For this reason he had come to Australia, away from the welter of vicious tameness. For tame dogs are far more vicious than wild ones. Only they can be brought to heel.
In Australia, a new sort of fight. A fight with tame dogs that were playing wild. Easu was a tame dog, playing the wolf in a mongrel, back-biting way. Tame dogs escaped and became licentious. That was Australia. He knew that.
But they were not all quite tame. Tom, the safe Tom, had salt of wild savour still in his blood. And Lennie had his wild streak. So had Monica. So, somewhere had the à terre Mary. Some odd freakish wildness of the splendid, powerful, wild old English blood.
Jack had escaped the tamers: they couldn't touch him now. He had escaped the insidious tameness, the slight degeneracy, of Wandoo. He had learned the tricks of the escaped tame dogs who played at licentiousness. And he had mastered Monica, who had wanted to be a domestic bitch playing wild. He had captured her wildness, to mate his own wildness.
It was no good playing wild. If he had any real wildness in him, it was dark, and wary, and collected, self-responsible, and of unbreakable steadfastness: like the wildness of a wolf or a fox, that knows it will die if it is caught.
If you had a tang of the old wildness in you, you ran with the most intense wariness, knowing that the good tame dogs are really turning into licentious, vicious tame dogs. The vicious tame dogs, pretending to be wild, hate the real clean wildness of an unbroken thing much more than do the respectable tame people.
No, if you refuse to be tamed, you have to be most wary, most subtle, on your guard all the time. You can't afford to be licentious. If you are, you will die in the trap. For the world is a great trap set wide for the unwary.
Jack had learned all these things. He refused to be tamed. He knew that the dark kingdom of death ahead had no room for tame dogs. They merely were put into the earth as carrion. Only the wild, untamed souls walked on after death over the border into the porch of death, to be lords of death and masters of the next living. This he knew. The tame dogs were put into the earth as carrion, like Easu and Percy's poor little baby, and Jacob Ellis. He often wondered if that courageous old witch-cat of a Gran had slipped into the halls of death, to be one of the ladies of the dark. The lords of death, and the ladies of the dark! He would take his own Monica over the border when she died. She would sit unbroken, a quiet, fearless bride in the dark chambers of the dead, the dead who order the goings of the next living.
That was the goal of the afterwards, that he had at the back of his eyes. But meanwhile here on earth he had to win. He had to make room again on earth for those who are not unbroken, those who are not tamed to carrion. Some place for those who know the dark mystery of being royal in death (so that they can enact the shadow of their own royalty on earth). Some place for the souls that are in themselves dark and have some of the sumptuousness of proud death, no matter what their fathers were. Jack's father was tame, as kings and dukes to-day are almost mongrelly tame. But Jack was not tame. And Easu's weird baby was not tame. She had some of the eternal fearlessness of the aristocrat whose bones are pure. But a weird sort of aristocrat.
Jack wanted to make a place on earth for a few aristocrats-to-the-bone. He wanted to conquer the world.