I met him nearly farthest out—
No matter when or where.
He carried in his ragged clothes
A kind of city air.
I said, “I’ve just been wondering
The devil who you are?”
And he replied, in broken tones,
“I’m all that’s left of Billy Jones,
The beau of Mullingar!”
“Brush up! brash up! my friend,” I cried,
“And bear it like a man.
Why, look at me, I’ve battled through
From Beersheba to Dan;
And yet may do the ‘buffer’ trick
When Fortune’s bogies jar,
And shade the truth
From callow youth
Who hail from Mullingar!
“Come, trot inside this shanty door!
This out-back mulga hell!
Where all our finer thoughts are damned,
And e’en our worst rebel.
But still when deathly monotone
Spreads over land and star,
Here, broken men
Oft dream again
Of some old Mullingar!”
He sighed, and took my hand in his—
The kind of flaccid clasp
That rankles through one’s very soul
And tears it like a rasp—
“Ah, yes, that talk is right enough
Beside a shanty bar;
But I’ve,” he said,
And bowed his head,
“A girl in Mullingar!”
“Remember this,” I laughed, “my lad!
The brave alone may win—
To her we’ll chink, where’er she be,
One foaming pannikin,
For Cupid’s cunning shafts, my lad,
They carry fast and far;
And girls are true
To me and you,
In hell—or Mullingar!
[Illustration: A BLOKE FROM MULLINGAR]
“Come, sink another pot to her!
A wizened soul and white
Would falter in its tracks by day,
And in its core by night.
For I, too, twenty years ago,
Beneath a luckless star,
Left, in a rage,
Life’s heritage
Behind at Mullingar!”
“Oh, yes,” he chortled with a sneer,
“I know, I know your kind
Of out-back bloke who babbles of
The girl he left behind—
Her face was quite a beauty show,
Her voice like a guitar.
I guess,” he grinned,
“The kind of wind
Blew you from Mullingar!
“For city men, like me, may read
The lying lines between,
Of blokes who bruise with hob-nailed feet
Love’s field of evergreen—
The car wherein _your_ goddess drives
May be Aspasia’s car!”
I hit him solid, fair and square,
And left the wastrel lying there—
That bloke from Mullingar.