unintellectual.”
“Gladys: Oh, but he always brings a pound of Billyer’s chocolates.”
Or else: “Sweets to the Sweet. Give Her Billyer’s chocolates”; or else: “Billyer’s chocolates sweeten the home.”
The game of chess was a very quiet one. Jack was pale and subdued, silent, tired, thought Somers, after his long day and short night. Somers too played without any zest. And yet they were satisfied, just sitting there together, a curious peaceful ease in being together. Somers wondered at it, the rich, full peace that there seemed to be between him and the other man. It was something he was not used to. As if one blood ran warm and rich between them. “Then shall thy peace be as a river.”
“There was nothing wrong at the Trewhella’s, was there, that made William James come so late?” asked Somers.
Jack looked up with a tinge of inquiry in his dark eyes at this question: as if he suspected something behind it. Somers flushed slightly.
“No, nothing wrong,” said Jack.
“I beg your pardon for asking,” said Somers hastily. “I heard a whistle when I’d just done setting the rat-traps, and I looked out, and heard you speak to him. That’s how I knew who it was. I only wondered if anything was wrong.”
“No, nothing wrong,” repeated Jack laconically.
“That’s all right,” said Somers. “It’s your move. Mind your queen.”
“Mind my queen, eh? She takes some minding, that lady does. I feel I need a special eye at the end of my nose, to keep track of her. Come out of it, old lady. I’m not very bright at handling royalty, that’s a fact.”
Somers was now silent. He felt he had made a faux pas, and was rebuffed. They played for some time, Jack talking to himself mostly in that facetious strain which one just had to get used to in him, though Somers occasionally found it tiring.
Then after a time Jack put his hands into his lap, and looked up at Somers.
“You mustn’t think I get the wind up, you know,” he said, “if you ask me a question. You can ask me what you like, you know. And when I can tell you, I’ll tell you. I know you’d never come shoving your nose in like a rat from under the skirting board when nobody’s looking.”
“Even if I seem to,” said Somers, ironically.
“No, no, you don’t seem to. And when I can tell you, I’ll do so. I know I can trust you.”
Somers looked up wondering, and met the meditative dark eyes of the other man resting on his face.
“There’s some of us chaps,” said Jack, “who’ve been through the war and had a lick at Paris and London, you know, who can tell a man by the smell of him, so to speak. If we can’t see the colour of his aura, we can jolly well size up the quality of it. And that’s what we go by. Call it instinct or what you like. If I like a man, slap out, at the first sight, I’d trust him into hell, I would.”
“Fortunately you haven’t anything very risky to trust him with,” laughed Somers.
“I don’t know so much about that,” said Jack. “When a man feels he likes a chap, and trusts him, he’s risking all he need, even by so doing. Because none of us likes to be taken in, and to have our feelings thrown back in our faces, as you may say, do we?”
“We don’t,” said Somers grimly.
“No, we don’t. And you know what it means to have them thrown back in your face. And so do I. There’s a lot of the people here that I wouldn’t trust with a thank-you, I wouldn’t. But then there’s some that I would. And mind you, taking all for all, I’d rather trust an Aussie, I’d rather trust an Australian than an Englishman, I would, and a lot rather. Yet there’s some of the rottenest people in Sydney that you’d find even if you sifted hell over. Rotten—absolute yellow rotten. And many of them in public positions, too. Simply white-anting society, that’s what they’re doing. Talk about public affairs in Sydney, talk about undercurrents of business in Sydney: the wickedest crew on God’s earth, bar none. All the underhanded tricks of a Chink, a blooming yellow Chinaman, and all the barefaced fair talk of an Englishman. There you are. And yet, I’m telling you, I’d rather trust even a Sydney man, and he’s a special sort of wombat, than an Englishman.”
“So you’ve told me before: for my good, I suppose,” laughed Somers, not without irony.
“No, now don’t you go running away with any wrong ideas,” said Jack, suddenly reaching out his hand and laying it on Somers’ arm. “I’m not hinting at anything. If I was I’d ask you to kick me out of your house. I should deserve it. No, you’re an Englishman. You’re a European, perhaps I ought to say, for you’ve lived about all over that old continent, and you’ve studied it, and you’ve got tired of it. And you’ve come to Australia. Your instinct brought you here, however much you may rebel against rats and tin cans and a few other things like that. Your instinct brought you here—and brought you straight up against me. Now that I call fate.”
He looked at Somers with dark, burning questioning eyes.
“I suppose following one’s deepest instinct is one’s fate,” said Somers, rather flatly.
“There—you know what I mean, you see. Well then, instinct brings us together. I knew it the minute I set eyes on you when I saw you coming across from the Botanical Gardens, and you wanted a taxi. And then when I heard the address, 51 Murdoch Street, I said to myself, ‘That chap is coming into my life.’ And it is so. I’m a believer in fate, absolute.”
“Yes,” said Somers, non-committal.
“It’s fate that you left Europe and came to Australia, bit by bit, and unwilling to come, as you say yourself. It’s fate that brings you to Sydney, and makes me see you that dinner-hour coming from the Botanical Gardens. It’s fate that brings you to this house. And it’s fate that sets you and me here at this minute playing chess.”
“If you call it playing chess,” laughed Somers.
Jack looked down at the board.
“I’m blest if I know whose move it is,” he said. “But never mind. I say that fate meant you and Mrs. Somers to come here: her as much as you. I say fate meant me and you and Victoria and her to mean a lot to one another. And when I feel my fate, I absolutely give myself up to it. That’s what I say. Do you think I’m right?”
His hand, which held Somers’ arm lightly, now gripped the biceps of that arm hard, while he looked into the other man’s face.
“I should say so,” said Somers, rather uncomfortably.
Jack hardly heeded the words. He was watching the face.
“You’re a stranger here. You’re from the old country. You’re different from us. But you’re a man we want, and you’re a man we’ve got to keep. I know it. What? What do you say? I cant trust you, can’t I?”
“What with?” asked Somers.
“What with?” Jack hesitated. “Why everything!” he blurted.
