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 raggletaggle 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 a 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: acknowledgement 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 recognized 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 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.
And in just the same way, that bond which connected himself with her, he would always keep unbroken for his part. But that did not mean that he was sworn body and soul to his wife. Oh no. There was a good deal of him which did not come into the marriage bond, and with all this part of himself he was free to make the best he could, according to his own idea. He loved her, quite sincerely, for her naive sophisticated innocence which allowed him to be unknown to her, except in so far as they were truly and intimately related. It was the innocence which has been through the fire, and knows its own limitations. In the same way he quite consciously chose not to know anything more about her than just so much as entered into the absolute relationship between them. He quite definitely did not want to absorb her, or to occupy the whole field of her nature. He would trust her to go her own way, only keeping her to the pledge that was between them. What this pledge consisted in he did not try to define. It was something indefinite: the field of contact between their two personalities. 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 continent has its own marriage instinct. And the instinct that develops in Australia will certainly not be the same as the instinct that develops in America. And each people must follow its own instinct, if it is to live, not matter whether the marriage law be universal or not.
The Callcotts had come to no agreement, verbally, as to their marriage. They had not thought it out. They were Australians, of strongly, subtly-developed desire for freedom, and with considerable indifference to old formulae and the conventions based thereon. So they took their stand instinctively and calmly. Jack had defined his stand as far as he found necessary. If his wife was good to him and satisfied him in so far as HE went, then he was pledged to trust her to do as she liked outside his ken, outside his range. He would make a cage for nobody. This he openly propounded to his mates: to William James, for example, and later to Somers. William James said yes, but thought the more. Somers was frankly disturbed, not liking the thought of applying the same prescription to his own marriage.
They
