“You don’t?” said Jaz, with a sudden winsome smile.
“I try to kid myself that I care about mankind and its destiny. And I have fits of wistful love for the working men. But at the bottom I’m as hard as a mango nut. I don’t care about them all. I don’t really care about anything, no I don’t. I just don’t care, so what’s the good of fussing.”
“Why no,” said Jaz, again with a quick smile.
“I feel neither good nor bad. I feel like a fox that has gnawed his tail off and so escaped out of a trap. It seems like a trap to me, all this social business and this saving mankind. Why can’t mankind save itself? It can if it wants to. I’m a fool. I neither want love nor power. I like the world. And I like to be alone in it, by myself. What do you want, Jaz?”
Richard was like a child escaped from school, escaped from his necessity to be something and to do something. They had jogged past the palm trees and the grass of the gardens, and the blue wrens had cocked their preposterous tails. They jogged to the end of the promontory, under wild trees, and Richard looked at the two lobes of the harbour, blue water on either side, and another part of the town beyond.
“Now take us back to the cockatoos,” he said to the cabby.
Richard loved the look of Australia, that marvellous soft flower-blue of the air, and the sombre grey of the earth, the foliage, the brown of the low rocks: like the dull pelts of kangaroos. It had a wonder and a far-awayness, even here in the heart of Sydney. All the shibboleths of mankind are so trumpery. Australia is outside everything.
“I couldn’t exactly say,” Jaz answered. “You’ve got a bit of an Australian look this morning about you,” he added with a smile.
“I feel Australian. I feel a new creature. But what’s the outcome?”
“Oh, you’ll come back to caring, I should think: for the sake of having something to care about. That’s what most of them do. They want to turn bushrangers for six months, and then they get frightened of themselves, and come back and want to be good citizens.”