Kangaroo quotes

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.

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.

A smile flitted over the face of the man in the overalls—or rather a grin. Seeing the strange, foreign-looking little man with the beard and the absent air of self-possession walking unheeding over the grass, the workman instinctively grinned. A comical-looking bloke! Perhaps a Bolshy.

“

He rooked me. But there you are, in a free country, it’s the man who makes you pay who is free—free to charge you what he likes, and you’re forced to pay it.

That’s what freedom amounts to. They’re free to charge, and you are forced to pay.”

It wasn’t like a town, it was like a whole country with towns and bays and darknesses. And all lying mysteriously within the Australian underdark, that peculiar lost, weary aloofness of Australia. There was the vast town of Sydney.

And it didn’t seem to be real, it seemed to be sprinkled on the surface of a darkness into which it never penetrated.

Somers sighed and shivered and went down to the house. It was chilly. Why had he come? Why, oh why? What was he looking for? Reflecting for a moment, he imagined he knew what he had come for.

and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in silence.

Waiting, waiting—the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting.

And he could not penetrate into its secret. He couldn’t get at it. Nobody could get at it. What was it waiting for?

and then the foliage so dark, like grey-green iron. And then it was so deathly still. Even the few birds seemed to be swamped in silence. Waiting, waiting—the bush seemed to be hoarily waiting.

And he could not penetrate into its secret. He couldn’t get at it.

Nobody could get at it. What was it waiting for?

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.

… burning off the bush in a ring of sultry red fire under the moon in the distance, a slow ring of creeping red fire, like some ring of fireflies, upon the far-off darkness of the land’s body, under the white blaze of the moon above.

It is always a question whether there is any sense in taking notice of a poet’s fine feelings. The poet himself has misgivings about them.

Yet a man ought to feel something, at night under such a moon.

It is always a question whether there is any sense in taking notice of a poet’s fine feelings. The poet himself has misgivings about them.

Yet a man ought to feel something, at night under such a moon.

Richard S. had never quite got over that glimpse of terror in the Westralian bush. Pure foolishness, of course, but there’s no telling where a foolishness may nip you.

Richard S. had never quite got over that glimpse of terror in the Westralian bush.

Pure foolishness, of course, but there’s no telling where a foolishness may nip you.

And, now that night had settled over Sydney, and the town and harbour were sparkling unevenly below, with reddish-seeming sparkles, whilst overhead the marvellous Southern Milky Way was tilting uncomfortably to the south, instead of crossing the zenith;

Or Bavaria with gentian and yellow globe flowers, and the Alps still icy. Oh God, to be in Europe, lovely, lovely Europe that he had hated so thoroughly and abused so vehemently, saying it was moribund and stale and finished.

The fool was himself.

He had got out of temper, and so had called Europe moribund: assuming that he himself, of course, was not moribund, but sprightly and chirpy and too vital, as the Americans would say, for Europe.

But in Australia, it seemed to Somers, the distinction was already gone. There was really no class distinction. There was a difference of money and of “smartness.” But nobody felt better than anybody else, or higher; only better-off.

And there is all the difference in the world between feeling better than your fellow man, and merely feeling better-off.

Now Somers was English by blood and education, and though he had no antecedents whatsoever, yet he felt himself to be one of the responsible members of society, as contrasted with the innumerable irresponsible members.

So Richard Lovat cogitated as he roamed about uneasily. Not that he knew all about it. Nobody knows all about it. And those that fancy they know almost all about it are usually most wrong.

A man must have some ideas about the thing he’s up against, otherwise he’s a simple wash-out.

But Richard was wrong. Given a good temper and a genuinely tolerant nature—both of which the Australians seem to have in a high degree—you can get on for quite a long time without “rule.” For quite a long time the thing just goes by itself.

So Richard Lovat cogitated as he roamed about uneasily. Not that he knew all about it.

Nobody knows all about it. And those that fancy they know almost all about it are usually most wrong.

A man must have some ideas about the thing he’s up against, otherwise he’s a simple wash-out.

“You are so bad-tempered,” said Harriet. “Why don’t you see the lovely things!”

“I do, by contrast.”

So they sat on the sands, and he peeled pears and buried the peel in the yellow sand. It was winter, and the shore was almost deserted. But the sun was warm as an English May.

The absence of any inner meaning: and at the same time the great sense of vacant spaces. The sense of irresponsible freedom. The sense of do-as-you-please liberty. And all utterly uninteresting.

What is more hopelessly uninteresting than accomplished liberty?

Great swarming, teeming Sydney flowing out into these myriads of bungalows, like shallow waters spreading, undyked. And what then? Nothing. No inner life, no high command, no interest in anything, finally.

It was just dazing. Even the rush for money had no real pip in it. They really cared very little for the power that money can give. And except for the sense of power, that had no real significance here.

When all is said and done, even money is not much good where there is no genuine culture.

Money is a means to rising to a higher, subtler, fuller state of consciousness, or nothing. And when you flatly don’t want a fuller consciousness, what good is your money to you? Just to chuck about and gamble with.

And when you flatly don’t want a fuller consciousness, what good is your money to you? Just to chuck about and gamble with. Even money is a European invention—European and American. It has no real magic in Australia.

Poor Richard Lovat wearied himself to death struggling with the problem of himself, and calling it Australia.

There was no actual need for him to struggle with Australia: he must have done it in the hedonistic sense, to please himself. But it wore him to rags.

Somers flushed, and laughed at the contradiction in metaphor.

“It’s not the loftiness,” he said, rather amused. “It’s that people just don’t care to hear some things.”

“Well, let me try,” said Jack. “We’re a new country—and we’re out to learn.”

“That’s exactly what we’re not,” broke out William James, with a Cornish accent and a blurt of a laugh.

“We’re out to show to everybody that we know everything there is to be known.”

“That’s some of us,” said Jack.

Where their two personalities met and joined, they were one, and pledged to permanent fidelity. But that part in each of them which did not belong to the other was free from all enquiry or even from knowledge.

Each silently consented to leave the other in large part unknown, unknown in word and deed and very being. They didn’t want to know—too much knowledge would be like shackles.

Such marriage is established on a very subtle sense of honour and of individual integrity. It seems as if each race and each continent has its own marriage instinct.

but there is always a certain reserve in the response, a preference for the non-intuitive forms of communication, for deliberate speech. What is not said is supposed not to exist: that is almost code of honour with the other classes.

With the true common people, only that which is not said is of any vital significance.

Which brings us back to Jack and Somers. The one thing Somers had kept, and which he possessed in a very high degree, was the power of intuitive communication with others.

And he had just a bit of contempt for the brilliant little fellow opposite, and he felt just a bit uneasy because the same little fellow laughed at his “manliness,” knowing it didn’t go right through.

It takes more than “manliness” to make a man.

Somers’ very brilliance had an overtone of contempt in it, for the other man. The women, of course, not demanding any orthodox “manliness,” didn’t mind the knock at Jack’s particular sort.

“No,” he repeated. “I mean the world—economics and politics. The welfare of the world.”

“It’s no good asking me,” said Somers. “Since the war burst my bubble of humanity I’m a pessimist, a black pessimist about the present human world.”

“You think it’s going to the bad?” said Jack, still drawing him with the same appearance of deference, of wanting to hear.

“The thing is, what’s the good of a life of idleness?” said William James.

“What’s the good of a life of work?” laughed Somers.

Shrewdly, with quick grey eye, Trewhella looked at the other man to see if he were laughing at him.

“About what?” Jack’s question was soft as a drop of water falling into water, and Richard sat struggling with himself.

“That,” he answered, “you either know or don’t know. And if you don’t know, it would only be words my trying to tell.”

There was a silence of check-mate.

He figured it all out. And Harriet mildly agreed. Her revulsion from Australia had passed quicker than his, now that she saw herself escaping from town and from neighbours to the quiet of a house by the sea, alone with him.

Still she let him talk. Verbal agreement and silent opposition is perhaps the best weapon on such occasions.

Harriet would look at him sometimes wistfully, as he sat with his brow clouded. She had a real instinctive mistrust of other people—all other people.

He laughed, realising that most of what she said was true.

“You see,” he said, “I have the roots of my life with you. But I want if possible to send out a new shoot in the life of mankind—the effort man makes forever, to grow into new forms.”

She looked at him. And somehow she wanted to cry, because he was so silly in refusing to be finally disappointed in his efforts with mankind, and yet his silliness was pathetic, in a way beautiful.

Harriet looked at him in wonder. And he looked at her—at her queer, rather large, but thin-skinned, soft hands.

“You need a thick skin to live out here,” he said.

“He did, did he! Wanted to warn you off, so to speak.”

“The little mingo. He’s as deep as a five hundred feet boring, and I’ve never got down to sweet water in him yet.”

“Don’t you trust him?” said Harriet.

“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.”

“Of course,” said Harriet, “it will take time. And of course a lot of love. A lot of fierce love, too.”

“Well,” said Harriet, arching her eyes at him, “that’s another matter. From what I see of them I rather doubt it,” she laughed, teasing him.

“I should say you would. But it’s no good loving Australia if you can’t love the Australian.”

“Yes, it is. If as you say Australia is like the poor prostitute, and the Australian just bullies her to get what he can out of her and then treats her like dirt.”

It was distinctly surprising. Somers had never known that he weighed so little, that he was such a scrap of unimportance. And he still dared not quite imagine the whole of the blind, invisible force of that water.

It was so different being in it, even on the edge of it, from looking at it from the outside.

As they came trembling and panting up the bank to the grass-plot, dripping and smelling so strong and sticky of the Pacific, they saw Jack standing smoking and watching.

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.

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

“But they say the civil world is not an army: it’s the will of the people,” cried Somers.

“Will of my grandmother’s old tom-cat. They’ve got no will, except to stop anybody else from having any.”

“Look at Australia. Absolutely fermenting rotten with politicians and the will of the people. Look at the country—going rottener every day, like an old pear.”

Jack had come closer to him, and was now holding him by the arm.

“What’s a man’s life for, anyhow? Is it just to save up like rotten pears on a shelf, in the hopes that one day it’ll rot into a pink canary or something of that?”

“What we want in Australia,” said Jack, “isn’t a statesman, not yet. It’s a set of chaps with some guts in them, who’ll obey orders when they find a man who’ll give the orders.”

“It does matter. If you can start a new life-form.”

“You know quite well you say yourself life doesn’t start with a form. It starts with a new feeling, and ends with a form.”

“I know. But I think there is a new feeling.”

She wasn’t a bit of flotsam, and she wasn’t a dog chained to a dog-kennel. Coo-ee might be absurd—and she knew it was only a camp.

But then where she camped with Lovat Somers was now the world’s centre to her, and that was enough.

She loved to wake in the morning and open the bedroom door—they had the north bedroom, on the verandah, the room that had the sun all day long;

Sharks, slinking along quite near the coast, as if they were walking on the land. She saw one caught in the heave of a breaker, and lifted. And then she saw him start, saw the quick flurry of his tail as he flung himself back.

The land to him was horror—as to her the sea, beyond that wall of ice-blue foam.

She made Lovat come to look. He watched them slowly, holding the brush in his hand. He had made the fire, and was sweeping the hearth. Coffee was ready by the time Harriet was dressed: and he was crouching making toast.

then the sea gradually going yellow, going primrose, with the foam breaking blue as forget-me-nots or frost, in front. And on the near swing of the bluey primrose, sticking up through the marvellous liquid pale yellow glaze, the black fins of sharks.

The triangular, black fins of sharks, like small, hard sails of hell-boats, amid the swimming luminousness.

Then she would run out on the verandah. Sharks! Four or five sharks, skulking in the morning glow, and so near, she could almost have thrown bread to them. Sharks, slinking along quite near the coast, as if they were walking on the land.

They went back to Sydney on the Thursday, for two days, to pack up and return to Coo-ee. All the time, they could hear the sea. It seemed strange that they felt the sea so far away, in Sydney.

In Sydney itself, there is no sea. It might be Birmingham.

Even in Mullimbimby, a queer raw little place, when Somers lifted his head and looked down Main Street and saw, a mile away, the high level of the solid sea, it was almost a shock to him.

You couldn’t mate him to anything in the heavens above or in the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth. No, there’s no female kangaroo of his species. Fine chap, for all that.

But as lonely as a nail in a post.

”

And then, when forced to admit, it was a revolution in his mind. He had all his life had this craving for an absolute friend, a David to his Jonathan, Pylades to his Orestes: a blood-brother.

All his life he had secretly grieved over his friendlessness.

And now at last, when it really offered—and it had offered twice before, since he had left Europe—he didn’t want it, and he realised that in his innermost soul he had never wanted it.

“Leave the indiscretion to us. We believe in it.

Indiscretion is the better part of valour.

You agree, Kangaroo?” said Jack, smiling over his plate directly at his host.

The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones round our necks.

Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are.

But our divine flowers—look at those hibiscus—they don’t want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned into stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy. But they won’t. They will quietly, gently wither.

“

Of course they do. They can’t stand me, though.

And I thoroughly sympathise with them.”

“The wind has permission too,” said Harriet. “

Everything goes by permission of something else, in this world.

” But she went rather red.

I can fight them with their own weapons: the hard mandibles and the acid sting of the cold ant. But that is not how I fight them. I fight them with the warm heart.

Deep calls to deep, and fire calls out fire.

And for warmth, for the fire of sympathy, to burn out the ant heap with the heat of fiery, living hearts: that is what I stand for.

Now he understood the yearning in the seal-woman’s croon, as she went back to the sea, leaving her husband and her children of warm flesh. No more cloying warmth. No more of this horrible stuffy heat of human beings.

To be an isolated swift fish in the big seas, that are bigger than the earth; fierce with cold, cold life, in the watery twilight before sympathy was created to clog us.

These were his feelings now. Mankind? Ha, he turned his face to the centre of the seas, away from any land. The noise of waters, and dumbness like a fish. The cold, lovely silence, before crying and calling were invented.

“

One believes a lot, and one believes very little, seems to me. Taking all in all, seems to me we live from hand to mouth, as far as beliefs go.

”

But where to? Where to?

Where is one carried to when one is carried away?

He had a bitter mistrust of seventh heavens and all heavens in general. But then the experience. If Kangaroo had got up at that moment Somers would have given him heart and soul and body, for the asking, and damn all consequences.

forever strange and a joyful mystery to him. Lovers henceforth have got to know one another. A terrible mistake, and a self delusion.

True lovers only learn that as they know less, and less, and less of each other, the mystery of each grows more startling to the other.

The tangible unknown: that is the magic, the mystery, and the grandeur of love, that it puts the tangible unknown in our arms, and against our breast: the beloved. We have made a fatal mistake.

Richard sat feeling very stupid.

The communicative soul is like the ass, you can lead him to the water, but you can’t make him drink.

“Why,” he said, “it means an end of us and what we are, in the first place. And then a re-entry into us of the great God, who enters us from below, not from above.”

“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.

“You can’t have it all perfect beforehand, you know.

You’ve got to sink a few times before you can swim.

”

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.

That was the motto to have on one’s red heart: not Love or Hope or any of those aspiring emotions: “

The world belongs to the courageous.

” To be sure, it was a rather two-edged motto just now for Germany. And Somers was not quite sure that it was the “world” that he wanted.

He left off kicking himself, and went down to the shore to get away from himself. After all, he knew the endless water would soon make him forget.

It had a language which spoke utterly without concern of him, and this utter unconcern gradually soothed him of himself and his world.

He began to forget.

But then it cleared again, and Somers and Harriet walked along the sands, watching the blue sky mirror purple and the white clouds mirror warm on the wet sand.

The sea talked and talked all the time, in its disintegrative, elemental language.

And at last it talked its way into Somers’ soul, and he forgot the world again, the babel. The simplicity came back, and with it the inward peace. The world had left him again.

The sea of his own inward soul, his own unconscious faith, over which his will had no exercise. Why did the mass of people not want this stillness and this peace with their own being? Why did they want cinemas and excitements?

Excitements are as nauseous as sea-sickness.

Why does the world want them?

Not that either party really believes in the lordship of man.

But you’ve got to get into still water some time or other.

The perfect-love business inevitably turns out to be a wildly stormy strait, like the Straits of Magellan, where two fierce and opposing currents meet and there is the devil of a business trying to keep the bark of marriage, with the flag of perfect-love at …

No. Obstinate and devilish as he was, he wanted to haul down the flag of perfect love, to set fire to the bark Harriet and Lovat, to seat himself in glory on the ashes, like a resurrected phœnix, with an imaginary crown on his head.

And she was to be a comfortable nest for his impertinence.

In short, he was to be the lord and master, and she the humble slave. Thank you.

But the dip slope was bush: gum trees rather scattered, and a low undergrowth like heath. The same lonely, unbreakable silence and loneliness that seemed to him the real bush. Curiously unapproachable to him.

The mystery of the bush seems to recede from you as you advance, and then it is behind you if you look round.

Lonely, and weird, and hoary.

He hung there on the parapet looking down, and he didn’t care. How profoundly, darkly he didn’t care. There are no problems for the soul in its darkened, wide-eyed torpor. Neither Harriet nor Kangaroo nor Jaz, nor even the world.

Worlds come, and worlds go: even worlds.

And when the old, old influence of the fern-world comes over a man, how can he care? He breathes the fern seed and drifts back, becomes darkly half vegetable, devoid of pre-occupations.

It was evening, and the intense dusk of the far-off land, and white folks peering out of the dusk almost like aborigines.

The far-off land, just as far-off when you are in it: nay, then furthest off.

The evening came very dark, with lightning playing pallid in the south-east, over the sea. There was nothing to be done with Jack but to play draughts with him. He wasn’t in a real sporting mood, so he let himself be beaten even at draughts.

Ah, a new country! The cabbage, for example, cost tenpence in the normal course of things, and a cauliflower a shilling. And the tradesmen’s carts flew round in the wilderness, delivering goods.

There isn’t much newness in man, whatever the country.

That old aeroplane that had lain broken-down in a field. It was nowadays always staggering in the low air just above the surf, past the front of Coo-ee, and lurching down on to the sands of the town “beach.”

“That’s all right, Mr Somers. I want your impressions. What they call knowledge is like any other currency, it’s liable to depreciate. Sound valuable knowledge to-day may not be worth the paper it’s printed on to-morrow—like the Austrian krone.

We’re no slaves to facts.

Give us your impressions.”

“That’s all right, Mr Somers. I want your impressions.

What they call knowledge is like any other currency, it’s liable to depreciate.

Sound valuable knowledge to-day may not be worth the paper it’s printed on to-morrow—like the Austrian krone. We’re no slaves to facts. Give us your impressions.”

He spoke with a peculiar kind of bitterness, that showed passion too. They talked about Europe for some time. The man could listen: listen with his black eyes too.

Watchful, always watchful, as if he expected some bird to fly suddenly out of the speaker’s face.

He was well-informed, and seemed to weigh and judge everything he heard as he heard it.

Because to place absolute trust on another human being is in itself a disaster, both ways, since each human being is a ship that must sail its own course, even if it go in company with another ship.

Two ships may sail together to the world’s end.

But lock them together in mid-ocean and try to steer both with one rudder, and they will smash one another to bits. So it is when one individual seeks absolutely to love, or trust, another. Absolute lovers always smash one another, absolute trusters the same.

And yet, love is the greatest thing between human beings, men and women, men and men, women and women, when it is love, when it happens.

But when human love starts out to lock individuals together, it is just courting disaster.

Man-and-woman love is a disaster nowadays. What a holy horror man-and-man love would be: mates or comrades!

like the dull pelts of kangaroos. It had a wonder and a far-awayness, even here in the heart of Sydney.

All the shibboleths of mankind are so trumpery.

Australia is outside everything.

“Bushranger?

But Australia’s like an open door with the blue beyond.

You just walk out of the world and into Australia. And it’s just somewhere else. All those nations left behind in their schoolrooms, fussing. Let them fuss. This is Australia, where one can’t care.”

“Me?” The smile was slow and pale. “Go into the middle of Australia and see how empty it is.

You can’t face emptiness long.

You have to come back and do something to keep from being frightened at your own emptiness, and everything else’s emptiness. It may be empty. But it’s wicked, and it’ll kill you if it can. Something comes out of the emptiness, to kill you.

Very wide-awake, and yet far off in the past. And a remote, alert, sharp gentleness belonging to far past twilight ages, before enemies and iron weapons were perfected. A very remote, dirt-brown gentleman from the lost plains of time.

The peacock rustling his blue fireworks seemed a sort of nouveau-riche in comparison.

Somers went in the evening of this memorable day to dine with Kangaroo. The other man was quiet, and seemed preoccupied.

Don’t love me. Don’t want to save mankind. You’re so awfully general, and your love is so awfully general: as if one were only a cherry in the syrup. Don’t love me. Don’t want me to love you.

Let’s be hard, separate men.

Let’s understand one another deeper than love.”

This Richard Lovat Somers had steadily refused to do.

The deepest part of a man is his sense of essential truth, essential honour, essential justice.

This deepest self makes him abide by his own feelings, come what may. It is not sentimentalism. It is just the male human creature, the thought-adventurer, driven to earth. Will he give in or won’t he?

Awful years—’16, ’17, ’18, ’19—the years when the damage was done. The years when the world lost its real manhood. Not for lack of courage to face death. Plenty of superb courage to face death.

But no courage in any man to face his own isolated soul, and abide by its decision.

Easier to sacrifice oneself. So much easier!

Somers could never recall it without writhing.

It is not death that matters, but the loss of the integral soul.

And these men howled as if they were going to their doom, helplessly, ghastly. It was not the death in front. It was the surrender of all their old beliefs, and all their sacred liberty.

So he hung on to it, and tried to keep his wits. If no man was with him, he was hardly aware of it, he had to grip on so desperately, like a man on a plank in a shipwreck.

The plank was his own individual self.

Followed that period of suspense which changed his life for ever. If the postman was coming plunging downhill through the bushes over the moor, the first thought was: What is he bringing now?

A white, static, arrested morning, away there in the west of Cornwall, with the moors looking primeval, and the huge granite boulders bulging out of the earth like presences. So easy to realise men worshipping stones.

It is not the stone. It is the mystery of the powerful, pre-human earth, showing its might.

And all, this morning, static, arrested in a cold, milky whiteness, like death, the west lost in the sea.

Enemies he had, however, people he didn’t know and hadn’t even spoken to. Enemies who hated him like poison.

They hated him because he was free, because of his different, unafraid face.

They hated him because he wasn’t cowed, as they were all cowed. They hated him for his intimacy at the farm, in the hamlet. For each farm was bitter jealous of each other.

So he discovered the great secret: to stand alone as his own judge of himself, absolutely. He took his stand absolutely on his own judgment of himself. Then, the mongrel-mouthed world would say and do what it liked.

This is the greatest secret of behaviour: to stand alone, and judge oneself from the deeps of one’s own soul.

And then, to know, to hear what the others say and think: to refer their judgment to the touchstone of one’s own soul-judgment.

You can reason with a sex-angry woman till you are black in the face. And if for a time you do overcome her with reason, the sex-anger only arises more hideously and furiously, later. Perhaps in another guise.

There is no arguing with the instinctive passional self.

Not the least use in the world. Yes, you are quite right, quite right in all your contentions. But! And the But just explodes everything like a bomb.

Man must have some idea of himself. He must live hard, hard, up to this idea of himself.

But the idea is perishable.

Say what you like, every idea is perishable: even the idea of God or Love or Humanity or Liberty—even the greatest idea has its day and perishes. Each formulated religion is in the end only a great idea.

But the idea is perishable.

Say what you like, every idea is perishable: even the idea of God or Love or Humanity or Liberty—even the greatest idea has its day and perishes.

Each formulated religion is in the end only a great idea. Once the idea becomes explicit, it is dead. Yet we must have ideas.

There is nothing for it but revenge.

If you sow the dragon’s teeth, you mustn’t expect lilies of the valley to spring up in sweet meekness.

And Kangaroo? Kangaroo insisted on the old idea as hard as ever, though on the Power of Love rather than on the Submission and Sacrifice of Love. He wanted to take his revenge in an odour of sanctification and Lily of the Valley essence.

It must struggle clear, knowing what it is doing: not waste itself in revenge. The revenge is inevitable enough, for each denial of the spontaneous dark soul creates the reflex of its own revenge.

But the greatest revenge on the lie is to get clear of the lie.

The long travail. The long gestation of the soul within a man, and the final parturition, the birth of a new way of knowing, a new God-influx. A new idea, true enough. But at the centre, the old anti-idea: the dark, the unutterable God.

So Christ’s commandment is as large as life, and its meaning can never be fixed. I sometimes hate myself: and my neighbour as myself.

Life makes no absolute statement. It is all Call and Answer.

As soon as the Call ceases, the Answer is invalid. And till the Answer comes, a Call is but a crying in the wilderness. And every Answer must wait until it hears the Call. Till the Call comes, the Answer is but an unborn fœtus.

Blessed are the pure in heart. That is absolute truth, a statement of living relativity, because the pure in heart are those who quiver to the dark God, to the call of woman, and to the call of men.

The pure in heart are the listeners and the answerers.

But Rameses II. was no doubt as pure in heart as John the Evangel. Indeed perhaps purer, since John was an insister.

After all his terrific upheaval, Richard Lovat at last gave it up, and went to sleep.

A man must even know how to give up his own earnestness, when its hour is over, and not to bother about anything any more, when he’s bothered enough.

Bits, bits, bits. Yet Richard Lovat read on. It was not mere anecdotage.

It was the sheer momentaneous life of the continent.

There was no consecutive thread. Only the laconic courage of experience.

A very strong wind had got up from the west. It blew down from the dark hills in a fury, and was cold as flat ice.

It blew the sea back until the great water looked like dark, ruffled mole-fur.

It blew it back till the waves got littler and littler, and could hardly uncurl the least swish of a rat-tail of foam.

The naked bush, sinking in a hollow to a sort of marsh, and then down the coast some sort of “works,” brick-works or something, smoking.

All as if it had tumbled haphazard off the pantechnicon of civilisation as it dragged round the edges of this wild land, and there lay, busy but not rooted in.

As if none of the houses had any foundations.

On the bay one lone man flinging a line into the water, on the edge of the conch-shaped, sloping sands. Dark-blue water, ruffled like mole-fur, and flicked all over with froth as with bits of feather-fluff.

And many white gannets turning in the air like a snow-storm and plunging down into the water like bombs.

And fish leaped in the furry water, as if the wind had turned them upside-down. And the gannets dropping and exploding into the wave, and disappearing. On the sea’s horizon, so perfectly clear, a steamer like a beetle walking slowly along.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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’s pretty well always the same. You come out from the old countries very cocksure, with a lot of criticism to you. But when it comes to doing anything, you sort of fade out, you’re nowhere. We’re used to it, we don’t mind.”

There was a silence of hate.

“No, we don’t mind,” Jack continued. “It’s quite right, you haven’t let us down, because we haven’t given you a chance. That’s all. In so far as you’ve had any chance to, you’ve let us down, and we know it.”

“He’ll try his best to,” said Harriet. “But whatever have you both got so furious about. Just look at Lovat, green with fury. It’s really shameful.

Men are like impish children—you daren’t leave them together for a minute.

”

Upon your conception of the single individual, all your descriptions will be based, all your science established. For this reason, the human sciences, philosophy, ethics, psychology, politics, economics, can never be sciences at all.

There can never be an exact science dealing with individual life.

L’anatomia presuppone il cadavere: anatomy presupposes a corpse, says D’Annunzio. You can establish an exact science on a corpse, supposing you start with the corpse, and don’t try to derive it from a living creature.

Iron must remain iron, or cease to exist. But a rabbit might evolve into something which is still rabbit, and yet different from that which a rabbit now is. So how can you define or precisely describe a rabbit?

There is always the unstable creative element present in life, and this science can never tackle.

Science is cause-and-effect.

The urge towards evolution if you like. But it is more than evolution. There is no simple cause-and-effect sequence. The change from caterpillar to butterfly is not cause and effect.

It is a new gesture in creation.

Science can wriggle as hard as it likes, but the change from caterpillar to butterfly is utterly unscientific, illogical, and unnatural, if we take science’s definition of nature.

The mob, then. Now, the vast bulk of mankind has always been, and always will be, helpless. By which we mean, helpless to interpret the new prompting of the God-urge.

The highest function of mind is its function of messenger.

The curious throbs and pulses of the God-urge in man would go on forever ignored, if it were not for some few exquisitely sensitive and fearless souls who struggle with all their might to make that strange translation of the low, dark throbbing into open …

There is though.

There is always something outside our universe.

And it is always at the doors of the innermost, sentient soul. And there throb-throb, throb-throb-throb, throb-throb. It is like the almost inaudible beating of a wireless machine. Nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand hear nothing at all. Absolutely nothing.

The neurasthenia comes from the inattention to the suggestion, or from a false interpretation. The best souls in the world make some of the worst interpretations—like President Wilson—and this is the bitterest tragedy of righteousness.

The heroic effort to carry out the old righteousness becomes at last sheer wrongeousness.

Men in the past have chosen to be martyred for an unborn truth. But life itself inflicts something worse than martyrdom on them if they will persist too long in the old truth.

And still the knocking goes on, on, on, till some soul that dares as well as can, listens, and struggles to interpret.

Every new word is anathema—bound to be.

Jargon, rant, mystical tosh, and so on. Evil, and anti-civilisation. Naturally. For the machine of the human psyche, once wound up to a certain ideal, doesn’t want to stop.

The fish is absolutely stone-wall limited in its consciousness, to itself. It knows none other. Stony, abstract, cold, alone, the fish has still the power of radio-communication. It is a form of telepathy, like a radium-effluence, vibrating fear principally.

Fear is the first of the actuating gods.

Then come the reptiles. They have sex, and dimly, darkly discern the bulk of the answerer. They are drawn to contact. It is the new motive. The fishes are never drawn to contact. Only food and fear.

At the right moment, a certain cry, like a war-cry, a catchword, suddenly sounds, and the movement begins.

The purest lesson our era has taught is that man, at his highest, is an individual, single, isolate, alone, in direct soul-communication with the unknown God, which prompts within him.

This lesson, however, puts us in danger of conceit, especially spiritual conceit.

There is all the time a powerful, unconscious interplay going on between the vertebral centres of consciousness in all men, a deep, mindless current flashing and quivering through the family, the community, the nation, the continent, and even the world.

No man can really isolate himself.

And this vertebral interplay is the root of our living: must always be so.

And so it was: far more regulated than London, yet all with a curious exhilaration of voluntariness that oppressed Richard like a madness. No control, and no opposition to control. Policemen were cyphers, not noticeable.

Every man his own policeman.

The terrible lift of the harmless crowd. The strange relief from all superimposed control. One feels the police, for example, in London, and their civic majesty of authority. But in Sydney no majesty of authority at all. Absolute freedom from all that.

But in Sydney no majesty of authority at all. Absolute freedom from all that. Great freedom in the air. Yet, if you got into the wrong stream on the pavement you felt they’d tread you down, almost unseeing.

You just mustn’t get in the wrong stream—Liberty!

Yes—the strange unanimity of harmlessness in the crowd had a half paralysing effect on Richard. “Can it be?” he said to himself, as he drifted in the strong sun-warmth of the world after rain, in the afternoon of this strange, antipodal city.

But what was the good even of being afraid?—even of grief? It was like a storm, in which he could do nothing but lie still and endure and wait. “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Perhaps it is the bitterest part, to keep still through it all, and watch and wait.

In a numb half-sleep Richard lay and waited—waited for heaven knows what.

Only an hour—or an hour and a half.

Time must have stood still and waited.

“What has happened?” asked Richard.

Fear? Yes, it was fear. But then, did he not believe also in the God of fear? There was not only one God. There was not only the God of love.

To insist that there is only one God, and that God the source of Love, is perhaps as fatal as the complete denial of God, and of all mystery.

He believed in the God of fear, of darkness, of passion, and of silence, the God that made a man realise his own sacred aloneness.

This dark, passionate religiousness and inward sense of an indwelling magnificence, direct flow from the unknowable God, this filled Richard’s heart first, and human love seemed such a fighting for candle-light, when the dark is so much better.

To meet another dark worshipper, that would be the best of human meetings.

But strain himself into a feeling of absolute human love, he just couldn’t do it.

Which being so, he proceeded, as ever, to try to disentangle himself from the white octopus of love. Not that even now he dared quite deny love.

Love is perhaps an eternal part of life. But it is only a part.

And when it is treated as if it were a whole, it becomes a disease, a vast white strangling octopus. All things are relative, and have their sacredness in their true relation to all other things.

that was his nearest throb of emotion. The other emotions seemed to abandon him. So suddenly, and so completely, to abandon him. So it was when he got back from Sydney and, in the night of moonlight, went down the low cliff to the sand.

Immediately the great rhythm and ringing of the breakers obliterated every other feeling in his breast, and his soul was a moonlit hollow with the waves striding home.

Nothing else.

He had it all to himself. And there, with his hands in his pockets, he drifted into indifference. The far-off, far-off, far-off indifference. The world revolved and revolved and disappeared.

Like a stone that has fallen into the sea, his old life, the old meaning, fell, and rippled, and there was vacancy, with the sea and the Australian shore in it.

Far-off, far-off, as if he had landed on another planet, as a man might land after death. Leaving behind the body of care. Even the body of desire. Shed. All that had meant so much to him, shed.

Shed. All that had meant so much to him, shed. All the old world and self of care, the beautiful care as well as the weary care, shed like a dead body. The landscape?—he cared not a thing about the landscape.

Love?—he was absolved from love, as if by a great pardon.

Humanity?—there was none. Thought?—fallen like a stone into the sea. The great, the glamorous past?—worn thin, frail, like a frail, translucent film of shell thrown up on the shore.

Home again. But what was home?

The fish has the vast ocean for home. And man has timelessness and nowhere.

“I won’t delude myself with the fallacy of home,” he said to himself. “The four walls are a blanket I wrap around in, in timelessness and nowhere, to go to sleep.”

Harriet and he? It was time they both agreed that nothing has any meaning. Meaning is a dead letter when a man has no soul. And speech is like a volley of dead leaves and dust, stifling the air.

Human beings should learn to make weird, wordless cries, like the animals, and cast off the clutter of words.

Old dust and dirt of corpses: words and feelings. The decomposed body of the past whirling and choking us, language, love, and meaning. When a man loses his soul he knows what a small, weary bit of clock-work it was.

Old dust and dirt of corpses: words and feelings. The decomposed body of the past whirling and choking us, language, love, and meaning. When a man loses his soul he knows what a small, weary bit of clock-work it was.

Who dares to be soulless finds the new dimension of life.

Home, to tea. The clicking of the clock. Tic-tac! Tic-tac! The clock. Home to tea. Just for clockwork’s sake.

Only in this pause that one finds the meaninglessness of meanings, and the other dimension, the reality of timelessness and nowhere. Home to tea! Do you hear the clock tick? And yet there is timelessness and nowhere. And the clock means nothing with its ticking.

And nothing is so meaningless as meanings.

Yet Richard meandered home to tea. For the sun had set, the sea of evening light was going pale blue, fair as evening, faintly glazed with yellow:

The moon rose about eight. She was so strong, so exciting, that Richard went out at nine o’clock down to the shore. The night was full of moonlight as a mother-of-pearl. He imagined it had a warmth in it towards the moon, a moon-heat.

The light on the waves was like liquid radium swinging and slipping.

Like radium, the mystic virtue of vivid decomposition, liquid-gushing lucidity.

But the care once broken inside him it had a deep mystery for him, and a dusky, far-off call that he knew would go on calling for long ages before it got any adequate response, in human beings.

From far off, from down long fern-dark avenues there seemed to be the voice of Australia, calling low.

He loved to wander in the bush at evening, when night fell so delicately yet with such soft mystery.

Man was there, but unnoticeable. You said a few words to a neighbour or an acquaintance, but it was merely for the sake of making a sound of some sort. Just a sound. There was nothing really to be said.

The vast continent is really void of speech.

Only man makes noises to man, from habit. Richard found he never wanted to talk to anybody, never wanted to be with anybody. He had fallen apart out of the human association.

“Wait! Wait!” he answered himself. “You have got to go through the mistakes. You’ve got to go all round the world, and then half way round again, till you get back. Go on, go on, the world is round, and it will bring you back.

Draw your ring round the world, the ring of your consciousness. Draw it round until it is complete.

”