“But do the women like him?”
“Rose does. I believe he’d make any woman like him, if he laid himself out to do it. Got that quiet way with him, you know, and a sly sort of touch-the-harp-gently, that’s what they like on the quiet. But he’s the sort of chap I don’t exactly fancy mixing my broth with, and drinking out of the same can with.”
Somers laughed at the avowal of antipathy between the two men.
They were not home till two o’clock. Somers found Harriet looking rather plaintive.
“You’ve been a long time,” she said. “What did you do?”
“Just talked.”
“What about?”
“Politics.”
“And did you like them?”
“Yes, quite well.”
“And have you promised to see them again to-day?”
“Who?”
“Why, any of them — the Callcotts.”
“No.”
“Oh. They’re becoming rather an institution.”
“You like them too?”
“Yes, they’re all right. But I don’t want to spend my life with them. After all, that sort of people isn’t exactly my sort — and I thought you used to pretend it wasn’t yours.”
“It isn’t. But then no sort of people is my sort.”
“Yes, it is. Any sort of people, so long as they make a fuss of you.”
“Surely they make an even greater fuss of you.”
“Do they! It’s you they want, not me. And you go as usual, like a lamb to the slaughter.”
“Baa!” he said.
“Yes, baa! You should hear yourself bleat.”
“I’ll listen,” he said.
But Harriet was becoming discontented. They had been in their house only six weeks: and she had had enough of it. Yet it was paid for for three months: at four guineas a week. And they were pretty short of money, and would be for the rest of the year. He had already overdrawn.
Yet she began to suggest going away: away from Sydney. She felt humiliated in that beastly little Murdoch Street.
“What did I tell you?” he retorted. “The very look of it humiliated me. Yet you wanted it, and you said you liked it.”
“I did like it — for the fun of it. But now there’s all this intimacy and neighbouring. I just can’t stand it. I just can’t.”
“But you began it.”
“No, I didn’t; you began it. And your beastly sweetness and gentleness with such people. I wish you kept a bit of it for me.”
He went away in silence, knowing the uselessness of argument. And to tell the truth he was feeling also a revulsion from all this neighbouring, as Harriet called it, and all this talk. It was usually the same. He started by holding himself aloof then gradually he let himself get mixed in, and then he had revulsions. And to-day was one of his revulsions. Coming home from Mosman’s Bay, he had felt himself dwindle to a cipher in Jack’s consciousness. Then, last evening, there had been all this fervour and protestation. And this morning all the cross-examination by Trewhella. And he, Somers, had plainly said all he thought. And now, as he walked home with Jack, Jack had no more use for him than for the stump of cigar which he chewed between his lips merely because he forgot to spit it away. Which state of affairs did not go at all well with OUR friend’s sense of self-importance.
Therefore, when he got home, his eyes opened once more to the delicacy of Harriet’s real beauty, which he knew as none else knew it, after twelve years of marriage. And once more he realized her gay, undying courage, her wonderful fresh zest in front of life. And all these other little people seemed so common in comparison, so common. He stood still with astonishment, wondering how he could have come to betray the essential reality of his life and Harriet’s to the common use of these other people with their watchful, vulgar wills. That scene of last evening: what right had a fellow like Callcott to be saying these things to him? What right had he to put his arm round his, Richard’s shoulder, and give him a tight hug? Somers winced to think of it. And now Callcott had gone off with his Victoria in Sunday clothes to some other outing. Anything was as good as anything else: why not!
A gulf there was between them, really, between the Somers and the Callcotts. And yet the easy way Callcott flung a flimsy rope of intimacy across the gulf, and was embracing the pair of his neighbours in mid-air, as it were, without a grain of common foothold. And Somers let himself be embraced. So he sat pale and silent and mortified in the kitchen that evening thinking of it all, and wishing himself far away, in Europe.
“Oh, how I detest this treacly democratic Australia,” he said. “It swamps one with a sort of common emotion like treacle, and before one knows where one is, one is caught like a fly on a flypaper, in one mess with all the other buzzers. How I hate it! I want to go away.”
“It isn’t Australia,” said Harriet. “Australia’s lonely. It’s just the people. And it isn’t even the people — if you would only keep your proper distance, and not make yourself cheap to them and get into messes.”
“No, it’s the country. It’s in the air. I want to leave it.”
But he was not very emphatic. Harriet wanted to go down to the South Coast, of which she had heard from Victoria.
“Think,” she said, “it must be lovely there — with the mountain behind, and steep hills, and blackberries, and lovely little bays of sand.”
“There’ll be no blackberries. It’s end of June — which is their mid-winter.”
“But there’ll be the other things. Let’s do that, and never mind the beastly money for this pokey Torestin.”
“They’ve asked us to go with them to Mullumbimby in a fortnight. Shall we wait till then and look?”
Harriet sat in silence for some moments.
“We might,” she said reluctantly. She didn’t want to wait. But what Victoria had told her of Mullumbimby, the township on the South Coast, so appealed to her that she decided to abide by her opportunity.
And then curiously enough, for the next week the neighbours hardly saw one another. It was as if the same wave of revulsion had passed over both sides of the fence. They had fleeting glimpses of Victoria as she went about the house. And when he could, Jack put in an hour at his garden in the evening, tidying it up finally for the winter. But the weather was bad, it rained a good deal; there were fogs in the morning, and foghorns on the harbour; and the Somers kept their doors continually blank and shut.
Somers went round to the shipping agents and found out about boats to San Francisco, and talked of sailing in July, and of stopping at Tahiti or at Fiji on the way, and of cabling for money for the fares. He figured it all out. And Harriet mildly agreed. Her revulsion from Australia had passed quicker than his, now that she saw herself escaping from town and from neighbours to the quiet of a house by the sea, alone with him. Still she let him talk. Verbal agreement and silent opposition is perhaps the best weapon on such occasions.
Harriet would look at him sometimes wistfully, as he sat with his brow clouded. She had a real instinctive mistrust of other people — all other people. In her heart of hearts she said she wanted to live alone with Somers, and know nobody, all the rest of her life. In Australia, where one can be lonely, and where the land almost calls to one to be lonely — and then drives one back again on one’s fellow-men in a kind of frenzy. Harriet would be quite happy, by the sea, with a house and a little garden and as much space to herself as