Circular Quay—Figure-heads—A Derelict’s Night—The World’s Worst Men—Off
to New Zealand—A Violin Prodigy—In the New Zealand Bush—My Maori
Girl—A Pied Piper—A Recipe for the Happy Vagabond—The Philosophical
Sun-downer
I HAD lived in Sydney five or six years before, when I had run away from
a ship in Brisbane and had come across to Sydney full of dreams and
hope. I was then only fourteen years of age. How vividly I recall those
days and nights.
Once more I stand on old Circular Quay and seem again to breathe through
my dreams the turbulent poetry of emigrant sin and sorrow; for ah! how
many cargoes of human lives have been brought across the world and then
dumped down on the quay. I dream on, and see the silent wool
clipper-ships lying alongside the wharfs, the tall masts and long yards
at rest beneath the sky. The fine carved figure-heads look alive, their
grand, allegorical faces gazing, their outstretched arms pointing,
towards Sydney’s silent streets. They seem to express dimly to me some
substance of great poetic thought, as though I stood on the mysterious
shores of the heaven whence those spiritual minds that conceived them
drew their inspiration, when with creating brain and moving fingers they
carved such sad, wonderful faces; faces destined to be exiled for years
on voyages across wild oceans.
I am a boy again, and am thrilled with such a feeling as a poet has when
he treads visionary worlds and forgets his sad reality. How happy I feel
as I move along in the white moonlight from wharf to wharf, gazing on
each wooden ship and wondering on their past voyages, what seas they
crossed ere I was born, and what the seaports looked like when they came
sailing down, with weather-beaten sailors staring from the fo’c’sle
head.
How distinctly I remember it all! I cannot move from one ship’s side:
the figure-head is that of some beautiful goddess with a crown of
bronzed hair, wherein a dove flutters. Her face represents, exactly, my
romantic ideal of all the tender beauty of woman as I dreamed of it in
my early boyhood. It is a beautiful face. I gaze from the wharf at it
with fascinated eyes: all is silent except for the plomp of the waters
against the ship’s side as the tide ebbs. Still I gaze at her praying
hands, as with wide-opened eyelids she stares across the moonlit quay at
the sleeping city.
I went back to my room and dreamed of that perfect face. So strangely
was I impressed by its beauty that I felt a longing to find some living
type resembling it. The next day I walked up the Sydney streets and
earnestly scanned the faces of the Colonial girls. None of them seemed
to me as beautiful as the thought of the artist who had fashioned the
perfect outlines of my figure-head. The next night I went down to the
quay and gazed once more at her, and then again the following night; but
when I arrived on the wharf to my great sorrow I found her gone. She had
left her beauty in my soul, and though she was only an insensate
figure-head, the memory of her features and expression stirred and fired
some devotional dream within me, and gave me a poetic reverence for
womanhood, a gift from out the great strangeness of things, that I have
ever cherished. Often in seaports, on my travels from land to land, my
comrades wondered why I stood a moment and gazed at the silent sailing
ships by the wharf. But, though I searched, I never saw that figure-head
again. I suppose they have broken those old wooden ships up now and
burnt them on the hearth fires of the cities, and by them other boys
have probably dreamed of strange lands, and lovers gazed in the curling
flames with shining eyes. Ah! little did they dream what their log of
firewood had meant to me; and while they kissed with clinging lips the
substance of my boyhood dreams, those features that lived spiritually in
my imagination fell to ash as the flames faded in the homestead hearth
fire.
The poetry of Sydney harbour, with its sights and turmoil of sound,
lives in my memory as though to-day is far-off yesterday. I even
remember, and feel again, my strange romantic loneliness as I watch the
silent ships lying out in the bay. Night, like life, is on the deep,
tide-moving waters; in the dark depths the fixed mirrored stars shine
steadfastly like Eternity, while over them the waters ebb seaward or
flow towards the shore. The outline of North Shore, like another
continent, rises across the wide harbour, and exactly opposite are the
spires of the grand, silent, sea-board city. Some drunken sailor’s song
floats across the bay from the wind-jammer that is lying at anchor out
in the stream. Several lights are twinkling across by Miller’s Point.
The Orient liner, the giant aristocrat of the quay, is agleam with
shining port-holes; her funnels belch forth smoke that ascends to the
silence. We creep by—three homeless men and a boy—looking for a place to
sleep! Our shadows suddenly hurry on with us, as in the moon’s gleam we
spy the quartermaster on watch at the gangway. No hope there for us, we
think, so we go round to the anchored ferry-boats and leave the great
liner behind. She’s off for England to-morrow, dear old England! O
magical word to how many exiles in the sleeping city, and especially to
us, with our stomachs rumbling with emptiness. The big Manly Beach
ferry-boat is moored by the wharf; our frightened eyes look carefully
around, then down on board we go to seek the cushioned settees of the
saloon. We slept there last night. Again we creep into the saloon, four
of us: Roberts, the ship’s stoker, villainous-looking, old, with
unshaved face; Ross, the son of the Right Honourable, and the third man,
who is a late schoolmaster from a school of great distinction. He is a
pessimistic-looking chap, perhaps because he lent Ross his last ten
shillings on the promise of five hundred per cent. interest when Ross
got an expected cheque from England. “Ah, woeful when!” The night is
getting old and cold; how comfortably the warmth of the dim saloon
strikes us as we four derelicts creep across. The moonlight is streaming
through the port-holes. Ross smothers a note of irresistible exultation,
for he has spotted a large bunch of bananas on the saloon table! Such
sudden unexpected affluence is too much for me, and even as I wonder why
the saloon smells so strongly of fresh tobacco smoke, I sit down plomp!
on the stomach of the ferry-boat’s night watchman, who is asleep on the
settee!
[Illustration: KAWIERI, N.Z.]
A terrible yell of pain escapes the official’s lips; like four shadows
in one headlong leap we cross the saloon and rush up the gangway. How we
scampered across the quay space and then rescued poor old Roberts, the
stoker, as he puffed behind and stumbled on the kerb-side and fell with
a crash! Under the trees in the domain he sat swearing terrifically, but
calmed down as we held his blood-splashed face up and examined it by
moonlight. The schoolmaster lent his handkerchief of other days to
stanch the blood-flow. Ross promised another fifteen shillings when the
cheque came. Then, under the big-leafed tree, with our heads pillowed on
our coats or caps, we lay with our faces side by side to sleep. I can
still see the many huddled derelicts under the gum-trees of Sydney’s
Hyde Park, disreputable old men, and young men, good and bad. I watch by
my chums on our big bedroom floor and hear the far cry of the wild
animals in the Botanical Gardens Zoo, and smell the dew-damp leaves and
domain grass, as dawn steals over the windless trees away back beyond
the horizon of more years than I like to count.
Some inexplicable kind of sadness comes over me as I look back to the
lost splendour of my derelict days. How wealthy I was with all my
youthful unfulfilled promises, and what security I found in the hopeful,
manly eyes of men who went down to the sea in ships. How I stuck to them
as they yarned together, or sang till the shore cave echoed. The shanty
was a paradise, filled with men of mighty deeds, as I gazed with the
eyes of boyish inexperience at the stalwart, unshaved men from ’Frisco
and London, and listened to the stories of sad self-sacrifice, or great
deeds on land and sea, performed in the valiant imagination of those
wonderful brains of the world’s worst men.
I often wonder what I have missed through the inherited taint of
vagabondage that is in my blood. Should I have been happier and gained
some wealth had I gone ashore in some far country, scorning vagabonds
and marching down the track on honest feet, like some Dick Whittington,
looking for the lights of some distant city, with my violin slung beside
me? I doubt it. If one is really honest, one is sure, some day, to trust
the wrong man through not being dishonest oneself. But to go back to my
reminiscences at the moment when I arrived in Sydney from Samoa.
I did not stay in Sydney very long. I had three or four pounds in my
pocket and did not want to get stranded, so once more I looked around
and was lucky enough to secure a berth on a steamer that was going to
New Zealand for a cargo of meat, and from there to London. I got a job
down in the engine-room as a kind of snowman to look after the
refrigerators. The chief engineer was a terrible pig; he was a Dutchman,
and gave me no peace, but made me paint the lower-deck iron roof. We
eventually had a fight, and I received a black eye which took a
considerable time to cure itself. I made up my mind to leave at the
first opportunity.
I smelt the freshness of the sea-water and tar when we dropped anchor in
Oriental Bay. After the first old loafer who is always waiting in every
Colonial seaport to say “This is God’s own country” had said it, I
looked about. Oh! the splendour of those days, the glorious homelessness
and the thrilling uncertainty of everything! I stood on the wharf with
my violin in my hand, and, though I was almost penniless, I felt like a
monarch gazing on his multitude of toiling subjects. Ships of many
nationalities lay alongside discharging their cargoes, and the crews
mingled with the crowds of embarking or disembarking passengers,
arriving from, or bound for, Australia, China, Japan, India; in fact
everywhere wealth and poverty massed together. I saw white faces, black
faces, yellowish faces, mahogany faces; glittering eyes, blue eyes,
black eyes, bilious eyes; Dantesque profiles, turbaned heads, thick,
black lips, expressing carelessness and humour, and thin, cynical lips;
also self-exiled, broken-down, sardonic-looking poets, authors and
musicians from the British Isles. It seemed that the drama of life was
being enacted on that wharf, with its hubbub of uncouth voices: Hindu
men, and women with rings in their ears, multitudes from the Far East,
South and West. A kind of miniature parade of existence, ere Time’s hand
swept the whole lot like pawns off the board, it seemed to me as I
watched them embark on the ships to go seaward.
I eventually secured a position as violinist in the orchestra of the
opera house in Wellington, and I had comfortable diggings with an
English family. I think I should have settled down there, but, just as I
got to like my landlady and her family, the old father made up his mind
to go back to England again. This unsettled me, and I started off on my
wanderings again. I got to know a man who hired concert halls. I played
at many of his shows, performing Paganini’s _Carnaval de Venise_, also
De Bériot’s and Spohr’s concertos. I was received very well indeed, and
I should have stopped on at the game, but I was very unfortunate. I
could not live on the applause which I received through being billed as
“The Sailor Violinist.” I wore a cheesecutter cap, at the request of my
employer, who indeed tried to go on the same lines as in London, where
foreign prodigies of twenty, with baby collars on, appear! I barely got
any wages; my employer secured the profits.
I never knew a man who could promise so much and give so little as that
particular employer of mine did. And what he _did_ give he gave with
such an air of munificence, as though he was conferring a favour on me
that I had never expected, or earned, that for the moment I was
completely disarmed and my protest died on my lips.
So one day I started off with my violin “up country.” The turmoil of the
crowded city streets, and my commercial inability, had sickened me of
trying to do well. When I got on the lonely roads the old knight-errant
fever gripped me. As I stood on the bush track I saw the primeval forest
trees all brightening in the sunlight, while singing winds, bending
their tops, blew through them, and wings glittered where, overhead,
flocks of cockatoos sped across the sky.
At midday, tired out, I came across a small bush town. It was by a river
where, on the banks, Maoris camped. I stopped there only for a day and
night, and I lodged with two old men who lived in a small wooden house
by a paddock. They were grizzled, retired shellbacks, not from the sea,
but from the trackless bush-lands. I unfortunately paid them for my
lodging in advance, and they at once bought some rum and sat at their
little wooden bench table yarning away till their mumbling voices seemed
deep down in their dirty beards.
As the rum fumes got more and more to their brains they ceased telling
me their experiences, grew argumentative, and, with fierce eyes, glared
at each other till they fell asleep at two o’clock in the morning. The
next day I heard from the farmer who lived in a shack just across the
flat that they were always drunk, and that the whole bush town thought I
was some relative of theirs who had come from abroad to see them,
otherwise they could not think anyone would lodge with them. Once more I
tramped off, and after doing about ten miles I “put up” at a homestead
in which an Irishman and his wife lived. I was getting short of cash and
was half inclined to sleep out; but though it was very hot by day, a
cold wind had blown for several nights. I have quite forgotten the name
of that little bush village, but I easily recall the picturesque Maoris
who lived by a creek in their _pah_ (stronghold), a beautiful spot,
sheltered by karri trees.
I played the violin to them; and two old Maori chiefs, aged and
wrinkled, squatted, with delight beaming in their deep eyes, listening
to me. They were tattooed with dark blue curves from their lips to their
eyebrows, and some of the girls were also decorated with tattoo. The
Maori women were very cheerful, and brought me food, fresh water, fish
and vegetables. An extremely beautiful Maori girl, dressed in
picturesque Maori style, sat on the grass beside me and sang as I played
the violin. The surroundings were wildly romantic, and I must confess
that I almost fell in love with her. I kept thinking of her eyes as I
lay sleeplessly on the extemporised bed that the Irishman’s wife had
made up for me in a shed adjoining their homestead. I went across to
that pah several times; indeed I stopped at the Irishman’s all the next
day and night. When I went my Maori girl bade me good-bye, and then,
with some little Maori children, she came to see me off, and crept by my
side along the track till the pah was almost out of sight. Her eyes
gazed earnestly into mine as she looked up to me; the wind fluttered her
blue frock; in her wealth of hair were stuck crimson and white flowers.
I seemed to live once again in the romance of my faded dreams of
boyhood. How beautiful she looked as sunset deepened the mystery of her
eyes. Gallantly I kissed her and then, on the top of the hill, waved my
hand back to her, and she faded away, and mad Don Quixote, carrying his
violin, faded away also.
Before it was quite dark I sat down on the bush grass and played the
song she had sung to me on my violin. I half wished I was a Maori and
lived in the old days. I am sure I should have gone with a tribe of
warriors and attacked that pah and ridden off into the forest with that
pretty Maori girl!
I slept out that night. I did not fall asleep till midnight, but I made
a small fire in my forest bedroom and managed to keep warm; for I opened
my violin-case out and with some bush grass made a good shelter, though
the slight trade wind on the weather-side blew cold. In the morning I
got up without bother as I had slept “all standing,” had a wash in the
stream just down by the gullies, and then tramped across the hills to
where the smoke arose from a group of homesteads. I counted my money; I
hadn’t much, I know; but people in the New Zealand bush proved as
generous to me as I had found them in the Australian bush a year or so
before.
As I emerged from under the gum-trees I saw that the village was a
decent-sized place of some fifty houses. A main road separated wooden
shop buildings, and just behind were the small homes of the population.
I had slept late, and the sun was blazing over the forest trees and
shining on the tin roofs of the township.
As I went across the paddocks the cows lifted their heads, stared at me,
slashed their tails and moved off. I heard the voices of romping
children running about in the scrub of their fenceless gardens. Summing
up my courage, I took up a position in the centre of the silent main
street. Only one or two shops had their shutters down as I stood erect
and started to play the violin! I was a good player, and before the
first strain of the sentimental operatic selection wailed to a close the
doors of all the shops and houses around me suddenly opened, and out
came rushing the children, rosy girls and boys, and women and men, who
gazed at me in astonishment.
I felt like some Pied Piper of Hamelin; but the Mayor did not turn blue
“to pay a sum to a wandering fellow with a gipsy coat of red and yellow”
as I fiddled away. The bushmen and the whole population grinned, as
though with one mouth of delight, and sunburnt little children rushed up
to me with shillings and half-crowns as I moved along and they scampered
behind me.
I was well dressed; my grey suit was still new looking and my collar
passably clean. I appeared outwardly to have a social standing that
outrivalled that of my delighted audience. The vagrancy in my blood made
me perfectly happy; and when the old storekeeper tapped me on the
shoulder and invited me in, I accepted with alacrity and without a blush
the breakfast he gave me. The little children’s bonny brown faces looked
in at the open door as I ate like a horse; then they all screamed with
delight as I tossed the cat to the wooden ceiling and caught it with one
hand. By midday I practically owned the township; for I played in the
houses and the children invited me to stop. When I went away and passed
up the track the whole population came to the end of the main street to
see me go! They all waved their hands as I faded along the bush path.
One never forgets those few hours in life when one has been really
happy, and so I have never forgotten that bush township.
[Illustration: WHAKAREWAREWA, ROTORUA, N.Z.]
To the thousands of literary and commercial vagabonds living under the
guise of respectability I give a recipe—how to be happy in vagabondage.
First, you must have a firm belief in God and be able to keep the belief
to yourself. This belief will help you when each great scheme
unexpectedly fails; for if you be a true vagabond your schemes will only
benefit others. Ere you go to sleep on the grass look upon the forest
about you as your bedroom; examine the moon as though it were your lamp,
trim it so that the shadows fall glimmering through the trees on to your
face, and keep saying to yourself: “I am better off than anyone else;
the world is certainly mine.” In time you will believe this, and people
will see the belief in your eyes and respect you. Be kind to little
children you meet on the tramp, and write on your brain the wisdom they
speak, for they are the cheeriest of vagabonds! Avoid luggage, and throw
away your conscience with all your unpaid bills. When you have cast your
socks into the bush, place palm or banana leaves in your boots as
substitutes: they are cool. I’ve walked for miles quite happily in
banana-leaf socks. If you can possibly play a musical instrument, well,
take it with you; at the worst you can pawn it. Never worry; and when
you have no money keep saying to yourself: “There was no money in the
world for millions of years before money was invented.” Have plenty of
tobacco with you; and when you sit under the trees by your camp fire
recall pleasant memories only; then the birds will serenade you
cheerfully; and if you have a good comrade by your side you will be as
two kings, your sentinels the stars, your domain extending to the
sky-lines around you. Remember that when beggars die, before they put
them to bed they wash their feet and place half-crowns on their eyelids
so as to keep them closed in deep sleep. If they do that for the dead,
what will they do for the living?
As I tramped along the sun blazed down, and I left the track for the
shade of some majestic trees. Across the gullies I saw a camp fire
burning and a man cooking food on it. I had run across a New Zealand
sundowner!
“Hallo, matey, how goes it?” he said as I approached.
“All right,” I answered cheerfully, as he looked at my violin and then
up at me and said: “Want some tucker?” I accepted a lump of damper and,
as his old dog greeted me affectionately and licked my hand, I sat down
beside him. We tramped along together all that day and slept in a gully
off the track. He was an experienced bushman, and made up two splendid
soft mattresses of leaves and moss, and with the dog’s soft muzzle
crouched to the ground, its sentinel eyes agleam between us, we slept,
and I dreamed of the Maori girl.
My companion did not seem extremely gifted, but he was a philosophical
and kind companion and never argued, only listened. He had little
thought of the morrow; dead yesterday was the land of his dreams, for he
was generally retrospective in his conversation. Nevertheless he was
agreeable, and though I understood little of what he said, the note of
the mumble in his beard sounded pleasant. I gathered that he had been
tramping for several years, and was off to see some friends who lived up
country on a farm of their own. We had a sad misfortune together: about
an hour after we had left a cattle yard that was just off the track, we
were tramping along, and the old fellow was mumbling, when suddenly his
dog ran in front of us and started to whimper and yelp, and then fell
down. It had evidently eaten something that was poisonous. Before sunset
it died in great agony. My friend, indeed both of us, were very much
upset. The poor dog had travelled with him for some years. Before it got
dark we went into the forest under the gum-trees, and I dug a hole at
the foot of a large blue gum, then covered our silent sentinel over, as
possums leapt overhead in the trees. I did everything, for my companion
was too upset. I also cut its name, “Bill,” on the tree trunk. He lent
me his knife, and when he spoke his voice sounded husky. “I’m a bit of a
fool,” he mumbled. “No, you’re not; I understand,” I said. Next day I
gave him a large tobacco plug and some money; but still he walked along
by my side, looking in front and never even speaking, as the flocks of
parakeets shrieked across the sky.
We came to a river with rushing falls, and a lagoon beside it caused by
the overflow when torrential rain fell in the mountains, which rose
miles away, brightening behind us in the sunset. I bathed my feet in the
cool water. The bushman looked on, and when I asked him to bathe also he
mumbled out that he had bathed like that once before and was afraid.
That same evening we came across a deserted Maori stronghold. The
_whares_ (huts) were in ruins and overgrown. Where the garden had once
been, among the tall grass and crowds of everlasting flowers, blossoms
like vividly coloured crimson and yellow parchment, still grew rock
melons, tomatoes and other fruit and vegetables, which the Maoris had
cultivated. The silent old bushman, to my astonishment, joined me in my
reflections as I stood and gazed on the relic of the once prosperous
pah. “I guess we’ll camp here to-night, for it’s not too warm these
times,” he said; and so we went into the one hut that had withstood the
rotting encroaching of time and still had a roof on. The floor was
carpeted with weeds and flowers; even the hollow that had served for a
fireplace had burst into bloom; and as my quiet old comrade, bending by
the door, gathered dead scrub and gum wood to make a fire to boil the
billy-can water, the wind moaned fitfully through the forest boughs
overhead: I fancied I heard the dead Maoris’ voices calling and echoing
in the forest depths, and the laughter of girls who were long-ago
dead.[12]
Footnote 12:
I was told by my comrade that it was the ruins of a pah stronghold
that had been attacked by an enemy tribe, all of the defenders having
been killed.
As the shadows closed, and sunset left a gleam out westward, we sat
together. In the corner of the whare the sundowner had made our beds, so
placed by the bushman’s instinct that they were completely sheltered
from the draughty weather-side. My comrade, who was so methodical in his
habits, and had the night before pulled his boots off and “turned in”
punctually at sunset, seemed wakeful and started talking to me. I
understood all he said, for I had got used to his pronunciation, odd
though it sounded, owing to his having lost all his teeth. I had been
playing the violin to him, and as he sat intently listening, with his
bearded chin on his hands, I played on, very pleased to find that he
appreciated music. First I had played a commonplace jig, thinking that
it would appeal to his uncultivated mind more than direct melody. But
when I played a melody from some operatic selection he at once lifted
his half-closed eyelids and said approvingly: “That’s right.” I inwardly
said to myself: “He’s an ignorant, low old fellow, but there’s something
in him; he’s got feeling anyway,” and I thought of his manner when I
buried his dog. I had been reading a little book—I forget the name of
it—but it quoted the philosophers a good deal, and dealt in such
subjects as the human mind and the Universe as it appeared to the
senses. As I looked up at the stars I pondered, and, half in earnest and
half with an idea of showing the old bushman how clever I was, I said,
“All those stars out there are other worlds”; and then I used such
phrases as “infinite extension”—a lot of high-toned phrases that I did
not understand myself. He listened silently, and that was sufficient. I
felt that, though he had no imagination, he would look upon me with
wonder in his eyes and think “how clever this youth is.” So I rattled on
with enthusiasm about the vastness of things and how, but for man’s
consciousness, there would be no big or little, sight, sound or time,
and how the immensity of space was a mighty ocean of nothingness, a
fungoid growth, wherein like jelly-fish universes floated in the eternal
waters of darkness, and as they twirled and flashed, their sparkles were
the stars!
Still he listened; and with pride I again delightedly attacked his
profound inferiority, striving to explain that all material and
immaterial things were chimeras of the mind’s madness, that crept on
shadowy feet through a vast Nothing, which was the Universe! I told him
that he was not then listening to me by the camp fire, but was as the
image of myself, an image that I saw at that moment in his wide-open
eyes, as he suddenly looked up at me and said: “That’ll do; if there’s
nothing, then your opinions, and those of all the philosophers, are
nothing!” My hearing seemed to have gone wrong. He mumbled off a Latin
phrase! I knew it was Latin, but that’s about all I did know. His grey,
deep-set eyes looked steadfastly at me. The lightning rapidity of
intuition telegraphed to my brain a startling message, which in human
speech would go this way: “Tick! tick! your old bushman, whom you think
you are teaching, knows more than you think he does!” Two feelings
struggled within me; one mockingly laughed at my discomfiture at being
such a fool, and the other smiled with pleasure to find my old man was
not one. I quickly recovered, and in my heart thanked the “fungoid
universe” that it was dark, so that the old man could not see my blush
as I dropped my pipe and groped for it in the shadows. And then I
received another shock; for he quietly picked my violin up and very
quietly started to play! His fingers were stiff, and the bow once slid
over the bridge, but it was very evident that somewhere, back in the
past, my mumbling old bushman had been a decent violin-player. Removing
the fiddle from the depths of his dirty beard, he said quietly: “That’s
a French-made fiddle; not a bad tone either; you can tell that by the
curve of the back and the shape. _Savez?_” Then he held it up in the
moonlight and, moving his wrinkled finger along the fine curves of my
violin, laid it down beside me. “You’ve been a good violin-player in
your time,” I replied.
[Illustration: OLD MAORI, SAID TO BE 105 YEARS OLD]
“Yes,” he said, and not a word more did I get out of him, except, as he
knocked the ash from his corn-cob pipe, “It’s getting late, chappie”;
then with a sigh he lay down in the corner on his bed and almost
immediately went off to sleep. He snored vigorously as I lay beside him,
quite sleepless. I looked at the outline of his sleeping face, which I
could just distinguish by the stream of moonlight that came through the
broken wall opposite us. Whether it was because of my just acquired
knowledge that he was not an uneducated derelict I don’t know, but I
fancied the outline of his face looked decidedly refined,
notwithstanding the grey, unkempt beard and sweaty grime.
Next morning we rose early, and the bushman cooked the breakfast on a
fire which he built by the deserted whare’s doorless passage; and as he
poured hot tea into a mug from his big billy can, and handed it to me,
he placed in it the last remaining bit of sugar, going without sugar
himself.
I noticed this; but when I remonstrated he simply said: “Never you mind,
chappie; you’re not as hardened as I am.” I tried to learn something of
his history, but to all my interrogations he was either silent or
evasive. One thing I did learn, and that was that he was by birth an
Englishman. That same day, after crossing some very rough but wildly
beautiful country, we arrived at a homestead where there were several
outhouses being built. It turned out to be my comrade’s destination. The
owners gave him a great welcome, took us both inside and in no time had
a table laid ready and a good feed of meat and pumpkin for us. They also
were emigrant English folk. As we sat at that grand table d’hôte a
venerable old blind man, who had been a sailor, sat at the shanty door,
secured from the blazing sun by the shade of the thickly clustered grape
vines, and sang: “Oh, ho! Rio! We’re bound for Rio Grande.”
He had retired, in England, from the sea many years before, and was the
father of our host, who had sent home for him and paid his passage out
to New Zealand. He was a jolly old fellow and, though over eighty years
of age, danced a hornpipe and sang, in spite of being quite blind. How
his white whiskers and red beak nose tossed as I played the fiddle and
he shuffled his feet and sang, and the boys from the next homestead, a
mile over the slopes, watched with delighted eyes.
“Avast there! Turn to!” he would say, as he asked for a bit more of
anything at the table to eat; and he loved to say that his rheumatism
had given him a twinge on his weather-side, or on his starboard-side or
his stern, as he moved his sightless eyes about and swayed, as though he
walked a rolling deck, across the shanty floor.
The last I saw of my travelling comrade the bushman was when he was
sawing poles in two and carefully measuring them with his little rule.
Several new outhouses were being built, and his friends gave him a job
for a few days. When the job was finished I have no doubt he went off
once more on the track, with his home on his back. I never heard why he
lived that life, or who he had been away back in the “has been” past,
but I took good care after my experience with him not to try and talk
philosophy or teach shabby-looking old men.
Very soon after I bade the New Zealand “bush-faller” good-bye I went off
visiting various townships with my violin and became a wandering
troubadour. I grew so well off that I was able to go on, devoid of all
worries, and see a great deal of New Zealand’s romantic scenery.
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