like bitter smouldering that at last leaps into flame. Not love — just weapon-like desire. He knew it. The god Bacchus. Iacchos! Iacchos! Bacchanals with weapon hands. She had the sacred glow in her eyes. Bacchus, the true Bacchus. Jack would not begrudge the god. And the fire was very clean and steely, after the smoke. And he felt the velvety fire from her face in his finger-tips.
And still his old stubborn self intervened. He decided almost involuntarily. Perhaps it was fear.
“Good-night,” he said to her. “Jack will be back in a moment. You look bonnie to-night.”
And he went to his room. When he had shut the door, he wondered if it was merely a sort of cowardice. Honour? No need as far as Jack was concerned, apparently. And Harriet? She was too honest a female. She would know that the dishonour, as far as she felt it, lay in the desire, not in the act. For her, too, honour did not consist in a pledged word kept according to pledge, but in a genuine feeling faithfully followed. He had not to reckon with honour there.
What then? Why not follow the flame, the moment sacred to Bacchus? Why not, if it was the way of life? He did not know why not. Perhaps only old moral habit, or fear, as Jack said, of committing himself. Perhaps only that. It was Victoria’s high moment; all her high moments would have this Bacchic, weapon-like momentaneity: since Victoria was Victoria. Why then deny it?
The pagan way, the many gods, the different service, the sacred moments of Bacchus. Other sacred moments: Zeus and Hera, for example, Ares and Aphrodite, all the great moments of the gods. Why not know them all, all the great moments of the gods, from the major moment with Hera to the swift short moments of Io or Leda or Ganymede? Should not a man know the whole range? And especially the bright, swift, weapon-like Bacchic occasion, should not any man seize it when it offered?
But his heart of hearts was stubbornly puritanical. And his innermost soul was dark and sullen, black with a sort of scorn. These moments bred in the head and born in the eye: he had enough of them. These flashes of desire for a visual object would no longer carry him into action. He had no use for them. There was a downslope into Orcus, and a vast, phallic, sacred darkness, where one was enveloped into the greater god as in an Egyptian darkness. He would meet there or nowhere. To the visual travesty he would lend himself no more.
Pondering and turning recklessly he heard Jack come back. Then he began to doze. He did not sleep well in Australia, it seemed as if the aboriginal daimon entered his body as he slept, to destroy its old constitution. Sleep was almost pain, and too full of dreams. This night he woke almost at once from a vivid little dream. The fact of the soonness troubled him too, for at home he never dreamed till morning.
But the dream had been just this. He was standing in the living room at Coo-ee, bending forward doing some little thing by the couch, perhaps folding the newspaper, making the room tidy at the last moment before going to bed, when suddenly a violent darkness came over him, he felt his arms pinned, and he heard a man’s voice speaking mockingly behind him, with a laugh. It was as if he saw the man’s face too — a stranger, a rough, strong sort of Australian. And he realised with horror: “Now they have put a sack over my head, and fastened my arms, and I am in the dark, and they are going to steal my little brown handbag from the bedroom, which contains all the money we have.” The shock of intense reality made him fight his way out of the depths of the first sleep, but it was some time before he could really lay hold of facts, like: “I am not at Coo-ee. I am not at Mullumbimby. I am in Sydney at Wyewurk, and the Callcotts are in the next room.” So he came really awake. But if the thing had really happened, it could hardly have happened to him more than in this dream.
In the morning they were returning to the South Coast. But Jack said to Somers, a little sarcastically:
“You aren’t altogether pleased with us, then?”
Somers hesitated before replying:
“I’m not altogether pleased with myself, am I?”
“You don’t have to be so particular, in this life,” said Jack.
“I may have to be.”
“You can’t have it all perfect beforehand, you know. You’ve got to sink a few times before you can swim.”
“Sink in what?”
“Why, it seems to me you want to have a thing all ready in your hand, know all about it, before you’ll try it. And there’s some things you can’t do that with. You’ve just got to flop into them, like when you chuck a dog into water.”
Somers received this rebuke rather sourly. This was the first wintry day they had really had. There was a cold fog in Sydney in the morning, and rain in the fog. In the hills it would be snow — away in the Blue Mountains. But the fog lifted, and the rain held off, and there was a wash of yellowish sunshine.
Harriet of course had to talk to a fellow-passenger in the train, because Lovat was his glummest.
It was a red-moustached Welshman with a slightly injured look in his pale blue eyes, as if everything hadn’t been as good to him as he thought it ought, considering his merit. He said his name was Evans, and he kept a store. He had been sixteen years in the country.
And is it VERY hot in the summer?” said Harriet. “I suppose it is.”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s very hot. I’ve known the days when I’ve had to lie down at two o’clock in the afternoon, and not been able to move. Overpowered, that’s what it is, overpowered.”
Harriet was suitably impressed, having tried heat in India.
“And do you think it takes one long to get used to this country?” she asked after a while.
“Well, I should say it takes about four or five years for your blood properly to thin down. You can’t say you’ve begun, under two years.”
“Four or five years!” re-echoed Harriet. But what she was really turning over in her mind was this phrase: “For your blood to thin down.” To thin down! how queer! Lovat also heard the sentence, and realized that his blood took this thinning very badly, and still about four years of simmering ahead, apparently, if he stayed in this country. And when the blood had finished its thinning, what then? He looked at Mr. Evans, with the sharp pale nose and the reddish hair and the injured look in his pale-blue eyes. Mr. Evans seemed to find it sweet still to talk to people from the “old country”. “You’re from the old country?” — the inevitable question. The thinning down had left him looking as if he felt he lacked something. Yet he wouldn’t go back to South Wales. Oh no, he wouldn’t go back.
“The blood is thinner out here than in the old country.” The Australians seemed to accept this as a scientific fact. Richard felt he didn’t want his blood thinned down to the Australian constituency. Yet no doubt in the night, in his sleep, the metabolic change was taking place fast and furious.
It was raining a little in the late afternoon when Somers and Harriet got back to Coo-ee. With infinite relief she stepped across her own threshold.
“Ah!” she said, taking a long breath. “Thank God to be back.” She looked round, and went to rearrange on the sofa the cushions that they had whacked so hard to get the dust out.
Somers went to the edge of the grass to be near the sea. It was raving in long, rasping lines of hissing breakers — not very high ones, but very long. The sky hung grey, with veils of dark rain out to sea, and in the south a blackness of much rain blowing nearer in the wind. At the end of the jetty, in the mist of the sea-wind’s spray, a long, heavy coal-steamer was slowly toiling to cast loose and get away. The waves were so long and the current so strong, they would hardly let her turn and get clear of the misty-black jetty.
Under the dark-grey sky the sea looked bright, but coldly bright, with its yellow-green waves and its ramparts of white foam. There were usually three white ramparts, one behind the other, of rasping surf: and sometimes four. Then the long swish and surge of the shoreward wash. The coast was quite deserted: the steep sand wet as the backwash slid away: the rocks wet with rain: the low, long black steamer still laboured in the fume of the wind, indistinctly.
Somers turned indoors, and suddenly began taking off his clothes. In a minute he was running naked in the rain which fell with lovely freshness on his skin. Ah, he felt so stuffy after that sort of emotional heat in town. Harriet in amazement saw him whitely disappearing over the edge of the low cliff-bank, and came to the edge to look.
He ran quickly over the sands, where the wind blew cold but velvety, and the raindrops fell loosely. He walked straight into the fore-wash, and fell into an advancing ripple. At least it looked a ripple, but was enough to roll him over so that he went under and got a little taste of the Pacific. Ah, the fresh cold wetness! — the fresh cold wetness! The water rushed in the back-wash and the sand melted under him, leaving him stranded like a fish. He turned again to the water. The walls of surf were some distance off, but near enough to look rather awful as they raced in high white walls shattering towards him. And above the ridge of the raving whiteness the dimness of the labouring steamer, as if it were perched on a bough.
Of course he did not go near the surf. No, the last green ripples of the broken swell were enough to catch him by the scruff of the neck and tumble him rudely up the beach, in a pell-mell. But even the blow did one good, as the sea struck one heavily on the back, if one were fleeing; full on the chest, if one were advancing.
It was raining quite heavily as he walked out, and the skies hung low over the sea, dark over the green and white vigour of the ocean. The shore was so foam-white it almost suggested sun. The rain felt almost warm.
Harriet came walking across the grass with a towel.
“What a good idea!” she said. “If I’d known I’d have come. I wish I had.”
But he ignored the towel, and went into the little wash-place and under the shower, to wash off the sticky, strong Pacific. Harriet came along with the towel, and he put his hand to her face and nodded to her. She knew what he meant, and went wondering, and when he had rubbed the wet off himself he came to her.
To the end she was more wondering than anything. But when it was the end, and the night was falling outside, she laughed and said to him:
“That was done in style. That was chic. Straight from the sea, like another creature.”
Style and chic seemed to him somewhat ill suited to the occasion, but he brought her a bowl of warm water and went and made the tea. The wind was getting noisier, and the sea was shut out but still calling outside the house. They had tea and toast and quince jam, and one of the seven brown teapots with a bit off the spout shone quite nicely and brightly at a corner of the little red-and-white check tea-cloth, which itself occupied a corner of the big, polished jarrah table. But, thank God, he felt cool and fresh and detached, not cosy and domestic. He was so thankful not to be feeling cosy and “homely”. The room felt as penetrable to the outside influence as if it were a sea-shell lying on the beach, cool with the freshness and insistence of the sea, not a snug, cosy box to be secured inside.
And Jack Callcott’s rebuke stuck in his throat. Perhaps after all he was just a Pommy, prescribing things with overmuch emphasis, and wanting to feel God-Almighty in the face of unborn events. A Pommy is a newcomer in Australia, from the Old Country.
Teacher: Why did you hit him, Georgie?
Georgie: Please miss, he called me a Pommy.
Aussie (with a discoloured eye): Well, you’re one, ain’cher? Can I help it that ch’are one?
Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country. Furthermore, immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood “thins down,” by their round and ruddy cheeks. So we are told. Hence again, pomegranate, and hence Pommy. Let etymologists be appeased: it is the authorised derivation.
Perhaps, said Somers to himself, I am just a Pommy and a fool. If my blood had thinned down, I shouldn’t make all this fuss over sharing in with Kangaroo or being mates with Jack Callcott. If I am not a ruddy Pommy, I am a green one. Of course they take the thing as it comes to them, and they expect me to do the same. Yet there I am hopping and hissing like a fish in a frying-pan. Putting too much “soul” into it. Far too much. When your blood has thinned down, out here, there’s nothing but the merest sediment of a soul left, and your wits and your feelings are clear of it. You take things as they come, as Jack says. Isn’t that the sanest way to take them, instead of trying to drive them through the exact hole in the hedge that you’ve managed to poke your head through? Oh, you unlearn a lot as your blood thins down. But there’s an awful lot to be unlearnt. And when you’ve unlearnt it, you never say so. In the first place, because it’s dead against the sane old British tradition. And in the second place, because you don’t really care about telling what you feel, once your blood has thinned down and is clear of soul.
“Thin, you Australian burgundy,” said Somers to his own b
ody, when he caught a glimpse of it unawares, reflected in the glass as he was going to bed. “You’re thin enough as a bottle, but the wine needs a lot of maturing. I’ve made a fool of myself latterly.”
Yet he said to himself: “Do I want my blood to thin down like theirs? — that peculiar emptiness that is in them, because of the thinning that’s gone out of them? Do I want this curious transparent blood of the antipodes, with its momentaneous feelings, and its sort of ABSENTNESS? But of course till my blood has thinned down I shan’t see with their eyes. And how in the name of heaven is this world-brotherhood mankind going to see with one eye, eye to eye, when the very blood is of different thickness on different continents, and with the difference in blood, the inevitable psychic difference? Different vision!”
CHAPTER 8. VOLCANIC EVIDENCE.
Richard Lovat Somers registered a new vow: not to take things with too overwhelming an amount of emotional seriousness, but to accept everything that came along with a certain sang froid, and not to sit frenziedly in judgment before he had heard the case. He had come to the end of his own tether, so why should he go off into tantrums if other folks strayed about with the broken bits of their tethers trailing from their ankles? Is it better to be savagely tugging at the end of your rope, or to wander at random tetherless? Matter of choice!
But the day of the absolute is over, and we’re in for the strange gods once more. “But when you get to the end of your tether you’ve nothing to do but die” — so sings an out-of-date vulgar song. But is it so? Why not all? When you come to the end of your tether you break the rope. When you come to the end of the lane you straggle on into the bush and beat about till you find a new way through, and no matter if you raise vipers or goannas or wallabies, or even only a stink. And if you see a man beating about for a new track you don’t immediately shout, “Perverted wretch!” or “Villain!” or “Vicious creature!” or even merely “The fool,” or mildly: “Poor dear!” You have to let him try. Anything is better than stewing in your own juice, or grinding at the end of your tether, or tread-milling away at a career. Better a “wicked creature” any day, than a mechanical tread-miller of a careerist. Better anything on earth than the millions of human ants.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 356