ACT IV

New Year’s Eve. The dance was at Buckolts’ this year, but Bertha didn’t

dance much; she was down by the gate most of the time with little Mary

Carey, waiting, and watching the long, white road, and listening for

horses’ feet, and disappointed often as other horsemen rode by or

turned up to the farm.

And in the hot sunrise that morning, within a hundred miles of Rocky

Rises, a tired, dusty drover camped in the edge of a scrub, boiled his

quart-pot, broiled a piece of mutton on the coals, and lay down on the

sand to rest an hour or so before pushing on to a cattle station he

knew to try and borrow fresh horses. He had ridden all night.

Old Buckolt and Carey and Reid smoked socially under the grape-vines,

with bottles of whisky and glasses, and nudged each other and coughed

when they wanted to laugh at Old Abel Albury, who was, for about the

first time in his life, condescending to explain. He was explaining to

them what thund’rin’ fools they had been.

Later on they sent a boy on horseback with a bottle of whisky and a

message to Ryan, who turned up in time to see the New Year in with them

and contradict certain slanders concerning the breed of his bull.

Meanwhile Bertha comforted Mary, and at last persuaded her to go home.

“He’s sure to be here to-morrow, Mary,” she said, “and you need to look

fresh and happy.”

But Mary didn’t sleep that night; she was up before daylight, had the

kettle on and some chops ready to fry, and at daybreak she was down by

the sliprails again. She was turning away for the second time when she

heard a clear whistle round the Spur—then the tune of “Willie Riley,”

and the hobble-chains and camp-ware on the packhorse jingling to the

tune.

She pulled out the rails with eager, trembling hands and leaned against

the tree. An hour later a tired drover lay on his back, in his ragged,

track-worn clothes and dusty leggings, on Mary’s own little bed in the

skillion off the living-room, and rested. Mary bustled round getting

breakfast ready, and singing softly to herself; once she slipped in,

bent over Harry and kissed him gently on the lips, and ran out as he

stirred.

“Why, who’s that?” exclaimed Uncle Abel, poking round early and

catching a glimpse of Harry through the open door.

“It’s only Harry, Uncle Abel,” said Mary.

Uncle Abel peered in again to make sure.

“Well, be sure you git the writin’s this time,” he said.

THE BUSH-FIRE

I.—SQUATTER AND SELECTOR

Wall was a squatter and a hard man. There had been long years of

drought and loss, and then came the rabbit pest—the rabbits swarmed

like flies over his run, and cropped the ground bare where even the

poor grass might have saved thousands of sheep—and the rabbits cost the

squatter hundreds of pounds in “rabbit-proof” fences, trappers’ wages,

etc., just to keep them down. Then came arrangements with the bank. And

then Wall’s wife died. Wall started to brood over other days, and the

days that had gone between, and developed a temper which drove his

children from home one by one, till only Mary was left. She managed the

lonely home with the help of a half-caste. Then in good seasons came

the selectors.

Men remembered Wall as a grand boss and a good fellow, but that was in

the days before rabbits and banks, and syndicates and “pastoralists” or

pastoral companies instead of good squatters. Runs were mostly pastoral

leases for which the squatter paid the Government so much per square

mile (almost a nominal rent). Selections were small holdings taken up

by farmers under residential and other conditions and paid for by

instalments. If you were not ruined by the drought, and paid up long

enough, the land became freehold. The writer is heir to a dusty patch

of three hundred acres or so in the scrub which was taken up thirty

years ago and isn’t freehold yet.

Selectors were allowed to take up land on runs or pastoral leases as

well as on unoccupied Crown lands, and as they secured the best bits of

land, and on water frontages if they could, and as, of course,

selections reduced the area of the run, the squatters loved selectors

like elder brothers. One man is allowed to select only a certain amount

of land, and required by law to live on it, so the squatters bought as

much freehold about the homestead as they could afford, selected as

much as they are allowed to by law, and sometimes employed “dummy”

selectors to take up choice bits about the runs and hold them for them.

They fought selectors in many various ways, and, in some cases, annoyed

and persecuted them with devilish ingenuity.

Ross was a selector, and a very hard man physically. He was a short,

nuggety man with black hair and frill beard (a little dusty), bushy

black eyebrows, piercing black eyes, horny knotted hands, and the

obstinacy or pluck of a dozen men to fight drought and the squatter.

Ross selected on Wall’s run, in a bend of Sandy Creek, a nice bit of

land with a black soil, flat and red soil sidings from the ridges,

which no one had noticed before, and with the help of his boys he got

the land cleared and fenced in a year or two—taking bush contracts

about the district between whiles to make “tucker” for the family until

he got his first crop off.

Wall was never accused of employing dummies, or underhanded methods in

dealings with selectors, but he had been through so much and had

brooded so long that he had grown very hard and bitter and suspicious,

and the reverse of generous—as many men do who start out in life too

soft and goodhearted and with too much faith in human nature. He was a

tall, dark man. He ordered Ross’s boys off the run, impounded Ross’s

stock—before Ross had got his fencing finished, summoned Ross for

trespass, and Ross retaliated as well as he could, until at last it

mightn’t have been safe for one of those men to have met the other with

a gun. The impounding of the selector’s cattle led to the last bad

quarrel between Wall and his son Billy, who was a tall, good-natured

Cornstalk, and who reckoned that Australia was big enough for all of

us. One day in the drought, and in an extra bitter mood, Wall heard

that some of his sheep had been dogged in the vicinity of Ross’s

selection, and he ordered Billy to take a station-hand and watch Ross’s

place all night, and, if Ross’s cattle put their noses over the

boundary, to drive them to the pound, fifteen miles away; also to lay

poisoned baits for the dogs all round the selection. And Billy flatly

refused.

“I know Ross and the boys,” he said, “and I don’t believe they dogged

the sheep. Why, they’ve only got a Newfoundland pup, and an old lame,

one-eyed sheep-dog that couldn’t hurt a flea. Now, father, this sort of

thing has been going on long enough. What difference does a few paltry

acres make to us? The country is big enough, God knows! Ross is a

straight man and—for God’s sake, give the man a chance to get his

ground fenced in; he’s doing it as fast as he can, and he can’t watch

his cattle day and night.”

“Are you going to do as I tell you, or are you not?” shouted Wall.

“Well, if it comes to that, I’m not,” said Billy. “I’m not going to

sneak round a place all night and watch for a chance to pound a poor

man’s cows.”

It was an awful row, down behind the wool-shed, and things looked so

bad that old Peter, the station-hand, who was a witness, took off his

coat and rolled up his sleeves, ready, as he said afterwards, “to roll

into” either the father or the son if one raised a hand against the

other.

“Father!” said Billy, though rather sobered by the sight of his

father’s trembling, choking passion, “do you call yourself an

Englishman?”

“Yes!” yelled Wall, furiously. “What the hell do you call yourself?”

“If it comes to that I’m an Australian,” said Billy, and he turned away

and went to catch his horse. He went up-country and knocked about in

the north-west for a year or two.

II.—ROMEO AND JULIET

Mary Wall was twenty-five. She was an Australian bush girl, every inch

of her five-foot-nine; she had a pink-and-white complexion, dark blue

eyes, blue-black hair, and “the finest figure in the district,” on

horseback or afoot. She was the best girlrider too (saddle or

bare-back), and they say that when she was a tomboy she used to tuck

her petticoats under her and gallop man-fashion through the scrub after

horses or cattle. She said she was going to be an old maid.

There came a jackaroo on a visit to the station. He was related to the

bank with which Wall had relations. He was a dude, with an expensive

education and no brains. He was very vain of his education and

prospects. He regarded Mary with undisguised admiration, and her father

had secret hopes. One evening the jackaroo was down by the

homestead-gate when Mary came cantering home on her tall chestnut. The

gate was six feet or more, and the jackaroo raised his hat and hastened

to open it, but Mary reined her horse back a few yards and the “dood”

had barely time to jump aside when there was a scuffle of hoofs on the

road, a “Ha-ha-ha!” in mid-air, a landing thud, and the girl was away

up the home-track in a cloud of dust.

A few days later the jackaroo happened to be at Kelly’s, a wayside

shanty, watching a fight between two bushmen, when Mary rode up. She

knew the men. She whipped her horse in between them and struck at first

one and then the other with her riding-whip.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!” she said; “and both married

men, too!”

It evidently struck them that way, for after a bit they shook hands and

went home.

“And I wouldn’t have married that girl for a thousand pounds,” said the

jackaroo, relating the incidents to some friends in Sydney.

Mary said she wanted a man, if she could get one.

There was no life at home nowadays, so Mary went to all the bush dances

in the district. She thought nothing of riding twenty or thirty miles

to a dance, dancing all night, and riding home again next morning. At

one of these dances she met young Robert Ross, a clean-limbed,

good-looking young fellow about her own age. She danced with him and

liked him, and danced with him again, and he rode part of the way home

with her. The subject of the quarrel between the two homes came up

gradually.

“The boss,” said Robert, meaning his father, “the boss is always ready

to let bygones be bygones. It’s a pity it couldn’t be fixed up.”

“Yes,” said Mary, looking at him (Bob looked very well on horseback),

“it is a pity.”

They met several times, and next Prince of Wales’s birthday they rode

home from the races together. Both had good horses, and they happened

to be far ahead of the others on the wide, straight clear road that ran

between the walls of the scrub. Along, about dusk, they became very

confidential indeed—Mary had remarked what a sad and beautiful sunset

it was. The horses got confidential, too, and shouldered together, and

touched noses, and, after a long interval in the conversation, during

which Robert, for one, began to breathe quickly, he suddenly leaned

over, put his arm round her waist and made to kiss her. She jerked her

body away, threw up her whiphand, and Robert ducked instinctively; but

she brought her whip down on her horse’s flank instead, and raced

ahead. Robert followed—or, rather, his horse did: he thought it was a

race, and took the bit in his teeth. Robert kept calling, appealing:

“Wait a while, Mary! I want to explain! I want to apologize! For God’s

sake listen to me, Mary!”

But Mary didn’t hear him. Perhaps she misunderstood the reason of the

chase and gave him credit for a spice of the devil in his nature. But

Robert grew really desperate; he felt that the thing must be fixed up

now or never, and gave his horse a free rein. Her horse was the

fastest, and Robert galloped in the dust from his heels for about a

mile and a half; then at the foot of a rise Mary’s horse stumbled and

nearly threw her over his head, and then he stopped like the good horse

he was.

Robert got down feeling instinctively that he might best make his peace

on foot, and approached Mary with a face of misery—she had dropped her

whip.

“Oh, Bob!” she said, “I’m knocked out;” and she slipped down into his

arms and stayed there a while.

They sat on a log and rested, while their horses made inquiries of each

other’s noses, and compared notes.

And after a good while Mary said “No, Bob, it’s no use talking of

marrying just yet. I like you, Bob, but I could never marry you while

things are as they are between your father and mine. Now, that’ll do.

Let me get on my horse, Bob. I’ll be safer there.”

“Why?” asked Bob.

“Come on, Bob, and don’t be stupid.”

She met him often and “liked” him.

III.—A TRAMP’S MATCH AND WHAT IT DID

It was Christmas Eve at Wall’s, but there was no score or so of buggies

and horses and dozens of strange dogs round the place as of old. The

glasses and decanters were dusty on the heavy old-fashioned sideboard

in the dining-room; and there was only a sullen, brooding man leaning

over the hurdles and looking at his rams in the yard, and a sullen,

brooding half-caste at work in the kitchen. Mary had ridden away that

morning to visit a girl chum.

It was towards the end of a long drought, and the country was like

tinder for hundreds of miles round—the ground for miles and miles in

the broiling scrubs “as bare as your hand,” or covered with coarse, dry

tufts. There was feed grass in places, but you had to look close to see

it.

Shearing had finished the day before, but there was a black boy and a

station-hand or two about the yards and six or eight shearers and

rouseabouts, and a teamster camped in the men’s huts—they were staying

over the holidays to shear stragglers and clean up generally. Old Peter

and a jackaroo were out on the run watching a bush-fire across Sandy

Creek.

A swagman had happened to call at the station that morning; he asked

for work and then for tucker. He irritated Wall, who told him to clear

out. It was the first time that a swagman had been turned away from the

station without tucker.

Swaggy went along the track some miles, brooding over his wrongs, and

crossed Sandy Creek. He struck a match and dropped it into a convenient

tuft of grass in a likely patch of tufts, with dead grass running from

it up into the scrubby ridges—then he hurried on.

Did you ever see a bush-fire? Not sheets of flame sweeping and roaring

from tree-top to tree-top, but the snaky, hissing grass-fire of

hardwood country.

The whole country covered with thin blue smoke so that you never know

in what direction the fire is travelling. At night you see it like the

lighted streets of cities, in the distant ranges. It roars up the

hollows of dead trees and gives them the appearance of factory chimneys

in the dusk. It climbs, by shreds of bark, the trunks of old dead

white-box and blue-gums—solid and hard as cast-iron—and cuts off the

limbs. And where there’s a piece of recently ringbarked country, with

the dead leaves still on the trees, the fire will roar from bough to

bough—a fair imitation of a softwood forest fire. The bush-fire travels

through the scrubs for hundreds of miles, taking the grass to the

roots, scorching the living bush but leaving it alive—for gumbush is

hardest of any to kill. Where there is no undergrowth, and the country

seems bare as a road for miles, the fire will cross, licking up

invisible straws of grass, dusty leaves, twigs and shreds of bark on

the hard ground already baking in the drought. You hear of a fire miles

away, and next day, riding across the head of a gully, you hear a

hissing and crackling and there is the fire running over the ground in

lines and curves of thin blue smoke, snakelike, with old logs blazing

on the blackened ground behind. Did you ever _hear_ a fire where a fire

should not be? There is something hellish in the sound of it. When the

breeze is, say, from the east the fire runs round western spurs, up

sheltered gullies—helped by an “eddy” in the wind perhaps—and appears

along the top of the ridge, ready, with a change in the wind, to come

down on farms and fields of ripe wheat, with a “front” miles long.

A selector might be protected by a wide sandy creek in front and wide

cleared roads behind, and, any hour in the day or night, a shout from

the farther end of the wheat paddock, and—“Oh, my God! the wheat!”

Wall didn’t mind this fire much; most of his sheep were on their way

out back, to a back run where there was young grass; and the dry ridges

along the creek would be better for a burning-off—only he had to watch

his fences.

But, about dusk, Mary came galloping home in her usual breakneck

fashion.

“Father,” she cried, “turn out the men and send them at once. The fire

is all down by Ross’s farm, and he has ten acres of wheat standing, and

no one at home but him and Bob.”

“How do you know?” growled Wall. Then suddenly and suspiciously, “Have

you been there?”

“I came home that way.”

“Well—let Ross look after his own,” snarled the father.

“But he can’t, father. They’re fighting the fire now, and they’ll be

burnt out before the morning if they don’t get help—for God’s sake,

father, act like a Christian and send the men. Remember it is

Christmas-time, father. You’re surely not going to see a neighbour

burnt out.”

“Yes, I am,” shouted Wall. “I’d like to see every selector in the

country burnt out, hut and all! Get off that horse and go inside. If a

man leaves the station to-night he needn’t come back.” (This last for

the benefit of the men’s hut.)

“But, father—”

“Get off that horse and go inside,” roared Wall.

“I—I won’t.”

“What!” He darted forward as though to drag her from the saddle, but

she swung her horse away.

“Stop! Where are you going?”

“To help Ross,” said Mary. “He had no one to send for help.”

“Then go the same way as your brother!” roared her father; “and if you

show your nose back again I’ll horse-whip you off the run!”

“I’ll go, father,” said Mary, and she was away.

IV.—THE FIRE AT ROSS’S FARM

Ross’s farm was in a corner between the ridges and the creek. The fire

had come down from the creek, but the siding on that side was fairly

clear, and they had stopped the fire there. It went behind the ridge

and ran up and over. The ridge was covered thickly with scrub and dead

grass; the wheat-field went well up the siding, and along the top was a

bush face with only a narrow bridle-track between it and the long dead

grass. Everything depended on the wind. Mary saw Ross and Mrs Ross and

the daughter Jenny, well up the siding above the fence, working

desperately, running to and fro, and beating out the fire with green

boughs. Mary left her horse, ran into the hut, and looked hurriedly

round for something to wear in place of her riding-skirt. She only saw

a couple of light print dresses. She stepped into a skillion room,

which happened to be Bob’s room, and there caught sight of a pair of

trousers and a coat hanging on the wall.

Bob Ross, beating desperately along a line of fire that curved

down-hill to his right, and half-choked and blinded with the smoke,

almost stumbled against a figure which was too tall to be his father.

“Why! who’s that?” he gasped.

“It’s only me, Bob,” said Mary, and she lifted her bough again.

Bob stared. He was so astonished that he almost forgot the fire and the

wheat. Bob was not thin—but—

“Don’t look at me, Bob!” said Mary, hurriedly. “We’re going to be

married, so it doesn’t matter. Let us save the wheat.”

There was no time to waste; there was a breeze now from over the

ridges, light, but enough to bear the fire down on them. Once, when

they had breathing space, Mary ran to the creek for a billy of water.

They beat out the fire all along the siding to where a rib of granite

came down over the ridge to the fence, and then they thought the wheat

was safe. They came together here, and Ross had time to look and see

who the strange man was; then he stared at Mary from under his black,

bushy eyebrows. Mary, choking and getting her breath after her

exertions, suddenly became aware, said “Oh!” and fled round the track

beyond the point of granite. She felt a gust of wind and looked up the

ridge. The bush fence ended here in a corner, where it was met by a new

wire fence running up from the creek. It was a blind gully full of tall

dead grass, and, glancing up, Mary saw the flames coming down fast. She

ran back.

“Come on!” she cried, “come on! The fire’s the other side of the

rocks!”

Back at the station, Wall walked up and down till he cooled. He went

inside and sat down, but it was no use. He lifted his head and saw his

dead wife’s portrait on the wall. Perhaps his whole life ran before him

in detail—but this is not a psychological study.

There were only two tracks open to him now: either to give in, or go on

as he was going—to shut himself out from human nature and become known

as “Mean Wall,” “Hungry Wall,” or “Mad Wall, the Squatter.” He was a

tall, dark man of strong imagination and more than ordinary

intelligence. And it was the great crisis of his ruined life. He walked

to the top of a knoll near the homestead and saw the fire on the ridges

above Ross’s farm. As he turned back he saw a horseman ride up and

dismount by the yard.

“Is that you, Peter?”

“Yes, boss. The fences is all right.”

“Been near Ross’s?”

“No. He’s burnt out by this time.”

Wall walked to and fro for a few minutes longer. Then he suddenly

stopped and called, “Peter!”

“Ay, ay!” from the direction of the huts.

“Turn out the men!” and Wall went into a shed and came out with his

saddle on his arm.

The fire rushed down the blind gully. Showers of sparks fell on the

bush fence, it caught twice, and they put it out, but the third time it

blazed and roared and a fire-engine could not have stopped it.

“The wheat must go,” said Ross. “We’ve done our best,” and he threw

down the blackened bough and leaned against a tree, and covered his

eyes with a grimy hand.

The wheat was patchy in that corner—there were many old stumps of

trees, and there were bare strips where the plough had gone on each

side of them. Mary saw a chance, and climbed the fence.

“Come on, Bob,” she cried, “we might save it yet. Mr Ross, pull out the

fence along there,” and she indicated a point beyond the fire. They

tramped down and tore up the wheat where it ran between the stumps—the

fire was hissing and crackling round and through it, and just as it ran

past them in one place there was a shout, a clatter of horses’ hoofs on

the stones, and Mary saw her father riding up the track with a dozen

men behind him. She gave a shriek and ran straight down, through the

middle of the wheat, towards the hut.

Wall and his men jumped to the ground, wrenched green boughs from the

saplings, and, after twenty minutes’ hard fighting, the crop was

saved—save for a patchy acre or so. When it was all over Ross sat down

on a log and rested his head on his hands, and his shoulders shook.

Presently he felt a hand on his shoulder, looked up, and saw Wall.

“Shake hands, Ross,” he said.

And it was Christmas Day.

But in after years they used to nearly chaff the life out of Mary. “You

were in a great hurry to put on the breeches, weren’t you, Mary?”

“Bob’s best Sunday-go-meetin’s, too, wasn’t they, Mary?” “Rather tight

fit, wasn’t they, Mary?” “Couldn’t get ’em on now, could you, Mary?”

“But,” reflected old Peter apart to some cronies, “it ain’t every young

chap as gits an idea of the shape of his wife afore he marries her—is

it? An’ that’s sayin’ somethin’.”

And old Peter was set down as being an innercent sort of ole cove.

THE HOUSE THAT WAS NEVER BUILT

There had been heavy rain and landslips all along the branch railway

which left the Great Western Line from Sydney just beyond the Blue

Mountains, and ran through thick bush and scrubby ridgy country and

along great alluvial sidings—were the hills on the opposite side of the

wide valleys (misty in depths) faded from deep blue into the pale azure

of the sky—and over the ends of western spurs to the little farming,

mining and pastoral town of Solong, situated in a circle of blue hills

on the banks of the willow-fringed Cudgegong River.

The line was hopelessly blocked, and some publicans at Solong had put

on the old coach-road a couple of buggies, a wagonette, and an old mail

coach—relic of the days of Cobb & Co., which had been resurrected from

some backyard and tinkered up—to bring the train passengers on from the

first break in the line over the remaining distance of forty miles or

so. Capertee Station (old time, “Capertee Camp”—a teamster’s camp) was

the last station before the first washout, and there the railway line

and the old road parted company for the last time before reaching

Solong—the one to run round by the ends of the western spurs that

spread fanlike, and the other to go through and over, the rough

country.

The train reached Capertee about midnight in broad moonlight that was

misty in the valleys and round the blue of Crown Ridge. I got a

“box-seat” beside the driver on the old coach. It was a grand old

road—one of the old main coach-roads of New South Wales—broad and

white, metalled nearly all the way, and in nearly as good condition as

on the day when the first passenger train ran into Solong and the

last-used section of the old road was abandoned. It dated back to the

bushranging days—right back to convict times: it ran through tall dark

bush, up over gaps or “saddles” in high ridges, down across deep dark

gullies, and here and there across grey, marshy, curlew-haunted flats.

Cobb & Co’s coach-and-six, with “Royal Mail” gilded on the panels, had

dashed over it in ten and twelve-mile stages in the old days, the three

head-lamps flashing on the wild dark bush at night, and maybe

twenty-four passengers on board. The biggest rushes to richest

goldfields in the west had gone over this old road on coaches, on

carts, on drays, on horse and bullock wagons, on horseback, and on

foot; new chums from all the world and from all stations in life.

When many a step was on the mountains,

Marching west to the land of gold.

And a few came back rich—red, round-faced and jolly—on the box-seat of

Cobb & Co’s, treating the driver and all hands, “going home” to

sweethearts or families. (Home people will never feel the meaning of

those two words, “going home,” as it is felt in a new land.) And many

came back broken men, tramping in rags, and carrying their swags

through the dusty heat of the drought in December or the bitter,

pelting rain in the mountains in June. Some came back grey who went as

boys; and there were many who never came back.

I remembered the old mile-trees, with a section of bark cut away and

the distances cut in Roman letters in the hardened sap—the distance

from Bowenfels, the railway terminus then. It was a ghostly old road,

and if it wasn’t haunted it should have been. There was an old decaying

and nearly deserted coaching town or two; there were abandoned farms

and halfway inns, built of stone, with the roofs gone and nettles

growing high between the walls; the remains of an orchard here and

there—a few gnarled quince-trees—and the bush reclaiming its own again.

It was a haunted ride for me, because I had last ridden over this old

road long ago when I was young—going to see the city for the first

time—and because I was now on my way to attend the funeral of one of my

father’s blood from whom t had parted in anger.

We slowly climbed, and almost as slowly descended, the steep siding of

a great hill called Aaron’s Pass, and about a mile beyond the foot of

the hill I saw a spot I remembered passing on the last journey down,

long ago. Rising back from the road, and walled by heavy bush, was a

square clearing, and in the background I saw plainly, by the broad

moonlight, the stone foundations for a large house; from the front an

avenue of grown pines came down to the road.

“Why!” I exclaimed, turning to the driver, “was that house burnt down?”

“No,” he said slowly. “That house was never built.”

I stared at the place again and caught sight of a ghostly-looking light

between the lines of the foundations, which I presently made out to be

a light in a tent.

“There’s someone camping there,” I said.

“Yes,” said the driver, “some old swaggy or ‘hatter.’ I seen him comin’

down. I don’t know nothing about that there place.” (I hadn’t “shouted”

for him yet.)

I thought and remembered. I remembered myself, as a boy, being sent a

coach journey along this road to visit some relatives in Sydney. We

passed this place, and the women in the coach began to talk of the fine

house that was going to be built there. The ground was being levelled

for the foundations, and young pines had been planted, with stakes

round them to protect them from the cattle. I remembered being mightily

interested in the place, for the women said that the house was to be a

two-storied one. I thought it would be a wonderful thing to see a

two-storied house there in the bush. The height of my ambition was to

live in a house with stairs in it. The women said that this house was

being built for young Brassington, the son of the biggest squatter then

in the district, who was going to marry the daughter of the next

biggest squatter. That was all I remember hearing the women say.

Three or four miles along the road was a public-house, with a post

office, general store, and blacksmith shop attached, as is usual in

such places—all that was left of the old pastoral and coaching town of

Ilford. I “shouted” for the driver at the shanty, but got nothing

further out of him concerning the fate of the house that was never

built. I wanted that house for a story.

However, while yarning with some old residents at Solong, I mentioned

the Brassingtons, and picked up a few first links in the story. The

young couple were married and went to Sydney for their honeymoon. The

story went that they intended to take a trip to the old country and

Paris, to be away a twelve-month, and the house was to be finished and

ready for them on their return. Young Brassington himself had a big

sheep-run round there. The railway wasn’t thought of in those days, or

if it was, no Brassington could have dreamed that the line could have

been brought to Solong in any other direction than through the property

of the “Big Brassingtons,” as they were called. Well, the young couple

went to Sydney, but whether they went farther the old residents did not

know. All they knew was that within a few weeks, and before the stone

foundations for the brick walls of the house were completed, the

building contract was cancelled, the workmen were dismissed, and the

place was left as I last saw it; only the ornamental pines had now

grown to trees. The Brassingtons and the bride’s people were English

families and reserved. They kept the story, if there was a story, to

themselves. The girl’s people left the district and squatted on new

stations up-country. The Big Brassingtons came down in the world and

drifted to the city, as many smaller people do, more and more every

year. Neither young Brassington nor his wife was ever again seen or

heard of in the district.

I attended my relative’s funeral, and next day started back for Sydney.

Just as we reached Ilford, as it happened, the pin of the fore

under-carriage of the coach broke, and it took the blacksmith several

hours to set it right. The place was dull, the publican was not

communicative—or else he harped on the old local grievance of the

railway not having come that way—so about half an hour before I thought

the coach would be ready, I walked on along the road to stretch by

legs. I walked on and on until I came, almost unaware, to the site of

the house that was never built. The tent was still there, in fact, it

was a permanent camp, and I was rather surprised to see the man working

with a trowel on a corner of the unfinished foundations of the house.

At first I thought he was going to build a stone hut in the corner, but

when I got close to him I saw that he was working carefully on the

original plan of the building: he was building the unfinished parts of

the foundation walls up to the required height. He had bricklayer’s

tools, a bag of lime, and a heap of sand, and had worked up a

considerable quantity of mortar. It was a rubble foundation: he was

knocking off the thin end of a piece of stone to make it fit, and the

clanging of the trowel prevented his hearing my footsteps.

“Good day, mate,” I said, close beside him.

I half expected he’d start when I spoke, but he didn’t: he looked round

slowly, but with a haunted look in his eyes as if I might have been one

of his ghosts. He was a tall man, gaunt and haggard-eyed, as many men

are in the bush; he may have been but little past middle age, and grey

before his time.

“Good day,” he said, and he set the stone in its place, carefully flush

with the outer edge of the wall, before he spoke again. Then he looked

at the sun, which was low, laid down his trowel, and asked me to come

to the tent-fire. “It’s turning chilly,” he said. It was a model camp,

everything clean and neat both inside the tent and out; he had made a

stone fireplace with a bark shelter over it, and a table and bench

under another little shed, with shelves for his tin cups and plates and

cooking utensils. He put a box in front of the fire and folded a

flour-bag on top of it for a seat for me, and hung the billy over the

fire. He sat on his heels and poked the burning sticks, abstractedly I

thought, or to keep his hands and thoughts steady.

“I see you’re doing a bit of building,” I said.

“Yes,” he said, keeping his eyes on the fire; “I’m getting on with it

slowly.”

I don’t suppose he looked at me half a dozen times the whole while I

was in his camp. When he spoke he talked just as if he were sitting

yarning in a row of half a dozen of us. Presently he said suddenly, and

giving the fire a vicious dig with his poker:

“That house must be finished by Christmas.”

“Why?” I asked, taken by surprise. “What’s the hurry?”

“Because,” he said, “I’m going to be married in the New Year—to the

best and dearest girl in the bush.”

There was an awkward pause on my part, but presently I pulled myself

together.

“You’ll never finish it by yourself,” I said. “Why don’t you put on

some men?”

“Because,” he said, “I can’t trust them. Besides, how am I to get

bricklayers and carpenters in a place like this?”

I noticed all through that his madness or the past in his mind was

mixed up with the real and the present.

“Couldn’t you postpone the marriage?” I asked.

“No!” he exclaimed, starting to his feet. “No!” and he looked round

wildly on the darkening bush. There was madness in his tone that time,

the last “No!” sounding as if from a man who was begging for his life.

“Couldn’t you run up a shanty then, to live in until the house is

ready?” I suggested, to soothe him.

He gave his arm an impatient swing. “Do you think I’d ask that girl to

live in a hut?” he said. “She ought to live in a palace!”

There seemed no way out of it, so I said nothing: he turned his back

and stood looking away over the dark, low-lying sweep of bush towards

sunset. He folded his arms tight, and seemed to me to be holding

himself. After a while he let fall his arms and turned and blinked at

me and the fire like a man just woke from a doze or rousing himself out

of a deep reverie.

“Oh, I almost forgot the billy!” he said. “I’ll make some tea—you must

be hungry.”

He made the tea and fried a couple of slices of ham; he laid the

biggest slice on a thick slice of white baker’s bread on a tin plate,

and put it and a pint-pot full of tea on a box by my side. “Have it

here, by the fire,” he said; “it’s warmer and more comfortable.”

I took the plate on my knee, and I must say I thoroughly enjoyed that

meal. The bracing mountain air and the walk had made me hungry. The

hatter had his meal standing up, cutting his ham on a slice of bread

with a clasp-knife. It was bush fashion, and set me thinking of some

old times. He ate very little, and, as far as I saw, he didn’t smoke.

Non-smokers are very scarce in the bush.

I saw by the way his tent was pitched and his camp arranged generally,

and by the way he managed the cooking, that he must have knocked about

the bush for some years.

He put the plates and things away and came and sat down on the other

empty gin-case by my side, and fell to poking the fire again. He never

showed the least curiosity as to who I was, or where I came from, or

what I was doing on this deserted track: he seemed to take me as a

matter of course—but all this was in keeping with bush life in general.

Presently he got up and stood looking upwards over the place where the

house should have been.

“I think now,” he said slowly, “I made a mistake in not having the

verandas carried all round the house.”

“I—I beg pardon!”

“I should have had the balcony all round instead of on two sides only,

as the man who made the plan suggested; it would have looked better and

made the house cooler in summer.”

I thought as I listened, and presently I saw that it was a case of

madness within madness, so to speak: he was mad on the idea that he

could build the house himself, and then he had moods when he imagined

that the house had been built and he had been married and had reared a

family.

“You could easily get the balcony carried round,” I said; “it wouldn’t

cost much—you can get good carpenters at Solong.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll have it done after Christmas.” Then he turned

from the house and blinked down at me. “I am sorry,” he said, “that

there’s no one at home. I sent the wife and family to Sydney for a

change. I’ve got the two boys at the Sydney Grammar School. I think

I’ll send the eldest to King’s School at Parramatta. The girls will

have to get along with a governess at home and learn to help their

mother—”

And so he went on talking away just as a man who has made money in the

bush, and is married and settled down, might yarn to an old bachelor

bush mate.

“I suppose I’ll have to get a good piano,” he went on. “The girls must

have some amusement: there’ll be no end of balls and parties. I suppose

the boys will soon be talking of getting ‘fivers’ and ‘tenners’ out of

the ‘guvner’ or ‘old man.’ It’s the way of the world. And they’ll marry

and leave us. It’s the way of the world—”

It was awful to hear him go on like this, the more so because he never

smiled—just talked on as if he had said the same thing over and over

again. Presently he stopped, and his eyes and hands began to wander: he

sat down on his heel to the fire again and started poking it. I began

to feel uneasy; I didn’t know what other sides there might be to his

madness, and wished the coach would come along.

“You’ve knocked about the bush a good deal?” I asked. I couldn’t think

of anything else to say, and I thought he might break loose if I let

him brood too long.

“Yes,” he said, “I have.”

“Been in Queensland and the Gulf country, I suppose?”

“I have.”

His tone and manner seemed a bit more natural. He had knocked about

pretty well all over Australia, and had been in many places where I had

been. I had got him on the right track, and after a bit he started

telling bush yarns and experiences, some of them awful, some of them

very funny, and all of them short and good; and now and then, looking

at the side of his face, which was all he turned to me, I thought I

detected the ghost of a smile.

One thing I noticed about him; when he spoke as a madman, he talked

like a man who had been fairly well educated (or sometimes, I fancied,

like a young fellow who was studying to be a school-teacher); his

speech was deliberate and his grammar painfully correct—far more so

than I have made it; but when he spoke as an old bushman, he dropped

his g’s and often turned his grammar back to front. But that reminds me

that I have met English college men who did the same thing after being

a few years in the bush; either they dropped their particular way of

speaking because it was mimicked, because they were laughed and chaffed

out of it, or they fell gradually into the habit of talking as rough

bushmen do (they learnt Australian), as clean-mouthed men fall, in

spite of themselves, into the habit of swearing in the heat and hurry

and rough life of a shearing-shed. And, coming back into civilized

life, these men, who had been well brought up, drop into their old

manner and style of speaking as readily as the foulest-mouthed man in a

shed or camp—who, amongst his fellows, cannot say three words without

an oath—can, when he finds himself in a decent home in the

woman-and-girl world, yarn by the hour without letting slip a solitary

little damn.

The hatter warmed up the tea-billy again, got out some currant buns,

which he had baked himself in the camp-oven, and we were yarning

comfortably like two old bushmen, and I had almost forgotten that he

was “ratty,” when we heard the coach coming. I jumped up to hurry down

to the road. This seemed to shake him up. He gripped my hand hard and

glanced round in his frightened, haunted way. I never saw the eyes of a

man look so hopeless and helpless as his did just then.

“I’m sorry you’re going,” he said, in a hurried way. “I’m sorry you’re

going. But—but they all go. Come again, come again—we’ll all be glad to

see you.”

I had to hurry off and leave him. “We all,” I suppose, meant himself

and his ghosts.

I ran down between the two rows of pines and reached the road just as

the coach came up. I found the publican from Ilford aboard—he was

taking a trip to Sydney. As the coach went on I looked up the clearing

and saw the hatter standing straight behind the fire, with his arms

folded and his face turned in our direction. He looked ghastly in the

firelight, and at that distance his face seemed to have an expression

of listening blindness. I looked round on the dark bush, with, away to

the left, the last glow of sunset fading from the bed of it, like a bed

of reddening coals, and I looked up at the black loom of Aaron’s Pass,

and thought that never a man, sane or mad, was left in such a depth of

gloomy loneliness.

“I see you’ve been yarning with him yonder,” said the publican, who

seemed to have relaxed wonderfully.

“Yes.”

“You know these parts, don’t you?”

“Yes. I was about here as a boy.”

He asked me what my name might be. I told him it was Smith. He blinked

a while.

“I never heard of anyone by the name of Smith in the district,” he

said.

Neither had I. I told him that we lived at Solong, and didn’t stay

long. It saved time.

“Ever heard of the Big Brassingtons?”

“Yes.”

“Ever heard the yarn of the house that wasn’t built?”

I told him how much I had heard of it.

“And that’s about all any on ’em knows. Have you any idea who that man

back yonder is?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, who do you think it is?”

“He is, or rather he was, young Brassington.”

“You’ve hit it!” said the publican. “I know—and a few others.”

“And do you know what became of his wife?” I asked.

“I do,” said the shanty-keeper, who had a generous supply of whisky

with him, and seemed to have begun to fill himself up for the trip.

He said no more for a while, and when I had remained silent long

enough, he went on, very deliberately and impressively:

“One yarn is that the girl wasn’t any good; that when she was married

to Brassington, and as soon as they got to Sydney, she met a chap she’d

been carrying on with before she married Brassington (or that she’d

been married to in secret), an’ she cleared off with him, leaving her

fortnight-old husband. That was one yarn.”

“Was it?” I said.

“Yes,” said the publican. “That yarn was a lie.” He opened a flask of

whisky and passed it round.

“There was madness in the family,” he said, after a nip.

“Whose?” I asked. “Brassington’s?”

“No,” said the publican, in a tone that implied contempt at my

ignorance, in spite of its innocence, “the girl’s. Her mother had been

in a ’sylum, and so had her grandmother. It was—it was heridited. Some

madnesses is heridited, an’ some comes through worry and hard graft

(that’s mine), an’ some comes through drink, and some through worse,

and, but as far as I’ve heard, all madnesses is pretty much the same.

My old man was a warder in a ’sylum. They have their madnesses a bit

different, the same as boozers has their d.t.’s different; but, takin’

it by the lump, it’s pretty much all the same. The difference is

accordin’ to their natures when they’re sane. All men are—”

“But about young Mrs Brassington,” I interrupted.

“Young Mrs Brassington? Rosy Webb she was, daughter of Webb the

squatter. Rosy was the brightest, best, good-heartedest, an’ most

ladylike little girl in the district, an’ the heriditry business come

on her in Sydney, about a week after she was married to young

Brassington. She was only twenty. Here—” He passed the flask round.

“And what happened?” I asked.

“What happened?” he repeated. Then he pulled himself together, as if

conscious that he had shown signs of whisky. “Everything was done, but

it was no use. She died in a year in a ’sylum.”

“How do you know that?”

“How do I know that?” he repeated in a tone of contempt. “How do I know

that? Well, I’ll tell you how. _My old wife_ was in service at

Brassington’s station at the time—the oldest servant—an’ young

Brassington wired to her from Sydney to come and help him in his

trouble. Old Mrs Brassington was bedridden, an’ they kep’ it from her.”

“And about young Brassington?”

“About young Brassington? He took a swag an’ wandered through the bush.

We’ve had him at our place several times all these years, but he always

wandered off again. My old woman tried everything with him, but it was

all no use. Years ago she used to get him to talk of things as they

was, in hopes of bringin’ his mind back, but he was always worse after.

She does all she can for him even now, but he’s mighty independent. The

last five or six years he’s been taken with the idea of buildin’ that

cursed house. He’ll stay there till he gets short of money, an’ then

he’ll go out back, shearin’, stock-ridin’, drovin’, cookin’,

fencin’—anything till he gets a few pounds. Then he’ll settle down and

build away at that bloody house. He’s knocked about so much that he’s a

regular old bushman. While he’s an old bushman he’s all right an’

amusin’ an’ good company;—but when he’s Brassington he’s mad—Don’t you

ever let on to my old woman that I told you. I allers let my tongue run

a bit when I get out of that hole we’re living in. We’ve kept the

secret all these years, but what does it matter now?—I ask you.”

“It doesn’t matter much,” I said.

“Nothing matters much, it seems to me, nothing matters a damn. The Big

Brassingtons come down years ago; the old people’s gone, and the young

scattered God knows where or how. The Webbs (the girl’s people) are

away up in new country, an’ the girls (they was mostly all girls) are

married an’ settled down by this time. We kept the secret, an’ the

Webbs kept the secret—even when the dirty yarns was goin’ round—so’s

not to spoil the chances of the other girls. What about the chances of

their husbands? Some on ’em might be in the same hell as Brassington

for all I know. The Brassingtons kept the secret because I suppose they

reckoned it didn’t matter much. Nothing matters much in this world—”

But I was thinking of another young couple who had married long ago,

whose married life was twenty long years of shameful quarrels, of

useless brutal recrimination—not because either was bad, but because

their natures were too much alike; of the house that was built, of the

family that was reared, of the sons and daughters who “went wrong,” of

the father and mother separated after twenty years, of the mother dead

of a broken heart, of the father (in a lunatic asylum), whose mania was

not to build houses, but to obtain and secrete matches for the purpose

of burning houses down.

“BARNEY, TAKE ME HOME AGAIN”

This is a sketch of one of the many ways in which a young married

woman, who is naturally thick-skinned and selfish—as most women are—and

who thinks she loves her husband, can spoil his life because he happens

to be good-natured, generous, sensitive, weak or soft, whichever you

like to call it.

Johnson went out to Australia a good many years ago with his young wife

and two children, as assisted emigrants. He should have left his wife

and children with her mother, in a street off City Road, N., and gone

out by himself and got settled down comfortably and strengthened in the

glorious climate and democratic atmosphere of Australia, and in the

knowledge that he could worry along a while without his wife, before

sending for her. That bit of knowledge would have done her good also,

and it would have been better for both of them. But no man knows the

future, and few can prescribe for their own wives. If we saw our

married lives as others see them, half of us would get divorced. But

Johnson was sentimental, he could not bear to part from his wife for a

little while. Moreover, man is instinctively against leaving his wife

behind; it may be either a natural or a cowardly instinct-but we won’t

argue that. I don’t believe that Johnson was a coward in that

direction; I believe that he trusted his wife implicitly, or rather

that he never dreamed of such a thing—as is the way with most married

men. Sentiment is selfishness, perhaps, but we won’t argue that, such

arguments come to nothing.

I heard from a fellow-passenger of Johnson’s that he had “a hell of a

voyage” because of his young wife’s ignorant selfishness and his own

sensitiveness; he bribed stewards for better food and accommodation for

his wife and children, paid the stewardess to help with the children,

got neither rest, nor peace, nor thanks for himself, and landed in

Sydney a nervous wreck, with five pounds out of the ten he started

with.

Johnson was a carpenter. He got work from a firm of contractors in

Sydney, who, after giving him a fortnight’s trial, sent him up-country

to work on the railway station buildings, at the little pastoral mining

and farming town of Solong. The railway having come to Solong, things

were busy in the building line, and Johnson settled there.

Johnson was thin when he came to Solong; he had landed a living

skeleton, he said, but he filled out later on. The democratic

atmosphere soothed his mind and he soon loved the place for its

unconventional hospitality. He worked hard and seemed to have plenty of

energy—he said he got it in Australia. He said that another year of the

struggle in London would have driven him mad. He fished in the river on

Saturday afternoons and Sundays, and, perhaps for the first month or

so, he thought that he had found peace. Johnson’s wife was a rather

stout, unsympathetic-looking young woman, with the knit of obstinacy in

her forehead; she had that stamp of “hardness” on her face which is the

rule amongst English and the exception amongst Australian women. We of

Solong thought her hard, selfish and narrow-minded, and paltry; later

on we thought she was a “bit touched;” but local people often think

that of strangers.

By her voice and her habit of whining she should have been a thin,

sharp-faced, untidy, draggled-tailed woman in a back street in London,

or a worn-out selector’s wife in the bush. She whined about the

climate. “It will kill the children! It will kill the children! We’ll

never rear them here!” She whined about the “wretched hole in the bush”

that her husband had brought her to; and to the women whom she

condescended to visit—because a woman must have a woman to talk to—she

exaggerated the miseries of the voyage until the thing became a

sing-song from repetition. Later on she settled down to endless

accounts of her home in London, of her mother and sisters, of the way

they lived. “And I’ll never see it any more. I’ll never see them any

more.”

The Solong climate was reckoned the best in Australia; the “wretched

hole” was a pretty little town on the banks of a clear, willow-bordered

river, with vineyards on the slopes, and surrounded by a circle of blue

hills and peaks. We knew nothing of London, so she had her own way

there.

“She’ll feel a bit lonely at first, but she’ll soon get used to

Australia,” said Johnson. He seemed to me to go out of his way to

excuse his wife.

Johnson had had a few contracts in England at one time; they had been

in “better circumstances”—that was the time she looked back to in

England; the last two years of bitter, black struggle at “home” seemed

a blank in her mind—but that’s how women jump over facts when they have

a selfish fad.

Johnson rented a cottage and garden on the bank of the sunny river. He

said he took the place because there was ivy growing on the cottage,

and it might cheer his wife; but he had lost sight of the fact that,

while he had been born in an English village, his wife had been born

and bred in London, and had probably never noticed ivy. She said it was

worse than living in a slum.

Johnson was clever at his trade, and at many other things, but his wife

didn’t seem aware of it. He was well liked, he grew to be popular, but

she didn’t seem proud of the fact; she never seemed interested in him

or his prospects. She only wanted him to take her home again. We

mustn’t forget that while he had a rush of work to occupy his mind she

had not.

But Johnson grew stouter and prospered in spite of his wife—for a year

or so. New schools were being built in the district and the town was

practically re-built. Johnson took contracts for brickwork, plumbing

and house-painting, as well as carpentering, and had at one time as

many as ten men in his employ. He was making money.

I was working at my trade then, house-painting, and worked for Johnson.

I lodged at his cottage for a while, but soon got tired of hearing

about London, and Mrs Johnson’s mother and sisters, and the house they

lived in, and the street it was in, and the parks where they used to

take their babies, and the shopping on Saturday afternoon. That woman

was terrible. She was at Johnson all the time about taking her home.

“We’ll surely be able to go home this year, Will.” “You promised to

take me home by the end of the year.” “Mother says in her last letter,

that Jack says there’s more building going on about London than ever.”

“You’ll do just as well in London as you’ll do here.” “What chance have

the children got in a hole like this?” And the rest of it—every night.

When he took a new contract, it would be, “What did you want to take

that new contract for, Will, when we’re going home? You know you

promised me you wouldn’t take any more contracts.” First he’d try to

cheer her, then he’d argue; but she’d only sit with the knit in her

forehead deep, looking as obstinate as a mule. Then she’d sit down to a

little harmonium he’d bought her and play and sing “Barney, take me

Home again,” and “The Old Folks at Home,” and “Swannie Ribber,” till I

felt like hanging myself—and I wasn’t an exile. Sometimes Johnson would

flare up and there’d be a row and he’d go to the pub. Gentle

persuasion, argument, or swearing, it was all the same with her.

Bosses and men were different towards each other in Solong to what they

are in London; besides, when I wasn’t Johnson’s sub-contractor I was

his foreman—so we often had a few drinks together; and one night over a

beer (and after a breeze at home, I think) he said to me:

“I can’t make it out, Harry; there was nothing but struggle and worry

and misery for us in England, and London was smothering me, my chest

was bad and the wife was always in ill-health; but I suppose I’ll have

to take her home in the end or else she’ll go melancholy mad!” And he

drew a breath that was more like a gasp than a sigh.

“Why not send her home for a trip, or a year or so, boss?” I asked. “As

likely as not she’ll be just as eager to get back; and that will be the

end of it.”

“I couldn’t do that, Harry,” said Johnson. “I couldn’t stay here and

work alone. It would be like beginning life again; I’ve started twice

and couldn’t start the third time. You’ll understand when you’re

married, Harry.”

Well, in the end, she wore Johnson out—or wore into him rather. He

drank more, and once or twice I saw him drinking alone. Sometimes he’d

“round on us” at work for nothing at all, and at other times he’d take

no interest in the jobs—he’d let the work go on anyhow. Some thought

that Johnson was getting too big for his boots, that’s how men are

misjudged. He grew moody and melancholy and thin again. Johnson was

homesick himself. No doubt it was the misery of his domestic life in

Australia that made him so.

Towards the end of the third or fourth year Johnson threw up a couple

of contracts he had on hand, sacrificed a piece of land which he had

bought and on which he had built a cottage in the short time he had

been in Solong, and, one lovely day in June, when the skies were their

fairest, the hills their bluest, the river its widest and clearest, and

the grass was waving waist high after rain—one blue and green and

golden day the Johnsons left Solong, with the trunks they had brought

out with them, for Sydney, _en route_ for smoky London.

Mrs Johnson was a woman transformed—she was happy and looked it. The

last few weeks she had seemed in every way the opposite of the woman we

had known: cheerful, kind to neighbours in sickness and trouble, even

generous; she made many small presents in the way of mantelshelf

ornaments, pictures, and house-linen. But then it was Johnson who had

to pay for that in the end.

He looked worn and worried at the railway station—more like himself as

he was when he first came to Solong—and as the train moved off I

thought he looked—well, frightened.

That must have been nearly twenty years ago.

London last winter. It was one of those days when London’s lurid sun

shows up for a little while like a smoky danger signal. The snow had

melted from the house-tops and the streets were as London streets are

after the first fall of snow of the season. But I could stand the flat

no longer, I had to go out and walk. I was sun-sick—I was heart-sick

for the sun, for the sunny South—for grassy plains, blue mountains,

sweeps of mountain bush and sunny ocean beaches. I walked hard; I

walked till I was mud-splashed to the shoulders; I walked through the

squalid, maddening sameness of miles of dingy, grimy-walled blocks and

rows of four-storied houses till I felt smothered—jailed, hopelessly.

“Best get home and in, and draw the blinds on it,” I said, “or my brain

will turn.”

I was about to ask a policeman where I was when I saw, by the name on a

corner of the buildings, that I was in City Road, North. All the

willow-fringed rivers and the sunny hills of Solong flashed before me

at the sight of the name of that street. I had not been able to recall

the name of the street off City Road in which the Johnsons lived,

though I had heard it often enough in the old days from the tongue of

Mrs Johnson.

I felt it would be a relief to see anyone who had been in Australia.

“Now,” I thought, “if I walk along City Road and see the name of that

street I’ll remember it”—and I did. It was a blind street, like the

long, narrow yard of a jail, walled by dark houses, all alike. The next

door but one to that at which I knocked to inquire was where the

Johnsons lived; they lived in a four-storied house, or rather a narrow

section of a four-storied terrace. I found later on that they paid the

land-lord, or nearly paid him, by letting lodgings. They lived in one

room with the use of the parlour and the kitchen when the lodgers

weren’t using them, and the son shared a room with a lodger. The back

windows looked out on the dead wall of a poorhouse of some kind, the

front on rows of similar windows opposite—rows of the same sort of

windows that run for miles and miles in London. In one a man sat

smoking in his shirtsleeves, from another a slavey leaned out watching

a fourwheeler that had stopped next door, in a third a woman sat

sewing, and in a fourth a woman was ironing, with a glimpse of a

bedstead behind her. And all outside was gloom and soot and slush.

I would never have recognized the Johnsons. I have visited them several

times since and their faces are familiar to me now, but I don’t know

whether any traces of the old likenesses worked up in my memory. I

found Johnson an old man—old and grey before his time. He had a grizzly

stubble round his chin and cheeks towards the end of the week, because

he could only afford a shave on Saturday afternoon. He was working at

some branch of his trade “in the shop” I understood, but he said he

felt the work come heavier on him every winter. “I’ve felt very poorly

this last winter or two,” he said, “very poorly indeed.” He was very

sad and gentle.

Mrs Johnson was old and thin-looking, but seemed cheerful and

energetic. Some chest trouble kept her within doors most of the winter.

“I don’t mind so long as I can manage,” she said, “but Johnson gets so

depressed.”

They seemed very kind towards each other; they spoke little of

Australia, and then only as an incident in their lives which was not of

any importance—had long been past and done with. It was all “before we

went to Australia” or “after we came back from Australia,” with Mrs

Johnson.

The son, whom I remembered as a bright, robust little fellow, was now a

tall, white-faced, clean-shaven young man, a clerk on thirty shillings

a week. He wore, on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, a tall hat and a

frock coat and overcoat made cheaply in the latest fashion, so he

couldn’t afford to help the old folk much.

“David is very extravagant,” said the old man, gently. “He won’t wear

anything when once the gloss is off it. But,” with a sad smile, “I get

the left-off overcoats.”

He took me across to see his daughter. She had married a tradesman and

they were having a hard struggle in three rooms in a workman’s

dwelling. She was twenty-five, thin, yellow, and looking ten years

older.

There were other children who had died. “I think we might have done

better for the children in Australia,” said the old man to me, sadly,

when we got outside, “but we did our best.”

We went into a hotel and had a drink. Johnson had treated last

time—twenty years before. We call treating “shouting” in Australia.

Presently Johnson let fall a word or two of Australian slang, and

brightened up wonderfully; we got back out into Australia at once and

stayed there an hour or so. Being an old man, Johnson’s memory for the

long ago was better than mine, and I picked up links; and, in return, I

told him what Solong was like now, and how some men he knew, who were

going up, had gone down, and others, who were going to the dogs in his

time, had gone up—and we philosophized. About one he’d say, “Ah, well!

who’d have thought it! I never thought that boy would come to any

good;” about another, “Ah, well! and he might have been an independent

man.” How familiar that expression sounded!—I think it is used more

often in Australia than in any other country: “He might have been an

independent man.”

When I left Johnson I felt less lonely in London, and rather humbled in

spirit. He seemed so resigned—I had never seen such gentle sadness in a

man’s eyes, nor heard it in a man’s voice. I could get back to

Australia somehow and start life again, but Johnson’s day had been dead

for many years. “Besides, assisted emigration’s done away with now,” he

said, with his sad, sad smile.

I saw the Johnsons again later on. “Things have been going very sadly

with us, very sadly indeed,” said the old man, when we’d settled down.

He had broken down at the beginning of the winter, he had dragged

himself out of bed and to work and back again until he could do so no

longer; he had been laid up most of the winter. Mrs Johnson had not

been outside the door for months.

“It comes very hard on us,” she said, “and I’m so poorly, and David out

of work, too. I wouldn’t mind if I could get about. But,” she went on

in her energetic manner, “we’ve had the house full all the winter;

we’ve had very good luck with the lodgers, all respectable people, and

one of them answers the door and that keeps me away from the draught—so

it might be worse, mightn’t it? But Johnson doesn’t seem to mend at

all, and he gets so terribly depressed. But the warm weather coming on,

etc.”

They and the Lord only knew how they managed to live, for they are

honest people and the lodgers scarcely pay the rent of the house. There

was only David between them and the poorhouse, as far as I could see.

Johnson came out with me a piece and we had a drink or two together—his

was gin hot. He talked a good deal about Australia, but sadly and

regretfully on this occasion.

“We could have done well in Australia,” he said, “very well indeed. I

might have been independent and the children well started in life. But

we did things for the best. Mrs Johnson didn’t like Australia, you

know. It was a pity we didn’t stay there, a great pity. We would have

done far better than in England. I’d go out again now if I had the

money, but I’m getting too old.”

“Would Mrs Johnson go out?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. But I’m afraid she wouldn’t stand the voyage.... Things have

been very sad with us ever since we came back to England, very sad

indeed.” And after a while he suddenly caught his breath.

“It takes me that way sometimes,” he said. “I catch my breath just as

if I was going to lose it.”

A DROVING YARN

Andy Maculloch had heard that old Bill Barker, the well-known overland

drover, had died over on the Westralian side, and Dave Regan told a

yarn about Bill.

“Bill Barker,” said Dave, talking round his pipe stem, “was the

_quintessence_ of a drover—”

“The whatter, Dave?” came the voice of Jim Bentley, in startled tones,

from the gloom on the far end of the veranda.

“The quintessence,” said Dave, taking his pipe out of his mouth. “You

shut up, Jim. As I said, Bill Barker was the quintessence of a drover.

He’d been at the game ever since he was a nipper. He run away from home

when he was fourteen and went up into Queensland. He’s been all over

Queensland and New South Wales and most of South Australia, and a good

deal of the Western, too: over the great stock routes from one end to

the other, Lord knows how many times. No man could keep up with him

riding out, and no one could bring a mob of cattle or a flock of sheep

through like him. He knew every trick of the game; if there was grass

to be had Bill’d get it, no matter whose run it was on. One of his

games in a dry season was to let his mob get boxed with the station

stock on a run where there was grass, and before Bill’s men and the

station-hands could cut ’em out, the travelling stock would have a good

bellyful to carry them on the track. Billy was the daddy of the

drovers. Some said that he could ride in his sleep, and that he had one

old horse that could jog along in his sleep too, and that—travelling

out from home to take charge of a mob of bullocks or a flock of

sheep—Bill and his horse would often wake up at daylight and blink

round to see where they were and how far they’d got. Then Bill would

make a fire and boil his quart-pot, and roast a bit of mutton, while

his horse had a mouthful of grass and a spell.

“You remember Bill, Andy? Big dark man, and a joker of the loud sort.

Never slept with a blanket over him—always folded under him on the sand

or grass. Seldom wore a coat on the route—though he always carried one

with him, in case he came across a bush ball or a funeral. Moleskins,

flannel waistcoat, cabbage-tree hat and ’lastic-side boots. When it was

roasting hot on the plains and the men swore at the heat, Jim would

yell, ‘Call this hot? Why, you blanks, I’m freezin’! Where’s me

overcoat?’ When it was raining and hailing and freezing on Bell’s Line

in the Blue Mountains in winter, and someone shivered and asked, ‘Is it

cold enough for yer now, Bill?’ ‘Cold!’ Bill would bellow, ‘I’m

sweatin’!’

“I remember it well. I was little more than a youngster then—Bill

Barker came past our place with about a thousand fat sheep for the

Homebush sale-yards at Sydney, and he gave me a job to help him down

with them on Bell’s Line over the mountains, and mighty proud I was to

go with him, I can tell you. One night we camped on the Cudgegong

River. The country was dry and pretty close cropped and we’d been

“sweating” the paddocks all along there for our horses. You see, where

there weren’t sliprails handy we’d just take the tomahawk and nick the

top of a straight-grained fence-post, just above the mortise, knock out

the wood there, lift the top rail out and down, and jump the horses in

over the lower one—it was all two-rail fences around there with sheep

wires under the lower rail. And about daylight we’d have the horses

out, lift back the rail, and fit in the chock that we’d knocked out.

Simple as striking matches, wasn’t it?

“Well, the horses were getting a good bellyful in the police horse

paddock at night, and Bill took the first watch with the sheep. It was

very cold and frosty on the flat and he thought the sheep might make

back for the ridges, it’s always warmer up in the ridges in winter out

of the frost. Bill roused me out about midnight. ‘There’s the sheep,’

he says, pointing to a white blur. ‘They’ve settled down. I think

they’ll be quiet till daylight. Don’t go round them; there’s no

occasion to go near ’em. You can stop by the fire and keep an eye on

’em.’

“The night seemed very long. I watched and smoked and toasted my shins,

and warmed the billy now and then, and thought up pretty much the same

sort of old things that fellers on night watch think over all over the

world. Bill lay on his blanket, with his back to the fire and his arm

under his head—freezing on one side and roasting on the other. He never

moved. I itched once or twice to turn him over and bake the front of

him—I reckoned he was about done behind.

“At last daylight showed. I took the billy and started down to the

river to get some water to make coffee; but half-way down, near the

sheep camp, I stopped and stared, I was never so surprised in my life.

The white blur of sheep had developed into a couple of acres of long

dead silver grass!

“I woke Bill, and he swore as I never heard a man swear before—nor

since. He swore at the sheep, and the grass, and at me; but it would

have wasted time, and besides I was too sleepy and tired to fight. But

we found those sheep scattered over a scrubby ridge about seven miles

back, so they must have slipped away back of the grass and started

early in Bill’s watch, and Bill must have watched that blessed grass

for the first half of the night and then set me to watch it. He

couldn’t get away from that.

“I wondered what the chaps would say if it got round that Bill Barker,

the boss overland drover, had lost a thousand sheep in clear country

with fences all round; and I suppose he thought that way too, for he

kept me with him right down to Homebush, and when he paid me off he

threw in an extra quid, and he said:

“‘Now, listen here, Dave! If I ever hear a word from anyone about

watching that gory grass, I’ll find you, Dave, and murder you, if

you’re in wide Australia. I’ll screw your neck, so look out.’

“But he’s dead now, so it doesn’t matter.”

There was silence for some time after Dave had finished. The chaps made

no comment on the yarn, either one way or the other, but sat smoking

thoughtfully, and in a vague atmosphere as of sadness—as if they’d just

heard of their mother’s death and had not been listening to an

allegedly humorous yarn.

Then the voice of old Peter, the station-hand, was heard to growl from

the darkness at the end of the hut, where he sat on a three-bushel bag

on the ground with his back to the slabs.

“What’s old Peter growlin’ about?” someone asked.

“He wants to know where Dave got that word,” someone else replied.

“What word?”

“_Quint-essents_.”

There was a chuckle.

“He got it out back, Peter,” said Mitchell, the shearer. “He got it

from a new chum.”

“How much did yer give for it, Dave?” growled Peter.

“Five shillings, Peter,” said Dave, round his pipe stem. “And stick of

tobacco thrown in.”

Peter seemed satisfied, for he was heard no more that evening.

GETTIN’ BACK ON DAVE REGAN

A RATHER FISHY YARN FROM THE BUSH

(AS TOLD BY JAMES NOWLETT, BULLOCK-DRIVER)

You might work this yarn up. I’ve often thought of doin’ it meself, but

I ain’t got the words. I knowed a lot of funny an’ rum yarns about the

bush, an’ I often wished I had the gift o’ writin’. I could tell a lot

better yarns than the rot they put in books sometimes, but I never had

no eddication. But you might be able to work this yarn up—as yer call

it.

There useter be a teamster’s camp six or seven miles out of Mudgee, at

a place called th’ Old Pipeclay, in the days before the railroad went

round to Dubbo, an’ most of us bullickies useter camp there for the

night. There was always good water in the crick, an’ sometimes we’d

turn the bullicks up in the ridge, an’ gullies behind for grass, an’

camp there for a few days, and do our washin’ an’ mendin’, and make new

yokes perhaps, an tinker up the wagons.

There was a woman livin’ on a farm there named Mrs Hardwick—an’ she

_was_ a hard wick. Her husban’, Jimmy Hardwick was throwed from his

horse agenst a stump one day when he was sober, an’ he was killed—an’

she was a widder. She had a tidy bit o’ land, an’ a nice bit of a

orchard an’ vineyard, an some cattle, an’ they say she had a tidy bit

o’ money in the bank. She had the worst tongue in the district, no

one’s character was safe with her; but she wasn’t old, an’ she wasn’t

bad-lookin’—only hard—so there was some fellers hangin’ round arter

her. An’ Dave Regan’s horse was hangin’ up outside her place as often

as anybody else’s. Dave was a native an’ a bushy, an’ drover an’ a

digger, an’ he was a bit soft in them days—he got hard enough

arterwards.

Mrs Hardwick hated bullick-drivers—she had a awful down on bullickies—I

dunno why. We never interfered with her fowls, an’ as for swearin’!

why, she could swear herself. Jimmy Hardwick was a bullick-driver when

she married him, an’ p’r’aps that helped to account for it. She

wouldn’t let us boil our billies at her kitchen fire, same as any other

bushwoman, an’ if one of our bullicks put his nose under her fence for

a mouthful of grass, she’d set her dogs onter him. An’ one of her dogs

got something what disagreed with him one day, an’ she accused us of

layin’ poisoned baits. An’, arter that, she ’pounded some of our

bullicks that got into her lucerne paddick one night when we was on the

spree in Mudgee, an’ put heavy damages on ’em. She’d left the sliprails

down on purpose, I believe. She talked of puttin’ the police onter us,

jest as if we was a sly-grog shop. (If _she’d_ kept a sly-grog shop

she’d have had a different opinion about bullick-drivers.) An’ all the

bullick-drivers hated her because she hated bullickies.

Well, one wet season half a dozen of us chaps was camped there for a

fortnight, because the roads was too boggy to travel, an’ one night

they got up a darnce at Peter Anderson’s shanty acrost the ridges, an’

a lot of gals an’ fellers turned up from all round about in spite of

the pourin’ rain. Someone had kidded Dave Regan that Mother Hardwick

was comin’, an’ he turned up, of course, in spite of a ragin’ toothache

he had. He was always ridin’ the high horse over us bullickies. It was

a very cold night, enough to cut the face an’ hands off yer, so we had

a roarin’ fire in the big bark-an’-slab kitchen where the darncin’ was.

It was one of them big, old-fashioned, clay-lined fire-places that goes

right acrost the end of the room, with a twenty-five foot slab-an’-tin

chimbly outside.

Dave Regan was pretty wild about being had, an’ we copped all the gals

for darncin’; he couldn’t get one that night, an’ when he wasn’t

proddin’ out his tooth with a red-hot wire some one was chaffin’ him

about Mrs Hardwick. So at last he got disgusted an’ left; but before he

went he got a wet three-bushel flour-bag an’ climbed up very quietly

onter the roof by the battens an’ log weights an’ riders, an’ laid the

wet bag very carefully acrost the top of the chimbly flue.

An’ we was a mortal hour tryin’ to find out what was the matter with

that infernal chimbly, and tackin’ bits o’ tin an’ baggin’ acrost the

top of the fire-place under the mantelshelf to try an’ stop it from

smokin’, an’ all the while the gals set there with the water runnin’

out of their eyes. We took the green back log out an’ fetched in a dry

one, but that chimbly smoked worse than ever, an’ we had to put the

fire out altogether, an’ the gals set there shiverin’ till the rain

held up a bit an’ the sky cleared, an’ then someone goes out an’ looks

up an’ sings out, “Why, there’s somethin’ acrost the top of the blazin’

chimbly!” an’ someone else climbs up an’ fetches down the bag. But the

darnce was spoilt, an’ the gals was so disgusted that they went off

with their fellers while the weather held up. They reckoned some of us

bullickies did it for a lark.

An’ arter that Dave’d come ridin’ past, an’ sing out to know if we knew

of a good cure for a smokin’ chimbly, an’ them sorter things. But he

always got away before we could pull him off of his horse. Three of us

chased him on horseback one day, but we didn’t ketch him.

So we made up our minds to git back on Dave some way or other, an’ it

come about this way.

About six months arter the smoked-out darnce, four or five of us same

fellers was campin’ on th’ Pipeclay agen, an’ it was a dry season. It

was dryer an’ hotter than it was cold ’n’ wet the larst time. Dave was

still hangin’ round Mrs Hardwick’s an’ doin’ odd jobs for her. Well,

one very hot day we seen Dave ridin’ past into Mudgee, an’ we knowed

he’d have a spree in town that night, an’ call at Mrs Hardwick’s for

sympathy comin’ out next day; an’ arter he’d been gone an hour or two,

Tom Tarrant comes drivin’ past on his mail-coach, an’ drops some

letters an’ papers an’ a bag o’ groceries at our camp.

Tom was a hard case. I remember wonst I was drivin’ along a lonely bit

o’ track, an’ it was a grand mornin’, an’ I felt great, an’ I got

singin’ an’ practisin’ a recitation that I allers meant to give at a

bush darnce some night. (I never sung or spouted poetry unless I was

sure I was miles away from anyone.) An’ I got worked up, an’ was wavin’

me arms about an’ throwin’ it off of me chest, when Tom’s coach comes

up behind, round a bend in the road, an’ took me by surprise. An’ Tom

looked at me very hard an’ he says, “What are yer shoutin’ an’ swearin’

an’ darncin’ an’ goin’ on at the bullicks like that for, Jimmy? They

seem to be workin’ all right.” It took me back, I can tell yer. The

coach was full of grinnin’ passengers, an’ the worst of it was that I

didn’t know how long Tom had been drivin’ slow behind me an’ takin’ me

out of windin’. There’s nothin’ upsets a cove as can’t sing so much as

to be caught singin’ or spoutin’ poetry when he thinks he’s privit’.

An’ another time I remember Tom’s coach broke down on the track, an’ he

had to ride inter town with the mails on horseback; an’ he left a

couple of greenhides, for Skinner the tanner at Mudgee, for me to take

on in the wagon, an’ a bag of potatoes for Murphy the storekeeper at

Home Rule, an’ a note that said: “Render unto Murphy the things which

is murphies, and unto Skinner them things which is skins.” Tom was a

hard case.

Well, this day, when Tom handed down the tucker an’ letters, he got

down to stretch his legs and give the horses a breathe. The coach was

full of passengers, an’ I noticed they all looked extra glum and sulky,

but I reckoned it was the heat an’ dust. Tom looked extra solemn, too,

an’ no one was talkin’. Then I suddenly began to notice something in

the atmosphere, as if there was a dead beast not far away, an’ my mates

started sniffin’ too. An’ that reminds me, it’s funny why some people

allers sniff hard instead of keepin’ their noses shut when there’s a

stink; the more it stinks the more they sniff. Tom spit in the dust an’

thought a while; then he took a parcel out of the boot an’ put it on

the corner post of the fence. “There,” he said, “There’s some fresh

fish that come up from Sydney by train an’ Cobb & Co’s coach larst

night. They’re meant for White the publican at Gulgong, but they won’t

keep this weather till I git out there. Pity to waste them! you chaps

might as well have a feed of ’em. I’ll tell White they went bad an’ I

had to throw them out,” says Tom. Then he got on to the coach agen an’

drove off in a cloud of dust. We undone the brown paper, an’ the fish

was in a small deal box, with a lid fastened by a catch. We nicked back

the catch an’ the lid flew open, an’ then we knowed where the smell

comed from all right. There wasn’t any doubt about that! We didn’t have

to put our noses in the box to see if the fish was bad. They was packed

in salt, but that made no difference.

You know how a smell will start sudden in the bush on a hot, still day,

an’ then seem to take a spell, an’ then get to work agen stronger than

ever. You might be clost alongside of a horse that has been dead a

fortnight an’ smell nothin’ particular till you start to walk away, an’

the further you go the worse it stinks. It seems to smell most round in

a circle of a hundred yards or so. But these fish smelt from the centre

right out. Tom Tarrant told us arterwards that them fish started to

smell as soon as he left Mudgee. At first they reckoned it was a dead

horse by the road; but arter a while the passengers commenced squintin’

at each other suspicious like, an’ the conversation petered out, an’

Tom thought he felt all their eyes on his back, an’ it was very

uncomfortable; an’ he sat tight an’ tried to make out where the smell

come from; an’ it got worse every hundred yards—like as if the track

was lined with dead horses, an’ every one dead longer than the

last—till it was like drivin’ a funeral. An’ Tom never thought of the

fish till he got down to stretch his legs and fetched his nose on a

level with the boot.

Well, we shut down the lid of that box quick an’ took it an’ throwed it

in the bushes a good way away from the camp, but next mornin’, while we

was havin’ breakfast, Billy Grimshaw got an idea, an’ arter breakfast

he wetted a canvas bag he had an’ lit up his pipe, an’ went an’ got

that there box o’ fish, an’ put it in the wet bag, an’ wrapped it tight

round it an’ tied it up tight with string. Billy had a nipper of a

nephew with him, about fourteen, named Tommy, an’ he was a sharp kid if

ever there was one. So Billy says, “Look here, Tommy, you take this

fish up to Mrs Hardwick’s an’ tell her that Dave Regan sent ’em with

his compliments, an’ he hopes she’ll enjoy ’em. Tell her that Dave

fetched ’em from Mudgee, but he’s gone back to look for a pound note

that he dropped out of a hole in his pocket somewheers along the road,

an’ he asked you to take the fish up.” So Tommy takes the fish an’ goes

up to the house with ’em. When he come back he says that Mrs Hardwick

smiled like a parson an’ give him a shillin’—an’ he didn’t wait. We

watched the house, an’ about half an hour arterwards we seen her run

out of the kitchen with the open box in her hand, an’ run a good way

away from the house an’ throw the fish inter the bushes, an’ then go

back quick, holdin’ her nose.

An’ jest then, as luck would have it, we seen Dave Regan ridin’ up from

the creek towards the house. He got down an’ went into the kitchen, an’

then come backin’ out agen in a hurry with her in front of him. We

could hear her voice from where we was, but we couldn’t hear what she

said. But we could see her arms wavin’ as if she was drivin’ fowls, an’

Dave backed all the way to his horse and gets on an’ comes ridin’ away

quick, she screamin’ arter him all the time. When he got down opposite

the camp we sung out to know what was the matter. “What have you been

doin’ to Mrs Hardwick, Dave?” we says. “We heerd her goin’ for yer

proper jest now.” “Damned if I know,” says Dave. “I ain’t done nothin’

to her that I knows of. She’s called me everything she can lay her

tongue to, an’ she’s ravin’ about my stinkin’ fish, or somethin’. I

can’t make it out at all. I believe she’s gone ratty.”

“But you _must_ have been doin’ somethin’ to the woman,” we says, “or

else she wouldn’t have gone on at yer like that.”

But Dave swore he hadn’t, an’ we talked it over for a while an’

couldn’t make head nor tail of it, an’ we come to the conclusion that

it was only a touch o’ the sun.

“Never mind, Dave,” we says. “Go up agen in a day or two, when she’s

cooled down, an’ find out what the matter is. Or write to her. It might

only have been someone makin’ mischief. That’s what it is.”

But Dave only sat an’ rubbed his head, an’ presently he started home to

wherever he was hangin’ out. He wanted a quiet week to think.

“Her chimbly might have been smokin’, Dave,” we shouted arter him, but

he was too dazed like to ketch on.

Well, in a month or two we was campin’ there agen, an’ we found she’d

fenced in a lane to the crick she had no right to, an’ we had to take

the bullicks a couple o’ miles round to grass an’ water. Well, the

first mornin’ we seen her down in the corner of her paddick near the

camp drivin’ some heifers, an’ Billy Grimshaw went up to the fence an’

spoke to her. Billy was the only one of us that dared face her and he

was the only one she was ever civil to—p’r’aps because Billy had a

squint an’ a wall eye and that put her out of countenance.

Billy took off his hat very respectful an’ sings out, “Mrs Hardwick.”

(It was Billy’s bullicks she’d “pounded,” by the way.)

“What is it?” she says.

“I want to speak to you, Mrs Hardwick,” says Billy.

“Well, speak,” she says. “I’ve got no time to waste talkin’ to

bullick-drivers.”

“Well, the fact is, Mrs Hardwick,” says Billy, “that I want to explain

somethin’, an’ apologize for that young scamp of a nephew o’ mine,

young Tommy. He ain’t here or I’d make him beg your pardon hisself, or

I’d cut him to pieces with the bullick-whip. I heard all about Dave

Regan sendin’ you that stinkin’ fish, an’ I think it was a damned mean,

dirty thing to do—to send stinkin’ fish to a woman, an’ especially to a

widder an’ an unprotected woman like you, Mrs Hardwick. I’ve had

mothers an’ sisters of me own. An’ I want to tell you that I’m sorry a

relation o’ mine ever had anythin’ to do with it. As soon as I heerd of

it I give young Tommy a lambastin’ he won’t forgot in a hurry.”

“Did Tommy know the fish was bad?” she says.

“It doesn’t matter a rap,” says Billy; “he had no right to go takin’

messages from nobody to nobody.”

Mrs Hardwick thought a while. Then she says: “P’r’aps arter all Dave

Regan didn’t know the fish was bad. I’ve often thought I might have

been in too much of a hurry. Things goes bad so quick out here in this

weather. An’ Dave was always very friendly. I can’t understand why he’d

do a dirty thing on me like that. I never done anything to Dave.”

Now I forgot to tell you that Billy had a notion that Dave helped drive

his bullicks to pound that time, though I didn’t believe it. So Billy

says:

“Don’t you believe that for a minute, Mrs Hardwick. Dave knew what he

was a-doin’ of all right; an’ if I ketch him _I’ll_ give him a beltin’

for it if no one else is man enough to stand up for a woman!” says

Billy.

“How d’yer know Dave knew?” says Mrs Hardwick.

“Know!” says Billy. “Why, he talked about it all over the district.”

“What!” she screamed out, an’ I moved away from that there fence, for

she had a stick to drive them heifers with. But Billy stood his ground.

“Is that the truth, Billy Grimshaw?” she screams.

“Yes;” he says. “I’ll-take me oath on it. He blowed about it all over

the district, as if it was very funny, an’ he says—” An’ Billy stopped.

“What did he say?” she shouted.

“Well, the fact is,” says Billy, “that I hardly like to tell it to a

lady. I wouldn’t like to tell yer, Mrs Hardwick.”

“But you’ll have to tell me, Billy Grimshaw,” she screams. “I have a

right to know. If you don’t tell me I’ll pull him next week an’ have it

dragged out of you in the witness-box!” she says. “An’ I’ll have

satisfaction out of him in the felon’s dock of a court of law!” she

says. “What did the villain say?” she screams.

“Well,” says Billy, “if yer must have it—an’, anyway, I’m hanged if I’m

goin’ to stand by an’ see a woman scandalized behind her back—if yer

must have it I’ll tell yer. Dave said that the fish didn’t smell no

worse than your place anyway.”

We got away from there then. She cut up too rough altogether. I can’t

tell you what she said—I ain’t got the words. She went up to the house,

an’ we seen the farm-hand harnessin’ up the horse, an’ we reckoned she

was goin’ to drive into town straight away an’ take out a summons

agenst Dave Regan. An’ jest then Dave hisself comes ridin’ past—jest

when he was most wanted, as usual. He always rode fast past Mrs

Hardwick’s nowadays, an’ never stopped there, but Billy shouted after

him:

“Hullo, Dave! I want to speak to yer,” shouts Billy. An’ Dave yanks his

horse round.

“What is it, Billy?” he says.

“Look here, Dave,” says Billy. “You had your little joke about the

chimbly, an’ we had our little joke about the fish an’ Mrs Hardwick, so

now we’ll call it quits. A joke’s a joke, but it can go too far, an’

this one’s gettin’ too red-hot altogether. So we’ve fixed it up with

Mrs Hardwick.”

“What fish an’ what joke?” says Dave, rubbin’ his head. “An’ what have

yer fixed up with Mrs Hardwick? Whatever are yer talkin’ about, Billy?”

So Billy told him all about us sendin’ the stinkin’ fish to Mrs

Hardwick by Tommy, an’ sayin’ Dave sent ’em—Dave rubbin’ the back of

his neck an’ starin’ at Billy all the time. “An’ now,” says Billy, “I

won’t say anything about them bullicks; but I went up and seen Mrs

Hardwick this mornin’, an’ told her the whole truth about them fish,

an’ how you knowed nothin’ about it, an’ I apologized an’ told her we

was very sorry; an’ she says she was very sorry too on your account,

an’ wanted to see yer. I promised to tell yer as soon as I seen yer. It

ought to be fixed up. You ought to go right up to the house an’ see her

now. She’s awfully cut up about it.”

“All right,” says Dave, brightenin’ up. “It was a dirty, mean trick

anyway to play on a cove; but I’ll go up an’ see her.” An’ he went

there ’n’ then.

An’ about fifteen minutes arterwards he comes boltin’ back from the

house one way an’ his horse the other. The horse acted as if it had a

big scare, an’ so did Dave. Billy went an’ ketched Dave’s horse for

him, an’ I got Dave a towel to wipe the dirty dish-water off of his

face an’ out of his hair an’ collar, an’ I give him a piece of soap to

rub on the places where he’d been scalded.

“Why, the woman must be ravin’ mad,” I says. “Whatever did yer say to

her this time, Dave? Yer allers gettin’ inter hot water with her.”

“I didn’t say nothin’,” says Dave. “I jest went up laughin’ like, an’

says, ‘How are yer, Mrs Hardwick?’ an’ she ups an’ lets me have a dish

of dirty wash-up water, an’ then on top of that she let fly with a

dipper of scaldin’-hot, greasy water outer the boiler. She’s gone clean

ravin’ mad, I think.”

“She’s as mad as a hatter, right enough, Dave,” says Billy Grimshaw.

“Don’t you go there no more, Dave, it ain’t safe.” An’ we lent Dave a

hat an’ a clean shirt, an’ he went on inter town. “You ought to have

humoured her,” says Billy, as Dave rode away. “You ought to have told

her to put a wet bag over her chimbly an’ hang the fish inside to

smoke.” But Dave was too stunned to ketch on. He went on inter the town

an’ got on a howlin’ spree. An’ while he was soberin’ up the thing

began to dawn on him. An’ the nex’ time he met Billy they had a fight.

An’ Dave got another woman to speak to Mrs Hardwick, an’ Mrs Hardwick

ketched young Tommy goin’ past her place one day an’ bailed him up an’

scared the truth out of him.

“Look here!” she says to him, “I want the truth, the whole truth, an’

nothin’ but the truth about them fish, an’ if I don’t get it outer you

I’ll wring yer young neck for tryin’ to poison me, an’ save yer from

the gallust!” she says to Tommy.

So he told her the whole truth, swelp him, an’ got away; an’ he

respected Mrs Hardwick arter that.

An’ next time we come past with the teams we seen Dave’s horse hangin’

up outside Mrs Hardwick’s, an’ we went some miles further along the

road an’ camped in a new place where we’d be more comfortable. An’ ever

arter that we used to always whip up an’ drive past her place as if we

didn’t know her.

“SHALL WE GATHER AT THE RIVER?”

TOLD BY JOE WILSON

God’s preacher, of churches unheeded,

God’s vineyard, though barren the sod,

Plain spokesman where spokesman is needed,

Rough link ’twixt the Bushman and God.

_The Christ of the Never_.

I never told you about Peter M’Laughlan. He was a sort of bush

missionary up-country and out back in Australia, and before he died he

was known from Riverina down south in New South Wales to away up

through the Never-Never country in western Queensland.

His past was a mystery, so, of course, there were all sorts of yarns

about him. He was supposed to be a Scotchman from London, and some said

that he had got into trouble in his young days and had had to clear out

of the old country; or, at least, that he had been a ne’e-er-do-well

and had been sent out to Australia on the remittance system. Some said

he’d studied for the law, some said he’d studied for a doctor, while

others believed that he was, or had been, an ordained minister. I

remember one man who swore (when he was drinking) that he had known

Peter M’Laughlan as a medical student in a big London hospital, and

that he had started in practice for himself somewhere near Gray’s Inn

Road in London. Anyway, as I got to know him he struck me as being a

man who had looked into the eyes of so much misery in his life that

some of it had got into his own.

He was a tall man, straight and well built, and about forty or

forty-five, when I first saw him. He had wavy dark hair, and a close,

curly beard. I once heard a woman say that he had a beard like you see

in some Bible pictures of Christ. Peter M’Laughlan seldom smiled; there

was something in his big dark brown eyes that was scarcely misery, nor

yet sadness—a sort of haunted sympathy.

He must have had money, or else he got remittances from home, for he

paid his way and helped many a poor devil. They said that he gave away

most of his money. Sometimes he worked for a while himself as

bookkeeper at a shearing-shed, wool-sorter, shearer, even rouseabout;

he’d work at anything a bushman could get to do. Then he’d go out back

to God-forgotten districts and preach to bushmen in one place, and get

a few children together in another and teach them to read. He could

take his drink, and swear a little when he thought it necessary. On one

occasion, at a rough shearing-shed, he called his beloved brethren

“damned fools” for drinking their cheques.

Towards the end of his life if he went into a “rough” shed or shanty

west of the Darling River—and some of them _were_ rough—there would be

a rest in the language and drinking, even a fight would be interrupted,

and there would be more than one who would lift their hats to Peter

M’Laughlan. A bushman very rarely lifts his hat to a man, yet the worst

characters of the West have listened bareheaded to Peter when he

preached.

It was said in our district that Peter only needed to hint to the

squatter that he wanted fifty or a hundred pounds to help someone or

something, and the squatter would give it to him without question or

hesitation.

He’d nurse sick boundary-riders, shearers, and station-hands, often

sitting in the desolate hut by the bedside of a sick man night after

night. And, if he had time, he’d look up the local blacks and see how

they were getting on. Once, on a far outback sheep station, he sat for

three nights running, by the bedside of a young Englishman, a B.A. they

said he was, who’d been employed as tutor at the homestead and who died

a wreck, the result of five years of life in London and Paris. The poor

fellow was only thirty. And the last few hours of his life he talked to

Peter in French, nothing but French. Peter understood French and one or

two other languages, besides English and Australian; but whether the

young wreck was raving or telling the story of a love, or his life,

none of us ever knew, for Peter never spoke of it. But they said that

at the funeral Peter’s eyes seemed haunted more than usual.

There’s the yarn about Peter and the dying cattle at Piora Station one

terrible drought, when the surface was as bare as your hand for

hundreds of miles, and the heat like the breath of a furnace, and the

sheep and cattle were perishing by thousands. Peter M’Laughlan was out

on the run helping the station-hands to pull out cattle that had got

bogged in the muddy waterholes and were too weak to drag themselves

out, when, about dusk, a gentlemanly “piano-fingered” parson, who had

come to the station from the next town, drove out in his buggy to see

the men. He spoke to Peter M’Laughlan.

“Brother,” he said, “do you not think we should offer up a prayer?”

“What for?” asked Peter, standing in his shirt sleeves, a rope in his

hands and mud from head to foot.

“For? Why, for rain, brother,” replied the parson, a bit surprised.

Peter held up his finger and said “Listen!”

Now, with a big mob of travelling stock camped on the plain at night,

there is always a lowing, soughing or moaning sound, a sound like that

of the sea on the shore at a little distance; and, altogether, it might

be called the sigh or yawn of a big mob in camp. But the long, low

moaning of cattle dying of hunger and thirst on the hot barren plain in

a drought is altogether different, and, at night there is something

awful about it—you couldn’t describe it. This is what Peter M’Laughlan

heard.

“Do you hear that?” he asked the other preacher.

The little parson said he did. Perhaps _he_ only heard the weak lowing

of cattle.

“Do you think that God will hear us when He does not hear _that_?”

asked Peter.

The parson stared at him for a moment and then got into his buggy and

drove away, greatly shocked and deeply offended. But, later on, over

tea at the homestead, he said that he felt sure that that “unfortunate

man,” Peter M’Laughlan, was not in his right mind; that his wandering,

irregular life, or the heat, must have affected him.

I well remember the day when I first heard Peter M’Laughlan preach. I

was about seventeen then. We used sometimes to attend service held on

Sunday afternoon, about once a month, in a little slab-and-bark

school-house in the scrub off the main road, three miles or so from our

selection, in a barren hole amongst the western ridges of the Great

Dividing Range. School was held in this hut for a few weeks or a few

months now and again, when a teacher could be got to stay there and

teach, and cook for himself, for a pound a week, more or less

contributed by the parents. A parson from the farming town to the east,

or the pastoral town over the ridges to the west, used to come in his

buggy when it didn’t rain and wasn’t too hot to hold the service.

I remember this Sunday. It was a blazing hot day towards the end of a

long and fearful drought which ruined many round there. The parson was

expected, and a good few had come to “chapel” in spring-carts, on

horseback, and on foot; farmers and their wives and sons and daughters.

The children had been brought here to Sunday-school, taught by some of

the girls, in the morning. I can see it all now quite plain: The

one-roomed hut, for it was no more, with the stunted blue-grey gum,

scrub all round. The white, dusty road, so hot that you could cook eggs

in the dust. The horses tied up, across the road, in the supposed shade

under clumps of scraggy saplings along by the fence of a cattle-run.

The little crowd outside the hut: selectors in washed and mended

tweeds, some with paper collars, some wearing starched and ironed white

coats, and in blucher boots, greased or blackened, or the young men

wearing “larstins” (elastic-side boots). The women and girls in prints

and cottons (or cheap “alpaca,” etc.), and a bright bit of ribbon here

and there amongst the girls. The white heat blazed everywhere, and

“dazzled” across light-coloured surfaces—dead white trees, fence-posts,

and sand-heaps, like an endless swarm of bees passing in the sun’s

glare. And over above the dry boxscrub-covered ridges, the great

Granite Peak, glaring like a molten mass.

The people didn’t like to go inside out of the heat and sit down before

the minister came. The wretched hut was a rough school, sometimes with

a clay fire-place where the teacher cooked, and a corner screened off

with sacking where he had his bunk; it was a camp for tramps at other

times, or lizards and possums, but to-day it was a house of God, and as

such the people respected it.

The town parson didn’t turn up. Perhaps he was unwell, or maybe the

hot, dusty ten-mile drive was too much for him to face. One of the

farmers, who had tried to conduct service on a previous occasion on

which the ordained minister had failed us, had broken down in the

middle of it, so he was out of the question. We waited for about an

hour, and then who should happen to ride along but Peter M’Laughlan,

and one or two of the elder men asked him to hold service. He was on

his way to see a sick friend at a sheep station over the ridges, but he

said that he could spare an hour or two. (Nearly every man who was

sick, either in stomach or pocket, was a friend of Peter M’Laughlan.)

Peter tied up his horse under a bush shed at the back of the hut, and

we followed him in.

The “school” had been furnished with a rough deal table and a wooden

chair for “the teacher,” and with a few rickety desks and stools cadged

from an old “provisional” school in town when the new public school was

built; and the desks and stools had been fastened to the floor to

strengthen them; they had been made for “infant” classes, and youth out

our way ran to length. But when grown men over six feet high squeezed

in behind the desks and sat down on the stools the effect struck me as

being ridiculous. In fact, I am afraid that on the first occasion it

rather took my attention from the sermon, and I remember being made

very uncomfortable by a school chum, Jack Barnes, who took a delight in

catching my eye and winking or grinning. He could wink without changing

a solemn line in his face and grin without exploding, and I couldn’t.

The boys usually sat on seats, slabs on blocks of wood, along the wall

at the far end of the room, which was comfortable, for they had a rest

for their backs. One or two of the boys were nearing six feet high, so

they could almost rest their chins on their knees as they sat. But I

squatted with some of my tribe on a stool along the wall by the

teacher’s table, and so could see most of the congregation.

Above us bare tie-beams and the round sapling rafters (with the bark

still on), and the inner sides of the sheets of stringybark that formed

the roof. The slabs had been lined with sacking at one time, but most

of it had fallen or dry-rotted away; there were wide cracks between the

slabs and we could see the white glare of sunlight outside, with a

strip of dark shade, like a deep trench in the white ground, by the

back wall. Someone had brought a canvas water-bag and hung it to the

beam on the other side of the minister’s table, with a pint-pot over

the tap, and the drip, drip from the bag made the whole place seem

cooler.

I studied Peter M’Laughlan first. He was dressed in washed and mended

tweed vest and trousers, and had on a long, lightcoloured coat of a

material which we called “Chinese silk.” He wore a “soft” cotton shirt

with collar attached, and blucher boots. He gave out a hymn in his

quiet, natural way, said a prayer, gave out another hymn, read a

chapter from the Bible, and then gave out another hymn. They liked to

sing, out in those places. The Southwicks used to bring a cranky little

harmonium in the back of their old dog-cart, and Clara Southwick used

to accompany the hymns. She was a very pretty girl, fair, and could

play and sing well. I used to think she had the sweetest voice I ever

heard. But—ah, well—

Peter didn’t sing himself, at first. I got an idea that he couldn’t.

While they were singing he stood loosely, with one hand in his

trouser-pocket, scratching his beard with his hymn-book, and looking as

if he were thinking things over, and only rousing himself to give

another verse. He forgot to give it once or twice, but we got through

all right. I noticed the wife of one of the men who had asked Peter to

preach looking rather black at her husband, and I reckoned that he’d

get it hotter than the weather on the way home.

Then Peter stood up and commenced to preach. He stood with both hands

in his pockets, at first, his coat ruffled back, and there was the stem

of a clay pipe sticking out of his waistcoat pocket. The pipe

fascinated me for a while, but after that I forgot the pipe and was

fascinated by the man. Peter’s face was one that didn’t strike you at

first with its full strength, it grew on you; it grew on me, and before

he had done preaching I thought it was the noblest face I had ever

seen.

He didn’t preach much of hope in this world. How could he? The drought

had been blazing over these districts for nearly a year, with only a

shower now and again, which was a mockery—scarcely darkening the baked

ground. Wheat crops came up a few inches and were parched by the sun or

mown for hay, or the cattle turned on them; and last year there had

been rust and smut in the wheat. And, on top of it all, the dreadful

cattle plague, pleuro-pneumonia, had somehow been introduced into the

district. One big farmer had lost fifty milkers in a week.

Peter M’Laughlan didn’t preach much of hope in this world; how could

he? There were men there who had slaved for twenty, thirty, forty

years; worked as farmers have to work in few other lands—first to clear

the stubborn bush from the barren soil, then to fence the ground, and

manure it, and force crops from it—and for what? There was Cox, the

farmer, starved off his selection after thirty years and going out back

with his drays to work at tank-sinking for a squatter. There was his

eldest son going shearing or droving—anything he could get to do—a

stoop-shouldered, young-old man of thirty. And behind them, in the end,

would be a dusty patch in the scrub, a fencepost here and there, and a

pile of chimney-stones and a hardwood slab or two where the but was—for

thirty hard years of the father’s life and twenty of the son’s.

I forget Peter’s text, if he had a text; but the gist of his sermon was

that there was a God—there was a heaven! And there were men there

listening who needed to believe these things. There was old Ross from

across the creek, old, but not sixty, a hard man. Only last week he had

broken down and fallen on his knees on the baked sods in the middle of

his ploughed ground and prayed for rain. His frightened boys had taken

him home, and later on, the same afternoon, when they brought news of

four more cows down with “the pleuro” in an outer paddock, he had stood

up outside his own door and shaken his fist at the brassy sky and

cursed high heaven to the terror of his family, till his brave,

sun-browned wife dragged him inside and soothed him. And Peter

M’Laughlan knew all about this.

Ross’s family had the doctor out to him, and persuaded him to come to

church this Sunday. The old man sat on the front seat, stooping

forward, with his elbow resting on the desk and his chin on his hand,

bunching up his beard over his mouth with his fingers and staring

gloomily at Peter with dark, piercing eyes from under bushy eyebrows,

just as I’ve since seen a Scotchman stare at Max O’Rell all through a

humorous lecture called “A nicht wi’ Sandy.”

Ross’s right hand resting on the desk was very eloquent: horny, scarred

and knotted at every joint, with broken, twisted nails, and nearly

closed, as though fitted to the handle of an axe or a spade. Ross was

an educated man (he had a regular library of books at home), and

perhaps that’s why he suffered so much.

Peter preached as if he were speaking quietly to one person only, but

every word was plain and every sentence went straight to someone. I

believe he looked every soul in the eyes before he had done. Once he

said something and caught my eye, and I felt a sudden lump in my

throat. There was a boy there, a pale, thin, sensitive boy who was

eating his heart out because of things he didn’t understand. He was

ambitious and longed for something different from this life; he’d

written a story or two and some rhymes for the local paper; his

companions considered him a “bit ratty” and the grown-up people thought

him a “bit wrong in his head,” idiotic, or at least “queer.” And during

his sermon Peter spoke of “unsatisfied longings,” of the hope of

something better, and said that one had to suffer much and for long

years before he could preach or write; and then he looked at that boy.

I knew the boy very well; he has risen in the world since then.

Peter spoke of the life we lived, of the things we knew, and used names

and terms that we used. “I don’t know whether it was a blanky sermon or

a blanky lecture,” said long swanky Jim Bullock afterwards, “but it was

straight and hit some of us hard. It hit me once or twice, I can tell

yer.” Peter spoke of our lives: “And there is beauty—even in this life

and in this place,” he said. “Nothing is wasted—nothing is without

reason. There is beauty even in this place——”

I noticed something like a hint of a hard smile on Ross’s face; he

moved the hand on the desk and tightened it.

“Yes,” said Peter, as if in answer to Ross’s expression and the

movement of his hand, “there is beauty in this life here. After a good

season, and when the bush is tall and dry, when the bush-fires threaten

a man’s crop of ripened wheat, there are tired men who run and ride

from miles round to help that man, and who fight the fire all night to

save his wheat—and some of them may have been wrangling with him for

years. And in the morning, when the wheat is saved and the danger is

past, when the fire is beaten out or turned, there are blackened, grimy

hands that come together and grip-hands that have not joined for many a

long day.”

Old Palmer, Ross’s neighbour, moved uneasily. He had once helped Ross

to put a fire out, but they had quarrelled again since. Ross still sat

in the same position, looking the hard man he was. Peter glanced at

Ross, looked down and thought a while, and then went on again: