Somers, and Somers tolerated with difficulty Jack's facetious familiarity and heartiness.
Callcott met quite a number of people he knew, and greeted them all heartily. "Hello Bill, old man, how's things?" "New boots pinchin' yet, Ant'ny? Hoppy sort of look about you this morning. Right 'o! So long, Ant'ny!" "Different girl again, boy! go on, Sydney's full of yer sisters. All right, good-bye, old chap." The same breezy intimacy with all of them, and the moment they had passed by, they didn't exist for him any more than the gull that had curved across in the air. They seemed to appear like phantoms, and disappear in the same instant, like phantoms. Like so many Flying Dutchmen the Australian's acquaintances seemed to steer slap through his consciousness, and were gone on the wind. What was the consecutive thread in the man's feelings? Not his feeling for any particular human beings, that was evident. His friends, even his loves, were just a series of disconnected, isolated moments in his life. Somers always came again upon this gap in the other man's continuity. He felt that if he knew Jack for twenty years, and then went away, Jack would say: "Friend o' mine, English-man, rum sort of bloke, but not a bad sort. Dunno where he's hanging out just now. Somewhere on the surface of the old humming-top, I suppose."
The only consecutive thing was that facetious attitude, which was the attitude of taking things as they come, perfected. A sort of ironical stoicism. Yet the man had a sort of passion, and a passionate identity. But not what Somers called human. And threaded on this ironical stoicism.
They found Trewhella dressed and expecting them. Trewhella was a coal and wood merchant, on the north side. He lived quite near the wharf, had his sheds at the side of the house, and in the front a bit of garden running down to the practically tideless bay of the harbour. Across the bit of blue water were many red houses, and new, wide streets of single cottages, seaside-like, disappearing rather forlorn over the brow of the low hill.
William James, or Jas, Jaz, as Jack called him, was as quiet as ever. The three men sat on a bench just above the brown rocks of the water's edge, in the lovely sun-
