Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/153

 they are not. When they're quite alone, they don't exist."

"Yet many of them have been alone a long time, in the bush," said Kangaroo, watching his visitor with slow, dumb, unchanging eyes.

"Alone, what sort of alone. Physically alone. And they've just gone hollow. They're never alone in spirit: quite, quite alone in spirit. And the people who have are the only people you can depend on."

"Where shall I find them?"

"Not here. It seems to me, least of all here. The Colonies make for outwardness. Everything is outward—like hollow stalks of corn. The life makes this inevitable: all that struggle with bush and water and what-not, all the mad struggle with the material necessities and conveniences—the inside soul just withers and goes into the outside, and they're all just lusty robust hollow stalks of people."

"The corn-stalks bear the corn. I find them generous to recklessness—the greatest quality. The old world is cautious and forever bargaining about its soul. Here they don't bother to bargain."

"They've no soul to bargain about. But they're even more full of conceit. What do you expect to do with such people. Build a straw castle?"

"You see I believe in them—perhaps I know them a little better than you do."

"Perhaps you do. It'll be cornstalk castle, for all that. What do you expect to build on?"

"They're generous—generous to recklessness," shouted Kangaroo. "And I love them. I love them. Don't you come here carping to me about them. They are my children, I love them. If I'm not to believe in their generosity, am I to believe in your cautious, old-world carping, do you think. I won't!" he shouted fiercely. "I won't. Do you hear that! ? And he sat hulked in his chair glowering like some queer dark god at bay. Somers paused, and his heart failed.;

"Then make me believe in them and their generosity," he said dryly. "They're nice. But they haven't got the last everlasting central bit of soul, solitary soul, that makes a man himself. The central bit of himself. They all merge