The Project Gutenberg EBook of On the Track, by Henry Lawson
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Title: On the Track
Author: Henry Lawson
Release Date: August 26, 2008 [EBook #1231]
Last Updated: March 9, 2018
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON THE TRACK ***
Produced by Alan R. Light, and David Widger
ON THE TRACK
by Henry Lawson
Author of “While the Billy Boils”, and “When the World was Wide”
[Note on text: Italicized words or phrases are CAPITALISED.
Some obvious errors have been corrected after being confirmed.]
Preface
Of the stories in this volume many have already appeared
in (various periodicals), while several now appear in print
for the first time.
H. L.
Sydney, March 17th, 1900.
CONTENTS
Preface
ON THE TRACK
The Songs They used to Sing
A Vision of Sandy Blight
Andy Page's Rival
The Iron-Bark Chip
“Middleton's Peter”
The Mystery of Dave Regan
Mitchell on Matrimony
Mitchell on Women
No Place for a Woman
Mitchell's Jobs
Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster
Bush Cats
Meeting Old Mates
Two Larrikins
Mr. Smellingscheck
“A Rough Shed”
Payable Gold
An Oversight of Steelman's
How Steelman told his Story
About the author
ON THE TRACK
The Songs They used to Sing
On the diggings up to twenty odd years ago—and as far back as I can
remember—on Lambing Flat, the Pipe Clays, Gulgong, Home Rule, and so
through the roaring list; in bark huts, tents, public-houses, sly grog
shanties, and—well, the most glorious voice of all belonged to a bad
girl. We were only children and didn't know why she was bad, but we
weren't allowed to play near or go near the hut she lived in, and we were
trained to believe firmly that something awful would happen to us if we
stayed to answer a word, and didn't run away as fast as our legs could
carry us, if she attempted to speak to us. We had before us the dread
example of one urchin, who got an awful hiding and went on bread and water
for twenty-four hours for allowing her to kiss him and give him lollies.
She didn't look bad—she looked to us like a grand and beautiful
lady-girl—but we got instilled into us the idea that she was an
awful bad woman, something more terrible even than a drunken man, and one
whose presence was to be feared and fled from. There were two other girls
in the hut with her, also a pretty little girl, who called her “Auntie”,
and with whom we were not allowed to play—for they were all bad;
which puzzled us as much as child-minds can be puzzled. We couldn't make
out how everybody in one house could be bad. We used to wonder why these
bad people weren't hunted away or put in gaol if they were so bad. And
another thing puzzled us. Slipping out after dark, when the bad girls
happened to be singing in their house, we'd sometimes run against men
hanging round the hut by ones and twos and threes, listening. They seemed
mysterious. They were mostly good men, and we concluded they were
listening and watching the bad women's house to see that they didn't kill
anyone, or steal and run away with any bad little boys—ourselves,
for instance—who ran out after dark; which, as we were informed,
those bad people were always on the lookout for a chance to do.
We were told in after years that old Peter McKenzie (a respectable,
married, hard-working digger) would sometimes steal up opposite the bad
door in the dark, and throw in money done up in a piece of paper, and
listen round until the bad girl had sung the “Bonnie Hills of Scotland”
two or three times. Then he'd go and get drunk, and stay drunk two or
three days at a time. And his wife caught him throwing the money in one
night, and there was a terrible row, and she left him; and people always
said it was all a mistake. But we couldn't see the mistake then.
But I can hear that girl's voice through the night, twenty years ago:
Oh! the bloomin' heath, and the pale blue bell,
In my bonnet then I wore;
And memory knows no brighter theme
Than those happy days of yore.
Scotland! Land of chief and song!
Oh, what charms to thee belong!
And I am old enough to understand why poor Peter McKenzie—who was
married to a Saxon, and a Tartar—went and got drunk when the bad
girl sang “The Bonnie Hills of Scotland.”
His anxious eye might look in vain
For some loved form it knew!
. . . . .
And yet another thing puzzled us greatly at the time. Next door to the bad
girl's house there lived a very respectable family—a family of good
girls with whom we were allowed to play, and from whom we got lollies
(those hard old red-and-white “fish lollies” that grocers sent home with
parcels of groceries and receipted bills). Now one washing day, they being
as glad to get rid of us at home as we were to get out, we went over to
the good house and found no one at home except the grown-up daughter, who
used to sing for us, and read “Robinson Crusoe” of nights, “out loud”, and
give us more lollies than any of the rest—and with whom we were
passionately in love, notwithstanding the fact that she was engaged to a
“grown-up man”—(we reckoned he'd be dead and out of the way by the
time we were old enough to marry her). She was washing. She had carried
the stool and tub over against the stick fence which separated her house
from the bad house; and, to our astonishment and dismay, the bad girl had
brought HER tub over against her side of the fence. They stood and worked
with their shoulders to the fence between them, and heads bent down close
to it. The bad girl would sing a few words, and the good girl after her,
over and over again. They sang very low, we thought. Presently the good
grown-up girl turned her head and caught sight of us. She jumped, and her
face went flaming red; she laid hold of the stool and carried it, tub and
all, away from that fence in a hurry. And the bad grown-up girl took her
tub back to her house. The good grown-up girl made us promise never to
tell what we saw—that she'd been talking to a bad girl—else
she would never, never marry us.
She told me, in after years, when she'd grown up to be a grandmother, that
the bad girl was surreptitiously teaching her to sing “Madeline” that day.
I remember a dreadful story of a digger who went and shot himself one
night after hearing that bad girl sing. We thought then what a frightfully
bad woman she must be. The incident terrified us; and thereafter we kept
carefully and fearfully out of reach of her voice, lest we should go and
do what the digger did.
. . . . .
I have a dreamy recollection of a circus on Gulgong in the roaring days,
more than twenty years ago, and a woman (to my child-fancy a being from
another world) standing in the middle of the ring, singing:
Out in the cold world—out in the street—
Asking a penny from each one I meet;
Cheerless I wander about all the day,
Wearing my young life in sorrow away!
That last line haunted me for many years. I remember being frightened by
women sobbing (and one or two great grown-up diggers also) that night in
that circus.
“Father, Dear Father, Come Home with Me Now”, was a sacred song then, not
a peg for vulgar parodies and more vulgar “business” for fourth-rate
clowns and corner-men. Then there was “The Prairie Flower”. “Out on the
Prairie, in an Early Day”—I can hear the digger's wife yet: she was
the prettiest girl on the field. They married on the sly and crept into
camp after dark; but the diggers got wind of it and rolled up with
gold-dishes, shovels, &c., &c., and gave them a real good
tinkettling in the old-fashioned style, and a nugget or two to start
housekeeping on. She had a very sweet voice.
Fair as a lily, joyous and free,
Light of the prairie home was she.
She's a “granny” now, no doubt—or dead.
And I remember a poor, brutally ill-used little wife, wearing a black eye
mostly, and singing “Love Amongst the Roses” at her work. And they sang
the “Blue Tail Fly”, and all the first and best coon songs—in the
days when old John Brown sank a duffer on the hill.
. . . . .
The great bark kitchen of Granny Mathews' “Redclay Inn”. A fresh back-log
thrown behind the fire, which lights the room fitfully. Company settled
down to pipes, subdued yarning, and reverie.
Flash Jack—red sash, cabbage-tree hat on back of head with nothing
in it, glossy black curls bunched up in front of brim. Flash Jack
volunteers, without invitation, preparation, or warning, and through his
nose:
Hoh!—
There was a wild kerlonial youth,
John Dowlin was his name!
He bountied on his parients,
Who lived in Castlemaine!
and so on to—
He took a pistol from his breast
And waved that lit—tle toy—
“Little toy” with an enthusiastic flourish and great unction on Flash
Jack's part—
“I'll fight, but I won't surrender!” said
The wild Kerlonial Boy.
Even this fails to rouse the company's enthusiasm. “Give us a song, Abe!
Give us the 'Lowlands'!” Abe Mathews, bearded and grizzled, is lying on
the broad of his back on a bench, with his hands clasped under his head—his
favourite position for smoking, reverie, yarning, or singing. He had a
strong, deep voice, which used to thrill me through and through, from hair
to toenails, as a child.
They bother Abe till he takes his pipe out of his mouth and puts it behind
his head on the end of the stool:
The ship was built in Glasgow;
'Twas the “Golden Vanitee”—
Lines have dropped out of my memory during the thirty years gone
between—
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!
The public-house people and more diggers drop into the kitchen, as all do
within hearing, when Abe sings.
“Now then, boys:
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!
“Now, all together!
The Low Lands! The Low Lands!
And she ploughed in the Low Lands, Low!”
Toe and heel and flat of foot begin to stamp the clay floor, and horny
hands to slap patched knees in accompaniment.
“Oh! save me, lads!” he cried,
“I'm drifting with the current,
And I'm drifting with the tide!
And I'm sinking in the Low Lands, Low!
The Low Lands! The Low Lands!”—
The old bark kitchen is a-going now. Heels drumming on gin-cases under
stools; hands, knuckles, pipe-bowls, and pannikins keeping time on the
table.
And we sewed him in his hammock,
And we slipped him o'er the side,
And we sunk him in the Low Lands, Low!
The Low Lands! The Low Lands!
And we sunk him in the Low Lands, Low!
Old Boozer Smith—a dirty gin-sodden bundle of rags on the floor in
the corner with its head on a candle box, and covered by a horse rug—old
Boozer Smith is supposed to have been dead to the universe for hours past,
but the chorus must have disturbed his torpor; for, with a suddenness and
unexpectedness that makes the next man jump, there comes a bellow from
under the horse rug:
Wot though!—I wear!—a rag!—ged coat!
I'll wear it like a man!
and ceases as suddenly as it commenced. He struggles to bring his ruined
head and bloated face above the surface, glares round; then, no one
questioning his manhood, he sinks back and dies to creation; and
subsequent proceedings are only interrupted by a snore, as far as he is
concerned.
Little Jimmy Nowlett, the bullock-driver, is inspired. “Go on, Jimmy! Give
us a song!”
In the days when we were hard up
For want of wood and wire—
Jimmy always blunders; it should have been “food and fire”—
We used to tie our boots up
With lit—tle bits—er wire;
and—
I'm sitting in my lit—tle room,
It measures six by six;
The work-house wall is opposite,
I've counted all the bricks!
“Give us a chorus, Jimmy!”
Jimmy does, giving his head a short, jerky nod for nearly every word, and
describing a circle round his crown—as if he were stirring a pint of
hot tea—with his forefinger, at the end of every line:
Hall!—Round!—Me—Hat!
I wore a weepin' willer!
Jimmy is a Cockney.
“Now then, boys!”
Hall—round—me hat!
How many old diggers remember it?
And:
A butcher, and a baker, and a quiet-looking quaker,
All a-courting pretty Jessie at the Railway Bar.
I used to wonder as a child what the “railway bar” meant.
And:
I would, I would, I would in vain
That I were single once again!
But ah, alas, that will not be
Till apples grow on the willow tree.
A drunken gambler's young wife used to sing that song—to herself.
A stir at the kitchen door, and a cry of “Pinter,” and old Poynton,
Ballarat digger, appears and is shoved in; he has several drinks aboard,
and they proceed to “git Pinter on the singin' lay,” and at last talk him
round. He has a good voice, but no “theory”, and blunders worse than Jimmy
Nowlett with the words. He starts with a howl—
Hoh!
Way down in Covent Gar-ar-r-dings
A-strolling I did go,
To see the sweetest flow-ow-wers
That e'er in gardings grow.
He saw the rose and lily—the red and white and blue—and he saw
the sweetest flow-ow-ers that e'er in gardings grew; for he saw two lovely
maidens (Pinter calls 'em “virgings”) underneath (he must have meant on
top of) “a garding chair”, sings Pinter.
And one was lovely Jessie,
With the jet black eyes and hair,
roars Pinter,
And the other was a vir-ir-ging,
I solemn-lye declare!
“Maiden, Pinter!” interjects Mr. Nowlett.
“Well, it's all the same,” retorts Pinter. “A maiden IS a virging, Jimmy.
If you're singing, Jimmy, and not me, I'll leave off!” Chorus of “Order!
Shut up, Jimmy!”
I quicklye step-ped up to her,
And unto her did sa-a-y:
Do you belong to any young man,
Hoh, tell me that, I pra-a-y?
Her answer, according to Pinter, was surprisingly prompt and
unconventional; also full and concise:
No; I belong to no young man—
I solemnlye declare!
I mean to live a virging
And still my laurels wear!
Jimmy Nowlett attempts to move an amendment in favour of “maiden”, but is
promptly suppressed. It seems that Pinter's suit has a happy termination,
for he is supposed to sing in the character of a “Sailor Bold”, and as he
turns to pursue his stroll in “Covent Gar-ar-dings”:
“Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!” she cried,
“I love a Sailor Bold!”
“Hong-kore, Pinter! Give us the 'Golden Glove', Pinter!”
Thus warmed up, Pinter starts with an explanatory “spoken” to the effect
that the song he is about to sing illustrates some of the little ways of
woman, and how, no matter what you say or do, she is bound to have her own
way in the end; also how, in one instance, she set about getting it.
Hoh!
Now, it's of a young squoire near Timworth did dwell,
Who courted a nobleman's daughter so well—
The song has little or nothing to do with the “squire”, except so far as
“all friends and relations had given consent,” and—
The troo-soo was ordered—appointed the day,
And a farmer were appointed for to give her away—
which last seemed a most unusual proceeding, considering the wedding was a
toney affair; but perhaps there were personal interests—the nobleman
might have been hard up, and the farmer backing him. But there was an
extraordinary scene in the church, and things got mixed.
For as soon as this maiding this farmer espied:
“Hoh, my heart! Hoh, my heart!
Hoh, my heart!” then she cried.
Hysterics? Anyway, instead of being wed—
This maiden took sick and she went to her bed.
(N.B.—Pinter sticks to 'virging'.)
Whereupon friends and relations and guests left the house in a body (a
strange but perhaps a wise proceeding, after all—maybe they smelt a
rat) and left her to recover alone, which she did promptly. And then:
Shirt, breeches, and waistcoat this maiding put on,
And a-hunting she went with her dog and her gun;
She hunted all round where this farmier did dwell,
Because in her own heart she love-ed him well.
The cat's out of the bag now:
And often she fired, but no game she killed—
which was not surprising—
Till at last the young farmier came into the field—
No wonder. She put it to him straight:
“Oh, why are you not at the wedding?” she cried,
“For to wait on the squoire, and to give him his bride.”
He was as prompt and as delightfully unconventional in his reply as the
young lady in Covent Gardings:
“Oh, no! and oh, no! For the truth I must sa-a-y,
I love her too well for to give her a-w-a-a-y!”
which was satisfactory to the disguised “virging”.
“.... and I'd take sword in hand,
And by honour I'd win her if she would command.”
Which was still more satisfactory.
Now this virging, being—
(Jimmy Nowlett: “Maiden, Pinter—” Jim is thrown on a stool and sat on
by several diggers.)
Now this maiding, being please-ed to see him so bold,
She gave him her glove that was flowered with gold,
and explained that she found it in his field while hunting around with her
dog and her gun. It is understood that he promised to look up the owner.
Then she went home and put an advertisement in the local 'Herald'; and
that ad. must have caused considerable sensation. She stated that she had
lost her golden glove, and
The young man that finds it and brings it to me,
Hoh! that very young man my husband shall be!
She had a saving clause in case the young farmer mislaid the glove before
he saw the ad., and an OLD bloke got holt of it and fetched it along. But
everything went all right. The young farmer turned up with the glove. He
was a very respectable young farmer, and expressed his gratitude to her
for having “honour-ed him with her love.” They were married, and the song
ends with a picture of the young farmeress milking the cow, and the young
farmer going whistling to plough. The fact that they lived and grafted on
the selection proves that I hit the right nail on the head when I guessed,
in the first place, that the old nobleman was “stony”.
In after years,
... she told him of the fun,
How she hunted him up with her dog and her gun.
But whether he was pleased or otherwise to hear it, after years of
matrimonial experiences, the old song doesn't say, for it ends there.
Flash Jack is more successful with “Saint Patrick's Day”.
I come to the river, I jumped it quite clever!
Me wife tumbled in, and I lost her for ever,
St. Patrick's own day in the mornin'!
This is greatly appreciated by Jimmy Nowlett, who is suspected, especially
by his wife, of being more cheerful when on the roads than when at home.
. . . . .
“Sam Holt” was a great favourite with Jimmy Nowlett in after years.
Oh, do you remember Black Alice, Sam Holt?
Black Alice so dirty and dark—
Who'd a nose on her face—I forget how it goes—
And teeth like a Moreton Bay shark.
Sam Holt must have been very hard up for tucker as well as beauty then,
for
Do you remember the 'possums and grubs
She baked for you down by the creek?
Sam Holt was, apparently, a hardened flash Jack.
You were not quite the cleanly potato, Sam Holt.
Reference is made to his “manner of holding a flush”, and he is asked to
remember several things which he, no doubt, would rather forget, including
... the hiding you got from the boys.
The song is decidedly personal.
But Sam Holt makes a pile and goes home, leaving many a better and worse
man to pad the hoof Out Back. And—Jim Nowlett sang this with so much
feeling as to make it appear a personal affair between him and the absent
Holt—
And, don't you remember the fiver, Sam Holt,
You borrowed so careless and free?
I reckon I'll whistle a good many tunes
(with increasing feeling)
Ere you think of that fiver and me.
For the chances will be that Sam Holt's old mate
Will be humping his drum on the Hughenden Road
To the end of the chapter of fate.
. . . . .
An echo from “The Old Bark Hut”, sung in the opposition camp across the
gully:
You may leave the door ajar, but if you keep it shut,
There's no need of suffocation in the Ould Barrk Hut.
. . . . .
The tucker's in the gin-case, but you'd better keep it shut—
For the flies will canther round it in the Ould Bark Hut.
However:
What's out of sight is out of mind, in the Ould Bark Hut.
. . . . .
We washed our greasy moleskins
On the banks of the Condamine.—
Somebody tackling the “Old Bullock Dray”; it must be over fifty verses
now. I saw a bushman at a country dance start to sing that song; he'd get
up to ten or fifteen verses, break down, and start afresh. At last he sat
down on his heel to it, in the centre of the clear floor, resting his
wrist on his knee, and keeping time with an index finger. It was very
funny, but the thing was taken seriously all through.
Irreverent echo from the old Lambing Flat trouble, from camp across the
gully:
Rule Britannia! Britannia rules the waves!
No more Chinamen will enter Noo South Wales!
and
Yankee Doodle came to town
On a little pony—
Stick a feather in his cap,
And call him Maccaroni!
All the camps seem to be singing to-night:
Ring the bell, watchman!
Ring! Ring! Ring!
Ring, for the good news
Is now on the wing!
Good lines, the introduction:
High on the belfry the old sexton stands,
Grasping the rope with his thin bony hands!...
Bon-fires are blazing throughout the land...
Glorious and blessed tidings! Ring! Ring the bell!
. . . . .
Granny Mathews fails to coax her niece into the kitchen, but persuades her
to sing inside. She is the girl who learnt 'sub rosa' from the bad girl
who sang “Madeline”. Such as have them on instinctively take their hats
off. Diggers, &c., strolling past, halt at the first notes of the
girl's voice, and stand like statues in the moonlight:
Shall we gather at the river,
Where bright angel feet have trod?
The beautiful—the beautiful river
That flows by the throne of God!—
Diggers wanted to send that girl “Home”, but Granny Mathews had the
old-fashioned horror of any of her children becoming “public”—
Gather with the saints at the river,
That flows by the throne of God!
. . . . .
But it grows late, or rather, early. The “Eyetalians” go by in the frosty
moonlight, from their last shift in the claim (for it is Saturday night),
singing a litany.
“Get up on one end, Abe!—stand up all!” Hands are clasped across the
kitchen table. Redclay, one of the last of the alluvial fields, has
petered out, and the Roaring Days are dying.... The grand old song that is
known all over the world; yet how many in ten thousand know more than one
verse and the chorus? Let Peter McKenzie lead:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min'?
And hearts echo from far back in the past and across wide, wide seas:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days o' lang syne?
Now boys! all together!
For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
We twa hae run about the braes,
And pu'd the gowans fine;
But we've wandered mony a weary foot,
Sin' auld lang syne.
The world was wide then.
We twa hae paidl't i' the burn,
Frae mornin' sun till dine:
the log fire seems to grow watery, for in wide, lonely Australia—
But seas between us braid hae roar'd,
Sin' auld lang syne.
The kitchen grows dimmer, and the forms of the digger-singers seemed
suddenly vague and unsubstantial, fading back rapidly through a misty
veil. But the words ring strong and defiant through hard years:
And here's a hand, my trusty frien',
And gie's a grup o' thine;
And we'll tak' a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.
. . . . .
And the nettles have been growing for over twenty years on the spot where
Granny Mathews' big bark kitchen stood.
A Vision of Sandy Blight
I'd been humping my back, and crouching and groaning for an hour or so in
the darkest corner of the travellers' hut, tortured by the demon of sandy
blight. It was too hot to travel, and there was no one there except
ourselves and Mitchell's cattle pup. We were waiting till after sundown,
for I couldn't have travelled in the daylight, anyway. Mitchell had tied a
wet towel round my eyes, and led me for the last mile or two by another
towel—one end fastened to his belt behind, and the other in my hand
as I walked in his tracks. And oh! but this was a relief! It was out of
the dust and glare, and the flies didn't come into the dark hut, and I
could hump and stick my knees in my eyes and groan in comfort. I didn't
want a thousand a year, or anything; I only wanted relief for my eyes—that
was all I prayed for in this world. When the sun got down a bit, Mitchell
started poking round, and presently he found amongst the rubbish a
dirty-looking medicine bottle, corked tight; when he rubbed the dirt off a
piece of notepaper that was pasted on, he saw “eye-water” written on it.
He drew the cork with his teeth, smelt the water, stuck his little finger
in, turned the bottle upside down, tasted the top of his finger, and
reckoned the stuff was all right.
“Here! Wake up, Joe!” he shouted. “Here's a bottle of tears.”
“A bottler wot?” I groaned.
“Eye-water,” said Mitchell.
“Are you sure it's all right?” I didn't want to be poisoned or have my
eyes burnt out by mistake; perhaps some burning acid had got into that
bottle, or the label had been put on, or left on, in mistake or
carelessness.
“I dunno,” said Mitchell, “but there's no harm in tryin'.”
I chanced it. I lay down on my back in a bunk, and Mitchell dragged my
lids up and spilt half a bottle of eye-water over my eye-balls.
The relief was almost instantaneous. I never experienced such a quick cure
in my life. I carried the bottle in my swag for a long time afterwards,
with an idea of getting it analysed, but left it behind at last in a camp.
Mitchell scratched his head thoughtfully, and watched me for a while.
“I think I'll wait a bit longer,” he said at last, “and if it doesn't
blind you I'll put some in my eyes. I'm getting a touch of blight myself
now. That's the fault of travelling with a mate who's always catching
something that's no good to him.”
As it grew dark outside we talked of sandy-blight and fly-bite, and
sand-flies up north, and ordinary flies, and branched off to Barcoo rot,
and struck the track again at bees and bee stings. When we got to bees,
Mitchell sat smoking for a while and looking dreamily backwards along
tracks and branch tracks, and round corners and circles he had travelled,
right back to the short, narrow, innocent bit of track that ends in a
vague, misty point—like the end of a long, straight, cleared road in
the moonlight—as far back as we can remember.
. . . . .
“I had about fourteen hives,” said Mitchell—“we used to call them
'swarms', no matter whether they were flying or in the box—when I
left home first time. I kept them behind the shed, in the shade, on tables
of galvanised iron cases turned down on stakes; but I had to make legs
later on, and stand them in pans of water, on account of the ants. When
the bees swarmed—and some hives sent out the Lord knows how many
swarms in a year, it seemed to me—we'd tin-kettle 'em, and throw
water on 'em, to make 'em believe the biggest thunderstorm was coming to
drown the oldest inhabitant; and, if they didn't get the start of us and
rise, they'd settle on a branch—generally on one of the scraggy
fruit trees. It was rough on the bees—come to think of it; their
instinct told them it was going to be fine, and the noise and water told
them it was raining. They must have thought that nature was mad, drunk, or
gone ratty, or the end of the world had come. We'd rig up a table, with a
box upside down, under the branch, cover our face with a piece of mosquito
net, have rags burning round, and then give the branch a sudden jerk, turn
the box down, and run. If we got most of the bees in, the rest that were
hanging to the bough or flying round would follow, and then we reckoned
we'd shook the queen in. If the bees in the box came out and joined the
others, we'd reckon we hadn't shook the queen in, and go for them again.
When a hive was full of honey we'd turn the box upside down, turn the
empty box mouth down on top of it, and drum and hammer on the lower box
with a stick till all the bees went up into the top box. I suppose it made
their heads ache, and they went up on that account.
“I suppose things are done differently on proper bee-farms. I've heard
that a bee-farmer will part a hanging swarm with his fingers, take out the
queen bee and arrange matters with her; but our ways suited us, and there
was a lot of expectation and running and excitement in it, especially when
a swarm took us by surprise. The yell of 'Bees swarmin'!' was as good to
us as the yell of 'Fight!' is now, or 'Bolt!' in town, or 'Fire' or 'Man
overboard!' at sea.
“There was tons of honey. The bees used to go to the vineyards at
wine-making and get honey from the heaps of crushed grape-skins thrown out
in the sun, and get so drunk sometimes that they wobbled in their
bee-lines home. They'd fill all the boxes, and then build in between and
under the bark, and board, and tin covers. They never seemed to get the
idea out of their heads that this wasn't an evergreen country, and it
wasn't going to snow all winter. My younger brother Joe used to put pieces
of meat on the tables near the boxes, and in front of the holes where the
bees went in and out, for the dogs to grab at. But one old dog, 'Black
Bill', was a match for him; if it was worth Bill's while, he'd camp there,
and keep Joe and the other dogs from touching the meat—once it was
put down—till the bees turned in for the night. And Joe would get
the other kids round there, and when they weren't looking or thinking,
he'd brush the bees with a stick and run. I'd lam him when I caught him at
it. He was an awful young devil, was Joe, and he grew up steady, and
respectable, and respected—and I went to the bad. I never trust a
good boy now.... Ah, well!
“I remember the first swarm we got. We'd been talking of getting a few
swarms for a long time. That was what was the matter with us English and
Irish and English-Irish Australian farmers: we used to talk so much about
doing things while the Germans and Scotch did them. And we even talked in
a lazy, easy-going sort of way.
“Well, one blazing hot day I saw father coming along the road, home to
dinner (we had it in the middle of the day), with his axe over his
shoulder. I noticed the axe particularly because father was bringing it
home to grind, and Joe and I had to turn the stone; but, when I noticed
Joe dragging along home in the dust about fifty yards behind father, I
felt easier in my mind. Suddenly father dropped the axe and started to run
back along the road towards Joe, who, as soon as he saw father coming,
shied for the fence and got through. He thought he was going to catch it
for something he'd done—or hadn't done. Joe used to do so many
things and leave so many things not done that he could never be sure of
father. Besides, father had a way of starting to hammer us unexpectedly—when
the idea struck him. But father pulled himself up in about thirty yards
and started to grab up handfuls of dust and sand and throw them into the
air. My idea, in the first flash, was to get hold of the axe, for I
thought it was sun-stroke, and father might take it into his head to start
chopping up the family before I could persuade him to put it (his head, I
mean) in a bucket of water. But Joe came running like mad, yelling:
“'Swarmer—bees! Swawmmer—bee—ee—es! Bring—a—tin—dish—and—a—dippera—wa-a-ter!'
“I ran with a bucket of water and an old frying-pan, and pretty soon the
rest of the family were on the spot, throwing dust and water, and banging
everything, tin or iron, they could get hold of. The only bullock bell in
the district (if it was in the district) was on the old poley cow, and
she'd been lost for a fortnight. Mother brought up the rear—but soon
worked to the front—with a baking-dish and a big spoon. The old lady—she
wasn't old then—had a deep-rooted prejudice that she could do
everything better than anybody else, and that the selection and all on it
would go to the dogs if she wasn't there to look after it. There was no
jolting that idea out of her. She not only believed that she could do
anything better than anybody, and hers was the only right or possible way,
and that we'd do everything upside down if she wasn't there to do it or
show us how—but she'd try to do things herself or insist on making
us do them her way, and that led to messes and rows. She was excited now,
and took command at once. She wasn't tongue-tied, and had no impediment in
her speech.
“'Don't throw up dust!—Stop throwing up dust!—Do you want to
smother 'em?—Don't throw up so much water!—Only throw up a
pannikin at a time!—D'yer want to drown 'em? Bang! Keep on banging,
Joe!—Look at that child! Run, someone!—run! you, Jack!—D'yer
want the child to be stung to death?—Take her inside!... Dy' hear
me?... Stop throwing up dust, Tom! (To father.) You're scaring 'em away!
Can't you see they want to settle?' [Father was getting mad and yelping:
'For Godsake shettup and go inside.'] 'Throw up water, Jack! Throw up—Tom!
Take that bucket from him and don't make such a fool of yourself before
the children! Throw up water! Throw—keep on banging, children! Keep
on banging!' [Mother put her faith in banging.] 'There!—they're off!
You've lost 'em! I knew you would! I told yer—keep on bang—!'
“A bee struck her in the eye, and she grabbed at it!
“Mother went home—and inside.
“Father was good at bees—could manage them like sheep when he got to
know their ideas. When the swarm settled, he sent us for the old washing
stool, boxes, bags, and so on; and the whole time he was fixing the bees I
noticed that whenever his back was turned to us his shoulders would jerk
up as if he was cold, and he seemed to shudder from inside, and now and
then I'd hear a grunting sort of whimper like a boy that was just starting
to blubber. But father wasn't weeping, and bees weren't stinging him; it
was the bee that stung mother that was tickling father. When he went into
the house, mother's other eye had bunged for sympathy. Father was always
gentle and kind in sickness, and he bathed mother's eyes and rubbed mud
on, but every now and then he'd catch inside, and jerk and shudder, and
grunt and cough. Mother got wild, but presently the humour of it struck
her, and she had to laugh, and a rum laugh it was, with both eyes bunged
up. Then she got hysterical, and started to cry, and father put his arm
round her shoulder and ordered us out of the house.
“They were very fond of each other, the old people were, under it all—right
up to the end.... Ah, well!”
Mitchell pulled the swags out of a bunk, and started to fasten the
nose-bags on.
Andy Page's Rival
Tall and freckled and sandy,
Face of a country lout;
That was the picture of Andy—
Middleton's rouseabout.
On Middleton's wide dominions
Plied the stock-whip and shears;
Hadn't any opinions———
And he hadn't any “ideers”—at least, he said so himself—except
as regarded anything that looked to him like what he called “funny
business”, under which heading he catalogued tyranny, treachery,
interference with the liberty of the subject by the subject, “blanky”
lies, or swindles—all things, in short, that seemed to his slow
understanding dishonest, mean or paltry; most especially, and above all,
treachery to a mate. THAT he could never forget. Andy was uncomfortably
“straight”. His mind worked slowly and his decisions were, as a rule,
right and just; and when he once came to a conclusion concerning any man
or matter, or decided upon a course of action, nothing short of an
earthquake or a Nevertire cyclone could move him back an inch—unless
a conviction were severely shaken, and then he would require as much time
to “back” to his starting point as he did to come to the decision.
Andy had come to a conclusion with regard to a selector's daughter—name,
Lizzie Porter—who lived (and slaved) on her father's selection, near
the township corner of the run on which Andy was a general “hand”. He had
been in the habit for several years of calling casually at the selector's
house, as he rode to and fro between the station and the town, to get a
drink of water and exchange the time of day with old Porter and his
“missus”. The conversation concerned the drought, and the likelihood or
otherwise of their ever going to get a little rain; or about Porter's
cattle, with an occasional enquiry concerning, or reference to, a stray
cow belonging to the selection, but preferring the run; a little, plump,
saucy, white cow, by-the-way, practically pure white, but referred to by
Andy—who had eyes like a blackfellow—as “old Speckledy”. No
one else could detect a spot or speckle on her at a casual glance. Then
after a long bovine silence, which would have been painfully embarrassing
in any other society, and a tilting of his cabbage-tree hat forward, which
came of tickling and scratching the sun-blotched nape of his neck with his
little finger, Andy would slowly say: “Ah, well. I must be gettin'.
So-long, Mr. Porter. So-long, Mrs. Porter.” And, if SHE were in evidence—as
she generally was on such occasions—“So-long, Lizzie.” And they'd
shout: “So-long, Andy,” as he galloped off from the jump. Strange that
those shy, quiet, gentle-voiced bushmen seem the hardest and most reckless
riders.
But of late his horse had been seen hanging up outside Porter's for an
hour or so after sunset. He smoked, talked over the results of the last
drought (if it happened to rain), and the possibilities of the next one,
and played cards with old Porter; who took to winking, automatically, at
his “old woman”, and nudging, and jerking his thumb in the direction of
Lizzie when her back was turned, and Andy was scratching the nape of his
neck and staring at the cards.
Lizzie told a lady friend of mine, years afterwards, how Andy popped the
question; told it in her quiet way—you know Lizzie's quiet way
(something of the old, privileged house-cat about her); never a sign in
expression or tone to show whether she herself saw or appreciated the
humour of anything she was telling, no matter how comical it might be. She
had witnessed two tragedies, and had found a dead man in the bush, and
related the incidents as though they were common-place.
It happened one day—after Andy had been coming two or three times a
week for about a year—that she found herself sitting with him on a
log of the woodheap, in the cool of the evening, enjoying the sunset
breeze. Andy's arm had got round her—just as it might have gone
round a post he happened to be leaning against. They hadn't been talking
about anything in particular. Andy said he wouldn't be surprised if they
had a thunderstorm before mornin'—it had been so smotherin' hot all
day.
Lizzie said, “Very likely.”
Andy smoked a good while, then he said: “Ah, well! It's a weary world.”
Lizzie didn't say anything.
By-and-bye Andy said: “Ah, well; it's a lonely world, Lizzie.”
“Do you feel lonely, Andy?” asked Lizzie, after a while.
“Yes, Lizzie; I do.”
Lizzie let herself settle, a little, against him, without either seeming
to notice it, and after another while she said, softly: “So do I, Andy.”
Andy knocked the ashes from his pipe very slowly and deliberately, and put
it away; then he seemed to brighten suddenly, and said briskly: “Well,
Lizzie! Are you satisfied!”
“Yes, Andy; I'm satisfied.”
“Quite sure, now?”
“Yes; I'm quite sure, Andy. I'm perfectly satisfied.”
“Well, then, Lizzie—it's settled!”
. . . . .
But to-day—a couple of months after the proposal described above—Andy
had trouble on his mind, and the trouble was connected with Lizzie Porter.
He was putting up a two-rail fence along the old log-paddock on the
frontage, and working like a man in trouble, trying to work it off his
mind; and evidently not succeeding—for the last two panels were out
of line. He was ramming a post—Andy rammed honestly, from the bottom
of the hole, not the last few shovelfuls below the surface, as some do. He
was ramming the last layer of clay when a cloud of white dust came along
the road, paused, and drifted or poured off into the scrub, leaving long
Dave Bentley, the horse-breaker, on his last victim.
“'Ello, Andy! Graftin'?”
“I want to speak to you, Dave,” said Andy, in a strange voice.
“All—all right!” said Dave, rather puzzled. He got down, wondering
what was up, and hung his horse to the last post but one.
Dave was Andy's opposite in one respect: he jumped to conclusions, as
women do; but, unlike women, he was mostly wrong. He was an old chum and
mate of Andy's who had always liked, admired, and trusted him. But now, to
his helpless surprise, Andy went on scraping the earth from the surface
with his long-handled shovel, and heaping it conscientiously round the
butt of the post, his face like a block of wood, and his lips set grimly.
Dave broke out first (with bush oaths):
“What's the matter with you? Spit it out! What have I been doin' to you?
What's yer got yer rag out about, anyway?”
Andy faced him suddenly, with hatred for “funny business” flashing in his
eyes.
“What did you say to my sister Mary about Lizzie Porter?”
Dave started; then he whistled long and low. “Spit it all out, Andy!” he
advised.
“You said she was travellin' with a feller!”
“Well, what's the harm in that? Everybody knows that—”
“If any crawler says a word about Lizzie Porter—look here, me and
you's got to fight, Dave Bentley!” Then, with still greater vehemence, as
though he had a share in the garment: “Take off that coat!”
“Not if I know it!” said Dave, with the sudden quietness that comes to
brave but headstrong and impulsive men at a critical moment: “Me and you
ain't goin' to fight, Andy; and” (with sudden energy) “if you try it on
I'll knock you into jim-rags!”
Then, stepping close to Andy and taking him by the arm: “Andy, this thing
will have to be fixed up. Come here; I want to talk to you.” And he led
him some paces aside, inside the boundary line, which seemed a ludicrously
unnecessary precaution, seeing that there was no one within sight or
hearing save Dave's horse.
“Now, look here, Andy; let's have it over. What's the matter with you and
Lizzie Porter?”
“I'M travellin' with her, that's all; and we're going to get married in
two years!”
Dave gave vent to another long, low whistle. He seemed to think and make
up his mind.
“Now, look here, Andy: we're old mates, ain't we?”
“Yes; I know that.”
“And do you think I'd tell you a blanky lie, or crawl behind your back? Do
you? Spit it out!”
“N—no, I don't!”
“I've always stuck up for you, Andy, and—why, I've fought for you
behind your back!”
“I know that, Dave.”
“There's my hand on it!”
Andy took his friend's hand mechanically, but gripped it hard.
“Now, Andy, I'll tell you straight: It's Gorstruth about Lizzie Porter!”
They stood as they were for a full minute, hands clasped; Andy with his
jaw dropped and staring in a dazed sort of way at Dave. He raised his
disengaged hand helplessly to his thatch, gulped suspiciously, and asked
in a broken voice:
“How—how do you know it, Dave?”
“Know it? Andy, I SEEN 'EM MESELF!”
“You did, Dave?” in a tone that suggested sorrow more than anger at Dave's
part in the seeing of them.
“Gorstruth, Andy!”
. . . . .
“Tell me, Dave, who was the feller? That's all I want to know.”
“I can't tell you that. I only seen them when I was canterin' past in the
dusk.”
“Then how'd you know it was a man at all?”
“It wore trousers, anyway, and was as big as you; so it couldn't have been
a girl. I'm pretty safe to swear it was Mick Kelly. I saw his horse
hangin' up at Porter's once or twice. But I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll
find out for you, Andy. And, what's more, I'll job him for you if I catch
him!”
Andy said nothing; his hands clenched and his chest heaved. Dave laid a
friendly hand on his shoulder.
“It's red hot, Andy, I know. Anybody else but you and I wouldn't have
cared. But don't be a fool; there's any Gorsquantity of girls knockin'
round. You just give it to her straight and chuck her, and have done with
it. You must be bad off to bother about her. Gorstruth! she ain't much to
look at anyway! I've got to ride like blazes to catch the coach. Don't
knock off till I come back; I won't be above an hour. I'm goin' to give
you some points in case you've got to fight Mick; and I'll have to be
there to back you!” And, thus taking the right moment instinctively, he
jumped on his horse and galloped on towards the town.
His dust-cloud had scarcely disappeared round a corner of the paddocks
when Andy was aware of another one coming towards him. He had a dazed idea
that it was Dave coming back, but went on digging another post-hole,
mechanically, until a spring-cart rattled up, and stopped opposite him.
Then he lifted his head. It was Lizzie herself, driving home from town.
She turned towards him with her usual faint smile. Her small features were
“washed out” and rather haggard.
“'Ello, Andy!”
But, at the sight of her, all his hatred of “funny business”—intensified,
perhaps, by a sense of personal injury—came to a head, and he
exploded:
“Look here, Lizzie Porter! I know all about you. You needn't think you're
goin' to cotton on with me any more after this! I wouldn't be seen in a
paddock with yer! I'm satisfied about you! Get on out of this!”
The girl stared at him for a moment thunderstruck; then she lammed into
the old horse with a stick she carried in place of a whip.
She cried, and wondered what she'd done, and trembled so that she could
scarcely unharness the horse, and wondered if Andy had got a touch of the
sun, and went in and sat down and cried again; and pride came to her aid
and she hated Andy; thought of her big brother, away droving, and made a
cup of tea. She shed tears over the tea, and went through it all again.
Meanwhile Andy was suffering a reaction. He started to fill the hole
before he put the post in; then to ram the post before the rails were in
position. Dubbing off the ends of the rails, he was in danger of
amputating a toe or a foot with every stroke of the adze. And, at last,
trying to squint along the little lumps of clay which he had placed in the
centre of the top of each post for several panels back—to assist him
to take a line—he found that they swam and doubled, and ran off in
watery angles, for his eyes were too moist to see straight and single.
Then he threw down the tools hopelessly, and was standing helplessly
undecided whether to go home or go down to the creek and drown himself,
when Dave turned up again.
“Seen her?” asked Dave.
“Yes,” said Andy.
“Did you chuck her?”
“Look here, Dave; are you sure the feller was Mick Kelly?”
“I never said I was. How was I to know? It was dark. You don't expect I'd
'fox' a feller I see doing a bit of a bear-up to a girl, do you? It might
have been you, for all I knowed. I suppose she's been talking you round?”
“No, she ain't,” said Andy. “But, look here, Dave; I was properly gone on
that girl, I was, and—and I want to be sure I'm right.”
The business was getting altogether too psychological for Dave Bentley.
“You might as well,” he rapped out, “call me a liar at once!”
“'Taint that at all, Dave. I want to get at who the feller is; that's what
I want to get at now. Where did you see them, and when?”
“I seen them Anniversary night, along the road, near Ross' farm; and I
seen 'em Sunday night afore that—in the trees near the old culvert—near
Porter's sliprails; and I seen 'em one night outside Porter's, on a log
near the woodheap. They was thick that time, and bearin' up proper, and no
mistake. So I can swear to her. Now, are you satisfied about her?”
But Andy was wildly pitchforking his thatch under his hat with all ten
fingers and staring at Dave, who began to regard him uneasily; then there
came to Andy's eyes an awful glare, which caused Dave to step back
hastily.
“Good God, Andy! Are yer goin' ratty?”
“No!” cried Andy, wildly.
“Then what the blazes is the matter with you? You'll have rats if you
don't look out!”
“JIMMINY FROTH!—It was ME all the time!”
“What?”
“It was me that was with her all them nights. It was me that you seen.
WHY, I POPPED ON THE WOODHEAP!”
Dave was taken too suddenly to whistle this time.
“And you went for her just now?”
“Yes!” yelled Andy.
“Well—you've done it!”
“Yes,” said Andy, hopelessly; “I've done it!”
Dave whistled now—a very long, low whistle. “Well, you're a bloomin'
goat, Andy, after this. But this thing'll have to be fixed up!” and he
cantered away. Poor Andy was too badly knocked to notice the abruptness of
Dave's departure, or to see that he turned through the sliprails on to the
track that led to Porter's.
. . . . .
Half an hour later Andy appeared at Porter's back door, with an expression
on his face as though the funeral was to start in ten minutes. In a tone
befitting such an occasion, he wanted to see Lizzie.
Dave had been there with the laudable determination of fixing the business
up, and had, of course, succeeded in making it much worse than it was
before. But Andy made it all right.
The Iron-Bark Chip
Dave Regan and party—bush-fencers, tank-sinkers, rough carpenters,
&c.—were finishing the third and last culvert of their contract
on the last section of the new railway line, and had already sent in their
vouchers for the completed contract, so that there might be no excuse for
extra delay in connection with the cheque.
Now it had been expressly stipulated in the plans and specifications that
the timber for certain beams and girders was to be iron-bark and no other,
and Government inspectors were authorised to order the removal from the
ground of any timber or material they might deem inferior, or not in
accordance with the stipulations. The railway contractor's foreman and
inspector of sub-contractors was a practical man and a bushman, but he had
been a timber-getter himself; his sympathies were bushy, and he was on
winking terms with Dave Regan. Besides, extended time was expiring, and
the contractors were in a hurry to complete the line. But the Government
inspector was a reserved man who poked round on his independent own and
appeared in lonely spots at unexpected times—with apparently no
definite object in life—like a grey kangaroo bothered by a new wire
fence, but unsuspicious of the presence of humans. He wore a grey suit,
rode, or mostly led, an ashen-grey horse; the grass was long and grey, so
he was seldom spotted until he was well within the horizon and bearing
leisurely down on a party of sub-contractors, leading his horse.
Now iron-bark was scarce and distant on those ridges, and another timber,
similar in appearance, but much inferior in grain and “standing” quality,
was plentiful and close at hand. Dave and party were “about full of” the
job and place, and wanted to get their cheque and be gone to another
“spec” they had in view. So they came to reckon they'd get the last girder
from a handy tree, and have it squared, in place, and carefully and
conscientiously tarred before the inspector happened along, if he did. But
they didn't. They got it squared, and ready to be lifted into its place;
the kindly darkness of tar was ready to cover a fraud that took four
strong men with crowbars and levers to shift; and now (such is the regular
cussedness of things) as the fraudulent piece of timber lay its last hour
on the ground, looking and smelling, to their guilty imaginations like
anything but iron-bark, they were aware of the Government inspector
drifting down upon them obliquely, with something of the atmosphere of a
casual Bill or Jim who had dropped out of his easy-going track to see how
they were getting on, and borrow a match. They had more than half hoped
that, as he had visited them pretty frequently during the progress of the
work, and knew how near it was to completion, he wouldn't bother coming
any more. But it's the way with the Government. You might move heaven and
earth in vain endeavour to get the “Guvermunt” to flutter an eyelash over
something of the most momentous importance to yourself and mates and the
district—even to the country; but just when you are leaving
authority severely alone, and have strong reasons for not wanting to worry
or interrupt it, and not desiring it to worry about you, it will take a
fancy into its head to come along and bother.
“It's always the way!” muttered Dave to his mates. “I knew the beggar
would turn up!... And the only cronk log we've had, too!” he added, in an
injured tone. “If this had 'a' been the only blessed iron-bark in the
whole contract, it would have been all right.... Good-day, sir!” (to the
inspector). “It's hot?”
The inspector nodded. He was not of an impulsive nature. He got down from
his horse and looked at the girder in an abstracted way; and presently
there came into his eyes a dreamy, far-away, sad sort of expression, as if
there had been a very sad and painful occurrence in his family, way back
in the past, and that piece of timber in some way reminded him of it and
brought the old sorrow home to him. He blinked three times, and asked, in
a subdued tone:
“Is that iron-bark?”
Jack Bentley, the fluent liar of the party, caught his breath with a jerk
and coughed, to cover the gasp and gain time. “I—iron-bark? Of
course it is! I thought you would know iron-bark, mister.” (Mister was
silent.) “What else d'yer think it is?”
The dreamy, abstracted expression was back. The inspector, by-the-way,
didn't know much about timber, but he had a great deal of instinct, and
went by it when in doubt.
“L—look here, mister!” put in Dave Regan, in a tone of innocent
puzzlement and with a blank bucolic face. “B—but don't the plans and
specifications say iron-bark? Ours does, anyway. I—I'll git the
papers from the tent and show yer, if yer like.”
It was not necessary. The inspector admitted the fact slowly. He stooped,
and with an absent air picked up a chip. He looked at it abstractedly for
a moment, blinked his threefold blink; then, seeming to recollect an
appointment, he woke up suddenly and asked briskly:
“Did this chip come off that girder?”
Blank silence. The inspector blinked six times, divided in threes,
rapidly, mounted his horse, said “Day,” and rode off.
Regan and party stared at each other.
“Wha—what did he do that for?” asked Andy Page, the third in the
party.
“Do what for, you fool?” enquired Dave.
“Ta—take that chip for?”
“He's taking it to the office!” snarled Jack Bentley.
“What—what for? What does he want to do that for?”
“To get it blanky well analysed! You ass! Now are yer satisfied?” And Jack
sat down hard on the timber, jerked out his pipe, and said to Dave, in a
sharp, toothache tone:
“Gimmiamatch!”
“We—well! what are we to do now?” enquired Andy, who was the hardest
grafter, but altogether helpless, hopeless, and useless in a crisis like
this.
“Grain and varnish the bloomin' culvert!” snapped Bentley.
But Dave's eyes, that had been ruefully following the inspector, suddenly
dilated. The inspector had ridden a short distance along the line,
dismounted, thrown the bridle over a post, laid the chip (which was too
big to go in his pocket) on top of it, got through the fence, and was now
walking back at an angle across the line in the direction of the fencing
party, who had worked up on the other side, a little more than opposite
the culvert.
Dave took in the lay of the country at a glance and thought rapidly.
“Gimme an iron-bark chip!” he said suddenly.
Bentley, who was quick-witted when the track was shown him, as is a
kangaroo dog (Jack ran by sight, not scent), glanced in the line of Dave's
eyes, jumped up, and got a chip about the same size as that which the
inspector had taken.
Now the “lay of the country” sloped generally to the line from both sides,
and the angle between the inspector's horse, the fencing party, and the
culvert was well within a clear concave space; but a couple of hundred
yards back from the line and parallel to it (on the side on which Dave's
party worked their timber) a fringe of scrub ran to within a few yards of
a point which would be about in line with a single tree on the cleared
slope, the horse, and the fencing party.
Dave took the iron-bark chip, ran along the bed of the water-course into
the scrub, raced up the siding behind the bushes, got safely, though
without breathing, across the exposed space, and brought the tree into
line between him and the inspector, who was talking to the fencers. Then
he began to work quickly down the slope towards the tree (which was a thin
one), keeping it in line, his arms close to his sides, and working, as it
were, down the trunk of the tree, as if the fencing party were kangaroos
and Dave was trying to get a shot at them. The inspector, by-the-bye, had
a habit of glancing now and then in the direction of his horse, as though
under the impression that it was flighty and restless and inclined to bolt
on opportunity. It was an anxious moment for all parties concerned—except
the inspector. They didn't want HIM to be perturbed. And, just as Dave
reached the foot of the tree, the inspector finished what he had to say to
the fencers, turned, and started to walk briskly back to his horse. There
was a thunderstorm coming. Now was the critical moment—there were
certain prearranged signals between Dave's party and the fencers which
might have interested the inspector, but none to meet a case like this.
Jack Bentley gasped, and started forward with an idea of intercepting the
inspector and holding him for a few minutes in bogus conversation.
Inspirations come to one at a critical moment, and it flashed on Jack's
mind to send Andy instead. Andy looked as innocent and guileless as he
was, but was uncomfortable in the vicinity of “funny business”, and must
have an honest excuse. “Not that that mattered,” commented Jack
afterwards; “it would have taken the inspector ten minutes to get at what
Andy was driving at, whatever it was.”
“Run, Andy! Tell him there's a heavy thunderstorm coming and he'd better
stay in our humpy till it's over. Run! Don't stand staring like a blanky
fool. He'll be gone!”
Andy started. But just then, as luck would have it, one of the fencers
started after the inspector, hailing him as “Hi, mister!” He wanted to be
set right about the survey or something—or to pretend to want to be
set right—from motives of policy which I haven't time to explain
here.
That fencer explained afterwards to Dave's party that he “seen what you
coves was up to,” and that's why he called the inspector back. But he told
them that after they had told their yarn—which was a mistake.
“Come back, Andy!” cried Jack Bentley.
Dave Regan slipped round the tree, down on his hands and knees, and made
quick time through the grass which, luckily, grew pretty tall on the
thirty or forty yards of slope between the tree and the horse. Close to
the horse, a thought struck Dave that pulled him up, and sent a shiver
along his spine and a hungry feeling under it. The horse would break away
and bolt! But the case was desperate. Dave ventured an interrogatory
“Cope, cope, cope?” The horse turned its head wearily and regarded him
with a mild eye, as if he'd expected him to come, and come on all fours,
and wondered what had kept him so long; then he went on thinking. Dave
reached the foot of the post; the horse obligingly leaning over on the
other leg. Dave reared head and shoulders cautiously behind the post, like
a snake; his hand went up twice, swiftly—the first time he grabbed
the inspector's chip, and the second time he put the iron-bark one in its
place. He drew down and back, and scuttled off for the tree like a
gigantic tailless “goanna”.
A few minutes later he walked up to the culvert from along the creek,
smoking hard to settle his nerves.
The sky seemed to darken suddenly; the first great drops of the
thunderstorm came pelting down. The inspector hurried to his horse, and
cantered off along the line in the direction of the fettlers' camp.
He had forgotten all about the chip, and left it on top of the post!
Dave Regan sat down on the beam in the rain and swore comprehensively.
“Middleton's Peter”
I.
The First Born
The struggling squatter is to be found in Australia as well as the
“struggling farmer”. The Australian squatter is not always the mighty wool
king that English and American authors and other uninformed people
apparently imagine him to be. Squatting, at the best, is but a game of
chance. It depends mainly on the weather, and that, in New South Wales at
least, depends on nothing.
Joe Middleton was a struggling squatter, with a station some distance to
the westward of the furthest line reached by the ordinary “new chum”. His
run, at the time of our story, was only about six miles square, and his
stock was limited in proportion. The hands on Joe's run consisted of his
brother Dave, a middle-aged man known only as “Middleton's Peter” (who had
been in the service of the Middleton family ever since Joe Middleton could
remember), and an old black shepherd, with his gin and two boys.
It was in the first year of Joe's marriage. He had married a very ordinary
girl, as far as Australian girls go, but in his eyes she was an angel. He
really worshipped her.
One sultry afternoon in midsummer all the station hands, with the
exception of Dave Middleton, were congregated about the homestead door,
and it was evident from their solemn faces that something unusual was the
matter. They appeared to be watching for something or someone across the
flat, and the old black shepherd, who had been listening intently with
bent head, suddenly straightened himself up and cried:
“I can hear the cart. I can see it!”
You must bear in mind that our blackfellows do not always talk the
gibberish with which they are credited by story writers.
It was not until some time after Black Bill had spoken that the white—or,
rather, the brown—portion of the party could see or even hear the
approaching vehicle. At last, far out through the trunks of the native
apple-trees, the cart was seen approaching; and as it came nearer it was
evident that it was being driven at a break-neck pace, the horses
cantering all the way, while the motion of the cart, as first one wheel
and then the other sprang from a root or a rut, bore a striking
resemblance to the Highland Fling. There were two persons in the cart. One
was Mother Palmer, a stout, middle-aged party (who sometimes did the
duties of a midwife), and the other was Dave Middleton, Joe's brother.
The cart was driven right up to the door with scarcely any abatement of
speed, and was stopped so suddenly that Mrs. Palmer was sent sprawling on
to the horse's rump. She was quickly helped down, and, as soon as she had
recovered sufficient breath, she followed Black Mary into the bedroom
where young Mrs. Middleton was lying, looking very pale and frightened.
The horse which had been driven so cruelly had not done blowing before
another cart appeared, also driven very fast. It contained old Mr. and
Mrs. Middleton, who lived comfortably on a small farm not far from
Palmer's place.
As soon as he had dumped Mrs. Palmer, Dave Middleton left the cart and,
mounting a fresh horse which stood ready saddled in the yard, galloped off
through the scrub in a different direction.
Half an hour afterwards Joe Middleton came home on a horse that had been
almost ridden to death. His mother came out at the sound of his arrival,
and he anxiously asked her:
“How is she?”
“Did you find Doc. Wild?” asked the mother.
“No, confound him!” exclaimed Joe bitterly. “He promised me faithfully to
come over on Wednesday and stay until Maggie was right again. Now he has
left Dean's and gone—Lord knows where. I suppose he is drinking
again. How is Maggie?”
“It's all over now—the child is born. It's a boy; but she is very
weak. Dave got Mrs. Palmer here just in time. I had better tell you at
once that Mrs. Palmer says if we don't get a doctor here to-night poor
Maggie won't live.”
“Good God! and what am I to do?” cried Joe desperately.
“Is there any other doctor within reach?”
“No; there is only the one at B——; that's forty miles away,
and he is laid up with the broken leg he got in the buggy accident.
Where's Dave?”
“Gone to Black's shanty. One of Mrs. Palmer's sons thought he remembered
someone saying that Doc. Wild was there last week. That's fifteen miles
away.”
“But it is our only hope,” said Joe dejectedly. “I wish to God that I had
taken Maggie to some civilised place a month ago.”
Doc. Wild was a well-known character among the bushmen of New South Wales,
and although the profession did not recognise him, and denounced him as an
empiric, his skill was undoubted. Bushmen had great faith in him, and
would often ride incredible distances in order to bring him to the bedside
of a sick friend. He drank fearfully, but was seldom incapable of treating
a patient; he would, however, sometimes be found in an obstinate mood and
refuse to travel to the side of a sick person, and then the devil himself
could not make the doctor budge. But for all this he was very generous—a
fact that could, no doubt, be testified to by many a grateful sojourner in
the lonely bush.
II.
The Only Hope
Night came on, and still there was no change in the condition of the young
wife, and no sign of the doctor. Several stockmen from the neighbouring
stations, hearing that there was trouble at Joe Middleton's, had ridden
over, and had galloped off on long, hopeless rides in search of a doctor.
Being generally free from sickness themselves, these bushmen look upon it
as a serious business even in its mildest form; what is more, their
sympathy is always practical where it is possible for it to be so. One
day, while out on the run after an “outlaw”, Joe Middleton was badly
thrown from his horse, and the break-neck riding that was done on that
occasion from the time the horse came home with empty saddle until the
rider was safe in bed and attended by a doctor was something
extraordinary, even for the bush.
Before the time arrived when Dave Middleton might reasonably have been
expected to return, the station people were anxiously watching for him,
all except the old blackfellow and the two boys, who had gone to yard the
sheep.
The party had been increased by Jimmy Nowlett, the bullocky, who had just
arrived with a load of fencing wire and provisions for Middleton. Jimmy
was standing in the moonlight, whip in hand, looking as anxious as the
husband himself, and endeavouring to calculate by mental arithmetic the
exact time it ought to take Dave to complete his double journey, taking
into consideration the distance, the obstacles in the way, and the chances
of horse-flesh.
But the time which Jimmy fixed for the arrival came without Dave.
Old Peter (as he was generally called, though he was not really old) stood
aside in his usual sullen manner, his hat drawn down over his brow and
eyes, and nothing visible but a thick and very horizontal black beard,
from the depth of which emerged large clouds of very strong tobacco smoke,
the product of a short, black, clay pipe.
They had almost given up all hope of seeing Dave return that night, when
Peter slowly and deliberately removed his pipe and grunted:
“He's a-comin'.”
He then replaced the pipe, and smoked on as before.
All listened, but not one of them could hear a sound.
“Yer ears must be pretty sharp for yer age, Peter. We can't hear him,”
remarked Jimmy Nowlett.
“His dog ken,” said Peter.
The pipe was again removed and its abbreviated stem pointed in the
direction of Dave's cattle dog, who had risen beside his kennel with
pointed ears, and was looking eagerly in the direction from which his
master was expected to come.
Presently the sound of horse's hoofs was distinctly heard.
“I can hear two horses,” cried Jimmy Nowlett excitedly.
“There's only one,” said old Peter quietly.
A few moments passed, and a single horseman appeared on the far side of
the flat.
“It's Doc. Wild on Dave's horse,” cried Jimmy Nowlett. “Dave don't ride
like that.”
“It's Dave,” said Peter, replacing his pipe and looking more unsociable
than ever.
Dave rode up and, throwing himself wearily from the saddle, stood
ominously silent by the side of his horse.
Joe Middleton said nothing, but stood aside with an expression of utter
hopelessness on his face.
“Not there?” asked Jimmy Nowlett at last, addressing Dave.
“Yes, he's there,” answered Dave, impatiently.
This was not the answer they expected, but nobody seemed surprised.
“Drunk?” asked Jimmy.
“Yes.”
Here old Peter removed his pipe, and pronounced the one word—“How?”
“What the hell do you mean by that?” muttered Dave, whose patience had
evidently been severely tried by the clever but intemperate bush doctor.
“How drunk?” explained Peter, with great equanimity.
“Stubborn drunk, blind drunk, beastly drunk, dead drunk, and damned well
drunk, if that's what you want to know!”
“What did Doc. say?” asked Jimmy.
“Said he was sick—had lumbago—wouldn't come for the Queen of
England; said he wanted a course of treatment himself. Curse him! I have
no patience to talk about him.”
“I'd give him a course of treatment,” muttered Jimmy viciously, trailing
the long lash of his bullock-whip through the grass and spitting
spitefully at the ground.
Dave turned away and joined Joe, who was talking earnestly to his mother
by the kitchen door. He told them that he had spent an hour trying to
persuade Doc. Wild to come, and, that before he had left the shanty, Black
had promised him faithfully to bring the doctor over as soon as his
obstinate mood wore off.
Just then a low moan was heard from the sick room, followed by the sound
of Mother Palmer's voice calling old Mrs. Middleton, who went inside
immediately.
No one had noticed the disappearance of Peter, and when he presently
returned from the stockyard, leading the only fresh horse that remained,
Jimmy Nowlett began to regard him with some interest. Peter transferred
the saddle from Dave's horse to the other, and then went into a small room
off the kitchen, which served him as a bedroom; from it he soon returned
with a formidable-looking revolver, the chambers of which he examined in
the moonlight in full view of all the company. They thought for a moment
the man had gone mad. Old Middleton leaped quickly behind Nowlett, and
Black Mary, who had come out to the cask at the corner for a dipper of
water, dropped the dipper and was inside like a shot. One of the black
boys came softly up at that moment; as soon as his sharp eye “spotted” the
weapon, he disappeared as though the earth had swallowed him.
“What the mischief are yer goin' ter do, Peter?” asked Jimmy.
“Goin' to fetch him,” said Peter, and, after carefully emptying his pipe
and replacing it in a leather pouch at his belt, he mounted and rode off
at an easy canter.
Jimmy watched the horse until it disappeared at the edge of the flat, and
then after coiling up the long lash of his bullock-whip in the dust until
it looked like a sleeping snake, he prodded the small end of the long pine
handle into the middle of the coil, as though driving home a point, and
said in a tone of intense conviction:
“He'll fetch him.”
III.
Doc. Wild
Peter gradually increased his horse's speed along the rough bush track
until he was riding at a good pace. It was ten miles to the main road, and
five from there to the shanty kept by Black.
For some time before Peter started the atmosphere had been very close and
oppressive. The great black edge of a storm-cloud had risen in the east,
and everything indicated the approach of a thunderstorm. It was not long
coming. Before Peter had completed six miles of his journey, the clouds
rolled over, obscuring the moon, and an Australian thunderstorm came on
with its mighty downpour, its blinding lightning, and its earth-shaking
thunder. Peter rode steadily on, only pausing now and then until a flash
revealed the track in front of him.
Black's shanty—or, rather, as the sign had it, “Post Office and
General Store”—was, as we have said, five miles along the main road
from the point where Middleton's track joined it. The building was of the
usual style of bush architecture. About two hundred yards nearer the
creek, which crossed the road further on, stood a large bark and slab
stable, large enough to have met the requirements of a legitimate bush
“public”.
The reader may doubt that a “sly grog shop” could openly carry on business
on a main Government road along which mounted troopers were continually
passing. But then, you see, mounted troopers get thirsty like other men;
moreover, they could always get their thirst quenched 'gratis' at these
places; so the reader will be prepared to hear that on this very night two
troopers' horses were stowed snugly away in the stable, and two troopers
were stowed snugly away in the back room of the shanty, sleeping off the
effects of their cheap but strong potations.
There were two rooms, of a sort, attached to the stables—one at each
end. One was occupied by a man who was “generally useful”, and the other
was the surgery, office, and bedroom 'pro tem.' of Doc. Wild.
Doc. Wild was a tall man, of spare proportions. He had a cadaverous face,
black hair, bushy black eyebrows, eagle nose, and eagle eyes. He never
slept while he was drinking. On this occasion he sat in front of the fire
on a low three-legged stool. His knees were drawn up, his toes hooked
round the front legs of the stool, one hand resting on one knee, and one
elbow (the hand supporting the chin) resting on the other. He was staring
intently into the fire, on which an old black saucepan was boiling and
sending forth a pungent odour of herbs. There seemed something uncanny
about the doctor as the red light of the fire fell on his hawk-like face
and gleaming eyes. He might have been Mephistopheles watching some
infernal brew.
He had sat there some time without stirring a finger, when the door
suddenly burst open and Middleton's Peter stood within, dripping wet. The
doctor turned his black, piercing eyes upon the intruder (who regarded him
silently) for a moment, and then asked quietly:
“What the hell do you want?”
“I want you,” said Peter.
“And what do you want me for?”
“I want you to come to Joe Middleton's wife. She's bad,” said Peter
calmly.
“I won't come,” shouted the doctor. “I've brought enough horse-stealers
into the world already. If any more want to come they can go to blazes for
me. Now, you get out of this!”
“Don't get yer rag out,” said Peter quietly. “The hoss-stealer's come, an'
nearly killed his mother ter begin with; an' if yer don't get yer
physic-box an' come wi' me, by the great God I'll——”
Here the revolver was produced and pointed at Doc. Wild's head. The sight
of the weapon had a sobering effect upon the doctor. He rose, looked at
Peter critically for a moment, knocked the weapon out of his hand, and
said slowly and deliberately:
“Wall, ef the case es as serious as that, I (hic) reckon I'd better come.”
Peter was still of the same opinion, so Doc. Wild proceeded to get his
medicine chest ready. He explained afterwards, in one of his softer
moments, that the shooter didn't frighten him so much as it touched his
memory—“sorter put him in mind of the old days in California, and
made him think of the man he might have been,” he'd say,—“kinder
touched his heart and slid the durned old panorama in front of him like a
flash; made him think of the time when he slipped three leaden pills into
'Blue Shirt' for winking at a new chum behind his (the Doc.'s) back when
he was telling a truthful yarn, and charged the said 'Blue Shirt' a
hundred dollars for extracting the said pills.”
Joe Middleton's wife is a grandmother now.
Peter passed after the manner of his sort; he was found dead in his bunk.
Poor Doc. Wild died in a shepherd's hut at the Dry Creeks. The shepherds
(white men) found him, “naked as he was born and with the hide half burned
off him with the sun,” rounding up imaginary snakes on a dusty clearing,
one blazing hot day. The hut-keeper had some “quare” (queer) experiences
with the doctor during the next three days and used, in after years, to
tell of them, between the puffs of his pipe, calmly and solemnly and as if
the story was rather to the doctor's credit than otherwise. The shepherds
sent for the police and a doctor, and sent word to Joe Middleton. Doc.
Wild was sensible towards the end. His interview with the other doctor was
characteristic. “And, now you see how far I am,” he said in conclusion—“have
you brought the brandy?” The other doctor had. Joe Middleton came with his
waggonette, and in it the softest mattress and pillows the station
afforded. He also, in his innocence, brought a dozen of soda-water. Doc.
Wild took Joe's hand feebly, and, a little later, he “passed out” (as he
would have said) murmuring “something that sounded like poetry”, in an
unknown tongue. Joe took the body to the home station. “Who's the boss
bringin'?” asked the shearers, seeing the waggonette coming very slowly
and the boss walking by the horses' heads. “Doc. Wild,” said a station
hand. “Take yer hats off.”
They buried him with bush honours, and chiselled his name on a slab of
bluegum—a wood that lasts.
The Mystery of Dave Regan
“And then there was Dave Regan,” said the traveller. “Dave used to die
oftener than any other bushman I knew. He was always being reported dead
and turnin' up again. He seemed to like it—except once, when his
brother drew his money and drank it all to drown his grief at what he
called Dave's 'untimely end'. Well, Dave went up to Queensland once with
cattle, and was away three years and reported dead, as usual. He was
drowned in the Bogan this time while tryin' to swim his horse acrost a
flood—and his sweetheart hurried up and got spliced to a worse man
before Dave got back.
“Well, one day I was out in the bush lookin' for timber, when the biggest
storm ever knowed in that place come on. There was hail in it, too, as big
as bullets, and if I hadn't got behind a stump and crouched down in time
I'd have been riddled like a—like a bushranger. As it was, I got
soakin' wet. The storm was over in a few minutes, the water run off down
the gullies, and the sun come out and the scrub steamed—and stunk
like a new pair of moleskin trousers. I went on along the track, and
presently I seen a long, lanky chap get on to a long, lanky horse and ride
out of a bush yard at the edge of a clearin'. I knowed it was Dave
d'reckly I set eyes on him.
“Dave used to ride a tall, holler-backed thoroughbred with a body and
limbs like a kangaroo dog, and it would circle around you and sidle away
as if it was frightened you was goin' to jab a knife into it.
“''Ello! Dave!' said I, as he came spurrin' up. 'How are yer!'
“''Ello, Jim!' says he. 'How are you?'
“'All right!' says I. 'How are yer gettin' on?'
“But, before we could say any more, that horse shied away and broke off
through the scrub to the right. I waited, because I knowed Dave would come
back again if I waited long enough; and in about ten minutes he came
sidlin' in from the scrub to the left.
“'Oh, I'm all right,' says he, spurrin' up sideways; 'How are you?'
“'Right!' says I. 'How's the old people?'
“'Oh, I ain't been home yet,' says he, holdin' out his hand; but, afore I
could grip it, the cussed horse sidled off to the south end of the
clearin' and broke away again through the scrub.
“I heard Dave swearin' about the country for twenty minutes or so, and
then he came spurrin' and cursin' in from the other end of the clearin'.
“'Where have you been all this time?' I said, as the horse came curvin' up
like a boomerang.
“'Gulf country,' said Dave.
“'That was a storm, Dave,' said I.
“'My oath!' says Dave.
“'Get caught in it?'
“'Yes.'
“'Got to shelter?'
“'No.'
“'But you're as dry's a bone, Dave!'
“Dave grinned. '———and———and———the————!'
he yelled.
“He said that to the horse as it boomeranged off again and broke away
through the scrub. I waited; but he didn't come back, and I reckoned he'd
got so far away before he could pull up that he didn't think it worth
while comin' back; so I went on. By-and-bye I got thinkin'. Dave was as
dry as a bone, and I knowed that he hadn't had time to get to shelter, for
there wasn't a shed within twelve miles. He wasn't only dry, but his coat
was creased and dusty too—same as if he'd been sleepin' in a holler
log; and when I come to think of it, his face seemed thinner and whiter
than it used ter, and so did his hands and wrists, which always stuck a
long way out of his coat-sleeves; and there was blood on his face—but
I thought he'd got scratched with a twig. (Dave used to wear a coat three
or four sizes too small for him, with sleeves that didn't come much below
his elbows and a tail that scarcely reached his waist behind.) And his
hair seemed dark and lank, instead of bein' sandy and stickin' out like an
old fibre brush, as it used ter. And then I thought his voice sounded
different, too. And, when I enquired next day, there was no one heard of
Dave, and the chaps reckoned I must have been drunk, or seen his ghost.
“It didn't seem all right at all—it worried me a lot. I couldn't
make out how Dave kept dry; and the horse and saddle and saddle-cloth was
wet. I told the chaps how he talked to me and what he said, and how he
swore at the horse; but they only said it was Dave's ghost and nobody
else's. I told 'em about him bein' dry as a bone after gettin' caught in
that storm; but they only laughed and said it was a dry place where Dave
went to. I talked and argued about it until the chaps began to tap their
foreheads and wink—then I left off talking. But I didn't leave off
thinkin'—I always hated a mystery. Even Dave's father told me that
Dave couldn't be alive or else his ghost wouldn't be round—he said
he knew Dave better than that. One or two fellers did turn up afterwards
that had seen Dave about the time that I did—and then the chaps said
they was sure that Dave was dead.
“But one fine day, as a lot of us chaps was playin' pitch and toss at the
shanty, one of the fellers yelled out:
“'By Gee! Here comes Dave Regan!'
“And I looked up and saw Dave himself, sidlin' out of a cloud of dust on a
long lanky horse. He rode into the stockyard, got down, hung his horse up
to a post, put up the rails, and then come slopin' towards us with a
half-acre grin on his face. Dave had long, thin bow-legs, and when he was
on the ground he moved as if he was on roller skates.
“''El-lo, Dave!' says I. 'How are yer?'
“''Ello, Jim!' said he. 'How the blazes are you?'
“'All right!' says I, shakin' hands. 'How are yer?'
“'Oh! I'm all right!' he says. 'How are yer poppin' up!'
“Well, when we'd got all that settled, and the other chaps had asked how
he was, he said: 'Ah, well! Let's have a drink.'
“And all the other chaps crawfished up and flung themselves round the
corner and sidled into the bar after Dave. We had a lot of talk, and he
told us that he'd been down before, but had gone away without seein' any
of us, except me, because he'd suddenly heard of a mob of cattle at a
station two hundred miles away; and after a while I took him aside and
said:
“'Look here, Dave! Do you remember the day I met you after the storm?'
“He scratched his head.
“'Why, yes,' he says.
“'Did you get under shelter that day?'
“'Why—no.'
“'Then how the blazes didn't yer get wet?'
“Dave grinned; then he says:
“'Why, when I seen the storm coming I took off me clothes and stuck 'em in
a holler log till the rain was over.'
“'Yes,' he says, after the other coves had done laughin', but before I'd
done thinking; 'I kept my clothes dry and got a good refreshin'
shower-bath into the bargain.'
“Then he scratched the back of his neck with his little finger, and
dropped his jaw, and thought a bit; then he rubbed the top of his head and
his shoulder, reflective-like, and then he said:
“'But I didn't reckon for them there blanky hailstones.'”
Mitchell on Matrimony
“I suppose your wife will be glad to see you,” said Mitchell to his mate
in their camp by the dam at Hungerford. They were overhauling their swags,
and throwing away the blankets, and calico, and old clothes, and rubbish
they didn't want—everything, in fact, except their pocket-books and
letters and portraits, things which men carry about with them always, that
are found on them when they die, and sent to their relations if possible.
Otherwise they are taken in charge by the constable who officiates at the
inquest, and forwarded to the Minister of Justice along with the
depositions.
It was the end of the shearing season. Mitchell and his mate had been
lucky enough to get two good sheds in succession, and were going to take
the coach from Hungerford to Bourke on their way to Sydney. The morning
stars were bright yet, and they sat down to a final billy of tea, two
dusty Johnny-cakes, and a scrag of salt mutton.
“Yes,” said Mitchell's mate, “and I'll be glad to see her too.”
“I suppose you will,” said Mitchell. He placed his pint-pot between his
feet, rested his arm against his knee, and stirred the tea meditatively
with the handle of his pocket-knife. It was vaguely understood that
Mitchell had been married at one period of his chequered career.
“I don't think we ever understood women properly,” he said, as he took a
cautious sip to see if his tea was cool and sweet enough, for his lips
were sore; “I don't think we ever will—we never took the trouble to
try, and if we did it would be only wasted brain power that might just as
well be spent on the blackfellow's lingo; because by the time you've
learnt it they'll be extinct, and woman 'll be extinct before you've
learnt her.... The morning star looks bright, doesn't it?”
“Ah, well,” said Mitchell after a while, “there's many little things we
might try to understand women in. I read in a piece of newspaper the other
day about how a man changes after he's married; how he gets short, and
impatient, and bored (which is only natural), and sticks up a wall of
newspaper between himself and his wife when he's at home; and how it comes
like a cold shock to her, and all her air-castles vanish, and in the end
she often thinks about taking the baby and the clothes she stands in, and
going home for sympathy and comfort to mother.
“Perhaps she never got a word of sympathy from her mother in her life, nor
a day's comfort at home before she was married; but that doesn't make the
slightest difference. It doesn't make any difference in your case either,
if you haven't been acting like a dutiful son-in-law.
“Somebody wrote that a woman's love is her whole existence, while a man's
love is only part of his—which is true, and only natural and
reasonable, all things considered. But women never consider as a rule. A
man can't go on talking lovey-dovey talk for ever, and listening to his
young wife's prattle when he's got to think about making a living, and
nursing her and answering her childish questions and telling her he loves
his little ownest every minute in the day, while the bills are running up,
and rent mornings begin to fly round and hustle and crowd him.
“He's got her and he's satisfied; and if the truth is known he loves her
really more than he did when they were engaged, only she won't be
satisfied about it unless he tells her so every hour in the day. At least
that's how it is for the first few months.
“But a woman doesn't understand these things—she never will, she
can't—and it would be just as well for us to try and understand that
she doesn't and can't understand them.”
Mitchell knocked the tea-leaves out of his pannikin against his boot, and
reached for the billy.
“There's many little things we might do that seem mere trifles and
nonsense to us, but mean a lot to her; that wouldn't be any trouble or
sacrifice to us, but might help to make her life happy. It's just because
we never think about these little things—don't think them worth
thinking about, in fact—they never enter our intellectual foreheads.
“For instance, when you're going out in the morning you might put your
arms round her and give her a hug and a kiss, without her having to remind
you. You may forget about it and never think any more of it—but she
will.
“It wouldn't be any trouble to you, and would only take a couple of
seconds, and would give her something to be happy about when you're gone,
and make her sing to herself for hours while she bustles about her work
and thinks up what she'll get you for dinner.”
Mitchell's mate sighed, and shifted the sugar-bag over towards Mitchell.
He seemed touched and bothered over something.
“Then again,” said Mitchell, “it mightn't be convenient for you to go home
to dinner—something might turn up during the morning—you might
have some important business to do, or meet some chaps and get invited to
lunch and not be very well able to refuse, when it's too late, or you
haven't a chance to send a message to your wife. But then again, chaps and
business seem very big things to you, and only little things to the wife;
just as lovey-dovey talk is important to her and nonsense to you. And when
you come to analyse it, one is not so big, nor the other so small, after
all; especially when you come to think that chaps can always wait, and
business is only an inspiration in your mind, nine cases out of ten.
“Think of the trouble she takes to get you a good dinner, and how she
keeps it hot between two plates in the oven, and waits hour after hour
till the dinner gets dried up, and all her morning's work is wasted. Think
how it hurts her, and how anxious she'll be (especially if you're inclined
to booze) for fear that something has happened to you. You can't get it
out of the heads of some young wives that you're liable to get run over,
or knocked down, or assaulted, or robbed, or get into one of the fixes
that a woman is likely to get into. But about the dinner waiting. Try and
put yourself in her place. Wouldn't you get mad under the same
circumstances? I know I would.
“I remember once, only just after I was married, I was invited
unexpectedly to a kidney pudding and beans—which was my favourite
grub at the time—and I didn't resist, especially as it was washing
day and I told the wife not to bother about anything for dinner. I got
home an hour or so late, and had a good explanation thought out, when the
wife met me with a smile as if we had just been left a thousand pounds.
She'd got her washing finished without assistance, though I'd told her to
get somebody to help her, and she had a kidney pudding and beans, with a
lot of extras thrown in, as a pleasant surprise for me.
“Well, I kissed her, and sat down, and stuffed till I thought every
mouthful would choke me. I got through with it somehow, but I've never
cared for kidney pudding or beans since.”
Mitchell felt for his pipe with a fatherly smile in his eyes.
“And then again,” he continued, as he cut up his tobacco, “your wife might
put on a new dress and fix herself up and look well, and you might think
so and be satisfied with her appearance and be proud to take her out; but
you want to tell her so, and tell her so as often as you think about it—and
try to think a little oftener than men usually do, too.”
. . . . .
“You should have made a good husband, Jack,” said his mate, in a softened
tone.
“Ah, well, perhaps I should,” said Mitchell, rubbing up his tobacco; then
he asked abstractedly: “What sort of a husband did you make, Joe?”
“I might have made a better one than I did,” said Joe seriously, and
rather bitterly, “but I know one thing, I'm going to try and make up for
it when I go back this time.”
“We all say that,” said Mitchell reflectively, filling his pipe. “She
loves you, Joe.”
“I know she does,” said Joe.
Mitchell lit up.
“And so would any man who knew her or had seen her letters to you,” he
said between the puffs. “She's happy and contented enough, I believe?”
“Yes,” said Joe, “at least while I was there. She's never easy when I'm
away. I might have made her a good deal more happy and contented without
hurting myself much.”
Mitchell smoked long, soft, measured puffs.
His mate shifted uneasily and glanced at him a couple of times, and seemed
to become impatient, and to make up his mind about something; or perhaps
he got an idea that Mitchell had been “having” him, and felt angry over
being betrayed into maudlin confidences; for he asked abruptly:
“How is your wife now, Mitchell?”
“I don't know,” said Mitchell calmly.
“Don't know?” echoed the mate. “Didn't you treat her well?”
Mitchell removed his pipe and drew a long breath.
“Ah, well, I tried to,” he said wearily.
“Well, did you put your theory into practice?”
“I did,” said Mitchell very deliberately.
Joe waited, but nothing came.
“Well?” he asked impatiently, “How did it act? Did it work well?”
“I don't know,” said Mitchell (puff); “she left me.”
“What!”
Mitchell jerked the half-smoked pipe from his mouth, and rapped the
burning tobacco out against the toe of his boot.
“She left me,” he said, standing up and stretching himself. Then, with a
vicious jerk of his arm, “She left me for—another kind of a fellow!”
He looked east towards the public-house, where they were taking the
coach-horses from the stable.
“Why don't you finish your tea, Joe? The billy's getting cold.”
Mitchell on Women
“All the same,” said Mitchell's mate, continuing an argument by the
camp-fire; “all the same, I think that a woman can stand cold water better
than a man. Why, when I was staying in a boarding-house in Dunedin, one
very cold winter, there was a lady lodger who went down to the shower-bath
first thing every morning; never missed one; sometimes went in freezing
weather when I wouldn't go into a cold bath for a fiver; and sometimes
she'd stay under the shower for ten minutes at a time.”
“How'd you know?”
“Why, my room was near the bath-room, and I could hear the shower and tap
going, and her floundering about.”
“Hear your grandmother!” exclaimed Mitchell, contemptuously. “You don't
know women yet. Was this woman married? Did she have a husband there?”
“No; she was a young widow.”
“Ah! well, it would have been the same if she was a young girl—or an
old one. Were there some passable men-boarders there?”
“I was there.”
“Oh, yes! But I mean, were there any there beside you?”
“Oh, yes, there were three or four; there was—a clerk and a——”
“Never mind, as long as there was something with trousers on. Did it ever
strike you that she never got into the bath at all?”
“Why, no! What would she want to go there at all for, in that case?”
“To make an impression on the men,” replied Mitchell promptly. “She wanted
to make out she was nice, and wholesome, and well-washed, and particular.
Made an impression on YOU, it seems, or you wouldn't remember it.”
“Well, yes, I suppose so; and, now I come to think of it, the bath didn't
seem to injure her make-up or wet her hair; but I supposed she held her
head from under the shower somehow.”
“Did she make-up so early in the morning?” asked Mitchell.
“Yes—I'm sure.”
“That's unusual; but it might have been so where there was a lot of
boarders. And about the hair—that didn't count for anything, because
washing-the-head ain't supposed to be always included in a lady's bath;
it's only supposed to be washed once a fortnight, and some don't do it
once a month. The hair takes so long to dry; it don't matter so much if
the woman's got short, scraggy hair; but if a girl's hair was down to her
waist it would take hours to dry.”
“Well, how do they manage it without wetting their heads?”
“Oh, that's easy enough. They have a little oilskin cap that fits tight
over the forehead, and they put it on, and bunch their hair up in it when
they go under the shower. Did you ever see a woman sit in a sunny place
with her hair down after having a wash?”
“Yes, I used to see one do that regular where I was staying; but I thought
she only did it to show off.”
“Not at all—she was drying her hair; though perhaps she was showing
off at the same time, for she wouldn't sit where you—or even a
Chinaman—could see her, if she didn't think she had a good head of
hair. Now, I'LL tell you a yarn about a woman's bath. I was stopping at a
shabby-genteel boarding-house in Melbourne once, and one very cold winter,
too; and there was a rather good-looking woman there, looking for a
husband. She used to go down to the bath every morning, no matter how cold
it was, and flounder and splash about as if she enjoyed it, till you'd
feel as though you'd like to go and catch hold of her and wrap her in a
rug and carry her in to the fire and nurse her till she was warm again.”
Mitchell's mate moved uneasily, and crossed the other leg; he seemed
greatly interested.
“But she never went into the water at all!” continued Mitchell. “As soon
as one or two of the men was up in the morning she'd come down from her
room in a dressing-gown. It was a toney dressing-gown, too, and set her
off properly. She knew how to dress, anyway; most of that sort of women
do. The gown was a kind of green colour, with pink and white flowers all
over it, and red lining, and a lot of coffee-coloured lace round the neck
and down the front. Well, she'd come tripping downstairs and along the
passage, holding up one side of the gown to show her little bare white
foot in a slipper; and in the other hand she carried her tooth-brush and
bath-brush, and soap—like this—so's we all could see 'em;
trying to make out she was too particular to use soap after anyone else.
She could afford to buy her own soap, anyhow; it was hardly ever wet.
“Well, she'd go into the bathroom and turn on the tap and shower; when she
got about three inches of water in the bath, she'd step in, holding up her
gown out of the water, and go slithering and kicking up and down the bath,
like this, making a tremendous splashing. Of course she'd turn off the
shower first, and screw it off very tight—wouldn't do to let that
leak, you know; she might get wet; but she'd leave the other tap on, so as
to make all the more noise.”
“But how did you come to know all about this?”
“Oh, the servant girl told me. One morning she twigged her through a
corner of the bathroom window that the curtain didn't cover.”
“You seem to have been pretty thick with servant girls.”
“So do you with landladies! But never mind—let me finish the yarn.
When she thought she'd splashed enough, she'd get out, wipe her feet, wash
her face and hands, and carefully unbutton the two top buttons of her
gown; then throw a towel over her head and shoulders, and listen at the
door till she thought she heard some of the men moving about. Then she'd
start for her room, and, if she met one of the men-boarders in the passage
or on the stairs, she'd drop her eyes, and pretend to see for the first
time that the top of her dressing-gown wasn't buttoned—and she'd
give a little start and grab the gown and scurry off to her room buttoning
it up.
“And sometimes she'd come skipping into the breakfast-room late, looking
awfully sweet in her dressing-gown; and if she saw any of us there, she'd
pretend to be much startled, and say that she thought all the men had gone
out, and make as though she was going to clear; and someone 'd jump up and
give her a chair, while someone else said, 'Come in, Miss Brown! come in!
Don't let us frighten you. Come right in, and have your breakfast before
it gets cold.' So she'd flutter a bit in pretty confusion, and then make a
sweet little girly-girly dive for her chair, and tuck her feet away under
the table; and she'd blush, too, but I don't know how she managed that.
“I know another trick that women have; it's mostly played by private
barmaids. That is, to leave a stocking by accident in the bathroom for the
gentlemen to find. If the barmaid's got a nice foot and ankle, she uses
one of her own stockings; but if she hasn't she gets hold of a stocking
that belongs to a girl that has. Anyway, she'll have one readied up
somehow. The stocking must be worn and nicely darned; one that's been worn
will keep the shape of the leg and foot—at least till it's washed
again. Well, the barmaid generally knows what time the gentlemen go to
bath, and she'll make it a point of going down just as a gentleman's
going. Of course he'll give her the preference—let her go first, you
know—and she'll go in and accidentally leave the stocking in a place
where he's sure to see it, and when she comes out he'll go in and find it;
and very likely he'll be a jolly sort of fellow, and when they're all
sitting down to breakfast he'll come in and ask them to guess what he's
found, and then he'll hold up the stocking. The barmaid likes this sort of
thing; but she'll hold down her head, and pretend to be confused, and keep
her eyes on her plate, and there'll be much blushing and all that sort of
thing, and perhaps she'll gammon to be mad at him, and the landlady'll
say, 'Oh, Mr. Smith! how can yer? At the breakfast table, too!' and
they'll all laugh and look at the barmaid, and she'll get more embarrassed
than ever, and spill her tea, and make out as though the stocking didn't
belong to her.”
No Place for a Woman
He had a selection on a long box-scrub siding of the ridges, about half a
mile back and up from the coach road. There were no neighbours that I ever
heard of, and the nearest “town” was thirty miles away. He grew wheat
among the stumps of his clearing, sold the crop standing to a Cockie who
lived ten miles away, and had some surplus sons; or, some seasons, he
reaped it by hand, had it thrashed by travelling “steamer” (portable steam
engine and machine), and carried the grain, a few bags at a time, into the
mill on his rickety dray.
He had lived alone for upwards of 15 years, and was known to those who
knew him as “Ratty Howlett”.
Trav'lers and strangers failed to see anything uncommonly ratty about him.
It was known, or, at least, it was believed, without question, that while
at work he kept his horse saddled and bridled, and hung up to the fence,
or grazing about, with the saddle on—or, anyway, close handy for a
moment's notice—and whenever he caught sight, over the scrub and
through the quarter-mile break in it, of a traveller on the road, he would
jump on his horse and make after him. If it was a horseman he usually
pulled him up inside of a mile. Stories were told of unsuccessful chases,
misunderstandings, and complications arising out of Howlett's mania for
running down and bailing up travellers. Sometimes he caught one every day
for a week, sometimes not one for weeks—it was a lonely track.
The explanation was simple, sufficient, and perfectly natural—from a
bushman's point of view. Ratty only wanted to have a yarn. He and the
traveller would camp in the shade for half an hour or so and yarn and
smoke. The old man would find out where the traveller came from, and how
long he'd been there, and where he was making for, and how long he
reckoned he'd be away; and ask if there had been any rain along the
traveller's back track, and how the country looked after the drought; and
he'd get the traveller's ideas on abstract questions—if he had any.
If it was a footman (swagman), and he was short of tobacco, old Howlett
always had half a stick ready for him. Sometimes, but very rarely, he'd
invite the swagman back to the hut for a pint of tea, or a bit of meat,
flour, tea, or sugar, to carry him along the track.
And, after the yarn by the road, they said, the old man would ride back,
refreshed, to his lonely selection, and work on into the night as long as
he could see his solitary old plough horse, or the scoop of his
long-handled shovel.
And so it was that I came to make his acquaintance—or, rather, that
he made mine. I was cantering easily along the track—I was making
for the north-west with a pack horse—when about a mile beyond the
track to the selection I heard, “Hi, Mister!” and saw a dust cloud
following me. I had heard of “Old Ratty Howlett” casually, and so was
prepared for him.
A tall gaunt man on a little horse. He was clean-shaven, except for a
frill beard round under his chin, and his long wavy, dark hair was turning
grey; a square, strong-faced man, and reminded me of one full-faced
portrait of Gladstone more than any other face I had seen. He had large
reddish-brown eyes, deep set under heavy eyebrows, and with something of
the blackfellow in them—the sort of eyes that will peer at something
on the horizon that no one else can see. He had a way of talking to the
horizon, too—more than to his companion; and he had a deep vertical
wrinkle in his forehead that no smile could lessen.
I got down and got out my pipe, and we sat on a log and yarned awhile on
bush subjects; and then, after a pause, he shifted uneasily, it seemed to
me, and asked rather abruptly, and in an altered tone, if I was married. A
queer question to ask a traveller; more especially in my case, as I was
little more than a boy then.
He talked on again of old things and places where we had both been, and
asked after men he knew, or had known—drovers and others—and
whether they were living yet. Most of his inquiries went back before my
time; but some of the drovers, one or two overlanders with whom he had
been mates in his time, had grown old into mine, and I knew them. I notice
now, though I didn't then—and if I had it would not have seemed
strange from a bush point of view—that he didn't ask for news, nor
seem interested in it.
Then after another uneasy pause, during which he scratched crosses in the
dust with a stick, he asked me, in the same queer tone and without looking
at me or looking up, if I happened to know anything about doctoring—if
I'd ever studied it.
I asked him if anyone was sick at his place. He hesitated, and said “No.”
Then I wanted to know why he had asked me that question, and he was so
long about answering that I began to think he was hard of hearing, when,
at last, he muttered something about my face reminding him of a young
fellow he knew of who'd gone to Sydney to “study for a doctor”. That might
have been, and looked natural enough; but why didn't he ask me straight
out if I was the chap he “knowed of”? Travellers do not like beating about
the bush in conversation.
He sat in silence for a good while, with his arms folded, and looking
absently away over the dead level of the great scrubs that spread from the
foot of the ridge we were on to where a blue peak or two of a distant
range showed above the bush on the horizon.
I stood up and put my pipe away and stretched. Then he seemed to wake up.
“Better come back to the hut and have a bit of dinner,” he said. “The
missus will about have it ready, and I'll spare you a handful of hay for
the horses.”
The hay decided it. It was a dry season. I was surprised to hear of a
wife, for I thought he was a hatter—I had always heard so; but
perhaps I had been mistaken, and he had married lately; or had got a
housekeeper. The farm was an irregularly-shaped clearing in the scrub,
with a good many stumps in it, with a broken-down two-rail fence along the
frontage, and logs and “dog-leg” the rest. It was about as lonely-looking
a place as I had seen, and I had seen some out-of-the-way, God-forgotten
holes where men lived alone. The hut was in the top corner, a two-roomed
slab hut, with a shingle roof, which must have been uncommon round there
in the days when that hut was built. I was used to bush carpentering, and
saw that the place had been put up by a man who had plenty of life and
hope in front of him, and for someone else beside himself. But there were
two unfinished skilling rooms built on to the back of the hut; the posts,
sleepers, and wall-plates had been well put up and fitted, and the slab
walls were up, but the roof had never been put on. There was nothing but
burrs and nettles inside those walls, and an old wooden bullock plough and
a couple of yokes were dry-rotting across the back doorway. The remains of
a straw-stack, some hay under a bark humpy, a small iron plough, and an
old stiff coffin-headed grey draught horse, were all that I saw about the
place.
But there was a bit of a surprise for me inside, in the shape of a clean
white tablecloth on the rough slab table which stood on stakes driven into
the ground. The cloth was coarse, but it was a tablecloth—not a
spare sheet put on in honour of unexpected visitors—and perfectly
clean. The tin plates, pannikins, and jam tins that served as sugar bowls
and salt cellars were polished brightly. The walls and fireplace were
whitewashed, the clay floor swept, and clean sheets of newspaper laid on
the slab mantleshelf under the row of biscuit tins that held the
groceries. I thought that his wife, or housekeeper, or whatever she was,
was a clean and tidy woman about a house. I saw no woman; but on the sofa—a
light, wooden, batten one, with runged arms at the ends—lay a
woman's dress on a lot of sheets of old stained and faded newspapers. He
looked at it in a puzzled way, knitting his forehead, then took it up
absently and folded it. I saw then that it was a riding skirt and jacket.
He bundled them into the newspapers and took them into the bedroom.
“The wife was going on a visit down the creek this afternoon,” he said
rapidly and without looking at me, but stooping as if to have another look
through the door at those distant peaks. “I suppose she got tired o'
waitin', and went and took the daughter with her. But, never mind, the
grub is ready.” There was a camp-oven with a leg of mutton and potatoes
sizzling in it on the hearth, and billies hanging over the fire. I noticed
the billies had been scraped, and the lids polished.
There seemed to be something queer about the whole business, but then he
and his wife might have had a “breeze” during the morning. I thought so
during the meal, when the subject of women came up, and he said one never
knew how to take a woman, etc.; but there was nothing in what he said that
need necessarily have referred to his wife or to any woman in particular.
For the rest he talked of old bush things, droving, digging, and old
bushranging—but never about live things and living men, unless any
of the old mates he talked about happened to be alive by accident. He was
very restless in the house, and never took his hat off.
There was a dress and a woman's old hat hanging on the wall near the door,
but they looked as if they might have been hanging there for a lifetime.
There seemed something queer about the whole place—something
wanting; but then all out-of-the-way bush homes are haunted by that
something wanting, or, more likely, by the spirits of the things that
should have been there, but never had been.
As I rode down the track to the road I looked back and saw old Howlett
hard at work in a hole round a big stump with his long-handled shovel.
I'd noticed that he moved and walked with a slight list to port, and put
his hand once or twice to the small of his back, and I set it down to
lumbago, or something of that sort.
Up in the Never Never I heard from a drover who had known Howlett that his
wife had died in the first year, and so this mysterious woman, if she was
his wife, was, of course, his second wife. The drover seemed surprised and
rather amused at the thought of old Howlett going in for matrimony again.
. . . . .
I rode back that way five years later, from the Never Never. It was early
in the morning—I had ridden since midnight. I didn't think the old
man would be up and about; and, besides, I wanted to get on home, and have
a look at the old folk, and the mates I'd left behind—and the girl.
But I hadn't got far past the point where Howlett's track joined the road,
when I happened to look back, and saw him on horseback, stumbling down the
track. I waited till he came up.
He was riding the old grey draught horse this time, and it looked very
much broken down. I thought it would have come down every step, and fallen
like an old rotten humpy in a gust of wind. And the old man was not much
better off. I saw at once that he was a very sick man. His face was drawn,
and he bent forward as if he was hurt. He got down stiffly and awkwardly,
like a hurt man, and as soon as his feet touched the ground he grabbed my
arm, or he would have gone down like a man who steps off a train in
motion. He hung towards the bank of the road, feeling blindly, as it were,
for the ground, with his free hand, as I eased him down. I got my blanket
and calico from the pack saddle to make him comfortable.
“Help me with my back agen the tree,” he said. “I must sit up—it's
no use lyin' me down.”
He sat with his hand gripping his side, and breathed painfully.
“Shall I run up to the hut and get the wife?” I asked.
“No.” He spoke painfully. “No!” Then, as if the words were jerked out of
him by a spasm: “She ain't there.”
I took it that she had left him.
“How long have you been bad? How long has this been coming on?”
He took no notice of the question. I thought it was a touch of rheumatic
fever, or something of that sort. “It's gone into my back and sides now—the
pain's worse in me back,” he said presently.
I had once been mates with a man who died suddenly of heart disease, while
at work. He was washing a dish of dirt in the creek near a claim we were
working; he let the dish slip into the water, fell back, crying, “O, my
back!” and was gone. And now I felt by instinct that it was poor old
Howlett's heart that was wrong. A man's heart is in his back as well as in
his arms and hands.
The old man had turned pale with the pallor of a man who turns faint in a
heat wave, and his arms fell loosely, and his hands rocked helplessly with
the knuckles in the dust. I felt myself turning white, too, and the sick,
cold, empty feeling in my stomach, for I knew the signs. Bushmen stand in
awe of sickness and death.
But after I'd fixed him comfortably and given him a drink from the water
bag the greyness left his face, and he pulled himself together a bit; he
drew up his arms and folded them across his chest. He let his head rest
back against the tree—his slouch hat had fallen off revealing a
broad, white brow, much higher than I expected. He seemed to gaze on the
azure fin of the range, showing above the dark blue-green bush on the
horizon.
Then he commenced to speak—taking no notice of me when I asked him
if he felt better now—to talk in that strange, absent, far-away tone
that awes one. He told his story mechanically, monotonously—in set
words, as I believe now, as he had often told it before; if not to others,
then to the loneliness of the bush. And he used the names of people and
places that I had never heard of—just as if I knew them as well as
he did.
“I didn't want to bring her up the first year. It was no place for a
woman. I wanted her to stay with her people and wait till I'd got the
place a little more ship-shape. The Phippses took a selection down the
creek. I wanted her to wait and come up with them so's she'd have some
company—a woman to talk to. They came afterwards, but they didn't
stop. It was no place for a woman.
“But Mary would come. She wouldn't stop with her people down country. She
wanted to be with me, and look after me, and work and help me.”
He repeated himself a great deal—said the same thing over and over
again sometimes. He was only mad on one track. He'd tail off and sit
silent for a while; then he'd become aware of me in a hurried, half-scared
way, and apologise for putting me to all that trouble, and thank me. “I'll
be all right d'reckly. Best take the horses up to the hut and have some
breakfast; you'll find it by the fire. I'll foller you, d'reckly. The
wife'll be waitin' an'——” He would drop off, and be going
again presently on the old track:—
“Her mother was coming up to stay awhile at the end of the year, but the
old man hurt his leg. Then her married sister was coming, but one of the
youngsters got sick and there was trouble at home. I saw the doctor in the
town—thirty miles from here—and fixed it up with him. He was a
boozer—I'd 'a shot him afterwards. I fixed up with a woman in the
town to come and stay. I thought Mary was wrong in her time. She must have
been a month or six weeks out. But I listened to her.... Don't argue with
a woman. Don't listen to a woman. Do the right thing. We should have had a
mother woman to talk to us. But it was no place for a woman!”
He rocked his head, as if from some old agony of mind, against the
tree-trunk.
“She was took bad suddenly one night, but it passed off. False alarm. I
was going to ride somewhere, but she said to wait till daylight. Someone
was sure to pass. She was a brave and sensible girl, but she had a terror
of being left alone. It was no place for a woman!
“There was a black shepherd three or four miles away. I rode over while
Mary was asleep, and started the black boy into town. I'd 'a shot him
afterwards if I'd 'a caught him. The old black gin was dead the week
before, or Mary would a' bin alright. She was tied up in a bunch with
strips of blanket and greenhide, and put in a hole. So there wasn't even a
gin near the place. It was no place for a woman!
“I was watchin' the road at daylight, and I was watchin' the road at dusk.
I went down in the hollow and stooped down to get the gap agen the sky,
so's I could see if anyone was comin' over.... I'd get on the horse and
gallop along towards the town for five miles, but something would drag me
back, and then I'd race for fear she'd die before I got to the hut. I
expected the doctor every five minutes.
“It come on about daylight next morning. I ran back'ards and for'ards
between the hut and the road like a madman. And no one come. I was running
amongst the logs and stumps, and fallin' over them, when I saw a cloud of
dust agen sunrise. It was her mother an' sister in the spring-cart, an'
just catchin' up to them was the doctor in his buggy with the woman I'd
arranged with in town. The mother and sister was staying at the town for
the night, when they heard of the black boy. It took him a day to ride
there. I'd 'a shot him if I'd 'a caught him ever after. The doctor'd been
on the drunk. If I'd had the gun and known she was gone I'd have shot him
in the buggy. They said she was dead. And the child was dead, too.
“They blamed me, but I didn't want her to come; it was no place for a
woman. I never saw them again after the funeral. I didn't want to see them
any more.”
He moved his head wearily against the tree, and presently drifted on again
in a softer tone—his eyes and voice were growing more absent and
dreamy and far away.
“About a month after—or a year, I lost count of the time long ago—she
came back to me. At first she'd come in the night, then sometimes when I
was at work—and she had the baby—it was a girl—in her
arms. And by-and-bye she came to stay altogether.... I didn't blame her
for going away that time—it was no place for a woman.... She was a
good wife to me. She was a jolly girl when I married her. The little girl
grew up like her. I was going to send her down country to be educated—it
was no place for a girl.
“But a month, or a year, ago, Mary left me, and took the daughter, and
never came back till last night—this morning, I think it was. I
thought at first it was the girl with her hair done up, and her mother's
skirt on, to surprise her old dad. But it was Mary, my wife—as she
was when I married her. She said she couldn't stay, but she'd wait for me
on the road; on—the road....”
His arms fell, and his face went white. I got the water-bag. “Another turn
like that and you'll be gone,” I thought, as he came to again. Then I
suddenly thought of a shanty that had been started, when I came that way
last, ten or twelve miles along the road, towards the town. There was
nothing for it but to leave him and ride on for help, and a cart of some
kind.
“You wait here till I come back,” I said. “I'm going for the doctor.”
He roused himself a little. “Best come up to the hut and get some grub.
The wife'll be waiting....” He was off the track again.
“Will you wait while I take the horse down to the creek?”
“Yes—I'll wait by the road.”
“Look!” I said, “I'll leave the water-bag handy. Don't move till I come
back.”
“I won't move—I'll wait by the road,” he said.
I took the packhorse, which was the freshest and best, threw the
pack-saddle and bags into a bush, left the other horse to take care of
itself, and started for the shanty, leaving the old man with his back to
the tree, his arms folded, and his eyes on the horizon.
One of the chaps at the shanty rode on for the doctor at once, while the
other came back with me in a spring-cart. He told me that old Howlett's
wife had died in child-birth the first year on the selection—“she
was a fine girl he'd heered!” He told me the story as the old man had told
it, and in pretty well the same words, even to giving it as his opinion
that it was no place for a woman. “And he 'hatted' and brooded over it
till he went ratty.”
I knew the rest. He not only thought that his wife, or the ghost of his
wife, had been with him all those years, but that the child had lived and
grown up, and that the wife did the housework; which, of course, he must
have done himself.
When we reached him his knotted hands had fallen for the last time, and
they were at rest. I only took one quick look at his face, but could have
sworn that he was gazing at the blue fin of the range on the horizon of
the bush.
Up at the hut the table was set as on the first day I saw it, and
breakfast in the camp-oven by the fire.
Mitchell's Jobs
“I'm going to knock off work and try to make some money,” said Mitchell,
as he jerked the tea-leaves out of his pannikin and reached for the billy.
“It's been the great mistake of my life—if I hadn't wasted all my
time and energy working and looking for work I might have been an
independent man to-day.”
“Joe!” he added in a louder voice, condescendingly adapting his language
to my bushed comprehension. “I'm going to sling graft and try and get some
stuff together.”
I didn't feel in a responsive humour, but I lit up and settled back
comfortably against the tree, and Jack folded his arms on his knees and
presently continued, reflectively:
“I remember the first time I went to work. I was a youngster then. Mother
used to go round looking for jobs for me. She reckoned, perhaps, that I
was too shy to go in where there was a boy wanted and barrack for myself
properly, and she used to help me and see me through to the best of her
ability. I'm afraid I didn't always feel as grateful to her as I should
have felt. I was a thankless kid at the best of times—most kids are—but
otherwise I was a straight enough little chap as nippers go. Sometimes I
almost wish I hadn't been. My relations would have thought a good deal
more of me and treated me better—and, besides, it's a comfort, at
times, to sit and watch the sun going down in the bed of the bush, and
think of your wicked childhood and wasted life, and the way you treated
your parents and broke their hearts, and feel just properly repentant and
bitter and remorseful and low-spirited about it when it's too late.
“Ah, well!... I generally did feel a bit backward in going in when I came
to the door of an office or shop where there was a 'Strong Lad', or a
'Willing Youth', wanted inside to make himself generally useful. I was a
strong lad and a willing youth enough, in some things, for that matter;
but I didn't like to see it written up on a card in a shop window, and I
didn't want to make myself generally useful in a close shop in a hot dusty
street on mornings when the weather was fine and the great sunny rollers
were coming in grand on the Bondi Beach and down at Coogee, and I could
swim.... I'd give something to be down along there now.”
Mitchell looked away out over the sultry sandy plain that we were to
tackle next day, and sighed.
“The first job I got was in a jam factory. They only had 'Boy Wanted' on
the card in the window, and I thought it would suit me. They set me to
work to peel peaches, and, as soon as the foreman's back was turned, I
picked out a likely-looking peach and tried it. They soaked those peaches
in salt or acid or something—it was part of the process—and I
had to spit it out. Then I got an orange from a boy who was slicing them,
but it was bitter, and I couldn't eat it. I saw that I'd been had
properly. I was in a fix, and had to get out of it the best way I could.
I'd left my coat down in the front shop, and the foreman and boss were
there, so I had to work in that place for two mortal hours. It was about
the longest two hours I'd ever spent in my life. At last the foreman came
up, and I told him I wanted to go down to the back for a minute. I slipped
down, watched my chance till the boss' back was turned, got my coat, and
cleared.
“The next job I got was in a mat factory; at least, Aunt got that for me.
I didn't want to have anything to do with mats or carpets. The worst of it
was the boss didn't seem to want me to go, and I had a job to get him to
sack me, and when he did he saw some of my people and took me back again
next week. He sacked me finally the next Saturday.
“I got the next job myself. I didn't hurry; I took my time and picked out
a good one. It was in a lolly factory. I thought it would suit me—and
it did, for a while. They put me on stirring up and mixing stuff in the
jujube department; but I got so sick of the smell of it and so full of
jujube and other lollies that I soon wanted a change; so I had a row with
the chief of the jujube department and the boss gave me the sack.
“I got a job in a grocery then. I thought I'd have more variety there. But
one day the boss was away, sick or something, all the afternoon, and I
sold a lot of things too cheap. I didn't know. When a customer came in and
asked for something I'd just look round in the window till I saw a card
with the price written up on it, and sell the best quality according to
that price; and once or twice I made a mistake the other way about and
lost a couple of good customers. It was a hot, drowsy afternoon, and
by-and-bye I began to feel dull and sleepy. So I looked round the corner
and saw a Chinaman coming. I got a big tin garden syringe and filled it
full of brine from the butter keg, and, when he came opposite the door, I
let him have the full force of it in the ear.
“That Chinaman put down his baskets and came for me. I was strong for my
age, and thought I could fight, but he gave me a proper mauling.
“It was like running up against a thrashing machine, and it wouldn't have
been well for me if the boss of the shop next door hadn't interfered. He
told my boss, and my boss gave me the sack at once.
“I took a spell of eighteen months or so after that, and was growing up
happy and contented when a married sister of mine must needs come to live
in town and interfere. I didn't like married sisters, though I always got
on grand with my brothers-in-law, and wished there were more of them. The
married sister comes round and cleans up the place and pulls your things
about and finds your pipe and tobacco and things, and cigarette portraits,
and “Deadwood Dicks”, that you've got put away all right, so's your mother
and aunt wouldn't find them in a generation of cats, and says:
“'Mother, why don't you make that boy go to work. It's a scandalous shame
to see a big boy like that growing up idle. He's going to the bad before
your eyes.' And she's always trying to make out that you're a liar, and
trying to make mother believe it, too. My married sister got me a job with
a chemist, whose missus she knew.
“I got on pretty well there, and by-and-bye I was put upstairs in the
grinding and mixing department; but, after a while, they put another boy
that I was chummy with up there with me, and that was a mistake. I didn't
think so at the time, but I can see it now. We got up to all sorts of
tricks. We'd get mixing together chemicals that weren't related to see how
they'd agree, and we nearly blew up the shop several times, and set it on
fire once. But all the chaps liked us, and fixed things up for us. One day
we got a big black dog—that we meant to take home that evening—and
sneaked him upstairs and put him on a flat roof outside the laboratory. He
had a touch of the mange and didn't look well, so we gave him a dose of
something; and he scrambled over the parapet and slipped down a steep iron
roof in front, and fell on a respected townsman that knew my people. We
were awfully frightened, and didn't say anything. Nobody saw it but us.
The dog had the presence of mind to leave at once, and the respected
townsman was picked up and taken home in a cab; and he got it hot from his
wife, too, I believe, for being in that drunken, beastly state in the main
street in the middle of the day.
“I don't think he was ever quite sure that he hadn't been drunk or what
had happened, for he had had one or two that morning; so it didn't matter
much. Only we lost the dog.
“One day I went downstairs to the packing-room and saw a lot of phosphorus
in jars of water. I wanted to fix up a ghost for Billy, my mate, so I
nicked a bit and slipped it into my trouser pocket.
“I stood under the tap and let it pour on me. The phosphorus burnt clean
through my pocket and fell on the ground. I was sent home that night with
my leg dressed with lime-water and oil, and a pair of the boss's pants on
that were about half a yard too long for me, and I felt miserable enough,
too. They said it would stop my tricks for a while, and so it did. I'll
carry the mark to my dying day—and for two or three days after, for
that matter.”
. . . . .
I fell asleep at this point, and left Mitchell's cattle pup to hear it
out.
Bill, the Ventriloquial Rooster
“When we were up country on the selection, we had a rooster at our place,
named Bill,” said Mitchell; “a big mongrel of no particular breed, though
the old lady said he was a 'brammer'—and many an argument she had
with the old man about it too; she was just as stubborn and obstinate in
her opinion as the governor was in his. But, anyway, we called him Bill,
and didn't take any particular notice of him till a cousin of some of us
came from Sydney on a visit to the country, and stayed at our place
because it was cheaper than stopping at a pub. Well, somehow this chap got
interested in Bill, and studied him for two or three days, and at last he
says:
“'Why, that rooster's a ventriloquist!'
“'A what?'
“'A ventriloquist!'
“'Go along with yer!'
“'But he is. I've heard of cases like this before; but this is the first
I've come across. Bill's a ventriloquist right enough.'
“Then we remembered that there wasn't another rooster within five miles—our
only neighbour, an Irishman named Page, didn't have one at the time—and
we'd often heard another cock crow, but didn't think to take any notice of
it. We watched Bill, and sure enough he WAS a ventriloquist. The
'ka-cocka' would come all right, but the 'co-ka-koo-oi-oo' seemed to come
from a distance. And sometimes the whole crow would go wrong, and come
back like an echo that had been lost for a year. Bill would stand on
tiptoe, and hold his elbows out, and curve his neck, and go two or three
times as if he was swallowing nest-eggs, and nearly break his neck and
burst his gizzard; and then there'd be no sound at all where he was—only
a cock crowing in the distance.
“And pretty soon we could see that Bill was in great trouble about it
himself. You see, he didn't know it was himself—thought it was
another rooster challenging him, and he wanted badly to find that other
bird. He would get up on the wood-heap, and crow and listen—crow and
listen again—crow and listen, and then he'd go up to the top of the
paddock, and get up on the stack, and crow and listen there. Then down to
the other end of the paddock, and get up on a mullock-heap, and crow and
listen there. Then across to the other side and up on a log among the
saplings, and crow 'n' listen some more. He searched all over the place
for that other rooster, but, of course, couldn't find him. Sometimes he'd
be out all day crowing and listening all over the country, and then come
home dead tired, and rest and cool off in a hole that the hens had
scratched for him in a damp place under the water-cask sledge.
“Well, one day Page brought home a big white rooster, and when he let it
go it climbed up on Page's stack and crowed, to see if there was any more
roosters round there. Bill had come home tired; it was a hot day, and he'd
rooted out the hens, and was having a spell-oh under the cask when the
white rooster crowed. Bill didn't lose any time getting out and on to the
wood-heap, and then he waited till he heard the crow again; then he
crowed, and the other rooster crowed again, and they crowed at each other
for three days, and called each other all the wretches they could lay
their tongues to, and after that they implored each other to come out and
be made into chicken soup and feather pillows. But neither'd come. You
see, there were THREE crows—there was Bill's crow, and the
ventriloquist crow, and the white rooster's crow—and each rooster
thought that there was TWO roosters in the opposition camp, and that he
mightn't get fair play, and, consequently, both were afraid to put up
their hands.
“But at last Bill couldn't stand it any longer. He made up his mind to go
and have it out, even if there was a whole agricultural show of prize and
honourable-mention fighting-cocks in Page's yard. He got down from the
wood-heap and started off across the ploughed field, his head down, his
elbows out, and his thick awkward legs prodding away at the furrows behind
for all they were worth.
“I wanted to go down badly and see the fight, and barrack for Bill. But I
daren't, because I'd been coming up the road late the night before with my
brother Joe, and there was about three panels of turkeys roosting along on
the top rail of Page's front fence; and we brushed 'em with a bough, and
they got up such a blessed gobbling fuss about it that Page came out in
his shirt and saw us running away; and I knew he was laying for us with a
bullock whip. Besides, there was friction between the two families on
account of a thoroughbred bull that Page borrowed and wouldn't lend to us,
and that got into our paddock on account of me mending a panel in the
party fence, and carelessly leaving the top rail down after sundown while
our cows was moving round there in the saplings.
“So there was too much friction for me to go down, but I climbed a tree as
near the fence as I could and watched. Bill reckoned he'd found that
rooster at last. The white rooster wouldn't come down from the stack, so
Bill went up to him, and they fought there till they tumbled down the
other side, and I couldn't see any more. Wasn't I wild? I'd have given my
dog to have seen the rest of the fight. I went down to the far side of
Page's fence and climbed a tree there, but, of course, I couldn't see
anything, so I came home the back way. Just as I got home Page came round
to the front and sung out, 'Insoid there!' And me and Jim went under the
house like snakes and looked out round a pile. But Page was all right—he
had a broad grin on his face, and Bill safe under his arm. He put Bill
down on the ground very carefully, and says he to the old folks:
“'Yer rooster knocked the stuffin' out of my rooster, but I bear no
malice. 'Twas a grand foight.'
“And then the old man and Page had a yarn, and got pretty friendly after
that. And Bill didn't seem to bother about any more ventriloquism; but the
white rooster spent a lot of time looking for that other rooster. Perhaps
he thought he'd have better luck with him. But Page was on the look-out
all the time to get a rooster that would lick ours. He did nothing else
for a month but ride round and enquire about roosters; and at last he
borrowed a game-bird in town, left five pounds deposit on him, and brought
him home. And Page and the old man agreed to have a match—about the
only thing they'd agreed about for five years. And they fixed it up for a
Sunday when the old lady and the girls and kids were going on a visit to
some relations, about fifteen miles away—to stop all night. The
guv'nor made me go with them on horseback; but I knew what was up, and so
my pony went lame about a mile along the road, and I had to come back and
turn him out in the top paddock, and hide the saddle and bridle in a
hollow log, and sneak home and climb up on the roof of the shed. It was a
awful hot day, and I had to keep climbing backward and forward over the
ridge-pole all the morning to keep out of sight of the old man, for he was
moving about a good deal.
“Well, after dinner, the fellows from roundabout began to ride in and hang
up their horses round the place till it looked as if there was going to be
a funeral. Some of the chaps saw me, of course, but I tipped them the
wink, and they gave me the office whenever the old man happened around.
“Well, Page came along with his game-rooster. Its name was Jim. It wasn't
much to look at, and it seemed a good deal smaller and weaker than Bill.
Some of the chaps were disgusted, and said it wasn't a game-rooster at
all; Bill'd settle it in one lick, and they wouldn't have any fun.
“Well, they brought the game one out and put him down near the wood-heap,
and rousted Bill out from under his cask. He got interested at once. He
looked at Jim, and got up on the wood-heap and crowed and looked at Jim
again. He reckoned THIS at last was the fowl that had been humbugging him
all along. Presently his trouble caught him, and then he'd crow and take a
squint at the game 'un, and crow again, and have another squint at gamey,
and try to crow and keep his eye on the game-rooster at the same time. But
Jim never committed himself, until at last he happened to gape just after
Bill's whole crow went wrong, and Bill spotted him. He reckoned he'd
caught him this time, and he got down off that wood-heap and went for the
foe. But Jim ran away—and Bill ran after him.
“Round and round the wood-heap they went, and round the shed, and round
the house and under it, and back again, and round the wood-heap and over
it and round the other way, and kept it up for close on an hour. Bill's
bill was just within an inch or so of the game-rooster's tail feathers
most of the time, but he couldn't get any nearer, do how he liked. And all
the time the fellers kept chyackin Page and singing out, 'What price yer
game 'un, Page! Go it, Bill! Go it, old cock!' and all that sort of thing.
Well, the game-rooster went as if it was a go-as-you-please, and he didn't
care if it lasted a year. He didn't seem to take any interest in the
business, but Bill got excited, and by-and-by he got mad. He held his head
lower and lower and his wings further and further out from his sides, and
prodded away harder and harder at the ground behind, but it wasn't any
use. Jim seemed to keep ahead without trying. They stuck to the wood-heap
towards the last. They went round first one way for a while, and then the
other for a change, and now and then they'd go over the top to break the
monotony; and the chaps got more interested in the race than they would
have been in the fight—and bet on it, too. But Bill was handicapped
with his weight. He was done up at last; he slowed down till he couldn't
waddle, and then, when he was thoroughly knocked up, that game-rooster
turned on him, and gave him the father of a hiding.
“And my father caught me when I'd got down in the excitement, and wasn't
thinking, and HE gave ME the step-father of a hiding. But he had a lively
time with the old lady afterwards, over the cock-fight.
“Bill was so disgusted with himself that he went under the cask and died.”
Bush Cats
“Domestic cats” we mean—the descendants of cats who came from the
northern world during the last hundred odd years. We do not know the name
of the vessel in which the first Thomas and his Maria came out to
Australia, but we suppose that it was one of the ships of the First Fleet.
Most likely Maria had kittens on the voyage—two lots, perhaps—the
majority of which were buried at sea; and no doubt the disembarkation
caused her much maternal anxiety.
. . . . .
The feline race has not altered much in Australia, from a physical point
of view—not yet. The rabbit has developed into something like a
cross between a kangaroo and a possum, but the bush has not begun to
develop the common cat. She is just as sedate and motherly as the mummy
cats of Egypt were, but she takes longer strolls of nights, climbs
gum-trees instead of roofs, and hunts stranger vermin than ever came under
the observation of her northern ancestors. Her views have widened. She is
mostly thinner than the English farm cat—which is, they say, on
account of eating lizards.
English rats and English mice—we say “English” because everything
which isn't Australian in Australia, IS English (or British)—English
rats and English mice are either rare or non-existent in the bush; but the
hut cat has a wider range for game. She is always dragging in things which
are unknown in the halls of zoology; ugly, loathsome, crawling abortions
which have not been classified yet—and perhaps could not be.
The Australian zoologist ought to rake up some more dead languages, and
then go Out Back with a few bush cats.
The Australian bush cat has a nasty, unpleasant habit of dragging a long,
wriggling, horrid, black snake—she seems to prefer black snakes—into
a room where there are ladies, proudly laying it down in a conspicuous
place (usually in front of the exit), and then looking up for approbation.
She wonders, perhaps, why the visitors are in such a hurry to leave.
Pussy doesn't approve of live snakes round the place, especially if she
has kittens; and if she finds a snake in the vicinity of her progeny—well,
it is bad for that particular serpent.
This brings recollections of a neighbour's cat who went out in the scrub,
one midsummer's day, and found a brown snake. Her name—the cat's
name—was Mary Ann. She got hold of the snake all right, just within
an inch of its head; but it got the rest of its length wound round her
body and squeezed about eight lives out of her. She had the presence of
mind to keep her hold; but it struck her that she was in a fix, and that
if she wanted to save her ninth life, it wouldn't be a bad idea to go home
for help. So she started home, snake and all.
The family were at dinner when Mary Ann came in, and, although she stood
on an open part of the floor, no one noticed her for a while. She couldn't
ask for help, for her mouth was too full of snake. By-and-bye one of the
girls glanced round, and then went over the table, with a shriek, and out
of the back door. The room was cleared very quickly. The eldest boy got a
long-handled shovel, and in another second would have killed more cat than
snake; but his father interfered. The father was a shearer, and Mary Ann
was a favourite cat with him. He got a pair of shears from the shelf and
deftly shore off the snake's head, and one side of Mary Ann's whiskers.
She didn't think it safe to let go yet. She kept her teeth in the neck
until the selector snipped the rest of the snake off her. The bits were
carried out on a shovel to die at sundown. Mary Ann had a good drink of
milk, and then got her tongue out and licked herself back into the proper
shape for a cat; after which she went out to look for that snake's mate.
She found it, too, and dragged it home the same evening.
Cats will kill rabbits and drag them home. We knew a fossicker whose cat
used to bring him a bunny nearly every night. The fossicker had rabbits
for breakfast until he got sick of them, and then he used to swap them
with a butcher for meat. The cat was named Ingersoll, which indicates his
sex and gives an inkling to his master's religious and political opinions.
Ingersoll used to prospect round in the gloaming until he found some
rabbit holes which showed encouraging indications. He would shepherd one
hole for an hour or so every evening until he found it was a duffer, or
worked it out; then he would shift to another. One day he prospected a big
hollow log with a lot of holes in it, and more going down underneath. The
indications were very good, but Ingersoll had no luck. The game had too
many ways of getting out and in. He found that he could not work that
claim by himself, so he floated it into a company. He persuaded several
cats from a neighbouring selection to take shares, and they watched the
holes together, or in turns—they worked shifts. The dividends more
than realised even their wildest expectations, for each cat took home at
least one rabbit every night for a week.
A selector started a vegetable garden about the time when rabbits were
beginning to get troublesome up country. The hare had not shown itself
yet. The farmer kept quite a regiment of cats to protect his garden—and
they protected it. He would shut the cats up all day with nothing to eat,
and let them out about sundown; then they would mooch off to the turnip
patch like farm-labourers going to work. They would drag the rabbits home
to the back door, and sit there and watch them until the farmer opened the
door and served out the ration of milk. Then the cats would turn in. He
nearly always found a semi-circle of dead rabbits and watchful cats round
the door in the morning. They sold the product of their labour direct to
the farmer for milk. It didn't matter if one cat had been unlucky—had
not got a rabbit—each had an equal share in the general result. They
were true socialists, those cats.
One of those cats was a mighty big Tom, named Jack. He was death on
rabbits; he would work hard all night, laying for them and dragging them
home. Some weeks he would graft every night, and at other times every
other night, but he was generally pretty regular. When he reckoned he had
done an extra night's work, he would take the next night off and go three
miles to the nearest neighbour's to see his Maria and take her out for a
stroll. Well, one evening Jack went into the garden and chose a place
where there was good cover, and lay low. He was a bit earlier than usual,
so he thought he would have a doze till rabbit time. By-and-bye he heard a
noise, and slowly, cautiously opening one eye, he saw two big ears
sticking out of the leaves in front of him. He judged that it was an extra
big bunny, so he put some extra style into his manoeuvres. In about five
minutes he made his spring. He must have thought (if cats think) that it
was a whopping, old-man rabbit, for it was a pioneer hare—not an
ordinary English hare, but one of those great coarse, lanky things which
the bush is breeding. The selector was attracted by an unusual commotion
and a cloud of dust among his cabbages, and came along with his gun in
time to witness the fight. First Jack would drag the hare, and then the
hare would drag Jack; sometimes they would be down together, and then Jack
would use his hind claws with effect; finally he got his teeth in the
right place, and triumphed. Then he started to drag the corpse home, but
he had to give it best and ask his master to lend a hand. The selector
took up the hare, and Jack followed home, much to the family's surprise.
He did not go back to work that night; he took a spell. He had a drink of
milk, licked the dust off himself, washed it down with another drink, and
sat in front of the fire and thought for a goodish while. Then he got up,
walked over to the corner where the hare was lying, had a good look at it,
came back to the fire, sat down again, and thought hard. He was still
thinking when the family retired.
Meeting Old Mates
I.
Tom Smith
You are getting well on in the thirties, and haven't left off being a fool
yet. You have been away in another colony or country for a year or so, and
have now come back again. Most of your chums have gone away or got
married, or, worse still, signed the pledge—settled down and got
steady; and you feel lonely and desolate and left-behind enough for
anything. While drifting aimlessly round town with an eye out for some
chance acquaintance to have a knock round with, you run against an old
chum whom you never dreamt of meeting, or whom you thought to be in some
other part of the country—or perhaps you knock up against someone
who knows the old chum in question, and he says:
“I suppose you know Tom Smith's in Sydney?”
“Tom Smith! Why, I thought he was in Queensland! I haven't seen him for
more than three years. Where's the old joker hanging out at all? Why,
except you, there's no one in Australia I'd sooner see than Tom Smith.
Here I've been mooning round like an unemployed for three weeks, looking
for someone to have a knock round with, and Tom in Sydney all the time. I
wish I'd known before. Where'll I run against him—where does he
live?”
“Oh, he's living at home.”
“But where's his home? I was never there.”
“Oh, I'll give you his address.... There, I think that's it. I'm not sure
about the number, but you'll soon find out in that street—most of
'em'll know Tom Smith.”
“Thanks! I rather think they will. I'm glad I met you. I'll hunt Tom up
to-day.”
So you put a few shillings in your pocket, tell your landlady that you're
going to visit an old aunt of yours or a sick friend, and mayn't be home
that night; and then you start out to hunt up Tom Smith and have at least
one more good night, if you die for it.
. . . . .
This is the first time you have seen Tom at home; you knew of his home and
people in the old days, but only in a vague, indefinite sort of way. Tom
has changed! He is stouter and older-looking; he seems solemn and settled
down. You intended to give him a surprise and have a good old jolly laugh
with him, but somehow things get suddenly damped at the beginning. He
grins and grips your hand right enough, but there seems something wanting.
You can't help staring at him, and he seems to look at you in a strange,
disappointing way; it doesn't strike you that you also have changed, and
perhaps more in his eyes than he in yours. He introduces you to his mother
and sisters and brothers, and the rest of the family; or to his wife, as
the case may be; and you have to suppress your feelings and be polite and
talk common-place. You hate to be polite and talk common-place. You aren't
built that way—and Tom wasn't either, in the old days. The wife (or
the mother and sisters) receives you kindly, for Tom's sake, and makes
much of you; but they don't know you yet. You want to get Tom outside, and
have a yarn and a drink and a laugh with him—you are bursting to
tell him all about yourself, and get him to tell you all about himself,
and ask him if he remembers things; and you wonder if he is bursting the
same way, and hope he is. The old lady and sisters (or the wife) bore you
pretty soon, and you wonder if they bore Tom; you almost fancy, from his
looks, that they do. You wonder whether Tom is coming out to-night,
whether he wants to get out, and if he wants to and wants to get out by
himself, whether he'll be able to manage it; but you daren't broach the
subject, it wouldn't be polite. You've got to be polite. Then you get
worried by the thought that Tom is bursting to get out with you and only
wants an excuse; is waiting, in fact, and hoping for you to ask him in an
off-hand sort of way to come out for a stroll. But you're not quite sure;
and besides, if you were, you wouldn't have the courage. By-and-bye you
get tired of it all, thirsty, and want to get out in the open air. You get
tired of saying, “Do you really, Mrs. Smith?” or “Do you think so, Miss
Smith?” or “You were quite right, Mrs. Smith,” and “Well, I think so too,
Mrs. Smith,” or, to the brother, “That's just what I thought, Mr. Smith.”
You don't want to “talk pretty” to them, and listen to their wishy-washy
nonsense; you want to get out and have a roaring spree with Tom, as you
had in the old days; you want to make another night of it with your old
mate, Tom Smith; and pretty soon you get the blues badly, and feel nearly
smothered in there, and you've got to get out and have a beer anyway—Tom
or no Tom; and you begin to feel wild with Tom himself; and at last you
make a bold dash for it and chance Tom. You get up, look at your hat, and
say: “Ah, well, I must be going, Tom; I've got to meet someone down the
street at seven o'clock. Where'll I meet you in town next week?”
But Tom says:
“Oh, dash it; you ain't going yet. Stay to tea, Joe, stay to tea. It'll be
on the table in a minute. Sit down—sit down, man! Here, gimme your
hat.”
And Tom's sister, or wife, or mother comes in with an apron on and her
hands all over flour, and says:
“Oh, you're not going yet, Mr. Brown? Tea'll be ready in a minute. Do stay
for tea.” And if you make excuses, she cross-examines you about the time
you've got to keep that appointment down the street, and tells you that
their clock is twenty minutes fast, and that you have got plenty of time,
and so you have to give in. But you are mightily encouraged by a winksome
expression which you see, or fancy you see, on your side of Tom's face;
also by the fact of his having accidentally knocked his foot against your
shins. So you stay.
One of the females tells you to “Sit there, Mr. Brown,” and you take your
place at the table, and the polite business goes on. You've got to hold
your knife and fork properly, and mind your p's and q's, and when she
says, “Do you take milk and sugar, Mr. Brown?” you've got to say, “Yes,
please, Miss Smith—thanks—that's plenty.” And when they press
you, as they will, to have more, you've got to keep on saying, “No,
thanks, Mrs. Smith; no, thanks, Miss Smith; I really couldn't; I've done
very well, thank you; I had a very late dinner, and so on”—bother
such tommy-rot. And you don't seem to have any appetite, anyway. And you
think of the days out on the track when you and Tom sat on your swags
under a mulga at mid-day, and ate mutton and johnny-cake with
clasp-knives, and drank by turns out of the old, battered, leaky billy.
And after tea you have to sit still while the precious minutes are wasted,
and listen and sympathize, while all the time you are on the fidget to get
out with Tom, and go down to a private bar where you know some girls.
And perhaps by-and-bye the old lady gets confidential, and seizes an
opportunity to tell you what a good steady young fellow Tom is now that he
never touches drink, and belongs to a temperance society (or the
Y.M.C.A.), and never stays out of nights.
Consequently you feel worse than ever, and lonelier, and sorrier that you
wasted your time coming. You are encouraged again by a glimpse of Tom
putting on a clean collar and fixing himself up a bit; but when you are
ready to go, and ask him if he's coming a bit down the street with you, he
says he thinks he will in such a disinterested, don't-mind-if-I-do sort of
tone, that he makes you mad.
At last, after promising to “drop in again, Mr. Brown, whenever you're
passing,” and to “don't forget to call,” and thanking them for their
assurance that they'll “be always glad to see you,” and telling them that
you've spent a very pleasant evening and enjoyed yourself, and are awfully
sorry you couldn't stay—you get away with Tom.
You don't say much to each other till you get round the corner and down
the street a bit, and then for a while your conversation is mostly
common-place, such as, “Well, how have you been getting on all this time,
Tom?” “Oh, all right. How have you been getting on?” and so on.
But presently, and perhaps just as you have made up your mind to chance
the alleged temperance business and ask Tom in to have a drink, he throws
a glance up and down the street, nudges your shoulder, says “Come on,” and
disappears sideways into a pub.
. . . . .
“What's yours, Tom?” “What's yours, Joe?” “The same for me.” “Well, here's
luck, old man.” “Here's luck.” You take a drink, and look over your glass
at Tom. Then the old smile spreads over his face, and it makes you glad—you
could swear to Tom's grin in a hundred years. Then something tickles him—your
expression, perhaps, or a recollection of the past—and he sets down
his glass on the bar and laughs. Then you laugh. Oh, there's no smile like
the smile that old mates favour each other with over the tops of their
glasses when they meet again after years. It is eloquent, because of the
memories that give it birth.
“Here's another. Do you remember——? Do you remember——?”
Oh, it all comes back again like a flash. Tom hasn't changed a bit; just
the same good-hearted, jolly idiot he always was. Old times back again!
“It's just like old times,” says Tom, after three or four more drinks.
. . . . .
And so you make a night of it and get uproariously jolly. You get as
“glorious” as Bobby Burns did in the part of Tam O'Shanter, and have a
better “time” than any of the times you had in the old days. And you see
Tom as nearly home in the morning as you dare, and he reckons he'll get it
hot from his people—which no doubt he will—and he explains
that they are very particular up at home—church people, you know—and,
of course, especially if he's married, it's understood between you that
you'd better not call for him up at home after this—at least, not
till things have cooled down a bit. It's always the way. The friend of the
husband always gets the blame in cases like this. But Tom fixes up a yarn
to tell them, and you aren't to “say anything different” in case you run
against any of them. And he fixes up an appointment with you for next
Saturday night, and he'll get there if he gets divorced for it. But he
MIGHT have to take the wife out shopping, or one of the girls somewhere;
and if you see her with him you've got to lay low, and be careful, and
wait—at another hour and place, perhaps, all of which is arranged—for
if she sees you she'll smell a rat at once, and he won't be able to get
off at all.
And so, as far as you and Tom are concerned, the “old times” have come
back once more.
. . . . .
But, of course (and we almost forgot it), you might chance to fall in love
with one of Tom's sisters, in which case there would be another and a
totally different story to tell.
II.
Jack Ellis
Things are going well with you. You have escaped from “the track”, so to
speak, and are in a snug, comfortable little billet in the city. Well,
while doing the block you run against an old mate of other days—VERY
other days—call him Jack Ellis. Things have gone hard with Jack. He
knows you at once, but makes no advance towards a greeting; he acts as
though he thinks you might cut him—which, of course, if you are a
true mate, you have not the slightest intention of doing. His coat is
yellow and frayed, his hat is battered and green, his trousers “gone” in
various places, his linen very cloudy, and his boots burst and innocent of
polish. You try not to notice these things—or rather, not to seem to
notice them—but you cannot help doing so, and you are afraid he'll
notice that you see these things, and put a wrong construction on it. How
men will misunderstand each other! You greet him with more than the
necessary enthusiasm. In your anxiety to set him at his ease and make him
believe that nothing—not even money—can make a difference in
your friendship, you over-act the business; and presently you are afraid
that he'll notice that too, and put a wrong construction on it. You wish
that your collar was not so clean, nor your clothes so new. Had you known
you would meet him, you would have put on some old clothes for the
occasion.
You are both embarrassed, but it is YOU who feel ashamed—you are
almost afraid to look at him lest he'll think you are looking at his
shabbiness. You ask him in to have a drink, but he doesn't respond so
heartily as you wish, as he did in the old days; he doesn't like drinking
with anybody when he isn't “fixed”, as he calls it—when he can't
shout.
It didn't matter in the old days who held the money so long as there was
plenty of “stuff” in the camp. You think of the days when Jack stuck to
you through thick and thin. You would like to give him money now, but he
is so proud; he always was; he makes you mad with his beastly pride. There
wasn't any pride of that sort on the track or in the camp in those days;
but times have changed—your lives have drifted too widely apart—you
have taken different tracks since then; and Jack, without intending to,
makes you feel that it is so.
You have a drink, but it isn't a success; it falls flat, as far as Jack is
concerned; he won't have another; he doesn't “feel on”, and presently he
escapes under plea of an engagement, and promises to see you again.
And you wish that the time was come when no one could have more or less to
spend than another.
. . . . .
P.S.—I met an old mate of that description once, and so successfully
persuaded him out of his beastly pride that he borrowed two pounds off me
till Monday. I never got it back since, and I want it badly at the present
time. In future I'll leave old mates with their pride unimpaired.
Two Larrikins
“Y'orter do something, Ernie. Yer know how I am. YOU don't seem to care.
Y'orter to do something.”
Stowsher slouched at a greater angle to the greasy door-post, and scowled
under his hat-brim. It was a little, low, frowsy room opening into Jones'
Alley. She sat at the table, sewing—a thin, sallow girl with weak,
colourless eyes. She looked as frowsy as her surroundings.
“Well, why don't you go to some of them women, and get fixed up?”
She flicked the end of the table-cloth over some tiny, unfinished articles
of clothing, and bent to her work.
“But you know very well I haven't got a shilling, Ernie,” she said,
quietly. “Where am I to get the money from?”
“Who asked yer to get it?”
She was silent, with the exasperating silence of a woman who has
determined to do a thing in spite of all reasons and arguments that may be
brought against it.
“Well, wot more do yer want?” demanded Stowsher, impatiently.
She bent lower. “Couldn't we keep it, Ernie?”
“Wot next?” asked Stowsher, sulkily—he had half suspected what was
coming. Then, with an impatient oath, “You must be gettin' ratty.”
She brushed the corner of the cloth further over the little clothes.
“It wouldn't cost anything, Ernie. I'd take a pride in him, and keep him
clean, and dress him like a little lord. He'll be different from all the
other youngsters. He wouldn't be like those dirty, sickly little brats out
there. He'd be just like you, Ernie; I know he would. I'll look after him
night and day, and bring him up well and strong. We'd train his little
muscles from the first, Ernie, and he'd be able to knock 'em all out when
he grew up. It wouldn't cost much, and I'd work hard and be careful if
you'd help me. And you'd be proud of him, too, Ernie—I know you
would.”
Stowsher scraped the doorstep with his foot; but whether he was “touched”,
or feared hysterics and was wisely silent, was not apparent.
“Do you remember the first day I met you, Ernie?” she asked, presently.
Stowsher regarded her with an uneasy scowl: “Well—wot o' that?”
“You came into the bar-parlour at the 'Cricketers' Arms' and caught a push
of 'em chyacking your old man.”
“Well, I altered that.”
“I know you did. You done for three of them, one after another, and two
was bigger than you.”
“Yes! and when the push come up we done for the rest,” said Stowsher,
softening at the recollection.
“And the day you come home and caught the landlord bullying your old
mother like a dog——”
“Yes; I got three months for that job. But it was worth it!” he reflected.
“Only,” he added, “the old woman might have had the knocker to keep away
from the lush while I was in quod.... But wot's all this got to do with
it?”
“HE might barrack and fight for you, some day, Ernie,” she said softly,
“when you're old and out of form and ain't got no push to back you.”
The thing was becoming decidedly embarrassing to Stowsher; not that he
felt any delicacy on the subject, but because he hated to be drawn into a
conversation that might be considered “soft”.
“Oh, stow that!” he said, comfortingly. “Git on yer hat, and I'll take yer
for a trot.”
She rose quickly, but restrained herself, recollecting that it was not
good policy to betray eagerness in response to an invitation from Ernie.
“But—you know—I don't like to go out like this. You can't—you
wouldn't like to take me out the way I am, Ernie!”
“Why not? Wot rot!”
“The fellows would see me, and—and——”
“And... wot?”
“They might notice——”
“Well, wot o' that? I want 'em to. Are yer comin' or are yer ain't? Fling
round now. I can't hang on here all day.”
They walked towards Flagstaff Hill.
One or two, slouching round a pub. corner, saluted with “Wotcher,
Stowsher!”
“Not too stinkin',” replied Stowsher. “Soak yer heads.”
“Stowsher's goin' to stick,” said one privately.
“An' so he orter,” said another. “Wish I had the chanst.”
The two turned up a steep lane.
“Don't walk so fast up hill, Ernie; I can't, you know.”
“All right, Liz. I forgot that. Why didn't yer say so before?”
She was contentedly silent most of the way, warned by instinct, after the
manner of women when they have gained their point by words.
Once he glanced over his shoulder with a short laugh. “Gorblime!” he said,
“I nearly thought the little beggar was a-follerin' along behind!”
When he left her at the door he said: “Look here, Liz. 'Ere's half a quid.
Git what yer want. Let her go. I'm goin' to graft again in the mornin',
and I'll come round and see yer to-morrer night.”
Still she seemed troubled and uneasy.
“Ernie.”
“Well. Wot now?”
“S'posin' it's a girl, Ernie.”
Stowsher flung himself round impatiently.
“Oh, for God's sake, stow that! Yer always singin' out before yer hurt....
There's somethin' else, ain't there—while the bloomin' shop's open?”
“No, Ernie. Ain't you going to kiss me?... I'm satisfied.”
“Satisfied! Yer don't want the kid to be arst 'oo 'is father was, do yer?
Yer'd better come along with me some day this week and git spliced. Yer
don't want to go frettin' or any of that funny business while it's on.”
“Oh, Ernie! do you really mean it?”—and she threw her arms round his
neck, and broke down at last.
. . . . .
“So-long, Liz. No more funny business now—I've had enough of it.
Keep yer pecker up, old girl. To-morrer night, mind.” Then he added
suddenly: “Yer might have known I ain't that sort of a bloke”—and
left abruptly.
Liz was very happy.
Mr. Smellingscheck
I met him in a sixpenny restaurant—“All meals, 6d.—Good beds,
1s.” That was before sixpenny restaurants rose to a third-class position,
and became possibly respectable places to live in, through the
establishment, beneath them, of fourpenny hash-houses (good beds, 6d.),
and, beneath THEM again, of THREE-penny “dining-rooms—CLEAN beds,
4d.”
There were five beds in our apartment, the head of one against the foot of
the next, and so on round the room, with a space where the door and
washstand were. I chose the bed the head of which was near the foot of
his, because he looked like a man who took his bath regularly. I should
like, in the interests of sentiment, to describe the place as a miserable,
filthy, evil-smelling garret; but I can't—because it wasn't. The
room was large and airy; the floor was scrubbed and the windows cleaned at
least once a week, and the beds kept fresh and neat, which is more—a
good deal more—than can be said of many genteel private
boarding-houses. The lodgers were mostly respectable unemployed, and one
or two—fortunate men!—in work; it was the casual boozer, the
professional loafer, and the occasional spieler—the
one-shilling-bed-men—who made the place objectionable, not the
hard-working people who paid ten pounds a week for the house; and, but for
the one-night lodgers and the big gilt black-and-red bordered and “shaded”
“6d.” in the window—which made me glance guiltily up and down the
street, like a burglar about to do a job, before I went in—I was
pretty comfortable there.
They called him “Mr. Smellingscheck”, and treated him with a peculiar kind
of deference, the reason for which they themselves were doubtless unable
to explain or even understand. The haggard woman who made the beds called
him “Mr. Smell-'is-check”. Poor fellow! I didn't think, by the look of
him, that he'd smelt his cheque, or anyone else's, or that anyone else had
smelt his, for many a long day. He was a fat man, slow and placid. He
looked like a typical monopolist who had unaccountably got into a suit of
clothes belonging to a Domain unemployed, and hadn't noticed, or had
entirely forgotten, the circumstance in his business cares—if such a
word as care could be connected with such a calm, self-contained nature.
He wore a suit of cheap slops of some kind of shoddy “tweed”. The coat was
too small and the trousers too short, and they were drawn up to meet the
waistcoat—which they did with painful difficulty, now and then
showing, by way of protest, two pairs of brass buttons and the ends of the
brace-straps; and they seemed to blame the irresponsive waistcoat or the
wearer for it all. Yet he never gave way to assist them. A pair of burst
elastic-sides were in full evidence, and a rim of cloudy sock, with a hole
in it, showed at every step.
But he put on his clothes and wore them like—like a gentleman. He
had two white shirts, and they were both dirty. He'd lay them out on the
bed, turn them over, regard them thoughtfully, choose that which appeared
to his calm understanding to be the cleaner, and put it on, and wear it
until it was unmistakably dirtier than the other; then he'd wear the other
till it was dirtier than the first. He managed his three collars the same
way. His handkerchiefs were washed in the bathroom, and dried, without the
slightest disguise, in the bedroom. He never hurried in anything. The way
he cleaned his teeth, shaved, and made his toilet almost transformed the
place, in my imagination, into a gentleman's dressing-room.
He talked politics and such things in the abstract—always in the
abstract—calmly in the abstract. He was an old-fashioned
Conservative of the Sir Leicester Deadlock style. When he was moved by an
extra shower of aggressive democratic cant—which was seldom—he
defended Capital, but only as if it needed no defence, and as if its
opponents were merely thoughtless, ignorant children whom he condescended
to set right because of their inexperience and for their own good. He
stuck calmly to his own order—the order which had dropped him like a
foul thing when the bottom dropped out of his boom, whatever that was. He
never talked of his misfortunes.
He took his meals at the little greasy table in the dark corner
downstairs, just as if he were dining at the Exchange. He had a chop—rather
well-done—and a sheet of the 'Herald' for breakfast. He carried two
handkerchiefs; he used one for a handkerchief and the other for a
table-napkin, and sometimes folded it absently and laid it on the table.
He rose slowly, putting his chair back, took down his battered old green
hat, and regarded it thoughtfully—as though it had just occurred to
him in a calm, casual way that he'd drop into his hatter's, if he had
time, on his way down town, and get it blocked, or else send the messenger
round with it during business hours. He'd draw his stick out from behind
the next chair, plant it, and, if you hadn't quite finished your side of
the conversation, stand politely waiting until you were done. Then he'd
look for a suitable reply into his hat, put it on, give it a twitch to
settle it on his head—as gentlemen do a “chimney-pot”—step out
into the gangway, turn his face to the door, and walk slowly out on to the
middle of the pavement—looking more placidly well-to-do than ever.
The saying is that clothes make a man, but HE made his almost respectable
just by wearing them. Then he'd consult his watch—(he stuck to the
watch all through, and it seemed a good one—I often wondered why he
didn't pawn it); then he'd turn slowly, right turn, and look down the
street. Then slowly back, left-about turn, and take a cool survey in that
direction, as if calmly undecided whether to take a cab and drive to the
Exchange, or (as it was a very fine morning, and he had half an hour to
spare) walk there and drop in at his club on the way. He'd conclude to
walk. I never saw him go anywhere in particular, but he walked and stood
as if he could.
Coming quietly into the room one day, I surprised him sitting at the table
with his arms lying on it and his face resting on them. I heard something
like a sob. He rose hastily, and gathered up some papers which were on the
table; then he turned round, rubbing his forehead and eyes with his
forefinger and thumb, and told me that he suffered from—something, I
forget the name of it, but it was a well-to-do ailment. His manner seemed
a bit jolted and hurried for a minute or so, and then he was himself
again. He told me he was leaving for Melbourne next day. He left while I
was out, and left an envelope downstairs for me. There was nothing in it
except a pound note.
I saw him in Brisbane afterwards, well-dressed, getting out of a cab at
the entrance of one of the leading hotels. But his manner was no more
self-contained and well-to-do than it had been in the old sixpenny days—because
it couldn't be. We had a well-to-do whisky together, and he talked of
things in the abstract. He seemed just as if he'd met me in the Australia.
“A Rough Shed”
A hot, breathless, blinding sunrise—the sun having appeared suddenly
above the ragged edge of the barren scrub like a great disc of molten
steel. No hint of a morning breeze before it, no sign on earth or sky to
show that it is morning—save the position of the sun.
A clearing in the scrub—bare as though the surface of the earth were
ploughed and harrowed, and dusty as the road. Two oblong huts—one
for the shearers and one for the rouseabouts—in about the centre of
the clearing (as if even the mongrel scrub had shrunk away from them)
built end-to-end, of weatherboards, and roofed with galvanised iron.
Little ventilation; no verandah; no attempt to create, artificially, a
breath of air through the buildings. Unpainted, sordid—hideous.
Outside, heaps of ashes still hot and smoking. Close at hand, “butcher's
shop”—a bush and bag breakwind in the dust, under a couple of sheets
of iron, with offal, grease and clotted blood blackening the surface of
the ground about it. Greasy, stinking sheepskins hanging everywhere with
blood-blotched sides out. Grease inches deep in great black patches about
the fireplace ends of the huts, where wash-up and “boiling” water is
thrown.
Inside, a rough table on supports driven into the black, greasy ground
floor, and formed of flooring boards, running on uneven lines the length
of the hut from within about 6ft. of the fire-place. Lengths of single
six-inch boards or slabs on each side, supported by the projecting ends of
short pieces of timber nailed across the legs of the table to serve as
seats.
On each side of the hut runs a rough framework, like the partitions in a
stable; each compartment battened off to about the size of a manger, and
containing four bunks, one above the other, on each side—their ends,
of course, to the table. Scarcely breathing space anywhere between.
Fireplace, the full width of the hut in one end, where all the cooking and
baking for forty or fifty men is done, and where flour, sugar, etc., are
kept in open bags. Fire, like a very furnace. Buckets of tea and coffee on
roasting beds of coals and ashes on the hearth. Pile of “brownie” on the
bare black boards at the end of the table. Unspeakable aroma of forty or
fifty men who have little inclination and less opportunity to wash their
skins, and who soak some of the grease out of their clothes—in
buckets of hot water—on Saturday afternoons or Sundays. And clinging
to all, and over all, the smell of the dried, stale yolk of wool—the
stink of rams!
. . . . .
“I am a rouseabout of the rouseabouts. I have fallen so far that it is
beneath me to try to climb to the proud position of 'ringer' of the shed.
I had that ambition once, when I was the softest of green hands; but then
I thought I could work out my salvation and go home. I've got used to hell
since then. I only get twenty-five shillings a week (less station store
charges) and tucker here. I have been seven years west of the Darling and
never shore a sheep. Why don't I learn to shear, and so make money? What
should I do with more money? Get out of this and go home? I would never go
home unless I had enough money to keep me for the rest of my life, and
I'll never make that Out Back. Otherwise, what should I do at home? And
how should I account for the seven years, if I were to go home? Could I
describe shed life to them and explain how I lived. They think shearing
only takes a few days of the year—at the beginning of summer. They'd
want to know how I lived the rest of the year. Could I explain that I
'jabbed trotters' and was a 'tea-and-sugar burglar' between sheds. They'd
think I'd been a tramp and a beggar all the time. Could I explain ANYTHING
so that they'd understand? I'd have to be lying all the time and would
soon be tripped up and found out. For, whatever else I have been I was
never much of a liar. No, I'll never go home.
“I become momentarily conscious about daylight. The flies on the track got
me into that habit, I think; they start at day-break—when the
mosquitoes give over.
“The cook rings a bullock bell.
“The cook is fire-proof. He is as a fiend from the nethermost sheol and
needs to be. No man sees him sleep, for he makes bread—or worse,
brownie—at night, and he rings a bullock bell loudly at half-past
five in the morning to rouse us from our animal torpors. Others, the
sheep-ho's or the engine-drivers at the shed or wool-wash, call him, if he
does sleep. They manage it in shifts, somehow, and sleep somewhere,
sometime. We haven't time to know. The cook rings the bullock bell and
yells the time. It was the same time five minutes ago—or a year ago.
No time to decide which. I dash water over my head and face and slap
handfuls on my eyelids—gummed over aching eyes—still blighted
by the yolk o' wool—grey, greasy-feeling water from a cut-down
kerosene tin which I sneaked from the cook and hid under my bunk and had
the foresight to refill from the cask last night, under cover of warm,
still, suffocating darkness. Or was it the night before last? Anyhow, it
will be sneaked from me to-day, and from the crawler who will collar it
to-morrow, and 'touched' and 'lifted' and 'collared' and recovered by the
cook, and sneaked back again, and cause foul language, and fights, maybe,
till we 'cut-out'.
“No; we didn't have sweet dreams of home and mother, gentle poet—nor
yet of babbling brooks and sweethearts, and love's young dream. We are too
dirty and dog-tired when we tumble down, and have too little time to sleep
it off. We don't want to dream those dreams out here—they'd only be
nightmares for us, and we'd wake to remember. We MUSTN'T remember here.
“At the edge of the timber a great galvanised-iron shed, nearly all roof,
coming down to within 6ft. 6in. of the 'board' over the 'shoots'. Cloud of
red dust in the dead timber behind, going up—noon-day dust. Fence
covered with skins; carcases being burned; blue smoke going straight up as
in noonday. Great glossy (greasy-glossy) black crows 'flopping' around.
“The first syren has gone. We hurry in single files from opposite ends of
rouseabouts' and shearers' huts (as the paths happen to run to the shed)
gulping hot tea or coffee from a pint-pot in one hand and biting at a junk
of brownie in the other.
“Shed of forty hands. Shearers rush the pens and yank out sheep and throw
them like demons; grip them with their knees, take up machines, jerk the
strings; and with a rattling whirring roar the great machine-shed starts
for the day.
“'Go it, you——tigers!' yells a tar-boy. 'Wool away!' 'Tar!'
'Sheep Ho!' We rush through with a whirring roar till breakfast time.
“We seize our tin plate from the pile, knife and fork from the candle-box,
and crowd round the camp-oven to jab out lean chops, dry as chips, boiled
in fat. Chops or curry-and-rice. There is some growling and cursing. We
slip into our places without removing our hats. There's no time to hunt
for mislaid hats when the whistle goes. Row of hat brims, level, drawn
over eyes, or thrust back—according to characters or temperaments.
Thrust back denotes a lucky absence of brains, I fancy. Row of forks going
up, or jabbing, or poised, loaded, waiting for last mouthful to be bolted.
“We pick up, sweep, tar, sew wounds, catch sheep that break from the pens,
jump down and pick up those that can't rise at the bottom of the shoots,
'bring-my-combs-from-the-grinder-will-yer,' laugh at dirty jokes, and
swear—and, in short, are the 'will-yer' slaves, body and soul, of
seven, six, five, or four shearers, according to the distance from the
rolling tables.
“The shearer on the board at the shed is a demon. He gets so much a
hundred; we, 25s. a week. He is not supposed, by the rules of the shed,
the Union, and humanity, to take a sheep out of the pen AFTER the bell
goes (smoke-ho, meals, or knock-off), but his watch is hanging on the
post, and he times himself to get so many sheep out of the pen BEFORE the
bell goes, and ONE MORE—the 'bell-sheep'—as it is ringing. We
have to take the last fleece to the table and leave our board clean. We go
through the day of eight hours in runs of about an hour and 20 minutes
between smoke-ho's—from 6 to 6. If the shearers shore 200 instead of
100, they'd get 2 Pounds a day instead of 1 Pound, and we'd have twice as
much work to do for our 25s. per week. But the shearers are racing each
other for tallies. And it's no use kicking. There is no God here and no
Unionism (though we all have tickets). But what am I growling about? I've
worked from 6 to 6 with no smoke-ho's for half the wages, and food we
wouldn't give the sheep-ho dog. It's the bush growl, born of heat, flies,
and dust. I'd growl now if I had a thousand a year. We MUST growl, swear,
and some of us drink to d.t.'s, or go mad sober.
“Pants and shirts stiff with grease as though a couple of pounds of soft
black putty were spread on with a painter's knife.
“No, gentle bard!—we don't sing at our work. Over the whirr and roar
and hum all day long, and with iteration that is childish and irritating
to the intelligent greenhand, float unthinkable adjectives and adverbs,
addressed to jumbucks, jackaroos, and mates indiscriminately. And worse
words for the boss over the board—behind his back.
“I came of a Good Christian Family—perhaps that's why I went to the
Devil. When I came out here I'd shrink from the man who used foul
language. In a short time I used it with the worst. I couldn't help it.
“That's the way of it. If I went back to a woman's country again I
wouldn't swear. I'd forget this as I would a nightmare. That's the way of
it. There's something of the larrikin about us. We don't exist
individually. Off the board, away from the shed (and each other) we are
quiet—even gentle.
“A great-horned ram, in poor condition, but shorn of a heavy fleece, picks
himself up at the foot of the 'shoot', and hesitates, as if ashamed to go
down to the other end where the ewes are. The most ridiculous object under
Heaven.
“A tar-boy of fifteen, of the bush, with a mouth so vile that a
street-boy, same age (up with a shearing uncle), kicks him behind—having
proved his superiority with his fists before the shed started. Of which
unspeakable little fiend the roughest shearer of a rough shed was heard to
say, in effect, that if he thought there was the slightest possibility of
his becoming the father of such a boy he'd——take drastic
measures to prevent the possibility of his becoming a proud parent at all.
“Twice a day the cooks and their familiars carry buckets of oatmeal-water
and tea to the shed, two each on a yoke. We cry, 'Where are you coming to,
my pretty maids?'
“In ten minutes the surfaces of the buckets are black with flies. We have
given over trying to keep them clear. We stir the living cream aside with
the bottoms of the pints, and guzzle gallons, and sweat it out again.
Occasionally a shearer pauses and throws the perspiration from his
forehead in a rain.
“Shearers live in such a greedy rush of excitement that often a strong man
will, at a prick of the shears, fall in a death-like faint on the board.
“We hate the Boss-of-the-Board as the shearers' 'slushy' hates the
shearers' cook. I don't know why. He's a very fair boss.
“He refused to put on a traveller yesterday, and the traveller knocked him
down. He walked into the shed this morning with his hat back and thumbs in
waistcoat—a tribute to man's weakness. He threatened to dismiss the
traveller's mate, a bigger man, for rough shearing—a tribute to
man's strength. The shearer said nothing. We hate the boss because he IS
boss, but we respect him because he is a strong man. He is as hard up as
any of us, I hear, and has a sick wife and a large, small family in
Melbourne. God judge us all!
“There is a gambling-school here, headed by the shearers' cook. After tea
they head-'em, and advance cheques are passed from hand to hand, and
thrown in the dust until they are black. When it's too dark to see with
nose to the ground, they go inside and gamble with cards. Sometimes they
start on Saturday afternoon, heading 'em till dark, play cards all night,
start again heading 'em Sunday afternoon, play cards all Sunday night, and
sleep themselves sane on Monday, or go to work ghastly—like dead
men.
“Cry of 'Fight'; we all rush out. But there isn't much fighting. Afraid of
murdering each other. I'm beginning to think that most bush crime is due
to irritation born of dust, heat, and flies.
“The smothering atmosphere shudders when the sun goes down. We call it the
sunset breeze.
“Saturday night or Sunday we're invited into the shearers' hut. There are
songs that are not hymns and recitations and speeches that are not
prayers.
“Last Sunday night: Slush lamps at long intervals on table. Men playing
cards, sewing on patches—(nearly all smoking)—some writing,
and the rest reading Deadwood Dick. At one end of the table a Christian
Endeavourer endeavouring; at the other a cockney Jew, from the hawker's
boat, trying to sell rotten clothes. In response to complaints, direct and
not chosen generally for Sunday, the shearers' rep. requests both apostles
to shut up or leave.
“He couldn't be expected to take the Christian and leave the Jew, any more
than he could take the Jew and leave the Christian. We are just amongst
ourselves in our hell.
. . . . .
“Fiddle at the end of rouseabouts' hut. Voice of Jackeroo, from upper bunk
with apologetic oaths: 'For God's sake chuck that up; it makes a man think
of blanky old things!'
“A lost soul laughs (mine) and dreadful night smothers us.”
Payable Gold
Among the crowds who left the Victorian side for New South Wales about the
time Gulgong broke out was an old Ballarat digger named Peter McKenzie. He
had married and retired from the mining some years previously and had made
a home for himself and family at the village of St. Kilda, near Melbourne;
but, as was often the case with old diggers, the gold fever never left
him, and when the fields of New South Wales began to blaze he mortgaged
his little property in order to raise funds for another campaign, leaving
sufficient behind him to keep his wife and family in comfort for a year or
so.
As he often remarked, his position was now very different from what it had
been in the old days when he first arrived from Scotland, in the height of
the excitement following on the great discovery. He was a young man then
with only himself to look out for, but now that he was getting old and had
a family to provide for he had staked too much on this venture to lose.
His position did certainly look like a forlorn hope, but he never seemed
to think so.
Peter must have been very lonely and low-spirited at times. A young or
unmarried man can form new ties, and even make new sweethearts if
necessary, but Peter's heart was with his wife and little ones at home,
and they were mortgaged, as it were, to Dame Fortune. Peter had to lift
this mortgage off.
Nevertheless he was always cheerful, even at the worst of times, and his
straight grey beard and scrubby brown hair encircled a smile which
appeared to be a fixture. He had to make an effort in order to look grave,
such as some men do when they want to force a smile.
It was rumoured that Peter had made a vow never to return home until he
could take sufficient wealth to make his all-important family comfortable,
or, at least, to raise the mortgage from the property, for the sacrifice
of which to his mad gold fever he never forgave himself. But this was one
of the few things which Peter kept to himself.
The fact that he had a wife and children at St. Kilda was well known to
all the diggers. They had to know it, and if they did not know the age,
complexion, history and peculiarities of every child and of the “old
woman” it was not Peter's fault.
He would cross over to our place and talk to the mother for hours about
his wife and children. And nothing pleased him better than to discover
peculiarities in us children wherein we resembled his own. It pleased us
also for mercenary reasons. “It's just the same with my old woman,” or
“It's just the same with my youngsters,” Peter would exclaim boisterously,
for he looked upon any little similarity between the two families as a
remarkable coincidence. He liked us all, and was always very kind to us,
often standing between our backs and the rod that spoils the child—that
is, I mean, if it isn't used. I was very short-tempered, but this failing
was more than condoned by the fact that Peter's “eldest” was given that
way also. Mother's second son was very good-natured; so was Peter's third.
Her “third” had a great aversion for any duty that threatened to increase
his muscles; so had Peter's “second”. Our baby was very fat and heavy and
was given to sucking her own thumb vigorously, and, according to the
latest bulletins from home, it was just the same with Peter's “last”.
I think we knew more about Peter's family than we did about our own.
Although we had never seen them, we were as familiar with their features
as the photographer's art could make us, and always knew their domestic
history up to the date of the last mail.
We became interested in the McKenzie family. Instead of getting bored by
them as some people were, we were always as much pleased when Peter got a
letter from home as he was himself, and if a mail were missed, which
seldom happened—we almost shared his disappointment and anxiety.
Should one of the youngsters be ill, we would be quite uneasy, on Peter's
account, until the arrival of a later bulletin removed his anxiety, and
ours.
It must have been the glorious power of a big true heart that gained for
Peter the goodwill and sympathy of all who knew him.
Peter's smile had a peculiar fascination for us children. We would stand
by his pointing forge when he'd be sharpening picks in the early morning,
and watch his face for five minutes at a time, wondering sometimes whether
he was always SMILING INSIDE, or whether the smile went on externally
irrespective of any variation in Peter's condition of mind.
I think it was the latter case, for often when he had received bad news
from home we have heard his voice quaver with anxiety, while the old smile
played on his round, brown features just the same.
Little Nelse (one of those queer old-man children who seem to come into
the world by mistake, and who seldom stay long) used to say that Peter
“cried inside”.
Once, on Gulgong, when he attended the funeral of an old Ballarat mate, a
stranger who had been watching his face curiously remarked that McKenzie
seemed as pleased as though the dead digger had bequeathed him a fortune.
But the stranger had soon reason to alter his opinion, for when another
old mate began in a tremulous voice to repeat the words “Ashes to ashes,
an' dust to dust,” two big tears suddenly burst from Peter's eyes, and
hurried down to get entrapped in his beard.
Peter's goldmining ventures were not successful. He sank three duffers in
succession on Gulgong, and the fourth shaft, after paying expenses, left a
little over a hundred to each party, and Peter had to send the bulk of his
share home. He lived in a tent (or in a hut when he could get one) after
the manner of diggers, and he “did for himself”, even to washing his own
clothes. He never drank nor “played”, and he took little enjoyment of any
kind, yet there was not a digger on the field who would dream of calling
old Peter McKenzie “a mean man”. He lived, as we know from our own
observations, in a most frugal manner. He always tried to hide this, and
took care to have plenty of good things for us when he invited us to his
hut; but children's eyes are sharp. Some said that Peter half-starved
himself, but I don't think his family ever knew, unless he told them so
afterwards.
Ah, well! the years go over. Peter was now three years from home, and he
and Fortune were enemies still. Letters came by the mail, full of little
home troubles and prayers for Peter's return, and letters went back by the
mail, always hopeful, always cheerful. Peter never gave up. When
everything else failed he would work by the day (a sad thing for a
digger), and he was even known to do a job of fencing until such time as
he could get a few pounds and a small party together to sink another
shaft.
Talk about the heroic struggles of early explorers in a hostile country;
but for dogged determination and courage in the face of poverty, illness,
and distance, commend me to the old-time digger—the truest soldier
Hope ever had!
In the fourth year of his struggle Peter met with a terrible
disappointment. His party put down a shaft called the Forlorn Hope near
Happy Valley, and after a few weeks' fruitless driving his mates jibbed on
it. Peter had his own opinion about the ground—an old digger's
opinion, and he used every argument in his power to induce his mates to
put a few days' more work in the claim. In vain he pointed out that the
quality of the wash and the dip of the bottom exactly resembled that of
the “Brown Snake”, a rich Victorian claim. In vain he argued that in the
case of the abovementioned claim, not a colour could be got until the
payable gold was actually reached. Home Rule and The Canadian and that
cluster of fields were going ahead, and his party were eager to shift.
They remained obstinate, and at last, half-convinced against his opinion,
Peter left with them to sink the “Iawatha”, in Log Paddock, which turned
out a rank duffer—not even paying its own expenses.
A party of Italians entered the old claim and, after driving it a few feet
further, made their fortune.
. . . . .
We all noticed the change in Peter McKenzie when he came to “Log Paddock”,
whither we had shifted before him. The old smile still flickered, but he
had learned to “look” grave for an hour at a time without much effort. He
was never quite the same after the affair of Forlorn Hope, and I often
think how he must have “cried” sometimes “inside”.
However, he still read us letters from home, and came and smoked in the
evening by our kitchen-fire. He showed us some new portraits of his family
which he had received by a late mail, but something gave me the impression
that the portraits made him uneasy. He had them in his possession for
nearly a week before showing them to us, and to the best of our knowledge
he never showed them to anybody else. Perhaps they reminded him of the
flight of time—perhaps he would have preferred his children to
remain just as he left them until he returned.
But stay! there was one portrait that seemed to give Peter infinite
pleasure. It was the picture of a chubby infant of about three years or
more. It was a fine-looking child taken in a sitting position on a
cushion, and arrayed in a very short shirt. On its fat, soft, white face,
which was only a few inches above the ten very podgy toes, was a smile
something like Peter's. Peter was never tired of looking at and showing
the picture of his child—the child he had never seen. Perhaps he
cherished a wild dream of making his fortune and returning home before
THAT child grew up.
. . . . .
McKenzie and party were sinking a shaft at the upper end of Log Paddock,
generally called “The other end”. We were at the lower end.
One day Peter came down from “the other end” and told us that his party
expected to “bottom” during the following week, and if they got no
encouragement from the wash they intended to go prospecting at the “Happy
Thought”, near Specimen Flat.
The shaft in Log Paddock was christened “Nil Desperandum”. Towards the end
of the week we heard that the wash in the “Nil” was showing good colours.
Later came the news that “McKenzie and party” had bottomed on payable
gold, and the red flag floated over the shaft. Long before the first load
of dirt reached the puddling machine on the creek, the news was all round
the diggings. The “Nil Desperandum” was a “Golden Hole”!
. . . . .
We will not forget the day when Peter went home. He hurried down in the
morning to have an hour or so with us before Cobb and Co. went by. He told
us all about his little cottage by the bay at St. Kilda. He had never
spoken of it before, probably because of the mortgage. He told us how it
faced the bay—how many rooms it had, how much flower garden, and how
on a clear day he could see from the window all the ships that came up to
the Yarra, and how with a good telescope he could even distinguish the
faces of the passengers on the big ocean liners.
And then, when the mother's back was turned, he hustled us children round
the corner, and surreptitiously slipped a sovereign into each of our dirty
hands, making great pantomimic show for silence, for the mother was very
independent.
And when we saw the last of Peter's face setting like a good-humoured sun
on the top of Cobb and Co.'s, a great feeling of discontent and loneliness
came over all our hearts. Little Nelse, who had been Peter's favourite,
went round behind the pig-stye, where none might disturb him, and sat down
on the projecting end of a trough to “have a cry”, in his usual methodical
manner. But old “Alligator Desolation”, the dog, had suspicions of what
was up, and, hearing the sobs, went round to offer whatever consolation
appertained to a damp and dirty nose and a pair of ludicrously doleful
yellow eyes.
An Oversight of Steelman's
Steelman and Smith—professional wanderers—were making back for
Wellington, down through the wide and rather dreary-looking Hutt Valley.
They were broke. They carried their few remaining belongings in two
skimpy, amateurish-looking swags. Steelman had fourpence left. They were
very tired and very thirsty—at least Steelman was, and he answered
for both. It was Smith's policy to feel and think just exactly as Steelman
did. Said Steelman:
“The landlord of the next pub. is not a bad sort. I won't go in—he
might remember me. You'd best go in. You've been tramping round in the
Wairarapa district for the last six months, looking for work. You're going
back to Wellington now, to try and get on the new corporation works just
being started there—the sewage works. You think you've got a show.
You've got some mates in Wellington, and they're looking out for a chance
for you. You did get a job last week on a sawmill at Silverstream, and the
boss sacked you after three days and wouldn't pay you a penny. That's just
his way. I know him—at least a mate of mine does. I've heard of him
often enough. His name's Cowman. Don't forget the name, whatever you do.
The landlord here hates him like poison; he'll sympathize with you. Tell
him you've got a mate with you; he's gone ahead—took a short cut
across the paddocks. Tell him you've got only fourpence left, and see if
he'll give you a drop in a bottle. Says you: 'Well, boss, the fact is
we've only got fourpence, but you might let us have a drop in a bottle';
and very likely he'll stand you a couple of pints in a gin-bottle. You can
fling the coppers on the counter, but the chances are he won't take them.
He's not a bad sort. Beer's fourpence a pint out here, same's in
Wellington. See that gin-bottle lying there by the stump; get it and we'll
take it down to the river with us and rinse it out.”
They reached the river bank.
“You'd better take my swag—it looks more decent,” said Steelman.
“No, I'll tell you what we'll do: we'll undo both swags and make them into
one—one decent swag, and I'll cut round through the lanes and wait
for you on the road ahead of the pub.”
He rolled up the swag with much care and deliberation and considerable
judgment. He fastened Smith's belt round one end of it, and the
handkerchiefs round the other, and made a towel serve as a shoulder-strap.
“I wish we had a canvas bag to put it in,” he said, “or a cover of some
sort. But never mind. The landlord's an old Australian bushman, now I come
to think of it; the swag looks Australian enough, and it might appeal to
his feelings, you know—bring up old recollections. But you'd best
not say you come from Australia, because he's been there, and he'd soon
trip you up. He might have been where you've been, you know, so don't try
to do too much. You always do mug-up the business when you try to do more
than I tell you. You might tell him your mate came from Australia—but
no, he might want you to bring me in. Better stick to Maoriland. I don't
believe in too much ornamentation. Plain lies are the best.”
“What's the landlord's name?” asked Smith.
“Never mind that. You don't want to know that. You are not supposed to
know him at all. It might look suspicious if you called him by his name,
and lead to awkward questions; then you'd be sure to put your foot into
it.”
“I could say I read it over the door.”
“Bosh. Travellers don't read the names over the doors, when they go into
pubs. You're an entire stranger to him. Call him 'Boss'. Say 'Good-day,
Boss,' when you go in, and swing down your swag as if you're used to it.
Ease it down like this. Then straighten yourself up, stick your hat back,
and wipe your forehead, and try to look as hearty and independent and
cheerful as you possibly can. Curse the Government, and say the country's
done. It don't matter what Government it is, for he's always against it. I
never knew a real Australian that wasn't. Say that you're thinking about
trying to get over to Australia, and then listen to him talking about it—and
try to look interested, too! Get that damned stone-deaf expression off
your face!... He'll run Australia down most likely (I never knew an
Other-sider that had settled down over here who didn't). But don't you
make any mistake and agree with him, because, although successful
Australians over here like to run their own country down, there's very few
of them that care to hear anybody else do it.... Don't come away as soon
as you get your beer. Stay and listen to him for a while, as if you're
interested in his yarning, and give him time to put you on to a job, or
offer you one. Give him a chance to ask how you and your mate are off for
tobacco or tucker. Like as not he'll sling you half a crown when you come
away—that is, if you work it all right. Now try to think of
something to say to him, and make yourself a bit interesting—if you
possibly can. Tell him about the fight we saw back at the pub. the other
day. He might know some of the chaps. This is a sleepy hole, and there
ain't much news knocking round.... I wish I could go in myself, but he's
sure to remember ME. I'm afraid he got left the last time I stayed there
(so did one or two others); and, besides, I came away without saying
good-bye to him, and he might feel a bit sore about it. That's the worst
of travelling on the old road. Come on now, wake up!”
“Bet I'll get a quart,” said Smith, brightening up, “and some tucker for
it to wash down.”
“If you don't,” said Steelman, “I'll stoush you. Never mind the bottle;
fling it away. It doesn't look well for a traveller to go into a pub. with
an empty bottle in his hand. A real swagman never does. It looks much
better to come out with a couple of full ones. That's what you've got to
do. Now, come along.”
Steelman turned off into a lane, cut across the paddocks to the road
again, and waited for Smith. He hadn't long to wait.
Smith went on towards the public-house, rehearsing his part as he walked—repeating
his “lines” to himself, so as to be sure of remembering all that Steelman
had told him to say to the landlord, and adding, with what he considered
appropriate gestures, some fancy touches of his own, which he determined
to throw in in spite of Steelman's advice and warning. “I'll tell him
(this)—I'll tell him (that). Well, look here, boss, I'll say you're
pretty right and I quite agree with you as far as that's concerned, but,”
&c. And so, murmuring and mumbling to himself, Smith reached the
hotel. The day was late, and the bar was small, and low, and dark. Smith
walked in with all the assurance he could muster, eased down his swag in a
corner in what he no doubt considered the true professional style, and,
swinging round to the bar, said in a loud voice which he intended to be
cheerful, independent, and hearty:
“Good-day, boss!”
But it wasn't a “boss”. It was about the hardest-faced old woman that
Smith had ever seen. The pub. had changed hands.
“I—I beg your pardon, missus,” stammered poor Smith.
It was a knock-down blow for Smith. He couldn't come to time. He and
Steelman had had a landlord in their minds all the time, and laid their
plans accordingly; the possibility of having a she—and one like this—to
deal with never entered into their calculations. Smith had no time to
reorganise, even if he had had the brains to do so, without the assistance
of his mate's knowledge of human nature.
“I—I beg your pardon, missus,” he stammered.
Painful pause. She sized him up.
“Well, what do you want?”
“Well, missus—I—the fact is—will you give me a bottle of
beer for fourpence?”
“Wha—what?”
“I mean——. The fact is, we've only got fourpence left, and—I've
got a mate outside, and you might let us have a quart or so, in a bottle,
for that. I mean—anyway, you might let us have a pint. I'm very
sorry to bother you, missus.”
But she couldn't do it. No. Certainly not. Decidedly not! All her drinks
were sixpence. She had her license to pay, and the rent, and a family to
keep. It wouldn't pay out there—it wasn't worth her while. It
wouldn't pay the cost of carting the liquor out, &c., &c.
“Well, missus,” poor Smith blurted out at last, in sheer desperation,
“give me what you can in a bottle for this. I've—I've got a mate
outside.” And he put the four coppers on the bar.
“Have you got a bottle?”
“No—but——”
“If I give you one, will you bring it back? You can't expect me to give
you a bottle as well as a drink.”
“Yes, mum; I'll bring it back directly.”
She reached out a bottle from under the bar, and very deliberately
measured out a little over a pint and poured it into the bottle, which she
handed to Smith without a cork.
Smith went his way without rejoicing. It struck him forcibly that he
should have saved the money until they reached Petone, or the city, where
Steelman would be sure to get a decent drink. But how was he to know? He
had chanced it, and lost; Steelman might have done the same. What troubled
Smith most was the thought of what Steelman would say; he already heard
him, in imagination, saying: “You're a mug, Smith—Smith, you ARE a
mug.”
But Steelman didn't say much. He was prepared for the worst by seeing
Smith come along so soon. He listened to his story with an air of gentle
sadness, even as a stern father might listen to the voluntary confession
of a wayward child; then he held the bottle up to the fading light of
departing day, looked through it (the bottle), and said:
“Well—it ain't worth while dividing it.”
Smith's heart shot right down through a hole in the sole of his left boot
into the hard road.
“Here, Smith,” said Steelman, handing him the bottle, “drink it, old man;
you want it. It wasn't altogether your fault; it was an oversight of mine.
I didn't bargain for a woman of that kind, and, of course, YOU couldn't be
expected to think of it. Drink it! Drink it down, Smith. I'll manage to
work the oracle before this night is out.”
Smith was forced to believe his ears, and, recovering from his surprise,
drank.
“I promised to take back the bottle,” he said, with the ghost of a smile.
Steelman took the bottle by the neck and broke it on the fence.
“Come on, Smith; I'll carry the swag for a while.”
And they tramped on in the gathering starlight.
How Steelman told his Story
It was Steelman's humour, in some of his moods, to take Smith into his
confidence, as some old bushmen do their dogs.
“You're nearly as good as an intelligent sheep-dog to talk to, Smith—when
a man gets tired of thinking to himself and wants a relief. You're a bit
of a mug and a good deal of an idiot, and the chances are that you don't
know what I'm driving at half the time—that's the main reason why I
don't mind talking to you. You ought to consider yourself honoured; it
ain't every man I take into my confidence, even that far.”
Smith rubbed his head.
“I'd sooner talk to you—or a stump—any day than to one of
those silent, suspicious, self-contained, worldly-wise chaps that listen
to everything you say—sense and rubbish alike—as if you were
trying to get them to take shares in a mine. I drop the man who listens to
me all the time and doesn't seem to get bored. He isn't safe. He isn't to
be trusted. He mostly wants to grind his axe against yours, and there's
too little profit for me where there are two axes to grind, and no stone—though
I'd manage it once, anyhow.”
“How'd you do it?” asked Smith.
“There are several ways. Either you join forces, for instance, and find a
grindstone—or make one of the other man's axe. But the last way is
too slow, and, as I said, takes too much brain-work—besides, it
doesn't pay. It might satisfy your vanity or pride, but I've got none. I
had once, when I was younger, but it—well, it nearly killed me, so I
dropped it.
“You can mostly trust the man who wants to talk more than you do; he'll
make a safe mate—or a good grindstone.”
Smith scratched the nape of his neck and sat blinking at the fire, with
the puzzled expression of a woman pondering over a life-question or the
trimming of a hat. Steelman took his chin in his hand and watched Smith
thoughtfully.
“I—I say, Steely,” exclaimed Smith, suddenly, sitting up and
scratching his head and blinking harder than ever—“wha—what am
I?”
“How do you mean?”
“Am I the axe or the grindstone?”
“Oh! your brain seems in extra good working order to-night, Smith. Well,
you turn the grindstone and I grind.” Smith settled. “If you could grind
better than I, I'd turn the stone and let YOU grind, I'd never go against
the interests of the firm—that's fair enough, isn't it?”
“Ye-es,” admitted Smith; “I suppose so.”
“So do I. Now, Smith, we've got along all right together for years, off
and on, but you never know what might happen. I might stop breathing, for
instance—and so might you.”
Smith began to look alarmed.
“Poetical justice might overtake one or both of us—such things have
happened before, though not often. Or, say, misfortune or death might
mistake us for honest, hard-working mugs with big families to keep, and
cut us off in the bloom of all our wisdom. You might get into trouble,
and, in that case, I'd be bound to leave you there, on principle; or I
might get into trouble, and you wouldn't have the brains to get me out—though
I know you'd be mug enough to try. I might make a rise and cut you, or you
might be misled into showing some spirit, and clear out after I'd stoushed
you for it. You might get tired of me calling you a mug, and bossing you
and making a tool or convenience of you, you know. You might go in for
honest graft (you were always a bit weak-minded) and then I'd have to wash
my hands of you (unless you agreed to keep me) for an irreclaimable mug.
Or it might suit me to become a respected and worthy fellow townsman, and
then, if you came within ten miles of me or hinted that you ever knew me,
I'd have you up for vagrancy, or soliciting alms, or attempting to levy
blackmail. I'd have to fix you—so I give you fair warning. Or we
might get into some desperate fix (and it needn't be very desperate,
either) when I'd be obliged to sacrifice you for my own personal safety,
comfort, and convenience. Hundreds of things might happen.
“Well, as I said, we've been at large together for some years, and I've
found you sober, trustworthy, and honest; so, in case we do part—as
we will sooner or later—and you survive, I'll give you some advice
from my own experience.
“In the first place: If you ever happen to get born again—and it
wouldn't do you much harm—get born with the strength of a bullock
and the hide of one as well, and a swelled head, and no brains—at
least no more brains than you've got now. I was born with a skin like
tissue-paper, and brains; also a heart.
“Get born without relatives, if you can: if you can't help it, clear out
on your own just as soon after you're born as you possibly can. I hung on.
“If you have relations, and feel inclined to help them any time when
you're flush (and there's no telling what a weak-minded man like you might
take it into his head to do)—don't do it. They'll get a down on you
if you do. It only causes family troubles and bitterness. There's no
dislike like that of a dependant. You'll get neither gratitude nor
civility in the end, and be lucky if you escape with a character. (You've
got NO character, Smith; I'm only just supposing you have.) There's no
hatred too bitter for, and nothing too bad to be said of, the mug who
turns. The worst yarns about a man are generally started by his own tribe,
and the world believes them at once on that very account. Well, the first
thing to do in life is to escape from your friends.
“If you ever go to work—and miracles have happened before—no
matter what your wages are, or how you are treated, you can take it for
granted that you're sweated; act on that to the best of your ability, or
you'll never rise in the world. If you go to see a show on the nod you'll
be found a comfortable seat in a good place; but if you pay the chances
are the ticket clerk will tell you a lie, and you'll have to hustle for
standing room. The man that doesn't ante gets the best of this world;
anything he'll stand is good enough for the man that pays. If you try to
be too sharp you'll get into gaol sooner or later; if you try to be too
honest the chances are that the bailiff will get into your house—if
you have one—and make a holy show of you before the neighbours. The
honest softy is more often mistaken for a swindler, and accused of being
one, than the out-and-out scamp; and the man that tells the truth too much
is set down as an irreclaimable liar. But most of the time crow low and
roost high, for it's a funny world, and you never know what might happen.
“And if you get married (and there's no accounting for a woman's taste) be
as bad as you like, and then moderately good, and your wife will love you.
If you're bad all the time she can't stand it for ever, and if you're good
all the time she'll naturally treat you with contempt. Never explain what
you're going to do, and don't explain afterwards, if you can help it. If
you find yourself between two stools, strike hard for your own self, Smith—strike
hard, and you'll be respected more than if you fought for all the world.
Generosity isn't understood nowadays, and what the people don't understand
is either 'mad' or 'cronk'. Failure has no case, and you can't build one
for it.... I started out in life very young—and very soft.”
. . . . .
“I thought you were going to tell me your story, Steely,” remarked Smith.
Steelman smiled sadly.
About the author:
Henry Lawson was born near Grenfell, New South Wales, Australia on 17
June 1867. Although he has since become Australia's most acclaimed
writer, in his own lifetime his writing was often “on the side”—his
“real” work being whatever he could find. His writing was frequently
taken from memories of his childhood, especially at Pipeclay/Eurunderee.
In his autobiography, he states that many of his characters were taken
from the better class of diggers and bushmen he knew there. His
experiences at this time deeply influenced his work, for it is
interesting to note a number of descriptions and phrases that are
identical in his autobiography and in his stories and poems. He died at
Sydney, 2 September 1922. He is most famous for his short stories.
“On the Track” and “Over the Sliprails” were both published at Sydney in
1900, the prefaces being dated March and June respectively—and so,
though printed separately, a combined edition was printed the same year
(the two separate, complete works were simply put together in one
binding); hence they are sometimes referred to as “On the Track and Over
the Sliprails”.
. . . . .
An incomplete Glossary of Australian terms and concepts which may prove
helpful to understanding this book:
Anniversary Day: Alluded to in the text, is now known as Australia
Day. It commemorates the establishment of the first English
settlement in Australia, at Port Jackson (Sydney Harbour), on 26
January 1788.
Billy: A kettle used for camp cooking, especially to boil water for
tea.
Cabbage-tree/Cabbage-tree hat: A wide-brimmed hat made with the
leaves of the cabbage tree palm (Livistona australis). It was a
common hat in early colonial days, and later became associated with
patriotism.
Gin: An aboriginal woman; use of the term is analogous to “squaw”
in N. America. May be considered derogatory in modern usage.
Graft: Work; hard work.
Humpy: (Aboriginal) A rough or temporary hut or shelter in the bush,
especially one built from bark, branches, and the like. A gunyah,
wurley, or mia-mia.
Jackeroo/Jackaroo: At the time Lawson wrote, a Jackeroo was a “new
chum” or newcomer to Australia, who sought work on a station to
gain experience. The term now applies to any young man working as a
station hand. A female station hand is a Jillaroo.
Jumbuck: A sheep.
Larrikin: A hoodlum.
Lollies: Candy, sweets.
'Possum/Possum: In Australia, a class of marsupials that were
originally mistaken for the American animal of the same name. They
are not especially related to the possums of North and South
America, other than being marsupials.
Public/Pub.: The traditional pub. in Australia was a hotel with a
“public” bar—hence the name. The modern pub has often (not always)
dispensed with the lodging, and concentrated on the bar.
Push: A group of people sharing something in common; Lawson uses the
word in an older and more particular sense, as a gang of violent
city hoodlums.
Ratty: Shabby, dilapidated; somewhat eccentric, perhaps even
slightly mad.
Selector: A free selector, a farmer who selected and settled land
by lease or license from the government.
Shout: To buy a round of drinks.
Sliprails/slip-rails: movable rails, forming a section of fence,
which can be taken down in lieu of a gate.
Sly grog shop or shanty: An unlicensed bar or liquor-store,
especially one selling cheap or poor-quality liquor.
Squatter: A person who first settled on land without government
permission, and later continued by lease or license, generally to
raise stock; a wealthy rural landowner.
Station: A farm or ranch, especially one devoted to cattle or sheep.
Stoush: Violence; to do violence to.
Tea: In addition to the regular meaning, Tea can also mean a light
snack or a meal (i.e., where Tea is served). In particular, Morning
Tea (about 10 AM) and Afternoon Tea (about 3 PM) are nothing more
than a snack, but Evening Tea (about 6 PM) is a meal. When just
“Tea” is used, it usually means the evening meal. Variant: Tea-
time.
Tucker: Food.
Also: a hint with the seasons—remember that the seasons are
reversed from those in the northern hemisphere, hence June may be
hot, but December is even hotter. Australia is at a lower latitude
than the United States, so the winters are not harsh by US
standards, and are not even mild in the north. In fact, large parts
of Australia are governed more by “dry” versus “wet” than by Spring-
Summer-Fall-Winter.
(Alan Light, Monroe, North Carolina, March 1998.)
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