Within a week we returned to the homestead, and for twenty-four hours
Cheon gloated over us, preparing every delicacy that appealed to him as
an antidote to an outbush course of beef and damper. Then a man rode
into our lives who was to teach us the depth and breadth of the meaning
of the word mate—a sturdy, thick-set man with haggard, tired eyes and
deep lines about his firm strong mouth that told of recent and prolonged
tension.
“Me mate’s sick; got a touch of fever,” he said simply dismounting near
the verandah. “I’ve left him camped back there at the Warlochs”; and as
the Maluka prepared remedies—making up the famous Gulf mixture—the man
with grateful thanks, found room in his pockets and saddle-pouch for
eggs, milk, and brandy, confident that “these’ll soon put him right,”
adding, with the tense lines deepening about his mouth as he touched on
what had brought them there: “He’s been real bad, ma’am. I’ve had a bit
of a job to get him as far as this.” In the days to come we were to
learn, little by little, that the “bit of a job” had meant keeping a
sick man in his saddle for the greater part of the fifty-mile dry stage,
with forty miles of “bad going” on top of that, and fighting for him
every inch of the way that terrible symptom of malaria—that longing to
“chuck it,” and lie down and die.
Bad water after that fifty-mile dry made men with a touch of fever only
too common at the homestead, and knowing how much the comforts of the
homestead could do, when the Maluka came out with the medicines he
advised bringing the sick man on as soon as he had rested sufficiently.
“You’ve only to ask for it and we’ll send the old station buck-board
across,” he said, and the man began fumbling uneasily at his saddle-
girths, and said something evasive about “giving trouble”; but when the
Maluka—afraid that a man’s life might be the forfeit of another man’s
shrinking fear of causing trouble—added that on second thoughts we would
ride across as soon as horses could be brought in, he flushed hotly and
stammered: “If you please, ma’am. If the boss’ll excuse me, me mate’s
dead-set against a woman doing things for him. If you wouldn’t mind not
coming. He’d rather have me. Me and him’s been mates this seven years.
The boss ’ll understand.”
The boss did understand, and rode across to the Warlochs alone, to find
a man as shy and reticent as a bushman can be, and full of dread lest
the woman at the homestead would insist on visiting him. “You see,
that’s why he wouldn’t come on,” the mate said. “He couldn’t bear the
thought of a woman doing things for him”; and the Maluka explained that
the missus understood all that. That lesson had been easily learned; for
again and again men had come in “down with a touch of fever,” whose
temperatures went up at the very thought of a woman doing things for
them, and always the actual nursing was left to the Maluka or the Dandy,
the woman seeing to egg-flips and such things, exchanging at first
perhaps only an occasional greeting, and listening at times to strange
life-histories later on.
But in vain the Maluka explained and entreated: the sick man was “all
right where he was.” His mate was worth “ten women fussing round,” he
insisted, ignoring the Maluka’s explanations. “Had he not lugged him
through the worst pinch already?” and then he played his trump card:
“He’ll stick to me till I peg out,” he said—“nothing’s too tough for
him”; and as he lay back, the mate deciding “arguing’ll only do for
him,” dismissed the Maluka with many thanks, refusing all offers of
nursing help with a quiet “He’d rather have me,” but accepting
gratefully broths and milk and anything of that sort the homestead could
furnish. “Nothing ever knocks me out,” he reiterated, and dragged on
through sleepless days and nights, as the days dragged by finding ample
reward in the knowledge that “he’d rather have me”, and when there came
that deep word of praise from his stricken comrade: “A good mate’s
harder to find than a good wife,” his gentle, protecting devotion
increased tenfold.
Bushmen are instinctively protective. There is no other word that so
exactly defines their tender helpfulness to all weakness and
helplessness. Knowing how hard the fight is out-bush for even the strong
and enduring all their magnificent strength and courage stand ready for
those who would go to the wall without it. A lame dog, a man down in his
luck, an old soaker, little women any woman in need or sickness—each and
all call forth this protectiveness; but nothing calls it forth in all
its self-sacrificing tenderness like the helplessness of a strong man
stricken down in his strength.
Understanding this also, we stood aside, and rejoicing as the sick man,
benefiting by the comparative comfort and satisfied to have his own way,
seemed to improve. For three days he improved steadily, and then, after
standing still for another day slipped back inch by inch to weakness and
prostration, until the homestead, without coercion, was the only chance
for his life.
But there was a woman there; and as the mate went back to his pleading
the woman did what the world may consider a strange thing—but a man’s
life depended on it—she sent a message out to the sick man, to say that
if he would come to the homestead she would not go to him until he asked
her.
He pondered over the message for a day, sceptical of a woman’s
word—surely some woman had left that legacy in his heart—but eventually
decided he wouldn’t risk it. Then the chief of the telegraph coming in—a
man widely experienced in fever—and urging one more attempt, the Dandy
volunteered to help us in our extremity, and, driving across to the
Warlochs in the chief’s buggy worked one of his miracles; he spent only
a few minutes alone with the man (and the Dandy alone knows now what
passed), but within an hour the sick traveller was resting quietly
between clean sheets in the Dandy’s bed. There were times when the links
in the chain seemed all blessing.
Waking warm and refreshed, the sick man faced the battle of life once
more, and the chief taking command, and the man quietly and hopefully
obeying orders, the woman found her promise easy to keep; but the mate’s
hardest task had come, the task of waiting with folded hands. With the
same quiet steadfastness he braced himself for this task and when, after
weary hours, the chief pronounced “all well” and turned to him with an
encouraging “I think he’ll pull through now, my man,” the sturdy
shoulders that had borne so much drooped and quivered beneath the kindly
words, and with dimming eyes he gave in at last to the Maluka’s
persuasions, and lay down and slept, sure of the Dandy’s promise to wake
him at dawn.
At midnight the Maluka left the Quarters, and going back just before the
dawn to relieve the Dandy, found the sick man lying quietly-restful,
with one arm thrown lightly across his brow. He had spoken in his sleep
a short while before the Dandy said as the Maluka bent over him with a
cup of warm milk, but the cup was returned to the table untasted. Many
travellers had come into our lies and passed on with a bright nod of
farewell; but at the first stirring of the dawn, without one word of
farewell, this traveller had passed on and left us; left us, and the
faithful mate of those seven strong young years and those last few days
of weariness. “Unexpected heart failure,” our chief said, as the Dandy
went to fulfil his promise to the sleeping mate. He promised to waken
him at the dawn, and leaving that awakening in the Dandy’s hands, as we
thought of that lonely Warloch camp our one great thankfulness was that
when the awakening came the man was not to be alone there with his dead
comrade. The bush can be cruel at times, and yet, although she may leave
us alone with our beloved dead, her very cruelty bungs with it a fierce,
consoling pain; for out-bush our dead are all our own.
Beyond those seven faithful years the mate could tell us but little of
his comrade’s life. He was William Neaves, born at Woolongong, with a
mother living somewhere there. That was all he knew. “He was always a
reticent chap,” he reiterated. “He never wanted any one but me about
him,” and the unspoken request was understood. He was his mate, and no
one but himself must render the last services.
Dry-eyed and worn, the man moved about, doing all that should be done,
the bushmen only helping where they dared; then shouldering a pick and
shovel, he went to the tattle rise beyond the slip rails, and set
doggedly to work at a little distance from two lonely graves already
there. Doggedly he worked on; but, as he worked, gradually his burden
lost its overwhelming weight, for the greater part of it had somehow
skipped on to the Dandy’s shoulders—those brave, unflinching shoulders,
that carried other men’s burdens so naturally and so willingly that
their burdens always seemed the Dandy’s own. The Dandy may have had that
power of finding “something decent” in every one he met, but in the
Dandy all men found the help they needed most.
Quietly and unassumingly, the Dandy put all in order and then, soon
after midday, with brilliant sunshine all about us, we stood by an open
grave in the shade of the drooping glory of a crimson flowering
bauhenia. Some scenes live undimmed in our memories for a
lifetime—scenes where we have seemed onlookers rather than actors seeing
every detail with minute exactness—and that scene with its mingling of
glorious beauty, human pathos, and soft, subdued sound, will bye, I
think, in the memory of most of us for many years to come:
“In the midst of life we are in death,” the Maluka read, standing among
that drooping crimson splendour and at his feet lay the open grave,
preaching silently its great lesson of Life and Death, with, beside it,
the still quiet form of the traveller whose last weary journey had
ended; around it, bareheaded and all in white, a little band of bush-
folk, silent and reverent and awed; above it, that crimson glory, and
all around and about it, soft sun-flecked bush, murmuring sounds,
flooding sunshine, and deep azure blue distances. Beyond the bush, deep
azure blue, within it and throughout it, flooding sunshine and golden
ladders of light; and at its sun-flecked heart, under that drooping
crimson-starred canopy of soft greygreen, that little company of bush-
folk, standing beside that open grave, as Mother Nature, strewing with
flowers the last resting place of one of her children, scattered gently
falling scarlet blossoms into it and about it. Here and there a dog lay,
stretched out in the shade, sniffing in idle curiosity at the blossoms
as they fell, well satisfied with what life had to give just then; while
at their master’s feet lay the traveller who was to leave such haunting
memories behind him: William Neaves, born at Woolongong, with somewhere
there a mother going quietly about her work, wondering vaguely perhaps
where her laddie was that day.
Poor mother! Yet, when even that knowledge came to her, it comforted her
in her sorrow to know that a woman had stood beside that grave mourning
for her boy in her name.
Quietly the Maluka read on to the end; and then in the hush that
followed the mate stooped, and, with deep lines hardening rigidly,
picked up a spade. There was no mistaking his purpose; but as he
straightened himself the Dandy’s hand was on the spade and the Maluka
was speaking. “Perhaps you’ll be good enough to drive the missus back to
the house right away,” he was saying, “I think she has had almost more
than she can stand.”
The man looked hesitatingly at him. “If you’ll be good enough,” the
Maluka added, “I should not leave here myself till all is completed.”
Unerringly the Maluka had read his man: no hint of his strength failing,
but a favour asked, and with it a service for a woman.
The stern set lines about the man’s mouth quivered for a moment, then
set again as he sacrificed his wishes to a woman’s need, and
relinquishing the spade, turned away; and as we drove down to the house
in the chief’s buggy—the buggy that a few minutes before had borne our
sick traveller along that last stage of his earthly journey—he said
gently, almost apologetically: “I should have reckoned on this knocking
you out a bit, missus.” Always others, never self, with the bush-folk.
Then, this service rendered for the man who had done what he could for
his comrade, his strong, unflinching heart turned back to its labour of
love, and, all else being done, found relief for itself in softening and
smoothing the rough outline of the newly piled mound, and as the man
toiled, Mother Nature went on with her work, silently and sweetly
healing the scar on her bosom, hiding her pain from the world, as she
shrouded in starry crimson the burial place of her brave, enduring son—a
service to be renewed from day to day until the mosses and grasses grew
again.
But there were still other services for the mate to render and as the
bush-folk stood aside, none daring to trespass here, a rough wooden
railing rose about the grave. Then the man packed his comrade’s swag for
the last time, and that done, came to the Maluka, as we stood under the
house verandah, and held out two sovereigns in his open palm. The man
was yet a stranger to the ways of the Never-Never.
“I’ll have to ask for tick for meself for awhile,” he said “But if that
won’t pay for all me mate’s had there’s another where they came from. He
was always independent and would never take charity.”
The hard lines about his mouth were very marked just then, and the
outstretched hand seemed fiercely defiant but the Maluka reading in it
only a man’s proud care for a comrade’s honour, put it gently aside,
saying: “We give no charity here; only hospitality to our guests. Surely
no man would refuse that.”
They speak of a woman’s delicate tact. But daily the bushman put the
woman to shame, while she stood dumb or stammering. The Maluka had
touched the one chord in the man’s heart that was not strained to
breaking point, and instantly the fingers closed over the sovereigns,
and the defiant hand fell to his side, as with a husky “Not from your
sort, boss,” he turned sharply on his heel; and as he walked away a hand
was brushed hastily across the weary eyes.
With that brushing of the hand the inevitable reaction began, and for a
little while we feared we would have another sick traveller on our hand.
But only for a little while. After a day or two of rest and care his
strength came back, but his thoughts were ever of those seven years of
steadfast comradeship. Simply and earnestly he spoke of them and of that
mother, all unconscious of the heartbreak that was speeding only too
surely to her. Poor mother! And yet those other two nameless graves on
that little rise deep in the heart of the bush bear witness that other
mothers have even deeper sorrows to bear. Their sons are gone from them,
and they, knowing nothing of it, wait patiently through the long silent
years for the word that can never come to them.
For a few days the man rested, and then, just when work—hard work—was
the one thing needful, Dan came in for a consultation, and with him a
traveller, the bearer of a message from our kind, great-hearted chief to
say that work was waiting for the mate at the line party. Our chief was
the personification of all that is best in the bush-folk (as all bushmen
will testify to his memory)—men’s lives crossed his by chance just here
and there, but at those crossing places life have been happier and
better. For one long weary day the mate’s life had run parallel with our
chief’s, and because of that, when he left us his heart was lighter than
ever we had dared to hope for. But this man was not to fade quite out of
our lives, for deep in that loyal heart the Maluka had been enshrined as
“one in ten thousand.”