Kangaroo

CHAPTER II. NEIGHBOURS-2

“ I say!” called a voice from behind.

It was Mrs Callcott running unevenly over the sand after them, the colour high in her cheeks. She wore a pale grey crêpe de chine dress and grey suède shoes. Some distance behind her Jack Callcott was following, in his shirt-sleeves.

“ Fancy you being here!” gasped Mrs Callcott, and Harriet was so flustered she could only cry:

“ Oh, how do you do!”—and effusively shake hands, as if she were meeting some former acquaintance on Piccadilly. The shaking hands quite put Mrs Callcott off her track. She felt it almost an affront, and went red. Her husband sauntered up and put his hands in his pockets, to avoid mistakes.

“ Ha, what are you doing here,” he said to the Somers pair. “Wouldn’t you like a cup of tea?”

Harriet glanced at Richard Lovat. He was smiling faintly.

“ Oh, we should love it,” she replied to Mr Callcott. “But where?—have you got a house here?”

“ My sister has the end house,” said he.

“ Oh, but—will she want us?” cried Harriet, backing out.

The Callcotts stood for a moment silent.

“ Yes, if you like to come,” said Jack. And it was evident he was aware of Somers’ desire to avoid contact.

“ Well, I should be awfully grateful,” said Harriet. “Wouldn’ you, Lovat?”

“ Yes,” he said, smiling to himself, feeling Jack’s manly touch of contempt for all this hedging.

So off they went to “St Columb.” The sister was a brown-eyed Australian with a decided manner, kindly, but a little suspicious of the two newcomers. Her husband was a young Cornishman, rather stout and short and silent. He had his hair cut round at the back, in a slightly rounded line above a smooth, sunburnt, reddened nape of the neck. Somers found out later that this young Cornishman—his name was Trewhella—had married his brother’s widow. Mrs Callcott supplied Harriet later on with all the information concerning her sister-in-law. The first Trewhella, Alfred John, had died two years ago, leaving his wife with a neat sum of money and this house, “St Columb,” and also with a little girl named Gladys, who came running in shaking her long brown hair just after the Somers appeared. So the present Trewhellas were a newly-married couple. The present husband, William James, went round in a strange, silent fashion helping his wife Rose to prepare tea.

The bungalow was pleasant, a large room facing the sea, with verandahs and other little rooms opening off. There were many family photographs, and a framed medal and ribbon and letter praising the first Trewhella. Mrs Trewhella was alert and watchful, and decided to be genteel. So the party sat around in the basket chairs and on the settles under the windows, instead of sitting at table for tea. And William James silently but willingly carried round the bread and butter and the cakes.

He was a queer young man, with an Irish-looking face, rather pale, an odd kind of humour in his grey eye and in the corners of his pursed mouth. But he spoke never a word. It was hard to decide his age—probably about thirty—a little younger than his wife. He seemed silently pleased about something—perhaps his marriage. Somers noticed that the whites of his eyes were rather bloodshot. He had been in Australia since he was a boy of fifteen—he had come with his brother—from St Columb, near Newquay—St Columb Major. So much Somers elicited.

“ Well, how do you like Sydney?” came the inevitable question from Mrs Trewhella.

“ The harbour, I think, is wonderful,” came Somers’ invariable answer.

“ It is a fine harbour, isn’t it. And Sydney is a fine town. Oh yes, I’ve lived there all my life.”

The conversation languished. Callcott was silent, and William James seemed as if he were never anything else. Even the little girl only fluttered into a whisper and went still again. Everybody was a little embarrassed, rather stiff: too genteel, or not genteel enough. And the men seemed absolute logs.

“ You don’t think much of Australia, then?” said Jack to Somers.

“ Why,” answered the latter, “how am I to judge! I haven’t even seen the fringe of it.”

“ Oh, it’s mostly fringe,” said Jack. “But it hasn’t made a good impression on you?”

“ I don’t know yet. My feelings are mixed. The country seems to me to have a fascination—strange—”

“ But you don’t take to the Aussies, at first sight. Bit of a collision between their aura and yours,” smiled Jack.

“ Maybe that’s what it is,” said Somers. “That’s a useful way of putting it. I can’t help my aura colliding, can I?”

“ Of course you can’t. And if it’s a tender sort of aura, of course it feels the bump.”

“ Oh, don’t talk about it,” cried Harriet. “He must be just one big bump, by the way he grumbles.”

They all laughed—perhaps a trifle uneasily.

“ I thought so,” said Jack. “What made you come here? Thought you’d like to write about it?”

“ I thought I might like to live here—and write here,” replied Somers smiling.

“ Write about the bushrangers and the heroine lost in the bush and wandering into a camp of bullies?” said Jack.

“ Maybe,” said Somers.

“ Do you mind if I ask you what sort of things you do write?” said Jack, with some delicacy.

“ Oh—poetry—essays.”

“ Essays about what?”

“ Oh—rubbish mostly.”

There was a moment’s pause.

“ Oh, Lovat, don’t be so silly. You know do speakyou don’t think your essays rubbish,” put in Harriet. “They’re about life, and democracy, and equality, and all that sort of thing,” Harriet explained.

“ Oh, yes?” said Jack. “I’d like to read some.”

“ Well,” hesitated Harriet. “He can lend you a volume—you’ve got some with you, haven’t you?” she added, turning to Somers.

“ I’ve got one,” admitted that individual, looking daggers at her.

“ Well, you’ll lend it to Mr Callcott, won’t you?”

“ If he wants it. But it will only bore him.”

“ I might rise up to it, you know,” said Jack laconically, “if I bring all my mental weight to bear on it.”

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.

“ And most of us,” said William James.

“ Have it your own way, boy. But let us speak for the minority. And there’s a minority that knows we’ve got to learn a big lesson—and that’s willing to learn it.”

Again there was silence. The women seemed almost effaced.

“ There’s one thing,” thought Somers to himself, “when these Colonials do speak seriously, they speak like men, not like babies.” He looked up at Jack.

“ It’s the world that’s got to learn a lesson,” he said. “Not only Australia.” His tone was acid and sinister. And he looked with his hard, pale blue eyes at Callcott. Callcott’s eyes, brown and less concentrated, less hard, looked back curiously at the other man.

“ Possibly it is,” he said. “But my job is Australia.”

Somers watched him. Callcott had a pale, clean-shaven, lean face with close-shut lips. But his lips weren’t bitten in until they just formed a slit, as they so often are in Colonials. And his eyes had a touch of mystery, of aboriginal darkness.

“ Do you care very much for Australia?” said Somers, a little wistfully.

“ I believe I do,” said Jack. “But if I was out of a job like plenty of other unlucky diggers, I suppose I should care more about getting a job.”

“ But you care very much about your Australia?”

“ My Australia? Yes, I own about seven acres of it, all told. I suppose I care very much about that. I pay my taxes on it, all right.”

“ No, but the future of Australia.”

“ You’ll never see me on a platform shouting about it.”

The Lovats said they must be going.

“ If you like to crowd in,” said Jack, “we can take you in the car. We can squeeze in Mr Somers in front, and there’ll be plenty of room for the others at the back, if Gladys sits on her Dad’s knee.”

This time Somers accepted at once. He felt the halting refusals were becoming ridiculous.

They left at sunset. The west, over the land, was a clear gush of light up from the departed sun. The east, over the Pacific, was a tall concave of rose-coloured clouds, a marvellous high apse. Now the bush had gone dark and spectral again, on the right hand. You might still imagine inhuman presences moving among the gum trees. And from time to time, on the left hand, they caught sight of the long green rollers of the Pacific, with the star-white foam, and behind that the dusk-green sea glimmered over with smoky rose, reflected from the eastern horizon where the bank of flesh-rose colour and pure smoke-blue lingered a long time, like magic, as if the sky’s rim were cooling down. It seemed to Somers characteristic of Australia, this far-off flesh-rose bank of colour on the sky’s horizon, so tender and unvisited, topped with the smoky, beautiful blueness. And then the thickness of the night’s stars overhead, and one star very brave in the last effulgence of sunset, westward over the continent. As soon as night came, all the raggle-taggle of amorphous white settlements disappeared, and the continent of the Kangaroo reassumed its strange, unvisited glamour, a kind of virgin sensual aloofness.

Somers sat in front between Jack and Victoria Callcott, because he was so slight. He made himself as small as he could, like the ham in the sandwich. When he looked her way, he found Victoria watching him under her lashes, and as she met his eyes, she flared into smile that filled him with wonder. She had such a charming, innocent look, like an innocent girl, naive and a little gawky. Yet the strange exposed smile she gave him in the dusk. It puzzled him to know what to make of it. Like an offering—and yet innocent. Perhaps like the sacred prostitutes of the temple: acknowledgment of the sacredness of the act. He chose not to think of it, and stared away across the bonnet of the car at the fading land.

Queer, thought Somers, this girl at once sees perhaps the most real me, and most women take me for something I am not at all. Queer to be recognised at once, as if one were of the same family.

He had to admit that he was flattered also. She seemed to see the wonder in him. And she had none of the European women’s desire to make a conquest of him, none of that feminine rapacity which is so hateful in the old world. She seemed like an old Greek girl just bringing an offering to the altar of the mystic Bacchus. The offering of herself.

Her husband sat steering the car and smoking his short pipe in silence. He seemed to have something to think about. At least he had considerable power of silence, a silence which made itself felt. Perhaps he knew his wife much better than anyone else. At any rate he did not feel it necessary to keep an eye on her. If she liked to look at Somers with a strange, exposed smile, that was her affair. She could do as she liked in that direction, so far as he, Jack Callcott, was concerned. She was his wife: she knew it, and he knew it. And it was quite established and final. So long as she did not betray what was between her and him, as husband and wife, she could do as she liked with the rest of herself. And he could, quite rightly, trust her to be faithful to that undefinable relation which subsisted between them as man and wife. He didn’t pretend and didn’t want to occupy the whole field of her consciousness.