Two chapters later, Somers is still thinking about Callcott's offer of mateship. Somers - and this is surely Lawrence himself - has not made up his mind how to respond...

He had all his life had this craving for an absolute friend, a David to his Jonathan, Pylades to his Orestes: a blood-brother.

 

Lawrence's search for a "blood-brother", a platonic relationship with another man, had already been a major theme in perhaps his greatest novel, Women in Love.

He thought he had found it in Middleton Murry (who was Gerald Crich to his Birkin in Women in Love). But that relationship had turned sour in Cornwall. Now his mind was drifting away from blood-brotherhood towards "the dark Gods who enter from below" (which also make their shadowy appearance in Kangaroo).

So Scott's approach, his offer of mateship, must have initially produced what Scott might have taken as an encouraging response in Lawrence.

In the text Somers is tempted to give Jack his hand there and then, and pledge himself to a friendship, or a comradeship, that nothing should ever alter. He wanted to do it. Yet something held him back, as if an invisible hand were upon him, preventing him.

 

"I'm not sure that I'm a mating man, either," he said slowly. "You?" Jack eyed him. "You are and you aren't. If you'd once come over--why man, do you think I wouldn't lay my life down for you?"

 

 

 

If Scott said anything like this to Lawrence - and I believe it is very likely that he did (for where else could Lawrence have got it?) - then that could explain his "indiscretion" in revealing, to an absolute stranger, the highly-secret details of "the garage" and its cover organisation.

So Scott's revelation about the secret army was not just "indiscretion". It was part and parcel of his offer of mateship. It was a token of what he was prepared to bring to what was, he may have thought, their emerging relationship.

As well, we must never underestimate Lawrence's ability to extract information ("You didn't try drawing us out. I should say you did."), and spread his limited source-material thinly.

Many people, down through the years, have remarked on Lawrence's ability to "make something" of scant information. That, after all, was part of his stock-in-trade as a novelist.

Lawrence's almost preternatural ability to form relationships with people must also be kept in mind. His "conquests" in this regard included Lady Ottoline Morrell, Bertrand Russell (with whom he discussed his "philosophy" on an almost equal basis), Aldous Huxley, Richard Aldington, Norman Douglas, Maynard Keynes, and the whole Bloomsburyerama - not to mention a passing cavalcade of lesser folk.

He could charm the birds out of the trees, especially if he put himself out to do so.

Scott could have fallen prey to his apparent friendliness and empathy...particularly if Lawrence started rabbiting on about such things as Whitman's League of Comrades.

Scott and Rosenthal could not possibly have suspected, in their wildest imaginations, what the indiscreet Lawrence really had in mind...

...and in hand.