In front in the small blue bay lay two little war-ships, pale grey, with the white flag having the Union Jack in one corner floating behind. And one boat had the Australian flag, with the five stars on a red field. They lay quite still, and seemed as lost as everything else, rusting into the water. Nothing seemed to keep its positive reality, this morning in the strong sun after the rain. The two ships were like bits of palpable memory, that persisted, but were only memory images.
Two tiny birds, one brown, one with a sky-blue patch on his head, like a dab of sky, fluttered and strutted, hoisting their long tails at an absurd angle. They were real: the absurd, sharp, unafraid creatures. They seemed to have no deep natural fear, as creatures in Europe have. Again and again Somers had felt this in Australia: the creatures had no sense of fear as in Europe. There was no animal fear in the air, as there is so deeply in India. Only sometimes a grey metaphysical dread.
“Perhaps,” thought he to himself, “this is really the country where men might live in a sort of harmless Eden, once they have settled the old Adam in themselves.”
He wandered the hot streets, walked round the circular quay and saw the women going to the ferries. So many women, almost elegant. Yet their elegance provincial, without pride, awful. So many almost beautiful women. When they were in repose, quite beautiful, with pure, wistful faces, and some nobility of expression. Then, see them change countenance, and it seemed almost always a grimace of ugliness. Hear them speak, and it was startling, so ugly. Once in motion they were not beautiful. Still, when their features were immobile, they were lovely.
Richard had noticed this in many cases. And they were like the birds, quite without fear, impudent, perky, with a strange spasmodic self-satisfaction. Almost every one of the younger women walked as if she thought she was sexually trailing every man in the street after her. And that was absurd, too, because the men seemed more often than not to hurry away and leave a blank space between them and these women. But it made no matter: like mad-women the females, in their quasi-elegance, pranced with that prance of crazy triumph in their own sexual powers which left little Richard flabbergasted.
Hot, big, free-and-easy streets of Sydney: without any sense of an imposition of control. No control, everybody going his own ways with alert harmlessness. On the pavement the foot-passengers walked in two divided streams, keeping to the left, and by their unanimity made it impossible for you to wander and look at the shops, if the shops happened to be on your right. The stream of foot passengers flowed over you.
And so it was: far more regulated than London, yet all with a curious exhilaration of voluntariness that oppressed Richard like a madness. No control, and no opposition to control. Policemen were cyphers, not noticeable. Every man his own policeman. The terrible lift of the harmless crowd. The strange relief from all superimposed control. One feels the police, for example, in London, and their civic majesty of authority. But in Sydney no majesty of authority at all. Absolute freedom from all that. Great freedom in the air. Yet, if you got into the wrong stream on the pavement you felt they’d tread you down, almost unseeing. You just mustn’t get in the wrong stream—Liberty!
Yes—the strange unanimity of harmlessness in the crowd had a half paralysing effect on Richard. “Can it be?” he said to himself, as he drifted in the strong sun-warmth of the world after rain, in the afternoon of this strange, antipodal city. “Can it be that there is any harm in these people at all?”
They were quick, and their manners were, in a free way, natural and kindly. They might say Right-O, Right you are!—they did say it, even in the most handsome and palatial banks and shipping offices. But they were patient and unaffected in their response. That was the beauty of the men: their absolute lack of affectation, their naive simplicity, which was at the same time sensitive and gentle. The gentlest country in the world. Really, a high pitch of breeding. Good-breeding at a very high pitch, innate, and in its shirt sleeves.
A strange country. A wonderful country. Who knows what future it may have? Can a great continent breed a people of this magic harmlessness without becoming a sacrifice of some other, external power? The land that invites parasites now—where parasites breed like nightmares—what would happen if the power-lust came that way?