troubled eyes into the dark, dilated, glowing eyes of the other man.
“But I don’t know what it means,” he stammered. “Everything! It means so much, that it means nothing.”
Jack nodded his head slowly.
“Oh yes it does,” he reiterated. “Oh yes it does.”
“Besides,” said Somers, “why should you trust me with anything, let alone everything. You’ve no occasion to trust me at all—except—except as one neighbour trusts another, in common honour.”
“Common honour!” Jack just caught up the words, not heeding the sense. “It’s more than common honour. It’s most uncommon honour. But look here,” he seemed to rouse himself. “Supposing I came to you, to ask you things, and tell you things, you’d answer me man to man, wouldn’t you?—with common honour? You’d treat everything I say with common honour, as between man and man?”
“Why, yes, I hope so.”
“I know you would. But for the sake of saying it, say it. I can trust you, can’t I? Tell me now, can I trust you?”
Somers watched him. Was it any good making reservations and qualifications? The man was in earnest. And according to standards of commonplace honour, the so-called honour of man to man, Somers felt that he would trust Callcott, and that Callcott might trust him. So he said simply:
“Yes.”
A light leaped into Jack’s eyes.
“That means you trust me, of course?” he said.
“Yes,” replied Somers.
“Done!” said Jack, rising to his feet and upsetting the chessmen. Somers also pushed his chair, and rose to his feet, thinking they were going across to the next house. But Jack came to him and flung an arm round his shoulder and pressed him close, trembling slightly, and saying nothing. Then he let go, and caught Somers by the hand.
“This is fate,” he said, “and we’ll follow it up.” He seemed to cling to the other man’s hand. And on his face was a strange light of purpose and of passion, a look at once exalted and dangerous.
“I’ll soon bring the others to see it,” he said.
“But you know I don’t understand,” said Somers, withdrawing his hand and taking off his spectacles.
“I know,” said Jack. “But I’ll let you know everything in a day or two. Perhaps you wouldn’t mind if William James—if Jaz came here one evening—or you wouldn’t mind having a talk with him over in my shack.”
“I don’t mind talking to anybody,” said the bewildered Somers.
“Right you are.”
They still sat for some time by the fire, silent; Jack was pondering. Then he looked up at Somers.
“You and me,” he said in a quiet voice, “in a way we’re mates and in a way we’re not. In a way—it’s different.”
With which cryptic remark he left it. And in a few minutes the women came running in with the sweets, to see if the men didn’t want a macaroon.
On Sunday morning Jack asked Somers to walk with him across to the Trewhellas. That is, they walked to one of the ferry stations, and took the ferry steamer to Mosman’s Bay. Jack was a late riser on Sunday morning. The Somers, who were ordinary half-past seven people, rarely saw any signs of life in Wyewurk before half-past ten on the Sabbath—then it was Jack in trousers and shirt, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, having a look at his dahlias while Vicky prepared breakfast.
So the two men did not get a start till eleven o’clock. Jack rolled along easily beside the smaller, quieter Somers. They were an odd couple, ill-assorted. In a colonial way, Jack was handsome, well-built, with strong, heavy limbs. He filled out his expensively tailored suit and looked a man who might be worth anything from five hundred to five thousand a year. The only lean, delicate part about him was his face. See him from behind, his broad shoulders and loose erect carriage and brown nape of the neck, and you expected a good square face to match. He turned, and his long lean, rather pallid face really didn’t seem to belong to his strongly animal body. For the face wasn’t animal at all, except perhaps in a certain slow, dark, lingering look of the eyes, which reminded one of some animal or other, some patient, enduring animal with an indomitable but naturally passive courage.
Somers, in a light suit of thin cloth, made by an Italian tailor, and an Italian hat, just looked a foreign sort of little bloke—but a gentleman. The chief difference was that he looked sensitive all over, his body, even its clothing, and his feet, even his brown shoes, all equally sensitive with his face. Whereas Jack seemed strong and insensitive in the body, only his face vulnerable. His feet might have been made of leather all the way through, tramping with an insentient tread. Whereas Somers put down his feet delicately, as if they had a life of their own, mindful of each step of contact with the earth. Jack strode along: Somers seemed to hover along. There was decision in both of them, but oh, of such different quality. And each had a certain admiration of the other, and a very definite tolerance. Jack just barely tolerated the quiet finesse of Somers, and Somers tolerated with difficulty Jack’s facetious familiarity and heartiness.
Callcott met quite a number of people he knew, and greeted them all heartily. “Hello Bill, old man, how’s things?” “New boots pinchin’ yet, Ant’ny? Hoppy sort of look about you this morning. Right ’o! So long, Ant’ny!” “Different girl again, boy! go on, Sydney’s full of yer sisters. All right, good-bye, old chap.” The same breezy intimacy with all of them, and the moment they had passed by, they didn’t exist for him any more than the gull that had curved across in the air. They seemed to appear like phantoms, and disappear in the same instant, like phantoms. Like so many Flying Dutchmen the Australian’s acquaintances seemed to steer slap through his consciousness, and were gone on the wind. What was the consecutive thread in the man’s feelings? Not his feeling for any particular human beings, that was evident. His friends, even his loves, were just a series of disconnected, isolated moments in his life. Somers always came again upon this gap in the other man’s continuity. He felt that if he knew Jack for twenty years, and then went away, Jack would say: “Friend o’ mine, Englishman, rum sort of bloke, but not a bad sort. Dunno where he’s hanging out just now. Somewhere on the surface of the old humming-top, I suppose.”
The only consecutive thing was that facetious attitude, which was the attitude of taking things as they come, perfected. A sort of ironical stoicism. Yet the man had a sort of passion, and a passionate identity. But not what Somers called human. And threaded on this ironical stoicism.
They found Trewhella dressed and expecting them. Trewhella was a coal and wood merchant, on the north side. He lived quite near the wharf, had his sheds at the side of the house, and in the front a bit of garden running down to the practically tideless bay of the harbour. Across the bit of blue water were many red houses, and new, wide streets of single cottages, seaside-like, disappearing rather forlorn over the brow of the low hill.
William James, or Jas, Jaz, as Jack called him, was as quiet as ever. The three men sat on a bench just above the brown rocks of the water’s edge, in the lovely sunshine, and watched the big ferry steamer slip in and discharge its stream of summer-dressed passengers, and embark another stream: watched the shipping of the middle harbour away to the right, and the boats loitering on the little bay in front. A motor-boat was sweeping at a terrific speed, like some broom
