What else? He didn’t know. He only knew he was never destined to be mate
or comrade or even friend with any man. Some other living relationship.
But what? He did not know. Perhaps the thing that the dark races know:
that one can still feel in India: the mystery of lordship. That which
white men have struggled so long against, and which is the clue to the
life of the Hindu. The mystery of lordship. The mystery of innate,
natural, sacred priority. The other mystic relationship between men,
which democracy and equality try to deny and obliterate. Not any
arbitrary caste or birth aristocracy. But the mystic recognition of
difference and innate priority, the joy of obedience and the sacred
responsibility of authority.
Before Somers went down to George Street to find Jack and to be taken by
him to luncheon with the Kangaroo, he had come to the decision, or to
the knowledge that mating or comradeship were contrary to his destiny.
He would never pledge himself to Jack, nor to this venture in which Jack
was concerned.
They arrived at Mr Cooley’s chambers punctually. It was a handsome
apartment with handsome jarrah furniture, dark and suave, and some very
beautiful rugs. Mr Cooley came at once: and he _was_ a kangaroo. His
face was long and lean and pendulous, with eyes set close together
behind his pince-nez: and his body was stout but firm. He was a man of
forty or so, hard to tell, swarthy, with short-cropped dark hair and a
smallish head carried rather forward on his large but sensitive, almost
shy body. He leaned forward in his walk, and seemed as if his hands
didn’t quite belong to him. But he shook hands with a firm grip. He was
really tall, but his way of dropping his head, and his sloping
shoulders, took away from his height. He seemed not much taller than
Somers, towards whom he seemed to lean the sensitive tip of his long
nose, hanging over him as he scrutinised him sharply through his
eyeglasses, and approaching him with the front of his stomach.
“Very glad to see you,” he said, in a voice half Australian, half
official.
The luncheon was almost impressive: a round table with a huge bunch of
violets in a queer old copper bowl, Queen Anne silver, a tablecloth with
heavy point edging, Venetian wine-glases, red and white wine in Venetian
wine-jugs, a Chinaman waiting at table, offering first a silver dish of
hors d’œuvres and a handsome crayfish with mayonnaise.
“Why,” said Somers, equivocally, “I might be anywhere.”
Kangaroo looked at him sharply. Somers noticed that when he sat down,
his thighs in his dark grey, striped trousers were very thick, making
his shoulders seem almost slender; but though his stomach was stout, it
was firm.
“Then I hope you feel at home,” said Kangaroo. “Because I am sure you
are at home anywhere.” And he helped himself to olives, putting one in
his queer, pursed, thick-lipped mouth.
“For which reason I’m never at home, presumably.”
“That may easily be the case. Will you take red or white wine?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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