“But you have your _own_ idea of power, haven’t you?” he said, getting
up suddenly, with quick power in his bulk, and gripping the other man’s
shoulder.
“I thought I had,” said Somers.
“Oh, you have, you have.” There was a calm, easy tone in the voice,
slightly fat, very agreeable. Somers thrilled to it as he had never
thrilled.
“Why, the man is like a god, I love him,” he said to his astonished
self. And Kangaroo was hanging forward his face and smiling heavily and
ambiguously to himself, knowing that Somers was with him.
“‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night’”
he quoted in a queer, sonorous voice, like a priest. “The lion of your
might would be a tiger, wouldn’t it. The tiger and the unicorn were
fighting for the crown. How about me for a unicorn?--if I tied a bayonet
on my nose?” He rubbed his nose with a heavy playfulness.
“Is the tiger your principle of evil?”
“The tiger? Oh dear, no. The jackal, the hyæna, and dear, deadly
humanity. No, no. The tiger stands on one side the shield, and the
unicorn on the other, and they don’t fight for the crown at all. They
keep it up between them. The pillars of the world! The tiger and the
kangaroo!” he boomed this out in a mock heroic voice, strutting with
heavy playfulness. Then he laughed, looking winsomely at Somers. Heaven,
what a beauty he had!
“Tiger, tiger, burning bright,” he resumed, sing-song, abstracted. “I
knew you’d come. Even since I read your first book of poems--how many
years is it ago?--ten?--eleven? I knew you’d come.
‘Your hands are five-branded flames--
_Noli me tangere_.’
Of course you had to come.”
“Well, here I am, anyhow,” said Somers.
“You are. You _are_!” shouted the other, and Somers was quite scared.
Then Kangaroo laughed again. “Get up,” he said. “Stand up and let me
look at you.”
The two men stood facing one another: Kangaroo large, with his full
stomach and his face hulking down, and his queer, glaring eyes; Somers
slight and aloof-looking. Cooley eyed him up and down.
“A little bit of a fellow--too delicate for rough me,” he said, then
started quoting again:
“‘Your hands are five-branded flames--
_Noli me tangere_.’
I’ve got fat and bulky on all the poetry I never wrote. How do you do,
Mr Somers? How do you like Australia, and its national animal, the
kangaroo?” Again he smiled with the sudden glow of warmth in his dark
eyes, startling and wonderful.
“Australia is a weird country, and it’s national animal is beyond me,”
Somers said, smiling rather palely.
“Oh no, it isn’t. You’ll be patting it on the back as soon as you’ve
taken your hands out of your pockets.”
He stood silent a long while, with feet apart, looking abstractedly at
Somers through his _pince nez_.
“Ah, well,” he sighed at last. “We shall see. We shall see. But I’m very
glad you came. You understand what I mean, I know, when I say we are
birds of the same feather. Aren’t we?”
“In some ways I think we are.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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