Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/172

 Teacher: Why did you hit him, Georgie?

Georgie: Please, miss, he called me a Pommy.

Aussie (with a discoloured eye): Well, you're one, ain'cher? Can I help it that ch'are one?

Pommy is supposed to be short for pomegranate. Pomegranate, pronounced invariably pommygranate, is a near enough rhyme to immigrant, in a naturally rhyming country. Furthermore, immigrants are known in their first months, before their blood "thins down," by their round and ruddy cheeks. So we are told. Hence again, pomegranate, and hence Pommy. Let etymologists be appeased: it is the authorised derivation.

Perhaps, said Somers to himself, I am just a Pommy and a fool. If my blood had thinned down, I shouldn't make all this fuss over sharing in with Kangaroo or being mates with Jack Callcott. If I am not a ruddy Pommy, I am a green one. Of course they take the thing as it comes to them, and they expect me to do the same. Yet there I am hopping and hissing like a fish in a frying-pan. Putting too much "soul" into it. Far too much. When your blood has thinned down, out here, there's nothing but the merest sediment of a soul left, and your wits and your feelings are clear of it. You take things as they come, as Jack says. Isn't that the sanest way to take them, instead of trying to drive them through the exact hole in the hedge that you've managed to poke your head through? Oh, you unlearn a lot as your blood thins down. But there's an awful lot to be unlearnt. And when you've unlearnt it, you never say so. In the first place, because it's dead against the sane old British tradition. And in the second place, because you don't really care about telling what you feel, once your blood has thinned down and is clear of soul.

"Thin, you Australian burgundy," said Somers to his own body, when he caught a glimpse of it unawares, reflected in the glass as he was going to bed. ""You're thin enough as a bottle, but the wine needs a lot of maturing. I've made a fool of myself latterly."

Yet he said to himself: "Do I want my blood to thin down like theirs?—that peculiar emptiness that is in them, because of the thinning that's gone out of them? Do I want this curious transparent blood of the antipodes, with