his farm, or his stock, or his crop, through no fault of his own, there
are poor men who put their hands into their pockets to help him.”
Old Kurtz, over the ridge, had had his stacked crop of wheat in sheaf
burned—some scoundrel had put a match to it at night—and the farmers
round had collected nearly fifty pounds for him.
“There is beauty even in this life and in this place. In the blazing
drought, when the cattle lie down and cannot rise from weakness,
neighbours help neighbours to lift them. When one man has hay or chaff
and no stock, he gives it or sells it cheaply to the poor man who has
starving cattle and no fodder.”
I only knew one or two instances of this kind; but Peter was preaching
of what man should do as well as what they did.
“When a man meets with an accident, or dies, there are young men who go
with their ploughs and horses and plough the ground for him or his
widow and put in the crop.”
Jim Bullock and one or two other young men squirmed. They had ploughed
old Leonard’s land for him when he met with an accident in the shape of
a broken leg got by a kick from a horse. They had also ploughed the
ground for Mrs Phipps when her husband died, working, by the way, all
Saturday afternoon and Sunday, for they were very busy at home at that
time.
“There is beauty even in this life and in this place. There are women
who were friends in girlhood and who quarrelled bitterly over a
careless word, an idle tale, or some paltry thing, who live within a
mile of each other and have not spoken for years; yet let one fall ill,
or lose husband or child, and the other will hurry across to her place
and take off her bonnet and tuck up her sleeves, and set to work to
help straighten things, and they will kiss, and cry in each other’s
arms, and be sisters again.”
I saw tears in the eyes of two hard and hard-faced women I knew; but
they were smiling to each other through their tears.
“And now,” said Peter, “I want to talk to you about some other things.
I am not preaching as a man who has been taught to preach comfortably,
but as a man who has learned in the world’s school. I know what trouble
is. Men,” he said, still speaking quietly, “and women too! I have been
through trouble as deep as any of yours—perhaps deeper. I know how you
toil and suffer, I know what battles you fight, I know. I too fought a
battle, perhaps as hard as any you fight. I carry a load and am
fighting a battle still.” His eyes were very haggard just them. “But
this is not what I wanted to talk to you about. I have nothing to say
against a young man going away from this place to better himself, but
there are young men who go out back shearing or droving, young men who
are goodhearted but careless, who make cheques, and spend their money
gambling or drinking and never think of the old folk at home until it
is too late. They never think of the old people, alone, perhaps, in a
desolate but on a worked-out farm in the scrub.”
Jim Bullock squirmed again. He had gone out back last season and made a
cheque, and lost most of it on horse-racing and cards.
“They never think—they cannot think how, perhaps, long years agone in
the old days, the old father, as a young man, and his brave young wife,
came out here and buried themselves in the lonely bush and toiled for
many years, trying—it does not matter whether they failed or not—trying
to make homes for their children; toiled till the young man was bowed
and grey, and the young wife brown and wrinkled and worn out. Exiles
they were in the early days—boy-husbands and girl-wives some of them,
who left their native lands, who left all that was dear, that seemed
beautiful, that seemed to make life worth living, and sacrificed their
young lives in drought and utter loneliness to make homes for their
children. I want you young men to think of this. Some of them came from
England, Ireland, Bonnie Scotland.” Ross straightened up and let his
hands fall loosely on his knees. “Some from Europe—your foreign
fathers—some from across the Rhine in Germany.” We looked at old Kurtz.
He seemed affected.
Then Peter paused for a moment and blinked thoughtfully at Ross, then
he took a drink of water. I can see now that the whole thing was a
battle between Peter M’Laughlan and Robert Ross—Scot met Scot. “It
seemed to me,” Jim Bullock said afterwards, “that Peter was only tryin’
to make some of us blanky well blubber.”
“And there are men,” Peter went on, “who have struggled and suffered
and failed, and who have fought and failed again till their tempers are
spoiled, until they grow bitter. They go in for self-pity, and
self-pity leads to moping and brooding and madness; self-pity is the
most selfish and useless thing on the face of God’s earth. It is cruel,
it is deadly, both to the man and to those who love him, and whom he
ought to love. His load grows heavier daily in his imagination, and he
sinks down until it is in him to curse God and die. He ceases to care
for or to think of his children who are working to help him.” (Ross’s
sons were good, steady, hard-working boys.) “Or the brave wife who has
been so true to him for many hard years, who left home and friends and
country for his sake. Who bears up in the blackest of times, and
persists in looking at the bright side of things for his sake; who has
suffered more than he if he only knew it, and suffers now, through him
and because of him, but who is patient and bright and cheerful while
her heart is breaking. He thinks she does not suffer, that she cannot
suffer as a man does. My God! he doesn’t know. He has forgotten in her
the bright, fresh-faced, loving lassie he loved and won long years
agone—long years agone——”
There was a sob, like the sob of an over-ridden horse as it sinks down
broken-hearted, and Ross’s arms went out on the desk in front of him,
and his head went down on them. He was beaten.
He was steered out gently with his wife on one side of him and his
eldest son on the other.
“Don’t be alarmed, my friends,” said Peter, standing by the water-bag
with one hand on the tap and the pannikin in the other. “Mr Ross has
not been well lately, and the heat has been too much for him.” And he
went out after Ross. They took him round under the bush shed behind the
hut, where it was cooler.
When Peter came back to his place he seemed to have changed his whole
manner and tone. “Our friend, Mr Ross, is much better,” he said. “We
will now sing”—he glanced at Clara Southwick at the harmonium—“we will
now sing ‘Shall We Gather at the River?’” We all knew that hymn; it was
an old favourite round there, and Clara Southwick played it well in
spite of the harmonium.
And Peter sang—the first and last time I ever heard him sing. I never
had an ear for music; but I never before nor since heard a man’s voice
that stirred me as Peter M’Laughlan’s. We stood like emus, listening to
him all through one verse, then we pulled ourselves together.
Shall we gather at the River,
Where bright angels’ feet have trod—
The only rivers round there were barren creeks, the best of them only
strings of muddy waterholes, and across the ridge, on the sheep-runs,
the creeks were dry gutters, with baked banks and beds, and perhaps a
mudhole every mile or so, and dead beasts rotting and stinking every
few yards.
Gather with the saints at the River,
That flows by the throne of God.
Peter’s voice trembled and broke. He caught his breath, and his eyes
filled. But he smiled then—he stood smiling at us through his tears.
The beautiful, the beautiful River,
That flows by the throne of God.
Outside I saw women kiss each other who had been at daggers drawn ever
since I could remember, and men shake hands silently who had hated each
other for years. Every family wanted Peter to come home to tea, but he
went across to Ross’s, and afterwards down to Kurtz’s place, and bled
and inoculated six cows or so in a new way, and after tea he rode off
over the gap to see his friend.
HIS BROTHER’S KEEPER
By his paths through the parched desolation,
Hot rides and the terrible tramps;
By the hunger, the thirst, the privation
Of his work in the furthermost camps;
By his worth in the light that shall search men
And prove—ay! and justify each—
I place him in front of all Churchmen
Who feel not, who _know_ not—but preach!
_The Christ of the Never_.
I told you about Peter M’Laughlan, the bush missionary, and how he
preached in the little slab-and-bark school-house in the scrub on
Ross’s Creek that blazing hot Sunday afternoon long ago, when the
drought was ruining the brave farmers all round there and breaking
their hearts. And how hard old Ross, the selector, broke down at the
end of the sermon, and blubbered, and had to be taken out of church.
I left home and drifted to Sydney, and “back into the Great North-West
where all the rovers go,” and knocked about the country for six or
seven years before I met Peter M’Laughlan again. I was young yet, but
felt old at times, and there were times, in the hot, rough, greasy
shearing-shed on blazing days, or in the bare “men’s hut” by the
flicker of the stinking slush-lamp at night, or the wretched wayside
shanty with its drink-madness and blasphemy, or tramping along the
dusty, endless track—there were times when I wished I could fall back
with all the experience I’d got, and sit once more in the little
slab-and-bark “chapel” on Ross’s Creek and hear Peter M’Laughlan and
the poor, struggling selectors sing “Shall We Gather at the River?” and
then go out and start life afresh.
My old school chum and bush mate, Jack Barnes, had married pretty
little Clara Southwick, who used to play the portable harmonium in
chapel. I nearly broke my heart when they were married, but then I was
a young fool. Clara was a year or so older than I, and I could never
get away from a boyish feeling of reverence for her, as if she were
something above and out of my world. And so, while I was worshipping
her in chapel once a month, and at picnics and parties in between, and
always at a distance, Jack used to ride up to Southwick’s place on
Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and on other days, and hang his horse
up outside, or turn it in the paddock, and argue with old Southwick,
and agree with the old woman, and court Clara on the sly. And he got
her.
It was at their wedding that I first got the worse for drink.
Jack was a blue-eyed, curly black-haired, careless, popular young
scamp; as good-hearted as he was careless. He could ride like a circus
monkey, do all kinds of bush work, add two columns of figures at once,
and write like copper-plate.
Jack was given to drinking, gambling and roving. He steadied up when he
got married and started on a small selection of his own; but within the
year Clara was living in a back skillion of her father’s house and Jack
was up-country shearing. He was “ringer” of the shed at Piora Station
one season and made a decent cheque; and within a fortnight after the
shed “cut out” he turned up at home in a very bad state from drink and
with about thirty shillings in his pockets. He had fallen from his
horse in the creek near Southwick’s, and altogether he was a nice sort
of young husband to go home to poor, heart-broken Clara.
I remember that time well. She stopped me one day as I was riding past
to ask me if I’d seen Jack, and I got off my horse. Her chin and mouth
began to twitch and tremble and I saw her eyes filling with tears. She
laid her hand on my arm and asked me to promise not to drink with Jack
if I met him, but to try and persuade him to come home. And—well, have
you, as a man, ever, with the one woman that you can’t have, and no
matter at what time or place, felt a sudden mad longing to take her in
your arms and kiss her—and damn the world? I got on my horse again. She
must have thought me an ignorant brute, but I felt safer there. And
when I thought how I had nearly made a fool of myself, and been a
cowardly brute, and a rotten mate to my mate, I rode ten miles to find
Jack and get him home.
He straightened up again after a bit and went out and got another shed,
and they say that Peter M’Laughlan got hold of him there. I don’t know
what Peter did to him then—Jack never spoke of it, even to me, his old
mate; but, anyway, at the end of the shearing season Jack’s cheque came
home to Clara in a registered envelope, addressed in Peter’s
hand-writing, and about a week later Jack turned up a changed man.
He got work as a temporary clerk in the branch government land office
at Solong, a pretty little farming town in a circle of blue hills on
the banks of a clear, willow-fringed river, where there were rich,
black-soil, river-flat farms, and vineyards on the red soil slopes, and
blue peaks in the distance. It was a great contrast to Ross’s Creek.
Jack paid a deposit on an allotment of land, a bit out of town, on the
river bank, and built a little weather-board box of a cottage in spare
times, and planted roses and grape-vines to hide its ugliness by and
by. It wasn’t much of a place, but Clara was mighty proud of it because
it was “our house.” They were very happy, and she was beginning to feel
sure of Jack. She seemed to believe that the miserable old time was all
past and gone.
When the work at the land’s office gave out, Jack did all sorts of jobs
about town, and at last, one shearing season, when there was a heavy
clip of wool, and shearers were getting L1 a hundred, he decided to go
out back. I know that Clara was against it, but he argued that it was
the only chance for him, and she persuaded herself that she could trust
him. I was knocking about Solong at the time, and Jack and I decided to
go out together and share his packhorse between us. He wrote to
Beenaway Shed, about three hundred: miles north-west in the Great
Scrubs, and got pens for both of us.
It was a fine fresh morning when we started; it was in a good season
and the country looked grand. When I rode up to Jack’s place I saw his
horse and packhorse tied up outside the gate. He had wanted me to come
up the evening before and have tea with them and camp at his place for
the night. “Come up! man alive!” he said. “We’ll make you a
shake-down!” But I wouldn’t; I said I had to meet a chap. Jack wouldn’t
have understood. I had been up before, but when I saw him and Clara so
happy and comfortable, and thought of the past and my secret, and
thought of myself, a useless, purposeless, restless, homeless sort of
fellow, hanging out at a boarding-house, it nearly broke me up, and I
had to have a drink or two afterwards. I often wonder if Clara guessed
and understood. You never know how much a woman knows; but—ah, well!
Jack had taken my things home with him and he and Clara had packed
them. I found afterwards that she had washed, dried and ironed some
collars and handkerchiefs of mine during the night. Clara and Jack came
out to the gate, and as I wouldn’t go in to have a cup of tea there was
nothing for it but to say good-bye. She was dressed in a fresh-looking
print blouse and dark skirt, and wore a white hood that fell back from
her head; she was a little girl, with sweet, small, freckled features,
and red-gold hair, and kind, sympathetic grey eyes. I thought her the
freshest, and fairest, and daintiest little woman in the district.
I was Jack’s mate, so she always treated me as a sort of
brother-in-law, and called me by my Christian name. Mates are closer
than brothers in the bush.
I turned my back and pretended to tighten the straps and girths on the
packhorse while she said good-bye to Jack. I heard her speaking
earnestly to him, and once I heard her mention Peter M’Laughlan’s name.
I thought Jack answered rather impatiently. “Oh, that’s all right,
Clara,” he said, “that’s all over—past and gone. I wish you would
believe it. You promised never to speak of that any more.”
I know how it was. Jack never cared to hear about Peter; he was too
ashamed of the past, perhaps; besides, deep down, we feel a sort of
resentment towards any reference to a man who has helped or saved us in
the past. It’s human nature.
Then they spoke in low tones for a while, and then Jack laughed, and
kissed her, and said, “Oh, I’ll be back before the time’s up.” Then he
ran into the house to say good-bye to Mary’s sister, who was staying
with her, and who was laid up with a sprained ankle.
Then Clara stepped up to me and laid her fingers on my shoulder. I
trembled from head to foot and hoped she didn’t notice it.
“Joe,” she said, looking at me with her big, searching grey eyes, “I
believe I can trust you. I want you to look after Jack. You know why.
Never let him have one drink if you can help it. One drink—the first
drink will do it. I want you to promise me that you will never have a
drink with Jack, no matter what happens or what he says.”
“I never will,” I said, and I meant it.
“It’s the first time he’s been away from me since he gave up drinking,
and if he comes back all right this time I will be sure of him and
contented. But, Joe, if he comes back wrong it will kill me; it will
break my heart. I want you to promise that if anything happens you will
ride or wire for Peter M’Laughlan. I hear he’s wool-sorting this year
at Beenaway Station. Promise me that if anything happens you will ride
for Peter M’Laughlan and tell him, no matter what Jack says.”
“I promise,” I said.
She half-held out her hand to me, but I kept both mine behind my back.
I suppose she thought I didn’t notice that she wanted to shake hands on
the bargain; but the truth was that my hands shook so, and I didn’t
want her to notice _that_.
I got on my horse and felt steadier. Then, “Good-bye, Clara”—“Good-bye,
Jack.” She bore up bravely, but I saw her eyes brimming. Jack got on
his horse, and I bent over and shook hands with her. Jack bent down and
kissed her while she stood on tiptoe. “Good-bye, little woman,” he
said. “Cheer up, and I’ll be back before you know where you are! You
mustn’t fret—you know why.”
“Good-bye, Jack!”—she was breaking down.
“Come on, Jack!” I said, and we rode off, turning and waving our hats
to her as she stood by the gate, looking a desolate little thing, I
thought, till we turned down a bend of the road into the river.
As we jogged along with the packhorse trotting behind us, and the
quart-pots and hobble-chains jingling on the packsaddle, I pictured
Clara running inside, to cry a while in her sister’s arms, and then to
bustle round and cheer up, for Jack’s sake—and for the sake of
something else.
“I’ll christen him after you, Joe,” said Jack, later on, when we’d got
confidential over our pipes after tea in our first camp. It never
seemed to enter his head that there was the ghost of a chance that it
might be a girl. “I’m glad he didn’t come along when I was drinking,”
he said.
And as we lay rolled in our blankets under the stars I swore a big oath
to myself.
We got along comfortably and reached Beenaway Station in about a week,
the day before the shearers’ roll-call. Jack never showed the slightest
inclination to go into a shanty; and several times we talked about old
times and what damned fools we’d been throwing away our money over
shanty bars shouting for loafers and cadgers. “Isn’t this ever so-much
better, Joe!” said Jack, as we lay on our blankets smoking one
moonlight night. “There’s nothing in boozing, Joe, you can take it from
me. Just you sling it for a year and then look back; you won’t want to
touch it again. You’ve been straight for a couple of months. Sling it
for good, Joe, before it gets a hold on you, like it did on me.”
It was the morning after cut-out at Beenaway Shed, and we were glad. We
were tired of the rush and roar and rattle and heat and grease and
blasphemy of the big, hot, iron machine shed in that dusty patch in the
barren scrubs. Swags were rolled up, saddle-bags packed, horses had
been rounded up and driven in, the shearers’ cook and his mate had had
their fight, and about a hundred men—shearers, rouseabouts, and
wool-washers—were waiting round the little iron office to get their
cheques.
We were about half through when one bushman said to another: “Stop your
damned swearin’, Jim. Here’s Peter M’Laughlan!” Peter walked up and the
men made way for him and he went into the office. There was always
considerably less swearing for a few feet round about where Peter
M’Laughlan happened to be working in a shearing-shed. It seemed to be
an understood thing with the men. He took no advantages, never
volunteered to preach at a shed where he was working, and only spoke on
union subjects when the men asked him to. He was “rep.” (Shearers’
Union representative) at this shed, but squatters and station managers
respected him as much as the men did.
He seemed much greyer now, but still stood square and straight. And his
eyes still looked one through.
When Peter came out and the crowd had cleared away he took Jack aside
and spoke to him in a low voice for a few minutes. I heard Jack say,
“Oh, that’s all right, Peter! You have my word for it,” and he got on
his horse. I heard Peter say the one word, “Remember!” “Oh, that’s all
right,” said Jack, and he shook hands with Peter, shouted, “Come on,
Joe!” and started off with the packhorse after him.
“I wish I were going down with you, Joe,” said Peter to me, “but I
can’t get away till to-morrow. I’ve got that sick rouseabout on my
hands, and I’ll have to see him fixed up somehow and started off to the
hospital” (the nearest was a hundred miles away). “And, by the way,
I’ve taken up a collection for him; I want a few shillings from you,
Joe. I nearly forgot you. The poor fellow only got in about a
fortnight’s work, and there’s a wife and youngsters in Sydney. I’ll be
down after you to-morrow. I promised to go to Comesomehow[1] and get
the people together and start an agitation for a half-time school
there. Anyway, I’ll be there by the end of the week. Good-bye, Joe. I
must get some more money for the rouser from some of those chaps before
they start.”
[1] There is a postal district in new South Wales called
“Come-by-Chance.”
Comesomehow was a wretched cockatoo settlement, a bit off the track,
about one hundred and fifty miles on our road home, where the settlers
lived like savages and the children ran wild. I reckoned that Peter
would have his work cut out to start a craving for education in that
place.
By saying he’d be there I think he intended to give me a hint, in case
anything happened. I believe now that Jack’s wife had got anxious and
had written to him.
We jogged along comfortably and happily for three or four days, and as
we passed shanty after shanty, and town after town, without Jack
showing the slightest inclination to pull up at any of them, I began to
feel safe about him.
Then it happened, in the simplest way, as most things of this sort
happen if you don’t watch close.
The third night it rained, rained heavens-hard, and rainy nights can be
mighty cold out on those plains, even in midsummer. Jack and I rigged
up a strip of waterproof stuff we had to cover the swags on the
packhorse, but the rain drove in, almost horizontally, and we got wet
through, blankets, clothes and all. Jack got a bad cold and coughed fit
to break himself; so about daylight, when the rain held up a bit, we
packed up and rode on to the next pub, a wretched little weather-board
place in the scrub.
Jack reckoned he’d get some stuff for his cold there. I didn’t like to
speak, but before we reached the place I said, “You won’t touch a
drink, Jack.”
“Do you think I’m a blanky fool?” said Jack, and I shut up.
The shanty was kept by a man who went by the name of Thomas, a
notorious lamber-down,[2] as I found out afterwards. He was a big,
awkward bullock of a man, a selfish, ignorant brute, as anyone might
have seen by his face; but he had a loud voice, and adopted a careless,
rollicking, hail-fellow-well-met! come-in-and-sit-down-man-alive!
clap-you-on-the-back style, which deceived a good many, or which a good
many pretended to believe in. His “missus” was an animal of his own
species, but she was duller and didn’t bellow.
[2] “Lamber-down,” a shanty keeper who entices cheque-men to drink.
He had a rather good-looking girl there—I don’t know whether she was
his daughter or not. They said that when he saw the shearers coming
he’d say, “Run and titivate yourself, Mary; here comes the shearers!”
But what surprised me was that Jack Barnes didn’t seem able to see
through Thomas; he thought that he was all right, “a bit of a rough
diamond.” There are any amount of scoundrels and swindlers knocking
about the world disguised as rough diamonds.
Jack had a fit of coughing when we came in.
“Why, Jack!” bellowed Thomas, “that’s a regular churchyarder you’ve
got. Go in to the kitchen fire and I’ll mix you a stiff toddy.”
“No, thank you, Thomas,” said Jack, glancing at me rather sheepishly, I
thought. “I’ll have a hot cup of coffee presently, that’ll do me more
good.”
“Why, man alive, one drink won’t hurt you!” said Thomas. “I know you’re
on the straight, and you know I’m the last man that ’ud try to get you
off it. But you want something for that cold. You don’t want to die on
the track, do you? What would your missus say? That cough of yours is
enough to bust a bullock.”
“Jack isn’t drinking, Thomas,” I said rather shortly, “and neither am
I.”
“I’ll have a cup of coffee at breakfast,” said Jack; “thank you all the
same, Thomas.”
“Right you are, Jack!” said Thomas. “Mary!” he roared at the girl,
“chuck yerself about and get breakfast, and make a strong cup of
coffee; and I say, missus” (to his wife), “git some honey and vinegar
in a cup, will yer? or see if there’s any of that cough stuff left in
the bottle. Go into the kitchen, you chaps, and dry yourselves at the
fire, you’re wringing wet.”
Jack went through into the kitchen. I stepped out to see if the horses
were all right, and as I came in again through the bar, Thomas, who had
slipped behind the counter, crooked his finger at me and poured out a
stiff whisky. “I thought you might like to have it on the quiet,” he
whispered, with a wink.
Now, there was this difference between Jack and me. When I was on the
track, and healthy and contented, I could take a drink, or two drinks,
and then leave it; or at other times I could drink all day, or all
night, and be as happy as a lord, and be mighty sick and repentant all
next day, and then not touch drink for a week; but if Jack once
started, he was a lost man for days, for weeks, for, months—as long as
his cash or credit lasted. I felt a cold coming on me this morning, and
wanted a whisky, so I had a drink with Thomas. Then, of course, I
shouted in my turn, keeping an eye out in case Jack should come in. I
went into the kitchen and steamed with Jack for a while in front of a
big log fire, taking care to keep my breath away from him. Then we went
in to breakfast. Those two drinks were all I meant to have, and we were
going right on after breakfast.
It was a good breakfast, ham and eggs, and we enjoyed it. The two
whiskies had got to work. I hadn’t touched drink for a long time. I
shouldn’t like to say that Thomas put anything in the drink he gave me.
Before we started breakfast he put a glass down in front of me and
said:
“There’s a good ginger-ale, it will warm you up.”
I tasted it; it was rum, hot. I said nothing. What could I say?
There was some joke about Jack being married and settled and steadied
down, and me, his old mate, still on the wallaby; and Mrs Thomas said
that I ought to follow Jack’s example. And just then I felt a touch of
that loneliness that some men feel when an old drinking mate turns
teetotaller.
Jack started coughing again, like an old cow with the pleuro.
“That cough will kill you, Jack,” said Thomas. “Let’s put a drop of
brandy in your coffee, that won’t start you, anyhow; it’s real ‘Three
Star.’” And he reached a bottle from the side-table.
I should have stood up then, for my manhood, for my mate, and for
little Clara, but I half rose from my chair, and Jack laughed and said,
“Sit down, Joe, you old fool, you’re tanked. I know all about your
seeing about the horses and your ginger-ales. It’s all right, old man.
Do you think I’m going on the booze? Why, I’ll have to hold you on the
horse all day.”
“Here’s luck, Joe!” said Jack, laughing, and lifting up his cup of
coffee with the brandy in it. “Here’s luck, Joe.”
Then suddenly, and as clearly as I ever heard it, came Clara’s voice to
my ear: “Promise me, whatever you do, that you will never have a drink
with Jack.” And I felt cold and sick to the stomach.
I got up and went out. They thought that the drink had made me sick,
but if I’d stayed there another minute I would have tackled Thomas; and
I knew that I needed a clear head to tackle a bullock like him. I
walked about a bit, and when I came in again Jack and Thomas were in
the bar, and Jack had a glass before him.
“Come on, Joe, you old bounder,” said Jack, “come and have a
whisky-and-soda; it will straighten you up.”
“What’s that you’re drinking, Jack?” I asked.
“Oh, don’t be a fool!” said Jack. “One drink won’t hurt me. Do you
think I’m going on the booze? Have a soda and straighten up; we must
make a start directly.”
I remember we had two or three whiskies, and then suddenly I tackled
Thomas, and Jack was holding me back, and laughing and swearing at me
at the same time, and I had a tussle with him; and then I was suddenly
calmer and sensible, and we were shaking hands all round, and Jack was
talking about just one more spree for the sake of old times.
“A bit of a booze won’t hurt me, Joe, you old fool,” he said. “We’ll
have one more night of it, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne, and start at
daylight in the morning. You go and see to the horses, it will
straighten you up. Take the saddle off and hobble ’em out.”
But I insisted on starting at once, and Jack promised he would. We were
gloriously happy for an hour or so, and then I went to sleep.
When I woke it was late in the afternoon. I was very giddy and shaky;
the girl brought me a whisky-and-soda, and that steadied me. Some more
shearers had arrived, and Jack was playing cards with two of them on
top of a cask in the bar. Thomas was dead drunk on the floor, or
pretending to be so, and his wife was behind the bar. I went out to see
to the horses; I found them in a bush yard at the back. The packhorse
was rolling in the mud with the pack-saddle and saddlebags on. One of
the chaps helped me take off the saddles and put them in the
harness-room behind the kitchen.
I’ll pass over that night. It wouldn’t be very edifying to the great,
steady-living, sober majority, and the others, the never-do-wells, the
rovers, wrecks and failures, will understand only too well without
being told—only too well, God help them!
When I woke in the morning I couldn’t have touched a drink to save my
life. I was fearfully shaky, and swimming about the head, but I put my
head over a tub under the pump and got the girl to pump for a while,
and then I drank a pint of tea and managed to keep it down, and felt
better.
All through the last half of the night I’d kept saying, in a sort of
drink nightmare, “I’ll go for Peter M’Laughlan in the morning. I’ll go
for Peter as soon as I can stand!” and repeating Clara Barnes’s words,
“Ride for Peter if anything happens. Ride for Peter M’Laughlan.”
There were drunken shearers, horsemen and swagmen sleeping all over the
place, and in all sorts of odd positions; some on the veranda with
their heads on their swags, one sitting back against the wall, and one
on the broad of his back with his head on the bare boards and his mouth
open. There was another horse rolling in its saddle, and I took the
saddle off. The horse belonged to an English University man.
I went in to see how Jack was. He was lying in the parlour on a little,
worn-out, horse-hair sofa, that might have seen better days in some
clean home in the woman-and-girl world. He had been drinking and
playing cards till early that morning, and he looked awful—he looked as
if he’d been boozing for a month.
“See what you’ve done!” he said, sitting up and glaring at me; then he
said, “Bring me a whisky-and-soda, Joe, for God’s sake!”
I got a whisky-and-soda from the girl and took it to him.
I talked to him for a while, and at last he said, “Well, go and get the
horses and we’ll start.”
I got the horses ready and brought them round to the front, but by that
time he’d had more drink, and he said he wanted to sleep before he
started. Next he was playing cards with one of the chaps, and asked me
to wait till he’d finished that game. I knew he’d keep promising and
humbugging me till there was a row, so at last I got him aside and
said:
“Look here, Jack, I’m going for Peter M’Laughlan——”
“Go to hell!” said Jack.
I put the other horses back in the yard, the saddles in the skillion,
got on my horse and rode off. Thomas and the others asked me no
questions, they took no notice. In a place like that a man could almost
do anything, short of hanging himself, without anyone interfering or
being surprised. And probably, if he did hang himself, they’d let him
swing for a while to get a taste of it.
Comesomehow was about fifteen miles back on a track off the main road.
I reckoned that I could find Peter and bring him on by the afternoon,
and I rode hard, sick as I was. I was too sick to smoke.
As it happened, Peter had started early from his last camp and I caught
him just as he was turning off into Comesomehow track.
“What’s up, Joe?” he asked as I rode up to him—but he could see.
“Jack Barnes is on the booze at Thomas’s,” I said.
Peter just looked right through me. Then he turned his horse’s head
without a word, and rode back with me. And, after a while, he said, as
if to himself:
“Poor Clara! Poor little lassie!”
By the time we reached the shanty it was well on in the afternoon. A
fight was stopped in the first round and voices lowered when the chaps
caught sight of us. As Peter walked into the bar one or two drunks
straightened themselves and took off their hats with drunken sentiment.
“Where is Jack Barnes, Thomas?” asked Peter, quietly.
“He’s in there if you want to see him,” said Thomas, jerking his head
towards the parlour.
We went in, and when Peter saw Jack lying there I noticed that swift,
haunted look came into his eyes, as if he’d seen a ghost of the past.
He sat down by the sofa to wait until Jack woke. I thought as he sat
there that his eyes were like a woman’s for sympathy and like a dog’s
for faithfulness. I was very shaky.
Presently Thomas looked in. “Is there anything I can do for you,
M’Laughlan?” he asked in as civil a tone as he could get to.
“Yes,” said Peter, “bring me a flask of your best whisky—your own,
mind—and a glass.
“We shall need the whisky for him on the track, Joe,” said Peter, when
the flask came. “Get another glass and a bottle of soda; you want a
nip.” He poured out a drink for himself.
“The first thing we’ve got to do is to get him away; then I’ll soon put
him on his feet. But we’ll let him sleep a while longer. I find I’ve
got business near Solong, and I’m going down with you.”
By and by Jack woke up and glared round, and when he caught sight of
Peter he just reached for his hands and said, “Peter! Thank God you’ve
come!” Then he said, “But I must have a drink first, Peter.”
“All right, Jack, you shall have a drink,” said Peter; and he gave him
a stiff nobblerq. It steadied Jack a bit.
“Now listen to me, Jack,” said Peter. “How much money have you got
left?”
“I—I can’t think,” said Jack. “I’ve got a cheque for twenty pounds
here, sewn inside my shirt.”
“Yes; but you drew thirty-six in three cheques. Where’s the rest?”
“Thomas has ten,” said Jack, “and the six—well, the six is gone. I was
playing cards last night.”
Peter stepped out into the bar.
“Look here, Thomas,” he said quietly, “you’ve got a ten-pound cheque
from Barnes.”
“I know I have.”
“Well, how much of it does he owe you?”
“The whole, and more.”
“Do you mean to tell me that? He has only been here since yesterday
morning.”
“Yes; but he’s been shoutin’ all round. Look at all these chaps here.”
“They only came yesterday afternoon,” said Peter. “Here, you had best
take this and give me the cheque;” and Peter laid a five-pound note on
the bar. Thomas bucked at first, but in the end he handed over the
cheque—he had had several warnings from the police. Then he suddenly
lost all control over himself; he came round from behind the bar and
faced Peter.
“Now, look here, you mongrel parson!” he said. “What the —— do you mean
by coming into my bar and, interfering with me. Who the —— are you
anyway? A ——!” He used the worst oaths that were used in the bush.
“Take off your —— coat!” he roared at last, shaping up to Peter.
Peter stepped back a pace and buttoned his coat and threw back his
head.
“No need to take off my coat, Thomas,” he said, “I am ready.”
He said it very quietly, but there was a danger-signal—a red light in
his eyes. He was quiet-voiced but hard-knuckled, as some had reason to
know.
Thomas balked like a bull at a spread umbrella. Jack lurched past me as
I stood in the parlour door, but I caught him and held him back; and
almost at the same moment a wretched old boozer that we called “Awful
Example,” who had been sitting huddled, a dirty bundle of rags and
beard and hair, in the corner of the bar, struggled to his feet,
staggered forward and faced Thomas, looking once again like something
that might have been a man. He snatched a thick glass bottle from the
counter and held it by the neck in his right hand.
“Stand back, Thomas!” he shouted. “Lay a hand—lay a finger on Peter
M’Laughlan, and I’ll smash your head, as sure as there’s a God above us
and I’m a ruined man!”
Peter took “Awful” gently by the shoulders and sat him down. “You keep
quiet, old man,” he said; “nothing is going to happen.” Thomas went
round behind the bar muttering something about it not being worth his
while to, etc.
“You go and get the horses ready, Joe,” said Peter to me; “and you sit
down, Jack, and keep quiet.”
“He can get the horses,” growled Thomas, from behind the bar, “but I’m
damned if he gets the saddles. I’ve got them locked up, and I’ll
something well keep them till Barnes is sober enough to pay me what he
owes me.”
Just then a tall, good-looking chap, with dark-blue eyes and a long,
light-coloured moustache, stepped into the bar from the crowd on the
veranda.
“What’s all this, Thomas?” he asked.
“What’s that got to do with you, Gentleman Once?” shouted Thomas.
“I think it’s got something to do with me,” said Gentleman Once. “Now,
look here, Thomas; you can do pretty well what you like with us poor
devils, and you know it, but we draw the line at Peter M’Laughlan. If
you really itch for the thrashing, you deserve you must tempt someone
else to give it to you.”
“What the —— are you talking about?” snorted Thomas. “You’re drunk or
ratty!”
“What’s the trouble, M’Laughlan?” asked Gentleman Once, turning to
Peter. “No trouble at all, Gentleman Once,” said Peter; “thank you all
the same. I’ve managed worse men than our friend Thomas. Now, Thomas,
don’t you think it would pay you best to hand over the key of the
harness-room and have done with this nonsense? I’m a patient man—a very
patient man—but I’ve not always been so, and the old blood comes up
sometimes, you know.”
Thomas couldn’t stand this sort of language, because he couldn’t
understand it. He threw the key on the bar and told us to clear out.
We were all three very quiet riding along the track that evening. Peter
gave Jack a nip now and again from the flask, and before we turned in
in camp he gave him what he called a soothing draught from a little
medicine chest that he carried in his saddle-bag. Jack seemed to have
got rid of his cough; he slept all night, and in the morning, after
he’d drunk a pint of mutton-broth that Peter had made in one of the
billies, he was all right—except that he was quiet and ashamed. I had
never known him to be so quiet, and for such a length of time, since we
were boys together. He had learned his own weakness; he’d lost all his
cocksureness. I know now just exactly how he felt. He felt as if his
sober year had been lost and he would have to live it all over again.
Peter didn’t preach. He just jogged along and camped with us as if he
were an ordinary, every-day mate. He yarned about all sorts of things.
He could tell good yarns, and when he was fairly on you could listen to
him all night. He seemed to have been nearly all over the world. Peter
never preached except when he was asked to hold service in some bush
pub, station-homestead or bush church. But in a case like ours he had a
way of telling a little life story, with something in it that hit the
young man he wanted to reform, and hit him hard. He’d generally begin
quietly, when we were comfortable with our pipes in camp after tea,
with “I once knew a young man—” or “That reminds me of a young fellow I
knew—” and so on. You never knew when he was going to begin; or when he
was going to hit you. In our last camp, before we reached Solong, he
told two of his time-fuse yarns. I haven’t time to tell them now, but
one stuffed up my pipe for a while, and made Jack’s hand tremble when
he tried to light his. I’m glad it was too dark to see our faces. We
lay a good while afterwards, rolled in our blankets, and couldn’t get
to sleep for thinking; but Peter seemed to fall asleep as soon as he
turned in.
Next day he told Jack not to tell Clara that he’d come down with us. He
said he wouldn’t go right into Solong with us; he was going back along
another road to stay a day or two with an old friend of his.
When we reached Solong we stopped on the river-bank just out of sight
of Jack’s house. Peter took the ten-pound cheque from his pocket and
gave it to Jack. Jack hadn’t seen Peter give the shanty-keeper the
five-pound note.
“But I owed Thomas something,” said Jack, staring. “However did you
manage to get the cheque out of him?”
“Never mind, Jack, I managed,” said Peter.
Jack sat silent for a while, then he began to breathe hard.
“I don’t know what to say, Peter.”
“Say nothing, Jack. Only promise me that you will give Clara the
cheques as soon as you go home, and let her take care of the cash for a
while.”
“I will,” said Jack.
Jack looked down at the ground for a while, then he lifted his head and
looked Peter in the eyes.
“Peter,” he said, “I can’t speak. I’m ashamed to make a promise; I’ve
broken so many. I’ll try to thank you in a year’s time from now.”
“I ask for no promises,” said Peter, and he held out his hand. Jack
gripped it.
“Aren’t you coming home with me, Joe?” he asked.
“No,” I said; “I’ll go into town. See you in the morning.”
Jack rode on. When he got along a piece Peter left his horse and moved
up to the head of the lane to watch Jack, and I followed. As Jack
neared the cottage we saw a little figure in a cloak run out to the
front gate. She had heard the horses and the jingle of the camp-ware on
the pack-saddle. We saw Jack jump down and take her in his arms. I
looked at Peter, and as he watched them, something, that might have
been a strange look of the old days, came into his eyes.
He shook hands with me. “Good-bye, Joe.”
He rode across the river again. He took the track that ran along the
foot of the spurs by the river, and up over a gap in the curve of blue
hills, and down and out west towards the Big Scrubs. And as he rounded
the last spur, with his packhorse trotting after him, I thought he must
have felt very lonely. And I felt lonely too.
THE STORY OF “GENTLEMAN ONCE”
They learn the world from black-sheep,
Who know it all too well.—_Out Back_.
Peter M’Laughlan, bush missionary, Joe Wilson and his mate, Jack
Barnes, shearers for the present, and a casual swagman named Jack
Mitchell, were camped at Cox’s Crossing in a bend of Eurunderee Creek.
It was a grassy little flat with gum-trees standing clear and clean
like a park. At the back was the steep grassy siding of a ridge, and
far away across the creek to the south a spur from the Blue Mountain
range ran west, with a tall, blue granite peak showing clear in the
broad moonlight, yet dream-like and distant over the sweeps of dark
green bush.
There was the jingle of hobble-chains and a crunching at the grass
where the horses moved in the soft shadows amongst the trees. Up the
creek on the other side was a surveyors’ camp, and from there now and
again came the sound of a good voice singing verses of old songs; and
later on the sound of a violin and a cornet being played, sometimes
together and sometimes each on its own.
Wilson and Barnes were on their way home from shearing out back in the
great scrubs at Beenaway Shed. They had been rescued by Peter
M’Laughlan from a wayside shanty where they had fallen, in spite of
mutual oaths and past promises, sacred and profane, because they had
got wringing wet in a storm on the track and caught colds, and had been
tempted to take just one drink.
They were in a bad way, and were knocking down their cheques
beautifully when Peter M’Laughlan came along. He rescued them and some
of their cash from the soulless shanty keeper, and was riding home with
them, on some pretence, because he had known them as boys, because Joe
Wilson had a vein of poetry in him—a something in sympathy with
something in Peter; because Jack Barnes had a dear little girl-wife who
was much too good for him, and who was now anxiously waiting for him in
the pretty little farming town of Solong amongst the western spurs.
Because, perhaps, of something in Peter’s early past which was a
mystery. Simply and plainly because Peter M’Laughlan was the kindest,
straightest and truest man in the West—a “white man.”
They all knew Mitchell and welcomed him heartily when he turned up in
their camp, because he was a pathetic humorist and a kindly cynic—a
“joker” or “hard case” as the bushmen say.
Peter was about fifty and the other three were young men.
There was another man in camp who didn’t count and was supposed to be
dead. Old Danny Quinn, champion “beer-chewer” of the district, was on
his way out, after a spree, to one of Rouse’s stations, where, for the
sake of past services—long past—and because of old times, he was
supposed to be working. He had spent his last penny a week before and
had clung to his last-hope hotel until the landlord had taken him in
one hand and his swag in the other and lifted them clear of the
veranda. Danny had blundered on, this far, somehow; he was the last in
the world who could have told how, and had managed to light a fire;
then he lay with his head on his swag and enjoyed nips of whisky in
judicious doses and at reasonable intervals, and later on a tot of
mutton-broth, which he made in one of the billies.
It was after tea. Peter sat on a log by the fire with Joe and Jack
Mitchell on one side and Jack Barnes on the other. Jack Mitchell sat on
the grass with his back to the log, his knees drawn up, and his arms
abroad on them: his most comfortable position and one which seemed to
favour the flow of his philosophy. They talked of bush things or
reflected, sometimes all three together, sometimes by turns.
From the surveyors’ camp:
I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn—
The breeze from the west strengthened and the voice was blown away.
“That chap seems a bit sentimental but he’s got a good voice,” said
Mitchell. Then presently he remarked, round his pipe:
“I wonder if old Danny remembers?” And presently Peter said quietly, as
if the thought had just occurred to him:
“By the way, Mitchell, I forgot to ask after your old folk. I knew your
father, you know.”
“Oh, they’re all right, Peter, thank you.”
“Heard from them lately?” asked Peter, presently, in a lazy tone.
Mitchell straightened himself up. “N—no. To tell the truth, Peter, I
haven’t written for—I don’t know how long.”
Peter smoked reflectively.
“I remember your father well, Jack,” he said. “He was a big-hearted
man.”
Old Danny was heard remonstrating loudly with spirits from a warmer
clime than Australia, and Peter stepped over to soothe him.
“I thought I’d get it, directly after I opened my mouth,” said
Mitchell. “I suppose it will be your turn next, Joe.”
“I suppose so,” said Joe, resignedly.
The wind fell.
I remember, I remember,
And it gives me little joy,
To think I’m further off from heaven,
Than when I was a boy!
When Peter came back another thought seemed to have occurred to him.
“How’s your mother getting on, Joe?” he asked. “She shifted to Sydney
after your father died, didn’t she?”
“Oh, she’s getting on all right!” said Joe, without elaboration.
“Keeping a boarding-house, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Joe.
“Hard to make ends meet, I suppose?” said Peter. “It’s almost a harder
life than it could have been on the old selection, and there’s none of
the old independence about it. A woman like your mother must feel it,
Joe.”
“Oh, she’s all right,” said Joe. “She’s used to it by this time. I
manage to send her a few pounds now and again. I send her all I can,”
he added resentfully.
Peter sat corrected for a few moments. Then he seemed to change the
subject.
“It’s some time since you were in Sydney last, isn’t it, Joe?’
“Yes, Peter,” said Joe. “I haven’t been there for two years. I never
did any good there. I’m far better knocking about out back.”
There was a pause.
“Some men seem to get on better in one place, some in another,”
reflected Mitchell, lazily. “For my part, I seem to get on better in
another.”
Peter blinked, relit his pipe with a stick from the fire and reflected.
The surveyor’s song had been encored:
I remember, I remember—
Perhaps Peter remembered. Joe did, but there were no vines round the
house where he was born, only drought and dust, and raspy voices raised
in recrimination, and hardship most times.
“I remember,” said Peter, quietly, “I remember a young fellow at home
in the old country. He had every advantage. He had a first-class
education, a great deal more money than he needed—almost as much as he
asked for, and nearly as much freedom as he wanted. His father was an
English gentleman and his mother an English lady. They were titled
people, if I remember rightly. The old man was proud, but fond of his
son; he only asked him to pay a little duty or respect now and again.
We don’t understand these things in Australia—they seem formal and cold
to us. The son paid his respects to his father occasionally—a week or
so before he’d be wanting money, as a rule. The mother was a dear lady.
She idolized her son. She only asked for a little show of affection
from him, a few days or a week of his society at home now and then—say
once in three months. But he couldn’t spare her even that—his time was
taken up so much in fashionable London and Paris and other places. He
would give the world to be able to take his proud, soft old father’s
hand now and look into his eyes as one man who understands another. He
would be glad and eager to give his mother twelve months out of the
year if he thought it would make her happier. It has been too late for
more than twenty years.”
Old Danny called for Peter.
Mitchell jerked his head approvingly and gave a sound like a sigh and
chuckle conjoined, the one qualifying the other.
“I told you you’d get it, Joe,” he said.
“I don’t see how it hits me,” said Joe.
“But it hit all the same, Joe.”
“Well, I suppose it did,” said Joe, after a short pause.
“He wouldn’t have hit you so hard if you hadn’t tried to parry,”
reflected Mitchell. “It’s your turn now, Jack.”
Jack Barnes said nothing.
“Now I know that Peter would do anything for a woman or child, or an
honest, straight, hard-up chap,” said Mitchell, straightening out his
legs and folding his arms, “but I can’t quite understand his being so
partial to drunken scamps and vagabonds, black sheep and
never-do-wells. He’s got a tremendous sympathy for drunks. He’d do
anything to help a drunken man. Ain’t it marvellous? It’s my private
opinion that Peter must have been an awful boozer and scamp in his
time.”
The other two only thought. Mitchell was privileged. He was a young man
of freckled, sandy complexion, and quizzical grey eyes. “Sly Joker”
“could take a rise out of anyone on the quiet;” “You could never tell
when he was getting at you;” “Face of a born comedian,” as bushmen said
of Mitchell. But he would probably have been a dead and dismal failure
on any other stage than that of wide Australia.
Peter came back and they sat and smoked, and maybe they reflected along
four very different back-tracks for a while.
The surveyor started to sing again:
I have heard the mavis singing
Her love-song to the morn.
I have seen the dew-drop clinging
To the rose just newly born.
They smoked and listened in silence all through to the end. It was very
still. The full moon was high. The long white slender branches of a
box-tree stirred gently overhead; the she-oaks in the creek sighed as
they are always sighing, and the southern peak seemed ever so far away.
That has made me thine for ever!
Bonny Mary of Argyle.
“Blarst my pipe!” exclaimed Mitchell, suddenly. “I beg your pardon,
Peter. My pipe’s always getting stuffed up,” and he proceeded to shell
out and clear his pipe.
The breeze had changed and strengthened. They heard the violin playing
“Annie Laurie.”
“They must be having a Scotch night in that camp tonight,” said
Mitchell. The voice came again:
Maxwelton Braes are bonny—
Where early fa’s the dew,
For ’twas there that Annie Laurie
Gie me her promise true—
Mitchell threw out his arm impatiently. “I wish they wouldn’t play and
sing those old songs,” he said. “They make you think of damned old
things. I beg your pardon, Peter.”
Peter sat leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees and his
hands fingering his cold pipe nervously. His sad eyes had grown haggard
and haunted. It is in the hearts of exiles in new lands that the old
songs are felt.
“Take no thought of the morrow, Mitchell,” said Peter, abstractedly. “I
beg your pardon, Mitchell. I mean——”
“That’s all right, Peter,” said Mitchell. “You’re right; to-morrow is
the past, as far as I’m concerned.”
Peter blinked down at him as if he were a new species.
“You’re an odd young man, Mitchell,” he said. “You’ll have to take care
of that head of yours or you’ll be found hanging by a saddle-strap to a
leaning tree on a lonely track, or find yourself in a lunatic asylum
before you’re forty-five.”
“Or else I’ll be a great man,” said Mitchell. “But—ah, well!”
Peter turned his eyes to the fire and smiled sadly. “Not enjoyment and
not sorrow, is our destined end or way,” he repeated to the fire.
“But we get there just the same,” said Mitchell, “destined or not.”
But to live, that each to-morrow,
Finds us further than to-day!
“Why, that just fits my life, Peter,” said Mitchell. “I might have to
tramp two or three hundred miles before I get a cut[3] or a job, and if
to-morrow didn’t find me nearer than to-day I’d starve or die of thirst
on a dry stretch.”
[3] Cut—a pen or “stand” in a shearing shed.
“Why don’t you get married and settle down, Mitchell?” asked Peter, a
little tired. “You’re a teetotaller.”
“If I got married I couldn’t settle down,” said Mitchell. “I reckon I’d
be the loneliest man in Australia.” Peter gave him a swift glance. “I
reckon I’d be single no matter how much married I might be. I couldn’t
get the girl I wanted, and—ah, well!”
Mitchell’s expression was still quaintly humorous round the lower part
of his face, but there was a sad light in his eyes. The strange light
as of the old dead days, and he was still young.
The cornet had started in the surveyors’ camp.
“Their blooming tunes seem to fit in just as if they knew what we were
talking about,” remarked Mitchell.
The cornet:
You’ll break my heart, you little bird,
That sings upon the flowering thorn
Thou mind’st me of departed joys,
Departed never to return.
“Damn it all,” said Mitchell, sitting up, “I’m getting sentimental.”
Then, as if voicing something that was troubling him, “Don’t you think
a woman pulls a man down as often as she lifts him up, Peter?”
“Some say so,” said Peter.
“Some say so, and they write it, too,” said Mitchell.
“Sometimes it seems to me as if women were fated to drag a man down
ever since Adam’s time. If Adam hadn’t taken his wife’s advice—but
there, perhaps he took her advice a good many times and found it good,
and, just because she happened to be wrong this time, and to get him
into a hole, the sons of Adam have never let the daughters of Eve hear
the last of it. That’s human nature.”
Jack Barnes, the young husband, who was suffering a recovery, had been
very silent all the evening. “I think a man’s a fool to always listen
to his wife’s advice,” he said, with the unreasonable impatience of a
man who wants to think while others are talking. “She only messes him
up, and drives him to the devil as likely as not, and gets a contempt
for him in the end.”
Peter gave him a surprised, reproachful look, and stood up. He paced
backwards and forwards on the other side of the fire, with his hands
behind his back for a while; then he came and settled himself on the
log again and filled his pipe.
“Yes,” he said, “a man can always find excuses for himself when his
conscience stings him. He puts mud on the sting. Man at large is
beginning all over the world to rake up excuses for himself; he
disguises them as ‘Psychological studies,’ and thinks he is clean and
clever and cultured, or he calls ’em problems—the sex problem, for
instance, and thinks he is brave and fearless.”
Danny was in trouble again, and Peter went to him. He complained that
when he lay down he saw the faces worse, and he wanted to be propped up
somehow, so Peter got a pack-saddle and propped the old man’s shoulders
up with that.
“I remember,” Peter began, when he came back to the fire, “I remember a
young man who got married——”
Mitchell hugged himself. He knew Jack Barnes. He knew that Jack had a
girl-wife who was many times too good for him; that Jack had been wild,
and had nearly broken her heart, and he had guessed at once that Jack
had broken out again, and that Peter M’Laughlan was shepherding him
home. Mitchell had worked as mates with Jack, and liked him because of
the good heart that was in him in spite of all; and, because he liked
him, he was glad that Jack was going to get a kicking, so to speak,
which might do him good. Mitchell saw it coming, as he said afterwards,
and filled his pipe, and settled himself comfortably to listen.
“I remember the case of a naturally selfish young man who got married”
said Peter. “He didn’t know he was selfish; in fact, he thought he was
too much the other way—but that doesn’t matter now. His name was—well,
we’ll call him—we’ll call him, ‘Gentleman Once.’”
“Do you mean Gentleman Once that we saw drinking back at Thomas’s
shanty?” asked Joe.
“No,” said Peter, “not him. There have been more than one in the bush
who went by the nickname of ‘Gentleman Once.’ I knew one or two. It’s a
big clan, the clan of Gentleman Once, and scattered all over the
world.”
“By the way,” said Mitchell—“excuse me for interrupting, Peter—but
wasn’t old Danny, there, a gentleman once? I’ve heard chaps say he
was.”
“I know he was,” said Peter.
“Gentleman Once! Who’s talking about Gentleman Once?” said an awful
voice, suddenly and quickly. “About twenty or thirty years ago I was
called Gentleman Once or Gentleman Jack, I don’t know which—Get out!
_Get out_, I say! It’s all lies, and you’re the devil. There’s four
devils sitting by the fire. I see them.”
Two of the four devils by the fire looked round, rather startled.
Danny was sitting up, his awful bloodshot eyes glaring in the
firelight, and his ruined head looking like the bloated head of a hairy
poodle that had been drowned and dried. Peter went to the old man and
soothed him by waving off the snakes and devils with his hands, and
telling them to go.
“I’ve heard Danny on the Gentleman Once racket before,” remarked
Mitchell.
“Seems funny, doesn’t it, for a man to be proud of the fact that he was
called ‘Gentleman Once’ about twenty years ago?”
“Seems more awful than funny to me,” said Joe.
“You’re right, Joe,” said Mitchell. “But the saddest things are often
funny.”
When Peter came back he went on with his story, and was only
interrupted once or twice by Danny waking up and calling him to drive
off the snakes, and green and crimson dogs with crocodile heads, and
devils with flaming tails, and those unpleasant sorts of things that
force their company on boozers and madmen.
“Gentleman Once,” said Peter, “he came from the old country with a good
education and no character. He disgraced himself and family once too
often and came, or was sent, out to Australia to reform. It’s a great
mistake. If a man is too far gone, or hasn’t the strength to live the
past down and reform at home, he won’t do it in a new country, unless a
combination of circumstances compels him to it. A man rises by chance;
just as often he falls by chance. Some men fall into the habit of
keeping steady and stick to it, for the novelty of it, until they are
on their feet and in their sane minds and can look at the past, present
and future sensibly. I knew one case—But that’s got nothing to do with
the story.
“Gentleman Once came out on the remittance system. That system is fatal
in nine cases out of ten. The remittance system is an insult to any
manhood that may be left in the black sheep, and an insult to the land
he is sent to. The cursed quarterly allowance is a stone round his neck
which will drag him down deeper in a new land than he would have fallen
at home. You know that remittance men are regarded with such contempt
in the bush that a man seldom admits he is one, save when he’s drunk
and reckless and wants money or credit. When a ne’er-do-well lands in
Melbourne or Sydney without a penny he will probably buck-up and do
something for himself. When he lands with money he will probably spend
it all in the first few months and then straighten up, because he has
to. But when he lands on the remittance system he drinks, first to
drown homesickness. He decides that he’ll wait till he gets his next
quarter’s allowance and then look round. He persuades himself that it’s
no use trying to do anything: that, in fact, he can’t do anything until
he gets his money. When he gets it he drifts into one ‘last’ night with
chums he has picked up in second and third-rate hotels. He drinks from
pure selfishness. No matter what precautions his friends at home take,
he finds means of getting credit or drawing on his allowance before it
is due—until he is two or three quarters behind. He drinks because he
feels happy and jolly and clever and good-natured and brave and honest
while he is drinking. Later on he drinks because he feels the reverse
of all these things when he is sober. He drinks to drown the past and
repentance. He doesn’t know that a healthy-minded man doesn’t waste
time in repenting. He doesn’t know how easy it is to reform, and is too
weak-willed to try. He gets a muddled idea that the past can’t be
mended. He finds it easy to get drink and borrow money on the strength
of his next quarter’s allowance, so he soon gets a quarter or two
behind, and sometimes gets into trouble connected with borrowed money.
He drifts to the bush and drinks, to drown the past only. The past
grows blacker and blacker until it is a hell without repentance; and
often the black sheep gets to that state when a man dreads his sober
hours. And the end? Well, you see old Danny there, and you saw old
Awful Example back at Thomas’s shanty—he’s worse than Danny, if
anything. Sometimes the end comes sooner. I saw a young
new-land-new-leaf man dying in a cheap lodging-house in Sydney. He was
a schoolmate of mine, by the way. For six weeks he lay on his back and
suffered as I never saw a man suffer in this world; and I’ve seen some
bad cases. They had to chloroform him every time they wanted to move
him. He had affected to be hard and cynical, and I must say that he
played it out to the end. It was a strong character, a strong mind
sodden and diseased with drink. He never spoke of home and his people
except when he was delirious. He never spoke, even to me, of his mental
agony. That was English home training. You young Australians wouldn’t
understand it; most bushmen are poets and emotional.
“My old schoolmate was shifted to the Sydney Hospital at last, and
consented to the amputation of one leg. But it was too late. He was
gone from the hips down. Drink—third-rate hotel and bush shanty
drink—and low debauchery.”
Jack Barnes drew up his leg and rubbed it surreptitiously. He had “pins
and needles.” Mitchell noticed and turned a chuckle into a grunt.
“Gentleman Once was a remittance man,” continued Peter. “But before he
got very far he met an Australian girl in a boarding-house. Her mother
was the landlady. They were bush people who had drifted to the city.
The girl was pretty, intelligent and impulsive. She pitied him and
nursed him. He wasn’t known as Gentleman Once then, he hadn’t got far
enough to merit the nickname.”
Peter paused. Presently he jerked his head, as if he felt a spasm of
pain, and leaned forward to get a stick from the fire to light his
pipe.
“Now, there’s the girl who marries a man to reform him, and when she
has reformed him never lets him hear the last of it. Sometimes, as a
woman, she drives him back again. But this was not one of that sort of
girls. I once held a theory that sometimes a girl who has married a man
and reformed him misses in the reformed man the something which
attracted her in the careless scamp, the something which made her love
him—and so she ceases to love him, and their married life is a far more
miserable one than it would have been had he continued drinking. I hold
no theory of that kind now. Such theories ruin many married lives.”
Peter jerked his head again as if impatient with a thought, and reached
for a fire-stick.
“But that’s got nothing to do with the story. When Gentleman Once
reformed his natural selfishness came back. He saw that he had made a
mistake. It’s a terrible thing for a young man, a few months, perhaps a
few weeks after his marriage, to ask himself the question, ‘Have I made
a mistake?’ But Gentleman Once wasn’t to be pitied. He discovered that
he had married beneath him in intellect and education. Home training
again. He couldn’t have discovered that he had married beneath him as
far as birth was concerned, for his wife’s father had been a younger
son of an older and greater family than his own—But Gentleman Once
wouldn’t have been cad enough to bother about birth. I’ll do him that
much justice. He discovered, or thought he did, that he and his wife
could never have one thought in common; that she couldn’t possibly
understand him. I’ll tell you later on whether he was mistaken or not.
He was gloomy most times, and she was a bright, sociable, busy little
body. When she tried to draw him out of himself he grew irritable.
Besides, having found that they couldn’t have a thought in common he
ceased to bother to talk to her. There are many men who don’t bother
talking to their wives; they don’t think their wives feel it—because
the wives cease to complain after a while; they grow tired of trying to
make the man realize how they suffer. Gentleman Once tried his
best—according to his lights—and weakness. Then he went in for
self-pity and all the problems. He liked to brood, and his poor little
wife’s energy and cheerfulness were wearying to him. He wanted to be
left alone. They were both high-spirited, in different ways; she was
highly strung and so was he—because of his past life mostly. They
quarrelled badly sometimes. Then he drank again and she stuck to him.
Perhaps the only time he seemed cheerful and affectionate was when he
had a few drinks in him. It was a miserable existence—a furnished room
in a cheap lodging-house, and the use of the kitchen.
“He drank alone.
“Now a dipsomaniac mostly thinks he is in the right—except, perhaps,
after he has been forced to be sober for a week. The noblest woman in
the world couldn’t save him—everything she does to reform him irritates
him; but a strong friend can save him sometimes—a man who has been
through it himself. The poor little wife of Gentleman Once went through
it all. And she stuck to him. She went into low pubs after him.”
Peter shuddered again. “She went through it all. He swore promises.
He’d come home sober and fill her with hope of future happiness, and
swear that he’d never take another glass. ‘And we’ll be happy yet, my
poor boy,’ she’d say, ‘we’ll be happy yet. I believe you, I trust you’
(she used to call him her ‘bonny boy’ when they were first married).
And next night he’d come home worse than ever. And one day he—he struck
her!”
Peter shuddered, head and shoulders, like a man who had accidentally
smashed his finger.
“And one day he struck her. He was sober when he did it—anyhow he had
not taken drink for a week. A man is never sober who gets drunk more
than once a week, though he might think he is. I don’t know how it
happened, but anyway he struck her, and that frightened him. He got a
billet in the Civil Service up-country. No matter in what town it was.
The little wife hoped for six months.
“I think it’s a cruel thing that a carelessly selfish young man cannot
realize how a sensitive young wife suffers for months after he has
reformed. How she hopes and fears, how she dreads the moment he has to
leave her, and frets every hour he is away from home—and suffers mental
agony when he is late. How the horror of the wretched old past time
grows upon her until she dares not think of it. How she listens to his
step and voice and watches his face, when he comes home, for a sign of
drink. A young man, a mate of mine, who drank hard and reformed, used
to take a delight in pretending for a few minutes to be drunk when he
came home. He was good-hearted, but dense. He said he only did it to
give his wife a pleasant surprise afterwards. I thought it one of the
most cruel things I had ever seen.
“Gentleman Once found that he could not stand the routine of office
work and the dull life in that place. He commenced to drink again, and
went on till he lost his billet. They had a little boy, a bright little
boy, yet the father drank.
“The last spree was a terrible one. He was away from home a fortnight,
and in that fortnight he got down as deep as a man could get. Then
another man got hold of him and set him on his feet, and straightened
him up. The other man was a ruined doctor, a wreck whose devil was
morphia. I don’t hold that a man’s salvation is always in his own
hands; I’ve seen mates pull mates out of hell too often to think that.
“Then Gentleman Once saw the past as he had never seen it before—he saw
hope for the future with it. And he swore an oath that he felt he would
keep.
“He suffered from reaction on his way home, and, as he neared the town,
a sudden fear, born of his nervous state, no doubt, sent a cold, sick
emptiness through him: ‘Was it too late?’
“As he turned into the street where he lived, he noticed a little group
of bush larrikins standing at the corner. And they moved uneasily when
they caught sight of him, and, as he passed, they touched and lifted
their hats to him. Now he knew that he had lost the respect even of
bush larrikins; and he knew enough of the bush to know that a bushman
never lifts his hat to a man—only to death, and a woman sometimes. He
hurried home and read the truth in his wife’s eyes. His little boy was
dead. He went down under the blow, and she held his head to her breast
and kept saying. ‘My poor boy, my poor boy!’
“It was he that she meant, not the boy she had lost. She knew him, she
understood him better than he did himself, and, heart-broken as she
was, she knew how he was going to suffer, and comforted him. ‘My poor
boy, my poor, foolish boy!’
“He mended the past, as far as he could, during the next two years, and
she seemed happy. He was very gentle, he was very kind to her. He was
happy, too, in a new, strange way. But he had learned what it was to
suffer through his own fault, and now he was to learn what it was to
suffer through no fault of his own, and without the consolation of
saying ‘I was wrong! I was to blame!’ At the end of the two years there
was another child, and his wife died.”
The four sat silently smoking until Jack Barnes asked:
“And what did he do then, Peter?”
“Who?” said Peter, abstractedly.
“Why, Gentleman Once.”
Peter roused himself.
“Well, I’ve told the story, and it is about time to turn in,” he said.
“I can’t say exactly what Gentleman Once did when his wife died. He
might have gone down to a deeper depth than Danny’s. He might have
risen higher than he had ever been before. From what I knew of his
character he would never have gone down an easy slope as Danny has
done. He might have dropped plump at first and then climbed up. Anyway,
he had the memory of the last two years to help him.
“Then there’s the reformed drunkard who has trained himself to take a
drink when he needs it, to drink in moderation—he’s the strongest
character of all, I think—but it’s time to turn in.”
The cornet up the creek was playing a march.
Peter walked across and looked at Danny, who seemed to be sleeping as
peacefully as could be expected of him.
Jack Barnes got up and walked slowly down the creek in the moonlight.
He wanted to think.
Peter rolled out his blankets on the grass and arranged his saddle-bags
for a pillow. Before he turned in Mitchell shook hands with him, a most
unusual and unnecessary proceeding in camp. But there’s something in
the bush grip which means “I know,” or “I understand.”
Joe Wilson rolled out his blankets close to Mitchell’s camp; he wanted
to enjoy some of Mitchell’s quiet humour before he went to sleep, but
Mitchell wasn’t in a philosophical mood. He wanted to reflect.
“I wonder who Gentleman Once was?” said Joe to Mitchell. “Could he have
been Danny, or old Awful Example back there at the shanty?”
“Dunno,” said Mitchell. He puffed three long puffs at his pipe, and
then said, reflectively:
“I’ve heard men tell their own stories before to-night Joe.”
It was Joe who wanted to think now.
About four o’clock Mitchell woke and stood up. Peter was lying rolled
in his blanket with his face turned to the west. The moon was low, the
shadows had shifted back, and the light was on Peter’s face. Mitchell
stood looking at him reverently, as a grown son might who sees his
father asleep for the first time. Then Mitchell quietly got some boughs
and stuck them in the ground at a little distance from Peter’s head, to
shade his face from the bright moonlight; and then he turned in again
to sleep till the sun woke him.
THE GHOSTS OF MANY CHRISTMASES
Did you ever trace back your Christmas days?—right back to the days
when you were innocent and Santa Claus was real. At times you thought
you were very wicked, but you never realize how innocent you were until
you’ve grown up and knocked about the world.
Let me think!
Christmas in an English village, with bare hedges and trees, and leaden
skies that lie heavy on our souls as we walk, with overcoat and
umbrella, sons of English exiles and exiles in England, and think of
bright skies and suns overhead, and sweeps of country disappearing into
the haze, and blue mountain ranges melting into the azure of distant
lower skies, and curves of white and yellow sand beaches, and runs of
shelving yellow sandstone sea-walls—and the glorious Pacific! Sydney
Harbour at sunrise, and the girls we took to Manly Beach.
Christmas in a London flat. Gloom and slush and soot. It is not the
cold that affects us Australians so much, but the horrible gloom. We
get heart-sick for the sun.
Christmas at sea—three Christmases, in fact—one going saloon from
Sydney to Westralia early in the Golden Nineties with funds; and one,
the Christmas after next, coming back steerage with nothing but the
clothes we’d slept in. All of which was bad judgment on our part—the
order and manner of our going and coming should have been reversed.
Christmas in a hessian tent in “th’ Westren,” with so many old mates
from the East that it was just old times over again. We had five pounds
of corned beef and a kerosene-tin to boil it in; and while we were
talking of old things the skeleton of a kangaroo-dog grabbed the beef
out of the boiling water and disappeared into the scrub—which made it
seem more like old times than ever.
Christmas going to New Zealand, with experience, by the s.s.
_Tasmania_. We had plum duff, but it was too “soggy” for us to eat. We
dropped it overboard, lest it should swamp the boat—and it sank to the
ooze. The Tasmania was saved on that occasion, but she foundered next
year outside Gisborne. Perhaps the cook had made more duff. There was a
letter from a sweetheart of mine amongst her mails when she went down;
but that’s got nothing to do with it, though it made some difference in
my life.
Christmas on a new telegraph line with a party of lining gangmen in New
Zealand. There was no duff nor roast because there was no firewood
within twenty miles. The cook used to pile armfuls of flax-sticks under
the billies, and set light to them when the last man arrived in camp.
Christmas in Sydney, with a dozen invitations out to dinner. The one we
accepted was to a sensible Australian Christmas dinner; a typical one,
as it should be, and will be before the Commonwealth is many years old.
Everything cold except the vegetables, the hose playing on the veranda
and vines outside, the men dressed in sensible pyjama-like suits, and
the women and girls fresh and cool and jolly, instead of being hot and
cross and looking like boiled carrots, and feeling like boiled rags,
and having headaches after dinner, as would have been the case had they
broiled over the fire in a hot kitchen all the blazing forenoon to cook
a scalding, indigestible dinner, as many Australian women do, and for
no other reason than that it was the fashion in England. One of those
girls was very pretty and—ah, well!—
Christmas dinner in a greasy Sydney sixpenny restaurant, that opened a
few days before with brass band going at full blast at the door by way
of advertisement. “Roast-beef, one! Cabbage and potatoes, one! Plum
pudding, two!” (That was the first time I dined to music.) The
Christmas dinner was a good one, but my appetite was spoilt by the
expression of the restaurant keeper, a big man with a heavy jowl, who
sat by the door with a cold eye on the sixpences, and didn’t seem to
have much confidence in human nature.
Christmas—no, that was New Year—on the Warrego River, out back (an
alleged river with a sickly stream that looked like bad milk). We spent
most of that night hunting round in the dark and feeling on the ground
for camel and horse droppings with which to build fires and make smoke
round our camp to keep off the mosquitoes. The mosquitoes started at
sunset and left off at daybreak, when the flies got to work again.
Christmas dinner under a brush shearing-shed. Mutton and plum
pudding—and fifty miles from beer!
An old bush friend of mine, one Jimmy Nowlett, who ranked as a
bullock-driver, told me of a Christmas time he had. He was cut off by
the floods with his team, and had nothing to eat for four days but
potatoes and honey. He said potatoes dipped in honey weren’t so bad;
but he had to sleep on bullock yokes laid on the ground to keep him out
of the water, and he got a toothache that paralysed him all down one
side.
And speaking of plum pudding, I consider it one of the most barbarous
institutions of the British. It is a childish, silly, savage
superstition; it must have been a savage inspiration, looking at it all
round—but then it isn’t so long since the British were savages.
I got a letter last year from a mate of mine in Western
Australia—prospecting the awful desert out beyond White Feather—telling
me all about a “perish” he did on plum pudding. He and his mates were
camped at the Boulder Soak with some three or four hundred miles—mostly
sand and dust—between them and the nearest grocer’s shop. They ordered
a case of mixed canned provisions from Perth to reach them about
Christmas. They didn’t believe in plum pudding—there are a good many
British institutions that bushmen don’t believe in but the cook was a
new chum, and he said he’d go home to his mother if he didn’t have plum
pudding for Christmas, so they ordered a can for him. Meanwhile, they
hung out on kangaroo and damper and the knowledge that it couldn’t last
for ever. It was in a terrible drought, and the kangaroos used to come
into the “Soak” for water, and they were too weak to run. Later on,
when wells were dug, the kangaroos used to commit suicide in them—there
was generally a kangaroo in the well in the morning.
The storekeeper packed the case of tinned dog, etc., but by some
blunder he or his man put the label on the wrong box, and it went per
rail, per coach, per camel, and the last stage per boot, and reached my
friends’ camp on Christmas Eve, to their great joy. My friend broke the
case open by the light of the camp-fire.
“Here, Jack!” he said, tossing out a can, “here’s your plum pudding.”
He held the next can in his hand a moment longer and read the label
twice.
“Why! he’s sent two,” he said, “and I’m sure I only ordered one. Never
mind—Jack’ll have a tuck-out.”
He held the next can close to the fire and blinked at it hard. “I’m
damned if he hasn’t sent three tins of plum pudding. Never mind, we’ll
manage to scoff some of it between us. You’re in luck’s way this trip,
Jack, and no mistake.”
He looked harder still at the fourth can; then he read the labels on
the other tins again to see if he’d made a mistake.
He didn’t tell me what he said then, but a milder mate suggested that
the storekeeper had sent half a dozen tins by mistake. But when they
reached the seventh can the language was not even fit to be written
down on a piece of paper and handed up to the magistrate. The
storekeeper had sent them an unbroken case of canned plum pudding, and
probably by this time he was wondering what had become of that blanky
case of duff.
The kangaroos disappeared about this time and my friend tells me that
he and his mates had to live for a mortal fortnight on canned plum
pudding. They tried it cold and they tried it boiled, they tried it
baked, they had it fried, and they had it toasted, they had it for
breakfast, dinner and tea. They had nothing else to think, or talk, or
argue and quarrel about; and they dreamed about it every night, my
friend says. It wasn’t a joke—it gave them the nightmare and
day-horrors.
They tried it with salt. They picked as many of the raisins out as they
could and boiled it with salt kangaroo. They tried to make Yorkshire
pudding out of it; but it was too rich.
My friend was experimenting and trying to discover a simple process for
separating the ingredients of plum pudding when a fresh supply of
provisions came along. He says he was never so sick of anything in his
life, and he has had occasion to be sick of a good many things.
The new-chum jackaroo is still alive, but he won’t ever eat plum
pudding any more, he says. It cured him of homesickness. He wouldn’t
eat it even if his bride made it.
Christmas on the goldfields in the last of the roaring days, in the
palmy days of Gulgong and those fields. Let’s see! it must be nearly
thirty years ago! Oh, how the time goes by!
Santa Claus, young, fresh-faced and eager; Santa Claus, blonde and
flaxen; Santa Claus, dark; Santa Claus with a brogue and Santa Claus
speaking broken English; Santa Claus as a Chinaman (Sun Tong Lee & Co.
storekeepers), with strange, delicious sweets that melted in our
mouths, and rum toys and Chinese dolls for the children.
Lucky diggers who were with difficulty restrained from putting pound
notes and nuggets and expensive lockets and things into the little
ones’ stockings. Santa Claus in flannel shirt and clay-covered
moleskins. Diggers who bought lollies by the pound and sent the little
ones home with as much as they could carry.
Diggers who gave a guinea or more for a toy for a child that reminded
them of some other child at home. Diggers who took as many children as
they could gather on short notice into a store, slapped a five-pound
note down on the counter and told the little ones to call for whatever
they wanted. Who set a family of poor children side by side on the
counter and called for a box of mixed children’s boots—the best—and
fitted them on with great care and anxiety and frequent inquiries as to
whether they pinched. Who stood little girls and boys on the counter
and called for the most expensive frocks, the latest and best in sailor
suits, and the brightest ribbons; and things came long distances by
bullock dray and were expensive in those days. Impressionable
diggers—and most of them were—who threw nuggets to singers, and who,
sometimes, slipped a parcel into the hands of a little boy or girl,
with instructions to give it to an elder sister (or young mother,
perhaps) whom the digger had never spoken to, only worshipped from afar
off. And the elder sister or young mother, opening the parcel, would
find a piece of jewellery or a costly article of dress, and wonder who
sent it.
Ah, the wild generosity of luck-intoxicated diggers of those days! and
the reckless generosity of the drinkers. “We thought it was going to
last for ever!”
“If I don’t spend it on the bairns I’ll spend it on the drink,” Sandy
Burns used to say. “I ha’ nane o’ me own, an’ the lass who was to gi’
me bairns, she couldn’t wait.”
Sandy had kept steady and travelled from one end of the world to the
other, and roughed it and toiled for five years, and the very day he
bottomed his golden hole on the Brown Snake Lead at Happy Valley he got
a letter from his girl in Scotland to say she had grown tired of
waiting and was married. Then he drank, and drink and luck went
together.
Gulgong on New Year’s Eve! Rows and rows of lighted tents and
camp-fires, with a clear glow over it all. Bonfires on the hills and
diggers romping round them like big boys. Tin kettling—gold dishes and
spoons, and fiddles, and hammers on pointing anvils, and sticks and
empty kerosene-tins (they made a row); concertinas and cornets,
shot-guns, pistols and crackers, all sorts of instruments, and “Auld
Lang Syne” in one mighty chorus. And now—a wretched little pastoral
town; a collection of glaring corrugated-iron hip-roofs, and maybe a
rotting propped-up bark or weather-board humpy or two—relics of the
roaring days; a dried-up storekeeper and some withered hags; a waste of
caved-in holes with rain-washed mullock heaps and quartz and gravel
glaring in the sun; thistles and burrs where old bars were; drought,
dryness, desolation and goats.
Lonely graves in the bush and grey old diggers here and there, anywhere
in the world, doing anything for a living, lonely yet because of the
girls who couldn’t wait, but prospecting and fossicking here and there,
and dreaming still.
They thought it was going to last for ever.
Christmas at Eurunderee Creek, amongst the old selection farms in the
western spurs of the Blue Mountains. They used to call it “Th’
Pipeclay” thirty years ago, but the old black names have been restored.
They make plum puddings yet, weeks beforehand, and boil them for hours
and hang them in cloths to the rafters to petrify; then they take them
down and boil them again. On Christmas Eve the boys cut boughs or young
pines on the hills, and drag them home and lash them to the
veranda-posts.
Ted has turned up with his wife and children from his selection out
back. The wheat is in and shearing is over on the big stations.
Tom—steady-going old Tom—clearing or fencing or dam-sinking up-country,
hides his tools in the scrub and gets his horse and rides home. Aunt
Emma (to everyone’s joy) has arrived from Sydney with presents
(astonishing bargains in frocks, etc.) and marvellous descriptions of
town life.
Joe, “poor” Mary’s husband, who has been droving in Queensland since
the Christmas before last—while poor Mary, who is afraid to live alone,
shared a skillion and the family quarrels at home—Joe rides day and
night and reaches home at sunrise on Christmas morning, tired and
dusty, gaunt and haggard, but with his last cheque intact. He kisses
his wife and child and throws himself on the bed to sleep till
dinner-time, while Mary moves round softly, hushes the baby, dresses it
and herself, lays out Joe’s clean things, and bends over him now and
then, and kisses him, perhaps, as he sleeps.
In the morning the boys and some of the men go down to the creek for a
swim in the big shady pool, under the she-oaks and take their Sunday
clothes with them and dress there.
Some of them ride into town to church, and some of the women and
children drive in in spring-carts—the children to go to Sunday school,
leaving mother and the eldest daughter—usually a hard-worked,
disappointed, short-tempered girl—at home to look after the cooking.
There is some anxiety (mostly on mother’s part) about Jim, who is
“wild,” and is supposed to be somewhere out back. There was “a piece of
blue paper” out for Jim on account of sweating (illegally using) a
horse, but his mother or father has got a hint—given in a kindly way by
the police-sergeant—that Jim is free to come home and stay at home if
he behaves himself. (There is usually a horse missing when Jim goes out
back.)
Jim turns up all right—save that he has no money—and is welcomed with
tearful affection by his favourite sister Mary, shakes hands silently
with his father, and has a long whispered conversation with his mother,
which leaves him very subdued. His brothers forbear to sneer at him,
partly because it is Christmas, partly on mother’s account, and
thirdly, because Jim can use his hands. Aunt Emma, who is fond of him,
cheers him up wonderfully.
The family sit down to dinner. “An old mate of your father’s”—a bearded
old digger—has arrived and takes the place of honour. (“I knowed yer
father, sonny, on the diggings long afore any of you was ever thought
on.”)
The family have only been a few hours together, yet there is an
undercurrent of growling, that, to the stranger, mysterious yet evident
undercurrent of nastiness and resentment which goes on in all families
and drags many a promising young life down. But Aunt Emma and the old
mate make things brighter, and so the dinner—of hot roast and red-hot
plum pudding—passes off fairly well.
The men sleep the afternoon away and wake up bathed in perspiration and
helpless; some of the women have headaches. After tea they gather on
the veranda in the cool of the evening, and that’s the time when the
best sides of their natures and the best parts of the past have a
chance of coming uppermost, and perhaps they begin to feel a bit sorry
that they are going to part again.
The local races or “sports” on Boxing Day. There is nothing to keep the
boys home over New Year. Ted and his wife go back to their lonely life
on their selection; Tom returns to his fencing or tank-sinking
contract; Jim, who has borrowed “a couple of quid” from Tom, goes out
back with strong resolutions for the New Year, and shears “stragglers,”
breaks in horses, cooks and clerks for survey parties, and gambles and
drinks, and gets into trouble again. Maybe Joe “knocks about” the farm
a bit before going into the Great North-West with another mob of
cattle.
The last time I saw the Old Year out at Eurunderee the bushfires were
burning all over the ranges, and looked like great cities lighted up.
No need for bonfires then. Christmas in Bourke, the metropolis of the
great pastoral scrubs and plains, five hundred miles west, with the
thermometer one-hundred-and-something-scarey in the shade. The rough,
careless shearers come in from stations many dusty miles out in the
scrubs to have their Christmas sprees, to drink and “shout” and
fight—and have the horrors some of them—and be run in and locked up
with difficulty, within sound of a church-going bell.
The Bourke Christmas is a very beery and exciting one. The hotels shut
up in front on Christmas Day to satisfy the law (or out of
consideration for the feelings of the sergeant in charge of the police
station), and open behind to satisfy the public, who are supposed to
have made the law.
Sensible cold dinners are the fashion in Bourke, I think, with the hose
going, and free-and-easy costumes.
The free males take their blankets and sleep in the “park;” the women
sleep with doors and windows open, and the married men on mattresses on
the verandas across the open doors—in case of accidents.
Christmas in Sydney, though Christmas holidays are not so popular as
Easter, or even Anniversary Day, in the Queen city of the South. Buses,
electric, cable and the old steam trams crowded with holiday-makers
with baskets. Harbour boats loaded down to the water’s edge with
harbour picnic-parties. “A trip round the harbour and to the head of
Middle Harbour one shilling return!” Strings of tourist trains running
over the Blue Mountains and the Great Zigzag, and up the coast to
Gosford and Brisbane Water, and down the south coast to beautiful
Illawarra, until after New Year. Hundreds of young fellows going out
with tents to fish in lonely bays or shoot in the mountains, and rough
it properly like bushmen—not with deck chairs, crockery, a piano and
servants. For you can camp in the grand and rugged solitude of the bush
within a stone’s throw of the city, so to speak.
Jolly camps and holiday parties all round the beautiful bays of the
harbour, and up and down the coast, and all close to home. Camps in the
moonlight on sandy beaches under great dark bluffs and headlands, where
yellow, shelving, sandstone cliffs run, broken only by sandy-beached
bays, and where the silver-white breakers leap and roar.
And Manly Beach on a holiday! Thousands of people in fresh summer
dress, hundreds of bare-legged, happy children running where the “blue
sea over the white sand rolls,” racing in and out with the rollers,
playing with the glorious Pacific. Manly—“Our Village”—Manly Beach,
where we used to take our girls, with the most beautiful harbour in the
world on one side, and the width of the grandest ocean on the other.
Ferny gullies and “fairy dells” to north and south, and every shady
nook its merry party or happy couple.
Manly Beach—I remember five years ago (oh, how the time goes by!)—and
two names that were written together in the sand when the tide was
coming in. And the boat home in the moonlight, past the Heads, where we
felt the roll of the ocean, and the moonlit harbour—and the harbour
lights of Sydney—the grandest of them all.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Henry Lawson 17th June 1867 — 2nd September 1922.
These stories were first published as a collection in 1902. Republished
as “Send Round the Hat” and “The Romance of the Swag” in 1907.
Notes on Australianisms. Based on my own speech over the years, with
some checking in the dictionaries, e.g. “Macquarie Book of Slang”
(2000), Oxford English Dictionary. Not all of these are peculiar to
Australian slang, but are important in Lawson’s stories, and carry
overtones.
anabranch: A bend in a river that has been cut through by the stream.
The main current now runs straight, the anabranch diverges and then
rejoins. See billabong.
Barcoo-rot. “Persistent ulceration of the skin, chiefly on the hands,
and often originating in abrasions”. (Morris, Australian English).
Barcoo is a river in Queensland.
billabong. Based on an aboriginal word. Sometimes used for an
anabranch, but more often used for one that, in dry season or droughts
especially, is cut off at either or both ends from the main stream. It
is often just a muddy pool, and may indeed dry up completely.
blackfellow: condescending for Australian Aboriginal
blackleg: someone who is employed to cross a union picket line to break
a workers’ strike. As Molly Ivins said, she was brought up on the three
great commandments: do not lie; do not steal; never cross a picket
line. Also scab.
blanky or ——: Fill in your own favourite word. Usually however used for
“bloody”—see crimson/gory.
blooming: actually used in speech instead of “bloody” (see crimson).
bluey: swag. Explanation in Lawson’s “The romance of the Swag” here.
bob: one shilling
bullocky: Bullock driver. A man who drove teams of bullocks yoked to
wagons carrying e.g. wool bales or provisions. Proverbially rough and
foul mouthed.
bummer: A cadger or bludger. Someone who begs for food. Interesting
Americanism already. Also, tramp. (Different meaning today)
bush: originally referred to the low tangled scrubs of the semi-desert
regions (cf. ‘mulga’ and ‘mallee’), and hence equivalent to “outback”.
Now used generally for remote rural areas (“the bush”) and scrubby
forest.
bushfire: wild fires: whether forest fires or grass fires.
bushman/bushwoman: someone who lives an isolated existence, far from
cities, “in the bush”. (today: a “bushy”)
bushranger: an Australian “highwayman”, who lived in the ‘bush’—
scrub—and attacked especially gold carrying coaches and banks.
Romanticised as anti-authoritarian Robin Hood figures—cf. Ned Kelly—but
usually very violent.
bunyip: Aboriginal monster, inhabiting waterholes, billabongs
particularly. Adopted into European legends.
caser: Five shillings (12 pence to the shilling, 20 shillings to the
pound (“quid”)). As a coin, a crown piece.
chaffing: teasing, mocking good-humouredly
churchyarder: Sounding as if dying—ready for the churchyard = cemetery
crimson = gory: literary substitutes for “bloody”—the “colonial oath”,
unacceptable in polite company. Why, is a complete mystery. Popularly
explained as contraction of “by Our Lady”. Unproved. In reproducing
(badly) a German’s pronunciation of Australian, Lawson retains the
word, but spells it “pluddy”.
dood: Dude. A classy/cool dresser.
drover: one who “droves” droving: driving on horseback cattle or sheep
from where they were fattened to a a city, or later, a rail-head.
fiver: a five pound note
gory, see crimson
Homebush: Saleyard, market area in Sydney
humpy: rough shack
half-caser: Two shillings and sixpence. As a coin, a half-crown.
jackaroo: (Jack + kangaroo; sometimes jackeroo)—someone, in early days
a new immigrant from England, learning to work on a sheep/cattle
station (U.S. “ranch”.)
jim-jams: the horrors, d.t.’s
jumbuck: a sheep (best known from Waltzing Matilda: “where’s that jolly
jumbuck, you’ve got in your tucker bag”.)
larrikin: anything from a disrespectful young man to a violent member
of a gang (“push”). Was considered a major social problem in Sydney of
the 1880’s to 1900. The _Bulletin_, a magazine in which much of Lawson
was published, spoke of the “aggressive, soft-hatted stoush brigade”.
Anyone today who is disrespectful of authority or convention is said to
show the larrikin element in the Australian character.
lucerne: Alfalfa in US
mallee: dwarfed eucalyptus trees growing in very poor soil and under
harsh rainfall conditions. Usually many stems emerging from the ground,
creating a low thicket.
mateship: See Lawson story, “Mateship”. A heavily romanticised, but
nevertheless very practical form of (male) loyalty to a (male)
companion who travels with/works with him. A “mate” provides not only
companionship, but help in emergencies. Typical of an Australian in the
“outback”—or “Never-Never”, or under war conditions. A man without a
mate was a “hatter”—“his hat covers his family”. Such a person might go
“ratty” (see further in The romance of the Swag). Equivalent to the
“buddy system” in SCUBA diving.
metalled: of a road, covered in crushed rock (e.g. “blue metal”)
mulga: Acacia sp. (“wattle” in Australian) especially Acacia aneura;
growing in semi-desert conditions. Used as a description of such a
harsh region.
mullock: the tailings left after gold has been removed. In Lawson
generally mud (alluvial) rather than rock
myall: aboriginal living in a traditional—pre-conquest—manner
nobbler: a drink
nuggety: compact but strong physique; small but well-muscled
pastoralist: OED sees it a equivalent to “squatter”, but in Lawson
someone often someone managing a large cattle/sheep “station” for a
“pastoral company” rather than an individual. Seen as ultimate
capitalist oppression.
pluddy: see crimson
quid: monetary unit; one pound
ratty: insane—or, very eccentric, “cranky”.
ringer: the champion sheep shearer in a shed that season
rouseabout: Labourer in a (sheep) shearing shed. Considered to be, as
far as any work is, unskilled labour.
sawney: silly, gormless
scab: see blackleg
shout: In a group; to stand (pay for) a round of drinks. Bad form to
leave before your turn comes around. Much peer pressure to drink more
than one wished. One can also “shout” for everyone in the pub.
skillion(-room): A “lean-to”, a room built up against the back of some
other building, with separate roof.
spifflicated: punished, thrashed without mercy.
spree: prolonged drinking bout—days, weeks.
squatter: Someone who took up large areas of land, originally without
official permission (“squatted”), for sheep especially. Became the
“landed aristocracy” of Australia. (“Up rode the squatter, mounted on
his thoroughbred”) steever: Originally a Dutch coin. Used here like
“penny”—or brass razoo.
sundowner: a swagman (see) who is NOT looking for work, but a
“handout”. Lawson explains the term as referring to someone who turns
up at a station at sundown, just in time for “tea” i.e. the evening
meal. Line (2494) of actual text (not counting P.G. matter).
swagman (swaggy): Generally, anyone who is walking in the “outback”
with a swag. (See “The Romance of the Swag”.) Lawson also restricts it
at times to those whom he considers to be tramps, not looking for work
but for “handouts”. In view of the Great Depression (1890—. In 1892 it
was reckoned 1/3 men were out of work) perhaps unfairly. Perhaps
because he _was_ there. See ‘travellers’.
Tattersalls: The earliest public lottery in Australia. (1881)
tenner: a ten pound note.
tin-kettling: making noise by striking metal pots/pans. May be
celebratory (weddings—in this collection, New Year’s Eve), or may
indicate extreme social disapproval of someone.
travellers: “shearers and rouseabouts travelling for work” (Lawson).