Harriet.
William James sat there with his quiet slumberous-seeming body, watching her: watching the quick radiance of her fair face, and the charm of her bearing. There was something quick and sure and, as it were, beyond the ordinary clay, about her, that exercised a spell over him. She was his real Cornish idea of a lady: simple, living among people as if one of themselves, and yet not one of themselves: a sort of magic about her. He could almost see a glow in the air around her. And he could see that for her he was just a nice fellow who lived in another world and on another plane than herself, and that he could never come up or she come down. She was the queen that slumbers somewhere in every Cornish imagination, the queen ungrudged. And perhaps, in the true Celtic imagination slumbers the glamorous king as well. The Celt needs the mystic glow of real kingliness. Hence his loneliness in the democratic world of industry, and his social perversity.
“I don’t suppose Rose could ever learn to do this with a room, could she now?” he asked, making a slight gesture with his hand. He sat with his clear, queer, light grey eyes fixed on Harriet’s face.
“I think so,” cried Harriet; then she met the watchful eyes. “In her own way she could. Every woman has her own way, you know.”
“Yes, I do know,” he answered.
“And you see,” said Harriet, “we’re more or less lazy people who have no regular work in the world. If we had, perhaps we should live in a different way.”
William James shook his head.
“It’s what’s bred into you,” he said, “that comes out. Now if I was a really rich man, I think I could learn to carry it off with the best of them, out here. But when it comes to being the real thing, why, I know it would be beyond me, so there you are.”
“But can one be sure?” she cried.
“I think I can. I can see the difference between common and uncommon. I can do more than that. I can see the difference between gentlemen who haven’t got the gift, and those that have. Take Lord Washburn, for example. He’s a gentleman all right — he comes of an old family, they tell me. But I doubt very much if he’s any better than I am.”
“Why should he be?” cried Harriet.
“What I mean is,” said William James, “he hasn’t got the gift, you know.”
“The gift of what?” said Harriet, puzzled.
“How shall I put it? The gift that you’ve got, now: and that Mr. Somers has as well: and that people out here don’t have.”
“But that may only be manner,” said Harriet.
“No, it’s more than manner. It’s the gift of being superior, there now: better than most folks. You understand me, I don’t mean swank and money. That’ll never give it you. Neither is it THINKING yourself superior. The people that are superior don’t think it, and don’t even seem to feel it, in a way. And yet in a way they know it. But there aren’t many of them out here. And what there are go away. This place is meant for all one dead level sort of people.”
He spoke with curious sarcasm.
“But,” said Harriet, “you are Australian yourself now, aren’t you? Or don’t you feel it?”
“Oh yes, I suppose I feel it,” he said shifting uneasily on his seat. “I AM Australian. And I’m Australian partly because I know that in Australia there WON’T be anybody any better than me. There now.”
“But,” laughed Harriet, “aren’t you glad then?”
“Glad?” he said. “It’s not a matter for gladness. It’s a fact. But I’m not one of the fools who think there’s nobody any better than me in the world. I know there are.”
“How queer to hear you say so!”
“But this isn’t the place for them. Here in Australia we don’t want them. We want the new-fashioned sort of people who are all dead-level as good as one another. You’re going to Mullumbimby this week-end with Jack and Victoria, aren’t you?”
“Yes. And I thought if we liked it we might stay down there for a while — by the sea — away from the town.”
“You please yourselves, of course. Perhaps better there than here. But — it’s no business of mine, you know that”— he shrugged his shoulders. “But there’s something comes over me when I see Mr. Somers thinking he can live out here, and work with the Australians. I think he’s wrong — I really do. They’ll drag him down to their level, and make what use they can of him — and — well, in my opinion you’d both be sorry for it.”
“How strange that you should say so, you who are one of them.”
“I am one of them, and I’m not. I’m not one of anybody. But I haven’t got only just the two eyes in my head that can tell the kettle from the teapot. I’ve got another set of eyes inside me somewhere that can tell real differences, when there are any. And that’s what these people don’t seem to have at all. They’ve only got the outside eyes.”
Harriet looked at him in wonder. And he looked at her — at her queer, rather large, but thin-skinned, soft hands.
“You need a thick skin to live out here,” he said.
But still she sat with her hands folded, lost in meditation.
“But Lovat wants so much to do something in the world, with other men,” she said at last. “It’s not MY urging, I assure you.”
“He’s making a mistake. He’s making a mistake to come out here, tell him from me. They’ll take him at their own level, not at his.”
“But perhaps he wants to be taken at their level,” said Harriet, rather bitterly, almost loving the short, thick man opposite for his quiet, Cornish voice and his uncanny grey eyes, and his warning.
“If he does he makes the mistake of his life, tell him from me.” And William James rose to his feet. “You’ll excuse me for stopping talking like this, over things that’s no business of mine,” he added.
“It’s awfully good of you,” said Harriet.
“Well, it’s not often I interfere with people’s doings. But there was just something about you and Mr. Somers —.”
“Awfully good of you.”
He had taken his little black felt hat. He had an almost Italian or Spanish look about him — from one of the big towns, Barcelona or even Palermo.
“I suppose I’ll have to be getting along,” he said.
She held out her hand to him to bid him good-bye. But he shook hands in a loose, slack way, and was gone, leaving Harriet uneasy as if she had received warning of a hidden danger.
She hastened to show Somers the persimmons when he came home, and to tell of her visitor.
“And he’s queer, Lovat, he’s awfully queer — nice too. He told me we were superior people, and that we made a mistake coming here, because they’d bring us down to their level.”
“Not if we don’t let them.”
“He says we can’t help it.”
“Why did he come to tell you that, I wonder.”
They were going down to Mullumbimby in two days’ time — and they had hardly seen anything of Jack and Victoria since the Sunday at Mosman’s Bay. But Victoria called across the fence, rather hesitatingly:
“You’re going with us on Saturday, aren’t you, Mrs. Somers?”
“Oh yes, we’re looking forward to it immensely — if it really suits you.”
“I’m so glad. I thought perhaps you didn’t want to go.”
That same evening Jack and Victoria came across for a few minutes.