“Oh, well, now—we’d give in to Him if we saw Him,” said Jaz, smiling with an odd winsomeness he sometimes had.
“All right. Well I prefer not to see, and yet to give in,” said Richard.
Jaz glanced up at him suspiciously, from under his brows.
“And another thing,” said Richard. “I won’t give up the flag of our real civilised consciousness. I’ll give up the ideals. But not the aware, self-responsible, deep consciousness that we’ve gained. I won’t go back on that, Jaz, though Kangaroo did say I was the enemy of civilisation.”
“You don’t consider you are, then?” asked Jaz, pertinently.
“The enemy of civilisation? Well, I’m the enemy of this machine-civilisation and this ideal civilisation. But I’m not the enemy of the deep, self-responsible consciousness in man, which is what I mean by civilisation. In that sense of civilisation, I’d fight forever for the flag, and try to carry it on into deeper, darker places. It’s an adventure, Jaz, like any other. And when you realise what you’re doing, it’s perhaps the best adventure.”
Harriet brought the tea-tray on to the verandah.
“It’s quite nice that somebody has come to see us,” she said to Jaz. “There seems such a gap, now Kangaroo is gone, and all he stood for.”
“You feel a gap, do you?” asked Jaz.
“Awful. As if the earth had opened. As for Lovat, he’s absolutely broken-hearted, and such a trial to live with.”