saloon, I met Crane and the bereaved Captain. I felt a bit uncomfortable
at first, and so did the Captain as he turned his face sideways, pulled
his whiskers and exchanged a quick glance with Crane and then nearly
tumbled over. I saw that he was “half seas over,” but I forgave him; I
knew that sorrow had driven better men than the Captain to take an extra
glass. Well, to cut a sad story short, I went over to the Captain’s
house next day to attend the funeral. I had not been invited, but I
wanted to do the thing properly. I had got the address out of Crane, and
the time, and about ten minutes before the procession was to start for
the cemetery I respectfully touched the knocker with a mournful tap,
tap. I shall never forget the face of the awful virago who opened the
door, and as soon as I mentioned the Captain’s name and told her the
purpose of my visit she glared at me and then roared with laughter. I
lost my temper at last and said, “I’ve paid fifty dollars for the
funeral.” That finished it, and then I heard the truth. The Captain was
a card-sharper and I had been done! Even the little ’Frisco kid of about
ten years of age looked up into my face with a partly sorrowful and
partly contemptuous expression that I was such an ass. I never knew
which one really had my fifty dollars, Crane or the Captain. I suppose
they shared it. I never saw the Captain again, but one night as I was
going to leave my room to go off to work I saw Crane dodge on the
staircase of the next floor. He had called to see if there were any
letters for him. I said, “Hi, Crane, I want to speak to you.” He came
into the room smiling. He had a white-livered face. “Where is my fifty
dollars?” I said. And then I had my first and last fight. The look in
his eyes broke the last thread of control in my temper, and I let out
and gave him a terrible smash in the jaw. He hardly defended himself; he
was such a coward, and so ended my friendship with Mr Crane and my trust
in “confidence men.” I have met many well-dressed men since that time
who agreed profoundly with all my ideas, and ended by telling me of
their rich old uncle who was waiting round the corner for ten dollars to
get back to his exchequer, but I’ve had my lesson, and if I met another
man who wanted money to bury his wife I would not advance it till I saw
the coffin, and even then I should respectfully lift the lid before I
left the room.
I never saw such a wild place as ’Frisco was in those days. Seafaring
men from all parts of the world congregated there much the same as in
the Australian sea-board cities. I know not if they were trade union
men, but they all looked very independent, chewed and spat much the same
as the sailors of my previous experience, excepting they were virtuosos
in the art and could send a stream of tobacco juice over their left
shoulder without moving the face from its frontward stare. Most of them
had billygoat whiskers, and cadaverous faces whereon was written
“recklessness”; they mostly lived on beer which was handed to them in
vast glasses which they called “deep seas,” “schooners” and “shea-oak.”
Those who are on the rocks never bother about food, but live on free
luncheons which you can help yourself to if you buy a drink; the food is
sometimes “hot sausages, roast beef, cheese and biscuits.”
I found the ’Frisco restaurants Oriental palaces compared with the
Australian dining-rooms. The Chinese were there by thousands, smoking
their opium and sleeping in awful hovels, such as damp underground
cellars, like rats in a hole, and often as you walked by Jackson Street
you knew they were under the pavement because the hot, fevered stench
came up through the paving stone cracks that let in air to their
subterranean dens. As in Sydney they live by gambling and pray for luck
in their “Joss-houses,” and you would always know that the “Fan-tan” was
on by the yellow nose and alert small eyes of the old spy peeping at the
door, keeping “tiggy” in case of a police raid.
At this time I got in with an elderly fellow named Guest. He was a real
“knock-out” for yarning and told me many thrilling tales of adventure as
we sat or walked out together. He had lived a good deal in Australia. He
and I went out through the Golden Gate together, and visited Farallon
Islands. He was hard up and I paid the expenses; he was a good chap and
thankful too, and would have done the same for me I knew if I had run
short. He seemed to know a lot about Australian gaol life and I think he
had lodged in one of them against his wish, and so I have not told you
his right name. He would tell me many of his experiences and I think
that he had escaped from penal servitude at one time or other, for he
always, when dwelling on his bush life, let out in some way or other
that he nearly stumbled across a township during his wanderings, which
was strange considering he should, from my own experience, have been
very pleased to do so.
One night we sat together in my little room in Kearney Street. I was
strumming on the fiddle and he sat by the window smoking and started one
of his yarns. He had a mysterious face, and a quiet earnest voice, and
whenever he was serious I would listen carefully to him, and that night
he seemed more serious than usual.
“Put your fiddle down, Middleton,” he said, “and I’ll tell you about my
hut experience.”
I was so impressed by that tale of his that I think I will tell it you
here, as nearly as possible the way he told it to me, as I sat there by
the window. Slowly he began: “I was fairly bushed once in North
Queensland; it was the time of the great drought. I hadn’t even a swag
and it was that sweltering hot that I lay stark naked in a swamp by a
gully for half the day. I felt pretty sick too, for I had drunk nearly a
quart of the frog-spawned water which was nearly black with ooze and
dead reptiles, and I got the fever in my blood that bad that I kept
seeing faces swim over me in the steam that rose from the two-inch-deep
scum as I lay flat on my back. Phew! it makes me sweat now as I think of
it.
“Well, that night as soon as the sun sank like a clot of blood below the
skyline, I rose up, full of aches and pains and nearly dead, wiped
myself down, put on my pants and shirt, which I had used for a towel,
and started staggering off determined to make a last attempt to get to
some township or shanty. I think I must have lost my head a bit then,
for I got shouting and tearing at my throat as I stumbled along. The
moon was up, and for miles over the flat country I could see the gum
clumps standing perfectly still, for there was not a breath of wind.
Presently I heard a dingo wailing and then silence again as a wind
sprang up and over my head the gums’ leaves stirred a bit and the cool
air washed my parched body over as though dead fingers were caressing
me. Then I could hardly believe my eyes, for across the grey slopes far
away I saw a small light. By God, didn’t that light buck me up as I
scrambled along and crawling up a small slope on all-fours, for I was
then too weak to walk up anything, I found myself standing before a
small hut. Outside was a large rain-water tub. I gave the hut door a
crash with my foot and then head first went for that tub. ‘Who’s there?’
someone said as I heard the bolt drawn. It was a woman’s voice. ‘It’s
only me,’ I answered as she stood at the door gazing astonished as I
wiped my mouth. I looked a terrible guy standing there bare-headed and
steaming, for I had ducked my head in that water butt; my boots were
open at the ends like an alligator’s jaws and I only had my pants on, so
you can imagine I did not look the kind of visitor that a woman longed
to see at a lonely bush hut at midnight. Anyway she soon saw that I was
genuine enough, and in no time I was sitting inside feeling wonderfully
refreshed as I drank a large pannikin of hot tea and washed down some
food. She was a wistful-looking wench, and I wondered a bit where the
boss was, as she sat there white-faced and the open door let the
midnight wind in and the moonbeams and shadowed leaves crept over the
walls and on to her face and knees from the trees outside. I told her my
tale, and then she told hers. Her husband lay in the next room dead, and
the young fellow who worked for him had gone off nearly fifty miles to
get a coffin for the body. I felt that I was dreaming as I sat there and
the night wind blew at intervals and sighed across the forest gums.
“‘When will he be back?’ I asked her.
“‘Not till to-morrow,’ she said, and as the hour was getting late and I
started to yawn and nearly fell asleep as I sat on the wooden bench, she
asked me if I would mind sleeping in the next room where that thing was!
At first I hesitated a bit, but not liking to look a coward I pulled
myself together and said, ‘Well, I don’t mind,’ for I saw that I should
have to sleep outside if I didn’t, as there was only one room besides
the small kitchen where we were, and just by where she sat twitching her
fingers on her knees was her own bed made up. She gave me a small bit of
candle and pointed to the long couch as I entered that hushed room and
quietly closed the door behind me. It was a large room and as I looked
around I caught sight of a long trestle up against the farther wall
right opposite the small window across which hung wild vines. I began to
feel pretty bad; my past experience had a bit unnerved me. Placing the
candle on a little stool beside me, I settled myself on the couch,
inwardly cursing my luck at being given only one inch of tallow candle.
By faith, I could not keep my eyes off that thing. I heard my own breath
as I lay there all of a sweat, and then the candle spluttered and went
out, and as the wind blew outside, and the shadow of the boughs through
the window moved to and fro on the walls just above the shrouded
six-foot figure, my eyes stared and stared and it seemed as though the
protruding feet moved as the moonlight crept in patches over the
trestle. And then a terrible thing happened.
“I swear by all that’s holy I tell the truth—the top of the white shroud
moved back and revealed a long grey-bearded face! My feet also slowly
moved off that couch to make a bolt from the room, and likewise those
dead feet moved slowly towards the floor to stay my flight! I was
paralysed with terror. I tried to shout, but something gripped my
throat. Up rose that dead man’s finger as with bright eyes gleaming he
said, ‘Hush, I’m not dead!’ Outside, as he said that, I heard a whisper
and the crackling of twigs and a shadow whipped across the wall as
someone passed by the window. In a moment I recovered. ‘Not dead?’
thought I. ‘I’ll show you to play this trick on me,’ and I leapt to my
feet, but the old bounder was too quick for me. Crash over my head went
something, and before I could get out of the door he had vanished,
shutting it with a bang behind him. I heard a scream. Taking a woodman’s
axe from the wall I crashed away at that door to get to the woman who
had befriended me. Down it came as I smashed away.
“Rushing into the room I looked round. I was too late. I stumbled over
something huddled on the floor, and saw that the worst had happened. I
turned round and looked through the hut door over the moonlit slopes;
with the jaw-rag flapping behind him ran that monstrous man who had
feigned death; in front flew a little man. I heard a scream as he
uplifted his gun and shot him and then turning it on himself blew the
top of his own head off. It all seemed to happen in an instant, and
there was I left alone by that hut. By the door stood a coffin and that
told me that the second victim was the man who had gone off to do the
undertaking job. I at once started off from that cursed place, for I
knew that were I found there the whole tragedy would be fastened on to
me,” and saying this he knocked the ashes out of his pipe and wished me
good-night and went off.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVI
I play the Violin at Fashionable Concerts, etc.—Ship before the Mast for
Sydney—Go Up Country—Sheep-shearing—The Shearers’ good Resolutions
and the Fall
I NEVER knew what to make of Guest; he certainly believed all that he
told me. He eventually came to my lodging and lived in the next room; he
had an old duck, I think he said it was eighteen years old; he carried
it about much the same as folks do a pet poodle. I never saw such a wise
and affectionate thing as that duck was. By his bed in a large
collar-box it would sit the whole night long and follow him and me about
the room like a kitten. How he got it and why he was so fond of it was a
mystery to me; he was the last man in the world one would have thought
to have a pet duck and put up with the nuisance of it, but he had the
duck right enough, and when we sat having our meals together it would
push its beak under our arms and steal the dainty bits off our plates.
That was nuisance enough, but the smell of it was outrageous and I very
seldom had luncheon with Guest afterwards, but had most of my meals in a
restaurant hard by.
I was still engaged at playing the fiddle at the dancing hall, and now
and again I accepted engagements to go out to balls, etc., among the
“élite” of San Francisco. It was at the palatial residence of a ’Frisco
nabob out at Menbo Park that I played my first public solo. I was
terribly nervous. The solo I played was Rode’s “Air in G,” and I gave as
an encore the “Cavatina” by Raff. Guest was there that night; I had
managed to get him a ticket and borrowed a decent suit for him. I was
sorry after that I had invited him. He got drinking too much, and though
I had warned him to behave himself he shouted at the top of his voice as
soon as I had finished my solo, “Good old Middleton! Give us another.” I
turned hot all over and the perspiration whisked off my brow as I bowed
to the applause of the audience and the pretty girl at the piano gazed
up into my face and quickly placed the music of the “Cavatina” on the
pianoforte and I was glad to start off playing again. I made several
mistakes but I don’t think anyone noticed them; my name on the programme
was not Middleton but Signor Marrionette! and everyone, of course, had
great faith in the playing of a gentleman with that name.
Through my musical ability and enterprise I saw a good deal of ’Frisco
“high life,” and after a deal of experience I came to the conclusion
that low life was only the crude essence of high life. One set wiped
their noses with a silk pocket handkerchief and the other with the thumb
and forefinger, but both acted under the same impulse. The real curse of
those early engagements was that after I had played the ladies would
circle round me, quizz me up and down, old and young plying me with
questions, telling me how they would love to spend their lives listening
to delicious strains of music; they thought I was a soft sentimental
poetical youth, green to the ways of life, and little dreamed that I had
seen them all, so to speak, dancing in the South Seas with nothing on!
I was very homesick about that time and as Guest had made up his mind to
go to Alaska I made up my mind to get out of ’Frisco and home to
England. I threw my job up and not having enough money to pay my fare
home I set about trying to get a berth on a ship. I will not weary you
with my disappointments, but I eventually after many hardships got a job
as deck-hand on the _Alameda_ bound for Sydney. I had made up my mind to
get to Sydney first and then get a berth on a ship that went by the Suez
Canal route. After a rotten trip across tropic seas, working like a
nigger, and sleeping in quarters that would have made the ’Frisco
Chinamen sniff with disgust, I arrived at Woolloomoolloo Bay, was paid
off and wandered about for several days.
I could not discover any of my old acquaintances that I would like to
have seen. The _Lubeck_ was in dock, but though I tried all I could to
see if William my friend had returned, I could get no information. There
were hundreds of English fellows trying to work their passages back to
England and every week the deep-sea boats came through Sydney Heads with
hundreds of passengers on deck gazing with admiring eyes at the
beautiful scrub-covered hills of Sydney Harbour, their hearts beating
happily as the relatives and friends waved their hands on the wharf. I
often stood and watched the sisters, brothers, and lovers meet, and as
the ships left the wharf for England once more I stood and watched the
farewell hands waving as the great P. & O. or Orient liners sailed away,
taking the hearts of the pinched white-faced, ragged brigade with her.
Failing to get a berth or a job at violin-playing, I availed myself of
an opportunity offered me to go up country sheep-shearing. The new
friends I had fallen in with told me that I could earn a splendid wage
at the job, and though I knew nothing about the work, I believed them
and went off.
We went a hundred miles by rail and tramped the rest, and when I
eventually reached the sheep-station I had no boots to my feet, and my
trouser legs were torn away through tramping through stiff scrub. I
never had such a rough job in my life as on that sheep-shearing station.
Hundreds of men arrived day after day from different parts of New South
Wales, and clamoured for work. They were men of all degrees, swagsmen of
long experience, and men of no experience, new chums and old chums. I
got in just in time to get a job as a “rouse-about,” and then became a
“penner-up.”
Many of us slept in camp tents and I made a good bit of money by
fiddle-playing. I extemporised a small orchestra, which consisted of a
concertina, two banjos and a bone clapper, and when the work was done we
would sit under the blue gums and, as the sun twinkled on the skyline
and disappeared, start the concert, and never did I have such an
appreciative audience as they stood, those rough unshaved men leaning
against the trees or sitting on stumps smoking and listening to the
melodies that took their hearts back to the homeland, and as we played
away and the marsh frogs croaked they would join in the chorus of some
old song and put their whole soul in it. “Play that again, matey,” they
would say as some strain touched them and awoke memories of long ago.
I’ve often seen the tears in the eyes of those men, and I liked them;
some of them were old enough to be my father. They were mostly men of a
sentimental turn of mind and good men, as far as their intentions went,
but they all found it so hard to make their actions harmonise with their
intentions. They work hard when they do work, and after the shearing
season go off with a big cheque and a firm resolve to start a little
business or go back across the seas to see the old faces again.
With their billy-can swinging in their hand and their swag on their back
they start across the bush, outbound to the new life of quiet and
sweetness, and then the dreadful fall comes. Hot and tired they all
stumble across the grog shanty in the bush town, outside of its wooden
door they drop their swags to the ground, gaze in each other’s eyes with
that querying look that says in silent language, “Well, I don’t think
just one drink would hurt us,” and then each one carefully looks at the
other, as though to say, “Mind, Bill, only one this time,” for they have
all been through the same old fiasco before, made the same good
resolutions and alas, then do as they will always do, for that one drink
resolves into two. Each one looks once more at the other and each one
relents and grants his comrade one more drink. “Yes, Bill, but mind you
that’s the last,” and then one poking his head out of the grog shanty
sees the sun setting and remarks to the others, “It’s getting late,
chums; we’d better camp here for the night.” They all agree, and again
all agree that another drink could not possibly hurt any of them. By
that time they are getting half-seas over with the extra drinks in
between which they each swallowed while the other wasn’t looking! Then
the loud songs commence, and the yarns of past brave deeds, and the grog
seller rubs his hands, delighted to see them getting affectionate one
with the other as each finds his appreciative listener. By this time
their voices can be heard at the township homesteads two miles over the
hills, and the folk come from far and near to hear the songs, and to see
the drunken spree of the homebound shearers. Already the dance has
commenced, and the banjo is going full speed, “pink-a-tee-pink,” and
then a space is cleared for the grand fight over the awful insult to the
man from Stony Creek who has been doubted when he said he knew where
gold could be found by the ton, and he found it but it was so heavy that
he couldn’t carry it into town.
By midnight all the money is nearly spent, and on the slopes by the grog
shanty most of them are sprawling fast asleep, the more excitable ones
lifting their hatless heads up now and again, gurgling out some
spasmodic strain of the last drunken song which they were singing just
before they fell down.
At daybreak they are standing outside of the grog seller’s door kicking
it with their boots, their mouths fevered and parched by the awful
poison which they drank the night before, and so the great resolution
ends once more. With their billy-cans and swags they depart across the
bush on their several ways sad men on the “Wallaby track” homeless and
penniless. And so they go on till they die, and I can well tell you all
this because I was with those men, heard the good resolutions, saw the
tears rise in their fearless eyes as they spoke with emotion of the
happy-to-be future, and then witnessed their fall. With four of them I
tramped away across the bush solitudes to look for work in a world of
stern reality, for wherever you go in this world you will find that you
cannot live on dreams.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
XXVII
Lost in the Bush—The Drought—We find dead Comrades together—Horse and
Rider
IT was my luck to be on the lonely track humping the swag when a great
drought swept its burning wave across the whole of Australia. On the
borders of Queensland I had been with two more English emigrants working
on a selector’s ranch at “Sunrise Creek.” Dorrell was the boss’s name
and he had a splendid stock of sheep and many acres of land under
cultivation. He proved a fine man to us lads and treated us as though we
were his own sons. I taught his daughter to play the violin and he was
so proud when she was first able to play “Home, Sweet Home” that he
smacked me on the back and gave me a week’s holiday. But life in a
selector’s homestead is extremely monotonous, and after staying there
six months I bade them all farewell, and with a kindred spirit started
off to tramp to Maranoa with the idea of getting across to Queensland
and into more lively surroundings.
[Illustration: MODERN SHEEP-SHEARERS]
It was on that tramp that the great drought struck the country; forests
that were green shrivelled to grey and then to brown, as the fiery blast
from the white hot sun day after day crept over the sky as we tramped
along. The wind blew like the hot blasts from some volcano; the swamps
and creeks and pools soon became baked and cracked shallows, wherein the
very frogs stuck in the dry ooze, died and stank. While we passed by,
half dead ourselves, searching for water, overhead across the cloudless
blue passed swarms of parrots. As my comrade and I staggered along we
heard the dismal mutterings of those birds as they sped away overhead
and faded away leaving a greater loneliness after they disappeared, tiny
specks on the Southern skyline. To the south-west of us rose some hills,
and at nightfall we came across a pool of water at the bottom of a deep
gully. It was hot-fevered stuff, but we knelt side by side and drank it
as on the scorched blue gums the carrion crows wept, and yet, with that
same hope that springs eternally in the human breast, sharpened up their
beaks with the forlorn hope that we might yet die and our rotting
carcasses supply them with food. By the swamp we slept that night, and
once more at daybreak started off. Over us on the eucalyptus trees the
carrion crows had slept and over our heads they croaked and flapped
lazily along, following us, and often they would stay by the trackless
track to feed on the dead birds in the mulga-scrub, birds that had
fallen from their perch during the night, dead through the want of
water. For miles and miles the bush lay around us, nothing but a
leafless, waterless drought-stricken ocean, and often as the migrating
birds passed over, some would half fall from the blazing sky and settle
on the tree-tops to die, just the same as swallows do far out at sea as
the stragglers fly to the rigging of the lonely ship, and fall dead on
the deck during the night through hunger.
My comrade was English, and was a splendid friend; he was three or four
years older than I, and when we sat down together and shared out the
food we had in our swag, we would almost quarrel because he would deny
himself and give me the largest share. He was uneducated, but that did
not matter. God had amply repaid him in the making for all that his
education might lack when he was a man, and twelve months after, when I
read in a newspaper that I had been drowned at sea on the schooner
_Alice_ that was lost with all hands, I felt terribly upset. I had given
him one of my “Very good” discharges so that he could secure a berth; he
got the berth, and my name being on his discharge he had to sail under
my name, and died bearing my name. Many beautiful things were said of me
when my old acquaintances also read the account, and thought it was I
who was drowned; but when the truth came out, and I appeared and was
once more known to be living in common flesh, I became commonplace, and
the beautiful things that only survive in the memory for those who are
dead, faded and my sins once more awoke and peeped through my good
reputation like the slit-mouths of those frogs that protrude among the
pure white lilies of a crystal lake. But I must return to that tramp
across those drought-stricken plains.