King Billy was given to strolling up and down the streets of Ballarat
when that eviscerated city was merely in process of disembowelment,
before alluvial mining gave way to quartz-crushing, when the individual
had a chance, if a very vague one, of sudden and delightful fortune. The
Ballarat blacks were a scaly lot, to talk of them like ill-fed hogs, as
men were wont to do. They dwined and dwindled, as natives will before
the resources of civilisation: the bloodthirsty ones got killed out;
the rumthirsty ones died out; the wild corroboree was reduced to a
poverty-stricken imitation of its former glory. King Billy’s authority
grew less with the increase of his clothes. The brass plate with his
name on it was about the last relic of his precarious power, and was
chiefly valued as a means of notifying the public generally that they
might stand drinks to a monarch if they saw fit and were not too humble.
He was not haughty, and never presumed on his plate, as parvenus will.
He came of an ancient stock, and could afford to condescend, even if he
could not afford to pay for drinks. He was very kind to children,--white
children, of course,--and was hale-fellow-well-met with many of them.
He was particularly fond of Annie Colborn, whose father was a magistrate
and a gold commissioner, and a person of very great importance. Whether
or not King Billy was wise in his generation, and out of the unwritten
Scriptures of the somber bush had culled a maxim inculcating the wisdom
of making friends of the sons of Mammon, I cannot say, but he was always
good to Annie. For my own part, I do not believe the simple-hearted old
king had any such notion inside his thick antipodean skull. He was good
because he was not bad, which is the very best morality after all, and a
great advance on much we hear of. And, besides, he was sometimes
hungry, and Mr. Colborn’s Chinese cook was very haughty, and not to
be approached except through an intermediary. And who so capable of
conciliating Wong as Annie? Wong would make her cakes even when his
pigtail hung despondently from his aching head after an opium debauch,
and his cheeks were shining with anything but gladness; for if you get
drunk very often on opium you shine.
Old Billy was mostly to be found where there was a chance of a drink;
but if the fountains were dried up, or he had been insulted by some
democratic, revolutionary, king-hating miner knocking his high hat down
over his eyes, he usually went up to Mr. Colborn’s place, and sat on
the fence, or on a log outside the gate. So he was often very melancholy
when Annie came out. One day his hat was very, very badly bulged indeed.
“Your hat is very bad to-day, King Billy,” said six-year-old Annie, as
she stood in front of him critically, with her head on one side. Without
knowing it, the child had come to look upon the state of the poor king’s
hat as emblematical of his state of mind. When it shut up like a closed
concertina his barometer was low.
“Yes, missy,” said the king; “white man knock ‘um over eyes, and”--with
a rub down his face--“skin ‘um nose.”
She inspected his nose carefully--though from a certain distance,
because her own nose was very good, both inside and out, and she knew
the king never got washed unless it rained when he was very drunk. And
this was the end of summer. It had not rained since November.
“There is not very much skin off,” said Annie. “You had better wash it.”
The king made a wry face and changed the conversation.
“You got ‘um hat, Missy Annie? One hat baal brokum, allasame white
fellow hat. Bad hat, King Billy bad; black fellow, white fellow laugh.”
He peered into his hat, and, trying to straighten it out, put his fist
through the side. Poor Billy looked as if he could cry.
“You stop a minute,” said Annie, and, flying indoors, she brought out a
very good high hat indeed. “Budgeree!” thought the king, that was a good
hat. He could go down the streets like a king indeed, able to hold up
his head with any rich man in Ballarat. He tried it on, and though it
was much too big, he knew it shone. And the glory of a hat is in its
shining as much as its shape; even a black fellow knows that.
But that hat very nearly led to serious trouble. For one thing, Mr.
Colborn missed it; and never thinking Annie had given it away, when
he saw the king sitting on the fence decorated with it, he stopped and
interviewed him.
“Where did you get that hat, you old thief?” asked the magistrate,
without any politeness to him who ruled the land before white men broke
into the country. Some in authority are polite to those they dispossess;
the Prussians, for instance, to the miserable King Billys who strut
about the empire. But the Anglo-Saxon only respects himself, and even
that to a limited extent, in new conquests.
The question troubled King Billy greatly. He did not know that Mr.
Colborn would as soon have thought of murdering Annie as of bullying
her; so he lied promptly: “Me buy ‘um, Mistah Cobon!”
Mr. Colborn took it off of his head, and saw that it was his, as he had
thought. What he would have said I do not know, for just then he heard a
voice behind him:
“Papa, it is my fault; I gave it to King Billy.”
Colborn turned round and took her up, letting fall the hat as he did
so. Billy made a jump, picked it up, and, in his agitation, brushed it
carefully the wrong way.
“My dear, if you gave it to him it’s all right. But why didn’t the old
fool tell me?”
“He’s not an old fool, papa, and you must not say so. He’s a good man,
and I think he thought you would be angry with me. Didn’t you, King
Billy?” And the king, with a smile of conscious rectitude, admitted it
was so.
Mr. Colborn gave him sixpence; and he gave Annie a great many kisses,
declaring, with uncommon thoughtlessness, that whatever she did was
right, and that she could give the king all his house, and Australia to
boot. Whereon King Billy smiled a smile that was portentous, and showed
his teeth to the uttermost recesses of his ample mouth. Looking down, he
surveyed the rest of his clothes, which in parts resembled the child’s
definition of a net as a lot of holes tied together with string, and,
looking up, he inspected Mr. Colborn as if estimating the resources of
his wardrobe. But being urgently smitten with the necessity of getting
rid of his sixpence, he shambled off into the town. Other matters might
wait; that admitted of no delay.
The mind of King Billy was not a big mind; it would no more have taken
in an abstract idea than his _gunyah_ would have accommodated a grand
piano. He was as simple as sunlight, and to resolve his intellect into
seven colours would want the most ingenious spectroscope. But he could
make an inference from a positive fact, and, having made it, he did not
allow more remote deductions to trouble his legitimate conclusion. He
ceased to fear Mr. Colborn, and began to look upon the magistrate’s
property as if it were at least half his own. So he got very drunk
on the hospitality of a new chum miner who had been successful, and
presently, presuming on his new possessions, got into a fight with
his entertainer and a disrespectful subking of his own blacks, and was
reduced to worse rags than ever.
Next morning he sat outside the magistrate’s house, on the lowest log he
could find, and when Mr. Colborn came out he tackled him with the air of
a subject king demanding redress of his suzerain.
“Well, Billy, what is it?” asked the suzerain.
“You belong gublement?” said Billy the king, with a question, an implied
doubt, and a great complaint in his voice. Colborn laughed.
“Why, yes, Billy; I belong to the government, I suppose.”
“Then,” said Billy, “what you say to white fellow make ‘um black fellow
drunk, knock ‘um all about? Call you that gublement?” And he showed his
kingly robe, which had once been a frock-coat, with great disgust.
However, he met with no favour, and was told that he should not get
drunk--that it served him right; with which magisterial decision Colborn
got on his horse and rode off to the flat.
The king sat down sadly and considered thickly in his slow brain.
Annie did not come out, and he knew better than to ask for her, for Mr.
Colborn’s niece, who kept house for him, was but newly come from home,
and thought all black fellows congenital murderers, which indeed they
are in some parts of the north. So Billy sat and waited, for he wanted a
new coat. How could he be respected in one whose natural divisions were
unnaturally extended to the very neck? It was obviously necessary to get
a new garment at once, and the best chance of a good one lay in little
Annie’s kindness. But in order to obviate the slightest chance of his
girl patron’s refusing, he must bring her some offering. He went off
into the bush at the back of the town, and, coming to where three or
four black fellows were camped, he sat down and talked with them. In
spite of the heat, a wretched old gin, muffled up in her one garment,
a ragged blanket, held her hands over the few burning sticks which
represent an Australian native’s idea of a fire. Presently King Billy
rose, and, taking a tomahawk, went farther into the bush. He looked
about, and at last came to a tree, which he climbed native fashion,
first discarding his clothes. When near the first big branches he came
to a hole, and, putting in his hand, he extracted a lively young possum
by the tail.
Next morning he was sitting on the Colborns’ fence as usual. At his
feet was a little box with two or three slats nailed roughly across it.
Inside was the possum. King Billy wondered what kind of a coat he could
get. He liked a frock-coat; there was something majestic about it,
something fine and ample. Common morning coats would not do; no one
would insult a king by offering him tweed; even little Annie knew
better than that, especially if he gave her a live possum he had caught
himself. And when Annie did come out, she was in the seventh heaven of
delight with the possum, and ready to bestow anything in the world on
King Billy.
“You give poor Billy one fellow coat, missy, and he go down along street
like a king.”
Annie flew into the house and seized the first garment she laid her
little hands on. It was her father’s dress-coat. She rolled it up, and,
running out, thrust it excitedly into the king’s black paw. As he went
off, she carried the possum indoors, and was deliriously happy for
hours.
King Billy hurried into the bush till he came to a water-hole, and,
stripping off his rags, he held up the coat. His jaw fell; there was a
remarkable exiguity about the coat which was inexplicable. He had never
observed such in his life. He put it on, and, bending over the surface
of the still pool, took a good look at the general effect. It was not
bad from some points of view, but Billy had his doubts as to whether
he would be received with the respect due to his title if he went into
Ballarat clothed thus. He tried to button it, but discovered that, if it
had ever been intended for buttoning, he could not get it to meet
across his chest. He picked up his discarded frock-coat, which was held
together by the collar; then he felt the stuff of which the dress-coat
was made, and the material pleased him. “Oh, why,” asked Billy, “had it
not been made with front tails?” He saw at last that this coat and his
high hat alone were insufficient for civilisation. For full dress in
a corroboree it might do. Unconsciously, he was so wrought upon by the
purpose for which the coat had been built that he determined to reserve
it for parties in the seclusion of the bush, where any merriment could
be rightly checked by a crack from his waddy. He planted it carefully
in a hollow log, and, having inserted himself with as much care into his
discarded rags, he wondered off into the town. He got very intoxicated
that night, and determined to have a party all by himself.
Now it may seem very annoying, and I confess I find it so myself; but,
having got so far, I don’t see my way to tell the rest, even if Annie
Colborn told me the story herself. For after her father’s death she
married a man who had a small sheep-station and a hotel not forty miles
from Carabobla, in New South Wales. I stayed there a couple of days when
I was going north to the Murrumbidgee. But though she told me, I cannot
tell it again, at least not in bold, bad print. Still, it will occur
to most that a man of King Billy’s sweet and innocent disposition might
very likely create a sensation, when his natural discretion was drowned
in bad whisky, if he ended his solitary corroboree in the moonlight by
going up to Colborn’s house in order to deliver a speech of gratitude
through the French windows.
So Colborn and the king had a corroboree all to themselves in the open
space before the house, while the gold commissioner’s guests roared with
laughter to find out where the missing dress-coat was. Next day King
Billy resumed the split frock-coat.