as they slept huddled around me on the matting of the “Donkey’s
Breakfast,” as they call the bunk mattresses which are thrown away and
piled up in wharf sheds when emigrant ships arrive. Snoring wrecks, a
few with low-bred faces who could not read or write and others with
refined-looking faces notwithstanding the scrubby beard that half hid
them, many boys also around, too shabby to get work and too wretched to
want it. One young fellow, through starvation and homesickness, went off
his head. He had an emotional, girlish face and was not more than
eighteen years of age. We cheered him up and I’m sure I did my best, but
he would keep muttering to himself and swore that spirits were charging
him in regiments all night long as he howled and brandished his arms
about fighting them. One night he got up and ran off; we heard a splash
in the bay. He was buried out at “Rookwood” with the hundreds of others
who sleep in nameless graves, forgotten for years, till _Lloyd’s Weekly_
says, “Wanted, the whereabouts of A. B.; left home in the year ——.
Mother inquires.”
I have been telling you the seamy side of the life of the seaboard
cities. Of course it is not all seamy. Sydney flourishes and is happy,
with her big streets, her skirts dipping into the bay, her bright
Botanical Gardens, a kind of tropical Hyde Park kissed by curling sea
waves, and near those gardens is the wide Domain. What a happy
hunting-ground for an Australian Charles Dickens that Domain would have
been, and still is! The emigrants still go seaward and are dumped down
to scramble to hell or dubious fame and fortune, while the ships go
flying homeward to old England full up with the remnants who landed on
the preceding voyage out!
* * * * *
After coming ashore from my stowaway trip, I lodged in a small top room
in Lower George Street, which was very different to Upper George Street.
By my dwelling-house the Chinese lived in their opium dens. Some of them
were very well off and had managed to secure white wives. How those
white women could stand them I don’t know. At sundown they would stand
by their den doors and looked like mummies peeping from their upright
coffins with twinkling eyes! Wrinkled yellow faces they had, and you
could always tell their presence by the peculiar smell that came in
faint whiffs from their shop doors mingled with the odour of orange
pekoe, for they mostly sold tea or pretended to, but really played
“fan-tan” in those gambling dens, and did other awful things as the
innocent old shrivelled spy stood at the door watching, picking his
yellow teeth with a long skewer. No one in Australia has ever seen a
Chinaman drunk; he takes his opium and nectar in an arm-chair in the
stuffy room at the back of his shop, and with his long opium pipe in his
mouth goes off back to China in dreams, when his stupefied head no
longer hears the traffic outside as the crowds hurry by and the Jack
Tars from the men-o’-war boats in the bay go rollicking up the street
“half seas over,” singing, arm in arm, and inside that innocent-looking
den the white wife goes through the celestial’s pockets as the
Australian “bum” stands up at the street corner waiting with greedy hand
to receive his half. Five hundred yards up the street stood the splendid
post office and all the business shops of the commercial world of
Sydney.
[Illustration: CABBAGE-TREE PALMS AND BUSH LAND]
After a month’s stay in the town I once more went up country and secured
work on a station, staying there nearly nine months. I became quite
colonised as I toiled in the pumpkin fields, rode for miles over the
slopes behind the flying sheep, and slept in a little outhouse by the
stockman’s homestead. I would sit and dream of home as over my head the
parrots wheeled away toward the sunset and the station children romped
and screamed with laughter. Sometimes as I sat thinking and remembering
my mind wandered back to Queensland and Ethel’s grave in the bush. I
often lay in that little hut unable to sleep till dawn crept over the
gum tops and the lyre-bird’s song chimed the first peeps of sunrise over
the hills. Two miles away was another station whereon worked two other
young Englishmen. I often rode across the bush at sundown to see them
and we would sit and yarn together about England, and all get homesick
over our dreams. Dell, the youngest of the two, was thrown from his
horse and killed. His friend William and I often went across at evening
time and placed flowers on his grave and then walked away with thick
throats, unable to speak to each other.
The Australian bush is the most melancholy place in the world to brood
over sorrows. The music of most of the bush birds has a prophetic note
in it—they wail away as though foretelling dire disaster; after sunset
myriads of frogs and locusts start to chant and chirrup mournfully; over
the solitude comes at long intervals the wail of the dingo, and often
like the phantom of some lost dead child from the gullies a wailful
scream from a bird that no one ever sees. I have often lain in my bunk
by night and looked through the little window hole and watched the
migrating cranes and other birds with long outstretched necks pass under
the moon, bound southward; they looked just like skeletons on wings,
their bones tinkling together as they passed swiftly across the moonlit
sky right overhead. I devoted a good deal of my time to music and
violin-playing in those quiet bush nights, and some of the very melodies
which are in the strains of my military band solos were composed at that
period.
William and I became close friends, linked together by the sorrow over
our dead comrade, and eventually we gave notice to our employers and
both went off “on the Wallaby” and “humped the bluey,” as they say in
the bush.
We followed that life for a long time and became real “sundowners.” The
atmosphere of that roving life has never wholly left my mind; the songs
of the birds in the gums and the winds moaning and bending the leafy
clump tips overhead during the nights, as we slept below, still echo
through my memories. He and I were happy together, and I found him a
beautiful friend. I can see his sky-blue eyes now, as he wondered and
listened to me when I told him of my adventures in the South Sea
Islands. Night after night we would sit by our camp fire and stare, side
by side, into the glowing embers as overhead sang some sweet night bird,
serenading our memories as we dreamed of home. My chum had a quiet
earnest voice and would sit there and sing wild sea chanteys as I played
an accompaniment on the violin.
And often in the night I hear,
Above the wind and rain,
My old chum singing in the hills
Those wild sea songs again.
He had an old bent-up cornet in his swag, and I took a few lessons from
him, and while I practised the scales in the silence of the night the
very hills seemed astonished as the echoes answered one another and died
away across the solitude, and away the frightened bush animals scampered
as though the devil was after them! And sometimes in the daytime as the
parrots passed overhead across the blinding sky they would hear those
notes and croak dismally and hurry faster on their skyward voyage.
One evening, just as we were camping for the night, we sighted over the
slope a genuine old bushman tramping along with his swag on his back. We
invited him to stay the night; it took a long time to wake him up, but
we succeeded, and his scrubby sunburnt face lit up with delight as my
comrade sang and I played the fiddle. I never before or since saw such a
dried-up old relic as he was. He had a big broken nose and black teeth
through chewing tobacco plug for many years. I never saw him spit; he
swallowed the juice. We managed to draw a few remarks out of him, and I
remember him saying that he had known Ned Kelly the bushranger in the
early days and mumbled a deal about how the times had changed and the
meanness of the station bosses, for he seemed to get his living by
cadging at the stations as he tramped along from day to day and month by
month, looking for work. He seemed very methodical in his habits, for as
we sat by the fire talking, and darkness came swiftly across the slopes,
he at once carefully took his boots off—he did not wear socks—and,
placing them side by side under his dirty blanket swag, put his feet
toward the camp fire, laid flat on his back, bit a large bit of black
tobacco plug off, and chewing the end fell asleep.
He left us in the morning at daybreak, went across the scrub with his
swag on his back and disappeared under the gums and never looked back
once.
Some of those old swagsmen are wise old men with venerable grey beards,
mouths that seldom speak, and their grey eyes gaze steadily as though
they can see through you, for they have wonderful instinct developed
through years of practice.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXIV
The Deserted Hut—Visiting in the Bush—Stockriders
THERE were a lot of lonely men in those days, tramping the ocean-wide
bush lands, real helmless derelicts of humanity, as they staggered on
the currents of luck into the stockman’s farm at sunset, wailed their
pitiful tales of better days behind, mumbled their thanks over the tea
and sugar given by a kindly hand for their billy-can, and tramped away
once more into the solitude of gums and scrub. On and on they go that
way till they die.
One afternoon, while we were both sitting under the shade of a gum clump
out of the stare of the flashing eye of the sun, I noticed some white
bones gleaming in the dried-up grass and scrub. It was the skeleton of
some bushman; a rotten swag blanket lay under the white skull and the
knee bones were drawn up to the chest, showing the way he died out there
alone. As the white night mists crept over the hollows and the winds
stirred the gums over that relic of loneliness, both sad at heart, we
turned away and did not camp till we were miles away from that spot. The
impression left after that sight hung on us for a long time.
Once we came across an old bush shanty by a river side. We crept in its
little doorless room; through chinks overhead we saw the blue sky and
the blossoms of wild vines that clung over the rotting roof. The old
chair was still there velveted all over with grey moss, and the hearth
was thick with bush flowers. On the wall still hung the photo of a young
girl; the face though nearly faded away was a strikingly sweet one; we
felt instinctively that some sorrow, some long-ago romance, was
connected with that photograph. There was the mouldy bunk-bed wherein
the bushman had slept, and outside under an old gum, surrounded by
wattle bush in full bloom, was a grave, a small roughly made cross over
it, and that told us all as we stood by it while the frogs chanted in
the marsh just below. I can tell you that the sight of that tiny
ancestral hall, rotting out there in the silence, and the grave hard by,
affected me much more than if I had stood among the ruins of Imperial
Rome.
A day or so after we arrived at the station, about twenty miles from
Arrawatta, and both tired out fell asleep on a bank just below a
stockman’s big wooden house and were both suddenly awakened by a loud,
gruff, but kindly voice saying, “Hello, youngsters, would you like some
tucker?” We sat up quickly and did not require any persuasion as that
big bearded fellow astride his horse told us to follow him up the slope.
When we arrived inside his wife had the table already laid; they had
noticed us both asleep on the slope outside and there is no place in the
world that can beat the colonial squatter for helping the bush wanderers
who are down on their luck. By Jove! we did have a feed, and as my
friend and I told the tall daughter, the squatter and his wife our
adventures and all we had seen they seemed to admire our pluck and did
all they could to cheer us up and invited us to stay the night, which we
did. There was a vineyard on the next slope, and in a shed close by
enormous bins full of the new season’s wine. I think we must have drunk
about two quarts each; I know that it livened us up, and that night
before going to bed we all sang and my comrade and I sang and played to
them some homeland songs. They had a visitor over from the next ranch.
He was an Irishman with merry blue eyes and a large pug nose. He owned
the world’s largest feet; I never saw such feet, and though he got drunk
and did step dances and jigs and swayed dangerously about, he never
fell, for as soon as he lost his mental balance his feet came to the
rescue; on them he swayed often with a terrible port or starboard list,
but always just in the nick of time slowly righted himself. Irishmen are
like Englishmen out in Australia. When they hear that you are from the
“Old Country” out comes their hand and in a firm grip you are sworn
friends. The Irishman will give you anything you ask for, will half
undress himself and place his clothes on your back, even though you
don’t want them; you are liable, however, to be sworn enemies at
daybreak when the reaction sets in, but if you know the way to manage
them they are soon smoothed over and you will find that you can keep
about half of the clothes without further threats.
We were near the border line that separates New South Wales and
Queensland then, and when we left next day we came across the drovers
marching across the country behind their cattle, bound south I think. I
can still see them in my mind as they passed away from us over the
sweltering hot plains, sitting astride their horses and cracking their
stock whips over their heads as the long ring of dancing flies that
wheeled round and round their big-rimmed hats parted in two and then
joined itself again, started to dine viciously off the eyes, necks and
steam that rose from the stockrider and his steed. It’s not all honey
(except for the flies), but nevertheless the bush drovers in their wild
life on the plains have happy lives; always on the move, they camp,
yarn, smoke and sing across the bushlands, always many miles away from
the spot where they camped the night before, and they have supplied the
Australian poets with any amount of inspired work in the songs of the
bush and of the rollicking men of the plains.
[Illustration: PASTORAL SCENERY, N.S.W.]
About a week after seeing those drovers pass by we arrived at a place
called “Bummer’s Creek” and stayed there for several days, helping Riley
the boss to build some outhouses. There seemed a good many loafers
hanging about that small township, for the Australian bush climate does
not inspire men to work. We were offered two horses at five shillings
each and I at once bought them. We sat astride, William and I, and
proudly waving our hands bade the men of the township farewell as we
started up the slope. I plied the stock whip and in less than
half-an-hour we had almost travelled three hundred yards! I was not much
of a judge of horse-flesh at that time, and I felt pretty wild at being
so sucked in. Two of the bushmen crept up the slope and then suddenly
discharged their revolvers close to the ears of those two horses of
ours, and that seemed to wake them up and off we went! Before sunset we
looked back and were out of sight of the township. I got terribly sore
through the protruding backbone of that stubborn beast; sometimes
William would dismount and laughing get behind and push it as its big
eyes stared like soap bubbles with fright. I felt sorry for it though,
especially when its underlip protruded as though through extreme nausea
it yearned to be sick and couldn’t. My comrade’s horse was nearly as
broken up as mine. We held a consultation together and decided to turn
them adrift. Away they went across the bush that night; we saw their
delighted tail stumps sticking up as they galloped across a patch of
moonlight and disappeared and became wild horses of the boundless
plains.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXV
Before the Mast—Bound for San Francisco—Man Overboard—I see ’Frisco High
Life—My first Funeral Expenses—Joss Houses—Guest my Friend
I WILL now leave my next three months of bush life unrecorded, as it
would be very much the same as I have already written about. William and
I got South Sea Island mad. It was my fault. I used to tell him about my
experiences and as I told him of Papoo and various other Samoan and
Fijian beauties, his eyes would gleam as he listened, until at last his
sole ambition in life was to go to the South Seas. Indeed I got a bit of
the fever on me to go out there again, and when we at length arrived in
Sydney I tried to get away with him, but as luck would have it he
managed to secure a billet on the German boat as messroom steward. I was
very sorry indeed to see him go, and he too when I said good-bye to him.
We had been happy and seen a lot together in our twelve months’
friendship. I stood on the wharf and waved good-bye to him. Dear old
William, I often wonder what became of him; I never saw him again.
A week after he left me I shipped before the mast on the _Cairnbulg_, a
large sailing ship bound for ’Frisco and then round the Horn home. We
had a terrible spell of bad weather. About two weeks after leaving
Sydney, one evening just as sunset faded a typhoon began to blow. We
were all sent aloft to take in sail; but it was too late, the mainmast
split and went overboard, taking and throwing one of the crew into the
raging sea. He still clung on to the tackle of the broken mast as it
floated overside, and then a big sea came down and he was washed off. We
hove her to and lowered the lifeboat; over came the seas like huge
icebergs, crashing to the decks as she shivered and groaned and pitched
with her broken masts and torn sails, swaying and screaming beneath the
storm-swept sky. There was no slackness of volunteers to man the
lifeboat as those white-faced sailors with the soul of pluck in their
eyes stood by and the chief mate took the helm. They lowered away; three
times they were nearly upset and thrown into the sea as the ship lay
right over and the big iron side seemed to lay under the lifeboat’s
keel. At last they got her safely on the water; the skipper stood on the
poop, the hurricane whipping his shouted orders away like pistol shots
as a sea came over and washed three of us along the deck. We all came
crash against the bulwark side, scrambled to our feet and rushed back
again to see if we could catch sight of the lifeboat that was out on the
pitch-black waters. How she lived in that sea was a marvel. They came
back, but without our comrade: he had gone for ever, and that night we
sat in the fo’c’sle on our sea-chests puffing our pipes deep in thought,
feeling very sad and wretched, and I heard the drowned sailor’s special
chum crying in his bunk opposite me for a long time as overhead the
look-out tramped to and fro and the fixed-up wind-jammer once more tore
along on her voyage. The empty bunk of the lost sailor which was just
below mine got on my nerves, and often when I was tired out and turned
in I lay sleeplessly thinking of the poor fellow away in his ocean grave
behind us, and would get up and go on deck and finish by sleeping on the
forepeak hatchway.
When we arrived in San Francisco our ship had to go into dry dock to
have a new mast fixed in and I got in with some American fellows ashore,
and what with the beautiful climate and congenial society and being sick
of living on “hard tack,” “soup and bully” and salt junk, I resolved to
leave the ship and stay behind. One of those shore friends of mine was
the manager of a dancing saloon in the north of the city, and he told me
that if I could play dance music on the violin he could offer me a good
salary. I got hold of a good book of dance music and, taking a small
room near Kearney Street, I practised the whole day long for nearly a
week, and soon got my hand in and eventually became a crack hand at the
job. The orchestra for that dancing establishment consisted of two
violins, a banjo and a harpist. The ladies who visited that secluded
hall were painted up to the eyes, some of them were pretty old stagers
painted and dressed up; whirling round the ballroom they passed off as
girls in their teens.
I had a good opportunity of observing the visitors of that ’Frisco
“high-class dancing saloon.” I found out after a little while that it
was used for various different crimes, and one night just as we had
finished the overture and the old Californian roués were taking their
partners, a fashionably dressed lady burst into the room and shot her
husband in the neck. I heard one of the bullets from her revolver whiz
by my head. The painted lady who had been hanging on the wounded man’s
arm fainted away and there was a terrible scene altogether, but the
whole matter never reached the public, it was all hushed up as the
victim was a gentleman who held a high position on the Bench. I think he
was a judge. I did not even care to play the fiddle to that crowd, but I
persevered and sawed away night after night. I received exceedingly good
money for the job and had no need to mix with the crew that danced to
the strains of music, as those wicked-looking members of the Californian
“elite” revelled in the atmosphere of freedom and all the dubious games
that caused the downfall of their old ancestors Adam and Eve.
I was then living in apartments in F—— Street; it was not a very
fashionable residence, but my comrade, whose name was “Crane,” lived
there, and persuaded me to live near him. He told me that he was an
Englishman and talked a good deal about dear old London, thinking that
it pleased me. There also lived a man in the same building who I was
told was the captain of a large sailing vessel. He was a suave-speaking
man, and spoke with a strong Yankee twang, wore side-whiskers, and every
time I chanced to meet him on the stairway, he was most genial in his
remarks and would praise my violin-playing, for I would play a good deal
during the daytime, not having much else to do. One morning my friend
Crane opened my room door and, coming in with a long face, sat opposite
me and said, “I say, Middleton, the Captain’s in great sorrow, his
wife’s dead, and if he can’t raise fifty dollars she will have to be
buried in a pauper’s grave.” I was very much touched as he continued the
tale, and told me several distressing details of the affection between
that captain and the poor wife, and when at last he described the death
scene the tears came into my eyes, and I at once volunteered to advance
the necessary cash, so as to give the poor fellow’s wife a decent
funeral.
Crane knew that I had nearly eighty dollars in the bank, and when I
stood up and said I would go and get the money forthwith, he wiped his
own eyes, so touched was he by my impulsive kindness. I went off and got
the money, and coming back I said to Crane, “Where is he? Is he in his
room?”
“Yes,” Crane answered, “but he’s so broken up, and moreover he’s so
sensitive about borrowing money from anyone, that you had better leave
it on the toilet in his room, when he goes out, and I will explain all
to him.” I at once accepted his idea and understood, as I too would have
been sensitive in those days at borrowing fifty dollars.