The music stopped. Perhaps it was over. Oh, enjoyment! Why did people do such things to enjoy themselves? Only he would have liked to hold Monica’s thin, keen hands again. The thin, keen, wild, wistful Monica. He would like to be near her.
Easu was bawling something. Figure Number Two. He could not listen to instructions in Easu’s voice.
They were dancing again, and he knew no more than at first what he was doing. All a maze. A natural diffidence and a dislike of being touched by any casual stranger made dancing unpleasant to him. But he kept up. And suddenly he found himself with Monica folded in his arms, and she clinging to him with sudden fierce young abandon. His heart stood still, as he realised that not only did he want to hold her hands — he had thought it was just that; but he wanted to hold her altogether in his arms. Terrible and embarrassing thought! He wished himself on the moon, to escape his new emotions. At the same time there was the instantaneous pang of disappointment as she broke away from him. Why could she not have stayed! And why, oh, why were they both doing this beastly dancing!
He received a clean clear kick on the shin as he passed Easu. Dazed with a confusion of feelings, keenest among which perhaps was anger, he pulled up again beside Ma. And there was Monica suddenly in his arms again.
“You always go again,” he said in a vague murmur.
“What did you say?” she asked archly, as she floated from him, just at the moment when Easu jolted him roughly. Across the little distance she was watching the hot anger in the boy’s confused, dark-blue eyes.
Another pause. More beastly instructions. Different music. Different evolutions.
“Steady, now!” he said to himself, trying to make his way in the new figure. But what work it was! He tried to keep his brain steady. But Ma on his arm was heavy as lead.
And then, with great ease and perfect abandon, in spite of her years, Ma threw herself on his left bosom and reclined in peace there. He was overcome. She seemed absolutely to like resting on his bosom.
“Throw out your right hand, dear boy,” she whispered, and before he knew he had done it, Easu had seized his hand in a big, brutal, bullying grasp, and was grinding his knuckles. And then sixteen people began to spin.
The startled agony of it made a different man of him. For Ma was heavy as a log on his left side, clinging to him as if she liked to cling to his body. He never quite forgave her. And Easu had his unprotected right hand gripped in a vice and was torturing him on purpose with the weight and the grind. Jack’s hands were naturally small, and Easu’s were big. And to be gripped by that great malicious paw was horrible. Oh, the tension, the pain and rage of that giddy-go-rounding, first forward, then abruptly backwards. It broke some of his innocence forever.
But although paralytic with rage when released, Jack’s face still looked innocent and cherubic. He had that sort of face, and that diabolic sort of stoicism. Mrs. Ellis thought: “What a nice kind boy! but late waking up to the facts of life!” She thought he had not even noticed Easu’s behaviour. And again she thought to herself, her husband would be jealous if he saw her. Poor old Jacob! Aloud she said:
“The next is the last figure. You’re doing very well, Jack. You go off round the ring now, handing the ladies first your right and then your left hand.”
He felt no desire to hand anybody his hand. But in the middle of the ring he met Monica, and her slim grasp took his hurt right hand, and seemed to heal it for a moment.
Easu grabbed his arm, and he saw three others, suffering fools gladly, locked arm in arm, playing soldiers, as they called it. Oh, God! Easu, much taller than Jack, was twisting his arm abominably, almost pulling it out of the socket. And Jack was saving up his anger.
It was over. “That was very kind of you, my dear boy,” Mrs. Ellis was saying. “I haven’t enjoyed a dance so much for years.”
Enjoyed! That ghastly word! Why would people insist on enjoying themselves in these awful ways! Why “enjoy” oneself at all? He didn’t see it. He decided he didn’t care for enjoyment, it wasn’t natural to him. Too humiliating, for one thing.
Twenty steps involved in the black skirts of Mrs. Ellis, and he was politely rid of her. She was very nice. And by some mystery she had really enjoyed herself in this awful melee. He gave it up. She was too distant in years and experience for him to try to understand her. Did these people never have living anger, like a bright black snake with unclosing eyes, at the bottom of their souls? Apparently not.
II
There was an interval in the dancing, and they were having games. Red was of course still bawling out instructions and directions, being the colonel of the feast. He was in his element, playing top sawyer.
The next game was to be “Modern Proposals.” It sounded rotten to Jack. Each young man was to make an original proposal to an appointed girl. Great giggling and squirming even at the mention of it.
Easu still held the middle of the floor. Jack thought it was time to butt in. With his hands in his pockets he walked coolly into the middle of the room.
“You people don’t know me, and I don’t know you,” he found himself announcing in his clear English voice. “Supposing I call this game.”
Carried unanimously!
The young men lined up, and Easu, after standing loose on his legs for some time just behind Jack, went and sat down somewhat discomfited.
Jack pushed Tom on to his knees before the prettiest girl in the room — the prettiest strange girl, anyhow. Tom, furiously embarrassed on his knees, stammered:
“I say! There’s a considerable pile o’ socks wantin’ darning in my ol’ camp. I’d go so far as to face the parson, if you’d do ‘em for me.”
It was beautifully non-committal. For all the Bushies were at heart terrified lest they might by accident contract a Scotch marriage, and be held accountable for it.
Jack was amused by the odd, humorous expression of the young bush-farmers. Joe Low, scratching his head funnily, said: “I’ll put the pot on, if you’ll cook the stew.” But the most approved proposal was that of a well-to-do young farmer who is now a J. P. and head of a prosperous family.
“Me ol’ dad an’ me ol’ lady, they never had no daughters. They gettin’ on well in years, and they kind o’ fancy one. I’ve gotter get ‘em one, quick an’ lively. I’ve fifteen head o’ cattle an’ seventy-six sheep, eighteen pigs an’ a fallowin’ sow. I’ve got one hundred an’ ninety-nine acres o’ cleared land, and ten improved with fruit trees. I’ve got forty ducks an’ hens an’ a flock o’ geese an’ no one home to feed ‘em. Meet me Sunday mornin’ eight-forty sharp at the cross roads, an’ I’ll be there in me old sulky to drive y’out an’ show y’.”
And the girl in pink with the wide smile, answered seriously:
“I will if Mother’ll let me, Mr. Burton.”
The next girl had been looming up like a big coal-barge. She was a half-caste, of course named Lily, and she sat aggressively forwards, her long elbows and wrists much in evidence, and her pleasant swarthy face alight and eager with anticipation. Oh, these Missioner half-castes!
Jack ordered Easu forward.
But Easu was not to be baited. He strode over, put his hand on the fuzzy head, and said in his strong voice:
“Hump y’r bluey and come home.”
The laugh was with him, he had won again.
III
They went down to the cold collation. There Jack found other arrivals. Mary had come in via York with Gran’s spinster daughters. Also the Greenlow girls from away back, and they made a great fuss of him. The doctor too turned up. He had been missing all day, but now he strolled back and forth, chatting politely first to one and then another, but vague and washed-out to a degree.
Jack’s anger coiled to rest at the supper, for Monica was very attentive to him. She sat next to him, found him the best pieces, and shared her glass with him, in her quick, dangerous, generous fashion, looking up at him with strange wide looks of offering, so that he felt very manly and very shy at the same time. But v
ery glad to be near her. He felt that it was his spell that was upon her, after all, and though he didn’t really like flirting with her there in the public supper room, he loved her hand finding his under the cover of her sash, and her fingers twining into his as if she were entering into his body. Safely under the cover of her silk sash. He would have liked to hold her again, close, close; her agile, live body, quick as a cat’s. She was mysterious to him as some cat-goddess, and she excited him in a queer electric fashion.
But soon she was gone again, elusive as a cat. And of course she was in great request. So Jack found himself talking to the little elderly Mary, with her dark animal’s museau. Mary was like another kind of cat: not the panther sort, but the quiet, dark, knowing sort. She was comfortable to talk to, also soft and stimulating.
Jack and Mary sat on the edge of the barn, in the hot night, looking at the trees against the strange, ragged southern sky, hearing the frogs occasionally, and fighting the mosquitoes. Mrs. Ellis also sat on the ledge not far off. And presently Jack and Mary were joined by the doctor. Then came Grace and Alec Rice, sitting a little further down, and talking in low tones. The night seemed full of low, half-mysterious talking, in a starry darkness that seemed pregnant with the scent and presence of the black people. Jack often wondered why, in the night, the country still seemed to belong to the black people, with their strange, big, liquid eyes.
Where was Easu? Was he talking to Monica? Or to the black half-caste Lily? It might as well be the one as the other. The odd way he had placed his hand on Lily’s black fuzzy head, as if he were master, and she a sort of concubine. She would give him all the submission he wanted.
But then, why Monica? Monica in her white, full-skirted frock with its moulded bodice, her slender, golden-white arms and throat! Why Monica in the same class with the half-caste Lily?
Anger against Easu was sharpening Jack’s wits, and curiously detaching him from his surroundings. He listened to the Australian voices and the Australian accent around him. The careless, slovenly speech in the uncontrolled, slack, caressive voices. At first he had thought the accent awful. And it was awful. But gradually, as he got into the rhythm of the people, he began even to sympathise with “Kytie” instead of “Katie.” There was an abandon in it all — an abandon of restrictions and confining control. Why have control? Why have authority? Why not let everybody do as they liked? Why not?
That was what Australia was for, a careless freedom. An easy, unrestricted freedom. At least out in the bush. Every man to do as he liked. Easu to run round with Monica, or with the black Lily, or to kick Jack’s shins in the dance.
Yes, even this. But Jack had scored it up. He was going to have his own back on Easu. He thought of Easu with his hand on the black girl’s fuzzy head. That would be just like Easu. And afterwards to want Monica. And Monica wouldn’t really mind about the black girl. Since Easu was Easu.
Sitting there on the barn ledge, Jack in a vague way understood it all. And in a vague way tolerated it all. But with a dim yet fecund germ of revenge in his heart. He was not morally shocked. But he was going to be revenged. He did not mind Easu’s running with a black girl, and afterwards Monica. Morally he did not mind it. But physically — perhaps pride of race — he minded. Physically he could never go so far as to lay his hand on the darky’s fuzzy head. His pride of blood was too intense.
He had no objection at all to Lily, until it came to actual physical contact. And then his blood recoiled with old haughtiness and pride of race. It was bad enough to have to come into contact with a woman of his own race: to have to give himself away even so far. The other was impossible.
And yet he wanted Monica. But he knew she was fooling round with Easu. So deep in his soul formed the motive of revenge.
There are times when a flood of realisation and purpose sweeps through a man. This was one of Jack’s times. He was not definitely conscious of what he realised and of what he purposed. Yet, there it was, resolved in him.
He was trying not to hear Dr. Rackett’s voice talking to Mary. Even Dr. Rackett was losing his Oxford drawl, and taking on some of the Australian ding-dong. But Rackett, like Jack, was absolutely fixed in his pride of race, no matter what extraneous vice he might have. Jack had a vague idea it was opium. Some chemical stuff.
“. . . free run of old George’s books? I should say it was a doubtful privilege for a young lady. But you hardly seem to belong to West Australia. I think England is really your place. Do you actually want to belong, may I ask?”
“To Western Australia? To the country, yes, very much. I love the land, the country life, Dr. Rackett. I don’t care for the social life of a town like Perth. But I should like to live all my life on a farm — in the bush.”
“Would you now!” said Rackett. “I wonder where you get that idea from. You are the granddaughter of an earl.”
“Oh, my grandfather is farther away from me than the moon. You would never know how far!” laughed Mary. “No, I am colonial born and bred. Though of course there is a fascination about the English. But I hardly knew Papa. He was a tenth child, so there wasn’t much of the earldom left to him. And then he was a busy A.D.C. to the Governor-General. And he married quite late in life. And then Mother died when I was little, and I got passed on to Aunt Matilda. Mother was Australian born. I don’t think there is much English in me.”
Mary said it in a queer complacent way, as if there were some peculiar, subtle antagonism between England and the colonial, and she was ranged on the colonial side. As if she were a subtle enemy of the father, the English father in her.
“Queer! Queer thing to me!” said Rackett, as if he half felt the antagonism. For he would never be colonial, not if he lived another hundred years in Australia. “I suppose,” he added, pointing his pipe stem upwards, “it comes from those unnatural stars up there. I always feel they are doing something to me.”
“I don’t think it’s the stars,” laughed Mary. “I am just Australian, in the biggest part of me, that’s all.”
Jack could feel in the statement some of the antagonism that burned in his own heart, against his own country, his own father, his own empty fate at home.
“If I’d been born in this country, I’d stick to it,” he broke in.
“But since you weren’t born in it, what will you do, Grant?” asked the doctor ironically.
“Stick to myself,” said Jack stubbornly, rather sulkily.
“You won’t stick to Old England then?” asked Rackett.
“Seems I’m a misfit in Old England,” said Jack. “And I’m not going to squeeze my feet into tight boots.”
Rackett laughed.
“Rather go barefoot like Lennie?” he laughed.
Jack relapsed into silence, and turned a deaf ear, looking into the alien night of the southern hemisphere. And having turned a deaf ear to Rackett and Mary, he heard, as if by divination, the low voice of Alec Rice proposing in real earnest to Grace: proposing in a low, urgent voice that sounded like a conspiracy.
He rose to go away. But Mary laid a detaining hand on his arm, as if she wished to include him in the conversation, and did not wish to be left alone with Dr. Rackett.
“Don’t you sympathise with me, Jack, for wishing I had been a boy, to make my own way in the world, and have my own friends, and size things up for myself?”
“Seems to me you do size things up for yourself,” said Jack rather crossly. “A great deal more than most men do.”
“Yes, but I can’t do things as I could if I were a man.”
“What can a man do, then, more than a woman — that’s worth doing?” asked Rackett.
“He can see the world, and love as he wishes to love, and work.”
“No man can love as he wishes to love,” said Rackett. “He’s nearly always stumped, in the love game.”
“But he can choose!” persisted Mary.
And Jack with his other ear was hearing Alec Rice’s low voice persisting.
“Go on, Grace, you’re not too
young: You’re just right. You’re just the ticket now. Go on, let’s be engaged and tell your Dad and fix it up. We’re meant for one another, you know we are. Don’t you think we’re meant for one another?”
“I never thought about it that way, truly.”
“But don’t you think so now? Yes, you do.”
Silence — the sort that gives consent. And the silence of a young, spontaneous embrace.
Jack was on tenterhooks. He wanted to be gone. But Mary was persisting, in her obstinate voice — he wished she’d shut up too.
“I wanted to be a sailor at ten, and an explorer at twelve. At nineteen I wanted to become a painter of wonderful pictures.” Jack wished she wouldn’t say all this. “And then I had a streak of humility, and wanted to be a gardener. Yet — — ” she laughed, “not a sort of gardener such as Aunt Matilda hires. I wanted to grow things and see them come up out of the earth. And see baby chicks hatched, and calves and lambs born.”
She had lifted her hand from Jack’s sleeve, to his relief. “And marry a farmer like Tom,” he said roughly. Mary received this with dead silence.
“And drudge your soul away like Mrs. Ellis,” said Rackett. “Worn out before your time, between babies and heavy housework. Groping on the earth all your life, grinding yourself into ugliness at work which some animal of a servant-lass would do with half the effort. Don’t you think of it, Miss Mary. Let the servant-lasses marry the farmers. You’ve got too much in you. Don’t go and have what you’ve got in you trampled out of you by marrying some cocky farmer. Tom’s as good as gold, but he wants a brawny lass of his own sort for a wife. You be careful, Miss Mary. Women can find themselves in ugly harness, out here in these god-forsaken colonies. Worse harness than any you’ve ever kicked against.”
Monica seemed to have scented the tense atmosphere under the barn, for she appeared like a young witch, in a whirlwind.
“Hullo, Mary! Hullo, Dr. Rackett! It’s just on midnight.” And she flitted over to Grace. “Just on midnight, Grace and Alec. Are you coming? You seem as if you were fixed here.”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 398