Kangaroo

A bunch of workmen were lying on the grass of the park beside Macquarie Street, in the dinner hour. It was winter, the end of May, but the sun was warm, and they lay there in shirt-sleeves, talking. Some were eating food from paper packages. They were a mixed lot—taxi-drivers, a group of builders who were putting a new inside into one of the big houses opposite, and then two men in blue overalls, some sort of mechanics. Squatting and lying on the grassy bank beside the broad tarred road where taxis and hansom cabs passed continually, they had that air of owning the city which belongs to a good Australian.

Sometimes, from the distance behind them, came the faintest squeal of singing from out of the “fortified” Conservatorium of Music. Perhaps it was one of these faintly wafted squeals that made a blue-overalled fellow look round, lifting his thick eyebrows vacantly. His eyes immediately rested on two figures approaching from the direction of the conservatorium, across the grass-lawn. One was a mature, handsome, fresh-faced woman, who might have been Russian. Her companion was a smallish man, pale-faced, with a dark beard. Both were well-dressed, and quiet, with that quiet self-possession which is almost unnatural nowadays. They looked different from other people.

And then one night at the time of the full moon he walked alone into the bush. A huge electric moon, huge, and the tree-trunks like naked pale aborigines among the dark-soaked foliage, in the moonlight. And not a sign of life—not a vestige.

Yet something. Something big and aware and hidden! He walked on, had walked a mile or so into the bush, and had just come to a clump of tall, nude, dead trees, shining almost phosphorescent with the moon, when the terror of the bush overcame him. He had looked so long at the vivid moon, without thinking. And now, there was something among the trees, and his hair began to stir with terror, on his head. There was a presence. He looked at the weird, white, dead trees, and into the hollow distances of the bush. Nothing! Nothing at all. He turned to go home. And then immediately the hair on his scalp stirred and went icy cold with terror. What of? He knew quite well it was nothing. He knew quite well. But with his spine cold like ice, and the roots of his hair seeming to freeze, he walked on home, walked firmly and without haste. For he told himself he refused to be afraid, though he admitted the icy sensation of terror. But then to experience terror is not the same thing as to admit fear into the conscious soul. Therefore he refused to be afraid.

“Your wonderful Australia!” said Harriet to Jack. “I can’t tell you how it moves me. It feels as if no one had ever loved it. Do you know what I mean? England and Germany and Italy and Egypt and India—they’ve all been loved so passionately. But Australia feels as if it had never been loved, and never come out into the open. As if man had never loved it, and made it a happy country, a bride country—or a mother country.”

“I don’t suppose they ever have,” said Jack.

“But they will?” asked Harriet. “Surely they will. I feel that if I were Australian, I should love the very earth of it—the very sand and dryness of it—more than anything.”

“Where should we poor Australian wives be?” put in Victoria, leaning forward her delicate, frail face—that reminded one of a flickering butterfly in its wavering.

“Yes,” said Harriet meditatively, as if they had to be considered, but were not as important as the other question.

“I’m afraid most Australians come to hate the Australian earth a good bit before they’re done with it,” said Jack. “If you call the land a bride, she’s the sort of bride not many of us are willing to tackle. She drinks your sweat and your blood, and then as often as not lets you down, does you in.”

Somers rose and followed him. The house was already lit up. The sea was bluey. They went down the steps cut in the earth of the bank top, and between the bushes to the sand. The tide was full, and swishing against a flat ledge of rocks. Jack went to the edge of this ledge, looking in at the surging water, white, hissing, heavy. Somers followed again. Jack turned his face to him.

“Funny thing it should go on doing this all the time, for no purpose,” said Jack, amid all the noise.

“Yes.”

Again they watched the heavy waves unfurl and fling the white challenge of foam on the shore.

“I say,” Jack turned his face. “I shan’t be making a mistake if I tell you a few things in confidence, shall I?”

“I hope not. But judge for yourself.”

“Well, it’s like this,” shouted Jack—they had to shout at one another in unnaturally lifted voices, because of the huge noise of the sea. “There’s a good many of us chaps as has been in France, you know—and been through it all—in the army—we jolly well know you can’t keep a country going on the vote-catching system—as you said the other day. We know it can’t be done.”

“It can’t,” said Somers, with a shout, “for ever.”

“If you’ve got to command, you don’t have to ask your men first if it’s right, before you give the command.”

“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.