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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of Children of the Bush, by Henry Lawson
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
+most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
+whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
+of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
+www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you
+will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before
+using this eBook.
+
+Title: Children of the Bush
+
+Author: Henry Lawson
+
+Release Date: March 5, 2003 [eBook #7065]
+[Most recently updated: May 27, 2022]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+Produced by: Geoffrey Cowling
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILDREN OF THE BUSH ***
+
+
+
+
+Children of the Bush
+
+by Henry Lawson
+
+
+Contents
+
+ SEND ROUND THE HAT
+ THAT PRETTY GIRL IN THE ARMY
+ “LORD DOUGLAS”
+ THE BLINDNESS OF ONE-EYED BOGAN
+ TWO SUNDOWNERS
+ A SKETCH OF MATESHIP
+ ON THE TUCKER TRACK: A STEELMAN STORY
+ A BUSH PUBLICAN’S LAMENT
+ THE SHEARER’S DREAM
+ THE LOST SOULS’ HOTEL
+ THE BOOZERS’ HOME
+ THE SEX PROBLEM AGAIN
+ THE ROMANCE OF THE SWAG
+ “BUCKOLTS’ GATE”
+ THE BUSH-FIRE
+ THE HOUSE THAT WAS NEVER BUILT
+ “BARNEY, TAKE ME HOME AGAIN”
+ A DROVING YARN
+ GETTIN’ BACK ON DAVE REGAN
+ “SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER?”
+ HIS BROTHER’S KEEPER
+ THE STORY OF “GENTLEMAN ONCE”
+ THE GHOSTS OF MANY CHRISTMASES
+
+
+
+
+SEND ROUND THE HAT
+
+
+Now this is the creed from the Book of the Bush—
+Should be simple and plain to a dunce:
+“If a man’s in a hole you must pass round the hat
+Were he jail-bird or gentleman once.”
+
+
+“Is it any harm to wake yer?”
+
+It was about nine o’clock in the morning, and, though it was Sunday
+morning, it was no harm to wake me; but the shearer had mistaken me for
+a deaf jackaroo, who was staying at the shanty and was something like
+me, and had good-naturedly shouted almost at the top of his voice, and
+he woke the whole shanty. Anyway he woke three or four others who were
+sleeping on beds and stretchers, and one on a shake-down on the floor,
+in the same room. It had been a wet night, and the shanty was full of
+shearers from Big Billabong Shed which had cut out the day before. My
+room mates had been drinking and gambling overnight, and they swore
+luridly at the intruder for disturbing them.
+
+He was six-foot-three or thereabout. He was loosely built, bony,
+sandy-complexioned and grey eyed. He wore a good-humoured grin at most
+times, as I noticed later on; he was of a type of bushman that I always
+liked—the sort that seem to get more good-natured the longer they grow,
+yet are hard-knuckled and would accommodate a man who wanted to fight,
+or thrash a bully in a good-natured way. The sort that like to carry
+somebody’s baby round, and cut wood, carry water and do little things
+for overworked married bushwomen. He wore a saddle-tweed sac suit two
+sizes too small for him, and his face, neck, great hands and bony
+wrists were covered with sun-blotches and freckles.
+
+“I hope I ain’t disturbin’ yer,” he shouted, as he bent over my bunk,
+“but there’s a cove—”
+
+“You needn’t shout!” I interrupted, “I’m not deaf.”
+
+“Oh—I beg your pardon!” he shouted. “I didn’t know I was yellin’. I
+thought you was the deaf feller.”
+
+“Oh, that’s all right,” I said. “What’s the trouble?”
+
+“Wait till them other chaps is done swearin’ and I’ll tell yer,” he
+said. He spoke with a quiet, good-natured drawl, with something of the
+nasal twang, but tone and drawl distinctly Australian—altogether apart
+from that of the Americans.
+
+“Oh, spit it out for Christ’s sake, Long’un!” yelled One-eyed Bogan,
+who had been the worst swearer in a rough shed, and he fell back on his
+bunk as if his previous remarks had exhausted him.
+
+“It’s that there sick jackaroo that was pickin’-up at Big Billabong,”
+said the Giraffe. “He had to knock off the first week, an’ he’s been
+here ever since. They’re sendin’ him away to the hospital in Sydney by
+the speeshall train. They’re just goin’ to take him up in the wagonette
+to the railway station, an’ I thought I might as well go round with the
+hat an’ get him a few bob. He’s got a missus and kids in Sydney.”
+
+“Yer always goin’ round with yer gory hat!” growled Bogan. “Yer’d
+blanky well take it round in hell!”
+
+“That’s what he’s doing, Bogan,” muttered Gentleman Once, on the
+shake-down, with his face to the wall.
+
+The hat was a genuine “cabbage-tree,” one of the sort that “last a
+lifetime.” It was well coloured, almost black in fact with weather and
+age, and it had a new strap round the base of the crown. I looked into
+it and saw a dirty pound note and some silver. I dropped in half a
+crown, which was more than I could spare, for I had only been a
+green-hand at Big Billabong.
+
+“Thank yer!” he said. “Now then, you fellers!”
+
+“I wish you’d keep your hat on your head, and your money in your
+pockets and your sympathy somewhere else,” growled Jack Moonlight as he
+raised himself painfully on his elbow, and felt under his pillow for
+two half-crowns. “Here,” he said, “here’s two half-casers. Chuck ’em in
+and let me sleep for God’s sake!”
+
+Gentleman Once, the gambler, rolled round on his shake-down, bringing
+his good-looking, dissipated face from the wall. He had turned in in
+his clothes and, with considerable exertion he shoved his hand down
+into the pocket of his trousers, which were a tight fit. He brought up
+a roll of pound notes and could find no silver.
+
+“Here,” he said to the Giraffe, “I might as well lay a quid. I’ll
+chance it anyhow. Chuck it in.”
+
+“You’ve got rats this mornin’, Gentleman Once,” growled the Bogan. “It
+ain’t a blanky horse race.”
+
+“P’r’aps I have,” said Gentleman Once, and he turned to the wall again
+with his head on his arm.
+
+“Now, Bogan, yer might as well chuck in somethin,” said the Giraffe.
+
+“What’s the matter with the —— jackaroo?” asked the Bogan, tugging his
+trousers from under the mattress.
+
+Moonlight said something in a low tone.
+
+“The —— he has!” said Bogan. “Well, I pity the ——! Here, I’ll chuck in
+half a —— quid!” and he dropped half a sovereign into the hat.
+
+The fourth man, who was known to his face as “Barcoo-Rot,” and behind
+his back as “The Mean Man,” had been drinking all night, and not even
+Bogan’s stump-splitting adjectives could rouse him. So Bogan got out of
+bed, and calling on us (as blanky female cattle) to witness what he was
+about to do, he rolled the drunkard over, prospected his pockets till
+he made up five shillings (or a “caser” in bush language), and
+“chucked” them into the hat.
+
+And Barcoo-Rot is probably unconscious to this day that he was ever
+connected with an act of charity.
+
+The Giraffe struck the deaf jackaroo in the next room. I heard the
+chaps cursing “Long-’un” for waking them, and “Deaf-’un” for being, as
+they thought at first, the indirect cause of the disturbance. I heard
+the Giraffe and his hat being condemned in other rooms and cursed along
+the veranda where more shearers were sleeping; and after a while I
+turned out.
+
+The Giraffe was carefully fixing a mattress and pillows on the floor of
+a wagonette, and presently a man, who looked like a corpse, was carried
+out and lifted into the trap.
+
+As the wagonette started, the shanty-keeper—a fat, soulless-looking
+man—put his hand in his pocket and dropped a quid into the hat which
+was still going round, in the hands of the Giraffe’s mate, little Teddy
+Thompson, who was as far below medium height as the Giraffe was above
+it.
+
+The Giraffe took the horse’s head and led him along on the most level
+parts of the road towards the railway station, and two or three chaps
+went along to help get the sick man into the train.
+
+The shearing-season was over in that district, but I got a job of
+house-painting, which was my trade, at the Great Western Hotel (a
+two-story brick place), and I stayed in Bourke for a couple of months.
+
+The Giraffe was a Victorian native from Bendigo. He was well known in
+Bourke and to many shearers who came through the great dry scrubs from
+hundreds of miles round. He was stakeholder, drunkard’s banker,
+peacemaker where possible, referee or second to oblige the chaps when a
+fight was on, big brother or uncle to most of the children in town,
+final court of appeal when the youngsters had a dispute over a
+foot-race at the school picnic, referee at their fights, and he was the
+stranger’s friend.
+
+“The feller as knows can battle around for himself,” he’d say. “But I
+always like to do what I can for a hard-up stranger cove. I was a
+green-hand jackaroo once meself, and I know what it is.”
+
+“You’re always bothering about other people, Giraffe,” said Tom Hall,
+the shearers’ union secretary, who was only a couple of inches shorter
+than the Giraffe. “There’s nothing in it, you can take it from me—I
+ought to know.”
+
+“Well, what’s a feller to do?” said the Giraffe. “I’m only hangin’
+round here till shearin’ starts agen, an’ a cove might as well be doin’
+something. Besides, it ain’t as if I was like a cove that had old
+people or a wife an’ kids to look after. I ain’t got no
+responsibilities. A feller can’t be doin’ nothin’. Besides, I like to
+lend a helpin’ hand when I can.”
+
+“Well, all I’ve got to say,” said Tom, most of whose screw went in
+borrowed quids, etc. “All I’ve got to say is that you’ll get no thanks,
+and you might blanky well starve in the end.”
+
+“There ain’t no fear of me starvin’ so long as I’ve got me hands about
+me; an’ I ain’t a cove as wants thanks,” said the Giraffe.
+
+He was always helping someone or something. Now it was a bit of a
+“darnce” that we was gettin’ up for the girls; again it was Mrs Smith,
+the woman whose husban’ was drowned in the flood in the Bogan River
+lars’ Crismas, or that there poor woman down by the Billabong—her
+husband cleared out and left her with a lot o’ kids. Or Bill Something,
+the bullocky, who was run over by his own wagon, while he was drunk,
+and got his leg broke.
+
+Toward the end of his spree One-eyed Bogan broke loose and smashed
+nearly all the windows of the Carriers’ Arms, and next morning he was
+fined heavily at the police court. About dinner-time I encountered the
+Giraffe and his hat, with two half-crowns in it for a start.
+
+“I’m sorry to trouble yer,” he said, “but One-eyed Bogan carn’t pay his
+fine, an’ I thought we might fix it up for him. He ain’t half a bad
+sort of feller when he ain’t drinkin’. It’s only when he gets too much
+booze in him.”
+
+After shearing, the hat usually started round with the Giraffe’s own
+dirty crumpled pound note in the bottom of it as a send-off, later on
+it was half a sovereign, and so on down to half a crown and a shilling,
+as he got short of stuff; till in the end he would borrow a “few
+bob”—which he always repaid after next shearing-“just to start the
+thing goin’.”
+
+There were several yarns about him and his hat. ’Twas said that the hat
+had belonged to his father, whom he resembled in every respect, and it
+had been going round for so many years that the crown was worn as thin
+as paper by the quids, half-quids, casers, half-casers, bobs and
+tanners or sprats—to say nothing of the scrums—that had been chucked
+into it in its time and shaken up.
+
+They say that when a new governor visited Bourke the Giraffe happened
+to be standing on the platform close to the exit, grinning
+good-humouredly, and the local toady nudged him urgently and said in an
+awful whisper, “Take off your hat! Why don’t you take off your hat?”
+
+“Why?” drawled the Giraffe, “he ain’t hard up, is he?”
+
+And they fondly cherish an anecdote to the effect that, when the
+One-Man-One-Vote Bill was passed (or Payment of Members, or when the
+first Labour Party went in—I forget on which occasion they said it was)
+the Giraffe was carried away by the general enthusiasm, got a few beers
+in him, “chucked” a quid into his hat, and sent it round. The boys
+contributed by force of habit, and contributed largely, because of the
+victory and the beer. And when the hat came back to the Giraffe, he
+stood holding it in front of him with both hands and stared blankly
+into it for a while. Then it dawned on him.
+
+“Blowed if I haven’t bin an’ gone an’ took up a bloomin’ collection for
+meself!” he said.
+
+He was almost a teetotaller, but he stood his shout in reason.  He
+mostly drank ginger beer.
+
+“I ain’t a feller that boozes, but I ain’t got nothin’ agen chaps
+enjoyin’ themselves, so long as they don’t go too far.”
+
+It was common for a man on the spree to say to him:
+
+“Here! here’s five quid. Look after it for me, Giraffe, will yer, till
+I git off the booze.”
+
+His real name was Bob Brothers, and his bush names, “Long-’un,” “The
+Giraffe,” “Send-round-the-hat,” “Chuck-in-a-bob,” and “Ginger-ale.”
+
+Some years before, camels and Afghan drivers had been imported to the
+Bourke district; the camels did very well in the dry country, they went
+right across country and carried everything from sardines to
+flooring-boards. And the teamsters loved the Afghans nearly as much as
+Sydney furniture makers love the cheap Chinese in the same line. They
+love ’em even as union shearers on strike love blacklegs brought
+up-country to take their places.
+
+Now the Giraffe was a good, straight unionist, but in cases of sickness
+or trouble he was as apt to forget his unionism, as all bushmen are, at
+all times (and for all time), to forget their creed. So, one evening,
+the Giraffe blundered into the Carriers’ Arms—of all places in the
+world—when it was full of teamsters; he had his hat in his hand and
+some small silver and coppers in it.
+
+“I say, you fellers, there’s a poor, sick Afghan in the camp down there
+along the—”
+
+A big, brawny bullock-driver took him firmly by the shoulders, or,
+rather by the elbows, and ran him out before any damage was done. The
+Giraffe took it as he took most things, good-humouredly; but, about
+dusk, he was seen slipping down towards the Afghan camp with a billy of
+soup.
+
+“I believe,” remarked Tom Hall, “that when the Giraffe goes to
+heaven—and he’s the only one of us, as far as I can see, that has a
+ghost of a show—I believe that when he goes to heaven, the first thing
+he’ll do will be to take his infernal hat round amongst the
+angels—getting up a collection for this damned world that he left
+behind.”
+
+“Well, I don’t think there’s so much to his credit, after all,” said
+Jack Mitchell, shearer. “You see, the Giraffe is ambitious; he likes
+public life, and that accounts for him shoving himself forward with his
+collections. As for bothering about people in trouble, that’s only
+common curiosity; he’s one of those chaps that are always shoving their
+noses into other people’s troubles. And, as for looking after sick
+men—why! there’s nothing the Giraffe likes better than pottering round
+a sick man, and watching him and studying him. He’s awfully interested
+in sick men, and they’re pretty scarce out here. I tell you there’s
+nothing he likes better—except, maybe, it’s pottering round a corpse. I
+believe he’d ride forty miles to help and sympathize and potter round a
+funeral. The fact of the matter is that the Giraffe is only enjoying
+himself with other people’s troubles—that’s all it is. It’s only vulgar
+curiosity and selfishness. I set it down to his ignorance; the way he
+was brought up.”
+
+A few days after the Afghan incident the Giraffe and his hat had a run
+of luck. A German, one of a party who were building a new wooden bridge
+over the Big Billabong, was helping unload some girders from a truck at
+the railway station, when a big log slipped on the skids and his leg
+was smashed badly. They carried him to the Carriers’ Arms, which was
+the nearest hotel, and into a bedroom behind the bar, and sent for the
+doctor. The Giraffe was in evidence as usual.
+
+“It vas not that at all,” said German Charlie, when they asked him if
+he was in much pain. “It vas not that at all. I don’t cares a damn for
+der bain; but dis is der tird year—und I vas going home dis year—after
+der gontract—und der gontract yoost commence!”
+
+That was the burden of his song all through, between his groans. There
+were a good few chaps sitting quietly about the bar and veranda when
+the doctor arrived. The Giraffe was sitting at the end of the counter,
+on which he had laid his hat while he wiped his face, neck, and
+forehead with a big speckled “sweatrag.” It was a very hot day.
+
+The doctor, a good-hearted young Australian, was heard saying
+something. Then German Charlie, in a voice that rung with pain:
+
+“Make that leg right, doctor—quick! Dis is der tird pluddy year—und I
+must go home!”
+
+The doctor asked him if he was in great pain. “Neffer mind der pluddy
+bain, doctor! Neffer mind der pluddy bain! Dot vas nossing. Make dat
+leg well quick, doctor. Dis vas der last gontract, and I vas going home
+dis year.” Then the words jerked out of him by physical agony: “Der
+girl vas vaiting dree year, und—by Got! I must go home.”
+
+The publican—Watty Braithwaite, known as “Watty Broadweight,” or, more
+familiarly, “Watty Bothways”—turned over the Giraffe’s hat in a tired,
+bored sort of way, dropped a quid into it, and nodded resignedly at the
+Giraffe.
+
+The Giraffe caught up the hint and the hat with alacrity. The hat went
+all round town, so to speak; and, as soon as his leg was firm enough
+not to come loose on the road German Charlie went home.
+
+It was well known that I contributed to the Sydney _Bulletin_ and
+several other papers. The Giraffe’s bump of reverence was very large,
+and swelled especially for sick men and poets. He treated me with much
+more respect than is due from a bushman to a man, and with an odd sort
+of extra gentleness I sometimes fancied. But one day he rather
+surprised me.
+
+“I’m sorry to trouble yer,” he said in a shamefaced way. “I don’t know
+as you go in for sportin’, but One-eyed Bogan an’ Barcoo-Rot is goin’
+to have a bit of a scrap down the Billybong this evenin’, an’——”
+
+“A bit of a what?” I asked.
+
+“A bit of fight to a finish,” he said apologetically. “An’ the chaps is
+tryin’ to fix up a fiver to put some life into the thing. There’s bad
+blood between One-eyed Bogan and Barcoo-Rot, an’ it won’t do them any
+harm to have it out.”
+
+It was a great fight, I remember. There must have been a couple of
+score blood-soaked handkerchiefs (or “sweat-rags”) buried in a hole on
+the field of battle, and the Giraffe was busy the rest of the evening
+helping to patch up the principals. Later on he took up a small
+collection for the loser, who happened to be Barcoo-Rot in spite of the
+advantage of an eye.
+
+The Salvation Army lassie, who went round with the _War Cry_, nearly
+always sold the Giraffe three copies.
+
+A new-chum parson, who wanted a subscription to build or enlarge a
+chapel, or something, sought the assistance of the Giraffe’s influence
+with his mates.
+
+“Well,” said the Giraffe, “I ain’t a churchgoer meself. I ain’t what
+you might call a religious cove, but I’ll be glad to do what I can to
+help yer. I don’t suppose I can do much. I ain’t been to church since I
+was a kiddy.”
+
+The parson was shocked, but later on he learned to appreciate the
+Giraffe and his mates, and to love Australia for the bushman’s sake,
+and it was he who told me the above anecdote.
+
+The Giraffe helped fix some stalls for a Catholic Church bazaar, and
+some of the chaps chaffed him about it in the union office.
+
+“You’ll be taking up a collection for a joss-house down in the
+Chinamen’s camp next,” said Tom Hall in conclusion.
+
+“Well, I ain’t got nothin’ agen the Roming Carflics,” said the Giraffe.
+“An’ Father O’Donovan’s a very decent sort of cove. He stuck up for the
+unions all right in the strike anyway.” (“He wouldn’t be Irish if he
+wasn’t,” someone commented.) “I carried swags once for six months with
+a feller that was a Carflick, an’ he was a very straight feller. And a
+girl I knowed turned Carflick to marry a chap that had got her into
+trouble, an’ she was always jes’ the same to me after as she was
+before. Besides, I like to help everything that’s goin’ on.”
+
+Tom Hall and one or two others went out hurriedly to have a drink. But
+we all loved the Giraffe.
+
+He was very innocent and very humorous, especially when he meant to be
+most serious and philosophical.
+
+“Some of them bush girls is regular tomboys,” he said to me solemnly
+one day. “Some of them is too cheeky altogether. I remember once I was
+stoppin’ at a place—they was sort of relations o’ mine—an’ they put me
+to sleep in a room off the verander, where there was a glass door an’
+no blinds. An’ the first mornin’ the girls—they was sort o’ cousins o’
+mine—they come gigglin’ and foolin’ round outside the door on the
+verander, an’ kep’ me in bed till nearly ten o’clock. I had to put me
+trowsis on under the bed-clothes in the end. But I got back on ’em the
+next night,” he reflected.
+
+“How did you do that, Bob?” I asked.
+
+“Why, I went to bed in me trowsis!”
+
+One day I was on a plank, painting the ceiling of the bar of the Great
+Western Hotel. I was anxious to get the job finished. The work had been
+kept back most of the day by chaps handing up long beers to me, and
+drawing my attention to the alleged fact that I was putting on the
+paint wrong side out. I was slapping it on over the last few boards
+when:
+
+“I’m very sorry to trouble yer; I always seem to be troublin’ yer; but
+there’s that there woman and them girls——”
+
+I looked down—about the first time I had looked down on him—and there
+was the Giraffe, with his hat brim up on the plank and two half-crowns
+in it.
+
+“Oh, that’s all right, Bob,” I said, and I dropped in half a crown.
+
+There were shearers in the bar, and presently there was some
+barracking. It appeared that that there woman and them girls were
+strange women, in the local as well as the Biblical sense of the word,
+who had come from Sydney at the end of the shearing-season, and had
+taken a cottage on the edge of the scrub on the outskirts of the town.
+There had been trouble this week in connection with a row at their
+establishment, and they had been fined, warned off by the police, and
+turned out by their landlord.
+
+“This is a bit too red-hot, Giraffe,” said one of the shearers. “Them
+——s has made enough out of us coves. They’ve got plenty of stuff, don’t
+you fret. Let ’em go to ——! I’m blanked if I give a sprat.”
+
+“They ain’t got their fares to Sydney,” said the Giraffe. “An’, what’s
+more, the little ’un is sick, an’ two of them has kids in Sydney.”
+
+“How the —— do you know?”
+
+“Why, one of ’em come to me an’ told me all about it.”
+
+There was an involuntary guffaw.
+
+“Look here, Bob,” said Billy Woods, the rouseabouts’ secretary, kindly.
+“Don’t you make a fool of yourself. You’ll have all the chaps laughing
+at you. Those girls are only working you for all you’re worth. I
+suppose one of ’em came crying and whining to you. Don’t you bother
+about ’em. _You_ don’t know ’em; they can pump water at a moment’s
+notice. You haven’t had any experience with women yet, Bob.”
+
+“She didn’t come whinin’ and cryin’ to me,” said the Giraffe, dropping
+his twanging drawl a little. “She looked me straight in the face an’
+told me all about it.”
+
+“I say, Giraffe,” said Box-o’-Tricks, “what have you been doin’? You’ve
+bin down there on the nod. I’m surprised at yer, Giraffe.”
+
+“An’ he pretends to be so gory soft an’ innocent, too,” growled the
+Bogan. “We know all about you, Giraffe.”
+
+“Look here, Giraffe,” said Mitchell the shearer. “I’d never have
+thought it of you. We all thought you were the only virgin youth west
+the river; I always thought you were a moral young man. You mustn’t
+think that because your conscience is pricking you everyone else’s is.”
+
+“I ain’t had anythin’ to do with them,” said the Giraffe, drawling
+again. “I ain’t a cove that goes in for that sort of thing. But other
+chaps has, and I think they might as well help ’em out of their fix.”
+
+“They’re a rotten crowd,” said Billy Woods. “You don’t know them, Bob.
+Don’t bother about them-they’re not worth it. Put your money in your
+pocket. You’ll find a better use for it before next shearing.”
+
+“Better shout, Giraffe,” said Box-o’-Tricks.
+
+Now in spite of the Giraffe’s softness he was the hardest man in Bourke
+to move when he’d decided on what he thought was “the fair thing to
+do.” Another peculiarity of his was that on occasion, such for instance
+as “sayin’ a few words” at a strike meeting, he would straighten
+himself, drop the twang, and rope in his drawl, so to speak.
+
+“Well, look here, you chaps,” he said now. “I don’t know anything about
+them women. I s’pose they’re bad, but I don’t suppose they’re worse
+than men has made them. All I know is that there’s four women turned
+out, without any stuff, and every woman in Bourke, an’ the police, an’
+the law agen ’em. An’ the fact that they is women is agenst ’em most of
+all. You don’t expect ’em to hump their swags to Sydney! Why, only I
+ain’t got the stuff I wouldn’t trouble yer. I’d pay their fares meself.
+Look,” he said, lowering his voice, “there they are now, an’ one of the
+girls is cryin’. Don’t let ’em see yer lookin’.”
+
+I dropped softly from the plank and peeped out with the rest.
+
+They stood by the fence on the opposite side of the street, a bit up
+towards the railway station, with their portmanteaux and bundles at
+their feet. One girl leant with her arms on the fence rail and her face
+buried in them, another was trying to comfort her. The third girl and
+the woman stood facing our way. The woman was good-looking; she had a
+hard face, but it might have been made hard. The third girl seemed half
+defiant, half inclined to cry. Presently she went to the other side of
+the girl who was crying on the fence and put her arm round her
+shoulder. The woman suddenly turned her back on us and stood looking
+away over the paddocks.
+
+The hat went round. Billy Woods was first, then Box-o’-Tricks, and then
+Mitchell.
+
+Billy contributed with eloquent silence. “I was only jokin’, Giraffe,”
+said Box-o’-Tricks, dredging his pockets for a couple of shillings. It
+was some time after the shearing, and most of the chaps were hard up.
+“Ah, well,” sighed Mitchell. “There’s no help for it. If the Giraffe
+would take up a collection to import some decent girls to this
+God-forgotten hole there might be some sense in it.... It’s bad enough
+for the Giraffe to undermine our religious prejudices, and tempt us to
+take a morbid interest in sick Chows and Afghans, and blacklegs and
+widows; but when he starts mixing us up with strange women it’s time to
+buck.” And he prospected his pockets and contributed two shillings,
+some odd pennies, and a pinch of tobacco dust.
+
+“I don’t mind helping the girls, but I’m damned if I’ll give a penny to
+help the old ——,” said Tom Hall.
+
+“Well, she was a girl once herself,” drawled the Giraffe.
+
+The Giraffe went round to the other pubs and to the union offices, and
+when he returned he seemed satisfied with the plate, but troubled about
+something else.
+
+“I don’t know what to do for them for to-night,” he said. “None of the
+pubs or boardin’-houses will hear of them, an’ there ain’t no empty
+houses, an’ the women is all agen ’em.”
+
+“Not all,” said Alice, the big, handsome barmaid from Sydney. “Come
+here, Bob.” She gave the Giraffe half a sovereign and a look for which
+some of us would have paid him ten pounds—had we had the money, and had
+the look been transferable.
+
+“Wait a minute, Bob,” she said, and she went in to speak to the
+landlord.
+
+“There’s an empty bedroom at the end of the store in the yard,” she
+said when she came back. “They can camp there for to-night if they
+behave themselves. You’d better tell ’em, Bob.”
+
+“Thank yer, Alice,” said the Giraffe.
+
+Next day, after work, the Giraffe and I drifted together and down by
+the river in the cool of the evening, and sat on the edge of the steep,
+drought-parched bank.
+
+“I heard you saw your lady friends off this morning, Bob,” I said, and
+was sorry I said it, even before he answered.
+
+“Oh, they ain’t no friends of mine,” he said. “Only four’ poor devils
+of women. I thought they mightn’t like to stand waitin’ with the crowd
+on the platform, so I jest offered to get their tickets an’ told ’em to
+wait round at the back of the station till the bell rung.... An’ what
+do yer think they did, Harry?” he went on, with an exasperatingly
+unintelligent grin. “Why, they wanted to kiss me.”
+
+“Did they?”
+
+“Yes. An’ they would have done it, too, if I hadn’t been so long....
+Why, I’m blessed if they didn’t kiss me hands.”
+
+“You don’t say so.”
+
+“God’s truth. Somehow I didn’t like to go on the platform with them
+after that; besides, they was cryin’, and I can’t stand women cryin’.
+But some of the chaps put them into an empty carriage.” He thought a
+moment. Then:
+
+“There’s some terrible good-hearted fellers in the world,” he
+reflected.
+
+I thought so too. “Bob,” I said, “you’re a single man. Why don’t you
+get married and settle down?”
+
+“Well,” he said, “I ain’t got no wife an’ kids, that’s a fact. But it
+ain’t my fault.”
+
+He may have been right about the wife. But I thought of the look that
+Alice had given him, and—
+
+“Girls seem to like me right enough,” he said, “but it don’t go no
+further than that. The trouble is that I’m so long, and I always seem
+to get shook after little girls. At least there was one little girl in
+Bendigo that I was properly gone on.”
+
+“And wouldn’t she have you?”
+
+“Well, it seems not.”
+
+“Did you ask her?”
+
+“Oh, yes, I asked her right enough.”
+
+“Well, and what did she say?”
+
+“She said it would be redicilus for her to be seen trottin’ alongside
+of a chimbley like me.”
+
+“Perhaps she didn’t mean that. There are any amount of little women who
+like tall men.”
+
+“I thought of that too—afterwards. P’r’aps she didn’t mean it that way.
+I s’pose the fact of the matter was that she didn’t cotton on to me,
+and wanted to let me down easy. She didn’t want to hurt me feelin’s, if
+yer understand—she was a very good-hearted little girl. There’s some
+terrible tall fellers where I come from, and I know two as married
+little girls.”
+
+He seemed a hopeless case.
+
+“Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes I wish that I wasn’t so blessed long.”
+
+“There’s that there deaf jackaroo,” he reflected presently. “He’s
+something in the same fig about girls as I am. He’s too deaf and I’m
+too long.”
+
+“How do you make that out?” I asked. “He’s got three girls, to my
+knowledge, and, as for being deaf, why, he gasses more than any man in
+the town, and knows more of what’s going on than old Mother Brindle the
+washerwoman.”
+
+“Well, look at that now!” said the Giraffe, slowly. “Who’d have thought
+it? He never told me he had three girls, an’ as for hearin’ news, I
+always tell him anything that’s goin’ on that I think he doesn’t catch.
+He told me his trouble was that whenever he went out with a girl people
+could hear what they was sayin’—at least they could hear what she was
+sayin’ to him, an’ draw their own conclusions, he said. He said he went
+out one night with a girl, and some of the chaps foxed ’em an’ heard
+her sayin’ ‘don’t’ to him, an’ put it all round town.”
+
+“What did she say ‘don’t’ for?” I asked.
+
+“He didn’t tell me that, but I s’pose he was kissin’ her or huggin’ her
+or something.”
+
+“Bob,” I said presently, “didn’t you try the little girl in Bendigo a
+second time?”
+
+“No,” he said. “What was the use. She was a good little girl, and I
+wasn’t goin’ to go botherin’ her. I ain’t the sort of cove that goes
+hangin’ round where he isn’t wanted. But somehow I couldn’t stay about
+Bendigo after she gave me the hint, so I thought I’d come over an’ have
+a knock round on this side for a year or two.”
+
+“And you never wrote to her?”
+
+“No. What was the use of goin’ pesterin’ her with letters? I know what
+trouble letters give me when I have to answer one. She’d have only had
+to tell me the straight truth in a letter an’ it wouldn’t have done me
+any good. But I’ve pretty well got over it by this time.”
+
+A few days later I went to Sydney. The Giraffe was the last I shook
+hands with from the carriage window, and he slipped something in a
+piece of newspaper into my hand.
+
+“I hope yer won’t be offended,” he drawled, “but some of the chaps
+thought you mightn’t be too flush of stuff—you’ve been shoutin’ a good
+deal; so they put a quid or two together. They thought it might help
+yer to have a bit of a fly round in Sydney.”
+
+I was back in Bourke before next shearing. On the evening of my arrival
+I ran against the Giraffe; he seemed strangely shaken over something,
+but he kept his hat on his head.
+
+“Would yer mind takin’ a stroll as fur as the Billerbong?” he said. “I
+got something I’d like to tell yer.”
+
+His big, brown, sunburnt hands trembled and shook as he took a letter
+from his pocket and opened it.
+
+“I’ve just got a letter,” he said. “A letter from that little girl at
+Bendigo. It seems it was all a mistake. I’d like you to read it.
+Somehow I feel as if I want to talk to a feller, and I’d rather talk to
+you than any of them other chaps.”
+
+It was a good letter, from a big-hearted little girl. She had been
+breaking her heart for the great ass all these months. It seemed that
+he had left Bendigo without saying good-bye to her. “Somehow I couldn’t
+bring meself to it,” he said, when I taxed him with it. She had never
+been able to get his address until last week; then she got it from a
+Bourke man who had gone south. She called him “an awful long fool,”
+which he was, without the slightest doubt, and she implored him to
+write, and come back to her.
+
+“And will you go back, Bob?” I asked.
+
+“My oath! I’d take the train to-morrer only I ain’t got the stuff. But
+I’ve got a stand in Big Billerbong Shed an’ I’ll soon knock a few quid
+together. I’ll go back as soon as ever shearin’s over. I’m goin’ to
+write away to her to-night.”
+
+The Giraffe was the “ringer” of Big Billabong Shed that season. His
+tallies averaged a hundred and twenty a day. He only sent his hat round
+once during shearing, and it was noticed that he hesitated at first and
+only contributed half a crown. But then it was a case of a man being
+taken from the shed by the police for wife desertion.
+
+“It’s always that way,” commented Mitchell. “Those soft, good-hearted
+fellows always end by getting hard and selfish. The world makes ’em so.
+It’s the thought of the soft fools they’ve been that finds out sooner
+or later and makes ’em repent. Like as not the Giraffe will be the
+meanest man out back before he’s done.”
+
+When Big Billabong cut out, and we got back to Bourke with our dusty
+swags and dirty cheques, I spoke to Tom Hall:
+
+“Look here, Tom,” I said. “That long fool, the Giraffe, has been
+breaking his heart for a little girl in Bendigo ever since he’s been
+out back, and she’s been breaking her heart for him, and the ass didn’t
+know it till he got a letter from her just before Big Billabong
+started. He’s going to-morrow morning.”
+
+That evening Tom stole the Giraffe’s hat. “I s’pose it’ll turn up in
+the mornin’,” said the Giraffe. “I don’t mind a lark,” he added, “but
+it does seem a bit red hot for the chaps to collar a cove’s hat and a
+feller goin’ away for good, p’r’aps, in the mornin’.”
+
+Mitchell started the thing going with a quid.
+
+“It’s worth it,” he said, “to get rid of him. We’ll have some peace
+now. There won’t be so many accidents or women in trouble when the
+Giraffe and his blessed hat are gone. Any way, he’s an eyesore in the
+town, and he’s getting on my nerves for one.... Come on, you sinners!
+Chuck ’em in; we’re only taking quids and half-quids.”
+
+About daylight next morning Tom Hall slipped into the Giraffe’s room at
+the Carriers’ Arms. The Giraffe was sleeping peacefully. Tom put the
+hat on a chair by his side. The collection had been a record one, and,
+besides the packet of money in the crown of the hat, there was a
+silver-mounted pipe with case—the best that could be bought in Bourke,
+a gold brooch, and several trifles—besides an ugly valentine of a long
+man in his shirt walking the room with a twin on each arm.
+
+Tom was about to shake the Giraffe by the shoulder, when he noticed a
+great foot, with about half a yard of big-boned ankle and shank,
+sticking out at the bottom of the bed. The temptation was too great.
+Tom took up the hair-brush, and, with the back of it, he gave a smart
+rap on the point of an in-growing toe-nail, and slithered.
+
+We heard the Giraffe swearing good-naturedly for a while, and then
+there was a pregnant silence. He was staring at the hat we supposed.
+
+We were all up at the station to see him off. It was rather a long
+wait. The Giraffe edged me up to the other end of the platform.
+
+He seemed overcome.
+
+“There’s—there’s some terrible good-hearted fellers in this world,” he
+said. “You mustn’t forgit ’em, Harry, when you make a big name writin’.
+I’m—well, I’m blessed if I don’t feel as if I was jist goin’ to
+blubber!”
+
+I was glad he didn’t. The Giraffe blubberin’ would have been a
+spectacle. I steered him back to his friends.
+
+“Ain’t you going to kiss me, Bob?” said the Great Western’s big,
+handsome barmaid, as the bell rang.
+
+“Well, I don’t mind kissin’ you, Alice,” he said, wiping his mouth.
+“But I’m goin’ to be married, yer know.” And he kissed her fair on the
+mouth.
+
+“There’s nothin’ like gettin’ into practice,” he said, grinning round.
+
+We thought he was improving wonderfully; but at the last moment
+something troubled him.
+
+“Look here, you chaps,” he said, hesitatingly, with his hand in his
+pocket, “I don’t know what I’m going to do with all this stuff. There’s
+that there poor washerwoman that scalded her legs liftin’ the boiler of
+clothes off the fire——”
+
+We shoved him into the carriage. He hung—about half of him—out the
+window, wildly waving his hat, till the train disappeared in the scrub.
+
+And, as I sit here writing by lamplight at midday, in the midst of a
+great city of shallow social sham, of hopeless, squalid poverty, of
+ignorant selfishness, cultured or brutish, and of noble and heroic
+endeavour frowned down or callously neglected, I am almost aware of a
+burst of sunshine in the room, and a long form leaning over my chair,
+and:
+
+“Excuse me for troublin’ yer; I’m always troublin’ yer; but there’s
+that there poor woman....”
+
+And I wish I could immortalize him!
+
+
+
+
+THAT PRETTY GIRL IN THE ARMY
+
+
+Now I often sit at Watty’s, when the night is very near,
+With a head that’s full of jingles—and the fumes of bottled beer;
+For I always have a fancy that, if I am over there
+When the Army prays for Watty, I’m included in the prayer.
+
+It would take a lot of praying, lots of thumping on the drum,
+To prepare our sinful, straying, erring souls for Kingdom Come.
+But I love my fellow-sinners! and I hope, upon the whole,
+That the Army gets a hearing when it prays for Watty’s soul.
+                    From _When the World was Wide_.
+
+
+The Salvation Army does good business in some of the outback towns of
+the great pastoral wastes of Australia. There’s the thoughtless,
+careless generosity of the bushman, whose pockets don’t go far enough
+down his trousers (that’s what’s the matter with him), and who
+contributes to anything that comes along, without troubling to ask
+questions, like long Bob Brothers of Bourke, who, chancing to be “a
+Protestant by rights,” unwittingly subscribed towards the erection of a
+new Catholic church, and, being chaffed for his mistake, said:
+
+“Ah, well, I don’t suppose it’ll matter a hang in the end, anyway it
+goes. I ain’t got nothink agenst the Roming Carflicks.”
+
+There’s the shearer, fresh with his cheque from a cut-out shed,
+gloriously drunk and happy, in love with all the world, and ready to
+subscribe towards any creed and shout for all hands—including Old Nick
+if he happened to come along. There’s the shearer, half-drunk and
+inclined to be nasty, who has got the wrong end of all things with a
+tight grip, and who flings a shilling in the face of out-back
+conventionality (as he thinks) by chucking a bob into the Salvation
+Army ring. Then he glares round to see if he can catch anybody winking
+behind his back. There’s the cynical joker, a queer mixture, who
+contributes generously and tempts the reformed boozer afterwards.
+There’s the severe-faced old station-hand—in clean shirt and
+neckerchief and white moleskins—in for his annual or semi-annual spree,
+who contributes on principle, and then drinks religiously until his
+cheque is gone and the horrors are come. There’s the shearer, feeling
+mighty bad after a spree, and in danger of seeing things when he tries
+to go to sleep. He has dropped ten or twenty pounds over bar counters
+and at cards, and he now “chucks” a repentant shilling into the ring,
+with a very private and rather vague sort of feeling that something
+might come of it. There’s the stout, contented, good-natured publican,
+who tips the Army as if it were a barrel-organ. And there are others
+and other reasons—black sheep and ne’er-do-wells—and faint echoes of
+other times in Salvation Army tunes.
+
+Bourke, the metropolis of the Great Scrubs, on the banks of the Darling
+River, about five hundred miles from Sydney, was suffering from a long
+drought when I was there in ninety-two; and the heat may or may not
+have been another cause contributing to the success, from a business
+point of view, of the Bourke garrison. There was much beer boozing—and,
+besides, it was vaguely understood (as most things are vaguely
+understood out there in the drought-haze) that the place the Army came
+to save us from was hotter than Bourke. We didn’t hanker to go to a
+hotter place than Bourke. But that year there was an extraordinary
+reason for the Army’s great financial success there.
+
+She was a little girl, nineteen or twenty, I should judge, the
+prettiest girl I ever saw in the Army, and one of the prettiest I’ve
+ever seen out of it. She had the features of an angel, but her
+expression was wonderfully human, sweet and sympathetic. Her big grey
+eyes were sad with sympathy for sufferers and sinners, and her poke
+bonnet was full of bunchy, red-gold hair. Her first appearance was
+somewhat dramatic—perhaps the Army arranged it so.
+
+The Army used to pray, and thump the drum, and sing, and take up
+collections every evening outside Watty Bothways’ Hotel, the Carriers’
+Arms. They performed longer and more often outside Watty’s than any
+other pub in town—perhaps because Watty was considered the most
+hopeless publican and his customers the hardest crowd of boozers in
+Bourke. The band generally began to play about dusk. Watty would lean
+back comfortably in a basket easy-chair on his wide veranda, and clasp
+his hands, in a calm, contented way, while the Army banged the drum and
+got steam up, and whilst, perhaps, there was a barney going on in the
+bar, or a bloodthirsty fight in the backyard. On such occasions there
+was something like an indulgent or fatherly expression on his fat and
+usually emotionless face. And by and by he’d move his head gently and
+doze. The banging and the singing seemed to soothe him, and the
+praying, which was often very personal, never seemed to disturb him in
+the least.
+
+Well, it was about dusk one day; it had been a terrible day, a hundred
+and something startling in the shade, but there came a breeze after
+sunset. There had been several dozen of buckets of water thrown on the
+veranda floor and the ground outside. Watty was seated in his
+accustomed place when the Army arrived. There was no barney in the bar
+because there was a fight in the backyard, and that claimed the
+attention of all the customers.
+
+The Army prayed for Watty and his clients; then a reformed drunkard
+started to testify against publicans and all their works. Watty settled
+himself comfortably, folded his hands, and leaned back and dozed.
+
+The fight was over, and the chaps began to drop round to the bar. The
+man who was saved waved his arms, and danced round and howled.
+
+“Ye-es!” he shouted hoarsely. “The publicans, and boozers, and
+gamblers, and sinners may think that Bourke is hot, but hell is a
+thousand times hotter! I tell you”
+
+“Oh, Lord!” said Mitchell, the shearer, and he threw a penny into the
+ring.
+
+“Ye-es! I tell you that hell is a million times hotter than Bourke! I
+tell you——”
+
+“Oh, look here,” said a voice from the background, “that won’t wash.
+Why, don’t you know that when the Bourke people die they send back for
+their blankets?”
+
+The saved brother glared round.
+
+“I hear a freethinker speaking, my friends,” he said. Then, with sudden
+inspiration and renewed energy, “I hear the voice of a freethinker.
+Show me the face of a freethinker,” he yelled, glaring round like a
+hunted, hungry man. “Show me the face of a freethinker, and I’ll tell
+you what he is.”
+
+Watty hitched himself into a more comfortable position and clasped his
+hands on his knee and closed his eyes again.
+
+“Ya-a-a-s!” shrieked the brand. “I tell you, my friends, I can tell a
+freethinker by his face. Show me the face of a——”
+
+At this point there was an interruption. One-eyed, or Wall-eyed, Bogan,
+who had a broken nose, and the best side of whose face was reckoned the
+ugliest and most sinister—One-eyed Bogan thrust his face forward from
+the ring of darkness into the torchlight of salvation. He had got the
+worst of a drawn battle; his nose and mouth were bleeding, and his good
+eye was damaged.
+
+“Look at my face!” he snarled, with dangerous earnestness. “Look at my
+face! That’s the face of a freethinker, and I don’t care who knows it.
+Now! what have you got to say against my face, ‘Man-without-a-Shirt?’”
+
+The brother drew back. He had been known in the northwest in his sinful
+days as “Man-without-a-Shirt,” alias “Shirty,” or “The Dirty Man,” and
+was flabbergasted at being recognized in speech. Also, he had been in a
+shearing-shed and in a shanty orgy with One-eyed Bogan, and knew the
+man.
+
+Now most of the chaps respected the Army, and, indeed, anything that
+looked like religion, but the Bogan’s face, as representing
+free-thought, was a bit too sudden for them. There were sounds on the
+opposite side of the ring as from men being smitten repeatedly and
+rapidly below the belt, and long Tom Hall and one or two others got
+away into the darkness in the background, where Tom rolled helplessly
+on the grass and sobbed.
+
+It struck me that Bogan’s face was more the result of free speech than
+anything else.
+
+The Army was about to pray when the Pretty Girl stepped forward, her
+eyes shining with indignation and enthusiasm. She had arrived by the
+evening train, and had been standing shrinkingly behind an Army lass of
+fifty Australian summers, who was about six feet high, flat and broad,
+and had a square face, and a mouth like a joint in boiler plates.
+
+The Pretty Girl stamped her pretty foot on the gravel, and her eyes
+flashed in the torchlight.
+
+“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” she said. “Great big men like
+you to be going on the way you are. If you were ignorant or poor, as
+I’ve seen people, there might be some excuse for you. Haven’t you got
+any mothers, or sisters, or wives to think of? What sort of a life is
+this you lead? Drinking, and gambling, and fighting, and swearing your
+lives away! Do you ever think of God and the time when you were
+children? Why don’t you make homes? Look at that man’s face!” (she
+pointed suddenly at Bogan, who collapsed and sidled behind his mates
+out of the light). “Look at that man’s face! Is it a face for a
+Christian? And you help and encourage him to fight. You’re worse than
+he is. Oh, it’s brutal. It’s—it’s wicked. Great big men like you, you
+ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”
+
+Long Bob Brothers—about six-foot-four—the longest and most innocent
+there, shrunk down by the wall and got his inquiring face out of the
+light. The Pretty Girl fluttered on for a few moments longer, greatly
+excited, and then stepped back, seemingly much upset, and was taken
+under the wing of the woman with the boiler-plate mouth.
+
+It was a surprise, and very sudden. Bogan slipped round to the
+backyard, and was seen bathing his battered features at the pump. The
+rest wore the expression of men who knew that something unusual has
+happened, but don’t know what, and are waiting vacantly for
+developments.—Except Tom Hall, who had recovered and returned. He stood
+looking over the head of the ring of bushmen, and apparently taking the
+same critical interest in the girl as he would in a fight—his
+expression was such as a journalist might wear who is getting exciting
+copy.
+
+The Army had it all their own way for the rest of the evening, and made
+a good collection. The Pretty Girl stood smiling round with shining
+eyes as the bobs and tanners dropped in, and then, being shoved forward
+by the flat woman, she thanked us sweetly, and said we were good
+fellows, and that she was sorry for some things she’d said to us. Then
+she retired, fluttering and very much flushed, and hid herself behind
+the hard woman—who, by the way, had an excrescence on her upper lip
+which might have stood for a rivet.
+
+Presently the Pretty Girl came from behind the big woman and stood
+watching things with glistening eyes. Some of the chaps on the opposite
+side of the ring moved a little to one side and all were careful not to
+meet her eye—not to be caught looking at her—lest she should be
+embarrassed. Watty had roused himself a little at the sound of a
+strange voice in the Army (and such a clear, sweet voice too!) and had
+a look; then he settled back peacefully again, but it was noticed that
+he didn’t snore that evening.
+
+And when the Army prayed, the Pretty Girl knelt down with the rest on
+the gravel. One or two tall bushmen bowed their heads as if they had
+to, and One-eyed Bogan, with the blood washed from his face, stood with
+his hat off, glaring round to see if he could catch anyone sniggering.
+
+Mitchell, the shearer, said afterwards that the whole business made him
+feel for the moment like he felt sometimes in the days when he used to
+feel things.
+
+The town discussed the Pretty Girl in the Army that night and for many
+days thereafter, but no one could find out who she was or where she
+belonged to—except that she came from Sydney last. She kept her secret,
+if she had one, very close—or else the other S.-A. women were not to be
+pumped. She lived in skillion-rooms at the back of the big
+weather-board Salvation Army barracks with two other “lassies,” who did
+washing and sewing and nursing, and went shabby, and half starved
+themselves, and were baked in the heat, like scores of women in the
+bush, and even as hundreds of women, suffering from religious mania,
+slave and stint in city slums, and neglect their homes, husbands and
+children—for the glory of Booth.
+
+The Pretty Girl was referred to as Sister Hannah by the Army people,
+and came somehow to be known by sinners as “Miss Captain.” I don’t know
+whether that was her real name or what rank she held in the Army, if
+indeed she held any.
+
+She sold _War Crys_, and the circulation doubled in a day. One-eyed
+Bogan, being bailed up unexpectedly, gave her “half a caser” for a
+_Cry_, and ran away without the paper or the change. Jack Mitchell
+bought a _Cry_ for the first time in his life, and read it. He said he
+found some of the articles intensely realistic, and many of the
+statements were very interesting. He said he read one or two things in
+the _Cry_ that he didn’t know before. Tom Hall, taken unawares, bought
+three _Crys_ from the Pretty Girl, and blushed to find it fame.
+
+Little Billy Woods, the Labourers’ Union secretary—who had a poetic
+temperament and more than the average bushman’s reverence for higher
+things—Little Billy Woods told me in a burst of confidence that he
+generally had two feelings, one after the other, after encountering
+that girl. One was that unfathomable far-away feeling of loneliness and
+longing, that comes at odd times to the best of married men, with the
+best of wives and children—as Billy had. The other feeling, which came
+later on, and was a reaction in fact, was the feeling of a man who
+thinks he’s been twisted round a woman’s little finger for the benefit
+of somebody else. Billy said that he couldn’t help being reminded by
+the shy, sweet smile and the shy, sweet “thank you” of the Pretty Girl
+in the Army, of the shy, sweet smile and the shy, sweet gratitude of a
+Sydney private barmaid, who had once roped him in, in the days before
+he was married. Then he’d reckon that the Army lassie had been sent out
+back to Bourke as a business speculation.
+
+Tom Hall was inclined to reckon so too—but that was after he’d been
+chaffed for a month about the three _War Crys_.
+
+The Pretty Girl was discussed from psychological points of view; not
+forgetting the sex problem. Donald Macdonald—shearer, union leader and
+labour delegate to other colonies on occasion—Donald Macdonald said
+that whenever he saw a circle of plain or ugly, dried-up women or girls
+round a shepherd, evangelist or a Salvation Army drum, he’d say
+“sexually starved!” They were hungry for love. Religious mania was
+sexual passion dammed out of its course. Therefore he held that
+morbidly religious girls were the most easily seduced.
+
+But this couldn’t apply to Pretty Girl in the Army. Mitchell reckoned
+that she’d either had a great sorrow—a lot of trouble, or a
+disappointment in love (the “or” is Mitchell’s); but they couldn’t see
+how a girl like her could possibly be disappointed in love—unless the
+chap died or got into jail for life. Donald decided that her soul had
+been starved somehow.
+
+Mitchell suggested that it might be only a craving for notoriety, the
+same thing that makes women and girls go amongst lepers, and out to the
+battlefield, and nurse ugly pieces of men back to life again; the same
+thing that makes some women and girls swear ropes round men’s necks.
+The Pretty Girl might be the daughter of well-to-do people—even
+aristocrats, said Mitchell—she was pretty enough and spoke well enough.
+“Every woman’s a barmaid at heart,” as the _Bulletin_ puts it, said
+Mitchell.
+
+But not even one of the haggard women of Bourke ever breathed a
+suspicion of scandal against her. They said she was too good and too
+pretty to be where she was. You see it was not as in an old settled
+town where hags blacken God’s world with their tongues. Bourke was just
+a little camping town in a big land, where free, good-hearted
+democratic Australians, and the best of black sheep from the old world
+were constantly passing through; where husband’s were often obliged to
+be away from home for twelve months, and the storekeepers had to trust
+the people, and mates trusted each other, and the folks were
+broad-minded. The mind’s eye had a wide range.
+
+After her maiden speech the Pretty Girl seldom spoke, except to return
+thanks for collections—and she never testified. She had a sweet voice
+and used to sing.
+
+Now, if I were writing pure fiction, and were not cursed with an
+obstinate inclination to write the truth, I might say that, after the
+advent of the Pretty Girl, the morals of Bourke improved suddenly and
+wonderfully. That One-eyed Bogan left off gambling and drinking and
+fighting and swearing, and put on a red coat and testified and fought
+the devil only; that Mitchell dropped his mask of cynicism; that Donald
+Macdonald ate no longer of the tree of knowledge and ceased to worry
+himself with psychological problems, and was happy; and that Tom Hall
+was no longer a scoffer. That no one sneaked round through the scrub
+after dusk to certain necessary establishments in weather-board
+cottages on the outskirts of the town; and that the broad-minded and
+obliging ladies thereof became Salvation Army lassies.
+
+But none of these things happened. Drunks quieted down or got out of
+the way if they could when the Pretty Girl appeared on the scene,
+fights and games of “headin’ ’em” were adjourned, and weak, ordinary
+language was used for the time being, and that was about all.
+
+Nevertheless, most of the chaps were in love with that Pretty Girl in
+the Army—all those who didn’t _worship_ her privately. Long Bob
+Brothers hovered round in hopes, they said, that she’d meet with an
+accident—get run over by a horse or something—and he’d have to carry
+her in; he scared the women at the barracks by dropping firewood over
+the fence after dark. Barcoo-Rot, the meanest man in the back country,
+was seen to drop a threepenny bit into the ring, and a rumour was
+industriously circulated (by Tom Hall) to the effect that One-eyed
+Bogan intended to shave and join the Army disguised as a lassie.
+
+Handsome Jake Boreham (_alias_ Bore-’em), a sentimental shearer from
+New Zealand, who had read Bret Harte, made an elaborate attempt for the
+Pretty Girl, by pretending to be going to the dogs headlong, with an
+idea of first winning her sorrowful interest and sympathy, and then
+making an apparently hard struggle to straighten up for her sake. He
+related his experience with the cheerful and refreshing absence of
+reserve which was characteristic of him, and is of most bushmen.
+
+“I’d had a few drinks,” he said, “and was having a spell under a gum by
+the river, when I saw the Pretty Girl and another Army woman coming
+down along the bank. It was a blazing hot day. I thought of Sandy and
+the Schoolmistress in Bret Harte, and I thought it would be a good idea
+to stretch out in the sun and pretend to be helpless; so I threw my hat
+on the ground and lay down, with my head in the blazing heat, in the
+most graceful position I could get at, and I tried to put a look of
+pained regret on my face, as if I was dreaming of my lost boyhood and
+me mother. I thought, perhaps, the Girl would pity me, and I felt sure
+she’d stoop and pick up my hat and put it gently over my poor troubled
+head. Then I was going to become conscious for a moment, and look
+hopelessly round, and into her eyes, and then start and look sorrowful
+and ashamed, and stagger to my feet, taking off my hat like the Silver
+King does to the audience when he makes his first appearance drunk on
+the stage; and then I was going to reel off, trying to walk as straight
+as I could. And next day I was going to clean up my teeth and nails and
+put on a white shirt, and start to be a new man henceforth.
+
+“Well, as I lay there with my eyes shut, I heard the footsteps come up
+and stop, and heard ’em whisper, and I thought I heard the Pretty Girl
+say ‘Poor fellow!’ or something that sounded like that; and just then I
+got a God-almighty poke in the ribs with an umbrella—at least I suppose
+it was aimed for my ribs; but women are bad shots, and the point of the
+umbrella caught me in the side, just between the bottom rib and the
+hip-bone, and I sat up with a click, like the blade of a pocketknife.
+
+“The other lassie was the big square-faced woman. The Pretty Girl
+looked rather more frightened and disgusted than sentimental, but she
+had plenty of pluck, and soon pulled herself together. She said I ought
+to be ashamed of myself, a great big man like me, lying there in the
+dust like a drunken tramp—an eyesore and a disgrace to all the world.
+She told me to go to my camp, wherever that was, and sleep myself
+sober. The square-jawed woman said I looked like a fool sitting there.
+I did feel ashamed, and I reckon I did look like a fool—a man generally
+does in a fix like that. I felt like one, anyway. I got up and walked
+away, and it hurt me so much that I went over to West Bourke and went
+to the dogs properly for a fortnight, and lost twenty quid on a game of
+draughts against a blindfold player. Now both those women had
+umbrellas, but I’m not sure to this day which of ’em it was that gave
+me the poke. It wouldn’t have mattered much anyway. I haven’t borrowed
+one of Bret Harte’s books since.”
+
+Jake reflected a while. “The worst of it was,” he said ruefully, “that
+I wasn’t sure that the girl or the woman didn’t see through me, and
+that worried me a bit. You never can tell how much a woman suspects,
+and that’s the worst of ’em. I found that out after I got married.”
+
+The Pretty Girl in the Army grew pale and thin and bigger-eyed. The
+women said it was a shame, and that she ought to be sent home to her
+friends, wherever they were. She was laid up for two or three days, and
+some of the women cooked delicacies and handed ’em over the barracks
+fence, and offered to come in and nurse her; but the square woman took
+washing home and nursed the girl herself.
+
+The Pretty Girl still sold _War Crys_ and took up collections, but in a
+tired, listless, half shamed-faced way. It was plain that she was tired
+of the Army, and growing ashamed of the Salvationists. Perhaps she had
+come to see things too plainly.
+
+You see, the Army does no good out back in Australia—except from a
+business point of view. It is simply there to collect funds for hungry
+headquarters. The bushmen are much too intelligent for the Army. There
+was no poverty in Bourke—as it is understood in the city; there was
+plenty of food; and camping out and roughing it come natural to the
+bushmen. In cases of sickness, accident, widows or orphans, the chaps
+sent round the hat, without banging a drum or testifying, and that was
+all right. If a chap was hard up he borrowed a couple of quid from his
+mate. If a strange family arrived without a penny, someone had to fix
+’em up, and the storekeepers helped them till the man got work. For the
+rest, we work out our own salvation, or damnation—as the case is—in the
+bush, with no one to help us, except a mate, perhaps. The Army can’t
+help us, but a fellow-sinner can, sometimes, who has been through it
+all himself. The Army is only a drag on the progress of Democracy,
+because it attracts many who would otherwise be aggressive
+Democrats—and for other reasons.
+
+Besides, if we all reformed the Army would get deuced little from us
+for its city mission.
+
+The Pretty Girl went to service for a while with the stock inspector’s
+wife, who could get nothing out of her concerning herself or her
+friends. She still slept at the barracks, stuck to the Army, and
+attended its meetings.
+
+It was Christmas morning, and there was peace in Bourke and goodwill
+towards all men. There hadn’t been a fight since yesterday evening, and
+that had only been a friendly one, to settle an argument concerning the
+past ownership, and, at the same time, to decide as to the future
+possession of a dog.
+
+It had been a hot, close night, and it ended in a suffocating sunrise.
+The free portion of the male population were in the habit of taking
+their blankets and sleeping out in “the Park,” or town square, in hot
+weather; the wives and daughters of the town slept, or tried to sleep,
+with bedroom windows and doors open, while husbands lay outside on the
+verandas. I camped in a corner of the park that night, and the sun woke
+me.
+
+As I sat up I caught sight of a swagman coming along the white, dusty
+road from the direction of the bridge, where the cleared road ran
+across west and on, a hundred and thirty miles, through the barren,
+broiling mulga scrubs, to Hungerford, on the border of Sheol. I knew
+that swagman’s walk. It was John Merrick (Jack Moonlight), one-time
+Shearers’ Union secretary at Coonamble, and generally “Rep” (shearers’
+representative) in any shed where he sheared. He was a “better-class
+shearer,” one of those quiet, thoughtful men of whom there are
+generally two or three in the roughest of rough sheds, who have great
+influence, and give the shed a good name from a Union point of view.
+Not quiet with the resentful or snobbish reserve of the educated
+Englishman, but with a sad or subdued sort of quietness that has force
+in it—as if they fully realized that their intelligence is much higher
+than the average, that they have suffered more real trouble and
+heartbreak than the majority of their mates, and that their mates
+couldn’t possibly understand them if they spoke as they felt and
+couldn’t see things as they do—yet men who understand and are intensely
+sympathetic in their loneliness and sensitive reserve.
+
+I had worked in a shed with Jack Moonlight, and had met him in Sydney,
+and to be mates with a bushman for a few weeks is to know him
+well—anyway, I found it so. He had taken a trip to Sydney the Christmas
+before last, and when he came back there was something wanting. He
+became more silent, he drank more, and sometimes alone, and took to
+smoking heavily. He dropped his mates, took little or no interest in
+Union matters, and travelled alone, and at night.
+
+The Australian bushman is born with a mate who sticks to him through
+life—like a mole. They may be hundreds of miles apart sometimes, and
+separated for years, yet they are mates for life. A bushman may have
+many mates in his roving, but there is always one his mate, “my mate;”
+and it is common to hear a bushman, who is, in every way, a true mate
+to the man he happens to be travelling with, speak of _his mate’s
+mate_—“Jack’s mate”—who might be in Klondyke or South Africa. A bushman
+has always a mate to comfort him and argue with him, and work and tramp
+and drink with him, and lend him quids when he’s hard up, and call him
+a b—— fool, and fight him sometimes; to abuse him to his face and
+defend his name behind his back; to bear false witness and perjure his
+soul for his sake; to lie to the girl for him if he’s single, and to
+his wife if he’s married; to secure a “pen” for him at a shed where he
+isn’t on the spot, or, if the mate is away in New Zealand or South
+Africa, to write and tell him if it’s any good coming over this way.
+And each would take the word of the other against all the world, and
+each believes that the other is the straightest chap that ever lived-“a
+white man!” And next best to your old mate is the man you’re tramping,
+riding, working, or drinking with.
+
+About the first thing the cook asks you when you come along to a
+shearers’ hut is, “Where’s your mate?” I travelled alone for a while
+one time, and it seemed to me sometimes, by the tone of the inquiry
+concerning the whereabouts of my mate, that the bush had an idea that I
+might have done away with him and that the thing ought to be looked
+into.
+
+When a man drops mateship altogether and takes to “hatting” in the
+bush, it’s a step towards a convenient tree and a couple of
+saddle-straps buckled together.
+
+I had an idea that I, in a measure, took the place of Jack Moonlight’s
+mate about this time.
+
+“’Ullo, Jack!” I hailed as he reached the corner of the park.
+
+“Good morning, Harry!” said Jack, as if he’d seen me last yesterday
+evening instead of three months ago. “How are you getting on?”
+
+We walked together towards the Union Office, where I had a camp in the
+skillion-room at the back. Jack was silent. But there’s no place in the
+world where a man’s silence is respected so much (within reasonable
+bounds) as in the Australian bush, where every man has a past more or
+less sad, and every man a ghost—perhaps from other lands that we know
+nothing of, and speaking in a foreign tongue. They say in the bush,
+“Oh, Jack’s only thinking!” And they let him think. Generally you want
+to think as much as your mate; and when you’ve been together some time
+it’s quite natural to travel all day without exchanging a word. In the
+morning Jim says, “Well, I think I made a bargain with that horse,
+Bill,” and some time late in the afternoon, say twenty miles farther
+on, it occurs to Bill to “rejoin,” “Well, I reckon the blank as sold it
+to you had yer proper!”
+
+I like a good thinking mate, and I believe that thinking in company is
+a lot more healthy and more comfortable, as well as less risky, than
+thinking alone.
+
+On the way to the Union Office Jack and I passed the Royal Hotel, and
+caught a glimpse, through the open door, of a bedroom off the veranda,
+of the landlord’s fresh, fair, young Sydney girl-wife, sleeping
+prettily behind the mosquito-net, like a sleeping beauty, while the
+boss lay on a mattress outside on the veranda, across the open door.
+(He wasn’t necessary for publication, but an evidence of good faith.)
+
+I glanced at Jack for a grin, but didn’t get one. He wore the pained
+expression of a man who is suddenly hit hard with the thought of
+something that might have been.
+
+I boiled the billy and fried a pound of steak.
+
+“Been travelling all night, Tack?” I asked.
+
+“Yes,” said Jack. “I camped at Emus yesterday.”
+
+He didn’t eat. I began to reckon that he was brooding too much for his
+health. He was much thinner than when I saw him last, and pretty
+haggard, and he had something of the hopeless, haggard look that I’d
+seen in Tom Hall’s eyes after the last big shearing strike, when Tom
+had worked day and night to hold his mates up all through the hard,
+bitter struggle, and the battle was lost.
+
+“Look here, Jack!” I said at last. “What’s up?”
+
+“Nothing’s up, Harry,” said Jack. “What made you think so?”
+
+“Have you got yourself into any fix?” I asked. “What’s the Hungerford
+track been doing to you?”
+
+“No, Harry,” he said, “I’m all right. How are you?” And he pulled some
+string and papers and a roll of dusty pound notes from his pocket and
+threw them on the bunk.
+
+I was hard up just then, so I took a note and the billy to go to the
+Royal and get some beer. I thought the beer might loosen his mind a
+bit.
+
+“Better take a couple of quid,” said Jack. “You look as if you want
+some new shirts and things.” But a pound was enough for me, and I think
+he had reason to be glad of that later on, as it turned out.
+
+“Anything new in Bourke?” asked Jack as we drank the beer.
+
+“No,” I said, “not a thing—except there’s a pretty girl in the
+Salvation Army.”
+
+“And it’s about time,” growled Jack.
+
+“Now, look here, Jack,” I said presently, “what’s come over you lately
+at all? I might be able to help you. It’s not a bit of use telling me
+that there’s nothing the matter. When a man takes to brooding and
+travelling alone it’s a bad sign, and it will end in a leaning tree and
+a bit of clothes-line as likely as not. Tell me what the trouble is.
+Tell us all about it. There’s a ghost, isn’t there?”
+
+“Well, I suppose so,” said Jack. “We’ve all got our ghosts for that
+matter. But never you mind, Harry; I’m all right. I don’t go
+interfering with your ghosts, and I don’t see what call you’ve got to
+come haunting mine. Why, it’s as bad as kicking a man’s dog.” And he
+gave the ghost of a grin.
+
+“Tell me, Jack,” I said, “is it a woman?”
+
+“Yes,” said Jack, “it’s a woman. Now, are you satisfied?”
+
+“Is it a girl?” I asked.
+
+“Yes,” he said.
+
+So there was no more to be said. I’d thought it might have been a lot
+worse than a girl. I’d thought he might have got married somewhere,
+sometime, and made a mess of it.
+
+We had dinner at Billy Woods’s place, and a sensible Christmas dinner
+it was—everything cold, except the vegetables, with the hose going on
+the veranda in spite of the by-laws, and Billy’s wife and her sister,
+fresh and cool-looking and jolly, instead of being hot and brown and
+cross like most Australian women who roast themselves over a blazing
+fire in a hot kitchen on a broiling day, all the morning, to cook
+scalding plum pudding and redhot roasts, for no other reason than that
+their grandmothers used to cook hot Christmas dinners in England.
+
+And in the afternoon we went for a row on the river, pulling easily up
+the anabranch and floating down with the stream under the shade of the
+river timber—instead of going to sleep and waking up helpless and
+soaked in perspiration, to find the women with headaches, as many do on
+Christmas Day in Australia.
+
+Mrs Woods tried to draw Jack out, but it was no use, and in the evening
+he commenced drinking, and that made Billy uneasy. “I’m afraid Jack’s
+on the wrong track,” he said.
+
+After tea most of us collected about Watty’s veranda. Most things that
+happened in Bourke happened at Watty’s pub, or near it.
+
+If a horse bolted with a buggy or cart, he was generally stopped
+outside Watty’s, which seemed to suggest, as Mitchell said, that most
+of the heroes drank at Watty’s—also that the pluckiest men were found
+amongst the hardest drinkers. (But sometimes the horse fetched up
+against Watty’s sign and lamppost—which was a stout one of
+“iron-bark”—and smashed the trap.) Then Watty’s was the Carriers’ Arms,
+a union pub; and Australian teamsters are mostly hard cases: while
+there was something in Watty’s beer which made men argue fluently, and
+the best fights came off in his backyard. Watty’s dogs were the most
+quarrelsome in town, and there was a dog-fight there every other
+evening, followed as often as not by a man-fight. If a bushman’s horse
+ran away with him the chances were that he’d be thrown on to Watty’s
+veranda, if he wasn’t pitched into the bar; and victims of accidents,
+and sick, hard-up shearers, were generally carried to Watty’s pub, as
+being the most convenient and comfortable for them. Mitchell denied
+that it was generosity or good nature on Watty’s part, he said it was
+all business—advertisement. Watty knew what he was doing. He was very
+deep, was Watty. Mitchell further hinted that if he was sick _he_
+wouldn’t be carried to Watty’s, for Watty knew what a thirsty business
+a funeral was. Tom Hall reckoned that Watty bribed the Army on the
+quiet.
+
+I was sitting on a stool along the veranda wall with Donald Macdonald,
+Bob Brothers (the Giraffe) and Mitchell, and one or two others, and
+Jack Moonlight sat on the floor with his back to the wall and his hat
+well down over his eyes. The Army came along at the usual time, but we
+didn’t see the Pretty Girl at first—she was a bit late. Mitchell said
+he liked to be at Watty’s when the Army prayed and the Pretty Girl was
+there; he had no objection to being prayed for by a girl like that,
+though he reckoned that nothing short of a real angel could save him
+now. He said his old grandmother used to pray for him every night of
+her life and three times on Sunday, with Christmas Day extra when
+Christmas Day didn’t fall on a Sunday; but Mitchell reckoned that the
+old lady couldn’t have had much influence because he became more sinful
+every year, and went deeper in ways of darkness, until finally he
+embarked on a career of crime.
+
+The Army prayed, and then a thin “ratty” little woman bobbed up in the
+ring; she’d gone mad on religion as women do on woman’s rights and
+hundreds of other things. She was so skinny in the face, her jaws so
+prominent, and her mouth so wide, that when she opened it to speak it
+was like a ventriloquist’s dummy and you could almost see the cracks
+open down under her ears.
+
+“They say I’m cracked!” she screamed in a shrill, cracked voice. “But
+I’m not cracked—I’m only cracked on the Lord Jesus Christ! That’s all
+I’m cracked on——.” And just then the Amen man of the Army—the Army
+groaner we called him, who was always putting both feet in it—just then
+he blundered forward, rolled up his eyes, threw his hands up and down
+as if he were bouncing two balls, and said, with deep feeling:
+
+“Thank the Lord she’s got a crack in the right place!”
+
+Tom Hall doubled up, and most of the other sinners seemed to think
+there was something very funny about it. And the Army, too, seemed
+struck with an idea that there was something wrong somewhere, for they
+started a hymn.
+
+A big American negro, who’d been a night watchman in Sydney, stepped
+into the ring and waved his arms and kept time, and as he got excited
+he moved his hands up and down rapidly, as if he was hauling down a
+rope in a great hurry through a pulley block above, and he kept saying,
+“Come down, Lord!” all through the hymn, like a bass accompaniment,
+“Come down, Lord; come down, Lord; come down, Lord; come down, Lord!”
+and the quicker be said it the faster he hauled. He was as good as a
+drum. And, when the hymn was over, he started to testify.
+
+“My frens!” he said, “I was once black as der coals in der mined! I was
+once black as der ink in der ocean of sin! But now—thank an’ bless the
+Lord!—I am whiter dan der dribben snow!”
+
+Tom Hall sat down on the edge of the veranda and leaned his head
+against a post and cried. He had contributed a bob this evening, and he
+was getting his money’s worth.
+
+Then the Pretty Girl arrived and was pushed forward into the ring. She
+looked thinner and whiter than I’d ever seen her, and there was a
+feverish brightness in her eyes that I didn’t like.
+
+“Men!” she said, “this is Christmas Day-.” I didn’t hear any more for,
+at the sound of her voice, Jack Moonlight jumped up as if he’d sat on a
+baby. He started forward, stared at her for a moment as if he couldn’t
+believe his eyes, and then said, “Hannah!” short and sharp. She started
+as if she was shot, gave him a wild look, and stumbled forward; the
+next moment he had her in his arms and was steering for the private
+parlour.
+
+I heard Mrs Bothways calling for water and smelling-salts; she was as
+fat as Watty, and very much like him in the face, but she was emotional
+and sympathetic. Then presently I heard, through the open window, the
+Pretty Girl say to Jack, “Oh, Jack, Jack! Why did you go away and leave
+me like that? It was cruel!”
+
+“But you told me to go, Hannah,” said Jack.
+
+“That-that didn’t make any difference. Why didn’t you write?” she
+sobbed.
+
+“Because you never wrote to me, Hannah,” he said.
+
+“That—that was no excuse!” she said. “It was so k-k-k-cruel of you,
+Jack.”
+
+Mrs Bothways pulled down the window. A new-comer asked Watty what the
+trouble was, and he said that the Army girl had only found her chap, or
+husband, or long-lost brother or something, but the missus was looking
+after the business; then he dozed again.
+
+And then we adjourned to the Royal and took the Army with us.
+
+“That’s the way of it,” said Donald Macdonald. “With a woman it’s love
+or religion; with a man it’s love or the devil.”
+
+“Or with a man,” said Mitchell, presently, “it’s love and the devil
+both, sometimes, Donald.”
+
+I looked at Mitchell hard, but for all his face expressed he might only
+have said, “I think it’s going to rain.”
+
+
+
+
+“LORD DOUGLAS”
+
+
+“They hold him true, who’s true to one,
+However false he be—”
+                    _The Rouseabout of Rouseabouts_.
+
+
+The Imperial Hotel was rather an unfortunate name for an out-back town
+pub, for out back is the stronghold of Australian democracy; it was the
+out-back vote and influence that brought about “One Man One Vote,”
+“Payment of Members,” and most of the democratic legislation of late
+years, and from out back came the overwhelming vote in favour of
+Australian as Imperial Federation.
+
+The name Royal Hotel is as familiar as that of the Railway Hotel, and
+passes unnoticed and ungrowled at, even by bush republicans. The Royal
+Hotel at Bourke was kept by an Irishman, one O’Donohoo, who was Union
+to the backbone, loudly in favour of “Australia for the Australians,”
+and, of course, against even the democratic New South Wales Government
+of the time. He went round town all one St Patrick’s morning with a
+bunch of green ribbon fastened to his coat-tail with a large fish-hook,
+and wasn’t aware of the fact till he sat down on the point of it. But
+that’s got nothing to do with it.
+
+The Imperial Hotel at Bourke was unpopular from the first. It was said
+that the very existence of the house was the result of a swindle. It
+had been built with money borrowed on certain allotments in the centre
+of the town and on the understanding that it should be built on the
+mortgaged land, whereas it was erected on a free allotment. Which fact
+was discovered, greatly to its surprise, by the building society when
+it came to foreclose on the allotments some years later. While the
+building was being erected the Bourke people understood, in a vague
+way, that it was to be a convent (perhaps the building society thought
+so, too), and when certain ornaments in brick and cement in the shape
+of a bishop’s mitre were placed over the corners of the walls the
+question seemed decided. But when the place was finished a bar was
+fitted up, and up went the sign, to the disgust of the other publicans,
+who didn’t know a licence had been taken out—for licensing didn’t go by
+local option in those days. It was rumoured that the place belonged to,
+and the whole business was engineered by, a priest. And priests are men
+of the world.
+
+The Imperial Hotel was patronized by the pastoralists, the civil
+servants, the bank manager and clerks—all the scrub aristocracy; it was
+the headquarters of the Pastoralists’ Union in Bourke; a barracks for
+blacklegs brought up from Sydney to take the place of Union shearers on
+strike; and the new Governor, on his inevitable visit to Bourke, was
+banqueted at the Imperial Hotel. The editor of the local “capitalistic
+rag” stayed there; the pastoralists’ member was elected mostly by dark
+ways and means devised at the Imperial Hotel, and one of its managers
+had stood as a dummy candidate to split the Labour vote; the management
+of the hotel was his reward. In short, it was there that most of the
+plots were hatched to circumvent Freedom, and put away or deliver into
+the clutches of law and order certain sons of Light and Liberty who
+believed in converting blacklegs into jellies by force of fists when
+bribes, gentle persuasion and pure Australian language failed to
+convert them to clean Unionism. The Imperial Hotel was called the
+“Squatters’ Pub,” the “Scabbery,” and other and more expressive names.
+
+The hotel became still more unpopular after Percy Douglas had managed
+it for a while. He was an avowed enemy of Labour Unionists. He employed
+Chinese cooks, and that in the height of the anti-Chinese agitation in
+Australia, and he was known to have kindly feelings towards the Afghans
+who, with their camels, were running white carriers off the roads. If
+an excited Unionist called a man a “blackleg” or “scab” in the Imperial
+bar he was run out—sometimes with great difficulty, and occasionally as
+far as the lock-up.
+
+Percy Douglas was a fine-looking man, “wid a chest on him an’ well
+hung—a fine fee-_gure_ of a man,” as O’Donohoo pronounced it. He was
+tall and erect, he dressed well, wore small side-whiskers, had an eagle
+nose, and looked like an aristocrat. Like many of his type, who start
+sometimes as billiard-markers and suddenly become hotel managers in
+Australia, nothing was known of his past. Jack Mitchell reckoned, by
+the way he treated his employees and spoke to workmen, that he was the
+educated son of an English farmer—gone wrong and sent out to Australia.
+Someone called him “Lord Douglas,” and the nickname caught on.
+
+He made himself well hated. He got One-eyed Bogan “three months’ hard”
+for taking a bottle of whisky off the Imperial bar counter because he
+(Bogan) was drunk and thirsty and had knocked down his cheque, and
+because there was no one minding the bar at the moment.
+
+Lord Douglas dismissed the barmaid, and, as she was leaving, he had her
+boxes searched and gave her in charge for stealing certain articles
+belonging to the hotel. The chaps subscribed to defend the case, and
+subsequently put a few pounds together for the girl. She proved her
+gratitude by bringing a charge of a baby against one of the chaps—but
+that was only one of the little ways of the world, as Mitchell said.
+She joined a Chinese camp later on.
+
+Lord Douglas employed a carpenter to do some work about the hotel, and
+because the carpenter left before the job was finished, Lord Douglas
+locked his tools in an outhouse and refused to give them up; and when
+the carpenter, with the spirit of an Australian workman, broke the
+padlock and removed his tool-chest, the landlord gave him in charge for
+breaking and entering. The chaps defended the case and won it, and
+hated Lord Douglas as much as if he were their elder brother. Mitchell
+was the only one to put in a word for him.
+
+“I’ve been puzzling it out,” said Mitchell, as he sat nursing his best
+leg in the Union Office, “and, as far as I can see, it all amounts to
+this—we’re all mistaken in Lord Douglas. We don’t know the man. He’s
+all right. We don’t understand him. He’s really a sensitive,
+good-hearted man who’s been shoved a bit off the track by the world.
+It’s the world’s fault—he’s not to blame. You see, when he was a
+youngster he was the most good-natured kid in the school; he was always
+soft, and, consequently, he was always being imposed upon, and bullied,
+and knocked about. Whenever he got a penny to buy lollies he’d count
+’em out carefully and divide ’em round amongst his schoolmates and
+brothers and sisters. He was the only one that worked at home, and
+consequently they all hated him. His father respected him, but didn’t
+love him, because he wasn’t a younger son, and wasn’t bringing his
+father’s grey hairs down in sorrow to the grave. If it was in
+Australia, probably Lord Douglas was an elder son and had to do all the
+hard graft, and teach himself at night, and sleep in a bark skillion
+while his younger brothers benefited—they were born in the new brick
+house and went to boarding-schools. His mother had a contempt for him
+because he wasn’t a black sheep and a prodigal, and, when the old man
+died, the rest of the family got all the stuff and Lord Douglas was
+kicked out because they could do without him now. And the family hated
+him like poison ever afterwards (especially his mother), and spread
+lies about him—because they had treated him shamefully and because his
+mouth was shut—they knew he wouldn’t speak. Then probably he went in
+for Democracy and worked for Freedom, till Freedom trod on him once too
+often with her hob-nailed boots. Then the chances are, in the end, he
+was ruined by a girl or woman, and driven, against his will, to take
+refuge in pure individualism. He’s all right, only we don’t appreciate
+him. He’s only fighting against his old ideals—his old self that comes
+up sometimes—and that’s what makes him sweat his barmaids and servants,
+and hate us, and run us in; and perhaps when he cuts up extra rough
+it’s because his conscience kicks him when he thinks of the damned soft
+fool he used to be. He’s all right—take my word for it. It’s all a
+mask. Why, he might be one of the kindest-hearted men in Bourke
+underneath.”
+
+Tom Hall rubbed his head and blinked, as if he was worried by an idea
+that there might be some facts in Mitchell’s theories.
+
+“You’re allers findin’ excuses for blacklegs an’ scabs, Mitchell,” said
+Barcoo-Rot, who took Mitchell seriously (and who would have taken a
+laughing jackass seriously). “Why, you’d find a white spot on a
+squatter. I wouldn’t be surprised if you blacklegged yourself in the
+end.”
+
+This was an unpardonable insult, from a Union point of view, and the
+chaps half-unconsciously made room on the floor for Barcoo-Rot to fall
+after Jack Mitchell hit him. But Mitchell took the insult
+philosophically.
+
+“Well, Barcoo-Rot,” he said, nursing the other leg, “for the matter of
+that, I did find a white spot on a squatter once. He lent me a quid
+when I was hard up. There’s white spots on the blackest characters if
+you only drop prejudice and look close enough. I suppose even
+Jack-the-Ripper’s character was speckled. Why, I can even see spots on
+your character, sometimes, Barcoo-Rot. I’ve known white spots to spread
+on chaps’ characters until they were little short of saints. Sometimes
+I even fancy I can feel my own wings sprouting. And as for turning
+blackleg—well, I suppose I’ve got a bit of the crawler in my
+composition (most of us have), and a man never knows what might happen
+to his principles.”
+
+“Well,” said Barcoo-Rot, “I beg yer pardon—ain’t that enough?”
+
+“No,” said Mitchell, “you ought to wear a three-bushel bag and ashes
+for three months, and drink water; but since the police would send you
+to an asylum if you did that, I think the best thing we can do is to go
+out and have a drink.”
+
+Lord Douglas married an Australian girl somewhere, somehow, and brought
+her to Bourke, and there were two little girls—regular little fairies.
+She was a gentle, kind-hearted little woman, but she didn’t seem to
+improve him much, save that he was very good to her.
+
+“It’s mostly that way,” commented Mitchell. “When a boss gets married
+and has children he thinks he’s got a greater right to grind his
+fellowmen and rob their wives and children. I’d never work for a boss
+with a big family—it’s hard enough to keep a single boss nowadays in
+this country.”
+
+After one stormy election, at the end of a long and bitter shearing
+strike, One-eyed Bogan, his trusty enemy, Barcoo-Rot, and one or two
+other enthusiastic reformers were charged with rioting, and got from
+one to three months’ hard. And they had only smashed three windows of
+the Imperial Hotel and chased the Chinese cook into the river.
+
+“I used to have some hopes for Democracy,” commented Mitchell, “but
+I’ve got none now. How can you expect Liberty, Equality or
+Fraternity—how can you expect Freedom and Universal Brotherhood and
+Equal Rights in a country where Sons of Light get three months’ hard
+for breaking windows and bashing a Chinaman? It almost makes me long to
+sail away in a gallant barque.”
+
+There were other cases in connection with the rotten-egging of
+Capitalistic candidates on the Imperial Hotel balcony, and it was
+partly on the evidence of Douglas and his friends that certain
+respectable Labour leaders got heavy terms of imprisonment for rioting
+and “sedition” and “inciting,” in connection with organized attacks on
+blacklegs and their escorts.
+
+Retribution, if it was retribution, came suddenly and in a most
+unexpected manner to Lord Douglas.
+
+It seems he employed a second carpenter for six months to repair and
+make certain additions to the hotel, and put him off under various
+pretences until he owed him a hundred pounds or thereabout. At last,
+immediately after an exciting interview with Lord Douglas, the
+carpenter died suddenly of heart disease. The widow, a strong-minded
+bushwoman, put a bailiff in the hotel on a very short notice—and
+against the advice of her lawyer, who thought the case hopeless—and the
+Lord Douglas bubble promptly burst. He had somehow come to be regarded
+as the proprietor of the hotel, but now the real proprietors or
+proprietor—he was still said to be a priest—turned Douglas out and put
+in a new manager. The old servants were paid after some trouble. The
+local storekeepers and one or two firms in Sydney, who had large
+accounts against the Imperial Hotel (and had trusted it, mainly because
+it was patronized by Capitalism and Fat), were never paid.
+
+Lord Douglas cleared out to Sydney, leaving his wife and children, for
+the present, with her brother, a hay-and-corn storekeeper, who also had
+a large and hopeless account against the hotel; and when the brother
+went broke and left the district she rented a two-roomed cottage and
+took in dressmaking.
+
+Dressmaking didn’t pay so well in the bush then as it did in the old
+diggings days when sewing-machines were scarce and the possession of
+one meant an independent living to any girl—when diggers paid ten
+shillings for a strip of “flannen” doubled over and sewn together, with
+holes for arms and head, and called a shirt. Mrs Douglas had a hard
+time, with her two little girls, who were still better and more
+prettily dressed than any other children in Bourke. One grocer still
+called on her for orders and pretended to be satisfied to wait “till Mr
+Douglas came back,” and when she would no longer order what he
+considered sufficient provisions for her and the children, and
+commenced buying sugar, etc., by the pound, for cash, he one day sent a
+box of groceries round to her. He pretended it was a mistake.
+
+“However,” he said, “I’d be very much obliged if you could use ’em, Mrs
+Douglas. I’m overstocked now; haven’t got room for another tin of
+sardines in the shop. Don’t you worry about bills, Mrs Douglas; I can
+wait till Douglas comes home. I did well enough out of the Imperial
+Hotel when your husband had it, and a pound’s worth of groceries won’t
+hurt me now. I’m only too glad to get rid of some of the stock.”
+
+She cried a little, thought of the children, and kept the groceries.
+
+“I suppose I’ll be sold up soon meself if things don’t git brighter,”
+said that grocer to a friend, “so it doesn’t matter much.”
+
+The same with Foley the butcher, who had a brogue with a sort of
+drawling groan in it, and was a cynic of the Mitchell school.
+
+“You see,” he said, “she’s as proud as the devil, but when I send round
+a bit o’ rawst, or porrk, or the undercut o’ the blade-bawn, she thinks
+o’ the little gur-r-rls before she thinks o’ sendin’ it back to me.
+That’s where I’ve got the pull on her.”
+
+The Giraffe borrowed a horse and tip-dray one day at the beginning of
+winter and cut a load of firewood in the bush, and next morning, at
+daylight, Mrs Douglas was nearly startled out of her life by a crash at
+the end of the cottage, which made her think that the chimney had
+fallen in, or a tree fallen on the house; and when she slipped on a
+wrapper and looked out, she saw a load of short-cut wood by the
+chimney, and caught a glimpse of the back view of the Giraffe, who
+stood in the dray with his legs wide apart and was disappearing into
+the edge of the scrub; and soon the rapid clock-clock-clock of the
+wheels died away in the west, as if he were making for West Australia.
+
+The next we heard of Lord Douglas he had got two years’ hard for
+embezzlement in connection with some canvassing he had taken up. Mrs
+Douglas fell ill—a touch of brain-fever—and one of the labourers’ wives
+took care of the children while two others took turns in nursing. While
+she was recovering, Bob Brothers sent round the hat, and, after a
+conclave in the Union Office—as mysterious as any meeting ever called
+with the object of downing bloated Capitalism—it was discovered that
+one of the chaps—who didn’t wish his name to be mentioned—had borrowed
+just twenty-five pounds from Lord Douglas in the old days and now
+wished to return it to Mrs Douglas. So the thing was managed, and if
+she had any suspicions she kept them to herself. She started a little
+fancy goods shop and got along fairly comfortable.
+
+Douglas, by the way, was, publicly, supposed, for her sake and because
+of the little girls, to be away in West Australia on the goldfields.
+
+Time passes without much notice out back, and one hot day, when the sun
+hung behind the fierce sandstorms from the northwest as dully lurid as
+he ever showed in a London fog, Lord Douglas got out of the train that
+had just finished its five-hundred-miles’ run, and not seeing a
+new-chum porter, who started forward by force of habit to take his bag,
+he walked stiffly off the platform and down the main street towards his
+wife’s cottage.
+
+He was very gaunt, and his eyes, to those who passed him closely,
+seemed to have a furtive, hunted expression. He had let his beard grow,
+and it had grown grey.
+
+It was within a few days of Christmas—the same Christmas that we lost
+the Pretty Girl in the Salvation Army. As a rule the big shearing-sheds
+within a fortnight of Bourke cut out in time for the shearers to reach
+the town and have their Christmas dinners and sprees—and for some of
+them to be locked up over Christmas Day—within sound of a church-going
+bell. Most of the chaps gathered in the Shearers’ Union Office on New
+Year’s Eve and discussed Douglas amongst other things.
+
+“I vote we kick the cow out of the town!” snarled One-eyed Bogan,
+viciously.
+
+“We can’t do that,” said Bob Brothers (the Giraffe), speaking more
+promptly than usual. “There’s his wife and youngsters to consider, yer
+know.”
+
+“He something well deserted his wife,” snarled Bogan, “an’ now he comes
+crawlin’ back to her to keep him.”
+
+“Well,” said Mitchell, mildly, “but we ain’t all got as much against
+him as you have, Bogan.”
+
+“He made a crimson jail-bird of me!” snapped Bogan. “Well,” said
+Mitchell, “that didn’t hurt you much, anyway; it rather improved your
+character if anything. Besides, he made a jail-bird of himself
+afterwards, so you ought to have a fellow-feeling—a feathered feeling,
+so to speak. Now you needn’t be offended, Bogan, we’re all jail-birds
+at heart, only we haven’t all got the pluck.”
+
+“I’m in favour of blanky well tarrin’ an’ featherin’ him an’ kickin’
+him out of the town!” shouted Bogan. “It would be a good turn to his
+wife, too; she’d be well rid of the——.”
+
+“Perhaps she’s fond of him,” suggested Mitchell; “I’ve known such cases
+before. I saw them sitting together on the veranda last night when they
+thought no one was looking.”
+
+“He deserted her,” said One-eyed Bogan, in a climbing-down tone, “and
+left her to starve.”
+
+“Perhaps the police were to blame for that,” said Mitchell. “You know
+you deserted all your old mates once for three months, Bogan, and it
+wasn’t your fault.”
+
+“He seems to be a crimson pet of yours, Jack Mitchell,” said Bogan,
+firing up.
+
+“Ah, well, all I know,” said Mitchell, standing up and stretching
+himself wearily, “all I know is that he looked like a gentleman once,
+and treated us like a gentleman, and cheated us like a gentleman, and
+ran some of us in like a gentleman, and, as far as I can see, he’s
+served his time like a gentleman and come back to face us and live
+himself down like a man. I always had a sneaking regard for a
+gentleman.”
+
+“Why, Mitchell, I’m beginning to think you are a gentleman yourself,”
+said Jake Boreham.
+
+“Well,” said Mitchell, “I used to have a suspicion once that I had a
+drop of blue blood in me somewhere, and it worried me a lot; but I
+asked my old mother about it one day, and she scalded me—God bless
+her!—and father chased me with a stockwhip, so I gave up making
+inquiries.”
+
+“You’ll join the bloomin’ Capitalists next,” sneered One-eyed Bogan.
+
+“I wish I could, Bogan,” said Mitchell. “I’d take a trip to Paris and
+see for myself whether the Frenchwomen are as bad as they’re made out
+to be, or go to Japan. But what are we going to do about Douglas?”
+
+“Kick the skunk out of town, or boycott him!” said one or two. “He
+ought to be tarred and feathered and hanged.”
+
+“Couldn’t do worse than hang him,” commented Jake Boreham, cheerfully.
+
+“Oh, yes, we could,” said Mitchell, sitting down, resting his elbows on
+his knees, and marking his points with one forefinger on the other.
+“For instance, we might boil him slow in tar. We might skin him alive.
+We might put him in a cage and poke him with sticks, with his wife and
+children in another cage to look on and enjoy the fun.”
+
+The chaps, who had been sitting quietly listening to Mitchell, and
+grinning, suddenly became serious and shifted their positions uneasily.
+
+“But I can tell you what would hurt his feelings more than anything
+else we could do,” said Mitchell.
+
+“Well, what is it, Jack?” said Tom Hall, rather impatiently.
+
+“Send round the hat and take up a collection for him,” said Mitchell,
+“enough to let him get away with his wife and children and start life
+again in some less respectable town than Bourke. You needn’t grin, I’m
+serious about it.”
+
+There was a thoughtful pause, and one or two scratched their heads.
+“His wife seems pretty sick,” Mitchell went on in a reflective tone. “I
+passed the place this morning and saw him scrubbing out the floor. He’s
+been doing a bit of house-painting for old Heegard to-day. I suppose he
+learnt it in jail. I saw him at work and touched my hat to him.”
+
+“What!” cried Tom Hall, affecting to shrink from Mitchell in horror.
+
+“Yes,” said Mitchell, “I’m not sure that I didn’t take my hat off. Now
+I know it’s not bush religion for a man to touch his hat, except to a
+funeral, or a strange roof or woman sometimes; but when I meet a braver
+man than myself I salute him. I’ve only met two in my life.”
+
+“And who were they, Jack?” asked Jake Boreham.
+
+“One,” said Mitchell—“one is Douglas, and the other—well, the other was
+the man I used to be. But that’s got nothing to do with it.”
+
+“But perhaps Douglas thought you were crowing over him when you took
+off your hat to him—sneerin’ at him, like, Mitchell,” reflected Jake
+Boreham.
+
+“No, Jake,” said Mitchell, growing serious suddenly. “There are ways of
+doing things that another man understands.”
+
+They all thought for a while.
+
+“Well,” said Tom Hall, “supposing we do take up a collection for him,
+he’d be too damned proud to take it.”
+
+“But that’s where we’ve got the pull on him,” said Mitchell,
+brightening up. “I heard Dr Morgan say that Mrs Douglas wouldn’t live
+if she wasn’t sent away to a cooler place, and Douglas knows it; and,
+besides, one of the little girls is sick. We’ve got him in a corner and
+he’ll have to take the stuff. Besides, two years in jail takes a lot of
+the pride out of a man.”
+
+“Well, I’m damned if I’ll give a sprat to help the man who tried his
+best to crush the Unions!” said One-eyed Bogan.
+
+“Damned if I will either!” said Barcoo-Rot.
+
+“Now, look here, One-eyed Bogan,” said Mitchell, “I don’t like to harp
+on old things, for I know they bore you, but when you returned to
+public life that time no one talked of kicking you out of the town. In
+fact, I heard that the chaps put a few pounds together to help you get
+away for a while till you got over your modesty.”
+
+No one spoke.
+
+“I passed Douglas’s place on my way here from my camp to-night,”
+Mitchell went on musingly, “and I saw him walking up and down in the
+yard with his sick child in his arms. You remember that little girl,
+Bogan? I saw her run and pick up your hat and give it to you one day
+when you were trying to put it on with your feet. You remember, Bogan?
+The shock nearly sobered you.”
+
+There was a very awkward pause. The position had become too
+psychological altogether and had to be ended somehow. The awkward
+silence had to be broken, and Bogan broke it. He turned up Bob
+Brothers’s hat, which was lying on the table, and “chucked” in a
+“quid,” qualifying the hat and the quid, and disguising his feelings
+with the national oath of the land.
+
+“We’ve had enough of this gory, maudlin, sentimental tommy-rot,” he
+said. “Here, Barcoo, stump up or I’ll belt it out of your hide!
+I’ll—I’ll take yer to pieces!”
+
+But Douglas didn’t leave the town. He sent his wife and children to
+Sydney until the heat wave was past, built a new room on to the
+cottage, and started a book and newspaper shop, and a poultry farm in
+the back paddock, and flourished.
+
+They called him Mr Douglas for a while, then Douglas, then Percy
+Douglas, and now he is well-known as Old Daddy Douglas, and the Sydney
+_Worker_, _Truth_, and _Bulletin_, and other democratic rags are on
+sale at his shop. He is big with schemes for locking the Darling River,
+and he gets his drink at O’Donohoo’s. He is scarcely yet regarded as a
+straight-out democrat. He was a gentleman once, Mitchell said, and the
+old blood was not to be trusted. But, last elections, Douglas worked
+quietly for Unionism, and gave the leaders certain hints, and put them
+up to various electioneering dodges which enabled them to return, in
+the face of Monopoly, a Labour member who is as likely to go straight
+as long as any other Labour member.
+
+
+
+
+THE BLINDNESS OF ONE-EYED BOGAN
+
+
+They judge not and they are not judged—’tis their philosophy—
+(There’s something wrong with every ship that sails upon the sea).
+                    _The Ballad of the Rouseabout_.
+
+
+“And what became of One-eyed Bogan?” I asked Tom Hall when I met him
+and Jack Mitchell down in Sydney with their shearing cheques the
+Christmas before last.
+
+“You’d better ask Mitchell, Harry,” said Tom. “He can tell you about
+Bogan better than I can. But first, what about the drink we’re going to
+have?”
+
+We turned out of Pitt Street into Hunter Street, and across George
+Street, where a double line of fast electric tramway was running, into
+Margaret Street and had a drink at Pfahlert’s Hotel, where a counter
+lunch—as good as many dinners you get for a shilling—was included with
+a sixpenny drink. “Get a quiet corner,” said Mitchell, “I like to bear
+myself cackle.” So we took our beer out in the fernery and got a cool
+place at a little table in a quiet corner amongst the fern boxes.
+
+“Well, One-eyed Bogan was a hard case, Mitchell,” I said. “Wasn’t he?”
+
+“Yes,” said Mitchell, putting down his “long-beer” glass, “he was.”
+
+“Rather a bad egg?”
+
+“Yes, a regular bad egg,” said Mitchell, decidedly.
+
+“I heard he got caught cheating at cards,” I said.
+
+“Did you?” said Mitchell. “Well, I believe he did. Ah, well,” he added
+reflectively, after another long pull, “One-eyed Bogan won’t cheat at
+cards any more.”
+
+“Why?” I said. “Is he dead then?”
+
+“No,” said Mitchell, “he’s blind.”
+
+“Good God!” I said, “how did that happen?”
+
+“He lost the other eye,” said Mitchell, and he took another drink. “Ah,
+well, he won’t cheat at cards any more—unless there’s cards invented
+for the blind.”
+
+“How did it happen?” I asked.
+
+“Well,” said Mitchell, “you see, Harry, it was this way. Bogan went
+pretty free in Bourke after the shearing before last, and in the end he
+got mixed up in a very ugly-looking business: he was accused of doing
+two new-chum jackaroos out of their stuff by some sort of confidence
+trick.”
+
+“Confidence trick,” I said. “I’d never have thought that One-eyed Bogan
+had the brains to go in for that sort of thing.”
+
+“Well, it seems he had, or else he used somebody else’s brains; there’s
+plenty of broken-down English gentlemen sharpers knocking about out
+back, you know, and Bogan might have been taking lessons from one. I
+don’t know the rights of the case, it was hushed up, as you’ll see
+presently; but, anyway, the jackaroos swore that Bogan had done ’em out
+of ten quid. They were both Cockneys and I suppose they reckoned
+themselves smart, but bushmen have more time to think. Besides, Bogan’s
+one eye was in his favour. You see he always kept his one eye fixed
+strictly on whatever business he had in hand; if he’d had another eye
+to rove round and distract his attention and look at things on the
+outside, the chances are he would never have got into trouble.”
+
+“Never mind that, Jack,” said Tom Hall. “Harry wants to hear the yarn.”
+
+“Well, to make it short, one of the jackaroos went to the police and
+Bogan cleared out. His character was pretty bad just then, so there was
+a piece of blue paper out for him. Bogan didn’t seem to think the thing
+was so serious as it was, for he only went a few miles down the river
+and camped with his horses on a sort of island inside an anabranch,
+till the thing should blow over or the new chums leave Bourke.
+
+“Bogan’s old enemy, Constable Campbell, got wind of Bogan’s camp, and
+started out after him. He rode round the outside track and came in on
+to the river just below where the anabranch joins it, at the lower end
+of the island and right opposite Bogan’s camp. You know what those
+billabongs are: dry gullies till the river rises from the Queensland
+rains and backs them up till the water runs round into the river again
+and makes anabranches of ’em—places that you thought were hollows
+you’ll find above water, and you can row over places you thought were
+hills. There’s no water so treacherous and deceitful as you’ll find in
+some of those billabongs. A man starts to ride across a place where he
+thinks the water is just over the grass, and blunders into a deep
+channel—that wasn’t there before—with a steady undercurrent with the
+whole weight of the Darling River funnelled into it; and if he can’t
+swim and his horse isn’t used to it—or sometimes if he can swim—it’s a
+case with him, and the Darling River cod hold an inquest on him, if
+they have time, before he’s buried deep in Darling River mud for ever.
+And somebody advertises in the missing column for Jack Somebody who was
+last heard of in Australia.”
+
+“Never mind that, Mitchell, go on,” I said.
+
+“Well, Campbell knew the river and saw that there was a stiff current
+there, so he hailed Bogan.
+
+“‘Good day, Campbell,’ shouted Bogan.
+
+“‘I want you, Bogan,’ said Campbell. ‘Come across and bring your
+horses.’
+
+“‘I’m damned if I will,’ says Bogan. ‘I’m not going to catch me death
+o’ cold to save your skin. If you want me you’ll have to bloody well
+come and git me.’ Bogan was a good strong swimmer, and he had good
+horses, but he didn’t try to get away—I suppose he reckoned he’d have
+to face the music one time or another—and one time is as good as
+another out back.
+
+“Campbell was no swimmer; he had no temptation to risk his life—you see
+it wasn’t as in war with a lot of comrades watching ready to advertise
+a man as a coward for staying alive—so he argued with Bogan and tried
+to get him to listen to reason, and swore at him. ‘I’ll make it damned
+hot for you, Bogan,’ he said, ‘if I have to come over for you.’
+
+“‘Two can play at that game,’ says Bogan.
+
+“‘Look here, Bogan,” said Campbell, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. If you
+give me your word that you’ll come up to the police station to-morrow
+I’ll go back and say nothing about it. You can say you didn’t know a
+warrant was out after you. It will be all the better for you in the
+end. Better give me your word, man.’
+
+“Perhaps Campbell knew Bogan better than any of us.
+
+“‘Now then, Bogan,’ he said, ‘don’t be a fool. Give your word like a
+sensible man, and I’ll go back. I’ll give you five minutes to make up
+your mind.’ And he took out his watch.
+
+“But Bogan was nasty and wouldn’t give his word, so there was nothing
+for it but for Campbell to make a try for him.
+
+“Campbell had plenty of pluck, or obstinacy, which amounts to the same
+thing. He put his carbine and revolver under a log, out of the rain
+that was coming on, saw to his handcuffs, and then spurred his horse
+into the water. Bogan lit his pipe with a stick from his camp-fire—so
+Campbell said afterwards—and sat down on his heels and puffed away, and
+waited for him.
+
+“Just as Campbell’s horse floundered into the current Bogan shouted to
+go back, but Campbell thought it was a threat and kept on. But Bogan
+had caught sight of a log coming down the stream, end on, with a sharp,
+splintered end, and before Campbell knew where he was, the sharp end of
+the log caught the horse in the flank. The horse started to plunge and
+struggle sideways, with all his legs, and Campbell got free of him as
+quick as he could. Now, you know, in some of those Darling River
+reaches the current will seem to run steadily far a while, and then
+come with a rush. (I was caught in one of those rushes once, when I was
+in swimming, and would have been drowned if I hadn’t been born to be
+hanged.) Well, a rush came along just as Campbell got free from his
+horse, and he went down-stream one side of a snag and his horse the
+other. Campbell’s pretty stout, you know, and his uniform was tight,
+and it handicapped him.
+
+“Just as he was being washed past the lower end of the snag he caught
+hold of a branch that stuck out of the water and held on. He swung
+round and saw Bogan running down to the point opposite him. Now, you
+know there was always a lot of low cunning about Bogan, and I suppose
+he reckoned that if he pulled Campbell out he’d stand a good show of
+getting clear of his trouble; anyway, if he didn’t save Campbell it
+might be said that he killed him—besides, Bogan was a good swimmer, so
+there wasn’t any heroism about it anyhow. Campbell was only a few feet
+from the bank, but Bogan started to strip—to make the job look as big
+as possible, I suppose. He shouted to Campbell to say he was coming,
+and to hold on. Campbell said afterwards that Bogan seemed an hour
+undressing. The weight of the current was forcing down the bough that
+Campbell was hanging on to, and suddenly, he said, he felt a great
+feeling of helplessness take him by the shoulders. He yelled to Bogan
+and let go.
+
+“Now, it happened that Jake Boreham and I were passing away the time
+between shearings, and we were having a sort of fishing and shooting
+loaf down the river in a boat arrangement that Jake had made out of
+boards and tarred canvas. We called her the _Jolly Coffin_. We were
+just poking up the bank in the slack water, a few hundred yards below
+the billabong, when Jake said, ‘Why, there’s a horse or something in
+the river.’ Then he shouted, ‘No, by God, it’s a man,’ and we poked the
+_Coffin_ out into the stream for all she was worth. ‘Looks like two men
+fighting in the water,’ Jake shouts presently. ‘Hurry up, or they’ll
+drown each other.’
+
+“We hailed ’em, and Bogan shouted for help. He was treading water and
+holding Campbell up in front of him now in real professional style. As
+soon as he heard us he threw up his arms and splashed a bit—I reckoned
+he was trying to put as much style as he could into that rescue. But I
+caught a crab, and, before we could get to them, they were washed past
+into the top of a tree that stood well below flood-mark. I pulled the
+boat’s head round and let her stern down between the branches. Bogan
+had one arm over a limb and was holding Campbell with the other, and
+trying to lift him higher out of the water. I noticed Bogan’s face was
+bleeding—there was a dead limb stuck in the tree with nasty sharp
+points on it, and I reckoned he’d run his face against one of them.
+Campbell was gasping like a codfish out of water, and he was the
+whitest man I ever saw (except one, and _he’d_ been drowned for a
+week). Campbell had the sense to keep still. We asked Bogan if he could
+hold on, and he said he could, but he couldn’t hold Campbell any
+longer. So Jake took the oars and I leaned over the stern and caught
+hold of Campbell, and Jake ran the boat into the bank, and we got him
+ashore; then we went back for Bogan and landed him.
+
+“We had some whisky and soon brought Campbell round; but Bogan was
+bleeding like a pig from a nasty cut over his good eye, so we bound wet
+handkerchiefs round his eyes and led him to a log and he sat down for a
+while, holding his hand to his eye and groaning. He kept saying, ‘I’m
+blind, mates, I’m blind! I’ve lost me other eye!’ but we didn’t dream
+it was so bad as that: we kept giving him whisky. We got some dry
+boughs and made a big fire. Then Bogan stood up and held his arms stiff
+down to his sides, opening and shutting his hands as if he was in great
+pain. And I’ve often thought since what a different man Bogan seemed
+without his clothes and with the broken bridge of his nose and his eyes
+covered by the handkerchiefs. He was clean shaven, and his mouth and
+chin are his best features, and he’s clean limbed and well hung. I
+often thought afterwards that there was something of a blind god about
+him as he stood there naked by the fire on the day he saved Campbell’s
+life—something that reminded me of a statue I saw once in the Art
+Gallery. (Pity the world isn’t blinder to a man’s worst points.)
+
+“Presently Jake listened and said, ‘By God, that’s lucky!’ and we heard
+a steamer coming up-river and presently we saw her coming round the
+point with a couple of wool-barges in tow. We got Bogan aboard and got
+some clothes on him, and took him ashore at Bourke to the new hospital.
+The doctors did all they knew, but Bogan was blind for life. He never
+saw anything again—except ‘a sort of dull white blur,’ as he called
+it—or his past life sometimes, I suppose. Perhaps he saw that for the
+first time. Ah, well!
+
+“Bogan’s old enemy, Barcoo-Rot, went to see him in the hospital, and
+Bogan said, ‘Well, Barcoo, I reckon we’ve had our last fight. I owe you
+a hiding, but I don’t see how I’m going to pay you.’ ‘Never mind that,
+Bogan, old man,’ says Barcoo. ‘I’ll take it from anyone yer likes to
+appoint, if that worries yer; and, look here, Bogan, if I can’t fight
+you I can fight for you—and don’t you forget it!’ And Barcoo used to
+lead Bogan round about town in his spare time and tell him all that was
+going on; and I believe he always had an ear cocked in case someone
+said a word against Bogan—as if any of the chaps would say a word
+against a blind man.
+
+“Bogan’s case was hushed up. The police told us to fix it up the best
+way we could. One of the jackaroos, who reckoned that Bogan had
+swindled him, was a gentleman, and he was the first to throw a quid in
+the Giraffe’s hat when it went round for Bogan, but the other jackaroo
+was a cur: he said he wanted the money that Bogan had robbed him of.
+There were two witnesses, but we sent ’em away, and Tom Hall, there,
+scared the jackaroo. You know Tom was always the best hand we had at
+persuading witnesses in Union cases to go home to see their mothers.”
+
+“How did you scare that jackaroo, Tom?” I asked.
+
+“Tell you about it some other time,” said Tom.
+
+“Well,” said Mitchell, “Bogan was always a good woolsorter, so, next
+shearing, old Baldy Thompson—(you know Baldy Thompson, Harry, of
+West-o’-Sunday Station)—Baldy had a talk with some of the chaps, and
+took Bogan out in his buggy with him to West-o’-Sunday. Bogan would sit
+at the end of the rolling tables, in the shearing-shed, with a boy to
+hand him the fleeces, and he’d feel a fleece and tell the boy what bin
+to throw it into; and by and by he began to learn to throw the fleeces
+into the bins himself. And sometimes Baldy would have a sheep brought
+to him and get him to feel the fleece and tell him the quality of it.
+And then again Baldy would talk, just loud enough for Bogan to
+overhear, and swear that he’d sooner have Bogan, blind as he was, than
+half a dozen scientific jackaroo experts with all their eyes about
+them.
+
+“Of course Bogan wasn’t worth anything much to Baldy, but Baldy gave
+him two pounds a week out of his own pocket, and another quid that we
+made up between us; so he made enough to pull him through the rest of
+the year.
+
+“It was curious to see how soon he learned to find his way about the
+hut and manage his tea and tucker. It was a rough shed, but everybody
+was eager to steer Bogan about—and, in fact, two of them had a fight
+about it one day. Baldy and all of us——and especially visitors when
+they came—were mighty interested in Bogan; and I reckon we were rather
+proud of having a blind wool-sorter. I reckon Bogan had thirty or forty
+pairs of eyes watching out for him in case he’d run against something
+or fall. It irritated him to be messed round too much—he said a baby
+would never learn to walk if it was held all the time. He reckoned he’d
+learn more in a year than a man who’d served a lifetime to blindness;
+but we didn’t let him wander much—for fear he’d fall into the big rocky
+waterhole there, by accident.
+
+“And after the shearing-season Bogan’s wife turned up in Bourke——”
+
+“Bogan’s wife!” I exclaimed. “Why, I never knew Bogan was married.”
+
+“Neither did anyone else,” said Mitchell. “But he was. Perhaps that was
+what accounted for Bogan. Sometimes, in his sober moods, I used to have
+an idea that there must have been something behind the Bogan to account
+for him. Perhaps he got trapped—or got married and found out that he’d
+made a mistake—which is about the worst thing a man can find out——”
+
+“Except that his wife made the mistake, Mitchell,” said Tom Hall.
+
+“Or that both did,” reflected Mitchell. “Ah, well!—never mind—Bogan had
+been married two or three years. Maybe he got married when he was on
+the spree—I knew that he used to send money to someone in Sydney and I
+suppose it was her. Anyway, she turned up after he was blind. She was a
+hard-looking woman—just the sort that might have kept a third-rate pub
+or a sly-grog shop. But you can’t judge between husband and wife,
+unless you’ve lived in the same house with them—and under the same
+roofs with their parents right back to Adam for that matter. Anyway,
+she stuck to Bogan all right; she took a little two-roomed cottage and
+made him comfortable—she’s got a sewing-machine and a mangle and takes
+in washing and sewing. She brought a carrotty-headed youngster with
+her, and the first time I saw Bogan sitting on the veranda with that
+youngster on his knee I thought it was a good thing that he was blind.”
+
+“Why?” I asked.
+
+“Because the youngster isn’t his,” said Mitchell.
+
+“How do you know that?”
+
+“By the look of it—and by the look on her face, once, when she caught
+me squinting from the kid’s face to Bogan’s.”
+
+“And whose was it?” I asked, without thinking.
+
+“How am I to know?” said Mitchell. “It might be yours for all I
+know—it’s ugly enough, and you never had any taste in women. But you
+mustn’t speak of that in Bourke. But there’s another youngster coming,
+and I’ll swear that’ll be Bogan’s all right.
+
+“A curious thing about Bogan is that he’s begun to be fidgety about his
+personal appearance—and you know he wasn’t a dood. He wears a collar
+now, and polishes his boots; he wears elastic-sides, and polishes ’em
+himself—the only thing is that he blackens over the elastic. He can do
+many things for himself, and he’s proud of it. He says he can see many
+things that he couldn’t see when he had his eyes. You seldom hear him
+swear, save in a friendly way; he seems much gentler, but he reckons he
+would stand a show with Barcoo-Rot even now, if Barcoo would stand up
+in front of him and keep yelling——”
+
+“By the way,” I asked, “how did Bogan lose the sight of his other eye?”
+
+“Sleeping out in the rain when he was drunk,” said Mitchell. “He got a
+cold in his eye.” Then he asked, suddenly:
+
+“Did you ever see a blind man cry?”
+
+“No,” I said.
+
+“Well, I have,” said Mitchell.
+
+“You know Bogan wears goggles to hide his eyes—his wife made him do
+that. The chaps often used to drop round and have a yarn with Bogan and
+cheer him up, and one evening I was sitting smoking with him, and
+yarning about old times, when he got very quiet all of a sudden, and I
+saw a tear drop from under one of his shutters and roll down his cheek.
+It wasn’t the eye he lost saving Campbell—it was the old wall-eye he
+used to use in the days before he was called ‘One-eyed Bogan.’ I
+suppose he thought it was dark and that I couldn’t see his face.
+(There’s a good many people in this world who think you can’t see
+because they can’t.) It made me feel like I used to feel sometimes in
+the days when I felt things——”
+
+“Come on, Mitchell,” said Tom Hall, “you’ve had enough beer.”
+
+“I think I have,” said Mitchell. “Besides, I promised to send a wire to
+Jake Boreham to tell him that his mother’s dead. Jake’s shearing at
+West-o’-Sunday; shearing won’t be over for three or four weeks, and
+Jake wants an excuse to get away without offending old Baldy and come
+down and have a fly round with us before the holidays are over.”
+
+Down at the telegraph-office Mitchell took a form and filled it in very
+carefully: “Jacob Boreham. West-o’-Sunday Station. Bourke. Come home at
+once. Mother is dead. In terrible trouble. Father dying.—MARY BOREHAM.”
+
+“I think that will do,” said Mitchell. “It ought to satisfy Baldy, and
+it won’t give Jake too much of a shock, because he hasn’t got a sister
+or sister-in-law, and his father and mother’s been dead over ten
+years.”
+
+“Now, if I was running a theatre,” said Mitchell, as we left the
+office, “I’d give five pounds a night for the face Jake’ll have on him
+when he takes that telegram to Baldy Thompson.”
+
+
+
+
+TWO SUNDOWNERS
+
+
+Sheep stations in Australia are any distance from twenty to a hundred
+miles apart, to keep well within the boundaries of truth and the great
+pastoral country. Shearing at any one shed only lasts a few weeks in
+the year; the number of men employed is according to the size of the
+shed—from three to five men in the little bough-covered shed of the
+small “cockatoo,” up to a hundred and fifty or two hundred hands all
+told in the big corrugated iron machine shed of a pastoral company.
+
+Shearing starts early up in northern Queensland, where you can get a
+“January shed;” and further south, in February, March or April sheds,
+and so on down into New South Wales, where shearing often lasts over
+Christmas. Shearers travel from shed to shed; some go a travel season
+without getting a pen, and an unlucky shearer might ride or tramp for
+several seasons and never get hands in wool; and all this explains the
+existence of the “footman” with his swag and the horse man with his
+packhorse. They have a rough life, and the Australian shearers are
+certainly the most democratic and perhaps the most independent,
+intelligent and generous body of workmen in the world.
+
+Shearers at a shed elect their own cook, pay him so much a head, and
+they buy their rations in the lump from the station store; and
+“travellers,” _i.e._ shearers and rouseabouts travelling for work, are
+invited, as a matter of course, to sit down to the shearers’ table.
+Also a certain allowance of tea, sugar, flour or meat is still made to
+travellers at most Western station stores; so it would be rather
+surprising if there weren’t some who travelled on the game. The swagman
+loafer, or “bummer,” times himself, especially in bad weather, to
+arrive at the shed just about sundown; he is then sure of “tea,”
+shelter for the night, breakfast, and some tucker from the cook to take
+him on along the track. Brummy and Swampy were sundowners.
+
+Swampy was a bummer born—and proud of it. Brummy had drifted down to
+loaferdom, and his nature was soured and his spirit revengeful against
+the world because of the memory of early years wasted at hard work and
+in being honest. Both were short and stout, and both had scrubby
+beards, but Brummy’s beard was a dusty black and Swampy’s fiery red—he
+indulged in a monkey-shave sometimes, but his lower face was mostly
+like a patch of coarse stubble with a dying hedge round it. They had
+travelled together for a long time. They seemed at times to hate each
+other with a murderous hatred, but they were too lazy to fight.
+Sometimes they’d tramp side by side and growl at each other by the
+hour, other times they’d sulk for days; one would push on ahead and the
+other drop behind until there was a mile or two between them; but one
+always carried the billy, or the sugar, or something that was necessary
+to the comfort of the other, so they’d come together at sundown. They
+had travelled together a long time, and perhaps that was why they hated
+each other. They often agreed to part and take different tracks, and
+sometimes they parted—for a while. They agreed in cadging, and cadged
+in turn. They carried a spare set of tucker-bags, and if, for instance,
+they were out of sugar and had plenty flour and tea, Brummy or Swampy
+would go to the store, boundary-rider’s hut, or selector’s, with the
+sugar-bag in his hand and the other bags in his shirt front on spec.
+He’d get the sugar first, and then, if it looked good enough, the
+flour-bag would come out, then the tea-bag. And before he left he’d
+remark casually that he and his mate hadn’t had a smoke for two days.
+They never missed a chance. And when they’d cadged more tucker than
+they could comfortably carry, they’d camp for a day or two and eat it
+down. Sometimes they’d have as much as a pound of tobacco, all in
+little “borrowed” bits, cut from the sticks or cakes of honest
+travellers. They never missed a chance. If a stranger gave Swampy his
+cake of tobacco with instructions to “cut off a pipeful,” Swampy would
+cut off as much as he thought judicious, talking to the stranger and
+watching his eye all the time, and hiding his palm as much as
+possible—and sometimes, when he knew he’d cut off more than he could
+cram into his pipe, he’d put his hand in his pocket for the pipe and
+drop some of the tobacco there. Then he’d hand the plug to his mate,
+engage the stranger in conversation and try to hold his eye or detract
+his attention from Brummy so as to give Brummy a chance of cutting off
+a couple of pipefuls, and, maybe, nicking off a corner of the cake and
+slipping it into his pocket. I once heard a bushman say that no one but
+a skunk would be guilty of this tobacco trick—that it is about the
+meanest trick a man could be capable of—_because it spoils the chances
+of the next hard-up swaggy who asks the victim for tobacco._
+
+When Brummy and Swampy came to a shed where shearing was in full swing,
+they’d inquire, first thing, and with some show of anxiety, if there
+was any chance of gettin’ on; if the shed was full-handed they’d growl
+about hard times, wonder what the country was coming to; talk of their
+missuses and kids that they’d left in Sydney, curse the squatters and
+the Government, and, next morning, get a supply of rations from the
+cook and depart with looks of gloom. If, on the other hand, there was
+room in the shed for one or both of them, and the boss told them to go
+to work in the morning, they’d keep it quiet from the cook if possible,
+and depart, after breakfast, unostentatiously.
+
+Sometimes, at the beginning of a drought, when the tall dead grass was
+like tinder for hundreds of miles and a carelessly-dropped match would
+set the whole country on fire, Swampy would strike a hard-faced
+squatter, manager or overseer with a cold eye, and the conversation
+would be somewhat as follows:
+
+Swampy: “Good day, boss!”
+
+Boss (shortly): “’Day.”
+
+Swampy: “Any chance of a job?”
+
+Boss: “Naw. Got all I want and we don’t start for a fortnight.”
+
+Swampy: “Can I git a bit o’ meat?”
+
+Boss: “Naw! Don’t kill till Saturday.”
+
+Swampy: “Pint o’ flour?”
+
+Boss: “Naw. Short ourselves.”
+
+Swampy: “Bit o’ tea or sugar, boss?”
+
+Boss: “Naw—what next?”
+
+Swampy: “Bit o’ baccer, boss. Ain’t had a smoke for a week.”
+
+Boss: “Naw. Ain’t got enough for meself till the wagon comes out.”
+
+Swampy: “Ah, well! It’s hot, ain’t it, boss?”
+
+Boss: “Yes-it’s hot.”
+
+Swampy: “Country very dry?”
+
+Boss: “Yes. Looks like it.”
+
+Swampy: “A fire ’ud be very bad just now?”
+
+Boss: “Eh?”
+
+Swampy: “Yes. Now I’m allers very careful with matches an’ fire when
+I’m on the track.”
+
+Boss “Are yer?”
+
+Swampy: “Yes. I never lights a fire near the grass—allers in the middle
+of the track—it’s the safest place yer can get. An’ I allers puts the
+fire out afore I leaves the camp. If there ain’t no water ter spare I
+covers the ashes with dirt. An’ some fellers are so careless with
+matches lightin’ their pipes.” (Reflective pause.)
+
+Boss: “Are they?”
+
+Swampy: “Yes. Now, when I lights me pipe on the track in dry weather I
+allers rubs the match head up an’ drops it in the dust. I never drops a
+burnin’ match. But some travellers is so careless. A chap might light
+his pipe an’ fling the match away without thinkin’ an’ the match might
+fall in a dry tuft, an’-there yer are!” (with a wave of his arms).
+“Hundreds of miles o’ grass gone an’ thousands o’ sheep starvin’. Some
+fellers is so careless—they never thinks.... An’ what’s more, they
+don’t care if they burn the whole country.”
+
+Boss (scratching his head reflectively): “Ah-umph! You can go up to the
+store and get a bit of tucker. The storekeeper might let yer have a bit
+o’ tobacco.”
+
+On one occasion, when they were out of flour and meat; Brummy and
+Swampy came across two other pilgrims camped on a creek, who were also
+out of flour and meat. One of them had tried a surveyors’ camp a little
+further down, but without success. The surveyors’ cook had said that he
+was short of flour and meat himself. Brummy tried him—no luck. Then
+Swampy said he’d go and have a try. As luck would have it, the
+surveyors’ cook was just going to bake; he had got the flour out in the
+dish, put in the salt and baking powder, mixed it up, and had gone to
+the creek for a billy of water when Swampy arrived. While the cook was
+gone Swampy slipped the flour out of the dish into his bag, _wiped_ the
+dish, set it down again, and planted the bag behind a tree at a little
+distance. Then he stood waiting, holding a spare empty bag in his hand.
+When the cook came back he glanced at the dish, lowered the billy of
+water slowly to the ground, scratched his head, and looked at the dish
+again in a puzzled way.
+
+“Blanked if I didn’t think I got that flour out!” he said.
+
+“What’s that, mate?” asked Swampy.
+
+“Why! I could have sworn I got the flour out in the dish and mixed it
+before I went for the water,” said the cook, staring at the dish again.
+“It’s rum what tricks your memory plays on you sometimes.”
+
+“Yes,” said Swampy, showing interest, while the cook got some more
+flour out into the dish from a bag in the back of the tent. “It is
+strange. I’ve done the same, thing meself. I suppose it’s the heat that
+makes us all a bit off at times.”
+
+“Do you cook, then?” asked the surveyors’ cook.
+
+“Well, yes. I’ve done a good bit of it in me time; but it’s about
+played out. I’m after stragglers now.” (Stragglers are stray sheep
+missed in the general muster and found about the out paddocks and shorn
+after the general shearing.)
+
+They had a yarn and Swampy “bit the cook’s ear” for a “bit o’ meat an’
+tea an’ sugar,” not forgetting “a handful of flour if yer can spare
+it.”
+
+“Sorry,” said the cook, “but I can only let you have about a pint.
+We’re very short ourselves.”
+
+“Oh, that’s all right!” said Swampy, as he put the stuff into his spare
+bags. “Thank you! Good day!”
+
+“Good day,” said the cook. The cook went on with his work and Swampy
+departed, catching up the bag of flour from behind the tree as he
+passed it, and keeping the clump of timber well between him and the
+surveyors’ camp, lest the cook should glance round, and, noticing the
+increased bulk of his load, get some new ideas concerning mental
+aberration.
+
+Nearly every bushman has at least one superstition, or notion, that
+lasts his time—as nearly every bushman has at least one dictionary word
+which lasts him all his life. Brummy had a gloomy notion—Lord knows how
+he got it!—that he should ’a’ gone on the boards if his people hadn’t
+been so ignorant. He reckoned that he had the face and cut of an actor,
+could mimic any man’s voice, and had wonderful control over his
+features. They came to a notoriously “hungry” station, where there was
+a Scottish manager and storekeeper. Brummy went up to “government
+house” in his own proper person, had a talk with the storekeeper, spoke
+of a sick mate, and got some flour and meat. They camped down the
+creek, and next morning Brummy started to shave himself.
+
+“Whatever are you a-doin’ of, Brummy?” gasped Swampy in great
+astonishment.
+
+“Wait and see,” growled Brummy, with awful impressiveness, as if he
+were going to cut Swampy’s throat after he’d finished shaving. He
+shaved off his beard and whiskers, put on a hat and coat belonging to
+Swampy, changed his voice, dropped his shoulders, and went limping up
+to the station on a game leg. He saw the cook and got some “brownie,” a
+bit of cooked meat and a packet of baking powder. Then he saw the
+storekeeper and approached the tobacco question. Sandy looked at him
+and listened with some slight show of interest, then he said:
+
+“Oh that’s all right now! But ye needn’t ha’ troublt shavin’ yer
+beard—the cold weather’s comin’ on! An’ yer mate’s duds don’t suit
+ye—they’re too sma’; an’ yer game leg doesn’t fit ye either—it takes a
+lot o’ practice. Ha’ ye got ony tea an’ sugar?”
+
+Brummy must have touched something responsive in that old Scot
+somewhere, but his lack of emotion upset Brummy somewhat, or else an
+old deep-rooted superstition had been severely shaken. Anyway he let
+Swampy do the cadging for several days thereafter.
+
+But one bad season they were very hard up indeed—even for Brummy and
+Swampy. They’d tramped a long hungry track and had only met a few
+wretched jackaroos, driven out of the cities by hard times, and
+tramping hopelessly west. They were out of tobacco, and their trousers
+were so hopelessly “gone” behind that when they went to cadge at a
+place where there was a woman they were moved to back and sidle and
+edge away again—and neither Brummy nor Swampy was over fastidious in
+matters of dress or personal appearance. It was absolutely necessary to
+earn a pound or two, so they decided to go to work for a couple of
+weeks. It wouldn’t hurt them, and then there was the novelty of it.
+
+They struck West-o’-Sunday Station, and the boss happened to want a
+rouseabout to pick up wool and sweep the floor for the shearers.
+
+“I can put _one_ of you on,” he said. “Fix it up between yourselves and
+go to work in the morning.”
+
+Brummy and Swampy went apart to talk it over.
+
+“Look here! Brum, old man,” said Swampy, with great heartiness, “we’ve
+been mates for a long while now, an’ shared an’ shared alike. You’ve
+allers acted straight to me an’ I want to do the fair thing by you. _I_
+don’t want to stand in _your_ light. You take the job an’ I’ll be
+satisfied with a pair of pants out of it and a bit o’ tobacco now an’
+agen. There yer are! I can’t say no fairer than that.”
+
+“Yes,” said Brummy, resentfully, “an’ you’ll always be thrown’ it up to
+me afterwards that I done you out of a job!”
+
+“I’ll swear I won’t,” said Swampy, hurriedly. “But since you’re so
+blasted touchy and suspicious about it, _you_ take this job an’ I’ll
+take the next that turns up. How’ll that suit you?”
+
+Brummy thought resentfully.
+
+“Look here!” he said presently, “let’s settle it and have done with
+this damned sentimental tommy-rot. I’ll tell you what I’ll do—I’ll give
+you the job and take my chance. The boss might want another man
+to-morrow. Now, are you satisfied?”
+
+But Swampy didn’t look grateful or happy.
+
+“Well,” growled Brummy, “of all the —— I ever travelled with you’re the
+——. What do you want anyway? What’ll satisfy you? That’s all I want to
+know. Hey?—can’t yer speak?”
+
+“Let’s toss up for it,” said Swampy, sulkily.
+
+“All right,” said Brummy, with a big oath, and he felt in his pocket
+for two old pennies he had. But Swampy had got a suspicion somehow that
+one of those pennies had two heads on it, and he wasn’t sure that the
+other hadn’t two tails—also, he suspected Brummy of some skill in
+“palming,” so he picked up a chip from the wood-heap, spat on it, and
+spun it into the air. “Sing out!” he cried, “wet or dry?”
+
+“Dry,” said Brummy, promptly. He had a theory that the wet side of the
+chip, being presumably heaviest, was more likely to fall downwards; but
+this time it was “wet” up three times in succession. Brummy ignored
+Swampy’s hand thrown out in hearty congratulation; and next morning he
+went to work in the shed. Swampy camped down the river, and Brummy
+supplied him with a cheap pair of moleskin trousers, tucker and
+tobacco. The shed cut out within three weeks and the two sundowners
+took the track again, Brummy with two pounds odd in his pocket—he
+having negotiated his cheque at the shed.
+
+But now there was suspicion, envy, and distrust in the hearts of those
+two wayfarers. Brummy was now a bloated capitalist, and proud, and
+anxious to get rid of Swampy—at least Swampy thought so. He thought
+that the least that Brummy might have done was to have shared the
+“stuff” with him.
+
+“Look here, Brummy,” he said reproachfully, “we’ve shared and shared
+alike, and——”
+
+“We never shared money,” said Brummy, decidedly.
+
+“Do you think I want yer blasted money?” retorted Swampy, indignantly.
+“When did I ever ask yer for a sprat? Tell me that!”
+
+“You wouldn’t have got it if you had asked,” said Brummy,
+uncompromisingly. “Look here!” with vehemence. “Didn’t I keep yer in
+tobacco and buy yer gory pants? What are you naggin’ about anyway?”
+
+“Well,” said Swampy, “all I was goin’ to say was that yer might let me
+carry one of them quids in case you lost one—yer know you’re careless
+and lose things; or in case anything happened to you.”
+
+“I ain’t going to lose it—if that’s all that’s fretting you,” said
+Brummy, “and there ain’t nothing going to happen to me—and don’t you
+forget it.”
+
+“That’s all the thanks I get for givin’ yer my gory job,” said Swampy,
+savagely. “I won’t be sick a soft fool agen, I can tell yer.”
+
+Brummy was silent, and Swampy dropped behind. He brooded darkly, and
+it’s a bad thing for a man to brood in the bush. He was reg’lar
+disgusted with Brummy. He’d allers acted straight to him, and Brummy
+had acted like a “cow.” He’d stand it no longer; but he’d have some
+satisfaction. He wouldn’t be a fool. If Brummy was mean skunk enough to
+act to a mate like that, Swampy would be even with him; he would wait
+till Brummy was asleep, collar the stuff, and clear. It was his job,
+anyway, and the money was his by rights. He’d have his rights.
+
+Brummy, who carried the billy, gave Swampy a long tramp before he
+camped and made a fire. They had tea in silence, and smoked moodily
+apart until Brummy turned in. They usually slept on the ground, with a
+few leaves under them, or on the sand where there was any, each wrapped
+in his own blankets, and with their spare clothes, or rags rather, for
+pillows. Presently Swampy turned in and pretended to sleep, but he lay
+awake watching, and listening to Brummy’s breathing. When he thought it
+was safe he moved cautiously and slipped his hand under Brummy’s head,
+but Brummy’s old pocket-book—in which he carried some dirty old letters
+in a woman’s handwriting—was not there. All next day Swampy watched
+Brummy sharply every time he put his hands into his pockets, to try and
+find out in which pocket he kept his money. Brummy seemed very cheerful
+and sociable, even considerate, to his mate all day, and Swampy
+pretended to be happy. They yarned more than they had done for many a
+day. Brummy was a heavy sleeper, and that night Swampy went over him
+carefully and felt all his pockets, but without success. Next day
+Brummy seemed in high spirits—they were nearing Bourke, where they
+intended to loaf round the pubs for a week or two. On the third night
+Swampy waited till about midnight, and then searched Brummy, every inch
+of him he could get at, and tickled him, with a straw of grass till he
+turned over, and ran his hands over the other side of him, and over his
+feet (Brummy slept with his socks on), and looked in his boots, and in
+the billy and in the tucker-bags, and felt in every tuft of grass round
+the camp, and under every bush, and down a hollow stump, and up a
+hollow log: but there was no pocket-book. Brummy couldn’t have lost the
+money and kept it dark—he’d have gone back to look for it at once.
+Perhaps he’d thrown away the book and sewn the money in his clothes
+somewhere. Swampy crept back to him and felt the lining of his hat, and
+was running his hand over Brummy’s chest when Brummy suddenly started
+to snore, and Swampy desisted without loss of time. He crept back to
+bed, breathing short, and thought hard. It struck him that there was
+something aggressive about that snore. He began to suspect that Brummy
+was up to his little game, and it pained him.
+
+Next morning Brummy was decidedly frivolous. At any other time Swampy
+would have put it down to a “touch o’ the sun,” but now he felt a
+growing conviction that Brummy knew what he’d been up to the last three
+nights, and the more he thought of it the more it pained him—till at
+last he could stand it no longer.
+
+“Look here, Brummy,” he said frankly, “where the hell do you keep that
+flamin’ stuff o’ yourn? I been tryin’ to git at it ever since we left
+West-o’-Sunday.”
+
+“I know you have, Swampy,” said Brummy, affectionately—as if he
+considered that Swampy had done his best in the interests of mateship.
+
+“I _knowed_ yer knowed!” exclaimed Swampy, triumphantly. “But where the
+blazes did yer put it?”
+
+“Under _your_ head, Swampy, old man,” said Brummy, cheerfully.
+
+Swampy was hurt now. He commented in the language that used to be used
+by the bullock-punchers of the good days as they pranced up and down by
+their teams and lammed into the bullocks with saplings and crow-bars,
+and called on them to lift a heavy load out of a bog in the bed of a
+muddy creek.
+
+“Never mind, Swampy!” said Brummy, soothingly, as his mate paused and
+tried to remember worse oaths. “It wasn’t your fault.”
+
+But they parted at Bourke. Swampy had allers acted straight ter
+Brummy—share ’n’ share alike. He’d do as much for a mate as any other
+man, an’ put up with as much from a mate. He had put up with a lot from
+Brummy: he’d picked him up on the track and learned him all he knowed;
+Brummy would have starved many a time if it hadn’t been for Swampy;
+Swampy had learned him how to “battle.” He’d stick to Brummy yet, but
+he couldn’t stand ingratitude. He hated low cunnin’ an’ suspicion, and
+when a gory mate got suspicious of his own old mate and wouldn’t trust
+him, an’ took to plantin’ his crimson money—it was time to leave him.
+
+
+
+
+A SKETCH OF MATESHIP
+
+
+Bill and Jim, professional shearers, were coming into Bourke from the
+Queensland side. They were horsemen and had two packhorses. At the last
+camp before Bourke Jim’s packhorse got disgusted and home-sick during
+the night and started back for the place where he was foaled. Jim was
+little more than a new-chum jackaroo; he was no bushman and generally
+got lost when he went down the next gully. Bill was a bushman, so it
+was decided that he should go back to look for the horse.
+
+Now Bill was going to sell his packhorse, a well-bred mare, in Bourke,
+and he was anxious to get her into the yards before the horse sales
+were over; this was to be the last day of the sales. Jim was the best
+“barracker” of the two; he had great imagination; he was a very
+entertaining story-teller and conversationalist in social life, and a
+glib and a most impressive liar in business, so it was decided that he
+should hurry on into Bourke with the mare and sell her for Bill. Seven
+pounds, reserve.
+
+Next day Bill turned up with the missing horse and saw Jim standing
+against a veranda-post of the Carriers’ Arms, with his hat down over
+his eyes, and thoughtfully spitting in the dust. Bill rode over to him.
+
+“’Ullo, Jim.”
+
+“’Ullo, Bill. I see you got him.”
+
+“Yes, I got him.”
+
+Pause.
+
+“Where’d yer find him?”
+
+“’Bout ten mile back. Near Ford’s Bridge. He was just feedin’ along.”
+
+Pause. Jim shifted his feet and spat in the dust.
+
+“Well,” said Bill at last. “How did you get on, Jim?”
+
+“Oh, all right,” said Jim. “I sold the mare.”
+
+“That’s right,” said Bill. “How much did she fetch?”
+
+“Eight quid;” then, rousing himself a little and showing some emotion,
+“An’ I could ’a’ got ten quid for her if I hadn’t been a dam’ fool.”
+
+“Oh, that’s good enough,” said Bill.
+
+“I could ’a’ got ten quid if I’d ’a’ waited.”
+
+“Well, it’s no use cryin’. Eight quid is good enough. Did you get the
+stuff?”
+
+“Oh, yes. They parted all right. If I hadn’t been such a dam’ fool an’
+rushed it, there was a feller that would ’a’ given ten quid for that
+mare.”
+
+“Well, don’t break yer back about it,” said Bill. “Eight is good
+enough.”
+
+“Yes. But I could ’a’ got ten,” said Jim, languidly, putting his hand
+in his pocket.
+
+Pause. Bill sat waiting for him to hand over the money; but Jim
+withdrew his hand empty, stretched, and said:
+
+“Ah, well, Bill, I done it in. Lend us a couple o’ notes.”
+
+Jim had been drinking and gambling all night and he’d lost the eight
+pounds as well as his own money.
+
+Bill didn’t explode. What was the use? He should have known that Jim
+wasn’t to be trusted with money in town. It was he who had been the
+fool. He sighed and lent Jim a pound, and they went in to have a drink.
+
+Now it strikes me that if this had happened in a civilized country
+(like England) Bill would have had Jim arrested and jailed for larceny
+as a bailee, or embezzlement, or whatever it was. And would Bill or Jim
+or the world have been any better for it?
+
+
+
+
+ON THE TUCKER TRACK: A STEELMAN STORY
+
+
+Steelman and Smith, professional wanderers from New Zealand, took a run
+over to Australia one year to have a look at the country, and drifted
+out back, and played cards and “headin’ ’em” at the shearing-sheds
+(while pretending to be strangers to each other), and sold eye-water
+and unpatented medicine, and worked the tucker tracks. They struck a
+streak of bad luck at West-o’-Sunday Station, where they were advised
+(by the boss and about fifty excited shearers) to go east, and not to
+stop till they reached the coast. They were tramping along the track
+towards Bourke; they were very hard up and had to “battle” for tucker
+and tobacco along the track. They came to a lonely shanty, about two
+camps west of Bourke.
+
+“We’ll turn off into the scrub and strike the track the other side of
+the shanty and come back to it,” said Steelman. “You see, if they see
+us coming into Bourke they’ll say to themselves, ‘Oh, we’re never
+likely to see these chaps again,’ and they won’t give us anything, or,
+perhaps, only a pinch of tea or sugar in a big lump of paper. There’s
+some women that can never see a tucker-bag, even if you hold it right
+under their noses. But if they see us going out back they’ll reckon
+that we’ll get a shed likely as not, and we’ll be sure to call there
+with our cheques coming back. I hope the old man’s got the lumbago, or
+sciatica, or something.”
+
+“Why?” asked Smith.
+
+“Because whenever I see an old man poking round the place on a stick I
+always make for him straight and inquire about his trouble; and no
+matter what complaint he’s got, my old man suffered from it for years.
+It’s pretty hard graft listening to an old man with a pet leg, but I
+find it pays; and I always finish up by advising him to try St Jacob’s
+oil. Perhaps he’s been trying it for years, but that doesn’t matter;
+the consultation works out all right all the same, and there’s never
+been a remedy tried yet but I’ve got another.
+
+“I’ve got a lot of Maori and blackfellow remedies in my mind, and when
+they fail I can fall back on the Chinese; and if that isn’t enough I’ve
+got a list of my grandmother’s remedies that she wrote down for me when
+I was leaving home, and I kept it for a curiosity. It took her three
+days to write them, and I reckon they’ll fill the bill.
+
+“You don’t want a shave. You look better with that stubble on. You
+needn’t say anything; just stand by and wear your usual expression, and
+if they ask me what’s the matter with my mate I’ll fix up a disease for
+you to have, and get something extra on your account, poor beggar!
+
+“I wish we had a chap with us that could sing a bit and run the gamut
+on a fiddle or something. With a sickly-looking fish like you to stand
+by and look interesting and die slowly of consumption all the time, and
+me to do the talking, we’d be able to travel from one end of the bush
+to the other and live on the fat of the land. I wouldn’t cure you for a
+hundred pounds:”
+
+They reached the shanty, and there, sure enough, was an old man
+pottering round with a list to starboard. He was working with a hoe
+inside a low paling fence round a sort of garden. Steelman and Smith
+stopped outside the fence.
+
+“Good day, boss!”
+
+“’Day.”
+
+“It’s hot.”
+
+“It’s hot.”
+
+So far it was satisfactory.
+
+He was a little man, with a wiry, red beard. He might have been a
+Scandinavian.
+
+“You seem to be a bit lame,” said Steelman. “Hurt your foot?”
+
+“Naw,” said the old man. “It’s an old thing.”
+
+“Ah!” said Steelman, “lumbago, I suppose? My father suffered cruel from
+it for years.”
+
+“Naw,” said the old man, moving closer to the fence. “It ain’t in me
+back; the trouble’s with me leg.”
+
+“Oh!” said Steelman. “One a bit shorter than the other?”
+
+“Well, yes. It seems to be wearin’ a bit shorter. I must see to it.”
+
+“Hip disease, perhaps?” said Steelman. “A brother o’ mine had——”
+
+“Naw, it’s not in the hip,” said the old man. “My leg’s gone at the
+knee.”
+
+“Oh! stiff joint; I know what that is. Had a touch of it once myself.
+An uncle of mine was nearly crippled with it. He used to use St Jacob’s
+oil. Ever try St Jacob’s oil?”
+
+“Naw,” said the old man, “not that I know of. I’ve used linseed oil
+though.”
+
+“Linseed oil!” said Steelman; “I’ve never heard of that for stiff knee.
+How do you use it?”
+
+“Use it raw,” said the old man. “Raw linseed oil; I’ve rubbed it in,
+and I’ve soaked me leg in it.”
+
+“Soaked your leg in it!” said Steelman. “And did it do it any good?”
+
+“Well, it seems to preserve it—keeps it from warping, and it wears
+better—and it makes it heavier. It seemed a bit too light before.”
+
+Steelman nudged Smith under cover of the palings. The old man was
+evidently a bit ratty.
+
+“Well, I hope your leg will soon be all right, boss,” said Steelman.
+
+“Thank you,” said the old man, “but I don’t think there’s much hope. I
+suppose you want some tucker?”
+
+“Well, yes,” said Steelman, rather taken aback by the old man’s sudden
+way of putting it. “We’re hard up.”
+
+“Well, come along to the house and I’ll see if I can get yer
+something,” said the old man; and they walked along outside the fence,
+and he hobbled along inside, till he came to a little gate at the
+corner. He opened the gate and stumped out. He had a wooden leg. He
+wore his trouser-leg down over it, and the palings had hidden the
+bottom from Steelman and Smith.
+
+He wanted them to stay to dinner, but Steelman didn’t feel comfortable,
+and thanked him, and said they’d rather be getting on (Steelman always
+spoke for Smith); so the old man gave them some cooked meat, bread, and
+a supply of tea and sugar. Steelman watched his face very close, but he
+never moved a muscle. But when they looked back he was leaning on his
+hoe, and seemed to be shaking.
+
+“Took you back a bit, Steely, didn’t it?” suggested Smith.
+
+“How do you make that out?” snorted Steelman, turning on him suddenly.
+“I knew a carpenter who used to soak his planes in raw linseed oil to
+preserve them and give them weight. There’s nothing funny about that.”
+
+Smith rubbed his head.
+
+
+
+
+A BUSH PUBLICAN’S LAMENT
+
+
+“... For thirst is long and throats is short
+Among the sons o’ men.”
+                    M. J. C.
+
+
+I wish I was spifflicated before I ever seen a pub!
+
+You see, it’s this way. Suppose a cove comes along on a blazin’ hot day
+in the drought—an’ _you_ ought to know how hell-hot it can be out
+here—an’ he dumps his swag in the corner of the bar; an’ he turns round
+an’ he ses ter me, “Look here boss, I ain’t got a lonely steever on me,
+an’ God knows when I’ll git one. I’ve tramped ten mile this mornin’,
+an’ I’ll have ter tramp another ten afore to-night. I’m expectin’ ter
+git on shearin’ with of Baldy Thompson at West-o’-Sunday nex’ week. I
+got a thirst on me like a sun-struck bone, an’, for God sake, put up a
+couple o’ beers for me an’ my mate, an’ I’ll fix it up with yer when I
+come back after shearin’.”
+
+An’ what’s a feller ter do? I bin there meself, an—I put it to you!
+I’ve known what it is to have a thirst on me.
+
+An’ suppose a poor devil comes along in the jim-jams, with every inch
+on him jumpin’ an’ a look in his eyes like a man bein’ murdered an’
+sent ter hell, an’ a whine in his voice like a whipped cur, an’ the
+snakes a-chasing of him; an’ he hooks me with his finger ter the far
+end o’ the bar—as if he was goin’ ter tell me that the world was
+ended—an’ he hangs over the bar an’ chews me lug, an’ tries to speak,
+an’ breaks off inter a sort o’ low shriek, like a terrified woman, an’
+he says, “For Mother o’ Christ’s sake, giv’ me a drink!” An’ what am I
+to do? I bin there meself. I knows what the horrors is. He mighter
+blued his cheque at the last shanty. But what am I ter do? I put it ter
+you. If I let him go he might hang hisself ter the nex’ leanin’ tree.
+
+What’s a drink? yer might arst—I don’t mind a drink or two; but when it
+comes to half a dozen in a day it mounts up, I can tell yer. Drinks is
+sixpence here—I have to pay for it, an’ pay carriage on it. It’s all up
+ter me in the end. I used sometimes ter think it was lucky I wasn’t
+west o’ the sixpenny line, where I’d lose a shillin’ on every drink I
+give away.
+
+An’ supposen a sundowner comes along smokin’ tea-leaves, an’ ses ter
+me, “Look her, boss! me an’ my mate ain’t had a smoke for three days!”
+What’s a man ter do? I put it ter you! I’m a heavy smoker meself, an’
+I’ve known what it is to be without a smoke on the track. But
+“nail-rod” is ninepence a stick out here, an’ I have ter pay carriage.
+It all mounts up, I can tell yer.
+
+An’ supposen Ole King Billy an’ his ole black gin comes round at
+holiday time and squats on the verander, an’ blarneys an’ wheedles and
+whines and argues like a hundred Jews an’ ole Irishwomen put tergether,
+an’ accuses me o’ takin’ his blarsted country from him, an’ makes me
+an’ the missus laugh; an’ we gives him a bottl’er rum an’ a bag of grub
+ter get rid of him an’ his rotten ole scarecrow tribe—It all tells up.
+I was allers soft on the blacks, an’, beside, a ole gin nursed me an’
+me mother when I was born, an’ saved me blessed life—not that that
+mounts to much. But it all tells up, an’ I got me licence ter pay. An’
+some bloody skunk goes an’ informs on me for supplyin’ the
+haboriginalls with intossicatin’ liquor, an’ I have ter pay a fine an’
+risk me licence. But what’s a man ter do?
+
+An’ three or four herrin’-gutted jackaroos comes along about
+dinner-time, when the table’s set and the cookin’ smellin’ from the
+kichen, with their belts done up three holes, an’ not the price of a
+feed on ’em. What’s a man ter do? I’ve known what it is ter do a perish
+on the track meself. It’s not the tucker I think on. I don’t care a
+damn for that. When the shearers come every one is free to go inter the
+kitchin an’ forage for hisself when he feels hungry—so long as he pays
+for his drink. But the jackaroos can’t pay for drinks, an’ I have ter
+pay carriage on the flour an’ tea an’ sugar an’ groceries—an’ it all
+tells up by the end o’ the year.
+
+An’ a straight chap that knows me gets a job to take a flock o’ sheep
+or a mob o’ cattle ter the bloomin’ Gulf, or South Australia, or
+somewheers—an’ loses one of his horses goin’ out ter take charge, an’
+borrers eight quid from me ter buy another. He’ll turn up agen in a
+year or two an’ most likely want ter make me take twenty quid for that
+eight—an’ make everybody about the place blind drunk—but I’ve got ter
+wait, an’ the wine an’ sperit merchants an’ the brewery won’t. They
+know I can’t do without liquor in the place.
+
+An’ lars’ rains Jimmy Nowlett, the bullick-driver, gets bogged over his
+axle-trees back there on the Blacksoil Plains between two flooded
+billerbongs, an’ prays till the country steams an’ his soul’s busted,
+an’ his throat like a lime-kiln. He taps a keg o’ rum or beer ter keep
+his throat in workin’ order. I don’t mind that at all, but him an’ his
+mates git flood-bound for near a week, an’ broach more kegs, an’ go on
+a howlin’ spree in ther mud, an’ spill mor’n they swipe, an’ leave a
+tarpaulin off a load, an’ the flour gets wet, an’ the sugar runs out of
+the bags like syrup, an’— What’s a feller ter do? Do yer expect me to
+set the law onter Jimmy? I’ve knowed him all my life, an’ he knowed my
+father afore I was born. He’s been on the roads this forty year, till
+he’s as thin as a rat, and as poor as a myall black; an’ he’s got a
+family ter keep back there in Bourke. No, I have ter pay for it in the
+end, an’ it all mounts up, I can tell yer.
+
+An’ suppose some poor devil of a new-chum black sheep comes along,
+staggerin’ from one side of the track to the other, and spoutin’
+poetry; dyin’ o’ heat or fever, or heartbreak an’ home-sickness, or a
+life o’ disserpation he’d led in England, an’ without a sprat on him,
+an’ no claim on the bush; an’ I ketches him in me arms as he stumbles
+inter the bar, an’ he wants me ter hold him up while he turns English
+inter Greek for me. An’ I put him ter bed, an’ he gits worse, an’ I
+have ter send the buggy twenty mile for a doctor—an’ pay him. An’ the
+jackaroo gits worse, an’ has ter be watched an’ nursed an’ held down
+sometimes; an’ he raves about his home an’ mother in England, an’ the
+blarsted University that he was eddicated at—an’ a woman—an’ somethin’
+that sounds like poetry in French; an’ he upsets my missus a lot, an’
+makes her blubber. An’ he dies, an’ I have ter pay a man ter bury him
+(an’ knock up a sort o’ fence round the grave arterwards ter keep the
+stock out), an’ send the buggy agen for a parson, an’—Well, what’s a
+man ter do? I couldn’t let him wander away an’ die like a dog in the
+scrub, an’ be shoved underground like a dog, too, if his body was ever
+found. The Government might pay ter bury him, but there ain’t never
+been a pauper funeral from my house yet, an’ there won’t be one if I
+can help it—except it be meself.
+
+An’ then there’s the bother goin’ through his papers to try an’ find
+out who he was an’ where his friends is. An’ I have ter get the missus
+to write a letter to his people, an’ we have ter make up lies about how
+he died ter make it easier for ’em. An’ goin’ through his letters, the
+missus comes across a portrait an’ a locket of hair, an’ letters from
+his mother an’ sisters an’ girl; an’ they upset her, an’ she blubbers
+agin, an’ gits sentimental—like she useter long ago when we was first
+married.
+
+There was one bit of poetry—I forgit it now—that that there jackaroo
+kep’ sayin’ over an’ over agen till it buzzed in me head; an’, weeks
+after, I’d ketch the missus mutterin’ it to herself in the kitchen till
+I thought she was goin’ ratty.
+
+An’ we gets a letter from the jackaroo’s friends that puts us to a lot
+more bother. I hate havin’ anythin’ to do with letters. An’ someone’s
+sure to say he was lambed down an’ cleaned out an’ poisoned with bad
+bush liquor at my place. It’s almost enough ter make a man wish there
+_was_ a recorin’ angel.
+
+An’ what’s the end of it? I got the blazin’ bailiff in the place now! I
+can’t shot him out because he’s a decent, hard-up, poor devil from
+Bourke, with consumption or somethin’, an’ he’s been talkin’ to the
+missus about his missus an’ kids; an’ I see no chance of gittin’ rid of
+him, unless the shearers come along with their cheques from
+West-o’-Sunday nex’ week and act straight by me. Like as not I’ll have
+ter roll up me swag an’ take the track meself in the end. They say
+publicans are damned, an’ I think so, too; an’ I wish I’d bin operated
+on before ever I seen a pub.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHEARER’S DREAM
+
+
+Mitchell and I rolled up our swags after New Year and started to tramp
+west. It had been a very bad season after a long drought. Old Baldy
+Thompson had only shorn a few bales of grass-seed and burrs, so he
+said, and thought of taking the track himself; but we hoped to get on
+shearing stragglers at West-o’-Sunday or one of the stations of the
+Hungerford track.
+
+It was very hot weather, so we started after sunset, intending to
+travel all night. We crossed the big billabong, and were ploughing
+through the dust and sand towards West Bourke, when a buggy full of
+city girls and swells passed by. They were part of a theatrical company
+on tour in the Back-Blocks, and some local Johnnies. They’d been driven
+out to see an artesian bore, or wool-shed, or something. The horses
+swerved, and jerked a little squawk out of one of the girls. Then
+another said:
+
+“Ow-w! Two old swaggies. He! he! he!”
+
+I glanced at Mitchell to see if he was hit, and caught his head down;
+but he pulled himself up and pretended to hitch his swag into an easier
+position.
+
+About a hundred yards further on he gave me a side look and said:
+
+“Did that touch you, Harry”
+
+“No,” I said, and I laughed.
+
+“You see,” reflected Mitchell, “they’re more to be pitied than blamed.
+It’s their ignorance. In the first place, we’re not two old tramps, as
+they think. We are professional shearers; and the Australian shearers
+are about the most independent and intelligent class of men in the
+world. We’ve got more genius in one of our little fingers than there is
+in the whole of that wagonette-load of diddle-daddle and fiddle-faddle
+and giggles. Their intellects are on a level with the rotten dramas
+they travel with, and their lives about as false. They are slaves to
+the public, and their home is the pub-parlour, with sickly, senseless
+Johnnies to shout suppers and drink for them and lend their men money.
+If one of those girls is above the average, how she must despise those
+Johnnies—and the life! She must feel a greater contempt for them than
+the private-barmaid does for the boozer she cleans out. He gets his
+drink and some enjoyment, anyhow. And how she must loathe the life she
+leads! And what’s the end of it as often as not? I remember once, when
+I was a boy, I was walking out with two aunts of mine—they’re both dead
+now. God rest their fussy, innocent old souls!—and one of ’em said
+suddenly, ‘Look! Quick, Jack! There’s Maggie So-and-So, the great
+actress.’ And I looked and saw a woman training vines in a porch. It
+seemed like seeing an angel to me, and I never forgot her as she was
+then. The diggers used to go miles out of town to meet the coach that
+brought her, and take the horses out and drag it in, and throw gold in
+her lap, and worship her.
+
+“The last time I was in Sydney I saw her sitting in the back parlour of
+a third-rate pub. She was dying of dropsy and couldn’t move from her
+chair. She showed me a portrait of herself as I remembered her, and
+talked quite seriously about going on the stage again.
+
+“Now, our home is about two thousand miles wide, and the world’s our
+stage. If the worst comes to the worst we can always get tucker and
+wood and water for nothing. If we’re camping at a job in a tent there’s
+no house-cleaning to bother us. All we’ve got to do when the camp gets
+too dirty is to shift the tent to a fresh place. We’ve got time to
+think and—we’re free.
+
+“But then, agen,” he reflected, “there’s the world’s point of view to
+be considered. Some day I might be flashing past in a buggy or
+saloon-carriage—or, the chances are it will be you—and you might look
+out the window and see an old swaggy tramping along in the dust, or
+camped under a strip of calico in the rain in the scrub. (And it might
+be me—old Mitchell—that really wrote your books, only the world won’t
+know it.) And then you’ll realize what a wretched, miserable life it
+was. We never realize the miseries of life till we look back—the
+mistakes and miseries that had to be and couldn’t be helped. It’s all
+luck—luck and chance.”
+
+But those girls seemed to have gravelled Mitchell, and he didn’t seem
+able to talk himself round. He tramped on, brooding for a while, and
+then suddenly he said:
+
+“Look here, Harry! Those girls are giving a dance to-night, and if I
+liked to go back to Bourke and tog up and go to the dance I could pick
+out the prettiest, dance with her all the evening, and take her for a
+stroll afterwards, old tramp as they thought me. I’ve lived—but it
+wouldn’t be worth my while now.”
+
+I’d seen Jack in a mood like this before, and thought it best to say
+nothing. Perhaps the terrible heat had affected him a little. We walked
+on in silence until we came to the next billabong. “Best boil the billy
+here, Harry,” said Mitchell, “and have some tea before we go any
+further.”
+
+I got some sticks together and made a fire and put the billy on. The
+country looked wretched—like the ghost of a burnt-out land—in the
+moonlight. The banks of the creek were like ashes, the thin, gnarled
+gum-bush seemed dry-rotting fast, and in many places the surface of the
+ground was cracked in squares where it had shrunk in the drought. In
+the bed of the creek was a narrow gutter of water that looked like bad
+milk.
+
+Mitchell sat on his swag, with his pint of tea on the ground by his
+foot, and chewed his pipe.
+
+“What’s up, Jack?” I asked. “Have you got the blues?”
+
+“Well, yes, Harry,” he said. “I’m generally dull the first day on the
+track. The first day is generally the worst, anywhere or
+anytime—except, perhaps, when you’re married.... I got—well, I got
+thinking of the time when a woman’s word could have hurt me.”
+
+Just then one of the “travellers” who were camped a bit up the creek
+suddenly commenced to sing. It was a song called “The Shearer’s Dream,”
+and I suppose the buggy of girls, or the conversation they started,
+reminded him of it. He started his verses and most of his lines with a
+howl; and there were unexpected howls all through the song, and it
+wailed off, just as unexpectedly, in places where there was no pathos
+that I could see:
+
+Oh, I dreamt I shore in a shearer’s shed, and it was a dream of joy,
+For every one of the rouseabouts was a girl dressed up as a boy—
+Dressed up like a page in a pantomime, and the prettiest ever seen—
+They had flaxen hair, they had coal-black hair—and every shade between.
+
+
+“Every” with sudden and great energy, a long drop on to “shade,” and a
+wail of intense sadness and regret running on into “between,” the dirge
+reaching its wailsomest in the “tween” in every case.
+
+The shed was cooled by electric fans that was over every “shoot”;
+The pens was of polished ma-ho-gany, and ev’rything else to suit;
+The huts was fixed with spring-mattresses, and the tucker was simply
+grand,
+And every night by the biller-bong we darnced to a German band.
+
+“_Chorus, boys!”_
+
+There was short, plump girls, there was tall, slim girls, and the
+handsomest ever seen
+They was four-foot-five, they was six-foot high, and hevery size
+between.
+
+Our pay was the wool on the jumbucks’ backs, so we shore till all was
+blue
+The sheep was washed afore they was shore (and the rams was scented
+too);
+And we all of us cried when the shed cut out, in spite of the long, hot
+days,
+For hevery hour them girls waltzed in with whisky and beer on
+tr-a-a-a-ys!
+
+“_Chorus_! _you_ ——!”
+
+They had kind grey eyes, they had coal-black eyes, and the grandest
+ever seen
+They had plump pink hands, they had slim white hands, and hevery shape
+be-tw-e-e-n.
+
+There was three of them girls to every chap, and as jealous as they
+could be—
+
+
+“Ow! you ——”
+
+The singer’s voice or memory seemed suddenly to have failed him at this
+point, but whether his mates hit him on the back of the head with a
+tomahawk, or only choked him, I do not know. Mitchell was inclined to
+think, from the sound of it, that they choked him.
+
+
+
+
+THE LOST SOULS’ HOTEL
+
+
+Hunqerford Road, February. One hundred and thirty miles of heavy
+reddish sand, bordered by dry, hot scrubs. Dense cloud of hot dust.
+Four wool-teams passing through a gate in a “rabbit proof” fence which
+crosses the road. Clock, clock, clock of wheels and rattle and clink of
+chains, crack of whips and explosions of Australian language. Bales and
+everything else coated with dust. Stink of old axle-grease and
+tarpaulins. Tyres hot enough to fry chops on: bows and chains so hot
+that it’s a wonder they do not burn through the bullock’s hides. Water
+lukewarm in blistered kegs slung behind the wagons. Bullocks dragging
+along as only bullocks do. Wheels ploughing through the deep sand, and
+the load lurching from side to side. Half-way on a “dry-stretch” of
+seventeen miles. Big “tank” full of good water through the scrub to the
+right, but it is a private tank and a boundary-rider is shepherding it.
+Mulga scrub and sparse, spiky undergrowth.
+
+The carriers camp for dinner and boil their billies while the bullocks
+droop under their yokes in the blazing heat; one or two lie down and
+the leaders drag and twist themselves round under a dead tree, under
+the impression that there is shade there. The carriers look like Red
+Indians, with the masks of red dust “bound” with sweat on their faces,
+but there is an unhealthy-looking, whitish space round their eyes,
+caused by wiping away the blinding dust, sweat, and flies. The dry
+sticks burn with a pale flame and an almost invisible thin pale blue
+smoke. The sun’s heat dancing and dazzling across every white
+fence-post, sandhill, or light-coloured object in the distance.
+
+One man takes off his boot and sock, empties half a pint of sand out of
+them, and pulls up his trouser-leg. His leg is sheathed to the knee in
+dust and sweat; he absently scrapes it with his knife, and presently he
+amuses himself by moistening a strip with his forefinger and shaving
+it, as if he were vaguely curious to see if he is still a white man.
+
+The Hungerford coach ploughs past in a dense cloud of dust.
+
+The teams drag on again like a “wounded snake that dies at sundown,” if
+a wounded snake that dies at sundown could revive sufficiently next
+morning to drag on again until another sun goes down.
+
+Hopeless-looking swagmen are met with during the afternoon, and one
+carrier—he of the sanded leg—lends them tobacco; his mates contribute
+“bits o’” tea, flour, and sugar.
+
+Sundown and the bullocks done up. The teamsters unyoke them and drive
+them on to the next water—five miles—having previously sent a mate to
+reconnoitre and see that boundary-rider is not round, otherwise, to
+make terms with him, for it is a squatter’s bore. They hurry the
+bullocks down to the water and back in the twilight, and then, under
+cover of darkness, turn them into a clearing in the scrub off the road,
+where a sign in the grass might be seen—if you look close. But the
+“bullockies” are better off than the horse-teamsters, for bad chaff is
+sold by the pound and corn is worth its weight in gold.
+
+Mitchell and I turned off the track at the rabbit-proof fence and made
+for the tank in the mulga. We boiled the billy and had some salt mutton
+and damper. We were making back for Bourke, having failed to get a cut
+in any of the sheds on the Hungerford track. We sat under a clump of
+mulga saplings, with our backs to the trunks, and got out our pipes.
+Usually, when the flies were very bad on the track, we had to keep
+twigs or wild-turkey=tail feathers going in front of our faces the
+whole time to keep the mad flies out of our eyes; and, when we camped,
+one would keep the feather going while the other lit his pipe—then the
+smoke would keep them away. But the flies weren’t so bad in a good
+shade or in a darkened hut. Mitchell’s pipe would have smoked out Old
+Nick; it was an ancient string-bound meerschaum, and strong enough to
+kill a blackfellow. I had one smoke out of it, once when I felt bad in
+my inside and wanted to be sick, and the result was very satisfactory.
+
+Mitchell looked through his old pocket-book—more by force of habit than
+anything else—and turned up a circular from Tattersall’s. And that
+reminded him.
+
+“Do you know what I’d do, Harry,” he said, “if I won Tattersall’s big
+sweep, or was to come into fifty or a hundred thousand pounds, or,
+better still, a million?”
+
+“Nothing I suppose,” I said, “except to get away to Sydney or some
+cooler place than this.”
+
+“I’ll tell you what I’d do,” said Mitchell, talking round his pipe.
+“I’d build a Swagman’s Rest right here.”
+
+“A Swagman’s Rest?”
+
+“Yes. Right here on this very God-forsaken spot. I’d build a Swagman’s
+Rest and call it the Lost Souls’ Hotel, or the Sundowners’ Arms, or the
+Half-way House to ——, or some such name that would take the bushmen’s
+fancy. I’d have it built on the best plans for coolness in a hot
+country; bricks, and plenty of wide verandas with brick floors, and
+balconies, and shingles, in the old Australian style. I wouldn’t have a
+sheet of corrugated iron about the place. And I’d have old-fashioned
+hinged sashes with small panes and vines round ’em; they look cooler
+and more homely and romantic than the glaring sort that shove up.
+
+“And I’d dig a tank or reservoir for surface water as big as a lake,
+and bore for artesian water—and get it, too, if I had to bore right
+through to England; and I’d irrigate the ground and make it grow
+horse-feed and fruit, and vegetables too, if I had to cart manure from
+Bourke. And every teamster’s bullock or horse, and every shearer’s
+hack, could burst itself free, but I’d make travelling stock pay—for it
+belongs to the squatters and capitalists. All carriers could camp for
+one night only. And I’d—no, I wouldn’t have any flowers; they might
+remind some heart-broken, new-chum black sheep of the house where he
+was born, and the mother whose heart he broke—and the father whose grey
+hairs he brought down in sorrow to the grave—and break him up
+altogether.”
+
+“But what about the old-fashioned windows and the vines?” I asked.
+
+“Oh!” said Mitchell, “I forgot them. On second thought, I think I would
+have some flowers; and maybe a bit of ivy-green. The new chum might be
+trying to work out his own salvation, and the sight of the roses and
+ivy would show him that he hadn’t struck such a God-forgotten country
+after all, and help strengthen the hope for something better that’s in
+the heart of every vagabond till he dies.”
+
+Puff, puff, puff, slowly and reflectively.
+
+“Until he dies,” repeated Mitchell. “And, maybe,” he said, rousing
+himself, “I’d have a little room fixed up like a corner of a swell
+restaurant, with silver and napkins on the table, and I’d fix up a
+waiter, so that when a broken-down University wreck came along he might
+feel, for an hour or so, something like the man he used to be. But I
+suppose,” Mitchell reflected, “he wouldn’t feel completely his old self
+without a lady friend sitting opposite to him. I might fix up a black
+gin for him, but I suppose he’d draw the colour line. But that’s
+nonsense.
+
+“All teamsters and travellers could camp there for one night only. I’d
+have shower-baths; but I wouldn’t force any man to have a bath against
+his will. They could sit down to a table and have a feed off a
+table-cloth, and sleep in sheets, and feel like they did before their
+old mothers died, or before they ran away from home.”
+
+“Who? The mothers?” I asked.
+
+“Yes, in some cases,” said Mitchell. “And I’d have a nice, cool little
+summer-house down near the artificial lake, out of earshot of the
+house, where the bullock-drivers could sit with their pipes after tea,
+and tell yarns, and talk in their own language. And I’d have boats on
+the lake, too, in case an old Oxford or Cambridge man, or an old sailor
+came along—it might put years on to his life to have a pull at the
+oars. You remember that old sailor we saw in charge of the engine back
+there at the government tank? You saw how he had the engine?—clean and
+bright as a new pin—everything spick-and-span and shipshape, and his
+hut fixed up like a ship’s cabin. I believe he thinks he’s at sea half
+his time, and shoving her through it, instead of pumping muddy water
+out of a hole in the baking scrubs for starving stock. Or maybe he
+reckons he’s keeping her afloat.”
+
+“And would you have fish in this lake of yours?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, yes,” said Mitchell, “and any ratty old shepherd or sundowner,
+that’s gone mad of heat and loneliness—like the old codger we met back
+yonder—he could sit by the lagoon in the cool of the evening and fish
+to his heart’s content with a string and a bent pin, and dream he’s
+playing truant from school and fishing in the brook near his native
+village in England about fifty years ago. It would seem more real than
+fishing in the dust as some mad old bushmen do.”
+
+“But you’d draw the line somewhere?” I asked.
+
+“No,” said Mitchell, “not even at poets. I’d try to cure them, too,
+with good wholesome food and plenty of physical exercise. The Lost
+Souls’ Hotel would be a refuge for men who’d been jail-birds once as
+well as men who were gentlemen once, and for physical wrecks and ruined
+drunkards as well as healthy honest shearers. I’d sit down and talk to
+the boozer or felon just as if I thought he was as good a man as me—and
+he might be, for that matter—God knows.
+
+“The sick man would be kept till he recovered, or died; and the boozer,
+suffering from a recovery, I’d keep him till he was on his legs again.”
+
+“Then you’d have to have a doctor,” I said.
+
+“Yes,” said Mitchell, “I’d fix that up all right. I wouldn’t bother
+much about a respectable medical practitioner from the city. I’d get a
+medical wreck who had a brilliant career before him once in England and
+got into disgrace, and cleared out to the colonies—a man who knows what
+the d.t.’s is—a man who’s been through it all and knows it all.”
+
+“Then you’d want a manager, or a clerk or secretary,” I suggested.
+
+“I suppose I would,” said Mitchell. “I’ve got no head for figures. I
+suppose I’d have to advertise for him. If an applicant came with the
+highest testimonials of character, and especially if one was signed by
+a parson, I’d tell him to call again next week; and if a young man
+could prove that he came of a good Christian family, and went to church
+regularly, and sang in the choir, and taught Sunday-school, I’d tell
+him that he needn’t come again, that the vacancy was filled, for I
+couldn’t trust, him. The man who’s been extra religious and honest and
+hard-working in his young days is most likely to go wrong afterwards.
+I’d sooner trust some poor old devil of a clerk who’d got into the
+hands of a woman or racing men when he was young, and went wrong, and
+served his time for embezzlement; anyway, I’d take him out and give him
+another chance.”
+
+“And what about woman’s influence?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, I suppose there’d have to be a woman, if only to keep the doctor
+on the line. I’d get a woman with a past, one that hadn’t been any
+better than she should have been, they’re generally the most
+kind-hearted in the end. Say an actress who’d come down in the world,
+or an old opera-singer who’d lost her voice but could still sing a
+little. A woman who knows what trouble is. And I’d get a girl to keep
+her company, a sort of housemaid, with a couple of black gins or
+half-castes to help her. I’d get hold of some poor girl who’d been
+deceived and deserted: and a baby or two wouldn’t be an objection—the
+kids would amuse the chaps and help humanize the place.”
+
+“And what if the manageress fell in love with the doctor?” I asked.
+
+“Well, I couldn’t provide against love,” said Mitchell. “I fell in love
+myself more than once—and I don’t suppose I’d have been any worse off
+if I’d have stayed in love. Ah, well! But suppose she did fall in love
+with the doctor and marry him, or suppose she fell in love with him and
+didn’t marry him, for that matter—and suppose the girl fell in love
+with the secretary? There wouldn’t be any harm done; it would only make
+them more contented with the home and bind them to it. They’d be a
+happy family, and the Lost Souls’ Hotel would be more cheerful and
+homelike than ever.”
+
+“But supposing they all fell in love with each other and cleared out,”
+I said.
+
+“I don’t see what they’d have to clear out for,” said Mitchell. “But
+suppose they did. There’s more than one medical wreck in Australia, and
+more than one woman with a past, and more than one broken old clerk who
+went wrong and was found out, and who steadied down in jail, and
+there’s more than one poor girl that’s been deceived. I could easily
+replace ’em. And the Lost Souls’ Hotel might be the means of patching
+up many wrecked lives in that way—giving people with pasts the chance
+of another future, so to speak.”
+
+“I suppose you’d have music and books and pictures?” I said.
+
+“Oh, yes,” said Mitchell. “But I wouldn’t have any bitter or
+sex-problem books. They do no good. Problems have been the curse of the
+world ever since it started. I think one noble, kindly, cheerful
+character in a book does more good than all the clever villains or
+romantic adventurers ever invented. And I think a man ought to get rid
+of his maudlin sentiment in private, or when he’s drunk. It’s a pity
+that every writer couldn’t put all his bitterness into one book and
+then burn it.
+
+“No; I’d have good cheerful books of the best and brightest sides of
+human nature—Charles Dickens, and Mark Twain, and Bret Harte, and those
+men. And I’d have all Australian pictures—showing the brightest and
+best side of Australian life. And I’d have all Australian songs. I
+wouldn’t have ‘Swannie Ribber,’ or ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ or ‘Annie
+Laurie,’ or any of those old songs sung at the Lost Souls’
+Hotel—they’re the cause of more heartbreaks and drink and suicide in
+the bush than anything else. And if a jackaroo got up to sing, ‘Just
+before the battle, mother,’ or, ‘Mother bit me in me sleep,’ he’d find
+it was just before the battle all right. He’d have to go out and sleep
+in the scrub, where the mosquitoes and bulldog ants would bite him out
+of his sleep. I hate the man who’s always whining about his mother
+through his nose, because, as a rule, he never cared a rap for his old
+mother, nor for anyone else, except his own paltry, selfish little
+self.
+
+“I’d have intellectual and elevating conversation for those that——”
+
+“Who’d take charge of that department?” I inquired hurriedly.
+
+“Well,” reflected Mitchell, “I did have an idea of taking it on myself
+for a while anyway; but, come to think of it, the doctor or the woman
+with the past would have more experience; and I could look after that
+part of the business at a pinch. Of course you’re not in a position to
+judge as to my ability in the intellectual line; you see, I’ve had no
+one to practise on since I’ve been with you. But no matter—— There’d be
+intellectual conversation for the benefit of black-sheep new chums. And
+any broken-down actors that came along could get up a play if they
+liked—it would brighten up things and help elevate the bullock-drivers
+and sundowners. I’d have a stage fixed up and a bit of scenery. I’d do
+all I could to attract shearers to the place after shearing, and keep
+them from rushing to the next shanty with their cheques, or down to
+Sydney, to be cleaned out by barmaids.
+
+“And I’d have the hero squashed in the last act for a selfish sneak,
+and marry the girl to the villain—he’d be more likely to make her happy
+in the end.”
+
+“And what about the farm?” I asked. “I suppose you’d get some expert
+from the agricultural college to manage that?”
+
+“No,” said Mitchell. “I’d get some poor drought-ruined selector and put
+him in charge of the vegetation. Only, the worst of it is,” he
+reflected, “if you take a selector who has bullocked all his life to
+raise crops on dusty, stony patches in the scrubs, and put him on land
+where there’s plenty of water and manure, and where he’s only got to
+throw the seed on the ground and then light his pipe and watch it grow,
+he’s apt to get disheartened. But that’s human nature.
+
+“And, of course, I’d have to have a ‘character’ about the place—a sort
+of identity and joker to brighten up things. I wouldn’t get a man who’d
+been happy and comfortable all his life; I’d get hold of some old
+codger whose wife had nagged him till she died, and who’d been sold off
+many times, and run in for drowning his sorrows, and who started as an
+undertaker and failed at that, and finally got a job pottering
+round—gardener, or gatekeeper, or something—in a lunatic asylum. I’d
+get him. He’d most likely be a humorist and a philosopher, and he’d
+help cheer up the Lost Souls’ Hotel. I reckon the lost souls would get
+very fond of him.”
+
+“And would you have drink at Lost Souls’?” I asked.
+
+“Yes,” said Mitchell. “I’d have the best beer and spirits and wine to
+be had. After tea I’d let every man have just enough to make him feel
+comfortable and happy, and as good and clever, and innocent and honest
+as any other man, but no more. But if a poor devil came along in the
+horrors, with every inch of him jumping, and snakes, and green-eyed
+yahoos, and flaming-nosed bunyips chasing him, we’d take him in and
+give him soothing draughts, and nurse him, and watch him, and clear him
+out with purgatives, and keep giving him nips of good whisky, and,
+above all, we’d sympathize with him, and tell him that we were worse
+than he was many a time. We wouldn’t tell him what a weak, selfish man
+he was, or harp on his ruined life. We’d try to make him out a good
+deal better morally than he really was. It’s remorse that hurries most
+men to hell—especially in the Bush. When a man firmly believes he is a
+hopeless case, then there’s no hope for him: but let him have doubts
+and there’s a chance. Make him believe that there are far worse cases
+than his. We wouldn’t preach the sin of dissipation to him, no—but we’d
+try to show him the _folly_ of a wasted life. I ought to be able to
+preach that, God knows.
+
+“And, above all, we’d try to drive out of his head the cursed old
+popular idea that it’s hard to reform—that a man’s got to fight a hard
+battle with himself to get away from drink—pity drunkards can’t believe
+how easy it is. And we’d put it to him straight whether his few hours’
+enjoyment were worth the days he had to suffer hell for it.”
+
+“And, likely as not,” I said, “when you’d put him on his feet he’d take
+the nearest track to the next shanty, and go on a howling spree, and
+come back to Lost Souls’ in a week, raving aid worse than ever. What
+would you do then?”
+
+“We’d take him in again, and build him up some more; and a third or
+fourth time if necessary. I believe in going right on with a thing once
+I take it in hand. And if he didn’t turn up after the last spree we’d
+look for him up the scrub and bring him in and let him die on a bed,
+and make his death as comfortable as possible. I’ve seen one man die on
+the ground, and found one dead in the bush. We’d bury him under a gum
+and put ‘Sacred to the Memory of a Man who Died. (Let him R.I.P.)’ over
+him. I’d have a nice little graveyard, with gums for tombstones—and I’d
+have some original epitaphs—I promise you.”
+
+“And how much gratitude would you expect to get out of the Lost Souls’
+Hotel?” I asked.
+
+“None,” said Mitchell, promptly. “It wouldn’t be a Gratitude Discovery
+Syndicate. People might say that the Lost Souls’ Hotel was a den for
+kidnapping women and girls to be used as decoys for the purpose of
+hocussing and robbing bushmen, and the law and retribution might come
+after me—but I’d fight the thing out. Or they might want to make a
+K.C.M.G., or a god of me, and worship me before they hung me. I reckon
+a philanthropist or reformer is lucky if he escapes with a whole skin
+in the end, let alone his character— But there!— Talking of gratitude:
+it’s the fear of ingratitude that keeps thousands from doing good. It’s
+just as paltry and selfish and cowardly as any other fear that curses
+the world—it’s rather more selfish than most fears, in fact—take the
+fear of being thought a coward, or being considered eccentric, or
+conceited, or affected, or too good, or too bad, for instance. The man
+that’s always canting about the world’s ingratitude has no gratitude
+owing to him as a rule—generally the reverse—he ought to be grateful to
+the world for being let live. He broods over the world’s ingratitude
+until he gets to be a cynic. He sees the world like the outside of a
+window, as it were, with the blind drawn and the dead, cold moonlight
+shining on it, and he passes on with a sour face; whereas, if he took
+the trouble to step inside he’d most likely find a room full of ruddy
+firelight, and sympathy and cheerfulness, and kindness, and love, and
+gratitude. Sometimes, when he’s right down on his uppers, and forced to
+go amongst people and hustle for bread, he gets a lot of surprises at
+the amount of kindness he keeps running against in the world—and in
+places where he’d never have expected to find it. But—ah, well! I’m
+getting maudlin.”
+
+“And you’ve forgot all about the Lost Souls’ Hotel,” I said.
+
+“No, I haven’t,” said Mitchell; “I’d fix that up all right. As soon as
+I’d got things going smoothly under a man I could trust, I’d tie up
+every penny I had for the benefit of the concern; get some ‘white men’
+for trustees, and take the track again. I’m getting too old to stay
+long in one place—(I’m a lost soul that always got along better in
+another place). I’m so used to the track that if I was shut up in a
+house I’d get walking up and down in my room of nights and disturb the
+folk; and, besides, I’d feel lost and light-shouldered without the
+swag.”
+
+“So you’d put all your money in the concern?”
+
+“Yes—except a pound or two to go on the track with—for, who knows, I
+might come along there, dusty and tired, and ragged and hard up and
+old, some day, and be very glad of a night’s rest at the Lost Souls’
+Hotel. But I wouldn’t let on that I was old Mitchell, the millionaire,
+who founded Lost Souls’. They might be too officious, and I hate
+fuss.... But it’s time to take the track, Harry.”
+
+There came a cool breeze with sunset; we stood up stiffly, shouldered
+our swags and tucker-bags, and pushed on, for we had to make the next
+water before we camped. We were out of tobacco, so we borrowed some
+from one of the bullock-drivers.
+
+
+
+
+THE BOOZERS’ HOME
+
+
+“A dipsomaniac,” said Mitchell, “needs sympathy and commonsense
+treatment. (Sympathy’s a grand and glorious thing, taking it all round
+and looking at it any way you will: a little of it makes a man think
+that the world’s a good world after all, and there’s room and hope for
+sinners, and that life’s worth living; enough of it makes him sure of
+it: and an overdose of sympathy makes a man _feel_ weak and ashamed of
+himself, and so moves him to stop whining—and wining—and buck up.)
+
+“Now, I’m not taking the case of a workman who goes on the spree on pay
+night and sweats the drink out of himself at work next day, nor a
+slum-bred brute who guzzles for the love of it; but a man with brains,
+who drinks to drown his intellect or his memory. He’s generally a man
+under it all, and a sensitive, generous, gentle man with finer feelings
+as often as not. The best and cleverest and whitest men in the world
+seem to take to drink mostly. It’s an awful pity. Perhaps it’s because
+they’re straight and the world’s crooked and they can see things too
+plain. And I suppose in the bush the loneliness and the thoughts of the
+girl-world they left behind help to sink ’em.
+
+“Now a drunkard seldom reforms at home, because he’s always surrounded
+by the signs of the ruin and misery he has brought on the home; and the
+sight and thought of it sets him off again before he’s had time to
+recover from the last spree. Then, again, the noblest wife in the world
+mostly goes the wrong way to work with a drunken husband—nearly
+everything she does is calculated to irritate him. If, for instance, he
+brings a bottle home from the pub, it shows that he wants to stay at
+home and not go back to the pub any more; but the first thing the wife
+does is to get hold of the bottle and plant it, or smash it before his
+eyes, and that maddens him in the state he is in then.
+
+“No. A dipsomaniac needs to be taken away from home for a while. I knew
+a man that got so bad that the way he acted at home one night
+frightened him, and next morning he went into an inebriate home of his
+own accord—to a place where his friends had been trying to get him for
+a year past. For the first day or two he was nearly dead with remorse
+and shame—mostly shame; and he didn’t know what they were going to do
+to him next—and he only wanted them to kill him quick and be done with
+it. He reckons he felt as bad as if he was in jail. But there were ten
+other patients there, and one or two were worse than he was, and that
+comforted him a lot. They compared notes and sympathized and helped
+each other. They discovered that all their wives were noble women. He
+struck one or two surprises too—one of the patients was a doctor who’d
+attended him one time, and another was an old boss of his, and they got
+very chummy. And there was a man there who was standing for
+Parliament—he was supposed to be having a rest down the coast.... Yes,
+my old mate felt very bad for the first day or two; it was all Yes,
+Nurse, and Thank you, Nurse, and Yes, Doctor, and No, Doctor, and Thank
+you, Doctor. But, inside a week, he was calling the doctor ‘Ol’
+Pill-Box’ behind his back, and making love to one of the nurses.
+
+“But he said it was pitiful when women relatives came to visit patients
+the first morning. It shook the patients up a lot, but I reckon it did
+’em good. There were well-bred old lady mothers in black, and
+hard-working, haggard wives and loving daughters—and the expressions of
+sympathy and faith and hope in those women’s faces! My old mate said it
+was enough in itself to make a man swear off drink for ever.... Ah,
+God—what a world it is!
+
+“Reminds me how I once went with the wife of another old mate of mine
+to see him. He was in a lunatic asylum. It was about the worst hour I
+ever had in my life, and I’ve had some bad ones. The way she tried to
+coax him back to his old self. She thought she could do it when all the
+doctors had failed. But I’ll tell you about him some other time.
+
+“The old mate said that the principal part of the treatment was
+supposed to be injection of bi-chloride of gold or something, and it
+was supposed to be a secret. It might have been water and sugar for all
+he knew, and he thought it was. You see, when patients got better they
+were allowed out, two by two, on their honour—one to watch the
+other—and it worked. But it was necessary to have an extra hold on
+them; so they were told that if they were a minute late for
+‘treatment,’ or missed one injection, all the good would be undone.
+This was dinged into their ears all the time. Same as many things are
+done in the Catholic religion—to hold the people. My old mate said
+that, as far as the medical treatment was concerned, he could do all
+that was necessary himself. But it was the sympathy that counted,
+especially the sympathy between the patients themselves. They always
+got hold of a new patient and talked to him and cheered him up; he
+nearly always came in thinking he was the most miserable wretch in this
+world. And it comforts a man and strengthens him and makes him happier
+to meet another man who’s worse off or sicker, or has been worse
+swindled than he has been. That’s human nature.... And a man will take
+draughts from a nurse and eat for her when he wouldn’t do it for his
+own wife—not even though she had been a trained nurse herself. And if a
+patient took a bad turn in the night at the Boozers’ Home and got up to
+hunt the snakes out of his room, he wouldn’t be sworn at, or laughed
+at, or held down; no, they’d help him shoo the snakes out and comfort
+him. My old mate said that, when he got better, one of the new patients
+reckoned that he licked St Pathrick at managing snakes. And when he
+came out he didn’t feel a bit ashamed of his experience. The
+institution didn’t profess to cure anyone of drink, only to mend up
+shattered nerves and build up wrecked constitutions; give them back
+some will-power if they weren’t too far gone. And they set my old mate
+on his feet all right. When he went in his life seemed lost, he had the
+horror of being sober, he couldn’t start the day without a drink or do
+any business without it. He couldn’t live for more than two hours
+without a drink; but when he came out he didn’t feel as if he wanted
+it. He reckoned that those six weeks in the institution were the
+happiest he’d ever spent in his life, and he wished the time had been
+longer; he says he’d never met with so much sympathy and genius, and
+humour and human nature under one roof before. And he said it was nice
+and novel to be looked after and watched and physicked and bossed by a
+pretty nurse in uniform—but I don’t suppose he told his wife that. And
+when he came out he never took the trouble to hide the fact that he’d
+been in. If any of his friends had a drunkard in the family, he’d
+recommend the institution and do his best to get him into it. But when
+he came out he firmly believed that if he took one drink he’d be a lost
+man. He made a mania of that. One curious effect was that, for some
+time after he left the institution, he’d sometimes feel suddenly in
+high spirits—with nothing to account for it—something like he used to
+feel when he had half a dozen whiskies in him; then suddenly he’d feel
+depressed and sort of hopeless—with nothing to account for that
+either—just as if he was suffering a recovery. But those moods never
+lasted long and he soon grew out of them altogether. He didn’t flee
+temptation. He’d knock round the pubs on Saturday nights with his old
+mates, but never drank anything but soft stuff—he was always careful to
+smell his glass for fear of an accident or trick. He drank gallons of
+ginger beer, milk-and-soda, and lemonade; and he got very fond of
+sweets, too—he’d never liked them before. He said he enjoyed the
+novelty of the whole thing and his mates amused him at first; but he
+found he had to leave them early in the evening, and, after a while, he
+dropped them altogether. They seemed such fools when they were drunk
+(they’d never seemed fools to him before). And, besides, as they got
+full, they’d get suspicious of him, and then mad at him, because he
+couldn’t see things as they could. That reminds me that it nearly
+breaks a man’s heart when his old drinking chum turns teetotaller—it’s
+worse than if he got married or died. When two mates meet and one is
+drunk and the other sober there is only one of two things for them to
+do if they want to hit it together—either the drunken mate must get
+sober or the sober mate drunk. And that reminds me: Take the case of
+two old mates who’ve been together all their lives, say they always had
+their regular sprees together and went through the same stages of
+drunkenness together, and suffered their recoveries and sobered up
+together, and each could stand about the same quantity of drink and one
+never got drunker than the other. Each, when he’s boozing, reckons his
+mate the cleverest man and the hardest case in the world—second to
+himself. But one day it happens, by a most extraordinary combination of
+circumstances, that Bill, being sober, meets Jim very drunk, and pretty
+soon Bill is the most disgusted man in this world. He never would have
+dreamed that his old mate could make such a fool and such a public
+spectacle of himself. And Bill’s disgust intensifies all the time he is
+helping Jim home, and Jim arguing with him and wanting to fight him,
+and slobbering over him and wanting to love him by turns, until Bill
+swears he’ll give Jim a hammering as soon as ever he’s able to stand
+steady on his feet.”
+
+“I suppose your old boozing mate’s wife was very happy when he
+reformed,” I said to Mitchell.
+
+“Well, no,” said Mitchell, rubbing his head rather ruefully. “I suppose
+it was an exceptional case. But I knew her well, and the fact is that
+she got more discontented and thinner, and complained and nagged him
+worse than she’d ever done in his drinking days. And she’d never been
+afraid of him. Perhaps it was this way: She loved and married a
+careless, good-natured, drinking scamp, and when he reformed and became
+a careful, hard-working man, and an honest and respected
+fellow-townsman, she was disappointed in him. He wasn’t the man that
+won her heart when she was a girl. Or maybe he was only company for her
+when he was half drunk. Or maybe lots of things. Perhaps he’d killed
+the love in her before he reformed—and reformed too late. I wonder how
+a man feels when he finds out for the first time that his wife doesn’t
+love him any longer? But my old mate wasn’t the nature to find out that
+sort of thing. Ah, well! If a woman caused all our trouble, my God!
+women have suffered for it since—and they suffer like martyrs mostly
+and with the patience of working bullocks. Anyway it goes, if I’m the
+last man in the world, and the last woman is the worst, and there’s
+only room for one more in Heaven, I’ll step down at once and take my
+chances in Blazes.”
+
+
+
+
+THE SEX PROBLEM AGAIN
+
+
+It was Mitchell’s habit to take an evening off now and then from
+yarning or reflecting, and proceed, in a most methodical manner, to
+wash his spare shirts and patch his pants. I was in the habit of
+contributing to some Sydney papers, and every man is an editor at
+heart, so, at other times, Mitchell would take another evening off, and
+root out my swag, and go through my papers in the same methodical
+manner, and make alterations and additions without comment or reference
+to me; and sometimes he’d read a little thing of my own which didn’t
+meet his views, and accidentally drop it into the fire; and at other
+times he’d get hold of some rhyme or sketch that was troubling me, and
+wrap it up and give it to a passing mailman unbeknown to me. The
+unexpected appearance of such articles in the paper, as well as the
+effects of the involuntary collaboration in other pieces, gave me
+several big surprises.
+
+It was in camp on a fencing contract west of Bourke. We had a book
+which we’d borrowed from a library at Bourke for a year or two—never
+mind the name of it—it was in ninety-one or ninety-two, and the sex
+problem was booming then. I had been surreptitiously tearing some
+carefully-written slips of manuscript—leaves taken from an old
+pocket-book—into small pieces; I dropped them, with apparent
+carelessness, into the fire and stood with my back to it.
+
+“I’ll bet five pounds,” said Mitchell, suddenly, “that you’ve been
+trying your hand on a sex-problem story.”
+
+I shifted uneasily and brought my hands from behind me into my pockets.
+“Well, to tell you the truth,” I admitted, “I have.”
+
+“I thought so,” exclaimed Mitchell. “We’ll be put to the expense of
+sending you to Sydney for medical treatment yet. You’ve been having too
+easy times lately, plenty of hard graft and no anxiety about tucker or
+the future. What are the symptoms?”
+
+“Well,” I said, taking a hand out to scratch the back of my head, “the
+plot looked all right—at first sight.”
+
+“So there’s a plot, is there? Well, in the first place, a plot is a
+problem. Well, what’s the plot?... Come on, you needn’t be frightened
+to tell an old mate like me.”
+
+“Well,” I said, “the yarn looked all right at first sight; that article
+of ‘T’s’ in the _Bulletin_ turned me off it; listen and see what you
+think of it: There was a young fellow, a bit of a genius——”
+
+“Just so, it’s the geniuses that build the sex problems. It’s an
+autobiography. Go on.”
+
+“Well, he married a girl.”
+
+Mitchell (sotto voce): “God help her.”
+
+“He loved her, and she loved him: but after they’d been married a while
+he found out that, although he understood her, she didn’t and couldn’t
+possibly ever understand him.”
+
+“Yes,” commented Mitchell, “and if he hadn’t caught the sex problem,
+nor been reading about it, he would never have found that out.”
+
+“It was a terrible disappointment,” I continued—I had got into the
+habit of taking Mitchell’s interruptions and comments as matters of
+course—“He saw that his life would be a hell with her——”
+
+Mitchell: “Didn’t strike him that her life would be a hell with him?”
+
+“They had no thought in common.”
+
+Mitchell: “She was in her right mind then.”
+
+“But he couldn’t leave her because he loved her, and because he knew
+that she loved him and would break her heart if he left her.”
+
+“Must have been a pretty cocksure sort of a fellow,” remarked Mitchell,
+“but all geniuses are.”
+
+“When he was with her he saw all her obstinacy, unreason, and
+selfishness; but when he was away he only saw her good points.”
+
+Mitchell: “Pity such men don’t stop away.”
+
+“He thought and thought, and brooded over it till his life was a
+hell——”
+
+Mitchell: “Jes-so: thanks to the problemaniacs.”
+
+“He thought of killing her and himself, and so taking her with him”
+
+“Where?” asked Mitchell. “He must have loved her a lot.... Good Lord!
+That shows the awful effects of the sex problem on the mind of a
+healthy young man like you;” and Mitchell stood up.
+
+“He lay awake by her side at nights thinking and fighting the thing
+out.”
+
+“And you’ve been lying awake, thinking, with me and ‘the Oracle’ by
+your side. We’ll have to plant the tommy-hawk, and watch you by turns
+at night till you get over this.”
+
+“One night he rested on his elbow, and watched her sleeping, and tried
+to reconstruct his ideal out of her, and, just when he was getting into
+a happier frame of mind, her mouth fell open, and she snored.... I
+didn’t get any further than the snore,” I said.
+
+“No, of course you didn’t,” said Mitchell, “and none of the sex
+problemers ever will—unless they get as far as ‘blanky.’ You might have
+made the snore cure him; did it?”
+
+“No, it was making things worse in my idea of the yarn. He fell back
+and lay staring at the ceiling in a hopeless kind of a way.”
+
+“Then he was a fit case for the lunatic asylum.... Now, look here,
+Harry, you’re a good-natured, soft old fool when you’re in your right
+mind; just you go on being a good-natured, soft old fool, and don’t try
+to make a problem out of yourself or anybody else, or you’ll come to a
+bad end. A pocket-book’s to keep your accounts in, not to take notes in
+(you take them in your head and use ’em in your arms), not to write
+sex-problem rot in—that’s spoilt many a good pocket-book, and many a
+good man. You’ve got a girl you’re talking about going back to as soon
+as we’ve finished this contract. Don’t you make a problem of her; make
+a happy wife and mother of her.... I was very clever when I was
+young”—and here Mitchell’s voice took a tinge of bitterness, or
+sadness. “I used to make problems out of things.... I ain’t much to
+boast of now.... Seems to me that a good many men want to make angels
+of their wives without first taking trouble of making saints of
+themselves. We want to make women’s ways our ways—it would be just as
+fair to make our ways theirs. Some men want to be considered gods in
+their own homes; you’ll generally find that sort of men very small
+potatoes outside; if they weren’t they wouldn’t bother so much about
+being cocks on their own little dunghills.... And again, old mates
+seldom quarrel, because they understand each other’s moods. Now, if you
+went brooding round for any length of time I’d say to you. ‘Now then,
+Harry, what have I been doing to you? Spit it out, old man.’ And you’d
+do the same by me; but how many men would take even that much trouble
+with their wives?”
+
+A breeze stirred the mulga and brought the sound of a good voice
+singing in the surveyors’ camp:
+
+Should old acquaintance be forgot
+    And never brought to min’?
+Should old acquaintance be forgot
+    And the days of Auld Lang Syne?
+
+
+“That damned old tune will upset the Oracle for the rest of the night,”
+I said.
+
+“Now, there’s the Oracle,” said Mitchell. “He was wronged by a woman as
+few men are wronged; his life was ruined—but he isn’t the man to take
+any stock in sex problems on account of her. He thinks he’s great on
+problems, but he isn’t. It all amounts to this—that he’s sorry for most
+men and all women and tries to act up to it to the best of his ability;
+and if he ain’t a Christian, God knows what is—I don’t. No matter what
+a woman does to you, or what you think she does to you, there come
+times, sooner or later, when you feel sorry for her—deep down in your
+heart—that is if you’re a man. And, no matter what action or course you
+might take against her, and no matter how right or justified you might
+seem in doing it, there comes a time when, deep down in your heart, you
+feel mean and doubtful about your own part. You can take that as a
+general thing as regards men against women, and man against man, I
+think. And I believe that deep-down feeling of being doubtful, or mean,
+or sorry, that comes afterwards, when you are cooler and know more
+about the world, is a right and natural thing, and we ought to act more
+in accordance with it.”
+
+Came the refrain from the surveyors’ camp:
+
+We twa hae run about the braes,
+    An’ pu’d the gowans fine;
+But we’ve wandered mony a weary foot
+    Sin’ Auld Lang Syne.
+
+
+“We feel sorry for our quarrels with our worst enemy when we see him
+lying still and quiet—dead. Why can’t we try and feel a bit sorry
+beforehand?”
+
+    For Auld Lang Syne.
+We twa ha’ padl’t i’ the burn,
+    Fra mornin’ sun till dine;
+But seas between us braid ha’ roar’d
+    Sin’ Auld Lang Syne.
+
+
+“I used to feel blazing bitter against things one time but it never
+hurt anybody but myself in the end. I argued and quarrelled with a girl
+once—and made a problem of the thing and went away. She’s married to a
+brute now, and I’m what I am. I made a problem of a good home or the
+world once, and went against the last man in God’s world that I should
+have gone against, and turned my back on his hand, and left him. His
+hand was very cold the next time I took it in mine. We don’t want
+problems to make us more bitter against the world than we get
+sometimes.”
+
+And here’s a han’ my trusty frien’,
+    An’ gie’s a han’ o’ thine,
+We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet
+    For Auld Lang Syne.
+
+
+“And that song’s the answer of all problems,” said Mitchell. But it was
+I who lay awake and thought that night.
+
+
+
+
+THE ROMANCE OF THE SWAG
+
+
+The Australian swag fashion is the easiest way in the world of carrying
+a load. I ought to know something about carrying loads: I’ve carried
+babies, which are the heaviest and most awkward and heartbreaking loads
+in this world for a boy or man to carry, I fancy. God remember mothers
+who slave about the housework (and do sometimes a man’s work in
+addition in the bush) with a heavy, squalling kid on one arm! I’ve
+humped logs on the selection, “burning-off,” with loads of
+fencing-posts and rails and palings out of steep, rugged gullies (and
+was happier then, perhaps); I’ve carried a shovel, crowbar, heavy
+“rammer,” a dozen insulators on an average (strung round my shoulders
+with raw flax)-to say nothing of soldiering kit, tucker-bag, billy and
+climbing spurs—all day on a telegraph line in rough country in New
+Zealand, and in places where a man had to manage his load with one hand
+and help himself climb with the other; and I’ve helped hump and drag
+telegraph-poles up cliffs and sidings where the horses couldn’t go.
+I’ve carried a portmanteau on the hot dusty roads in green old jackaroo
+days. Ask any actor who’s been stranded and had to count railway
+sleepers from one town to another! he’ll tell you what sort of an
+awkward load a portmanteau is, especially if there’s a broken-hearted
+man underneath it. I’ve tried knapsack fashion—one of the least healthy
+and most likely to give a man sores; I’ve carried my belongings in a
+three-bushel sack slung over my shoulder—blankets, tucker, spare boots
+and poetry all lumped together. I tried carrying a load on my head, and
+got a crick in my neck and spine for days. I’ve carried a load on my
+mind that should have been shared by editors and publishers. I’ve
+helped hump luggage and furniture up to, and down from, a top flat in
+London. And I’ve carried swag for months out back in Australia—and it
+was life, in spite of its “squalidness” and meanness and wretchedness
+and hardship, and in spite of the fact that the world would have
+regarded us as “tramps”—and a free life amongst _men_ from all the
+world!
+
+The Australian swag was born of Australia and no other land—of the
+Great Lone Land of magnificent distances and bright heat; the land of
+self-reliance, and never-give-in, and help-your-mate. The grave of many
+of the world’s tragedies and comedies—royal and otherwise. The land
+where a man out of employment might shoulder his swag in Adelaide and
+take the track, and years later walk into a hut on the Gulf, or never
+be heard of any more, or a body be found in the bush and buried by the
+mounted police, or never found and never buried—what does it matter?
+
+The land I love above all others—not because it was kind to me, but
+because I was born on Australian soil, and because of the foreign
+father who died at his work in the ranks of Australian pioneers, and
+because of many things. Australia! My country! Her very name is music
+to me. God bless Australia! for the sake of the great hearts of the
+heart of her! God keep her clear of the old-world shams and social lies
+and mockery, and callous commercialism, and sordid shame! And heaven
+send that, if ever in my time her sons are called upon to fight for her
+young life and honour, I die with the first rank of them and be buried
+in Australian ground.
+
+But this will probably be called false, forced or “maudlin sentiment”
+here in England, where the mawkish sentiment of the music-halls, and
+the popular applause it receives, is enough to make a healthy man sick,
+and is only equalled by music-hall vulgarity. So I’ll get on.
+
+In the old digging days the knapsack, or straps-across-the chest
+fashion, was tried, but the load pressed on a man’s chest and impeded
+his breathing, and a man needs to have his bellows free on long tracks
+in hot, stirless weather. Then the “horse-collar,” or rolled military
+overcoat style—swag over one shoulder and under the other arm—was
+tried, but it was found to be too hot for the Australian climate, and
+was discarded along with Wellington boots and leggings. Until recently,
+Australian city artists and editors—who knew as much about the bush as
+Downing Street knows about the British colonies in general—seemed to
+think the horse-collar swag was still in existence; and some artists
+gave the swagman a stick, as if he were a tramp of civilization with an
+eye on the backyard and a fear of the dog. English artists, by the way,
+seem firmly convinced that the Australian bushman is born in Wellington
+boots with a polish on ’em you could shave yourself by.
+
+The swag is usually composed of a tent “fly” or strip of calico (a
+cover for the swag and a shelter in bad weather—in New Zealand it is
+oilcloth or waterproof twill), a couple of blankets, blue by custom and
+preference, as that colour shows the dirt less than any other (hence
+the name “bluey” for swag), and the core is composed of spare clothing
+and small personal effects. To make or “roll up” your swag: lay the fly
+or strip of calico on the ground, blueys on top of it; across one end,
+with eighteen inches or so to spare, lay your spare trousers and shirt,
+folded, light boots tied together by the laces toe to heel, books,
+bundle of old letters, portraits, or whatever little knick-knacks you
+have or care to carry, bag of needles, thread, pen and ink, spare
+patches for your pants, and bootlaces. Lay or arrange the pile so that
+it will roll evenly with the swag (some pack the lot in an old
+pillowslip or canvas bag), take a fold over of blanket and calico the
+whole length on each side, so as to reduce the width of the swag to,
+say, three feet, throw the spare end, with an inward fold, over the
+little pile of belongings, and then roll the whole to the other end,
+using your knees and judgment to make the swag tight, compact and
+artistic; when within eighteen inches of the loose end take an inward
+fold in that, and bring it up against the body of the swag. There is a
+strong suggestion of a roley-poley in a rag about the business, only
+the ends of the swag are folded in, in rings, and not tied. Fasten the
+swag with three or four straps, according to judgment and the supply of
+straps. To the top strap, for the swag is carried (and eased down in
+shanty bars and against walls or veranda-posts when not on the track)
+in a more or less vertical position—to the top strap, and lowest, or
+lowest but one, fasten the ends of the shoulder strap (usually a towel
+is preferred as being softer to the shoulder), your coat being carried
+outside the swag at the back, under the straps. To the top strap fasten
+the string of the nose-bag, a calico bag about the size of a
+pillowslip, containing the tea, sugar and flour bags, bread, meat,
+baking-powder and salt, and brought, when the swag is carried from the
+left shoulder, over the right on to the chest, and so balancing the
+swag behind. But a swagman can throw a heavy swag in a nearly vertical
+position against his spine, slung from one shoulder only and without
+any balance, and carry it as easily as you might wear your overcoat.
+Some bushmen arrange their belongings so neatly and conveniently, with
+swag straps in a sort of harness, that they can roll up the swag in
+about a minute, and unbuckle it and throw it out as easily as a roll of
+wall-paper, and there’s the bed ready on the ground with the wardrobe
+for a pillow. The swag is always used for a seat on the track; it is a
+soft seat, so trousers last a long time. And, the dust being mostly
+soft and silky on the long tracks out back, boots last marvellously.
+Fifteen miles a day is the average with the swag, but you must travel
+according to the water: if the next bore or tank is five miles on, and
+the next twenty beyond, you camp at the five-mile water to-night and do
+the twenty next day. But if it’s thirty miles you have to do it.
+Travelling with the swag in Australia is variously and picturesquely
+described as “humping bluey,” “walking Matilda,” “humping Matilda,”
+“humping your drum,” “being on the wallaby,” “jabbing trotters,” and
+“tea and sugar burglaring,” but most travelling shearers now call
+themselves trav’lers, and say simply “on the track,” or “carrying
+swag.”
+
+And there you have the Australian swag. Men from all the world have
+carried it—lords and low-class Chinamen, saints and world martyrs, and
+felons, thieves, and murderers, educated gentlemen and boors who
+couldn’t sign their mark, gentlemen who fought for Poland and convicts
+who fought the world, women, and more than one woman disguised as a
+man. The Australian swag has held in its core letters and papers in all
+languages, the honour of great houses, and more than one national
+secret, papers that would send well-known and highly-respected men to
+jail, and proofs of the innocence of men going mad in prisons, life
+tragedies and comedies, fortunes and papers that secured titles and
+fortunes, and the last pence of lost fortunes, life secrets, portraits
+of mothers and dead loves, pictures of fair women, heart-breaking old
+letters written long ago by vanished hands, and the pencilled
+manuscript of more than one book which will be famous yet.
+
+The weight of the swag varies from the light rouseabout’s swag,
+containing one blanket and a clean shirt, to the “royal Alfred,” with
+tent and all complete, and weighing part of a ton. Some old sundowners
+have a mania for gathering, from selectors’ and shearers’ huts, and
+dust-heaps, heart-breaking loads of rubbish which can never be of any
+possible use to them or anyone else. Here is an inventory of the
+contents of the swag of an old tramp who was found dead on the track,
+lying on his face on the sand, with his swag on top of him, and his
+arms stretched straight out as if he were embracing the mother earth,
+or had made, with his last movement, the sign of the cross to the
+blazing heavens:
+
+Rotten old tent in rags. Filthy blue blanket, patched with squares of
+red and calico. Half of “white blanket” nearly black now, patched with
+pieces of various material and sewn to half of red blanket.
+Three-bushel sack slit open. Pieces of sacking. Part of a woman’s
+skirt. Two rotten old pairs of moleskin trousers. One leg of a pair of
+trousers. Back of a shirt. Half a waistcoat. Two tweed coats, green,
+old and rotting, and patched with calico. Blanket, etc. Large bundle of
+assorted rags for patches, all rotten. Leaky billy-can, containing
+fishing-line, papers, suet, needles and cotton, etc. Jam-tin, medicine
+bottles, corks on strings, to hang to his hat to keep the flies off (a
+sign of madness in the bush, for the corks would madden a sane man
+sooner than the flies could). Three boots of different sizes, all
+belonging to the right foot, and a left slipper. Coffee-pot, without
+handle or spout, and quart-pot full of rubbish—broken knives and forks,
+with the handles burnt off, spoons, etc., picked up on rubbish-heaps;
+and many rusty nails, to be used as buttons, I suppose.
+
+Broken saw blade, hammer, broken crockery, old pannikins, small rusty
+frying-pan without a handle, children’s old shoes, many bits of old
+bootleather and greenhide, part of yellowback novel, mutilated English
+dictionary, grammar and arithmetic book, a ready reckoner, a cookery
+book, a bulgy anglo-foreign dictionary, part of a Shakespeare, book in
+French and book in German, and a book on etiquette and courtship. A
+heavy pair of blucher boots, with uppers parched and cracked, and soles
+so patched (patch over patch) with leather, boot protectors, hoop iron
+and hobnails that they were about two inches thick, and the boots
+weighed over five pounds. (If you don’t believe me go into the
+Melbourne Museum, where, in a glass case in a place of honour, you will
+see a similar, perhaps the same, pair of bluchers labelled “An example
+of colonial industry.”) And in the core of the swag was a sugar-bag
+tied tightly with a whip-lash, and containing another old skirt, rolled
+very tight and fastened with many turns of a length of clothes-line,
+which last, I suppose, he carried to hang himself with if he felt that
+way. The skirt was rolled round a small packet of old portraits and
+almost indecipherable letters—one from a woman who had evidently been a
+sensible woman and a widow, and who stated in the letter that she did
+not intend to get married again as she had enough to do already,
+slavin’ her finger-nails off to keep a family, without having a second
+husband to keep. And her answer was “final for good and all,” and it
+wasn’t no use comin’ “bungfoodlin’” round her again. If he did she’d
+set Satan on to him. “Satan” was a dog, I suppose.
+
+The letter was addressed to “Dear Bill,” as were others. There were no
+envelopes. The letters were addressed from no place in particular, so
+there weren’t any means of identifying the dead man. The police buried
+him under a gum, and a young trooper cut on the tree the words:
+
+SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
+BILL,
+WHO DIED.
+
+
+
+
+“BUCKOLTS’ GATE”
+AN AUSTRALIAN STORY
+
+
+PROLOGUE
+
+Old Abel Albury had a genius for getting the bull by the tail with a
+tight grip, and holding on with both hands and an obstinacy born of
+ignorance—and not necessarily for the sake of self-preservation or
+selfishness—while all the time the bull might be, so to speak, rooting
+up life-long friendships and neighbourly relations, and upsetting
+domestic customs and traditions with his horns.
+
+Yes, Uncle Abel was always grasping the wrong end of things, and
+sticking to it with that human mulishness which is often stronger, and
+more often wearies and breaks down the opposition than an intelligent
+man’s arguments. He was——or professed to be, the family said—unable for
+a long time to distinguish between his two grand-nephews, one of whom
+was short and fat, while the other was tall and thin, the only points
+of resemblance between them being that each possessed the old family
+nose and eyes. When they were boys he used to lay the strap about one
+in mistake for the other. They had a saying that Uncle Abel saw with
+ten squinting eyes.
+
+Also, he could never—or would not, as the family said—remember names.
+He referred to Mrs Porter, a thin, haggard selector’s wife, as “Mrs
+Stout” and he balanced matters by calling Mrs Southwick “Mrs
+Porterwicket”—when he didn’t address her as “Mrs
+What’s-the-woman’s-name”—and he succeeded in deeply offending both
+ladies.
+
+Uncle Abel was Mrs Carey’s uncle.
+
+Down at the lower end of Carey’s selection at Rocky Rises, in the
+extreme corner of the lower or outer paddock, were sliprails opening
+into the main road, which ran down along the siding, round the foot of
+a spur from ridge, and out west. These sliprails were called “The Lower
+Sliprails” by the family, and it occurred to Uncle Abel to refer to
+them as “Buckolts’ Gate,” for no other reason apparently than that
+Buckolts’ farm lay in that direction. The farm was about a mile further
+on, on the other side of the creek, and the gate leading to it from the
+main road was round the spur, out of sight of Carey’s selection. It is
+quite possible that Uncle Abel reasoned the thing out for days, for of
+such material are some human brains. Sliprails, or a slip-panel, is a
+panel of fencing of which the rails are made to be slipped out of the
+mortise holes in the posts so as to give passage to horses, vehicles
+and cattle. I suppose Abel called it a gate, because he was always
+going to hang a proper gate there some day. The family were unaware of
+his new name for the Lower Sliprails, and after he had, on one or two
+occasions, informed the boys that they would find a missing cow or
+horse at the Buckolts’ Gate, and they had found it calmly camped at the
+Lower Sliprails, and after he had made several appointments to meet
+parties at Buckolts’ Gate, and had been found leaning obstinately on
+the fence by the Lower Sliprails with no explanation to offer other
+than that he _was_ waiting at Buckolts’ Gate, they began to fear that
+he was becoming weak in his mind.
+
+ACT I
+
+It was New Year’s Eve at Rocky Rises. There was no need for fireworks
+nor bonfires, for the bush-fires were out all along the ranges to the
+east, and, as night came on, lines and curves of lights—clear lights,
+white lights, and, in the nearer distance, red lights and smoky
+lights—marked the sidings and ridges of a western spur of the Blue
+Mountain Range, and seemed suspended against a dark sky, for the stars
+and the loom of the hills were hidden by smoke and drought haze.
+
+There was a dance at Careys’. Old Carey was a cheerful, broad-minded
+bushman, haunted at times by the memories of old days, when he was the
+beau of the bush balls, and so when he built his new slab-and-bark barn
+he had it properly floored with hard-wood, and the floor well-faced “to
+give the young people a show when they wanted a dance,” he said. The
+floor had a spring in it, and bush boys and girls often rode twenty
+miles and more to dance on that floor. The girls said it was a lovely
+floor.
+
+On this occasion Carey had stacked his wheat outside until after the
+New Year. Spring-carts, and men and girls on horseback came in from
+miles round. “Sperm” candles had been cut up and thrown on the floor
+during the afternoon, and rubbed over by feet cased tightly in
+’lastic-sides; and hoops were hung horizontally from the tie-beams,
+with candles stuck round them. There were fresh-faced girls, and sweet,
+freckled-faced girls, and jolly girls, and shy girls—all sorts of girls
+except sulky, “toney” girls—and lanky chaps, most of them sawney, and
+weird, whiskered agriculturists, who watched the dancers with old, old
+time-worn smiles, or stood, or sat on their heels yarning, with their
+pipes, outside, where two boilers were slung over a log-fire to boil
+water for tea; and there were leathery women, with complexions like
+dried apples, who gossiped—for the first time in months perhaps—and
+watched the young people, and thought at times, no doubt, of other
+days—of other days when they were girls. (And not so far distant
+either, in some cases, for women dry quickly in the bush.)
+
+And there were one or two old soldiers and their wives, whose eyes
+glistened when Jim Bullock played “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”
+
+Jim Bullock was there with his concertina. He sat on a stool in front
+of a bench, on which was a beer-keg, piles of teacups and saucers,
+several big tin teapots, and plates of sandwiches, sponge-cakes, and
+tarts. Jim sat in his shirt-sleeves, with his flat-brimmed, wire-bound,
+“hard-hitter” hat on, slanting over his weaker eye. He held one leg
+loosely and the other rigid, with the concertina on his knee, and
+swanked away at the instrument by the hour, staring straight in front
+of him with the expression of a cod-fish, and never moving a muscle
+except the muscles of his great hairy arms and big chapped and
+sun-blotched hands; while chaps in tight “larstins” (elastic-side
+boots), slop suits of black, bound with braid, and with coats too short
+in the neck and arms, and trousers bell-mouthed at the bottoms, and
+some with paper collars, narrow red ribbon ties, or scarfs through
+walnut shells, held their partners rigidly, and went round the room
+with their eyes—most of them—cocked at the rafters in semi-idiotic
+ecstasy.
+
+But there was tall, graceful, pink-and-white Bertha Buckolt, blue-eyed
+and blue-black-haired, and little Mary Carey with the kind, grey eyes
+and red-gold hair; there was Mary’s wild brother Jim, with curly black
+hair and blue eyes and dimples of innocence; and there was Harry Dale,
+the drover, Jim’s shearing and droving mate, a tall, good-looking,
+brown-eyed and brown-haired young fellow, a “better-class” bushman and
+the best dancer in the district. Uncle Abel usurped the position of
+M.C., and roared “Now then! take yer partners!” and bawled instructions
+and interrupted and tangled up the dancers, until they got used to
+taking no notice of his bull voice. Mary Carey was too shy—because she
+loved him, and secretly and fondly hoped and doubted that he cared for
+her—to be seen dancing more than once with Harry Dale, so he shared
+Bertha Buckolt, the best girl dancer there, with Jim Carey, who danced
+with his sister when Harry was dancing with Bertha Buckolt, and who
+seemed, for some reason best known to himself, to be perfectly
+satisfied with the arrangement. Poor little Mary began to fret
+presently, and feel a little jealous of Bertha, her old schoolmate. She
+was little and couldn’t dance like Bertha, and she couldn’t help
+noticing how well Bertha looked to-night, and what a well-matched pair
+she and Harry made; and so, when twelve o’clock came and they all went
+outside to watch the Old Year out and the New Year in—with a big
+bonfire on the distant ridge where the grass fires had reached a
+stretch of dry scrub—and to join hands all round and sing “Auld Lang
+Syne,” little Mary was not to be found, for she was sitting on a log
+round behind the cow-yard, crying softly to herself.
+
+And when about three o’clock they all started home, Mary gave Bertha
+her cheek to kiss instead of her mouth, and that hurt Bertha, who had
+_her_ cry riding home, to the astonishment and irritation of her
+brother Jack, who rode home with her. But when they were all gone Mary
+was missing again and when her mother called her, and, after a pause,
+the voice of Harry Dale said, respectfully, in the darkness, “She’s
+here, Mrs Carey, she’s all right,” the two were discovered sitting on a
+convenient log of the wood-heap, with an awkward and overacted interval
+of log between them.
+
+Old Carey liked Harry Dale, and seemed very well satisfied with the way
+things appeared to be going. He pressed Harry to stay at the selection
+overnight. “The missus will make you a shake-down on the floor,” he
+said. Harry had no appointments, and stayed cheerfully, and old Carey,
+having had a whisky or two, insisted on Mary making the shake-down, and
+the old folks winked at each other behind the young folks’ backs to see
+how poor little Mary spread a spare mattress, with redhot, averted
+face, and found an extra pillow and a spare pair of ironed sheets for
+the shake-down.
+
+At sunrise she stole out to milk the cows, which was her regular duty;
+there was no other way out from her room than through the dining-room,
+where Harry lay on his back, with his arms folded, resting peacefully.
+He seemed sound asleep and safe for a good two hours, so she ventured.
+As she passed out she paused a moment looking down on him with all the
+lovelight in her eyes, and, obeying a sudden impulse, she stooped
+softly and touched his forehead with her lips, then she slipped out.
+Harry stretched, opened his eyes, winked solemnly at the ceiling, and
+then, after a decent interval, he got up, dressed, and went out to help
+her to milk.
+
+Harry Dale and Jim Carey were going out to take charge of a mob of
+bullocks going north-west, away up in Queensland. And as they had lost
+a day and night to be at the dance, they decided to start in the cool
+of the evening and travel all night. Mary walked from the homestead to
+the Lower Sliprails between her brother, who rode—because he was her
+brother—and led a packhorse on the other side, and Harry, who walked
+and led his horse—because he was her sweetheart, avowed only since last
+night.
+
+There were thunderstorms about, and Mary had repented sufficiently with
+regard to Bertha Buckolt to wear on her shoulders a cape which Bertha
+had left behind her last night.
+
+When they reached the Lower Sliprails Jim said he’d go on and that
+Harry needn’t hurry: he stooped over his horse’s neck, kissed his
+sister, promised to keep away from the drink, not to touch a card, and
+to leave off fighting, and rode on. And when he rounded the Spur he saw
+a tall, graceful figure slipping through the trees from the creek
+towards Buckolts’ Gate.
+
+Then came the critical time at the Lower Sliprails. The shadows from
+the setting sun lengthened quickly on the siding, and then the sun
+slipped out of sight over a “saddle” in the ridges, and all was soon
+dusk save the sunlit peaks of the Blue Mountains away to the east over
+the sweeps of blue-grey bush.
+
+“Ah, well! Mary,” said Harry, “I must make a start now.”
+
+“You’ll—you’ll look after Jim, won’t you, Harry?” said Mary.
+
+“I will, Mary, for your sake.”
+
+Her mouth began to twitch, her chin to tremble, and her eyes brimmed
+suddenly.
+
+“You must cheer up, Mary,” he said with her in his arms. “I’ll be back
+before you know where you are, and then we’ll be married right off at
+once and settle down for life.”
+
+She smiled bravely.
+
+“Good-bye, Mary!”
+
+“Good-bye, Harry!”
+
+He led his horse through the rails and lifted them, with trembling
+hands, and shot them home. Another kiss across the top rail and he got
+on his horse. She mounted the lower rail, and he brought his horse
+close alongside the fence and stooped to kiss her again.
+
+“Cheer up, Mary!” he said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do—when I come back
+I’ll whistle when I reach the Spur and you be here to let the sliprails
+down for me. I’ll time myself to get here about sundown. I’ll whistle
+‘Willie Riley,’ so you’ll know it’s me. Good-bye, little girl! I must
+go now. Don’t fret—the time will soon go by.”
+
+He turned, swung his horse, and rode slowly down the track, turning now
+and again to wave his hand to her, with a farewell flourish of his hat
+as he rounded the Spur. His track, five hundred miles, or perhaps a
+thousand, into the great north-west; his time, six months, or perhaps a
+year. Hers a hundred yards or so back to the dusty, dreary drudgery of
+selection life. The daylight faded into starlight, the sidings grew
+very dim, and a faint white figure blurred against the bars of the
+slip-panel.
+
+ACT II
+
+It was the last day of the threshing—shortly after New Year—at Rocky
+Rises. The green boughs, which had been lashed to the veranda-posts on
+Christmas Eve, had withered and been used for firewood. The travelling
+steamer had gone with its gang of men, and the family sat down to tea,
+the men tired with hard work and heat, and with prickly heat and
+irritating wheaten chaff and dust under their clothes—and with smut
+(for the crop had been a smutty one) “up their brains” as Uncle Abel
+said—the women worn out with cooking for a big gang of shearers.
+
+Good-humoured Aunt Emma—who was Uncle Abel’s niece—recovered first, and
+started the conversation. There were one or two neighbours’ wives who
+bad lent crockery and had come over to help with the cooking in their
+turns. Jim Carey’s name came up incidentally, but was quickly dropped,
+for ill reports of Jim had come home. Then Aunt Emma mentioned Harry
+Dale, and glanced meaningly at Mary, whose face flamed as she bent over
+her plate.
+
+“Never mind, Mary,” said Aunt Emma, “it’s nothing to be ashamed of. We
+were all girls once. There’s many a girl would jump at Harry.”
+
+“Who says I’m ashamed?” said Mary, straightening up indignantly.
+
+“Don’t tease her, Emma,” said Mrs Carey, mildly.
+
+“I’ll tell yer what,” said young Tom Carey, frankly, “Mary got a letter
+from him to-day. I seen her reading it behind the house.”
+
+Mary’s face flamed again and went down over her plate.
+
+“Mary,” said her mother, with sudden interest, “did Harry say anything
+of Jim?”
+
+“No, mother,” said Mary. “And that’s why I didn’t tell you about the
+letter.”
+
+There was a pause. Then Tommy said, with that delightful tact which
+usually characterizes young Tommies:
+
+“Well, Mary needn’t be so cocky about Harry Dale, anyhow. I seen him
+New Year’s Eve when we had the dance. I seen him after the dance
+liftin’ Bertha Buckolt onter her horse in the dark—as if she couldn’t
+get on herself—she’s big enough. I seen him lift her on, an’ he took
+her right up an’ lifted her right inter the saddle, ’stead of holdin’
+his hand for her to tread on like that new-chum jackaroo we had. An’,
+what’s more, I seen him hug her an’ give her a kiss before he lifted
+her on. He told her he was as good as her brother.”
+
+“What did he mean by that, Tommy?” asked Mrs Porter, to break an
+awkward pause.
+
+“How’m I ter know what he means?” said Tommy, politely.
+
+“And, Tommy, I seen Harry Dale give young Tommy Carey a lick with a
+strap the day before New Year’s Eve for throwing his sister’s cat into
+the dam,” said Aunt Emma, coming to poor Mary’s rescue. “Never mind,
+Mary, my dear, he said goodbye to you last.”
+
+“No, _he didn’t_!” roared Uncle Abel.
+
+They were used to Uncle Abel’s sudden bellowing, but it startled them
+this time.
+
+“Why, Uncle Abel,” cried both Aunt Emma and Mrs Carey, “whatever do you
+mean?”
+
+“What I means is that I ain’t a-goin’ to have the feelin’s of a niece
+of mine trifled with. What I means is that I seen Harry Dale with
+Bertha Buckolt on New Year’s night after he left here. That’s what I
+means—”
+
+“Don’t speak so loud, Abel, we’re not deaf,” interrupted Carey, as Mary
+started up white-faced. “What do you want to always shout for?”
+
+“I speak loud because I want people to hear me!” roared Uncle Abel,
+turning on him.
+
+“Go on, Uncle Abel,” said Mary, “tell me what you mean.”
+
+“I mean,” said Uncle Abel, lowering his voice a little, “that I seen
+Harry Dale and Bertha Buckolt at Buckolts’ Gate that night—I seen it
+all—”
+
+“At _Buckolts_’ Gate!” cried Mary.
+
+“_Yes_! at Buckolts’ Gate! Ain’t I speakin’ loud enough?”
+
+“And where were you?”
+
+“Never mind wheers I was. I was comin’ home along the ridges, and I
+seen them. I seen them say good-bye; I seen them hug an’ kiss—”
+
+“Uncle Abel!” exclaimed Aunt Emma.
+
+“It’s no use Uncle Abelin’ me. What I sez I sez. I ain’t a-goin’ to
+have a niece of mine bungfoodled—”
+
+“Uncle Abel,” cried Mary, staring at him wild-eyed, “do be careful what
+you say. You must have made a mistake. Are you sure it was Bertha and
+Harry?”
+
+“Am I sure my head’s on me neck?” roared Uncle Abel. “Would I see ’em
+if I didn’t see ’em? I tell you—”
+
+“Now wait a moment, Uncle Abel,” interrupted Mary, with dangerous
+calmness. “Listen to me. Harry Dale and I are engaged to be married,
+and—”
+
+“Have you got the writings!” shouted Uncle Abel.
+
+“The what?” said Mary.
+
+“The writings.”
+
+“No, of course not.”
+
+“Then that’s where you are,” said Uncle Abel, triumphantly. “If you had
+the writings you could sue him for breach of contract.”
+
+Uncle Abel, who couldn’t read, had no faith whatever in verbal
+agreements (he wouldn’t sign one, he said), all others he referred to
+as “writings.”
+
+“Now, listen to me, Uncle Abel,” said Mary, trembling now. “Are you
+sure you saw Harry Dale and Bertha Buckolt at Buckolts’ Gate after he
+left here that night?”
+
+“Yes. An’ what’s more, I seen young Tommy there ridin’ on his pony
+along by the Spur a little while after, an’ he muster seen them too, if
+he’s got a tongue.”
+
+Mary turned quickly to her brother.
+
+“Well, all I can say,” said Tommy, quietened now, “is that I seen _her_
+at Buckolts’ Gate that night. I was comin’ home from Two-Mile Flat, and
+I met Jim with his packhorse about a mile the other side of Buckolts’,
+and while we was talkin’ Harry Dale caught up, so I jist said ‘So-long’
+an’ left ’em. And when I got to Buckolt’s Gate I seen Bertha Buckolt.
+She was standin’ under a tree, and she looked as if she was cryin’.”
+
+But Mary got her bonnet and started out.
+
+“Where are you going to, Mary?” asked her mother, starting up
+nervously.
+
+“I’m going across to Buckolts’ to find out the truth,” said Mary, and
+she went out.
+
+“Better let her go, Lizzie,” said Aunt Emma, detaining her sister.
+
+“You’ve done it now, Uncle Abel.”
+
+“Well, why didn’t she get the writings?” retorted Uncle Abel.
+
+Half-way to Buckolts’ Mary met Bertha Buckolt herself, coming over to
+the selection for the first time since the night of the party. Bertha
+started forward to kiss Mary, but stopped short as Mary stood
+stock-still and faced her, with her hands behind her back.
+
+“Why! whatever is the matter, Mary?” exclaimed Bertha.
+
+“You know very well, Bertha.”
+
+“Why! Whatever do you mean? What have I done?”
+
+“What haven’t you done? You’ve—you’ve broken my heart.”
+
+“Good gracious me! Whatever are you talking about? Tell me what it is,
+Mary?”
+
+“You met him at your gate that night?”
+
+“I know I did.”
+
+“Oh, Bertha! How could you be so mean and deceitful?”
+
+“Mean and deceitful! What do you mean by that? Whatever are you talking
+about? I suppose I’ve got as good a right to meet him as anyone else.”
+
+“No, you haven’t,” retorted Mary, “you’re only stringing him on. You
+only did it to spite me. You helped him to deceive me. You ought to be
+ashamed to look me in the face.”
+
+“Good gracious! Whatever are you talking about? Ain’t I good enough for
+him! I ought to be, God knows! I suppose he can marry who he likes, and
+if I’m poor fool enough to love him and marry him, what then? Mary, you
+ought to be the last to speak—speak to—to me like that.”
+
+“Yes. He can marry all, the girls in the country for all I care. I
+never want to see either him or you any more. You’re a cruel,
+deceitful, brazen-faced hussy, and he’s a heartless, deceiving
+blackguard.”
+
+“Mary! I believe you’re mad,” said Bertha, firmly. “How dare you speak
+to me like that! And as for him being a blackguard. Why, you ought to
+be the last in the world to say such a thing; you ought to be the last
+to say a word against him. Why, I don’t believe you ever cared a rap
+for him in spite of all your pretence. He could go to the devil for all
+you cared.”
+
+“That’s enough, Bertha Buckolt!” cried Mary. “_You_—you! Why, you’re a
+barefaced girl, that’s what you are! I don’t want to see your brazen
+face again.” With that she turned and stumbled blindly in the direction
+of home.
+
+“Send back my cape,” cried Bertha as she too turned away.
+
+Mary walked wildly home and fled to her room and locked the door.
+Bertha did likewise.
+
+Mary let Aunt Emma in after a while, ceased sobbing and allowed herself
+to be comforted a little. Next morning she was out milking at the usual
+time, but there were dark hollows under her eyes, and her little face
+was white and set. After breakfast she rolled the cape up very tight in
+a brown-paper parcel, addressed it severely to
+
+MISS BERTHA BUCKOLT,
+Eurunderee Creek,
+
+
+and sent it home by one of the school-children. She wrote to Harry Dale
+and told him that she knew all about it (not stating what), but she
+forgave him and hoped he’d be happy. She never wanted to see his face
+again, and enclosed his portrait.
+
+Harry, who was as true and straight as a bushman could be, puzzled it
+out and decided that some one of his old love affairs must have come to
+Mary’s ears, and wrote demanding an explanation.
+
+She never answered that letter.
+
+ACT III
+
+It was Christmas Day at Rocky Rises. The plum puddings had been made,
+as usual, weeks beforehand, and hung in rags to the tie-beams and taken
+down and boiled again. Poultry had been killed and plucked and cooked,
+and all the toil had been gone through, and every preparation made for
+a red-hot dinner on a blazing hot day—and for no other reason than that
+our great-grandmothers used to do it in a cold climate at
+Christmas-times that came in mid-winter. Merry men hadn’t gone forth to
+the wood to gather in the mistletoe (if they ever did in England, in
+the olden days, instead of sending shivering, wretched vassals in rags
+to do it); but Uncle Abel had gone gloomily up the ridge on Christmas
+Eve, with an axe on his shoulder (and Tommy unwillingly in tow,
+scowling and making faces behind his back), and had cut young pines and
+dragged them home and lashed them firmly to the veranda-posts, which
+was the custom out there.
+
+There was little goodwill or peace between the three or four farms
+round Rocky Rises that Christmas Day, and Uncle Abel had been the cause
+of most of the ill-feeling, though they didn’t know, and he was least
+aware of it of any.
+
+It all came about in this way.
+
+Shortly after last New Year Ryan’s bull had broken loose and gone
+astray for two days and nights, breaking into neighbours’ paddocks and
+filling himself with hay and damaging other bulls, and making love by
+night and hiding in the scrub all day. On the second night he broke
+through and jumped over Reid’s fences, and destroyed about an acre of
+grape-vines and adulterated Reid’s stock, besides interfering with
+certain heifers which were not of a marriageable age. There was a L5
+penalty on a stray bull. Reid impounded the bull and claimed heavy
+damages. Ryan, a small selector of little account, was always pulling
+some neighbour to court when he wasn’t being “pulled” himself, so he
+went to court over this case.
+
+Now, it appears that the bull, on his holiday, had spent a part of the
+first night in Carey’s lower paddock, and Uncle Abel (who was out
+mooching about the bush at all hours, “havin’ a look at some timber” or
+some “indercations” [of gold], or on some mysterious business or fad,
+the mystery of which was of his own making)—Uncle Abel saw the bull in
+the paddock at daylight and turned it out the sliprails, and talked
+about it afterwards, referring to the sliprails as “Buckolts’ Gate,” of
+course, and spoke mysteriously of the case, and put on an appearance of
+great importance, and allowed people to get an idea that he knew a lot
+if he only liked to speak; and finally he got himself “brought up” as a
+witness for Ryan.
+
+He had a lot of beer in town before he went to the courthouse. All he
+knew would have been of no use to either party, but he swore that he
+had seen Ryan’s bull inside Buckolts’ Gate at daylight (on the day
+which wasn’t in question) and had turned him out. Uncle Abel mixed up
+the court a good deal, and roared like the bull, and became more
+obstinate the more he was cross-examined, and narrowly escaped being
+committed for contempt of court.
+
+Ryan, who had a high opinion of the breed of his bull, got an idea that
+the Buckolts had enticed or driven the bull into their paddock for
+stock-raising purposes, instead of borrowing it honestly or offering to
+pay for the use of it. Then Ryan wanted to know why Abel had driven his
+bull out of Buckolts’ Gate, and the Buckolts wanted to know what
+business Abel Albury had to drive Ryan’s bull out of their paddock, if
+the bull had really ever been there. And so it went on till Rocky Rises
+was ripe for a tragedy.
+
+The breach between the Careys and the Buckolts was widened, the quarrel
+between Ryan and Reid intensified. Ryan got a down on the Careys
+because he reckoned that Uncle Abel had deliberately spoilt his case
+with his evidence; and the Reids and Careys were no longer on speaking
+terms, because nothing would convince old Reid that Abel hadn’t tried
+to prove that Ryan’s bull had never been in Reid’s paddock at all.
+
+Well, it was Christmas Day, and the Carey family and Aunt Emma sat down
+to dinner. Jim was present, having arrived overnight, with no money, as
+usual, and suffering a recovery. The elder brother, Bob (who had a
+selection up-country), and his wife were there. Mrs Carey moved round
+with watchful eyes and jealous ears, lest there should be a word or a
+look which might hurt the feelings of her wild son—for of such are
+mothers.
+
+Dinner went on very moodily, in spite of Aunt Emma, until at last Jim
+spoke—almost for the first time, save for a long-whispered and, on his
+part, repentant conversation with his mother.
+
+“Look here, Mary!” said Jim. “What did you throw Harry Dale over for?”
+
+“Don’t ask me, Jim.”
+
+“Rot! What did he do to you? I’m your brother” (with a glance at Bob),
+“and I ought to know.”
+
+“Well, then, ask Bertha Buckolt. She saw him last.”
+
+“What!” cried Jim.
+
+“Hold your tongue, Jim! You’ll make her cry,” said Aunt Emma.
+
+“Well, what’s it all about, anyway?” demanded Jim. “All I know is that
+Mary wrote to Harry and threw him over, and he ain’t been the same man
+since. He swears he’ll never come near the district again.”
+
+“Tell Jim, Aunt Emma,” said Mary. And Aunt Emma started to tell the
+story as far as she knew.
+
+“Saw her at Buckolt’s sliprails!” cried Jim, starting up. “Well, he
+couldn’t have had time to more than say good-bye to her, for I was with
+her there myself, and Harry caught up to me within a mile of the
+gate—and I rode pretty fast.”
+
+“He had a jolly long good-bye with her,” shouted Uncle Abel. “Look
+here, Jim! I ain’t goin’ to stand by and see a nephew of mine
+bungfoodled by no girl; an’, I tell you I seen ’em huggin’ and kissin’
+and canoodlin’ for half an hour at Buckolts’ Gate!”
+
+“It’s a—a— Look here, Uncle Abel, be careful what you say. You’ve got
+the bull by the tail again, that’s what it is!” Jim’s face grew
+whiter—and it had been white enough on account of the drink. “How did
+you know it was them? You’re always mistaking people. It might have
+been someone else.”
+
+“I know Harry Dale on horseback two miles off!” roared Uncle Abel. “And
+I knowed her by her cape.”
+
+It was Mary’s turn to gasp and stare at Uncle Abel.
+
+“Uncle Abel,” she managed to say, “Uncle Abel! Wasn’t it at our Lower
+Sliprails you saw them and not Buckolts’ Gate?”
+
+“Well!” bellowed Uncle Abel. “You might call ’em the ‘Lower Sliprails,’
+but I calls ’em Buckolts’ Gate! They lead to’r’ds Buckolts’, don’t
+they? Hey? Them other sliprails”—jerking his arms in the direction of
+the upper paddock “them theer other sliprails that leads outer Reid’s
+lane I calls Reid’s Sliprails. I don’t know nothing about no upper or
+lower, or easter or wester, or any other la-di-dah names you like to
+call ’em.”
+
+“Oh, uncle,” cried Mary, trembling like a leaf, “why didn’t you explain
+this before? Why didn’t you tell us?”
+
+“What cause have I got to tell any of you everything I sez or does or
+thinks? It ’ud take me all me time. Ain’t you got any more brains than
+Ryan’s bull, any of you? Hey!—You’ve got heads, but so has cabbages.
+Explain! Why, if the world wasn’t stuffed so full of jumped-up fools
+there’d be never no need for explainin’.”
+
+Mary left the table.
+
+“What is it, Mary?” cried Aunt Emma.
+
+“I’m going across to Bertha,” said Mary, putting on her hat with
+trembling hands. “It was me Uncle Abel saw. I had Bertha’s cape on that
+night.”
+
+“Oh, Uncle Abel,” cried Aunt Emma, “whatever have you done?”
+
+“Well,” said Uncle Abel, “why didn’t she get the writin’s as I told
+her? It’s to be hoped she won’t make such a fool of herself next time.”
+
+Half an hour later, or thereabouts, Mary sat on Bertha Buckolt’s bed,
+with Bertha beside her and Bertha’s arm round her, and they were crying
+and laughing by turns.
+
+“But-but-why didn’t you _tell_ me it was Jim?” said Mary.
+
+“Why didn’t you tell me it was Harry, Mary?” asked Bertha. “It would
+have saved all this year of misery.
+
+“I didn’t see Harry Dale at all that night,” said Bertha. “I was—I was
+crying when Jim left me, and when Harry came along I slipped behind a
+tree until he was past. And now, look here, Mary, I can’t marry Jim
+until he steadies down, but I’ll give him another chance. But, Mary,
+I’d sooner lose him than you.”
+
+Bertha walked home with Mary, and during the afternoon she took Jim
+aside and said:
+
+“Look here, Jim, I’ll give you another chance—for a year. Now I want
+you to ride into town and send a telegram to Harry Dale. How long would
+it take him to get here?”
+
+“He couldn’t get here before New Year,” said Jim.
+
+“That will do,” said Bertha, and Jim went to catch his horse. Next day
+Harry’s reply came: “Coming”
+
+ACT IV
+
+New Year’s Eve. The dance was at Buckolts’ this year, but Bertha didn’t
+dance much; she was down by the gate most of the time with little Mary
+Carey, waiting, and watching the long, white road, and listening for
+horses’ feet, and disappointed often as other horsemen rode by or
+turned up to the farm.
+
+And in the hot sunrise that morning, within a hundred miles of Rocky
+Rises, a tired, dusty drover camped in the edge of a scrub, boiled his
+quart-pot, broiled a piece of mutton on the coals, and lay down on the
+sand to rest an hour or so before pushing on to a cattle station he
+knew to try and borrow fresh horses. He had ridden all night.
+
+Old Buckolt and Carey and Reid smoked socially under the grape-vines,
+with bottles of whisky and glasses, and nudged each other and coughed
+when they wanted to laugh at Old Abel Albury, who was, for about the
+first time in his life, condescending to explain. He was explaining to
+them what thund’rin’ fools they had been.
+
+Later on they sent a boy on horseback with a bottle of whisky and a
+message to Ryan, who turned up in time to see the New Year in with them
+and contradict certain slanders concerning the breed of his bull.
+
+Meanwhile Bertha comforted Mary, and at last persuaded her to go home.
+“He’s sure to be here to-morrow, Mary,” she said, “and you need to look
+fresh and happy.”
+
+But Mary didn’t sleep that night; she was up before daylight, had the
+kettle on and some chops ready to fry, and at daybreak she was down by
+the sliprails again. She was turning away for the second time when she
+heard a clear whistle round the Spur—then the tune of “Willie Riley,”
+and the hobble-chains and camp-ware on the packhorse jingling to the
+tune.
+
+She pulled out the rails with eager, trembling hands and leaned against
+the tree. An hour later a tired drover lay on his back, in his ragged,
+track-worn clothes and dusty leggings, on Mary’s own little bed in the
+skillion off the living-room, and rested. Mary bustled round getting
+breakfast ready, and singing softly to herself; once she slipped in,
+bent over Harry and kissed him gently on the lips, and ran out as he
+stirred.
+
+“Why, who’s that?” exclaimed Uncle Abel, poking round early and
+catching a glimpse of Harry through the open door.
+
+“It’s only Harry, Uncle Abel,” said Mary.
+
+Uncle Abel peered in again to make sure.
+
+“Well, be sure you git the writin’s this time,” he said.
+
+
+
+
+THE BUSH-FIRE
+
+
+I.—SQUATTER AND SELECTOR
+
+Wall was a squatter and a hard man. There had been long years of
+drought and loss, and then came the rabbit pest—the rabbits swarmed
+like flies over his run, and cropped the ground bare where even the
+poor grass might have saved thousands of sheep—and the rabbits cost the
+squatter hundreds of pounds in “rabbit-proof” fences, trappers’ wages,
+etc., just to keep them down. Then came arrangements with the bank. And
+then Wall’s wife died. Wall started to brood over other days, and the
+days that had gone between, and developed a temper which drove his
+children from home one by one, till only Mary was left. She managed the
+lonely home with the help of a half-caste. Then in good seasons came
+the selectors.
+
+Men remembered Wall as a grand boss and a good fellow, but that was in
+the days before rabbits and banks, and syndicates and “pastoralists” or
+pastoral companies instead of good squatters. Runs were mostly pastoral
+leases for which the squatter paid the Government so much per square
+mile (almost a nominal rent). Selections were small holdings taken up
+by farmers under residential and other conditions and paid for by
+instalments. If you were not ruined by the drought, and paid up long
+enough, the land became freehold. The writer is heir to a dusty patch
+of three hundred acres or so in the scrub which was taken up thirty
+years ago and isn’t freehold yet.
+
+Selectors were allowed to take up land on runs or pastoral leases as
+well as on unoccupied Crown lands, and as they secured the best bits of
+land, and on water frontages if they could, and as, of course,
+selections reduced the area of the run, the squatters loved selectors
+like elder brothers. One man is allowed to select only a certain amount
+of land, and required by law to live on it, so the squatters bought as
+much freehold about the homestead as they could afford, selected as
+much as they are allowed to by law, and sometimes employed “dummy”
+selectors to take up choice bits about the runs and hold them for them.
+They fought selectors in many various ways, and, in some cases, annoyed
+and persecuted them with devilish ingenuity.
+
+Ross was a selector, and a very hard man physically. He was a short,
+nuggety man with black hair and frill beard (a little dusty), bushy
+black eyebrows, piercing black eyes, horny knotted hands, and the
+obstinacy or pluck of a dozen men to fight drought and the squatter.
+Ross selected on Wall’s run, in a bend of Sandy Creek, a nice bit of
+land with a black soil, flat and red soil sidings from the ridges,
+which no one had noticed before, and with the help of his boys he got
+the land cleared and fenced in a year or two—taking bush contracts
+about the district between whiles to make “tucker” for the family until
+he got his first crop off.
+
+Wall was never accused of employing dummies, or underhanded methods in
+dealings with selectors, but he had been through so much and had
+brooded so long that he had grown very hard and bitter and suspicious,
+and the reverse of generous—as many men do who start out in life too
+soft and goodhearted and with too much faith in human nature. He was a
+tall, dark man. He ordered Ross’s boys off the run, impounded Ross’s
+stock—before Ross had got his fencing finished, summoned Ross for
+trespass, and Ross retaliated as well as he could, until at last it
+mightn’t have been safe for one of those men to have met the other with
+a gun. The impounding of the selector’s cattle led to the last bad
+quarrel between Wall and his son Billy, who was a tall, good-natured
+Cornstalk, and who reckoned that Australia was big enough for all of
+us. One day in the drought, and in an extra bitter mood, Wall heard
+that some of his sheep had been dogged in the vicinity of Ross’s
+selection, and he ordered Billy to take a station-hand and watch Ross’s
+place all night, and, if Ross’s cattle put their noses over the
+boundary, to drive them to the pound, fifteen miles away; also to lay
+poisoned baits for the dogs all round the selection. And Billy flatly
+refused.
+
+“I know Ross and the boys,” he said, “and I don’t believe they dogged
+the sheep. Why, they’ve only got a Newfoundland pup, and an old lame,
+one-eyed sheep-dog that couldn’t hurt a flea. Now, father, this sort of
+thing has been going on long enough. What difference does a few paltry
+acres make to us? The country is big enough, God knows! Ross is a
+straight man and—for God’s sake, give the man a chance to get his
+ground fenced in; he’s doing it as fast as he can, and he can’t watch
+his cattle day and night.”
+
+“Are you going to do as I tell you, or are you not?” shouted Wall.
+
+“Well, if it comes to that, I’m not,” said Billy. “I’m not going to
+sneak round a place all night and watch for a chance to pound a poor
+man’s cows.”
+
+It was an awful row, down behind the wool-shed, and things looked so
+bad that old Peter, the station-hand, who was a witness, took off his
+coat and rolled up his sleeves, ready, as he said afterwards, “to roll
+into” either the father or the son if one raised a hand against the
+other.
+
+“Father!” said Billy, though rather sobered by the sight of his
+father’s trembling, choking passion, “do you call yourself an
+Englishman?”
+
+“Yes!” yelled Wall, furiously. “What the hell do you call yourself?”
+
+“If it comes to that I’m an Australian,” said Billy, and he turned away
+and went to catch his horse. He went up-country and knocked about in
+the north-west for a year or two.
+
+II.—ROMEO AND JULIET
+
+Mary Wall was twenty-five. She was an Australian bush girl, every inch
+of her five-foot-nine; she had a pink-and-white complexion, dark blue
+eyes, blue-black hair, and “the finest figure in the district,” on
+horseback or afoot. She was the best girlrider too (saddle or
+bare-back), and they say that when she was a tomboy she used to tuck
+her petticoats under her and gallop man-fashion through the scrub after
+horses or cattle. She said she was going to be an old maid.
+
+There came a jackaroo on a visit to the station. He was related to the
+bank with which Wall had relations. He was a dude, with an expensive
+education and no brains. He was very vain of his education and
+prospects. He regarded Mary with undisguised admiration, and her father
+had secret hopes. One evening the jackaroo was down by the
+homestead-gate when Mary came cantering home on her tall chestnut. The
+gate was six feet or more, and the jackaroo raised his hat and hastened
+to open it, but Mary reined her horse back a few yards and the “dood”
+had barely time to jump aside when there was a scuffle of hoofs on the
+road, a “Ha-ha-ha!” in mid-air, a landing thud, and the girl was away
+up the home-track in a cloud of dust.
+
+A few days later the jackaroo happened to be at Kelly’s, a wayside
+shanty, watching a fight between two bushmen, when Mary rode up. She
+knew the men. She whipped her horse in between them and struck at first
+one and then the other with her riding-whip.
+
+“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” she said; “and both married
+men, too!”
+
+It evidently struck them that way, for after a bit they shook hands and
+went home.
+
+“And I wouldn’t have married that girl for a thousand pounds,” said the
+jackaroo, relating the incidents to some friends in Sydney.
+
+Mary said she wanted a man, if she could get one.
+
+There was no life at home nowadays, so Mary went to all the bush dances
+in the district. She thought nothing of riding twenty or thirty miles
+to a dance, dancing all night, and riding home again next morning. At
+one of these dances she met young Robert Ross, a clean-limbed,
+good-looking young fellow about her own age. She danced with him and
+liked him, and danced with him again, and he rode part of the way home
+with her. The subject of the quarrel between the two homes came up
+gradually.
+
+“The boss,” said Robert, meaning his father, “the boss is always ready
+to let bygones be bygones. It’s a pity it couldn’t be fixed up.”
+
+“Yes,” said Mary, looking at him (Bob looked very well on horseback),
+“it is a pity.”
+
+They met several times, and next Prince of Wales’s birthday they rode
+home from the races together. Both had good horses, and they happened
+to be far ahead of the others on the wide, straight clear road that ran
+between the walls of the scrub. Along, about dusk, they became very
+confidential indeed—Mary had remarked what a sad and beautiful sunset
+it was. The horses got confidential, too, and shouldered together, and
+touched noses, and, after a long interval in the conversation, during
+which Robert, for one, began to breathe quickly, he suddenly leaned
+over, put his arm round her waist and made to kiss her. She jerked her
+body away, threw up her whiphand, and Robert ducked instinctively; but
+she brought her whip down on her horse’s flank instead, and raced
+ahead. Robert followed—or, rather, his horse did: he thought it was a
+race, and took the bit in his teeth. Robert kept calling, appealing:
+
+“Wait a while, Mary! I want to explain! I want to apologize! For God’s
+sake listen to me, Mary!”
+
+But Mary didn’t hear him. Perhaps she misunderstood the reason of the
+chase and gave him credit for a spice of the devil in his nature. But
+Robert grew really desperate; he felt that the thing must be fixed up
+now or never, and gave his horse a free rein. Her horse was the
+fastest, and Robert galloped in the dust from his heels for about a
+mile and a half; then at the foot of a rise Mary’s horse stumbled and
+nearly threw her over his head, and then he stopped like the good horse
+he was.
+
+Robert got down feeling instinctively that he might best make his peace
+on foot, and approached Mary with a face of misery—she had dropped her
+whip.
+
+“Oh, Bob!” she said, “I’m knocked out;” and she slipped down into his
+arms and stayed there a while.
+
+They sat on a log and rested, while their horses made inquiries of each
+other’s noses, and compared notes.
+
+And after a good while Mary said “No, Bob, it’s no use talking of
+marrying just yet. I like you, Bob, but I could never marry you while
+things are as they are between your father and mine. Now, that’ll do.
+Let me get on my horse, Bob. I’ll be safer there.”
+
+“Why?” asked Bob.
+
+“Come on, Bob, and don’t be stupid.”
+
+She met him often and “liked” him.
+
+III.—A TRAMP’S MATCH AND WHAT IT DID
+
+It was Christmas Eve at Wall’s, but there was no score or so of buggies
+and horses and dozens of strange dogs round the place as of old. The
+glasses and decanters were dusty on the heavy old-fashioned sideboard
+in the dining-room; and there was only a sullen, brooding man leaning
+over the hurdles and looking at his rams in the yard, and a sullen,
+brooding half-caste at work in the kitchen. Mary had ridden away that
+morning to visit a girl chum.
+
+It was towards the end of a long drought, and the country was like
+tinder for hundreds of miles round—the ground for miles and miles in
+the broiling scrubs “as bare as your hand,” or covered with coarse, dry
+tufts. There was feed grass in places, but you had to look close to see
+it.
+
+Shearing had finished the day before, but there was a black boy and a
+station-hand or two about the yards and six or eight shearers and
+rouseabouts, and a teamster camped in the men’s huts—they were staying
+over the holidays to shear stragglers and clean up generally. Old Peter
+and a jackaroo were out on the run watching a bush-fire across Sandy
+Creek.
+
+A swagman had happened to call at the station that morning; he asked
+for work and then for tucker. He irritated Wall, who told him to clear
+out. It was the first time that a swagman had been turned away from the
+station without tucker.
+
+Swaggy went along the track some miles, brooding over his wrongs, and
+crossed Sandy Creek. He struck a match and dropped it into a convenient
+tuft of grass in a likely patch of tufts, with dead grass running from
+it up into the scrubby ridges—then he hurried on.
+
+Did you ever see a bush-fire? Not sheets of flame sweeping and roaring
+from tree-top to tree-top, but the snaky, hissing grass-fire of
+hardwood country.
+
+The whole country covered with thin blue smoke so that you never know
+in what direction the fire is travelling. At night you see it like the
+lighted streets of cities, in the distant ranges. It roars up the
+hollows of dead trees and gives them the appearance of factory chimneys
+in the dusk. It climbs, by shreds of bark, the trunks of old dead
+white-box and blue-gums—solid and hard as cast-iron—and cuts off the
+limbs. And where there’s a piece of recently ringbarked country, with
+the dead leaves still on the trees, the fire will roar from bough to
+bough—a fair imitation of a softwood forest fire. The bush-fire travels
+through the scrubs for hundreds of miles, taking the grass to the
+roots, scorching the living bush but leaving it alive—for gumbush is
+hardest of any to kill. Where there is no undergrowth, and the country
+seems bare as a road for miles, the fire will cross, licking up
+invisible straws of grass, dusty leaves, twigs and shreds of bark on
+the hard ground already baking in the drought. You hear of a fire miles
+away, and next day, riding across the head of a gully, you hear a
+hissing and crackling and there is the fire running over the ground in
+lines and curves of thin blue smoke, snakelike, with old logs blazing
+on the blackened ground behind. Did you ever _hear_ a fire where a fire
+should not be? There is something hellish in the sound of it. When the
+breeze is, say, from the east the fire runs round western spurs, up
+sheltered gullies—helped by an “eddy” in the wind perhaps—and appears
+along the top of the ridge, ready, with a change in the wind, to come
+down on farms and fields of ripe wheat, with a “front” miles long.
+
+A selector might be protected by a wide sandy creek in front and wide
+cleared roads behind, and, any hour in the day or night, a shout from
+the farther end of the wheat paddock, and—“Oh, my God! the wheat!”
+
+Wall didn’t mind this fire much; most of his sheep were on their way
+out back, to a back run where there was young grass; and the dry ridges
+along the creek would be better for a burning-off—only he had to watch
+his fences.
+
+But, about dusk, Mary came galloping home in her usual breakneck
+fashion.
+
+“Father,” she cried, “turn out the men and send them at once. The fire
+is all down by Ross’s farm, and he has ten acres of wheat standing, and
+no one at home but him and Bob.”
+
+“How do you know?” growled Wall. Then suddenly and suspiciously, “Have
+you been there?”
+
+“I came home that way.”
+
+“Well—let Ross look after his own,” snarled the father.
+
+“But he can’t, father. They’re fighting the fire now, and they’ll be
+burnt out before the morning if they don’t get help—for God’s sake,
+father, act like a Christian and send the men. Remember it is
+Christmas-time, father. You’re surely not going to see a neighbour
+burnt out.”
+
+“Yes, I am,” shouted Wall. “I’d like to see every selector in the
+country burnt out, hut and all! Get off that horse and go inside. If a
+man leaves the station to-night he needn’t come back.” (This last for
+the benefit of the men’s hut.)
+
+“But, father—”
+
+“Get off that horse and go inside,” roared Wall.
+
+“I—I won’t.”
+
+“What!” He darted forward as though to drag her from the saddle, but
+she swung her horse away.
+
+“Stop! Where are you going?”
+
+“To help Ross,” said Mary. “He had no one to send for help.”
+
+“Then go the same way as your brother!” roared her father; “and if you
+show your nose back again I’ll horse-whip you off the run!”
+
+“I’ll go, father,” said Mary, and she was away.
+
+IV.—THE FIRE AT ROSS’S FARM
+
+Ross’s farm was in a corner between the ridges and the creek. The fire
+had come down from the creek, but the siding on that side was fairly
+clear, and they had stopped the fire there. It went behind the ridge
+and ran up and over. The ridge was covered thickly with scrub and dead
+grass; the wheat-field went well up the siding, and along the top was a
+bush face with only a narrow bridle-track between it and the long dead
+grass. Everything depended on the wind. Mary saw Ross and Mrs Ross and
+the daughter Jenny, well up the siding above the fence, working
+desperately, running to and fro, and beating out the fire with green
+boughs. Mary left her horse, ran into the hut, and looked hurriedly
+round for something to wear in place of her riding-skirt. She only saw
+a couple of light print dresses. She stepped into a skillion room,
+which happened to be Bob’s room, and there caught sight of a pair of
+trousers and a coat hanging on the wall.
+
+Bob Ross, beating desperately along a line of fire that curved
+down-hill to his right, and half-choked and blinded with the smoke,
+almost stumbled against a figure which was too tall to be his father.
+
+“Why! who’s that?” he gasped.
+
+“It’s only me, Bob,” said Mary, and she lifted her bough again.
+
+Bob stared. He was so astonished that he almost forgot the fire and the
+wheat. Bob was not thin—but—
+
+“Don’t look at me, Bob!” said Mary, hurriedly. “We’re going to be
+married, so it doesn’t matter. Let us save the wheat.”
+
+There was no time to waste; there was a breeze now from over the
+ridges, light, but enough to bear the fire down on them. Once, when
+they had breathing space, Mary ran to the creek for a billy of water.
+They beat out the fire all along the siding to where a rib of granite
+came down over the ridge to the fence, and then they thought the wheat
+was safe. They came together here, and Ross had time to look and see
+who the strange man was; then he stared at Mary from under his black,
+bushy eyebrows. Mary, choking and getting her breath after her
+exertions, suddenly became aware, said “Oh!” and fled round the track
+beyond the point of granite. She felt a gust of wind and looked up the
+ridge. The bush fence ended here in a corner, where it was met by a new
+wire fence running up from the creek. It was a blind gully full of tall
+dead grass, and, glancing up, Mary saw the flames coming down fast. She
+ran back.
+
+“Come on!” she cried, “come on! The fire’s the other side of the
+rocks!”
+
+Back at the station, Wall walked up and down till he cooled. He went
+inside and sat down, but it was no use. He lifted his head and saw his
+dead wife’s portrait on the wall. Perhaps his whole life ran before him
+in detail—but this is not a psychological study.
+
+There were only two tracks open to him now: either to give in, or go on
+as he was going—to shut himself out from human nature and become known
+as “Mean Wall,” “Hungry Wall,” or “Mad Wall, the Squatter.” He was a
+tall, dark man of strong imagination and more than ordinary
+intelligence. And it was the great crisis of his ruined life. He walked
+to the top of a knoll near the homestead and saw the fire on the ridges
+above Ross’s farm. As he turned back he saw a horseman ride up and
+dismount by the yard.
+
+“Is that you, Peter?”
+
+“Yes, boss. The fences is all right.”
+
+“Been near Ross’s?”
+
+“No. He’s burnt out by this time.”
+
+Wall walked to and fro for a few minutes longer. Then he suddenly
+stopped and called, “Peter!”
+
+“Ay, ay!” from the direction of the huts.
+
+“Turn out the men!” and Wall went into a shed and came out with his
+saddle on his arm.
+
+The fire rushed down the blind gully. Showers of sparks fell on the
+bush fence, it caught twice, and they put it out, but the third time it
+blazed and roared and a fire-engine could not have stopped it.
+
+“The wheat must go,” said Ross. “We’ve done our best,” and he threw
+down the blackened bough and leaned against a tree, and covered his
+eyes with a grimy hand.
+
+The wheat was patchy in that corner—there were many old stumps of
+trees, and there were bare strips where the plough had gone on each
+side of them. Mary saw a chance, and climbed the fence.
+
+“Come on, Bob,” she cried, “we might save it yet. Mr Ross, pull out the
+fence along there,” and she indicated a point beyond the fire. They
+tramped down and tore up the wheat where it ran between the stumps—the
+fire was hissing and crackling round and through it, and just as it ran
+past them in one place there was a shout, a clatter of horses’ hoofs on
+the stones, and Mary saw her father riding up the track with a dozen
+men behind him. She gave a shriek and ran straight down, through the
+middle of the wheat, towards the hut.
+
+Wall and his men jumped to the ground, wrenched green boughs from the
+saplings, and, after twenty minutes’ hard fighting, the crop was
+saved—save for a patchy acre or so. When it was all over Ross sat down
+on a log and rested his head on his hands, and his shoulders shook.
+Presently he felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up, and saw Wall.
+
+“Shake hands, Ross,” he said.
+
+And it was Christmas Day.
+
+But in after years they used to nearly chaff the life out of Mary. “You
+were in a great hurry to put on the breeches, weren’t you, Mary?”
+“Bob’s best Sunday-go-meetin’s, too, wasn’t they, Mary?” “Rather tight
+fit, wasn’t they, Mary?” “Couldn’t get ’em on now, could you, Mary?”
+
+“But,” reflected old Peter apart to some cronies, “it ain’t every young
+chap as gits an idea of the shape of his wife afore he marries her—is
+it? An’ that’s sayin’ somethin’.”
+
+And old Peter was set down as being an innercent sort of ole cove.
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE THAT WAS NEVER BUILT
+
+
+There had been heavy rain and landslips all along the branch railway
+which left the Great Western Line from Sydney just beyond the Blue
+Mountains, and ran through thick bush and scrubby ridgy country and
+along great alluvial sidings—were the hills on the opposite side of the
+wide valleys (misty in depths) faded from deep blue into the pale azure
+of the sky—and over the ends of western spurs to the little farming,
+mining and pastoral town of Solong, situated in a circle of blue hills
+on the banks of the willow-fringed Cudgegong River.
+
+The line was hopelessly blocked, and some publicans at Solong had put
+on the old coach-road a couple of buggies, a wagonette, and an old mail
+coach—relic of the days of Cobb & Co., which had been resurrected from
+some backyard and tinkered up—to bring the train passengers on from the
+first break in the line over the remaining distance of forty miles or
+so. Capertee Station (old time, “Capertee Camp”—a teamster’s camp) was
+the last station before the first washout, and there the railway line
+and the old road parted company for the last time before reaching
+Solong—the one to run round by the ends of the western spurs that
+spread fanlike, and the other to go through and over, the rough
+country.
+
+The train reached Capertee about midnight in broad moonlight that was
+misty in the valleys and round the blue of Crown Ridge. I got a
+“box-seat” beside the driver on the old coach. It was a grand old
+road—one of the old main coach-roads of New South Wales—broad and
+white, metalled nearly all the way, and in nearly as good condition as
+on the day when the first passenger train ran into Solong and the
+last-used section of the old road was abandoned. It dated back to the
+bushranging days—right back to convict times: it ran through tall dark
+bush, up over gaps or “saddles” in high ridges, down across deep dark
+gullies, and here and there across grey, marshy, curlew-haunted flats.
+Cobb & Co’s coach-and-six, with “Royal Mail” gilded on the panels, had
+dashed over it in ten and twelve-mile stages in the old days, the three
+head-lamps flashing on the wild dark bush at night, and maybe
+twenty-four passengers on board. The biggest rushes to richest
+goldfields in the west had gone over this old road on coaches, on
+carts, on drays, on horse and bullock wagons, on horseback, and on
+foot; new chums from all the world and from all stations in life.
+
+When many a step was on the mountains,
+Marching west to the land of gold.
+
+
+And a few came back rich—red, round-faced and jolly—on the box-seat of
+Cobb & Co’s, treating the driver and all hands, “going home” to
+sweethearts or families. (Home people will never feel the meaning of
+those two words, “going home,” as it is felt in a new land.) And many
+came back broken men, tramping in rags, and carrying their swags
+through the dusty heat of the drought in December or the bitter,
+pelting rain in the mountains in June. Some came back grey who went as
+boys; and there were many who never came back.
+
+I remembered the old mile-trees, with a section of bark cut away and
+the distances cut in Roman letters in the hardened sap—the distance
+from Bowenfels, the railway terminus then. It was a ghostly old road,
+and if it wasn’t haunted it should have been. There was an old decaying
+and nearly deserted coaching town or two; there were abandoned farms
+and halfway inns, built of stone, with the roofs gone and nettles
+growing high between the walls; the remains of an orchard here and
+there—a few gnarled quince-trees—and the bush reclaiming its own again.
+It was a haunted ride for me, because I had last ridden over this old
+road long ago when I was young—going to see the city for the first
+time—and because I was now on my way to attend the funeral of one of my
+father’s blood from whom t had parted in anger.
+
+We slowly climbed, and almost as slowly descended, the steep siding of
+a great hill called Aaron’s Pass, and about a mile beyond the foot of
+the hill I saw a spot I remembered passing on the last journey down,
+long ago. Rising back from the road, and walled by heavy bush, was a
+square clearing, and in the background I saw plainly, by the broad
+moonlight, the stone foundations for a large house; from the front an
+avenue of grown pines came down to the road.
+
+“Why!” I exclaimed, turning to the driver, “was that house burnt down?”
+
+“No,” he said slowly. “That house was never built.”
+
+I stared at the place again and caught sight of a ghostly-looking light
+between the lines of the foundations, which I presently made out to be
+a light in a tent.
+
+“There’s someone camping there,” I said.
+
+“Yes,” said the driver, “some old swaggy or ‘hatter.’ I seen him comin’
+down. I don’t know nothing about that there place.” (I hadn’t “shouted”
+for him yet.)
+
+I thought and remembered. I remembered myself, as a boy, being sent a
+coach journey along this road to visit some relatives in Sydney. We
+passed this place, and the women in the coach began to talk of the fine
+house that was going to be built there. The ground was being levelled
+for the foundations, and young pines had been planted, with stakes
+round them to protect them from the cattle. I remembered being mightily
+interested in the place, for the women said that the house was to be a
+two-storied one. I thought it would be a wonderful thing to see a
+two-storied house there in the bush. The height of my ambition was to
+live in a house with stairs in it. The women said that this house was
+being built for young Brassington, the son of the biggest squatter then
+in the district, who was going to marry the daughter of the next
+biggest squatter. That was all I remember hearing the women say.
+
+Three or four miles along the road was a public-house, with a post
+office, general store, and blacksmith shop attached, as is usual in
+such places—all that was left of the old pastoral and coaching town of
+Ilford. I “shouted” for the driver at the shanty, but got nothing
+further out of him concerning the fate of the house that was never
+built. I wanted that house for a story.
+
+However, while yarning with some old residents at Solong, I mentioned
+the Brassingtons, and picked up a few first links in the story. The
+young couple were married and went to Sydney for their honeymoon. The
+story went that they intended to take a trip to the old country and
+Paris, to be away a twelve-month, and the house was to be finished and
+ready for them on their return. Young Brassington himself had a big
+sheep-run round there. The railway wasn’t thought of in those days, or
+if it was, no Brassington could have dreamed that the line could have
+been brought to Solong in any other direction than through the property
+of the “Big Brassingtons,” as they were called. Well, the young couple
+went to Sydney, but whether they went farther the old residents did not
+know. All they knew was that within a few weeks, and before the stone
+foundations for the brick walls of the house were completed, the
+building contract was cancelled, the workmen were dismissed, and the
+place was left as I last saw it; only the ornamental pines had now
+grown to trees. The Brassingtons and the bride’s people were English
+families and reserved. They kept the story, if there was a story, to
+themselves. The girl’s people left the district and squatted on new
+stations up-country. The Big Brassingtons came down in the world and
+drifted to the city, as many smaller people do, more and more every
+year. Neither young Brassington nor his wife was ever again seen or
+heard of in the district.
+
+I attended my relative’s funeral, and next day started back for Sydney.
+
+Just as we reached Ilford, as it happened, the pin of the fore
+under-carriage of the coach broke, and it took the blacksmith several
+hours to set it right. The place was dull, the publican was not
+communicative—or else he harped on the old local grievance of the
+railway not having come that way—so about half an hour before I thought
+the coach would be ready, I walked on along the road to stretch by
+legs. I walked on and on until I came, almost unaware, to the site of
+the house that was never built. The tent was still there, in fact, it
+was a permanent camp, and I was rather surprised to see the man working
+with a trowel on a corner of the unfinished foundations of the house.
+At first I thought he was going to build a stone hut in the corner, but
+when I got close to him I saw that he was working carefully on the
+original plan of the building: he was building the unfinished parts of
+the foundation walls up to the required height. He had bricklayer’s
+tools, a bag of lime, and a heap of sand, and had worked up a
+considerable quantity of mortar. It was a rubble foundation: he was
+knocking off the thin end of a piece of stone to make it fit, and the
+clanging of the trowel prevented his hearing my footsteps.
+
+“Good day, mate,” I said, close beside him.
+
+I half expected he’d start when I spoke, but he didn’t: he looked round
+slowly, but with a haunted look in his eyes as if I might have been one
+of his ghosts. He was a tall man, gaunt and haggard-eyed, as many men
+are in the bush; he may have been but little past middle age, and grey
+before his time.
+
+“Good day,” he said, and he set the stone in its place, carefully flush
+with the outer edge of the wall, before he spoke again. Then he looked
+at the sun, which was low, laid down his trowel, and asked me to come
+to the tent-fire. “It’s turning chilly,” he said. It was a model camp,
+everything clean and neat both inside the tent and out; he had made a
+stone fireplace with a bark shelter over it, and a table and bench
+under another little shed, with shelves for his tin cups and plates and
+cooking utensils. He put a box in front of the fire and folded a
+flour-bag on top of it for a seat for me, and hung the billy over the
+fire. He sat on his heels and poked the burning sticks, abstractedly I
+thought, or to keep his hands and thoughts steady.
+
+“I see you’re doing a bit of building,” I said.
+
+“Yes,” he said, keeping his eyes on the fire; “I’m getting on with it
+slowly.”
+
+I don’t suppose he looked at me half a dozen times the whole while I
+was in his camp. When he spoke he talked just as if he were sitting
+yarning in a row of half a dozen of us. Presently he said suddenly, and
+giving the fire a vicious dig with his poker:
+
+“That house must be finished by Christmas.”
+
+“Why?” I asked, taken by surprise. “What’s the hurry?”
+
+“Because,” he said, “I’m going to be married in the New Year—to the
+best and dearest girl in the bush.”
+
+There was an awkward pause on my part, but presently I pulled myself
+together.
+
+“You’ll never finish it by yourself,” I said. “Why don’t you put on
+some men?”
+
+“Because,” he said, “I can’t trust them. Besides, how am I to get
+bricklayers and carpenters in a place like this?”
+
+I noticed all through that his madness or the past in his mind was
+mixed up with the real and the present.
+
+“Couldn’t you postpone the marriage?” I asked.
+
+“No!” he exclaimed, starting to his feet. “No!” and he looked round
+wildly on the darkening bush. There was madness in his tone that time,
+the last “No!” sounding as if from a man who was begging for his life.
+
+“Couldn’t you run up a shanty then, to live in until the house is
+ready?” I suggested, to soothe him.
+
+He gave his arm an impatient swing. “Do you think I’d ask that girl to
+live in a hut?” he said. “She ought to live in a palace!”
+
+There seemed no way out of it, so I said nothing: he turned his back
+and stood looking away over the dark, low-lying sweep of bush towards
+sunset. He folded his arms tight, and seemed to me to be holding
+himself. After a while he let fall his arms and turned and blinked at
+me and the fire like a man just woke from a doze or rousing himself out
+of a deep reverie.
+
+“Oh, I almost forgot the billy!” he said. “I’ll make some tea—you must
+be hungry.”
+
+He made the tea and fried a couple of slices of ham; he laid the
+biggest slice on a thick slice of white baker’s bread on a tin plate,
+and put it and a pint-pot full of tea on a box by my side. “Have it
+here, by the fire,” he said; “it’s warmer and more comfortable.”
+
+I took the plate on my knee, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed that
+meal. The bracing mountain air and the walk had made me hungry. The
+hatter had his meal standing up, cutting his ham on a slice of bread
+with a clasp-knife. It was bush fashion, and set me thinking of some
+old times. He ate very little, and, as far as I saw, he didn’t smoke.
+Non-smokers are very scarce in the bush.
+
+I saw by the way his tent was pitched and his camp arranged generally,
+and by the way he managed the cooking, that he must have knocked about
+the bush for some years.
+
+He put the plates and things away and came and sat down on the other
+empty gin-case by my side, and fell to poking the fire again. He never
+showed the least curiosity as to who I was, or where I came from, or
+what I was doing on this deserted track: he seemed to take me as a
+matter of course—but all this was in keeping with bush life in general.
+
+Presently he got up and stood looking upwards over the place where the
+house should have been.
+
+“I think now,” he said slowly, “I made a mistake in not having the
+verandas carried all round the house.”
+
+“I—I beg pardon!”
+
+“I should have had the balcony all round instead of on two sides only,
+as the man who made the plan suggested; it would have looked better and
+made the house cooler in summer.”
+
+I thought as I listened, and presently I saw that it was a case of
+madness within madness, so to speak: he was mad on the idea that he
+could build the house himself, and then he had moods when he imagined
+that the house had been built and he had been married and had reared a
+family.
+
+“You could easily get the balcony carried round,” I said; “it wouldn’t
+cost much—you can get good carpenters at Solong.”
+
+“Yes,” he said. “I’ll have it done after Christmas.” Then he turned
+from the house and blinked down at me. “I am sorry,” he said, “that
+there’s no one at home. I sent the wife and family to Sydney for a
+change. I’ve got the two boys at the Sydney Grammar School. I think
+I’ll send the eldest to King’s School at Parramatta. The girls will
+have to get along with a governess at home and learn to help their
+mother—”
+
+And so he went on talking away just as a man who has made money in the
+bush, and is married and settled down, might yarn to an old bachelor
+bush mate.
+
+“I suppose I’ll have to get a good piano,” he went on. “The girls must
+have some amusement: there’ll be no end of balls and parties. I suppose
+the boys will soon be talking of getting ‘fivers’ and ‘tenners’ out of
+the ‘guvner’ or ‘old man.’ It’s the way of the world. And they’ll marry
+and leave us. It’s the way of the world—”
+
+It was awful to hear him go on like this, the more so because he never
+smiled—just talked on as if he had said the same thing over and over
+again. Presently he stopped, and his eyes and hands began to wander: he
+sat down on his heel to the fire again and started poking it. I began
+to feel uneasy; I didn’t know what other sides there might be to his
+madness, and wished the coach would come along.
+
+“You’ve knocked about the bush a good deal?” I asked. I couldn’t think
+of anything else to say, and I thought he might break loose if I let
+him brood too long.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “I have.”
+
+“Been in Queensland and the Gulf country, I suppose?”
+
+“I have.”
+
+His tone and manner seemed a bit more natural. He had knocked about
+pretty well all over Australia, and had been in many places where I had
+been. I had got him on the right track, and after a bit he started
+telling bush yarns and experiences, some of them awful, some of them
+very funny, and all of them short and good; and now and then, looking
+at the side of his face, which was all he turned to me, I thought I
+detected the ghost of a smile.
+
+One thing I noticed about him; when he spoke as a madman, he talked
+like a man who had been fairly well educated (or sometimes, I fancied,
+like a young fellow who was studying to be a school-teacher); his
+speech was deliberate and his grammar painfully correct—far more so
+than I have made it; but when he spoke as an old bushman, he dropped
+his g’s and often turned his grammar back to front. But that reminds me
+that I have met English college men who did the same thing after being
+a few years in the bush; either they dropped their particular way of
+speaking because it was mimicked, because they were laughed and chaffed
+out of it, or they fell gradually into the habit of talking as rough
+bushmen do (they learnt Australian), as clean-mouthed men fall, in
+spite of themselves, into the habit of swearing in the heat and hurry
+and rough life of a shearing-shed. And, coming back into civilized
+life, these men, who had been well brought up, drop into their old
+manner and style of speaking as readily as the foulest-mouthed man in a
+shed or camp—who, amongst his fellows, cannot say three words without
+an oath—can, when he finds himself in a decent home in the
+woman-and-girl world, yarn by the hour without letting slip a solitary
+little damn.
+
+The hatter warmed up the tea-billy again, got out some currant buns,
+which he had baked himself in the camp-oven, and we were yarning
+comfortably like two old bushmen, and I had almost forgotten that he
+was “ratty,” when we heard the coach coming. I jumped up to hurry down
+to the road. This seemed to shake him up. He gripped my hand hard and
+glanced round in his frightened, haunted way. I never saw the eyes of a
+man look so hopeless and helpless as his did just then.
+
+“I’m sorry you’re going,” he said, in a hurried way. “I’m sorry you’re
+going. But—but they all go. Come again, come again—we’ll all be glad to
+see you.”
+
+I had to hurry off and leave him. “We all,” I suppose, meant himself
+and his ghosts.
+
+I ran down between the two rows of pines and reached the road just as
+the coach came up. I found the publican from Ilford aboard—he was
+taking a trip to Sydney. As the coach went on I looked up the clearing
+and saw the hatter standing straight behind the fire, with his arms
+folded and his face turned in our direction. He looked ghastly in the
+firelight, and at that distance his face seemed to have an expression
+of listening blindness. I looked round on the dark bush, with, away to
+the left, the last glow of sunset fading from the bed of it, like a bed
+of reddening coals, and I looked up at the black loom of Aaron’s Pass,
+and thought that never a man, sane or mad, was left in such a depth of
+gloomy loneliness.
+
+“I see you’ve been yarning with him yonder,” said the publican, who
+seemed to have relaxed wonderfully.
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“You know these parts, don’t you?”
+
+“Yes. I was about here as a boy.”
+
+He asked me what my name might be. I told him it was Smith. He blinked
+a while.
+
+“I never heard of anyone by the name of Smith in the district,” he
+said.
+
+Neither had I. I told him that we lived at Solong, and didn’t stay
+long. It saved time.
+
+“Ever heard of the Big Brassingtons?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“Ever heard the yarn of the house that wasn’t built?”
+
+I told him how much I had heard of it.
+
+“And that’s about all any on ’em knows. Have you any idea who that man
+back yonder is?”
+
+“Yes, I have.”
+
+“Well, who do you think it is?”
+
+“He is, or rather he was, young Brassington.”
+
+“You’ve hit it!” said the publican. “I know—and a few others.”
+
+“And do you know what became of his wife?” I asked.
+
+“I do,” said the shanty-keeper, who had a generous supply of whisky
+with him, and seemed to have begun to fill himself up for the trip.
+
+He said no more for a while, and when I had remained silent long
+enough, he went on, very deliberately and impressively:
+
+“One yarn is that the girl wasn’t any good; that when she was married
+to Brassington, and as soon as they got to Sydney, she met a chap she’d
+been carrying on with before she married Brassington (or that she’d
+been married to in secret), an’ she cleared off with him, leaving her
+fortnight-old husband. That was one yarn.”
+
+“Was it?” I said.
+
+“Yes,” said the publican. “That yarn was a lie.” He opened a flask of
+whisky and passed it round.
+
+“There was madness in the family,” he said, after a nip.
+
+“Whose?” I asked. “Brassington’s?”
+
+“No,” said the publican, in a tone that implied contempt at my
+ignorance, in spite of its innocence, “the girl’s. Her mother had been
+in a ’sylum, and so had her grandmother. It was—it was heridited. Some
+madnesses is heridited, an’ some comes through worry and hard graft
+(that’s mine), an’ some comes through drink, and some through worse,
+and, but as far as I’ve heard, all madnesses is pretty much the same.
+My old man was a warder in a ’sylum. They have their madnesses a bit
+different, the same as boozers has their d.t.’s different; but, takin’
+it by the lump, it’s pretty much all the same. The difference is
+accordin’ to their natures when they’re sane. All men are—”
+
+“But about young Mrs Brassington,” I interrupted.
+
+“Young Mrs Brassington? Rosy Webb she was, daughter of Webb the
+squatter. Rosy was the brightest, best, good-heartedest, an’ most
+ladylike little girl in the district, an’ the heriditry business come
+on her in Sydney, about a week after she was married to young
+Brassington. She was only twenty. Here—” He passed the flask round.
+
+“And what happened?” I asked.
+
+“What happened?” he repeated. Then he pulled himself together, as if
+conscious that he had shown signs of whisky. “Everything was done, but
+it was no use. She died in a year in a ’sylum.”
+
+“How do you know that?”
+
+“How do I know that?” he repeated in a tone of contempt. “How do I know
+that? Well, I’ll tell you how. _My old wife_ was in service at
+Brassington’s station at the time—the oldest servant—an’ young
+Brassington wired to her from Sydney to come and help him in his
+trouble. Old Mrs Brassington was bedridden, an’ they kep’ it from her.”
+
+“And about young Brassington?”
+
+“About young Brassington? He took a swag an’ wandered through the bush.
+We’ve had him at our place several times all these years, but he always
+wandered off again. My old woman tried everything with him, but it was
+all no use. Years ago she used to get him to talk of things as they
+was, in hopes of bringin’ his mind back, but he was always worse after.
+She does all she can for him even now, but he’s mighty independent. The
+last five or six years he’s been taken with the idea of buildin’ that
+cursed house. He’ll stay there till he gets short of money, an’ then
+he’ll go out back, shearin’, stock-ridin’, drovin’, cookin’,
+fencin’—anything till he gets a few pounds. Then he’ll settle down and
+build away at that bloody house. He’s knocked about so much that he’s a
+regular old bushman. While he’s an old bushman he’s all right an’
+amusin’ an’ good company;—but when he’s Brassington he’s mad—Don’t you
+ever let on to my old woman that I told you. I allers let my tongue run
+a bit when I get out of that hole we’re living in. We’ve kept the
+secret all these years, but what does it matter now?—I ask you.”
+
+“It doesn’t matter much,” I said.
+
+“Nothing matters much, it seems to me, nothing matters a damn. The Big
+Brassingtons come down years ago; the old people’s gone, and the young
+scattered God knows where or how. The Webbs (the girl’s people) are
+away up in new country, an’ the girls (they was mostly all girls) are
+married an’ settled down by this time. We kept the secret, an’ the
+Webbs kept the secret—even when the dirty yarns was goin’ round—so’s
+not to spoil the chances of the other girls. What about the chances of
+their husbands? Some on ’em might be in the same hell as Brassington
+for all I know. The Brassingtons kept the secret because I suppose they
+reckoned it didn’t matter much. Nothing matters much in this world—”
+
+But I was thinking of another young couple who had married long ago,
+whose married life was twenty long years of shameful quarrels, of
+useless brutal recrimination—not because either was bad, but because
+their natures were too much alike; of the house that was built, of the
+family that was reared, of the sons and daughters who “went wrong,” of
+the father and mother separated after twenty years, of the mother dead
+of a broken heart, of the father (in a lunatic asylum), whose mania was
+not to build houses, but to obtain and secrete matches for the purpose
+of burning houses down.
+
+
+
+
+“BARNEY, TAKE ME HOME AGAIN”
+
+
+This is a sketch of one of the many ways in which a young married
+woman, who is naturally thick-skinned and selfish—as most women are—and
+who thinks she loves her husband, can spoil his life because he happens
+to be good-natured, generous, sensitive, weak or soft, whichever you
+like to call it.
+
+Johnson went out to Australia a good many years ago with his young wife
+and two children, as assisted emigrants. He should have left his wife
+and children with her mother, in a street off City Road, N., and gone
+out by himself and got settled down comfortably and strengthened in the
+glorious climate and democratic atmosphere of Australia, and in the
+knowledge that he could worry along a while without his wife, before
+sending for her. That bit of knowledge would have done her good also,
+and it would have been better for both of them. But no man knows the
+future, and few can prescribe for their own wives. If we saw our
+married lives as others see them, half of us would get divorced. But
+Johnson was sentimental, he could not bear to part from his wife for a
+little while. Moreover, man is instinctively against leaving his wife
+behind; it may be either a natural or a cowardly instinct-but we won’t
+argue that. I don’t believe that Johnson was a coward in that
+direction; I believe that he trusted his wife implicitly, or rather
+that he never dreamed of such a thing—as is the way with most married
+men. Sentiment is selfishness, perhaps, but we won’t argue that, such
+arguments come to nothing.
+
+I heard from a fellow-passenger of Johnson’s that he had “a hell of a
+voyage” because of his young wife’s ignorant selfishness and his own
+sensitiveness; he bribed stewards for better food and accommodation for
+his wife and children, paid the stewardess to help with the children,
+got neither rest, nor peace, nor thanks for himself, and landed in
+Sydney a nervous wreck, with five pounds out of the ten he started
+with.
+
+Johnson was a carpenter. He got work from a firm of contractors in
+Sydney, who, after giving him a fortnight’s trial, sent him up-country
+to work on the railway station buildings, at the little pastoral mining
+and farming town of Solong. The railway having come to Solong, things
+were busy in the building line, and Johnson settled there.
+
+Johnson was thin when he came to Solong; he had landed a living
+skeleton, he said, but he filled out later on. The democratic
+atmosphere soothed his mind and he soon loved the place for its
+unconventional hospitality. He worked hard and seemed to have plenty of
+energy—he said he got it in Australia. He said that another year of the
+struggle in London would have driven him mad. He fished in the river on
+Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and, perhaps for the first month or
+so, he thought that he had found peace. Johnson’s wife was a rather
+stout, unsympathetic-looking young woman, with the knit of obstinacy in
+her forehead; she had that stamp of “hardness” on her face which is the
+rule amongst English and the exception amongst Australian women. We of
+Solong thought her hard, selfish and narrow-minded, and paltry; later
+on we thought she was a “bit touched;” but local people often think
+that of strangers.
+
+By her voice and her habit of whining she should have been a thin,
+sharp-faced, untidy, draggled-tailed woman in a back street in London,
+or a worn-out selector’s wife in the bush. She whined about the
+climate. “It will kill the children! It will kill the children! We’ll
+never rear them here!” She whined about the “wretched hole in the bush”
+that her husband had brought her to; and to the women whom she
+condescended to visit—because a woman must have a woman to talk to—she
+exaggerated the miseries of the voyage until the thing became a
+sing-song from repetition. Later on she settled down to endless
+accounts of her home in London, of her mother and sisters, of the way
+they lived. “And I’ll never see it any more. I’ll never see them any
+more.”
+
+The Solong climate was reckoned the best in Australia; the “wretched
+hole” was a pretty little town on the banks of a clear, willow-bordered
+river, with vineyards on the slopes, and surrounded by a circle of blue
+hills and peaks. We knew nothing of London, so she had her own way
+there.
+
+“She’ll feel a bit lonely at first, but she’ll soon get used to
+Australia,” said Johnson. He seemed to me to go out of his way to
+excuse his wife.
+
+Johnson had had a few contracts in England at one time; they had been
+in “better circumstances”—that was the time she looked back to in
+England; the last two years of bitter, black struggle at “home” seemed
+a blank in her mind—but that’s how women jump over facts when they have
+a selfish fad.
+
+Johnson rented a cottage and garden on the bank of the sunny river. He
+said he took the place because there was ivy growing on the cottage,
+and it might cheer his wife; but he had lost sight of the fact that,
+while he had been born in an English village, his wife had been born
+and bred in London, and had probably never noticed ivy. She said it was
+worse than living in a slum.
+
+Johnson was clever at his trade, and at many other things, but his wife
+didn’t seem aware of it. He was well liked, he grew to be popular, but
+she didn’t seem proud of the fact; she never seemed interested in him
+or his prospects. She only wanted him to take her home again. We
+mustn’t forget that while he had a rush of work to occupy his mind she
+had not.
+
+But Johnson grew stouter and prospered in spite of his wife—for a year
+or so. New schools were being built in the district and the town was
+practically re-built. Johnson took contracts for brickwork, plumbing
+and house-painting, as well as carpentering, and had at one time as
+many as ten men in his employ. He was making money.
+
+I was working at my trade then, house-painting, and worked for Johnson.
+I lodged at his cottage for a while, but soon got tired of hearing
+about London, and Mrs Johnson’s mother and sisters, and the house they
+lived in, and the street it was in, and the parks where they used to
+take their babies, and the shopping on Saturday afternoon. That woman
+was terrible. She was at Johnson all the time about taking her home.
+“We’ll surely be able to go home this year, Will.” “You promised to
+take me home by the end of the year.” “Mother says in her last letter,
+that Jack says there’s more building going on about London than ever.”
+“You’ll do just as well in London as you’ll do here.” “What chance have
+the children got in a hole like this?” And the rest of it—every night.
+When he took a new contract, it would be, “What did you want to take
+that new contract for, Will, when we’re going home? You know you
+promised me you wouldn’t take any more contracts.” First he’d try to
+cheer her, then he’d argue; but she’d only sit with the knit in her
+forehead deep, looking as obstinate as a mule. Then she’d sit down to a
+little harmonium he’d bought her and play and sing “Barney, take me
+Home again,” and “The Old Folks at Home,” and “Swannie Ribber,” till I
+felt like hanging myself—and I wasn’t an exile. Sometimes Johnson would
+flare up and there’d be a row and he’d go to the pub. Gentle
+persuasion, argument, or swearing, it was all the same with her.
+
+Bosses and men were different towards each other in Solong to what they
+are in London; besides, when I wasn’t Johnson’s sub-contractor I was
+his foreman—so we often had a few drinks together; and one night over a
+beer (and after a breeze at home, I think) he said to me:
+
+“I can’t make it out, Harry; there was nothing but struggle and worry
+and misery for us in England, and London was smothering me, my chest
+was bad and the wife was always in ill-health; but I suppose I’ll have
+to take her home in the end or else she’ll go melancholy mad!” And he
+drew a breath that was more like a gasp than a sigh.
+
+“Why not send her home for a trip, or a year or so, boss?” I asked. “As
+likely as not she’ll be just as eager to get back; and that will be the
+end of it.”
+
+“I couldn’t do that, Harry,” said Johnson. “I couldn’t stay here and
+work alone. It would be like beginning life again; I’ve started twice
+and couldn’t start the third time. You’ll understand when you’re
+married, Harry.”
+
+Well, in the end, she wore Johnson out—or wore into him rather. He
+drank more, and once or twice I saw him drinking alone. Sometimes he’d
+“round on us” at work for nothing at all, and at other times he’d take
+no interest in the jobs—he’d let the work go on anyhow. Some thought
+that Johnson was getting too big for his boots, that’s how men are
+misjudged. He grew moody and melancholy and thin again. Johnson was
+homesick himself. No doubt it was the misery of his domestic life in
+Australia that made him so.
+
+Towards the end of the third or fourth year Johnson threw up a couple
+of contracts he had on hand, sacrificed a piece of land which he had
+bought and on which he had built a cottage in the short time he had
+been in Solong, and, one lovely day in June, when the skies were their
+fairest, the hills their bluest, the river its widest and clearest, and
+the grass was waving waist high after rain—one blue and green and
+golden day the Johnsons left Solong, with the trunks they had brought
+out with them, for Sydney, _en route_ for smoky London.
+
+Mrs Johnson was a woman transformed—she was happy and looked it. The
+last few weeks she had seemed in every way the opposite of the woman we
+had known: cheerful, kind to neighbours in sickness and trouble, even
+generous; she made many small presents in the way of mantelshelf
+ornaments, pictures, and house-linen. But then it was Johnson who had
+to pay for that in the end.
+
+He looked worn and worried at the railway station—more like himself as
+he was when he first came to Solong—and as the train moved off I
+thought he looked—well, frightened.
+
+That must have been nearly twenty years ago.
+
+London last winter. It was one of those days when London’s lurid sun
+shows up for a little while like a smoky danger signal. The snow had
+melted from the house-tops and the streets were as London streets are
+after the first fall of snow of the season. But I could stand the flat
+no longer, I had to go out and walk. I was sun-sick—I was heart-sick
+for the sun, for the sunny South—for grassy plains, blue mountains,
+sweeps of mountain bush and sunny ocean beaches. I walked hard; I
+walked till I was mud-splashed to the shoulders; I walked through the
+squalid, maddening sameness of miles of dingy, grimy-walled blocks and
+rows of four-storied houses till I felt smothered—jailed, hopelessly.
+“Best get home and in, and draw the blinds on it,” I said, “or my brain
+will turn.”
+
+I was about to ask a policeman where I was when I saw, by the name on a
+corner of the buildings, that I was in City Road, North. All the
+willow-fringed rivers and the sunny hills of Solong flashed before me
+at the sight of the name of that street. I had not been able to recall
+the name of the street off City Road in which the Johnsons lived,
+though I had heard it often enough in the old days from the tongue of
+Mrs Johnson.
+
+I felt it would be a relief to see anyone who had been in Australia.
+“Now,” I thought, “if I walk along City Road and see the name of that
+street I’ll remember it”—and I did. It was a blind street, like the
+long, narrow yard of a jail, walled by dark houses, all alike. The next
+door but one to that at which I knocked to inquire was where the
+Johnsons lived; they lived in a four-storied house, or rather a narrow
+section of a four-storied terrace. I found later on that they paid the
+land-lord, or nearly paid him, by letting lodgings. They lived in one
+room with the use of the parlour and the kitchen when the lodgers
+weren’t using them, and the son shared a room with a lodger. The back
+windows looked out on the dead wall of a poorhouse of some kind, the
+front on rows of similar windows opposite—rows of the same sort of
+windows that run for miles and miles in London. In one a man sat
+smoking in his shirtsleeves, from another a slavey leaned out watching
+a fourwheeler that had stopped next door, in a third a woman sat
+sewing, and in a fourth a woman was ironing, with a glimpse of a
+bedstead behind her. And all outside was gloom and soot and slush.
+
+I would never have recognized the Johnsons. I have visited them several
+times since and their faces are familiar to me now, but I don’t know
+whether any traces of the old likenesses worked up in my memory. I
+found Johnson an old man—old and grey before his time. He had a grizzly
+stubble round his chin and cheeks towards the end of the week, because
+he could only afford a shave on Saturday afternoon. He was working at
+some branch of his trade “in the shop” I understood, but he said he
+felt the work come heavier on him every winter. “I’ve felt very poorly
+this last winter or two,” he said, “very poorly indeed.” He was very
+sad and gentle.
+
+Mrs Johnson was old and thin-looking, but seemed cheerful and
+energetic. Some chest trouble kept her within doors most of the winter.
+
+“I don’t mind so long as I can manage,” she said, “but Johnson gets so
+depressed.”
+
+They seemed very kind towards each other; they spoke little of
+Australia, and then only as an incident in their lives which was not of
+any importance—had long been past and done with. It was all “before we
+went to Australia” or “after we came back from Australia,” with Mrs
+Johnson.
+
+The son, whom I remembered as a bright, robust little fellow, was now a
+tall, white-faced, clean-shaven young man, a clerk on thirty shillings
+a week. He wore, on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, a tall hat and a
+frock coat and overcoat made cheaply in the latest fashion, so he
+couldn’t afford to help the old folk much.
+
+“David is very extravagant,” said the old man, gently. “He won’t wear
+anything when once the gloss is off it. But,” with a sad smile, “I get
+the left-off overcoats.”
+
+He took me across to see his daughter. She had married a tradesman and
+they were having a hard struggle in three rooms in a workman’s
+dwelling. She was twenty-five, thin, yellow, and looking ten years
+older.
+
+There were other children who had died. “I think we might have done
+better for the children in Australia,” said the old man to me, sadly,
+when we got outside, “but we did our best.”
+
+We went into a hotel and had a drink. Johnson had treated last
+time—twenty years before. We call treating “shouting” in Australia.
+Presently Johnson let fall a word or two of Australian slang, and
+brightened up wonderfully; we got back out into Australia at once and
+stayed there an hour or so. Being an old man, Johnson’s memory for the
+long ago was better than mine, and I picked up links; and, in return, I
+told him what Solong was like now, and how some men he knew, who were
+going up, had gone down, and others, who were going to the dogs in his
+time, had gone up—and we philosophized. About one he’d say, “Ah, well!
+who’d have thought it! I never thought that boy would come to any
+good;” about another, “Ah, well! and he might have been an independent
+man.” How familiar that expression sounded!—I think it is used more
+often in Australia than in any other country: “He might have been an
+independent man.”
+
+When I left Johnson I felt less lonely in London, and rather humbled in
+spirit. He seemed so resigned—I had never seen such gentle sadness in a
+man’s eyes, nor heard it in a man’s voice. I could get back to
+Australia somehow and start life again, but Johnson’s day had been dead
+for many years. “Besides, assisted emigration’s done away with now,” he
+said, with his sad, sad smile.
+
+I saw the Johnsons again later on. “Things have been going very sadly
+with us, very sadly indeed,” said the old man, when we’d settled down.
+He had broken down at the beginning of the winter, he had dragged
+himself out of bed and to work and back again until he could do so no
+longer; he had been laid up most of the winter. Mrs Johnson had not
+been outside the door for months.
+
+“It comes very hard on us,” she said, “and I’m so poorly, and David out
+of work, too. I wouldn’t mind if I could get about. But,” she went on
+in her energetic manner, “we’ve had the house full all the winter;
+we’ve had very good luck with the lodgers, all respectable people, and
+one of them answers the door and that keeps me away from the draught—so
+it might be worse, mightn’t it? But Johnson doesn’t seem to mend at
+all, and he gets so terribly depressed. But the warm weather coming on,
+etc.”
+
+They and the Lord only knew how they managed to live, for they are
+honest people and the lodgers scarcely pay the rent of the house. There
+was only David between them and the poorhouse, as far as I could see.
+
+Johnson came out with me a piece and we had a drink or two together—his
+was gin hot. He talked a good deal about Australia, but sadly and
+regretfully on this occasion.
+
+“We could have done well in Australia,” he said, “very well indeed. I
+might have been independent and the children well started in life. But
+we did things for the best. Mrs Johnson didn’t like Australia, you
+know. It was a pity we didn’t stay there, a great pity. We would have
+done far better than in England. I’d go out again now if I had the
+money, but I’m getting too old.”
+
+“Would Mrs Johnson go out?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, yes. But I’m afraid she wouldn’t stand the voyage.... Things have
+been very sad with us ever since we came back to England, very sad
+indeed.” And after a while he suddenly caught his breath.
+
+“It takes me that way sometimes,” he said. “I catch my breath just as
+if I was going to lose it.”
+
+
+
+
+A DROVING YARN
+
+
+Andy Maculloch had heard that old Bill Barker, the well-known overland
+drover, had died over on the Westralian side, and Dave Regan told a
+yarn about Bill.
+
+“Bill Barker,” said Dave, talking round his pipe stem, “was the
+_quintessence_ of a drover—”
+
+“The whatter, Dave?” came the voice of Jim Bentley, in startled tones,
+from the gloom on the far end of the veranda.
+
+“The quintessence,” said Dave, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “You
+shut up, Jim. As I said, Bill Barker was the quintessence of a drover.
+He’d been at the game ever since he was a nipper. He run away from home
+when he was fourteen and went up into Queensland. He’s been all over
+Queensland and New South Wales and most of South Australia, and a good
+deal of the Western, too: over the great stock routes from one end to
+the other, Lord knows how many times. No man could keep up with him
+riding out, and no one could bring a mob of cattle or a flock of sheep
+through like him. He knew every trick of the game; if there was grass
+to be had Bill’d get it, no matter whose run it was on. One of his
+games in a dry season was to let his mob get boxed with the station
+stock on a run where there was grass, and before Bill’s men and the
+station-hands could cut ’em out, the travelling stock would have a good
+bellyful to carry them on the track. Billy was the daddy of the
+drovers. Some said that he could ride in his sleep, and that he had one
+old horse that could jog along in his sleep too, and that—travelling
+out from home to take charge of a mob of bullocks or a flock of
+sheep—Bill and his horse would often wake up at daylight and blink
+round to see where they were and how far they’d got. Then Bill would
+make a fire and boil his quart-pot, and roast a bit of mutton, while
+his horse had a mouthful of grass and a spell.
+
+“You remember Bill, Andy? Big dark man, and a joker of the loud sort.
+Never slept with a blanket over him—always folded under him on the sand
+or grass. Seldom wore a coat on the route—though he always carried one
+with him, in case he came across a bush ball or a funeral. Moleskins,
+flannel waistcoat, cabbage-tree hat and ’lastic-side boots. When it was
+roasting hot on the plains and the men swore at the heat, Jim would
+yell, ‘Call this hot? Why, you blanks, I’m freezin’! Where’s me
+overcoat?’ When it was raining and hailing and freezing on Bell’s Line
+in the Blue Mountains in winter, and someone shivered and asked, ‘Is it
+cold enough for yer now, Bill?’ ‘Cold!’ Bill would bellow, ‘I’m
+sweatin’!’
+
+“I remember it well. I was little more than a youngster then—Bill
+Barker came past our place with about a thousand fat sheep for the
+Homebush sale-yards at Sydney, and he gave me a job to help him down
+with them on Bell’s Line over the mountains, and mighty proud I was to
+go with him, I can tell you. One night we camped on the Cudgegong
+River. The country was dry and pretty close cropped and we’d been
+“sweating” the paddocks all along there for our horses. You see, where
+there weren’t sliprails handy we’d just take the tomahawk and nick the
+top of a straight-grained fence-post, just above the mortise, knock out
+the wood there, lift the top rail out and down, and jump the horses in
+over the lower one—it was all two-rail fences around there with sheep
+wires under the lower rail. And about daylight we’d have the horses
+out, lift back the rail, and fit in the chock that we’d knocked out.
+Simple as striking matches, wasn’t it?
+
+“Well, the horses were getting a good bellyful in the police horse
+paddock at night, and Bill took the first watch with the sheep. It was
+very cold and frosty on the flat and he thought the sheep might make
+back for the ridges, it’s always warmer up in the ridges in winter out
+of the frost. Bill roused me out about midnight. ‘There’s the sheep,’
+he says, pointing to a white blur. ‘They’ve settled down. I think
+they’ll be quiet till daylight. Don’t go round them; there’s no
+occasion to go near ’em. You can stop by the fire and keep an eye on
+’em.’
+
+“The night seemed very long. I watched and smoked and toasted my shins,
+and warmed the billy now and then, and thought up pretty much the same
+sort of old things that fellers on night watch think over all over the
+world. Bill lay on his blanket, with his back to the fire and his arm
+under his head—freezing on one side and roasting on the other. He never
+moved. I itched once or twice to turn him over and bake the front of
+him—I reckoned he was about done behind.
+
+“At last daylight showed. I took the billy and started down to the
+river to get some water to make coffee; but half-way down, near the
+sheep camp, I stopped and stared, I was never so surprised in my life.
+The white blur of sheep had developed into a couple of acres of long
+dead silver grass!
+
+“I woke Bill, and he swore as I never heard a man swear before—nor
+since. He swore at the sheep, and the grass, and at me; but it would
+have wasted time, and besides I was too sleepy and tired to fight. But
+we found those sheep scattered over a scrubby ridge about seven miles
+back, so they must have slipped away back of the grass and started
+early in Bill’s watch, and Bill must have watched that blessed grass
+for the first half of the night and then set me to watch it. He
+couldn’t get away from that.
+
+“I wondered what the chaps would say if it got round that Bill Barker,
+the boss overland drover, had lost a thousand sheep in clear country
+with fences all round; and I suppose he thought that way too, for he
+kept me with him right down to Homebush, and when he paid me off he
+threw in an extra quid, and he said:
+
+“‘Now, listen here, Dave! If I ever hear a word from anyone about
+watching that gory grass, I’ll find you, Dave, and murder you, if
+you’re in wide Australia. I’ll screw your neck, so look out.’
+
+“But he’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter.”
+
+There was silence for some time after Dave had finished. The chaps made
+no comment on the yarn, either one way or the other, but sat smoking
+thoughtfully, and in a vague atmosphere as of sadness—as if they’d just
+heard of their mother’s death and had not been listening to an
+allegedly humorous yarn.
+
+Then the voice of old Peter, the station-hand, was heard to growl from
+the darkness at the end of the hut, where he sat on a three-bushel bag
+on the ground with his back to the slabs.
+
+“What’s old Peter growlin’ about?” someone asked.
+
+“He wants to know where Dave got that word,” someone else replied.
+
+“What word?”
+
+“_Quint-essents_.”
+
+There was a chuckle.
+
+“He got it out back, Peter,” said Mitchell, the shearer. “He got it
+from a new chum.”
+
+“How much did yer give for it, Dave?” growled Peter.
+
+“Five shillings, Peter,” said Dave, round his pipe stem. “And stick of
+tobacco thrown in.”
+
+Peter seemed satisfied, for he was heard no more that evening.
+
+
+
+
+GETTIN’ BACK ON DAVE REGAN
+
+A RATHER FISHY YARN FROM THE BUSH
+
+(AS TOLD BY JAMES NOWLETT, BULLOCK-DRIVER)
+
+
+You might work this yarn up. I’ve often thought of doin’ it meself, but
+I ain’t got the words. I knowed a lot of funny an’ rum yarns about the
+bush, an’ I often wished I had the gift o’ writin’. I could tell a lot
+better yarns than the rot they put in books sometimes, but I never had
+no eddication. But you might be able to work this yarn up—as yer call
+it.
+
+There useter be a teamster’s camp six or seven miles out of Mudgee, at
+a place called th’ Old Pipeclay, in the days before the railroad went
+round to Dubbo, an’ most of us bullickies useter camp there for the
+night. There was always good water in the crick, an’ sometimes we’d
+turn the bullicks up in the ridge, an’ gullies behind for grass, an’
+camp there for a few days, and do our washin’ an’ mendin’, and make new
+yokes perhaps, an tinker up the wagons.
+
+There was a woman livin’ on a farm there named Mrs Hardwick—an’ she
+_was_ a hard wick. Her husban’, Jimmy Hardwick was throwed from his
+horse agenst a stump one day when he was sober, an’ he was killed—an’
+she was a widder. She had a tidy bit o’ land, an’ a nice bit of a
+orchard an’ vineyard, an some cattle, an’ they say she had a tidy bit
+o’ money in the bank. She had the worst tongue in the district, no
+one’s character was safe with her; but she wasn’t old, an’ she wasn’t
+bad-lookin’—only hard—so there was some fellers hangin’ round arter
+her. An’ Dave Regan’s horse was hangin’ up outside her place as often
+as anybody else’s. Dave was a native an’ a bushy, an’ drover an’ a
+digger, an’ he was a bit soft in them days—he got hard enough
+arterwards.
+
+Mrs Hardwick hated bullick-drivers—she had a awful down on bullickies—I
+dunno why. We never interfered with her fowls, an’ as for swearin’!
+why, she could swear herself. Jimmy Hardwick was a bullick-driver when
+she married him, an’ p’r’aps that helped to account for it. She
+wouldn’t let us boil our billies at her kitchen fire, same as any other
+bushwoman, an’ if one of our bullicks put his nose under her fence for
+a mouthful of grass, she’d set her dogs onter him. An’ one of her dogs
+got something what disagreed with him one day, an’ she accused us of
+layin’ poisoned baits. An’, arter that, she ’pounded some of our
+bullicks that got into her lucerne paddick one night when we was on the
+spree in Mudgee, an’ put heavy damages on ’em. She’d left the sliprails
+down on purpose, I believe. She talked of puttin’ the police onter us,
+jest as if we was a sly-grog shop. (If _she’d_ kept a sly-grog shop
+she’d have had a different opinion about bullick-drivers.) An’ all the
+bullick-drivers hated her because she hated bullickies.
+
+Well, one wet season half a dozen of us chaps was camped there for a
+fortnight, because the roads was too boggy to travel, an’ one night
+they got up a darnce at Peter Anderson’s shanty acrost the ridges, an’
+a lot of gals an’ fellers turned up from all round about in spite of
+the pourin’ rain. Someone had kidded Dave Regan that Mother Hardwick
+was comin’, an’ he turned up, of course, in spite of a ragin’ toothache
+he had. He was always ridin’ the high horse over us bullickies. It was
+a very cold night, enough to cut the face an’ hands off yer, so we had
+a roarin’ fire in the big bark-an’-slab kitchen where the darncin’ was.
+It was one of them big, old-fashioned, clay-lined fire-places that goes
+right acrost the end of the room, with a twenty-five foot slab-an’-tin
+chimbly outside.
+
+Dave Regan was pretty wild about being had, an’ we copped all the gals
+for darncin’; he couldn’t get one that night, an’ when he wasn’t
+proddin’ out his tooth with a red-hot wire some one was chaffin’ him
+about Mrs Hardwick. So at last he got disgusted an’ left; but before he
+went he got a wet three-bushel flour-bag an’ climbed up very quietly
+onter the roof by the battens an’ log weights an’ riders, an’ laid the
+wet bag very carefully acrost the top of the chimbly flue.
+
+An’ we was a mortal hour tryin’ to find out what was the matter with
+that infernal chimbly, and tackin’ bits o’ tin an’ baggin’ acrost the
+top of the fire-place under the mantelshelf to try an’ stop it from
+smokin’, an’ all the while the gals set there with the water runnin’
+out of their eyes. We took the green back log out an’ fetched in a dry
+one, but that chimbly smoked worse than ever, an’ we had to put the
+fire out altogether, an’ the gals set there shiverin’ till the rain
+held up a bit an’ the sky cleared, an’ then someone goes out an’ looks
+up an’ sings out, “Why, there’s somethin’ acrost the top of the blazin’
+chimbly!” an’ someone else climbs up an’ fetches down the bag. But the
+darnce was spoilt, an’ the gals was so disgusted that they went off
+with their fellers while the weather held up. They reckoned some of us
+bullickies did it for a lark.
+
+An’ arter that Dave’d come ridin’ past, an’ sing out to know if we knew
+of a good cure for a smokin’ chimbly, an’ them sorter things. But he
+always got away before we could pull him off of his horse. Three of us
+chased him on horseback one day, but we didn’t ketch him.
+
+So we made up our minds to git back on Dave some way or other, an’ it
+come about this way.
+
+About six months arter the smoked-out darnce, four or five of us same
+fellers was campin’ on th’ Pipeclay agen, an’ it was a dry season. It
+was dryer an’ hotter than it was cold ’n’ wet the larst time. Dave was
+still hangin’ round Mrs Hardwick’s an’ doin’ odd jobs for her. Well,
+one very hot day we seen Dave ridin’ past into Mudgee, an’ we knowed
+he’d have a spree in town that night, an’ call at Mrs Hardwick’s for
+sympathy comin’ out next day; an’ arter he’d been gone an hour or two,
+Tom Tarrant comes drivin’ past on his mail-coach, an’ drops some
+letters an’ papers an’ a bag o’ groceries at our camp.
+
+Tom was a hard case. I remember wonst I was drivin’ along a lonely bit
+o’ track, an’ it was a grand mornin’, an’ I felt great, an’ I got
+singin’ an’ practisin’ a recitation that I allers meant to give at a
+bush darnce some night. (I never sung or spouted poetry unless I was
+sure I was miles away from anyone.) An’ I got worked up, an’ was wavin’
+me arms about an’ throwin’ it off of me chest, when Tom’s coach comes
+up behind, round a bend in the road, an’ took me by surprise. An’ Tom
+looked at me very hard an’ he says, “What are yer shoutin’ an’ swearin’
+an’ darncin’ an’ goin’ on at the bullicks like that for, Jimmy? They
+seem to be workin’ all right.” It took me back, I can tell yer. The
+coach was full of grinnin’ passengers, an’ the worst of it was that I
+didn’t know how long Tom had been drivin’ slow behind me an’ takin’ me
+out of windin’. There’s nothin’ upsets a cove as can’t sing so much as
+to be caught singin’ or spoutin’ poetry when he thinks he’s privit’.
+
+An’ another time I remember Tom’s coach broke down on the track, an’ he
+had to ride inter town with the mails on horseback; an’ he left a
+couple of greenhides, for Skinner the tanner at Mudgee, for me to take
+on in the wagon, an’ a bag of potatoes for Murphy the storekeeper at
+Home Rule, an’ a note that said: “Render unto Murphy the things which
+is murphies, and unto Skinner them things which is skins.” Tom was a
+hard case.
+
+Well, this day, when Tom handed down the tucker an’ letters, he got
+down to stretch his legs and give the horses a breathe. The coach was
+full of passengers, an’ I noticed they all looked extra glum and sulky,
+but I reckoned it was the heat an’ dust. Tom looked extra solemn, too,
+an’ no one was talkin’. Then I suddenly began to notice something in
+the atmosphere, as if there was a dead beast not far away, an’ my mates
+started sniffin’ too. An’ that reminds me, it’s funny why some people
+allers sniff hard instead of keepin’ their noses shut when there’s a
+stink; the more it stinks the more they sniff. Tom spit in the dust an’
+thought a while; then he took a parcel out of the boot an’ put it on
+the corner post of the fence. “There,” he said, “There’s some fresh
+fish that come up from Sydney by train an’ Cobb & Co’s coach larst
+night. They’re meant for White the publican at Gulgong, but they won’t
+keep this weather till I git out there. Pity to waste them! you chaps
+might as well have a feed of ’em. I’ll tell White they went bad an’ I
+had to throw them out,” says Tom. Then he got on to the coach agen an’
+drove off in a cloud of dust. We undone the brown paper, an’ the fish
+was in a small deal box, with a lid fastened by a catch. We nicked back
+the catch an’ the lid flew open, an’ then we knowed where the smell
+comed from all right. There wasn’t any doubt about that! We didn’t have
+to put our noses in the box to see if the fish was bad. They was packed
+in salt, but that made no difference.
+
+You know how a smell will start sudden in the bush on a hot, still day,
+an’ then seem to take a spell, an’ then get to work agen stronger than
+ever. You might be clost alongside of a horse that has been dead a
+fortnight an’ smell nothin’ particular till you start to walk away, an’
+the further you go the worse it stinks. It seems to smell most round in
+a circle of a hundred yards or so. But these fish smelt from the centre
+right out. Tom Tarrant told us arterwards that them fish started to
+smell as soon as he left Mudgee. At first they reckoned it was a dead
+horse by the road; but arter a while the passengers commenced squintin’
+at each other suspicious like, an’ the conversation petered out, an’
+Tom thought he felt all their eyes on his back, an’ it was very
+uncomfortable; an’ he sat tight an’ tried to make out where the smell
+come from; an’ it got worse every hundred yards—like as if the track
+was lined with dead horses, an’ every one dead longer than the
+last—till it was like drivin’ a funeral. An’ Tom never thought of the
+fish till he got down to stretch his legs and fetched his nose on a
+level with the boot.
+
+Well, we shut down the lid of that box quick an’ took it an’ throwed it
+in the bushes a good way away from the camp, but next mornin’, while we
+was havin’ breakfast, Billy Grimshaw got an idea, an’ arter breakfast
+he wetted a canvas bag he had an’ lit up his pipe, an’ went an’ got
+that there box o’ fish, an’ put it in the wet bag, an’ wrapped it tight
+round it an’ tied it up tight with string. Billy had a nipper of a
+nephew with him, about fourteen, named Tommy, an’ he was a sharp kid if
+ever there was one. So Billy says, “Look here, Tommy, you take this
+fish up to Mrs Hardwick’s an’ tell her that Dave Regan sent ’em with
+his compliments, an’ he hopes she’ll enjoy ’em. Tell her that Dave
+fetched ’em from Mudgee, but he’s gone back to look for a pound note
+that he dropped out of a hole in his pocket somewheers along the road,
+an’ he asked you to take the fish up.” So Tommy takes the fish an’ goes
+up to the house with ’em. When he come back he says that Mrs Hardwick
+smiled like a parson an’ give him a shillin’—an’ he didn’t wait. We
+watched the house, an’ about half an hour arterwards we seen her run
+out of the kitchen with the open box in her hand, an’ run a good way
+away from the house an’ throw the fish inter the bushes, an’ then go
+back quick, holdin’ her nose.
+
+An’ jest then, as luck would have it, we seen Dave Regan ridin’ up from
+the creek towards the house. He got down an’ went into the kitchen, an’
+then come backin’ out agen in a hurry with her in front of him. We
+could hear her voice from where we was, but we couldn’t hear what she
+said. But we could see her arms wavin’ as if she was drivin’ fowls, an’
+Dave backed all the way to his horse and gets on an’ comes ridin’ away
+quick, she screamin’ arter him all the time. When he got down opposite
+the camp we sung out to know what was the matter. “What have you been
+doin’ to Mrs Hardwick, Dave?” we says. “We heerd her goin’ for yer
+proper jest now.” “Damned if I know,” says Dave. “I ain’t done nothin’
+to her that I knows of. She’s called me everything she can lay her
+tongue to, an’ she’s ravin’ about my stinkin’ fish, or somethin’. I
+can’t make it out at all. I believe she’s gone ratty.”
+
+“But you _must_ have been doin’ somethin’ to the woman,” we says, “or
+else she wouldn’t have gone on at yer like that.”
+
+But Dave swore he hadn’t, an’ we talked it over for a while an’
+couldn’t make head nor tail of it, an’ we come to the conclusion that
+it was only a touch o’ the sun.
+
+“Never mind, Dave,” we says. “Go up agen in a day or two, when she’s
+cooled down, an’ find out what the matter is. Or write to her. It might
+only have been someone makin’ mischief. That’s what it is.”
+
+But Dave only sat an’ rubbed his head, an’ presently he started home to
+wherever he was hangin’ out. He wanted a quiet week to think.
+
+“Her chimbly might have been smokin’, Dave,” we shouted arter him, but
+he was too dazed like to ketch on.
+
+Well, in a month or two we was campin’ there agen, an’ we found she’d
+fenced in a lane to the crick she had no right to, an’ we had to take
+the bullicks a couple o’ miles round to grass an’ water. Well, the
+first mornin’ we seen her down in the corner of her paddick near the
+camp drivin’ some heifers, an’ Billy Grimshaw went up to the fence an’
+spoke to her. Billy was the only one of us that dared face her and he
+was the only one she was ever civil to—p’r’aps because Billy had a
+squint an’ a wall eye and that put her out of countenance.
+
+Billy took off his hat very respectful an’ sings out, “Mrs Hardwick.”
+(It was Billy’s bullicks she’d “pounded,” by the way.)
+
+“What is it?” she says.
+
+“I want to speak to you, Mrs Hardwick,” says Billy.
+
+“Well, speak,” she says. “I’ve got no time to waste talkin’ to
+bullick-drivers.”
+
+“Well, the fact is, Mrs Hardwick,” says Billy, “that I want to explain
+somethin’, an’ apologize for that young scamp of a nephew o’ mine,
+young Tommy. He ain’t here or I’d make him beg your pardon hisself, or
+I’d cut him to pieces with the bullick-whip. I heard all about Dave
+Regan sendin’ you that stinkin’ fish, an’ I think it was a damned mean,
+dirty thing to do—to send stinkin’ fish to a woman, an’ especially to a
+widder an’ an unprotected woman like you, Mrs Hardwick. I’ve had
+mothers an’ sisters of me own. An’ I want to tell you that I’m sorry a
+relation o’ mine ever had anythin’ to do with it. As soon as I heerd of
+it I give young Tommy a lambastin’ he won’t forgot in a hurry.”
+
+“Did Tommy know the fish was bad?” she says.
+
+“It doesn’t matter a rap,” says Billy; “he had no right to go takin’
+messages from nobody to nobody.”
+
+Mrs Hardwick thought a while. Then she says: “P’r’aps arter all Dave
+Regan didn’t know the fish was bad. I’ve often thought I might have
+been in too much of a hurry. Things goes bad so quick out here in this
+weather. An’ Dave was always very friendly. I can’t understand why he’d
+do a dirty thing on me like that. I never done anything to Dave.”
+
+Now I forgot to tell you that Billy had a notion that Dave helped drive
+his bullicks to pound that time, though I didn’t believe it. So Billy
+says:
+
+“Don’t you believe that for a minute, Mrs Hardwick. Dave knew what he
+was a-doin’ of all right; an’ if I ketch him _I’ll_ give him a beltin’
+for it if no one else is man enough to stand up for a woman!” says
+Billy.
+
+“How d’yer know Dave knew?” says Mrs Hardwick.
+
+“Know!” says Billy. “Why, he talked about it all over the district.”
+
+“What!” she screamed out, an’ I moved away from that there fence, for
+she had a stick to drive them heifers with. But Billy stood his ground.
+“Is that the truth, Billy Grimshaw?” she screams.
+
+“Yes;” he says. “I’ll-take me oath on it. He blowed about it all over
+the district, as if it was very funny, an’ he says—” An’ Billy stopped.
+
+“What did he say?” she shouted.
+
+“Well, the fact is,” says Billy, “that I hardly like to tell it to a
+lady. I wouldn’t like to tell yer, Mrs Hardwick.”
+
+“But you’ll have to tell me, Billy Grimshaw,” she screams. “I have a
+right to know. If you don’t tell me I’ll pull him next week an’ have it
+dragged out of you in the witness-box!” she says. “An’ I’ll have
+satisfaction out of him in the felon’s dock of a court of law!” she
+says. “What did the villain say?” she screams.
+
+“Well,” says Billy, “if yer must have it—an’, anyway, I’m hanged if I’m
+goin’ to stand by an’ see a woman scandalized behind her back—if yer
+must have it I’ll tell yer. Dave said that the fish didn’t smell no
+worse than your place anyway.”
+
+We got away from there then. She cut up too rough altogether. I can’t
+tell you what she said—I ain’t got the words. She went up to the house,
+an’ we seen the farm-hand harnessin’ up the horse, an’ we reckoned she
+was goin’ to drive into town straight away an’ take out a summons
+agenst Dave Regan. An’ jest then Dave hisself comes ridin’ past—jest
+when he was most wanted, as usual. He always rode fast past Mrs
+Hardwick’s nowadays, an’ never stopped there, but Billy shouted after
+him:
+
+“Hullo, Dave! I want to speak to yer,” shouts Billy. An’ Dave yanks his
+horse round.
+
+“What is it, Billy?” he says.
+
+“Look here, Dave,” says Billy. “You had your little joke about the
+chimbly, an’ we had our little joke about the fish an’ Mrs Hardwick, so
+now we’ll call it quits. A joke’s a joke, but it can go too far, an’
+this one’s gettin’ too red-hot altogether. So we’ve fixed it up with
+Mrs Hardwick.”
+
+“What fish an’ what joke?” says Dave, rubbin’ his head. “An’ what have
+yer fixed up with Mrs Hardwick? Whatever are yer talkin’ about, Billy?”
+
+So Billy told him all about us sendin’ the stinkin’ fish to Mrs
+Hardwick by Tommy, an’ sayin’ Dave sent ’em—Dave rubbin’ the back of
+his neck an’ starin’ at Billy all the time. “An’ now,” says Billy, “I
+won’t say anything about them bullicks; but I went up and seen Mrs
+Hardwick this mornin’, an’ told her the whole truth about them fish,
+an’ how you knowed nothin’ about it, an’ I apologized an’ told her we
+was very sorry; an’ she says she was very sorry too on your account,
+an’ wanted to see yer. I promised to tell yer as soon as I seen yer. It
+ought to be fixed up. You ought to go right up to the house an’ see her
+now. She’s awfully cut up about it.”
+
+“All right,” says Dave, brightenin’ up. “It was a dirty, mean trick
+anyway to play on a cove; but I’ll go up an’ see her.” An’ he went
+there ’n’ then.
+
+An’ about fifteen minutes arterwards he comes boltin’ back from the
+house one way an’ his horse the other. The horse acted as if it had a
+big scare, an’ so did Dave. Billy went an’ ketched Dave’s horse for
+him, an’ I got Dave a towel to wipe the dirty dish-water off of his
+face an’ out of his hair an’ collar, an’ I give him a piece of soap to
+rub on the places where he’d been scalded.
+
+“Why, the woman must be ravin’ mad,” I says. “Whatever did yer say to
+her this time, Dave? Yer allers gettin’ inter hot water with her.”
+
+“I didn’t say nothin’,” says Dave. “I jest went up laughin’ like, an’
+says, ‘How are yer, Mrs Hardwick?’ an’ she ups an’ lets me have a dish
+of dirty wash-up water, an’ then on top of that she let fly with a
+dipper of scaldin’-hot, greasy water outer the boiler. She’s gone clean
+ravin’ mad, I think.”
+
+“She’s as mad as a hatter, right enough, Dave,” says Billy Grimshaw.
+“Don’t you go there no more, Dave, it ain’t safe.” An’ we lent Dave a
+hat an’ a clean shirt, an’ he went on inter town. “You ought to have
+humoured her,” says Billy, as Dave rode away. “You ought to have told
+her to put a wet bag over her chimbly an’ hang the fish inside to
+smoke.” But Dave was too stunned to ketch on. He went on inter the town
+an’ got on a howlin’ spree. An’ while he was soberin’ up the thing
+began to dawn on him. An’ the nex’ time he met Billy they had a fight.
+An’ Dave got another woman to speak to Mrs Hardwick, an’ Mrs Hardwick
+ketched young Tommy goin’ past her place one day an’ bailed him up an’
+scared the truth out of him.
+
+“Look here!” she says to him, “I want the truth, the whole truth, an’
+nothin’ but the truth about them fish, an’ if I don’t get it outer you
+I’ll wring yer young neck for tryin’ to poison me, an’ save yer from
+the gallust!” she says to Tommy.
+
+So he told her the whole truth, swelp him, an’ got away; an’ he
+respected Mrs Hardwick arter that.
+
+An’ next time we come past with the teams we seen Dave’s horse hangin’
+up outside Mrs Hardwick’s, an’ we went some miles further along the
+road an’ camped in a new place where we’d be more comfortable. An’ ever
+arter that we used to always whip up an’ drive past her place as if we
+didn’t know her.
+
+
+
+
+“SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER?”
+
+
+TOLD BY JOE WILSON
+
+God’s preacher, of churches unheeded,
+God’s vineyard, though barren the sod,
+Plain spokesman where spokesman is needed,
+Rough link ’twixt the Bushman and God.
+                    _The Christ of the Never_.
+
+
+I never told you about Peter M’Laughlan. He was a sort of bush
+missionary up-country and out back in Australia, and before he died he
+was known from Riverina down south in New South Wales to away up
+through the Never-Never country in western Queensland.
+
+His past was a mystery, so, of course, there were all sorts of yarns
+about him. He was supposed to be a Scotchman from London, and some said
+that he had got into trouble in his young days and had had to clear out
+of the old country; or, at least, that he had been a ne’e-er-do-well
+and had been sent out to Australia on the remittance system. Some said
+he’d studied for the law, some said he’d studied for a doctor, while
+others believed that he was, or had been, an ordained minister. I
+remember one man who swore (when he was drinking) that he had known
+Peter M’Laughlan as a medical student in a big London hospital, and
+that he had started in practice for himself somewhere near Gray’s Inn
+Road in London. Anyway, as I got to know him he struck me as being a
+man who had looked into the eyes of so much misery in his life that
+some of it had got into his own.
+
+He was a tall man, straight and well built, and about forty or
+forty-five, when I first saw him. He had wavy dark hair, and a close,
+curly beard. I once heard a woman say that he had a beard like you see
+in some Bible pictures of Christ. Peter M’Laughlan seldom smiled; there
+was something in his big dark brown eyes that was scarcely misery, nor
+yet sadness—a sort of haunted sympathy.
+
+He must have had money, or else he got remittances from home, for he
+paid his way and helped many a poor devil. They said that he gave away
+most of his money. Sometimes he worked for a while himself as
+bookkeeper at a shearing-shed, wool-sorter, shearer, even rouseabout;
+he’d work at anything a bushman could get to do. Then he’d go out back
+to God-forgotten districts and preach to bushmen in one place, and get
+a few children together in another and teach them to read. He could
+take his drink, and swear a little when he thought it necessary. On one
+occasion, at a rough shearing-shed, he called his beloved brethren
+“damned fools” for drinking their cheques.
+
+Towards the end of his life if he went into a “rough” shed or shanty
+west of the Darling River—and some of them _were_ rough—there would be
+a rest in the language and drinking, even a fight would be interrupted,
+and there would be more than one who would lift their hats to Peter
+M’Laughlan. A bushman very rarely lifts his hat to a man, yet the worst
+characters of the West have listened bareheaded to Peter when he
+preached.
+
+It was said in our district that Peter only needed to hint to the
+squatter that he wanted fifty or a hundred pounds to help someone or
+something, and the squatter would give it to him without question or
+hesitation.
+
+He’d nurse sick boundary-riders, shearers, and station-hands, often
+sitting in the desolate hut by the bedside of a sick man night after
+night. And, if he had time, he’d look up the local blacks and see how
+they were getting on. Once, on a far outback sheep station, he sat for
+three nights running, by the bedside of a young Englishman, a B.A. they
+said he was, who’d been employed as tutor at the homestead and who died
+a wreck, the result of five years of life in London and Paris. The poor
+fellow was only thirty. And the last few hours of his life he talked to
+Peter in French, nothing but French. Peter understood French and one or
+two other languages, besides English and Australian; but whether the
+young wreck was raving or telling the story of a love, or his life,
+none of us ever knew, for Peter never spoke of it. But they said that
+at the funeral Peter’s eyes seemed haunted more than usual.
+
+There’s the yarn about Peter and the dying cattle at Piora Station one
+terrible drought, when the surface was as bare as your hand for
+hundreds of miles, and the heat like the breath of a furnace, and the
+sheep and cattle were perishing by thousands. Peter M’Laughlan was out
+on the run helping the station-hands to pull out cattle that had got
+bogged in the muddy waterholes and were too weak to drag themselves
+out, when, about dusk, a gentlemanly “piano-fingered” parson, who had
+come to the station from the next town, drove out in his buggy to see
+the men. He spoke to Peter M’Laughlan.
+
+“Brother,” he said, “do you not think we should offer up a prayer?”
+
+“What for?” asked Peter, standing in his shirt sleeves, a rope in his
+hands and mud from head to foot.
+
+“For? Why, for rain, brother,” replied the parson, a bit surprised.
+
+Peter held up his finger and said “Listen!”
+
+Now, with a big mob of travelling stock camped on the plain at night,
+there is always a lowing, soughing or moaning sound, a sound like that
+of the sea on the shore at a little distance; and, altogether, it might
+be called the sigh or yawn of a big mob in camp. But the long, low
+moaning of cattle dying of hunger and thirst on the hot barren plain in
+a drought is altogether different, and, at night there is something
+awful about it—you couldn’t describe it. This is what Peter M’Laughlan
+heard.
+
+“Do you hear that?” he asked the other preacher.
+
+The little parson said he did. Perhaps _he_ only heard the weak lowing
+of cattle.
+
+“Do you think that God will hear us when He does not hear _that_?”
+asked Peter.
+
+The parson stared at him for a moment and then got into his buggy and
+drove away, greatly shocked and deeply offended. But, later on, over
+tea at the homestead, he said that he felt sure that that “unfortunate
+man,” Peter M’Laughlan, was not in his right mind; that his wandering,
+irregular life, or the heat, must have affected him.
+
+I well remember the day when I first heard Peter M’Laughlan preach. I
+was about seventeen then. We used sometimes to attend service held on
+Sunday afternoon, about once a month, in a little slab-and-bark
+school-house in the scrub off the main road, three miles or so from our
+selection, in a barren hole amongst the western ridges of the Great
+Dividing Range. School was held in this hut for a few weeks or a few
+months now and again, when a teacher could be got to stay there and
+teach, and cook for himself, for a pound a week, more or less
+contributed by the parents. A parson from the farming town to the east,
+or the pastoral town over the ridges to the west, used to come in his
+buggy when it didn’t rain and wasn’t too hot to hold the service.
+
+I remember this Sunday. It was a blazing hot day towards the end of a
+long and fearful drought which ruined many round there. The parson was
+expected, and a good few had come to “chapel” in spring-carts, on
+horseback, and on foot; farmers and their wives and sons and daughters.
+The children had been brought here to Sunday-school, taught by some of
+the girls, in the morning. I can see it all now quite plain: The
+one-roomed hut, for it was no more, with the stunted blue-grey gum,
+scrub all round. The white, dusty road, so hot that you could cook eggs
+in the dust. The horses tied up, across the road, in the supposed shade
+under clumps of scraggy saplings along by the fence of a cattle-run.
+The little crowd outside the hut: selectors in washed and mended
+tweeds, some with paper collars, some wearing starched and ironed white
+coats, and in blucher boots, greased or blackened, or the young men
+wearing “larstins” (elastic-side boots). The women and girls in prints
+and cottons (or cheap “alpaca,” etc.), and a bright bit of ribbon here
+and there amongst the girls. The white heat blazed everywhere, and
+“dazzled” across light-coloured surfaces—dead white trees, fence-posts,
+and sand-heaps, like an endless swarm of bees passing in the sun’s
+glare. And over above the dry boxscrub-covered ridges, the great
+Granite Peak, glaring like a molten mass.
+
+The people didn’t like to go inside out of the heat and sit down before
+the minister came. The wretched hut was a rough school, sometimes with
+a clay fire-place where the teacher cooked, and a corner screened off
+with sacking where he had his bunk; it was a camp for tramps at other
+times, or lizards and possums, but to-day it was a house of God, and as
+such the people respected it.
+
+The town parson didn’t turn up. Perhaps he was unwell, or maybe the
+hot, dusty ten-mile drive was too much for him to face. One of the
+farmers, who had tried to conduct service on a previous occasion on
+which the ordained minister had failed us, had broken down in the
+middle of it, so he was out of the question. We waited for about an
+hour, and then who should happen to ride along but Peter M’Laughlan,
+and one or two of the elder men asked him to hold service. He was on
+his way to see a sick friend at a sheep station over the ridges, but he
+said that he could spare an hour or two. (Nearly every man who was
+sick, either in stomach or pocket, was a friend of Peter M’Laughlan.)
+Peter tied up his horse under a bush shed at the back of the hut, and
+we followed him in.
+
+The “school” had been furnished with a rough deal table and a wooden
+chair for “the teacher,” and with a few rickety desks and stools cadged
+from an old “provisional” school in town when the new public school was
+built; and the desks and stools had been fastened to the floor to
+strengthen them; they had been made for “infant” classes, and youth out
+our way ran to length. But when grown men over six feet high squeezed
+in behind the desks and sat down on the stools the effect struck me as
+being ridiculous. In fact, I am afraid that on the first occasion it
+rather took my attention from the sermon, and I remember being made
+very uncomfortable by a school chum, Jack Barnes, who took a delight in
+catching my eye and winking or grinning. He could wink without changing
+a solemn line in his face and grin without exploding, and I couldn’t.
+The boys usually sat on seats, slabs on blocks of wood, along the wall
+at the far end of the room, which was comfortable, for they had a rest
+for their backs. One or two of the boys were nearing six feet high, so
+they could almost rest their chins on their knees as they sat. But I
+squatted with some of my tribe on a stool along the wall by the
+teacher’s table, and so could see most of the congregation.
+
+Above us bare tie-beams and the round sapling rafters (with the bark
+still on), and the inner sides of the sheets of stringybark that formed
+the roof. The slabs had been lined with sacking at one time, but most
+of it had fallen or dry-rotted away; there were wide cracks between the
+slabs and we could see the white glare of sunlight outside, with a
+strip of dark shade, like a deep trench in the white ground, by the
+back wall. Someone had brought a canvas water-bag and hung it to the
+beam on the other side of the minister’s table, with a pint-pot over
+the tap, and the drip, drip from the bag made the whole place seem
+cooler.
+
+I studied Peter M’Laughlan first. He was dressed in washed and mended
+tweed vest and trousers, and had on a long, lightcoloured coat of a
+material which we called “Chinese silk.” He wore a “soft” cotton shirt
+with collar attached, and blucher boots. He gave out a hymn in his
+quiet, natural way, said a prayer, gave out another hymn, read a
+chapter from the Bible, and then gave out another hymn. They liked to
+sing, out in those places. The Southwicks used to bring a cranky little
+harmonium in the back of their old dog-cart, and Clara Southwick used
+to accompany the hymns. She was a very pretty girl, fair, and could
+play and sing well. I used to think she had the sweetest voice I ever
+heard. But—ah, well—
+
+Peter didn’t sing himself, at first. I got an idea that he couldn’t.
+While they were singing he stood loosely, with one hand in his
+trouser-pocket, scratching his beard with his hymn-book, and looking as
+if he were thinking things over, and only rousing himself to give
+another verse. He forgot to give it once or twice, but we got through
+all right. I noticed the wife of one of the men who had asked Peter to
+preach looking rather black at her husband, and I reckoned that he’d
+get it hotter than the weather on the way home.
+
+Then Peter stood up and commenced to preach. He stood with both hands
+in his pockets, at first, his coat ruffled back, and there was the stem
+of a clay pipe sticking out of his waistcoat pocket. The pipe
+fascinated me for a while, but after that I forgot the pipe and was
+fascinated by the man. Peter’s face was one that didn’t strike you at
+first with its full strength, it grew on you; it grew on me, and before
+he had done preaching I thought it was the noblest face I had ever
+seen.
+
+He didn’t preach much of hope in this world. How could he? The drought
+had been blazing over these districts for nearly a year, with only a
+shower now and again, which was a mockery—scarcely darkening the baked
+ground. Wheat crops came up a few inches and were parched by the sun or
+mown for hay, or the cattle turned on them; and last year there had
+been rust and smut in the wheat. And, on top of it all, the dreadful
+cattle plague, pleuro-pneumonia, had somehow been introduced into the
+district. One big farmer had lost fifty milkers in a week.
+
+Peter M’Laughlan didn’t preach much of hope in this world; how could
+he? There were men there who had slaved for twenty, thirty, forty
+years; worked as farmers have to work in few other lands—first to clear
+the stubborn bush from the barren soil, then to fence the ground, and
+manure it, and force crops from it—and for what? There was Cox, the
+farmer, starved off his selection after thirty years and going out back
+with his drays to work at tank-sinking for a squatter. There was his
+eldest son going shearing or droving—anything he could get to do—a
+stoop-shouldered, young-old man of thirty. And behind them, in the end,
+would be a dusty patch in the scrub, a fencepost here and there, and a
+pile of chimney-stones and a hardwood slab or two where the but was—for
+thirty hard years of the father’s life and twenty of the son’s.
+
+I forget Peter’s text, if he had a text; but the gist of his sermon was
+that there was a God—there was a heaven! And there were men there
+listening who needed to believe these things. There was old Ross from
+across the creek, old, but not sixty, a hard man. Only last week he had
+broken down and fallen on his knees on the baked sods in the middle of
+his ploughed ground and prayed for rain. His frightened boys had taken
+him home, and later on, the same afternoon, when they brought news of
+four more cows down with “the pleuro” in an outer paddock, he had stood
+up outside his own door and shaken his fist at the brassy sky and
+cursed high heaven to the terror of his family, till his brave,
+sun-browned wife dragged him inside and soothed him. And Peter
+M’Laughlan knew all about this.
+
+Ross’s family had the doctor out to him, and persuaded him to come to
+church this Sunday. The old man sat on the front seat, stooping
+forward, with his elbow resting on the desk and his chin on his hand,
+bunching up his beard over his mouth with his fingers and staring
+gloomily at Peter with dark, piercing eyes from under bushy eyebrows,
+just as I’ve since seen a Scotchman stare at Max O’Rell all through a
+humorous lecture called “A nicht wi’ Sandy.”
+
+Ross’s right hand resting on the desk was very eloquent: horny, scarred
+and knotted at every joint, with broken, twisted nails, and nearly
+closed, as though fitted to the handle of an axe or a spade. Ross was
+an educated man (he had a regular library of books at home), and
+perhaps that’s why he suffered so much.
+
+Peter preached as if he were speaking quietly to one person only, but
+every word was plain and every sentence went straight to someone. I
+believe he looked every soul in the eyes before he had done. Once he
+said something and caught my eye, and I felt a sudden lump in my
+throat. There was a boy there, a pale, thin, sensitive boy who was
+eating his heart out because of things he didn’t understand. He was
+ambitious and longed for something different from this life; he’d
+written a story or two and some rhymes for the local paper; his
+companions considered him a “bit ratty” and the grown-up people thought
+him a “bit wrong in his head,” idiotic, or at least “queer.” And during
+his sermon Peter spoke of “unsatisfied longings,” of the hope of
+something better, and said that one had to suffer much and for long
+years before he could preach or write; and then he looked at that boy.
+I knew the boy very well; he has risen in the world since then.
+
+Peter spoke of the life we lived, of the things we knew, and used names
+and terms that we used. “I don’t know whether it was a blanky sermon or
+a blanky lecture,” said long swanky Jim Bullock afterwards, “but it was
+straight and hit some of us hard. It hit me once or twice, I can tell
+yer.” Peter spoke of our lives: “And there is beauty—even in this life
+and in this place,” he said. “Nothing is wasted—nothing is without
+reason. There is beauty even in this place——”
+
+I noticed something like a hint of a hard smile on Ross’s face; he
+moved the hand on the desk and tightened it.
+
+“Yes,” said Peter, as if in answer to Ross’s expression and the
+movement of his hand, “there is beauty in this life here. After a good
+season, and when the bush is tall and dry, when the bush-fires threaten
+a man’s crop of ripened wheat, there are tired men who run and ride
+from miles round to help that man, and who fight the fire all night to
+save his wheat—and some of them may have been wrangling with him for
+years. And in the morning, when the wheat is saved and the danger is
+past, when the fire is beaten out or turned, there are blackened, grimy
+hands that come together and grip-hands that have not joined for many a
+long day.”
+
+Old Palmer, Ross’s neighbour, moved uneasily. He had once helped Ross
+to put a fire out, but they had quarrelled again since. Ross still sat
+in the same position, looking the hard man he was. Peter glanced at
+Ross, looked down and thought a while, and then went on again:
+
+“There is beauty even in this life and in this place. When a man loses
+his farm, or his stock, or his crop, through no fault of his own, there
+are poor men who put their hands into their pockets to help him.”
+
+Old Kurtz, over the ridge, had had his stacked crop of wheat in sheaf
+burned—some scoundrel had put a match to it at night—and the farmers
+round had collected nearly fifty pounds for him.
+
+“There is beauty even in this life and in this place. In the blazing
+drought, when the cattle lie down and cannot rise from weakness,
+neighbours help neighbours to lift them. When one man has hay or chaff
+and no stock, he gives it or sells it cheaply to the poor man who has
+starving cattle and no fodder.”
+
+I only knew one or two instances of this kind; but Peter was preaching
+of what man should do as well as what they did.
+
+“When a man meets with an accident, or dies, there are young men who go
+with their ploughs and horses and plough the ground for him or his
+widow and put in the crop.”
+
+Jim Bullock and one or two other young men squirmed. They had ploughed
+old Leonard’s land for him when he met with an accident in the shape of
+a broken leg got by a kick from a horse. They had also ploughed the
+ground for Mrs Phipps when her husband died, working, by the way, all
+Saturday afternoon and Sunday, for they were very busy at home at that
+time.
+
+“There is beauty even in this life and in this place. There are women
+who were friends in girlhood and who quarrelled bitterly over a
+careless word, an idle tale, or some paltry thing, who live within a
+mile of each other and have not spoken for years; yet let one fall ill,
+or lose husband or child, and the other will hurry across to her place
+and take off her bonnet and tuck up her sleeves, and set to work to
+help straighten things, and they will kiss, and cry in each other’s
+arms, and be sisters again.”
+
+I saw tears in the eyes of two hard and hard-faced women I knew; but
+they were smiling to each other through their tears.
+
+“And now,” said Peter, “I want to talk to you about some other things.
+I am not preaching as a man who has been taught to preach comfortably,
+but as a man who has learned in the world’s school. I know what trouble
+is. Men,” he said, still speaking quietly, “and women too! I have been
+through trouble as deep as any of yours—perhaps deeper. I know how you
+toil and suffer, I know what battles you fight, I know. I too fought a
+battle, perhaps as hard as any you fight. I carry a load and am
+fighting a battle still.” His eyes were very haggard just them. “But
+this is not what I wanted to talk to you about. I have nothing to say
+against a young man going away from this place to better himself, but
+there are young men who go out back shearing or droving, young men who
+are goodhearted but careless, who make cheques, and spend their money
+gambling or drinking and never think of the old folk at home until it
+is too late. They never think of the old people, alone, perhaps, in a
+desolate but on a worked-out farm in the scrub.”
+
+Jim Bullock squirmed again. He had gone out back last season and made a
+cheque, and lost most of it on horse-racing and cards.
+
+“They never think—they cannot think how, perhaps, long years agone in
+the old days, the old father, as a young man, and his brave young wife,
+came out here and buried themselves in the lonely bush and toiled for
+many years, trying—it does not matter whether they failed or not—trying
+to make homes for their children; toiled till the young man was bowed
+and grey, and the young wife brown and wrinkled and worn out. Exiles
+they were in the early days—boy-husbands and girl-wives some of them,
+who left their native lands, who left all that was dear, that seemed
+beautiful, that seemed to make life worth living, and sacrificed their
+young lives in drought and utter loneliness to make homes for their
+children. I want you young men to think of this. Some of them came from
+England, Ireland, Bonnie Scotland.” Ross straightened up and let his
+hands fall loosely on his knees. “Some from Europe—your foreign
+fathers—some from across the Rhine in Germany.” We looked at old Kurtz.
+He seemed affected.
+
+Then Peter paused for a moment and blinked thoughtfully at Ross, then
+he took a drink of water. I can see now that the whole thing was a
+battle between Peter M’Laughlan and Robert Ross—Scot met Scot. “It
+seemed to me,” Jim Bullock said afterwards, “that Peter was only tryin’
+to make some of us blanky well blubber.”
+
+“And there are men,” Peter went on, “who have struggled and suffered
+and failed, and who have fought and failed again till their tempers are
+spoiled, until they grow bitter. They go in for self-pity, and
+self-pity leads to moping and brooding and madness; self-pity is the
+most selfish and useless thing on the face of God’s earth. It is cruel,
+it is deadly, both to the man and to those who love him, and whom he
+ought to love. His load grows heavier daily in his imagination, and he
+sinks down until it is in him to curse God and die. He ceases to care
+for or to think of his children who are working to help him.” (Ross’s
+sons were good, steady, hard-working boys.) “Or the brave wife who has
+been so true to him for many hard years, who left home and friends and
+country for his sake. Who bears up in the blackest of times, and
+persists in looking at the bright side of things for his sake; who has
+suffered more than he if he only knew it, and suffers now, through him
+and because of him, but who is patient and bright and cheerful while
+her heart is breaking. He thinks she does not suffer, that she cannot
+suffer as a man does. My God! he doesn’t know. He has forgotten in her
+the bright, fresh-faced, loving lassie he loved and won long years
+agone—long years agone——”
+
+There was a sob, like the sob of an over-ridden horse as it sinks down
+broken-hearted, and Ross’s arms went out on the desk in front of him,
+and his head went down on them. He was beaten.
+
+He was steered out gently with his wife on one side of him and his
+eldest son on the other.
+
+“Don’t be alarmed, my friends,” said Peter, standing by the water-bag
+with one hand on the tap and the pannikin in the other. “Mr Ross has
+not been well lately, and the heat has been too much for him.” And he
+went out after Ross. They took him round under the bush shed behind the
+hut, where it was cooler.
+
+When Peter came back to his place he seemed to have changed his whole
+manner and tone. “Our friend, Mr Ross, is much better,” he said. “We
+will now sing”—he glanced at Clara Southwick at the harmonium—“we will
+now sing ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’” We all knew that hymn; it was
+an old favourite round there, and Clara Southwick played it well in
+spite of the harmonium.
+
+And Peter sang—the first and last time I ever heard him sing. I never
+had an ear for music; but I never before nor since heard a man’s voice
+that stirred me as Peter M’Laughlan’s. We stood like emus, listening to
+him all through one verse, then we pulled ourselves together.
+
+Shall we gather at the River,
+Where bright angels’ feet have trod—
+
+
+The only rivers round there were barren creeks, the best of them only
+strings of muddy waterholes, and across the ridge, on the sheep-runs,
+the creeks were dry gutters, with baked banks and beds, and perhaps a
+mudhole every mile or so, and dead beasts rotting and stinking every
+few yards.
+
+Gather with the saints at the River,
+That flows by the throne of God.
+
+
+Peter’s voice trembled and broke. He caught his breath, and his eyes
+filled. But he smiled then—he stood smiling at us through his tears.
+
+The beautiful, the beautiful River,
+That flows by the throne of God.
+
+
+Outside I saw women kiss each other who had been at daggers drawn ever
+since I could remember, and men shake hands silently who had hated each
+other for years. Every family wanted Peter to come home to tea, but he
+went across to Ross’s, and afterwards down to Kurtz’s place, and bled
+and inoculated six cows or so in a new way, and after tea he rode off
+over the gap to see his friend.
+
+
+
+
+HIS BROTHER’S KEEPER
+
+
+By his paths through the parched desolation,
+    Hot rides and the terrible tramps;
+By the hunger, the thirst, the privation
+    Of his work in the furthermost camps;
+
+By his worth in the light that shall search men
+    And prove—ay! and justify each—
+I place him in front of all Churchmen
+    Who feel not, who _know_ not—but preach!
+                    _The Christ of the Never_.
+
+
+I told you about Peter M’Laughlan, the bush missionary, and how he
+preached in the little slab-and-bark school-house in the scrub on
+Ross’s Creek that blazing hot Sunday afternoon long ago, when the
+drought was ruining the brave farmers all round there and breaking
+their hearts. And how hard old Ross, the selector, broke down at the
+end of the sermon, and blubbered, and had to be taken out of church.
+
+I left home and drifted to Sydney, and “back into the Great North-West
+where all the rovers go,” and knocked about the country for six or
+seven years before I met Peter M’Laughlan again. I was young yet, but
+felt old at times, and there were times, in the hot, rough, greasy
+shearing-shed on blazing days, or in the bare “men’s hut” by the
+flicker of the stinking slush-lamp at night, or the wretched wayside
+shanty with its drink-madness and blasphemy, or tramping along the
+dusty, endless track—there were times when I wished I could fall back
+with all the experience I’d got, and sit once more in the little
+slab-and-bark “chapel” on Ross’s Creek and hear Peter M’Laughlan and
+the poor, struggling selectors sing “Shall We Gather at the River?” and
+then go out and start life afresh.
+
+My old school chum and bush mate, Jack Barnes, had married pretty
+little Clara Southwick, who used to play the portable harmonium in
+chapel. I nearly broke my heart when they were married, but then I was
+a young fool. Clara was a year or so older than I, and I could never
+get away from a boyish feeling of reverence for her, as if she were
+something above and out of my world. And so, while I was worshipping
+her in chapel once a month, and at picnics and parties in between, and
+always at a distance, Jack used to ride up to Southwick’s place on
+Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and on other days, and hang his horse
+up outside, or turn it in the paddock, and argue with old Southwick,
+and agree with the old woman, and court Clara on the sly. And he got
+her.
+
+It was at their wedding that I first got the worse for drink.
+
+Jack was a blue-eyed, curly black-haired, careless, popular young
+scamp; as good-hearted as he was careless. He could ride like a circus
+monkey, do all kinds of bush work, add two columns of figures at once,
+and write like copper-plate.
+
+Jack was given to drinking, gambling and roving. He steadied up when he
+got married and started on a small selection of his own; but within the
+year Clara was living in a back skillion of her father’s house and Jack
+was up-country shearing. He was “ringer” of the shed at Piora Station
+one season and made a decent cheque; and within a fortnight after the
+shed “cut out” he turned up at home in a very bad state from drink and
+with about thirty shillings in his pockets. He had fallen from his
+horse in the creek near Southwick’s, and altogether he was a nice sort
+of young husband to go home to poor, heart-broken Clara.
+
+I remember that time well. She stopped me one day as I was riding past
+to ask me if I’d seen Jack, and I got off my horse. Her chin and mouth
+began to twitch and tremble and I saw her eyes filling with tears. She
+laid her hand on my arm and asked me to promise not to drink with Jack
+if I met him, but to try and persuade him to come home. And—well, have
+you, as a man, ever, with the one woman that you can’t have, and no
+matter at what time or place, felt a sudden mad longing to take her in
+your arms and kiss her—and damn the world? I got on my horse again. She
+must have thought me an ignorant brute, but I felt safer there. And
+when I thought how I had nearly made a fool of myself, and been a
+cowardly brute, and a rotten mate to my mate, I rode ten miles to find
+Jack and get him home.
+
+He straightened up again after a bit and went out and got another shed,
+and they say that Peter M’Laughlan got hold of him there. I don’t know
+what Peter did to him then—Jack never spoke of it, even to me, his old
+mate; but, anyway, at the end of the shearing season Jack’s cheque came
+home to Clara in a registered envelope, addressed in Peter’s
+hand-writing, and about a week later Jack turned up a changed man.
+
+He got work as a temporary clerk in the branch government land office
+at Solong, a pretty little farming town in a circle of blue hills on
+the banks of a clear, willow-fringed river, where there were rich,
+black-soil, river-flat farms, and vineyards on the red soil slopes, and
+blue peaks in the distance. It was a great contrast to Ross’s Creek.
+Jack paid a deposit on an allotment of land, a bit out of town, on the
+river bank, and built a little weather-board box of a cottage in spare
+times, and planted roses and grape-vines to hide its ugliness by and
+by. It wasn’t much of a place, but Clara was mighty proud of it because
+it was “our house.” They were very happy, and she was beginning to feel
+sure of Jack. She seemed to believe that the miserable old time was all
+past and gone.
+
+When the work at the land’s office gave out, Jack did all sorts of jobs
+about town, and at last, one shearing season, when there was a heavy
+clip of wool, and shearers were getting L1 a hundred, he decided to go
+out back. I know that Clara was against it, but he argued that it was
+the only chance for him, and she persuaded herself that she could trust
+him. I was knocking about Solong at the time, and Jack and I decided to
+go out together and share his packhorse between us. He wrote to
+Beenaway Shed, about three hundred: miles north-west in the Great
+Scrubs, and got pens for both of us.
+
+It was a fine fresh morning when we started; it was in a good season
+and the country looked grand. When I rode up to Jack’s place I saw his
+horse and packhorse tied up outside the gate. He had wanted me to come
+up the evening before and have tea with them and camp at his place for
+the night. “Come up! man alive!” he said. “We’ll make you a
+shake-down!” But I wouldn’t; I said I had to meet a chap. Jack wouldn’t
+have understood. I had been up before, but when I saw him and Clara so
+happy and comfortable, and thought of the past and my secret, and
+thought of myself, a useless, purposeless, restless, homeless sort of
+fellow, hanging out at a boarding-house, it nearly broke me up, and I
+had to have a drink or two afterwards. I often wonder if Clara guessed
+and understood. You never know how much a woman knows; but—ah, well!
+
+Jack had taken my things home with him and he and Clara had packed
+them. I found afterwards that she had washed, dried and ironed some
+collars and handkerchiefs of mine during the night. Clara and Jack came
+out to the gate, and as I wouldn’t go in to have a cup of tea there was
+nothing for it but to say good-bye. She was dressed in a fresh-looking
+print blouse and dark skirt, and wore a white hood that fell back from
+her head; she was a little girl, with sweet, small, freckled features,
+and red-gold hair, and kind, sympathetic grey eyes. I thought her the
+freshest, and fairest, and daintiest little woman in the district.
+
+I was Jack’s mate, so she always treated me as a sort of
+brother-in-law, and called me by my Christian name. Mates are closer
+than brothers in the bush.
+
+I turned my back and pretended to tighten the straps and girths on the
+packhorse while she said good-bye to Jack. I heard her speaking
+earnestly to him, and once I heard her mention Peter M’Laughlan’s name.
+I thought Jack answered rather impatiently. “Oh, that’s all right,
+Clara,” he said, “that’s all over—past and gone. I wish you would
+believe it. You promised never to speak of that any more.”
+
+I know how it was. Jack never cared to hear about Peter; he was too
+ashamed of the past, perhaps; besides, deep down, we feel a sort of
+resentment towards any reference to a man who has helped or saved us in
+the past. It’s human nature.
+
+Then they spoke in low tones for a while, and then Jack laughed, and
+kissed her, and said, “Oh, I’ll be back before the time’s up.” Then he
+ran into the house to say good-bye to Mary’s sister, who was staying
+with her, and who was laid up with a sprained ankle.
+
+Then Clara stepped up to me and laid her fingers on my shoulder. I
+trembled from head to foot and hoped she didn’t notice it.
+
+“Joe,” she said, looking at me with her big, searching grey eyes, “I
+believe I can trust you. I want you to look after Jack. You know why.
+Never let him have one drink if you can help it. One drink—the first
+drink will do it. I want you to promise me that you will never have a
+drink with Jack, no matter what happens or what he says.”
+
+“I never will,” I said, and I meant it.
+
+“It’s the first time he’s been away from me since he gave up drinking,
+and if he comes back all right this time I will be sure of him and
+contented. But, Joe, if he comes back wrong it will kill me; it will
+break my heart. I want you to promise that if anything happens you will
+ride or wire for Peter M’Laughlan. I hear he’s wool-sorting this year
+at Beenaway Station. Promise me that if anything happens you will ride
+for Peter M’Laughlan and tell him, no matter what Jack says.”
+
+“I promise,” I said.
+
+She half-held out her hand to me, but I kept both mine behind my back.
+I suppose she thought I didn’t notice that she wanted to shake hands on
+the bargain; but the truth was that my hands shook so, and I didn’t
+want her to notice _that_.
+
+I got on my horse and felt steadier. Then, “Good-bye, Clara”—“Good-bye,
+Jack.” She bore up bravely, but I saw her eyes brimming. Jack got on
+his horse, and I bent over and shook hands with her. Jack bent down and
+kissed her while she stood on tiptoe. “Good-bye, little woman,” he
+said. “Cheer up, and I’ll be back before you know where you are! You
+mustn’t fret—you know why.”
+
+“Good-bye, Jack!”—she was breaking down.
+
+“Come on, Jack!” I said, and we rode off, turning and waving our hats
+to her as she stood by the gate, looking a desolate little thing, I
+thought, till we turned down a bend of the road into the river.
+
+As we jogged along with the packhorse trotting behind us, and the
+quart-pots and hobble-chains jingling on the packsaddle, I pictured
+Clara running inside, to cry a while in her sister’s arms, and then to
+bustle round and cheer up, for Jack’s sake—and for the sake of
+something else.
+
+“I’ll christen him after you, Joe,” said Jack, later on, when we’d got
+confidential over our pipes after tea in our first camp. It never
+seemed to enter his head that there was the ghost of a chance that it
+might be a girl. “I’m glad he didn’t come along when I was drinking,”
+he said.
+
+And as we lay rolled in our blankets under the stars I swore a big oath
+to myself.
+
+We got along comfortably and reached Beenaway Station in about a week,
+the day before the shearers’ roll-call. Jack never showed the slightest
+inclination to go into a shanty; and several times we talked about old
+times and what damned fools we’d been throwing away our money over
+shanty bars shouting for loafers and cadgers. “Isn’t this ever so-much
+better, Joe!” said Jack, as we lay on our blankets smoking one
+moonlight night. “There’s nothing in boozing, Joe, you can take it from
+me. Just you sling it for a year and then look back; you won’t want to
+touch it again. You’ve been straight for a couple of months. Sling it
+for good, Joe, before it gets a hold on you, like it did on me.”
+
+It was the morning after cut-out at Beenaway Shed, and we were glad. We
+were tired of the rush and roar and rattle and heat and grease and
+blasphemy of the big, hot, iron machine shed in that dusty patch in the
+barren scrubs. Swags were rolled up, saddle-bags packed, horses had
+been rounded up and driven in, the shearers’ cook and his mate had had
+their fight, and about a hundred men—shearers, rouseabouts, and
+wool-washers—were waiting round the little iron office to get their
+cheques.
+
+We were about half through when one bushman said to another: “Stop your
+damned swearin’, Jim. Here’s Peter M’Laughlan!” Peter walked up and the
+men made way for him and he went into the office. There was always
+considerably less swearing for a few feet round about where Peter
+M’Laughlan happened to be working in a shearing-shed. It seemed to be
+an understood thing with the men. He took no advantages, never
+volunteered to preach at a shed where he was working, and only spoke on
+union subjects when the men asked him to. He was “rep.” (Shearers’
+Union representative) at this shed, but squatters and station managers
+respected him as much as the men did.
+
+He seemed much greyer now, but still stood square and straight. And his
+eyes still looked one through.
+
+When Peter came out and the crowd had cleared away he took Jack aside
+and spoke to him in a low voice for a few minutes. I heard Jack say,
+“Oh, that’s all right, Peter! You have my word for it,” and he got on
+his horse. I heard Peter say the one word, “Remember!” “Oh, that’s all
+right,” said Jack, and he shook hands with Peter, shouted, “Come on,
+Joe!” and started off with the packhorse after him.
+
+“I wish I were going down with you, Joe,” said Peter to me, “but I
+can’t get away till to-morrow. I’ve got that sick rouseabout on my
+hands, and I’ll have to see him fixed up somehow and started off to the
+hospital” (the nearest was a hundred miles away). “And, by the way,
+I’ve taken up a collection for him; I want a few shillings from you,
+Joe. I nearly forgot you. The poor fellow only got in about a
+fortnight’s work, and there’s a wife and youngsters in Sydney. I’ll be
+down after you to-morrow. I promised to go to Comesomehow[1] and get
+the people together and start an agitation for a half-time school
+there. Anyway, I’ll be there by the end of the week. Good-bye, Joe. I
+must get some more money for the rouser from some of those chaps before
+they start.”
+
+[1] There is a postal district in new South Wales called
+“Come-by-Chance.”
+
+
+Comesomehow was a wretched cockatoo settlement, a bit off the track,
+about one hundred and fifty miles on our road home, where the settlers
+lived like savages and the children ran wild. I reckoned that Peter
+would have his work cut out to start a craving for education in that
+place.
+
+By saying he’d be there I think he intended to give me a hint, in case
+anything happened. I believe now that Jack’s wife had got anxious and
+had written to him.
+
+We jogged along comfortably and happily for three or four days, and as
+we passed shanty after shanty, and town after town, without Jack
+showing the slightest inclination to pull up at any of them, I began to
+feel safe about him.
+
+Then it happened, in the simplest way, as most things of this sort
+happen if you don’t watch close.
+
+The third night it rained, rained heavens-hard, and rainy nights can be
+mighty cold out on those plains, even in midsummer. Jack and I rigged
+up a strip of waterproof stuff we had to cover the swags on the
+packhorse, but the rain drove in, almost horizontally, and we got wet
+through, blankets, clothes and all. Jack got a bad cold and coughed fit
+to break himself; so about daylight, when the rain held up a bit, we
+packed up and rode on to the next pub, a wretched little weather-board
+place in the scrub.
+
+Jack reckoned he’d get some stuff for his cold there. I didn’t like to
+speak, but before we reached the place I said, “You won’t touch a
+drink, Jack.”
+
+“Do you think I’m a blanky fool?” said Jack, and I shut up.
+
+The shanty was kept by a man who went by the name of Thomas, a
+notorious lamber-down,[2] as I found out afterwards. He was a big,
+awkward bullock of a man, a selfish, ignorant brute, as anyone might
+have seen by his face; but he had a loud voice, and adopted a careless,
+rollicking, hail-fellow-well-met! come-in-and-sit-down-man-alive!
+clap-you-on-the-back style, which deceived a good many, or which a good
+many pretended to believe in. His “missus” was an animal of his own
+species, but she was duller and didn’t bellow.
+
+[2] “Lamber-down,” a shanty keeper who entices cheque-men to drink.
+
+
+He had a rather good-looking girl there—I don’t know whether she was
+his daughter or not. They said that when he saw the shearers coming
+he’d say, “Run and titivate yourself, Mary; here comes the shearers!”
+
+But what surprised me was that Jack Barnes didn’t seem able to see
+through Thomas; he thought that he was all right, “a bit of a rough
+diamond.” There are any amount of scoundrels and swindlers knocking
+about the world disguised as rough diamonds.
+
+Jack had a fit of coughing when we came in.
+
+“Why, Jack!” bellowed Thomas, “that’s a regular churchyarder you’ve
+got. Go in to the kitchen fire and I’ll mix you a stiff toddy.”
+
+“No, thank you, Thomas,” said Jack, glancing at me rather sheepishly, I
+thought. “I’ll have a hot cup of coffee presently, that’ll do me more
+good.”
+
+“Why, man alive, one drink won’t hurt you!” said Thomas. “I know you’re
+on the straight, and you know I’m the last man that ’ud try to get you
+off it. But you want something for that cold. You don’t want to die on
+the track, do you? What would your missus say? That cough of yours is
+enough to bust a bullock.”
+
+“Jack isn’t drinking, Thomas,” I said rather shortly, “and neither am
+I.”
+
+“I’ll have a cup of coffee at breakfast,” said Jack; “thank you all the
+same, Thomas.”
+
+“Right you are, Jack!” said Thomas. “Mary!” he roared at the girl,
+“chuck yerself about and get breakfast, and make a strong cup of
+coffee; and I say, missus” (to his wife), “git some honey and vinegar
+in a cup, will yer? or see if there’s any of that cough stuff left in
+the bottle. Go into the kitchen, you chaps, and dry yourselves at the
+fire, you’re wringing wet.”
+
+Jack went through into the kitchen. I stepped out to see if the horses
+were all right, and as I came in again through the bar, Thomas, who had
+slipped behind the counter, crooked his finger at me and poured out a
+stiff whisky. “I thought you might like to have it on the quiet,” he
+whispered, with a wink.
+
+Now, there was this difference between Jack and me. When I was on the
+track, and healthy and contented, I could take a drink, or two drinks,
+and then leave it; or at other times I could drink all day, or all
+night, and be as happy as a lord, and be mighty sick and repentant all
+next day, and then not touch drink for a week; but if Jack once
+started, he was a lost man for days, for weeks, for, months—as long as
+his cash or credit lasted. I felt a cold coming on me this morning, and
+wanted a whisky, so I had a drink with Thomas. Then, of course, I
+shouted in my turn, keeping an eye out in case Jack should come in. I
+went into the kitchen and steamed with Jack for a while in front of a
+big log fire, taking care to keep my breath away from him. Then we went
+in to breakfast. Those two drinks were all I meant to have, and we were
+going right on after breakfast.
+
+It was a good breakfast, ham and eggs, and we enjoyed it. The two
+whiskies had got to work. I hadn’t touched drink for a long time. I
+shouldn’t like to say that Thomas put anything in the drink he gave me.
+Before we started breakfast he put a glass down in front of me and
+said:
+
+“There’s a good ginger-ale, it will warm you up.”
+
+I tasted it; it was rum, hot. I said nothing. What could I say?
+
+There was some joke about Jack being married and settled and steadied
+down, and me, his old mate, still on the wallaby; and Mrs Thomas said
+that I ought to follow Jack’s example. And just then I felt a touch of
+that loneliness that some men feel when an old drinking mate turns
+teetotaller.
+
+Jack started coughing again, like an old cow with the pleuro.
+
+“That cough will kill you, Jack,” said Thomas. “Let’s put a drop of
+brandy in your coffee, that won’t start you, anyhow; it’s real ‘Three
+Star.’” And he reached a bottle from the side-table.
+
+I should have stood up then, for my manhood, for my mate, and for
+little Clara, but I half rose from my chair, and Jack laughed and said,
+“Sit down, Joe, you old fool, you’re tanked. I know all about your
+seeing about the horses and your ginger-ales. It’s all right, old man.
+Do you think I’m going on the booze? Why, I’ll have to hold you on the
+horse all day.”
+
+“Here’s luck, Joe!” said Jack, laughing, and lifting up his cup of
+coffee with the brandy in it. “Here’s luck, Joe.”
+
+Then suddenly, and as clearly as I ever heard it, came Clara’s voice to
+my ear: “Promise me, whatever you do, that you will never have a drink
+with Jack.” And I felt cold and sick to the stomach.
+
+I got up and went out. They thought that the drink had made me sick,
+but if I’d stayed there another minute I would have tackled Thomas; and
+I knew that I needed a clear head to tackle a bullock like him. I
+walked about a bit, and when I came in again Jack and Thomas were in
+the bar, and Jack had a glass before him.
+
+“Come on, Joe, you old bounder,” said Jack, “come and have a
+whisky-and-soda; it will straighten you up.”
+
+“What’s that you’re drinking, Jack?” I asked.
+
+“Oh, don’t be a fool!” said Jack. “One drink won’t hurt me. Do you
+think I’m going on the booze? Have a soda and straighten up; we must
+make a start directly.”
+
+I remember we had two or three whiskies, and then suddenly I tackled
+Thomas, and Jack was holding me back, and laughing and swearing at me
+at the same time, and I had a tussle with him; and then I was suddenly
+calmer and sensible, and we were shaking hands all round, and Jack was
+talking about just one more spree for the sake of old times.
+
+“A bit of a booze won’t hurt me, Joe, you old fool,” he said. “We’ll
+have one more night of it, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, and start at
+daylight in the morning. You go and see to the horses, it will
+straighten you up. Take the saddle off and hobble ’em out.”
+
+But I insisted on starting at once, and Jack promised he would. We were
+gloriously happy for an hour or so, and then I went to sleep.
+
+When I woke it was late in the afternoon. I was very giddy and shaky;
+the girl brought me a whisky-and-soda, and that steadied me. Some more
+shearers had arrived, and Jack was playing cards with two of them on
+top of a cask in the bar. Thomas was dead drunk on the floor, or
+pretending to be so, and his wife was behind the bar. I went out to see
+to the horses; I found them in a bush yard at the back. The packhorse
+was rolling in the mud with the pack-saddle and saddlebags on. One of
+the chaps helped me take off the saddles and put them in the
+harness-room behind the kitchen.
+
+I’ll pass over that night. It wouldn’t be very edifying to the great,
+steady-living, sober majority, and the others, the never-do-wells, the
+rovers, wrecks and failures, will understand only too well without
+being told—only too well, God help them!
+
+When I woke in the morning I couldn’t have touched a drink to save my
+life. I was fearfully shaky, and swimming about the head, but I put my
+head over a tub under the pump and got the girl to pump for a while,
+and then I drank a pint of tea and managed to keep it down, and felt
+better.
+
+All through the last half of the night I’d kept saying, in a sort of
+drink nightmare, “I’ll go for Peter M’Laughlan in the morning. I’ll go
+for Peter as soon as I can stand!” and repeating Clara Barnes’s words,
+“Ride for Peter if anything happens. Ride for Peter M’Laughlan.”
+
+There were drunken shearers, horsemen and swagmen sleeping all over the
+place, and in all sorts of odd positions; some on the veranda with
+their heads on their swags, one sitting back against the wall, and one
+on the broad of his back with his head on the bare boards and his mouth
+open. There was another horse rolling in its saddle, and I took the
+saddle off. The horse belonged to an English University man.
+
+I went in to see how Jack was. He was lying in the parlour on a little,
+worn-out, horse-hair sofa, that might have seen better days in some
+clean home in the woman-and-girl world. He had been drinking and
+playing cards till early that morning, and he looked awful—he looked as
+if he’d been boozing for a month.
+
+“See what you’ve done!” he said, sitting up and glaring at me; then he
+said, “Bring me a whisky-and-soda, Joe, for God’s sake!”
+
+I got a whisky-and-soda from the girl and took it to him.
+
+I talked to him for a while, and at last he said, “Well, go and get the
+horses and we’ll start.”
+
+I got the horses ready and brought them round to the front, but by that
+time he’d had more drink, and he said he wanted to sleep before he
+started. Next he was playing cards with one of the chaps, and asked me
+to wait till he’d finished that game. I knew he’d keep promising and
+humbugging me till there was a row, so at last I got him aside and
+said:
+
+“Look here, Jack, I’m going for Peter M’Laughlan——”
+
+“Go to hell!” said Jack.
+
+I put the other horses back in the yard, the saddles in the skillion,
+got on my horse and rode off. Thomas and the others asked me no
+questions, they took no notice. In a place like that a man could almost
+do anything, short of hanging himself, without anyone interfering or
+being surprised. And probably, if he did hang himself, they’d let him
+swing for a while to get a taste of it.
+
+Comesomehow was about fifteen miles back on a track off the main road.
+I reckoned that I could find Peter and bring him on by the afternoon,
+and I rode hard, sick as I was. I was too sick to smoke.
+
+As it happened, Peter had started early from his last camp and I caught
+him just as he was turning off into Comesomehow track.
+
+“What’s up, Joe?” he asked as I rode up to him—but he could see.
+
+“Jack Barnes is on the booze at Thomas’s,” I said.
+
+Peter just looked right through me. Then he turned his horse’s head
+without a word, and rode back with me. And, after a while, he said, as
+if to himself:
+
+“Poor Clara! Poor little lassie!”
+
+By the time we reached the shanty it was well on in the afternoon. A
+fight was stopped in the first round and voices lowered when the chaps
+caught sight of us. As Peter walked into the bar one or two drunks
+straightened themselves and took off their hats with drunken sentiment.
+
+“Where is Jack Barnes, Thomas?” asked Peter, quietly.
+
+“He’s in there if you want to see him,” said Thomas, jerking his head
+towards the parlour.
+
+We went in, and when Peter saw Jack lying there I noticed that swift,
+haunted look came into his eyes, as if he’d seen a ghost of the past.
+He sat down by the sofa to wait until Jack woke. I thought as he sat
+there that his eyes were like a woman’s for sympathy and like a dog’s
+for faithfulness. I was very shaky.
+
+Presently Thomas looked in. “Is there anything I can do for you,
+M’Laughlan?” he asked in as civil a tone as he could get to.
+
+“Yes,” said Peter, “bring me a flask of your best whisky—your own,
+mind—and a glass.
+
+“We shall need the whisky for him on the track, Joe,” said Peter, when
+the flask came. “Get another glass and a bottle of soda; you want a
+nip.” He poured out a drink for himself.
+
+“The first thing we’ve got to do is to get him away; then I’ll soon put
+him on his feet. But we’ll let him sleep a while longer. I find I’ve
+got business near Solong, and I’m going down with you.”
+
+By and by Jack woke up and glared round, and when he caught sight of
+Peter he just reached for his hands and said, “Peter! Thank God you’ve
+come!” Then he said, “But I must have a drink first, Peter.”
+
+“All right, Jack, you shall have a drink,” said Peter; and he gave him
+a stiff nobblerq. It steadied Jack a bit.
+
+“Now listen to me, Jack,” said Peter. “How much money have you got
+left?”
+
+“I—I can’t think,” said Jack. “I’ve got a cheque for twenty pounds
+here, sewn inside my shirt.”
+
+“Yes; but you drew thirty-six in three cheques. Where’s the rest?”
+
+“Thomas has ten,” said Jack, “and the six—well, the six is gone. I was
+playing cards last night.”
+
+Peter stepped out into the bar.
+
+“Look here, Thomas,” he said quietly, “you’ve got a ten-pound cheque
+from Barnes.”
+
+“I know I have.”
+
+“Well, how much of it does he owe you?”
+
+“The whole, and more.”
+
+“Do you mean to tell me that? He has only been here since yesterday
+morning.”
+
+“Yes; but he’s been shoutin’ all round. Look at all these chaps here.”
+
+“They only came yesterday afternoon,” said Peter. “Here, you had best
+take this and give me the cheque;” and Peter laid a five-pound note on
+the bar. Thomas bucked at first, but in the end he handed over the
+cheque—he had had several warnings from the police. Then he suddenly
+lost all control over himself; he came round from behind the bar and
+faced Peter.
+
+“Now, look here, you mongrel parson!” he said. “What the —— do you mean
+by coming into my bar and, interfering with me. Who the —— are you
+anyway? A ——!” He used the worst oaths that were used in the bush.
+“Take off your —— coat!” he roared at last, shaping up to Peter.
+
+Peter stepped back a pace and buttoned his coat and threw back his
+head.
+
+“No need to take off my coat, Thomas,” he said, “I am ready.”
+
+He said it very quietly, but there was a danger-signal—a red light in
+his eyes. He was quiet-voiced but hard-knuckled, as some had reason to
+know.
+
+Thomas balked like a bull at a spread umbrella. Jack lurched past me as
+I stood in the parlour door, but I caught him and held him back; and
+almost at the same moment a wretched old boozer that we called “Awful
+Example,” who had been sitting huddled, a dirty bundle of rags and
+beard and hair, in the corner of the bar, struggled to his feet,
+staggered forward and faced Thomas, looking once again like something
+that might have been a man. He snatched a thick glass bottle from the
+counter and held it by the neck in his right hand.
+
+“Stand back, Thomas!” he shouted. “Lay a hand—lay a finger on Peter
+M’Laughlan, and I’ll smash your head, as sure as there’s a God above us
+and I’m a ruined man!”
+
+Peter took “Awful” gently by the shoulders and sat him down. “You keep
+quiet, old man,” he said; “nothing is going to happen.” Thomas went
+round behind the bar muttering something about it not being worth his
+while to, etc.
+
+“You go and get the horses ready, Joe,” said Peter to me; “and you sit
+down, Jack, and keep quiet.”
+
+“He can get the horses,” growled Thomas, from behind the bar, “but I’m
+damned if he gets the saddles. I’ve got them locked up, and I’ll
+something well keep them till Barnes is sober enough to pay me what he
+owes me.”
+
+Just then a tall, good-looking chap, with dark-blue eyes and a long,
+light-coloured moustache, stepped into the bar from the crowd on the
+veranda.
+
+“What’s all this, Thomas?” he asked.
+
+“What’s that got to do with you, Gentleman Once?” shouted Thomas.
+
+“I think it’s got something to do with me,” said Gentleman Once. “Now,
+look here, Thomas; you can do pretty well what you like with us poor
+devils, and you know it, but we draw the line at Peter M’Laughlan. If
+you really itch for the thrashing, you deserve you must tempt someone
+else to give it to you.”
+
+“What the —— are you talking about?” snorted Thomas. “You’re drunk or
+ratty!”
+
+“What’s the trouble, M’Laughlan?” asked Gentleman Once, turning to
+Peter. “No trouble at all, Gentleman Once,” said Peter; “thank you all
+the same. I’ve managed worse men than our friend Thomas. Now, Thomas,
+don’t you think it would pay you best to hand over the key of the
+harness-room and have done with this nonsense? I’m a patient man—a very
+patient man—but I’ve not always been so, and the old blood comes up
+sometimes, you know.”
+
+Thomas couldn’t stand this sort of language, because he couldn’t
+understand it. He threw the key on the bar and told us to clear out.
+
+We were all three very quiet riding along the track that evening. Peter
+gave Jack a nip now and again from the flask, and before we turned in
+in camp he gave him what he called a soothing draught from a little
+medicine chest that he carried in his saddle-bag. Jack seemed to have
+got rid of his cough; he slept all night, and in the morning, after
+he’d drunk a pint of mutton-broth that Peter had made in one of the
+billies, he was all right—except that he was quiet and ashamed. I had
+never known him to be so quiet, and for such a length of time, since we
+were boys together. He had learned his own weakness; he’d lost all his
+cocksureness. I know now just exactly how he felt. He felt as if his
+sober year had been lost and he would have to live it all over again.
+
+Peter didn’t preach. He just jogged along and camped with us as if he
+were an ordinary, every-day mate. He yarned about all sorts of things.
+He could tell good yarns, and when he was fairly on you could listen to
+him all night. He seemed to have been nearly all over the world. Peter
+never preached except when he was asked to hold service in some bush
+pub, station-homestead or bush church. But in a case like ours he had a
+way of telling a little life story, with something in it that hit the
+young man he wanted to reform, and hit him hard. He’d generally begin
+quietly, when we were comfortable with our pipes in camp after tea,
+with “I once knew a young man—” or “That reminds me of a young fellow I
+knew—” and so on. You never knew when he was going to begin; or when he
+was going to hit you. In our last camp, before we reached Solong, he
+told two of his time-fuse yarns. I haven’t time to tell them now, but
+one stuffed up my pipe for a while, and made Jack’s hand tremble when
+he tried to light his. I’m glad it was too dark to see our faces. We
+lay a good while afterwards, rolled in our blankets, and couldn’t get
+to sleep for thinking; but Peter seemed to fall asleep as soon as he
+turned in.
+
+Next day he told Jack not to tell Clara that he’d come down with us. He
+said he wouldn’t go right into Solong with us; he was going back along
+another road to stay a day or two with an old friend of his.
+
+When we reached Solong we stopped on the river-bank just out of sight
+of Jack’s house. Peter took the ten-pound cheque from his pocket and
+gave it to Jack. Jack hadn’t seen Peter give the shanty-keeper the
+five-pound note.
+
+“But I owed Thomas something,” said Jack, staring. “However did you
+manage to get the cheque out of him?”
+
+“Never mind, Jack, I managed,” said Peter.
+
+Jack sat silent for a while, then he began to breathe hard.
+
+“I don’t know what to say, Peter.”
+
+“Say nothing, Jack. Only promise me that you will give Clara the
+cheques as soon as you go home, and let her take care of the cash for a
+while.”
+
+“I will,” said Jack.
+
+Jack looked down at the ground for a while, then he lifted his head and
+looked Peter in the eyes.
+
+“Peter,” he said, “I can’t speak. I’m ashamed to make a promise; I’ve
+broken so many. I’ll try to thank you in a year’s time from now.”
+
+“I ask for no promises,” said Peter, and he held out his hand. Jack
+gripped it.
+
+“Aren’t you coming home with me, Joe?” he asked.
+
+“No,” I said; “I’ll go into town. See you in the morning.”
+
+Jack rode on. When he got along a piece Peter left his horse and moved
+up to the head of the lane to watch Jack, and I followed. As Jack
+neared the cottage we saw a little figure in a cloak run out to the
+front gate. She had heard the horses and the jingle of the camp-ware on
+the pack-saddle. We saw Jack jump down and take her in his arms. I
+looked at Peter, and as he watched them, something, that might have
+been a strange look of the old days, came into his eyes.
+
+He shook hands with me. “Good-bye, Joe.”
+
+He rode across the river again. He took the track that ran along the
+foot of the spurs by the river, and up over a gap in the curve of blue
+hills, and down and out west towards the Big Scrubs. And as he rounded
+the last spur, with his packhorse trotting after him, I thought he must
+have felt very lonely. And I felt lonely too.
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY OF “GENTLEMAN ONCE”
+
+
+They learn the world from black-sheep,
+Who know it all too well.—_Out Back_.
+
+
+Peter M’Laughlan, bush missionary, Joe Wilson and his mate, Jack
+Barnes, shearers for the present, and a casual swagman named Jack
+Mitchell, were camped at Cox’s Crossing in a bend of Eurunderee Creek.
+
+It was a grassy little flat with gum-trees standing clear and clean
+like a park. At the back was the steep grassy siding of a ridge, and
+far away across the creek to the south a spur from the Blue Mountain
+range ran west, with a tall, blue granite peak showing clear in the
+broad moonlight, yet dream-like and distant over the sweeps of dark
+green bush.
+
+There was the jingle of hobble-chains and a crunching at the grass
+where the horses moved in the soft shadows amongst the trees. Up the
+creek on the other side was a surveyors’ camp, and from there now and
+again came the sound of a good voice singing verses of old songs; and
+later on the sound of a violin and a cornet being played, sometimes
+together and sometimes each on its own.
+
+Wilson and Barnes were on their way home from shearing out back in the
+great scrubs at Beenaway Shed. They had been rescued by Peter
+M’Laughlan from a wayside shanty where they had fallen, in spite of
+mutual oaths and past promises, sacred and profane, because they had
+got wringing wet in a storm on the track and caught colds, and had been
+tempted to take just one drink.
+
+They were in a bad way, and were knocking down their cheques
+beautifully when Peter M’Laughlan came along. He rescued them and some
+of their cash from the soulless shanty keeper, and was riding home with
+them, on some pretence, because he had known them as boys, because Joe
+Wilson had a vein of poetry in him—a something in sympathy with
+something in Peter; because Jack Barnes had a dear little girl-wife who
+was much too good for him, and who was now anxiously waiting for him in
+the pretty little farming town of Solong amongst the western spurs.
+Because, perhaps, of something in Peter’s early past which was a
+mystery. Simply and plainly because Peter M’Laughlan was the kindest,
+straightest and truest man in the West—a “white man.”
+
+They all knew Mitchell and welcomed him heartily when he turned up in
+their camp, because he was a pathetic humorist and a kindly cynic—a
+“joker” or “hard case” as the bushmen say.
+
+Peter was about fifty and the other three were young men.
+
+There was another man in camp who didn’t count and was supposed to be
+dead. Old Danny Quinn, champion “beer-chewer” of the district, was on
+his way out, after a spree, to one of Rouse’s stations, where, for the
+sake of past services—long past—and because of old times, he was
+supposed to be working. He had spent his last penny a week before and
+had clung to his last-hope hotel until the landlord had taken him in
+one hand and his swag in the other and lifted them clear of the
+veranda. Danny had blundered on, this far, somehow; he was the last in
+the world who could have told how, and had managed to light a fire;
+then he lay with his head on his swag and enjoyed nips of whisky in
+judicious doses and at reasonable intervals, and later on a tot of
+mutton-broth, which he made in one of the billies.
+
+It was after tea. Peter sat on a log by the fire with Joe and Jack
+Mitchell on one side and Jack Barnes on the other. Jack Mitchell sat on
+the grass with his back to the log, his knees drawn up, and his arms
+abroad on them: his most comfortable position and one which seemed to
+favour the flow of his philosophy. They talked of bush things or
+reflected, sometimes all three together, sometimes by turns.
+
+From the surveyors’ camp:
+
+I remember, I remember,
+    The house where I was born,
+The little window where the sun
+    Came peeping in at morn—
+
+
+The breeze from the west strengthened and the voice was blown away.
+
+“That chap seems a bit sentimental but he’s got a good voice,” said
+Mitchell. Then presently he remarked, round his pipe:
+
+“I wonder if old Danny remembers?” And presently Peter said quietly, as
+if the thought had just occurred to him:
+
+“By the way, Mitchell, I forgot to ask after your old folk. I knew your
+father, you know.”
+
+“Oh, they’re all right, Peter, thank you.”
+
+“Heard from them lately?” asked Peter, presently, in a lazy tone.
+
+Mitchell straightened himself up. “N—no. To tell the truth, Peter, I
+haven’t written for—I don’t know how long.”
+
+Peter smoked reflectively.
+
+“I remember your father well, Jack,” he said. “He was a big-hearted
+man.”
+
+Old Danny was heard remonstrating loudly with spirits from a warmer
+clime than Australia, and Peter stepped over to soothe him.
+
+“I thought I’d get it, directly after I opened my mouth,” said
+Mitchell. “I suppose it will be your turn next, Joe.”
+
+“I suppose so,” said Joe, resignedly.
+
+The wind fell.
+
+I remember, I remember,
+    And it gives me little joy,
+To think I’m further off from heaven,
+    Than when I was a boy!
+
+
+When Peter came back another thought seemed to have occurred to him.
+
+“How’s your mother getting on, Joe?” he asked. “She shifted to Sydney
+after your father died, didn’t she?”
+
+“Oh, she’s getting on all right!” said Joe, without elaboration.
+
+“Keeping a boarding-house, isn’t she?”
+
+“Yes,” said Joe.
+
+“Hard to make ends meet, I suppose?” said Peter. “It’s almost a harder
+life than it could have been on the old selection, and there’s none of
+the old independence about it. A woman like your mother must feel it,
+Joe.”
+
+“Oh, she’s all right,” said Joe. “She’s used to it by this time. I
+manage to send her a few pounds now and again. I send her all I can,”
+he added resentfully.
+
+Peter sat corrected for a few moments. Then he seemed to change the
+subject.
+
+“It’s some time since you were in Sydney last, isn’t it, Joe?’
+
+“Yes, Peter,” said Joe. “I haven’t been there for two years. I never
+did any good there. I’m far better knocking about out back.”
+
+There was a pause.
+
+“Some men seem to get on better in one place, some in another,”
+reflected Mitchell, lazily. “For my part, I seem to get on better in
+another.”
+
+Peter blinked, relit his pipe with a stick from the fire and reflected.
+
+The surveyor’s song had been encored:
+
+I remember, I remember—
+
+
+Perhaps Peter remembered. Joe did, but there were no vines round the
+house where he was born, only drought and dust, and raspy voices raised
+in recrimination, and hardship most times.
+
+“I remember,” said Peter, quietly, “I remember a young fellow at home
+in the old country. He had every advantage. He had a first-class
+education, a great deal more money than he needed—almost as much as he
+asked for, and nearly as much freedom as he wanted. His father was an
+English gentleman and his mother an English lady. They were titled
+people, if I remember rightly. The old man was proud, but fond of his
+son; he only asked him to pay a little duty or respect now and again.
+We don’t understand these things in Australia—they seem formal and cold
+to us. The son paid his respects to his father occasionally—a week or
+so before he’d be wanting money, as a rule. The mother was a dear lady.
+She idolized her son. She only asked for a little show of affection
+from him, a few days or a week of his society at home now and then—say
+once in three months. But he couldn’t spare her even that—his time was
+taken up so much in fashionable London and Paris and other places. He
+would give the world to be able to take his proud, soft old father’s
+hand now and look into his eyes as one man who understands another. He
+would be glad and eager to give his mother twelve months out of the
+year if he thought it would make her happier. It has been too late for
+more than twenty years.”
+
+Old Danny called for Peter.
+
+Mitchell jerked his head approvingly and gave a sound like a sigh and
+chuckle conjoined, the one qualifying the other.
+
+“I told you you’d get it, Joe,” he said.
+
+“I don’t see how it hits me,” said Joe.
+
+“But it hit all the same, Joe.”
+
+“Well, I suppose it did,” said Joe, after a short pause.
+
+“He wouldn’t have hit you so hard if you hadn’t tried to parry,”
+reflected Mitchell. “It’s your turn now, Jack.”
+
+Jack Barnes said nothing.
+
+“Now I know that Peter would do anything for a woman or child, or an
+honest, straight, hard-up chap,” said Mitchell, straightening out his
+legs and folding his arms, “but I can’t quite understand his being so
+partial to drunken scamps and vagabonds, black sheep and
+never-do-wells. He’s got a tremendous sympathy for drunks. He’d do
+anything to help a drunken man. Ain’t it marvellous? It’s my private
+opinion that Peter must have been an awful boozer and scamp in his
+time.”
+
+The other two only thought. Mitchell was privileged. He was a young man
+of freckled, sandy complexion, and quizzical grey eyes. “Sly Joker”
+“could take a rise out of anyone on the quiet;” “You could never tell
+when he was getting at you;” “Face of a born comedian,” as bushmen said
+of Mitchell. But he would probably have been a dead and dismal failure
+on any other stage than that of wide Australia.
+
+Peter came back and they sat and smoked, and maybe they reflected along
+four very different back-tracks for a while.
+
+The surveyor started to sing again:
+
+I have heard the mavis singing
+    Her love-song to the morn.
+I have seen the dew-drop clinging
+    To the rose just newly born.
+
+
+They smoked and listened in silence all through to the end. It was very
+still. The full moon was high. The long white slender branches of a
+box-tree stirred gently overhead; the she-oaks in the creek sighed as
+they are always sighing, and the southern peak seemed ever so far away.
+
+That has made me thine for ever!
+Bonny Mary of Argyle.
+
+
+“Blarst my pipe!” exclaimed Mitchell, suddenly. “I beg your pardon,
+Peter. My pipe’s always getting stuffed up,” and he proceeded to shell
+out and clear his pipe.
+
+The breeze had changed and strengthened. They heard the violin playing
+“Annie Laurie.”
+
+“They must be having a Scotch night in that camp tonight,” said
+Mitchell. The voice came again:
+
+Maxwelton Braes are bonny—
+    Where early fa’s the dew,
+For ’twas there that Annie Laurie
+    Gie me her promise true—
+
+
+Mitchell threw out his arm impatiently. “I wish they wouldn’t play and
+sing those old songs,” he said. “They make you think of damned old
+things. I beg your pardon, Peter.”
+
+Peter sat leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees and his
+hands fingering his cold pipe nervously. His sad eyes had grown haggard
+and haunted. It is in the hearts of exiles in new lands that the old
+songs are felt.
+
+“Take no thought of the morrow, Mitchell,” said Peter, abstractedly. “I
+beg your pardon, Mitchell. I mean——”
+
+“That’s all right, Peter,” said Mitchell. “You’re right; to-morrow is
+the past, as far as I’m concerned.”
+
+Peter blinked down at him as if he were a new species.
+
+“You’re an odd young man, Mitchell,” he said. “You’ll have to take care
+of that head of yours or you’ll be found hanging by a saddle-strap to a
+leaning tree on a lonely track, or find yourself in a lunatic asylum
+before you’re forty-five.”
+
+“Or else I’ll be a great man,” said Mitchell. “But—ah, well!”
+
+Peter turned his eyes to the fire and smiled sadly. “Not enjoyment and
+not sorrow, is our destined end or way,” he repeated to the fire.
+
+“But we get there just the same,” said Mitchell, “destined or not.”
+
+But to live, that each to-morrow,
+Finds us further than to-day!
+
+
+“Why, that just fits my life, Peter,” said Mitchell. “I might have to
+tramp two or three hundred miles before I get a cut[3] or a job, and if
+to-morrow didn’t find me nearer than to-day I’d starve or die of thirst
+on a dry stretch.”
+
+[3] Cut—a pen or “stand” in a shearing shed.
+
+
+“Why don’t you get married and settle down, Mitchell?” asked Peter, a
+little tired. “You’re a teetotaller.”
+
+“If I got married I couldn’t settle down,” said Mitchell. “I reckon I’d
+be the loneliest man in Australia.” Peter gave him a swift glance. “I
+reckon I’d be single no matter how much married I might be. I couldn’t
+get the girl I wanted, and—ah, well!”
+
+Mitchell’s expression was still quaintly humorous round the lower part
+of his face, but there was a sad light in his eyes. The strange light
+as of the old dead days, and he was still young.
+
+The cornet had started in the surveyors’ camp.
+
+“Their blooming tunes seem to fit in just as if they knew what we were
+talking about,” remarked Mitchell.
+
+The cornet:
+
+You’ll break my heart, you little bird,
+That sings upon the flowering thorn
+Thou mind’st me of departed joys,
+Departed never to return.
+
+
+“Damn it all,” said Mitchell, sitting up, “I’m getting sentimental.”
+Then, as if voicing something that was troubling him, “Don’t you think
+a woman pulls a man down as often as she lifts him up, Peter?”
+
+“Some say so,” said Peter.
+
+“Some say so, and they write it, too,” said Mitchell.
+
+“Sometimes it seems to me as if women were fated to drag a man down
+ever since Adam’s time. If Adam hadn’t taken his wife’s advice—but
+there, perhaps he took her advice a good many times and found it good,
+and, just because she happened to be wrong this time, and to get him
+into a hole, the sons of Adam have never let the daughters of Eve hear
+the last of it. That’s human nature.”
+
+Jack Barnes, the young husband, who was suffering a recovery, had been
+very silent all the evening. “I think a man’s a fool to always listen
+to his wife’s advice,” he said, with the unreasonable impatience of a
+man who wants to think while others are talking. “She only messes him
+up, and drives him to the devil as likely as not, and gets a contempt
+for him in the end.”
+
+Peter gave him a surprised, reproachful look, and stood up. He paced
+backwards and forwards on the other side of the fire, with his hands
+behind his back for a while; then he came and settled himself on the
+log again and filled his pipe.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “a man can always find excuses for himself when his
+conscience stings him. He puts mud on the sting. Man at large is
+beginning all over the world to rake up excuses for himself; he
+disguises them as ‘Psychological studies,’ and thinks he is clean and
+clever and cultured, or he calls ’em problems—the sex problem, for
+instance, and thinks he is brave and fearless.”
+
+Danny was in trouble again, and Peter went to him. He complained that
+when he lay down he saw the faces worse, and he wanted to be propped up
+somehow, so Peter got a pack-saddle and propped the old man’s shoulders
+up with that.
+
+“I remember,” Peter began, when he came back to the fire, “I remember a
+young man who got married——”
+
+Mitchell hugged himself. He knew Jack Barnes. He knew that Jack had a
+girl-wife who was many times too good for him; that Jack had been wild,
+and had nearly broken her heart, and he had guessed at once that Jack
+had broken out again, and that Peter M’Laughlan was shepherding him
+home. Mitchell had worked as mates with Jack, and liked him because of
+the good heart that was in him in spite of all; and, because he liked
+him, he was glad that Jack was going to get a kicking, so to speak,
+which might do him good. Mitchell saw it coming, as he said afterwards,
+and filled his pipe, and settled himself comfortably to listen.
+
+“I remember the case of a naturally selfish young man who got married”
+said Peter. “He didn’t know he was selfish; in fact, he thought he was
+too much the other way—but that doesn’t matter now. His name was—well,
+we’ll call him—we’ll call him, ‘Gentleman Once.’”
+
+“Do you mean Gentleman Once that we saw drinking back at Thomas’s
+shanty?” asked Joe.
+
+“No,” said Peter, “not him. There have been more than one in the bush
+who went by the nickname of ‘Gentleman Once.’ I knew one or two. It’s a
+big clan, the clan of Gentleman Once, and scattered all over the
+world.”
+
+“By the way,” said Mitchell—“excuse me for interrupting, Peter—but
+wasn’t old Danny, there, a gentleman once? I’ve heard chaps say he
+was.”
+
+“I know he was,” said Peter.
+
+“Gentleman Once! Who’s talking about Gentleman Once?” said an awful
+voice, suddenly and quickly. “About twenty or thirty years ago I was
+called Gentleman Once or Gentleman Jack, I don’t know which—Get out!
+_Get out_, I say! It’s all lies, and you’re the devil. There’s four
+devils sitting by the fire. I see them.”
+
+Two of the four devils by the fire looked round, rather startled.
+
+Danny was sitting up, his awful bloodshot eyes glaring in the
+firelight, and his ruined head looking like the bloated head of a hairy
+poodle that had been drowned and dried. Peter went to the old man and
+soothed him by waving off the snakes and devils with his hands, and
+telling them to go.
+
+“I’ve heard Danny on the Gentleman Once racket before,” remarked
+Mitchell.
+
+“Seems funny, doesn’t it, for a man to be proud of the fact that he was
+called ‘Gentleman Once’ about twenty years ago?”
+
+“Seems more awful than funny to me,” said Joe.
+
+“You’re right, Joe,” said Mitchell. “But the saddest things are often
+funny.”
+
+When Peter came back he went on with his story, and was only
+interrupted once or twice by Danny waking up and calling him to drive
+off the snakes, and green and crimson dogs with crocodile heads, and
+devils with flaming tails, and those unpleasant sorts of things that
+force their company on boozers and madmen.
+
+“Gentleman Once,” said Peter, “he came from the old country with a good
+education and no character. He disgraced himself and family once too
+often and came, or was sent, out to Australia to reform. It’s a great
+mistake. If a man is too far gone, or hasn’t the strength to live the
+past down and reform at home, he won’t do it in a new country, unless a
+combination of circumstances compels him to it. A man rises by chance;
+just as often he falls by chance. Some men fall into the habit of
+keeping steady and stick to it, for the novelty of it, until they are
+on their feet and in their sane minds and can look at the past, present
+and future sensibly. I knew one case—But that’s got nothing to do with
+the story.
+
+“Gentleman Once came out on the remittance system. That system is fatal
+in nine cases out of ten. The remittance system is an insult to any
+manhood that may be left in the black sheep, and an insult to the land
+he is sent to. The cursed quarterly allowance is a stone round his neck
+which will drag him down deeper in a new land than he would have fallen
+at home. You know that remittance men are regarded with such contempt
+in the bush that a man seldom admits he is one, save when he’s drunk
+and reckless and wants money or credit. When a ne’er-do-well lands in
+Melbourne or Sydney without a penny he will probably buck-up and do
+something for himself. When he lands with money he will probably spend
+it all in the first few months and then straighten up, because he has
+to. But when he lands on the remittance system he drinks, first to
+drown homesickness. He decides that he’ll wait till he gets his next
+quarter’s allowance and then look round. He persuades himself that it’s
+no use trying to do anything: that, in fact, he can’t do anything until
+he gets his money. When he gets it he drifts into one ‘last’ night with
+chums he has picked up in second and third-rate hotels. He drinks from
+pure selfishness. No matter what precautions his friends at home take,
+he finds means of getting credit or drawing on his allowance before it
+is due—until he is two or three quarters behind. He drinks because he
+feels happy and jolly and clever and good-natured and brave and honest
+while he is drinking. Later on he drinks because he feels the reverse
+of all these things when he is sober. He drinks to drown the past and
+repentance. He doesn’t know that a healthy-minded man doesn’t waste
+time in repenting. He doesn’t know how easy it is to reform, and is too
+weak-willed to try. He gets a muddled idea that the past can’t be
+mended. He finds it easy to get drink and borrow money on the strength
+of his next quarter’s allowance, so he soon gets a quarter or two
+behind, and sometimes gets into trouble connected with borrowed money.
+He drifts to the bush and drinks, to drown the past only. The past
+grows blacker and blacker until it is a hell without repentance; and
+often the black sheep gets to that state when a man dreads his sober
+hours. And the end? Well, you see old Danny there, and you saw old
+Awful Example back at Thomas’s shanty—he’s worse than Danny, if
+anything. Sometimes the end comes sooner. I saw a young
+new-land-new-leaf man dying in a cheap lodging-house in Sydney. He was
+a schoolmate of mine, by the way. For six weeks he lay on his back and
+suffered as I never saw a man suffer in this world; and I’ve seen some
+bad cases. They had to chloroform him every time they wanted to move
+him. He had affected to be hard and cynical, and I must say that he
+played it out to the end. It was a strong character, a strong mind
+sodden and diseased with drink. He never spoke of home and his people
+except when he was delirious. He never spoke, even to me, of his mental
+agony. That was English home training. You young Australians wouldn’t
+understand it; most bushmen are poets and emotional.
+
+“My old schoolmate was shifted to the Sydney Hospital at last, and
+consented to the amputation of one leg. But it was too late. He was
+gone from the hips down. Drink—third-rate hotel and bush shanty
+drink—and low debauchery.”
+
+Jack Barnes drew up his leg and rubbed it surreptitiously. He had “pins
+and needles.” Mitchell noticed and turned a chuckle into a grunt.
+
+“Gentleman Once was a remittance man,” continued Peter. “But before he
+got very far he met an Australian girl in a boarding-house. Her mother
+was the landlady. They were bush people who had drifted to the city.
+The girl was pretty, intelligent and impulsive. She pitied him and
+nursed him. He wasn’t known as Gentleman Once then, he hadn’t got far
+enough to merit the nickname.”
+
+Peter paused. Presently he jerked his head, as if he felt a spasm of
+pain, and leaned forward to get a stick from the fire to light his
+pipe.
+
+“Now, there’s the girl who marries a man to reform him, and when she
+has reformed him never lets him hear the last of it. Sometimes, as a
+woman, she drives him back again. But this was not one of that sort of
+girls. I once held a theory that sometimes a girl who has married a man
+and reformed him misses in the reformed man the something which
+attracted her in the careless scamp, the something which made her love
+him—and so she ceases to love him, and their married life is a far more
+miserable one than it would have been had he continued drinking. I hold
+no theory of that kind now. Such theories ruin many married lives.”
+
+Peter jerked his head again as if impatient with a thought, and reached
+for a fire-stick.
+
+“But that’s got nothing to do with the story. When Gentleman Once
+reformed his natural selfishness came back. He saw that he had made a
+mistake. It’s a terrible thing for a young man, a few months, perhaps a
+few weeks after his marriage, to ask himself the question, ‘Have I made
+a mistake?’ But Gentleman Once wasn’t to be pitied. He discovered that
+he had married beneath him in intellect and education. Home training
+again. He couldn’t have discovered that he had married beneath him as
+far as birth was concerned, for his wife’s father had been a younger
+son of an older and greater family than his own—But Gentleman Once
+wouldn’t have been cad enough to bother about birth. I’ll do him that
+much justice. He discovered, or thought he did, that he and his wife
+could never have one thought in common; that she couldn’t possibly
+understand him. I’ll tell you later on whether he was mistaken or not.
+He was gloomy most times, and she was a bright, sociable, busy little
+body. When she tried to draw him out of himself he grew irritable.
+Besides, having found that they couldn’t have a thought in common he
+ceased to bother to talk to her. There are many men who don’t bother
+talking to their wives; they don’t think their wives feel it—because
+the wives cease to complain after a while; they grow tired of trying to
+make the man realize how they suffer. Gentleman Once tried his
+best—according to his lights—and weakness. Then he went in for
+self-pity and all the problems. He liked to brood, and his poor little
+wife’s energy and cheerfulness were wearying to him. He wanted to be
+left alone. They were both high-spirited, in different ways; she was
+highly strung and so was he—because of his past life mostly. They
+quarrelled badly sometimes. Then he drank again and she stuck to him.
+Perhaps the only time he seemed cheerful and affectionate was when he
+had a few drinks in him. It was a miserable existence—a furnished room
+in a cheap lodging-house, and the use of the kitchen.
+
+“He drank alone.
+
+“Now a dipsomaniac mostly thinks he is in the right—except, perhaps,
+after he has been forced to be sober for a week. The noblest woman in
+the world couldn’t save him—everything she does to reform him irritates
+him; but a strong friend can save him sometimes—a man who has been
+through it himself. The poor little wife of Gentleman Once went through
+it all. And she stuck to him. She went into low pubs after him.”
+
+Peter shuddered again. “She went through it all. He swore promises.
+He’d come home sober and fill her with hope of future happiness, and
+swear that he’d never take another glass. ‘And we’ll be happy yet, my
+poor boy,’ she’d say, ‘we’ll be happy yet. I believe you, I trust you’
+(she used to call him her ‘bonny boy’ when they were first married).
+And next night he’d come home worse than ever. And one day he—he struck
+her!”
+
+Peter shuddered, head and shoulders, like a man who had accidentally
+smashed his finger.
+
+“And one day he struck her. He was sober when he did it—anyhow he had
+not taken drink for a week. A man is never sober who gets drunk more
+than once a week, though he might think he is. I don’t know how it
+happened, but anyway he struck her, and that frightened him. He got a
+billet in the Civil Service up-country. No matter in what town it was.
+The little wife hoped for six months.
+
+“I think it’s a cruel thing that a carelessly selfish young man cannot
+realize how a sensitive young wife suffers for months after he has
+reformed. How she hopes and fears, how she dreads the moment he has to
+leave her, and frets every hour he is away from home—and suffers mental
+agony when he is late. How the horror of the wretched old past time
+grows upon her until she dares not think of it. How she listens to his
+step and voice and watches his face, when he comes home, for a sign of
+drink. A young man, a mate of mine, who drank hard and reformed, used
+to take a delight in pretending for a few minutes to be drunk when he
+came home. He was good-hearted, but dense. He said he only did it to
+give his wife a pleasant surprise afterwards. I thought it one of the
+most cruel things I had ever seen.
+
+“Gentleman Once found that he could not stand the routine of office
+work and the dull life in that place. He commenced to drink again, and
+went on till he lost his billet. They had a little boy, a bright little
+boy, yet the father drank.
+
+“The last spree was a terrible one. He was away from home a fortnight,
+and in that fortnight he got down as deep as a man could get. Then
+another man got hold of him and set him on his feet, and straightened
+him up. The other man was a ruined doctor, a wreck whose devil was
+morphia. I don’t hold that a man’s salvation is always in his own
+hands; I’ve seen mates pull mates out of hell too often to think that.
+
+“Then Gentleman Once saw the past as he had never seen it before—he saw
+hope for the future with it. And he swore an oath that he felt he would
+keep.
+
+“He suffered from reaction on his way home, and, as he neared the town,
+a sudden fear, born of his nervous state, no doubt, sent a cold, sick
+emptiness through him: ‘Was it too late?’
+
+“As he turned into the street where he lived, he noticed a little group
+of bush larrikins standing at the corner. And they moved uneasily when
+they caught sight of him, and, as he passed, they touched and lifted
+their hats to him. Now he knew that he had lost the respect even of
+bush larrikins; and he knew enough of the bush to know that a bushman
+never lifts his hat to a man—only to death, and a woman sometimes. He
+hurried home and read the truth in his wife’s eyes. His little boy was
+dead. He went down under the blow, and she held his head to her breast
+and kept saying. ‘My poor boy, my poor boy!’
+
+“It was he that she meant, not the boy she had lost. She knew him, she
+understood him better than he did himself, and, heart-broken as she
+was, she knew how he was going to suffer, and comforted him. ‘My poor
+boy, my poor, foolish boy!’
+
+“He mended the past, as far as he could, during the next two years, and
+she seemed happy. He was very gentle, he was very kind to her. He was
+happy, too, in a new, strange way. But he had learned what it was to
+suffer through his own fault, and now he was to learn what it was to
+suffer through no fault of his own, and without the consolation of
+saying ‘I was wrong! I was to blame!’ At the end of the two years there
+was another child, and his wife died.”
+
+The four sat silently smoking until Jack Barnes asked:
+
+“And what did he do then, Peter?”
+
+“Who?” said Peter, abstractedly.
+
+“Why, Gentleman Once.”
+
+Peter roused himself.
+
+“Well, I’ve told the story, and it is about time to turn in,” he said.
+“I can’t say exactly what Gentleman Once did when his wife died. He
+might have gone down to a deeper depth than Danny’s. He might have
+risen higher than he had ever been before. From what I knew of his
+character he would never have gone down an easy slope as Danny has
+done. He might have dropped plump at first and then climbed up. Anyway,
+he had the memory of the last two years to help him.
+
+“Then there’s the reformed drunkard who has trained himself to take a
+drink when he needs it, to drink in moderation—he’s the strongest
+character of all, I think—but it’s time to turn in.”
+
+The cornet up the creek was playing a march.
+
+Peter walked across and looked at Danny, who seemed to be sleeping as
+peacefully as could be expected of him.
+
+Jack Barnes got up and walked slowly down the creek in the moonlight.
+He wanted to think.
+
+Peter rolled out his blankets on the grass and arranged his saddle-bags
+for a pillow. Before he turned in Mitchell shook hands with him, a most
+unusual and unnecessary proceeding in camp. But there’s something in
+the bush grip which means “I know,” or “I understand.”
+
+Joe Wilson rolled out his blankets close to Mitchell’s camp; he wanted
+to enjoy some of Mitchell’s quiet humour before he went to sleep, but
+Mitchell wasn’t in a philosophical mood. He wanted to reflect.
+
+“I wonder who Gentleman Once was?” said Joe to Mitchell. “Could he have
+been Danny, or old Awful Example back there at the shanty?”
+
+“Dunno,” said Mitchell. He puffed three long puffs at his pipe, and
+then said, reflectively:
+
+“I’ve heard men tell their own stories before to-night Joe.”
+
+It was Joe who wanted to think now.
+
+About four o’clock Mitchell woke and stood up. Peter was lying rolled
+in his blanket with his face turned to the west. The moon was low, the
+shadows had shifted back, and the light was on Peter’s face. Mitchell
+stood looking at him reverently, as a grown son might who sees his
+father asleep for the first time. Then Mitchell quietly got some boughs
+and stuck them in the ground at a little distance from Peter’s head, to
+shade his face from the bright moonlight; and then he turned in again
+to sleep till the sun woke him.
+
+
+
+
+THE GHOSTS OF MANY CHRISTMASES
+
+
+Did you ever trace back your Christmas days?—right back to the days
+when you were innocent and Santa Claus was real. At times you thought
+you were very wicked, but you never realize how innocent you were until
+you’ve grown up and knocked about the world.
+
+Let me think!
+
+Christmas in an English village, with bare hedges and trees, and leaden
+skies that lie heavy on our souls as we walk, with overcoat and
+umbrella, sons of English exiles and exiles in England, and think of
+bright skies and suns overhead, and sweeps of country disappearing into
+the haze, and blue mountain ranges melting into the azure of distant
+lower skies, and curves of white and yellow sand beaches, and runs of
+shelving yellow sandstone sea-walls—and the glorious Pacific! Sydney
+Harbour at sunrise, and the girls we took to Manly Beach.
+
+Christmas in a London flat. Gloom and slush and soot. It is not the
+cold that affects us Australians so much, but the horrible gloom. We
+get heart-sick for the sun.
+
+Christmas at sea—three Christmases, in fact—one going saloon from
+Sydney to Westralia early in the Golden Nineties with funds; and one,
+the Christmas after next, coming back steerage with nothing but the
+clothes we’d slept in. All of which was bad judgment on our part—the
+order and manner of our going and coming should have been reversed.
+
+Christmas in a hessian tent in “th’ Westren,” with so many old mates
+from the East that it was just old times over again. We had five pounds
+of corned beef and a kerosene-tin to boil it in; and while we were
+talking of old things the skeleton of a kangaroo-dog grabbed the beef
+out of the boiling water and disappeared into the scrub—which made it
+seem more like old times than ever.
+
+Christmas going to New Zealand, with experience, by the s.s.
+_Tasmania_. We had plum duff, but it was too “soggy” for us to eat. We
+dropped it overboard, lest it should swamp the boat—and it sank to the
+ooze. The Tasmania was saved on that occasion, but she foundered next
+year outside Gisborne. Perhaps the cook had made more duff. There was a
+letter from a sweetheart of mine amongst her mails when she went down;
+but that’s got nothing to do with it, though it made some difference in
+my life.
+
+Christmas on a new telegraph line with a party of lining gangmen in New
+Zealand. There was no duff nor roast because there was no firewood
+within twenty miles. The cook used to pile armfuls of flax-sticks under
+the billies, and set light to them when the last man arrived in camp.
+
+Christmas in Sydney, with a dozen invitations out to dinner. The one we
+accepted was to a sensible Australian Christmas dinner; a typical one,
+as it should be, and will be before the Commonwealth is many years old.
+Everything cold except the vegetables, the hose playing on the veranda
+and vines outside, the men dressed in sensible pyjama-like suits, and
+the women and girls fresh and cool and jolly, instead of being hot and
+cross and looking like boiled carrots, and feeling like boiled rags,
+and having headaches after dinner, as would have been the case had they
+broiled over the fire in a hot kitchen all the blazing forenoon to cook
+a scalding, indigestible dinner, as many Australian women do, and for
+no other reason than that it was the fashion in England. One of those
+girls was very pretty and—ah, well!—
+
+Christmas dinner in a greasy Sydney sixpenny restaurant, that opened a
+few days before with brass band going at full blast at the door by way
+of advertisement. “Roast-beef, one! Cabbage and potatoes, one! Plum
+pudding, two!” (That was the first time I dined to music.) The
+Christmas dinner was a good one, but my appetite was spoilt by the
+expression of the restaurant keeper, a big man with a heavy jowl, who
+sat by the door with a cold eye on the sixpences, and didn’t seem to
+have much confidence in human nature.
+
+Christmas—no, that was New Year—on the Warrego River, out back (an
+alleged river with a sickly stream that looked like bad milk). We spent
+most of that night hunting round in the dark and feeling on the ground
+for camel and horse droppings with which to build fires and make smoke
+round our camp to keep off the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes started at
+sunset and left off at daybreak, when the flies got to work again.
+
+Christmas dinner under a brush shearing-shed. Mutton and plum
+pudding—and fifty miles from beer!
+
+An old bush friend of mine, one Jimmy Nowlett, who ranked as a
+bullock-driver, told me of a Christmas time he had. He was cut off by
+the floods with his team, and had nothing to eat for four days but
+potatoes and honey. He said potatoes dipped in honey weren’t so bad;
+but he had to sleep on bullock yokes laid on the ground to keep him out
+of the water, and he got a toothache that paralysed him all down one
+side.
+
+And speaking of plum pudding, I consider it one of the most barbarous
+institutions of the British. It is a childish, silly, savage
+superstition; it must have been a savage inspiration, looking at it all
+round—but then it isn’t so long since the British were savages.
+
+I got a letter last year from a mate of mine in Western
+Australia—prospecting the awful desert out beyond White Feather—telling
+me all about a “perish” he did on plum pudding. He and his mates were
+camped at the Boulder Soak with some three or four hundred miles—mostly
+sand and dust—between them and the nearest grocer’s shop. They ordered
+a case of mixed canned provisions from Perth to reach them about
+Christmas. They didn’t believe in plum pudding—there are a good many
+British institutions that bushmen don’t believe in but the cook was a
+new chum, and he said he’d go home to his mother if he didn’t have plum
+pudding for Christmas, so they ordered a can for him. Meanwhile, they
+hung out on kangaroo and damper and the knowledge that it couldn’t last
+for ever. It was in a terrible drought, and the kangaroos used to come
+into the “Soak” for water, and they were too weak to run. Later on,
+when wells were dug, the kangaroos used to commit suicide in them—there
+was generally a kangaroo in the well in the morning.
+
+The storekeeper packed the case of tinned dog, etc., but by some
+blunder he or his man put the label on the wrong box, and it went per
+rail, per coach, per camel, and the last stage per boot, and reached my
+friends’ camp on Christmas Eve, to their great joy. My friend broke the
+case open by the light of the camp-fire.
+
+“Here, Jack!” he said, tossing out a can, “here’s your plum pudding.”
+
+He held the next can in his hand a moment longer and read the label
+twice.
+
+“Why! he’s sent two,” he said, “and I’m sure I only ordered one. Never
+mind—Jack’ll have a tuck-out.”
+
+He held the next can close to the fire and blinked at it hard. “I’m
+damned if he hasn’t sent three tins of plum pudding. Never mind, we’ll
+manage to scoff some of it between us. You’re in luck’s way this trip,
+Jack, and no mistake.”
+
+He looked harder still at the fourth can; then he read the labels on
+the other tins again to see if he’d made a mistake.
+
+He didn’t tell me what he said then, but a milder mate suggested that
+the storekeeper had sent half a dozen tins by mistake. But when they
+reached the seventh can the language was not even fit to be written
+down on a piece of paper and handed up to the magistrate. The
+storekeeper had sent them an unbroken case of canned plum pudding, and
+probably by this time he was wondering what had become of that blanky
+case of duff.
+
+The kangaroos disappeared about this time and my friend tells me that
+he and his mates had to live for a mortal fortnight on canned plum
+pudding. They tried it cold and they tried it boiled, they tried it
+baked, they had it fried, and they had it toasted, they had it for
+breakfast, dinner and tea. They had nothing else to think, or talk, or
+argue and quarrel about; and they dreamed about it every night, my
+friend says. It wasn’t a joke—it gave them the nightmare and
+day-horrors.
+
+They tried it with salt. They picked as many of the raisins out as they
+could and boiled it with salt kangaroo. They tried to make Yorkshire
+pudding out of it; but it was too rich.
+
+My friend was experimenting and trying to discover a simple process for
+separating the ingredients of plum pudding when a fresh supply of
+provisions came along. He says he was never so sick of anything in his
+life, and he has had occasion to be sick of a good many things.
+
+The new-chum jackaroo is still alive, but he won’t ever eat plum
+pudding any more, he says. It cured him of homesickness. He wouldn’t
+eat it even if his bride made it.
+
+Christmas on the goldfields in the last of the roaring days, in the
+palmy days of Gulgong and those fields. Let’s see! it must be nearly
+thirty years ago! Oh, how the time goes by!
+
+Santa Claus, young, fresh-faced and eager; Santa Claus, blonde and
+flaxen; Santa Claus, dark; Santa Claus with a brogue and Santa Claus
+speaking broken English; Santa Claus as a Chinaman (Sun Tong Lee & Co.
+storekeepers), with strange, delicious sweets that melted in our
+mouths, and rum toys and Chinese dolls for the children.
+
+Lucky diggers who were with difficulty restrained from putting pound
+notes and nuggets and expensive lockets and things into the little
+ones’ stockings. Santa Claus in flannel shirt and clay-covered
+moleskins. Diggers who bought lollies by the pound and sent the little
+ones home with as much as they could carry.
+
+Diggers who gave a guinea or more for a toy for a child that reminded
+them of some other child at home. Diggers who took as many children as
+they could gather on short notice into a store, slapped a five-pound
+note down on the counter and told the little ones to call for whatever
+they wanted. Who set a family of poor children side by side on the
+counter and called for a box of mixed children’s boots—the best—and
+fitted them on with great care and anxiety and frequent inquiries as to
+whether they pinched. Who stood little girls and boys on the counter
+and called for the most expensive frocks, the latest and best in sailor
+suits, and the brightest ribbons; and things came long distances by
+bullock dray and were expensive in those days. Impressionable
+diggers—and most of them were—who threw nuggets to singers, and who,
+sometimes, slipped a parcel into the hands of a little boy or girl,
+with instructions to give it to an elder sister (or young mother,
+perhaps) whom the digger had never spoken to, only worshipped from afar
+off. And the elder sister or young mother, opening the parcel, would
+find a piece of jewellery or a costly article of dress, and wonder who
+sent it.
+
+Ah, the wild generosity of luck-intoxicated diggers of those days! and
+the reckless generosity of the drinkers. “We thought it was going to
+last for ever!”
+
+“If I don’t spend it on the bairns I’ll spend it on the drink,” Sandy
+Burns used to say. “I ha’ nane o’ me own, an’ the lass who was to gi’
+me bairns, she couldn’t wait.”
+
+Sandy had kept steady and travelled from one end of the world to the
+other, and roughed it and toiled for five years, and the very day he
+bottomed his golden hole on the Brown Snake Lead at Happy Valley he got
+a letter from his girl in Scotland to say she had grown tired of
+waiting and was married. Then he drank, and drink and luck went
+together.
+
+Gulgong on New Year’s Eve! Rows and rows of lighted tents and
+camp-fires, with a clear glow over it all. Bonfires on the hills and
+diggers romping round them like big boys. Tin kettling—gold dishes and
+spoons, and fiddles, and hammers on pointing anvils, and sticks and
+empty kerosene-tins (they made a row); concertinas and cornets,
+shot-guns, pistols and crackers, all sorts of instruments, and “Auld
+Lang Syne” in one mighty chorus. And now—a wretched little pastoral
+town; a collection of glaring corrugated-iron hip-roofs, and maybe a
+rotting propped-up bark or weather-board humpy or two—relics of the
+roaring days; a dried-up storekeeper and some withered hags; a waste of
+caved-in holes with rain-washed mullock heaps and quartz and gravel
+glaring in the sun; thistles and burrs where old bars were; drought,
+dryness, desolation and goats.
+
+Lonely graves in the bush and grey old diggers here and there, anywhere
+in the world, doing anything for a living, lonely yet because of the
+girls who couldn’t wait, but prospecting and fossicking here and there,
+and dreaming still.
+
+They thought it was going to last for ever.
+
+Christmas at Eurunderee Creek, amongst the old selection farms in the
+western spurs of the Blue Mountains. They used to call it “Th’
+Pipeclay” thirty years ago, but the old black names have been restored.
+They make plum puddings yet, weeks beforehand, and boil them for hours
+and hang them in cloths to the rafters to petrify; then they take them
+down and boil them again. On Christmas Eve the boys cut boughs or young
+pines on the hills, and drag them home and lash them to the
+veranda-posts.
+
+Ted has turned up with his wife and children from his selection out
+back. The wheat is in and shearing is over on the big stations.
+Tom—steady-going old Tom—clearing or fencing or dam-sinking up-country,
+hides his tools in the scrub and gets his horse and rides home. Aunt
+Emma (to everyone’s joy) has arrived from Sydney with presents
+(astonishing bargains in frocks, etc.) and marvellous descriptions of
+town life.
+
+Joe, “poor” Mary’s husband, who has been droving in Queensland since
+the Christmas before last—while poor Mary, who is afraid to live alone,
+shared a skillion and the family quarrels at home—Joe rides day and
+night and reaches home at sunrise on Christmas morning, tired and
+dusty, gaunt and haggard, but with his last cheque intact. He kisses
+his wife and child and throws himself on the bed to sleep till
+dinner-time, while Mary moves round softly, hushes the baby, dresses it
+and herself, lays out Joe’s clean things, and bends over him now and
+then, and kisses him, perhaps, as he sleeps.
+
+In the morning the boys and some of the men go down to the creek for a
+swim in the big shady pool, under the she-oaks and take their Sunday
+clothes with them and dress there.
+
+Some of them ride into town to church, and some of the women and
+children drive in in spring-carts—the children to go to Sunday school,
+leaving mother and the eldest daughter—usually a hard-worked,
+disappointed, short-tempered girl—at home to look after the cooking.
+
+There is some anxiety (mostly on mother’s part) about Jim, who is
+“wild,” and is supposed to be somewhere out back. There was “a piece of
+blue paper” out for Jim on account of sweating (illegally using) a
+horse, but his mother or father has got a hint—given in a kindly way by
+the police-sergeant—that Jim is free to come home and stay at home if
+he behaves himself. (There is usually a horse missing when Jim goes out
+back.)
+
+Jim turns up all right—save that he has no money—and is welcomed with
+tearful affection by his favourite sister Mary, shakes hands silently
+with his father, and has a long whispered conversation with his mother,
+which leaves him very subdued. His brothers forbear to sneer at him,
+partly because it is Christmas, partly on mother’s account, and
+thirdly, because Jim can use his hands. Aunt Emma, who is fond of him,
+cheers him up wonderfully.
+
+The family sit down to dinner. “An old mate of your father’s”—a bearded
+old digger—has arrived and takes the place of honour. (“I knowed yer
+father, sonny, on the diggings long afore any of you was ever thought
+on.”)
+
+The family have only been a few hours together, yet there is an
+undercurrent of growling, that, to the stranger, mysterious yet evident
+undercurrent of nastiness and resentment which goes on in all families
+and drags many a promising young life down. But Aunt Emma and the old
+mate make things brighter, and so the dinner—of hot roast and red-hot
+plum pudding—passes off fairly well.
+
+The men sleep the afternoon away and wake up bathed in perspiration and
+helpless; some of the women have headaches. After tea they gather on
+the veranda in the cool of the evening, and that’s the time when the
+best sides of their natures and the best parts of the past have a
+chance of coming uppermost, and perhaps they begin to feel a bit sorry
+that they are going to part again.
+
+The local races or “sports” on Boxing Day. There is nothing to keep the
+boys home over New Year. Ted and his wife go back to their lonely life
+on their selection; Tom returns to his fencing or tank-sinking
+contract; Jim, who has borrowed “a couple of quid” from Tom, goes out
+back with strong resolutions for the New Year, and shears “stragglers,”
+breaks in horses, cooks and clerks for survey parties, and gambles and
+drinks, and gets into trouble again. Maybe Joe “knocks about” the farm
+a bit before going into the Great North-West with another mob of
+cattle.
+
+The last time I saw the Old Year out at Eurunderee the bushfires were
+burning all over the ranges, and looked like great cities lighted up.
+No need for bonfires then. Christmas in Bourke, the metropolis of the
+great pastoral scrubs and plains, five hundred miles west, with the
+thermometer one-hundred-and-something-scarey in the shade. The rough,
+careless shearers come in from stations many dusty miles out in the
+scrubs to have their Christmas sprees, to drink and “shout” and
+fight—and have the horrors some of them—and be run in and locked up
+with difficulty, within sound of a church-going bell.
+
+The Bourke Christmas is a very beery and exciting one. The hotels shut
+up in front on Christmas Day to satisfy the law (or out of
+consideration for the feelings of the sergeant in charge of the police
+station), and open behind to satisfy the public, who are supposed to
+have made the law.
+
+Sensible cold dinners are the fashion in Bourke, I think, with the hose
+going, and free-and-easy costumes.
+
+The free males take their blankets and sleep in the “park;” the women
+sleep with doors and windows open, and the married men on mattresses on
+the verandas across the open doors—in case of accidents.
+
+Christmas in Sydney, though Christmas holidays are not so popular as
+Easter, or even Anniversary Day, in the Queen city of the South. Buses,
+electric, cable and the old steam trams crowded with holiday-makers
+with baskets. Harbour boats loaded down to the water’s edge with
+harbour picnic-parties. “A trip round the harbour and to the head of
+Middle Harbour one shilling return!” Strings of tourist trains running
+over the Blue Mountains and the Great Zigzag, and up the coast to
+Gosford and Brisbane Water, and down the south coast to beautiful
+Illawarra, until after New Year. Hundreds of young fellows going out
+with tents to fish in lonely bays or shoot in the mountains, and rough
+it properly like bushmen—not with deck chairs, crockery, a piano and
+servants. For you can camp in the grand and rugged solitude of the bush
+within a stone’s throw of the city, so to speak.
+
+Jolly camps and holiday parties all round the beautiful bays of the
+harbour, and up and down the coast, and all close to home. Camps in the
+moonlight on sandy beaches under great dark bluffs and headlands, where
+yellow, shelving, sandstone cliffs run, broken only by sandy-beached
+bays, and where the silver-white breakers leap and roar.
+
+And Manly Beach on a holiday! Thousands of people in fresh summer
+dress, hundreds of bare-legged, happy children running where the “blue
+sea over the white sand rolls,” racing in and out with the rollers,
+playing with the glorious Pacific. Manly—“Our Village”—Manly Beach,
+where we used to take our girls, with the most beautiful harbour in the
+world on one side, and the width of the grandest ocean on the other.
+Ferny gullies and “fairy dells” to north and south, and every shady
+nook its merry party or happy couple.
+
+Manly Beach—I remember five years ago (oh, how the time goes by!)—and
+two names that were written together in the sand when the tide was
+coming in. And the boat home in the moonlight, past the Heads, where we
+felt the roll of the ocean, and the moonlit harbour—and the harbour
+lights of Sydney—the grandest of them all.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Notes:
+
+
+Henry Lawson 17th June 1867 — 2nd September 1922.
+
+These stories were first published as a collection in 1902. Republished
+as “Send Round the Hat” and “The Romance of the Swag” in 1907.
+
+Notes on Australianisms. Based on my own speech over the years, with
+some checking in the dictionaries, e.g. “Macquarie Book of Slang”
+(2000), Oxford English Dictionary.  Not all of these are peculiar to
+Australian slang, but are important in Lawson’s stories, and carry
+overtones.
+
+anabranch: A bend in a river that has been cut through by the stream.
+The main current now runs straight, the anabranch diverges and then
+rejoins. See billabong.
+
+Barcoo-rot. “Persistent ulceration of the skin, chiefly on the hands,
+and often originating in abrasions”. (Morris, Australian English).
+Barcoo is a river in Queensland.
+
+billabong. Based on an aboriginal word. Sometimes used for an
+anabranch, but more often used for one that, in dry season or droughts
+especially, is cut off at either or both ends from the main stream. It
+is often just a muddy pool, and may indeed dry up completely.
+
+blackfellow: condescending for Australian Aboriginal
+
+blackleg: someone who is employed to cross a union picket line to break
+a workers’ strike. As Molly Ivins said, she was brought up on the three
+great commandments: do not lie; do not steal; never cross a picket
+line. Also scab.
+
+blanky or ——: Fill in your own favourite word. Usually however used for
+“bloody”—see crimson/gory.
+
+blooming: actually used in speech instead of “bloody” (see crimson).
+
+bluey: swag. Explanation in Lawson’s “The romance of the Swag” here.
+
+bob: one shilling
+
+bullocky: Bullock driver. A man who drove teams of bullocks yoked to
+wagons carrying e.g. wool bales or provisions. Proverbially rough and
+foul mouthed.
+
+bummer: A cadger or bludger. Someone who begs for food. Interesting
+Americanism already. Also, tramp. (Different meaning today)
+
+bush: originally referred to the low tangled scrubs of the semi-desert
+regions (cf. ‘mulga’ and ‘mallee’), and hence equivalent to “outback”.
+Now used generally for remote rural areas (“the bush”) and scrubby
+forest.
+
+bushfire: wild fires: whether forest fires or grass fires.
+
+bushman/bushwoman: someone who lives an isolated existence, far from
+cities, “in the bush”. (today: a “bushy”)
+
+bushranger: an Australian “highwayman”, who lived in the ‘bush’—
+scrub—and attacked especially gold carrying coaches and banks.
+Romanticised as anti-authoritarian Robin Hood figures—cf. Ned Kelly—but
+usually very violent.
+
+bunyip: Aboriginal monster, inhabiting waterholes, billabongs
+particularly. Adopted into European legends.
+
+caser: Five shillings (12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the
+pound (“quid”)). As a coin, a crown piece.
+
+chaffing: teasing, mocking good-humouredly
+
+churchyarder: Sounding as if dying—ready for the churchyard = cemetery
+
+crimson = gory: literary substitutes for “bloody”—the “colonial oath”,
+unacceptable in polite company. Why, is a complete mystery. Popularly
+explained as contraction of “by Our Lady”. Unproved. In reproducing
+(badly) a German’s pronunciation of Australian, Lawson retains the
+word, but spells it “pluddy”.
+
+dood: Dude. A classy/cool dresser.
+
+drover: one who “droves” droving: driving on horseback cattle or sheep
+from where they were fattened to a a city, or later, a rail-head.
+
+fiver: a five pound note
+
+gory, see crimson
+
+Homebush: Saleyard, market area in Sydney
+
+humpy: rough shack
+
+half-caser: Two shillings and sixpence. As a coin, a half-crown.
+
+jackaroo: (Jack + kangaroo; sometimes jackeroo)—someone, in early days
+a new immigrant from England, learning to work on a sheep/cattle
+station (U.S. “ranch”.)
+
+jim-jams: the horrors, d.t.’s
+
+jumbuck: a sheep (best known from Waltzing Matilda: “where’s that jolly
+jumbuck, you’ve got in your tucker bag”.)
+
+larrikin: anything from a disrespectful young man to a violent member
+of a gang (“push”). Was considered a major social problem in Sydney of
+the 1880’s to 1900. The _Bulletin_, a magazine in which much of Lawson
+was published, spoke of the “aggressive, soft-hatted stoush brigade”.
+Anyone today who is disrespectful of authority or convention is said to
+show the larrikin element in the Australian character.
+
+lucerne: Alfalfa in US
+
+mallee: dwarfed eucalyptus trees growing in very poor soil and under
+harsh rainfall conditions. Usually many stems emerging from the ground,
+creating a low thicket.
+
+mateship: See Lawson story, “Mateship”. A heavily romanticised, but
+nevertheless very practical form of (male) loyalty to a (male)
+companion who travels with/works with him. A “mate” provides not only
+companionship, but help in emergencies. Typical of an Australian in the
+“outback”—or “Never-Never”, or under war conditions. A man without a
+mate was a “hatter”—“his hat covers his family”. Such a person might go
+“ratty” (see further in The romance of the Swag). Equivalent to the
+“buddy system” in SCUBA diving.
+
+metalled: of a road, covered in crushed rock (e.g. “blue metal”)
+
+mulga: Acacia sp. (“wattle” in Australian) especially Acacia aneura;
+growing in semi-desert conditions. Used as a description of such a
+harsh region.
+
+mullock: the tailings left after gold has been removed. In Lawson
+generally mud (alluvial) rather than rock
+
+myall: aboriginal living in a traditional—pre-conquest—manner
+
+nobbler: a drink
+
+nuggety: compact but strong physique; small but well-muscled
+
+pastoralist: OED sees it a equivalent to “squatter”, but in Lawson
+someone often someone managing a large cattle/sheep “station” for a
+“pastoral company” rather than an individual. Seen as ultimate
+capitalist oppression.
+
+pluddy: see crimson
+
+quid: monetary unit; one pound
+
+ratty: insane—or, very eccentric, “cranky”.
+
+ringer: the champion sheep shearer in a shed that season
+
+rouseabout: Labourer in a (sheep) shearing shed. Considered to be, as
+far as any work is, unskilled labour.
+
+sawney: silly, gormless
+
+scab: see blackleg
+
+shout: In a group; to stand (pay for) a round of drinks. Bad form to
+leave before your turn comes around. Much peer pressure to drink more
+than one wished. One can also “shout” for everyone in the pub.
+
+skillion(-room): A “lean-to”, a room built up against the back of some
+other building, with separate roof.
+
+spifflicated: punished, thrashed without mercy.
+
+spree: prolonged drinking bout—days, weeks.
+
+squatter: Someone who took up large areas of land, originally without
+official permission (“squatted”), for sheep especially. Became the
+“landed aristocracy” of Australia. (“Up rode the squatter, mounted on
+his thoroughbred”) steever: Originally a Dutch coin. Used here like
+“penny”—or brass razoo.
+
+sundowner: a swagman (see) who is NOT looking for work, but a
+“handout”. Lawson explains the term as referring to someone who turns
+up at a station at sundown, just in time for “tea” i.e. the evening
+meal. Line (2494) of actual text (not counting P.G. matter).
+
+swagman (swaggy): Generally, anyone who is walking in the “outback”
+with a swag. (See “The Romance of the Swag”.) Lawson also restricts it
+at times to those whom he considers to be tramps, not looking for work
+but for “handouts”. In view of the Great Depression (1890—. In 1892 it
+was reckoned 1/3 men were out of work) perhaps unfairly. Perhaps
+because he _was_ there. See ‘travellers’.
+
+Tattersalls: The earliest public lottery in Australia. (1881)
+
+tenner: a ten pound note.
+
+tin-kettling: making noise by striking metal pots/pans. May be
+celebratory (weddings—in this collection, New Year’s Eve), or may
+indicate extreme social disapproval of someone.
+
+travellers: “shearers and rouseabouts travelling for work” (Lawson).
+
+
+
+
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