Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/152

 stiffen his back, and a kind of haughtiness flew into his soul.

"Different men, different ways, Mr Trewhella," he said.

William James did not answer, but smiled rather stubbornly. It seemed to Somers the man would be smiling that stubborn, taunting smile till the crack of doom.

"I told Mrs Somers what I think about it," said Jaz, with a very Cornish accent. "I doubt if she'll ever do much more believin' than I shall." And the taunt was forked this time.

"She says she believes entirely in Kangaroo."

"Does she now? Who did she tell it to?"

"Me."

Trewhella still stood with that faint grin on his face, short and stocky and erect like a little post left standing. Somers looked at him again, frowning, and turned abruptly down the bank. The smile left the face of the Cornishman, and he just looked obstinate, indifferent, and curiously alone, as if he stood there all alone in the world. He watched Somers emerge on the sands below, and go walking slowly among the sea-ragged flat shelves of the coast-bed rocks, his head dropping, looking in the pools, his hands in his pockets. And the obstinate light never changed in the eyes of the watcher, not even when he turned to the approaching manager.

Perhaps it was this meeting which made Somers want to see Kangaroo once more. Everything had suddenly become unreal to him. He went to Sydney and to Cooley's rooms. But during the first half hour, the revulsion from the First persisted. Somers disliked his appearance, and the kangaroo look made him feel devilish. And then the queer, slow manner of approach. Kangaroo was not really ready for his visitor, and he seemed dense, heavy, absent, clownish. It was that kangarooish clownishness that made a vicious kind of hate spring into Somers' face. He talked in a hard, cutting voice.

"Whom can you depend on, in this world," he was saying. "Look at these Australians—they're awfully nice, but they've got no inside to them. They're hollow. How are you going to built on such hollow stalks. They may well call them corn-stalks. They're marvellous and manly and independent and all that, outside. But inside,