III
They went down to the cold collation. There Jack found other arrivals. Mary had come in via York with Gran’s spinster daughters. Also the Greenlow girls from away back, and they made a great fuss of him. The doctor too turned up. He had been missing all day, but now he strolled back and forth, chatting politely first to one and then another, but vague and washed-out to a degree.
Jack’s anger coiled to rest at the supper, for Monica was very attentive to him. She sat next to him, found him the best pieces, and shared her glass with him, in her quick, dangerous, generous fashion, looking up at him with strange wide looks of offering, so that he felt very manly and very shy at the same time. But very glad to be near her. He felt that it was his spell that was upon her, after all, and though he didn’t really like flirting with her there in the public supper room, he loved her hand finding his under the cover of her sash, and her fingers twining into his as if she were entering into his body. Safely under the cover of her silk sash. He would have liked to hold her again, close, close; her agile, live body, quick as a cat’s. She was mysterious to him as some cat-goddess, and she excited him in a queer electric fashion.
But soon she was gone again, elusive as a cat. And of course she was in great request. So Jack found himself talking to the little elderly Mary, with her dark animal’s museau. Mary was like another kind of cat: not the panther sort, but the quiet, dark, knowing sort. She was comfortable to talk to, also soft and stimulating.
Jack and Mary sat on the edge of the barn, in the hot night, looking at the trees against the strange, ragged southern sky, hearing the frogs occasionally, and fighting the mosquitoes. Mrs. Ellis also sat on the ledge not far off. And presently Jack and Mary were joined by the doctor. Then came Grace and Alec Rice, sitting a little further down, and talking in low tones. The night seemed full of low, half-mysterious talking, in a starry darkness that seemed pregnant with the scent and presence of the black people. Jack often wondered why, in the night, the country still seemed to belong to the black people, with their strange, big, liquid eyes.
Where was Easu? Was he talking to Monica? Or to the black half-caste Lily? It might as well be the one as the other. The odd way he had placed his hand on Lily’s black fuzzy head, as if he were master, and she a sort of concubine. She would give him all the submission he wanted.
But then, why Monica? Monica in her white, full-skirted frock with its moulded bodice, her slender, golden-white arms and throat! Why Monica in the same class with the half-caste Lily?
Anger against Easu was sharpening Jack’s wits, and curiously detaching him from his surroundings. He listened to the Australian voices and the Australian accent around him. The careless, slovenly speech in the uncontrolled, slack, caressive voices. At first he had thought the accent awful. And it was awful. But gradually, as he got into the rhythm of the people, he began even to sympathise with “Kytie” instead of “Katie.” There was an abandon in it all—an abandon of restrictions and confining control. Why have control? Why have authority? Why not let everybody do as they liked? Why not?
That was what Australia was for, a careless freedom. An easy, unrestricted freedom. At least out in the bush. Every man to do as he liked. Easu to run round with Monica, or with the black Lily, or to kick Jack’s shins in the dance.
Yes, even this. But Jack had scored it up. He was going to have his own back on Easu. He thought of Easu with his hand on the black girl’s fuzzy head. That would be just like Easu. And afterwards to want Monica. And Monica wouldn’t really mind about the black girl. Since Easu was Easu.
Sitting there on the barn ledge, Jack in a vague way understood it all. And in a vague way tolerated it all. But with a dim yet fecund germ of revenge in his heart. He was not morally shocked. But he was going to be revenged. He did not mind Easu’s running with a black girl, and afterwards Monica. Morally he did not mind it. But physically—perhaps pride of race—he minded. Physically he could never go so far as to lay his hand on the darky’s fuzzy head. His pride of blood was too intense.
He had no objection at all to Lily, until it came to actual physical contact. And then his blood recoiled with old haughtiness and pride of race. It was bad enough to have to come into contact with a woman of his own race: to have to give himself away even so far. The other was impossible.
And yet he wanted Monica. But he knew she was fooling round with Easu. So deep in his soul formed the motive of revenge.
There are times when a flood of realisation and purpose sweeps through a man. This was one of Jack’s times. He was not definitely conscious of what he realised and of what he purposed. Yet, there it was, resolved in him.
He was trying not to hear Dr. Rackett’s voice talking to Mary. Even Dr. Rackett was losing his Oxford drawl, and taking on some of the Australian ding-dong. But Rackett, like Jack, was absolutely fixed in his pride of race, no matter what extraneous vice he might have. Jack had a vague idea it was opium. Some chemical stuff.
“... free run of old George’s books? I should say it was a doubtful privilege for a young lady. But you hardly seem to belong to West Australia. I think England is really your place. Do you actually want to belong, may I ask?”
“To Western Australia? To the country, yes, very much. I love the land, the country life, Dr. Rackett. I don’t care for the social life of a town like Perth. But I should like to live all my life on a farm—in the bush.”
“Would you now!” said Rackett. “I wonder where you get that idea from. You are the granddaughter of an earl.”
“Oh, my grandfather is farther away from me than the moon. You would never know how far!” laughed Mary. “No, I am colonial born and bred. Though of course there is a fascination about the English. But I hardly knew Papa. He was a tenth child, so there wasn’t much of the earldom left to him. And then he was a busy A. D. C. to the Governor-General. And he married quite late in life. And then Mother died when I was little, and I got passed on to Aunt Matilda. Mother was Australian born. I don’t think there is much English in me.”
Mary said it in a queer complacent way, as if there were some peculiar, subtle antagonism between England and the colonial, and she was ranged on the colonial side. As if she were a subtle enemy of the father, the English father in her.
“Queer! Queer thing to me!” said Rackett, as if he half felt the antagonism. For he would never be colonial, not if he lived another hundred years in Australia. “I suppose,” he added, pointing his pipe stem upwards, “it comes from those unnatural stars up there. I always feel they are doing something to me.”
“I don’t think it’s the stars,” laughed Mary. “I am just Australian, in the biggest part of me, that’s all.”
Jack could feel in the statement some of the antagonism that burned in his own heart, against his own country, his own father, his own empty fate at home.
“If I’d been born in this country, I’d stick to it,” he broke in.
“But since you weren’t born in it, what will you do, Grant?” asked the doctor ironically.
“Stick to myself,” said Jack stubbornly, rather sulkily.
“You won’t stick to Old England then?” asked Rackett.
“Seems I’m a misfit in Old England,” said Jack. “And I’m not going to squeeze my feet into tight boots.”
Rackett laughed.
“Rather go barefoot like Lennie?” he laughed.
Jack relapsed into silence, and turned a deaf ear, looking into the alien night of the southern hemisphere. And having turned a deaf ear to Rackett and Mary, he heard, as if by divination, the low voice of Alec Rice proposing in real earnest to Grace: proposing in a low, urgent voice that sounded like a conspiracy.
He rose to go away. But Mary laid a detaining hand on his arm, as if she wished to include him in the conversation, and did not wish to be left alone with Dr. Rackett.
“Don’t you sympathise with me, Jack, for wishing I had been a boy, to make my own way in the world, and have my own friends, and size things up for myself?”
“Seems to me you do size things up for yourself,” said Jack rather crossly. “A great deal more than most men do.”
“Yes, but I can’t do things as I could if I were a man.”
“What can a man do, then, more than a woman—that’s worth doing?” asked Rackett.
“He can see the world, and love as he wishes to love, and work.”
“No man can love as he wishes to love,” said Rackett. “He’s nearly always stumped, in the love game.”
“But he can choose!” persisted Mary.
And Jack with his other ear was hearing Alec Rice’s low voice persisting.
“Go on, Grace, you’re not too young. You’re just right. You’re just the ticket now. Go on, let’s be engaged and tell your Dad and fix it up. We’re meant for one another, you know we are. Don’t you think we’re meant for one another?”
“I never thought about it that way, truly.”
“But don’t you think so now? Yes, you do.”
Silence—the sort that gives consent. And the silence of a young, spontaneous embrace.
Jack was on tenterhooks. He wanted to be gone. But Mary was persisting, in her obstinate voice—he wished she’d shut up too.
“I wanted to be a sailor at ten, and an explorer at twelve. At nineteen I wanted to become a painter of wonderful pictures.” Jack wished she wouldn’t say all this. “And then I had’ a streak of humility, and wanted to be a gardener. Yet——” she laughed, “not a sort of gardener such as Aunt Matilda hires. I wanted to grow things and see them come up out of the earth. And see baby chicks hatched, and calves and lambs born.”
She had lifted her hand from Jack’s sleeve, to his relief.
“And marry a farmer like Tom,” he said roughly. Mary received this with dead silence.
“And drudge your soul away like Mrs. Ellis,” said Rackett. “Worn out before your time, between babies and heavy housework. Groping on the earth all your life, grinding yourself into ugliness at work which some animal of a servant-lass would do with half the effort. Don’t you think of it, Miss Mary. Let the servant-lasses marry the farmers. You’ve got too much in you. Don’t go and have what you’ve got in you trampled out of you by marrying some cocky farmer. Tom’s as good as gold, but he wants a brawny lass of his own sort for a wife. You be careful, Miss Mary. Women can find themselves in ugly harness, out here in these god-forsaken colonies. Worse harness than any you’ve ever kicked against.”
Monica seemed to have scented the tense atmosphere under the barn, for she appeared like a young witch, in a whirlwind.
“Hullo, Mary! Hullo, Dr. Rackett! It’s just on midnight.” And she flitted over to Grace. “Just on midnight, Grace and Alec. Are you coming? You seem as if you were fixed here.”
“We’re not fixed on the spot, but we’re fixed up all right, otherwise,” said Alec, in a slight tone of resentment, as he rose from Grace’s side.
“Oh, have you and Grace fixed it up!” exclaimed Monica, with a false vagueness and innocence. “I’m awfully glad. I’m awfully glad, Grace.”
“I am,” said Grace, with a faint touch of resentment, and she rose and took Alec’s arm.
They were already like a married couple armed against that witch. Had she been flirting with Alec, and then pushed him over on to Grace? Jack sensed it with the sixth sense which divines these matters.
Monica appeared at his side.
“It’s just twelve. Come and hold my hand in the ring. Mary can hold your other hand. Come on! Come on, Alec, as well. I don’t want any strangers next to me to-night.”
Jack smiled sardonically to himself as she impulsively caught hold of his hand. Monica was “a circumstance over which we have no control,” Lennie said. Jack felt that he had a certain control.
They all took hands as she directed, and moved into the barn to link up with the rest of the chain. There in the soft light of the big chamber, Easu suddenly appeared, without collar or cravat, his hair ruffled, his white suit considerably creased. But he lurched up in his usual aggressive way, with his assertive good humour, demanding to break in between Jack and Monica. Jack held on, and Monica said:
“You mustn’t break in, you know it makes enemies.”
“Does it!” grinned Easu. And with sardonic good humour he lurched away to an unjoined part of the ring. He carried about with him a sense of hostile power. But Jack was learning to keep within himself another sort of power, small and concentrated and fixed like a stone, the sort of power that ultimately would break through the bulk of Easu’s domineering.
The ring complete at last, they all began to sing: “Cheer, Boys, Cheer!” and “God Bless the Prince of Wales, John Brown’s Body,” and “Britons, Never, Never, Never.”
Then Easu bawled: “Midnight!” There was a moment’s frightened pause. Joe Low blasted on the cornet, his toe beating time madly all the while. Fiddles, whistles, concertinas, Jew’s harps raggedly began to try out the tune. The clasped hands began to rock, and taking Easu’s shouting lead, they all began to sing, in the ring:
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
An’ never brought to min’?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?
“For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet
For days of auld lang syne.”
They all sang heartily and with feeling. There was a queer Scottish tang in the colony, that made the Scottish emotion dominant. Jack disliked it. There was no auld acquaintance, or auld lang syne, at least for him. And he didn’t care for these particular cups of kindness, in one ring with Easu, black Lily, Dr. Rackett and Monica, and all. He didn’t like the chain of emotion and supposed pathetic clanship. It was worse here even than on shipboard.
Why start the New Year like this? As a matter of fact he wanted to forget most of his own Auld Acquaintance, and start something a little different. And any rate, the emotion was spurious, the chain was artificial, the flow was false.
Monica seemed to take a wicked pleasure in it, and sang more emotionally than anybody, in a sweet but smallish voice. And poor little Mary, with her half-audible murmur, had her eyes full of tears and seemed so moved.
Auld lang syne!
Old Long Since.
Why not put it in plain English?