Jim and gave him his breakfast, and made a comfortable place for him
on the load with the ‘possum rug and a spare pillow. She got up on the
wheel to do it herself. Then was the awkward time. I’d half start to
speak to her, and then turn away and go fixing up round the horses, and
then make another false start to say good-bye. At last she took Jim up
in her arms and kissed him, and lifted him on the wheel; but he put his
arms tight round her neck, and kissed her--a thing Jim seldom did
with anybody, except his mother, for he wasn’t what you’d call an
affectionate child,--he’d never more than offer his cheek to me, in his
old-fashioned way. I’d got up the other side of the load to take him
from her.
‘Here, take him,’ she said.
I saw his mouth twitching as I lifted him. Jim seldom cried nowadays--no
matter how much he was hurt. I gained some time fixing Jim comfortable.
‘You’d better make a start,’ she said. ‘You want to get home early with
that boy.’
I got down and went round to where she stood. I held out my hand and
tried to speak, but my voice went like an ungreased waggon wheel, and I
gave it up, and only squeezed her hand.
‘That’s all right,’ she said; then tears came into her eyes, and she
suddenly put her hand on my shoulder and kissed me on the cheek. ‘You be
off--you’re only a boy yourself. Take care of that boy; be kind to your
wife, and take care of yourself.’
‘Will you come to see us?’
‘Some day,’ she said.
I started the horses, and looked round once more. She was looking up at
Jim, who was waving his hand to her from the top of the load. And I saw
that haggard, hungry, hopeless look come into her eyes in spite of the
tears.
I smoothed over that story and shortened it a lot, when I told it to
Mary--I didn’t want to upset her. But, some time after I brought Jim
home from Gulgong, and while I was at home with the team for a few days,
nothing would suit Mary but she must go over to Brighten’s shanty and
see Brighten’s sister-in-law. So James drove her over one morning in the
spring-cart: it was a long way, and they stayed at Brighten’s overnight
and didn’t get back till late the next afternoon. I’d got the place in a
pig-muck, as Mary said, ‘doing for’ myself, and I was having a snooze
on the sofa when they got back. The first thing I remember was some one
stroking my head and kissing me, and I heard Mary saying, ‘My poor boy!
My poor old boy!’
I sat up with a jerk. I thought that Jim had gone off again. But it
seems that Mary was only referring to me. Then she started to pull grey
hairs out of my head and put ‘em in an empty match-box--to see how many
she’d get. She used to do this when she felt a bit soft. I don’t
know what she said to Brighten’s sister-in-law or what Brighten’s
sister-in-law said to her, but Mary was extra gentle for the next few
days.
‘Water Them Geraniums’.
I. A Lonely Track.
The time Mary and I shifted out into the Bush from Gulgong to ‘settle on
the land’ at Lahey’s Creek.
I’d sold the two tip-drays that I used for tank-sinking and dam-making,
and I took the traps out in the waggon on top of a small load of rations
and horse-feed that I was taking to a sheep-station out that way. Mary
drove out in the spring-cart. You remember we left little Jim with
his aunt in Gulgong till we got settled down. I’d sent James (Mary’s
brother) out the day before, on horseback, with two or three cows and
some heifers and steers and calves we had, and I’d told him to clean up
a bit, and make the hut as bright and cheerful as possible before Mary
came.
We hadn’t much in the way of furniture. There was the four-poster cedar
bedstead that I bought before we were married, and Mary was rather proud
of it: it had ‘turned’ posts and joints that bolted together. There was
a plain hardwood table, that Mary called her ‘ironing-table’, upside
down on top of the load, with the bedding and blankets between the
legs; there were four of those common black kitchen-chairs--with apples
painted on the hard board backs--that we used for the parlour; there was
a cheap batten sofa with arms at the ends and turned rails between the
uprights of the arms (we were a little proud of the turned rails); and
there was the camp-oven, and the three-legged pot, and pans and buckets,
stuck about the load and hanging under the tail-board of the waggon.
There was the little Wilcox & Gibb’s sewing-machine--my present to Mary
when we were married (and what a present, looking back to it!). There
was a cheap little rocking-chair, and a looking-glass and some
pictures that were presents from Mary’s friends and sister. She had her
mantel-shelf ornaments and crockery and nick-nacks packed away, in the
linen and old clothes, in a big tub made of half a cask, and a box
that had been Jim’s cradle. The live stock was a cat in one box, and in
another an old rooster, and three hens that formed cliques, two against
one, turn about, as three of the same sex will do all over the world. I
had my old cattle-dog, and of course a pup on the load--I always had a
pup that I gave away, or sold and didn’t get paid for, or had ‘touched’
(stolen) as soon as it was old enough. James had his three spidery,
sneaking, thieving, cold-blooded kangaroo-dogs with him. I was taking
out three months’ provisions in the way of ration-sugar, tea, flour, and
potatoes, &c.
I started early, and Mary caught up to me at Ryan’s Crossing on Sandy
Creek, where we boiled the billy and had some dinner.
Mary bustled about the camp and admired the scenery and talked too much,
for her, and was extra cheerful, and kept her face turned from me as
much as possible. I soon saw what was the matter. She’d been crying
to herself coming along the road. I thought it was all on account of
leaving little Jim behind for the first time. She told me that she
couldn’t make up her mind till the last moment to leave him, and that,
a mile or two along the road, she’d have turned back for him, only that
she knew her sister would laugh at her. She was always terribly anxious
about the children.
We cheered each other up, and Mary drove with me the rest of the way
to the creek, along the lonely branch track, across native-apple-tree
flats. It was a dreary, hopeless track. There was no horizon, nothing
but the rough ashen trunks of the gnarled and stunted trees in all
directions, little or no undergrowth, and the ground, save for the
coarse, brownish tufts of dead grass, as bare as the road, for it was
a dry season: there had been no rain for months, and I wondered what I
should do with the cattle if there wasn’t more grass on the creek.
In this sort of country a stranger might travel for miles without
seeming to have moved, for all the difference there is in the scenery.
The new tracks were ‘blazed’--that is, slices of bark cut off from both
sides of trees, within sight of each other, in a line, to mark the track
until the horses and wheel-marks made it plain. A smart Bushman, with
a sharp tomahawk, can blaze a track as he rides. But a Bushman a little
used to the country soon picks out differences amongst the trees, half
unconsciously as it were, and so finds his way about.
Mary and I didn’t talk much along this track--we couldn’t have heard
each other very well, anyway, for the ‘clock-clock’ of the waggon and
the rattle of the cart over the hard lumpy ground. And I suppose we
both began to feel pretty dismal as the shadows lengthened. I’d noticed
lately that Mary and I had got out of the habit of talking to each
other--noticed it in a vague sort of way that irritated me (as vague
things will irritate one) when I thought of it. But then I thought, ‘It
won’t last long--I’ll make life brighter for her by-and-by.’
As we went along--and the track seemed endless--I got brooding, of
course, back into the past. And I feel now, when it’s too late, that
Mary must have been thinking that way too. I thought of my early
boyhood, of the hard life of ‘grubbin’’ and ‘milkin’’ and ‘fencin’’ and
‘ploughin’’ and ‘ring-barkin’’, &c., and all for nothing. The few months
at the little bark-school, with a teacher who couldn’t spell. The cursed
ambition or craving that tortured my soul as a boy--ambition or craving
for--I didn’t know what for! For something better and brighter, anyhow.
And I made the life harder by reading at night.
It all passed before me as I followed on in the waggon, behind Mary in
the spring-cart. I thought of these old things more than I thought of
her. She had tried to help me to better things. And I tried too--I had
the energy of half-a-dozen men when I saw a road clear before me,
but shied at the first check. Then I brooded, or dreamed of making a
home--that one might call a home--for Mary--some day. Ah, well!----
And what was Mary thinking about, along the lonely, changeless miles? I
never thought of that. Of her kind, careless, gentleman father, perhaps.
Of her girlhood. Of her homes--not the huts and camps she lived in with
me. Of our future?--she used to plan a lot, and talk a good deal of our
future--but not lately. These things didn’t strike me at the time--I was
so deep in my own brooding. Did she think now--did she begin to feel
now that she had made a great mistake and thrown away her life, but must
make the best of it? This might have roused me, had I thought of it. But
whenever I thought Mary was getting indifferent towards me, I’d think,
‘I’ll soon win her back. We’ll be sweethearts again--when things
brighten up a bit.’
It’s an awful thing to me, now I look back to it, to think how far apart
we had grown, what strangers we were to each other. It seems, now, as
though we had been sweethearts long years before, and had parted, and
had never really met since.
The sun was going down when Mary called out--
‘There’s our place, Joe!’
She hadn’t seen it before, and somehow it came new and with a shock to
me, who had been out here several times. Ahead, through the trees to
the right, was a dark green clump of the oaks standing out of the creek,
darker for the dead grey grass and blue-grey bush on the barren ridge in
the background. Across the creek (it was only a deep, narrow gutter--a
water-course with a chain of water-holes after rain), across on the
other bank, stood the hut, on a narrow flat between the spur and the
creek, and a little higher than this side. The land was much better than
on our old selection, and there was good soil along the creek on both
sides: I expected a rush of selectors out here soon. A few acres round
the hut was cleared and fenced in by a light two-rail fence of timber
split from logs and saplings. The man who took up this selection left it
because his wife died here.
It was a small oblong hut built of split slabs, and he had roofed it
with shingles which he split in spare times. There was no verandah, but
I built one later on. At the end of the house was a big slab-and-bark
shed, bigger than the hut itself, with a kitchen, a skillion for tools,
harness, and horse-feed, and a spare bedroom partitioned off with sheets
of bark and old chaff-bags. The house itself was floored roughly, with
cracks between the boards; there were cracks between the slabs all
round--though he’d nailed strips of tin, from old kerosene-tins, over
some of them; the partitioned-off bedroom was lined with old chaff-bags
with newspapers pasted over them for wall-paper. There was no ceiling,
calico or otherwise, and we could see the round pine rafters and
battens, and the under ends of the shingles. But ceilings make a hut hot
and harbour insects and reptiles--snakes sometimes. There was one
small glass window in the ‘dining-room’ with three panes and a sheet
of greased paper, and the rest were rough wooden shutters. There was a
pretty good cow-yard and calf-pen, and--that was about all. There was
no dam or tank (I made one later on); there was a water-cask, with the
hoops falling off and the staves gaping, at the corner of the house, and
spouting, made of lengths of bent tin, ran round under the eaves. Water
from a new shingle roof is wine-red for a year or two, and water from
a stringy-bark roof is like tan-water for years. In dry weather the
selector had got his house water from a cask sunk in the gravel at
the bottom of the deepest water-hole in the creek. And the longer the
drought lasted, the farther he had to go down the creek for his water,
with a cask on a cart, and take his cows to drink, if he had any. Four,
five, six, or seven miles--even ten miles to water is nothing in some
places.
James hadn’t found himself called upon to do more than milk old ‘Spot’
(the grandmother cow of our mob), pen the calf at night, make a fire
in the kitchen, and sweep out the house with a bough. He helped me
unharness and water and feed the horses, and then started to get the
furniture off the waggon and into the house. James wasn’t lazy--so
long as one thing didn’t last too long; but he was too uncomfortably
practical and matter-of-fact for me. Mary and I had some tea in the
kitchen. The kitchen was permanently furnished with a table of split
slabs, adzed smooth on top, and supported by four stakes driven into the
ground, a three-legged stool and a block of wood, and two long
stools made of half-round slabs (sapling trunks split in halves) with
auger-holes bored in the round side and sticks stuck into them for legs.
The floor was of clay; the chimney of slabs and tin; the fireplace
was about eight feet wide, lined with clay, and with a blackened pole
across, with sooty chains and wire hooks on it for the pots.
Mary didn’t seem able to eat. She sat on the three-legged stool near the
fire, though it was warm weather, and kept her face turned from me.
Mary was still pretty, but not the little dumpling she had been: she was
thinner now. She had big dark hazel eyes that shone a little too much
when she was pleased or excited. I thought at times that there was
something very German about her expression; also something aristocratic
about the turn of her nose, which nipped in at the nostrils when she
spoke. There was nothing aristocratic about me. Mary was German in
figure and walk. I used sometimes to call her ‘Little Duchy’ and ‘Pigeon
Toes’. She had a will of her own, as shown sometimes by the obstinate
knit in her forehead between the eyes.
Mary sat still by the fire, and presently I saw her chin tremble.
‘What is it, Mary?’
She turned her face farther from me. I felt tired, disappointed, and
irritated--suffering from a reaction.
‘Now, what is it, Mary?’ I asked; ‘I’m sick of this sort of thing.
Haven’t you got everything you wanted? You’ve had your own way. What’s
the matter with you now?’
‘You know very well, Joe.’
‘But I DON’T know,’ I said. I knew too well.
She said nothing.
‘Look here, Mary,’ I said, putting my hand on her shoulder, ‘don’t go on
like that; tell me what’s the matter?’
‘It’s only this,’ she said suddenly, ‘I can’t stand this life here; it
will kill me!’
I had a pannikin of tea in my hand, and I banged it down on the table.
‘This is more than a man can stand!’ I shouted. ‘You know very well that
it was you that dragged me out here. You run me on to this! Why weren’t
you content to stay in Gulgong?’
‘And what sort of a place was Gulgong, Joe?’ asked Mary quietly.
(I thought even then in a flash what sort of a place Gulgong was. A
wretched remnant of a town on an abandoned goldfield. One street, each
side of the dusty main road; three or four one-storey square brick
cottages with hip roofs of galvanised iron that glared in the heat--four
rooms and a passage--the police-station, bank-manager and schoolmaster’s
cottages, &c. Half-a-dozen tumble-down weather-board shanties--the three
pubs., the two stores, and the post-office. The town tailing off into
weather-board boxes with tin tops, and old bark huts--relics of the
digging days--propped up by many rotting poles. The men, when at home,
mostly asleep or droning over their pipes or hanging about the verandah
posts of the pubs., saying, ‘’Ullo, Bill!’ or ‘’Ullo, Jim!’--or
sometimes drunk. The women, mostly hags, who blackened each other’s and
girls’ characters with their tongues, and criticised the aristocracy’s
washing hung out on the line: ‘And the colour of the clothes! Does that
woman wash her clothes at all? or only soak ‘em and hang ‘em out?’--that
was Gulgong.)
‘Well, why didn’t you come to Sydney, as I wanted you to?’ I asked Mary.
‘You know very well, Joe,’ said Mary quietly.
(I knew very well, but the knowledge only maddened me. I had had an idea
of getting a billet in one of the big wool-stores--I was a fair wool
expert--but Mary was afraid of the drink. I could keep well away from it
so long as I worked hard in the Bush. I had gone to Sydney twice since
I met Mary, once before we were married, and she forgave me when I came
back; and once afterwards. I got a billet there then, and was going to
send for her in a month. After eight weeks she raised the money somehow
and came to Sydney and brought me home. I got pretty low down that
time.)
‘But, Mary,’ I said, ‘it would have been different this time. You would
have been with me. I can take a glass now or leave it alone.’
‘As long as you take a glass there is danger,’ she said.
‘Well, what did you want to advise me to come out here for, if you can’t
stand it? Why didn’t you stay where you were?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘why weren’t you more decided?’
I’d sat down, but I jumped to my feet then.
‘Good God!’ I shouted, ‘this is more than any man can stand. I’ll chuck
it all up! I’m damned well sick and tired of the whole thing.’
‘So am I, Joe,’ said Mary wearily.
We quarrelled badly then--that first hour in our new home. I know now
whose fault it was.
I got my hat and went out and started to walk down the creek. I didn’t
feel bitter against Mary--I had spoken too cruelly to her to feel that
way. Looking back, I could see plainly that if I had taken her advice
all through, instead of now and again, things would have been all right
with me. I had come away and left her crying in the hut, and James
telling her, in a brotherly way, that it was all her fault. The trouble
was that I never liked to ‘give in’ or go half-way to make it up--not
half-way--it was all the way or nothing with our natures.
‘If I don’t make a stand now,’ I’d say, ‘I’ll never be master. I gave up
the reins when I got married, and I’ll have to get them back again.’
What women some men are! But the time came, and not many years after,
when I stood by the bed where Mary lay, white and still; and, amongst
other things, I kept saying, ‘I’ll give in, Mary--I’ll give in,’ and
then I’d laugh. They thought that I was raving mad, and took me from the
room. But that time was to come.
As I walked down the creek track in the moonlight the question rang in
my ears again, as it had done when I first caught sight of the house
that evening--
‘Why did I bring her here?’
I was not fit to ‘go on the land’. The place was only fit for some
stolid German, or Scotsman, or even Englishman and his wife, who had no
ambition but to bullock and make a farm of the place. I had only drifted
here through carelessness, brooding, and discontent.
I walked on and on till I was more than half-way to the only
neighbours--a wretched selector’s family, about four miles down the
creek,--and I thought I’d go on to the house and see if they had any
fresh meat.
A mile or two farther I saw the loom of the bark hut they lived in, on
a patchy clearing in the scrub, and heard the voice of the selector’s
wife--I had seen her several times: she was a gaunt, haggard Bushwoman,
and, I supposed, the reason why she hadn’t gone mad through hardship
and loneliness was that she hadn’t either the brains or the memory to go
farther than she could see through the trunks of the ‘apple-trees’.
‘You, An-nay!’ (Annie.)
‘Ye-es’ (from somewhere in the gloom).
‘Didn’t I tell yer to water them geraniums!’
‘Well, didn’t I?’
‘Don’t tell lies or I’ll break yer young back!’
‘I did, I tell yer--the water won’t soak inter the ashes.’
Geraniums were the only flowers I saw grow in the drought out there.
I remembered this woman had a few dirty grey-green leaves behind some
sticks against the bark wall near the door; and in spite of the sticks
the fowls used to get in and scratch beds under the geraniums, and
scratch dust over them, and ashes were thrown there--with an idea of
helping the flower, I suppose; and greasy dish-water, when fresh water
was scarce--till you might as well try to water a dish of fat.
Then the woman’s voice again--
‘You, Tom-may!’ (Tommy.)
Silence, save for an echo on the ridge.
‘Y-o-u, T-o-m-MAY!’
‘Ye-e-s!’ shrill shriek from across the creek.
‘Didn’t I tell you to ride up to them new people and see if they want
any meat or any think?’ in one long screech.
‘Well--I karnt find the horse.’
‘Well-find-it-first-think-in-the-morning and.
And-don’t-forgit-to-tell-Mrs-Wi’son-that-mother’ll-be-up-as-soon-as-she-can.’
I didn’t feel like going to the woman’s house that night. I felt--and
the thought came like a whip-stroke on my heart--that this was what Mary
would come to if I left her here.
I turned and started to walk home, fast. I’d made up my mind. I’d take
Mary straight back to Gulgong in the morning--I forgot about the load I
had to take to the sheep station. I’d say, ‘Look here, Girlie’ (that’s
what I used to call her), ‘we’ll leave this wretched life; we’ll leave
the Bush for ever! We’ll go to Sydney, and I’ll be a man! and work my
way up.’ And I’d sell waggon, horses, and all, and go.
When I got to the hut it was lighted up. Mary had the only kerosene
lamp, a slush lamp, and two tallow candles going. She had got both rooms
washed out--to James’s disgust, for he had to move the furniture and
boxes about. She had a lot of things unpacked on the table; she had
laid clean newspapers on the mantel-shelf--a slab on two pegs over the
fireplace--and put the little wooden clock in the centre and some of
the ornaments on each side, and was tacking a strip of vandyked American
oil-cloth round the rough edge of the slab.
‘How does that look, Joe? We’ll soon get things ship-shape.’
I kissed her, but she had her mouth full of tacks. I went out in the
kitchen, drank a pint of cold tea, and sat down.
Somehow I didn’t feel satisfied with the way things had gone.
II. ‘Past Carin’’.
Next morning things looked a lot brighter. Things always look brighter
in the morning--more so in the Australian Bush, I should think, than in
most other places. It is when the sun goes down on the dark bed of the
lonely Bush, and the sunset flashes like a sea of fire and then fades,
and then glows out again, like a bank of coals, and then burns away to
ashes--it is then that old things come home to one. And strange, new-old
things too, that haunt and depress you terribly, and that you can’t
understand. I often think how, at sunset, the past must come home to
new-chum blacksheep, sent out to Australia and drifted into the Bush.
I used to think that they couldn’t have much brains, or the loneliness
would drive them mad.
I’d decided to let James take the team for a trip or two. He could drive
alright; he was a better business man, and no doubt would manage better
than me--as long as the novelty lasted; and I’d stay at home for a
week or so, till Mary got used to the place, or I could get a girl from
somewhere to come and stay with her. The first weeks or few months of
loneliness are the worst, as a rule, I believe, as they say the first
weeks in jail are--I was never there. I know it’s so with tramping or
hard graft*: the first day or two are twice as hard as any of the rest.
But, for my part, I could never get used to loneliness and dulness; the
last days used to be the worst with me: then I’d have to make a move, or
drink. When you’ve been too much and too long alone in a lonely place,
you begin to do queer things and think queer thoughts--provided you have
any imagination at all. You’ll sometimes sit of an evening and watch the
lonely track, by the hour, for a horseman or a cart or some one that’s
never likely to come that way--some one, or a stranger, that you can’t
and don’t really expect to see. I think that most men who have been
alone in the Bush for any length of time--and married couples too--are
more or less mad. With married couples it is generally the husband who
is painfully shy and awkward when strangers come. The woman seems to
stand the loneliness better, and can hold her own with strangers, as a
rule. It’s only afterwards, and looking back, that you see how queer you
got. Shepherds and boundary-riders, who are alone for months, MUST have
their periodical spree, at the nearest shanty, else they’d go raving
mad. Drink is the only break in the awful monotony, and the yearly or
half-yearly spree is the only thing they’ve got to look forward to: it
keeps their minds fixed on something definite ahead.
* ‘Graft’, work. The term is now applied, in Australia, to
all sorts of work, from bullock-driving to writing poetry.
But Mary kept her head pretty well through the first months of
loneliness. WEEKS, rather, I should say, for it wasn’t as bad as it
might have been farther up-country: there was generally some one came
of a Sunday afternoon--a spring-cart with a couple of women, or maybe
a family,--or a lanky shy Bush native or two on lanky shy horses. On
a quiet Sunday, after I’d brought Jim home, Mary would dress him and
herself--just the same as if we were in town--and make me get up on one
end and put on a collar and take her and Jim for a walk along the creek.
She said she wanted to keep me civilised. She tried to make a gentleman
of me for years, but gave it up gradually.
Well. It was the first morning on the creek: I was greasing the
waggon-wheels, and James out after the horse, and Mary hanging out
clothes, in an old print dress and a big ugly white hood, when I heard
her being hailed as ‘Hi, missus!’ from the front slip-rails.
It was a boy on horseback. He was a light-haired, very much freckled boy
of fourteen or fifteen, with a small head, but with limbs, especially
his bare sun-blotched shanks, that might have belonged to a grown
man. He had a good face and frank grey eyes. An old, nearly black
cabbage-tree hat rested on the butts of his ears, turning them out at
right angles from his head, and rather dirty sprouts they were. He wore
a dirty torn Crimean shirt; and a pair of man’s moleskin trousers rolled
up above the knees, with the wide waistband gathered under a greenhide
belt. I noticed, later on, that, even when he wore trousers short enough
for him, he always rolled ‘em up above the knees when on horseback, for
some reason of his own: to suggest leggings, perhaps, for he had them
rolled up in all weathers, and he wouldn’t have bothered to save them
from the sweat of the horse, even if that horse ever sweated.
He was seated astride a three-bushel bag thrown across the ridge-pole of
a big grey horse, with a coffin-shaped head, and built astern something
after the style of a roughly put up hip-roofed box-bark humpy.* His
colour was like old box-bark, too, a dirty bluish-grey; and, one time,
when I saw his rump looming out of the scrub, I really thought it was
some old shepherd’s hut that I hadn’t noticed there before. When he
cantered it was like the humpy starting off on its corner-posts.
* ‘Humpy’, a rough hut.
‘Are you Mrs Wilson?’ asked the boy.
‘Yes,’ said Mary.
‘Well, mother told me to ride acrost and see if you wanted anythink. We
killed lars’ night, and I’ve fetched a piece er cow.’
‘Piece of WHAT?’ asked Mary.
He grinned, and handed a sugar-bag across the rail with something heavy
in the bottom of it, that nearly jerked Mary’s arm out when she took
it. It was a piece of beef, that looked as if it had been cut off with a
wood-axe, but it was fresh and clean.
‘Oh, I’m so glad!’ cried Mary. She was always impulsive, save to me
sometimes. ‘I was just wondering where we were going to get any fresh
meat. How kind of your mother! Tell her I’m very much obliged to her
indeed.’ And she felt behind her for a poor little purse she had. ‘And
now--how much did your mother say it would be?’
The boy blinked at her, and scratched his head.
‘How much will it be,’ he repeated, puzzled. ‘Oh--how much does it weigh
I-s’pose-yer-mean. Well, it ain’t been weighed at all--we ain’t got no
scales. A butcher does all that sort of think. We just kills it, and
cooks it, and eats it--and goes by guess. What won’t keep we salts down
in the cask. I reckon it weighs about a ton by the weight of it if yer
wanter know. Mother thought that if she sent any more it would go bad
before you could scoff it. I can’t see----’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Mary, getting confused. ‘But what I want to know is,
how do you manage when you sell it?’
He glared at her, and scratched his head. ‘Sell it? Why, we only goes
halves in a steer with some one, or sells steers to the butcher--or
maybe some meat to a party of fencers or surveyors, or tank-sinkers, or
them sorter people----’
‘Yes, yes; but what I want to know is, how much am I to send your mother
for this?’
‘How much what?’
‘Money, of course, you stupid boy,’ said Mary. ‘You seem a very stupid
boy.’
Then he saw what she was driving at. He began to fling his heels
convulsively against the sides of his horse, jerking his body backward
and forward at the same time, as if to wind up and start some clockwork
machinery inside the horse, that made it go, and seemed to need
repairing or oiling.
‘We ain’t that sorter people, missus,’ he said. ‘We don’t sell meat
to new people that come to settle here.’ Then, jerking his thumb
contemptuously towards the ridges, ‘Go over ter Wall’s if yer wanter buy
meat; they sell meat ter strangers.’ (Wall was the big squatter over the
ridges.)
‘Oh!’ said Mary, ‘I’m SO sorry. Thank your mother for me. She IS kind.’
‘Oh, that’s nothink. She said to tell yer she’ll be up as soon as she
can. She’d have come up yisterday evening--she thought yer’d feel lonely
comin’ new to a place like this--but she couldn’t git up.’
The machinery inside the old horse showed signs of starting. You
almost heard the wooden joints CREAK as he lurched forward, like an old
propped-up humpy when the rotting props give way; but at the sound of
Mary’s voice he settled back on his foundations again. It must have been
a very poor selection that couldn’t afford a better spare horse than
that.
‘Reach me that lump er wood, will yer, missus?’ said the boy, and he
pointed to one of my ‘spreads’ (for the team-chains) that lay inside the
fence. ‘I’ll fling it back agin over the fence when I git this ole cow
started.’
‘But wait a minute--I’ve forgotten your mother’s name,’ said Mary.
He grabbed at his thatch impatiently. ‘Me mother--oh!--the old woman’s
name’s Mrs Spicer. (Git up, karnt yer!)’ He twisted himself round, and
brought the stretcher down on one of the horse’s ‘points’ (and he had
many) with a crack that must have jarred his wrist.
‘Do you go to school?’ asked Mary. There was a three-days-a-week school
over the ridges at Wall’s station.
‘No!’ he jerked out, keeping his legs going. ‘Me--why I’m going on fur
fifteen. The last teacher at Wall’s finished me. I’m going to Queensland
next month drovin’.’ (Queensland border was over three hundred miles
away.)
‘Finished you? How?’ asked Mary.
‘Me edgercation, of course! How do yer expect me to start this horse
when yer keep talkin’?’
He split the ‘spread’ over the horse’s point, threw the pieces over the
fence, and was off, his elbows and legs flinging wildly, and the old
saw-stool lumbering along the road like an old working bullock trying a
canter. That horse wasn’t a trotter.
And next month he DID start for Queensland. He was a younger son and a
surplus boy on a wretched, poverty-stricken selection; and as there was
‘northin’ doin’’ in the district, his father (in a burst of fatherly
kindness, I suppose) made him a present of the old horse and a new
pair of Blucher boots, and I gave him an old saddle and a coat, and he
started for the Never-Never Country.
And I’ll bet he got there. But I’m doubtful if the old horse did.
Mary gave the boy five shillings, and I don’t think he had anything more
except a clean shirt and an extra pair of white cotton socks.
‘Spicer’s farm’ was a big bark humpy on a patchy clearing in the native
apple-tree scrub. The clearing was fenced in by a light ‘dog-legged’
fence (a fence of sapling poles resting on forks and X-shaped uprights),
and the dusty ground round the house was almost entirely covered with
cattle-dung. There was no attempt at cultivation when I came to live on
the creek; but there were old furrow-marks amongst the stumps of another
shapeless patch in the scrub near the hut. There was a wretched sapling
cow-yard and calf-pen, and a cow-bail with one sheet of bark over it for
shelter. There was no dairy to be seen, and I suppose the milk was set
in one of the two skillion rooms, or lean-to’s behind the hut,--the
other was ‘the boys’ bedroom’. The Spicers kept a few cows and steers,
and had thirty or forty sheep. Mrs Spicer used to drive down the creek
once a-week, in her rickety old spring-cart, to Cobborah, with butter
and eggs. The hut was nearly as bare inside as it was out--just a frame
of ‘round-timber’ (sapling poles) covered with bark. The furniture was
permanent (unless you rooted it up), like in our kitchen: a rough slab
table on stakes driven into the ground, and seats made the same
way. Mary told me afterwards that the beds in the bag-and-bark
partitioned-off room [‘mother’s bedroom’) were simply poles laid side
by side on cross-pieces supported by stakes driven into the ground, with
straw mattresses and some worn-out bed-clothes. Mrs Spicer had an old
patchwork quilt, in rags, and the remains of a white one, and Mary said
it was pitiful to see how these things would be spread over the beds--to
hide them as much as possible--when she went down there. A packing-case,
with something like an old print skirt draped round it, and a cracked
looking-glass (without a frame) on top, was the dressing-table.
There were a couple of gin-cases for a wardrobe. The boys’ beds were
three-bushel bags stretched between poles fastened to uprights. The
floor was the original surface, tramped hard, worn uneven with much
sweeping, and with puddles in rainy weather where the roof leaked. Mrs
Spicer used to stand old tins, dishes, and buckets under as many of
the leaks as she could. The saucepans, kettles, and boilers were old
kerosene-tins and billies. They used kerosene-tins, too, cut longways in
halves, for setting the milk in. The plates and cups were of tin;
there were two or three cups without saucers, and a crockery plate or
two--also two mugs, cracked and without handles, one with ‘For a Good
Boy’ and the other with ‘For a Good Girl’ on it; but all these were kept
on the mantel-shelf for ornament and for company. They were the only
ornaments in the house, save a little wooden clock that hadn’t gone for
years. Mrs Spicer had a superstition that she had ‘some things packed
away from the children.’
The pictures were cut from old copies of the ‘Illustrated Sydney News’
and pasted on to the bark. I remember this, because I remembered, long
ago, the Spencers, who were our neighbours when I was a boy, had the
walls of their bedroom covered with illustrations of the American Civil
War, cut from illustrated London papers, and I used to ‘sneak’ into
‘mother’s bedroom’ with Fred Spencer whenever we got the chance, and
gloat over the prints. I gave him a blade of a pocket-knife once, for
taking me in there.
I saw very little of Spicer. He was a big, dark, dark-haired and
whiskered man. I had an idea that he wasn’t a selector at all, only a
‘dummy’ for the squatter of the Cobborah run. You see, selectors were
allowed to take up land on runs, or pastoral leases. The squatters
kept them off as much as possible, by all manner of dodges and paltry
persecution. The squatter would get as much freehold as he could afford,
‘select’ as much land as the law allowed one man to take up, and then
employ dummies (dummy selectors) to take up bits of land that he fancied
about his run, and hold them for him.
Spicer seemed gloomy and unsociable. He was seldom at home. He was
generally supposed to be away shearin’, or fencin’, or workin’ on
somebody’s station. It turned out that the last six months he was away
it was on the evidence of a cask of beef and a hide with the brand cut
out, found in his camp on a fencing contract up-country, and which he
and his mates couldn’t account for satisfactorily, while the squatter
could. Then the family lived mostly on bread and honey, or bread and
treacle, or bread and dripping, and tea. Every ounce of butter and every
egg was needed for the market, to keep them in flour, tea, and sugar.
Mary found that out, but couldn’t help them much--except by ‘stuffing’
the children with bread and meat or bread and jam whenever they came up
to our place--for Mrs Spicer was proud with the pride that lies down in
the end and turns its face to the wall and dies.
Once, when Mary asked Annie, the eldest girl at home, if she was
hungry, she denied it--but she looked it. A ragged mite she had with her
explained things. The little fellow said--
‘Mother told Annie not to say we was hungry if yer asked; but if yer
give us anythink to eat, we was to take it an’ say thenk yer, Mrs
Wilson.’
‘I wouldn’t ‘a’ told yer a lie; but I thought Jimmy would split on me,
Mrs Wilson,’ said Annie. ‘Thenk yer, Mrs Wilson.’
She was not a big woman. She was gaunt and flat-chested, and her face
was ‘burnt to a brick’, as they say out there. She had brown eyes,
nearly red, and a little wild-looking at times, and a sharp face--ground
sharp by hardship--the cheeks drawn in. She had an expression
like--well, like a woman who had been very curious and suspicious at one
time, and wanted to know everybody’s business and hear everything, and
had lost all her curiosity, without losing the expression or the quick
suspicious movements of the head. I don’t suppose you understand. I
can’t explain it any other way. She was not more than forty.
I remember the first morning I saw her. I was going up the creek to look
at the selection for the first time, and called at the hut to see if she
had a bit of fresh mutton, as I had none and was sick of ‘corned beef’.
‘Yes--of--course,’ she said, in a sharp nasty tone, as if to say, ‘Is
there anything more you want while the shop’s open?’ I’d met just the
same sort of woman years before while I was carrying swag between the
shearing-sheds in the awful scrubs out west of the Darling river, so I
didn’t turn on my heels and walk away. I waited for her to speak again.
‘Come--inside,’ she said, ‘and sit down. I see you’ve got the waggon
outside. I s’pose your name’s Wilson, ain’t it? You’re thinkin’ about
takin’ on Harry Marshfield’s selection up the creek, so I heard. Wait
till I fry you a chop and boil the billy.’
Her voice sounded, more than anything else, like a voice coming out of
a phonograph--I heard one in Sydney the other day--and not like a voice
coming out of her. But sometimes when she got outside her everyday
life on this selection she spoke in a sort of--in a sort of lost
groping-in-the-dark kind of voice.
She didn’t talk much this time--just spoke in a mechanical way of the
drought, and the hard times, ‘an’ butter ‘n’ eggs bein’ down, an’ her
husban’ an’ eldest son bein’ away, an’ that makin’ it so hard for her.’
I don’t know how many children she had. I never got a chance to count
them, for they were nearly all small, and shy as piccaninnies, and used
to run and hide when anybody came. They were mostly nearly as black as
piccaninnies too. She must have averaged a baby a-year for years--and
God only knows how she got over her confinements! Once, they said, she
only had a black gin with her. She had an elder boy and girl, but she
seldom spoke of them. The girl, ‘Liza’, was ‘in service in Sydney.’ I’m
afraid I knew what that meant. The elder son was ‘away’. He had been a
bit of a favourite round there, it seemed.
Some one might ask her, ‘How’s your son Jack, Mrs Spicer?’ or, ‘Heard of
Jack lately? and where is he now?’
‘Oh, he’s somewheres up country,’ she’d say in the ‘groping’ voice, or
‘He’s drovin’ in Queenslan’,’ or ‘Shearin’ on the Darlin’ the last time
I heerd from him.’ ‘We ain’t had a line from him since--les’ see--since
Chris’mas ‘fore last.’
And she’d turn her haggard eyes in a helpless, hopeless sort of way
towards the west--towards ‘up-country’ and ‘Out-Back’.*
* ‘Out-Back’ is always west of the Bushman, no matter how
far out he be.
The eldest girl at home was nine or ten, with a little old face and
lines across her forehead: she had an older expression than her mother.
Tommy went to Queensland, as I told you. The eldest son at home, Bill
(older than Tommy), was ‘a bit wild.’
I’ve passed the place in smothering hot mornings in December, when the
droppings about the cow-yard had crumpled to dust that rose in the
warm, sickly, sunrise wind, and seen that woman at work in the cow-yard,
‘bailing up’ and leg-roping cows, milking, or hauling at a rope round
the neck of a half-grown calf that was too strong for her (and she was
tough as fencing-wire), or humping great buckets of sour milk to the
pigs or the ‘poddies’ (hand-fed calves) in the pen. I’d get off the
horse and give her a hand sometimes with a young steer, or a cranky old
cow that wouldn’t ‘bail-up’ and threatened her with her horns. She’d
say--
‘Thenk yer, Mr Wilson. Do yer think we’re ever goin’ to have any rain?’
I’ve ridden past the place on bitter black rainy mornings in June or
July, and seen her trudging about the yard--that was ankle-deep in black
liquid filth--with an old pair of Blucher boots on, and an old coat of
her husband’s, or maybe a three-bushel bag over her shoulders. I’ve seen
her climbing on the roof by means of the water-cask at the corner, and
trying to stop a leak by shoving a piece of tin in under the bark. And
when I’d fixed the leak--
‘Thenk yer, Mr Wilson. This drop of rain’s a blessin’! Come in and have
a dry at the fire and I’ll make yer a cup of tea.’ And, if I was in a
hurry, ‘Come in, man alive! Come in! and dry yerself a bit till the rain
holds up. Yer can’t go home like this! Yer’ll git yer death o’ cold.’
I’ve even seen her, in the terrible drought, climbing she-oaks and
apple-trees by a makeshift ladder, and awkwardly lopping off boughs to
feed the starving cattle.
‘Jist tryin’ ter keep the milkers alive till the rain comes.’
They said that when the pleuro-pneumonia was in the district and amongst
her cattle she bled and physicked them herself, and fed those that were
down with slices of half-ripe pumpkins (from a crop that had failed).
‘An’, one day,’ she told Mary, ‘there was a big barren heifer (that we
called Queen Elizabeth) that was down with the ploorer. She’d been down
for four days and hadn’t moved, when one mornin’ I dumped some wheaten
chaff--we had a few bags that Spicer brought home--I dumped it in front
of her nose, an’--would yer b’lieve me, Mrs Wilson?--she stumbled onter
her feet an’ chased me all the way to the house! I had to pick up me
skirts an’ run! Wasn’t it redic’lus?’
They had a sense of the ridiculous, most of those poor sun-dried
Bushwomen. I fancy that that helped save them from madness.
‘We lost nearly all our milkers,’ she told Mary. ‘I remember one day
Tommy came running to the house and screamed: ‘Marther! [mother] there’s
another milker down with the ploorer!’ Jist as if it was great news.
Well, Mrs Wilson, I was dead-beat, an’ I giv’ in. I jist sat down
to have a good cry, and felt for my han’kerchief--it WAS a rag of a
han’kerchief, full of holes (all me others was in the wash). Without
seein’ what I was doin’ I put me finger through one hole in the
han’kerchief an’ me thumb through the other, and poked me fingers into
me eyes, instead of wipin’ them. Then I had to laugh.’
There’s a story that once, when the Bush, or rather grass, fires were
out all along the creek on Spicer’s side, Wall’s station hands were up
above our place, trying to keep the fire back from the boundary, and
towards evening one of the men happened to think of the Spicers: they
saw smoke down that way. Spicer was away from home, and they had a small
crop of wheat, nearly ripe, on the selection.
‘My God! that poor devil of a woman will be burnt out, if she ain’t
already!’ shouted young Billy Wall. ‘Come along, three or four of you
chaps’--(it was shearing-time, and there were plenty of men on the
station).
They raced down the creek to Spicer’s, and were just in time to save the
wheat. She had her sleeves tucked up, and was beating out the burning
grass with a bough. She’d been at it for an hour, and was as black as a
gin, they said. She only said when they’d turned the fire: ‘Thenk yer!
Wait an’ I’ll make some tea.’
*****
After tea the first Sunday she came to see us, Mary asked--
‘Don’t you feel lonely, Mrs Spicer, when your husband goes away?’
‘Well--no, Mrs Wilson,’ she said in the groping sort of voice. ‘I uster,
once. I remember, when we lived on the Cudgeegong river--we lived in
a brick house then--the first time Spicer had to go away from home I
nearly fretted my eyes out. And he was only goin’ shearin’ for a month.
I muster bin a fool; but then we were only jist married a little while.
He’s been away drovin’ in Queenslan’ as long as eighteen months at a
time since then. But’ (her voice seemed to grope in the dark more
than ever) ‘I don’t mind,--I somehow seem to have got past carin’.
Besides--besides, Spicer was a very different man then to what he is
now. He’s got so moody and gloomy at home, he hardly ever speaks.’
Mary sat silent for a minute thinking. Then Mrs Spicer roused herself--
‘Oh, I don’t know what I’m talkin’ about! You mustn’t take any notice of
me, Mrs Wilson,--I don’t often go on like this. I do believe I’m gittin’
a bit ratty at times. It must be the heat and the dulness.’
But once or twice afterwards she referred to a time ‘when Spicer was a
different man to what he was now.’
I walked home with her a piece along the creek. She said nothing for
a long time, and seemed to be thinking in a puzzled way. Then she said
suddenly--
‘What-did-you-bring-her-here-for? She’s only a girl.’
‘I beg pardon, Mrs Spicer.’
‘Oh, I don’t know what I’m talkin’ about! I b’lieve I’m gittin’ ratty.
You mustn’t take any notice of me, Mr Wilson.’
She wasn’t much company for Mary; and often, when she had a child with
her, she’d start taking notice of the baby while Mary was talking, which
used to exasperate Mary. But poor Mrs Spicer couldn’t help it, and she
seemed to hear all the same.
Her great trouble was that she ‘couldn’t git no reg’lar schoolin’ for
the children.’
‘I learns ‘em at home as much as I can. But I don’t git a minute to
call me own; an’ I’m ginerally that dead-beat at night that I’m fit for
nothink.’
Mary had some of the children up now and then later on, and taught them
a little. When she first offered to do so, Mrs Spicer laid hold of the
handiest youngster and said--
‘There--do you hear that? Mrs Wilson is goin’ to teach yer, an’
it’s more than yer deserve!’ (the youngster had been ‘cryin’’ over
something). ‘Now, go up an’ say “Thenk yer, Mrs Wilson.” And if yer
ain’t good, and don’t do as she tells yer, I’ll break every bone in yer
young body!’
The poor little devil stammered something, and escaped.
The children were sent by turns over to Wall’s to Sunday-school. When
Tommy was at home he had a new pair of elastic-side boots, and there was
no end of rows about them in the family--for the mother made him lend
them to his sister Annie, to go to Sunday-school in, in her turn. There
were only about three pairs of anyway decent boots in the family, and
these were saved for great occasions. The children were always as clean
and tidy as possible when they came to our place.
And I think the saddest and most pathetic sight on the face of God’s
earth is the children of very poor people made to appear well: the
broken worn-out boots polished or greased, the blackened (inked) pieces
of string for laces; the clean patched pinafores over the wretched
threadbare frocks. Behind the little row of children hand-in-hand--and
no matter where they are--I always see the worn face of the mother.
Towards the end of the first year on the selection our little girl came.
I’d sent Mary to Gulgong for four months that time, and when she came
back with the baby Mrs Spicer used to come up pretty often. She came up
several times when Mary was ill, to lend a hand. She wouldn’t sit down
and condole with Mary, or waste her time asking questions, or talking
about the time when she was ill herself. She’d take off her hat--a
shapeless little lump of black straw she wore for visiting--give
her hair a quick brush back with the palms of her hands, roll up her
sleeves, and set to work to ‘tidy up’. She seemed to take most pleasure
in sorting out our children’s clothes, and dressing them. Perhaps she
used to dress her own like that in the days when Spicer was a different
man from what he was now. She seemed interested in the fashion-plates
of some women’s journals we had, and used to study them with an interest
that puzzled me, for she was not likely to go in for fashion. She never
talked of her early girlhood; but Mary, from some things she noticed,
was inclined to think that Mrs Spicer had been fairly well brought up.
For instance, Dr Balanfantie, from Cudgeegong, came out to see Wall’s
wife, and drove up the creek to our place on his way back to see how
Mary and the baby were getting on. Mary got out some crockery and some
table-napkins that she had packed away for occasions like this; and
she said that the way Mrs Spicer handled the things, and helped set the
table (though she did it in a mechanical sort of way), convinced her
that she had been used to table-napkins at one time in her life.
Sometimes, after a long pause in the conversation, Mrs Spicer would say
suddenly--
‘Oh, I don’t think I’ll come up next week, Mrs Wilson.’
‘Why, Mrs Spicer?’
‘Because the visits doesn’t do me any good. I git the dismals
afterwards.’
‘Why, Mrs Spicer? What on earth do you mean?’
‘Oh,-I-don’t-know-what-I’m-talkin’-about. You mustn’t take any notice
of me.’ And she’d put on her hat, kiss the children--and Mary too,
sometimes, as if she mistook her for a child--and go.
Mary thought her a little mad at times. But I seemed to understand.
Once, when Mrs Spicer was sick, Mary went down to her, and down again
next day. As she was coming away the second time, Mrs Spicer said--
‘I wish you wouldn’t come down any more till I’m on me feet, Mrs Wilson.
The children can do for me.’
‘Why, Mrs Spicer?’
‘Well, the place is in such a muck, and it hurts me.’
We were the aristocrats of Lahey’s Creek. Whenever we drove down on
Sunday afternoon to see Mrs Spicer, and as soon as we got near enough
for them to hear the rattle of the cart, we’d see the children running
to the house as fast as they could split, and hear them screaming--
‘Oh, marther! Here comes Mr and Mrs Wilson in their spring-cart.’
And we’d see her bustle round, and two or three fowls fly out the
front door, and she’d lay hold of a broom (made of a bound bunch of
‘broom-stuff’--coarse reedy grass or bush from the ridges--with a stick
stuck in it) and flick out the floor, with a flick or two round in front
of the door perhaps. The floor nearly always needed at least one flick
of the broom on account of the fowls. Or she’d catch a youngster and
scrub his face with a wet end of a cloudy towel, or twist the towel
round her finger and dig out his ears--as if she was anxious to have him
hear every word that was going to be said.
No matter what state the house would be in she’d always say, ‘I was jist
expectin’ yer, Mrs Wilson.’ And she was original in that, anyway.
She had an old patched and darned white table-cloth that she used to
spread on the table when we were there, as a matter of course [‘The
others is in the wash, so you must excuse this, Mrs Wilson’), but I saw
by the eyes of the children that the cloth was rather a wonderful thing
to them. ‘I must really git some more knives an’ forks next time I’m in
Cobborah,’ she’d say. ‘The children break an’ lose ‘em till I’m ashamed
to ask Christians ter sit down ter the table.’
She had many Bush yarns, some of them very funny, some of them rather
ghastly, but all interesting, and with a grim sort of humour about them.
But the effect was often spoilt by her screaming at the children to
‘Drive out them fowls, karnt yer,’ or ‘Take yer maulies [hands] outer
the sugar,’ or ‘Don’t touch Mrs Wilson’s baby with them dirty maulies,’
or ‘Don’t stand starin’ at Mrs Wilson with yer mouth an’ ears in that
vulgar way.’
Poor woman! she seemed everlastingly nagging at the children. It was
a habit, but they didn’t seem to mind. Most Bushwomen get the nagging
habit. I remember one, who had the prettiest, dearest, sweetest, most
willing, and affectionate little girl I think I ever saw, and she nagged
that child from daylight till dark--and after it. Taking it all round,
I think that the nagging habit in a mother is often worse on ordinary
children, and more deadly on sensitive youngsters, than the drinking
habit in a father.
One of the yarns Mrs Spicer told us was about a squatter she knew who
used to go wrong in his head every now and again, and try to commit
suicide. Once, when the station-hand, who was watching him, had his eye
off him for a minute, he hanged himself to a beam in the stable. The
men ran in and found him hanging and kicking. ‘They let him hang for
a while,’ said Mrs Spicer, ‘till he went black in the face and stopped
kicking. Then they cut him down and threw a bucket of water over him.’
‘Why! what on earth did they let the man hang for?’ asked Mary.
‘To give him a good bellyful of it: they thought it would cure him of
tryin’ to hang himself again.’
‘Well, that’s the coolest thing I ever heard of,’ said Mary.
‘That’s jist what the magistrate said, Mrs Wilson,’ said Mrs Spicer.
‘One morning,’ said Mrs Spicer, ‘Spicer had gone off on his horse
somewhere, and I was alone with the children, when a man came to the
door and said--
‘“For God’s sake, woman, give me a drink!”
‘Lord only knows where he came from! He was dressed like a new chum--his
clothes was good, but he looked as if he’d been sleepin’ in them in the
Bush for a month. He was very shaky. I had some coffee that mornin’,
so I gave him some in a pint pot; he drank it, and then he stood on his
head till he tumbled over, and then he stood up on his feet and said,
“Thenk yer, mum.”
‘I was so surprised that I didn’t know what to say, so I jist said,
“Would you like some more coffee?”
‘“Yes, thenk yer,” he said--“about two quarts.”
‘I nearly filled the pint pot, and he drank it and stood on his head
as long as he could, and when he got right end up he said, “Thenk yer,
mum--it’s a fine day,” and then he walked off. He had two saddle-straps
in his hands.’
‘Why, what did he stand on his head for?’ asked Mary.
‘To wash it up and down, I suppose, to get twice as much taste of the
coffee. He had no hat. I sent Tommy across to Wall’s to tell them that
there was a man wanderin’ about the Bush in the horrors of drink, and
to get some one to ride for the police. But they was too late, for he
hanged himself that night.’
‘O Lord!’ cried Mary.
‘Yes, right close to here, jist down the creek where the track to Wall’s
branches off. Tommy found him while he was out after the cows. Hangin’
to the branch of a tree with the two saddle-straps.’
Mary stared at her, speechless.
‘Tommy came home yellin’ with fright. I sent him over to Wall’s at once.
After breakfast, the minute my eyes was off them, the children slipped
away and went down there. They came back screamin’ at the tops of their
voices. I did give it to them. I reckon they won’t want ter see a dead
body again in a hurry. Every time I’d mention it they’d huddle together,
or ketch hold of me skirts and howl.
‘“Yer’ll go agen when I tell yer not to,” I’d say.
‘“Oh no, mother,” they’d howl.
‘“Yer wanted ter see a man hangin’,” I said.
‘“Oh, don’t, mother! Don’t talk about it.”
‘“Yer wouldn’t be satisfied till yer see it,” I’d say; “yer had to see
it or burst. Yer satisfied now, ain’t yer?”
‘“Oh, don’t, mother!”
‘“Yer run all the way there, I s’pose?”
‘“Don’t, mother!”
‘“But yer run faster back, didn’t yer?”
‘“Oh, don’t, mother.”
‘But,’ said Mrs Spicer, in conclusion, ‘I’d been down to see it myself
before they was up.’
‘And ain’t you afraid to live alone here, after all these horrible
things?’ asked Mary.
‘Well, no; I don’t mind. I seem to have got past carin’ for anythink
now. I felt it a little when Tommy went away--the first time I felt
anythink for years. But I’m over that now.’
‘Haven’t you got any friends in the district, Mrs Spicer?’
‘Oh yes. There’s me married sister near Cobborah, and a married brother
near Dubbo; he’s got a station. They wanted to take me an’ the children
between them, or take some of the younger children. But I couldn’t bring
my mind to break up the home. I want to keep the children together as
much as possible. There’s enough of them gone, God knows. But it’s a
comfort to know that there’s some one to see to them if anythink happens
to me.’
*****
One day--I was on my way home with the team that day--Annie Spicer came
running up the creek in terrible trouble.
‘Oh, Mrs Wilson! something terribl’s happened at home! A trooper’
(mounted policeman--they called them ‘mounted troopers’ out there), ‘a
trooper’s come and took Billy!’ Billy was the eldest son at home.
‘What?’
‘It’s true, Mrs Wilson.’
‘What for? What did the policeman say?’
‘He--he--he said, “I--I’m very sorry, Mrs Spicer; but--I--I want
William.”’
It turned out that William was wanted on account of a horse missed from
Wall’s station and sold down-country.
‘An’ mother took on awful,’ sobbed Annie; ‘an’ now she’ll only sit
stock-still an’ stare in front of her, and won’t take no notice of any
of us. Oh! it’s awful, Mrs Wilson. The policeman said he’d tell Aunt
Emma’ (Mrs Spicer’s sister at Cobborah), ‘and send her out. But I had to
come to you, an’ I’ve run all the way.’
James put the horse to the cart and drove Mary down.
Mary told me all about it when I came home.
‘I found her just as Annie said; but she broke down and cried in my
arms. Oh, Joe! it was awful! She didn’t cry like a woman. I heard a man
at Haviland cry at his brother’s funeral, and it was just like that. She
came round a bit after a while. Her sister’s with her now.... Oh, Joe!
you must take me away from the Bush.’
Later on Mary said--
‘How the oaks are sighing to-night, Joe!’
*****
Next morning I rode across to Wall’s station and tackled the old man;
but he was a hard man, and wouldn’t listen to me--in fact, he ordered
me off the station. I was a selector, and that was enough for him. But
young Billy Wall rode after me.
‘Look here, Joe!’ he said, ‘it’s a blanky shame. All for the sake of a
horse! And as if that poor devil of a woman hasn’t got enough to put up
with already! I wouldn’t do it for twenty horses. I’LL tackle the boss,
and if he won’t listen to me, I’ll walk off the run for the last time,
if I have to carry my swag.’
Billy Wall managed it. The charge was withdrawn, and we got young Billy
Spicer off up-country.
But poor Mrs Spicer was never the same after that. She seldom came up to
our place unless Mary dragged her, so to speak; and then she would talk
of nothing but her last trouble, till her visits were painful to look
forward to.
‘If it only could have been kep’ quiet--for the sake of the other
children; they are all I think of now. I tried to bring ‘em all up
decent, but I s’pose it was my fault, somehow. It’s the disgrace that’s
killin’ me--I can’t bear it.’
I was at home one Sunday with Mary and a jolly Bush-girl named Maggie
Charlsworth, who rode over sometimes from Wall’s station (I must tell
you about her some other time; James was ‘shook after her’), and we got
talkin’ about Mrs Spicer. Maggie was very warm about old Wall.
‘I expected Mrs Spicer up to-day,’ said Mary. ‘She seems better lately.’
‘Why!’ cried Maggie Charlsworth, ‘if that ain’t Annie coming running up
along the creek. Something’s the matter!’
We all jumped up and ran out.
‘What is it, Annie?’ cried Mary.
‘Oh, Mrs Wilson! Mother’s asleep, and we can’t wake her!’
‘What?’
‘It’s--it’s the truth, Mrs Wilson.’
‘How long has she been asleep?’
‘Since lars’ night.’
‘My God!’ cried Mary, ‘SINCE LAST NIGHT?’
‘No, Mrs Wilson, not all the time; she woke wonst, about daylight this
mornin’. She called me and said she didn’t feel well, and I’d have to
manage the milkin’.’
‘Was that all she said?’
‘No. She said not to go for you; and she said to feed the pigs and
calves; and she said to be sure and water them geraniums.’
Mary wanted to go, but I wouldn’t let her. James and I saddled our
horses and rode down the creek.
*****
Mrs Spicer looked very little different from what she did when I last
saw her alive. It was some time before we could believe that she was
dead. But she was ‘past carin’’ right enough.
A Double Buggy at Lahey’s Creek.
I. Spuds, and a Woman’s Obstinacy.
Ever since we were married it had been Mary’s great ambition to have a
buggy. The house or furniture didn’t matter so much--out there in the
Bush where we were--but, where there were no railways or coaches, and
the roads were long, and mostly hot and dusty, a buggy was the great
thing. I had a few pounds when we were married, and was going to get
one then; but new buggies went high, and another party got hold of a
second-hand one that I’d had my eye on, so Mary thought it over and at
last she said, ‘Never mind the buggy, Joe; get a sewing-machine and I’ll
be satisfied. I’ll want the machine more than the buggy, for a while.
Wait till we’re better off.’
After that, whenever I took a contract--to put up a fence or wool-shed,
or sink a dam or something--Mary would say, ‘You ought to knock a buggy
out of this job, Joe;’ but something always turned up--bad weather or
sickness. Once I cut my foot with the adze and was laid up; and, another
time, a dam I was making was washed away by a flood before I finished
it. Then Mary would say, ‘Ah, well--never mind, Joe. Wait till we are
better off.’ But she felt it hard the time I built a wool-shed and
didn’t get paid for it, for we’d as good as settled about another
second-hand buggy then.
I always had a fancy for carpentering, and was handy with tools. I made
a spring-cart--body and wheels--in spare time, out of colonial hardwood,
and got Little the blacksmith to do the ironwork; I painted the cart
myself. It wasn’t much lighter than one of the tip-drays I had, but it
WAS a spring-cart, and Mary pretended to be satisfied with it: anyway, I
didn’t hear any more of the buggy for a while.
I sold that cart, for fourteen pounds, to a Chinese gardener who wanted
a strong cart to carry his vegetables round through the Bush. It was
just before our first youngster came: I told Mary that I wanted the
money in case of extra expense--and she didn’t fret much at losing
that cart. But the fact was, that I was going to make another try for
a buggy, as a present for Mary when the child was born. I thought of
getting the turn-out while she was laid up, keeping it dark from her
till she was on her feet again, and then showing her the buggy standing
in the shed. But she had a bad time, and I had to have the doctor
regularly, and get a proper nurse, and a lot of things extra; so the
buggy idea was knocked on the head. I was set on it, too: I’d thought of
how, when Mary was up and getting strong, I’d say one morning, ‘Go round
and have a look in the shed, Mary; I’ve got a few fowls for you,’ or
something like that--and follow her round to watch her eyes when she saw
the buggy. I never told Mary about that--it wouldn’t have done any good.
Later on I got some good timber--mostly scraps that were given to
me--and made a light body for a spring-cart. Galletly, the coach-builder
at Cudgeegong, had got a dozen pairs of American hickory wheels up from
Sydney, for light spring-carts, and he let me have a pair for cost price
and carriage. I got him to iron the cart, and he put it through
the paint-shop for nothing. He sent it out, too, at the tail of Tom
Tarrant’s big van--to increase the surprise. We were swells then for
a while; I heard no more of a buggy until after we’d been settled at
Lahey’s Creek for a couple of years.
I told you how I went into the carrying line, and took up a selection at
Lahey’s Creek--for a run for the horses and to grow a bit of feed--and
shifted Mary and little Jim out there from Gulgong, with Mary’s young
scamp of a brother James to keep them company while I was on the road.
The first year I did well enough carrying, but I never cared for it--it
was too slow; and, besides, I was always anxious when I was away from
home. The game was right enough for a single man--or a married one whose
wife had got the nagging habit (as many Bushwomen have--God help ‘em!),
and who wanted peace and quietness sometimes. Besides, other small
carriers started (seeing me getting on); and Tom Tarrant, the
coach-driver at Cudgeegong, had another heavy spring-van built, and put
it on the roads, and he took a lot of the light stuff.
The second year I made a rise--out of ‘spuds’, of all the things in the
world. It was Mary’s idea. Down at the lower end of our selection--Mary
called it ‘the run’--was a shallow watercourse called Snake’s Creek, dry
most of the year, except for a muddy water-hole or two; and, just above
the junction, where it ran into Lahey’s Creek, was a low piece of good
black-soil flat, on our side--about three acres. The flat was fairly
clear when I came to the selection--save for a few logs that had been
washed up there in some big ‘old man’ flood, way back in black-fellows’
times; and one day, when I had a spell at home, I got the horses and
trace-chains and dragged the logs together--those that wouldn’t split
for fencing timber--and burnt them off. I had a notion to get the flat
ploughed and make a lucern-paddock of it. There was a good water-hole,
under a clump of she-oak in the bend, and Mary used to take her stools
and tubs and boiler down there in the spring-cart in hot weather, and
wash the clothes under the shade of the trees--it was cooler, and
saved carrying water to the house. And one evening after she’d done the
washing she said to me--
‘Look here, Joe; the farmers out here never seem to get a new idea: they
don’t seem to me ever to try and find out beforehand what the market is
going to be like--they just go on farming the same old way and putting
in the same old crops year after year. They sow wheat, and, if it comes
on anything like the thing, they reap and thresh it; if it doesn’t,
they mow it for hay--and some of ‘em don’t have the brains to do that in
time. Now, I was looking at that bit of flat you cleared, and it struck
me that it wouldn’t be a half bad idea to get a bag of seed-potatoes,
and have the land ploughed--old Corny George would do it cheap--and
get them put in at once. Potatoes have been dear all round for the last
couple of years.’
I told her she was talking nonsense, that the ground was no good for
potatoes, and the whole district was too dry. ‘Everybody I know has
tried it, one time or another, and made nothing of it,’ I said.
‘All the more reason why you should try it, Joe,’ said Mary. ‘Just try
one crop. It might rain for weeks, and then you’ll be sorry you didn’t
take my advice.’
‘But I tell you the ground is not potato-ground,’ I said.
‘How do you know? You haven’t sown any there yet.’
‘But I’ve turned up the surface and looked at it. It’s not rich enough,
and too dry, I tell you. You need swampy, boggy ground for potatoes. Do
you think I don’t know land when I see it?’
‘But you haven’t TRIED to grow potatoes there yet, Joe. How do you
know----’
I didn’t listen to any more. Mary was obstinate when she got an idea
into her head. It was no use arguing with her. All the time I’d be
talking she’d just knit her forehead and go on thinking straight ahead,
on the track she’d started,--just as if I wasn’t there,--and it used to
make me mad. She’d keep driving at me till I took her advice or lost my
temper,--I did both at the same time, mostly.
I took my pipe and went out to smoke and cool down.
A couple of days after the potato breeze, I started with the team down
to Cudgeegong for a load of fencing-wire I had to bring out; and after
I’d kissed Mary good-bye, she said--
‘Look here, Joe, if you bring out a bag of seed-potatoes, James and I
will slice them, and old Corny George down the creek would bring his
plough up in the dray and plough the ground for very little. We could
put the potatoes in ourselves if the ground were only ploughed.’
I thought she’d forgotten all about it. There was no time to argue--I’d
be sure to lose my temper, and then I’d either have to waste an hour
comforting Mary or go off in a ‘huff’, as the women call it, and be
miserable for the trip. So I said I’d see about it. She gave me another
hug and a kiss. ‘Don’t forget, Joe,’ she said as I started. ‘Think it
over on the road.’ I reckon she had the best of it that time.
About five miles along, just as I turned into the main road, I heard
some one galloping after me, and I saw young James on his hack. I got a
start, for I thought that something had gone wrong at home. I remember,
the first day I left Mary on the creek, for the first five or six miles
I was half-a-dozen times on the point of turning back--only I thought
she’d laugh at me.
‘What is it, James?’ I shouted, before he came up--but I saw he was
grinning.
‘Mary says to tell you not to forget to bring a hoe out with you.’
‘You clear off home!’ I said, ‘or I’ll lay the whip about your young
hide; and don’t come riding after me again as if the run was on fire.’
‘Well, you needn’t get shirty with me!’ he said. ‘*I* don’t want to have
anything to do with a hoe.’ And he rode off.
I DID get thinking about those potatoes, though I hadn’t meant to. I
knew of an independent man in that district who’d made his money out
of a crop of potatoes; but that was away back in the roaring
‘Fifties--‘54--when spuds went up to twenty-eight shillings a
hundredweight (in Sydney), on account of the gold rush. We might get
good rain now, and, anyway, it wouldn’t cost much to put the potatoes
in. If they came on well, it would be a few pounds in my pocket; if the
crop was a failure, I’d have a better show with Mary next time she was
struck by an idea outside housekeeping, and have something to grumble
about when I felt grumpy.
I got a couple of bags of potatoes--we could use those that were
left over; and I got a small iron plough and a harrow that Little the
blacksmith had lying in his yard and let me have cheap--only about
a pound more than I told Mary I gave for them. When I took advice, I
generally made the mistake of taking more than was offered, or adding
notions of my own. It was vanity, I suppose. If the crop came on well I
could claim the plough-and-harrow part of the idea, anyway. (It didn’t
strike me that if the crop failed Mary would have the plough and harrow
against me, for old Corny would plough the ground for ten or fifteen
shillings.) Anyway, I’d want a plough and harrow later on, and I might
as well get it now; it would give James something to do.
I came out by the western road, by Guntawang, and up the creek home; and
the first thing I saw was old Corny George ploughing the flat. And
Mary was down on the bank superintending. She’d got James with the
trace-chains and the spare horses, and had made him clear off every
stick and bush where another furrow might be squeezed in. Old Corny
looked pretty grumpy on it--he’d broken all his ploughshares but one, in
the roots; and James didn’t look much brighter. Mary had an old felt
hat and a new pair of ‘lastic-side boots of mine on, and the boots were
covered with clay, for she’d been down hustling James to get a rotten
old stump out of the way by the time Corny came round with his next
furrow.
‘I thought I’d make the boots easy for you, Joe,’ said Mary.
‘It’s all right, Mary,’ I said. ‘I’m not going to growl.’ Those boots
were a bone of contention between us; but she generally got them off
before I got home.
Her face fell a little when she saw the plough and harrow in the waggon,
but I said that would be all right--we’d want a plough anyway.
‘I thought you wanted old Corny to plough the ground,’ she said.
‘I never said so.’
‘But when I sent Jim after you about the hoe to put the spuds in, you
didn’t say you wouldn’t bring it,’ she said.
I had a few days at home, and entered into the spirit of the thing. When
Corny was done, James and I cross-ploughed the land, and got a stump or
two, a big log, and some scrub out of the way at the upper end and added
nearly an acre, and ploughed that. James was all right at most Bushwork:
he’d bullock so long as the novelty lasted; he liked ploughing or
fencing, or any graft he could make a show at. He didn’t care for
grubbing out stumps, or splitting posts and rails. We sliced the
potatoes of an evening--and there was trouble between Mary and James
over cutting through the ‘eyes’. There was no time for the hoe--and
besides it wasn’t a novelty to James--so I just ran furrows and they
dropped the spuds in behind me, and I turned another furrow over them,
and ran the harrow over the ground. I think I hilled those spuds, too,
with furrows--or a crop of Indian corn I put in later on.
It rained heavens-hard for over a week: we had regular showers all
through, and it was the finest crop of potatoes ever seen in the
district. I believe at first Mary used to slip down at daybreak to see
if the potatoes were up; and she’d write to me about them, on the road.
I forget how many bags I got; but the few who had grown potatoes in the
district sent theirs to Sydney, and spuds went up to twelve and fifteen
shillings a hundredweight in that district. I made a few quid out of
mine--and saved carriage too, for I could take them out on the waggon.
Then Mary began to hear (through James) of a buggy that some one had for
sale cheap, or a dogcart that somebody else wanted to get rid of--and
let me know about it, in an offhand way.
II. Joe Wilson’s Luck.
There was good grass on the selection all the year. I’d picked up
a small lot--about twenty head--of half-starved steers for next to
nothing, and turned them on the run; they came on wonderfully, and my
brother-in-law (Mary’s sister’s husband), who was running a butchery
at Gulgong, gave me a good price for them. His carts ran out twenty or
thirty miles, to little bits of gold-rushes that were going on at th’
Home Rule, Happy Valley, Guntawang, Tallawang, and Cooyal, and those
places round there, and he was doing well.
Mary had heard of a light American waggonette, when the steers went--a
tray-body arrangement, and she thought she’d do with that. ‘It would
be better than the buggy, Joe,’ she said--‘there’d be more room for
the children, and, besides, I could take butter and eggs to Gulgong,
or Cobborah, when we get a few more cows.’ Then James heard of a small
flock of sheep that a selector--who was about starved off his selection
out Talbragar way--wanted to get rid of. James reckoned he could get
them for less than half-a-crown a-head. We’d had a heavy shower of rain,
that came over the ranges and didn’t seem to go beyond our boundaries.
Mary said, ‘It’s a pity to see all that grass going to waste, Joe.
Better get those sheep and try your luck with them. Leave some money
with me, and I’ll send James over for them. Never mind about the
buggy--we’ll get that when we’re on our feet.’
So James rode across to Talbragar and drove a hard bargain with that
unfortunate selector, and brought the sheep home. There were about two
hundred, wethers and ewes, and they were young and looked a good breed
too, but so poor they could scarcely travel; they soon picked up,
though. The drought was blazing all round and Out-Back, and I think that
my corner of the ridges was the only place where there was any grass to
speak of. We had another shower or two, and the grass held out. Chaps
began to talk of ‘Joe Wilson’s luck’.
I would have liked to shear those sheep; but I hadn’t time to get a shed
or anything ready--along towards Christmas there was a bit of a boom
in the carrying line. Wethers in wool were going as high as thirteen
to fifteen shillings at the Homebush yards at Sydney, so I arranged to
truck the sheep down from the river by rail, with another small lot that
was going, and I started James off with them. He took the west road, and
down Guntawang way a big farmer who saw James with the sheep (and who
was speculating, or adding to his stock, or took a fancy to the wool)
offered James as much for them as he reckoned I’d get in Sydney, after
paying the carriage and the agents and the auctioneer. James put the
sheep in a paddock and rode back to me. He was all there where riding
was concerned. I told him to let the sheep go. James made a Greener
shot-gun, and got his saddle done up, out of that job.
I took up a couple more forty-acre blocks--one in James’s name, to
encourage him with the fencing. There was a good slice of land in an
angle between the range and the creek, farther down, which everybody
thought belonged to Wall, the squatter, but Mary got an idea, and went
to the local land office and found out that it was ‘unoccupied Crown
land’, and so I took it up on pastoral lease, and got a few more
sheep--I’d saved some of the best-looking ewes from the last lot.
One evening--I was going down next day for a load of fencing-wire for
myself--Mary said,--
‘Joe! do you know that the Matthews have got a new double buggy?’
The Matthews were a big family of cockatoos, along up the main road, and
I didn’t think much of them. The sons were all ‘bad-eggs’, though the
old woman and girls were right enough.
‘Well, what of that?’ I said. ‘They’re up to their neck in debt, and
camping like black-fellows in a big bark humpy. They do well to go
flashing round in a double buggy.’
‘But that isn’t what I was going to say,’ said Mary. ‘They want to sell
their old single buggy, James says. I’m sure you could get it for six or
seven pounds; and you could have it done up.’
‘I wish James to the devil!’ I said. ‘Can’t he find anything better to
do than ride round after cock-and-bull yarns about buggies?’
‘Well,’ said Mary, ‘it was James who got the steers and the sheep.’
Well, one word led to another, and we said things we didn’t mean--but
couldn’t forget in a hurry. I remember I said something about Mary
always dragging me back just when I was getting my head above water and
struggling to make a home for her and the children; and that hurt her,
and she spoke of the ‘homes’ she’d had since she was married. And that
cut me deep.
It was about the worst quarrel we had. When she began to cry I got my
hat and went out and walked up and down by the creek. I hated anything
that looked like injustice--I was so sensitive about it that it made
me unjust sometimes. I tried to think I was right, but I couldn’t--it
wouldn’t have made me feel any better if I could have thought so. I got
thinking of Mary’s first year on the selection and the life she’d had
since we were married.
When I went in she’d cried herself to sleep. I bent over and, ‘Mary,’ I
whispered.
She seemed to wake up.
‘Joe--Joe!’ she said.
‘What is it Mary?’ I said.
‘I’m pretty well sure that old Spot’s calf isn’t in the pen. Make James
go at once!’
Old Spot’s last calf was two years old now; so Mary was talking in her
sleep, and dreaming she was back in her first year.
We both laughed when I told her about it afterwards; but I didn’t feel
like laughing just then.
Later on in the night she called out in her sleep,--
‘Joe--Joe! Put that buggy in the shed, or the sun will blister the
varnish!’
I wish I could say that that was the last time I ever spoke unkindly to
Mary.
Next morning I got up early and fried the bacon and made the tea, and
took Mary’s breakfast in to her--like I used to do, sometimes, when we
were first married. She didn’t say anything--just pulled my head down
and kissed me.
When I was ready to start Mary said,--
‘You’d better take the spring-cart in behind the dray and get the tyres
cut and set. They’re ready to drop off, and James has been wedging them
up till he’s tired of it. The last time I was out with the children
I had to knock one of them back with a stone: there’ll be an accident
yet.’
So I lashed the shafts of the cart under the tail of the waggon, and
mean and ridiculous enough the cart looked, going along that way. It
suggested a man stooping along handcuffed, with his arms held out and
down in front of him.
It was dull weather, and the scrubs looked extra dreary and endless--and
I got thinking of old things. Everything was going all right with me,
but that didn’t keep me from brooding sometimes--trying to hatch out
stones, like an old hen we had at home. I think, taking it all round, I
used to be happier when I was mostly hard-up--and more generous. When I
had ten pounds I was more likely to listen to a chap who said, ‘Lend me
a pound-note, Joe,’ than when I had fifty; THEN I fought shy of careless
chaps--and lost mates that I wanted afterwards--and got the name of
being mean. When I got a good cheque I’d be as miserable as a miser over
the first ten pounds I spent; but when I got down to the last I’d buy
things for the house. And now that I was getting on, I hated to spend
a pound on anything. But then, the farther I got away from poverty the
greater the fear I had of it--and, besides, there was always before us
all the thought of the terrible drought, with blazing runs as bare and
dusty as the road, and dead stock rotting every yard, all along the
barren creeks.
I had a long yarn with Mary’s sister and her husband that night in
Gulgong, and it brightened me up. I had a fancy that that sort of a
brother-in-law made a better mate than a nearer one; Tom Tarrant had
one, and he said it was sympathy. But while we were yarning I couldn’t
help thinking of Mary, out there in the hut on the Creek, with no one to
talk to but the children, or James, who was sulky at home, or Black
Mary or Black Jimmy (our black boy’s father and mother), who weren’t
oversentimental. Or maybe a selector’s wife (the nearest was five
miles away), who could talk only of two or three things--‘lambin’’ and
‘shearin’’ and ‘cookin’ for the men’, and what she said to her old man,
and what he said to her--and her own ailments--over and over again.
It’s a wonder it didn’t drive Mary mad!--I know I could never listen to
that woman more than an hour. Mary’s sister said,--
‘Now if Mary had a comfortable buggy, she could drive in with the
children oftener. Then she wouldn’t feel the loneliness so much.’
I said ‘Good night’ then and turned in. There was no getting away from
that buggy. Whenever Mary’s sister started hinting about a buggy, I
reckoned it was a put-up job between them.
III. The Ghost of Mary’s Sacrifice.
When I got to Gudgeegong I stopped at Galletly’s coach-shop to leave the
cart. The Galletlys were good fellows: there were two brothers--one was
a saddler and harness-maker. Big brown-bearded men--the biggest men in
the district, ‘twas said.
Their old man had died lately and left them some money; they had men,
and only worked in their shops when they felt inclined, or there was a
special work to do; they were both first-class tradesmen. I went into
the painter’s shop to have a look at a double buggy that Galletly had
built for a man who couldn’t pay cash for it when it was finished--and
Galletly wouldn’t trust him.
There it stood, behind a calico screen that the coach-painters used to
keep out the dust when they were varnishing. It was a first-class piece
of work--pole, shafts, cushions, whip, lamps, and all complete. If you
only wanted to drive one horse you could take out the pole and put in
the shafts, and there you were. There was a tilt over the front seat;
if you only wanted the buggy to carry two, you could fold down the back
seat, and there you had a handsome, roomy, single buggy. It would go
near fifty pounds.
While I was looking at it, Bill Galletly came in, and slapped me on the
back.
‘Now, there’s a chance for you, Joe!’ he said. ‘I saw you rubbing your
head round that buggy the last time you were in. You wouldn’t get a
better one in the colonies, and you won’t see another like it in the
district again in a hurry--for it doesn’t pay to build ‘em. Now you’re a
full-blown squatter, and it’s time you took little Mary for a fly round
in her own buggy now and then, instead of having her stuck out there in
the scrub, or jolting through the dust in a cart like some old Mother
Flourbag.’
He called her ‘little Mary’ because the Galletly family had known her
when she was a girl.
I rubbed my head and looked at the buggy again. It was a great
temptation.
‘Look here, Joe,’ said Bill Galletly in a quieter tone. ‘I’ll tell you
what I’ll do. I’ll let YOU have the buggy. You can take it out and send
along a bit of a cheque when you feel you can manage it, and the rest
later on,--a year will do, or even two years. You’ve had a hard pull,
and I’m not likely to be hard up for money in a hurry.’
They were good fellows the Galletlys, but they knew their men. I
happened to know that Bill Galletly wouldn’t let the man he built the
buggy for take it out of the shop without cash down, though he was a
big-bug round there. But that didn’t make it easier for me.
Just then Robert Galletly came into the shop. He was rather quieter than
his brother, but the two were very much alike.
‘Look here, Bob,’ said Bill; ‘here’s a chance for you to get rid of your
harness. Joe Wilson’s going to take that buggy off my hands.’
Bob Galletly put his foot up on a saw-stool, took one hand out of his
pockets, rested his elbow on his knee and his chin on the palm of his
hand, and bunched up his big beard with his fingers, as he always did
when he was thinking. Presently he took his foot down, put his hand
back in his pocket, and said to me, ‘Well, Joe, I’ve got a double set of
harness made for the man who ordered that damned buggy, and if you like
I’ll let you have it. I suppose when Bill there has squeezed all he
can out of you I’ll stand a show of getting something. He’s a regular
Shylock, he is.’
I pushed my hat forward and rubbed the back of my head and stared at the
buggy.
‘Come across to the Royal, Joe,’ said Bob.
But I knew that a beer would settle the business, so I said I’d get the
wool up to the station first and think it over, and have a drink when I
came back.
I thought it over on the way to the station, but it didn’t seem good
enough. I wanted to get some more sheep, and there was the new run to
be fenced in, and the instalments on the selections. I wanted lots of
things that I couldn’t well do without. Then, again, the farther I got
away from debt and hard-upedness the greater the horror I had of it. I
had two horses that would do; but I’d have to get another later on, and
altogether the buggy would run me nearer a hundred than fifty pounds.
Supposing a dry season threw me back with that buggy on my hands.
Besides, I wanted a spell. If I got the buggy it would only mean an
extra turn of hard graft for me. No, I’d take Mary for a trip to Sydney,
and she’d have to be satisfied with that.
I’d got it settled, and was just turning in through the big white
gates to the goods-shed when young Black, the squatter, dashed past the
station in his big new waggonette, with his wife and a driver and a lot
of portmanteaus and rugs and things. They were going to do the grand
in Sydney over Christmas. Now it was young Black who was so shook after
Mary when she was in service with the Blacks before the old man died,
and if I hadn’t come along--and if girls never cared for vagabonds--Mary
would have been mistress of Haviland homestead, with servants to wait on
her; and she was far better fitted for it than the one that was there.
She would have been going to Sydney every holiday and putting up at the
old Royal, with every comfort that a woman could ask for, and seeing
a play every night. And I’d have been knocking around amongst the big
stations Out-Back, or maybe drinking myself to death at the shanties.
The Blacks didn’t see me as I went by, ragged and dusty, and with an
old, nearly black, cabbage-tree hat drawn over my eyes. I didn’t care
a damn for them, or any one else, at most times, but I had moods when I
felt things.
One of Black’s big wool teams was just coming away from the shed, and
the driver, a big, dark, rough fellow, with some foreign blood in him,
didn’t seem inclined to wheel his team an inch out of the middle of the
road. I stopped my horses and waited. He looked at me and I looked at
him--hard. Then he wheeled off, scowling, and swearing at his horses.
I’d given him a hiding, six or seven years before, and he hadn’t
forgotten it. And I felt then as if I wouldn’t mind trying to give some
one a hiding.
The goods clerk must have thought that Joe Wilson was pretty grumpy that
day. I was thinking of Mary, out there in the lonely hut on a barren
creek in the Bush--for it was little better--with no one to speak to
except a haggard, worn-out Bushwoman or two, that came to see her
on Sunday. I thought of the hardships she went through in the first
year--that I haven’t told you about yet; of the time she was ill, and I
away, and no one to understand; of the time she was alone with James and
Jim sick; and of the loneliness she fought through out there. I thought
of Mary, outside in the blazing heat, with an old print dress and a
felt hat, and a pair of ‘lastic-siders of mine on, doing the work of
a station manager as well as that of a housewife and mother. And her
cheeks were getting thin, and her colour was going: I thought of the
gaunt, brick-brown, saw-file voiced, hopeless and spiritless Bushwomen I
knew--and some of them not much older than Mary.
When I went back down into the town, I had a drink with Bill Galletly at
the Royal, and that settled the buggy; then Bob shouted,* and I took the
harness. Then I shouted, to wet the bargain. When I was going, Bob said,
‘Send in that young scamp of a brother of Mary’s with the horses: if
the collars don’t fit I’ll fix up a pair of makeshifts, and alter the
others.’ I thought they both gripped my hand harder than usual, but that
might have been the beer.
* ‘Shout’, to buy a round of drinks.--A. L., 1997.
IV. The Buggy Comes Home.
I ‘whipped the cat’ a bit, the first twenty miles or so, but then, I
thought, what did it matter? What was the use of grinding to save money
until we were too old to enjoy it. If we had to go down in the world
again, we might as well fall out of a buggy as out of a dray--there’d be
some talk about it, anyway, and perhaps a little sympathy. When Mary had
the buggy she wouldn’t be tied down so much to that wretched hole in the
Bush; and the Sydney trips needn’t be off either. I could drive down to
Wallerawang on the main line, where Mary had some people, and leave the
buggy and horses there, and take the train to Sydney; or go right on, by
the old coach-road, over the Blue Mountains: it would be a grand drive.
I thought best to tell Mary’s sister at Gulgong about the buggy; I told
her I’d keep it dark from Mary till the buggy came home. She entered
into the spirit of the thing, and said she’d give the world to be able
to go out with the buggy, if only to see Mary open her eyes when she saw
it; but she couldn’t go, on account of a new baby she had. I was rather
glad she couldn’t, for it would spoil the surprise a little, I thought.
I wanted that all to myself.
I got home about sunset next day, and, after tea, when I’d finished
telling Mary all the news, and a few lies as to why I didn’t bring the
cart back, and one or two other things, I sat with James, out on a log
of the wood-heap, where we generally had our smokes and interviews, and
told him all about the buggy. He whistled, then he said--
‘But what do you want to make it such a Bushranging business for?
Why can’t you tell Mary now? It will cheer her up. She’s been pretty
miserable since you’ve been away this trip.’
‘I want it to be a surprise,’ I said.
‘Well, I’ve got nothing to say against a surprise, out in a hole like
this; but it ‘ud take a lot to surprise me. What am I to say to Mary
about taking the two horses in? I’ll only want one to bring the cart
out, and she’s sure to ask.’
‘Tell her you’re going to get yours shod.’
‘But he had a set of slippers only the other day. She knows as much
about horses as we do. I don’t mind telling a lie so long as a chap has
only got to tell a straight lie and be done with it. But Mary asks so
many questions.’
‘Well, drive the other horse up the creek early, and pick him up as you
go.’
‘Yes. And she’ll want to know what I want with two bridles. But I’ll fix
her--YOU needn’t worry.’
‘And, James,’ I said, ‘get a chamois leather and sponge--we’ll want ‘em
anyway--and you might give the buggy a wash down in the creek, coming
home. It’s sure to be covered with dust.’
‘Oh!--orlright.’
‘And if you can, time yourself to get here in the cool of the evening,
or just about sunset.’
‘What for?’
I’d thought it would be better to have the buggy there in the cool
of the evening, when Mary would have time to get excited and get over
it--better than in the blazing hot morning, when the sun rose as hot as
at noon, and we’d have the long broiling day before us.
‘What do you want me to come at sunset for?’ asked James. ‘Do you want
me to camp out in the scrub and turn up like a blooming sundowner?’
‘Oh well,’ I said, ‘get here at midnight if you like.’
We didn’t say anything for a while--just sat and puffed at our pipes.
Then I said,--
‘Well, what are you thinking about?’
I’m thinking it’s time you got a new hat, the sun seems to get in
through your old one too much,’ and he got out of my reach and went to
see about penning the calves. Before we turned in he said,--
‘Well, what am I to get out of the job, Joe?’
He had his eye on a double-barrel gun that Franca the gunsmith in
Cudgeegong had--one barrel shot, and the other rifle; so I said,--
‘How much does Franca want for that gun?’
‘Five-ten; but I think he’d take my single barrel off it. Anyway, I can
squeeze a couple of quid out of Phil Lambert for the single barrel.’
(Phil was his bosom chum.)
‘All right,’ I said. ‘Make the best bargain you can.’
He got his own breakfast and made an early start next morning, to get
clear of any instructions or messages that Mary might have forgotten to
give him overnight. He took his gun with him.
I’d always thought that a man was a fool who couldn’t keep a secret
from his wife--that there was something womanish about him. I found out.
Those three days waiting for the buggy were about the longest I ever
spent in my life. It made me scotty with every one and everything;
and poor Mary had to suffer for it. I put in the time patching up the
harness and mending the stockyard and the roof, and, the third morning,
I rode up the ridges to look for trees for fencing-timber. I remember I
hurried home that afternoon because I thought the buggy might get there
before me.
At tea-time I got Mary on to the buggy business.
‘What’s the good of a single buggy to you, Mary?’ I asked. ‘There’s only
room for two, and what are you going to do with the children when we go
out together?’
‘We can put them on the floor at our feet, like other people do. I can
always fold up a blanket or ‘possum rug for them to sit on.’
But she didn’t take half so much interest in buggy talk as she would
have taken at any other time, when I didn’t want her to. Women are
aggravating that way. But the poor girl was tired and not very well, and
both the children were cross. She did look knocked up.
‘We’ll give the buggy a rest, Joe,’ she said. (I thought I heard it
coming then.) ‘It seems as far off as ever. I don’t know why you want to
harp on it to-day. Now, don’t look so cross, Joe--I didn’t mean to hurt
you. We’ll wait until we can get a double buggy, since you’re so set on
it. There’ll be plenty of time when we’re better off.’
After tea, when the youngsters were in bed, and she’d washed up, we sat
outside on the edge of the verandah floor, Mary sewing, and I smoking
and watching the track up the creek.
‘Why don’t you talk, Joe?’ asked Mary. ‘You scarcely ever speak to me
now: it’s like drawing blood out of a stone to get a word from you. What
makes you so cross, Joe?’
‘Well, I’ve got nothing to say.’
‘But you should find something. Think of me--it’s very miserable for me.
Have you anything on your mind? Is there any new trouble? Better tell
me, no matter what it is, and not go worrying and brooding and making
both our lives miserable. If you never tell one anything, how can you
expect me to understand?’
I said there was nothing the matter.
‘But there must be, to make you so unbearable. Have you been drinking,
Joe--or gambling?’
I asked her what she’d accuse me of next.
‘And another thing I want to speak to you about,’ she went on. ‘Now,
don’t knit up your forehead like that, Joe, and get impatient----’
‘Well, what is it?’
‘I wish you wouldn’t swear in the hearing of the children. Now, little
Jim to-day, he was trying to fix his little go-cart and it wouldn’t run
right, and--and----’
‘Well, what did he say?’
‘He--he’ (she seemed a little hysterical, trying not to laugh)--‘he said
“damn it!”’
I had to laugh. Mary tried to keep serious, but it was no use.
‘Never mind, old woman,’ I said, putting an arm round her, for her
mouth was trembling, and she was crying more than laughing. ‘It won’t be
always like this. Just wait till we’re a bit better off.’
Just then a black boy we had (I must tell you about him some other time)
came sidling along by the wall, as if he were afraid somebody was going
to hit him--poor little devil! I never did.
‘What is it, Harry?’ said Mary.
‘Buggy comin’, I bin thinkit.’
‘Where?’
He pointed up the creek.
‘Sure it’s a buggy?’
‘Yes, missus.’
‘How many horses?’
‘One--two.’
We knew that he could hear and see things long before we could. Mary
went and perched on the wood-heap, and shaded her eyes--though the sun
had gone--and peered through between the eternal grey trunks of the
stunted trees on the flat across the creek. Presently she jumped down
and came running in.
‘There’s some one coming in a buggy, Joe!’ she cried, excitedly. ‘And
both my white table-cloths are rough dry. Harry! put two flat-irons down
to the fire, quick, and put on some more wood. It’s lucky I kept those
new sheets packed away. Get up out of that, Joe! What are you sitting
grinning like that for? Go and get on another shirt. Hurry--Why! It’s
only James--by himself.’
She stared at me, and I sat there, grinning like a fool.
‘Joe!’ she said, ‘whose buggy is that?’
‘Well, I suppose it’s yours,’ I said.
She caught her breath, and stared at the buggy and then at me again.
James drove down out of sight into the crossing, and came up close to
the house.
‘Oh, Joe! what have you done?’ cried Mary. ‘Why, it’s a new double
buggy!’ Then she rushed at me and hugged my head. ‘Why didn’t you tell
me, Joe? You poor old boy!--and I’ve been nagging at you all day!’ and
she hugged me again.
James got down and started taking the horses out--as if it was an
everyday occurrence. I saw the double-barrel gun sticking out from under
the seat. He’d stopped to wash the buggy, and I suppose that’s what made
him grumpy. Mary stood on the verandah, with her eyes twice as big as
usual, and breathing hard--taking the buggy in.
James skimmed the harness off, and the horses shook themselves and
went down to the dam for a drink. ‘You’d better look under the seats,’
growled James, as he took his gun out with great care.
Mary dived for the buggy. There was a dozen of lemonade and ginger-beer
in a candle-box from Galletly--James said that Galletly’s men had a
gallon of beer, and they cheered him, James (I suppose he meant they
cheered the buggy), as he drove off; there was a ‘little bit of a
ham’ from Pat Murphy, the storekeeper at Home Rule, that he’d ‘cured
himself’--it was the biggest I ever saw; there were three loaves of
baker’s bread, a cake, and a dozen yards of something ‘to make up for
the children’, from Aunt Gertrude at Gulgong; there was a fresh-water
cod, that long Dave Regan had caught the night before in the Macquarie
river, and sent out packed in salt in a box; there was a holland suit
for the black boy, with red braid to trim it; and there was a jar of
preserved ginger, and some lollies (sweets) [‘for the lil’ boy’), and
a rum-looking Chinese doll and a rattle [‘for lil’ girl’) from Sun Tong
Lee, our storekeeper at Gulgong--James was chummy with Sun Tong Lee,
and got his powder and shot and caps there on tick when he was short of
money. And James said that the people would have loaded the buggy with
‘rubbish’ if he’d waited. They all seemed glad to see Joe Wilson getting
on--and these things did me good.
We got the things inside, and I don’t think either of us knew what we
were saying or doing for the next half-hour. Then James put his head in
and said, in a very injured tone,--
‘What about my tea? I ain’t had anything to speak of since I left
Cudgeegong. I want some grub.’
Then Mary pulled herself together.
‘You’ll have your tea directly,’ she said. ‘Pick up that harness at
once, and hang it on the pegs in the skillion; and you, Joe, back
that buggy under the end of the verandah, the dew will be on it
presently--and we’ll put wet bags up in front of it to-morrow, to
keep the sun off. And James will have to go back to Cudgeegong for the
cart,--we can’t have that buggy to knock about in.’
‘All right,’ said James--‘anything! Only get me some grub.’
Mary fried the fish, in case it wouldn’t keep till the morning, and
rubbed over the tablecloths, now the irons were hot--James growling
all the time--and got out some crockery she had packed away that had
belonged to her mother, and set the table in a style that made James
uncomfortable.
‘I want some grub--not a blooming banquet!’ he said. And he growled a
lot because Mary wanted him to eat his fish without a knife, ‘and that
sort of Tommy-rot.’ When he’d finished he took his gun, and the black
boy, and the dogs, and went out ‘possum-shooting.
When we were alone Mary climbed into the buggy to try the seat, and
made me get up alongside her. We hadn’t had such a comfortable seat for
years; but we soon got down, in case any one came by, for we began to
feel like a pair of fools up there.
Then we sat, side by side, on the edge of the verandah, and talked
more than we’d done for years--and there was a good deal of ‘Do you
remember?’ in it--and I think we got to understand each other better
that night.
And at last Mary said, ‘Do you know, Joe, why, I feel to-night
just--just like I did the day we were married.’
And somehow I had that strange, shy sort of feeling too.
The Writer Wants to Say a Word.
In writing the first sketch of the Joe Wilson series, which happened
to be ‘Brighten’s Sister-in-law’, I had an idea of making Joe Wilson a
strong character. Whether he is or not, the reader must judge. It seems
to me that the man’s natural sentimental selfishness, good-nature,
‘softness’, or weakness--call it which you like--developed as I wrote
on.
I know Joe Wilson very well. He has been through deep trouble since the
day he brought the double buggy to Lahey’s Creek. I met him in Sydney
the other day. Tall and straight yet--rather straighter than he had
been--dressed in a comfortable, serviceable sac suit of ‘saddle-tweed’,
and wearing a new sugar-loaf, cabbage-tree hat, he looked over the
hurrying street people calmly as though they were sheep of which he was
not in charge, and which were not likely to get ‘boxed’ with his. Not
the worst way in which to regard the world.
He talked deliberately and quietly in all that roar and rush. He is a
young man yet, comparatively speaking, but it would take little Mary a
long while now to pick the grey hairs out of his head, and the process
would leave him pretty bald.
In two or three short sketches in another book I hope to complete the
story of his life.